Junot forthwith commenced his march through Spain, where the French soldiery were received everywhere with coldness and suspicion, but nowhere by any hostile movement of the people.  He would have halted at Salamanca to organise his army, which consisted mostly of young conscripts, but Napoleon’s policy outmarched his General’s schemes, and the troops were, in consequence of a peremptory order from Paris, poured into Portugal in the latter part of November.  Godoy’s contingent of Spaniards appeared there also, and placed themselves under Junot’s command.  Their numbers overawed the population, and they advanced, unopposed, towards the capital—­Junot’s most eager desire being to secure the persons of the Prince Regent and the royal family.  The feeble government, meantime, having made, one by one, every degrading submission which France dictated, having expelled the British factory and the British minister, confiscated all English property, and shut the ports against all English vessels, became convinced at length that no measures of subserviency could avert the doom which Napoleon had fulminated.  A Moniteur, proclaiming that “the House of Braganza had ceased to reign,” reached Lisbon.  The Prince Regent re-opened his communication with the English admiral off the Tagus (Sir Sydney Smith) and the lately expelled ambassador (Lord Strangford), and being assured of their protection, embarked on the 27th of November, and sailed for the Brazils on the 29th, only a few hours before Junot made his appearance at the gates of Lisbon.  The disgust with which the Portuguese people regarded his flight, the cowardly termination, as they might not unnaturally regard it, of a long course of meanness, was eminently useful to the invader.  With the exception of one trivial insurrection, when the insolent conqueror took down the Portuguese arms and set up those of Napoleon in their place, several months passed in apparent tranquillity; and these were skilfully employed by the General in perfecting the discipline of his conscripts, improving the fortifications of the coast, and making such a disposal of his force as might best guard the country from any military demonstration on the part of England.

Napoleon thus saw Portugal in his grasp:  but that he had all along considered as a point of minor importance, and he had accordingly availed himself of the utmost concessions of the treaty of Fontainebleau, without waiting for any insurrection of the Portuguese, or English debarkation on their territory.  His army of reserve, in number far exceeding the 40,000 men named in the treaty, had already passed the Pyrenees, in two bodies, under Dupont and Moncey, and were advancing slowly, but steadily, into the heart of Spain.  Nay, without even the pretext of being mentioned in the treaty, another French army of 12,000, under Duhesme, had penetrated through the eastern Pyrenees, and being received as friends among the unsuspecting garrisons, obtained possession of Barcelona, Pampeluna, and St. Sebastian, and the other fortified places in the north of Spain, by a succession of treacherous artifices, to which the history of civilised nations presents no parallel.  The armies then pushed forwards, and the chief roads leading from the French frontiers to Madrid were entirely in their possession.