Stuart.
The central junta, having first repaired to Badajos, were terrified, and fled from thence to Seville, and their inactivity was more conspicuous in this season of adversity than before, and contrasted strangely with the pompous and inflated language of their public papers. Their promises were fallacious, their incapacity glaring, their exertions ridiculous and abortive; and the junta of Seville, still actuated by their own ambitious views, had now openly reassumed all their former authority.
In short, the strength and spirit of Spain was broken, the enthusiasm was null, except in a few places, and the emperor was, with respect to the Spaniards, perfectly master of his operations. He was in the centre of the country; he held the capital; the fortresses; the command of the great lines of communication between the provinces; and on the wide military horizon, no dark cloud intercepted his view, save the heroic city of Zaragoza on the one side, and a feeble British army on the other. Sooner or later, he observed, and with truth, that the former must fall; it was an affair of artillery calculation. The latter, he naturally supposed to be in full retreat for Portugal; but the fourth corps were nearer to Lisbon than the British general; a hurried retreat alone could bring the latter in time to that capital, and consequently no preparations for defence could be made sufficient to arrest the sixty thousand Frenchmen which the emperor could carry there at the same moment. The subjugation of Spain appeared inevitable, when the genius and vigour of one man frustrated Napoleon’s plans at the very moment of execution; and the Austrian war breaking out at the instant, drew the master-spirit from the scene of contention. England then put forth all her vast resources; fortunately those resources were wielded by a general equal to the task of delivering the Peninsula, and it was delivered. But through what changes of fortune; by what unexpected helps; by what unlooked-for and extraordinary events; under what difficulties; and by whose perseverance, and in despite of whose errors, let posterity judge; for in that judgment only will impartiality and justice be found.
CHAPTER III.
The 20th of December, Napoleon became aware that sir John Moore (having relinquished his communication with Lisbon, and adopted a new one upon Coruña) was menacing the French line of operations on the side of Burgos. This intelligence obliged him to suspend all his designs against the south of Spain and Portugal, and to fix his whole attention upon
THE OPERATIONS OF THE BRITISH ARMY.
The reasons which induced the English general to divide his army, and to send general Hope with one column by the Tagus, while the other marched under his own personal command, by Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo, have been already related; as likewise the arrangements which brought sir David Baird to Coruña, without having permission to land his troops, and without money to equip them, when they were at last suffered to disembark.
The 8th of November, sir John Moore being at Almeida, on the frontier of Portugal, his artillery was at Truxillo, in Spanish Estremadura, and sir David Baird’s division was at Coruña.
General Blake, pursued by fifty thousand enemies, was that day flying from Nava to Espinosa, and Castaños and Palafox were quarrelling at Tudela.