We find in the warrant under which the Board of Inquiry was to act, and which defined its powers, that an inquiry was to be made into the conditions of the ’armistice and convention; and into all the causes and circumstances, whether arising from the operations of the British army, or otherwise, which led to them.’

Whether answers to the charges of the people of England were made possible by the provisions of this warrant—­and, secondly, whether even these provisions have been satisfied by the Board of Inquiry—­will best appear by involving those charges in four questions, according to the following scale, which supposes a series of concessions impossible to those who think the nation justified in the language held on the transactions in Portugal.

1.  Considering the perfidy with which the French army had entered Portugal; the enormities committed by it during its occupation of that country; the vast military power of which that army was a part, and the use made of that power by its master; the then existing spirit of the Spanish, Portugueze, and British nations; in a word, considering the especial nature of the service, and the individual character of this war;—­was it lawful for the British army, under any conceivable circumstances, so long as it had the liberty of re-embarking, to make any conceivable convention? i.e.  Was the negative evil of a total failure in every object for which it had been sent to Portugal of worse tendency than the positive evil of acknowledging in the French army a fair title to the privileges of an honourable enemy by consenting to a mode of treaty which (in its very name, implying a reciprocation of concession and respect) must be under any limitations as much more indulgent than an ordinary capitulation, as that again must (in its severest form) be more indulgent than the only favour which the French marauders could presume upon obtaining—­viz. permission to surrender at discretion?

To this question the reader need not be told that these pages give a naked unqualified denial; and that to establish the reasonableness of that denial is one of their main purposes:  but, for the benefit of the men accused, let it be supposed granted; and then the second question will be

2.  Was it lawful for the English army, in the case of its being reduced to the supposed dilemma of either re-embarking or making some convention, to make that specifical convention which it did make at Cintra?

This is of necessity and a fortiori denied; and it has been proved that neither to this, nor any other army, could it be lawful to make such a convention—­not merely under the actual but under any conceivable circumstances; let however this too, on behalf of the parties accused, be granted; and then the third question will be

3.  Was the English Army reduced to that dilemma?

4.  Finally, this also being conceded (which not even the Generals have dared to say), it remains to ask by whose and by what misconduct did an army—­confessedly the arbiter of its own movements and plans at the opening of the campaign—­forfeit that free agency—­either to the extent of the extremity supposed, or of any approximation to that extremity?