A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 5, Oct. 1811-Aug. 31, 1812

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

CATALONIA AND ARAGON

The chronicle of the obstinate and heroic defence made by the Catalans, even after the falls of Tarragona and Figueras had seemed to make all further resistance hopeless, was carried in the last volume of this work down to October 28, 1811, when Marshal Macdonald, like St. Cyr and Augereau, was recalled to Paris, having added no more to his reputation than had his predecessors while in charge of this mountainous principality. We have seen how General Lacy, hoping against hope, rallied the last remnants of the old Catalan army, and recommenced (just as Macdonald was departing) a series of small enterprises against the scattered French garrisons. He had won several petty successes in evicting the enemy from Cervera, Igualada, and Belpuig—the small strongholds which covered the main line of communication east and west, through the centre of the land, between Lerida and Barcelona. The enemy had even been forced to evacuate the holy mountain of Montserrat, the strongest post on the whole line.

Hence when, in November, General Decaen arrived to take over Macdonald’s task, he found before him a task not without serious difficulties, though the actual force of Spaniards in the field was far less than it had been before the disasters at Tarragona and Figueras. Lacy had a very small field army—he had reorganized 8,000 men by October, and all through his command the total did not grow very much greater. When he handed over his office to Copons fifteen months after, there were no more than 14,000 men under arms, including cadres and recruits. On the other hand he had a central position, a free range east and west, now that the line of French posts across Catalonia had been broken, and several points of more or less safe access to the sea. Munitions and stores, and occasionally very small reinforcements from the Balearic Isles, were still brought over by the British squadron which ranged along the coast. Some of the officers, especially the much tried and never-despairing Eroles, and the indefatigable Manso, were thoroughly to be relied upon, and commanded great local popularity. This Lacy himself did not possess—he was obeyed because of his stern resolve, but much disliked for his autocratic and dictatorial ways, which kept him in constant friction with the Junta that sat at Berga. Moreover he was a stranger, while the Catalans disliked all leaders who were not of their own blood: and he was strongly convinced that the brunt of the fighting must be borne by the regular troops, while the popular voice was all in favour of the somatenes and guerrilleros, and against the enforcement of conscription. Much was to be said on either side: the warfare of the irregulars was very harassing to the French, and had led to many petty successes, and one great one—the capture of Figueras. On the other hand these levies were irresponsible and untrustworthy when any definite operation was in hand: they might, or they might not, turn up in force when they were required: the frank disregard of their chiefs for punctuality or obedience drove to wild rage any officer who had served in the old army. With regular troops it was possible to calculate that a force would be where it was wanted to be at a given time, and would at least attempt to carry out its orders: with the somatenes it was always possible, nay probable, that some petty quarrel of rival chiefs, or some rival attraction of an unforeseen sort, would lead to non-appearance. To this there was the easy reply that ever since Blake first tried to make the Catalans work ‘militarmente and not paisanmente’ the regular army for some two years had never gained a single battle, nor relieved a single fortress[84]. The best plan would probably have been to attempt to combine the two systems: it was absolutely necessary to have a nucleus of regular troops, but unwise to act like Blake and Lacy, who tried to break up and discourage the somatenes, in order that they might be forced into the battalions of the standing army. The constant series of defeats on record had been caused rather by the unskilful and over-ambitious operations of the generals than by their insisting on keeping up the regular troops, who had behaved well enough on many occasions. But too much had been asked of them when, half-trained and badly led, they were brought into collision with the veterans of France, without the superiority of numbers which alone could make up for their military faults.

Since the capture of Cervera, Belpuig, and Igualada in October, the territories held by the French in Catalonia fell into two separate and divided sections. On the western side, adjacent to Aragon, Frère’s division, left behind by Suchet, garrisoned Lerida, Tarragona, and Tortosa: though it was a powerful force of over 7,000 men, it could do little more than occupy these three large places, each requiring several battalions. At the best it could only furnish very small flying columns to keep up the communication between them. It was hard to maintain touch with the other group of French fortresses, along the sea-coast road from Tarragona to Barcelona, which were often obsessed by Spanish bands, and always liable to be molested by Edward Codrington’s British ships, which sailed up and down the shore looking for detachments or convoys to shell. The fort of the Col de Balaguer, twenty miles north of Tortosa, was the look-out point towards Tarragona and the sole French outpost in that direction.

In eastern Catalonia the newly-arrived commander, General Decaen (a veteran whose last work had been the hopeless defence of Bourbon and Mauritius, where he had capitulated in 1810), had some 24,000 men in hand. But he was much hampered by the necessity for holding and feeding the immense Barcelona, a turbulent city which absorbed a whole division for its garrison. It was constantly on the edge of starvation, and was only revictualled with great trouble by vessels sailing from the ports of Languedoc, of which more than half were habitually captured by the British, or by heavy convoys labouring across the hills from Gerona, which were always harassed, and sometimes taken wholesale, by the Spanish detachments told off by Lacy for this end. Gerona and Figueras, both fortresses of considerable size, absorbed several battalions each. Smaller garrisons had also to be kept in Rosas, Hostalrich, Mataro, and Montlouis, and there were many other fortified posts which guarded roads or passes, and were worth holding. It was with difficulty that 6,000 or 8,000 men could be collected for a movable field-force, even by borrowing detachments from the garrisons. An additional nuisance cropped up just as Decaen took over the command: Lacy, seeing that the Pyrenean passes were thinly manned, sent Eroles with 3,000 men to raid the valleys of Cerdagne on the French side of the hills. The invaders beat two battalions of national guards near Puigcerda, and swept far down the valley (October 29-November 2), returning with thousands of sheep and cattle and a large money contribution levied from the villages. This raid (which enraged Napoleon[85]) made it necessary to guard the Pyrenees better, and to send up more national guards from the frontier departments.

Thus it came to pass that though Lacy had no more than 8,000 men available, and no fortress of any strength to serve as his base (Cardona and Seu d’Urgel, his sole strongholds, were mediaeval strongholds with no modern works), he paralysed the French force which, between Lerida and Figueras, could show more than three times that strength. Such was the value of the central position, and the resolute hatred of the countryside for its oppressors. Catalonia could only be held down by garrisoning every village—and if the army of occupation split itself up into garrisons it was helpless. Hence, during the winter of 1811-12 and the spring and summer of the following year, it may be said that the initiative lay with the Catalans, and that the enemy (despite of his immensely superior numbers) was on the defensive. The helplessness of the French was sufficiently shown by the fact that from June to December 1811 Barcelona was completely cut off from communication with Gerona and France. It was only in the latter month that Decaen, hearing that the place was on the edge of starvation, marched with the bulk of Lamarque’s division from Upper Catalonia to introduce a convoy; while Maurice Mathieu, the governor of Barcelona, came out with 3,000 men of the garrison to meet him, as far as Cardadeu. Lacy, determined that nothing short of a vigorous push by the enemy should make their junction possible, and relieve Barcelona, offered opposition in the defile of the Trentapassos, where Vives had tried to stop St. Cyr two years back, showing a front both to Decaen and to Mathieu. But on recognizing the very superior numbers of the enemy he wisely withdrew, or he would have been caught between the two French columns. Decaen therefore was able to enter Barcelona with his immense convoy. [December 3rd-4th, 1811.] The Spaniards retreated into the inland; their headquarters on the first day of the New Year were at Vich.

There being no further profit in pressing Barcelona for the time being, Lacy, in January, resolved to turn his attention to the much weaker garrison of Tarragona, which belonged to Frère’s division and Suchet’s army, and was not under Decaen’s immediate charge. Its communications with Lerida and Tortosa were hazardous, and its stores were running low. The Spanish general therefore (about January 2) sent down Eroles’s division to Reus, a few miles inland from Tarragona, with orders to cut all the roads leading into that fortress. The place was already in a parlous condition for want of food, and its governor had sent representations to Suchet that he was in need of instant succour. Therefore the moment that Valencia fell, the Marshal directed Musnier, whose division he had told off to hold the sea-coast between the Ebro and Guadalaviar, to march with the bulk of his men to Tortosa, to pick up what reinforcements he could from its garrison, and to open the road from thence to Tarragona.

Lafosse, the governor of Tortosa, was so impressed with the danger of his colleague in Tarragona, that he marched ahead along the coast-road before Musnier arrived, and reached the Col de Balaguer with a battalion of the 121st regiment and one troop of dragoons on January 18. Here he should have waited for the main column, but receiving false news that Eroles had left Reus and returned to the north, he resolved to push on ahead and clear the way for Musnier, believing that nothing but local somatenes were in front of him. He had reached Villaseca, only seven miles from Tarragona, when he was suddenly surprised by Eroles descending on his flank with over 3,000 men. He himself galloped on with the dragoons towards Tarragona, and escaped, with only twenty-two men, into the fortress. But his battalion, after barricading itself in Villaseca village and making a good resistance for some hours, was forced to surrender. Eroles took nearly 600 prisoners, and over 200 French had fallen. Lafosse, sallying from Tarragona with all that could be spared from the garrison, arrived too late to help his men, and had to return in haste [January 19][86].

Tarragona now seemed in imminent danger, and both Musnier at Tortosa and Maurice Mathieu at Barcelona saw that they must do their best to relieve the place, or it would be starved out. Musnier spent so much time in organizing a convoy that he was late, and the actual opening of the road was carried out by the governor of Barcelona. That great city chanced to be crammed with troops at the moment, since Lamarque’s division, which had escorted the December convoy, was still lying within its walls. Maurice Mathieu, therefore, was able to collect 8,000 men for the march on Tarragona. Eroles, unfortunately for himself, was not aware of this, and believing that the enemy was a mere sally of the Barcelona garrison, offered them battle at Altafulla on January 24. The French had marched by night, and a fog chanced to prevent the Catalans from recognizing the strength of the two columns that were approaching them. Eroles found himself committed to a close fight with double his own numbers, and after a creditable resistance was routed, losing his only two guns and the rearguard with which he tried to detain the enemy. His troops only escaped by breaking up and flying over the hills, in what a French eye-witness described as un sauve-qui-peut général. About 600 of them in all were slain or taken: the rest assembled at Igualada three days later. Eroles blamed Lacy and Sarsfield for his disaster, asserting that the Captain-General had promised to send the division of the latter to his help. But his anger appears to have been misplaced, for at this very time Decaen, to make a division in favour of Maurice Mathieu’s movement, had sent out two columns from Gerona and Figueras into Upper Catalonia. They occupied Vich, Lacy’s recent head-quarters, on January 22, two days before the combat of Altafulla, and Sarsfield’s troops were naturally sent to oppose them. After wasting the upper valleys, Decaen drew back to Gerona and Olot on the 29th, having sufficiently achieved his purpose. Tarragona, meanwhile, was thoroughly revictualled by Musnier, who brought up a large convoy from Tortosa. Reinforcements were also thrown into the place, and a new governor, General Bertoletti, who was to distinguish himself by a spirited defence in the following year.

In February the whole situation of affairs in Aragon and western Catalonia (eastern Catalonia was less affected), was much modified by the return from the south of the numerous troops which had been lent to Suchet for his Valencian expedition. It will be remembered that Napoleon had ordered that Reille should march back to the Ebro with his own and Severoli’s divisions, and that shortly afterwards he directed that Palombini’s division should follow the other two into Aragon. Thus a very large body of troops was once more available for the subjection of Aragon and western Catalonia, which, since Reille’s departure in December, had been very inadequately garrisoned by Caffarelli’s and Frère’s battalions, and had been overrun in many districts by the bands of the Empecinado, Duran, Mina, and the Conde de Montijo. Napoleon’s new plan was to rearrange the whole of the troops in eastern Spain.

Reille was to be the chief of a new ‘Army of the Ebro,’ composed of four field divisions—his own, Palombini’s and Severoli’s Italians, and a new composite one under General Ferino constructed from so many of Frère’s troops as could be spared from garrison duty (seven battalions of the 14th and 115th of the line), and six more battalions (1st Léger and 5th of the line) taken half from Musnier’s division of Suchet’s army and half from Maurice Mathieu’s Barcelona garrison[87]. This last division never came into existence, as Suchet and Maurice Mathieu both found themselves too weak to give up the requisitioned regiments, which remained embodied respectively with the Valencian and Catalan armies. Nevertheless Reille had more than 20,000 men actually in hand, not including the fixed garrisons of Tarragona, Lerida, and the other fortresses on the borders of Aragon and Catalonia. This, when it is remembered that Caffarelli was still holding the Saragossa district, seemed an adequate force with which to make an end of the guerrilleros of Aragon, and then to complete, in conjunction with Decaen’s Corps, the subjection of inland Catalonia. For this last operation was to be the final purpose of Reille: while Decaen was to attack Lacy from the eastern side, Reille (with Lerida as his base) was to fall on from the west, to occupy Urgel and Berga (the seat of the Catalan Junta and the centre of organized resistance), and to join hands with Decaen across the crushed remnants of the Spanish army[88]. So sure did the Emperor feel that the last elements of Catalan resistance were now to be destroyed, that he gave orders for the issue of the proclamation (drawn up long before[89]) by which the Principality was declared to be united to the French empire. It was to be divided into the four departments of the Ter [capital Gerona], Montserrat [capital Barcelona], Bouches-de-l’Ebre [capital Lerida], and Segre [capital Puigcerda]. Prefects and other officials were appointed for each department, and justice was to be administered in the name of the Emperor. The humour of the arrangement (which its creator most certainly failed to see) was that three-fourths of the territory of each department was in the hands of the patriots whom he styled rebels, and that none of his prefects could have gone ten miles from his chef-lieu without an escort of 200 men, under pain of captivity or death.

Reille’s start was much delayed by the fact that one of his French brigades had been told off to serve as escort to the mass of Blake’s prisoners from Valencia, and could not get quit of them till, marching by Teruel, it had handed them over for transference beyond the Pyrenees to the garrison of Saragossa. Of his two Italian divisions, Palombini’s was instructed to devote itself to the clearing of southern Aragon, and the opening up of the communications between the French garrisons of Daroca, Teruel, and Calatayud. The other, Severoli’s, called off from the siege of Peniscola, which had originally been entrusted to it[90], marched for Lerida in two columns, the one by the sea-coast and Tortosa, the other inland, by way of Morella and Mequinenza. When his troops had begun to concentrate on the borders of Aragon and Catalonia, in and about Lerida, Reille began operations by sending a column, one French brigade and one Italian regiment, to attack the ubiquitous Eroles, who, since his defeat at Altafulla a month before, had betaken himself to the inland, and the rough country along the valleys of the two Nogueras, with the object of covering Catalonia on its western front.

This expedition, entrusted to the French brigadier Bourke, ended in an unexpected check: Eroles offered battle with 3,000 men in a strong position at Roda, with a torrent bed covering his front (March 5). Bourke, having far superior numbers, and not aware of the tenacity of the Catalan troops, whom he had never before encountered, ordered a general frontal attack by battalions of the 60th French and 7th Italian line. It was handsomely repulsed, with such heavy loss—600 casualties it is said—that the French retreated as far as Barbastro, pursued for some distance by the troops of Eroles, who thus showed that their late disaster had not impaired their morale[91]. This was a most glorious day for the Baron, one of the few leaders of real capacity whom the war in Catalonia revealed. He had been a civilian in 1808, and had to learn the elements of military art under chiefs as incapable as Blake and Campoverde. From a miquelete chief he rose to be a general in the regular army, purely by the force of his unconquerable pertinacity and a courage which no disasters could break. As a local patriot he had an advantage in dealing with his Catalan countrymen, which strangers like Reding, Blake, Lacy, or Sarsfield never possessed, and their confidence was never betrayed. A little active man of great vivacity, generally with a cigar in the corner of his mouth, and never long still, he was not only a good leader of irregular bands, but quite capable of understanding a strategical move, and of handling a division in a serious action. His self-abnegation during his service under chiefs whose plans were often unwise, and whose authority was often exercised in a galling fashion, was beyond all praise[92].

The check at Roda forced Reille to turn aside more troops against Eroles—practically the whole of Severoli’s division was added to the column which had just been defeated, and on March 13th such a force marched against him that he was compelled to retire, drawing his pursuers after him toward the upper course of the Noguera, and ultimately to seek refuge in the wilds of Talarn among the foot-hills of the higher Pyrenees. His operations with a trifling force paralysed nearly half Reille’s army during two critical months of the spring of 1812. Meanwhile, covered by his demonstration, Sarsfield executed a destructive raid across the French border, overran the valleys beyond Andorra, and exacted a ransom of 70,000 dollars from Foix, the chief town of the department of the Arriège (February 19). This was the best possible reply to Napoleon’s recent declaration that Catalonia had become French soil. The Emperor was naturally enraged; he reiterated his orders to Reille to ‘déloger les insurgents: il n’est que trop vrai qu’ils se nourrissent de France’—’il faut mettre un terme à ces insultes[93].’ But though Reille pushed his marches far into the remote mountainous districts where the borders of Aragon and Catalonia meet, he never succeeded in destroying the bands which he was set to hunt down: a trail of burnt villages marked his course, but it had no permanent result. The inhabitants descended from the hills, to reoccupy their fields and rebuild their huts, when he had passed by, and the insurgents were soon prowling again near the forts of Lerida, Barbastro, and Monzon.

Palombini in southern Aragon had equally unsatisfactory experiences. Coming up from Valencia by the high-road, he had reached Teruel on February 19th, and, after relieving and strengthening the garrison there, set out on a circular sweep, with the intention of hunting down Gayan and Duran—the Conde de Montijo had just returned to the Murcian army at this moment[94], while the Empecinado was out of the game for some weeks, being, as we shall presently see, busy in New Castile. But the movements of the Italian general were soon complicated by the fact that Villacampa, with the remnants of his division, had started from the neighbourhood of Alicante and Murcia much at the same time as himself, to seek once more his old haunts in Aragon. This division had given a very poor account of itself while serving as regular troops under Blake, but when it returned to its native mountains assumed a very different efficiency in the character of a large guerrilla band. Appearing at first only 2,000 strong, it recruited itself up to a much greater strength from local levies, and became no mean hindrance to Palombini’s operations.

On the 29th of February the Italian general relieved Daroca, and a few days later he occupied Calatayud, which had been left ungarrisoned since the disaster of the previous October[95]. After fortifying the convent of Nostra Señora de la Peña as a new citadel for this place, he split up his division into several small columns, which scoured the neighbourhood, partly to sweep in provisions for the post at Calatayud, partly to drive off the guerrilleros of the region. But to risk small detachments in Aragon was always a dangerous business; Villacampa, who had now come up from the south, cut off one body of 200 men at Campillo on March 5, and destroyed six companies at Pozohondon on the 28th of the same month. Taught prudence by these petty disasters, and by some less successful attacks on others of his flying columns, Palombini once more drew his men together, and concentrated them in the upland plain of Hused near Daroca. From thence he made another blow at Villacampa, who was at the same time attacked in the rear by a column sent up by Suchet from Valencia to Teruel. The Spaniard, however, easily avoided the attempt to surround him, and retired without much loss or difficulty into the wild Sierra de Albarracin (April 18th). Meanwhile, seeing Palombini occupied in hunting Villacampa, the guerrillero Gayan made a dash at the new garrison of Calatayud, and entering the city unexpectedly captured the governor and sixty men, but failed to reduce the fortified convent in which the rest of the Italians took refuge [April 29th]. He then sat down to besiege them, though he had no guns, and could work by mines alone: but Palombini soon sent a strong column under the brigadiers Saint Paul and Schiazzetti, who drove off Gayan and relieved Calatayud [May 9th].

Nevertheless three months had now gone by since the attempt to reduce southern Aragon began, and it was now obvious that it had been wholly unsuccessful. The hills and great part of the upland plains were still in the possession of the Spaniards, who had been often hunted but never caught nor seriously mishandled. Palombini owned nothing more than the towns which he had garrisoned, and the spot on which his head-quarters chanced for the moment to be placed. His strength was not sufficient to enable him to occupy every village, and without such occupation no conquest could take place. Moreover the time was at hand when Wellington’s operations in the West were to shake the fabric of French power all over Spain—even in the remote recesses of the Aragonese Sierras. Palombini was to be drawn off in July to join the Army of the Centre and to oppose the English. And with his departure such hold as the French possessed on the rugged region between Calatayud, Saragossa, and Teruel was to disappear.

It will be noted that during these operations of the spring no mention has been made of the Empecinado, who had been so prominent in this quarter during the preceding autumn and winter. This chief was now at the bottom of his fortunes: raiding in New Castile after his accustomed fashion, he had been completely defeated by General Guy and a column of King Joseph’s army near Siguenza (February 7). He lost 1,000 men, only saved his own person by throwing himself down an almost impracticable cliff, and saw his whole force dispersed. This affair is said to have been the result of treachery: one of the Empecinado’s lieutenants, a certain guerrillero leader named Albuir (better known as El Manco from having lost a hand) being taken prisoner a few days before, saved his neck by betraying his chief’s position and plans: hence the surprise. El Manco entered the King’s service and raised a ‘counter-guerrilla’ band, with which he did considerable harm for a space. The Empecinado had only collected 600 men even by April, when he joined Villacampa and aided him in a raid round Guadalajara[96].

Mina, on the other hand, the greatest of all the partisans, was doing some of his best service to the cause of liberty during the early months of 1812. This was the period when he was conducting his bloody campaign of reprisals against Abbé, the governor of Navarre, who had published in December 1811 the celebrated proclamation which not only prohibited any quarter for guerrilleros, but made their families and villages responsible for them, and authorized the execution of ‘hostages’ levied on them, as well as the infliction of crushing fines. Mina replied by the formal declaration of a ‘war of extermination against all French without distinction of rank,’ and started the system of shooting four prisoners for every Spaniard, soldier or civilian, executed by the enemy. This he actually carried out for some months, till the French proclamation was withdrawn. The most horrid incident of this reign of terror was the shooting by the French, on March 21, of the four members of the ‘insurrectional junta’ of the province of Burgos, all magistrates and civilians, whom they had captured in a raid, and the counter-execution of eighty French soldiers by the Curate Merino, one of Mina’s colleagues, a few days later. This time of atrocities ended shortly after, when Abbé withdrew his proclamation and Mina followed his example.

On the departure of Reille’s troops from Valencia it will be remembered that one of his French brigades, that of Pannetier, had been sent as escort to the captive Spaniards of Blake’s army. While the remainder of the new ‘Army of the Ebro’ went off in the direction of Lerida, as has already been seen, this brigade was turned aside against Mina. Dorsenne at the same time directed the greater part of his available field-force to join in the hunt, and all such of Caffarelli’s troops as were not shut up in garrisons were told off for the same purpose. These detachments, when added to the normal force of occupation in Navarre and Biscay, made up in all some 30,000 men. Divided into many columns, each of which was strong enough to face the 3,000 or 4,000 irregulars under Mina’s command, they endeavoured to converge upon him, and to enclose him within the net of their operations. The chase was very hot in March: on the first of that month Caffarelli invaded the remote Pyrenean valley of Roncal, where it had been discovered that Mina kept his dépôts, his ammunition factory, and his hospitals. The valley was swept clean, but no appreciable number of the guerrilleros were captured. On the 24th, however, it looked as if disaster was impending, as three columns under Abbé, Dumoustier (who had a brigade of the Young Guard), and Laferrière had succeeded in disposing themselves around Mina’s main body, between Sanguessa and Ochagavia. The guerrillero, however, saved himself by a night march of incredible difficulty across impracticable hills, and got away into Aragon. He was lost to sight, and was believed to have been too harassed to be formidable for many a day.

Such was not the true state of affairs. Mina at once came back to his old haunts, by a circuitous march through southern Navarre, and on April 9th performed one of his most notable exploits. On that day he surprised an immense convoy of convalescents, civilians, baggage, and food-stuffs, which was marching from Vittoria to Mondragon, in the Pass of Salinas (or Puerto de Arlaban). Though escorted by 2,000 men (including the whole of the 7th Polish regiment just drawn off from Soult for the Russian war), it was completely destroyed. Five hundred of the Poles were slain, 150 captured, and an enormous booty, including (it is said) several hundred thousand francs in cash, fell into Mina’s hands. He also delivered 450 Spanish prisoners, who were being conducted to captivity beyond the Pyrenees.

Such an exploit naturally drew down once more upon Mina the attention of all the neighbouring French commanders: Dorsenne and Reille again sent columns to aid the governor of Navarre, and from the 23rd to the 28th of April Mina was being hunted by powerful detachments converging on him from all sides[97]. He himself was very nearly captured at Robres by General Pannetier—who surprised him at dawn, helped by treachery on the part of a subordinate guerrillero chief, and dispersed his followers for the moment[98]. But all who were not slain or captured rallied around their indomitable leader, and followed him in a hazardous retreat, in which he threaded his way between the converging columns of the French and ultimately escaped to the Rioja. He asserts in his Memoirs, and with truth, that he was at this time of the highest service to Wellington’s main operations, since he attracted and detained beyond the Ebro such a large proportion of Dorsenne’s Army of the North, that in April and May it had not a man to spare to help Marmont. Even Dumoustier’s Guard division, under orders to return to France for the Russian war, was put into the pack of pursuers who tried in vain to hunt him down.

To sum up the results of all the operations in Catalonia, Aragon, and Navarre, which followed on the release of Reille’s troops from the Valencian expedition, it may be said that Napoleon’s scheme for the complete reduction of north-eastern Spain had completely failed by April. Large forces had been put in motion; toilsome marches had been executed over many mountain roads in the worst season of the year; all the bands of the insurgents had been more than once defeated and dispersed. But the country-side was not conquered: the isolated garrisons were still cut off from each other by the enemy, wherever the heavy marching columns had passed on. The communications were no more safe and free than they had been in December. The loss of men by sickness and in the innumerable petty combats and disasters had been immense. The game had yet to be finished, and the spare time in which it could be conducted was drawing to an end. For Wellington was on the march, and ere long not a man from the Armies of the North or the Centre was to be available to aid Reille, Suchet, and Decaen in their unending and ungrateful task. Gone, too, were the days in which reserves without end could be poured in from France: the Russian war was about to open, and when once it began reinforcements were to be drawn from Spain rather than sent into it. The invasion had reached its high-water mark in January 1812 before the walls of Valencia and Alicante.

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SECTION XXXI: CHAPTER II

OPERATIONS OF SOULT IN ANDALUSIA: THE SIEGE OF TARIFA, DEC. 1811-JAN. 1812

In the south-west no less than in the south-east of Spain the month of January 1812 was to witness the last offensive movement of the French armies of invasion. But while Suchet’s advance ended, as we have seen, in a splendid success, that of Soult was to meet with a disastrous check. Neither marshal was to have another chance of taking the initiative—thanks, directly or indirectly, to the working out of Wellington’s great plan of campaign for the New Year.

In the previous volume the fortunes of Soult and the Army of Andalusia were narrated down to the first days of November 1811, when Hill’s raid into Estremadura, after the surprise of Arroyo dos Molinos, ended with his retreat within the borders of Portugal. That raid had inflicted a severe blow on Drouet’s corps of observation, which formed Soult’s right wing, and covered his communications with Badajoz. But its net result was only to restrict the activities of the French on this side to that part of Estremadura which lies south of the Guadiana. Hill had made no attempt to drive away Drouet’s main body, or to blockade Badajoz, and had betaken himself to winter quarters about Elvas, Portalegre, and Estremos. Consequently Drouet was able to settle down opposite him once more, in equally widespread cantonments, with his right wing at Merida, and his left at Zafra, and to devote his attention to sending successive convoys forward to Badajoz, whenever the stores in that fortress showed signs of running low. Drouet’s force no longer bore the name of the ‘5th Corps’—all the old corps distinctions were abolished in the Southern Army this autumn, and no organization larger than that of the divisions was permitted to remain. The troops in Estremadura were simply for the future Drouet’s and Daricau’s divisions of the ‘Armée du Midi.’ The composition of this ‘containing force,’ whose whole purpose was now to observe Hill, was somewhat changed after midwinter: for the Emperor sent orders that the 34th and 40th regiments, the victims of Girard’s carelessness at Arroyo dos Molinos, were to be sent home to France to recruit their much depleted ranks. They duly left Drouet, and marched off northward[99], but they never got further than Burgos, where Dorsenne detained them at a moment of need, so that they became attached to the ‘Army of the North,’ and (after receiving some drafts) were involved in the operations against Wellington in the valley of the Douro. Two regiments from Andalusia (the 12th Léger and 45th Line) came up to replace them in Drouet’s division, but even then the French troops in Estremadura did not exceed 13,500 men, if the garrison of Badajoz (about 5,000 strong) be deducted. This constituted a field-force insufficient to hold back Hill when next he should take the offensive; but all through November and far into December Hill remained quiescent, by Wellington’s orders, and his adversary clung to his advanced positions as long as he could, though much disturbed as to what the future might bring forth.

Of the remainder of Soult’s army, the troops in front of Cadiz, originally the 1st Corps, had been cut down to an irreducible minimum, by the necessity for keeping flank-guards to either side, to watch the Spanish forces in the Condado de Niebla on the west and the mountains of Ronda on the south. Even including the marines and sailors of the flotilla, there were seldom 20,000 men in the Lines, and the Spanish force in Cadiz and the Isle of Leon, stiffened by the Anglo-Portuguese detachment which Wellington always retained there, was often not inferior in numbers to the besiegers. The bombardment from the heavy Villoutreys mortars, placed in the works of the Matagorda peninsula, continued intermittently: but, though a shell occasionally fell in the city, no appreciable harm was done. The inhabitants killed or injured by many months of shelling could be counted on the fingers of two hands. The citizens had come to take the occasional descent of a missile in their streets with philosophic calm, and sang a derisive street ditty which told how

‘De las bombas que tiran los Gavachos

Se hacen las Gaditanas tirabuzones.’

‘The splinters of the bombs that the French threw served the ladies of Cadiz as weights to curl their hair[100].’

The Fort of Puntales, on the easternmost point of the isthmus that links Cadiz to the Isle of Leon, felt the bombardment more severely, but was never seriously injured, and always succeeded in keeping up an effective return fire. With the artillery of those days—even when mortars of the largest calibre, specially cast in the arsenal of Seville, were used—Cadiz was safe from any real molestation.

Marshal Victor was still in command of the troops in the Lines at the end of 1811, but the Emperor gave orders for his return to France, when he ordered the Army of Andalusia to drop its organization into army-corps, and replaced them by divisions. He directed that the Marshal should set out at once, unless he was engaged in some serious enterprise at the moment that the summons arrived. This—as we shall see—chanced to be the case, and Victor was still hard at work in January, and did not leave Spain till early in April.

The third main section of Soult’s troops consisted of the two infantry and one cavalry divisions which had lately formed the 4th Corps, and had, since their first arrival in the South, been told off for the occupation of the kingdom of Granada. The whole of the coast and the inland from Malaga as far as Baza fell to their charge. The corps had been a strong one—16,000 foot and 4,000 horse—but was shortly to be reduced; the order of December 30, recalling troops for the expected Russian war, took off the whole Polish infantry division of Dembouski, 5,000 bayonets: the regiment of Lancers of the Vistula, who had won such fame by their charge at Albuera, was also requisitioned, but did not get off till the autumn. But in the last month of the old year the Poles were still present and available, and Soult was far from expecting their departure. Yet even before they were withdrawn the garrison of the kingdom of Granada was by no means too strong for the work allotted to it. The greater part of its available field-force had been drawn to the south-west, to curb the insurrection of the Serranos of the Ronda mountains, and the inroads of Ballasteros. The forces left in Granada itself and the other eastern towns were so modest that Soult protested, and apparently with truth, that he could not spare from them even a small flying column of all arms, to make the demonstration against Murcia in assistance of Suchet’s operations which the Emperor ordered him to execute. Nothing, as it will be remembered, was done in this direction during December and January, save the sending out of Pierre Soult’s raid[101], a mere affair of a single cavalry brigade.

The total force of the Andalusian army was still in December as high as 80,000 men on paper. But after deducting the sick, the garrison of Badajoz—5,000 men,—the troops of Drouet, entirely taken up with observing and containing Hill, the divisions in the Lines before Cadiz, and the obligatory garrisons of Granada, Malaga, Cordova, and other large towns, the surplus left over for active operations was very small. At the most ten or twelve thousand men, obtained by borrowing from all sides, could be formed to act as a central reserve, prepared to assist Drouet in Estremadura, Victor in the Cadiz region, or Leval in the East, as occasion might demand. During the two crises when Soult brought up his reserves to join Drouet, in the winter of 1811-12 and the spring of 1812, their joint force did not exceed 25,000 men. The Marshal was resolved to hold the complete circuit of Andalusia, the viceroyalty which brought him so much pride and profit; and so long as he persisted in this resolve he could make no offensive move, for want of a field army of competent strength.

Soult made some effort to supplement the strength of his garrisons by raising Spanish levies—both battalions and squadrons of regulars, and units for local service in the style of urban guards. The former ‘Juramentados’ never reached any great strength: they were composed of deserters, or prisoners who volunteered service in order to avoid being sent to France. Occasionally there were as many as 5,000 under arms—usually less. The men for the most part disappeared at the first opportunity, and rejoined the national army or the guerrilleros: the officers were less prone to abscond, because they were liable to be shot as traitors on returning to their countrymen. Two or three cases are recorded of such renegades who committed suicide, when they saw themselves about to fall into the hands of Spanish troops[102]. The urban guards or ‘escopeteros’ were of a little more service, for the reason that, being interested in the preservation of their own families, goods, and houses, they would often prevent the entry into their towns of any roving Spanish force which showed itself for a moment. For if they admitted any small band, which went on its way immediately, and could make no attempt to defend them on the reappearance of the enemy, they were liable to be executed as traitors by the French, and their town would be fined or perhaps sacked. Hence it was to their interest, so long as Soult continued to dominate all Andalusia, to keep the guerrilleros outside their walls. But their service was, of course, unwilling; and they were usually ready to yield on the appearance of any serious Spanish force, whose size was sufficient to excuse their submission in the eyes of Soult. Often a town was ostensibly held for King Joseph, but was privately supplying recruits, provisions, and money contributions to the national cause. Nevertheless there were real ‘Afrancesados’ in Andalusia, people who had so far committed themselves to the cause of King Joseph that they could not contemplate the triumph of the Patriots without terror. When Soult evacuated Andalusia in September 1812 several thousand refugees followed him, rather than face the vengeance of their countrymen.

During the midwinter of 1811-12 Soult’s main attention was taken up by a serious enterprise in the extreme south of his viceroyalty, which absorbed all the spare battalions of his small central reserve, and rendered it impossible for him to take the offensive in any other direction. This was the attempt to crush Ballasteros, and to capture Tarifa, which rendered his co-operation in Suchet’s Valencian campaign impossible.

General Ballasteros, as it will be remembered, had landed from Cadiz at Algeciras on September 4th, 1811, and had been much hunted during the autumn by detachments drawn both from the troops in the kingdom of Granada and those of Victor[103]. As many as 10,000 men were pressing him in October, when he had been forced to take refuge under the cannon of Gibraltar. But when want of food compelled the columns of Barrois, Sémélé, and Godinot to withdraw and to disperse, he had emerged from his refuge, had followed the retiring enemy, and had inflicted some damage on their rearguards [November 5, 1811]. His triumphant survival, after the first concentrated movement made against him, had much provoked Soult, who saw the insurrectionary movement in southern Andalusia spreading all along the mountains, and extending itself towards Malaga on the one side and Arcos on the other. The Marshal, therefore, determined to make a serious effort to crush Ballasteros, and at the same time to destroy one of the two bases from which he was wont to operate. Gibraltar was, of course, impregnable: but Tarifa, the other fortress at the southern end of the Peninsula, was not, and had proved from time to time very useful to the Spaniards. It was now their only secure foothold in southern Andalusia, and was most useful as a port of call for vessels going round from Cadiz to the Mediterranean, especially for the large flotilla of British and Spanish sloops, brigs, and gunboats, which obsessed the coast of Andalusia, and made the use of routes by the seaside almost impracticable for the enemy. Soult was at this time trying to open up communications with the Moors of Tangier, from whom he hoped to get horses for his cavalry, and oxen for the army before Cadiz. But he could not hope to accomplish anything in this way so long as Tarifa was the nest and victualling-place of privateers, who lay thick in the straits only a few miles from the coast of Morocco.

The main reason for attacking Tarifa, however, was that it had recently become the head-quarters of a small Anglo-Spanish field-force, which had been molesting the rear of the lines before Cadiz. The place had not been garrisoned in 1810, when Soult first broke into Andalusia: but a few months after General Colin Campbell, governor of Gibraltar, threw into it a small force, that same battalion of flank-companies of the 9th, 28th, 30th, and 47th Foot, which distinguished itself so much at Barrosa in the following year, when led by Colonel Brown of the 28th. This hard fighter had moved on with his regiment later in 1811, but his place had been taken by Major King of the 82nd—a one-legged officer of great energy and resolution[104]. The garrison was trifling down to October 1811, when General Campbell threw into Tarifa a brigade under Colonel Skerrett, consisting of the 2/47th and 2/87th, and some details[105], making (with the original garrison) 1,750 British troops. Three days later the Spaniards sent in from Cadiz another brigade[106] of about the same strength, under General Copons. After the French expedition against Ballasteros had failed, Copons and Skerrett went out and drove from Vejer the southernmost outposts of Victor’s corps in the Lines (November 6th). A fortnight later they marched across the hills to Algeciras, and prepared to join Ballasteros in an attack on the French troops in the direction of Ronda, but returned to Tarifa on the news that Victor was showing a considerable force at Vejer, and threatening to cut them off from their base[107]. Ballasteros by himself was a sufficient nuisance to Soult, but when his operations began to be aided by another separate force, partly composed of British troops, the Duke of Dalmatia determined that a clean sweep must be made in southern Andalusia.

The idea of capturing Tarifa did not appear by any means impracticable. This little decayed place of 6,000 souls had never been fortified in the modern style, and was surrounded by nothing more than a mediaeval wall eight feet thick, with square towers set in it at intervals. There was a citadel, the castle of Guzman El Bueno[108], but this, too, was a thirteenth-century building, and the whole place, though tenable against an enemy unprovided with artillery, was reckoned helpless against siege-guns. It is described by one of its defenders as ‘lying in a hole,’ for it was completely commanded by a range of low heights, at no greater distance than 300 yards from its northern front. In the sea, half a mile beyond it, was a rocky island, connected with the mainland by a very narrow strip of sand, which was well suited to serve as a final place of refuge for the garrison, and which had been carefully fortified. It was furnished with batteries, of which one bore on the sand-spit and the town: a redoubt (Santa Catalina) had been erected at the point where the isthmus joined the mainland: several buildings had been erected to serve as a shelter for troops, and a great series of caves (Cueva de los Moros) had been converted into casemates and store-rooms: they were perfectly safe against bombardment. In the eyes of many officers the island was the real stronghold, and the city was but an outwork to it, which might be evacuated without any serious damage to the strength of the defence. Nevertheless something had been done to improve the weak fortifications of the place: the convent of San Francisco, seventy yards from its northern point, had been entrenched and loopholed, to serve as a redoubt, and some of the square towers in the enceinte had been strengthened and built up so as to bear artillery. The curtain, however, was in all parts far too narrow and weak to allow of guns being placed upon it, and there was no glacis and practically no ditch, the whole wall to its foot being visible from the heights which overlook the city on its eastern side. There were only twenty-six guns available, and of these part belonged to the defences of the island. In the town itself there were only two heavy guns mounted on commanding towers, six field-pieces (9-pounders) distributed along the various fronts, and four mortars. When the siege actually began, the main defence was by musketry fire. It was clear from the topography of Tarifa that its northern front, that nearest to and most completely commanded by the hills outside, would be the probable point of attack by the enemy; and long before the siege began preparations were made for an interior defence. The buildings looking on the back of the ramparts were barricaded and loopholed, the narrow streets were blocked with traverses, and some ‘entanglements’ were contrived with the iron window-bars requisitioned from all the houses of the town, which served as a sort of chevaux de frise. The outer enceinte was so weak that it was intended that the main defence should be in the network of streets. Special preparations were thought out for the right-centre of the north front, where the walls are pierced by the ravine of a winter torrent of intermittent flow, called the Retiro. The point where it made its passage under the enceinte through a portcullis was the lowest place in the front, the walls sinking down as they followed the outline of the ravine. Wherefore palisades were planted outside the portcullis, entanglements behind it, and all the houses looking down on the torrent bed within the walls were prepared with loopholes commanding its course[109]. There was ample time for work, for while the first certain news that the French were coming arrived in November, the enemy did not actually appear before the walls till December 20. By that time much had been done, though the balance was only completed in haste after the siege had begun.

The long delay of the enemy was caused by the abominable condition of the roads of the district—the same that had given Graham and La Peña so much trouble in February 1811[110]: moreover, any considerable concentration of troops in southern Andalusia raised a food problem for Soult. The region round Tarifa is very thinly inhabited, and it was clear that, if a large army were collected, it would have to carry its provisions with it, and secure its communication with its base, under pain of falling into starvation within a few days. Heavy guns abounded in the Cadiz lines, and Soult had no trouble in selecting a siege-train of sixteen pieces from them: but their transport and that of their ammunition was a serious problem. To complete the train no less than 500 horses had to be requisitioned from the field artillery and military wagons of the 1st Corps. While it was being collected, Victor moved forward to Vejer, near the coast, half-way between Cadiz and Tarifa, with 2,000 men, in order to clear the country-side from the guerrillero bands, who made survey of the roads difficult and dangerous. Under cover of escorts furnished by him, several intelligence officers inspected the possible routes: there were two, both passing through the mountainous tract between the sea and the lagoon of La Janda (which had given Graham so much trouble in the last spring). One came down to the waterside at the chapel of Virgen de la Luz, only three miles from Tarifa, but was reported to be a mere mule-track. The other, somewhat more resembling a road, descended to the shore several miles farther to the north, and ran parallel with it for some distance. But in expectation of the siege, the Spaniards, with help from English ships, had blown up many yards of this road, where it was narrowest between the water and the mountain. Moreover, ships of war were always stationed off Tarifa, and their guns would make passage along this defile dangerous. Nevertheless General Garbé, the chief French engineer, held that this was the only route practicable for artillery, and reported that the road could be remade, and that the flotilla might be kept at a distance by building batteries on the shore, which would prevent any vessel from coming close enough to deliver an effective fire. It was determined, therefore, that the siege-train should take this path, which for the first half of its way passes close along the marshy borders of the lagoon of La Janda, and then enters the hills in order to descend to the sea at Torre Peña.

On December 8th the siege-train was concentrated at Vejer, and in the hope that it would in four days (or not much more) reach its destination before Tarifa, Victor gave orders for the movement of the troops which were to conduct the siege. Of this force the smaller part, six battalions[111] and two cavalry regiments, was drawn from Leval’s command, formerly the 4th Corps. These two divisions had also to provide other detachments to hold Malaga in strength, and watch Ballasteros. The troops from the blockade of Cadiz supplied eight battalions[112], and three more to keep up communications[113]; one additional regiment was borrowed from the brigade in the kingdom of Cordova, which was always drawn upon in times of special need[114]. The whole force put in motion was some 15,000 men, but only 10,000 actually came before Tarifa and took part in the siege.

The various columns, which were under orders to march, came from distant points, and had to concentrate. Barrois lay at Los Barrios, inland from Algeciras, with six battalions from the Cadiz lines, watching Ballasteros, who had once more fallen back under shelter of the guns of Gibraltar. To this point Leval came to join him, with the 3,000 men drawn from Malaga and Granada. The third column, under Victor himself, consisting of the siege-train and the battalions told off for its escort, came from the side of Vejer. All three were to meet before Tarifa: but from the first start difficulties began to arise owing to the bad weather.

The winter, which had hitherto been mild and equable, broke up into unending rain-storms on the day appointed for the start, and the sudden filling of the torrents in the mountains cut the communications between the columns. Leval, who had got as far as the pass of Ojen, in the range which separates the district about Algeciras and Los Barrios from the Tarifa region, was forced to halt there for some days: but his rear, a brigade under Cassagne, could not come forward to join him, nor did the convoy-column succeed in advancing far from Vejer. Victor sent three successive officers with escorts to try to get into touch with Cassagne, but each returned without having been able to push through. It was not till the 12th that a fourth succeeded in reaching the belated column, which only got under way that day and joined on the following afternoon. The siege-train was not less delayed, and was blocked for several days by the overflowing of the lagoon of La Janda, along whose shore its first stages lay. It only struggled through to the south end of the lagoon on the 14th, and took no less than four days more to cover the distance of sixteen miles across the hills to Torre Peña, where the road comes down to the sea. Forty horses, it is said, had to be harnessed to each heavy gun to pull it through[115]. Much of the ammunition was spoilt by the rain, which continued to fall intermittently, and more had to be requisitioned from the Cadiz lines, and to be brought forward by supplementary convoys.

These initial delays went far to wreck the whole scheme, because of the food problem. Each of the columns had to bring its own provisions with it, and, when stopped on the road, consumed stores that had been intended to serve it during the siege. The distance from Vejer to Tarifa is only thirty miles, and from Los Barrios to Tarifa even less: but the columns, which had been ordered to march on December 8th, did not reach their destination till December 20th, and the communications behind them were cut already, not by the enemy but by the vile weather, which had turned every mountain stream into a torrent, and every low-lying bottom into a marsh. The column with the siege artillery arrived two days later: it had got safely through the defile of Torre Peña: the sappers had repaired the road by the water, and had built a masked battery for four 12-pounders and two howitzers, whose fire kept off from the dangerous point several Spanish and English gunboats which came up to dispute the passage. The column from the pass of Ojen had been somewhat delayed in its march by a sally of Ballasteros, who came out from the Gibraltar lines on the 17th-18th and fell upon its rear with 2,000 men. He drove in the last battalion, but when Barrois turned back and attacked him with a whole brigade, the Spaniard gave way and retreated in haste to San Roque. Nevertheless, by issuing from his refuge and appearing in the open, he had cut the communications between the army destined for the siege and the troops at Malaga. At the same time that Ballasteros made this diversion, Skerrett, with his whole brigade and a few of Copons’s Spaniards, had issued from Tarifa to demonstrate against the head of the approaching French column, and advanced some distance on the road to Fascinas, where his handful of hussars bickered with the leading cavalry in the enemy’s front. Seeing infantry behind, he took his main body no farther forward than the convent of Nuestra Señora de la Luz, three miles from the fortress. On the 19th the French showed 4,000 men on the surrounding hills, and on the 20th advanced in force in two columns, and pushed the English and Spanish pickets into Tarifa, after a long skirmish in which the British had 31, the Spaniards about 40 casualties, while the French, according to Leval’s report, lost only 1 officer and 3 men killed and 27 wounded. By four in the afternoon the place was invested—the French pickets reaching from sea to sea, and their main body being encamped behind the hills which command the northern side of Tarifa. They could not place themselves near the water, owing to the fire of two British frigates and a swarm of gunboats, which lay in-shore, and shelled their flanks all day, though without great effect.

Copons and Skerrett had divided the manning of the town and island between their brigades on equal terms, each keeping two battalions in the town and a third in the island and the minor posts. Of the British the 47th and 87th had the former, King’s battalion of flank-companies (reinforced by 70 marines landed from the ships) the latter charge. The convent of San Francisco was held by a company of the 82nd, the redoubt of Santa Catalina on the isthmus by one of the 11th. Seeing the French inactive on the 21st—they were waiting for the siege-train which was not yet arrived—Skerrett sent out three companies to drive in their pickets, and shelled the heights behind which they were encamped. On the following day the sortie was repeated, by a somewhat larger force under Colonel Gough of the 87th, covered by a flanking fire from the gunboats. The right wing of the French pickets was driven in with some loss, and a house too near the Santa Catalina redoubt demolished. The besiegers lost 3 men killed and 4 officers and 19 men wounded, mainly from the 16th Léger. The sallying troops had only 1 man killed and 5 wounded (2 from the 11th, 4 from the 87th). That night the siege-train arrived, and was parked behind the right-hand hill of the three which face the northern side of Tarifa.

The engineer officers who had come up with the siege-train executed their survey of the fortress next morning, and reported (as might have been expected) that it would be best to attack the central portion of the north front, because the ground facing it was not exposed to any fire from the vessels in-shore, as was the west front, and could only be searched by the two or three guns which the besieged had mounted on the towers of Jesus and of Guzman, the one in the midst of the northern front, the other in a dominating position by the castle, at the southern corner. However, the 24-pounders on the island, shooting over the town, could throw shells on to the hillside where the French were about to work, though without being able to judge of their effect.

On the night of the 23rd the French began their first parallel, on their right flank of the central hill, at a distance of 300 yards from the walls: the approaches to it needed no spadework, being completely screened by a ravine and a thick aloe hedge. The besieged shelled it on the succeeding day, but with small effect—only 3 workers were killed and 4 wounded. On the 24th a minor front of attack was developed on the left-hand hill, where a first parallel was thrown up about 250 yards from the walls. The gunboats on the southern shore fired on this work when it was discovered, but as it was invisible to them, and as they could only shoot at haphazard, by directions signalled from the town, they generally failed to hit the mark, and did little to prevent the progress of the digging. The besiegers only lost 4 killed and 25 wounded this day, and on the original point of attack were able to commence a second parallel, in which there was marked out the place for the battery which was destined to breach the town wall at the lowest point of its circuit, just south of the bed of the Retiro torrent.

On the two following days the French continued to push forward with no great difficulty; they completed the second parallel on the centre hill, parts of which were only 180 yards from the town. On the left or eastern hill the trenches were continued down the inner slope, as far as the bottom of the ravine, so as almost to join those of the right attack. On the 26th a violent south-east gale began to blow, which compelled the British and Spanish gunboats to quit their station to the right of Tarifa, lest they should be driven ashore, and to run round to the west side of the island which gave them shelter from wind coming from such a quarter. The French works were, therefore, only molested for the future by the little 6-pounders on the north-east (or Corchuela) tower, and the heavy guns firing at a high trajectory from the island and the tower of Guzman.

But the gale was accompanied by rain, and this, beginning with moderate showers on the 26th, developed into a steady downpour on the 27th and 28th, and commenced to make the spadework in the trenches more laborious, as the sappers were up to their ankles in mud, and the excavated earth did not bind easily into parapets owing to its semi-liquid condition. Nevertheless the plans of the engineers were carried out, and two batteries were finished and armed on the central hill, one lower down to batter the walls, the other higher up, to deal with the guns of the besieged and silence them if possible. The French lined all the advanced parallel with sharpshooters, who kept up a heavy fire on the ramparts, and would have made it difficult for the garrison to maintain a reply, if a large consignment of sandbags had not been received from Gibraltar, with which cover was contrived for the men on the curtain, and the artillery in the towers.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of the 29th the two French batteries opened[116], with twelve heavy guns. The weakness of the old town wall at once became evident: the first shot fired went completely through it, and lodged in a house to its rear. Before evening there was a definite breach produced, just south of the Retiro ravine, and it was clear that the enemy would be able to increase it to any extent that he pleased—the masonry fell to pieces the moment that it was well pounded. The two small field-guns on the tower of Jesus were silenced by 3 o’clock, and the heavy gun on Guzman’s tower also ceased firing—of which more anon. By night only the distant guns on the island, and the ships in the south-western bay, were making an effective reply to the French.

This, from the psychological point of view, was the critical day of the siege, for on the clear demonstration of the weakness of the walls, Colonel Skerrett, who had never much confidence in his defences, proposed to evacuate the city of Tarifa. At a council of officers he argued in favour of withdrawing the garrison into the island, and making no attempt to hold the weak mediaeval walls which the French were so effectively battering. This would have been equivalent, in the end, to abandoning the entire foothold of the British on this point of the coast. For there was on the island no cover for troops, save two or three recently erected buildings, and the recesses of the ‘Cueva de los Moros.’ Some of the inhabitants had already taken refuge there, and were suffering great privations, from being exposed to the weather in tents and hastily contrived huts. It is clear that if 3,000 men, British and Spanish, had been lodged on the wind-swept rocks of the island, it would soon have been necessary to withdraw them; however inaccessible the water-girt rock, with its low cliffs, might be, no large body of troops could have lived long upon it, exposed as they would have been not only to wind and wet, but to constant molestation by heavy guns placed in and about the city and the hills that dominate it. Meanwhile the French would have possessed the excellent cover of the houses of Tarifa, and would have effectively blocked the island by leaving a garrison to watch the causeway, the only possible exit from it. It is certain that the abandonment of the island would have followed that of the town within a few days: indeed Skerrett had already obtained leave from General Cooke, then commanding at Cadiz, to bring his brigade round to that port as soon as he should feel it necessary. He regarded the evacuation of the place as so certain, that he ordered the 18-pounder gun on Guzman’s tower to be spiked this day, though it was the only piece of heavy calibre in the city[117]—the reason given was that one of its missiles (spherical case-shot) had fallen short within the streets, and killed or wounded an inhabitant. But the real cause was that he had fully decided on abandoning Tarifa that night or the following day, and thought the moving of such a big gun in a hurry impossible—it had been hoisted with great difficulty to its place by the sailors, with cranes and tackle[118].

Skerrett stated his decision in favour of the evacuation at the council of war, produced General Cooke’s letter supporting his plan, and stated that Lord Proby, his second in command, concurred in the view of its necessity. Fortunately for the credit of the British arms, his opinion was boldly traversed by Captain C. F. Smith, the senior engineer officer, Major King commanding the Gibraltar battalion of flank-companies, and Colonel Gough of the 87th. The former urged that the town should be defended, as an outwork of the island, to the last possible moment: though the breach was practicable, he had already made arrangements for cutting it off by retrenchments from the body of the town. The streets had been blocked and barricaded, and all the houses looking upon the back of the walls loopholed. Tarifa could be defended for some time in the style of Saragossa, lane by lane. He pointed out that such was the configuration of the ground that if the enemy entered the breach, he would find a fourteen-foot drop between its rear and the ground below, on to which he would have to descend under a concentric fire of musketry from all the neighbouring buildings. Even supposing that the worst came, the garrison had the castle to retire into, and this was tenable until breached by artillery, while a retreat from it to the island would always be possible, under cover of the guns of the flotilla. There was no profit or credit in giving up outworks before they were forced. Major King concurred, and said that his battalion, being Gibraltar troops, was under the direct orders of General Campbell, from whom he had received directions to hold Tarifa till the last extremity. If Skerrett’s brigade should embark, he and the flank-companies would remain behind, to defend it, along with Copons’s Spaniards. Gough concurred in the decision, and urged that the evacuation would be wholly premature and ‘contrary to the spirit of General Campbell’s instructions’ until it was seen whether the French were able to effect a lodgement inside the walls[119].

Skerrett’s resolve was shaken—he still held to his opinion, but dismissed the council of war without coming to a decision: he tried to avoid responsibility by requesting the officers who voted for further resistance to deliver him their opinions in writing. This King, Smith, and Gough did, in the strongest wording. The first named of these three resolute men sent that same night a messenger by boat to Gibraltar, to inform General Campbell of Skerrett’s faint-hearted decision, and to observe that, with a few companies more to aid his own flank-battalion and the Spaniards, he would try to hold first Tarifa and then the island, even if Skerrett withdrew his brigade. Campbell, angry in no small degree, sent a very prompt answer to the effect that the town should not be abandoned without the concurrence of the commanding officers of artillery and engineers, while the Gibraltar battalion should be concentrated in the island, in order to ensure its defence even if Tarifa itself fell. Still more drastic was an order to the officers commanding the transports to bring their ships back at once to Gibraltar: this decisive move made it impossible for Skerrett to carry out his plan[120]. A few days later Campbell sent two more flank-companies to join the garrison—but they only arrived after the assault.

The idea of evacuating the town without attempting any defence was all the more ignominious because Copons had declared his intention of holding it to the last, had protested against the spiking of the heavy gun in Guzman’s tower, and next morning, when Leval summoned the place to surrender, sent in a most unhesitating, if somewhat bombastic[121], note of refusal. If Skerrett had withdrawn into the island, or taken to his ships, and Copons had been overwhelmed, fighting in the streets, the disgrace to the British flag would have been very great. As a sidelight on the whole matter, we may remember that this was the same officer who had refused to land his troops to defend the breach of Tarragona six months before. He was no coward, as he showed in many fights, and he died gallantly at Bergen-op-Zoom in 1814, but he was undoubtedly a shirker of responsibilities.

On the morning of the 30th the besiegers’ batteries opened again, and enlarged the breach to a broad gap of thirty feet or more; they also dismounted a field-piece which the besieged had hoisted on the Jesus tower, to replace those injured on the previous day. At midday Leval sent in the summons already recorded, and receiving Copons’s uncompromising reply, directed the fire to continue. It was very effective, and by evening the breach was nearly sixty feet long, occupying almost the whole space between the tower at the portcullis over the ravine, and that next south of it. At dusk the garrison crept out to clear the foot of the breach, and began also to redouble the inner defences in the lanes and houses behind it. All work on both sides, however, was stopped, shortly after nightfall, by a most torrential downpour of rain, which drove the French from their batteries and the English and Spaniards from their repairing. The sky seemed to be falling—the hillsides became cataracts, and the Retiro ravine was soon filled with a broad river which came swirling against the walls, bearing with it fascines, planks, gabions, and even dead bodies washed out of the French lines. Presently the mass of débris, accumulating against the palisades erected in front of the portcullis, and urged on by the water, swept away these outer defences, and then, pressing against the portcullis itself, bent it inwards and twisted it, despite of its massive iron clamps, so as to make an opening into the town, down which everything went swimming through the ravine. The flood also swept away some of the defensive works on each side of the depression. When the hurricane was over, the rain still continued to fall heavily, but the garrison, emerging from shelter, commenced to repair their works, and had undone much of the damage by daylight[122].

If the besieged had been sorely incommoded by the tempest, the besiegers on the bare hillsides had been still worse tried. They had been forced to abandon their trenches and batteries, of which those high up the slope were water-logged, while those below had been largely swept away by the flood. The breach had been pronounced practicable by the engineers, and an assault had been fixed for dawn. But it was necessary to put it off for some hours, in order to allow the artillery to reoccupy their batteries, and recommence their fire, and the infantry to come up from the camps where they had vainly tried to shelter themselves during the downpour. Nevertheless the French commanders resolved to storm as soon as the men could be assembled, without waiting for further preparations. ‘The troops,’ says the French historian of the siege, ‘unable to dry themselves, or to light fires to cook their rations, loudly cried out for an assault, as the only thing that could put an end to their misery.’ A large force had been set apart for the storm, the grenadier and voltigeur companies of each of the battalions engaged in the sieges, making a total of over 2,200 men. They were divided into two columns—the grenadiers were to storm the breach; the voltigeurs to try whether the gap at the Portcullis tower was practicable or not: they were to break in if possible, if not, to engage the defenders in a fusilade which should distract their attention from the main attack.

As soon as day dawned, the besieged could detect that the trenches were filling, and that the storm was about to break. They had time to complete their dispositions before the French moved: the actual breach was held by Copons with a battalion of his own troops[123]: the 87th, under Gough, occupied the walls both to right and left of the breach, including the Portcullis tower, with two companies in reserve. Captain Levesey with 100 of the 47th was posted in the south-eastern (Jesus) tower, which completely enfiladed the route which the enemy would have to take to the foot of the breach. The rest of the 47th was in charge of the south front of the town.

At nine o’clock the column of French grenadiers issued from the trenches near the advanced breaching battery, and dashed down the side of the Retiro ravine towards the breach, while the voltigeur companies, at the same time, running out from the approaches on the eastern hill, advanced by the opposite side of the ravine towards the Portcullis tower. Demonstrations to right and left were made by Cassagne’s brigade on one flank and Pécheux’s on the other. The progress of the storming column was not rapid—the slopes of the ravine were rain-sodden and slippery; its bottom (where the flood had passed) was two feet deep in mud. The troops were forced to move slowly, and the moment that they were visible from the walls they became exposed to a very heavy fire of musketry, both from the curtain and the enfilading towers on each of their flanks. Of guns the besieged had only one available—a field-piece in the northernmost (or Corchuela) tower, which fired case-shot diagonally along the foot of the walls.

Nevertheless the French grenadiers pushed forward across the open space towards the breach, under a rain of bullets from the 87th which smote them on both flanks. The Fusiliers were firing fast and accurately, to the tune of Garry Owen, which the regimental band was playing by order of Gough just behind the breach, accompanied by bursts of shouts and cheering. On arriving at the foot of the walls, in great disorder, the French column hesitated for a moment; many men began to fire instead of pressing on, but some bold spirits scaled the rough slope of the breach and reached its lip—only to get a momentary glimpse of the fourteen-foot drop behind it, and to fall dead. The bulk of the column then swerved away to its right, and fell upon the palisades and other defences in front of the Portcullis tower, where the hasty repairs made after the flood of the preceding night did not look effective. Apparently many of the voltigeurs who had been already engaged in this quarter joined in their assault, which surged over the outer barricades and penetrated as far as the portcullis itself. It was found too well repaired to be broken down, and the stormers, crowded in front of it, and caught in an angle between the front wall defended by the 87th, and the flanking Jesus tower from which the 47th were firing, found the corner too hot for them, and suddenly recoiled and fled. The officer at the head of the forlorn hope gave up his sword to Gough through the bars of the portcullis, which alone separated them, and many other men at the front of the column also surrendered, rather than face the point-blank fire at close range which would have accompanied the first stage of their retreat.

This was a striking instance of an assault on a very broad breach, by a strong force, being beaten off by musketry fire alone. The French seem never to have had a chance in face of the steady resistance of the 87th and their comrades. Their loss is given by the official French historian at only 48 killed and 159 wounded, which seems an incredibly low figure when over 2,000 men were at close quarters with the besieged, in a very disadvantageous position, for some time[124]. The British lost 2 officers and 7 men killed, 3 officers, 2 sergeants, and 22 men wounded: the Spaniards had a lieutenant-colonel killed and about 20 men killed and wounded.

The assault having failed so disastrously, the spirits of the besiegers sank to a very low pitch. The rain continued to fall during the whole day and the following night, and the already water-logged trenches became quite untenable. On New Year’s Day, 1812, the dawn showed a miserable state of affairs—not only were the roads to the rear, towards Fascinas and Vejer, entirely blocked by the swelling of mountain torrents, but communications were cut even between the siege-camps. All the provision of powder in the siege-batteries was found to be spoilt by wet, and a great part of the cartridges of the infantry. Nearly a third of the horses of the train had perished from cold combined with low feeding. No rations were issued to the troops that day, and on the three preceding days only incomplete ones had been given, because of the impossibility of getting them up from the reserve dépôt, and many of the men wandered without leave for three miles to the rear in search of food or shelter. An exploring party of the 47th pushing out into the trenches found them quite unguarded[125] and full of water. Leval wrote a formal proposal for the abandonment of the siege to his chief, Victor, saying that the only choice was to save the army by retreat, or to see it perish in a few days if it remained stationary[126]. The Marshal, however, refused to turn back from an enterprise in which he considered his honour involved, and the tempest having abated on the night of Jan. 2nd-3rd, ordered the batteries and approaches to be remanned, and directed that an attempt should be made to sap forward toward the Jesus tower from the left advanced trenches. The work done was feeble—the batteries had fired only fifty shots by evening, and the repairs to the damaged works were very incomplete.

Even Victor’s obstinacy yielded, however, when on the night of the 3rd-4th January another furious storm arose, and once more stopped all possibility of continuing operations. No food had now come up from the base for many days, and the stores at the front being exhausted, the Marshal saw that it was necessary to march at once. An attempt was made to withdraw the guns from the batteries, but only one 12-pounder and two howitzers were got off—the horses were so weak and the ground so sodden that even when 200 infantry were set to help, most of the pieces could not be dragged more than a few yards. Wherefore the attempt was given over, the powder in the batteries was thrown open to the rain, the balls rolled into the Retiro ravine, the nine remaining heavy guns spiked.

On the night of the 4th-5th the army crawled off on the road to Vejer, abandoning nearly all its material in its camps. An attempt was made to fire a mass of abandoned vehicles, but the rain stopped it. Next morning the French were passing the defile of Torre Peña, under the not very effective fire of an English frigate, which kept as close to the shore as was possible on a very rough day. The four guns from the battery at this point were brought on, with much toil, and no wounded were abandoned. On the 6th the column reached Tayvilla, where it found a convoy and 100 horses, which were of inestimable value, for those with the field-force were completely spent. Nevertheless the one 12-pounder brought off from Tarifa was abandoned in the mud. On the 7th Vejer was reached, and the expedition was at an end. The troops of Victor’s division, after a short rest, went back to the Cadiz Lines, those of Leval’s division marched for Xeres.

Thus ended the leaguer of Tarifa, which cost the besiegers about 500 lives, more by sickness than by casualties in the trenches. There were also some deserters—fifteen Poles came over in a body and surrendered to Captain Carroll on the 3rd[127], and other individuals stole in from time to time. But the main loss to the French, beyond that of prestige, was that the battalions which had formed part of the expeditionary force were so tired out and war-worn, that for several weeks they continued to fill the hospitals in the Lines with sick, and were incapable of further active service. Wherefore Soult could not send any appreciable detachment to help Suchet on the side of Valencia: the cavalry brigade, which sacked Murcia on January 26 and killed La Carrera,[128] was his only contribution to the operations on the east side of Spain. The field-force which might otherwise have accompanied Pierre Soult’s cavalry raid had been used up in the Tarifa expedition.

Another distraction had come upon Soult while the Tarifa expedition was in progress. On December 27, six days after Victor and Leval commenced the siege, General Hill had once more begun to move on the Estremaduran side, after remaining quiescent for nearly two months since the surprise of Arroyo dos Molinos. His advance was a diversion made by Wellington’s direct orders, with the purpose of drawing Soult’s attention away from the pursuit of Ballasteros and the molesting of Tarifa[129]. It failed to achieve the latter purpose, since the operations of Victor had gone so far, before Hill moved, that the Marshal stood committed to the siege, and indeed only heard that Hill was on the move after the assault of December 31st had been made and beaten off. But it caused Soult to cut off all support from Victor, to turn his small remaining reserves in the direction of Estremadura, and to welcome as a relief, rather than to deplore as a disaster, the return of the defeated expeditionary force to the Lines of Cadiz on January 7th. For about that date Hill was pushing Drouet before him, and the reserves from Seville were moving northwards, so that Soult was pleased to learn that the 10,000 men from Tarifa had returned, and that, in consequence of their reappearance, he could draw off more men from the direction of Cadiz to replace the troops moved toward Estremadura.

Hill crossed the Portuguese frontier north of the Guadiana on December 27th, with his own division, Hamilton’s Portuguese, two British cavalry brigades (those of Long and de Grey[130]) and one of Portuguese (4th and 10th regiments under J. Campbell of the former corps), or about 12,000 men. The small remainder of his force[131] was left about Elvas, to watch any possible movement of the French from the direction of Badajoz. His objective was Merida, where it was known that Dombrouski, with the greater part of the 5th French Division, was lying, in a position far advanced from the main body of Drouet’s troops, who were cantoned about Zafra and Llerena. There was some hope of surprising this force, and a certainty of driving it in, and of throwing Drouet and Soult into a state of alarm. Wellington directed Hill to keep to the desolate road north of the Guadiana, because a winter raid from this direction would be the last thing expected by the enemy. He bade his lieutenant keep a wary eye in the direction of Truxillo and Almaraz, from which the divisions of Marmont’s army then in New Castile might possibly descend upon his rear. But the warning turned out to be superfluous, since, before Hill moved, Marmont had been forced by the Emperor’s orders to detach his troops on the Tagus for the ruinous expedition under Montbrun to Alicante.

Marching very rapidly Hill reached Albuquerque on the 27th, and La Rocca, only twenty miles from Merida, on the 28th. On the next day[132] the prospect of surprising Dombrouski came to an end by the merest of chances. The French general had sent out that morning a small column to raise requisitions of food in the villages on this road. A troop of hussars at its head discovered Hill’s advanced cavalry, near Navas de Membrillo, and alarmed the infantry, three companies of the 88th regiment under a Captain Neveux, who formed up and began to retreat hastily towards Merida. Hill sent two squadrons each of the 13th Light Dragoons and 2nd Hussars of the King’s German Legion in pursuit, with orders to head off and capture, if possible, these 400 men. The result was a combat of the same sort as that of Barquilla in 1810, where it had already been shown that steady infantry could not be ridden down by cavalry save under very exceptional circumstances. Neveux, seeing the dragoons hurrying forward, turned off the road, formed his men in square, and made for a cork wood on a rising ground. The cavalry overtook him, and delivered five determined charges, which were all beaten off with heavy loss. We are told that their order and impetus were both broken by scattered trees outside the wood, but the main cause of their defeat was the impossibility of breaking into a solidly-formed square of determined men, well commanded[133]. After the final charge the squadrons drew off, and Neveux hastened on through the wood, fell back again into the road, and reached Merida, though he lost a few men[134] by shells from Hawker’s battery, which came up late in the day. The K.G.L. Hussars had 2 men killed and 1 officer and 17 men wounded: the 13th Light Dragoons 1 killed and 19 wounded.

Dombrouski, warned of the approach of the allies in force, immediately evacuated Merida, where Hill made prize of 160,000 lb. of wheat, unground, and a large magazine of biscuit. He found that the French had been fortifying the town, but the works were too unfinished to allow them to defend it. On January 1st Hill, continuing his advance, marched across the bridge of Merida on Almendralejo, thinking that Drouet might possibly have come up to help Dombrouski, and that he might force him to fight. This was not to be: the rearguard of the force from Merida was discovered drawn up in front of Almendralejo, but gave way at the first push: a small magazine of food was captured in the town.

It was now clear that Drouet did not intend to make a stand, but would fall back towards the Andalusian frontier, and wait for aid from Soult. Hill resolved to move his main body no further, but sent out a small flying column under Major-General Abercrombie, with orders to press the French rearguard as long as it would give way, but to halt and turn back on finding serious forces in front of him. This detachment (1/50th regiment, two squadrons 2nd Hussars K.G.L., two squadrons 10th Portuguese, three guns) passing Fuente del Maestre neared Los Santos on January 3rd, and found Dombrouski, with a rearguard of all arms, disposed to fight. This led to a sharp cavalry combat, between two squadrons of the 26th French Dragoons and the allied horse. One squadron of the hussars and one of the Portuguese, gallantly led by Colonel Campbell, charged the enemy in front, the other squadrons remaining in reserve. The dragoons, soon broken, lost 6 killed, many wounded, and 2 officers and 35 men prisoners. Thereupon the French infantry moved rapidly off southwards, making no attempt to stand. The victors lost 1 man killed and 14 wounded from the hussars, 1 officer and 5 men from the Portuguese.

Drouet was now concentrating at Llerena, and ready to give up all Estremadura north of that point. He was sending daily appeals for succour to Soult, who had little to give him, while Victor and the expeditionary force were away at Tarifa. On January 5th the Duke of Dalmatia wrote a dispatch which ordered that the siege should be abandoned—but long ere it came to hand Victor had been forced to depart, as we have seen, for reasons entirely unconnected with Hill’s midwinter raid. Wellington’s plan would have worked if the weather had not already driven Victor away, but had in actual fact no effect on his proceedings.

Hill, having accomplished all that could be done in the way of alarming Soult, held Merida and Almendralejo for a few days, with his advanced cavalry about Fuente del Maestre: but retired on January 13th to Albuquerque and Portalegre, to the intense relief of his enemy. The raising of the siege of Tarifa being known, there was no further reason for keeping Hill in an advanced position, which might have tempted Soult to make a great concentration and take the offensive. Wellington had no desire that he should do so, since the Army of Andalusia, while dispersed, was harmless, but might become dangerous if it should evacuate great regions, and so be able to collect in force. Soult did not wish to make such sacrifices unless he were obliged, and on hearing of Hill’s retreat countermanded all orders for concentration, and contented himself with bringing back Drouet to Llerena and Zalamea, and with reopening his communication with Badajoz, which had been cut while the allies were at Fuente del Maestre. He did not at this time reoccupy Merida, partly because the position had been demonstrated to be dangerous by Hill’s recent raid, partly because its main importance was that it covered the road to Truxillo and Almaraz and Marmont’s army. But Marmont having, for the moment, no troops in this direction, owing to the Alicante expedition, it was useless to try to keep in touch with him.

Hill’s expedition, by driving Drouet for some time from the line of the Guadiana, made possible a sudden irruption of the Spaniards into La Mancha, where none of their regular troops had been since the battle of Ocaña two years before. This raid was carried out by Morillo at the head of a brigade of the Estremaduran army of Castaños. That general had heard of the way in which the upper valley of the Guadiana had been denuded of troops, in order that the Army of the Centre might assist Suchet in the direction of Cuenca and Requeña[135]. Nothing was left in La Mancha save a few battalions of King Joseph’s German Division, and a brigade of Treillard’s dragoons, a force which could only provide garrisons for a few large towns and watch the high-road from Madrid to Andalusia. Morillo was directed to slip eastward through the gap made by Hill between the Armies of the South and Portugal, to endeavour to cut up the French posts, and to collect recruits and contributions in the country-side. With luck he might even break the line of communication between Soult and Madrid. His force of 3,000 men was insufficient for anything more than a raid.

Starting from Montanches near Caçeres on December 30th—three days after Hill’s expedition had begun—Morillo crossed the Guadiana, and after making a fruitless dash at Belalcazar, the isolated French garrison which protected the northernmost corner of Andalusia, marched straight on by Agudo and Sarceruela into the heart of La Mancha, where he seized Ciudad Real, its capital [January 15]. The small French force quartered there fled at his approach, which was wholly unexpected—no Spanish army had ever marched up the valley of the Guadiana before. On the next day Morillo attacked Almagro, where there was a garrison of 500 men; but before he had made any impression he was surprised by the arrival of General Treillard, with a column hastily gathered from the posts along the high-road. The Spanish general refused to fight, and, abandoning Ciudad Real, withdrew with little loss into the passes of the Sierra de Guadalupe, where his enemy declined to follow. Since Hill had by this time abandoned Merida and returned to Portugal, Morillo felt his position to be uncomfortably isolated, and feared that French troops from Estremadura or from the Tagus valley might intercept his way homeward. The danger turned out to be imaginary, and on reaching Truxillo on January 30 the column was able to rest unmolested for a fortnight at that important strategical point, and then to retire at leisure to Montanches, its original starting-point.

Thus ended an extraordinary raid, which, though it had no positive results whatever, demonstrated two things clearly enough—one was the marching power of the Spanish infantry, which between December 28 and January 30 covered 250 miles of vile mountain roads in bitter weather, and came back intact with little loss[136], the other was the slightness of the French hold on La Mancha, where the appearance of a small brigade of 3,000 men upset the whole country-side. Morillo was only driven off by a concentration of many small garrisons, and, when they were withdrawn, the local guerrillero bands overran the land. Their chiefs, El Medico [Palarea], Chaleco, and others, did an immense amount of damage while the French were concentrated, and ravaged up to the very gates of Madrid. Chaos reigned in New Castile till Foy’s and Sarrut’s divisions came back from the Alicante expedition, and dispersed themselves along the valley of the Tagus at the beginning of February. For, as we have often had occasion to remark before, every province of Spain required not only to be conquered but to be held down by a permanent garrison. The moment that it was left too lightly held, the guerrilleros came down from the hills, occupied all the open country, and cut all communications.

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SECTION XXXI: CHAPTER III

POLITICS AT CADIZ AND ELSEWHERE

The military operations in the South during the winter of 1811-12 were inconclusive, and only important in a negative way, as showing that the initiative of the French armies was spent in this direction. But it must not be forgotten that while Soult had been brought to a standstill, Suchet’s operations were still progressing: January, indeed, saw the last great Spanish disaster of the war, the fall of Valencia, so that the spirits of government and people still ran very low. It was not till the sudden irruption of Wellington into the kingdom of Leon had ended in the capture of Ciudad Rodrigo (January 19), that there was any great occasion for hopefulness. And for a long time after that event its importance was not fully understood. That the central turning-point of the war had come, that for the future the allies were to be on the offensive, and the French on the defensive, was not realized till Badajoz had fallen in April, a blow which shook the whole fabric of King Joseph’s power throughout the regions where he seemed to reign. Nor was it only the state of affairs in the Peninsula which, during the winter of 1811-12, seemed sufficiently gloomy both for the present and for the future. The news from the Spanish colonies in America grew steadily worse: in most of the viceroyalties of the Western world there was now a nucleus of trouble: the name of Ferdinand VII was still used by the insurgents as a rallying cry, except in Venezuela, where Miranda had proclaimed an independent republic in July 1811. But in La Plata and Chili lip-loyalty to the sovereign was accompanied by practical secession from the Spanish state: the Cabildos or Juntas paid no attention to orders received from Cadiz. In Mexico, though the capital and the greater part of the country were still in the hands of the constituted authorities, there was a lively insurrection on foot since September 1810, under the priest Hidalgo—he was captured and executed in 1812, but his death did not crush his faction. The Viceroyalty of Peru was almost the only part of Spanish America which still remained loyal. The Cortes at Cadiz made elaborate attempts to conciliate the Americans, but was unable to satisfy their expectations or to end their discontents. The deeply-rooted belief of the Creoles that they and their country were still being exploited for the benefit of Spain, could not be removed by any declaration that they were now to be Spanish citizens with full rights, or by giving them representation in the Cortes. The idea of autonomy was already abroad in Spanish America, and in every quarter ambitious men were quoting the precedent of the revolt of the Thirteen United Colonies from Great Britain in the previous generation. Truly Spain had committed an unwise act when she joined France in wrecking the British domination in North America. She revenged an old grudge successfully, but she taught her own colonists a lesson impossible to forget and easy to copy.

The Peninsular War had hitherto been maintained in no small degree by the money which kept flowing in from America: what would happen if the treasure-ships with their regular supply of silver dollars from the mines of Mexico and Peru ceased altogether to come in? Already affairs were looking so threatening that, despite of all the needs of the campaign at home, reinforcements were being sent out to the New World from Cadiz and from Corunna: the Army of Galicia, as we shall presently see, was nearly put out of action in the spring of 1812 by the dispatch of an over-great proportion of its trained artillerymen to America[137]. Some French observers of the situation formed the idea that the Spaniards, if pressed to a decision between the possible loss of their colonies and the chance of obtaining a free hand by peace with Napoleon, might make the choice for empire rather than freedom. By acknowledging Joseph Bonaparte as king, and coming into the Napoleonic system, they might be able to turn their whole strength against the discontented Americans. This idea had one fatal error: any Spaniard could see that submission to France meant war with Great Britain: and then the way across the Atlantic would be closed. The British government would be forced into an alliance with the colonists; it had already thought of this device in the old days before Napoleon’s invasion of the Peninsula. Whitelock’s unhappy Buenos Ayres expedition in 1807 had been sent out precisely to take advantage of the discontent of the Americans, and in the hope that they would rise against the mother country if promised assistance. The adventurer Miranda had spent much time in pressing this policy on the Portland cabinet. Whitelock’s descent on the Rio de la Plata, it is true, had been as disappointing in the political as in the military line: he had got no help whatever from the disaffected colonists. But feeling in America had developed into much greater bitterness since 1807: in 1812 actual insurrection had already broken out. British aid would not, this time, be rejected: the malcontents would buy it by the grant of liberal trading concessions, which the Cadiz government, even in its worst time of trouble, had steadily refused to grant. There was every chance, therefore, that a policy of submission to Napoleon would ensure the loss of America even more certainly and more rapidly than a persistence in the present war. It does not seem that any person of importance at Cadiz ever took into serious consideration the idea of throwing up the struggle for independence, in order to obtain the opportunity of dealing with the American question.

The idea, however, was in the air. This was the time at which King Joseph made his last attempt to open up secret negotiation with the patriots. His own condition was unhappy enough, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter: but he was well aware that the outlook of his enemies was no less gloomy. One of the numerous—and usually impracticable—pieces of advice which his brother had sent him was the suggestion that he should assemble some sort of a Cortes, and then, posing as a national king, try to open up communications with the Cadiz government, setting forth the somewhat unconvincing thesis that Great Britain, and not France, was the real enemy of Spanish greatness. The idea of calling a Cortes fell through: the individuals whom Joseph could have induced to sit in it would have been so few, so insignificant, and so unpopular, that such a body could only have provoked contempt[138]. But an attempt was made to see if anything could be done at Cadiz: the inducement which Joseph was authorized to offer to the patriots was that immediately on his recognition as a constitutional king by the Cortes—and a constitution was to be drawn up in haste at Madrid—the French army should retire from Spain, and the integrity of the realm should be guaranteed. Napoleon even made a half-promise to give up Catalonia, though he had practically annexed it to his empire in the previous year[139].

Joseph and his ministers had no confidence either in the Emperor’s sincerity in making these offers, or in the likelihood of their finding any acceptance among the patriots. He sent, however, to Cadiz as his agent a certain Canon La Peña, a secret Afrancesado, but a brother of Manuel La Peña, the incapable general who had betrayed Graham at Barrosa. This officer was on his trial at the moment for his misbehaviour on that occasion, and the canon pretended to have come to assist him in his day of trouble on grounds of family affection. It would seem that he sounded certain persons but with small effect. Toreno, who was present in Cadiz at the time, and well acquainted with every intrigue that was in progress, says that the Regency never heard of the matter, and that very few members of the Cortes knew what La Peña was doing. It seems that he had conversations with certain freemasons, who were connected with lodges in Madrid that were under French influence, and apparently with one member of the ministry. ‘I do not give his name,’ says the historian, ‘because I have no documentary proof to bear out the charge, but moral proof I have[140].’ Be this as it may, the labours of La Peña do not seem to have been very fruitful, and the assertion made by certain French historians, and by Napoleon himself in the Mémorial de Ste-Hélène, that the Cortes would have proceeded to treat with Joseph, but for Wellington’s astonishing successes in the spring of 1812, has little or no foundation. As Toreno truly observes, any open proposal of the sort would have resulted in the tearing to pieces by the populace of the man hardy enough to make it. The intrigue had no more success than the earlier mission of Sotelo, which has been spoken of in another place[141]. But it lingered on, till the battle of Salamanca in July, and the flight of Joseph from Madrid in August, proved, to any doubters that there may have been, that the French cause was on the wane[142]. One of the most curious results of this secret negotiation was that Soult, hearing that the King’s emissary was busy at Cadiz, and not knowing that it was at Napoleon’s own suggestion that the experiment was being made, came to the conclusion that Joseph was plotting to abandon his brother, and to make a private peace with the Cortes, on condition that he should break with France and be recognized as king. He wrote, as we shall presently see, to denounce him to Napoleon as a traitor. Hence came no small friction in the following autumn.

These secret intrigues fell into a time of keen political strife at Cadiz—the famous Constitution, which was to cause so much bickering in later years, was being drafted, discussed, and passed through the Cortes in sections, all through the autumn of 1811 and the winter of 1811-12. The Liberals and the Serviles fought bitterly over almost every clause, and during their disputes the anti-national propaganda of the handful of Afrancesados passed almost unnoticed. It is impossible in a purely military history to relate the whole struggle, and a few words as to its political bearings must suffice.

The Constitution was a strange amalgam of ancient Spanish national tradition, of half-understood loans from Great Britain and America, and of political theory borrowed from France. Many of its framers had obviously studied the details of the abortive ‘limited monarchy’ which had been imposed on Louis XVI in the early days of the French Revolution. From this source came the scheme which limited within narrow bounds the sovereign’s power in the Constitution. The system evolved was that of a king whose main constitutional weapon was that right of veto on legislation which had proved so unpopular in France. He was to choose ministers who, like those of the United States of America, were not to sit in parliament, nor to be necessarily dependent on a party majority in the house, though they were to be responsible to it. There was to be but one Chamber, elected not directly by the people—though universal suffrage was introduced—but by notables chosen by the parishes in local primary assemblies, who again named district notables, these last nominating the actual members for the Cortes.

The right of taxation was vested in the Chamber, and the Ministry was placed at its mercy by the power of refusing supply. The regular army was specially subjected to the Chamber and not to the King, though the latter was left some power with regard to calling out or disbanding the local militia which was to form the second line in the national forces—at present it was in fact non-existent, unless the guerrillero bands might be considered to represent it.

The most cruel blows were struck not only at the King’s power but at his prestige. A clause stating that all treaties or grants made by him while in captivity were null and void was no doubt necessary—there was no knowing what documents Napoleon might not dictate to Ferdinand. But it was unwise to formulate in a trenchant epigram that ‘the nation is free and independent, not the patrimony of any family or person,’ or that ‘the people’s obligation of obedience ceases when the King violates the laws.’ And when, after granting their sovereign a veto on legislation, the Constitution proceeded to state that the veto became inoperative after the Cortes had passed any act in three successive sessions, it became evident that the King’s sole weapon was to be made ineffective. ‘Sovereignty,’ it was stated, ‘is vested essentially in the nation, and for this reason the nation alone has the right to establish its fundamental laws.’ But the most extraordinary attack on the principle of legitimate monarchy was a highhanded resettlement of the succession to the throne, in which the regular sequence of next heirs was absolutely ignored. If King Ferdinand failed to leave issue, the crown was to go to his brother Don Carlos: if that prince also died childless, the Constitution declared that the infante Don Francisco and his sister the Queen of Etruria were both to be passed over. No definite reasons were given in the act of settlement for this astonishing departure from the natural line of descent. The real meaning of the clause concerning Don Francisco was that many suspected him of being the son of Godoy and not of Charles IV[143]. As to the Queen of Etruria, she had been in her younger days a docile tool of Napoleon, and had lent herself very tamely to his schemes. But it is said that the governing cause of her exclusion from the succession was not so much her own unpopularity, as the incessant intrigues of her sister Carlotta, the wife of the regent João of Portugal, who had for a long time been engaged in putting forward a claim to be elected as sole regent of Spain. She had many members of the Cortes in her pay, and their influence was directed to getting her name inserted in the list above that of her brother in the succession-roll, and to the disinheritance of her sister also. Her chance of ever reaching the throne was not a very good one, as both Ferdinand and Carlos were still young, and could hardly be kept prisoners at Valençay for ever. It is probable that the real object of the manœvres was rather to place her nearer to the regency of Spain in the present crisis, than to seat her upon its throne at some remote date. For the regency was her desire, though the crown too would have been welcome, and sometimes not only the anti-Portuguese party in the Cortes, but Wellington and his brother Henry Wellesley, the Ambassador at Cadiz, were afraid that by patience and by long intrigue her partisans might achieve their object.

Wellington was strongly of opinion that a royal regent at Cadiz would be most undesirable. The personal influences of a camarilla, surrounding an ambitious but incapable female regent, would add another difficulty to the numerous problems of the relations between England and Spain, which were already sufficiently tiresome.

This deliberate humiliation of the monarchy, by clauses accentuated by phrases of insult, which angered, and were intended to anger, the Serviles, was only accomplished after long debate, in which protests of the most vigorous sort were made by many partisans of the old theory of Spanish absolutism. Some spoke in praise of the Salic Law, violated by the mention of Carlotta as heiress to the throne, others (ignoring rumours as to his paternity) defended Don Francisco, as having been by his youth exempted from the ignominies of Bayonne, and dwelt on the injustice of his fate. But the vote went against them by a most conclusive figure.

The majority in the Cortes, which made such parade of its political liberalism, did not pursue its theories into the realm of religion. After reading its fulsome declarations in favour of freedom, it is astounding to note the black intolerance of the clause which declares not only, as might naturally be expected, that ‘the religion of the Spanish nation is, and ever shall be, the Catholic Apostolic Roman, the one true faith,’ but that ‘the nation defends it by wise laws, forbidding the exercise of any other.’ Schism and unorthodoxy still remained political as well as ecclesiastical crimes, no less than in the time of Philip II. The Liberals, despite of murmurs by the Serviles, refused to recreate the Inquisition, but this was as far as their conception of religious freedom went.

Contemplating this exhibition of mediaeval intolerance, it is impossible to rate at any very high figure the ostentatious liberalism which pervades the greater part of the Constitution. We are bound to recognize in it merely the work of a party of ambitious politicians, who desired to secure control of the state-machine for themselves, and to exclude the monarchy from all share in its manipulation. No doubt any form of limited government was better than the old royal bureaucracy. But this particular scheme went much farther than the needs or the possibilities of the time, and was most unsuited for a country such as the Spain of 1812. When its meaning began to be understood in the provinces, it commanded no enthusiasm or respect. Indeed, outside the Cortes itself the only supporters that it possessed were the populace of Cadiz and a few other great maritime towns. Considered as a working scheme it had the gravest faults, especially the ill-arranged relations between the ministers (who did not form a real cabinet) and the Chamber, in which they were prohibited from sitting. In 1814 Lord Castlereagh observed, with great truth, that he could now say from certain experience, that in practice as well as in theory the Constitution of 1812 was one of the worst among the modern productions of its kind[144].

Among the many by-products of the Constitution was a change in the membership of the Regency. The old ‘trinitarian’ body composed of Blake, Agar, and Cisgar, had long been discredited, and proposals for its dissolution had been debated, even before its further continuance was rendered impossible by Blake’s surrender to the French at Valencia in the earliest days of 1812. A furious discussion in the Cortes had ended in a vote that no royal personage should be a member of any new regency, so that the pretensions of the Princess of Portugal were finally discomfited. The new board consisted of the Duke of Infantado, Joaquim Mosquera, a member of the Council of the Indies, Admiral Villavicencio, military governor of Cadiz, Ignacio Rodriguez de Rivas, and Henry O’Donnell, Conde de la Bispal, the energetic soldier whose exploits in Catalonia have been set forth in the last volume of this book. He was the only man of mark in the new regency: Infantado owed his promotion to his rank and wealth, and the fact that he had been the trusted friend of Ferdinand VII. He possessed a limited intelligence and little education, and was hardly more than a cipher, with a distinct preference for ‘Serviles’ rather than for Liberals. Villavicencio had no military reputation, but had been an energetic organizer, and a fairly successful governor during the siege of Cadiz. Mosquera and Rivas were elected mainly because they were of American birth—their choice was intended to conciliate the discontented colonists. Neither of them was entitled by any great personal merit to the promotion which was thrust upon him. Henry O’Donnell, now at last recovered from the wound which had laid him on a sick bed for so many months in 1811[145], was both capable and energetic, but quarrelsome and provocative: he belonged to that class of men who always irritate their colleagues into opposition, by their rapid decisions and imperious ways, especially when those colleagues are men of ability inferior to their own. The Duke of Infantado was absent for some time after his election—he had been serving as ambassador in London. Of the other four Regents two ranked as ‘Serviles,’ two as Liberals, a fact which told against their efficiency as a board. They had little strength to stand out against the Cortes, whose jealousy against any power in the State save its own was intense. On the whole it may be said that the substitution of the five new Regents for the three old ones had no great political consequences. The destiny of the patriot cause was not in the hands of the executive, but of the turbulent, faction-ridden, and ambitious legislative chamber, an ideally bad instrument for the conduct of a difficult and dangerous war. Fortunately it was neither the Regency nor the Cortes whose actions were to settle the fate of the campaign of 1812, but purely and solely Wellington and the Anglo-Portuguese army. The intrigues of Cadiz turned out to be a negligible quantity in the course of events.

In Lisbon at this time matters were much more quiet than they had been a little while back. The Portuguese government had abandoned any overt opposition to Wellington, such as had been seen in 1810, when the Patriarch and the President Souza had given him so much trouble. The expulsion of Masséna from Portugal had justified the policy of Wellington, and almost silenced his critics. He had not even found it necessary to press for the removal of the men whom he distrusted from the Council of Regency[146], in which the word of his loyal coadjutor, Charles Stuart, who combined the rather incompatible functions of British Ambassador and Regent, was now supreme. Open opposition had ceased, but Wellington complained that while compliance was always promised, ‘every measure which I propose is frittered away to nothing, the form and the words remain, but the spirit of the measure is taken away in the execution[147].’ This was, he remarked, the policy of the Portuguese government: they no longer refused him anything; but if they thought that any of his demands might offend either the Prince Regent at Rio Janeiro or the popular sentiment of the Portuguese nation, they carried out his proposals in such a dilatory fashion, and with so many exceptions and excuses, that he failed to obtain what he had expected.

In this there was a good deal of injustice. Wellington does not always seem to have realized the abject poverty which four years of war had brought upon Portugal. The Regency calculated that, on account of falling revenue caused by the late French invasion, for 1812 they could only count on 12,000,000 cruzados novos of receipts[148]—this silver coin was worth about 2s. 6d. sterling, so that the total amounted to about £1,500,000. Of this three-fourths, or 9,000,000 cruzados, was set aside for the army, the remainder having to sustain all the other expenses of the State—justice, civil administration, roads, navy, &c. The British subsidy had been raised to £2,000,000 a year, but it was paid with the utmost irregularity: in one month of 1811 the Portuguese treasury had received only £6,000, in another only £20,000, instead of the £166,000 promised[149]. When such arrears accumulated, it was no wonder that the soldiers starved and the magazines ran low. It was calculated that to keep the army up to its full numbers, and to supply all military needs efficiently, 45,000,000 cruzados a year were required. Taking the British subsidy as equalling 16,000,000, and the available national contribution at 9,000,000 cruzados, there was little more than half the required sum available. This Portuguese calculation appears to be borne out by the note of Beresford’s chief of the staff, D’Urban, in February 1812. ‘The Marshal at Lisbon finds that, after a perfect investigation, it appears that the expenditure must be nearly £6,000,000—the means at present £3,500,000! Nous verrons.’

It is clear that the Portuguese government must have shrunk from many of Wellington’s suggestions on account of mere lack of resources. A third of the country had been at one time or another overrun by the French—the provinces north of the Douro in 1809, the Beira and northern Estremadura in 1810-11. It would take long years before they were in a position to make their former contributions to the expenses of the State. It was impossible to get over this hard fact: but Wellington thought that a rearrangement of taxes, and an honest administration of their levy, would produce a much larger annual revenue than was being raised in 1812. He pointed out, with some plausibility, that British money was being poured into Portugal by millions and stopped there: some one—the merchant and contractor for the most part—must be making enormous profits and accumulating untold wealth. Moreover he had discovered cases of the easy handling of the rich and influential in the matter of taxation, while the peasantry were being drained of their last farthing. Such little jobs were certain to occur in an administration of the ancien régime: fidalgos and capitalists knew how to square matters with officials at Lisbon. ‘A reform in the abuses of the Customs of Lisbon and Oporto, a more equal and just collection of the Income Tax on commercial property, particularly in those large and rich towns [it is scandalous to hear of the fortunes made by the mercantile classes owing to the war, and to reflect that they contribute practically nothing to bear its burdens], a reform of the naval establishment and the arsenal, would make the income equal to the expenditure, and the government would get on without calling upon Great Britain at every moment to find that which, in the existing state of the world, cannot be procured, viz. money[150].’ So wrote Wellington, who was always being irritated by discovering that the magazines of Elvas or Almeida were running low, or that recruits were not rejoining their battalions because there was no cash to arm or clothe them, or that troops in the field were getting half-rations, unless they were on the British subsidy list.

No doubt Wellington was right in saying that there was a certain amount of jobbery in the distribution of taxation, and that more could have been raised by a better system. But Portuguese figures of the time seem to make it clear that even if a supernatural genius had been administering the revenue instead of the Conde de Redondo, all could not have been obtained that was demanded. The burden of the war expenses was too heavy for an impoverished country, with no more than two and a half million inhabitants, which was compelled to import a great part of its provisions owing to the stress of war. The state of Portugal may be estimated by the fact that in the twelve months between February 1811 and January 1812 £2,672,000 worth of imported corn, besides 605,000 barrels of flour, valued at £2,051,780 more, was brought into the country and sold there[151]. On the other hand the export of wine, with which Portugal used to pay for its foreign purchases, had fallen off terribly: in 1811 only 18,000 pipes were sold as against an average of 40,000 for the eight years before the outbreak of the Peninsular War. An intelligent observer wrote in 1812 that the commercial distress of the country might mainly be traced to the fact that nearly all the money which came into the country from England, great as was the sum, found its way to the countries from which Portugal was drawing food, mainly to the United States, from which the largest share of the wheat and flour was brought. ‘As we have no corresponding trade with America, the balance has been very great against this country: for the last three years this expenditure has been very considerable, without any return whatever, as the money carried to America has been completely withdrawn from circulation.’

The shrinkage in the amount of the gold and silver current in Portugal was as noticeable in these years as the same phenomenon in England, and (like the British) the Portuguese government tried to make up the deficiency by the issue of inconvertible paper money, which gradually fell in exchange value as compared with the metallic currency. The officers of the army, as well as all civil functionaries, were paid their salaries half in cash and half in notes—the latter suffered a depreciation of from 15 to 30 per cent. Among the cares which weighed on Wellington and Charles Stuart was that of endeavouring to keep the Regency from the easy expedient of issuing more and more of a paper currency which was already circulating at far less than its face value. This was avoided—fortunately for the Portuguese people and army, no less than for the Anglo-Portuguese alliance.

After all, the practical results of the efforts made by the Portuguese government were invaluable. Wellington could not have held his ground, much less have undertaken the offensive campaign of 1812, without the aid of the trusty auxiliaries that swelled his divisions to normal size. Without their Portuguese brigades most of them would have been mere skeletons of 3,000 or 4,000 men. Beresford’s army was almost up to its full establishment in January 1812—there were 59,122 men on the rolls, when recruits, sick, men on detachment, and the regiment lent for the succour of Cadiz are all counted. Deducting, beyond these, the garrisons of Elvas, Abrantes, Almeida, and smaller places, as also the dismounted cavalry left in the rear[152], there were over 30,000 men for the fighting-line, in ten brigades of infantry, six regiments of cavalry, and eight field-batteries. Beresford, lately entrusted by orders from Rio Janeiro with still more stringent powers over the military establishment, was using them to the full. An iron hand kept down desertion and marauding, executions for each of those offences appear incessantly in the Ordens do Dia, which give the daily chronicle of the Portuguese head-quarters. In addition to the regular army it must be remembered that he had to manage the militia, of which as many as 52,000 men were under arms at one time or another in 1812. Counting the first and the second line together, there were 110,000 men enrolled—a fine total for a people of two and a half million souls.

Putting purely Portuguese difficulties aside, Wellington was much worried at this time by a trouble which concerned the British and not the local finances. This was the delay in the cashing of the ‘vales’ or bills for payment issued by the Commissary-General for food and forage bought from the peasantry. As long as they were settled at short intervals, no difficulty arose about them—they were indeed treated as negotiable paper, and had passed from hand to hand at a lesser discount than the inconvertible Portuguese government papers. But all through the year 1811 the interval between the issue of the ‘vale’ and its payment in cash at Lisbon had been growing longer, and an uncomfortable feeling was beginning to spread about the country-side. The peasantry were growing suspicious, and were commencing to sell the bills, for much less than their face value, to speculators who could afford to wait for payment. To recoup themselves for their loss they were showing signs of raising prices all round. Fortunately they were a simple race, and communication between districts was slow and uncertain, so that no general tendency of this sort was yet prevalent, though the symptoms were making themselves visible here and there. Hence came Wellington’s constant applications for more cash from England at shorter notice. Late in the spring he devised a scheme by which interest at 5 per cent. was to be paid by the Commissary-General on bonds or certificates representing money or money’s worth advanced to the British army, till the principal was repaid—two years being named as the period after which the whole sum must be refunded. This was a desperate measure, an endeavour to throw forward payment on to a remote future, ‘when it is not probable that there will be the same difficulty in procuring specie in England to send abroad as there is at the present moment.’ The plan[153] was never tried, and was not good: for how could small creditors of the English army be expected to stand out of their money—representing the price of their crops or their cattle—for so long a period as two years, even if they were, in the meantime, receiving interest on what was really their working capital? Wellington himself remarked, when broaching the scheme to Lord Liverpool, that there remained the difficulty that no one could look forward, and say that the British army would still be in the Peninsula two years hence. If it had left Portugal—whether victorious and pushing towards the Pyrenees, or defeated and driven back on to Great Britain—how would the creditors communicate with the Commissary-General, their debtor? They could only be referred to London, to which they would have no ready access: indeed many of them would not know where, or what, London was. That such an idea should have been set forward only shows the desperate financial situation of the British army.

We shall have to be referring to this problem at several later points of the history of the campaign of 1812[154]: at the opening of the invasion of Leon in June it reached its worst point, just before the great victory of Salamanca. But it was always present, and when Wellington’s mind was not occupied with deductions as to the manœuvres of French marshals, it may undoubtedly be said that his main preoccupation was the normally depleted state of the military chest, into which dollars and guineas flowed, it is true, in enormous quantities, but only to be paid out at once, in settling arrears many months old. These were never fully liquidated, and began to accumulate again, with distressing rapidity, after every tardy settlement.

Whig historians have often tried to represent Wellington’s financial difficulties as the fault of the home government, and it is easy to pick passages from his dispatches in which he seems to assert that he is not being supported according to his necessities. But a nearer investigation of the facts will not bear out this easy theory, the product of party spite. The Whigs of 1811-12 were occupied in decrying the Peninsular War as a failure, in minimizing the successes of Wellington, and in complaining that the vast sums of money lavished on his army were wasted. Napoleon was invincible, peace was the only way out of disaster, even if the peace must be somewhat humiliating. It was unseemly for their representatives, twenty years after, to taunt the Perceval and Liverpool ministries with having stinted Wellington in his hour of need. We have learnt to estimate at their proper value tirades against ‘the administration which was characterized by all the corruption and tyranny of Mr. Pitt’s system, without his redeeming genius.’ We no longer think that the Napoleonic War was waged ‘to repress the democratic principle,’ nor that the cabinets which maintained it were ‘the rapacious usurpers of the people’s rights[155].’

Rather, in the spirit of Mr. Fortescue’s admirable volume on British Statesmen of the Great War, shall we be prone to stand amazed at the courage and resolution of the group of British ministers who stood out, for long years and against tremendous odds, to defeat the tyrant of Europe and to preserve the British Empire. ‘On the one side was Napoleon, an autocrat vested with such powers as great genius and good fortune have rarely placed in the hands of one man, with the resources of half Europe at his disposition, and an armed force unsurpassed in strength and devotion ready to march to the ends of the world to uphold his will. On the other were these plain English gentlemen, with not so much as a force of police at their back, with a population by nature five times as turbulent as it is now, and in the manufacturing districts inflamed alike by revolutionary teaching and by real distress, with an Ireland always perilously near revolt, with a House of Commons unreformed indeed, but not on that account containing a less factious, mischievous, and obstructive opposition than any other House of Commons during a great war. In face of all these difficulties they had to raise armies, maintain fleets, construct and pursue a military policy, and be unsuccessful at their peril. Napoleon might lose whole armies with impunity: five thousand British soldiers beaten and captured would have brought any British minister’s head perilously near the block. Such were the difficulties that confronted Perceval, Liverpool, and Castlereagh: yet for their country’s sake they encountered them without flinching[156].’

The winter of 1811-12 was not quite the darkest hour: the Russian war was looming in the near future, and Napoleon was already beginning to withdraw troops from Spain in preparation for it. No longer therefore, as in 1810 and the earlier half of 1811, was there a high probability that the main bulk of the French armies, under the Emperor himself, might be turned once more against the Peninsula. It was all but certain that England would soon have allies, and not stand practically alone in the struggle, as she had done ever since Wagram. Nevertheless, even with the political horizon somewhat brightened in the East, the time was a sufficiently anxious one. In Great Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the harvest of 1811 had been exceptionally bad, and the high price of bread, coinciding with much unemployment, was causing not only distress but wide-spread turbulence in the manufacturing districts. This was the year of the first outbreak of the ‘Luddites,’ and of their senseless exploits in the way of machine-smashing. The worst stringency of domestic troubles coincided with the gradual disappearance of the external danger from the ambition of Napoleon.

In addition it must be remembered that the Perceval cabinet, on which all the responsibilities fell, was by no means firmly established in power. When it first took office many politicians believed that it could not last for a single year. All through 1811 the Prince Regent had been in secret negotiation with the Whigs, and would gladly have replaced his ministers with some sort of a coalition government. And in January 1812 Lord Wellesley, by far the most distinguished man in the cabinet, resigned his post as Foreign Minister. He asserted that he did so because his colleagues had failed to accept all his plans for the support of his brother and the Peninsular army: and no doubt this was to a certain extent true. Yet it cannot be said that, either before or after his resignation, the Ministry had neglected Wellington; in 1811 they had doubled his force of cavalry, and sent him about a dozen new battalions of infantry. It was these reinforcements which made the victories of 1812 possible, and in that year the stream of reinforcements did not cease—nine more infantry regiments came out, mostly in time for the great crisis in June[157]. In the autumn the dispatch of further succours had become difficult, because of the outbreak of the American war, which diverted of necessity to Canada many units that might otherwise have gone to Spain. It is impossible to maintain that Wellington was stinted of men: money was the difficulty. And even as regards money—which had to be gold or silver, since paper was useless in the Peninsula—the resources placed at his disposal were much larger than in previous years, though not so large as he demanded, nor as the growing scale of the war required.

It is difficult to acquit Wellesley of factiousness with regard to his resignation, and the most damaging document against him is the apologia drawn up by his devoted adherent Shawe[158], in the belief that it afforded a complete justification for his conduct: many of the words and phrases are the Marquess’s own. From this paper no one can fail to deduce that it was not so much a quixotic devotion to his brother’s interests, as an immoderate conception of his own dignity and importance that made Wellesley resign. He could not stand the free discussion and criticism of plans and policies which is essential in a cabinet. ‘Lord Wellesley has always complained, with some justice, that his suggestions were received as those of a mere novice.... His opinions were overruled, and the opposition he met with could only proceed from jealousy, or from a real contempt for his judgement. It seemed to him that they were unwilling to adopt any plan of his, lest it might lead to his assuming a general ascendancy in the Cabinet.... He said that he took another view of the situation: the Government derived the most essential support from his joining it, because it was considered as a pledge that the war would be properly supported.... “The war is popular, and any government that will support Lord Wellington properly will stand. I do not think the war is properly supported, and I cannot, as an honest man, deceive the nation by remaining in office.” ... It is needless to particularize all the points of difference between Lord Wellesley and his colleagues: Spain was the main point, but he also disapproved of their obstinate adherence to the Orders in Council, and their policy towards America and in Sicily’—not to speak of Catholic Emancipation.

These are the words of injured pride, not of patriotism. The essential thing at the moment was that the war in Spain should be kept up efficiently. By resigning, Wellesley intended to break up the Ministry, and of this a probable result might have been the return to office of the Whigs, whose policy was to abandon the Peninsula and make peace with Napoleon. Wellesley’s apologia acknowledges that his influence in the Cabinet had brought about, on more occasions than one, an increase of the support given to his brother, e.g. his colleagues had given in about additions to the Portuguese subsidy, and about extra reinforcements to the army. This being so, it was surely criminal in him to retire, when he found that some of his further suggestions were not followed. Would the wrecking of the Perceval cabinet, and the succession of the Whigs to power, have served Wellington or the general cause of the British Empire?

Wellington himself saw the situation with clear eyes, and in a letter, in which a touch of his sardonic humour can be detected, wrote in reply to his brother’s announcement of his resignation that ‘In truth the republic of a cabinet is but little suited to any man of taste or of large views[159].’ There lay the difficulty: the great viceroy loved to dictate, and hated to hear his opinions criticized. Lord Liverpool, in announcing the rupture to Wellington in a letter of a rather apologetic cast, explains the situation in a very few words: ‘Lord Wellesley says generally that he has not the weight in the Government which he expected, when he accepted office.... The Government, though a cabinet, is necessarily inter pares, in which every member must expect to have his opinions and his dispatches canvassed, and this previous friendly canvass of opinions and measures appears necessary, under a constitution where all public acts of ministers will be hostilely debated in parliament.’ The Marquess resented all criticism whatever.

The ministers assured Wellington that his brother’s resignation would make no difference in their relations with himself, and invited him to write as freely to Lord Castlereagh, who succeeded Wellesley at the Foreign Office, as to his predecessor. The assurance of the Cabinet’s good will and continued confidence was received—as it had been given—in all sincerity. Not the least change in Wellington’s relations with the Ministry can be detected from his dispatches. Nor can it be said that the support which he received from home varied in the least, after his brother’s secession from the Cabinet. Even the grudging Napier is forced to concede this much, though he endeavours to deprive the Perceval ministry of any credit, by asserting that their only chance of continuance in office depended on the continued prosperity of Wellington. Granting this, we must still conclude that Wellesley’s resignation, even if it produced no disastrous results—as it well might have done—was yet an unhappy exhibition of pride and petulance. A patriotic statesman should have subordinated his own amour propre to the welfare of Great Britain, which demanded that a strong administration, pledged to the continuance of war with Napoleon, should direct the helm of the State. He did his best to wreck Perceval’s cabinet, and to put the Whigs in power.

The crisis in the Ministry passed off with less friction and less results than most London observers had expected, and Lord Liverpool turned out to be right when he asserted that in his opinion[160] it would be of no material prejudice to the Perceval government. Castlereagh, despite of his halting speech and his involved phrases, was a tower of strength at the Foreign Office, and certainly replaced Wellesley with no disadvantage to the general policy of Great Britain.

Here the jealousies and bickerings in London may be left for a space. We shall only need to turn back for a moment to ministerial matters when, at midsummer, the whole situation had been transformed, for France and Russia were at last openly engaged in war, a great relief to British statesmen, although at the same time a new trouble was arising in the West to distract their attention. For the same month that started Napoleon on his way to Moscow saw President Madison’s declaration of war on Great Britain, and raised problems, both on the high seas and on the frontiers of Canada, that would have seemed heart-breaking and insoluble if the strength of France had not been engaged elsewhere. But the ‘stab in the back,’ as angry British politicians called it, was delivered too late to be effective.

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