[220] List of Arms sent to Portugal on p. 9 of _Parliamentary Papers_ for 1809.
[221] The Portuguese volume for December 1808 and January-February 1809 in the Record Office being mysteriously lost, Cradock’s correspondence and that of the other British officers in Portugal is no longer available. But Napier took copious notes from it, while it was still forthcoming; they will be found on pp. 425-31 of his vol. ii, and bear witness to a complete state of anarchy in Oporto.
[222] The first battalion used to call the second ‘Baron Eben’s runaways’ when they met again, as Mayne assures us in his _History of the Loyal Lusitanian Legion_.
Meanwhile Lisbon was almost as disturbed as Oporto, and might have lapsed into the same state of anarchy, if a British garrison had not been on the spot. The mistaken policy of the Regency had led to the formation of sixteen so-called ‘legions[223]’ in the capital and suburbs. These tumultuary levies had few officers and hardly any arms but pikes. They were under no sort of discipline, and devoted themselves to the self-imposed duty of hunting for spies and ‘_Afrancesados_.’ Led by demagogues of the streets, they paraded up and down Lisbon to beat of drum, arresting persons whom they considered suspicious, especially foreign residents of all nationalities. The Regency having issued a decree prohibiting this practice [January 29], the armed levies only assembled in greater numbers next night, and engaged in a general chase after unpopular citizens, policemen, and aliens of all kinds. Many fugitives were only saved from death by taking refuge in the guard-houses and the barracks where the garrison was quartered. Isolated British soldiers were assaulted, some were wounded, and parties of ‘legionaries’ actually stopped aides-de-camp and orderlies carrying dispatches, and stripped them of the documents they were bearing. The mob was inclined, indeed, to be ill-disposed towards their allies, from the suspicion that they were intending to evacuate Lisbon and to retire from the Peninsula. They had seen the baggage and non-combatants left behind by Moore put on ship-board; early in February they beheld the troops told off for the occupation of Cadiz embark and disappear. When they also noticed that the forts at the Tagus mouth were being dismantled[224] they made up their minds that the British were about to desert them, without making any attempt to defend Portugal. Hence came the malevolent spirit which they displayed. It died down when their suspicions were proved unfounded by the arrival of Beresford and other British officers, at the beginning of March, with resources for the reorganization of the Portuguese army, and still more when a little later heavy reinforcements from England began to pour into the city. But in the last days of January and the first of February matters at Lisbon had been in a most dangerous and critical condition: the Regency, utterly unable to keep order, had hinted to Sir John Cradock that he must take his own measures against the mob, and for several days the British general had kept the garrison under arms, and planted artillery in the squares and broader streets--exactly as Junot had done seven months before. The ‘legions’ were cowed, and most fortunately no collision occurred: if a single shot had been fired in anger, there would have been an end of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, and it is more than likely that Cradock--a man of desponding temperament--would have abandoned the country.