Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (60 page)

¹
Boothby,
222.
"The Spaniards are a courageous people. Unmindful of themselves, they braved a superior enemy to assist a friend whom they had no prospect of ever seeing again."—
Journal
of
a Soldier,
78.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

The Gates of Europe

" England, although she has every right to expect worse generals than France, is much more rigid with them in articles of skill and judgment. For, if she can by any means attribute a disaster to the error of a general, she is not only savage but sanguinary. And this makes very good generals and very brave men so vastly afraid of responsibility that when they assume command they appear cowardly and indecisive."

Lieutenant Boothby

A
south-westerly
gale carried Sir John Moore's army swiftly to England. Battened down in the holds of tiny transports— few of them of more than two hundred tons burden
¹
—the exhausted men reached Plymouth and Portsmouth more dead than alive. Barefooted, gaunt and verminous, their filthy rags and pallid, bearded faces horrified southern England. As they hobbled up the quaysides in their dirt and misery, cracking after the manner of their race jests about their appearance, they were greeted as the survivors of a terrible disaster.

Of
35
,000 who had gone forth to liberate Spain, 8000 remained behind. Their chief had fallen in battle, his second-in-command had been dangerously wounded, and many distinguished officers— including Coote Manningham, the trainer of the Rifle Corps—had died from their sufferings. Every hour brought tidings of some new loss. The inhabitants of the south coast ports and the villages along the line of march were harrowed by tales of suffering; their hearts were deeply touched. "The people," wrote a Highlander of the 71st, "come around us, showing all manner of kindness, carrying the lame and leading the blind. We were received into every house as if we had been their own relations. How proud did I f
eel to belong to such a people !
"
²

The romantic dreams of Spanish valour and patriotism vanished in a night. The returned soldiers presented the Spaniards as heartless

¹
Harris described how, when the ship in which he was travelling heeled over, an officer was posted over the hold with a drawn sword in one hand and a lantern in the other to keep the men from moving.—Harris,
157.

2
"Journal
of
a Soldier,
80.
See also Boothby,
221;
Harris,
91-2, 157-60;
Smith, I,
17,
Costeilo,
6;
Fortescue, VI,
393;
Schaumann,
146-7;
Paget Brothers,
111;
Dyott, I,
268; 272;
Jackson, II,
372;
Blakency,
124.

curmudgeons who had barred their doors and hidden their food and wine; as cravens who had fled from the battlefield leaving their would-be liberators surrounded. Nobody had a good word to say for them or their beggarly country: a land, it seemed, of rain-soaked, frozen uplands and stinking hovels swarming with lice and fleas, where a clean bed and a coal fire were as little known as kindliness and honesty. Even the story of Saragossa was now discredited; " our people returning from Spain," wrote Francis Jackson, " treat the whole thing as a fable. They cannot believe the Spaniards to be capable of anything like energy and bravery."

For their disillusionment the British people blamed not themselves but their leaders. Moore's death saved him from official censure, but many laid the sufferings of the troops at his door, blaming alternatively his inactivity and his precipitate retreat. The nature of his achievement was unperceivcd; at best, it seemed that he had got his army out of an impossible scrape at the cost of drawing the enemy into a province that had hitherto escaped invasion. It was the old, familiar tale, wrote Walter Scott; England wanted everything but courage and virtue in her struggle against genius. "Skill, knowledge of mankind, ineffable, unhesitating villainy, combination of movement and combination of means are with our adversary. We can only fight like mastiffs, blindly and desperately." Old Lord St. Vincent, speaking in the Lords, went further; the campaign had proved the greatest disgrace of the whole war. Transports had been frittered away conveying Junot's ruffians to the battlefield; the army should have been sent at the start to northern Spain instead of Portugal; it was the grossest miscarriage to make it traverse a wild and inhospitable country in the rainy season. He ended by appealing for the employment of one of the Princes of the Blood—preferably the Duke of Kent—in its command.
¹

It was a measure of the Opposition's irresponsibility that while one of its leaders was clamouring in the Lords for a Royal Duke to command in the field, its members in the Commons were engaged in hounding the Duke of York from the Horse Guards where he was supremely useful. At the beginning of February, 1809, a Volunteer colonel of convivial habits named Wardle, supported by the radical member for Westminster, Sir Francis Burdett, electrified the House by revealing not only—what everybody but the general public knew
²
—that the Duke's matrimonial life was not what it

¹
" They have made the science ot" war their study from childhood," he declared, "if they are not to be employed, I am at a loss to conjecture for what purpose they were bred to arms."—Tucker, II,
341-3.
See also Scott, II,
151;
Jackson, II,
348-9, 352;
Campbell, II,
159.

⁸
See
A Letter to his Royal Highness or a Delicate Enquiry into the. Doubt whether he be more favoured
by
Mars or Venus.
—London,
1807.

appeared to be, but that his ex-mistress, Mrs. Clarke, had been dealing in Army commissions at prices that undercut regulation rates, presumably with his complicity. Her subsequent appearance in the House as a witness sent every member scurrying into the chamber to gape at her pert face and brazen answers; poor Wilberforce, wrote the irreverent Dudley Ward, was horrified "at the thought of this Babylonish person being brought into his holy presence." For a whole month, while the Commons sat in Grand Committee, the campaign in the Peninsula was forgotten. "If half a dozen Spains had been lost and half a dozen armies with them," Francis Jackson testified, "they would not have been thought of." In the end the Duke, though proved guiltless of any share in the lady's financial transactions, was forced to resign. Thus in the co
urse of a few weeks the British
soldier lost his two best friends, the one in battle, the other by slander.

The Opposition, however, had by then lost its chance of exploiting the wave of indignation over the retreat and the Convention of Cintra. By the time Mrs. Clarke had faded into comparative obscurity the public had regained its temper. Though there was unrest in the industrial towns and a rising undercurrent in favour of reform, few responsible men wanted to turn out the Government for aristocrats like Grenville and Grey, who seldom left their country seats,
¹
or politicians of the stamp of Whitbread and Sheridan. The former had become a public jest and the latter—" drunk, lazy and discontented"
²
—a public scandal. Even the noisy Wardle's brief blaze of popularity faded when it was found that he had bribed Mrs. Clarke to accuse the Duke by a promise of new furniture and then —so the lady affirmed—failed to pay for it. Nor was there any agreement between the various Opposition groups except in the hysterical vehemence with which they assailed the Government. They spoilt even the best case by violence and exaggeration.

But the Whigs' greatest disability was their failure in patriotism. For this the country could not forgive them. When Grenville reacted to Corunna by declaring that England must never again send an army to the Continent or Whitbread argued that the Government had been mad to reject the pretended peace overtures which Napoleon had made after Erfurt, the average man felt only contempt. Hatred of Bonaparte and all his ways was by now too deeply implanted in the national consciousness; Britons thought of him, like Walter Scott, as a demon permitted to scourge the earth

¹
" Many people enjoy their country houses, but Lord Grenville's attachment to Boconnoc surpasses anything I have yet seen. . . . Politics are no more alluded to in conversation than astrology."—Auckland, IV,
314.

2
Dudley,
62.

for its sins. It was not for them to compromise with him. For more than sixteen years they had grown accustomed to loathe the very name of Frenchman. Their army's late encounter with them only hardened their resolve to thrash them. It had proved that, man for man, they were a match for them on land as well as sea.
¹

In its uncompromising patriotism the Government represented the country. It even refused to despair of Spain. After Corunna many wrote the Peninsula off as a dead loss like Russia and Prussia. " That the wretch Bonaparte will get possession of all Spain," wrote good Mrs. Jackson from Bath in February; " I have no more doubt than that I shall send this letter to the post"; an old captain she met at the Pump House told her that she might as well send her cook to Newbury to stop the mail coach as try to hold up the Grand Army. News of further Spanish disasters followed
the return of Moore's troops. Vene
gas was routed by Victor at Ucles, Corunna and Ferrol were yielded by their Governors a few days after the British evacuation, Joseph Bonaparte was crowned at the end of January, 1809, in Madrid. In the next month, St. Cyr, overwhelming the Spaniards at Vails, made himself master of nearly all Catalonia, while, after 50,000 of the defenders of Saragossa had perished and a third of the city been reduced to nubble, 16,000 pestilence-stricken survivors—still proudly dragging their starved bones to the sound of the drum—staggered out to surrender. Even the staunch Collingwood, directing his interminable blockade in the Mediterranean, admitted that he could hear of no success from any quarter.

Yet, though the north and centre of Spain might be lost, the British colours flew over Lisbon. Seville and Cadiz were still un-conquered. Command of the sea enabled Britain to dominate the wide perimeter of the Peninsula: her troops withdrawn from one point on the coast could be moved more swiftly than Napoleon's road-bound legions to another. The Spaniards had suffered disasters but their resistance was unbroken. The extension of French conquests only hardened it. No sooner had Soult's army, followed by Ney's, overrun Galicia than that province—hitherto indifferent to the war—rose in passionate revolt. The moral forces which had made the Revolution and which had ever since operated against its excesses came into play. The exuberant lawlessness that prompted Napoleon to filch the Spanish crown, and the private of his Guard to rob the peasant's household peace, aroused instincts deep in the human conscience. Spain might still be medieval, but nowhere were individuals more ready to respond to elemental moral promptings.

¹
Two Duche
ses,
317-18.
See also Windham
Papers,
II,
344-5;
Windham,
488
; Jackson, H,
374;
Haydon, I,
244;
Scott, II,
135.

The doctrine that a revolutionary army was entitled to live on a conquered country was met by the still more revolutionary doctrine that a country so treated was morally obliged to destroy the invader. Scarcely a day passed that February without ten or twenty of the French being killed; the banks of the Tagus were lined with peasants armed with fowling pieces, whose victims fell before they knew they were being attacked.
¹
The Spanish temperament, with its fierce individualism, heroic obstinacy and passion for revenge, lent itself to such warfare. So did the landscape with its wild and inaccessible hills and immense distances.

The British Government had other reasons for persevering in the Peninsula. The enslaved peoples of the Continent watching Napoleon's veterans recede into Spain, had realised there was only one Grand Army. They were thrilled by Saragossa and Baylen; the Spaniards, wrote a German in the autumn of 1808, were the ruling theme of every conversation. To still such hopes Napoleon was now issuing terrifying threats against traitors, foreign and domestic. In the last week of January, 1809, arriving from Valladollid at St. Cloud, he had turned on Talleyrand and denounced him as so much dung in silk stockings. For, being more concerned with his own future safety—and so by implication France's—than with Napoleon's present glory, Talleyrand had ventured to criticise his master's foreign policy. He wished to reconcile Europe to French hegemony. Napoleon only wanted to subjugate it to his will.