The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (66 page)

Meanwhile, just as Pitt had predicted, the map of Europe continued to be redrawn by Napoleon. On 14 October 1806 at Jena he destroyed even Prussia’s crack troops in a resounding victory and went on to occupy Berlin. Of the Third Coalition, only Britain and Russia now remained in the field. And by June 1807 it was only Britain. For after Russian troops had been beaten by Napoleon on their own borders at the Battle of Friedland, Russia decided to submit to France. At the Treaty of Tilsit of 1807 on a raft in the middle of the River Niemen, the Russian emperor agreed to Napoleon’s plan to parcel out Europe between them into zones of eastern and western influence. Russia was at liberty to help herself to Finland, Sweden and Turkey as long as she recognized that the rest of Europe was Napoleon’s, including the French-controlled Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Russia also agreed to join the Continental System, a comprehensive blockade which Napoleon had imposed against all English goods to try and starve Britain into surrender.

Under this policy, Britain was forbidden to export any of her goods to any of the ports of Napoleon’s satellites, and by now that meant all the ports on the continent. All British shipping of whatever kind was to be seized, as was the shipping of any country which had used British ports. Defiantly, Lord Grenville–the new Whig prime minister, who took office because there was no natural Tory successor to Pitt–had retaliated by issuing Orders in Council which denied the freedom of the seas to any of Napoleon’s allies. Thanks to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar it was really the French who were in a state of blockade. And in order to prevent the Danish fleet being pressed into service against her, Britain simply seized it. Nevertheless, these were desperate days. If help did not come soon from somewhere on the continent, to start a fightback against Napoleon, the British Isles might be starved into leading the half-life of a Napoleonic satellite.

This was anyway not a glorious era for the country. The dying Charles James Fox’s efforts got a bill passed in 1807 which made Britain the earliest European country to outlaw the slave trade, but Britons themselves were experiencing a different kind of slavery in the early factories. The unrelenting war effort and fear of revolution meant that there was neither the time nor the political will for social reforms. One year after the Whigs had formed a government they were turned out by George III for trying to give English Catholic officers rights equal to their Irish comrades. Henceforth the king would have only Tory governments, in which after Pitt’s death the reactionary or Ultra wing of the party predominated. MPs like Sir Francis Burdett, Sir Samuel Romilly, Samuel Whitbread and Henry Brougham, known as Radicals, were lone voices in Parliament drawing attention to the need for less savage laws, better treatment of the poor, and shorter and more representative Parliaments. They were a new generation of brave and unpopular politicians following in the footsteps of Fox and his nephew Lord Holland. The difference was that they were not connected to the great Whig aristocratic families. The Radical movement’s supporters were found in the large towns and among intellectuals who had been members of the Corresponding Societies until they were made illegal.

But there was one area of the Tory government’s policy that was dazzlingly successful. The decision to send a small army to the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 and support the resistance against the French there turned the tide against Napoleon and led eventually to his downfall. The theoretically straightforward little war in the peninsula, which the emperor dismissed as the Spanish Ulcer, became a cancer that destroyed the Napoleonic Empire. Until 1808 Bonaparte had been content to leave his southern neighbours as cowed allies. But the obstinate Portuguese refused to join in the Continental System against the British, with whom they had a long history of favoured trading status. Though the Spanish king Charles IV helped Napoleon capture Portugal, while the British evacuated the Portuguese government in warships, the emperor soon perceived that the warring Spanish Bourbon dynasty might be neatly replaced by his own brother Joseph, currently the King of Naples. In so doing Napoleon created his own Achilles’ heel. Passionately proud of their history, scornful of the French peoples living north of them, the Spanish were not having any Frenchman on their throne. Like all other European nations the Spaniards were defeated in pitched battle by Napoleon. But, unlike the other peoples of Europe who were crushed by Napoleon, Spain refused to accept the French occupation.

A series of spontaneous risings swept the peninsula. Though it was occupied by the cream of the French armies under General Junot, the bare rocky country would not be subdued. Spanish guerrilla armies hidden all over the hills breathed defiance at Napoleon. The new King of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, was forced humiliatingly to abandon the Spanish capital, Madrid, and to retreat with the French army to Bayonne, on the other side of the Spanish border. Meanwhile a self-appointed provisional government hidden in the Asturian Mountains of northern Spain sent a message to London asking for help. From this tiny foothold began the climb-back which would result in victory on the battlefield of Waterloo. In 1808, however, that was a happy outcome which could scarcely have been predicted.

The man put in charge of the peninsular expedition, Sir Arthur Wellesley, was a lieutenant-general in the British army, fresh from glory in India. Pitt had admired him for the way he ‘states every difficulty before he undertakes any service, but none after he has undertaken it’. Wellesley was now landed with a small force in Portugal and kicked off the Peninsular Wars with a flourish at Vimeiro when he defeated General Junot, whose troops outnumbered his by three to one. But the incompetence and shortsightedness of two more senior British generals who arrived immediately after the battle enabled Junot apparently to recover, and despite Wellesley’s victory an armistice was agreed in the form of the infamous Convention of Cintra. This allowed the French to evacuate Portugal with all their troops and arms and the gold they had looted from Portuguese churches, all of which were conveyed to France courtesy of the British navy at considerable expense. All those evacuated troops could of course be used against Britain in the near future.

The stupidity of these arrangements created a scandal in Britain, and Wellesley was the only commander to escape with his reputation. On the other hand, at least Cintra left Portugal free of all French soldiers, and thus made it a very good starting point for British operations against Napoleon in Spain. For there, at the end of 1808, the emperor himself arrived in his magnificent travelling Berlin carriage with his solid-gold campaigning dinner service. He was stung to the quick that the backward Spanish peasantry were defying the master of Europe. By 4 December he had defeated the Spanish forces and the French tricolore was once more flying over occupied Madrid.

As Wellesley was still in London giving evidence into the inquiry into the Cintra débâcle, the new commander of the British forces in Portugal was the affable and popular General Sir John Moore. He had just crossed into Spain to join up with the Spanish armies when he heard the news of their defeat. He was then at Salamanca, horribly near Napoleon and with insufficient troops to fight him. He courageously decided to draw the emperor north by threatening his communications with France. This would keep him away from the Spanish army, which was fleeing south to recover its strength.

Moore’s tactics worked. Napoleon went north towards Burgos, leaving the Spanish to regroup in the south, but Moore had to beat a rapid retreat over the bleak mountains of the Asturias in the raw Spanish winter, pursued by the furious emperor’s forces. He managed to get his men to Corunna in the north-west corner of Spain, where he had been promised that transport ships would be waiting to take him and his men back to England. But to their dismay there was nothing at the fortified town except sullen grey waves, while at their heels was Marshal Soult, one of Napoleon’s most gifted generals. It was then that Moore managed to rally his exhausted, mutinous, demoralized men to make a stand. Though the transports finally arrived and the British sent Soult packing, Moore himself died in the mêlée, and was buried hastily at dead of night outside Corunna’s walls with bayonets for spades. Moore’s legendary courage and daring inspired the famous poem ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, which begins so evocatively:

The arrival from Corunna of the piteous, emaciated British soldiers, who had almost perished as a result of administrative bungling, as well as the shame of Cintra, increased the unpopularity of the government at home. Headed by the Duke of Portland, one of the former Whigs sufficiently alarmed at the beginning of the French Revolution to join Pitt as a Tory, the administration was proving hopelessly incompetent, as disaster after disaster piled on Portland’s head. George III’s second son the Duke of York, who had shown himself an able administrator as commander-in-chief of the army, was forced to resign when his ex-mistress Mary Ann Clark (an ancestress of the writer Daphne du Maurier) revealed that she had used her favours to get commissions for wealthy friends.

Next came further military catastrophe at Walcheren, where the British had sent an invasion force to capture Antwerp in a bid to distract Napoleon and help Austria, which had once more declared war against France. For a moment in 1809, the Spanish risings had engendered the idea that the rest of occupied Europe would manage to throw off the Napoleonic yoke. The emperor had abandoned his pursuit of Moore to rush off to fight Austria, and it looked as if some of the German principalities would join her. But thanks to lack of co-ordination between the naval and military arms and poor reconnaissance the British forces never got nearer than Flushing and had to return home without striking a blow. Four thousand men died of fever that July at Walcheren, a small island in Zeeland above Antwerp. Meanwhile Austria had been shown by Napoleon’s decisive victory over her at Wagram in the same month how unwise it was to raise a finger against her overlord. She made peace and provided Napoleon with a second wife, the youthful Archduchess Marie Louise. By a strange turn of the wheel of historical fortune, she was the great-niece of Marie Antoinette.

Military failure, reports of improper use of influence during the election, a scandalous duel between Canning, now foreign secretary, and the war and colonial secretary Viscount Castlereagh, and his own poor health brought about Portland’s resignation as premier. He was replaced by the former chancellor of the Exchequer, the right-wing Tory Spencer Perceval, who proved as unmemorable as Portland, and the trade slump continued. The Whig opposition, who had close links to manufacturers keen for the war to end, continued to attack the government for wasting money on the Peninsular War. But the one good thing about the Tory government was that it refused to abandon the peninsula. Indeed the only bright spot amid widespread gloom were Wellesley’s sustained military successes in Portugal.

At his own insistence Wellesley had been back on the peninsula since April 1809, having impressed upon his fellow Anglo-Irishman Castlereagh the urgency of his mission there. He was convinced that Portugal could still be defended with only 20,000 British troops and 4,000 cavalry alongside a newly recruited Portuguese army, while the Spanish guerrillas tied down the French in their own country. He believed that the peninsula was especially important as a theatre of war because it showed the other European nations that their French oppressor was not invincible. Vimeiro had emphasized that the Napoleonic column, that massive and alarming spectacle of moving soldiery and glinting metal, sixty men deep, which had evolved out of the overwhelming numbers of the untrained French citizen-army, could be outmanoeuvred. In terms of firepower most of the men were actually useless while in column formation, because those in the middle were never able to fire for fear of hitting their comrades. The Napoleonic column that had spread fear through Europe could be defeated if a thin line of infantry–thin because it was only two men deep to enable every man to fire–directed musket fire at it. This would be the pattern over and over again in encounters between Napoleon’s armies and Wellington’s.

Wellesley believed that it was essential to maintain the friendship of the Portuguese people. On landing he issued the strictest orders to his soldiers. It was absolutely forbidden to requisition anything from the locals or to lay hands on the female population. The Protestant British, who tended to deride what to them seemed the more superstitious elements of Roman Catholicism, were to be respectful of the Portuguese people’s religion. Anyone who laid a finger on a woman or stole a chicken was to be hanged. Wellesley’s measures were harsh but effective. The Portuguese, who scarcely had enough food for themselves, were particularly grateful for his orders. The disciplined behaviour of the British troops was a pleasing change from the pillage and looting of the French soldiers.

Wellesley forged the 20,000 men he had brought to the peninsula into a superior military instrument. But Portugal was once again threatened with invasion by the French from two directions. The odds were greatly against the English, and Wellesley chose to give battle only when he knew he could win, because, he said, ‘As this is the last army England has got we must take care of it.’ Though there were terrible losses of life, Wellesley pursued the French out of Portugal to Talavera, halfway across Spain, but after inflicting a crushing defeat there on Soult with the help of 30,000 Spanish troops, he decided that the British army’s position in Spain was untenable and retreated back to Portugal. His men now had to be even more carefully preserved because the French had put 200,000 soldiers into the peninsula. To this end Wellesley, now created Viscount Wellington of Talavera, constructed the strategical masterpiece known as the Lines of Torres Vedras. It was to be a lair in which Wellington’s army–the British troops and 25,000 Portuguese soldiers–would hole up over the winter.