The seminary still stands, though it has now been swallowed by Oporto’s suburbs, but a plaque records its defense on 12 May 1809. Another plaque, on the quay close to where Eiffel’s magnificent iron bridge now spans the gorge, records the horrors of 29 March when the Portuguese refugees crowded onto the broken pontoon bridge. There are two explanations for the drownings. One claims that retreating Portuguese troops pulled the drawbridge up to prevent the French from ???? the bridge, while the second explanation, which I prefer, is that the sheer weight of refugees sank the central pontoons which then broke under me pressure of the river. Whichever is true the result was horror as hundreds of people, most of them civilians, were forced off the shattered end to drown in the Douro.
With his capture of Oporto Marshal Soult had conquered northern Portugal and, as he gathered his strength for the onward march to Lissabon, he did indeed flirt with the idea of making himself king. More than once he canvassed his general officers, tried to gain support among me Portuguese and doubtless encouraged the Diario do Porto, a newspaper established during the French occupation of the city and edited by a priest who supported the egregious idea. Quite what Napoleon would have made of such a self-promotion is not difficult to guess and it was probably the prospect of the Emperor’s displeasure, as much as anything else, which persuaded Soult against the idea.
But the idea was real and it gave Soult the nickname „King Nicolas“ and very nearly provoked a mutiny which was to be led by Colonel Donadieu and Colonel Lafitte, plus several other now unknown officers, and Captain Argenton did make two trips through the lines to consult with the British. Argenton wanted the British to use their influence on the Portuguese to persuade them to encourage Soult to declare himself king, for when Soult did so the mutiny would break out, at which point Donadieu and the others would supposedly lead the army back to France. The British were asked to encourage this nonsense by blocking the roads east into Spain, but leaving the northern roads unthreatened. Sir Arthur Wellesley, arriving at Lisbon to take over from Cradock, met Argenton and dismissed the plot out of hand. Argenton then returned to Soult, was betrayed and arrested, but was promised his life if he revealed all that he knew and among those revelations was the fact that the British army, far from readying itself to withdraw from Portugal, was preparing to attack northwards. The warning gave Soult a chance to withdraw his advance forces from south of the Douro who otherwise might have been trapped by an ambitious encircling move that Wellesley had initiated. Argenton’s career was not over. He managed to escape his captors, reached the British army and was given a safe passage to England. For some reason he then decided to return to France where he was again captured and this time shot. It is also worth noting, while we are discussing sinister plots, that the aspirations Christopher attributes to Napoleon, aspirations for „a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary and one nation alone in Europe, Europeans,” were indeed articulated by Bonaparte.
This is a story that begins and ends on bridges and the twin tales of how Major Dulong of the 31st Leger captured the Ponte Nova and then the Saltador are true. He was a rather Sharpe-like character who enjoyed an extraordinary reputation for bravery, but he was wounded at the Saltador and I have been unable to discover his subsequent fate. He almost single-handedly saved Soult’s army, so he deserved a long life and an easy death, and he certainly does not deserve to be given a failing role in the fictional story of the fictional village of Vila Real de Zedes.
Hagman’s marksmanship at seven hundred paces sounds a little too good to be believable, but is based on an actual event which occurred the previous year during Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna. Tom Plunkett (an „irrepressibly vulgar rifleman,” Christopher Hibbert calls him in his book Corunna) fired the „miracle shot” which killed the French General Colbert at around seven hundred yards. The shot, rightly, became famous among riflemen. I read in a recent publication that the extreme range of the Baker rifle was only three hundred yards, a fact that would have surprised the men in green who reckoned that distance to be middling.