But there was one area of the Tory government’s policy that was dazzlingly successful. The decision to send a small army to the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 and support the resistance against the French there turned the tide against Napoleon and led eventually to his downfall. The theoretically straightforward little war in the peninsula, which the emperor dismissed as the Spanish Ulcer, became a cancer that destroyed the Napoleonic Empire. Until 1808 Bonaparte had been content to leave his southern neighbours as cowed allies. But the obstinate Portuguese refused to join in the Continental System against the British, with whom they had a long history of favoured trading status. Though the Spanish king Charles IV helped Napoleon capture Portugal, while the British evacuated the Portuguese government in warships, the emperor soon perceived that the warring Spanish Bourbon dynasty might be neatly replaced by his own brother Joseph, currently the King of Naples. In so doing Napoleon created his own Achilles’ heel. Passionately proud of their history, scornful of the French peoples living north of them, the Spanish were not having any Frenchman on their throne. Like all other European nations the Spaniards were defeated in pitched battle by Napoleon. But, unlike the other peoples of Europe who were crushed by Napoleon, Spain refused to accept the French occupation.
A series of spontaneous risings swept the peninsula. Though it was occupied by the cream of the French armies under General Junot, the bare rocky country would not be subdued. Spanish guerrilla armies hidden all over the hills breathed defiance at Napoleon. The new King of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, was forced humiliatingly to abandon the Spanish capital, Madrid, and to retreat with the French army to Bayonne, on the other side of the Spanish border. Meanwhile a self-appointed provisional government hidden in the Asturian Mountains of northern Spain sent a message to London asking for help. From this tiny foothold began the climb-back which would result in victory on the battlefield of Waterloo. In 1808, however, that was a happy outcome which could scarcely have been predicted.
The man put in charge of the peninsular expedition, Sir Arthur Wellesley, was a lieutenant-general in the British army, fresh from glory in India. Pitt had admired him for the way he ‘states every difficulty before he undertakes any service, but none after he has undertaken it’. Wellesley was now landed with a small force in Portugal and kicked off the Peninsular Wars with a flourish at Vimeiro when he defeated General Junot, whose troops outnumbered his by three to one. But the incompetence and shortsightedness of two more senior British generals who arrived immediately after the battle enabled Junot apparently to recover, and despite Wellesley’s victory an armistice was agreed in the form of the infamous Convention of Cintra. This allowed the French to evacuate Portugal with all their troops and arms and the gold they had looted from Portuguese churches, all of which were conveyed to France courtesy of the British navy at considerable expense. All those evacuated troops could of course be used against Britain in the near future.
The stupidity of these arrangements created a scandal in Britain, and Wellesley was the only commander to escape with his reputation. On the other hand, at least Cintra left Portugal free of all French soldiers, and thus made it a very good starting point for British operations against Napoleon in Spain. For there, at the end of 1808, the emperor himself arrived in his magnificent travelling Berlin carriage with his solid-gold campaigning dinner service. He was stung to the quick that the backward Spanish peasantry were defying the master of Europe. By 4 December he had defeated the Spanish forces and the French tricolore was once more flying over occupied Madrid.
As Wellesley was still in London giving evidence into the inquiry into the Cintra débâcle, the new commander of the British forces in Portugal was the affable and popular General Sir John Moore. He had just crossed into Spain to join up with the Spanish armies when he heard the news of their defeat. He was then at Salamanca, horribly near Napoleon and with insufficient troops to fight him. He courageously decided to draw the emperor north by threatening his communications with France. This would keep him away from the Spanish army, which was fleeing south to recover its strength.
Moore’s tactics worked. Napoleon went north towards Burgos, leaving the Spanish to regroup in the south, but Moore had to beat a rapid retreat over the bleak mountains of the Asturias in the raw Spanish winter, pursued by the furious emperor’s forces. He managed to get his men to Corunna in the north-west corner of Spain, where he had been promised that transport ships would be waiting to take him and his men back to England. But to their dismay there was nothing at the fortified town except sullen grey waves, while at their heels was Marshal Soult, one of Napoleon’s most gifted generals. It was then that Moore managed to rally his exhausted, mutinous, demoralized men to make a stand. Though the transports finally arrived and the British sent Soult packing, Moore himself died in the mêlée, and was buried hastily at dead of night outside Corunna’s walls with bayonets for spades. Moore’s legendary courage and daring inspired the famous poem ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, which begins so evocatively:
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.
The arrival from Corunna of the piteous, emaciated British soldiers, who had almost perished as a result of administrative bungling, as well as the shame of Cintra, increased the unpopularity of the government at home. Headed by the Duke of Portland, one of the former Whigs sufficiently alarmed at the beginning of the French Revolution to join Pitt as a Tory, the administration was proving hopelessly incompetent, as disaster after disaster piled on Portland’s head. George III’s second son the Duke of York, who had shown himself an able administrator as commander-in-chief of the army, was forced to resign when his ex-mistress Mary Ann Clark (an ancestress of the writer Daphne du Maurier) revealed that she had used her favours to get commissions for wealthy friends.
Next came further military catastrophe at Walcheren, where the British had sent an invasion force to capture Antwerp in a bid to distract Napoleon and help Austria, which had once more declared war against France. For a moment in 1809, the Spanish risings had engendered the idea that the rest of occupied Europe would manage to throw off the Napoleonic yoke. The emperor had abandoned his pursuit of Moore to rush off to fight Austria, and it looked as if some of the German principalities would join her. But thanks to lack of co-ordination between the naval and military arms and poor reconnaissance the British forces never got nearer than Flushing and had to return home without striking a blow. Four thousand men died of fever that July at Walcheren, a small island in Zeeland above Antwerp. Meanwhile Austria had been shown by Napoleon’s decisive victory over her at Wagram in the same month how unwise it was to raise a finger against her overlord. She made peace and provided Napoleon with a second wife, the youthful Archduchess Marie Louise. By a strange turn of the wheel of historical fortune, she was the great-niece of Marie Antoinette.
Military failure, reports of improper use of influence during the election, a scandalous duel between Canning, now foreign secretary, and the war and colonial secretary Viscount Castlereagh, and his own poor health brought about Portland’s resignation as premier. He was replaced by the former chancellor of the Exchequer, the right-wing Tory Spencer Perceval, who proved as unmemorable as Portland, and the trade slump continued. The Whig opposition, who had close links to manufacturers keen for the war to end, continued to attack the government for wasting money on the Peninsular War. But the one good thing about the Tory government was that it refused to abandon the peninsula. Indeed the only bright spot amid widespread gloom were Wellesley’s sustained military successes in Portugal.
At his own insistence Wellesley had been back on the peninsula since April 1809, having impressed upon his fellow Anglo-Irishman Castlereagh the urgency of his mission there. He was convinced that Portugal could still be defended with only 20,000 British troops and 4,000 cavalry alongside a newly recruite
d Portuguese army, while the Spanish guerrillas tied down the French in their own country. He believed that the peninsula was especially important as a theatre of war because it showed the other European nations that their French oppressor was not invincible. Vimeiro had emphasized that the Napoleonic column, that massive and alarming spectacle of moving soldiery and glinting metal, sixty men deep, which had evolved out of the overwhelming numbers of the untrained French citizen-army, could be outmanoeuvred. In terms of firepower most of the men were actually useless while in column formation, because those in the middle were never able to fire for fear of hitting their comrades. The Napoleonic column that had spread fear through Europe could be defeated if a thin line of infantry–thin because it was only two men deep to enable every man to fire–directed musket fire at it. This would be the pattern over and over again in encounters between Napoleon’s armies and Wellington’s.
Wellesley believed that it was essential to maintain the friendship of the Portuguese people. On landing he issued the strictest orders to his soldiers. It was absolutely forbidden to requisition anything from the locals or to lay hands on the female population. The Protestant British, who tended to deride what to them seemed the more superstitious elements of Roman Catholicism, were to be respectful of the Portuguese people’s religion. Anyone who laid a finger on a woman or stole a chicken was to be hanged. Wellesley’s measures were harsh but effective. The Portuguese, who scarcely had enough food for themselves, were particularly grateful for his orders. The disciplined behaviour of the British troops was a pleasing change from the pillage and looting of the French soldiers.
Wellesley forged the 20,000 men he had brought to the peninsula into a superior military instrument. But Portugal was once again threatened with invasion by the French from two directions. The odds were greatly against the English, and Wellesley chose to give battle only when he knew he could win, because, he said, ‘As this is the last army England has got we must take care of it.’ Though there were terrible losses of life, Wellesley pursued the French out of Portugal to Talavera, halfway across Spain, but after inflicting a crushing defeat there on Soult with the help of 30,000 Spanish troops, he decided that the British army’s position in Spain was untenable and retreated back to Portugal. His men now had to be even more carefully preserved because the French had put 200,000 soldiers into the peninsula. To this end Wellesley, now created Viscount Wellington of Talavera, constructed the strategical masterpiece known as the Lines of Torres Vedras. It was to be a lair in which Wellington’s army–the British troops and 25,000 Portuguese soldiers–would hole up over the winter.
The Lines of Torres Vedras–‘old towers’ in Portuguese–were actually a series of more than a hundred forts complete with redoubts, ditches and earthworks north of the city of Lisbon. Wellington’s army would be able to keep a steady holding pattern until hunger supplemented by ambushes drove the French out of Portugal. The fortifications were thrown up in such secrecy that the French had absolutely no idea of their existence. It was not until what was intended to be the French army of occupation under General Masséna got to within two days’ march of the Lines in the autumn of 1810 that they realized they could go no further. The whole British army had vanished into the hillside. Wellington had meanwhile given orders to the reluctant but nobly self-sacrificing Portuguese farmers to lay waste all the country around Torres Vedras and bring all their provisions and livestock within the Lines. He intended to hold out there indefinitely until starvation forced the French army to go away.
The British supply boats that he had waiting offshore permitted Wellington to sit out the winter of 1810–11 with his men. Outside Torres Vedras the French army under General Masséna prowled and ultimately starved, thanks to their policy of depending on the local produce. In the end, after waiting from October to March, in the course of which 30,000 French troops died, Masséna and his men were forced to abandon Portugal. In 1811 Wellington began his campaign to drive the French out of Spain. In that same year the Prince of Wales at last became regent, his father George III having been diagnosed as incurably mad. Although he had allied himself with the Whigs since his youth, the new prince regent was obliged to accept a Tory government, and the Peninsular War therefore continued unimpeded.
By April 1812 all four of the most important fortresses of Spain–Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida in the north, and Badajos and Elvas to the south–had fallen into British hands. But they had only done so after a series of sieges whose huge fatalities required gallant self-sacrifice on the part of the British soldiers. At Badajos Wellington wept at the appalling waste of life when the storming of an incomplete breech required his men to use the bodies of dead colleagues as bridges. Nevertheless his object had been attained: the road to Spain lay open, and, beginning with a magnificent victory at Salamanca, he began to achieve his aim of forcing the French out of the south of Spain and keeping them out.
Wellington’s influence in the corridors of power over the war’s strategy was now unexpectedly helped by the tragic death in May of the prime minister Spencer Perceval. After Perceval had been shot by a crazed businessman named Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, the new prime minister Lord Liverpool made Wellington’s old ally Castlereagh foreign secretary. Meanwhile events in another part of Europe were aiding the allies. It was in 1812 that Napoleon finally overplayed his hand. He had parted company with the Russians over who should have Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and, believing that they were about to ally themselves with Britain as they were allowing British goods into their ports, in June he made the outstanding error of invading Russia.
His best soldiers were withdrawn from Spain to fight the new Russian foe, and were replaced by raw recruits. But not only was Napoleon badly overstretched. On its home territory the awakening colossus straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, which stretched from Poland in the west to China in the east, was too gigantic an enemy even for Napoleon. The 600,000 French soldiers he poured into Russia counted for nothing in its vast empty spaces. Like France herself, Russia was the nation in arms; and just as the French nation in arms in 1793 had proved too much for Europe, the Russian nation in arms was too much for Napoleon.
By 19 October Napoleon decided to abandon his attempt to conquer Russia, whose patriotic inhabitants were so determined to defeat him that they had burned their own capital, Moscow. It was far more important to return to his own empire, which he had been out of contact with for too long. The long and dreadful retreat from Moscow began. The ravenous once Grand Army broke up under the combined onslaught of hunger, the Cossacks and what Napoleon’s renowned general Marshal Ney called General Winter. Thousands of Frenchmen were abandoned to their fate. They died where they lay. Too weak to move they were buried alive in the snow or became the food of wolves. Those who did not die–and the dead numbered a staggering 170,000–made their way home often barefoot and without overcoats.
Unlike Wellington who provided for his men with meticulous care and invented the rubber boot which bears his name, Napoleon did not look after his soldiers. As Wellington said, ‘No man ever lost more armies than he did.’ Wherever he was, and in whatever circumstances, even if his men were starving, his aides were under orders to make sure that the ultimate luxury of white bread was available for the emperor.
Meanwhile, encouraged by the humiliation of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, the Prussians, Swedes and Austrians once more declared war on Napoleon, their soldiers paid for by British subsidies. Now that their ranks no longer consisted solely of patriotic Frenchmen, the emperor’s armies had lost some of the vigour and esprit de corps which had won the breathtaking campaigns of the past. Soldiers from Italy and the German Confederation of the Rhine made up much of their numbers. The Napoleonic Empire was beginning to pull apart under its own contradictions.
Against the inferior recruits in the French army in Spain, Wellington’s already triumphant campaign turned into a rout. By 1813 after a superb set of flanking movements he controlled the whole
of the peninsula, and had pressed the French right back to the Pyrenees. Then in October of that year in central Europe the allies won a decisive victory. At the Battle of Leipzig the troops of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Sweden threw Napoleon and 190,000 French soldiers back across the Rhine. By January 1814 all the German states had risen against Napoleon, impelled by a proud new sense of German nationalism. Having defeated Soult, Wellington crossed the Pyrenees to join the invasion of France as allied soldiers advanced from all directions. By the end of March Tsar Alexander I was in Paris along with leaders of the other victorious nations, while Napoleon himself was forced to abdicate and retire to the Italian island of Elba.
The more far-sighted pointed out that Napoleon was far too near Italy for safety, and that the people of France should be consulted on the question of what sort of ruler they wished for. But the victors were too frightened of another French Revolution rocking their own thrones to do anything but immediately reimpose the Bourbon monarchy in the shape of Louis XVIII, younger brother of Louis XVI. Deliberations about the future shape of Europe were referred to a Congress at Vienna. But into the peacemaking–conducted in a self-conscious return to the style of the pre-war era by aristocratic diplomats in between glittering balls–broke hideous news. There was no point in continuing: Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The Hundred Days of his last campaign had begun.
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