Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  1 "What I am most anxious about is the plantation of oak in the country. We shall never cease to be a great people while we have ships, which we cannot have without timber; and that is not planted because people are unable to play at cards next year with the produce of it. I plant an oak whenever I have a place to put it in."—Collingwood, 272. "I consider it as enriching and fertilising that which would otherwise be barren. It is drawing soil from the very air."—Idem, 199.

  sort of machine at the best of times, and, when old it is always wanting repair, but I must keep it going as long as I can. From England they tell me of my being relieved at the end of the war: I wish to heaven that day were come." By the end of the following year age and infirmities, blinding headaches by day and cramps at night had done their work, and he could do no more. In March, 1810, the doctors, despairing of his life, ordered him to return to England for rest and exercise, and, so weak that he could hardly stand, he sailed from Port Mahon for Gibraltar. He died on the first day of the voyage.1 A month after the old stoic's death an amphibious force from Sicily freed the Ionian island of Santa Maura, thus tightening a little closer the sea circumference of Napoleon's immense land-bound empire.

  Outside it, in an unimaginably wider world of sun-bathed islands and undeveloped continents, British ships and minute detachments of troops still gathered in—at an ever accelerating pace—the fruits of Trafalgar. During the summer of 1809 and the ensuing winter the last West Indian stations hauled down the tricolour: by the spring of 1810 the whole Caribbean had become a British lake. " Homebound Frenchmen," wrote a naval captain, "is so scarce a commodity that it is for us sailors a sad measure of policy possessing the West Indies."2 The whole wealth of the sugar islands now flowed directly, and without deduction of prize-money, into the Customs and the pockets of Liverpool and Bristol merchants. Elsewhere Senegal, Cayenne, the Seychelles, the lie dc Bourbon, Amboina and Banda Neira fell to local British expeditions. Sailing along the Malayan shores Jane Austen's brother found his countrymen firmly established at Penang with a garrison of Sepoys and European artillery; in Paramatta, while Napoleon rode triumphantly through German cities, humble Englishmen were building schools and laying the foundations of a new commonwealth under the Southern Cross. Others in the hutted town of Sydney were making up shares to settle New Zealand with flax-growers so as to enrich themselves and provide sail-cloth for the Royal Navy.

  All this spelt increased trade and wealth to the island State which Napoleon was trying to ruin. In 1810, with the Continental System stretched against her to its utmost, the value of British exports rose from fifty to nearly seventy millions. Even those to the barred coasts of Europe, after the first cataclysmic drop which followed the Berlin

  1 Alfred de Vigny, ardent French patriot though he was, confessed that it was from Collingwood's life of service that he first learnt to recognise true grandeur.

  2 Paget Brothers, 137.

  Decrees, were now twenty per cent higher than in the year of Trafalgar. So cheap were the machine-made manufactures of England, so indispensable to starved palates her colonial wares that whole divisions of douaniers could not keep them out. The very depreciation of her currency, partly due to the drain of foreign war and the embargo on her exports, only assisted the process by lowering the costs of smuggling. Try as he might, the Emperor could not suppress the immense natural force of individual self-interest by bayonets. Because millions in every country, including France, wanted England's sea-borne wares, it became profitable to the enterprising and bold to evade the Imperial edicts. British naval officers, endeavouring to rescue King Ferdinand of Spain from a French castle, found a former General of Vendean insurgents doing a roaring trade as a smuggler in the island of Houat. He was probably doing more harm to the usurper's cause than he had ever done on the battlefield.1

  In his attempt to prevent the unpreventable Napoleon imposed intense suffering on the peoples of Europe. Legitimate trade became paralysed. Of more than four hundred Hamburg sugar-boiling factories only three remained open by the summer of 1810. The wharves of the great port were almost deserted. The principal comforts of life were unobtainable by all but the richest; pathetic attempts were made to manufacture coffee out of dried carrots and sunflower seeds, and tobacco out of gooseberry leaves and cabbages. Evasion was met by ruthless repression. "Have the crew and gear of the fishing boat which communicates with the English seized at once," Napoleon ordered, "make the skipper speak! If he should seem to hesitate squeeze his thumbs in the hammer of a musket." When his brother, Louis, struggling to avert the ruin of the little mercantile nation he had been sent to rule, petitioned for some relaxation of the regulations, he was made to abdicate, and Holland was incorporated in France. The whole of Europe, a Papal nuncio reported, had become a prison house.2

  Little by little in his resolve to smash the English and slake his insatiable will, Napoleon was alienating those very forces of natural instinct and inclination which had swept him on the surge of revolution to power. Outside the favoured ranks of the Grand Army la volatile generale was ceasing to sustain him. Those whom he sought to unite in a single uniform European State, free of racial feeling and prejudice, he drove through poverty and repression back on ancient loyalties and separatist feelings. His ultimate legacy to

  1 Wellesley, I, 336. 2Jerningham, I, 310.

  the Continent he dominated was riot unity but a romantic and intensely dangerous nationalism.

  Nowhere was the reaction of that disconcerting, centrifugal force so swift and sure as in Spain. . Even the most crushing French victories were unable to stem it. After the disaster of Almonacid in the autumn of 1809 and the retreat of the British army to the borders of Portugal, the Supreme Junta, desperate to retrieve its credit, had refused to remain on the defensive in the passes of the Sierra Morena. Instead, contrary to every canon of strategy and common sense, it had launched a new offensive from the mountains of the south, west and north-west. Advancing against a more numerous and infinitely more efficient enemy with the advantage of interior lines, the ragged Spanish armies, after a brief, initial success at Tamames near Salamanca, suffered the inevitable consequence of such folly. On November, 19th Areizaga, the rash and inexperienced general whom the Junta in a desperate gamble had appointed to command the joint armies of Andalusia and Estremadura, was routed by Soult at Ocana. Fifty of his sixty guns were taken and half his 50,000 men killed or taken prisoner.

  Yet the very magnitude of the victory only increased Joseph's difficulties. It tempted him to play for stakes beyond his means. Unable in the barren uplands of Castile to raise revenue to support his Court and denied aid by a brother who believed in making war pay for itself, the titular King of Spain coveted above all things the rich valleys of Andalusia. So long as the Spaniards held the Sierra Morena in force he dared not, with the British undefeated on his flank, risk a second Baylen by advancing through the passes. But now, with the last army of Spain scattered and the British withdrawing in disgust into Portugal, the road to the south was open.

  The only obstacle remaining was Napoleon who had ordered that, until the British army had been expelled from the Peninsula, other objectives must take second place. But his brother's plight for money was so excruciating and his clamour so pitiful, that the Emperor for once followed the military line of least political resistance and let him have his way. He did not actually grant him permission to invade Andalusia but, absorbed in the preparations for his own divorce and approaching wedding, he refrained from answering his letters. Interpreting his silence as consent, Joseph at the beginning of January, 1810, left Madrid at the head of his army for the south.

  In this he was abetted by Soult, who had succeeded Jourdan as Chief of Staff. The Marshal knew as well as his master that no new commitments ought to be undertaken in the Peninsula until the hard core of British resistance had been broken. But the art treasures of the Andalusian monasteries made an irresistible appeal to his princely tastes. He also had secret hopes of a Spanish throne. He theref
ore collected all the troops who could be spared from the north and interior and poured them through the passes of the Sierra Morena, brushing aside the remnants of Areizaga's army. Jaen fell on January 23rd, Cordoba on the 24th and Seville on February ist. Five days later Sebastiani, driving far to the south, reached the Mediterranean at Malaga.

  Yet the final prize eluded the French. Immediately the Andalusian capital had fallen Victor set out for Cadiz. It looked as though nothing could save the port and the Spanish fleet. But the Duke of Albuquerque, hurrying south from Medellin, threw his ragged army into the town just in time. Meanwhile the local Junta appealed to the British. Their Commander immediately sent every man he could spare. By the end of March 9000 British and Portuguese under Sir Thomas Graham and 18,000 Spanish regulars were holding the narrow, fortified isthmus which separated Cadiz and the Isle of Leon from the mainland. All Victor could do, after a few vain attempts to force the outer forts and a still vainer appeal to Napoleon for naval help, was to sit down and blockade the town. Besiege it he could not for it was open to the sea.

  Thus, by the time spring returned to Spain, the principal French field army was irretrievably committed to siege and garrison operations in Andalusia. Three corps, totalling 70,000 troops—twice as many as the British effectives in Portugal—were tied down in the south. For, despite Joseph's sanguine hopes, his new dominion proved no more susceptible of government than his old. Like the north and centre, it could only be held by bayonets. Kindly proclamations and promises were utterly unavailing. Though here and there a few, chiefly among the possessing classes in the towns, accepted a French king as the price of a quiet life, the average Spaniard contemptuously refused to acknowledge the usurper. Sooner than do so he preferred to see his lands ravaged, his house and chattels burnt, his wife raped and his children butchered before his eyes. It was a choice that, as Goya's fearful cartoons reveal, thousands were to make during the next three years.

  For, as both French and British learnt to their amazement, the Spaniards were as formidable behind their native rocks as they were ineffective on the battlefield. The French horsemen, in their serried ranks and gleaming casques, might cry " Retirez vous, coquhis! to the ragged levies on the open plain,1 but it was another matter when they entered the sierras or tried to force their way through the portals of the grim little towns in the hills. There the unconquerable spirit of the people burnt only the brighter for disaster. In the northeast, within a few leagues of the French frontier, the antiquated fortress of Gerona held out against the French 7th Corps until more than half its inhabitants and two-thirds of its 9000 defenders had perished. Even then its Governor—the silent ascetic, Mariano Alvarez de Castro—refused to yield: delirious with the fever which was sweeping the town, he told those who urged surrender that, when the last food was gone, they could eat the cowards. Asked by his officers where they should retire, he replied uncompromisingly, "To the cemetery!" Brutally treated and dragged from dungeon to dungeon by Napoleon's orders, this valiant soldier was left to die a few months later half naked on a prison barrow. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had closed the principal road into eastern Spain for nearly seven months and cost his captor 14,000 of his best soldiers.

  In every province of the conquered land it was the same: no suffering could daunt this stark, uncompromising race. " We have conquered, but not convinced," wrote Joseph's adviser, Miot de Melito. No sooner had the half-starved, tattered Spanish armies fled from the plain than they reformed in the hills, descending again from the wild the moment the victors had moved on. Wherever to feed themselves the conquerors seized the peasant's corn and livestock, armed guerrilla bands sprang up as though by magic. Villainous faces, livid with hatred, peered from behind every boulder; revengeful fingers in waiting cellar and glade stole along fowling-piece and knife. The very priests took to the hills to stalk and kill: one Franciscan friar boasted that he had slain six hundred invaders with his own hands.

  No Frenchman was safe. For nearly four years Napoleon's daily losses in Spain averaged a hundred.2 In the remoter fastnesses—and there was no highway that did not run through or near one—the guerrilla forces at times assumed the dimensions of small armies. Their leaders—many of them men of the humblest origin—were as elusive as they were daring. They would sally out from some impregnable eyries, attack couriers, foraging parties, convoys and even field detachments. But, once they had learnt their limitations, they carefully refrained from meddling with any force stronger than their own. They merely waited for it to pass on or straggle. Some

  1 Stanhope, Conversations, 52. 2 Fortescue, VI, 178.

  of these chieftains acquired an almost European reputation: Martin Diez—El Empecinado or Inky Face—a labourer's son from Aranda who haunted the mountains on the borders of Old and New Castile and once seized and held the town of Guadalajara for a day; Mina, the student, who stormed Tafalla in Navarre.; Camilo who made thousands pay with their blood for the violation of his wife and daughter; the savage Don Julian Sanchez who provided Wellington with a tribute of decapitated couriers and the contents of their dispatch cases. The impressionable William Napier, meeting Sanchez at Almeida in the summer of 1810, conceived a romantic admiration for him until he found that he had just massacred a hundred and sixty prisoners in cold blood. For these brigand patriots were nothing if not cruel. Sanchez vowed that, if he caught Soult, he would slice him into strips beginning at his feet. One of his colleagues boiled a general alive and sawed another in half.

  The effect on French morale was grave and cumulative. The war in the Peninsula became detested even by the toughest moustache. This was a very different proposition to campaigning in a land populated by timid Italians or docile, home-keeping Germans. Plunder ceased to be a pleasure: the mildest foraging expedition assumed the character of a nightmare. Every convoy needed a powerful escort; every village and town, if it was to be of the slightest value to Joseph's tax-gatherers, had to be garrisoned. Denied all but a pittance for military essentials by Napoleon, King Pepe, as he was called by his scornful subjects, was unable to pay even the salaries of his Court. Confiscation brought in little, for no one—even a traitor—was willing to buy in a land where the military were so powerless to protect property. And as the French generals never knew where their invisible foes would attack next, they were driven to disperse their forces ever wider to maintain order and preserve their communications. The more they did so, the weaker they became at any given point.

  It was Wellesley's merit as a commander that, despite his strong prejudice against the Spaniards, he grasped the importance of this. "If we can maintain ourselves in Portugal," he wrote, "the war will not cease in the Peninsula, and, if the war lasts in the Peninsula, Europe will be saved." With his insight into realities he saw that, so long as the guerrillas fought on and his army remained in the field, the French would be in a quandary. If they dispersed enough strength to smother the growing conflagration, they would sooner or later expose some part of their forces to a blow from the British. If they

  1 See Stanhope, Conversations, 70.

  concentrated against the latter, they would be unable to keep the flame of rebellion under control.

  In the dark hour after the retreat from Talavera, therefore, when almost every other Englishman despaired of Spain, the Commander-in-Chief urged the Government to persist. He was still doing so three months later when the Spaniards by their incredible folly had lost the battles of Ocana and Alba de Tonnes and exposed Andalusia to invasion. " If they had preserved their two armies or even one of them, " the cause was safe," he commented bitterly. But no! nothing will answer but to fight great battles in plains in which their defeat is as certain as the commencement of the battle."1 Yet he continued to contend that, with 30,000 British and 40,000 disciplined Portuguese troops, he could hold Lisbon. Ministers, he told Lord Liverpool, would betray the honour and interests of the country if they abandoned the campaign. "If you are beaten," he declared, "you cannot help it, but do not give up unnecess
arily." 2

  For, so long as the guerrillas tied down the bulk of the French armies in garrison, police and convoy duty, only limited forces could be assembled for an advance across the barren Portuguese mountains. And by delaying actions, driving the countryside and utilising its defensive features, Wellesley felt that he could deal with any force of less than seventy or eighty thousand. He told the Secretary of State that the French were desperately anxious for the British to withdraw but that they could only bring sufficient strength against Portugal by abandoning other objects and jeopardising their whole fabric in Spain. If they invaded and failed to force his army to evacuate, they would be in a very dangerous situation, and, the longer they could be delayed, the more they were likely to suffer.

  In this, like Sir Charles Stuart twelve years before, Wellesley took account of the peculiarities of Portuguese geography. Ostensibly the long, narrow land was defenceless: the mountains ran, not along the frontier from north to south, but from east to west, and the main river valleys flowed from the Spanish hinterland to the coast, so splitting the defenders into isolated groups. With the Tagus and the mountains cutting the country into isolated lateral strips and with almost every road leading to Lisbon, an army acting on the frontier ran a grave risk of being cut off from the capital.

  Yet the map was deceptive. The river valleys—Douro, Mondego, Tagus and Guadiana—were not so much throughfares as deep gorges, almost as hard to penetrate as the mountains through which they seeped their way. The only easy approach from Spain to Lisbon was

  1 To Bartle Frere, 6th Dec, 1809. Garwood. 2 To Liverpool, 14th Nov., 1809. Gurwood.

  the Merida highway to the south of the Tagus. But this was dominated by the great fortresses of Badajoz and Elvas—still held by the Spaniards and Portuguese. And it led an invading army not into the capital but merely to the opposite shore of the broad Tagus estuary, which could not be forced in the face of British naval power. Only at Santarem, nearly fifty miles to the north or, at best at Villa Franca a little lower down, was there bridge or ford.