The War of Wars (87 page)

He secured election to parliament as part of the Grenville faction, his old friend Pitt having died. With the fall of Grenville and the accession of Portland he was offered the job of chief secretary for Ireland, which he dutifully fulfilled in that divided land until the summer of 1807, while pressing for another military command. At last he was given the job of carrying out the land operation on Lord Gambier’s expedition to Copenhagen to cut out the Danish fleet, a job he performed with spectacular efficiency. He was now a respected military commander with a string of distinguished engagements behind him. Yet he was far from being a household name.

Wellesley now seemed destined for an extraordinary adventure: to travel with Francisco de Miranda at the head of the expedition to liberate Caracas. With the French invasion of Portugal, however, he was given a new assignment. In July 1808 he spoke to a good friend: ‘I am thinking of the French that I am going to fight . . . Tis enough to make one thoughtful; but no matter: my die is cast, they may overwhelm me, but I don’t think they will out-manoeuvre me . . . I am not afraid of them, as everybody else seems to be.’

Behind him he left an undistinguished political career which chiefly revolved around defending his brother Richard from the inevitable charges of corruption, lavish expenditure and tyranny that had followed his return from India – just as similar changes had followed the
incontestably more gifted Clive and Warren Hastings, but with better reason. In addition their brother William Wellesley-Pole was charged with covering up corruption in the Admiralty.

Sir Arthur thus came from a clan that was distrusted by the public, and his appointment was greeted by a storm of opprobrium. Once again he was superseding senior generals: he had only just been promoted lieutenant-general. Even the King had serious doubts. His brother’s friend Lord Castlereagh had been instrumental in the choice. The expedition was limited in scope and small in size, and seemed as doomed as other previous British military adventures on the continent. It consisted of 9,000 men sailing on 12 July 1808 and arriving a week later at La Coruña (Corunna to the British) on the Peninsula that was to make his reputation.

Arriving there he found to his dismay that the northern Spanish army under General Blake had been defeated by Marshal Bessières at Medina del Rio Seco. Meanwhile General Dupont with 15,000 men had just taken Córdoba in the south and General Masséna had just occupied Valladolid in the centre. The new ‘King’ of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, entered Madrid with 4,000 troops to take up his throne just the day after Wellington first set foot on Peninsular soil. The news was all bad. Only the town of Zaragoza, it seemed, had held out. It appeared that everywhere the French were invincible, moving relentlessly forward to occupy the huge, rugged Spanish interior. What possible impression could Wellesley and his puny force make upon them?

Wellesley’s force sailed disconsolately further south to Oporto in northern Portugal. He did not know that an astonishing thing was happening even as he sailed: Dupont had advanced beyond Córdoba to inflict a final defeat on the Spaniards, but the sullen people of the countryside had begun to resist the advance while others rose up behind him. After a few days the increasingly anxious general ordered a retreat in those sunbaked, impenetrable mountains. He was harried and ambushed on all sides. On 23 July he surrendered to the ragged Spanish ‘army’ of General Castaños.

The first triumph in the Peninsular War had thus been achieved by the Spaniards themselves. They were a people oppressively misgoverned
for centuries, whose social fabric was antiquated, unaffected by the economic and social revolutions that had taken place elsewhere in Europe, still living as peasants on harsh soils that barely afforded a living in many areas, the upper class grown rich on South American gold and silver and refusing to engage in the menial tasks of trade and industry. But the peasants were proud, and could be bitter fighters. Usually steeped in provincialism, with poor communications linking their enormous country, they had no knowledge of or interest in nearby provinces, but their swelling nationalism and resentment at the foreign invaders had reared its head for the first time.

Wellesley knew nothing of this. Further south there was discouraging news: a Russian fleet was in the Tagus, which might be hostile, as well as several French vessels. He decided it would be safest to make a landing from the Atlantic some hundred miles to the north at Mondego Bay, and from there to march on Lisbon. Encouragingly, he learnt that the Portuguese countryside had also risen against the French, and that the latter occupied only the capital and a few strongholds to the west around the Tagus.

When Wellesley’s men at last went ashore, they were joined by a force of some 4,000 men from Gibraltar led by General Sir Brent Spencer. But Wellesley also learnt to his chagrin that he was soon to be reinforced by an army of some 16,000 under three senior officers. Sir John Moore had at last extricated himself and his men from the clutches of the King of Sweden and was preparing to embark from England; before him General Sir Hew Dalrymple, an old buffer who had not seen active service for fourteen years, was to arrive with General Sir Henry Burrard, another amiable officer of limited intelligence. That had been the decision of the King and the Duke of York, who considered Wellesley too junior. Castlereagh wrote to him: ‘I shall rejoice if it shall have befallen to your lot to place the Tagus in our hands; if not, I have no fear that you will find many opportunities of doing yourself honour and your country service’. Wellesley promised to respect his seniors but said privately, ‘I hope that I shall beat Junot before any of them arrive, and then they may do as they please with me’.

It was brave talk, yet he cannot but have feared that his first great opportunity was to be snatched away from him after his adventure had
barely begun. Wellesley calculated that with the defeat of Dupont confirmed, the French armies in Spain would be too busy to threaten him from the east. He decided to move down along the coastal road to Lisbon with 12,300 British troops and 1,500 Portuguese, so that he could not be attacked from the east without possibility of evacuation and had naval support.

He had little artillery and virtually no cavalry, but his men made good progress in the intense heat of a Portuguese summer through fertile and well-provisioned countryside. Junot had sent General Laborde with 4,000 men up the main road to Lisbon along the Tagus and instructed General Loison with another army across the river to reinforce him. On 15 August there was a first skirmish as the enthusiastic British advanced guard routed a French patrol, only to pursue it straight into the main French army: two officers and twenty-seven men were lost. Two days later Wellesley ordered a general attack on Laborde’s small army for fear that he would soon be reinforced by Loison.

One observer described the spectacle of the British army that morning on the Plain of Obidos:

The arms piled, and the men occupied as they usually are on all occasions of a morning halt – some sitting on their knapsacks, others stretched on the grass, many with a morsel of cold meat on a ration biscuit for a place in one hand, with a clasp-knife in the other, all doing justice to the contents of their haversacks, and not a few with their heads thrown back and canteens at their mouths, eagerly gulping down his Majesty’s grog or the wine of the country, while others, whiffing their pipes, were jestingly promising their comrades better billets and softer beds for the next night, or repeating the valorous war-cry of the Portuguese.

But to the person of reflecting mind there was more in this condensed formation than a causal halt required. A close observer would have noticed the silence and anxious looks of the several general officers of brigades, and the repeated departure and arrival of staff-officers and aides-de-camp, and he would have known that the enemy was not far distant, and that an important event was on the eve of taking place.

Wellesley divided his army in two, sending 4,000 towards the French rear, also to intercept Loison if he should arrive. Laborde in response occupied a ridge overlooking the Lisbon road, where he looked down upon the advancing British, inflicting great damage before again withdrawing to avoid being outflanked on both sides. The British lost some 500 men, the French around the same, but they retreated intact. The first little battle of the Peninsular War between two able generals had been a stand off.

Learning that British reinforcements were being landed to the west at Vimeiro, Wellesley lengthened his position to protect them. There were now up to 17,000 infantry and 18 guns, as well as the 1,500 Portuguese. Wellesley decided to march for the defile of Torres Vedras, but Sir Henry Burrard had just arrived and assumed command. He ordered Wellesley to adopt a defensive position until further reinforcements arrived. Wellesley was incensed, believing he had a good opportunity to seize Lisbon, but had no choice but to obey. He took up a defensive position on a ridge to the east and on Vimeiro hill, south of the village of that name.

Junot himself had arrived to take command of his 13,000 troops and twenty-four guns; his 70,000 remaining men were left in and around Lisbon to maintain order there. His aim was to drive the inexperienced British forces to the east. Wellesley sent his skirmishers forward along and down the sides of the ridge while placing his main forces intact behind it. The French came bravely forward under fire from their flanks and in front, unaware that a larger force awaited them on the reverse slope.

British artillery opened up, using shrapnel for the first time – named after the captain who invented it – a shell which blew up in the air raining grapeshot on the men below. Rifleman Harris described the motionless lines in the August sunshine ‘glittering with bright arms, the stern features of the men as they stood with their eyes fixed unalterably upon the enemy, the proud colours of England floating over the heads of the different battalions and the dark cannon on the rising ground’. At close range the volleys were fired at fifteen-second intervals by the disciplined British soldiers, drawn up in two lines of 800 men. After the volleys a textbook bayonet attack decisively dispersed the French,
exhausted by the uphill walk under intense fire and surprised by the main British army.

As they broke and ran, Wellesley’s few horse were ordered forward where they at first put the French infantry to flight. But they went too far, to Wellesley’s irritation, and came up against superior French cavalry before galloping back to the main British lines with a quarter of the men lost. A renewed French attack on the left failed and by midday Junot’s force was in full retreat. They had lost some 2,000 men to 700 British casualties as well as fifteen guns.

Wellesley rode up to Burrard who had arrived on the battlefield and urged him to march on Torres Vedras. ‘We shall be in Lisbon in three days,’ he said. The cautious general flatly refused, and was reinforced in his dithering by Sir Hew Dalrymple who arrived the following day. Moore, who arrived several days later, took Wellesley’s view: ‘Several of our brigades had not been in action; our troops were in high spirits and the French so crestfallen that probably they would have dispersed. They could never have reached Lisbon.’ But it was too late: the French had entrenched themselves at Torres Vedras.

There was then an offer from Junot to withdraw all French forces from Portugal. To Dalrymple and Burrard this seemed a vindication of their caution, although Wellesley fumed at ‘Dowager Dalrymple and Betty Burrard’. In fact Junot had shrewdly assessed that it would have been disastrous for him to remain at Lisbon. The British had assembled a fleet under Sir Charles Cotton which could bottle up or attack the Russian and French ships in the Tagus and bombard Lisbon from the sea. They had an army approaching from the north which could trap the French in an enclave surrounded on three sides by water. In addition the people of Lisbon were highly restive and might stage an insurrection.

The two generals reached agreement with the French General Kellerman at the Convention of Cintra, then ordered Wellesley to sign the terms. He read them with astonishment, describing them as ‘very extraordinary’, but obeying his superiors’ orders in an untypical show of humility. The terms were surprising indeed: the French were to be evacuated by the Royal Navy, to a French port no less, and retain
their arms and baggage and all their personal property. French troops were to be allowed to return to the fight from the port in which they were landed. Those Portuguese who had collaborated with the French were not to be punished. The Russian fleet was to be allowed to depart for the Baltic.

Wellesley promptly wrote to Castlereagh to dissociate himself from the agreement, but it was too late. The French interpreted the agreement to mean that they could take everything they could plunder from the capital away with them, including £25,000 from the Portuguese treasury. At first, as news of the French defeat at Vimeiro reached Britain at the end of August, a nation so long accustomed to the failure of British armies on the continent, there was a great outburst of popular emotion. Lady Errol wrote: ‘I hear that hero Kellerman, who last November was dictating strict humiliating terms to Emperors and Kings, was obliged to go down upon his knees to Sir Arthur Wellesley – I like it
loads
and quantities.’

In mid-September news of the agreement signed by the three British generals arrived and joy turned to fury. Wellesley had begged Castlereagh to relieve him of his post as he could not continue in a subordinate capacity to these two old gentlemen, and departed after making arrangements for the French withdrawal. After his spectacular victory and his bottling up of the French army in a trap where it faced certain defeat, he was now unfairly blamed for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: The enemies of the Wellesleys – of which there were many – closed ranks and attacked him as well as Richard and William.

In November an inquiry was set up at the Royal Hospital at Chelsea at which Dalrymple and Wellesley gave conflicting accounts. The army proceeded to exonerate all three officers. Parliament voted to thank Wellesley for the victory at Vimeiro. Dalrymple was dismissed as governor of Gibraltar, while Burrard was retired to domestic duty. It had been a major scandal smoothed over in traditional British fashion so as not to ruffle feathers. Wellesley himself retired to Dublin bitter and angry at what seemed a terminal setback to his career.