On the morning of the 9th, as soon as the fog cleared, the army marched in three columns upon Olivença: it was thought not unlikely that the enemy would wait for them there, or on the opposite bank of the Valverde river, where the ground was favourable: they had, however, fallen back to Albuhera, leaving a garrison in Olivença. The place was summoned, and refused to surrender; guns and stores, therefore, were ordered from Elvas; the fourth division remained to besiege it; and the rest of the army moved by Valverde, and bivouacked in the wood of Albuhera, the enemy’s rear-guard retiring before their advance, which entered S. Martha on the 12th. Here the army halted till the 15th, to get up provisions which were still brought from the rear; and on that day Olivença surrendered at discretion, before the breach was practicable. The garrison consisted of about 480 men, in a place where Mendizabal had thrown away 3000. The French had committed a fault of the same kind, though not to an equal extent; the force they left there being totally inadequate to the defence of so large a fortress. The recapture of this place would have produced an angry contention between the Spanish and Portugueze Governments, if Portugal had not been rendered, by English influence, patient in this instance under a galling sense of injustice. The territory on the left of the Guadiana, in which Olivença stands, was part of the dowry given with his daughter to Affonso III. by the Castillian king, Alfonso the Wise; a grant which, though deemed at the time to have been an arbitrary, ♦CLAIM OF THE PORTUGUEZE TO THAT PLACE.♦ and therefore an illegal cession of national rights, was subsequently confirmed to Portugal with due form by the treaty between kings Dinez and Ferdinand IV. But as the Guadiana might seem to form a natural boundary between the two kingdoms on this part of the frontier, Spain has ever looked with an evil eye upon this cession. Five centuries had not reconciled a people peculiarly tenacious of what they deem national rights, to this dismemberment, as they considered it, though in itself of little importance to Spain, and though what had been ceded to Portugal was in reality the right of winning it from the Moors, and keeping it when won. In times of international war, therefore, the possession of Olivença had been contested not less as a point of honour than for its own value, when it was a place of great strength; and so strong was the border spirit which prevailed there that, when the Spaniards captured it in 1658, the whole of the inhabitants chose rather to leave the town, and lose whatever they could not carry with them, than become subjects to the King of Spain, though the property of those who should remove was offered to any who would remain. It was restored at the end of that war, and Portugal continued to hold it till its cession was extorted in 1801, in the treaty of Badajoz. But the war which was terminated by that treaty had been entirely unprovoked by Portugal: Spain was then acting as the deceived and degraded instrument of French policy; and the Portugueze felt, as they well might do, that the surrender, though made to Spain, had been compelled by France; and that so long as Spain retained Olivença by virtue of that treaty, they were an injured people. The Prince of Brazil, in the proclamation which he issued on his arrival in Brazil, declaring war against France, and against Spain as then the ally and instrument of French oppression, had protested against the injustice which was done him in that treaty, and declared his intention of recovering when he could whatever he had then been compelled to abandon: and the Spaniards were themselves so conscious of this injustice, that the local authorities, with the sanction of the Junta of Extremadura, had, at the commencement of the war against Buonaparte and the Intruder, proposed to restore Olivença and its district to Portugal for a certain sum of money. The Central Government had not authorised this proposal; and Olivença was not to be thought of in times when the independence of both nations was at stake. But fortune had now put it in the power of the Portugueze to right themselves: Olivença had been taken by the French, and retaken from them by an allied force of Portugueze and British: and one of the Portugueze Regents proposed to his colleague the British ambassador that the Portugueze standards should be displayed there, without previous explanation, or subsequent justification of the measure.