The Treaty of Paris and the Fantastic War: Portugal, 1762 to 1763

On 10 February 1763, in Paris, three ambassadors signed the peace that ended the Seven Years' War: the Duke of Bedford for George III of Britain, the Duke of Praslin for Louis XV of France and the Marquis of Grimaldi for Charles III of Spain. The treaty also named a fourth envoy, Martinho de Melo e Castro, ambassador of José I of Portugal to the French court. His signature is not on it.1 source1 source

Portugal's place was settled in a separate article signed the same day. The three crowns agreed that the King of Portugal, though he had not signed, was included in the treaty as a contracting party, and promised to carry out every clause once he had formally acceded. The printed text calls itself a treaty between three kings, “to which the King of Portugal acceded on the same day”.1 source1 source

For Portugal one clause mattered most. Article XXI ordered French and Spanish troops out of every town, place and castle they had taken from Portugal in Europe, and told them to leave the guns and ammunition they had found there. Nine months earlier Spanish soldiers had marched into the north of the kingdom. In South America, a Spanish governor had taken the Portuguese town of Colónia do Sacramento.3 sources3 sources

The Seven Years' War began in 1756 as a contest between Britain and France, fought in Germany, North America, the West Indies, India and at sea. Spain stayed out at first. In 1761 Charles III bound himself to France in the Third Family Compact, an alliance of the Bourbon kings, and Britain declared war on Spain in January 1762.3 sources3 sources

Portugal wanted to stay neutral. Its government was run by José I's minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, then Count of Oeiras and later Marquis of Pombal. In the spring of 1762 France and Spain sent Lisbon two ultimatums demanding that it give up the British alliance and join the Family Compact. José I refused.3 sources3 sources

The kingdom was in no state to fight. In December 1761 Portugal's envoy in London sent the British a return of the army: 31,000 men on paper, but only 16,500 in fact, because the cost of rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 had forced cuts. It was short of artillery, provisions and horses. Pombal himself argued that Portugal had gone too long without a European war to have officers with the right experience.2 sources2 sources

The next day British ministers agreed to send troops. Charles III told the French he hoped they would: he could then treat Portugal as an enemy and take land there to make up for losses elsewhere. Spain promised France an invasion force of 56,000 men.1 source1 source

Spain's invading army was called the Ejército de Prevención. Its commander, the elderly Marquis of Sarria, had printed notices put up in Portuguese towns from 30 April 1762, saying that his troops came as friends, wanted no fighting and would pay for what they took. The official reason was to protect Portugal's coasts from the British. On 1 May the army crossed into Trás-os-Montes, the mountainous north-east of the country. Black, writing from British papers, puts the invasion at the end of April.4 sources4 sources

Resistance was almost nil. At Miranda do Douro a powder magazine exploded on 8 May and killed several hundred people, and the town fell without the besiegers using, in the words of a letter from Chaves, so much as a charge of powder. Bragança, Chaves, Moncorvo, Vimioso and Outeiro had fallen by 24 May. Several of them had no garrison at all.3 sources3 sources

Taking towns was easy; holding the country was not. Peasants attacked supply columns and killed stragglers, and Spanish soldiers in Chaves were reported to be too frightened of them to go out. According to Charles-François Dumouriez, a French officer who toured Portugal four years later, three or four hundred peasants turned back 3,000 Spanish light troops heading for Porto. A Spanish attempt to cross the Douro near Vila Nova de Foz Côa failed.3 sources3 sources

The historian David Martín Marcos, following earlier work, sees panic and the defence of the peasants' livelihoods, more than patriotism, behind these attacks. The violence crossed the border. On 3 August Portuguese villagers raided Navasfrías, a Spanish village near the frontier, killed three militiamen and took the parish priest prisoner. Almost a year later he was still writing to Madrid from the prison at Belém.1 source1 source

War was declared only after the invasion. On 18 May 1762 José I ordered every subject of France and Spain to leave Portugal within fifteen days, and Spain answered by expelling the Portuguese and confiscating their goods. Shopkeepers, shepherds and families who had lived for years across the frontier became enemy aliens overnight, and many petitioned to stay.1 source1 source

Pombal asked Britain for troops and for a general. On George III's recommendation the choice fell on Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, the 38-year-old ruler of a small German state. Born in London in 1724, he had commanded the artillery of the Hanoverian army earlier in the war. Lippe reached Portugal in early July, and a decree of 3 July 1762 made him marshal general of all the king's armies.3 sources3 sources

He commanded the British too. Instructions for the army's daily service, printed in Lisbon that year, give him both titles: marshal general of the armies of His Most Faithful Majesty and general in chief of the auxiliary troops of His Britannic Majesty. The British contingent was led first by Lord Tyrawley and then by the Earl of Loudoun, who was held in the Channel by contrary winds and arrived in July.2 sources2 sources

Supplies were a constant problem. One British brigadier reported that nine men of the Buffs died on a single day's march to Santarém in the summer heat, and that they found the houses shut and no bread or beef waiting. One captain complained that he could not gather intelligence without an interpreter. The Earl of Bath passed on his son's verdict from Lisbon, where he served as a lieutenant-colonel: the Portuguese were “scarce worth saving from destruction”.1 source1 source

Charles III changed plan. His troops were to hold what they had taken in Trás-os-Montes while the main blow fell further south. On 30 June, Barbosa writes, the Spanish army, with some French units, crossed into the Beira from Ciudad Rodrigo and moved on Castelo Rodrigo and the fortress of Almeida.2 sources2 sources

Lippe needed Almeida to hold out while he struck at Spanish depots across the border, and ordered its governor to defend it to the last. It surrendered on 25 August. Dumouriez, telling the story from the Spanish side, says the siege began on 4 August and the town gave up with no breach in its walls, 96 guns and a garrison of 3,600. He blamed the governor, who he says was eighty years old and had last served as a cavalry captain in the War of the Spanish Succession.3 sources3 sources

Lippe's raid went ahead all the same. In late August Colonel John Burgoyne crossed the Tagus at Abrantes with British dragoons and six companies of grenadiers, four of them Portuguese, rode into Spain and took the town of Valencia de Alcántara by surprise. A Spanish general, Balanza, was among his prisoners.3 sources3 sources

The Count of Aranda, who replaced Sarria, then pushed south-west towards the Tagus and Abrantes, on the road to Lisbon. On 9 October the British merchants of Lisbon feared for their lives and goods, and their consul asked Loudoun whether they should send for ships to take them away. “The Kingdom of Portugal seems at present to be generally given up as lost,” Robert Ellison wrote in London on 19 October.3 sources3 sources

Lippe would not risk a battle. He dug in on strong ground in front of Abrantes, sent Burgoyne to guard the Tagus at Vila Velha de Ródão with batteries on the cliffs, and ordered everything that could feed the invaders removed from their path. On 5 October, Black writes, British and Portuguese troops forded the river by night and stormed a Spanish camp at Vila Velha.2 sources2 sources

Who led the attack depends on the source. Black credits Burgoyne, who commanded on that stretch of the river. Burgoyne's own report to London, written at the camp four days later, gave the whole credit to “the conduct and bravery of Colonel Lee”: Charles Lee, later a general in the American War of Independence. Dumouriez names a Scottish officer called Hamilton.4 sources4 sources

Autumn rain, empty country and constant raids did the rest. Aranda fell back on Castelo Branco and then into Spain. Late Spanish attempts on Campo Maior and Olivença, in the Alentejo, failed. Preliminaries of peace had been signed at Fontainebleau on 3 November, and the two commanders agreed an armistice: Martín Marcos dates it from 24 November, Barbosa to 30 November and the old Portuguese dictionary to 1 December.6 sources6 sources

Nobody counted the Bourbon losses reliably. Dumouriez says the Spanish army, ordered at 40,000 men, came back to the frontier with 25,000, its sick and stragglers “almost all of them massacred by the peasants”. Barbosa speaks of several thousand soldiers lost to hunger and supply failures without a single battle. Combat deaths were few. Because the campaign had no battle of note, only skirmishes and months of marching and countermarching, historians came to call it the Guerra Fantástica, the Fantastic War.3 sources3 sources

The war reached South America as well. Colónia do Sacramento had been founded in 1680 on the north bank of the River Plate, across the estuary from Buenos Aires, partly to keep silver from the mines of Potosí flowing to Lisbon by contraband. Spain had destroyed or taken it before, and handed it back each time at the peace table, most recently under a treaty of 1715 signed at Utrecht.1 source1 source

In 1762 the Spanish governor of the River Plate, Pedro de Cevallos, took Colónia, and a Portuguese attempt to win it back failed. The next year he also seized Rio Grande de São Pedro, the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Lagoa dos Patos in southern Brazil.2 sources2 sources

Article XXI covered this too. Any Portuguese colony that had changed hands was to be restored as it had been before the war, under the earlier treaties between France, Spain and Portugal. Spain gave Colónia back. It kept Rio Grande, arguing that the Portuguese had built it on Spanish land, so the treaty did not settle the southern frontier.2 sources2 sources

The list of renewed treaties tells the story of Portugal's frontier. The treaty of 1668 was the peace in which Spain recognised Portuguese independence after the war that followed 1640. That of 1715 had returned Colónia. That of February 1761, signed at El Pardo, had cancelled the Treaty of Madrid of 1750, which would have swapped Colónia for the Sete Povos das Missões, seven Jesuit mission towns.3 sources3 sources

Portugal gained no land. For the great powers the treaty was about empires: France gave up Canada to Britain, Britain returned Havana to Spain, and Spain gave Florida to Britain in exchange. For Portugal it meant the restoration of the status quo, with Britain, France and Spain guaranteeing it. In Portugal José I had illuminations lit to celebrate, and the definitive peace was proclaimed on 7 March 1763.3 sources3 sources

Eight days after the treaty, on 18 February 1763, a royal decree with the force of law approved Lippe's Regulation for the Exercise and Discipline of the Infantry Regiments. Its 27 chapters covered drill, uniforms, recruitment, pay and punishment, and the decree ordered every one of them applied literally and without interpretation.1 source1 source

The model was Prussian. Punishments ran from bread and water for light offences, such as turning up drunk for drill or sleeping on guard, to flogging and blows with the flat of a sword. Desertion, mutiny or threatening an officer meant the firing squad or the gallows, judged by a council of war under 29 Articles of War. Soldiers were paid every five days in front of the captain's house, after a sergeant had read the Articles aloud to the new men.1 source1 source

The crown extended the regulation to its troops overseas. In Brazil it stayed in force until independence, and its Articles of War until 1891. Blows with the flat of the sword ended there only after the Revolt of the Lash in 1910. In Portugal Lippe's Articles of War also lasted many years, until a new code of military justice replaced them.2 sources2 sources

Lippe also looked to the frontier. In 1763 he began a new fort on the hill of Graça above Elvas, where Spanish besiegers had dug in a century before. It took until 1792 to finish and was long known as the Forte de Lippe. When he went home, José I made him a prince of the blood with the style of Highness. According to the old Portuguese dictionary, the king also gave him six gold cannon, each weighing 32 pounds, on ebony carriages plated with silver.2 sources2 sources

The war also left bills. In August 1762 the crown had ordered a royal military hospital and war stores set up in Coimbra, run by the rector of the university and paid for with a loan of 14.2 million réis from the city's Real d'Água fund. The hospital took in soldiers from 5 September 1762 to 22 October 1763, and its accounts, kept by double entry, were closed only in 1766.1 source1 source

The war of 1762 tested the British alliance on land, and it held. A small kingdom whose ports mattered to a naval power was defended by British troops and a foreign general, while its own peasants and its empty roads wore the invader down. Dumouriez thought the war gave Portugal a military spirit it had lacked, though it weakened once Lippe left.2 sources2 sources

The pattern came back half a century later. Against Napoleon's armies in 1810, Wellington's British and Portuguese troops emptied the country in front of the French, as Lippe's men had done in the Beira in 1762, a story Lisboeta tells separately. The peace on the River Plate was shorter. Spain kept Rio Grande, the Portuguese retook it in the 1770s, and in 1777 the Treaty of San Ildefonso gave Colónia to Spain for good.3 sources3 sources