The War of Wars (102 page)

In these mountainous provinces of the north of the Peninsula, the French, although always conquerors where the . . . Spaniards showed themselves in battle, were not . . . the [latter] assailed by clouds of armed mountaineers, who, never coming near to fight in close ranks, or body to body, retreated from position to position, from rock to rock, on heights, without ceasing to fire even in flying. It sometimes required entire battalions to carry an order of a battalion to another distant one. The soldiers, wounded, sick or fatigued, who remained behind the French columns, were immediately
murdered. Every victory produced only a new conflict. Victories had become useless by the persevering and invincible character of the Spaniards, and the French armies were consuming themselves . . . in continual fatigues, nightly watchings and anxieties.

Most of these guerrillas were mere brigands and much of the local population, as well as the French, hated them because of the atrocities they committed and because they prompted local French reprisals. But they kept up the pressure on the French occupiers in a manner that had occurred nowhere else in Europe. Many were motivated by simple hatred of civil society and by poverty, vendetta and resistance. King Joseph sought desperately to abdicate, complaining that he was penniless, his palace plundered and his soldiers unpaid. ‘I live here in the ruins of a great monarchy,’ he wrote. Madrid, a once fine city, was now in a wretched state.

In August 1811 Wellington was on the move once again with 45,000 men back in the mountains behind the Agueda river and Ciudad Rodrigo. The French reacted with alarm and alacrity, mustering an army of 60,000 men at Tamames to the east under Marmont. Wellington responded by retreating again into one of his strategic fastnesses some fifteen miles south of Ciudad Rodrigo. When the French failed to follow he emerged from this safe position on to the plain only to be very nearly surprised by a huge French force. He immediately returned to the hills.

While this game of cat and mouse continued, General Hill marched some 8,000 men across the highest point of the Portuguese mountains – 6,000 feet – through rain and gales in October and surprised a force of some 5,000 French soldiers near Merida, killing 800 and taking 1,500 prisoner for the loss of just seven men killed.

Wellington stayed on the alert in his defensive position waiting for the opportunity to cross over into Spain. He seemed certain that the days of fighting to defend Portugal were over. He scented the kill, awaiting the opportunity to push into Spain.

In Paris Napoleon continued to affect indifference to the situation in the Iberian Peninsula. He refused to appoint an overall commander over his feuding generals. Joseph was no general, and exercised no real control over them. Only Napoleon could have done so, but he was hopelessly out of touch and ill-informed about the state on the ground, issuing long-distance directives to which most of his commanders paid no attention. He ordered Soult to renew the attempt to suppress
Andalucia, and then told Marmont to send nearly half of his army from the Portuguese border to help General Suchet besieging Valencia and on the east coast of Spain against the Spanish General Blake with 30,000 men supplied by the British from the sea. Marmont was left with just 30,000 men opposing the predatory Wellington.

Wellington prepared to move from Ciudad Rodrigo to Badajoz, which was almost impregnable, because the French armies in the south were mired in Andalucia. The march also offered the opportunity for a daring strike across the French lines of communications from Badajoz to Madrid, and even possibly into France itself. His army had refreshed itself in the bracing upland villages where they were quartered, indulging in sports such as wild boar and fox hunting as well as partying with the local girls. Meanwhile a siege train had at last landed from Britain and been dragged across the mountains.

It was January 1812 before a meticulously prepared Wellington was ready to attack Ciudad Rodrigo, which was now much less strongly defended: the very season caught the French unarmed. The same night he reached the fortress, the British began a classic siege, digging parallel trenches in a zigzag to close in on the fortress, a process which lasted five days and nights under heavy mortar attack which killed some 500 men.

After just a week Wellington decided to storm the fortress to forestall Marmont, who was about to hurry to the rescue. He made two breaches in the walls with his light guns – his heavy ones had not yet arrived – and then prepared three simultaneous attacks, two of them feints. It was to be a difficult operation.

A young officer, Grattan gave his impression of the men as they prepared for the assault:

They were in the highest spirits, but without the slightest appearance of levity in their demeanour – on the contrary, there was a cast of determined seventy thrown over their countenances that expressed in legible characters that they knew the sort of service they were about to perform, and had made up their minds to the issue. They had no knapsacks – their firelocks were slung over their shoulders – their shirt-collars were open, and there was an indescribable
something
about them. In passing us each officer and soldier stepped out of the ranks for an instant as he recognized a friend to press his hand – many for the last time. Yet, notwithstanding this animating scene, there was no shouting or huzzaing, no boisterous bravadoing, no unbecoming language; in short, every one seemed to be impressed with the seriousness of the affair entrusted to his charge, and any interchange of words was to this effect: ‘Well, lads, mind what you’re about tonight’; or, ‘We’ll meet in the town by and by’; and other little familiar phrases, all expressive of confidence. The regiment at length passed us, and we stood gazing after it as long as the rear platoon continued in sight; the music grew fainter every moment, until at last it died away altogether. They had no drums, and there was a melting sweetness in the sounds that touched the heart.

The unit which entered the breach first was called the Forlorn Hope – so-called because so few would survive of the vagabonds of which they consisted, although the survivors were promised fine rewards. It was to be followed by a 500-strong force under General Crauford, the army’s leading disciplinarian, who declared: ‘Soldiers! the eyes of your country are upon you. Be steady – be cool – be firm in the assault. The town must be yours this night. Once masters of the wall, let your first duty be to clear the ramparts, and in doing this keep together.’

Crauford himself was one of the first to be killed. After fierce fighting the British at last reached the top of the breach and within half an hour were rampaging through the streets of the citadel. The citadel had been seized at a cost of around 1,000 British casualties. The entire French garrison were captured or killed. The British went on a wild plundering spree.

Wellington considered next attacking the French headquarters at Salamanca but decided against it, as Marmont could quickly summon reinforcements on the open plains. Methodical and cautious as always, except when an unmissable opportunity presented itself, Wellington decided to repeat his feat of taking the fortress at Badajoz, a seemingly impregnable garrison to crack.

Before this, however, he had to cope with a British political crisis. The government had elevated him from viscount to earl after the capture of Ciudad Rodrigo. But his grandstanding older brother, Lord Mornington, chose this moment for an attempt to bring down the government of the insignificant Spencer Perceval by resigning the post of foreign secretary, in which he had been a key supporter of his brother’s Peninsular campaigns. Mornington believed he would now attain the highest office himself, but his reckless love life – Wellington once declared he should have been castrated for his own good – and his grand manner counted against him.

Perceval survived, but not for long, as he was killed in the lobby of the House of Commons by a half-insane bankrupt merchant, who had in fact no quarrel with him. Perceval was the first and only British prime minister ever to be assassinated. His successor was a man of almost equal mediocrity, Lord Liverpool, who was to become the third longest serving prime minister in British history, after only Walpole and Pitt.

In Brougham’s damning description, he was also one of its least talented:

The abilities of Lord Liverpool were far more solid than shining. Men are apt to be jealous, perhaps envious, certainly distrustful, of great and brilliant genius in statesmen. Respectable mediocrity offends nobody. Nay, as the great bulk of mankind feel it to be their own case, they perhaps have some satisfaction in being correctly represented by those who administer their affairs. Add to this, that the subject of these remarks was gifted with extraordinary prudence, displaying, from his earliest years, a rare discretion in all the parts of his conduct. Not only was there nothing of imagination, or extravagance, or any matter above the most ordinary comprehension, in whatever he spoke (excepting only his unhappy flight about marching to Paris, and which for many years seemingly sunk him in the public estimation) – but he spoke so seldom as to show that he never did so unless the necessity of the case required it; while his life was spent in the business of office, a thing eminently agreeable to the taste, because closely resembling the habits, of a nation composed of men of business.

Wellington was anxious lest the change might diminish government backing for his Peninsular campaign, but he need not have worried. Castlereagh was an inveterate ally and Wellington stood out as the victor of so many battles against Napoleon’s forces as to make him invulnerable in the eyes of public opinion at home. He was also a master of ‘spin’, forcing the disconsolate Beresford, for example, to rewrite his gloomy despatch after the carnage at Albuera in order to portray it as a magnificent triumph.

Indeed Wellington was almost the only jewel in the government’s crown. Its difficulties were quite otherwise. Under Liverpool’s and Castlereagh’s tutelage it was so reactionary and suppressive of political change at a time of seething social discontent that it seemed to be risking outright revolution on occasion. As far back as 1810 revolution seemed to beckon.

The spark of revolt was, as always, an unlikely one. Typically the House of Commons decided to hold its inquiry into the fiasco of the Walcheren expedition in February 1810 in secret. John Gale Jones, a veteran and professional radical who was probably slightly off his head, put up a poster denouncing this ‘outrage’. Charles Yorke, former First Lord of the Admiralty and a veteran of the cabal of die hards in the cabinet, promptly inflated the whole affair into a breach of the House of Commons’ privileges. Jones was thrown into Newgate gaol without a trial.

The radical leader Burdett wrote a stinging denunciation of parliament, accusing it of indulging in arbitrary practices of the kind which the Tudors and Stuarts had practised, and witheringly labelling his parliamentary colleagues ‘as part of our fellow subjects collected together by means which it is not necessary for me to describe’, an allusion to the bribery and purchase of rotten boroughs and the unrepresentative nature of most MPs.

Indignantly, the government held a vote, which, by 189 to 152 votes, narrowly found Burdett guilty of breach of privilege and in medieval fashion ordered his committal to the Tower of London. The size of the minority was in fact a triumph for Burdett, but the vote had to be acted upon. The sergeant-at-arms, Francis Colman, was despatched to Burdett’s sumptuous house at 78 Piccadilly, but found that
the radical leader was not there. Burdett, from hiding, proclaimed the warrant illegal and said he would submit only to overwhelming force. Popular agitation spread in Burdett’s defence. Soon tens of thousands had taken to the streets, spreading across London in what seemed the prelude to a general insurrection.

On the night of 7 April the mob was occupying the main approaches to the Tower. Small boats were also blocking the river approach. The crowds outside 78 Piccadilly, where Burdett had now taken refuge, continued to grow, spreading into Albemarle Street, Berkeley Square and St James’s Square. Violence erupted and windows were smashed in the houses of leading political figures, some of the houses being broken into and furniture carried off. Anyone who passed Burdett’s house and refused to raise his hat and shout ‘Burdett for ever’ was pelted with mud.

The authorities responded by sending in the troops: the Horse Guards were ordered out to charge the demonstrators, while the Foot Guards and Light Dragoons attacked demonstrators by hitting them with the flats of their swords. Batteries of artillery were erected in St James’s Park, Berkeley Square and Soho Square – and fortified. The moat of the Tower was flooded, the guns there were prepared for action, and all troops within a hundred miles of London were recalled to the capital. It was suggested that Wellington himself should be recalled from the Peninsular War to take charge. To the nervous minor politicians running Britain, there were echoes of the tumbrils, the Bastille and the guillotine.

The Life Guards charged the demonstrators, who fled into the side streets down Piccadilly. As the cavalry regrouped, enterprising rioters seized ladders which they pulled suddenly across as barricades when the cavalry charged again, forcing their horses to shy away under a hail of stones and mud. The demonstrators kept up a torchlight vigil outside Burdett’s house long into the night. The authorities could not approach through the crowds.

The following day, 8 April, the tall, distinguished figure of Thomas Cochrane, the hero of Aix Roads and now a radical MP, arrived by coach. To the crowd’s delight he rolled out a barrel of gunpowder, which he took into the house, busily knocking holes in the wall to
accommodate charges, so that he could threaten a massive explosion if the house was raided.

Even by Cochrane’s standards this was extreme. He was crossing the line dividing legitimate protest and revolution. Nothing in his previous or subsequent career suggested that he was wedded to the cause of violent revolution as the solution for the country’s many abuses. Was this simply the act of someone whose mind had been unhinged by the Gambier affair? The answer is probably less dramatic. Cochrane was first and foremost a man of action and a fighter. The first course that would come into his mind when the threat of force was proposed against his fellow radical MP was to set up defences which could not be crossed, and defy the authorities to do their worst. Mining the house was not, in itself, an offence. It is unlikely that he thought through the consequences of his actions. If violence did break out and half the façades of Piccadilly were blown up, along with countless soldiers and demonstrators, it could be classed as open insurrection and terrorism. He would then have had no alternative but to lead the Revolution or be brought to the gallows.