The War of Wars (83 page)

Napoleon, after his triumphal return to Paris from Prussia in the summer of 1807 and the reassertion of his authority, was getting restless. Bored by the capital, and neglecting the threat still posed by Britain, he looked to new areas of conquest. He conceived a dream of first sewing together a three-pronged alliance, supposedly against England, but in reality to add to his dominions. He would join the Russians and the Austrians and invade the Ottoman empire, thence march through Persia to occupy British India. A second offensive would be mounted to take control of Britain’s naval base in Sicily and thus ensure total control of the Mediterranean. (As a start, Reggio Calabria was taken on 2 February 1808 and Scylla, across the Strait of Messina, on 17 February). Thirdly he would occupy the Iberian Peninsula and from there launch an expedition across the Straits of Gibraltar and invade North Africa. Of the three, the last was to be pursued most vigorously. A variety of pretexts was trotted out: it was necessary to enforce the Continental System by taking over Britain’s last ally and major trading entrepot, Portugal, and therefore it was necessary to cross Spain. Spain also needed liberating from the Bourbons.

It seems clear that Napoleon simply wanted to add the plump prize of Spain, with its glittering South American empire, to his domains. First though, he needed to take Portugal and its rather poor – in those days – Brazilian colony, close allies of Britain. In September 1807 Marshal Junot and an army corps were sent to the Spanish border, with the demand that Godoy allow them to cross northern Spain to subdue
Portugal. Godoy, cowardly and venal, agreed in exchange for his being given the huge slice of Portugal south of the Tagus as his personal kingdom.

The regent of Portugal, Prince João, was approached. He agreed to close his ports and declare war on Britain, but then prevaricated. Losing patience, Napoleon instructed Junot to invade Portugal on 12 October as João dithered. Junot crossed the rugged and sodden hills of northern Spain to Salamanca, which he reached on 12 November and then drove on towards Lisbon.

The British moved swiftly. Under the rival dual leadership of Canning and Castlereagh – Portland being a figurehead – Lord Strangford, the energetic British ambassador in Lisbon, Sir Sidney Smith in charge of a naval squadron, and the crusty Lord St Vincent himself had decided to make up João’s mind for him. St Vincent may have actually threatened to bombard Lisbon to persuade the Portuguese court to depart for Brazil – in those days little more than a tropical backwater – which they were deeply reluctant to do.

There followed a remarkable exodus. On 27 November 1807 the mad Queen Maria made an appalling scene on the quayside, refusing to embark because she believed she was being taken to die on the guillotine, like Louis XVI. She had to be coaxed aboard gently. Almost the entire court and nobility of Portugal were leaving Lisbon. With them the royal family took the crown jewels, the royal library, the royal silver, the royal carriages, a multitude of other belongings, and a huge personal retinue. About 10,000 Portuguese retainers and officials boarded some forty ships to make the long journey across the Atlantic to Brazil, escorted by British warships.

All were aboard, but there was no wind. On the 28th Junot reached Santarém, his progress held up by an incessant downpour and the resultant mud. The following day he had reached Cartaxo, but a slight breeze had by then enabled the ships to slip down the Tagus as far as the mouth of the estuary. The speed with which the Portuguese court moved took Junot by surprise. On the night he heard of it he leapt from his bed at Cartaxo and ordered 1,000 of his grenadiers down the rain-sodden road to Lisbon. The following day they reached the Bay of Bom Suceso at the tip of the Tagus estuary in time to open fire on the
sails disappearing over the horizon. When news of the Portuguese court’s escape reached Napoleon he exploded in one of his more spectacular rages. Years later, in exile on St Helena, he described João as ‘the only one who ever tricked me’.

Napoleon was now determined to seize Spain itself, although as a vassal state it was much more conveniently governed through the puppet Charles and Godoy than directly by the French. Napoleon’s seizure of Italy, and in particular of Naples, as well as the punitive treatment of Prussia, were the moments at which French conquests ceased to be defensible and became merely acquisitive. The invasion of Spain was on another plane altogether. The Prussian annexation could be defended in theory as self-defence against an attacker, Naples as a pre-emptive strike against a British base. There was no such excuse for the invasion of Spain. It was imperial aggrandisement. And it was a terrible misreading of the country. Unlike Italy, so long supine before invading and occupying powers, as well as fragmented, Spain was the hub of a powerful global empire which even then was perhaps the world’s most extensive. Spain was in decline, certainly, and had no military ambitions in Europe, but it was a misjudgement to assume that it could simply be colonized and that its people would tamely accept this.

The turn of the tide against Napoleon therefore began in Spain in 1808, not with the invasion of Russia in 1812. He had embarked upon an impossible campaign of conquest against one of the proudest people on earth. Nor was it the British initially who mounted the greatest struggle against the Emperor: it was the Spanish and Portuguese themselves. Napoleon wrote contemptuously: ‘If this thing were going to cost me 80,000 men I wouldn’t do it; but it won’t take 12,000; it’s mere child’s play. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but when my great political chariot is rolling, it’s as well to stand from under the wheels.’

Napoleon, the supreme opportunist, as always took advantage of events as they occurred. Some 100,000 French troops crossed the Pyrenees. On 16 February the French, on a pretext, seized Pamplona, San Sebastian, Figueras, and Barcelona. Napoleon then ordered Murat, at the head of the invading army, to march on Madrid.

There is no doubt he had annexation in mind. But an uprising
occurred on 17 March, known as the Tumult of Aranjuez, in which a column of dissident Spanish soldiers and peasants, furious at the corruption of the court and its supine pro-French policy, as well as the country’s economic crisis, marched against Godoy, who had to take refuge in a rolled up carpet to preserve his life.

The chief minister’s fall was followed by that of the King himself, who was forced by the mob to abdicate in favour of his twenty-four-year-old son, Ferdinand VII, a spiteful and cruel reactionary under the influence of his appalling aunt, the hunchback dwarf Carlota, who had married the regent of Portugal. Ferdinand loathed Godoy, who he believed was plotting to exclude him from the succession. All this provided the pretext for French intervention in Spain and its conversion from a quasi-colony of France into a full-blown one.

Ferdinand had, in fact, been conspiring secretly with Napoleon, and had been arrested by Godoy for treason, but the Spanish people were unaware of this, and believed him to be an anti-French patriot by comparison with his parents and with Godoy. Napoleon moved swiftly: he travelled immediately down to Bayonne, where he arrested Charles IV as well as Godoy and Ferdinand, declaring that he would mediate between the warring factions. Ordinary Spaniards understood what that meant, and crowds attempted to decouple Ferdinand’s carriage from its horses in an effort to delay him; but the lantern-jawed prince took no notice, believing that he was Napoleon’s trusted ally and that his father and Godoy would be regarded by the French as enemies.

He arrived at Bayonne on 20 April, ten days ahead of his parents. There, to his astonishment, Napoleon took Charles’s side against him, insisting that the young King abdicate immediately, and threatening to arrest him if he did not. Napoleon wrote on May 1st:

I have just met the King and Queen, who are very glad to be here. The King received his sons with displeasure. All the Spaniards have kissed hands: but the old King appears to be very angry with them.

The Prince of the Asturias is very stupid, very surly, very hostile to France; with my knowledge of how to handle men, his twenty-four years’ experience makes no impression.

King Charles is a good soul. Whether it comes from his position, or from his circumstances, he gives the impression of an honest and kindly patriarch. The Queen’s heart and history are revealed in her face; that is saying everything. It surpasses all one could imagine. They are both of them dining with me. The Prince of Peace [Godoy] looks like a bull.

The next stage was to force the old man to hand over his throne to Napoleon. The Emperor had already asked his brother Louis, King of Holland, to take over Spain. When he refused, the almost equally reluctant Joseph was told to abandon his throne in Naples – which he was deeply unhappy about doing – and become King of Spain. This incensed the much more capable Murat, who had not been chosen because of Napoleon’s suspicion that he was conniving against him.

Napoleon insouciantly behaved as though he was merely adding a jewel to the imperial crown. The wretched Charles IV, Queen Maria Luisa and Godoy were exiled to an unhappy house arrest in the forest of Compiègne and later Italy, while Ferdinand and his retainers were sent off to Talleyrand’s estates in Valençay – a kind of punishment, in fact for the former French foreign minister, who entirely disapproved of the Spanish venture. There they enjoyed hunting, music and dancing as well as girlfriends – including, by all accounts, the delectable Madame Talleyrand. Talleyrand never forgave the Emperor for this personal humiliation, as well as for the contemptuous way in which he had treated one of the foremost monarchs in Europe.

Even before Ferdinand’s ‘abdication’ in favour of his father on 5 May, there had occurred one of the bloodiest yet most potent moments in that country’s proud history: 2 May, the Dos de Mayo, was perhaps the greatest assertion of Spanish national spirit there has ever been. The people of Madrid rose in their thousands to cut down every Frenchman they could find. The massacre continued for three hours until Murat regained control and ordered an equally bloody repression. French artillery was brought in to mow down demonstrators in the main streets.

If Murat and Napoleon thought the nation was cowed, they were appallingly mistaken. On 20 May a mob seized the governor of
Badajoz, suspected of French sympathies, and dragged him through the streets to his death. On 3 May it was the turn of the garrison of Cartagena. On 24 August an uprising took place in Valencia, and the following day in Asturias, 500 miles away, in an uncoordinated insurrection. There the local notables called for a declaration of war on France and the restoration of Ferdinand to the throne. On 27 May Seville rose up. Oviedo and Zaragoza also took to the streets, as did Galicia on 30 May and Catalonia on 7 June. At Cadiz the governor was beaten to death.

This spontaneous national resistance movement caught Napoleon entirely by surprise. All over Europe local populations had sullenly acquiesced in his rule once their rulers had made peace, in some cases actually welcoming the French as liberators from colonial oppression, in others believing that they were merely exchanging masters. Paradoxically in Spain, where the peasantry lived in conditions of wretched misery while their court had been one of the most corrupt and decadent in Europe, the people did not acquiesce in their Napoleonic takeover. Moreover, Spain was one of the most fractured countries in Europe, with a strong sense of local identity in each of its regions: Catalonia, the Basque country, Cadiz and Extremadura. That the country should have united against the common foe was even more astonishing.

One explanation is that the Spanish had not actually been defeated in battle by the French, as had happened elsewhere. Their rulers had effectively been kidnapped and national pride was affronted. Another is the power of the provincial gentry and clergy and the strong sense of local identity in the incredibly remote country regions of Spain at that time. In the case of Austria and Russia, moreover, occupied border territories had been taken by the French (although this was not the case with Prussia, which had been dismembered). In Spain the very heartland of an ancient empire had been seized: Napoleon was later on to encounter the same sort of resistance from the brutalized yet nationalist peasants of Russia.

On 30 May the gentry of Oviedo despatched an emissary to seek help from Britain: it took him seven days to arrive. They reached London to be feted by Canning, the foreign minister. A junta was set
up in Seville and Cadiz declaring war against France and proclaiming allegiance to Ferdinand VII.

At Cadiz, Collingwood’s ships helped the Spanish seize the remaining French ships trapped after Trafalgar. For once the British had troops available to help their continental allies – 9,500 men under Sir Arthur Wellesley at Cork, who had been preparing to depart with Francisco de Miranda to seize Venezuela, or possibly Mexico, from the Spanish empire; 5,000 men more at Venga; 3,000 at Malta; and 8,000 off Sweden under the country’s best soldier, Sir John Moore (who had been stuck at Gothenburg for three months negotiating with the insane King, who ordered him arrested: the British general had escaped his captors from Stockholm at midnight).

For once, too, the British resolved to act with speed and decisiveness. Quite why must remain a matter of conjecture. Under Pitt virtually every opportunity for a major continental entanglement had been rebuffed except in concert with big continental allies: conflicting chains of command usually condemned their expeditions to disaster. The British had singularly failed to help the rebels in the Vendée and at Toulon.

The cautious Pitt and the more interventionist Grenville had now been replaced by entirely new blood: the brilliant and mercurial young Canning, and the highly efficient, if cold and reactionary, Castlereagh, represented both major strands of British opinion, liberal and conservative: both were determined to seize the opportunity provided by the uprising in Spain for continental intervention. They instantly realized the potential in a country that had arisen almost in unison against Napoleon. The Peninsular War was about to begin.