Napoleon was the contriver and the sole support of a political system that required time and victory to consolidate; he was the connecting link between the new interests of mankind and what of the old were left in a state of vigour; he held them together strongly, but he was no favourite with either, and consequently in danger from both. His power, unsanctified by time, depended not less upon delicate management than upon vigorous exercise; he had to fix the foundations of, as well as to defend, an empire, and he may be said to have been rather peremptory than despotic. There were points of administration with which he durst not meddle even wisely, much less arbitrarily; customs, prejudices, and the dregs of the revolutionary licence interfered with his policy, and rendered it complicated and difficult. It was not so with his inveterate adversaries; the delusion of parliamentary representation enabled the English government safely to exercise an unlimited power over the persons and the property of the nation, and through the influence of an active and corrupt press they exercised nearly the same power over the public mind.
The vast commerce of England, penetrating by a thousand channels (open or secret) as it were into every house on the face of the globe, supplied unequalled sources of intelligence. The spirit of traffic, which seldom acknowledges the ties of country, was universally on the side of Great Britain, and those twin curses, paper-money and public credit, so truly described as “strength in the beginning but weakness in the end,” were recklessly used by statesmen whose policy regarded not the interests of posterity. Such were the adventitious causes of England’s power; and her natural, legitimate resources were many and great.
If any credit is to be given to the census, the increasing population of the United Kingdom, amounted at this period to nearly twenty millions: France reckoned but twenty-seven millions when Frederick the Great declared that if he were her king, “not a gun should be fired in Europe without his leave.”
The French army was undoubtedly very formidable from numbers, discipline, skill, and bravery; but contrary to the general opinion, the British army was inferior to it in none of these points save the first, and in discipline it was superior, because a national army will always bear a sterner code than a mixed force will suffer. With the latter, the military not the moral crimes can be punished; men will submit to death for a breach of great regulations which they know by experience to be useful, but the constant restraint of petty though wholesome rules they will escape from by desertion, or resist by mutiny, when the ties of custom and country are removed; for the disgrace of bad conduct attaches not to them, but to the nation under whose colours they serve; great indeed is that genius that can keep men of different nations firm to their colours, and preserve a rigid discipline at the same time. Napoleon’s military system was, from this cause, inferior to the British, which, if it be purely administered, combines the solidity of the Germans with the rapidity of the French, excluding the mechanical dulness of the one, and the dangerous vivacity of the other; yet, before the campaign in the Peninsula had proved its excellence in every branch of war, the English army was absurdly under-rated in foreign countries, and absolutely despised in its own. It was reasonable to suppose that it did not possess that facility of moving in large bodies which long practice had given to the French; but the individual soldier was (and is still) most falsely stigmatized as deficient in intelligence and activity, the officers ridiculed, and the idea that a British could cope with a French army, even for a single campaign, considered chimerical.
The English are a people very subject to receive and to cherish false impressions; proud of their credulity as if it were a virtue, the majority will adopt any fallacy, and cling to it with a tenacity proportioned to its grossness. Thus an ignorant contempt for the British soldiery had been long entertained, before the ill success of the expeditions in 1794 and 1799 appeared to justify the general prejudice. The true cause of those failures was not traced, and the excellent discipline afterwards introduced and perfected by the duke of York was despised. England, both at home and abroad, was, in 1808, scorned as a military power, when she possessed, without a frontier to swallow up large armies in expensive fortresses, at least two hundred thousand[2] of the best equipped and best disciplined soldiers in the universe, together with an immense recruiting establishment, and through the medium of the militia, the power of drawing upon the population without limit. It is true that of this number many were necessarily employed in the defence of the colonies, but enough remained to compose a disposable force greater than that with which Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz, and double that with which he conquered Italy. In all the materials of war, the superior ingenuity and skill of the English mechanics were visible, and that intellectual power that distinguishes Great Britain amongst the nations, in science, arts, and literature, was not wanting to her generals in the hour of danger.
CHAPTER II.
For many years antecedent to the French invasion, the royal family of Spain was distracted with domestic quarrels; the son’s hand was against his mother, the father’s against his son, and the court was a scene of continual broils, under cover of which artful men, as is usual in such cases, pushed their own interest forward, while they seemed to act only for the sake of the party whose cause they espoused. Nellerto.[3] Charles IV. attributed this unhappy state of his house to the intrigues of his sister-in-law, the queen of the Two Sicilies. He himself, a weak and inefficient old man, was governed by his wife, and she again by don Manuel Godoy, of whose person she was enamoured even to folly. Vide Doblado’s Letters. From the rank of a simple gentleman of the Royal Guards, this person had, through her influence, been raised to the highest dignities; and the title of Prince of the Peace was conferred upon a man whose name must be for ever connected with one of the bloodiest wars that fill the page of history.
Ferdinand prince of the Asturias, naturally hated this favourite, and the miserable death of his young wife, his own youth and apparently forlorn condition created such an interest in his favour, that the people partook of his feelings; and the disunion of the royal family extending its effects beyond the precincts of the court, involved the nation in ruin. Those who know how a Spaniard hates, will readily comprehend why Godoy, who was really a mild, good-natured man, although a sensual and corrupt one, has been so overloaded with imprecations, as if he, and he alone, had been the cause of the disasters of Spain.