AHISTORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR

ORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR

BY

CHARLES OMAN

Vol. I

1807-1809

FROM THE TREATY OF FONTAINEBLEAU

TO THE BATTLE OF CORUNNA

PREFACE

IT is many years since an attempt has been made in England to deal with the general history of the Peninsular War. Several interesting and valuable diaries or memoirs of officers who took part in the great struggle have been published of late, but no writer of the present generation has dared to grapple with the details of the whole of the seven years of campaigning that lie between the Dos Mayo and Toulouse. Napier’s splendid work has held the field for sixty years. Meanwhile an enormous bulk of valuable material has been accumulating in English, French, and Spanish, which has practically remained unutilized. Papers, public and private, are accessible whose existence was not suspected in the ’thirties; an infinite number of autobiographies and reminiscences which have seen the light after fifty or sixty years of repose in some forgotten drawer, have served to fill up many gaps in our knowledge. At least one formal history of the first importance, that of General Arteche y Moro, has been published. I fancy that its eleven volumes are practically unknown in England, yet it is almost as valuable as Toreno’s Guerra de la Independencia in enabling us to understand the purely Spanish side of the war.

I trust therefore that it will not be considered presumptuous for one who has been working for some ten or fifteen years at the original sources to endeavour to summarize in print the results of his investigations ; for I believe that even the reader who has already devoted a good deal of attention to the Peninsular War will find a considerable amount of new matter in these pages.

My resolve to take in hand a general history of the struggle was largely influenced by the passing into the hands of All Souls College of the papers of one of its most distinguished fellows, the diplomatist Sir Charles Vaughan. Not only had Vaughan unique opportunities for observing the early years of the Peninsular War, but he turned them to the best account, and placed all his observations on record. I suppose that there was seldom a man who had a greater love for collecting and filing information. His papers contain not only his own diaries and correspondence, but an infinite number of notes made for him by Spanish friends on points which he desired to master, and a vast bulk of pamphlets, proclamations, newspapers, and tables of statistics, carefully bound together in bundles, which (as far as I can see) have not been opened between the day of his death and that on which they passed, by a legacy from his last surviving relative, into the possession of his old college. Vaughan landed at Corunna in September, 1808, in company with Charles Stuart, the first English emissary to the Central Junta. He rode with Stuart to Madrid and Aranjuez, noting everything that he saw, from Homan inscriptions to the views of local Alcaldes and priests on the politics of the day. He contrived to interview many persons of importance—for example, he heard from Cuesta’s own lips of his treasonable plot to overthrow the Junta, and he secured a long conversation with Castanos as to the Capitulation of Baylen, from which I have extracted some wholly new facts as to that event. He then went to Aragon, where he stayed three weeks in the company of the Captain­General Joseph Palafox. Not only did he cross-question Palafox as to all . the details of his famous defence of Saragossa, but lie induced San Genis (the colonel who conducted the engineering side of the operations) to write him a memorandum, twelve pages long, as to the character and system of his work. Vaughan accompanied Palafox to the front in November, but left the Army of Aragon a day before the battle of Tudela. Hearing of the disaster from the fugitives of Castaños’s army, he resolved to take the news to Madrid. Riding hard for the capital, he crossed the front of Ney’s cavalry at Agreda, but escaped them and came safely through. On arriving at Madrid he was given dispatches for Sir John Moore, and carried them to Salamanca. It was the news which he brought that induced the British general to order his abortive retreat on Portugal. Moore entrusted to him not only his dispatch to Sir David Baird, bidding him retire into Galicia, but letters for Lord Castlereagh, which needed instant conveyance to London. Accordingly Vaughan rode with headlong speed to Baird at Astorga, and from Astorga to Corunna, which he reached eleven days after his start from Tudela. From thence he took ship to England and brought the news of the Spanish disasters to the British Ministry.

Vaughan remained some time in England before returning to Spain, but he did not waste his time. Not only did he write a short account of the siege of Sara­gossa, which had a great vogue at the moment, but he collected new information from an unexpected source. General Lefebvre-Desnouettes, the besieger of Saragossa, arrived as a prisoner in England. Vaughan promptly went to Cheltenham, where the Frenchman was living on parole, and had a long conversation with him as to the details of the siege, which he carefully compared with the narrative of Palafox. Probably no other person ever had such opportunities for collecting first-hand information as to that famous leaguer. It will please those who love the romantic side of history, to know that Vaughan was introduced by Palafox to Agostina, the famous Maid of Sara­gossa, and heard the tale of her exploit from the Captain-General less than three months after it had occurred. The doubts of Napier and others as to her existence are completely dissipated by the diary of this much-travelled Fellow of All Souls College.

Vaughan returned to Spain ere 1809 was out, and served under various English ambassadors at Seville and Cadiz for the greater part of the war. His papers and collections for the later years of the struggle are almost as full and interesting as those for 1808 which I have utilized in this volume.

I have worked at the Record Office on the British official papers of the first years of the war, especially noting all the passages which are omitted in the printed dispatches of Moore and other British generals. The suppressed paragraphs (always placed within brackets marked with a pencil) contain a good deal of useful matter, mainly criticisms on individuals which it would not have been wise to publish at the time. There are a considerable number of intercepted French dispatches in the collection, and a certain amount of correspondence with the Spaniards which contains facts and figures generally unknown. Among the most interesting are the letters of General Leith, who was attached to the head quarters of Blake; in them I found by far the best account of the operations of the Army of Galicia in Oct.—Nov., 1808, which I have come upon.

As to printed sources of information, I have read all the Parliamentary papers of 1808-9, and the whole file of the Madrid Gazette, as well as many scores of memoirs and diaries, French, English, and Spanish. I think that no important English or French book has escaped me; but I must confess that some of the Spanish works quoted by General Arteche proved unprocurable, both in London and Paris. The British Museum Library is by no means strong in this department; it is even short of obvious authorities, such as the monographs of St. Cyr and of Cabanes on the War in Catalonia. The memoirs of the Peninsular veterans on both sides often require very cautious handling; some cannot be trusted for anything that did not happen under the author’s eye. Others were written so long after the events which they record, that they are not even to be relied upon for facts which must have been under his actual observation. For example, General Marbot claims that he brought to Bayonne the dispatch from Murat informing Napoleon of the insurrection of Madrid on May 2, and gives details as to the way in which the Emperor received the news. But it is absolutely certain, both from the text of Murat’s letter and from Napoleon’s answer to it, that the document was carried and delivered by a Captain Hannecourt. The aged Marbot’s memory had played him false. There are worse cases, where an eye­witness, writing within a short time of the events which he describes, gives a version which he must have known to be incorrect, for the glorification of himself or some friend. Thiebault and Le Noble are bad offenders in this respect: Thiebault’s account of some of the incidents in Portugal and of the combat of A Idea del Ponte, Le Noble’s narrative of Corunna, seem to be deliberately falsified. I have found one English au­thority who falls under the same suspicion. But on both sides the majority of the mistakes come either from writers who describe that which did not pass under their own eyes, or from aged narrators who wrote their story twenty, thirty, or forty years after the war was over. Their diaries written at the time are often invaluable correctives to their memoirs or monographs composed after an interval; e. g. Foy’s rough diary lately pub­lished by Girod de l’Ain contains some testimonials to Wellington and the British army very much more handsomely expressed than anything which the General wrote in his formal history of the early campaigns of 1808.

I hope to insert in my second volume a bibliography of all the works useful for the first two years of the war. The inordinate size to which my first volume has swelled has made it impossible to include in it a list of authorities, which covers a good many pages.

It will be noticed that my Appendices include several extensive tables, giving the organization of the French and Spanish armies in 1808. For part of them I am indebted to General Arteche’s work; but the larger half has been constructed at great cost of time and labour from scattered contemporary papers—from returns to be found in the most varied places (some of the most important Spanish ones survive only in the Record Office or in Vaughan’s papers, others only in the Madrid Gazette. No one, so far as I know, had hitherto endeavoured to construct the complete table of the Spanish army in October, or of that of the exact composition of Napoleon’s ‘ grand army ’ in the same month. I hope my Appendices therefore may be found of some use.

More than one friend has asked me during the last few months whether it is worth while to rewrite the history of the Peninsular War when Napier’s great work is everywhere accessible. I can only reply that I no more dream of superseding the immortal six volumes of that grand old soldier, than Dr. S. R. Gardiner dreamed of superseding Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion when he started to write the later volumes of his account of the reign of Charles I. The books of Napier and Clarendon must remain as all-important contemporary narratives, written by men who saw clearly one aspect of the events which they describe; in each the personal element counts for much, and the political and individual sympathies and enmities of the historian have coloured his whole work. No one would think of going to Clarendon for an unprejudiced account of the character and career of Oliver Cromwell. But I do not think that it is generally realized that it is just as unsafe to go to Napier for an account of the aims and undertakings of the Spanish Juntas, or the Tory governments of 1808-14. As a narrator of the incidents of war he is unrivalled: no one who has ever read them can forget his soul-stirring descriptions of the charge of the Fusilier brigade at Albuera, of the assault on the Great Breach at Badajoz, or the storming of Soult’s positions on the Rhune. These and a hundred other eloquent passages will survive for ever as masterpieces of vigorous English prose.

But when he wanders off into politics, English or Spanish, Napier is a less trustworthy guide. All his views are coloured by the fact that he was a bitter enemy of the Tories of his own day. The kinsman not only of Charles James Fox, but of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he could never look with unprejudiced eyes on their political opponents. Canning and Spencer Perceval were in his ideas men capable of any folly, any gratuitous perversity. Castlereagh’s splendid services to England are ignored: it would be impossible to discover from the pages of the Peninsular War that this was the man who picked out Wellington for the command in Spain, and kept him there in spite of all manner of opposition. Nor is this all: Napier was also one of those strange Englishmen who, notwithstanding all the evidence that lay before them, believed that Napo­leon Bonaparte was a beneficent character, thwarted in his designs for the regeneration of Europe by the obstinate and narrow-minded opposition of the British Government. In his preface, he goes so far as to say that the Tories fought the Emperor not because he was the dangerous enemy of the British Empire, but because he was the champion of Democracy, and they the champions of caste and privilege. When the tidings of Napoleon’s death at St. Helena reached him (as readers of his Life will remember), he cast himself down on his sofa and wept for three hours! Hence it was that, in dealing with the Tory ministries, he is ever a captious and unkind critic, while for the Emperor he displays a respect that seems very strange in an enthusiastic friend of political liberty. Every one who has read the first chapters of his great work must see that Bonaparte gets off with slight reproof for his monstrous act of treachery at Bayonne, and for the even more disgusting months of hypocritical friendship that had preceded it. While pouring scorn on Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, the silly father and the rebellious son, whose quarrels were the Emperor’s opportunity, Napier forgets to rise to the proper point of indignation in dealing with the false friend who betrayed them. He almost writes as if there were some excuse for the crimes of robbery and kidnapping, if the victim were an imbecile or a bigot, or an undutiful son. The prejudice in favour of the Emperor goes so far that he even endeavours to justify obvious political and military mistakes in his conduct of the Peninsular War, by throwing all the blame on the way in which his marshals executed his orders, and neglecting to point out that the orders themselves were impracticable.

On the other hand, Napier was just as over-hard to the Spaniards as he was over-lenient to Bonaparte. He was one of those old Peninsular officers who could never dismiss the memory of some of the things that he had seen or heard. The cruelties of the Guerrillas, the dis­graceful panic on the eve of Talavera, the idiotic pride and obstinacy of Cuesta, the cowardice of Imaz and La Pena, prejudiced him against all their countrymen. The turgid eloquence of Spanish proclamations, followed by the prosaic incapacity of Spanish performance, sickened him. He always accepts the French rather than the Spanish version of a story, forgetting that Bonaparte and his official writers were authorities quite as un­worthy of implicit credence as their opponents. In dealing with individual Spaniards—we may take for example Joseph Palafox, or the unfortunate Daoiz and Velarde—he is unjust to the extreme of cruelty. His astounding libel on La Romana’s army, I have had occasion to notice in some detail on page 416 of this work. He invariably exaggerates Spanish defeats, and minimizes Spanish successes. He is reckless in the statements which he gives as to their numbers in battle, or their losses in defeat. Evidently he did not take the trouble to consult the elaborate collection of morning­states of armies and other official documents which the Spanish War Office published several years before he wrote his first volume. All his figures are borrowed from the haphazard guesses of the French marshals. This may seem strong language to use concerning so great an author, but minute investigation seems to prove that nearly every statement of Napier’s concerning a battle in which the Spaniards were engaged is drawn from some French source. The Spaniards’ version is ignored.

In his indignation at the arrogance and obstinacy with which they often hampered his hero Wellington, he refuses to look at the extenuating circumstances which often explain, or even excuse, their conduct. After reading his narrative, one should turn to Arguelles or Toreno or Arteche, peruse their defence of their country­men, and then make one’s ultimate decision as to facts. Every student of the Peninsular War, in short, must read Napier: but he must not think that, when the reading is finished, he has mastered the whole meaning and importance of the great struggle.

The topographical details of most of my maps are drawn from the splendid Atlas published by the Spanish War Office during the last twenty years. But the details of the placing of the troops are my own. I have been particularly careful in the maps of Vimiero and Corunna to indicate the position of every battalion, French or English.

I am in duty bound to acknowledge the very kind assistance of three helpers in the construction of this . volume. The first compiled the Index, after grappling with the whole of the proofs. The second, Mr. C. E. Doble, furnished me with a great number of suggestions as to revision, which I have adopted. The third, Mr. C. T. Atkinson, of Exeter College, placed at my disposition his wide knowledge of British regimental history, and put me in the way of obtaining many details as to the organization of Wellesley’s and Moore’s armies. I am infinitely obliged to all three.

C. OMAN.

All Souls College,

March 31, 1902.

SECTION I

NAPOLEON AND THE SPANISH BOURBONS

CHAPTER I

THE TREATY OF FONTAINEBLEAU

“I AM not the heir of Louis XIV, I am the heir of Charlemagne,” wrote Napoleon, in one of those moments of epigrammatic self-revelation which are so precious to the students of the most interesting epoch and the most interesting personality of modern history. There are historians who have sought for the origins of the Peninsular War far back in the eternal and inevitable conflict between democracy and privilege: there are others who—accepting the Emperor’s own version of the facts—have represented it as a fortuitous development arising from his plan of forcing the Continental System upon every state in Europe. To us it seems that the moment beyond which we need not search back­ward was that in which Bonaparte formulated to himself the idea that he was not the successor of the greatest of the Bourbons, but of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a different thing to claim to be the first of European monarchs, and to claim to be the king of kings. Louis XIV had wide-reaching ambitions for himself and for his family: but it was from his not very deep or accurate knowledge of Charlemagne that Napoleon had derived his idea of a single imperial power bestriding Europe, of a monarch whose writ ran alike at Paris and at Mainz, at Milan and at Hamburg, at Rome and at Barcelona, and whose vassal-princes brought him the tribute of all the lands of the Oder, the Elbe, and the middle Danube.

There is no need for us to trace back the growth of Napoleon’s conception of himself as the successor of Charlemagne beyond the Winter of 1805-6, the moment when victorious at Austerlitz and master for the first time of Central Europe, he began to put into execution his grandiose scheme for enfeoffing all the realms of the Continent as vassal states of the French Empire. He had extorted from Francis of Austria the renunciation of his meagre and time­worn rights as head of the Holy Roman Empire, because he intended to replace the ancient shadow by a new reality. The idea that he might be Emperor of Europe and not merely Emperor of the French was already developed, though Prussia still needed to be chastised, and Russia to be checked and turned back on to the ways of the East. It was after Austerlitz but before Jena that the foundations of the Confederation of the Rhine were laid, and that the Emperor took in hand the erection of that series of subject realms under princes of his own house, which was to culminate in the new kingdom of Spain ruled by ‘Joseph Napoleon the First.’ By the summer of 1806 the system was already well developed : the first modest experiment, the planting out of his sister Eliza and her insignificant husband in the duchy of Lucca and Piombino was now twelve months old. There had followed the gift of the old Bourbon kingdom of Naples to Joseph Bonaparte in February, 1806, and the transformation of the Batavian Republic into Louis Bonaparte’s kingdom of Holland in June. The Emperor’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, had been made Grand-Duke of Berg in March, his sister, Pauline, Duchess of Guastalla in the same month. It cannot be doubted that his eye was already roving all round Europe, marking out every region in which the system of feudatory states could be further extended.

At the ill-governed realms of Spain and Portugal it is certain that he must have taken a specially long glance. He had against the house of the Bourbons the grudge that men always feel against those whom they have injured. He knew that they could never forgive the disappointed hopes of 1799, nor the murder of the Due d’Enghien, however much they might disguise their sentiments by base servility. What their real feelings were might be guessed from the treacherous conduct of their kinsmen of Naples, whom he had just expelled from the Continent. The Bourbons of Spain were at this moment the most subservient and the most ill-used of his allies. Under the imbecile guidance of his favourite Godoy, Charles IV had consistently held to the league with France since 1795, and had thereby brought down untold calamities upon his realm. Nevertheless Napoleon was profoundly dissatisfied with him as an ally. The seventy-two million francs of subsidies which he was annually wringing from his impoverished neighbour seemed to him a trifle. The chief gain that he had hoped to secure, when he goaded Spain into war with England in 1804, had been the assistance of her fleet, by whose aid he had intended to gain the control of the narrow seas, and to dominate the Channel long enough to enable him to launch his projected invasion against the shores of Kent and Sussex. But the Spanish navy, always more formidable on paper than in battle, had proved a broken reed. The flower of its vessels had been destroyed at Trafalgar. There, only remained in 1806 a few ships rotting in harbour at Cadiz, Cartagena, and Ferrol, unable even to concentrate on account of the strictness of Collingwood’s blockade. Napoleon was angry at his ally’s impotence, and was already reflecting that in hands more able and energetic than those of Charles IV Spain might give aid of a very different kind. In after years men remembered that as early as 1805 he had muttered to his confidants that a Bourbon on the Spanish throne was a tiresome neighbour—too weak as an ally, yet dangerous as a possible enemy[1]. For in spite of all the subservience of Charles IV the Emperor believed, and believed quite rightly, that a Bourbon prince must in his heart loathe the unnatural alliance with the child of the Revolution. But in 1806 Bonaparte had an impending war with Prussia on his hands, and there was no leisure for interfering in the affairs of the Peninsula. Spain, he thought, could wait, and it is improbable that he had formulated in his brain any definite plan for dealing with her.

The determining factor in his subsequent action was undoubtedly supplied in the autumn of 1806 by the conduct of the Spanish government during the campaign of Jena. There was a moment, just before that decisive battle had been fought, during which European public opinion was expecting a check to the French arms. The military prestige of Prussia was still very great, and it was well known that Russia had not been able to put forth her full strength at Austerlitz. Combined it was believed that they would be too much for Napoleon. While this idea was still current, the Spanish king, or rather his favourite Godoy, put forth a strange proclamation which showed how slight was the bond of allegiance that united them to France, and how hollow their much vaunted loyalty to the emperor. It was an impassioned appeal to the people of Spain to take arms en masse, and to help the government with liberal gifts of men, horses and money. “Come,” it said, “dear fellow countrymen, come and swear loyalty beneath the banners of the most benevolent of sovereigns.” The God of Victories was to smile on a people which helped itself, and a happy and enduring peace was to be the result of a vigorous effort. It might have been pleaded in defence of Charles IV that all this was very vague, and that the anonymous enemy who was to be crushed might be England. But unfortunately for this interpretation, three whole sentences of the document are filled with demands for horses and an instant increase in the cavalry arm of the Spanish military establishment. It could hardly be urged with seriousness that horsemen were intended to be employed against the English fleet. And of naval armaments there was not one word in the proclamation.

This document was issued on Oct. 5, 1806 : not long after there arrived in Madrid the news of the battle of Jena and the capture of Berlin. The Prince of the Peace was thunderstruck at the non-fulfilment of his expectations and the complete triumph of Napoleon. He hastened to countermand his armaments, and to shower letters of explanation and apology on the Emperor, pointing out that his respected ally could not possibly have been the ‘enemy’ referred to in the proclamation. That document had reached Napoleon on the very battlefield of Jena, and had caused a violent paroxysm of rage in the august reader1. But, having Russia still to fight, he repressed his wrath for a moment, affecting to regard as satisfactory Godoy’s servile letters of explanation. Yet we can hardly doubt that this was the moment at which he made up his mind that the House of Bourbon must cease to reign in Spain. He must have reflected on the danger that southern France had escaped; a hundred thousand Spaniards might have marched on Bordeaux or Toulouse at the moment of Jena, and there would have been no army whatever on the unguarded frontier of the Pyrenees to hold them in check. Supposing that Jena had been deferred a month, or that no decisive battle at all had been fought in the first stage of the struggle with Prussia, it was clear that Godoy would have committed himself to open war. A stab in the back, even if dealt with no better weapon than the disorganized Spanish army, must have deranged all Napoleon’s plans, and forced him to turn southward the reserves destined to feed the ‘Grand Army.’ It was clear that such a condition of affairs must never be allowed to recur, and we should naturally expect to find that, the moment the war of 1806-7 was ended, Napoleon would turn against Spain, either to dethrone Charles IV, or at least to demand the dismissal from office of Godoy. He acknowledged this himself at St. Helena : the right thing to have done, as he then conceded, would have been to declare open war on Spain immediately after Tilsit.

After eight years of experience of Bonaparte as an ally, the rulers of Spain ought to have known that his silence during the campaigns of Eylau and Friedland boded them no good. But his present intentions escaped them, and they hastened to atone for the proclamation of Oct. 5 by a servile obedience to all the orders which he sent them. The most important of these was the command to mobilize and send to the Baltic 15,000 of their best troops [March, 1807]. This was promptly done, the depleted battalions and squadrons being raised to war-strength, by drafts of men and horses which disorganized dozens of the corps that remained at home . The reason alleged, the fear of Swedish and English descents on the rear of the Grand Army, was plausible, but there can be no doubt that the real purpose was to deprive Spain of a considerable part, and that the most efficient, of her disposable forces. If Godoy could have listened to the interviews of Napoleon and Alexander of Russia at Tilsit, he would have been terrified at the offhand way in which the Emperor suggested to the Czar that the Balearic Isles should be taken from Spain and given to Ferdinand of Naples, if the latter would consent to cede Sicily to Joseph Napoleon. To despoil his allies was quite in the usual style of Bonaparte—Godoy cannot have forgotten the lot of Trinidad and Ceylon—but he had not before proposed to tear from Spain, not a distant colony, but an ancient province of the Aragonese crown. The project was enshrined in the ‘secret and supplementary’ clauses of the Treaty of Tilsit, which Napoleon wished to conceal till the times were ripe.

It was only when Bonaparte had returned to France from his long campaign in Poland that the affairs of the Iberian Peninsula began to come seriously to the front. The Emperor arrived in Paris at the end of July, 1807, and this was the moment at which he might have been expected to produce the rod, for the chas­tisement which the rulers of Spain had merited by their foolish proclamation of the preceding year. But no sign of any such intention was displayed: it is true that early in August French troops in considerable numbers began to muster at Bayonne, but Bonaparte openly declared that they were destined to be used, not against Spain, but against Portugal. One of the articles of the Peace of Tilsit had been to the effect that Sweden and Portugal, the last powers in Europe which had not submitted to the Continental System, should be compelled—if necessary by force—to adhere to it, and to exclude the commerce of England from their ports. It was natural that now, as in 1801, a French contingent should be sent to aid Spain in bringing pressure to bear on her smaller neighbour. With this idea Godoy and his master persisted in the voluntary blindness to the signs of the times which they had so long been cultivating. They gave their ambassador in Lisbon orders to act in all things in strict conjunction with his French colleague.

On August 12, therefore, the representatives of Spain and France delivered to John, the Prince-Regent of Portugal (his mother, Queen Maria, was insane), almost identical notes, in which they declared that they should ask for their passports and leave Lisbon, unless by the first of September the Regent had declared war on England, joined his fleet to that of the allied powers, confiscated all British goods in his harbours, and arrested all British subjects within the bounds of his kingdom. The prince, a timid and incapable person, whose only wish was to preserve his neutrality, answered that he was ready to break off diplomatic relations with England, and to close his ports against British ships, but that the seizure of the persons and property of the British merchants, without any previous declaration of war, would be contrary to the rules of international law and morality. For a moment he hoped that this half-measure would satisfy Napoleon, that he might submit to the Continental System without actually being compelled to declare war on Great Britain. But when dispatches had been interchanged between the French minister Rayneval and his master at Paris, the answer came that the Regent’s offer was insufficient, and that the representatives of France and Spain were ordered to quit Lisbon at once. This they did on September 30, but without issuing any formal declaration of war.

On October 18, the French army, which had been concentrating at Bayonne since the beginning of August, under the harmless name of the ‘Corps of Observation of the Gironde,’ crossed the Bidassoa at Irun and entered Spain. It had been placed under the orders of Junot, one of Napoleon’s most active and vigorous officers, but not a great strategist after the style of Massena, Soult, or Davoust. He was a good fighting-man, but a mediocre general. The reason that he received the appointment was that he had already some knowledge of Portugal, from having held the post of ambassador at Lisbon in 1805. He had been promised a duchy and a marshal’s baton if his mission was carried out to his master’s complete satisfaction.

It is clear that from the first Napoleon had intended that Portugal should refuse the ignominious orders which he had given to the Prince-Regent. If he had only been wishing to complete the extension of the Continental System over all Southern Europe, the form of obedience which had been offered him by the Portuguese government would have been amply sufficient. But he was aiming at annexation, and not at the mere assertion of his suzerainty over Portugal. The fact that he began to mass troops at Bayonne before he commenced to threaten the Regent is sufficient proof of his intentions. An army was not needed to coerce the Portuguese: for it was incredible that in the then condition of European affairs they would dare to risk war with France and Spain by adhering too stiffly to the cause of England. The Regent was timid and his submission was certain; but Napoleon took care to dictate the terms that he offered in such an offensive form that the Portuguese government would be tempted to beg for changes of detail, though it sorrowfully accepted the necessity of conceding the main point—war with England and the acceptance of the Continental System. The Prince-Regent, as might have been expected, made a feeble attempt to haggle over the more ignominious details, and then Napoleon withdrew his ambassador and let loose his armies.

Shortly after Junot had crossed the Bidassoa there was signed at Fontainebleau the celebrated secret treaty which marks the second stage of the Emperor’s designs against the Peninsula. It was drawn up by Duroc, Napoleon’s marshal of the palace, and Eugenio Izquierdo, the agent of Godoy. For the official ambassador of Spain in Paris, the Prince of Masserano, was not taken into the confidence of his master. All delicate matters were conducted by the favourite’s private representative, an obscure but astute personage, the director of the Botanical Gardens at Madrid, whose position was legitimized by a royal sign-manual giving him powers to treat as a plenipotentiary with France. “Manuel is your protector: do what he tells you, and by serving him you serve me,” the old king had said, when giving him his commission.

The Treaty of Fontainebleau is a strange document, whose main purpose, at a first glance, seems to be the glorification of Godoy. It is composed of fourteen articles, the most important of which contain the details of a projected dismemberment of Portugal. The country was to be cut up into three parts. Oporto and the northern province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho were to become the Kingdom of Northern Lusitania, and to be ceded to a Bourbon, the young King of Etruria, whom Napoleon was just evicting from his pleasant abode at Florence. All Southern Portugal, the large province of Alemtejo and the coast region of Algarve, was to be given as an independent principality to Godoy, under the title of Prince of the Algarves. The rest of Portugal, Lisbon and the provinces of Beira, Estremadura and Tras-os-Montes were to be sequestrated till the conclusion of a general peace, and meanwhile were to be governed and administered by the French. Ultimately they were to be restored, or not restored, to the house of Braganza according as the high contracting parties might determine.

Instead therefore of receiving punishment for his escapade in the autumn of 1806, Godoy was to be made by Napoleon a sovereign prince! But Spain, as apart from the favourite, got small profit from this extraordinary treaty: Charles IV might take, within the next three years, the pompous title of ‘Emperor of the Two Americas,’ and was to be given some share of the transmarine possessions of Portugal—which meanwhile (treaties or no) would inevitably fall into the hands of Great Britain, who held the com­mand of the seas, while Napoleon did not.

It is incredible that Bonaparte ever seriously intended to carry out the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau: they were not even to be divulged (as Article XIV stipulated) till it was his pleasure. Godoy had deserved badly of him, and the Emperor was never forgiving. The favourite’s whole position and character (as we shall presently show) were so odious and disgraceful, that it would have required an even greater cynicism than Napoleon possessed, to overthrow an ancient and respectable kingdom in order to make him a sovereign prince. To pose perpetually as the regenerator of Europe, and her guardian against the sordid schemes of Britain, and then to employ as one’s agent for regeneration the corrupt and venal favourite of the wicked old Queen of Spain, would have been too absurd. Napoleon’s keen intelligence would have repudiated the idea, even in the state of growing autolatry into which he was already lapsing in the year 1807. What profit could there be in giving a kingdom to a false friend, already convicted of secret disloyalty, incapable, disreputable, and universally detested?

But if we apply another meaning to the Treaty of Fontainebleau we get a very different light upon it. If we adopt the hypothesis that Bonaparte’s real aim was to obtain an excuse for marching French armies into Spain without exciting suspicion, all its pro­visions become intelligible. ‘This Prince of the Peace,’ he said in one of his confidential moments, ‘this mayor of the palace, is loathed by the nation; he is the rascal who will himself open for me the gates of Spain.’ The phantom principality that was dangled before Godoy’s eyes was only designed to attract his attention while the armies of France were being poured across the Pyrenees. It is doubtful whether the Emperor intended the project of the ‘Princi­pality of the Algarves’ to become generally known. If he did, it must have been with the intention of making the favourite more odious than he already was to patriotic Spaniards, at the moment when he and his master were about to be brushed away by a sweep of the imperial arm. That Napoleon was already in October preparing other armies beside that of Junot, and that he purposed to overrun Spain when the time was ripe, is shown in the Treaty itself. Annexed to it is a convention regulating the details of the invasion of Portugal: the sixth clause of this paper mentions that it was the emperor’s intention to concentrate 40,000 more troops at Bayonne—in case Great Britain should threaten an armed descent on Portugal—and that this force would be ready to cross the Pyrenees by November 20. Napoleon sent not 40,000 but 100,000 men, and pushed them into Spain, though no English invasion of Portugal had taken place, or even been projected. After this is it possible to believe for a moment in his good faith, or to think that the Treaty of Fontainebleau was anything more than a snare?

Those who could best judge what was at the back of the emperor’s mind, such as Talleyrand and Fouche, penetrated his designs long before the treaty of Fontainebleau had been signed. Talleyrand declares in his memoirs that the reason for which he was deprived of the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in August, 1807, was that he had disliked the scheme of invading Spain in a treacherous fashion, and warned his master against it. No improbability is added to this allegation by the fact that Napoleon at St. Helena repeatedly stated that Talleyrand had first thought of the idea, and had recommended it to him ‘while at the same time contriving to set an opinion abroad that he was opposed to the design.’ On the other hand, we are not convinced of the Prince of Benevento’s innocence merely by the fact that he wrote in his autobiography that he was a strenuous opponent of the plan. He says that the emperor broached the whole scheme to him the moment that he returned from Tilsit, asseverating that he would never again expose himself to the danger of a stab in the back at some moment when he might be busy in Central Europe. He himself, he adds, combated the project by every possible argument, but could not move his master an inch from his purpose. This is probably true; but we believe it not because Talleyrand wrote it down—his bills require the endorsement of some backer of a less tarnished repu­tation—but because the whole of the Spanish episode is executed in the true Napoleonesque manner. Its scientific mixture of force and fraud is clearly the work of the same hand that managed the details of the fall of the Venetian Republic, and of the dethroning of Pope Pius VII. It is impossible to ascribe the plot to any other author.

SECTION I: CHAPTER II

THE COURT OF SPAIN

Junot’s army was nearing the Portuguese frontier, and the reserve at Bayonne was already beginning to assemble—it was now styled ‘the Second Corps of Observation of the Gironde’— when a series of startling events took place at the Spanish Court. On October 27, the very day that the treaty of Fontainebleau was signed, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, was seized by his father and thrown into confinement, on a charge of high treason, of having plotted to dethrone or even to murder his aged parent. This astonishing development in the situation need not be laid to Napoleon’s charge. There have been historians who think that he deliberately stirred up the whole series of family quarrels at Madrid: but all the materials for trouble were there already, and the shape which they took was not particularly favourable to the Emperor’s present designs. They sprang from the inevitable revolt against the predominance of Godoy, which had long been due.

The mere fact that an incapable upstart like Godoy had been able to control the foreign and internal policy of Spain ever since 1792 is a sufficient evidence of the miserable state of the country, lie was a mere court favourite of the worst class: to compare him to Buckingham would be far too flattering—and even Piers Gaveston had a pretty wit and no mean skill as a man-at-arms, though he was also a vain ostentatious fool. After a few years, we may remember, the one met the dagger and the other the axe, with the full approval of English public opinion. But Godoy went on flourishing like the green bay-tree, for sixteen years, decked with titles and offices and laden with plunder, with no other support than the queen’s unconcealed partiality for him, and the idiotic old king’s desire to have trouble taken off his hands. Every thinking man in Spain hated the favourite as the outward and visible sign of corruption in high places. Every patriot saw that the would-be statesman who made himself the adulator first of Barras and then of Bonaparte, and played cat’s-paw to each of them, to the ultimate ruin and bankruptcy of the realm, ought to be removed. Yet there was no sign of any movement against him, save obscure plots in the household of the Prince Royal. But for the inter­ference of Napoleon in the affairs of Spain, it is possible that the Prince of the Peace might have enjoyed many years more of power. Such is the price which nations pay for handing over their bodies to autocratic monarchy and their souls to three centuries of training under the Inquisition.

It is perhaps necessary to gain some detailed idea of the un­pleasant family party at Madrid. King Charles IV was now a man of sixty years of age: he was so entirely simple and helpless that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his weakness bordered on imbecility. His elder brother, Don Philip, was so clearly wanting in intellect that he had to be placed in confinement and excluded from the throne. It might occur to us that it would have been well for Spain if Charles had followed him to the asylum, if we had not to remember that the crown would then have fallen to Ferdinand of Naples, who if more intelligent was also more morally worthless than his brother. Till the age of forty Charles had been entirely suppressed and kept in tutelage by an autocratic father: when he came to the throne he never developed any will or mind of his own, and remained the tool and servant of those about him. He may be described as a good-natured and benevolent imbecile: he was not cruel or malicious or licentious, or given to extravagant fancies. His one pronounced taste was hunting: if he could get away from his ministers to some country palace, and go out all day with his dogs, his gun, and his gamekeepers, he was perfectly happy. His brother of Naples, it will be remembered, had precisely the same hobby. Of any other tastes, save a slight interest in some of the minor handicrafts, which he shared with his cousin Louis XVI, we find no trace in the old king. He was very ugly, not with the fierce clever ugliness of his father Charles III, but in an imbecile fashion, with a frightfully receding forehead, a big nose, and a retreating jaw generally set in a harmless grin. He did not understand business or politics, but was quite capable of getting through speeches and ceremonies when properly primed and prompted beforehand. Even his private letters were managed for him by his wife and his favourite. He had just enough brains to be proud of his position as king, and to resent anything that he regarded as an attack on his dignity—such as the mention of old constitutional rights and privileges, or any allusion to a Cortes. He liked, in fact, to feel himself and to be called an absolute king, though he wished to hand over all the duties and worries of king­ship to his wife and his chosen servants. Quite contrary to Spanish usage, he often associated Maria Luisa’s name with his own in State documents, and in popular diction they were often called ‘los Reyes,’ ‘the Kings,’ as Ferdinand and Isabella had been three hundred years before.

The Queen was about the most unfit person in Europe to be placed on the throne at the side of such an imbecile husband. She was his first cousin, the daughter of his uncle Don Philip, Duke of Parma—Bourbon on the mother’s side also, for she was the child of the daughter of Louis XV of France. Maria Luisa was self-confident, flighty, reckless, and utterly destitute of con­science of any sort. Her celebrated portrait by Goya gives us at once an idea of the woman, bold, shameless, pleasure-loving, and as corrupt as Southern court morality allows—which is saying a good deal. She had from the first taken the measure of her imbecile husband: she dominated him by her superior force of will, made him her mere mouthpiece, and practically ruled the realm, turning him out to hunt while she managed ministers and ambassadors.

For the last twenty years her scandalous partiality for Don Manuel Godoy had been public property. When Charles IV came to the throne Godoy was a mere private in the bodyguard—a sort of ornamental corps of gentlemen-at-arms. He was son of a decayed noble family, a big handsome showy young man of twenty-one—barely able to read and write, say his detractors—but a good singer and musician. Within four years after he caught the Queen’s eye he was a grandee of Spain, a duke, and prime minister! He was married to a royal princess, the Infanta Teresa, a cousin of the King, a mesalliance unparalleled in the whole history of the house of Bourbon. Three years later, to commemorate his part in con­cluding the disgraceful peace of Basle, he was given the odd title of ‘Prince of the Peace,’ ‘Principe de la Paz’: no Spanish subject had ever before been decorated with any title higher than that of duke. In 1808 he was a man of forty, beginning to get a little plump and bald after so many years of good (or evil) living, but still a fine personable figure. He had stowed away enormous riches, not only from the gifts of the King and Queen, but by the sale of offices and commissions, the taking of all sorts of illicit percentages, and (perhaps the worst symptom of all) by colossal speculations on the stock exchange. A French ambassador recorded the fact that he had to keep the treaty of peace of 1802 quiet for three days after it was signed, in order that Godoy might complete his purchases ‘for a rise’ before the news got about1. Godoy was corrupt and licentious, but not cruel or even tyrannical: though profoundly ignorant, he had the vanity to pose as a patron of art and science. His foible was to be hailed as a universal benefactor, and as the introducer of modern civilization into Spain. He endeavoured to popularize the practice of vaccination, waged a mild and intermittent war with the Inquisition, and (a most astonishing piece of courage) tried to suppress the custom of bull-fighting. The last two acts were by far the most creditable items that can be put down to his account: unfortunately they were also precisely those which appealed least to the populace of Spain. Godoy was a notable collector of pictures and antiquities, and had a certain liking for, and skill in, music. When this has been said, there is nothing more to put down in his favour. Fifteen years of power had so turned his head that for a long time he had been taking himself quite seriously, and his ambition had grown so monstrous that, not contented with his alliance by marriage with the royal house, he was dreaming of becoming a sovereign prince. The bait by which Napoleon finally drew him into the trap, the promise that he should be given the Algarves and Alemtejo, was not the Corsican’s own invention. It had been an old idea of Godoy’s which he broached to his ally early in 1806, only to receive a severe rebuff. Hence came the joy with which he finally saw it take shape in the treaty of Fontainebleau. When such schemes were running in his head, we can perfectly well credit the accusation which Prince Ferdinand brought against him, of having intended to change the succession to the crown of Spain, by a coup d’état on the death of Charles IV. The man had grown capable of any outburst of pride and ambition.

Meanwhile he continued to govern Spain by his hold over the imbecile and gouty old king and his worthless wife, who was now far over fifty, but as besotted on her favourite as ever. It was his weary lot to be always in attendance on them. They could hardly let him out of their sight. Toreno relates a ridiculous story that, when Napoleon invited them to dinner on the first night of their unhappy visit to Bayonne, he did not ask the Prince of the Peace to the royal table. Charles was so unhappy and uncomfortable that he could not settle down to his meal till the emperor had sent for Godoy, and found a place for him near his master and mistress.

The fourth individual with whose personality it is necessary to be acquainted when studying the court of Spain in 1808 is the heir to the throne, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias. Little was known of him, for his parents and Godoy had carefully excluded him from political life. But when a prince is getting on for thirty, and his father has begun to show signs of failing health, it is impossible that eyes should not be turned on him from all quarters. Ferdinand was not an imbecile like his father, nor a scandalous person like his mother; but (though Spain knew it not) he was coward and a cur. With such parents he had naturally been brought up very badly. He was ignominiously excluded from all public business, and kept in absolute ignorance of all subjects on which a prince should have some knowledge: history, military science, modern politics, foreign languages, were all sealed books to him. He had been educated, so far as he was trained at all, by a clever and ambitious priest, Juan Escoiquiz, a canon of Toledo. An obscure churchman was not the best tutor for a future sovereign: he could not instruct the prince in the more necessary arts of governance, but he seems to have taught him dissimulation and superstition. For Ferdinand was pious with a grovelling sort of piety, which made him carry about strings of relics, spend much of his time in church ceremonies, and (as rumour said) take to embroidering petticoats for his favourite image of the Virgin in his old age.

The prince had one healthy sentiment, a deep hatred for Godoy, who had from his earliest youth excluded him from his proper place in the court and the state. But he was too timid to resent the favourite’s influence by anything but sulky rudeness. If he had chosen, he could at once have put himself at the head of the powerful body of persons whom the favourite had disobliged or offended. His few intimate friends, and above all his tutor Escoiquiz, were always spurring him on to take some active measures against the Prince of the Peace. But Ferdinand was too indolent and too cautious to move, though he was in his secret heart convinced that his enemy was plotting his destruction, and intended to exclude him from the throne at his father’s death.

To give a fair idea of the education, character, and brains of this miserable prince it is only necessary to quote a couple of his letters. The first was written in November, 1807, when he had been imprisoned by his father for carrying on the famous secret correspondence with Napoleon. It runs as follows:—

Dear Papa

I have done wrong: I have sinned against your majesty, both as king and as father; but I have repented, and I now offer your majesty the most humble obedience. I ought to have done nothing without your majesty’s knowledge; but I was caught unawares. I have given up the names of the guilty persons, and I beg your majesty to pardon me for having lied to you the other night, and to allow your grateful son to kiss your royal feet.

(Signed) Fernando.

San Lorenzo (The Escurial), Nov. 5, 1807.

It is doubtful whether the childish whining, the base betrayal of his unfortunate accomplices, or the slavish tone of the confession forms the most striking point in this epistle.

But the second document that we have to quote gives an even worse idea of Ferdinand. Several years after he had been imprisoned by Napoleon at Valençay, a desperate attempt was made to deliver him. Baron Colli, a daring Austrian officer, entered France, amid a thousand dangers, with a scheme for delivering the prince: he hoped to get him to the coast, and to an English frigate, by means of false passports and relays of swift horses. The unfortunate adventurer was caught and thrown into a dungeon at Vincennes h After the plot had miscarried Ferdinand wrote as follows to his jailor:—

‘An unknown person got in here in disguise and proposed to Senor Amezaga, my master of the horse and steward, to carry me off from Valençay, asking him to pass on some papers, which he had brought, to my hands, and to aid in carrying out this horrible undertaking. My honour, my repose, and the good opinion due to my principles might all have been compromised, if Senor Amezaga had not given proof of his devotion to His Imperial Majesty and to myself, by revealing everything to me at once. I write immediately to give information of the matter, and take this opportunity of showing anew my inviolable fidelity to the Emperor Napoleon, and the horror that I feel at this infernal project, whose author, I hope, may be chastised according to his deserts.’

It is not surprising to find that the man who was capable of writing this letter also wrote more than once to congratulate Joseph Bonaparte on his victories over the ‘rebels’ in Spain.

It had been clear for some time that the bitter hatred which the Prince Royal bore to Godoy, and the fear which the favourite felt at the prospect of his enemy’s accession to the throne, would lead to some explosion ere long. If Ferdinand had been a man of ordinary ability and determination he could probably have organized a coup d’état to get rid of the favourite, without much trouble. But he was so slow and timid that, in spite of all the exhortations of his partisans, he never did more than copy out two letters to his father which Escoiquiz drafted for him. He never screwed up his courage to the point of sending them, or personally delivering them into his father’s hands. They were rhetorical compositions, setting forth the moral and political turpitude of Godoy, and warning the King that his favourite was guilty of designs on the throne. If Charles IV had been given them, he probably could not have made out half the meaning, and would have handed them over for interpretation to the trusty Manuel himself. The only other move which the prince was induced to make was to draw out a warrant appointing his friend and confidant, the Duke of Infantado, Captain-General of New Castile. It was to be used if the old king, who was then labouring under one of his attacks of gout, should chance to be carried off by it. The charge of Madrid, and of the troops in its vicinity, was to be consigned to one whom Ferdinand could trust, so that Godoy might be check­mated.

But the Prince of the Asturias took one other step in the autumn of 1807 which was destined to bring matters to a head. It occurred to him that instead of incurring the risks of conspiracy at home he would do better to apply for aid to his father’s all­powerful ally. If Napoleon took up his cause, and promised him protection, he would be safe against all the machinations of the Prince of the Peace: for a frank and undisguised terror of the Emperor was the mainspring of Godoy’s foreign and domestic ­policy. Ferdinand thought that he had a sure method of enlisting Bonaparte’s benevolence: he was at this moment the most eligible parti in Europe: he had lost his first wife, a daughter of his uncle of Naples, and being childless was bound to marry again. By offering to accept a spouse of the Emperor’s choice he would give such a guarantee of future loyalty and obedience that his patron (who was quite aware of Godoy’s real feelings towards France) would withdraw all his support from the favourite and transfer it to himself. Acting under the advice of Escoiquiz, with whom he was always in secret communication, Ferdinand first sounded the French ambassador at Madrid, the Marquis de Beauharnais, a brother-in-law of the Empress Josephine. Escoiquiz saw the ambassador, who displayed much pleasure at his proposals, and urged him to encourage the prince to proceed with his plan. The fact was that the diplomatist saw profit to his own family in the scheme: for in default of eligible damsels of the house of Bonaparte, it was probable that the lady whom the Emperor might choose as Queen of Spain would be one of his own relatives—some Beauharnais or Tascher—a niece or cousin of the Empress. A wife for the hereditary prince of Baden had been already chosen from among them in the preceding year.

When therefore Escoiquiz broached the matter to the ambassador in June, 1807, the latter only asked that he should be given full assurance that the Prince of the Asturias would carry out his design. No private interview could be managed between them in the existing state of Spanish court etiquette, and with the spies of Godoy lurking in every corner. But by a prearranged code of signals Ferdinand certified to Beauharnais, at one of the royal levees, that he had given all his confidence to Escoiquiz, and that the latter was really acting in his name. The ambassador therefore undertook to transmit to his master at Paris any document which the prince might entrust to him. Hence there came to be written the celebrated letter of October 11, 1807, in which Ferdinand implored the pity of ‘the hero sent by providence to save Europe from anarchy, to strengthen tottering thrones, and to give to the nations peace and felicity.’ His father, he said, was surrounded by malignant and astute intriguers who had estranged him from his son. But one word from Paris would suffice to discomfit such persons, and to open the eyes of his loved parents to the just grievances of their child. As a token of amity and protection he ventured to ask Bonaparte for the hand of some lady of his august house. He does not seem to have had any particular one in his eye, as the demand is made in the most general terms. The choice would really have lain between the eldest daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, who was then (as usual) on strained terms with his brother, and one of the numerous kinswomen of the Empress Josephine.

Godoy was so well served by his numerous spies that the news of the letter addressed to Bonaparte was soon conveyed to him. He resolved to take advantage to the full of the mistake which the prince had made in opening a correspondence with a foreign power behind the back of his father. He contrived an odious scene. He induced the old king to make a sudden descent on his son’s apartments on the night of October 27, with an armed guard at his back, to accuse him publicly of aiming at dethroning or even murdering his parents, and to throw him into solitary confinement. Ferdinand’s papers were sequestrated, but there was found among them nothing of importance except the two documents denouncing Godoy, which the prince had composed or copied out under the direction of his adviser Escoiquiz, and a cypher code which was discovered to have belonged to the prince’s late wife, and to have been used by her in her private letters to her mother, the Queen of Naples.

There was absolutely nothing that proved any intention on the part of Ferdinand to commit himself to overt treason, though plenty to show his deep discontent, and his hatred for the Prince of the Peace. The only act that an honest critic could call disloyal was the attempt to open up a correspondence with Napoleon. But Godoy thought that he had found his opportunity of crushing the heir to the throne, and even of removing him from the succes­sion. He caused Charles IV to publish an extraordinary manifesto to his subjects, in which he was made to speak as follows:—

‘God, who watches over all creation, does not permit the success of atrocious designs against an innocent victim. His omnipotence has just delivered me from an incredible catastrophe. My people, my faithful subjects, know my Christian life, my regular conduct they all love me and give me constant proof of their veneration, the reward due to a parent who loves his children. I was living in perfect confidence, when an unknown hand delated to me the most enormous and incredible plot, hatched in my own palace against my person. The preservation of my life, which has been already several times in danger, should have been the special charge of the heir to my throne, but blinded, and estranged from all those Christian principles in which my paternal care and love have reared him, he has given his consent to a plot to dethrone me. Taking in hand the investigation of the matter, I surprised him in his apartments and found in his hands the cypher which he used to communicate with his evil counsellors. I have thrown several of these criminals into prison, and have put my son under arrest in his own abode. This necessary punishment adds another sorrow to the many which already afflict me; but as it is the most painful of all, it is also the most necessary of all to carry out. Meanwhile I publish the facts : I do not hide from my subjects the grief that I feel—which can only be lessened by the proofs of loyalty which I know that they will display [Oct. 30, 1807].

Charles was therefore made to charge his son with a deliberate plot to dethrone him, and even to hint that his life had been in danger. The only possible reason for the formulating of this most unjustifiable accusation must have been that Godoy thought that he might now dare to sweep away the Prince of the Asturias from his path by imprisonment or exile. There can be no other explanation for the washing in public of so much of the dirty linen of the palace. Ferdinand, by his craven conduct, did his best to help his enemy’s designs: in abject fear he delated to the King the names of Escoiquiz and his other confidants, the dukes of Infantado and San Carlos. He gave full particulars of his attempt to communicate with Napoleon, and of all his correspondence with his partisans—even acknowledging that he had given Infantado that undated commission as Captain-General of New Castile, to come into effect when he himself should become king, which we have already had occasion to mention. This act, it must be owned, was a little unseemly, but if it had really borne the sinister meaning that Godoy chose to put upon it, we may guess that Ferdinand would never have divulged it. In addition the prince wrote the disgusting letter of supplication to his father which has been already quoted, owning that ‘he had lied the other night,’ and asking leave to kiss his majesty’s royal feet. It is beyond dispute that this epistle, with another similar one to the Queen, was written after a stormy interview with Godoy. The favourite had been allowed by his master and mistress to visit Ferdinand in prison, and to bully him into writing these documents, which (as he hoped) would ruin the prince’s reputation for ever with every man of heart and honour. Godoy was wrong here : what struck the public mind far more than the prince’s craven tone was the unseemliness of publishing to the world his miserable letters. That a prince royal of Spain should have been terrified by am upstart charlatan like Godoy into writing such words maddened all who read them.

Napoleon was delighted to see the royal family of Spain putting itself in such an odious light. He only intervened on a side issue by sending peremptory orders that in any proceedings taken against the Prince of the Asturias no mention was to be made of himself or of his ambassador, i. e. the matter of the secret appeal to France (the one thing for which Ferdinand could be justly blamed) was not to be allowed to transpire. It was probably this communication from Paris which saved Ferdinand from experiencing the full consequences of Godoy’s wrath. If any public trial took place, it was certain that either Ferdinand or some of his friends would speak of the French intrigue, and if the story came out Napoleon would be angry. The mere thought of this possibility so worked upon the favourite that he suddenly resolved to stop the impeachment of the prince. In return for his humiliating prayers for mercy he was given a sort of ungracious pardon. ‘The voice of nature,’ so ran the turgid proclamation which Godoy dictated to the old king, ‘disarms the hand of vengeance; I forgive my son, and will restore him to my good graces when his conduct shall have proved him a truly reformed character.’ Ferdinand was left dishonoured and humiliated: he had been accused of intended parricide, made to betray his friends and to confess plots which he had never formed, and then pardoned. Godoy hoped that he was so ruined in the eyes of the Spanish people, and (what was more important) in the eyes of Napoleon, that there would be no more trouble with him, a supposition in which he grievously erred. After a decent interval the prince’s fellow conspirators, Escoiquiz and Infantado, were acquitted of high treason by the court before which they had been sent, and allowed to go free. Of the dreadful accusations made in the Proclamation of Oct. 30 nothing more was heard.

The whole of the ‘Affair of the Escurial,’ as the arrest, imprisonment, and forgiveness of Ferdinand came to be called, took place between the twenty-seventh of October and the fifth of November, dates at which it is pretty certain that Napoleon’s unscrupulous designs against the royal house of Spain had long been matured. The open quarrel of the imbecile father and the cowardly son only helped him in his plans, by making more manifest than ever the deplorable state of the Spanish court. It served as a useful plea to justify acts of aggression which must have been planned many months before. If it had never taken place, it is still certain that Napoleon would have found some other plea for sweeping out the worthless house of Bourbon from the Peninsula. He had begun to collect armies at the roots of the Pyrenees, without any obvious military necessity, some weeks before Ferdinand was arrested. When that simple fact is taken into consideration we see at once the hollowness of his plea, elaborated during his exile at St. Helena, that it was the disgraceful explosion of family hatred in the Spanish royal house that first suggested to him the idea of removing the whole generation of Bourbons, and giving Spain a new king and a new dynasty.

SECTION I: CHAPTER III

THE CONQUEST OF PORTUGAL

There is certainly no example in history of a kingdom conquered in so few days and with such small trouble as was Portugal in 1807. That a nation of three million souls, which in earlier days had repeatedly defended itself with success against numbers far greater than those now employed against it, should yield without firing a single shot was astonishing. It is a testimony not only to the timidity of the Portuguese Government, but to the numbing power of Napoleon’s name.

The force destined by the Treaty of Fontainebleau for the invasion of Portugal consisted of Junot’s ‘Army of the Gironde,’ 25,000 strong, and of three auxiliary Spanish corps amounting in all to about the same numbers. Of these one, coming from Galicia, was to strike at Oporto and the Lower Douro; another, from Badajoz, was to take the fortress of Elvas, the southern bulwark of Portugal, and then to march on Lisbon by the left bank of the Tagus. These were flanking operations: the main blow at the Portuguese capital was to be dealt by Junot himself, strengthened by a third Spanish force; they were to concentrate at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, and make for Lisbon by the high-road that passes by Almeida and Coimbra.

The Army of the Gironde crossed the Bidassoa on October 18: by the 12th of November it had arrived at Salamanca, having covered 300 miles in twenty-five days—very leisurely marching at the rate of twelve miles a day. The Spaniards would not have been pleased to know that, by Napoleon’s orders, engineer officers were secretly taking sketches of every fortified place and defile that the army passed, and preparing reports as to the resources of all the towns of Old Castile and Leon. This was one of the many signs of the Emperor’s ultimate designs. On the 12th of November, in con­sequence we cannot doubt of the outbreak of the troubles of October 27 at the Spanish court, Junot suddenly received new orders, telling him to hurry. He was informed that every day which intervened before his arrival at Lisbon was time granted to the Portuguese in which to prepare resistance,—possibly also time in which England, who had plenty of troops in the Mediterranean, might make up her mind to send military aid to her old ally. Junot was directed to quicken his pace, and to strike before the enemy could mature plans of defence.

For this reason he was told to change his route. The Emperor had originally intended to invade the country over the usual line of attack from Spain, by Almeida and Coimbra, which Massena was to take three years later, in 1810. But when the events at the Escurial showed that a crisis was impending in Spain, Napoleon changed his mind: there was the fortress of Almeida in the way, which might offer resistance and cause delay, and beyond were nearly 200 miles of difficult mountain roads. Looking at his maps, Napoleon saw that there was a much shorter way to Lisbon by another route, down the Tagus. From Alcantara, the Spanish frontier town on that river, to Lisbon is only 120 miles, and there is no fortress on the way. The maps could not show the Emperor that this road was for half of its length a series of rocky defiles through an almost unpeopled wilderness.

Orders were therefore sent to Junot to transfer his base of operations from Salamanca to Alcantara, and to march down the Tagus. The Spaniards (according to their orders) had collected the magazines for feeding Junot’s force at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo. But for that Napoleon cared little. He wrote that the army must take the shortest road at all costs, whatever the difficulty of getting supplies. ‘I will not have the march of the army delayed for a single day,’ he added; ‘20,000 men can feed them­selves anywhere, even in a desert.’ It was indeed a desert that Junot was ordered to cross: the hill-road from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara, which hugs the Portuguese frontier, has hardly a village on it; it crosses, ridge after ridge, ravine after ravine. In November the rains had just set in, and every torrent was full. Over this stony wilderness, by the Pass of Perales, the French army rushed in five days, but at the cost of dreadful privations. When it reached Alcantara half the horses had perished of cold, all the guns but six had been left behind, stranded at various points on the road, and of the infantry more than a quarter was missing— the famished men having scattered in all directions to find food. If there had been a Portuguese force watching Alcantara, Junot must have waited for many days to get his army together again, all the more so because every cartridge that his men were carrying had been spoiled by the wet. But there were no enemies near; Junot found at the great Tagus bridge only a few Spanish battalions and guns on the way to join his army. Confiscating their munitions to fill his men’s pouches, and their food to provide them with two days’ rations, Junot rushed on again upon the 19th of November. He found, to his surprise, that there was no road suitable for wheeled traffic along the Tagus valley, but only a poor track running along the foot of the mountains to Castello Branco, the sole Portuguese town in this part of the frontier. The march from Alcantara to Abrantes proved even more trying than that from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara. It was through a treeless wilderness of grey granite, seamed with countless ravines. The rain continued, the torrents were even fuller than before, the country even more desolate than the Spanish side of the border. It was only after terrible sufferings that the head of the column reached Abrantes on November 23: the rear trailed in on the 26th. All the guns except four Spanish pieces of horse artillery had fallen behind: the cavalry was practically dismounted. Half the infantry was marauding oft’ the road, or resting dead-beat in the few poor villages that it had passed. If there had been even 5,000 Portuguese troops at Abrantes the French would have been brought to a stop. But instead of hostile battalions, Junot found there only an anxious diplomatist, named Barreto, sent by the Prince-Regent to stop his advance by offers of servile submission to the Emperor and proffers of tribute. Reassured as to the possibility that the Portuguese might have been intending armed resistance, Junot now took a most hazardous step. Choosing the least disorganized companies of every regiment, he made up four battalions of picked men, and pushed on again for Lisbon, now only seventy-five miles distant. This time he had neither a gun nor a horseman left, but he struggled forward, and on the 30th of November entered the Portuguese capital at the head of 1,500 weary soldiers, all that had been able to endure to the end. They limped in utterly exhausted, their clothes in rags, and their cartridges so soaked through that they could not have fired a shot had they been attacked. If the mob of Lisbon had fallen on them with sticks and stones, the starving invaders must have been driven out of the city. But nothing of the kind happened, and Junot was able to install himself as governor of Portugal without having to strike a blow. It was ten days before the last of the stragglers came up from the rear, and even more before the artillery appeared and the cavalry began to remount itself with confiscated horses. Meanwhile the Portuguese were digesting the fact that they had allowed 1,500 famished, half armed men to seize their capital.

While Junot had been rushing on from Salamanca to Alcantara, and from Alcantara to Abrantes, Lisbon had been the scene of much pitiful commotion. The Prince-Regent had long refused to believe that Napoleon really intended to dethrone him, and had been still occupying himself with futile schemes for propitiating the Emperor. Of his courtiers and generals, hardly one counselled resistance : there was no talk of mobilizing the dilapidated army of some 30,000 men which the country was supposed to possess, or of calling out the militia which had done such good service in earlier wars with Spain and France. Prince John contented himself with declaring war on England on the twentieth of October, and with garrisoning the coast batteries which protect Lisbon against attacks from the sea. Of these signs of obedience he sent reports to Napoleon: on the eighth of November he seized the persons of the few English merchants who still remained in Portugal; the majority had wisely absconded in October. At the same time he let the British Government know that he was at heart their friend, and only driven by brute force to his present course: he even permitted their ambassador, Lord Strangford, to linger in Lisbon.

In a few days the Regent began to see that Napoleon was inexorable: his ambassador from Paris was sent back to him, and reported that he had passed on the way the army of Junot marching by Burgos on Salamanca. Presently an English fleet under Sir Sydney Smith, the hero of Acre, appeared at the mouth of the Tagus, and declared Lisbon in a state of blockade—the natural reply to the Regent’s declaration of war and seizure of English residents. Other reasons existed for the blockade: there had lately arrived in the Tagus a Russian squadron on its homeward way from the Mediterranean. The Czar Alexander was at this time Napoleon’s eager ally, and had just declared war on England; it seemed wise to keep an eye on these ships, whose arrival appeared to synchronize in a most suspicious way with the approach of Junot. Moreover there was the Portuguese fleet to be considered: if the Prince-Regent intended to hand it over to the French, it would have to be dealt with in the same way as the Danish fleet had been treated a few months before.

Lord Strangford retired on board Sydney Smith’s flagship, the Hibernia, and from thence continued to exchange notes with the miserable Portuguese Government. The Regent was still hesitating between sending still more abject proposals of submission to Bonaparte, and the only other alternative, that of getting on board his fleet and crossing the Atlantic to the great Portuguese colony in Brazil. The news that Junot had reached Alcantara only confused him still more; he could not make up his mind to leave his comfortable palace at Mafra, his gardens, and the countless chapels and shrines in which his soul delighted, in order to dare the unaccustomed horrors of the deep. On the other hand, he feared that, if he stayed, he might ere long find himself a prisoner of state in some obscure French castle. At last his mind was made up for him from without: Lord Strangford on the twenty-fifth of November received a copy of the Paris Moniteur of the thirteenth of October, in which appeared a proclamation in the true Napoleonesque vein, announcing that ‘the house of Braganza had ceased to reign in Europe.’ The celerity with which the paper had been passed on from Paris to London and from London to Lisbon was most fortunate, as it was just not too late for the prince to fly, though far too late for him to think of defending himself. Junot was already at Abrantes, but during the four days which he spent between that place and Lisbon the die was cast. Abandoning his wonted indecision, the Regent hurried on shipboard his treasure, his state papers, his insane mother, his young family, and all the hangers-on of his court. The whole fleet, fifteen men-of-war, was crowded with official refugees and their belongings. More than twenty merchant vessels were hastily manned and freighted with other inhabitants of Lisbon, who determined to fly with their prince: merchants and nobles alike preferred the voyage to Rio de Janeiro to facing the dreaded French. On the twenty-ninth of November the whole convoy passed out of the mouth of the Tagus and set sail for the West. When he toiled in on the thirtieth, Junot found the birds flown, and took possession of the dismantled city.

Junot’s Spanish auxiliaries were, as might have been expected from the national character and the deplorable state of the government, much slower than their French allies. Solano and the southern army did not enter Portugal till the second of December, three days after Lisbon had fallen. Taranco and the Galician corps only reached Oporto on the thirteenth of December. To neither of them was any opposition offered: the sole show of national feeling which they met was that the Governor of Valenza closed his gates, and would not admit the Spaniards till he heard that Lisbon was in the enemy’s hands, and that the Prince-Regent had abandoned the country.

Junot at first made some attempt to render himself popular and to keep his troops in good discipline. But it was impossible to conciliate the Portuguese: when they saw the exhausted condition and comparatively small numbers of the army that had overrun their realm, they were filled with rage to think that no attempt had been made to strike a blow to save its independence. When, on the thirteenth of December, Junot made a great show out of the ceremony of hauling down the Portuguese flag and of hoisting the tricolour on the public buildings of the metropolis, there broke out a fierce riot, which had to be dispersed with a cavalry charge. But this was the work of the mob: both the civil and the military authorities showed a servile obedience to Junot’s orders, and no one of importance stood forward to head the crowd.

The first precautionary measure of the French general was to dissolve the Portuguese army. He ordered the discharge of all men with less than one and more than six years’ service, dissolved the old regimental cadres, and reorganized the 6,000 or 7,000 men left into nine new corps, which were soon ordered out of the realm. Ultimately they were sent to the Baltic, and remained garrisoned in Northern Germany for some years. At the time of the Russian War of 1812 there were still enough of these unhappy exiles left to constitute three strong regiments. Nearly all of them perished in the snow during the retreat from Moscow.

Further endeavour to make French rule popular in Portugal was soon rendered impossible by orders from Paris. The Emperor’s mandate not only bade Junot confiscate and realize all the property of the 15,000 persons, small and great, who had fled to Brazil with the Prince-Regent; it also commanded him to raise a fine of 100,000,000 francs, four millions of our money, from the little kingdom. But the emigrants had carried away nearly half the coined money in Portugal, and the rest had been hidden, leaving nothing but coppers and depreciated paper money visible in circulation. With the best will in the world Junot found it difficult to begin to collect even the nucleus of the required sum. The heavy taxes and imposts which he levied had no small effect in adding to the discontent of the people, but their total did little more than pay for the maintenance of the invaders. Meanwhile the troops behaved with the usual licence of a French army in a conquered country, and repeatedly provoked sanguinary brawls with the peasantry. Military executions of persons who had resisted requisitions by force began as early as January, 1808. Nothing was wanting to prepare an insurrection but leaders: of their appearance there was no sign; the most spirited members of the upper classes had gone off with the Regent. Those who had remained were the miserable bureaucrats which despotic governments always breed. They were ready to serve the stranger if they could keep their posts and places. A discreditable proportion of the old state servants acquiesced in the new government. The Patriarch of Lisbon issued a fulsome address in praise of Napoleon. The members of the provisional government which the Regent had nominated on his departure mostly submitted to Junot. There was little difficulty found in collecting a deputation, imposing by its numbers and by the names of some of its personnel, which travelled to Bayonne, to compliment Bonaparte and request him to grant some definite form of government to Portugal. The Emperor treated them in a very offhand way, asked them if they would like to be annexed to Spain, and on their indignant repudia­tion of that proposal, sent them off with a few platitudes to the effect that the lot of a nation depends upon itself, and that his eye was upon them. But this interview only took place in April, 1808, when events in Spain were assuming a very different aspect from that which they displayed at the moment of Junot’s first seizure of Lisbon.

SECTION I: CHAPTER IV

THE FRENCH AGGRESSION IN SPAIN: ABDICATION OF CHARLES IV

The Affair of the Escurial added some complications to the situation of affairs in Spain from Napoleon’s point of view. But there was nothing in it to make him alter the plans which he was at this moment carrying out: if the Bourbons were to be evicted from Spain, it made the task somewhat easier to find that the heir to the throne was now in deep disgrace. It would be possible to urge that by his parricidal plots he had forfeited any rights to the kingdom which he had hitherto possessed. In dealing with the politics of Spain he might for the future be disregarded, and there would be no one to take into consideration save the King and Queen and Godoy. All three were, as the Emperor knew, profoundly unpopular : if anything had been needed to make the nation more discontented, it was the late scandalous events at the Escurial. Nothing could be more convenient than that the favourite and his sovereigns should sink yet further into the abyss of unpopularity.

Napoleon therefore went steadily on with his plans for pushing more and more French troops into Spain, with the object of occupying all the main strategical points in the kingdom. The only doubtful point in his schemes is whether he ultimately proposed to seize on the persons of the royal family, or whether he intended by a series of threatening acts to scare them off to Mexico, as he had already scared the Prince of Portugal off to Rio de Janeiro. It is on the whole probable that he leaned to the latter plan. Every week the attitude of the French armies became more aggressive, and the language of their master more haughty and sinister. The tone in which he had forbidden the court of Spain to allow any mention of himself or his ambassador to appear, during the trial of Prince Ferdinand and his fellow conspirators, had been menacing in the highest degree. After the occupation of Portugal no further allusion had been made to the project for proclaiming Godoy Prince of the Algarves. His name was never mentioned either to the Portuguese or to the officers of Junot. The favourite soon saw that he had been duped, but was too terrified to complain.

But it was the constant influx into Spain of French troops which contributed in the most serious way to frighten the Spanish court. Junot had entered Lisbon on Nov. 30, and the news that he had mastered the place without firing a shot had reached the Emperor early in December. But long before, on the twenty-second of November, the French reserves, hitherto known as the ‘Second Corps of Observation of the Gironde,’ which had been collected at Bayonne in November, crossed the Spanish frontier. They con­sisted of 25,000 men—nearly all recently levied conscripts—under General Dupont. The treaty of Fontainebleau had contained a clause providing that, if the English tried to defend Portugal by landing troops, Napoleon might send 40,000 men to aid Junot after giving due notice to the King of Spain. Instead of waiting to hear how the first corps had fared, or apprising his ally of his intention to dispatch Dupont’s corps across the frontier, the Emperor merely ordered it to cross the Bidassoa without sending any information to Madrid. The fact was that whether the pre­liminary condition stated in the treaty, an English descent on Portugal, did or did not take place, Bonaparte was determined to carry out his design. A month later the Spaniards heard, to their growing alarm, that yet a third army corps had come across the border: this was the ‘Corps of Observation of the Ocean Coast,’ which had been hastily organized under Marshal Moncey at Bor­deaux, and pushed on to Bayonne when Dupont’s troops moved forward. It was 30,000 strong, but mainly composed of conscript battalions of the levy of 1808, which had been raised by antici­pation in the previous spring, while the Russian war was still in progress. On the eighth of January this army began to pass the Pyrenees, occupying all the chief towns of Biscay and Navarre, while Dupont’s divisions pressed on and cantoned themselves in Burgos, Valladolid, and the other chief cities of Old Castile. They made no further advance towards Portugal, where Junot clearly did not require their aid.

The Spanish government was terror-stricken at the unexpected; appearance of more than 60,000 French troops on the road to Madrid. If anything more was required to cause suspicion, it was the news that still more ‘corps of observation’ were being formed at Bordeaux and Poitiers. What legitimate reason could there possibly be for the direction of such masses of troops on Northern Spain? But any thought of resistance was far from the mind of Godoy and the King. Their first plan was to propitiate Napoleon by making the same request which had brought the Prince of the Asturias into such trouble in October—that the hand of a princess of the house of Bonaparte might be granted to the heir of the Spanish throne. The Emperor was making an ostentatious tour in Italy while his forces were overrunning the provinces of his ally—as if the occupation of Castile and Biscay were no affair of his. His most important act in November was to evict from Florence the ruling sovereign, the King of Etruria, and the Regent, his mother, thus annexing the last surviving Bourbon state save Spain to the French crown. He wrote polite but meaningless letters to Madrid, making no allusion to the boon asked by Charles IV. The fact was that Napoleon could now treat Ferdinand as ‘damaged goods’; he was, by his father’s own avowal, no more than a pardoned parricide, and it suited the policy of the Emperor to regard him as a convicted criminal who had played away his rights of succession. If Napoleon visited his brother Lucien at Mantua, it was not (as was thought at the time) with any real intention of persuading him to give his daughter to the craven suitor offered her, but in order to tempt her father to accept the crown of Portugal—even perhaps that of Spain. But Lucien, who always refused to fall in with Napoleon’s family policy, showed no gratitude for the offer of a thorny throne in the Iberian Peninsula, and not without reason, for one of the details of the bargain was to be that he should divorce a wife to whom he was fondly attached.

It was only after returning from Italy in January that the Emperor deigned to answer the King of Spain’s letter, now two months old, in precise terms. He did not object to the principle of the alliance, but doubted if he could give any daughter of his house to a son dishonoured by his own father’s declaration. This reply was not very reassuring to Godoy and his master, and worse was to follow. In the end of January the Moniteur, which the Emperor always used as a means for ventilating schemes which were before long to take shape in fact, began a systematic course of abusing the Prince of the Peace as a bad minister and a false friend. More troops kept pouring across the Pyrenees without any ostensible reason, and now it was not only at the western passes that they began to appear, but also on the eastern roads which lead from Roussillon into Catalonia and Valencia. These provinces are so remote from Portugal that it was clear that the army which was collecting opposite them could not be destined for Lisbon. But on February 10, 1808, 14,000 men, half French, half Italians, under General Duhesme, began to drift into Catalonia and to work their way down towards its capital—Barcelona. A side-light on the meaning of this development was given by Izquierdo, Godoy’s agent at Paris, who now kept sending his master very disquieting reports. French ministers had begun to sound him as to the way in which Spain would take a proposal for the cession to France of Cata­lonia and part of Biscay, in return for Central Portugal. King Charles would probably be asked ere long to give up these ancient and loyal provinces, and to do so would mean the outbreak of a revolution all over Spain.

In the middle of February Napoleon finally threw off the mask, and frankly displayed himself as a robber in his ally’s abode. On the sixteenth of the month began that infamous seizure by surprise of the Spanish frontier fortresses, which would pass for the most odious act of the Emperor’s whole career, if the kidnapping at Bayonne were not to follow. The movement started at Pampeluna: French troops were quartered in the lower town, while a Spanish garrison held, as was natural, the citadel. One cold morning a large party of French soldiers congregated about the gate of the fortress, without arms, and pretended to be amusing themselves with snowballing, while waiting for a distribution of rations. At a given signal many of them, as if beaten in the mock contest, rushed in at the gate, pursued by the rest. The first men knocked down the unsuspecting sentinels, and seized the muskets of the guard stacked in the arms-racks of the guard-room. Then a company of grenadiers, who had been hidden in a neighbouring house, suddenly ran in at the gate, followed by a whole battalion which had been at drill a few hundred yards away. The Spanish garrison, taken utterly by surprise and unarmed, were hustled out of their quarters and turned into the town.

A high-spirited prince would have declared war at once, what­ever the odds against him, on receiving such an insulting blow. But this was not to be expected from persons like Godoy and Charles IV. Accordingly they exposed themselves to the continuation of these odious tricks. On February 29 General Lecchi, the officer com­manding the French troops which were passing through Barcelona, ordered a review of his division before, as he said, its approaching departure for the south. After some evolutions he marched it through the city, and past the gate of the citadel; when this point was reached, he suddenly bade the leading company wheel to the left and enter the fortress. Before the Spaniards understood what was happening, several thousand of their allies were inside the place, and by the evening the rightful owners, who carried their opposition no further than noisy protestations, had been evicted. A few days later the two remaining frontier fortresses of Spain, San Sebastian, at the Atlantic end of the Pyrenees, and Figueras, at the great pass along the Mediterranean coast, suffered the same fate: the former place was surrendered by its governor when threatened with an actual assault, which orders from Madrid forbade him to resist [March 5]. Figueras, on the other hand, was seized by a coup de main, similar to that at Pampeluna; 200 French soldiers, having obtained entrance within the walls on a futile pretext, suddenly seized the gates and admitted a whole regiment, which turned out the Spanish garrison [March 18]. It would be hard, if not impossible, to find in the whole of modern history any incident approaching, in cynical effrontery and mean cunning, to these first hostile acts of the French on the territory of their allies. The net result was to leave the two chief fortresses, on each of the main entries into Spain from France, completely in the power of the Emperor.

Godoy and his employers were driven into wild alarm by these acts of open hostility. The favourite, in his memoirs, tells us that he thought, for a moment, of responding by a declaration of war, but that the old king replied that Napoleon could not be intending treachery, because he had just sent him twelve fine coach-horses and several polite letters. In face of his master’s reluctance, he tells us that he temporized for some days more. The story is highly improbable: Charles had no will save Godoy’s, and would have done whatever he was told. It is much more likely that the reluctance to take a bold resolve was the favourite’s own. When the French troops still continued to draw nearer to Madrid, Godoy could only bethink himself of a plan for absconding. He proposed to the King and Queen that they should leave Madrid and take refuge in Seville, in order to place themselves as far as possible from the French armies. Behind this move was a scheme for a much longer voyage. It seems that he proposed that the court should follow the example of the Regent of Portugal, and fly to America. At Mexico or Buenos Ayres they would at least be safe from Bonaparte. To protect the first stage of the flight, the troops in Portugal were directed to slip away from Junot and mass in Estremadura. The garrison of Madrid was drawn to Aranjuez, the palace where the court lay in February and March, and was to act as its escort to Seville. It is certain that nothing would have suited Napoleon’s plans better than that Charles IV should abscond and leave his throne derelict: it would have given the maximum of advantage with the minimum of odium. It is possible that the Emperor was working precisely with the object of frightening Godoy into flight. If so his scheme was foiled, because he forgot that he had to deal not only with the contemptible court, but with the suspicious and revengeful Spanish nation. In March the people intervened, and their outbreak put quite a different face upon affairs.

Meanwhile the Emperor was launching a new figure upon the stage. On February 26 his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, the new Grand-Duke of Berg, appeared at Bayonne with the title of ‘ Lieutenant of the Emperor,’ and a commission to take command of all the French forces in Spain. On March 10 he crossed the Bidassoa and assumed possession of his post. Murat’s character is well known: it was not very complicated. He was a headstrong, unscrupulous soldier, with a genius for heading a cavalry charge on a large scale, and an unbounded ambition. He was at present meditating on thrones and kingdoms: Berg seemed a small thing to this son of a Gascon innkeeper, and ever since his brothers-in-law Joseph, Louis, and Jerome Bonaparte had become kings, he was determined to climb up to be their equal, [t has frequently been asserted that Murat was at this moment dreaming of the Spanish crown: he was certainly aware that the Emperor was plotting against the Bourbons, and the military movements which he had been directed to carry out were sufficient in themselves to indicate more or less his brother-in-law’s intentions. Yet on the whole it is probable that he had not received more than half­ confidences from his august relative. His dispatches are full of murmurs that he was being kept in the dark, and that he could not act with full confidence for want of explicit directions. Napoleon had certainly promised him promotion, if the Spanish affair came to a successful end : but it is probable that Murat understood that he was not to be rewarded with the crown of Charles IV. Perhaps Portugal, or Holland, or Naples (if one of the Emperor’s brothers should pass on to Madrid) was spoken of as his reward. Certainly there was enough at stake to make him eager to carry out whatever Bonaparte ordered. In his cheerful self-confidence he imagined himself quite capable of playing the part of a Machiavelli, and of edging the old king out of the country by threats and hints. But if grape-shot was required, he was equally ready to administer an unsparing dose. With a kingdom in view he could be utterly unscrupulous.

On March 13 Murat arrived at Burgos, and issued a strange proclamation bidding his army ‘treat the estimable Spanish nation as friends, for the Emperor sought only the good and happiness of Spain.’ The curious phrase could only suggest that unless he gave this warning, his troops would have treated their allies as enemies. The scandalous pillage committed by many regiments during February and March quite justified the suspicion.

The approach of Murat scared Godoy into immediate action, all the more because a new corps d'armée, more than 30,000 strong, under Marshal Bessières, was already commencing to cross the Pyrenees, bringing up the total of French troops in the Peninsula to more than 100,000 men. He ordered the departure of the King and his escort, the Madrid garrison, for Seville on March 18. This brought matters to a head: it was regarded as the commencement of the projected flight to America, of which rumours were already floating round the court and capital. A despotic govern­ment, which never takes the people into its confidence, must always expect to have its actions interpreted in the most unfavourable light. Except Godoy’s personal adherents, there was not a soul in Madrid who did not believe that the favourite was acting in collusion with Napoleon, and deliberately betraying his sovereign and his country. It was by his consent, they thought, that the French had crossed the Pyrenees, had seized Pampeluna and Barcelona, and were now marching on the capital. They were far from imagining that of all the persons in the game he was the greatest dupe, and that the recent developments of Napoleon’s policy had reduced him to despair. It was correct enough to attribute the present miserable situation of the realm to Godoy’s policy, but only because his servility to Bonaparte had tempted the latter to see how far he could go, and because his maladministration had brought the army so low that it was no longer capable of defending the fatherland. Men did well to be angry with the Prince of the Peace, but they should have cursed him as a timid, incompetent fool, not as a deliberate traitor. But upstarts who guide the policy of a great realm for their private profit must naturally expect to be misrepresented, and there can be no doubt that the Spaniards judged Godoy to be a willing helper in the ruin of his master and his country.

Aranjuez, ordinarily a quiet little place, was now crowded with the hangers-on of the court, the garrison of Madrid, and a throng of anxious and distraught inhabitants of the capital: some had come out to avoid the advancing French, some to learn the latest news of the King’s intentions, others with the deliberate intention of attacking the favourite. Among the latter were the few friends of the Prince of the Asturias, and a much greater number who sympathized with his unhappy lot and had not gauged his miserable disposition. It is probable that as things stood it was really the best move to send the King to Seville, or even to America, and to commence open resistance to the French when the royal person should be in safety. But the crowd could see nothing but deliberate treason in the proposal: they waited only for the confirmation of the news of the departure of the court before breaking out into violence.

On the night of the seventeenth of March Godoy was actually commencing the evacuation of Aranjuez, by sending off his most precious possession, the too-celebrated Donna Josepha Tudo, under cover of the dark. The party which was escorting her fell into the midst of a knot of midnight loiterers, who were watching the palace. There was a scuffle, a pistol was fired, and as if by a prearranged plan crowds poured out into the streets. The cry went round that Godoy was carrying off the King and Queen, and a general rush was made to his house. There were guards before it, but they refused to fire on the mob, of which no small propor­tion was composed of soldiers who had broken out of their barracks without leave. In a moment the doors were battered down and the assailants poured into the mansion, hunting for the favourite. They could not find him, and in their disappointment smashed all his works of art, and burnt his magnificent furniture. Then they flocked to the palace, in which they suspected that he had taken refuge, calling for his head. The King and Queen, in deadly terror, besought their ill-used son to save them, by propitiating the mob, who would listen to his voice if to no other. Then came the hour of Ferdinand’s triumph; stepping out on to the balcony, he announced to the crowd that the King was much displeased with the Prince of the Peace, and had determined to dismiss him from office. The throng at once dispersed with loud cheers.

Next morning, in fact, a royal decree was issued, declaring Godoy relieved of all his posts and duties and banished from the court. Without the favourite at their elbow Charles and his queen seemed perfectly helpless. The proclamation was received at first with satisfaction, but the people still hung about the palace and kept calling for the King, who had to come out several times and salute them. It began to look like a scene from the beginning of the French Revolution. There was already much talk in the crowd of the benefit that would ensue to Spain if the Prince of the Asturias, with whose sufferings every one had sympathized, were to be entrusted with some part in the governance of the realm. His partisans openly spoke of the abdication of the old king as a desirable possibility.

Next day the rioting commenced again, owing to the reappearance of Godoy. He had lain concealed for thirty-six hours beneath a heap of mats, in a hiding-place contrived under the rafters of his mansion; but hunger at last drove him out, and, when he thought that the coast was clear, he slipped down and tried to get away. In spite of his mantle and slouched hat he was recognized almost at once, and would have been pulled to pieces by the crowd if he had not been saved by a detachment of the royal guard, who carried him off a prisoner to the palace. The news that he was trapped brought thousands of rioters under the royal windows, shouting for his instant trial and execution. The imbecile King could not be convinced that he was himself safe, and the Queen, who usually displayed more courage, seemed paralysed by her fears for Godoy even more than for herself. This was the lucky hour of the Prince of the Asturias; urged on by his secret advisers, he suggested abdication to his father, promising that he would disperse the mob and save the favourite’s life. The silly old man accepted the pro­posal with alacrity, and drew up a short document of twelve lines, to the effect ‘that his many bodily infirmities made it hard for him to support any longer the heavy weight of the administration of the realm, and that he had decided to remove to some more temperate clime, there to enjoy the peace of private life. After serious deliberation he had resolved to abdicate in favour of his natural heir, and wished that Don Ferdinand should at once be received as king in all the provinces of the Spanish crown. That this free and spontaneous abdication should be immediately pub­lished was to be the duty of the Council of Castile.’

SECTION I: CHAPTER V

THE TREACHERY AT BAYONNE

The news of the abdication of Charles IV was received with universal joy. The rioters of Aranjuez dispersed after saluting the new sovereign, and allowed Godoy to be taken off, without further trouble, to the castle of Villaviciosa. Madrid, though Murat was now almost at its gates, gave itself up to feasts and processions, after having first sacked the palaces of the Prince of the Peace and some of his unpopular relations and partisans. Completely ignorant of the personal character of Ferdinand VII, the Spaniards attributed to him all the virtues and graces, and blindly expected the commencement of a golden age—as if the son of Charles IV and Maria Luisa was likely to be a genius and a hero.

Looking at the general situation of affairs, there can be no doubt that the wisest course for the young king to have taken would have been to concentrate his army, put his person in safety, and ask Napoleon to speak out and formulate his intentions. Instead of taking this, the only manly course, Ferdinand resolved to throw himself on the Emperor’s mercy, as if the fall of Godoy had been Napoleon’s object, and not the conquest of Spain. Although Murat had actually arrived at Madrid on March 23, with a great body of cavalry and 20,000 foot, the King entered the city next day and practically put himself in the hands of the invader. He wrote a fulsome letter to Napoleon assuring him of his devotion, and begging once more for the hand of a princess of his house.

His reception in Madrid by the French ought to have undeceived him at once. The ambassador Beauharnais, alone among the foreign ministers, refrained from acknowledging him as king. Murat was equally recalcitrant, and moreover most rude and disobliging in his language and behaviour. The fact was that the Grand-Duke had supposed that he was entering Madrid in order to chase out Godoy and rule in his stead. The popular explosion which had swept away the favourite and the old king, and substituted for them a young and popular monarch, had foiled his design. He did not know how Bonaparte would take the new situation, and mean­while was surly and discourteous. But he was determined that there should at least be grounds provided for a breach with Ferdinand, if the Emperor should resolve to go on with his original plan.

Accordingly, he not only refused to acknowledge the new king’s title, but hastened to put himself in secret communication with the dethroned sovereigns. They were only too eager to meet him half­way, and Maria Luisa especially was half-mad with rage at her son’s success. At first she and her husband thought of nothing but escaping from Spain: they begged Murat to pass on to the Emperor letters in which they asked to be permitted to buy a little estate in France, where they might enjoy his protection during their declining years. But they begged also that ‘the poor Prince of the Peace, who lies in a dungeon covered with wounds and contusions and in danger of death,’ might be saved and allowed to join them, ‘so that we may all live together in some healthy spot far from intrigues and state business’.

Murat saw that the angry old queen might be utilized to dis­credit her son, and promised to send on everything to Napoleon. At the first word of encouragement given by the Grand-Duke’s agent, De Monthion, Maria Luisa began to cover many sheets with abuse of her son. ‘He is false to the core: he has no natural affection: he is hard-hearted and nowise inclined to clemency. He has been directed by villains and will do anything that ambition suggests : he makes promises, but does not always keep them.’ Again she writes:— ‘From my son we have nothing to expect but outrages and persecution. He has commenced by forgery, and he will go on manufacturing evidence to prove that the Prince of the Peace—that innocent and affectionate friend of the Emperor, the Duke of Berg, and every Frenchman!—may appear a criminal in the eyes of the Spanish people and of Napoleon himself. Do not believe a word that he says, for our enemies have the power and means to make any falsehood seem true.’ In another letter she says that the riots of Aranjuez were no genuine explosion of popular wrath, but a deliberate plot got up by her son, who spent countless sums on debauching the soldiery and importing ruffians from Madrid. He gave the signal for the outburst himself by putting a lamp in his window at a fixed hour—and so forth.

Finding the Queen in this state of mind, Murat saw his way to dealing a deadly blow at Ferdinand: with his counsel and consent Charles IV was induced to draw up and send to Bonaparte a formal protest against his abdication. He was made to declare that his resignation had not been voluntary, but imposed on him by force and threats. And so he ‘throws himself into the arms of the great monarch who has been his ally, and puts himself at his disposition wholly and for every purpose.’ This document placed in Napoleon’s hands the precise weapon which he required to crush King Ferdinand. If the Emperor chose to take it seriously, he could declare the new monarch a usurper—almost a parricide—the legality of whose accession had been vitiated by force and fraud.

As a matter of fact Bonaparte’s mind had long been made up. The revolution of Aranjuez had been a surprise and a disappoint­ment to him: his designs against Spain were made infinitely more difficult of realization thereby. While he had only the weak and unpopular government of Godoy and Charles IV to deal with, he had fancied that the game was in his hands. It had been more than probable that the Prince of the Peace would take fright, and carry off the King and Queen to America—in which case he would, as it were, find Spain left derelict. If, however, the emi­gration did not take place, and it became necessary to lay hands on Charles and his favourite, Napoleon calculated that the Spaniards would be more pleased to be rid of Godoy than angry to see force employed against him. He was so profoundly ignorant of the character of the nation, that he imagined that a few high-sounding proclamations and promises of liberal reforms would induce them to accept from his hands any new sovereign whom he chose to nominate. It was clear that the accession of a young and popular king would make matters far more difficult. It was no longer possible to pose as the deliverer of Spain from the shameful pre­dominance of Godoy. Any move against Ferdinand must bear the character of an open assault on the national independence of the kingdom.

But Bonaparte had gone too far to recede: he had not moved 100,000 men across the Pyrenees, and seized Pampeluna and Barce­lona, merely in order that his troops might assist at the coronation ceremonies of another Bourbon king. In spite of all difficulties he was resolved to persevere in his iniquitous plan. He would not recognize the new monarch, but would sweep him away, and put in his place some member of his own family. But his chosen instrument was not to be Murat, but one of the Bonapartes. He knew too well the Duke of Berg’s restless spirit and over­weening ambition to trust him with so great a charge as Spain. And he was right—with only Naples at his back Joachim was powerful enough to do his master grave harm in 1814. The tool was to be one of his own brothers. It was on the night of March 26 that the news of the abdication of Charles IV reached him: on the morning of the twenty-seventh he wrote to Amsterdam offering Louis Bonaparte the chance of exchanging the Dutch for the Spanish crown. The proposal was made in the most casual form—‘You say that the climate of Holland does not suit you. Besides the country is too thoroughly ruined to rise again. Give me a categorical answer: if I nominate you King of Spain will you take the offer; can I count on you?’ Louis very wisely refused the proffered crown: but his weaker brother Joseph, tired of Naples and its brigands, made no scruples when the same proposal was laid before him.

This letter to Louis of Holland having been written on the first news of the events at Aranjuez, and four days before Murat began to send in his own plans and the letters of protest from the King and Queen of Spain, it is clear that the Emperor had never any intention of recognizing Ferdinand, and was only playing with him during the month that followed. It was not in mere caution that Beauharnais, the ambassador, and Murat, the military representative, of France, were bidden never to address the new sovereign as king but as Prince of the Asturias, and to act as if Charles IV were still legally reigning until they should have specific directions from Paris.

This state of semi-suspended relations lasted for a fortnight, from Ferdinand’s arrival in Madrid on March 24, down to his departure from it on April 10. They were very uncomfortable weeks for the new king, who grew more alarmed as each day passed without a letter from Paris ratifying his title, while French troops continued to pour into Madrid till some 35,000 were assembled in it and its suburbs.

A very few days after his accession Ferdinand was informed that it was probable that Napoleon was intending a visit to Madrid, and was at any rate coming as far as Bayonne. He immediately sent off his eldest brother Don Carlos (the hero of the unhappy wars of 1833-40) to compliment his patron, and if necessary to receive him at the frontier [April 5]. Two days later there appeared in Madrid a new French emissary, General Savary— afterwards Duke of Rovigo—who purported to come as Bonaparte’s harbinger, charged with the duty of preparing Madrid for his arrival. He carried the farce so far that he asked for a palace for the Emperor’s residence, produced trunks of his private luggage, and began to refurnish the apartments granted him. That he bore secret orders for Murat we know from the latter’s dispatches, but this was only half his task. Napoleon had confided to him verbal instructions to lure Ferdinand to come out to meet him in the north of Spain, among the French armies massed in Biscay and Navarre—if possible even to get him to Bayonne on French soil. In his St. Helena memoirs Napoleon denies this, and Savary in his autobiography also states that he did not act the part of tempter or make any promises to the young king: the journey to Bayonne, he says, was a silly inspiration of Ferdinand’s own. But neither Bonaparte nor Savary are witnesses whom one would believe on their most solemn oath. The former we know well: the latter had been one of the persons most implicated in the shocking murder of the Due d’Enghien. When we find the Spanish witnesses, who conversed with Savary during his short stay in Madrid, agreeing that the general promised that Napoleon would recognize Ferdinand as king, give him an imperial princess as wife, and take him into favour, we need not doubt them. It is not disputed that Savary, unlike Murat and Beauharnais, regularly addressed his victim by the royal title, and it is certain that he started in his company and acted as his keeper during the journey. The move that he at first proposed was not a long one: the general said that according to his advices the Emperor must be due at Burgos on April 13: it would be time enough to start to meet him on the tenth. Burgos lies well inside the frontiers of Castile, and if it was packed with French troops, so was Madrid : one place was no more dangerous than the other.

Exactly how far the perjuries of Savary went, or how far he was apprised of his master’s final intentions, we cannot tell, but it is certain that on April 10 he set out from Madrid in the King’s company: with them went Escoiquiz, Ferdinand’s clerical confidant, Cevallos the minister of foreign affairs, and half a dozen dukes and marquises chosen from among the King’s old partisans. To administer affairs in his absence Ferdinand nominated a 6 Junta ’ or council of regency, with his uncle Don Antonio, a simple and very silly old man, at its head.

On reaching Burgos, on April 12, the party found masses of French troops but no signs of Napoleon. Savary appeared vexed, said that his calculation must have been wrong, and got the King to go forward two more stages, as far as Vittoria, at the southern foot of the Pyrenees [April 14]. Here Ferdinand received a note from his brother Don Carlos, whom he had sent ahead, saying that Bonaparte had been lingering at Bordeaux, and was not expected at Bayonne till the fifteenth. Ferdinand, always timid and suspicious, was getting restive: he had nothing on paper to assure him of Napoleon’s intentions, and began to suspect Savary’s bland­ishments. The latter doubted for a moment whether he should not have the court seized by the French garrison of Vittoria, but finally resolved to endeavour to get a letter from his master, which would suffice to lure Ferdinand across the frontier. He was entrusted with a petition of the same cast that Napoleon had been in the habit of receiving from his would-be client, full of servile loyalty and demands for the much-desired Bonaparte princess.

The four days during which Savary was absent, while the royal party remained at Vittoria, were a period of harassing doubt to Ferdinand. He was visited by all manner of persons who besought him not to go on, and especially by Spaniards lately arrived from Paris, who detailed all the disquieting rumours which they had heard at the French court. Some besought him to disguise himself and escape by night from the 4,000 troops of the Imperial Guard who garrisoned Vittoria. Others pointed out that the Spanish troops in Bilbao, which was still unoccupied by the French, might be brought down by cross-roads, and assume charge of the king’s person halfway between Vittoria and the frontier, in spite of the 600 French cavalry which escorted the cavalcade. Guarded by his own men Ferdinand might retire into the hills of Biscay. But to adopt either of the courses proposed to him would have com­pelled the King to come to an open breach with Bonaparte, and for this he had not sufficient courage, as long as there was the slightest chance of getting safely through his troubles by mere servility.

On April 18 Savary reappeared with the expected communication from Bayonne. It was certainly one of the strangest epistles that one sovereign ever wrote to another, and one of the most characteristic products of Napoleon’s pen. It was addressed to the Prince of the Asturias, not to the King of Spain, which was an ominous preface. But on the other hand the Emperor distinctly stated that 6 he wished to conciliate his friend in every way, and to find occasion to give him proofs of his affection and perfect esteem.’ He added that ‘the marriage of your royal highness to a French princess seems conformable to the interests of my people, and likely to forge new links of union between myself and the house of Bourbon.’ The core of the whole was the explicit statement that ‘if the abdication of King Charles was spontaneous, and not forced on him by the riot at Aranjuez, I shall have no difficulty in re­cognizing your royal highness as King of Spain. On these details I wish to converse with your royal highness.’ This was a double ­edged saying: Napoleon had in his pocket Charles’s protest, com­plaining that the abdication had been forced upon him by fears for his personal safety: but Ferdinand was not aware of the fact; indeed he so little realized his parent’s state of mind that he had written to him before quitting Madrid in the most friendly terms. If he had fathomed the meaning of Napoleon’s carefully constructed sentence, he would have fled for his life to the mountains.

These were the main clauses of Napoleon’s letter, but they are embedded in a quantity of turgid verbiage, in which we are only uncertain whether the hypocrisy or the bad taste is the more offensive. ‘How perilous is it for kings to permit their subjects to seek justice for themselves by deeds of blood! I pray God that your royal highness may not experience this for yourself some day! It is not for the interest of Spain that the Prince of the Peace should be hunted down : he is allied by marriage to the royal house and has governed the realm for many years. He has no friends now: but if your royal highness were to fall into similar disgrace you would have no more friends than he. You cannot touch him without touching your parents. You have no rights to the crown save those which your mother has transmitted to you: if in trying the Prince you smirch her honour, you are destroying your own rights. You have no power to bring him to judgement: his evil deeds are hidden behind the throne ... O wretched Humanity! Weakness, and Error, such is our device! But all can be hushed up : turn the Prince out of Spain, and I will give him an asylum in France.’

In the next paragraph Napoleon tells Ferdinand that he should never have written to him in the preceding autumn without his father’s knowledge—in that your royal highness was culpable; but I flatter myself that I contributed by my remonstrances in securing a happy end to the affair of the Escurial.’ Finally Ferdinand might assure himself that he should have from his ally precisely the same treatment that his father had always experienced —which again is a double-edged saying, if we take into consideration the history of the relations of Charles IV and France.

The King and his confidant Escoiquiz read and reread this curious document without coming to any certain conclusion: probably they thought (as would any one else who did not know the Emperor thoroughly) that the meeting at Bayonne would open with a scolding, and end with some tiresome concessions, but that Ferdinand’s title would be recognized. Savary’s commentary was reassuring: Spanish witnesses say that he exclaimed 41 am ready to have my head taken off if, within a quarter of an hour of your majesty’s arrival at Bayonne, the Emperor has not saluted you as King of Spain and the Indies.... The whole negotiation will not take three days, and your majesty will be back in Spain in a moment.’

On April 19, therefore, the royal party set out amid the groans of the populace of Vittoria, who tried to hold back the horses, and to cut the traces of the King’s coach: on the twentieth they reached Bayonne. Napoleon entertained them at dinner, but would not talk politics: after the meal they were sent home to the not very spacious or magnificent lodgings prepared for them. An hour later the shameless Savary presented himself at the door, with the astounding message that the Emperor had thought matters over, and had come to the conclusion that the best thing for Spain would be that the house of Bourbon should cease to reign, and that a French prince should take their place. A prompt acquiescence in the bargain should be rewarded by the gift of the kingdom of Etruria, which had just been taken from Ferdinand’s widowed sister and her young son.

The possibility of such an outrage had never occurred to the young king and his counsellors: when something of the kind had been suggested to them at Vittoria, they had cried out that it was insulting to the honour of the greatest hero of the age to dream that he could be plotting treachery. And now, too late, they learnt the stuff of which heroes were made. Even with Savary’s words ringing in their ears, they could not believe that they had heard aright. It must be some mere threat intended to frighten them before negotiations began: probably it meant that Spain would have to cede some American colonies or some Catalonian frontier districts. Next morning, therefore, Ferdinand sent his minister Cevallos to plead his cause: Napoleon refused to bargain or compromise: he wanted nothing, he said, but a prompt resignation of his rights by the Prince of the Asturias: there was nothing left to haggle about. It was gradually borne in upon Ferdinand that the Emperor meant what he had said. But though timid he was obstinate, and nothing like an abdication could be got out of him. He merely continued to send to Napoleon one agent after another—first the minister Cevallos, then his tutor and confidant Escoiquiz, then Don Pedro Labrador, a councillor of state, all charged with professions of his great readiness to do anything, short of resigning the Spanish throne, which might satisfy his captor. Cevallos and Escoiquiz have left long narratives of their fruitless embassies. That of the latter is especially interesting: he was admitted to a long conference with Bonaparte, in which he plied every argument to induce him to leave Ferdinand on the throne, after marrying him to a French princess and exacting from him every possible guarantee of fidelity. The Emperor was ready to listen to every remonstrance, but would not move from his projects. He laughed at the idea that Spain would rise in arms, and give him trouble. ‘Countries full of monks, like yours,’ he said, ‘are easy to subjugate. There may be some riots, but the Spaniards will quiet down when they see that I offer them the integrity of the boundaries of the monarchy, a liberal constitution, and the preservation of their religion and their national customs.’

When such were Napoleon’s ideas it was useless to argue with him. But Ferdinand refused to understand this, and kept reiterating all sorts of impracticable offers of concession and subservience, while refusing to do the one thing which the Emperor required of him. Napoleon, much irritated at the refusal of such a poor creature to bow to his will, has left a sketch of him during these trying days. ‘The Prince of the Asturias,’ he wrote, ‘is very stupid, very malicious, a very great hater of France ... He is a thoroughly uninteresting person, so dull that I cannot get a word out of him. Whatever one says to him he makes no reply. Whether I scold him, or whether I coax him, his face never moves. After studying him you can sum him up in a single word—he is a sulky fellow.’

As Ferdinand would not budge, Bonaparte had now to bring his second device to the front. With the old king’s protest before him, the Emperor could say that Charles IV had never abdicated in any real sense of the word. He had been made to sign a resignation ‘with a pistol levelled at his head,’ as a leading article in the Moniteur duly set forth. Such a document was, of course, worth nothing: therefore Charles was still King of Spain, and might sign that surrender of his rights which Ferdinand denied. Napoleon promptly sent for the old king and queen, who arrived under a French escort on April 30, ten days after their son’s captivity began. At Bayonne they rejoined their dearly-loved Godoy, whom Murat had extorted from the Junta of Regency, under cover of a consent sent by Ferdinand to Napoleon from Vittoria two days before he crossed the frontier.

Charles IV arrived in a state of lachrymose collapse, sank on Napoleon’s breast and called him his true friend and his only support. ‘I really do not know whether it is his position or the circumstances, but he looks like a good honest old man,’ com­mented the Emperor. ‘The Queen has her past written on her face—that is enough to define her. As to the Prince of the Peace, he looked like a prize bull, with a dash of Count Daru about him.’ Godoy and the Queen had only one thought, to avenge themselves on Ferdinand: after what had taken place they could never go back to rule in Spain, so they cared little what happened to the country. As to the King, his wife and his favourite pulled the strings, and he gesticulated in the fashion that they desired. The Emperor treated them with an ostentatious politeness which he had always refused to the new king: at the first banquet that he gave them occurred the absurd scene (already mentioned by us), in which Charles refused to sit down to table till Godoy had been found and put near him.

Two days after their arrival Napoleon compelled Ferdinand to appear before his parents: he himself was also present. The interview commenced by King Charles ordering his son to sign a complete and absolute renunciation of the Spanish throne. Bonaparte then threw in a few threatening words: but Ferdinand, still unmoved, made a steady refusal. At this the old king rose from his chair—he was half-crippled with rheumatism—and tried to strike his son with his cane, while the Queen burst in with a stream of abuse worthy of a fishwife. Napoleon, horrified at the odious scene, according to his own narrative of it, hurried Ferdinand, ‘who looked scared,’ out of the room.

The same night [May 1], Ferdinand’s advisers bethought them of a new and ingenious move—we need not ascribe it to his own brains, which were surely incapable of the device. He wrote to King Charles to the effect that he had always regarded the abdication at Aranjuez as free and unconstrained, but that if it had not been so, he was ready to lay down his crown again and hand it back to his father. But the ceremony must be done in an open and honourable way at Madrid, before the Cortes. If his parent personally resumed the reins of power, he bowed to his authority: but if his age and infirmities induced him to name a regent, that regent should be his eldest son.

This proposal did not suit the Emperor at all, so he dictated to the old king a long letter, in which the Napoleonesque phraseology peeps out in a score of places. Charles refuses all terms, says that his son’s conduct had ‘placed a barrier of bronze between him and the Spanish throne,’ and concludes that’ only the Emperor can save Spain, and he himself would do nothing that might stir up the fire of discord among his loved vassals or bring misery on them [May 2], Ferdinand replied with an equally long letter justifying at large all his conduct of the past year [May 4].

When things stood at this point there arrived from Madrid the news of the bloody events of the second of May, which we have to relate in the next chapter. This brought Napoleon up to striking point, and once more he intervened in his own person. He sent for Ferdinand, and in the presence of his parents accused him of having stirred up the riot in the capital, and informed him that if he did not sign an abdication and an acknowledgement of his father as the only true king by twelve that night ‘he should be dealt with as ft traitor and rebel.’ This is Napoleon’s own version, but Spanish witnesses say that the words used were that ‘he must choose between abdication and death.’

To any one who remembered the fate of the Duc d’Enghien such a phrase was more than an idle threat. It brought the stubborn Ferdinand to his knees at last. That evening he wrote out a simple and straightforward form of abdication—‘without any motive, save that I limited my former proposal for resignation by certain proper conditions, your majesty has thought fit to insult me in the presence of my mother and the Emperor. I have been abused in the most humiliating terms : I have been told that unless I make an unconditional resignation I and my companions shall be treated as criminals guilty of conspiracy. Under such circumstances I make the renunciation which your majesty com­mands, that the government of Spain may return to the con­dition in which it was on March 19 last, the day on which your majesty spontaneously laid down your crown in my favour’ [May 6].

Ferdinand having abdicated, Napoleon at once produced a treaty which King Charles had ratified on the previous day, twenty-four hours before his son gave in. By it the old man ‘resigned all his rights to the throne of Spain and the Indies to the Emperor Napoleon, the only person who in the present state of affairs can re-establish order.’ He only annexed two conditions: (1) that: there should be no partition of the Spanish monarchy; (2) that the Roman Catholic religion should be the only one recognized in Spain: there should, according to the existing practice, be no toleration for any of the reformed religions, much less for infidels.’ If anything is wanting to make the silly old man odious, it is the final touch of bigotry in his abdication. The rest of the document consists of a recital of the pensions and estates in France conferred by the Emperor on his dupe in return for the abdication. It took five days more to extort from Don Ferdinand a formal cession of his ultimate rights, as Prince of the Asturias, to the succession to the throne. It was signed on May 10, and purported to give him in return a palace in France and a large annual revenue. But he was really put under close surveillance at Talleyrand’s estate of Valençay, along with his brother Don Carlos, and never allowed to go beyond its bounds. The Emperor’s letter of instructions to Talleyrand is worth quoting for its cynical brutality. He wrote to his ex-minister, who was much disgusted with the invidious duty put upon him: ‘Let the princes be received without any show, but yet respectably, and try to keep them amused. If you chance to have a theatre at Valençay there would be no harm in importing some actors now and then. You may bring over Mme de Talleyrand [the notorious Mme Grand of 1800], and four or five ladies in attendance on her. If the prince should fall in love with some pretty girl among them, there would be no harm in it, especially if you are quite sure of her. The prince must not be allowed to take any false step, but must be amused and occupied. I ought, for political safety, to put him in Bitche or some other fortress-prison: but as he placed himself into my clutches of his own free will, and as everything in Spain is going on as I desire, I have resolved merely to place him in a country house where he can amuse himself under strict surveillance ... Your mission is really a very honourable one—to take in three1 illustrious guests and keep them amused is a task which should suit a Frenchman and a personage of your rank.’ Napoleon afterwards owned that he was framing what he called ‘a practical joke’ on Talleyrand, by billeting the Spaniards on him. The Prince of Benevento had wished to make no appearance in the matter, and the Emperor revenged himself by implicating him in it as the jailor of his captives. Talleyrand’s anger may be imagined, and estimated by his after conduct.

At Valençay the unfortunate Ferdinand was destined to remain for nearly six years, not amusing himself at all according to Napoleon’s ideas of amusement, but employed in a great many church services, a little partridge shooting, and (so his unwilling jailor tells us) the spoiling of much paper, not with the pen but with the scissors; for he developed a childish passion for clipping out paper patterns and bestowing them on every one that he met. One could pardon him everything if he had not spoilt his attitude as victim and martyr by occasionally sending adulatory letters to the Emperor, and even to his own supplanter, Joseph Bonaparte the new King of Spain.

SECTION I : CHAPTER VI

THE SECOND OF MAY: OUTBREAK OF THE SPANISH INSURRECTION

When King Ferdinand had taken his departure to Bayonne, the position of Murat in Madrid became very delicate. He might expect to hear at any moment, since the Emperor’s plans were more or less known to him, either that the Spanish king had been made a prisoner, or that he had taken the alarm, escaped from his escort, and fled into the mountains. In either case trouble at Madrid was very probable, though there was no serious military danger to be feared, for of Spanish troops there were only 3,000 in the city, while some 35,000 French were encamped in or about it. But there might be a moment of confusion if the Junta of Regency should take violent measures on hearing of the King’s fate, or the populace of Madrid (and this was much more likely) burst into rioting.

From the tenth of April, the day of the King’s departure for the north, down to the twenty-ninth there was no serious cause for apprehension. The people were no doubt restless: they could not understand why the French lingered in Madrid instead of marching on Portugal or Gibraltar, according to their expressed intention. Rumours of all kinds, some of which hit off fairly well the true projects of Bonaparte, were current. Murat’s conduct was not calculated to reassure observers; he gave himself the airs of a military governor, rather than those of an officer engaged in conducting an allied army through friendly territory. Some of his acts gave terrible offence, such as that of insisting that the sword of Francis I, taken at Pavia in 1525, the pride for three centuries of the royal armoury, should be given up to him. His call on the Junta for the surrender of the Prince of the Peace, whom he forwarded under French escort to Bayonne, could not fail to be unpopular. But the first real signs of danger were not seen till the twenty-second of April, when Murat, in obedience to his master, intended to publish the protest of Charles IV against his abdication. It was to be presented to the Junta in the form of a letter to its president, Don Antonio. Meanwhile French agents were set to print it: their Spanish underlings stole and circulated some of the proofs. Their appearance raised a mob, for the name of Charles IV could only suggest the reappearance of Godoy. An angry crowd broke into the printing office, destroyed the presses, and hunted away the Frenchmen. Murat at once made a great matter of the affair, and began to threaten the Junta. 6 The army which he commanded could not without dishonouring itself allow disorders to arise: there must be no more anarchy in Spain. He was not going to allow the corrupt tools of the English government to stir up troubles.’ The Junta replied with rather more spirit than might have been expected, asked why an army of 35,000 French troops had now lingered more than a month around the capital, and expressed an opinion that the riot was but an explosion of loyalty to Ferdinand. But they undertook to deal severely with factious persons, and to discourage even harmless assemblies like that of the twenty-second.

Meanwhile Murat wrote to the Emperor that it was absurd that he could not yet establish a police of his own in Madrid, that he could not print what he pleased, and that he had to negotiate with the Junta when he wished his orders published, instead of being able to issue them on his own authority. He was answered in a style which must have surprised him. Napoleon was ashamed, he said, of a general who, with 50,000 men at his back, asked for things instead of taking them. His letters to the Junta were servile; he should simply assume possession of the reins of power, and act for himself. If the canaille stirred, let it be shot down. Murat could only reply that ‘if he had not yet scattered rioters by a blast of grape, it was only because there were no mobs to shoot: his imperial majesty’s rebuke had stunned him “like a tile falling on his head” by its unmerited severity.’

Within three days of this letter there was to be plenty of grape-shot, enough to satisfy both Emperor and Grand-Duke. They probably had the revolt of Cairo and the 13th Vendemiaire in their mind, and were both under the impression that a good émeute pitilessly crushed by artillery was the best basis of a new regime.

On the night of April 29 the first clear and accurate account of what was happening at Bayonne arrived at Madrid. Napoleon had intercepted all the letters which Don Ferdinand had tried to smuggle out of his prison. He read them with grave disapproval, for his guest had not scrupled to use the expression ‘the cursed French,’ and had hinted at the propriety of resistance. He had not yet been cowed by the threat of a rebel’s death. But on the twenty-third one of the Spaniards at Bayonne succeeded in escaping in disguise, crossed the mountains by a lonely track, and reached Pampeluna, whence he posted to Madrid. This was a certain Navarrese magistrate named Ibarnavarro, to whom Ferdinand had given a verbal message to explain Napoleon’s plans and conduct to the Junta, and to inform them that he would never give in to this vile mixture of force and fraud. He could not send them any definite instructions, not knowing the exact state of affairs at Madrid, and a premature stroke might imperil the life of himself, his brother, and his companions: let them beware therefore of showing their warlike intentions till preparations had been fully made to shake off the yoke of the oppressor.

This message Ibarnavarro delivered on the night of April 29-30 to the Junta who had summoned in to hear it a number of judges and other magnates of the city. Next morning, of course, the information, in a more or less garbled shape, spread all round Madrid: there were foolish rumours that the Biscayans had already taken arms, and that 30,000 of them were marching on Bayonne to save the King, as also that certain of the coast towns had invited the English to land. On the thirtieth leaflets, both written and printed, were being secretly circulated round the city, setting forth the unhappy condition of the King, and bidding his subjects not to forget Numancia. It is astonishing that riots did not break out at once, considering the growing excitement of the people, and the habitual insolence of the French soldiery. But leaders were wanting, and in especial the Junta of Regency and its imbecile old president made no move whatever, on the pretext, apparently, that any commotion might imperil the lives of Napoleon’s prisoners.

It was Murat himself who brought matters to a head next day, by ordering the Junta to put into his hands the remaining members of the royal family, Ferdinand’s youngest brother Don Francisco, a boy of sixteen, and his sister the widowed and exiled Queen of Etruria, with her children. Only Don Antonio, the incapable president of the Junta, and the Archbishop of Toledo, the King’s second-cousin, were to be left behind: the rest were to be sent to Bayonne. Knowing what had happened to Don Ferdinand and Don Carlos, the people were horrified at the news; but they trusted that the Regency would refuse its leave. To its eternal disgrace that body did nothing: it did not even try to smuggle away the young Don Francisco before Murat should arrest him.

On the morning, therefore, of May 2 the streets were filled with people, and the palace gates in especial were beset by an excited mob. It was soon seen that the news was true, for the Queen of Etruria appeared and started for the north with all her numerous family. She was unpopular for having sided with her mother and Godoy against Don Ferdinand, and was allowed to depart undisturbed. But when the carriage that was to bear off Don Francisco was brought up, and one of Murat’s aides-de-camp appeared at the door to take charge of the young prince, the rage of the crowd burst all bounds. The French officer was stoned, and saved with difficulty by a patrol: the coach was torn to pieces. Murat had not been unprepared for something of the kind: the battalion on guard at his palace was at once turned out, and fired a dozen volleys into the unarmed mob, which fled devious, leaving scores of dead and wounded on the ground.

The Grand-Duke thought that the matter was over, but it had but just begun. At the noise of the firing the excited citizens flocked into the streets armed with whatever came to hand, pistols, blunderbusses, fowling-pieces, many only with the long Spanish knife. They fell upon, and slew, a certain number of isolated French soldiers, armed and unarmed, who were off duty and wandering round the town, but they also made a fierce attack on Murat’s guard. Of course they could do little against troops armed and in order: in the first hour of the fight there were only about 1,000 men at the Grand-Duke’s disposal, but this small force held its own without much loss, though eight or ten thousand angry insurgents fell upon them. But within seventy minutes the French army from the suburban camps came pouring into the city, brigade after brigade. After this the struggle was little more than a massacre: many of the insurgents took refuge in houses, and maintained a fierce but futile resistance for some time; but the majority were swept away in a few minutes by cavalry charges. Only at one point did the fight assume a serious shape. Almost the entire body of the Spanish garrison of Madrid refrained from taking any part in the rising: without the orders of the Junta the chiefs refused to move, and the men waited in vain for the orders of their officers. But at the Artillery Park two captains, Daoiz and Velarde, threw open the gates to the rioters, allowed them to seize some hundreds of muskets, and when the first French column appeared ran out three guns and opened upon it with grape1. Though aided by no more than forty soldiers, and perhaps 500 civilians, they beat off two assaults, and only succumbed to a third. Daoiz was bayonetted, Velarde shot dead, and their men perished with them; but they had poured three volleys of grape into a street packed with the enemy, and caused the only serious losses which the French suffered that day.

The whole struggle had occupied not more than four hours: when it was over Murat issued an ‘order of the day,’ sentencing all prisoners taken with arms in their hands, all persons discovered with arms concealed in their houses, and all distributors of seditious leaflets, ‘the agents of the English government,’ to be shot. It seems that at least a hundred persons were executed under this edict, many of them innocent bystanders who had taken no part in the fighting. Next morning Murat withdrew his Draconian decree, and no further fusilades took place. It is impossible, in the conflict of authorities, to arrive at any clear estimate of the numbers slain on each side on May 2. Probably Toreno is not far out when he estimates the whole at something over a thousand. Of these four-fifths must have been Spaniards, for the French only lost heavily at the arsenal: the number of isolated soldiers murdered in the streets at the first outbreak of the riot does not seem to have been very large.

Many French authors have called the rising a deliberate and preconcerted conspiracy to massacre the French garrison. On the other hand Spanish writers have asserted that Murat had arranged everything so as to cause a riot, in order that he might have the chance of administering a ‘whiff of grape-shot,’ after his master’s plan. But it is clear that both are making unfounded accusations: if the insurrection had been premeditated, the Spanish soldiery would have been implicated in it, for nothing would have been easier than to stir them up. Yet of the whole 3,000 only forty ran out to help the insurgents. Moreover, the mob would have been found armed at the first commencement of trouble, which it certainly was not. On the other hand, if Murat had been organizing a massacre, he would not have been caught with no more than two squadrons of cavalry and five or six companies of infantry under his hand. These might have been cut to pieces before the troops from outside could come to their help. He had been expecting riots, and was prepared to deal with them, but was surprised by a serious insurrection on a larger scale than he had foreseen, and at a moment when he was not ready.

For a few days after May 2, Murat at Madrid and his master at Bayonne were both living in a sort of fools’ paradise, imagining that ‘the affairs of Spain were going off wonderfully well,’ and that ‘the party of Ferdinand had been crushed by the prompt suppression of its conspiracy.’ The Grand-Duke had the simplicity or the effrontery to issue a proclamation in which he said ‘that every good Spaniard had groaned at the sight of such disorders,’ and another in which the insurrection was attributed to ‘the machinations of our common enemy, i.e. the British government1.’ On May 4 Don Antonio laid down the presidency of the Junta without a word of regret, and went off to Bayonne, having first borrowed 25,000 francs from Murat. The latter, by virtue of a decree issued by Charles IV, then assumed the presidency of the Junta of Regency. The rest of the members of that ignoble body easily sank into his servile instruments, though they had at last received a secret note smuggled out from Bayonne, in which Ferdinand (the day before his abdication) told them to regard his removal into the interior of France as a declaration of war, and to call the nation to arms. To this they paid no attention, while they pretended to take the document of resignation, which Bona­parte had forced him to sign, as an authentic and spontaneous expression of his will. The fact is that twenty years of Godoy had thoroughly demoralized the bureaucracy and the court of Spain: if the country’s will had not found better exponents than her ministers and officials, Napoleon might have done what he pleased with the Peninsula.

At present his sole interest seems to have lain in settling the details of his brother Joseph’s election to the Spanish throne. Ferdinand’s final resignation of all his rights having been signed on May 10, the field was open for his successor. The Emperor thought that some sort of deputation to represent the Spanish nation ought to be got together, in order that his brother might not seem to receive the crown from his own hands only. Murat was first set to work to terrorize the Junta of Regency, and the ‘Council of Castile,’ a body which practically occupied much the same position as the English Privy Council. At his dictation the Junta yielded, but with an ill grace, and sent petitions to Bayonne asking for a new monarch, and suggesting (as desired) that the person chosen might be Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples [May 13]. Murat had just been informed that as all had gone well with the Emperor’s plans he should have his reward: he might make his choice between the thrones of Naples and of Portugal. He wisely chose the former, where the rough work of subjection had already been done by his predecessor.

But resolved to get together something like a representative body which might vote away the liberty of Spain, Napoleon nominated, in the Madrid Gazette of May 24, 150 persons who were to go to Bayonne and there ask him to grant them a king. He named a most miscellaneous crowd—ministers, bishops, judges, municipal officers of Madrid, dukes and counts, the heads of the religious orders, the Grand Inquisitor and some of his colleagues, and six well-known Americans who were to speak for the colonies. To the eternal disgrace of the ruling classes of Spain, no less than ninety-one of the nominees were base enough to obey the orders given them, to go to Bayonne, and there to crave as a boon that the weak and incompetent Joseph Bonaparte might be set to govern their unhappy country, under the auspices of his brother the hero and regenerator. Long before the degrading farce was complete, the whole country was in arms behind them, and they knew themselves for traitors. The election of King Joseph I was only taken in hand on June 15, while twenty days before the north and south of Spain had risen in arms in the name of the captive Ferdinand VII.

It took a week for the news of the insurrection of May 2 to spread round Spain : in the public mouth it of course assumed the shape of a massacre deliberately planned by Murat. It was not till some days later that the full details of the events at Bayonne got abroad. But ever since the surprise of the frontier fortresses in February and March, intelligent men all over the country had been suspecting that some gross act of treachery was likely to be the outcome of the French invasion. Yet in most of the districts of Spain there was a gap of some days between the arrival of the news of the King’s captivity and the first outbreak of popular indignation. The fact was that the people were waiting for the lawful and constituted authorities to take action, and did not move of themselves till it was certain that no initiative was to be expected from those in high places. But Spain was a country which had long been governed on despotic lines; and its official chiefs, whether the nominees of Godoy or of the knot of intriguers who had just won their way to power under Ferdinand, were not the men to lead a war of national independence. Many were mere adventurers, who had risen to preferment by flattering the late favourite. Others were typical bureaucrats, whose only concern was to accept as legitimate whatever orders reached them from Madrid: provided those orders were couched in the proper form and written on the right paper, they did not look to see whether the signature at the bottom was that of Godoy or of the Infante Don Antonio, or of Murat. Others again were courtiers who owed their position to their great names, and not to any personal ability. It is this fact that accounts for the fortnight or even three weeks of torpor that followed the events of the second and sixth of May. Murat’s orders during that space travelled over the country, and most of the captains-general and other authorities seemed inclined to obey them. Yet they were orders which should have stirred up instant disobedience; the Mediterranean squadron was to be sent to Toulon, where (if it did not get taken on the way by the British) it would fall into the hands of Napoleon. A large detachment of the depleted regular army was to sail for Buenos Ayres, with the probable prospect of finding itself ere long on the hulks at Portsmouth, instead of on the shores of the Rio de la Plata. The Swiss regiments in Spanish pay were directed to be transferred to the French establishment, and to take the oath to Napoleon. All this could have no object save that of diminishing the fighting power of the country.

The first province where the people plucked up courage to act without their officials, and to declare war on France in spite of the dreadful odds against them, was the remote and inaccessible principality of the Asturias, pressed in between the Bay of Biscay and the Cantabrian hills. Riots began at its capital, Oviedo, as early as the first arrival of the news from Madrid on May 9, when Murat’s edicts were torn down in spite of the feeble resistance of the commander of the garrison and some of the magistrates. The Asturias was one of the few provinces of Spain which still preserved vestiges of its mediaeval representative institutions. It had a ‘Junta General,’ a kind of local ‘estates,’ which chanced to be in session at the time of the crisis. Being composed of local magnates and citizens, and not of officials and bureaucrats, this body was sufficiently in touch with public opinion to feel itself borne on to action. After ten days of secret preparation, the city of Oviedo and the surrounding country-side rose in unison on May 24: the partisans of the new government were imprisoned, and next day the estates formally declared war on Napoleon Bonaparte, and ordered a levy of 18,000 men from the principality to resist invasion. A great part of the credit for this daring move must be given to the president of the Junta, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who had stirred up his colleagues as early as the thirteenth by declaring that ‘when and wherever one single Spaniard took arms against Napoleon, he would shoulder a musket and put himself at that man’s side.’ The Asturians had no knowledge that other provinces would follow their example; there was only one battalion of regular troops and one of militia under arms in the province; its financial resources were small. Its only strength lay in the rough mountains that had once sheltered King Pelayo from the Moors. It was therefore an astounding piece of patriotism when the inhabitants of the principality threw down the challenge to i the victor of Jena and Austerlitz, confiding in their stern resolu­tion and their good cause. All through the war the Asturian played a very creditable part in the struggle, and never let the light of liberty go out, though often its capital and its port of Gijon fell into French hands.

One of the first and wisest measures taken by the Asturian Junta was an attempt to interest Great Britain in the insurrection. On May 30 they sent to London two emissaries (one of whom was the historian Toreno) on a Jersey privateer, whose captain was persuaded to turn out of his course for the public profit. On June 7 they had reached London and had an interview with Canning, the Foreign Secretary of the Tory government which had lately come into power. Five days later they were assured that the Asturias might draw on England for all it required in the way of arms, munitions, and money. All this was done before it was known in England that any other Spanish province was stirring, for it was not till June 22 that the plenipotentiaries of the other juntas began to appear in London.

The revolt of other provinces followed in very quick succession. Galicia rose on May 30, in spite of its captain-general, Filanghieri, whose resistance to the popular voice cost him his popularity and, not long after, his life. Corunna and Ferrol, the two northern arsenals of Spain, led the way. This addition to the insurgent forces was very important, for the province was full of—troops the garrisons that protected the ports from English descents. There were eighteen battalions of regulars and fourteen of militia— a whole army—concentrated in this remote corner of Spain. Napoleon’s plan of removing the Spanish troops from the neighbourhood of Madrid had produced the unintended result of making the outlying provinces very strong for self-defence.

It is more fitting for a Spanish than an English historian to descend into the details of the rising of each province of Spain. The general characteristics of the outburst in each region were much the same: hardly anywhere did the civil or military officials in charge of the district take the lead. Almost invariably they hung back, fearing for their places and profits, and realizing far better than did the insurgents the enormous military power which they were challenging. The leaders of the movement were either local magnates not actually holding office—like the celebrated Joseph Palafox at Saragossa—or demagogues of the streets, or (but less frequently than might have been expected) churchmen, Napoleon was quite wrong when he called the Spanish rising ‘an insurrection of monks.’ The church followed the nation, and not the nation the church: indeed many of the spiritual hierarchy were among the most servile instruments of Murat. Among them was the primate of Spain, the Archbishop of Toledo, who was actually a scion of the house of Bourbon. There were many ecclesiastics among the dishonoured ninety-one that went to Bayonne, if there were others who (like the Bishop of Santander) put themselves at the head of their flocks when the country took arms.

It was a great misfortune for Spain that the juntas, which were everywhere formed when the people rose, had to be composed in large part of men unacquainted with government and organization. There were many intelligent patriots among their members, a certain number of statesmen who had been kept down or disgraced by Godoy, but also a large proportion of ambitious windbags and self-seeking intriguers. It was hard to constitute a capable government, on the spur of the moment, in a country which had suffered twenty years of Godoy’s rule.

An unfortunate feature of the rising was that in most of the provinces, and especially those of the south, it took from the first a very sanguinary cast. It was natural that the people should sweep away in their anger every official who tried to keep them down, or hesitated to commit himself to the struggle with France. But there was no reason to murder these weaklings or traitors, in the style of the Jacobins. There was a terrible amount of assassination, public and private, during the first days of the insurrection. Three captains-general were slain under circumstances of brutal cruelty—Filanghieri in Galicia, Torre del Fresno in Estremadura, Solano at Cadiz. The fate of Solano may serve as an example: he tried to keep the troops from joining the people, and vainly harangued the mob: pointing to the distant sails of the English blockading squadron he shouted, 4 There are your real enemies! ’ But his words had no effect: he was hunted down in a house where he took refuge, and was being dragged to be hung on the public gallows, when the hand of a fanatic (or perhaps of a secret friend who wished to spare him a dishonourable death) dealt him a fatal stab in the side. Gregorio de la Cuesta, the Governor-General of Old Castile, who was destined to play such a prominent and unhappy part in the history of the next two years, nearly shared Solano’s fate. The populace of Valladolid, where he was residing, rose in insurrection like those of the other cities of Spain. They called on their military chief to put himself at their head; but Cuesta, an old soldier of the most unintelligent and brainless sort, hated mob-violence almost more than he hated the French. He held back, not from a desire to serve Bonaparte, but from a dislike to being bullied by civilians. The indignant populace erected a gallows outside his house and came to hang him thereon. It was not, it is said, till the rope was actually round his neck that the obstinate old man gave in. The Castilians promptly released him, and put him at the head of the armed rabble which formed their only force. Remembering the awful slaughter at Cabezon, at Medina de Rio Seco, and at Medellin, which his incapacity and mulish obstinacy was destined to bring about, it is impossible not to express the wish that his consent to take arms had been delayed for a few minutes longer.

All over Spain there took place, during the last days of May and the first week of June, scores of murders of prominent men, of old favourites of Godoy, of colonels who would not allow their regiments to march, of officials who had shown alacrity in obeying the orders of Murat. In the Asturias and at Saragossa alone do the new juntas seem to have succeeded in keeping down assassina­tion. The worst scenes took place at Valencia, where a mad priest, the Canon Baltasar Calvo, led out a mob of ruffians who in two days [June 6-7] murdered 338 persons, the whole colony of French merchants residing in that wealthy town. It is satisfactory to ; know that when the Junta of Valencia felt itself firmly seated in the saddle of power, it seized and executed this abominable person and his chief lieutenants. In too many parts of Spain the mur­derers went unpunished: yet remembering the provocation which the nation had received, and comparing the blood shed by mob­violence with that which flowed in Revolutionary France, we must consider the outburst deplorable rather than surprising.

When the insurrection had reached its full development, we find that it centred round five points, in each of which a separate junta had seized on power and begun to levy an army. The most powerful focus was Seville, from which all Andalusia took its directions: indeed the Junta of Seville had assumed the arrogant style of ‘supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies,’ to which it had no legitimate title. The importance of Andalusia was that it was full of troops, the regular garrisons having been joined by most of the expeditionary corps which had returned from southern Portugal. Moreover it was in possession of a full treasury and a fleet, and had free communication with the English at Gibraltar. On June 15 the Andalusians struck the first military blow that told on Napoleon, by bombarding and capturing the French fleet (the relics of Trafalgar) which lay at their mercy within the harbour of Cadiz.

The second in importance of the centres of resistance was Galicia, which was also fairly well provided with troops, and contained the arsenals of Ferrol and Corunna. The risings in Asturias, and the feebler gatherings of patriots in Leon and Old Castile, practically became branches of the Galician insurrection, though they were directed by their own juntas and tried to work for themselves. It was on the army of Galicia that they relied for support, and without it they would not have been formidable. The boundaries of this area of insurrection were Santander, Valladolid, and Segovia: further east the troops of Moncey and Bessières, in the direction of Burgos and Aranda, kept the country-side from rising. There were sporadic gatherings of peasants in the Upper Ebro valley and the mountains of Northern Castile, but these were mere un­organized ill-armed bands that half a battalion could disperse. It was the same in the Basque Provinces and Navarre: here too the French lay cantoned so thickly that it was impossible to meddle with them: their points of concentration were Vittoria and the two fortresses of Pampeluna and San Sebastian.

The other horn of the half-moon of revolt, which encircled Madrid, was composed of the insurrections in Murcia and Valencia to the south and Aragon to the north. These regions were much less favourably situated for forming centres of resistance, because they were very weak in organized troops. When the Aragonese elected Joseph Palafox as their captain-general and declared war on France, there were only 2,000 regulars and one battery of artillery in their realm. The levies which they began to raise were nothing more than half-armed peasants, with no adequate body of officers to train and drill them. Valencia and Murcia were a little better off, because the arsenal of Cartagena and its garrison lay within their boundaries, but there were only 9,000 men in all under arms in the two provinces. Clearly they could not hope to deliver such a blow as Galicia or Andalusia might deal.

The last centre of revolt, Catalonia, did not fall into the same strategical system as the other four. It looked for its enemies not at Madrid, but at Barcelona, where Lecchi and Duhesme were firmly established ever since their coup de main in February. The Catalans had as their task the cutting off of this body of invaders from its communication with France, and the endeavour to prevent new forces from joining it by crossing the Eastern Pyrenees. The residence of the insurrectionary Junta was at Tarragona, but the most important point in the province for the moment was Gerona, a fortress commanding the main road from France, which Napoleon had not had the foresight to seize at the same moment that he won by treachery Barcelona and Figueras. While the Spaniards could hold it, they had some chance of isolating the army of Duhesme from its supports. In Catalonia, or in the Balearic Isles off its coast, there were in May 1808, about 16,000 men of regular troops, among whom there were only 1,200 soldiers of the cavalry arm. There was no militia, but by old custom the levee en masse might always be called out in moments of national danger. These irregulars, somatenes as they were called (from somaten, the alarm-bell which roused them), turned out in great numbers according to ancient custom: they had been mobilized thirteen years before in the French War of 1793-5 and their warlike traditions were by no means forgotten. All through the Peninsular struggle they made a very creditable figure, considering their want of organization and the difficulty of keeping them together.

The French armies, putting aside Duhesme’s isolated force at Barcelona, lay compactly in a great wedge piercing into the heart of Spain. Its point was at Toledo, just south of Madrid : its base was a line drawn from San Sebastian to Pampeluna across the Western Pyrenees. Its backbone lay along the great high road from Vittoria by Burgos to Madrid. The advantageous point of this position was that it completely split Central Spain in two: there was no communication possible between the insurgents of Galicia and those of Aragon. On the other hand the wedge was long and narrow, and exposed to be pierced by a force striking at it either from the north-east or the north-west. The Aragonese rebels were too few to be dangerous; but the strong Spanish army of Galicia was well placed for a blow at Burgos, and a successful attack in that direction would cut off Madrid from France, and leave the troops in and about the capital, who formed the point of the intrusive wedge, in a very perilous condition. This is the reason why, in the first stage of the war, Napoleon showed great anxiety as to what the army of Galicia might do, while professing comparative equanimity about the proceedings of the other forces of the insurrection.

Having thus sketched the strategic position of affairs in the Peninsula during the first days of June, we must set ourselves to learn the main characteristics of the military geography of Spain, and to estimate the character, organization, and fighting value of the two armies which were just about to engage. With­out some knowledge of the conditions of warfare in Spain, a mere catalogue of battles and marches would be absolutely useless.

SECTION II

THE LAND AND THE COMBATANTS

CHAPTER I

MILITARY GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA : MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, ROADS

Of all the regions of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula possesses the best marked frontier. It is separated from France, its only neighbour, by one broad range of mountains, which defines its boundaries even more clearly than the Alps mark those of Italy. For the Alps are no single chain, but a system of double and triple chains running parallel to each other, and leaving between them debatable lands such as Savoy and the Southern Tyrol. Between Spain and France there is no possibility of any such claims and counter-claims. It is true that Roussillon, where the eastern end of the Pyrenean range runs into the sea, was Spanish down to 1659, but that was a political survival from the Middle Ages, not a natural union: there can be no doubt that geographically Roussillon is a French and not an Iberian land: the main backbone of the boundary chain lies south and not north of it.

The Pyrenees, though in height they cannot vie with the Alps, and though they are not nearly so jagged or scarped as the greater chain, are extremely difficult to cross, all the more so because the i hand of man has seldom come to help the hand of nature in making practicable lines of access between France and Spain. In the whole length between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean there are only two short fronts where intercommunication is easy, and these lie at the extreme east and west, where the mountains touch the sea. In the 250 miles which intervene there is hardly one good pass practicable for wheeled traffic or for the march of an army: most are mere mule-paths, rarely used save by smugglers and shepherds. The only one of these minor routes employed in the war was that which leads from Jaca in Aragon to Oloron in Béarn, and that was not much used: only on one single occasion in 1813 does it appeal prominently in history, when Clausel’s French division, fleeing before Wellington and pressed up against the foot of the mountains, escaped across it with some difficulty.

The only passes that were systematically employed during the war were those which lie close to the water at each end of the Pyrenean chain. At the eastern end there are three which lead from Roussillon into Catalonia. One hugs the water’s edge, and crawls along under the cliffs from Perpignan to Rosas: this was not in 1808 the most important of the three, though it is the one by which the railway passes today. Inland there are two other roads over difficult crests—one ten, the other forty miles from the shore— the former from Bellegarde to Figueras, the other from Mont-louis to Puycerda and Vich. The first was the pass most used in the war, being less exposed than the Rosas route to English descents from the sea: the coast road could actually be cannonaded by warships at some corners. It was blocked indeed by the fortress of Figueras, but that stronghold was only in Spanish hands for a very short period of the war. The inmost, or Mont-louis-Puycerda road was bad, led into nothing more than a few upland valleys, and was very little employed by the French. It would have been of importance had it led down into the lowlands of Aragon, but after taking a long turn in the hills it harks back towards the Catalan coast, and joins the other two roads near Gerona—a fortress which is so placed as practically to command every possible access into Eastern Spain.

Taking all three of these paths into Catalonia together, they do but form a sort of back door into the Iberian Peninsula. They only communicate with the narrow eastern coast-strip from Barcelona to Valencia. There is no direct access from them into Castile, the heart of the country, and only a roundabout entrance by Lerida into Aragon. The great mass of the Catalan and Valencian Sierras bars them out from the main bulk of the Spanish realm. Catalonia and Valencia, wealthy and in parts fertile as they are, are but its back premises.

The true front door of the kingdom is formed by the passes at the other, the western, end of the Pyrenees. Here too we have three available routes, but they differ in character from the roads at the edge of the Mediterranean, in that they open up two com­pletely separate lines of advance into Spain, and do not (like the Catalan defiles) all lead on to the same goal. All three start from Bayonne, the great southern fortress of Gascony. The first keeps for some time close to the seaside, and after crossing the Bidassoa, the boundary river of France and Spain, at Irun, leaves the fortress of San Sebastian a few miles to its right and then charges the main chain of the mountains. It emerges at Vittoria, the most northerly town of importance in the basin of the Ebro. A few miles further south it crosses that stream, and then makes for Burgos and Madrid, over two successive lines of Sierras. It opens up the heart of both Old and New Castile. The other two roads from Bayonne strike inland at once, and do not hug the Biscayan shore like the Irun-Vittoria route. They climb the Pyrenees, one by the pass of Maya, the other, twenty miles further east, by the more famous pass of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne suffered disaster of old, and left the great paladin, Roland, dead behind him. The Maya and Roncesvalles roads join, after passing the mountains, at the great fortress of Pampeluna, the capital of Navarre. From thence several lines are available for the invader, the two chief of which are the roads into Old Castile by Logrono and into Aragon by Tudela. Pampeluna is quite as valuable as Vittoria as the base for an attack on Central Spain.

The whole Iberian Peninsula has been compared, not inaptly, to an inverted soup-plate : roughly it consists of a high central plateau, surrounded by a flat rim. But no comparison of that kind can be pressed too hard, and we must remember that the rim is variable in width: sometimes, as on the north coast, and in the extreme south-east of the peninsula, it is very narrow, and much cut up by small spurs running down to the sea. But as a rule, and especially in Central Portugal, Andalusia, Murcia, and Valencia, it is broad and fertile. Indeed if we set aside the northern coast— Biscay, Asturias, and Galicia—we may draw a sharp division between the rich and semi-tropical coast plain, and the high, wind­swept, and generally barren central plateau. All the wealth of the land lies in the outer strip : the centre is its most thinly inhabited • and worthless part. Madrid, lying in the very midst of the plateau, : is therefore not the natural centre of the land in anything save a mathematical sense. It is a new and artificial town of the sixteenth century, pitched upon as an administrative capital by the Hapsburg kings; but in spite of the long residence of the court there, it never grew into a city of the first class. Summing up its ineligibilities, an acute observer said that Madrid combined ‘the soil of the Sahara, the sun of Calcutta, the wind of Edinburgh, and the cold of the North Pole.’ Though in no sense the natural capital of the country, it has yet a certain military importance as the centre from which the road-system of Spain radiates. There is, as a glance at the map will show, no other point from which all the main avenues of communication with the whole of the provinces can be controlled. An invader, therefore, who has got possession of it can make any combined action against himself very difficult. But he must not flatter himself that the capture of Madrid carries with it the same effect that the capture of Paris or Berlin or Vienna entails. The provinces have no such feeling of dependence on the national capital as is common in other countries. France with Paris occupied by an enemy is like a body deprived of its head. But for Andalusians or Catalonians or Galicians the occu­pation of Madrid had no such paralysing effect. No sentimental affection for the royal residence—and Madrid was nothing more—existed. And a government established at Seville or Cadiz, or any other point, would be just as well (or as ill) obeyed as one that issued its orders from the sandy banks of the Manzanares.

The main geographical, as well as the main political, characteristics of Spain are determined by its very complicated mountain­system. It is a land where the rivers count for little, and the hills for almost everything, in settling military conditions. In most countries great rivers are connecting cords of national life: their waters carry the internal traffic of the realm: the main roads lie along their banks. But in Spain the streams, in spite of their length and size, are useless. They mostly flow in deep-sunk beds, far below the level of the surrounding country-side. Their rapid current is always swirling round rocks, or dashing over sandbanks : often they flow for mile after mile between cliffs from which it is impossible to reach the water’s edge. In the rainy season they are dangerous torrents: in the summer all save the very largest dwindle down into miserable brooks. A river in Spain is always a sundering obstacle, never a line of communication. Only for a few scores of miles near their mouths can any one of them be utilized for navigation: the Douro can be so employed as far as Freneda on the frontier of Portugal, the Tagus in good seasons as far as Abrantes, the Guadalquivir to Seville. For the rest of their long courses they are not available even for the lightest boats.

Spanish rivers, in short, are of importance not as lines of transit, but as obstacles. They form many fine positions for defence, but positions generally rendered dangerous by the fact that a very few days of drought may open many unsuspected fords, where just before there had been deep and impassable water. Rivers as broad as the Tagus below Talavera and the Douro at Toro were occasionally crossed by whole armies in dry weather. It was always hazardous to trust to them as permanent lines of defence.

It is the mountains which really require to be studied in detail from the military point of view. Speaking generally we may describe the Iberian system—as distinct from the Pyrenees—as consisting of one chain running roughly from north to south, so as to separate the old kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, while at right angles to this chain run a number of others, whose general courses are parallel to each other and run from east to west. There is no single name for the mountains which separate Castile and Aragon, nor do they form one continuous range. They are a number of separate systems, often divided from each other by wide gaps, and sometimes broadening out into high tablelands. The central nucleus, from which the rest run out, lies between the provinces of New Castile and Valencia, from Guadalajara in the former to Morelia in the latter. Here there is a great ganglion of chaotic sierras, pierced by hardly a single practicable road. Northward, in the direction of Aragon, they sink down into the plain of the Ebro : southward they spread out into the lofty plateau of Murcia, but rise into higher and narrower ranges again as they get near the frontier of Andalusia.

This block of chains and plateaus forms the central watershed of Spain, which throws westward the sources of the Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir, and eastward those of the Xucar and Segura. The basins of these streams and their tributaries form three-fourths of the Iberian Peninsula. The rest consists mainly of the great valley of the Ebro: this hardly falls into the system, and is somewhat exceptional. It has been described as serving as a sort of wet-ditch to the main fortification of the peninsula. Starting in the western extension of the Pyrenees, quite close to the Bay of Biscay, it runs diagonally across Spain, more or less parallel to the Pyrenees, and falls into the Mediterranean between Catalonia and Valencia. It is more low-lying than the rest of the main valleys of Spain, is broader, and is not so much cramped and cut up by mountains running down to it at right angles to its course.

Behind the Ebro lie, chain after chain, the parallel sierras which mark off the divisions of the great central plateau of Spain. Arteche compares them to the waves of a great petrified sea, running some higher and some lower, but all washing up into jagged crests, with deep troughs between them.

The first and most northerly of these waves is that which we may call the range of Old Castile, which separates the basin of the Ebro from that of the Douro. At one end it links itself to the Pyrenean chain in the neighbourhood of Santander: at the other it curves round to join the more central sierras in the direction of Soria and Calatayud. It is the lowest of the chains which bound the central plateau of Spain, and is pierced by three practicable roads, of which the most important is that from Vittoria to Burgos.

Between this chain on the east and the Cantabrian mountains on the north lies the great plain of Old Castile and Leon, the heart of the elder Spanish monarchy, in the days when Aragon was still independent and Andalusia remained in the hands of the Moor. It is a fairly productive corn-producing land, studded with ancient cities such as Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Toro, Zamora, Salamanca. The Tierra de Campos (land of the plains), as it was called, was the granary of Northern Spain, the most civilized part of the kingdom, and the only one where there existed a fairly complete system of roads. For want of the isolated mountain chains which cut up most provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, it was hard to defend and easy to overrun. If the mountains that divide it from the Ebro valley are once passed, there is no way of stopping the invader till he reaches the border of Asturias, Galicia, or New Castile. The whole plain forms the valley of the Upper Douro and its tributaries, the Adaja, Pisuerga, Esla, Tormes, and the rest. It narrows down towards Portugal, as the mountains of Galicia on the one side and Estremadura on the other throw out their spurs to north and south. Hence the Lower Douro valley, after the Portuguese frontier has been passed, is a defile rather than a plain. Before Oporto and the estuary are reached, there are many places where the mountains on either side come right down to the river’s edge.

The second chain is much more important, and more strongly marked: it divides Old from New Castile, the valley of the Douro from that of the Tagus. In its central and western parts it is really a double range, with two narrow valleys between its chief ridges. These valleys are drained by the Zezere and Alagon, two tributaries of’ the Tagus which flow parallel for many scores of miles to the broad river which they feed. If we call this great system of mountains the chain of New Castile it is only for convenience’ sake: the Spaniards and Portuguese have no common name for them. In the east they are styled the Sierra de Ayllon; above Madrid they are known as the Guadarrama—a name some­times extended to the whole chain. When they become double, west of Madrid, the northern chain is the Sierra de Gata, the southern the Sierra de Gredos. Finally in Portugal the extension of the Sierra de Gata is called the Sierra da Estrella, the southern parallel ridge the Sierra do Moradal. The whole system forms a very broad, desolate, and lofty belt of hills between the Tagus and Douro, through which the practicable passes are few and difficult. Those requiring notice are (1) the Somosierra Pass, through which runs the great northern road from Burgos to Madrid: its name is well remembered owing to the extraordinary way in which Napoleon succeeded in forcing it (against all the ordinary rules of war) in the winter of 1808.(2) There is a group of three passes, all within twelve miles of each other, across the Guadarrama, through which there debouch on to Madrid the main roads from North-western Spain—those from (2) Valladolid and Segovia, (3) from Astorga, Tordesillas, and Arevalo, (4) from Salamanca by Avila. After this group of passes there is a long space of impracticable hills, till we come to the chief road from north to south, parallel to the Portuguese frontier: it comes down the valley of the Alagon from Salamanca, by Banos and Plasencia, on to the great Roman bridge of Alcantara, the main passage over the Middle Tagus. This is a bad road through a desolate country, but the exigencies of war caused it to be used continually by the French and English armies, whenever they had to transfer them­selves from the valley of the Douro to that of the Tagus. Occasion­ally they employed a still worse route, a little further west, from Ciudad Rodrigo by Perales to Alcantara. When we get within the Portuguese frontier, we find a road parallel to the last, from Almeida by Guarda to Abrantes, also a difficult route, but like it in perpetual use: usually, when the French marched from Salamanca to Alcantara, Wellington moved in a corresponding way from near Almeida to Abrantes. This road runs along the basin of the Zezere, though not down in the trough of the river, but high up the hillsides above it. Spanish and Portuguese roads, as we shall see, generally avoid the river banks and run along the slopes far above them.

The next great chain across the Peninsula is that which separates the barren and sandy valley of the Upper Tagus from the still more desolate and melancholy plateau of La Mancha, the basin of the Guadiana. Of all the regions of Central Spain, this is the most thinly peopled and uninviting. In the whole valley there are only two towns of any size, Ciudad Real, the capital of La Mancha, and Badajoz, the frontier fortress against Portugal. The mountains north of the Guadiana are called first the Sierra de Toledo, then the Sierra de Guadalupe, lastly on the Portuguese frontier the Sierra de San Mamed. Their peculiarity, as opposed to the other cross ranges of the Peninsula, is that at their eastern end they do not unite directly with the mountains of Valencia, but leave a broad gap of upland, through which the roads from Madrid to Murcia and Madrid to Valencia take their way. When the Sierra de Toledo once begins roads are very few. There are practically only three—(1) Toledo by San Vincente to Merida, a most break-neck route winding among summits for forty miles; (2) Almaraz by Truxillo to Merida, the main path from Tagus to Guadiana, and the most used, though it is difficult and steep; (3) Alcantara by Albuquerque to Badajoz, a bad military road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, continuing the similar route from Salamanca to Alcantara.

Leaving the barren basin of the Guadiana to proceed southward, we find across our path a range of first-rate importance, the southern boundary of the central plateaux of Spain: dropping down from its crest we are no longer among high uplands, but in the broad low-lying semi-tropical plain of Andalusia, the richest region of Spain. The chain between the fertile valley of the Guadalquivir and the barren plateau of La Mancha is known for the greater part of its course as the Sierra Morena, but in its western section it takes the name of Sierra de Constantino. The passes across it require special notice: the most eastern and the most important is that of Despeñaperros, through which passes the high road from Madrid to Cordova, Seville, and Cadiz. At its southern exit was fought the fight of Baylen, in which the armies of Napoleon received their first great check by the surrender of Dupont and his 20,000 men on July 23, 1808. Higher up the defile lies another historic spot, on which Christian and Moor fought the decisive battle for the mastery of Spain in the early years of the thirteenth century, the well-known fight of Las Navas de Tolosa. The Despena-Perros has two side-passes close to its left and right: the former is that of San Estevan del Puerto: the latter is known as the ‘King’s Gate’ (Puerto del Rey). All these three defiles present tremendous difficulties to an assailant from the north, yet all were carried in a single rush by the armies of Soult and Sebastiani in 1810. The central pass of the Sierra Morena lies ninety miles to the left, and is of much less importance, as it starts from the most arid corner of La Mancha, and does not connect itself with any of the great roads from the north. It leads down on to Cordova from Hinojosa. Again sixty miles to the west three more passes come down on to Seville, the one by Llerena, the second by Monasterio, the third by Fregenal: they lead to Badajoz and Merida. These are easier routes through a less rugged country: they were habitually used by Soult in 1811 and 1812, when, from his Andalusian base at Seville, he used to go north to besiege or to relieve the all-important fortress of Badajoz.

Last of all the great Spanish chains is that which lies close along the Mediterranean Sea, forming the southern edge of the fertile Andalusian plain. It is the Sierra Nevada, which, though neither the longest nor the broadest of the ranges of the south, contains the loftiest peaks in Spain, Mulhacen and La Veleta. This chain runs from behind Gibraltar along the shore, till it joins the mountains of Murcia, leaving only a very narrow coast-strip between its foot and the southern sea. Three roads cut it in its western half, which, starting from Granada, Ronda, and Antequera all come down to the shore at, or in the neighbourhood of, the great port of Malaga. The parts of the coast-line that are far from that city are only accessible by following difficult roads that run close to the water’s edge.

We have still to deal with two corners of the Iberian Peninsula, which do not fall into any of the great valleys that we have described—Galicia and Northern Portugal in the north-west, and Catalonia in the north-east. The geographical conditions of the former region depend on the Cantabrian Mountains, the western continuation of the Pyrenees. This chain, after running for many miles as a single ridge, forks in the neighbourhood of the town of Leon. One branch keeps on in its original direction, and runs by the coast till it reaches the Atlantic at Cape Finisterre. The other turns south-west and divides Spain from Portugal as far as the sea. The angle between these forking ranges is drained by a considerable river, the Minho. The basins of this stream and its tributary the Sil, form the greater part of the province of Galicia. Their valleys are lofty, much cut up by cross-spurs, and generally barren. The access to them from Central Spain is by two openings. The main one is the high road from Madrid to Corunna by Astorga; it does not follow the course of either the Sil or the Minho, but charges cross-ridge after cross-ridge of the spurs of the Galician hills, till at last it comes down to the water, and forks into two routes leading the one to Corunna, the other to the still more important arsenal of Ferrol. The other gate of Galicia is a little to the south of Astorga, where a pass above the town of Puebla de Sanabria gives access to a steep and winding road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, which finally gets into the valley of the Minho, and turns down to reach the port of Vigo. It will be remembered that Sir John Moore, in his famous retreat, hesitated for some time at Astorga between the Vigo and Corunna roads, and finally chose the latter. His judgement was undoubtedly correct, but the best alternative was bad, for in winter even the Madrid- Corunna road, the main artery of this part of Spain, is distressing enough to an army. It does not follow any well-marked valley, but cuts across four separate ranges, every one of which in January was a nursery of torrents in its lower slopes, and an abode of snow in its upper levels. Besides the roads with which we have already dealt there is a third important line of communication in Galicia, that by the narrow coast-plain of the Atlantic, from Corunna by Santiago to Vigo, and thence into Portugal as far as Oporto. This would be a good road but for the innumerable river-mouths, small and great, which it has to cross: the road passes each stream just where it ceases to be tidal, and at each is fronted at right angles by a defensible position, which, if held by a competent enemy, is difficult to force from the front, and still more difficult to turn by a detour up-stream. Nevertheless it was by this route that Soult successfully invaded Northern Portugal in the spring of 1809. It must be remembered that he was only opposed by bands of peasants not even organized into the loosest form of militia.

The geography of Catalonia, the last Iberian region with which we have to deal, is more simple than that of Galicia. The land is formed by a broad mountain belt running out from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, parallel to the Mediterranean. From this chain the slopes run down and form on the eastern side a coast-plain, generally rather narrow, on the western a series of parallel valleys drained by tributaries of the Segre, the most important affluent of the Ebro. They all unite near Lerida, an important town and a great centre of roads. But two considerable rivers, the Ter and the Llobregat, have small basins of their own in the heart of the central mountain mass, which open down into the coast-plain by defiles, the one blocked by the peak of Montserrat, the other by the town of Gerona. During the greater part of the Peninsular War the French held the larger share of the shoreland, dominating it from the great fortress of Barcelona, which they had seized by treachery ere hostilities began. In 1811 they captured Tarragona also, the second capital of the sea coast. But they never succeeded in holding down all the small upland plains, and the minor passes that lead from one to the other. Hunted out of one the Spanish army took refuge in the next, and, though it dwindled down ultimately to a mass of guerilla bands, was never caught en masse and exterminated. There were too many bolt-holes among the network of hills, and the invaders never succeeded in stopping them all, so that down to the end of the war the patriots always main­tained a precarious existence inland, descending occasionally to the shore to get ammunition and stores from the English squadrons which haunted the coast. They were supplied and reinforced from the Balearic Isles, which Napoleon could never hope to touch, for his power (like that of the witches of old) vanished when it came to running water. The survival of the Catalan resistance after the French had drawn a complete cordon around the hill-country, holding the whole coast-plain on the one hand, and Lerida and the Segre valley on the other, is one of the incidents of the war most creditable to Spanish constancy.

Having dealt with the physical geography of Spain, it is necessary for us to point out the way in which the natural difficulties of the country had influenced its main lines of communication. Roads always take the ‘line of least resistance ’ in early days, and seek for easy passes, not for short cuts. The idea that ‘time is money,’ and that instead of going round two sides of a triangle it may be worth while to cut a new path across its base, in spite of all engineering difficulties, was one very unfamiliar to the Spaniard. Nothing shows more clearly the state of mediaeval isolation in which the kingdom still lay in 1808 than the condition of its roads. Wherever the country presented any serious obstacles, little or no attempt had been made to grapple with them since the days of the Romans. The energetic Charles III, alone among the kings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had done something to improve the system of intercommunication. He had, for example, superseded the old break-neck road from the plains of Leon into Galicia, by building the fine new chaussée from Astorga to Villafranca by Manzanal; but among the line of Hapsburg and Bourbon sovereigns Charles was a rare exception. Under the imbecile rule of his son (or rather of Godoy) improvements ceased, and internal communications were as much neglected as any other branch of state management. What roads there were, when the war of 1808 broke out, were in a state of dreadful neglect. The Spaniard was still too prone to go round an intolerable distance rather than attempt a serious piece of engineering work. Let us take, for example, the northern coast of Spain: the Cantabrian range is no doubt a most serious obstacle to intercourse between Castile and Leon, on the one side, and the maritime provinces of Asturias and Biscay on the other. But who would have conceived it possible that in a length of 300 miles of mountain, there should be no more than five roads practicable for wheeled traffic and artillery ? Yet this was so: to get down from the central plateau to the coast there are only available these five routes—one from Leon to Oviedo, one from Burgos to Santander, one from Burgos to Bilbao, one from Vittoria to Bilbao, and one from Vittoria to San Sebastian and Irun. There were many other points at which a division travelling in light order without guns or baggage could cross the watershed—as was shown in Blake’s flight from Reynosa and Ney’s invasion of the Asturias. But for an army travelling with all its impedimenta such bypaths were impracticable.

Let us take another part of the Peninsula—its eastern side. The ancient separation between Aragon and Castile is fully reflected by the utter isolation of the two for intercommunication. To get from Madrid to the east coast there are only three roads suitable for wheeled traffic : one goes by the main gap in the hills by Chinchilla to Murcia, another by Requena to Valencia. The third passes by Calatayud to Saragossa and ultimately to Barcelona. Between it and the Valencia road there is a gap of no less than 120 miles unpierced by any good practicable line of communication. This being so, we begin to understand how it was that the operations on the eastern side of Spain, during the whole of the struggle, were a sort of independent episode that never exercised any great influence on the main theatre of the war, or, on the other hand, was much affected by the progress of the strife in Castile or Portugal. Soult’s conquest of Andalusia did not help Suchet to conquer Valencia. On the other hand, when the latter did, in January, 1812, succeed in his attempt to subdue the eastern coast-line, it did not much affect him that Wellington was storm­ing Ciudad Rodrigo and pressing back the French in the west. He was able to hold on to Valencia till the allies, in 1813, got possession of the upper valley of the Ebro and the great road from Madrid to Saragossa and Lerida, after the battle of Vittoria. It was only then that his flank was really turned, and that he was compelled to retreat and to abandon his southern conquests.

Summing up the general characteristics of the road-system of Spain, we note first that the main routes are rather at right angles to the great rivers than parallel to them. The sole exception is to be found in the valley of the Ebro, where the only good cross-road of Northern Spain does follow the river-bank from Logrono and Tudela on to Saragossa and Lerida.

Just because the roads do not cling to the valleys, but strike across them at right angles, they are always crossing watersheds by means of difficult passes. And so there is hardly a route in the whole Peninsula where it is possible to find fifty miles without a good defensive position drawn across the path. Moreover, the continual passes make the question of supplies very difficult: in crossing a plain an army can live, more or less, on the supplies of the country-side; but among mountains and defiles there is no population, and therefore no food to be had. Hence an army on the move must take with it all that it consumes, by means of a heavy wagon train, or an enormous convoy of pack-mules. But only the best roads are suitable for wheeled traffic, and so the lines practicable for a large host are very restricted in number. The student is often tempted to consider the movements of the rival generals very slow. The explanation is simply that to transfer an army from one river-basin to another was a serious matter. It was necessary to spend weeks in collecting at the base food and transport sufficient to support the whole force till it reached its goal. In 1811 or 1812 the French and English were continually moving up and down the Portuguese frontier parallel to each other, the one from Salamanca to Badajoz, the other from Almeida or Guarda to Elvas. But to prepare for one of these Hittings was such a serious matter that by the time that the army was able to move, the enemy had usually got wind of the plan, and was able to follow the movement on his own side of the frontier. There were months of preparation required before a few weeks of active operations, and when the concentration was over and the forces massed, they could only keep together as long is the food held out, and then had to disperse again in order to live. This was what was meant by the old epigram, that ‘in Spain large armies starve,’, and small armies get beaten.

Half the strategy of the campaigns of 1811-12-13 consisted in one of the combatants secretly collecting stores, concentrating his whole army, and then dashing at some important part of his adversary’s line, before the other could mass his forces in a corresponding way. If prompt, the assailant might gain a fortnight, in which he might either try to demolish the enemy in detail before he could concentrate, or else to take from him some important position or town. In 1811 Marmont and Dorsenne played this trick on Wellington, during the short campaign of El Bodon and Aldea da Ponte. They relieved Ciudad Rodrigo, and nearly caught some divisions of the English army before the rest could join. But missing the instant blow, and allowing Wellington time to draw in his outlying troops, they failed and went home. In 1812, on the other hand, the British general successfully played off this device on the French. He first concentrated in the north, and captured Ciudad Rodrigo in eleven days, before Marmont could mass his scattered divisions; then going hastily south he took Badajoz in exactly the same way, storming it after only nineteen days of siege. Soult drew his army together at the news of Wellington’s move, but had to bring troops from such distances, and to collect so much food, that he arrived within three marches of Badajoz only to hear that the place had just fallen.

In dealing with the main geographical facts of the war it is fair to recollect that an invasion of Spain from France is one of the most difficult of undertakings, because the whole river and moun­tain system of the Peninsula lies across the main line of advance from Bayonne to Cadiz, which the invader must adopt. While the French conquest must be pushed from north to south, both the streams and the Sierras of Spain all run at right angles to this direction, i. e. from east to west. In advancing from the Pyrenees to Madrid, and again from Madrid to Seville and Cadiz, the invader has to cross every main river—Ebro, Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir—and to force the passes of every main range. Moreover, as he advances southward, he has to keep his flanks safe against disturbance from the two mountainous regions, Catalonia and Portugal, which lie along the eastern and western coasts of the Peninsula. Unless the whole breadth of Spain, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, be occupied step by step as the invader moves on towards the Straits of Gibraltar, he can always be molested and have his lines of communication with France threatened. In the end it may be said that Napoleon’s whole scheme of conquest was shipwrecked upon the blunder of attacking Andalusia and Cadiz while Portugal was still unsubdued.

Wellington’s constant sallies out of that country upon the French flank, in Leon and Estremadura, detained such large forces to protect the valleys of the Central Douro and Tagus that enough men were never found to finish the conquest of the south and east. And finally one crushing victory at Salamanca, in the plains of Leon, so threatened the invader’s line of touch with France, that he had to abandon the whole south of Spain in order to concentrate an army large enough to force Wellington back from Burgos and the great northern road.

On the other hand, one tremendous advantage possessed by the French in the central years of the war must be remembered. It is manifest that Madrid is the only really important road-centre in Spain, and that its undisturbed possession by the French in 1809-11 gave them the advantage of being able to operate from a single point, against enemies who lay in a vast semicircle around, with no good cross-roads to join them and enable them to work together. The small 4 Army of the Centre,’ which was always kept in and around Madrid, could be used as a reserve for any other of the French armies, and transferred to join it in a few marches, while it was infinitely more difficult to unite the various forces lying on an outer circle at Astorga, Almeida, Abrantes, and Cadiz, which the Spaniards and the British kept in the field. In short, in estimating the difficulties of the two parties, the advantage of the central position must be weighed against the disadvantage of long and exposed lines of communication.

One of the cardinal blunders of Napoleon’s whole scheme for the conquest of the Peninsula was that he persisted in treating it as if it were German or Italian soil, capable of supporting an army on the march. His troops were accustomed to live on the country-side while crossing Central Europe, and therefore made no proper preparations for supplying themselves by other means than plunder. But in Spain there are only a few districts where this can be done : it may be possible to get forward without an enormous train of convoys in Andalusia, the coast plain of Valencia, and certain parts of the rather fertile plateau of Leon, the wheat-bearing Tierra de Campos. But over four-fifths of the Peninsula, an army that tries to feed on the country-side will find itself at the point of starvation in a few days, and be forced to disperse in order to live.

Till he had seen Spain with his own eyes Napoleon might perhaps have been excused for ignoring the fact that his ordinary method of ‘making war support itself’ was not in this case possible. But even after he had marched from Bayonne to Madrid, and then from Madrid to Astorga, in 1808, he persisted in refusing to see facts as they were. We find him on his way back to Paris from the campaign uttering the extraordinary statement that ‘Spain is a much better country than he had ever supposed, and that he had no idea what a magnificent present he had made to his brother Joseph till he had seen it.’ Of his utter failure to grasp the difficulties of the country we may get a fair conception from his orders, given at the same time, to Marshal Soult, who was at that moment occupied in pushing Sir John Moore towards Corunna. He told the Duke of Dalmatia that if he reached Lugo on January 9, and the English got away safely by sea, he was to march on Oporto, where he ought to arrive on the first of February; after seizing that city he was to go on to Lisbon, which he might reach on or about February 10. As a matter of fact Soult saw the English depart, and occupied Corunna on January 19, but his army was so utterly worn out, and his stores so entirely exhausted, that with the best will in the world he could not move again till February 20, only took Oporto on March 29, and had not yet started for Lisbon when Wellesley suddenly fell on him and drove him out of the country on May 12,1809. The Emperor, in short, had given Soult orders executable perhaps, according to the distance, in Lombardy or Bavaria, but utterly absurd when applied to a country where roads are few and bad, with a defile or a river crossing the path at every few miles, and where food has to be carefully collected before a move, and taken on with the army by means of enormous convoys. More­over the month was January, when every brook had become a raging mountain stream, and every highland was covered with snow! With such conceptions of the task before him, it is not wonderful that Napoleon was continually issuing wholly impracticable orders. The one that we have just quoted was sent out from Valladolid: how much worse would the case be when the Emperor persisted in directing affairs from Paris or Vienna, the last news that had reached him from the front being now several weeks old! With all his genius he never thoroughly succeeded in grasping the state of affairs, and to the very last continued to send directions that would have been wise enough in Central Europe, but happened to be inapplicable in the Iberian Peninsula.

It is only fair to Napoleon to add that his Spanish enemies, who ought at least to have known the limitations of their own road­system, and the disabilities of their half-starved armies, used habitually to produce plans of operations far more fantastically impossible than any that he ever drafted. They would arrange far-reaching schemes, for the co-operation of forces based on the most remote corners of the Peninsula, without attempting to work out the ‘logistics’ of the movement. The invariable result was that such enterprises either ended in disaster, or at the best came to a stop after the first few marches, because some vital point of the calculation had already been proved to have been made on erroneous data.

SECTION II: CHAPTER II

THE SPANISH ARMY IN 1808

When the English student begins to investigate the Peninsular War in detail, he finds that, as regards the Spanish armies and their behaviour, he starts with a strong hostile prejudice. The Duke of Wellington in his dispatches, and still more in his private letters and his table-talk, was always enlarging on the folly and arrogance of the Spanish generals with whom he had to co-operate, and on the untrustworthiness of their troops. Napier, the one military classic whom most Englishmen have read, is still more emphatic and far more impressive, since he writes in a very judicial style, and with the most elaborate apparatus of references and authorities. When the reader begins to work through the infinite number of Peninsular diaries of British officers and men (for there are a very considerable number of writers from among the rank and file) the impression left upon him is much the same. It must be confessed that for the most part they had a very poor opinion of our allies.

Before allowing ourselves to be carried away by the almost unanimous verdict of our own countrymen, it is only fair to examine the state and character of the Spanish army when the war broke out. Only when we know its difficulties can we judge with fairness of its conduct, or decide upon its merits and shortcomings.

The armed force which served under the banners of Charles IV in the spring of 1808 consisted of 131,000 men, of whom 101,000 were regulars and 30,000 embodied militia. The latter had been under arms since 1804, and composed the greater part of the garrisons of the seaports of Spain, all of which had to be protected against possible descents of English expeditions.

Of the 101,000 men of the regular army, however, not all were available for the defence of the country. While the war with Russia was still in progress, Bonaparte had requested the Spanish govern­ment to furnish him with a strong division for use in the North [March, 1807], and in consequence the Marquis of La Romana had been sent to the Baltic with 15,000 men, the picked regiments of the army. There remained therefore only 86,000 regulars within the kingdom. A very cursory glance down the Spanish army-list of 1808 is sufficient to show that this force was far from being in a satisfactory condition for either offensive or defensive operations. It is well worth while to look at the details of its composition. The infantry consisted of three sorts of troops—the Royal Guard, the line regiments, and the foreign corps in Spanish pay. For Spain, more than any other European state, had kept up the old seventeenth-century fashion of hiring foreign mercenaries on a large scale. Even in the Royal Guard half the infantry were composed of ‘Walloon Guards,’ a survival from the day when the Netherlands had been part of the broad dominions of the Hapsburg kings. The men of these three battalions were no longer mainly Walloons, for Belgium had been a group of French departments for the last thirteen years. There were Germans and other foreigners of all sorts in the ranks, as well as a large number of native Spaniards. There were also six regiments of Swiss mercenaries—over 10,000 bayonets—and in these the men in the ranks did really come from Switzerland and Germany, though there was a sprinkling among them of strangers from all lands who had 6 left their country for their country’s good.’ There were also one Neapolitan and three Irish regiments. These latter were survivals from the days of the ‘ Penal Laws,’ when young Irishmen left their homes by thousands every year to take service with France or Spain, in the hope of getting some day a shot at the hated redcoats. The regiments bore the names of Hibernia, Irlanda, and Ultonia (i.e. Ulster). They were very much under their proper establishment, for of late years Irish recruits had begun to run short, even after the ’98: they now took service in France and not in Spain. The three Irish corps in 1808 had only 1,900 men under arms, instead of the 5,000 which they should have produced; and of those the large majority were not real Irish, but waifs of all nationalities. Of late native Spaniards had been drafted in, to keep the regiments from dying out. On the other hand we shall find that not only the foreign regiments but the whole Spanish army was still full of officers of Irish name and blood, the sons and grandsons of the original emigrants of two generations back. An astounding proportion of the officers who rose to some note during the war bore Irish names, and were hereditary soldiers of fortune, who justified their existence by the unwavering courage which they always showed, in a time when obstinate perseverance was the main military virtue. We need only mention Blake, the two O’Donnells, Lacy, Sarsfield, O’Neill, O’Daly, Mahony, O’Donahue. If none of them showed much strategical skill, yet their constant readiness to fight, which no series of defeats could tame, contrasts very well with the spiritless behaviour of a good many of the Spanish generals. No officer of Irish blood was ever found among the cowards, and hardly one among the traitors.

The ten foreign corps furnished altogether about 13,000 men to the Spanish regular army. The rest of the infantry was composed of thirty-five regiments of troops of the line, of three battalions each, and twelve single-battalion regiments of light infantry. They were theoretically territorial, like our own infantry of today, and mostly bore local names derived from the provinces—Asturias, Toledo, Estremadura, and so forth. All the light infantry corps belonged to the old kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre, which were therefore scantily represented in the nomenclature of the ordinary line regiments. There were altogether 147 battalions of Spanish infantry, excluding the foreign troops, and if all of these had been up to the proper establishment of 840 men, the total would have amounted to 98,000 bayonets. But the state of disor­ganization was such that as a matter of fact there were only 58,000 under arms. The regiments which Napoleon had requisitioned for service in the North had been more or less brought up to a war­footing, and each showed on an average 2,000 men in the ranks. But many of the corps in the interior of Spain displayed the most lamentable figures: e. g. the three battalions of the regiment of Estremadura had only 770 men between them, Cordova 793, and Navarre 822—showing 250 men to the battalion instead of the proper 840. Theoretically there should have been no difficulty in keeping them up to their proper strength, as machinery for recruiting them had been duly provided. Voluntary enlistment was the first resource: but when that did not suffice to keep the ranks full, there was a kind of limited conscription called the Quinta to fall back upon. This consisted in balloting for men in the regimental district, under certain rules which allowed an enormous number of exemptions—e. g. all skilled artisans and all middle-class townsfolk were free from the burden—so that the agri­cultural labourers had to supply practically the whole contingent. Substitutes were allowed, if by any means the conscript could afford to pay for them. The conscription therefore should have kept the regiments up to their proper strength, and if many of them had only a third of their complement under arms, it was merely due to the general demoralization of the times. Under Godoy’s administration money was always wanting, more especially since Napoleon had begun to levy his monthly tribute of 6,000,000 francs from the Spanish monarchy, and the gaps in the ranks probably represented enforced economy as well as corrupt administration.

The 30,000 embodied militia, which formed the remainder of the Spanish infantry, had been under arms since 1804, doing garrison duty; they seem in many respects to have been equal to the line battalions in efficiency. They bore names derived from the towns in whose districts they had been raised—Badajoz, Lugo, Alcazar, and so forth. Their officering was also strictly local, all ranks being drawn from the leading families of their districts, and seems to have been quite as efficient as that of the line. Moreover their ranks were, on the average, much fuller than those of the regular regiments—only two battalions in the total of forty-three showed less than 550 bayonets on parade.

It is when we turn to the cavalry that we come to the weakest part of the Spanish army. There were twelve regiments of heavy and twelve of light horse, each with a nominal establishment of 700 sabres, which should have given 16,800 men for the whole force. There were only about 15,000 officers and troopers em­bodied, but this was a small defect. A more real weakness lay in the fact that there were only 9,000 horses for the 15,000 men. It is difficult for even a wealthy government, like our own, to keep its cavalry properly horsed, and that of Charles IV was naturally unable to cope with this tiresome military problem. The chargers were not only too few, but generally of bad quality, especially those of the heavy cavalry : of those which were to be found in the regimental stables a very large proportion were not fit for service. When the five regiments which Napoleon demanded for the ex­pedition to Denmark had been provided with 540 horses each and sent off, the mounts of the rest of the army were in such a deplorable state that some corps had not the power to horse one-third of their troopers: e. g. in June, 1808, the Queen’s Regiment, No. 2 of the heavy cavalry, had 202 horses for 668 men; the 12th Regiment had 259 horses for 667 men; the 1st Chasseurs—more extraordinary still—only 185 horses for 577 men. It resulted from this penury of horses that when Napoleon made a second demand for Spanish cavalry, asking for a division of 2,000 sabres to aid Junot in invading Portugal, that force had to be made up by putting together the mounted men of no less than ten regiments, each contributing two or at the most three squadrons and leaving the rest of its men dismounted at the depot.

Even if the cavalry had all been properly mounted, they would have been far too few in proportion to the other arms, only 15,000 out of a total force of 130,000—one in eight; whereas in the time of the Napoleonic wars one in six, or even one in five, was considered , the proper complement. In the Waterloo campaign the French had the enormous number of 21,000 cavalry to 83,000 infantry— one to four. What with original paucity, and with want of re­mounts, the Spaniards took the field in 1808, when the insurrection began, with a ridiculously small number of horsemen. At Medina de Rio Seco they had only 750 horsemen to 22,000 foot-soldiers, at Baylen only 1,200 to 16,000. Later in the war they succeeded in filling up the ranks of the old cavalry regiments, and in raising many new ones. But the gain in number was not in the least accompanied by a gain in efficiency. For the whole six years of the struggle the mounted arm was the weakest point of their hosts. Again and again it disgraced itself by allowing itself to be beaten by half its own numbers, or by absconding early in the fight and abandoning its infantry. It acquired, and merited, a detestable reputation, and it is hard to find half a dozen engagements in which it behaved even reasonably well. When Wellington was made generalissimo of the Spanish armies in 1813 he would not bring it up to the front at all, and though he took 40,000 Spaniards over the Pyrenees, there was not a horseman among them. It is hard to account for the thorough worthlessness of these squadrons, even when we make allowance for all the difficulties of the time: Spain was notoriously deficient in decent cavalry officers when the war began. The horses were inferior to the French, and the equipment bad. From early disasters the troopers contracted a demoralization which they could never shake off. But granting all this, it is still impossible to explain the consistent misbehaviour of these evasive squadrons. The officers, no doubt, had a harder task in organizing their new levies than those of the infantry and artillery, but it is curious that they should never have succeeded in learning their business even after four or five years of war.

The artillery of the Spanish army, on the other hand, earned on the whole a good reputation. This was not the result of proper preparation. When the struggle began it consisted of thirty-four batteries of field artillery, six of horse, and twenty-one garrison batteries (compañias fijas) with a total of 6,500 men. Forty batteries—that is to say 240 guns or somewhat less, for in some cases there seem to have been only four instead of six pieces in the battery—was according to the standard of 1808 a mediocre allow­ance to an army of 130,000 men, only about two-thirds of what it should have been. But this was not the worst. Deducting four fully-horsed batteries, which had been taken off by Napoleon to Denmark, there remained in Spain four horse and thirty-two field batteries. These were practically unable to move, for they were almost entirely destitute of horses. For the 216 guns and their caissons there were only in hand 400 draught animals! When the war began, the artillery had to requisition, and more or less train, 3,000 horses or mules before they could move from their barracks! I do not know any fact that illustrates better the state of Spanish administration under the rule of Godoy. The raising of the great insurrectionary armies in the summer of 1808 ought to have led to an enormous increase to the artillery arm, but the trained men were so few that the greatest difficulty was found in organizing new batteries. Something was done by turning the marine artillery of the fleet into land troops, and there were a few hundreds of the militia who had been trained to work guns. But the officers necessary for the training and officering of new batteries were so scarce, that for many months no fresh forces of the artillery arm could take the field. In the autumn of 1808, at the time of the battles of Espinosa and Tudela, if we carefully add up the number of guns brought into action by the five armies of Galicia, Estremadura, Aragon, the ‘Centre’ (i.e. Andalusia and Castile), and Catalonia, we do not find a piece more than the 240 which existed at the outbreak of the war. That is to say, the Spaniards had raised 100,000 new levies of infantry, without any corresponding extension of the artillery arm. During the campaign the conduct of the corps seems on the whole to have been very good, compared with that of the other arms. This was to be expected, as they were old soldiers to a much greater extent than either the infantry or the cavalry. They seem to have attained a fair skill with their weapons, and to have stuck to them very well. We often hear of gunners cut down or bayonetted over their pieces, seldom of a general bolt to the rear. For this very reason the personnel of the batteries suffered terribly: every defeat meant the capture of some dozens of guns, and the cutting up of the men who served them. It was as much as the government could do to keep up a moderate number of batteries, by supplying new guns and amalgamating the remnants of those which had been at the front. Each batch of lost battles in 1808-10 entailed the loss and con­sequent reconstruction of the artillery. If, in spite of this, we seldom hear complaints as to its conduct, it must be taken as a high compliment to the arm. But as long as Spanish generals persisted in fighting pitched battles, and getting their armies dispersed, a solid proportion of artillery to infantry could never be established. Its average strength may be guessed from the fact that at Albuera the best army that Spain then possessed put in line 16,300 men with only fourteen guns, less than one gun per thousand men—while Napoleon (as we have already noted) believed that five per thousand was the ideal, and often managed in actual fact to have three. In the latter years of the war the pieces were almost always drawn by mules, yoked tandem-fashion, and not ridden by drivers but goaded by men walking at their side—the slowest and most unsatisfactory form of traction that can be imagined. Hence came, in great part, their inability to manoeuvre.

Of engineers Spain in 1808 had 169 officers dispersed over the kingdom. The corps had no proper rank and file. But there was a regiment of sappers, 1,000 strong, which was officered from the engineers. There was no army service corps, no military train, no organized commissariat of any kind. When moving about a Spanish army depended either on contractors who undertook to provide horses and wagons driven by civilians, or more fre­quently on the casual sweeping in by requisition of all the mules, oxen, and carts of the unhappy district in which it was operating. In this respect, as in so many others, Spain was still in the Middle Ages. The fact that there was no permanent arrangement for providing for the food of the army is enough in itself to account for many of its disasters. If, like the British, the Spaniards had possessed money to pay for what they took, things might have worked somewhat better. Or if, like the French, they had possessed an organized military train, and no scruples, they might have contrived to get along at the cost of utterly ruining the country-side. But as things stood, depending on incapable civil commissaries and the unwilling contributions of the local authorities, they were generally on the edge of starvation. Sometimes they got over the edge, and then the army, in spite of the proverbial frugality of the Spanish soldier, simply dispersed. It is fair to the men to say that they generally straggled back to the front sooner or later, when 'they had succeeded in filling their stomachs, and got incorporated in their own or some other regiment. It is said that by the end of the war there were soldiers who had, in their fashion, served in as many as ten different corps during the six years of the struggle.

Summing up the faults of the Spanish army, its depleted battalions, its small and incompetent cavalry force, its insufficient proportion of artillery, its utter want of commissariat, we find that its main source of weakness was that while the wars of the French Revolution had induced all the other states of Europe to overhaul their military organization and learn something from the methods of the French, Spain was still, so far as its army was concerned, in the middle of the eighteenth century. The national temperament, with its eternal relegation of all troublesome reforms to the morrow, was no doubt largely to blame. But Godoy, the all-powerful favourite who had also been commander-in-chief for the last seven years, must take the main responsibility. If he had chosen, he possessed the power to change everything; and in some ways he had peddled a good deal with details, changing the uniforms, and increasing the number of battalions in each regi­ment. But to make the army efficient he had done very little: the fact was that the commander-in-chief was quite ignorant of the military needs and tendencies of the day: all his knowledge of the army was gained while carpet-soldiering in the ranks of the royal body-guard. It was natural that the kind of officers who commended themselves to his haughty and ignorant mind should be those who were most ready to do him homage, to wink at his peculations, to condone his jobs, and to refrain from worrying him for the money needed for reforms and repairs. Promotion was wholly arbitrary, and was entirely in the favourite’s hands. Those who were prepared to bow down to him prospered: those who showed any backbone or ventured on remonstrances were shelved. After a few years of this system it was natural that all ranks of the army became demoralized, since not merit but the talents of the courtier and the flatterer were the sure road to prosperity. Hence it came to pass that when the insurrection began, the level of military ability, patriotism, and integrity among the higher ranks of the army was very low. There were a few worthy men like Castanos and La Romana in offices of trust, but a much greater proportion of Godoy’s proteges. One cannot condone the shocking way in which, during the first days of the war, the populace and the rank and file of the army united to murder so many officers in high place, like Filanghieri, the Captain-General of Galicia, Torre del Fresno, the Captain-General of Estremadura, and Solano, who commanded at Cadiz. But the explanation of the atrocities is simple: the multitude were resenting the results of the long administration of Godoy’s creatures, and fell upon such of them as refused to throw in their lot immediately with the insurrection. The murdered men were (rightly or wrongly) suspected either of an intention to submit to Joseph Bonaparte, or of a design to hang back, wait on the times, and make their decision only when it should become obvious which paid better, patriotism or servility. The people had considerable justification in the fact that a very large proportion of Godoy’s proteges, especially of those at Madrid, did swear homage to the intruder in order to keep their places and pensions. They were the base of the miserable party of Afrancesados which brought so much disgrace on Spain. The misguided cosmopolitan liberals who joined them were much the smaller half of the traitor ­faction.

Godoy and his clique, therefore, must take the main responsibility for the state of decay and corruption in which the Spanish army was found in 1808. What more could be expected when for so many years an idle, venal, dissolute, ostentatious upstart had been permitted to control the administration of military affairs, and to settle all promotions to rank and office.’ ‘Like master like man’ is always a true proverb, and the officers who begged or bought responsible positions from Godoy naturally followed their patron’s example in spreading jobs and peculation downwards. The undrilled and half-clothed soldiery, the unhorsed squadrons, the empty arsenals, the idle and ignorant subalterns, were all, in the end, the result of Godoy’s long domination. But we do not wish to absolve from its share of blame the purblind nation which tolerated him for so long. In another country he would have gone the way of Gaveston or Mortimer long before.

When this was the state of the Spanish armies, it is no wonder that the British observer, whether officer or soldier, could never get over his prejudice against them. It was not merely because a Spanish army was generally in rags and on the verge of starva­tion that he despised it. These were accidents of war which every one had experienced in his own person: a British battalion was often tattered and hungry. The Spanish government was notoriously poor, its old regiments had been refilled again and again with raw conscripts, its new levies had never had a fair start. Hence came the things which disgusted the average Peninsular diarist of British origin—the shambling indiscipline, the voluntary dirt, the unmilitary habits of the Spanish troops. He could not get over his dislike for men who kept their arms in a filthy, rusty condition, who travelled not in orderly column of route but like a flock of sheep straggling along a high road, who obeyed their officers only when they pleased. And for the officers themselves the English observer had an even greater contempt: continually we come across observations to the effect that the faults of the rank and file might be condoned—after all they were only half­trained peasants—but that the officers were the source and fount of evil from their laziness, their arrogance, their ignorance, and their refusal to learn from experience. Here is a typical passage from the Earl of Munster’s Reminiscences:—

“We should not have been dissatisfied with our allies, malgré their appearance and their rags, if we had felt any reason to confide in them. The men might be 44 capable of all that men dare,” but the appearance of their officers at once bespoke their not being fit to lead them in the attempt. They not only did not look like soldiers, but even not like gentlemen, and it was difficult from their mean and abject appearance, particularly among the infantry, to guess what class of society they could have been taken from. Few troops will behave well if those to whom they should look up are undeserving respect. Besides their general inefficiency we found their moral feeling different from what we expected. Far from evincing devotion or even common courage in their country’s cause, they were very often guilty, individually and collectively, of disgraceful cowardice. We hourly regretted that the revolution had not occasioned a more complete bouleversement of society, so as to bring forward fresh and vigorous talent from all classes. Very few of the regular military showed them­selves worthy of command. Indeed, with the exception of a few self-made soldiers among the Guerillas, who had risen from among the farmers and peasantry, it would be hard to point out a Spanish officer whose opinion on the most trivial military sub­ject was worth being asked. We saw old besotted generals whose armies were formed on obsolete principles of the ancien régime of a decrepit government. To this was added blind pride and vanity. No proofs of inferiority could open their eyes, and they rushed from one error and misfortune to another, benefiting by no experience, and disdaining to seek aid and improvement.”

A voice from the ranks, Sergeant Surtees of the Rifle Brigade, gives the same idea in different words.

“Most of the Spanish officers appeared to be utterly unfit and unable to command their men. They had all the pride, arrogance, and self-sufficiency of the best officers in the world, with the very least of all pretension to have a high opinion of themselves. It is true they were not all alike, but the majority were the most haughty, and at the same time the most contemptible creatures in the shape of officers that ever I beheld.”

As a matter of fact the class of officers in Spain was filled up in three different ways. One-third of them were, by custom, drawn from the ranks. In an army raised by conscription from all strata of society excellent officers can be procured in this way. But in one mainly consisting of the least admirable part of the surplus population, forced by want or hatred of work into enlisting, it was hard to get even good sergeants. And the sergeants made still worse sub-lieutenants, when the colonel was forced to promote some of them. No wonder that the English observer thought that there were ‘Spanish officers who did not look like gentlemen.’ This class were seldom or never allowed to rise above the grade of captain. The remaining two-thirds of the officers received their commissions from the war office: in the cavalry they were supposed to show proofs of noble descent, but this was not required in the infantry. There was a large sprinkling, however, of men of family, and for them the best places and the higher ranks were generally reserved—a thing feasible because all promotion was arbitrary, neither seniority nor merit being necessarily considered. The rest were drawn from all classes of society: for the last fifteen years any toady of Godoy could beg or buy as many commissions for his proteges as he pleased. But a large, and not the worst, part of the body of officers was composed of the descendants of soldiers of fortune—Irishmen were most numerous, but there were also French and Italians—who had always been seen in great numbers in the Spanish army. They held most of the upper­middle grades in the regiments, for the promoted sergeants were kept down to the rank of captain, while the nobles got rapid promotion and soon rose to be colonels and generals. On the whole we cannot doubt that there was a mass of bad officers in the Spanish army: the ignorant fellows who had risen from the ranks, the too-rapidly promoted scions of the noblesse, and the nominees of Godoy’s hangers-on, were none of them very promising material with which to conduct a war a outrance for the existence of the realm.

In 1808 there was but one small military college for the training of infantry and cavalry officers. Five existed in 1790, but Godoy cut them down to one at Zamora, and only allowed sixty cadets there at a time, so that five-sixths of the young men who got commissions went straight to their battalions, there to pick up (if they chose) the rudiments of their military education. From want of some common teaching the drill and organization of the regiments were in a condition of chaos. Every colonel did what he chose in the way of manual exercise and manoeuvres. A French officer says that in 1807 he saw a Spanish brigade at a review, in which, when the brigadier gave the order ‘Ready, present, fire!’ the different battalions carried it out in three different times and with wholly distinct details of execution.

Not only was the Spanish army indifferently officered, but even of such officers as it possessed there were not enough. In the old line regiments there should have been seventy to each corps, i.e. 2,450 to the 105 battalions of that arm. But Godoy had allowed the numbers to sink to 1,520. When the insurrection broke out, the vacant places had to be filled, and many regiments received at the same moment twenty or thirty subalterns taken from civil life and completely destitute of military training. Similarly the militia ought to have had 1,800 officers, and only possessed 1,200 when the war began. The vacancies were filled, but with raw and often indifferent material.

Such were the officers with whom the British army had to co-operate. There is no disguising the fact that from the first the allies could not get on together. In the earlier years of the war there were some incidents that happened while the troops of the two nations lay together, which our countrymen could never forgive or forget. We need only mention the midnight panic in Cuesta’s army on the eve of Talavera, when 10,000 men ran away without having had a shot fired at them, and the cowardly behaviour of La Pena in 1811, when he refused to aid Graham at the bloody little battle of Barossa.

The strictures of Wellington, Napier, and the rest were undoubtedly well deserved; and yet it is easy to be too hard on the Spaniards. It chanced that our countrymen did not get a fair opportunity of observing their allies under favourable conditions; of the old regular army that fought at Baylen they never got a glimpse. It had been practically destroyed before we came upon the field. La Romana’s starving hordes, and Cuesta’s evasive and demoralized battalions were the samples from which the whole Spanish army was judged. In the Talavera campaign, the first in which English and Spanish troops stood side by side, there can be no doubt that the latter (with few exceptions) behaved in their very worst style. They often did much better; but few Englishmen had the chance of watching a defence like that of Saragossa or Gerona. Very few observers from our side saw anything of the heroically obstinate resistance of the Catalonian migueletes and somatenes. Chance threw in our way Cuesta and La Pena and Imaz as types of Peninsular generals, and from them the rest were judged. No one supposes that the Spaniards as a nation are destitute of all military qualities. They made good soldiers enough in the past, and may do so in the future: but when, after centuries of intellectual and political torpor, they were called upon to fight for their national existence, they were just emerging from subjection to one of the most worthless adventurers and one of the most idiotic kings whom history has known. Charles IV and Godoy account for an extraordinary amount of the decrepitude of the monarchy and the demoralization of its army.

It is more just to admire the constancy with which a nation so handicapped persisted in the hopeless struggle, than to condemn it for the incapacity of its generals, the ignorance of its officers, the unsteadiness of its raw levies. If Spain had been a first-rate military power, there would have been comparatively little merit in the six years’ struggle which she waged against Bonaparte. When we consider her weakness and her disorganization, we find ourselves more inclined to wonder at her persistence than to sneer at her mishaps.

SECTION II: CHAPTER III

THE FRENCH ARMY IN SPAIN

§ 1. The Army of 1808 : its Character and Organization.

In dealing with the history of the imperial armies in the Peninsula, it is our first duty to point out the enormous difference between the troops who entered Spain in 1807 and 1808, under Dupont, Moncey, and Murat, and the later arrivals who came under Bonaparte’s personal guidance when the first disastrous stage of the war was over.

Nothing can show more clearly the contempt which the Emperor entertained, not only for the Spanish government but for the Spanish nation, than the character of the hosts which he first sent forth to occupy the Peninsula. After Tilsit he was the master of half a million of the best troops in the world; but he did not consider the subjugation of Spain and Portugal a sufficiently formidable task to make it necessary to move southward any appreciable fraction of the Grand Army. The victors of Jena and Friedland were left in their cantonments on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder, while a new force, mainly composed of elements of inferior fighting value, was sent across the Pyrenees.

This second host was at Napoleon’s disposition mainly owing to the fact that during the late war he had been anticipating the conscription. In the winter of 1806-7 he had called out, a year too soon, the men who were due to serve in 1808. In the late autumn of 1807, while his designs in Spain were already in progress, he had summoned forth the conscription of 1809. He had thus under arms two years’ contingents of recruits raised before their proper time. The depots were gorged, and, even after the corps which had been depleted in Prussia and Poland had been made up to full strength, there was an enormous surplus of men in hand.

To utilize this mass of conscripts the Emperor found several ways. Of the men raised in the winter of 1806-7 some thousands had been thrown into temporary organizations, called ‘legions of reserve,’ and used to do garrison duty on the Atlantic coast, in order to guard against possible English descents. There were five of these ‘legions’ and two ‘supplementary legions’ in the army sent into Spain: they showed a strength of 16,000 men. None of them had been more than a year under arms, but they were at any rate organized units complete in themselves. They formed the greater part of the infantry in the corps of Dupont.

A shade worse in composition were twenty ‘provisional regiments’ which the Emperor put together for Spain. Each regimental depot in the south of France was told to form four companies from its superabundant mass of conscripts. These bodies, of about 560 men each, were united in fours, and each group was called a ‘provisional regiment.’ The men of each battalion knew nothing of those of the others, since they were all drawn from separate regiments : there was not a single veteran soldier in the ranks: the officers were almost all either half-pay men called back to service, or young sub­lieutenants who had just received their commissions. These bodies, equally destitute of esprit de corps and of instruction, made up nearly 30,000 men of the army of Spain. They constituted nearly the whole of the divisions under Bessières and Moncey, which lay in Northern Spain at the moment of the outbreak of the war.

But there were military units even less trustworthy than the provisional regiments which Napoleon transferred to Spain in the spring of 1808. These were the five or six regiments de marche, which were to be found in some of the brigades which crossed the Pyrenees when the state of affairs was already growing dangerous. They were formed of companies, or even smaller bodies, hastily drawn together from such southern depots, as were found to be still in possession of superfluous conscripts even after contributing to the 4 provisional regiments. They were to be absorbed into the old corps when the pressing need for instant reinforcements for the Peninsula should come to an end. In addition to all these temporary units, Bonaparte was at the same moment making a vast addition to his permanent regular army. Down to the war of 1806-7 the French regiments of infantry had consisted of three battalions for the field and a fourth at the depot, which kept drafting its men to the front in order to fill up the gaps in the other three. Napoleon had now resolved to raise the establishment to five battalions per regiment, four for field service, while the newly created fifth became the depot battalion. When the Peninsular War broke out, a good many regiments had already completed their fourth field-battalion, and several of these new corps are to be found in the rolls of the armies which had entered Spain. The multiplication of battalions had been accompanied by a reduction of their individual strength: down to February, 1808, there were nine companies to each unit, and Junot’s corps had battalions of a strength of 1,100 or 1,200 bayonets. But those which came later were six-company battalions, with a strength of 840 bayonets when at their full establishment.

All the troops of which we have hitherto spoken were native Frenchmen. But they did not compose by any means the whole of the infantry which the Emperor dispatched into Spain between October, 1807, and May, 1808. According to his usual custom he employed great numbers of auxiliaries from his vassal kingdoms: we note intercalated among the French units seven battalions of Swiss, four of Italians, two each of Neapolitans and Portuguese and one each of Prussians, Westphalians, Hanoverians, and Irish. Altogether there were no less than 14,000 men of foreign infantry dispersed among the troops of Junot, Dupont, Bessières, Moncey, and Duhesme. They were not massed, but scattered broadcast in single battalions, save the Italians and Neapolitans, who formed a complete division under Lecchi in the army of Catalonia.

The cavalry of the army of Spain was quite as heterogeneous and ill compacted as the infantry. Just as provisional regiments of foot were patched up from the southern depots of France, so were provisional regiments of cavalry. The best of them were composed of two, three, or four squadrons, each contributed by the depot of a different cavalry regiment. The worst were escadrons de marche, drawn together in a haphazard fashion from such of the depots as had a surplus of conscripts even after they had given a full squadron to the provisional regiments. There were also a number of foreign cavalry regiments, Italians, Neapolitans, lancers of Berg, and Poles. Of veteran regiments of French cavalry there were actually no more than three, about 1,250 men, among the 12,000 horsemen of the army of Spain.

When we sum up the composition of the 116,000 men who lay south of the Pyrenees on the last day of May, 1808, we find that not a third part of them belonged to the old units of the regular French army. It may be worth while to give the figures:—

Of veterans we have—

A detachment of the Imperial Guard, which was intended to serve as the Emperor’s special escort during his irruption into Spain : infantry 3600, cavalry 1750

Twenty-six battalions of infantry of the line and light infantry, being all first, second, or third battalions, and not newly raised fourth battalions: infantry 25.800. 

Three old regiments of cavalry of the line: 1,250

Three newly raised fourth battalions of infantry regiments of the line: 1800

This gives a total of regularly organized French troops of the standing army of 31.200 infantry & 3000 cavalry

Five legions of reserve, and two ‘supplementary legions of reserve’: 1600

Fifteen provisional regiments from the depots of Southern France [the remaining five had not crossed the frontier on May 31] : 31.000

Six regiments de marche of conscripts: 3200

Eighteen battalions of Italian, Swiss, German, and other auxiliaries: 14000

Sixteen ‘provisional regiments’ of cavalry, and a few detached ‘provisional squadrons,’ and escadrons de marche cavalry: 9.500

Three regiments of foreign cavalry: 1000

This makes a total of troops in temporary organization, or of foreign origin, of infantry: 64.200, and cavalry; 10.500

Napoleon, then, intended to conquer Spain with a force of about 110,000 men, of which no more than 34,000 sabres and bayonets belonged to his regular army; the rest were conscripts or foreign auxiliaries. But we must also note that the small body of veteran troops was not distributed equally in each of the corps, so as to stiffen the preponderating mass of conscripts. If we put aside the division of Imperial Guards, we find that of the remaining 25,000 infantry of old organization no less than 17,500 belonged to Junot’s army of Portugal, which was the only one of the corps that had a solid organization. Junot had indeed a very fine force, seventeen old line battalions to two battalions of conscripts and three of foreigners. The rest of the veteran troops were mainly with Duhesme in Catalonia, who had a good division of 5,000 veterans. In the three corps of Dupont, Moncey, and Bessières on the other hand old troops were conspicuous by their absence: among the 19,000 infantry of Dupont’s corps, on which (as it chanced) the first stress of the Spanish war was destined to fall, there was actually only two battalions (1,700 men) of old troops. In Moncey’s there was not a single veteran unit; in Bessières’, only four battalions. This simple fact goes far to explain why Dupont’s expedition to Andalusia led to the capitulation of Baylen, and why Moncey’s march on Valencia ended in an ignominious retreat. Countries cannot be conquered with hordes of undrilled conscripts —not even countries in an advanced stage of political decomposition, such as the Spain of 1808.

§ 2. The Army of 1808-14: its Character and Organization.

Baylen, as we shall see, taught Napoleon his lesson, and the second army which he brought into the Peninsula in the autumn of 1808, to repair his initial disasters, was very differently constituted from the heterogeneous masses which he had at first judged to be sufficient for his task. It was composed of his finest old regiments from the Rhine and Elbe, the flower of the victors of Jena and Friedland. Even when the despot had half a million good troops at his disposition, he could not be in force everywhere, and the transference of 200,000 veterans to Spain left him almost too weak in Central Europe. In the Essling-Wagram campaign of 1809 he found that he was barely strong enough to conquer the Austrians, precisely because he had left so many men behind him in the Peninsula. In the Russian campaign of 1812, vast as were the forces that he displayed, they were yet not over numerous for the enterprise, because such an immense proportion of them was composed of unwilling allies and disaffected subjects. If the masses of Austrians, Prussians, Neapolitans, Portuguese, Westphalians, Bavarians, and so forth had been replaced by half their actual number of old French troops from Spain, the army would have1 been far more powerful. Still more was this the case in 1813: if the whole of the Peninsular army had been available for service on the Elbe and Oder at the time of Lutzen and Bautzen, the effect on the general history of Europe might have been incalculable. Truly, therefore, did the Emperor call the Spanish War ‘the running sore’ which had sapped his strength ever since its commencement.

A word as to the tactical organization of the French army in 1808 is required. The infantry regiments of normal formation consisted, as we have seen, of four field battalions and one depot battalion; the last named never, of course, appeared at the front. Each field battalion was composed of six companies of 140 men: its two flank companies, the grenadiers and voltigeurs, were formed of the pick of the corps: into the grenadiers only tall, into the voltigeurs only short men were drafted. Thus a battalion should normally have shown 840 and a regiment 3,360 men in the field. But it was by no means the universal rule to find the whole four battalions of a regiment serving together. In the modern armies of France, Germany, or Russia, a regiment in time of peace lives concentrated in its recruiting district, and can take the field in a compact body. This was not the case in Napoleon’s ever-wandering hosts: the chances of war were always isolating single battalions, which, once dropped in a garrison or sent on an expedition, did not easily rejoin their fellows. Many, too, of the new fourth battalions raised in 1807 had never gone forward to Germany to seek the main body of their regiments. Of the corps which were brought down to Spain in the late autumn of 1808 there were more with three battalions than with four concentrated under the regimental eagle. Some had only two present, a few no more than one. But the Emperor disliked to have single isolated battalions, and pre­ferred to work them in pairs, if he could not get three or four together. The object of this was. that, if one or two battalions got much weakened in a campaign, the men could be fused into a single unit, and the supernumerary officers and sergeants sent back to the depot, where they would form a new battalion out of the stock of conscripts. But the fresh organization might very likely be hurried, by some sudden chance of war, to Flushing, or Italy, or the Danube, while the eagle and the main body remained in Spain —or vice versa.

There was therefore, in consequence of the varying strength of the regiments, no regularity or system in the brigading of the French troops in Spain: in one brigade there might be five or six isolated battalions, each belonging to a separate regiment; in another three from one regiment and two from a second; in a third four from one regiment and one from another. Nor was there any fixed number of battalions in a brigade: it might vary from three (a very unusual minimum) up to nine—an equally rare maximum. Six was perhaps the most frequent number. A division was composed of two, or less frequently of three, brigades, and might have any number from ten up to sixteen or eighteen battalions—i. e. it varied, allowing for casual losses, from 6,000 to 10,000 men. This irregularity was part of Napoleon’s system: he laid it down as an axiom that all military units, from a brigade to an army corps, ought to differ in strength among themselves: otherwise the enemy, if he had once discovered how many brigades or divisions were in front of him, could calculate with accuracy the number of troops with which he had to do.

Much confusion is caused; when we deal with Napoleon’s army, by the strange system of numeration which he adopted. The infantry, whether called ‘line regiments’ or ‘light infantry regiments,’ were drilled and organized in the same way. But the Emperor had some odd vagaries: he often refused to raise again a regiment which had been exterminated, or taken prisoners en masse. Hence after a few years of his reign there were some vacant numbers in the list of infantry corps. The regiments, for example, which were garrisoning the colonies at the time of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, fell one after another into the hands of the English as the war went on. They were never replaced, and left gaps in the army list. On the other hand the Emperor sometimes raised regiments with duplicate numbers, a most tiresome thing for the military historian of the next age. It is impossible to fathom his purpose, unless he was set on confusing his enemies by showing more battalions than the list of existing corps seemed to make possible. Or perhaps he was thinking of the old legions of the Roman Empire, of which there were always several in existence bearing the same number, but distinguished by their honorary titles. Those who wish to read the story of one of these duplicate regiments may follow in the history of Nodier the tale of the raising and extermination of Colonel Oudet’s celebrated ‘9th Bis ’ of the line.

There is another difficulty caused by a second freak of the Emperor : all regiments ought, as we have said, to have shown four field battalions. But Bonaparte sometimes added one or even two more, to corps which stood high in his favour, or whose depots produced on some occasions a very large surplus of conscripts. Thus we find now and then, in the morning state of a French army corps, a fifth or even a sixth battalion of some regiment. But as a rule these units had not a very long existence: their usual fate was to be sent home, when their numbers ran low from the wear and tear of war, in order to be incorporated in the normal cadres of their corps. On the authority of that good soldier and admirable historian, Foy, we are able to state that on the first of June, 1808, Napoleon had 417 field battalions, over and above the depots, on his army rolls. If the 113 regiments of the line, and the thirty-two light infantry regiments had all been in existence and complete, there should have been 580 field battalions. Clearly then some corps had disappeared and many others had not more than three battalions ready. But the units were always being created, amalgamated, or dissolved, from week to week, so that it is almost impossible to state the exact force of the whole French army at any given moment. The most important change that was made during the year 1808 was the conversion of those of the provisional regiments which escaped Dupont’s disaster into new permanent corps. By combining them in pairs the 114th-120th of the line and the 33rd leger were created. In the succeeding five years more and more corps were raised: the annexation of Holland and Northern Germany in 1810-11 ultimately enabled the Emperor to carry the total of his line regiments up to 156 [1813], and of his light infantry regiments up to thirty- six.

Of the French cavalry we need not speak at such length. When the Spanish war broke out, Bonaparte was possessed of about eighty regiments of horsemen, each taking the field with four squadrons of some 150 to 200 men. There were twelve regiments of cuirassiers, two of carabineers, thirty of dragoons, twenty-six of chasseurs à cheval, ten of hussars, i. e. fourteen regiments of heavy, thirty of medium, and thirty-six of light horse. The cuirassiers were hardly ever seen in Spain—not more than two or three regiments ever served south of the Pyrenees. On the other hand the greater part of the dragoons were employed in the Peninsula—there were in 1809 twenty-five of the thirty regiments of them in the field against the English and Spaniards. More than half of the hussars also served in Spain. To the veteran corps of regulars there were added, at the outset of the war, as will be remembered, a great number of ‘provisional regiments,’ but these gradually disappeared, by being incorporated in the older cadres, or in a few cases by being formed into new permanent units. There was also a mass of Polish, German, and Italian cavalry; but these auxiliaries did not bear such a high proportion to the native French as did the foreign part of the infantry arm. By far the most distinguished of these corps were the Polish lancers, whom the English came to know only too well at Albuera. The Italians were almost exclusively employed on the east coast of Spain, in the army of Catalonia. The Germans— mostly from Westphalia, Berg, and Nassau—were scattered about in single regiments among the cavalry corps of the various armies. They were always mixed with the French horse, and never appeared in brigades (much less in divisions) of their own.

The average strength of a French cavalry regiment during the years 1809-14 was four squadrons of about 150 men each. It was very seldom that a corps showed over 600 men in the ranks: not unfrequently it sank to 450. When it grew still further attenuated, it was usual to send back the cadres of one or two squadrons, and to complete to full numbers the two or three which kept the field. These figures do not hold good for the raw ‘provisional regiments’ which Bonaparte used during the first year of the war: they sometimes rose to 700 or even 800 strong, when the depots from which they had been drawn chanced to be exceptionally full of recruits. But such large corps are not to be found in the later years of the war. By 1812, when Napoleon, busied in Central Europe, ceased to reinforce his Spanish armies, the average of a cavalry regiment had shrunk to 500 men. In 1813 it was seldom that 400 effective sabres could be mustered by any mounted corps.

As to the scientific arms of the French service, the artillery and engineers, there is no doubt that throughout the war they deserved very well of their master. Artillery cannot be improvised in the manner that is possible with infantry, and the batteries which accompanied Dupont’s and Moncey’s conscripts into Spain in 1808 were veterans. Without them the raw infantry would have fared even worse than it did, during the first year of the struggle. The proportion of guns which the French employed during the wars of the Empire was generally very large in comparison with the size of their armies—one of the many results of the fact that Bonaparte had originally been an artillery officer. He raised, as was remarked, the number of gunners in the French service to a figure as large as that of the whole regular army of Louis XVI at the moment when the Revolution broke out. But in Spain the difficulties of trans­port and the badness of the roads seem to have combined to keep down the proportion of guns to something very much less than was customary in the more favourable terrain of Italy or Germany. A large part, too, of the pieces were of very light metal—four- and even three-pounders, which were found easier to transport across the mountains than six- or eight-pounders, though much less effective in the field. In many of the campaigns, therefore, of the Peninsular War the French artillery stood in a proportion to the total number of men present, which was so low that it barely exceeded that customary among the British, who were notoriously more ‘under­gunned’ than any other European army save that of Spain. Junot at Vimiero had twenty-three guns to 13,500 men: Victor at Talavera had eighty guns to about 50,000 men: Massena in 1810 invaded Portugal with some 70,000 men and 126 guns; at Fuentes d’Onoro he only showed forty-two guns to 40,000 bayonets and sabres. Soult at Albuera had (apparently) forty guns to 24,000 men: in the autumn campaign of 1813 the same marshal had 125 guns to 107,000 men. It will be noted that the proportion never rises to two guns per thousand men, and occasionally does not much exceed one gun per thousand. This contrasts remarkably with the 350 guns to 120,000 men which Bonaparte took out for the campaign of Waterloo, or even with the 1,372 guns to 600,000 men of the Russian expedition and 1,056 guns to 450,000 men of the ill-compacted army of 1813.

SECTION II: CHAPTER IV

THE TACTICS OF THE FRENCH AND THEIR ADVERSARIES DURING THE PENINSULAR WAR

An account of the numbers and the organization of an army is of comparatively little interest, unless we understand the principles on which its leaders are accustomed to handle it on the day of battle, and its value as a fighting machine.

Speaking generally, the tactics of the French infantry during the Peninsular War were those which had been developed fifteen years before, during the first struggles of the Revolution. They nearly always attacked with a thick cloud of tirailleurs covering one or two lines of battalions in column. The idea was that the very numerous and powerful skirmishing line would engage the enemy sufficiently to attract all his attention, so that the massed battalions behind arrived at the front of battle almost without sustaining loss. The momentum of the columns ought then to suffice to carry them right through the enemy’s lines, which would already have suffered appreciably from the fire of the tirailleurs. This form of attack had won countless victories over Prussian, Austrian, and Russian; and many cases had been known where a hostile position had been carried by the mere impetus of the French columns, without a shot having been fired save by their skirmishers. But this method, which Wellington called ‘the old French style,’ never succeeded against the English. It had the fatal defect that when the column came up through the tirailleurs and endeavoured to charge, it presented a small front, and only the first two ranks could fire. For the normal French battalion advanced in column of companies, or less frequently of double companies, i. e. with a front of forty or at most of eighty men, and a depth of nine or of eighteen, since the company was always three deep, and there were six companies to a battalion. The rear ranks only served to give the front ranks moral support, and to impress the enemy with a sense of the solidity and inexorable strength of the approaching mass. Sometimes a whole regiment or brigade formed one dense column. Now if the enemy, as was always the case with the British, refused to be impressed, but stood firm in line, held their ground, and blazed into the head of the mass, the attack was certain to fail. For 800 men in the two-deep line, which Wellington loved, could all use their muskets, and thus poured 800 bullets per volley into a French battalion of the same strength, which only could return 160. The nine-deep, or eighteen-deep, column was a: target which it was impossible to miss. Hence the front ranks went down in rows and the whole came to a standstill. If, as was often the case, the French battalion tried to deploy in front of the English line, so as to bring more muskets to bear, it seldom or never succeeded in accomplishing the manoeuvre, for each company, as it straggled out from the mass, got shot down so quickly that the formation could never be completed. No wonder that Foy in his private journal felt himself constrained to confess that, for a set battle with equal numbers on a limited front, the English infantry was superior. ‘I keep this opinion to myself,’ he adds, ‘and have never divulged it; for it is necessary that the soldier in the ranks should not only hate the enemy, but also despise him.’ Foy kept his opinion so closely to himself that he did not put it in his formal history of the Peninsular War: it has only become public property since his journals were published in 1900.

But the fact that with anything like equal numbers the line must beat the column was demonstrated over and over again during the war. It had first been seen at Maida in 1806, but that obscure Calabrian battle was hardly known, even by name, save to those who had been present. It was at Talavera, and still more at Busaco and Albuera, that it became patent to everybody that the attack in battalion column, even if preceded by a vigorous swarm of skirmishers, could never succeed against the English. At the two former fights the French attacked uphill, and laid the blame of their defeat upon the unfavourable ground. But when at Albuera three English brigades drove double their own numbers from the commanding ridge on which Soult had ranged them, simply by the superiority of their musketry fire, there was no longer any possibility of disguising the moral. Yet to the end of the war, down to Waterloo itself, the French stuck to their old formation: at the great battle in 1815, as Wellington tersely said, ‘The French came on once more in the old style, and we beat them in the old style.’

But when Napoleon’s armies were opposed to troops who could not stand firm to meet them in a line formation, they generally succeeded. The Spaniards, in their earlier battles, often tried to resist in a line of deployed battalions, but their morale was not good enough when the attacking column drew close to them, and they generally gave way at the critical moment and let their assailants break through. The same had often been the case with the Austrians and Prussians, who in their earlier wars with Napoleon used the line formation which Frederick the Great had popularized fifty years before. The great king had accustomed his troops to fight in a three- or four-deep line, with a comparatively small provision of skirmishers to cover their front, for it was by the fire of the whole battalion that his troops were intended to win. The masses of tirailleurs which the French sent forward in front of their columns generally succeeded in engaging the Prussian or Austrian line so closely, that the columns behind them came up without much loss, and then broke the line by their mere momentum and moral effect. Hence in their later wars the German powers copied their enemies, and took to using a very thick skirmishing line backed by battalion columns in the French style.

Wellington never found any reason to do so. His method was to conceal his main line as long as possible by a dip in the ground, a hedge, or a wall, or to keep it behind the crest of the position which it was holding. To face the tirailleurs each battalion sent out its light company, and each brigade had assigned to it several detached companies of riflemen: from 1809 onward some of the 60th Rifles and one or two foreign light corps were broken up and distributed round the various divisions for this special purpose. This gave a line of skirmishers strong enough to hold back the tirailleurs for a long time, probably till the supporting columns came up to help them. It was only then that the British skirmishing line gave way and retired behind its main body, leaving the deployed battalions in face of the French column, of which they never failed to give a satisfactory account. The covering screen of light troops often suffered terribly; e.g., at Barossa, Brown’s light battalion lost fourteen out of twenty-one officers and more than half its rank and file while holding off the French advance from the line which was forming in its rear. But the combat always went well if the enemy’s skirmishers could be kept back, and his supporting columns forced to come to the front, to engage with the regiments in two-deep formation which were waiting for them.

Charges with the bayonet are often heard of in narratives—especially French narratives—of the Peninsular War. But it was very seldom that the opposing troops actually came into collision with the white weapon. There were occasions, almost invariably in fighting in villages or enclosed ground, on which considerable numbers of men were killed or wounded with the bayonet, but they were but few. It is certain, however, that the 43rd at Vimiero, the 71st and 88th at Fuentes d’Onoro, and the 20th at Roncesvalles, engaged in this fashion; and other cases could be quoted. But as a rule a ‘bayonet charge’ in a French historian merely means the advance of a column up to the enemy’s position without firing: it does not imply actual contact or the crossing of weapons. An English charge on the other hand was practically an advance in line with frequent volleys, or independent file-firing. At Albuera, or Barossa, or Salamanca it was the ball not the bayonet which did the work; the enemy was shot down, or gave way without any hand-to-hand conflict.

French cavalry tactics had by 1808 developed into as definite a system as those of the infantry. Napoleon was fond of massing his horsemen in very large bodies and launching them at the flank, or even at the centre, of the army opposed to him. He would occasionally use as many as 6,000 or 8,000, or (as at Waterloo) even 12,000 men for one of these great strokes. Two or three of his famous battles were won by tremendous cavalry charges—notably Marengo and Dresden, while Eylau was just saved from falling into a disaster by a blow of the same kind. But cavalry must be used at precisely the right moment, must be skilfully led and pushed home without remorse, and even then it may be beaten off by thoroughly cool and unshaken troops. It is only against tired, distracted, or undisciplined battalions that it can count on a reasonable certainty of success. All through the war the Spanish armies supplied the French horsemen with exactly the opportunities that they required: they were always being surprised, or caught in confusion while executing some complicated manceuvre; and as if this was not enough, they were often weak enough in morale to allow themselves to be broken even when they had been allowed time to take their ground and form their squares. The battles of Gamonal (1808), Medellin, Alba de Tormes, and Ocaña (1809), the Gebora, and Saguntum (1811) were good examples of the power of masses of horse skilfully handled over a numerous but ill-disciplined infantry.

On the other hand, against the English the French cavalry hardly ever accomplished anything worthy of note. It is only possible to name two occasions on which they made their mark: the first was at Albuera, where, profiting by an opportune cloud­burst which darkened the face of day, two regiments of lancers came in upon the flank of a British brigade (Colborne’s of the second division), and almost entirely cut it to pieces. The second incident of the kind was at Fuentes d’Oñoro, in the same summer, when Montbrun’s cavalry charged with some effect on Houston’s division and hustled it back for some two miles, though they never succeeded in breaking its squares.

On the other hand the cases where the French horsemen found themselves utterly unable to deal with the British infantry were very numerous—we need only mention Cacabellos (during Moore’s retreat), El Bodon, Salamanca, and several skirmishes during the retreat from Burgos in 1812. After such experiences it was no wonder that Foy, and other old officers of the army of Spain, looked with dismay upon Napoleon’s great attempt at Waterloo to break down the long line of British squares between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, by the charges of ten or twelve thousand heavy cavalry massed on a short front of less than a mile The Emperor had never seen the British infantry fight, and was entirely ignorant of their resisting power.

Of fights between cavalry and cavalry, where the two sides were present in such equal numbers as to make the struggle a fair test of their relative efficiency, there were but few in the Peninsular War. In the early years of the struggle Wellington was very scantily provided with horsemen, and never could afford to engage in a cavalry battle on a large scale. Later on, when he was more happily situated in this respect, he showed such a marked reluctance to risk great cavalry combats that the old saying that he was ‘pre-eminently an infantry general’ seems justified. That he could use his horsemen vigorously enough, when he saw his opportunity, he showed at Assaye, long before he had made his name known in Europe. Yet the only one of his great battles in Spain where his dragoons took a prominent part in the victory was Salamanca, where Le Marchant’s brigade struck such a smashing blow on the flank of the French army. We have his own authority1 for the fact that he hesitated to mass great bodies of horse, because he doubted the tactical skill of his officers, and the power of the regiments to manoeuvre. ‘I considered our cavalry,’ he wrote ten years after the war was over, ‘so inferior to the French from want of order, that although I considered one squadron a match for two French, I did not like to see four British opposed to four French: and as the numbers increased and order, of course, became more necessary, I was the more unwilling to risk our men without having a superiority in numbers. They could gallop, but could not preserve their order.’

Foy, in his excellent history of the Spanish War, emits an opinion in words curiously similar to those of Wellington, stating that for practical purposes the English troopers were inferior to the French on account of their headlong impetuosity and want of power to manoeuvre. When two such authorities agree, there must clearly have been some solid foundation for their verdict. Yet it is hard to quote many combats in their support: there were cases, no doubt, where English regiments threw their chances away by their blind fury in charging, as did the 23rd Light Dragoons at Talavera, the 13th Light Dragoons near Campo Mayor on March 25, 1811, and Slade’s brigade at Maguilla on June 11, 1812. Yet with the memory before us of Paget’s admirable operations at Sahagun and Benavente in December, 1808, of Lumley’s skilful containing of Latour Maubourg’s superior numbers at Albuera, and his brilliant success at Usagre over that same general in 1811, as well as Cotton’s considerable cavalry fight at Villa Garcia in 1812, it seems strange to find Wellington disparaging his own troopers. No doubt we must concede that the British horsemen did not show that marked superiority over their rivals of the same arm which Wellington’s infantry always asserted. But fairly balancing their faults and their merits, it would seem that there was something wanting in their general no less than in themselves. A lover of the cavalry arm would have got more profit out of the British horse than Wellington ever obtained. It is noticeable that not one of the successful fights cited above took place under the eye or the direction of the Duke.

As to the Spanish cavalry, it was (as we have already had occasion to remark) the weakest point in the national army. In the first actions of the war it appeared on the field in such small numbers that it had no chance against the French. But later on, when the juntas succeeded in raising large masses of horsemen, their scandalous conduct on a score of fields was the despair of Spanish generals. We need only mention Medellin and Ocaña as examples of their misbehaviour. No French cavalry-general ever hesitated to engage with double of his own number of Spanish horse. When vigorously charged they never failed to give way, and when once on the move it was impossible to rally them. It was often found on the night of a battle that the mass of the cavalry was in flight twenty miles ahead of the infantry, which it had basely deserted.

Napoleon, as every student of the art of war knows, had started his career as an officer of artillery, and never forgot the fact. He himself has left on record the statement that of all his tactical secrets the concentration of an overwhelming artillery fire on a given point was the most important. ‘When once the combat has grown hot,’ he wrote, ‘the general who has the skill to unite an imposing mass of artillery, suddenly and without his adversary’s knowledge, in front of some point of the hostile position, may be sure of success’ His leading idea was to secure an overwhelming artillery preparation for his infantry attacks: for this reason his typical battle began with the massing of a great number of guns on the points of the enemy’s line which he intended ultimately to break down. In this respect he abandoned entirely the vicious tactics that prevailed in the earlier years of the revolutionary war, when the cannon, instead of being concentrated, were distributed about in twos and threes among the infantry battalions. We shall find that his method had been perfectly assimilated by his subordinates: when the ground allowed of it, they were much given to collecting many guns at some salient point of the line, and bringing a concentrated fire to bear on the weak spot in the enemy’s position. At Ocaña a battery of this kind had a great share in the credit of the victory; at Albuera it saved Soult’s routed troops from complete destruction. The names of artillery generals like Senarmont and Ruty need honourable mention for such achievements. If the French artillery had less effect against the English than against most of Napoleon’s foes, it was because of Wellington’s admirable custom of hiding his troops till the actual moment of battle. Austrian, Russian, or Prussian generals occupied a hillside by long lines drawn up on the hither slope, of which every man could be counted. Hence they could be thoroughly searched out and battered by the French guns, long before the infantry was let loose. Wellington, on the other hand, loved to show a position apparently but half-defended, with his reserves, or even his main line, carefully hidden behind the crest, or covered by walls and hedges, or concealed in hollows and ravines. Hence the French artillery-preparation was much embarrassed: there were no masses to fire at, and it was impossible to tell how any part of the line was held. By the end of the war the French marshals grew very chary of attacking any position where Wellington showed fight, for they never could tell whether they were opposed by a mere rearguard, or by a whole army skilfully concealed.

The English armies, unlike the French, always took with them a comparatively small proportion of artillery, seldom so much as two guns to the thousand men, as Foy remarks. But what there was excellent, from its high discipline and the accuracy of its fire. The Duke preferred to work with small and movable units, placed in well-chosen spots, and kept dark till the critical moment, rather than with the enormous lines of guns that Bonaparte believed in. His horse artillery was often pushed to the front in the most daring way, in reliance on its admirable power of manoeuvring and its complete steadiness. At Fuentes d’Oñoro, for example, it was made to cover the retreat of the right wing before the masses of French cavalry, in a way that would have seemed impossible to any one who was not personally acquainted with Norman Ramsay and his gunners. Hence came the astounding fact that during the whole war the Duke never in the open field lost an English gun. Several times cannon were taken and retaken; once or twice guns not belonging to the horse or field batteries were left behind in a retreat, when transport failed. But in the whole six years of his command Wellington lost no guns in battle. Foy gives an unmistakable testimony to the English artillery in his history, by remarking that in its material it was undoubtedly superior to the French: the same fact may be verified from the evidence of our own officers, several of whom have left their opinion on record, that after having inspected captured French cannon, limbers, and caissons they much preferred their own.

This statement, it must be remembered, only applies to the field and horse artillery. The English siege artillery, all through the war, was notably inferior to the French. Wellington never possessed a satisfactory battering train, and the awful cost at which his sieges were turned into successes is a testimony to the inadequacy of his resources. The infantry were sent in to win, by j sheer courage and at terrible expense of life, the places that could not be reduced by the ill-equipped siege artillery. There can be no doubt that in poliorcetics the enemy was our superior: but with a very small number of artillery officers trained to siege work, an insignificant body of Royal Engineer, and practically no provision of trained sappers, what was to be expected? It was not strange that the French showed themselves our masters in this respect. But the fault lay with the organization at head quarters, not with the artillery and engineer officers of the Peninsular army, who had to learn their trade by experience without having received any proper training at home.