Then, after intimating a belief that Sir John Moore had acted against his own judgment, and in consequence only of Mr. Frere’s repeatedly urging him to advance, he asked whether the Spaniards had been found willing and cordial in their assistance to the British army? whether they had received them as deliverers and guests, or with jealousy and fear? “Perhaps,” he continued, “ministers may say that the Spaniards did not discover all that cordiality which was expected. But can it be permitted that they shall say this after they have involved the country in such a ruinous, unproductive, and inglorious struggle? For let us not forget this, that, although we have obtained renown for our military bravery, England has for ever lost its character as a military nation. Were you to propose to send your soldiers again, as an encouragement and aid to other foreign powers, what would be the answer? It would be, ‘No! Your troops are good; your officers are skilful and courageous; but there is something in the councils of England, or in the nature and manner of the application of her force, that renders it impossible ever to place any reliance upon her military assistance.’ When you appeared in Holland and Germany as auxiliaries, you failed; true it is, your force in these cases was comparatively small, and the question remained undecided. The problem is solved, however, by what has passed in Spain. You professed to send forth the largest army that ever went from England, for the purpose of meeting the force of France; and what has been the result? A shameful retreat before the armies of France, and a disgraceful desertion of the power you wished to assist. This campaign, I say, will have an influence upon the character of England long after all of us shall cease to live. I ask the House, then, to institute an inquiry. I call upon the country to seek for one, in order to show how much distress, difficulties, dangers, and perils unexampled, our soldiers have endured in this fruitless and inglorious struggle. I call upon you, by the gratitude you owe to those who were thus shamefully sacrificed at Coruña, ... by that which you owe to their companions in arms, who are still in existence, and able and willing to defend their country; I call upon you, by the interest you take in those who yet remain, to institute this inquiry, in order that they may not be sacrificed by similar misconduct upon a future occasion. I call upon you, as you value the glory of our country, the preservation of our future power and reputation, as well as our interest, by every thing that can excite the exertions of brave men, to institute this investigation.”
♦Lord Castlereagh.♦
Lord Castlereagh, in his reply to this speech, observed with sarcastic truth, there could not be a greater mistake than to suppose they who called for inquiry meant that they wanted information. It happened, however, that by pronouncing upon facts of which he was imperfectly ♦Mr. Tierney.♦ informed, Mr. Tierney was led into a course of argument most unfavourable to the intentions of himself and those who acted with him. Why, he demanded, had not the 10,000 men who were embarked been sent forward with all speed to Sir John Moore’s assistance? On board the transports they were, and Lord Castlereagh took them out. Had they been sent, Sir John might have been still alive, and a real diversion then have been effected; for our army might for some time have maintained itself in Coruña, and have obliged the enemy to turn their whole attention to that quarter. The loss which we had sustained in our retreat, he said, was carefully glossed over, but he understood that it was at least from 8,000 to 10,000 men. Such a scene of woe, indeed, had scarcely ever been heard of. Think of blowing up the ammunition, destroying three or four hundred waggons, staving the dollar casks, leaving the artillery to be cast away, and the Shrapnell shells to the French, who would thus discover their composition! He meant not to ascribe these disasters in the smallest degree to the General: all might have been avoided, if only 10,000 men had been sent to his support. Inquiry, therefore, was more than ever necessary; and by the result of that night’s debate Great Britain would judge of the character of the House of Commons. That House ought to convince the army that, though they might be exposed to unavailing exertions, and useless hardships, by the mismanagement of ignorant councils, they had protection in Parliament, who would never be slow in attending to their interest and their comforts. Unless the officers of the army had this support to look to, all would with them be absolute despair; for, with the exception of some of the connexions of ministers, there was not an officer who came home from the expedition who did not vent execrations against the authors of it ... there was not a man engaged in that retreat of unparalleled hardship who did not curse those who placed them in such a situation.
The fact was as Mr. Tierney stated it; ... he was only mistaken in imputing it to the government. Four regiments and two troops of horse artillery were actually on board, and had been disembarked. Five more regiments of cavalry were under orders for Spain, and would have been dispatched as soon as the transports could return for them. Nor had Mr. Tierney overstated the advantages which might have been expected had they arrived at the scene of action. On the contrary, far more important results than that of maintaining Coruña for a time must have ensued, if the British army had found these reinforcements there, even if it could be supposed that the retreat would have been made with such desperate precipitance, the General knowing he had such support at hand. He would then have retreated like one who was falling back upon his reinforcements, not flying to his ships. Broken in strength as the army was by severe exertion and excessive sufferings, broken in spirit too and almost in heart by the manner of its retreat, it had beaten the pursuers in fair battle, and 10,000 fresh troops would have turned the tide. Galicia would have been delivered from the enemy, Portugal saved from invasion, and Soult’s army have been cut off, unless they could have crossed the mountains faster in flight than they had done in pursuit. Ministers would indeed have deserved the imputation so confidently cast on them by their opponents, if these advantages had been lost by their misconduct. Mr. Canning stated in their defence, that the reinforcements had been countermanded by the Generals, and empty transports sent out in conformity to their distinct requisition. “It was an afflicting circumstance,” said he, “to send out empty, for the purpose of bringing off the army, those ships which had been filled for the purpose of reinforcing it. Among all the decisions to which I have been a party, no one has ever in the course of my life occurred which gave me more pain than this; ... every dictate of the understanding was tortured, every feeling was wrung by it. But his Majesty’s ministers had no choice. They felt that it would excite dissatisfaction in England and dismay in Spain; and yet they had no alternative.”
♦Mr. Canning.♦
Mr. Canning then proceeded to examine the more general arguments of Mr. Ponsonby. “It had been argued,” he said, “that before the assistance of this country had been given to Spain, we ought to have ascertained whether or not the Spaniards were instigated by the monks; whether they were encouraged by the higher ranks; whether they were wedded to their ancient institutions, or disposed to shake off the oppression of their former government; to abjure the errors of a delusive religion; and to forswear the Pope and the Grand Inquisitor. The policy of his Majesty’s government was different. They felt that the Spanish nation wanted other and more aids than lectures on municipal institutions; they were content that a British army should act in Spain, though the Grand Inquisitor might have been at the head of the Spanish armies; though the people might have been attached to their ancient monarchy, and with one hand upheld Ferdinand VII., whilst with the other they worshipped the Lady of the Pillar. God forbid we should be so intolerant as to make a conformity to our own opinions the price of our assistance to others, in their efforts for national independence; to carry the sword in one hand, and what we may choose to call the Rights of Man in the other! But the enthusiasm of the Spaniards was not pretended; what they had in their mouths, they felt in their hearts: they were enthusiastically determined to defend their country to the last extremity, or to perish under its ruins. The cause was not desperate; the spirit of the people was unsubdued; the boundaries of French power were confined within the limits of their military posts; the throne of Joseph was erected on sand, and would totter with the first blast; and Buonaparte, even should he succeed, instead of a yielding and unreproaching ally, would have an impatient, revolting, and turbulent nation to keep down. The cause was not therefore desperate, because our army of 30,000 or 40,000 men had been obliged to withdraw; and it was not just to the country, or to the army, which he hoped would again prove the stay and bulwark of Europe, to assert that its honour was in consequence gone for ever. All the energy of liberty, and all the sacredness of loyalty, still survived; and the Spanish revolution was, he trusted, destined by Providence to stand between posterity and French despotism, and to show to the world, that, amidst the paroxysms of freedom, a monarch might still be loved. If, therefore, ministers could show that these were the feelings by which they were influenced, and that they had acted up to these feelings, their justification would be complete; and he was convinced that the liberal and disinterested measures of his Majesty’s government towards Spain were more congenial to British feeling, and more honourable to the national character, than if they had set out in their career of assistance by picking up golden apples for ourselves. For himself, as an humble individual of the government, and having a share in these transactions, the recollection would be a source of gratification which he should carry with him to the grave. If we had been obliged to quit Spain, we had left that country with fresh laurels blooming upon our brows; and whatever failure there had been upon the whole might still be repaired. If that was to be brought forward as the ground for accusation, he stood there for judgement. The object of the motion was to take the reins of government out of the hands of those who held them; and upon that ground he desired that the present ministers might be judged by comparison. Was it the pleasure of the House that Spain should be abandoned? Was it a principle agreed upon, that the direction of government should be committed to other hands? Was it then a settled opinion, that there was something fatal in the will, and irresistible in the power of Buonaparte? and was the world to submit to his tyrannous resolves, as to a divine infliction? Whatever might be the fruits of Buonaparte’s victories in other respects, the spirit of the Spanish nation was yet unsubdued. His fortune, no doubt, had been augmented; but still it was fortune, not fate; and therefore not to be considered unchangeable and fixed. There was something unworthy in the sentiment that would defer to this fortune, as to the dispensations of Providence; looking upon it as immutable in its nature, and irresistible by human means:—
‘Te
Nos facimus Fortuna Deam, cœloque locamus.’”
This was a triumphant reply. The arguments of the opposition had been so misdirected, that there was no occasion of subterfuge, sophistry, or the shield of a majority to baffle them: they were refutable by a plain statement of facts, where they relied on facts, ... by an appeal to principles and feelings, where they pretended to philosophy. Mr. Canning spoke from his heart. There was nothing which he was required to extenuate or to exaggerate; all that was needful was a manly avowal of what had been done, and of the reasons why it had been done. He had a good cause to plead, and he pleaded it with a force and eloquence worthy of the occasion. The same cause was in effect ♦Mr. Windham.♦ pleaded by Mr. Windham, though he took his place in the opposition ranks, and voted for the inquiry as an opposition question. “Our expedition to Spain,” he said, “had been so managed as to produce what was much worse than nothing. What we called our best army had retreated from the field without striking a blow, on the mere rumour of the enemy’s advance. We had shown them that our best troops could do nothing, and therefore that there was little chance of their undisciplined peasantry succeeding better. There were two courses which might have been pursued, either that of striking a blow upon the Ebro while the enemy were weak and their attention distracted, ... or, if this were hopeless, of proceeding at once upon some general plan with a view to the final deliverance of the Peninsula. The first was a mere question on which few but those in office could have the means of judging. But if the force sent to the Ebro had (as it ought to have been) been chiefly cavalry (which the enemy most wanted, and we could best spare), such a force, even if it had been found insufficient for its immediate object, could have retired in safety to that part of the Peninsula where, at all events, and in every view, the great mass of our force should be collected ... the neighbourhood of Cadiz and Gibraltar. These were the only two places from which a large body of troops, when pressed by a superior army, could hope to get away; and there was no other part of Spain to which a British army, large enough to be of any use, could with propriety be trusted.
“There, therefore,” Mr. Windham continued, “I would have collected the greatest force that this country could by any possibility have furnished. There was no reason why we might not have had an army of 100,000. An hundred thousand men, with Gibraltar to retreat upon, was a far less risk to the country than 30,000 in the situation in which the ministry had placed them; nay, than 30,000 in the very situation spoken of; because a general must be miserably deficient in knowledge of his business, who, in such an abundant country, and with such a fortress behind him, would, with an army of that amount, suffer himself to be prevented from making good his retreat, by any force which the enemy could bring against him. For when we talked of Buonaparte’s numbers, we must recollect where those numbers were to act. To meet in the south of Spain a British force of 100,000, Buonaparte must bring over the Pyrenees a force of not less than 200,000; to say nothing of the demand that would be made upon him by the Spanish army which might be raised in that part of Spain, to co-operate with the British, and which the presence of such a British force would help to raise. Buonaparte would have a whole kingdom, which he must garrison, behind him, if he would either be sure of his supplies, or make provision against total destruction, in the event of any reverse. He must fight us at arm’s-length, while our strength would be exerted within distance, with an impregnable fortress at hand, furnishing a safe retreat in case of disaster, and a source of endless supply, by means of its safe and undisturbable communication with this country. And let it not be said, that while the army continued in the south, Buonaparte might continue master of the north. What mastery could he have of any part of Spain, while such an army could keep on foot in any other? And why, in case of success, did the security of its retreat require that it should never advance? There was never any thing so demonstrable, therefore, as that the only way of carrying on effectually a campaign in Spain, whatever else you might have done, was to collect your army in the south. A force raised to the greatest possible amount to which the mind and means of the country, ... then elevated above itself, and exalted to something of a preternatural greatness, ... could have carried it, should have been placed where it would have been safe from the risk of total loss, and would not have been kept down by the idea that the deposit was too great for the country to hazard. This should have been the great foundation, the base line of the plan of the campaign. On this the country might have given a loose to all its exertions, with the consolatory reflection, that the greater its exertions, the greater its security, ... the more it made its preparations effectual to their purpose, the less was the risk at which it acted.”
Mr. Windham then censured in strong terms the neglect of those opportunities which our command at sea had offered upon the eastern coast of Spain; “a coast,” he said, “which was placed as the high road for the entry of troops from France, which was every where accessible for our ships, and which was inhabited by the race of men who fought at Gerona and Zaragoza. Total forgetfulness could alone explain this most unaccountable neglect. But the great and pregnant source of error in ministers,” he observed, “besides the fault of not knowing better, was that which they had in common with many other ministers, and which he had signally witnessed in some of his own time, ... that of mistaking bustle for activity, and supposing that they were doing a great deal, when they were only making a great deal of noise, and spending a great deal of money. They looked at every measure, not with a view to the effect which it was to produce abroad, but to the appearance which it was to make at home.” He then spoke of the campaign in Spain more fairly than either party had ventured to represent it. “He could not,” he said, “help perceiving in the conduct of this war, and certainly in much of the language held about it, a certain mixture of that error which prevailed in many years of the last, of looking to other powers for what ought to have been our own work. We did not set our shoulders to the wheel, as people would who estimated truly what the exertions of this country could do, when fairly put forth. In this point there was a want of confidence in ourselves; ... in another there was a want, not merely of generosity, but of common justice toward our allies. There could be nothing more fallacious than to estimate the feelings of a country towards any cause by the feelings excited in that part of it which should be exposed to the immediate pressure of an army. If the scene of war lay in England, and we had an army of allies, or even of our own countrymen, acting for our defence, they would not be very popular in the places where they were quartered or encamped; and there would not be wanting complaints among the farmers whose provisions were consumed, whose hen-roosts were plundered, whose furniture was stolen, whose ricks were set on fire, and whose wives and daughters might not always escape insult, that the French themselves could not do them greater mischief. Now, if this were true, as infallibly it would be, of English troops upon English ground, might we not suppose that a good deal more of the same sort would happen when English troops were on Spanish ground, where every cause of dissatisfaction must be aggravated a thousand-fold, by difference of habits and manners, and the want of any common language, by which the parties might understand one another? It must be confessed, too, he was afraid, that we were not the nation who accommodated ourselves best to strangers, or knew best how to conciliate their good will: and when to all this was added, that we were a retreating army, and an army compelled to retreat with extraordinary rapidity, and much consequent disorder, it would not be surprising if neither we appeared to the people, nor they to us, in the most advantageous form. Nor were the inhabitants of the towns and villages on the line of our march to be considered as a fair representation of the feelings and sentiments of the mass of people in Spain. On many occasions the soldiers, at the end of a long march, had nothing provided for them to eat, and were obliged to help themselves. The inhabitants, whether they staid or had fled, had locked up their houses, and nothing was to be got but by breaking them open; and when once soldiers, whether from necessity or otherwise, began to break open houses, farther irregularities must be expected. Galicia was probably an unfair specimen of what was to be looked for from the rest of Spain; not so much from the character of the inhabitants, as from the state of society there, where the gentry were few, and of little influence; and where there was almost a total want of those classes which might direct and methodize the exertions of the lower orders. But to talk of the Spaniards generally, as wanting in zeal, or courage, or determination to defend their country, was more than any one would venture, after such examples as Zaragoza. A defence had there been made, so far exceeding what was to be expected from a regular army, that a general in this country would have been made a peer for having surrendered Zaragoza, in circumstances far short of those in which its inhabitants defended it.”