(4) To appoint to his head-quarters a Spanish chief-of-the-staff, to whom all military reports from the whole kingdom should be sent: so that nothing should take place without his knowledge. Through this officer he would correspond with the Regency, and send them regular reports.
He then proceeded to definite demands as to administration. The present state of military organization was absurd, burdensome, and expensive. The realm was overrun with unnecessary army-commanders and captain-generals, with immense and useless staffs. ‘For example, General Castaños is most usefully employed as commander of the 5th Army, whose territory consists of Estremadura and Castile. But there is a captain-general and a large staff in each of these provinces, though the troops in the former are not enough to make a full garrison for Badajoz, or those in the latter to make a full garrison for Ciudad Rodrigo[276].’ The captain-generals and their staffs have nothing to administer, are quite useless, and absorb money which should go to the army. In the same way the 2nd (Valencian) and 3rd (Murcian) Armies, together have a strength equivalent to two divisions, yet have each the full military and civil staff of a complete army[277]. So has the 9th (Cantabrian) Army, which is composed entirely of guerrillero bands. Only the Andalusian and Galician troops are sufficiently numerous to be worth calling armies at all.
The first thing to do is to cut down unnecessary commanders-in-chief and staffs. The Galician, Castilian, and Estremaduran commands should be at once amalgamated, and put under Castaños, with one single staff for all three. Probably the same should be done with the Andalusian, Murcian, and Valencian commands. An immense body of superfluous staff-officers must be sent back to Cadiz at once. As a second step he would have to revise the organization of the country into captain-generalships and intendancies. Captain-generals often hampered army-commanders; intendants must probably be put under military authority. This was no doubt wrong in principle. But the civil intendant was powerless, in a country just liberated from the enemy and full of trouble and disorder. He could not exert authority unless he were lent military assistance: yet he would probably fall out with the military chief, because their ends would be divergent[278]. ‘When the enemy is still in the country that must be done which tends most directly to drive him out—whatever constitutional principles may be violated in the process[279].’
Finally, Wellington resolved that he must come down to Cadiz in person to urge his schemes of reorganization on the Regency and the Cortes—obviously a most invidious task, since no nation likes to have administrative reforms thrust upon it by a foreigner—more especially by a foreigner whose tone is dictatorial and whose phrases seem almost deliberately worded so as to wound national pride.
On December 12th he started out to deal with the Cadiz bureaucrats, planning to cover the whole 300 miles from Freneda in six days. As a matter of fact he took eleven, partly because he was smitten with lumbago, which made riding painful, partly because he was delayed one night in the Pass of Perales, and two at Albuquerque, by floods, which made mountain-streams impassable for many hours. Immediately on reaching the seat of government, where he was received with great state if with little real cordiality, he started on his campaign against the Regency, the Cortes, and the Minister of War. It is much to the credit of the Spaniards that, though many of his demands were unpalatable, the greater part of them were conceded with slight variation of terms. It is curious to note the points on which the Regency proved recalcitrant and started argument. Of the four great preliminary conditions which Wellington exacted, they granted at once that which seemed the most important of all—the creation of a Spanish chief-of-the-staff to be attached to Wellington’s head-quarters, and conceded that all military correspondence should pass through his hands. The person selected was General Wimpffen, a Spanish-Swiss officer, of whom we have had to speak occasionally in dealing with Catalonian affairs—he had been Henry O’Donnell’s adjutant-general in 1810. He was a non-political soldier of good abilities, and Wellington found him laborious and obliging: there seems never to have been any friction between them. Secondly, the Regency granted the great point that the whole British subsidy should be applied to such military expenses as Wellington should designate: and they afterwards went so far as to order that in the recovered provinces nine-tenths of the taxes raised should be devoted to military purposes. But they haggled on the two conditions dealing with military patronage. Instead of giving the generalissimo power to revise all appointments, they proposed that ‘no officer should be promoted to a chief command, or the command of a division, or any extraordinary command, except at the recommendation of the general-in-chief. With regard to other promotions the rules of the Spanish service shall be strictly observed.’ This left all patronage from the rank of brigadier-general downward in the hands of the Minister of War and the Cortes. And whereas Wellington had proposed, as his second condition, that he should have power to cashier any officer whom he considered deserving of such punishment, the Regents offered him only the right of suspending and sending away from the army in the field officers guilty of grave misconduct[280].
It is clear that these variations on the original proposals had two main objects. The Spaniards evidently thought that if Wellington had every officer down to the lowest under his thumb, liable to be cashiered without any appeal, he might use this tremendous power to stock the whole army with men of one political colour, and make it into a machine quite independent of the Government, and capable of being turned against it. And similarly there was a great difference between the right to send an officer away from the front, and the right to drive him out of the army. To be put on half-pay, or on administrative duty in some office at Cadiz, was a much less terrible fate than cashiering.
It must be remembered that many Spaniards thought Wellington capable of aiming at a military dictatorship, to which he might be helped by generals who were considered Anglophils, such as Castaños, his nephew and chief-of-the-staff Giron, or Morillo. And others believed that British policy secretly desired the seizure of Cadiz and Minorca and the reduction of Spain to a Protectorate. Now if there had been any truth in these absurd suspicions, there is no doubt that the powers which Wellington demanded would have given him the chance of carrying out such designs. And there were an infinite number of Spanish officers, from generals like La Peña down to petty governors and members of provincial staffs, who had come into direct contact with Wellington, and knew his unflattering opinion of them. All these men in disgrace, or disgruntled placemen, thought that the new generalissimo would start his career by a general cashiering of those against whom he had an old grudge.
Hence pressure was brought to bear upon the Regents and the Cortes from many and diverse quarters, with the common plea that there must be no British military dictatorship, and that Spanish officers must be protected from possible persecution and oppression. The underlying idea was that if the mass of the middle and lower grades in the army were out of Wellington’s supervision, it did not matter so much who held the post of army-commander or captain-general. For the chiefs, though in influential posts, were few, and would not be able to carry their subordinates with them in any unpopular movement dictated to them by the generalissimo.
After much discussion, and with reluctance[281], Wellington accepted the modifications—thinking that the other things conceded gave him practically all that he needed. He was to find out his error in the year that followed. He had not guarded himself against seeing officers with whom he was satisfied removed from his field-army under the pretence of promotion, or of transference to other duties, or of political offences. He had forgotten to demand that he should have the power of retaining as much as that of dismissing generals. In this way he was deprived of the services of Castaños and afterwards of Giron, both of whom he was anxious to keep. Successors technically unobjectionable, whom he had no wish to ‘blackball,’ were substituted for them, to his deep regret. And another evasion of his intention was that officers whom he had intended to disgrace, and had removed from the front, were given posts elsewhere which could not be called ‘divisional’ or ‘separate’ commands, but were quite desirable; and so while the letter of the bargain was kept, the purpose of inflicting punishment on such people was foiled.
Another long controversy was provoked by Wellington’s proposal that the small armies should be amalgamated, and that unnecessary captain-generals with their staffs should be got rid of. Much but not all of what he asked was conceded. The Murcian and Valencian armies were consolidated, and given the new name of the ‘Second Army’—the Catalan army being still the ‘First Army’. But they were not amalgamated with the Andalusian command (now the ‘Third Army’), as Wellington suggested. And similarly the Estremaduran, Castilian, and Galician armies, with the outlying Cantabrian division, ceased to be the 5th, 6th, and 7th Armies, and took the new name of the Fourth. And a great reduction of staffs and removal of contending military authorities was procured, by nominating Elio, commander of the new 2nd Army, to be Captain-General of Murcia and Valencia, Del Parque of the 3rd Army to be Captain-General of Granada and Jaen, and Castaños to be Captain-General alike of Estremadura, Galicia, and Castile. This was all to the good, but the Cortes refused Wellington’s other proposal, that the civil government in each province should be placed under the control of the army-commanders. Declaring that it was constitutionally impossible to abolish the independence of the civil power, the Cortes yet conceded that the jefe político (or provincial prefect) and the Intendant should obey the Captain-General ‘in all matters relating to the Army[282],’ also that nine-tenths of the revenue in each province should be allocated to the military budget. This would have worked if all parties concerned had been both willing and competent; but it remained a melancholy fact throughout the next campaign that the army-commanders could seldom get either money or food from the civil authorities, and that most essential operations were delayed by the absolute impossibility of moving large bodies of men without adequate magazines or a fair supply of money. The only regular income of the army was that drawn from the British subsidy.