Chapter VIII: Book XXIV: Chap. I (5)

Let us see then what the Spaniards did during that time. And first it is false to say that they were unaided. They were aided against Victor by the vicinity of sir John Craddock’s troops; they were aided on the Gallician coast by an English squadron; they were aided on the Beira frontier, against Lapisse, by the Portuguese troops under sir Robert Wilson; they were aided on the Catalonian coast by lord Collingwood’s fleet; they were aided at Cadiz by the presence of general M‘Kenzie’s troops, sent from Lisbon; and they were aided everywhere by enormous supplies of money arms and ammunition sent from England. Finally, they were aided, and most powerfully so, by sir John Moore’s generalship, which had enabled them to rally and keep several considerable armies on foot in the southern parts of the country. What did these armies—these invincible Spaniards—do? They lost Zaragoza, Monzon, and Jaca, in the east; the fortresses of Ferrol and Coruña, and their fleet, in the north; they lost Estremadura, La Mancha, Aragon, the Asturias, and Gallicia; they lost the battles of Ucles and of Valls; the battle of Monterrey, that of Ciudid Real, and the battle of Medellin. They won nothing! they did not save themselves, it was the _British army and the indolence and errors of the French that saved them_.

_Extract from Napoleon’s Memoirs._

‘After the embarkation of the English army, the king of Spain did
nothing; _he lost four months_; he ought to have marched upon
Cadiz, upon Valencia, upon Lisbon; political means would have done
the rest.’

_Extracts from lord Wellington’s Correspondence. 1809._

‘It is obvious that the longer, and the more intimately we become
acquainted with the affairs of Spain, the less prospect do they
hold out of anything like a glorious result. The great extent of
the country, the natural difficulties which it opposes to an enemy,
and the enmity of the people towards the French may spin out the
war into length, and at last the French may find it impossible to
establish a government in the country; but there is no prospect of
a glorious termination to the contest.’

‘After the perusal of these details, and of Soult’s letters, can
any one doubt that the evacuation of Gallicia was occasioned by the
operations of the British troops in Portugal?’

‘The fact is, that the British army _has saved Spain and Portugal_
during this year.’

The reviewer is not only a great critic, he is a great general also. He has discovered that there are no positions in the mountains of Portugal; nay, he will scarcely allow that there are mountains at all; and he insists that they offer no defence against an invader, but that the rivers do—that the Douro defends the _eastern_ frontier of Beira, and that the frontier of Portugal generally is very compact and strong for defence, and well suited for a weak army to fight superior numbers;—that the weak army cannot be turned and cut off from Lisbon, and the strong army must invade in mass and by one line.

Now, first, it so happened, unluckily for this lucid military notion of Portugal, that in Massena’s invasion lord Wellington stopped to fight on the mountain of Busaco, and stopped Massena altogether at the mountains of Alhandra, Aruda, Sobral, and Torres Vedras—in other words at the lines, and that he did not once stop him or attempt to stop him by defending a river. That Massena, in his retreat, stopped lord Wellington on the mountain of Santarem, attempted to stop him on the mountains of Cazal Nova, Moita, and Guarda, but never attempted to stop him by defending a river, save at Sabugal, and then he was instantly beaten. Oh, certainly, ’tis a most noble general, and a very acute critic! Nevertheless, I must support my own opinions about the frontier of Portugal, the non-necessity of invading this country in one mass, and the unfordable nature of the Tagus, by the testimony of two generals as distinguished as honest Iago.

_Extract of a letter from sir John Moore._

‘I am not prepared at this moment to answer minutely your
lordship’s question respecting the defence of Portugal; but I can
say generally that the frontier of Portugal is not defensible
against a superior force. It is an open frontier, all equally
rugged, but all equally to be penetrated.’

_Extracts from lord Wellington’s Correspondence._

‘In whatever season the enemy may enter Portugal, he will probably
make his attack by _two distinct lines_, the one north the other
south of the Tagus; and the system of defence must be founded upon
this general basis. In the summer season, however, the _Tagus being
fordable_, &c. &c., care must be taken that the enemy does not by
his attack directed from the south of the Tagus and by the passage
of that river, _cut off from Lisbon the British army engaged in
operations to the north of the Tagus_.’

‘The line of frontier to Portugal is so long in proportion to the
extent and means of the country, and the Tagus and the mountains
separate the parts of it so effectually from each other, and it is
so open in many parts, that it would be _impossible for an army
acting upon the defensive to carry on its operations upon the
frontier without being cut off from the capital_.’

‘In the summer it is probable as I have before stated that the
enemy will make his attacks in two principal corps, and that he
will also push on through the mountains between Castello Branco and
Abrantes. His object will be by means of his corps, _south of the
Tagus_, to turn the positions which might be taken in his front on
the north of that river; _to cut off from Lisbon the corps opposed
to him_; and to destroy it by an attack in front and rear at the
same time. This can be avoided only _by the retreat of the right
centre and left of the allies, and their junction at a point, at
which from the state of the river they cannot be turned by the
passage of the Tagus by the enemy’s left_. The first point of
defence which presents itself below that at which the Tagus ceases
to be fordable, is the river Castenheira close to the lines.’

In the above extracts, the fordable nature of the Tagus has been pretty clearly shown, but I will continue my proofs upon that fact to satiety.

_Lord Wellington to Charles Stuart, Esq._

‘The line of operations which we are obliged to adopt for the
defence of Lisbon and for our own embarkation necessarily throws us
back as far as below Salvaterra on the Tagus, to which place, and
I believe lower, _the Tagus is fordable during the summer_; and we
should be liable to be turned or cut off from Lisbon and the Tagus
if we were to take our line of defence higher upon the river.’

_Lord Wellington to general Hill, August._

‘I had already considered the possibility that Regnier might _move
across the fords of the Tagus at Vilha Velha_ and thus turn your
right.’

_Lord Wellington to general Hill, October._

‘If there are no boats, send them (the sick and encumbrances)
_across the Tagus by the ford_ (at Santarem).’

_Sir Arthur Wellesley to general Hill._

‘I have desired Murray to send you the copy of a plan we have,
_with some of the fords of the Tagus_ marked upon it, but I believe
_the whole river from Barquina to Santarem is fordable_.’

_Sir Arthur Wellesley to marshal Beresford._

‘I enclose a letter which colonel Fletcher has given me, _which
affords but a bad prospect of a defence for the Tagus_. I think
that if captain Chapman’s facts are true his arguments are
unanswerable, and that it is very doubtful whether any heavy
ordnance should be placed in the batteries on the upper Tagus.’

_Sir Arthur Wellesley to admiral Berkeley._

‘But if the invasion should be made in summer, _when the Tagus is
fordable in many places_.’... ‘In the event of the attack being
made _between the months of June and November_, when the _Tagus is
fordable, at least as low down as Salvaterra_ (near the lines).’

_Sir John Craddock to lord Castlereagh, April._

‘There is a ferry at Salvaterra, near Alcantara, and another up
the left bank of the Tagus in the Alemtejo, _where there is also a
ford_, and the river may be easily passed.’

_Extract from a Memoir by sir B. D’Urban, quarter-master-general
to Beresford’s army_:—‘_The Tagus_, between Golegao and Rio
Moinhos was _known to offer several fords after a few days’ dry
weather_.’[12]

Thus we see that, in nearly every month in the year, this unfordable Tagus of the reviewer is fordable in many places, and that in fact it is no barrier except in very heavy rains. But to render this still clearer I will here give one more and conclusive proof. In an elaborate manuscript memoir upon the defence of Portugal, drawn up by the celebrated general Dumourier for the duke of Wellington, that officer argues like this reviewer, that the Tagus is unfordable and a strong barrier. But a marginal note in Wellington’s hand-writing runs thus:—‘_He (Dumourier) does not seem to be aware of the real state of the Tagus at any season_.’

What can I say more? Nothing upon this head, but much upon others. I can call upon the reader to trace the deceitful mode in which the reviewer perverts or falsifies my expressions throughout. How he represents the Spaniards at one moment so formidable as to resist successfully the utmost efforts of more than 300,000 soldiers, the next breath calls them a poor unarmed horde of peasants incapable of making any resistance at all. How he quotes me as stating that the ministers had unbounded confidence in the success of the struggle in Spain; whereas my words are, that the ministers _professed_ unbounded confidence. How he represents me as saying, the _Cabinet_ were too much dazzled to analyse the real causes of the Spanish Revolution; whereas it was the _nation_ not the _Cabinet_ of which I spoke. And this could not be mistaken, because I had described the ministers as only anxious to pursue a warlike system necessary to their own existence, and that they were actuated by a personal hatred of Napoleon. Again, how he misrepresents me as wishing the British to _seize_ Cadiz, and speaks of a _mob_ in that city, when I have spoken only of the _people_ (oh, true Tory!); and never proposed to seize Cadiz at all, and have also given the unexceptionable authority of Mr. Stuart, general M‘Kenzie, and sir George Smith, for my statement. And here I will notice a fine specimen of this reviewer’s mode of getting up a case. Having undertaken to prove that every river in Portugal is a barrier, except the Zezere which I had fixed upon as being an important line, he gives an extract of a letter from lord Wellington to a general _Smith_, to the effect that, as the Zezere might be _turned at that season_ in so many ways, he did not wish to construct works to defend it then. Now, first, it is necessary to inform the reader that there is no letter to general Smith. The letter in question was to general Leith, and the _mistake_ was not without its object, namely, to prevent any curious person from discovering that the very next sentence is as follows:—‘If, however, this work can be performed, either by the peasantry or by the troops, without any great inconvenience, _the line of the Zezere may, hereafter, become of very great importance_.’

All this is very pitiful, and looks like extreme soreness in the reviewer; but the effrontery with which he perverts my statements about the Austrian war surpasses all his other efforts in that line, and deserves a more elaborate exposure.

In my history it is stated, that some obscure intrigues of the princess of Tour and Taxis, and the secret societies on the continent, emanating from patrician sources, excited the sympathy, and nourished certain _distempered feelings_ in the English ministers, _which feeling_ made them see only weakness and disaffection in France. This I stated, because I knew that those intrigues were, in fact, a conspiracy concocted, with Talleyrand’s connivance, for the dethronement of Napoleon; and the English ministers neglected Spain and every other part of their foreign affairs for the moment, so intent were they upon this foolish scheme and so sanguine of success. These facts are not known to many, but they are true.

In the same paragraph of my history it is said, the _warlike preparations of Austria_, and the reputation of the archduke Charles, whose talents were foolishly said to exceed Napoleon’s, _had awakened the dormant spirit of coalitions_; meaning, as would be evident to any persons not wilfully blind, had awakened that dormant spirit in the English ministers.

Now reader, mark the candour and simplicity of the reviewer. He says that I condemned these ministers, ‘for nourishing their distempered feelings _by combining the efforts of a German monarch in favour of national independence_.’ As if it were the _Austrian war_, and not the _obscure intrigues for dethroning Napoleon_ that the expression of _distempered feelings_ applied to. As if the awakening the _dormant spirit of coalitions_, instead of being a reference to the sentiments of the English ministers, meant the exciting the Austrians and other nations to war, and the forming of a vast plan of action by those ministers! And for fear any mistake on that head should arise, it is so asserted in another part of the review in the following terms:—

‘_To have “awakened the dormant spirit”_ of _coalitions_, is
another of the crimes which the British ministers are charged
with, as if it would have been a proof of wisdom to have abstained
from _forming a combination of those states of Europe which still
retained some degree of independence and magnanimity to resist a
conqueror_,’ &c. &c.—_Review._

The Quarterly’s attention to Spanish affairs seems to have rendered it very intimate with the works of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto. But since it has thus claimed the Austrian war as the work of its former patrons, the ministers of 1809, I will throw some new light upon the history of that period, which, though they should prove little satisfactory to the Quarterly, may, as the details are really curious, in some measure repay the reader for his patience in wading through the tedious exposition of this silly and unscrupulous writer’s misrepresentations.

After the conference of Erfurth, the Austrian count Stadion, a man of ability and energy, either believing, or affecting to believe, that Napoleon was determined to destroy Austria and only waited until Spain was conquered, resolved to employ the whole force of the German empire against the French monarch in a war of destruction for one or other of the contending states. With this view his first efforts were directed to change the opinions of the archduke Charles and those immediately about him who were averse to a war; and though he was long and vigorously resisted by general Grün, an able man and the archduke’s confidant, he finally succeeded. Some time before this France had insisted upon a reduction of the Austrian forces, and being asked if she would do the same for the sake of peace, replied that she would maintain no more troops in Germany than should be found necessary; but the army of the Confederation must be kept up as a constitutional force, and it was impossible during the war with England to reduce the French troops in other quarters. To this succeeded an attempt at a triple treaty, by which the territories of Austria, Russia, and France, were to be mutually guaranteed. Champagny and Romanzow suggested this plan, but the Austrian minister did not conceive Russia strong enough to guarantee Austria against France. Stadion’s project was more agreeable, and a note of a declaration of war was sent to Metternich, then at Paris, to deliver to the French government. The archduke Charles set off for the army, and was followed by the emperor.

When the war was thus resolved upon, it remained to settle whether it should be carried on for the sole benefit of Austria, or in such a manner as to interest other nations. Contrary to her usual policy Austria decided for the latter, and contrary to her usual parsimony she was extremely liberal to her general officers and spies. It was determined that the war should be one of restitution, and in that view secret agents had gone to Italy, and were said to have made great progress in exciting the people; officers had been also sent to Sicily and Sardinia to urge those courts to attempt their own restoration to the continental thrones. The complete restoration of Naples, of Tuscany, and the Pope’s dominions, and large additions to the old kingdom of Piedmont were proposed, and Austria herself only demanded a secure frontier, namely, the Tyrol, the river Po, and the Chiusa, which was not much more than the peace of Campo Formio had left her.

Such were her views in the south where kings were to be her coadjutors, but in the north she was intent upon a different plan. There she expected help from the people, who were discontented at being parcelled out by Napoleon. Treaties were entered into with the elector of Hesse, the dukes of Brunswick and Oels, and it was understood that the people there and in the provinces taken from Prussia, were ready to rise on the first appearance of an Austrian soldier. Hanover was to be restored to England; but Austria was so discontented with the Prussian king, that the restoration of the Prussian provinces, especially the duchy of Warsaw, was to depend upon his conduct in the war.

The means of effecting this mighty project were the great resources which Stadion had found or created; they were greater than Austria had ever before produced and the enthusiasm of her people was in proportion. The landwehr levy had been calculated at only 150 battalions; it produced 300 battalions, besides the Hungarian insurrection. The regular army was complete in everything, and the cavalry good, though not equal to what it had been in former wars. There were nine ‘_corps d’armée_.’ The archduke Ferdinand with one was to strike a blow in the duchy of Warsaw. The archduke Charles commanded in chief. Marching with six corps, containing 160,000 regular troops besides the landwehr attached to them, he was to cross the frontier and fall on the French army, supposed to be only 40,000. That is to say, the first corps, under Belgarde and Klenau, were to march by Peterwalde and Dresden against Bernadotte who was in that quarter. The second corps, under Kollowrath and Brady, were to march by Eger upon Bareith and Wurzburg, to prevent the union of Davoust and Bernadotte. The third corps, under prince Rosenberg, was to move by Waldmunchen, in the Upper Palatinate, and after beating Wrede at Straubingen, to join the archduke Charles near Munich. The archduke himself was to proceed against that city with the reserves of prince John of Lichtenstein, Hiller’s corps, Stipchitz, and those of Hohenzollern’s, and the archduke Louis’. The archduke John was to attack Italy; and the different corps, exclusive of landwehr, amounted to not less than 260,000 men.

The project was gigantic, the force prodigious, and though the quarter-master-general Meyer, seeing the vice of the military plan, resigned his situation, and that Meerfelt quarrelled with the archduke Charles, the general feeling was high and sanguine; and the princes of the empire were, with the exception of Wirtemberg and Westphalia, thought to be rather favourable towards the Austrians. But all the contributions were in kind; Austria had only a depreciated paper currency which would not serve her beyond her own frontiers; wherefore England, at that time the paymaster of all Europe, was looked to. England, however, had no ambassador, no regular accredited agent at Vienna; all this mighty armament and plan were carried on without her aid, almost without her knowledge; and a despatch from the Foreign Office, dated the 8th of December, but which only arrived the 10th of March, _refused all aid whatsoever! and even endeavoured to prove that Austria could not want, and England was not in a situation to grant_. Yet this was the period in which such lavish grants had been made to Spain without any condition—so lavish, that, in Cadiz, nearly four hundred thousand pounds, received from England, was lying untouched by the Spaniards. They were absolutely glutted with specie, for they had, at that moment, of their own money, and lying idle in their treasury, _fourteen millions of dollars_, and _ten millions more were on the way from Vera Cruz and Buenes Ayres_. Such was the wisdom, such the providence of the English ministers! heaping money upon money at Cadiz, where it was not wanted, and if it had been wanted, ill bestowed; but refusing it to Austria to forward the explosion of the enormous mine prepared against Napoleon in Germany and Italy. Their agent, Mr. Frere, absolutely refused even to ask for a loan of some of this money from the Spaniards. This is what the reviewer, wilfully perverting my expression, namely, ‘_awakened the dormant spirit of coalitions_,’ calls ‘_the forming a combination of the states of Europe_!’ The English ministers were treated as mere purse-bearers, to be bullied or cajoled as the case might be; and in these two instances, not without reason, for they neither know how to give nor how to refuse in the right time or place. Nor were their military dispositions better arranged, as we shall presently see.

To proceed with our narrative. Stadion, to prevent the mischief which this despatch from England might have produced, by encouraging the peace-party at the court, and discouraging the others, only imparted it to the emperor and his secret council, but hid it from those members of the cabinet who were wavering. Even this was like to have cost him his place; and some members of the council actually proposed to reduce one-third of the army. In fine, a cry was arising against the war, but the emperor declared himself on Stadion’s side, and the cabinet awaited the result of count Walmoden’s mission to London. That nobleman had been despatched with full powers to conclude a treaty of alliance and subsidy with England, and to learn the feeling of the English cabinet upon an extraordinary measure which Austria had resorted to; for being utterly unable to pay her way at the outset, and trusting to the importance of the crisis, and not a little to the known facility with which the English ministers lavished their subsidies, she had resolved to raise, through the principal bankers in Vienna, £150,000 a month, by making drafts through Holland upon their correspondents in London, _to be repaid from the subsidy_ TO BE granted by England! Prince Staremberg was sent at the same time with a special mission to London, to arrange a definite treaty for money, and a convention regulating the future object and conduct of the war—a very curious proceeding—because Staremberg had been recalled before for conduct offensive to the English cabinet; but he was well acquainted with London, and the emperor wished to get him away lest he should put himself at the head of the peace-party in Vienna. Thus the English ministers continued so to conduct their affairs, that, while they gave their money to Spain and their advice to Austria, and both unprofitably, they only excited the contempt of both countries.

From the conference of Erfurth, France had been earnest with Russia to take an active part, according to treaty, against Austria; and Romanzow, who was an enemy of England, increased Alexander’s asperity toward that country, but nothing was done against Austria; and when Caulaincourt, the French ambassador at Petersburg, became clamorous, Alexander pretended to take the Austrian ambassador Swartzenberg to task for the measures of his court, but really gave him encouragement, by repairing immediately afterwards to Finland without inviting Caulaincourt. A contemporaneous official note, from Romanzow to Austria, was indeed couched in terms to render the intention of Alexander apparently doubtful, but this was only a blind for Napoleon. There was no doubt of the favourable wishes and feelings of the court, the Russian troops in Poland did not stir, and Stadion, far from having any dread of them, calculated upon their assistance in case of any marked success in the outset. The emperor Alexander was, however, far from inattentive to his own interests, for he sent general Hitroff at this time to Turkey to demand Moldavia and Wallachia as the price of a treaty, hoping thus to snatch these countries during the general commotion. He was foiled by the Austrian cabinet, which secretly directed the Turks sent to meet Hitroff, to assume a high tone and agree to no negociation in which England was not a party: hence, when the Russians demanded the dismissal of Mr. Adair from Constantinople Hitroff was himself sent away.

While the affairs with Russia were in this state, the present king of Holland arrived, incognito, at Vienna, to offer his services either as heir to the stadtholdership, as a prince of the German empire, or as a near and confidential connection of the house of Brandenberg; but it was only in the latter view he could be useful, and it was evident he expected the Austrian court would make their policy in the north coincide with that of the Prussian court. He said the secret voyage of the royal family to Petersburg had exposed them to mortifications and slights which had changed the sentiments of both the king and queen towards France, and the queen, bowed down by misfortune, dreaded new reverses and depressed the spirit of the king. They stood alone in their court, ministers and officers alike openly maintained opinions diametrically opposed to the sovereign, and at a grand council held in Koningsberg every minister had voted for war with Napoleon. The king assented, but the next day the queen induced him to retract. However, the voice of the people and of the army was for war, and any order to join the troops to those of the Rhenish confederation was sure to produce an explosion. There were between 30,000 and 40,000 regular troops under arms, and Austria was assured, that if any Austrian force approached the frontier, the Prussian soldiers would, bag and baggage, join it, despite of king or queen.

In this state of affairs, and when a quarrel had arisen between Bernadotte and the Saxon king (for the people of that country were ill-disposed towards the French), it is evident that a large English army appearing in the north of Germany would have gathered around it all the people and armies of the north, and accordingly Stadion proposed a landing in the Weser and the Elbe. Now England had at that time the great armament which went to Walcheren, the army under Wellington in the Peninsula, and that under sir John Stuart in Sicily, that is to say, she had about 80,000 or 90,000 men disposable; and yet so contriving were the ministers, that they kept Wellington too weak in Spain, Stuart too strong in Sicily; and instead of acting in the north of Germany where such a great combination awaited them, they sent their most powerful force to perish in the marshes of Walcheren, where the only diversion they caused was the bringing together a few thousand national guards from the nearest French departments. And this the reviewer calls ‘_the forming a combination of those states in Europe which still retained some degree of independence and magnanimity to resist the ambition of a conqueror_.’ What a profound, modest, and, to use a Morning Post compound, not-at-all-a-flagitious writer this reviewer is.

Well, notwithstanding this grand ‘_combination_,’ things did not turn out well. The Austrians changed their first plan of campaign in several particulars. Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly appeared at the head of his army, which, greatly inferior in number, and composed principally of German contingents, was not very well disposed towards him; and yet, such was the stupendous power of this man’s genius and bravery, he in a few days by a series of movements unequalled in skill by any movement known in military records, broke through the Austrian power, separated her armies, drove them in disorder before him, and seized Vienna; and but for an accident, one of those minor accidents so frequent in war, which enabled the archduke Charles to escape over the Danube at Ratisbon, he would have terminated this gigantic contest in ten days. The failure there led to the battle of Esling, where the sudden swell of the Danube again baffled him and produced another crisis, which might have been turned to his hurt if the English army had been in the north of Germany; but it was then perishing amongst the stagnant ditches of Walcheren, and the only combination of the English ministers to be discovered was a combination of folly, arrogance, and conceit. I have now done with the review. Had all the objections contained in it been true, it would have evinced the petty industry of a malicious mind more than any just or generous interest in the cause of truth; but being, as I have demonstrated, false even in the minutest particular, I justly stigmatise it as remarkable only for malignant imbecility and systematic violation of truth.

* * * * *

The reviewers having asserted that I picked out of Foy’s history the charge against lord Melville of saying “the worst men made the best soldiers,” I replied that I drew for it on my own clear recollection of the fact.

Since then a friend has sent me the report of lord Melville’s speech, extracted from the Annual Register (Baldwin’s) 1808, p. 112, and the following passage extracted from his lordship’s speech bears out my assertion and proves the effrontery with which the reviewers deny facts.

“What was meant by a better sort of men? Was it that they should be
taller or shorter, broader or thinner? This might be intelligible,
but it was not the fact. The men that had hitherto formed the
British armies were men of stout hearts and habits; men of spirit
and courage; lovers of bold enterprize. These were the materials of
which an army must be composed. Give him such men though not of the
better description. _The worse men were the fittest for soldiers._
Keep the better sort at home.”

HISTORY

OF THE

WAR IN THE PENINSULA.

HISTORY

OF THE

PENINSULAR WAR.