There was another and a less pleasant surprise in store for Wellesley when he landed at Plymouth. He learnt that if he himself disliked the armistice of August 22, and the Convention of Cintra, the British public had gone far beyond him, and was in a state of frantic rage concerning them. To his anger and amazement he also learnt that he himself was considered no less responsible for the two agreements than were Dalrymple and Burrard. The fact that the former had told him to set his signature opposite to that of Kellermann on the document signed at Vimiero, had misled the world into regarding him as the negotiator and framer of the armistice. ‘Every whisperer who disliked the name of Wellesley[280]’--and Sir Arthur’s brother, the Governor-General, had made it very unpopular in certain quarters--was busy propagating the story that of the three generals who had lately commanded in Portugal, each one was as slack and supine as the others. [280] The Duke of Richmond to Wellesley, Oct. 12, 1808 (_Well. Suppl. Disp._, vi. 633). The wave of indignation which swept across England on the receipt of the news of the Convention of Cintra is, at this distance of time, a little hard to understand. Successes had not been so plentiful on the Continent during the last fifteen years, that an agreement which gave back its liberty to a whole kingdom need have been criticized with vindictive minuteness. But the news of Baylen had set the public mind on the look-out for further triumphs, and when the dispatches which gave an account of Roliça and of Vimiero had come to hand, there had been a confident expectation that the next news received would be that Junot’s army had been scattered or captured, and that Lisbon had been set free. Then came a gap of thirteen days, caused by Dalrymple’s strange fit of silence. The only intelligence that reached London in this interval was the Bishop of Oporto’s letter of protest against the armistice, in which, without giving any definite details about that agreement, he denounced it as insulting to Portugal and unworthy of England. The public was prepared, therefore, to hear that something timid and base had been done, when Dalrymple’s dispatch of September 3, enclosing the Convention of Cintra, came to hand. It was easy to set forth the terms of that treaty in an odious light. Junot, it was said, had been beaten in the field, he was completely isolated from all the other French armies, and his surrender must have followed in a few days, if the British generals had only chosen to press their advantage. Instead of this, they preferred to let him return to France with the whole of his troops, and with most of his plunder. He was not even compelled to release a corresponding number of British prisoners in return for the freedom secured to his army. In fact, his position was much better after than before his defeat at Vimiero, for the Convention granted him a quiet and safe return home with his force intact, while,