He was accompanied to the Spanish frontier by the Adjutant-General Florestan Pipi, who was then sent to Naples. On entering France he was sent to Paris, and from thence to the strong Château de Vincennes, where he remained a close prisoner until the fall of the Imperial Government; but this captivity did not prevent the Cortes from appointing him a Counsellor of State when naming the regency. The triumph of the allies having broken his fetters in 1814, after receiving many marks of favour from the Emperor Alexander, he returned into Spain under the ministry of Ballasteros, and was appointed Director-General of the Corps of Engineers. He occupied this honourable post until the revolution of 1820, when, in exchange, he received a seat in the Council of State. When war was threatened between France and Spain in 1823 he was appointed, on the 7th February, one of the committee of five generals who were ordered to concert measures for defending the kingdom. In the French army which entered Spain in that year, under the Marquis of Lauriston (an officer of Scottish parentage), we find two lieutenant-generals of Irish descent—Count Bourke and Viscount O'Donoughue; the Duke of Angoulême was General-in-Chief, and to him, the Duke of Berwick and Alba, a Spanish grandee of the Stuart blood, gave his adherence. The restoration caused by the French intervention under the Marshal Lauriston was fatal to Blake; for being suspected by the royalists of constitutional principles, he was only able to avoid prosecution by great care and solicitude: but his career was drawing to a close, as he died at Valladolid in 1827, regretted by all the Spanish army, and eulogized by the people in their songs and stories of "the War of Independence."
The military men who had borne arms under him, says a French writer, recognised and admitted his positive talent, his great knowledge and perspicacité of tactiques; but agreed that he failed in two essential points—the prompt coup d'œil which decides at once the fortune of a battle, and that art of manner by which it is necessary to excite the enthusiasm of the soldier.
A distinguished branch of the old Celtic sept of O'Donnel has borne a prominent part in the Spanish annals during the last fifty years; but so early as the days of Philip of Anjou and Charles of Spain, we find an O'Donnel fighting in the ranks of their armies.
Soon after the accession of James VI. to the English throne, he was engaged in the last struggle of the Crown against the houses of O'Donnel and O'Neil. An earldom was bestowed as a peace-offering upon the chief of the former; but his plots against the king soon deprived him of it: his estates were seized, an English colony planted in the land of his tribe, and he fled to the Court of Spain, between which and the Irish there had been a close connexion during the animosity of Philip II. and Elizabeth. He was welcomed with all the honours of a Castilian grandee, and attained a high rank under King Charles. Eighty years after this we find his descendant, Baldearg O'Donnel, still remembering the days when the chiefs, or petty princes of his race, were solemnly inaugurated as the successors of St. Columba on the Rock of Kilmacrenan. He resigned his commission in the service of Philip V., of whom he begged permission to join the Irish, then in arms against William of Orange. Philip refused; but the O'Donnel fled by a route so circuitous that he visited Turkey, and after enduring many privations, landed at Kinsale in 1690, where seven thousand armed Ulster-men hailed him with joy, as the Red O'Donnel of an ancient Celtic prophecy.
From Baldearg O'Donnel is descended General Count O'Donnel, who commanded the army of Maria Theresa on the fall of Count Lacy at the great battle of Toorgau in 1761; and also General O'Donnel, Vice-Governor of Lombardy, who was attacked by the Milanese during the Austrian revolution of 1848, when his palace was stormed and himself taken prisoner. There was also a Count O'Donnel in the Hungarian service, who died at Brussels in 1767, after reaching the patriarchal age of one hundred and two years.
Of this ancient Celtic family there are now, or were lately, four general officers of the highest rank in the service of Great Britain, Spain, Austria, and America; but of these the most distinguished is Leopold O'Donnel, Conde de Lucena and Marshal in the service of Donna Isabella II.
The four O'Donnels, Henry, Charles, Joseph, and Alexander, who attained such distinction in Spain during the Peninsula War, were the sons of Irish gentlemen who emigrated to that country during the latter end of the last century; and of their services and honours our limits will allow but a brief outline; while General Sarsfield, Colonel O'Ronan, A.D.C. to the Marquis de Campo Verde, or such partisan soldiers as MacDonel, the unfortunate Guerilla chief who fell in action, Captain Flinter the Christino, or General O'Doyle and his brother, a captain, who were taken prisoners at the last battle of Vittoria, and shot in cold blood by Zumalacarregui, can only be indicated here by name.
Charles (afterwards) Count O'Donnel first became known to history in 1810, when commanding at Albuquerque, from whence, on the 14th March, he made a vigorous attempt to surprise General Foy, but was driven into Casceres. Marching towards the ancient city of Merida on the 2nd April, he drove back General Regnier and made an attempt to surprise Truxillo (the birthplace of Pizarro), which is situated on a mountain. Here he was repulsed, and with difficulty effected a retreat to Albuquerque; but three months after we find him at Truxillo again, co-operating with Don Carlos de España, with whom he cut off the French at Rio Monte. In May he had lent two thousand infantry and two hundred cannoneers to Blake, to enable that officer to conduct the siege of Tarragona, receiving in return from Captain Codrington two thousand British muskets to equip a new levy. He allowed four thousand of his best Valencians to embark with Miranda to fight at Tarragona, but not until he received a pledge that the British would bring back all who survived the siege.
Charles served long with Blake, and was in most of the battles just recounted; thus, to rehearse his earlier services would be to enumerate those of Blake a second time.