♦SENTENCE ON THE GOVERNOR FOR SURRENDERING IT.♦
There was no treason here, as there had been at Lerida, but there was a want of honour, of principle, and of virtue. Seven thousand eight hundred men, not pressed by famine, not debilitated by disease, with a brave and willing population to have supported them, laid down their arms and surrendered at discretion to ten thousand French. The enemy indeed affirmed that the garrison could not have continued the defence an hour longer without being put to the sword: the people of Spain thought otherwise; they remembered Palafox and Alvarez; they remembered that at Gerona a French army, not inferior to this of Suchet’s in number, lay ten whole weeks in sight of an open breach which they did not venture to assault a second time, though it was defended only by half-starved men, who would have come from the hospitals to take their stand there. They remembered this, and therefore they thought that the governor who under such circumstances had hung out the white flag, ought himself to have been hung over the walls. Accordingly sentence of death was pronounced in Tarragona against the Conde de Alache for having, it was said, infamously surrendered a city which he ought to have defended to the last extremity; and his effigy was beheaded there in the market-place.
The fortress at Col de Balaguer, which commanded a strong pass about half-way between Tortosa and Tarragona, was yielded a few days after Lili’s surrender, by the treachery or cowardice of the men entrusted with its defence. Tarragona was now the only strong place that remained to the Catalans; it had been the seat of government since the fall of Mequinenza, the Provincial Congress, which was to have assembled at Solsona, having then been summoned thither, as the only place of safety; now its land communication with Valencia and the rest of Spain was cut off; and Suchet immediately prepared to follow up his success by investing it, with less apprehension of any obstruction from the Catalan army, because the wound which O’Donell had received at La Bisbal compelled him at this time to retire to Majorca. The Marquis de Campoverde, being second in command, succeeded him. In O’Donell the Catalans lost a commander who had raised himself by his services, and whose conduct had justified the public opinion, in deference to which he had been promoted. But the spirit of the people was not shaken: they relied upon the strength of their country, even though the fortresses were lost, ... upon their cause, and their own invincible resolution; and they lived in continual hope that some effectual assistance would be afforded by England to a province which so well deserved it. The little which had been given had been gratefully received, and it had shown also how much might and ought to have been done.