The plan which Wellesley had drawn up for the conduct of the campaign, and which he now urged upon his chief, is detailed in the proceedings of the Court of Inquiry. He had hoped to get Sir John Moore’s division, whose arrival was just reported, sent to Santarem, to cut off any attempt of Junot to escape out of the Lisbon peninsula by following the road along the right bank of the Tagus: the Portuguese were to be brought up to assist. Meanwhile the army which had fought at Vimiero was to turn the position of Torres Vedras, on which the enemy had retired, by marching along the sea-coast by the route that leads to Mafra. If Junot let them march past him, he would infallibly lose Lisbon; for they could, by forcing the pace, arrive in the capital as soon as he. If he abandoned Torres Vedras, and fell back on Mafra or Montechique as soon as he saw them moving, he would have to fight a second battle on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, with an army which had been gravely demoralized by the events of Roliça and Vimiero, and which could not receive much succour from Lisbon: for the populace of that city, when apprised of the defeat of the French, would undoubtedly have burst into insurrection, and would have required for its repression every man of the 5,000[239] troops who had been left to hold it down. There was a third possibility, that Junot, on hearing that the English were marching past his flank, might have hastened from Torres Vedras to attack their line of march by one of the cross-roads (such as that from Torres Vedras to Puente de Roll), which cut down to the Atlantic coast. But Wellesley had convinced himself that this chance would not occur: he reckoned, very rightly, on the exhaustion of the enemy on the day after such a crushing blow as Vimiero. As a matter of fact, on the morning of the twenty-second, at the moment when the head of the British column, if it had marched, would have been outflanking their position, Junot and those of his generals who were not _hors de combat_ were sitting in council of war at Torres Vedras, with despair in their souls, and resolving to ask for terms on which to evacuate Portugal. Kellermann was just about to ride in to the English lines to open negotiations[240]. The idea of an ‘offensive return’ by the French was in the head of the cautious Burrard[241]: but not in that of Wellesley, who had made up his mind ‘that they would act in Portugal as they did in Egypt: they tried their strength once in the field, and having failed they would have continued to retreat till they could have got into safety. I do not believe that any corps could have fallen on the flank of our march on the twenty-third.’ The only course open to the French, in his opinion, was to throw over any idea of holding the capital, withdraw its garrison, and cross the Tagus at Saccavem or Villafranca, or Santarem, by means of the ships which lay in the river, and the large fleet of barges which is always to be found in and near Lisbon.