The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), page 29
They were not to. Although in the course of 1810 Napoleon increased his forces in the Peninsula to over 300 000 troops, the need to hold down the conquered territories prevented the French employing their numerical advantage; the garrisons in Andalusia alone amounted to 70 000 men. Nor was the emperor free to direct the invasion of Portugal in person as he had intended; his divorce and remarriage preoccupied him among other things, so he handed the task to a rather unwilling Massena.
Having besieged and taken the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida,54 Massena advanced into the Portuguese interior at the head of 65 000 troops. To oppose him, Wellington had 44 000 British and 45 000 Portuguese regulars, supported by roughly 70,000 militia. The countryside in the path of the invaders had been ‘scorched’ and, unknown to the French, Lisbon had, as we have seen, been ringed with elaborate defences.
Resisting pressure from the Portuguese to make a determined stand in the north, Wellington withdrew his field army before the advancing foe, stopping only to give battle on the awe-inspiring ridge at Bussaco. His new Portuguese regiments performed well in this, their baptism of fire, and the French infantry, denied cavalry and artillery support by the adverse terrain, were repelled with heavy casualties.55 The next day, however, Massena discovered a way past the Allied position and Wellington was obliged to continue his retreat towards Lisbon.
Although he and his political masters exalted the victory at Bussaco,56 the seemingly inexorable progress of the French caused some concern, not least among those Portuguese who anticipated that the British would abandon the country. But, on 11 October 1810, Massena found himself brought to a halt by the Lines of Torres Vedras. He quickly judged them to be impregnable and, pulling back to Santarem, dallied there until March in the hope that Wellington might be tempted into attacking him. This did not occur, however, and Massena, lacking fresh orders from Napoleon and with his army on the brink of starvation, retreated towards Almeida, gingerly shadowed by the Allies.57
The next few weeks saw clashes along the Portuguese-Spanish frontier at Sabugal and Albuera as the Allies advanced to encircle Almeida and Badajoz respectively.58 Massena, having rested and replenished his forces, strove to relieve the former in May, but was checked by Wellington in a bitter, two-day battle at Fuentes de Oñoro.59 Having secured the Leon border for the time being at least, Wellington besieged Badajoz, only to be chased off by relief columns under Soult and Marmont (who had superseded Massena).60 However, switching his attention back to the north, he invested Ciudad Rodrigo on 8 January 1812, and stormed it just 11 days later before Marmont could assemble his army and react.61 Although he sustained heavy casualties, this gave Wellington control of the gateway to northern Spain, to which he added mastery of the southern corridor when, just weeks later, he finally seized Badajoz in similar style.62 Should an opportunity present itself, the Anglo-Portuguese forces were now ready and able to mount an offensive into Spain’s heartland.
Such a chance was not long in coming. The fortunes of the French were now firmly on the wane, if only because the impending Russian campaign meant that no reinforcements would be available for operations in the Peninsula. In the Tyrol and Calabria, it will be recalled, popular revolts had, in time, been smothered through the application of overwhelming military power. By 1812, the Imperial forces had come very close to accomplishing this in Spain, too; despite heavy losses in their attritional contest with the partisans, they had made considerable headway and the Spanish were palpably feeling the strain. For just how much longer they would have proved able to continue the struggle without active British and Portuguese assistance must remain a moot point; but their ancestors had fought the Romans for 200 years and the Moors, as one beggar observed to a cocksure French captain, for 800.63 As early as 1810 the conflict’s financial costs alone were troubling Napoleon, while the ongoing fighting continued to encourage his adversaries elsewhere. Indeed, the preservation of his empire as a whole was imposing burdens which France could not carry for much longer.
But if the Peninsular game was not worth the candle, how was it to be ended? Abandoning his own brother would have done little for Napoleon’s credibility with his other allies, and any admission of defeat would have badly tarnished his own military and political prestige. In any event, while Portugal steadily lost interest in the war as the French menace receded from her frontiers, not only was an end to hostilities with Spain unlikely so long as Imperial troops occupied her territory, but also it was unclear with whom Napoleon could negotiate an enforceable settlement. For, whereas his earlier wars had all been neatly terminated by accords with the relevant dynasties, in Spain’s case the Cortes insisted that sovereignty resided in the people and had arrogated the monarch’s prerogatives to itself. In fact, when Napoleon did eventually conclude the Treaty of Valençay with the captive Ferdinand, the Cortes was to reject it precisely on these grounds.
On this, the deputies were to exhibit a unanimity that had become all too rare. For as the legislative programme of the liberales steadily revealed a determination to further the sociopolitical changes begun by the antiguo régimen, popular opinion hardened against it. Particularly controversial were measures which undermined the Church’s position, such as the extirpation of the Holy Office, attempts to curb the re-establishment of religious orders destroyed in the war and the ending of censorship. However, the fundamental problem was that the lower strata of society derived no benefits from the 1812 Constitution whatsoever; at their expense, it advanced the interests of the middle class and effectively protected many of the rights of the señores.
The result was a cataclysmic backlash against the liberals and those associated with them.64 By the time of the Inquisition’s abolition in 1813, a distinct traditionalist party – the serviles, ‘the servile ones’, as their political opponents dubbed them – had emerged in the Cortes and begun linking liberalism with the heresies and anticlericalism of the French revolutionaries. Nobles were alienated by the reformers’ attacks on their seigniorial privileges, while many peasants, penalized by the loss of benevolent local monasteries and convents and by fiscal and land reforms, resorted to open rebellion; they withheld their dues, occupied estates, rioted and even murdered landlords and entrepreneurs. It became, as one French officer remarked, ‘a war of the poor against the rich’,65 with the Cortes responding to the disorder by authorizing the creation of municipal guards. Not only did this underscore another schism, that between those Spaniards who inhabited the countryside and those who dwelt in urban areas, it also inflamed the tensions between patriots and Josefinos. However inappropriate, liberalism’s adversaries found it all too easy to equate it with Bonapartism. Besides any similarities between the Bayonne Constitution devised by Napoleon for Spain – the first document of its kind in the country’s history66 – and that of 1812, the typical afrancesado was a bourgeois town-dweller.
Owing to a combination of the liberals’ reforms and the incipient collapse of the French occupation, all this internecine strife gradually intensified, with guerrilla partidas turning their attention from the retreating French to milking local communities.67 Moreover, as its unpopularity grew, the liberal faction within the Cortes became ever more concerned about the regular Army’s loyalty, which, through its antimilitarism and general neglect, it had progressively undermined.68 Not only had Spanish professional soldiers to endure the appointment of Wellington as their commander-in-chief in September 1812, they also had to suffer the humiliation of watching him and his Anglo-Portuguese divisions take the lead in liberating their country. Yet such were the accumulated weaknesses within the Spanish forces and so suspicious were the liberales of his efforts to rectify them that not even the talented Wellington could achieve more than a marginal improvement. Consequently, he was only able to allot the Spaniards a subordinate role in the decisive battles of 1813–14.69
Predictably, all this compounded Spain’s mounting Anglophobia, while Wellington, who detested the liberals, was encouraged to overthrow them by the British cabinet. This would just exacerbate matters, he concluded, though he did resign the unenviable office of generalissimo at one point.70 Some Spanish officers, by contrast, were more unscrupulous. General Ballesteros, in reaction to Wellington’s designation as commander-in-chief, ‘pronounced’ against the government. He was arrested and replaced by Del Parque, one of the grandees who, initially, had joined the afrancesados only to change sides after Bailen,71 subsequently proving his loyalty in a dozen engagements. Ballesteros’s example, however, was to be followed by others – and with greater effect. On the return of Ferdinand, General Francisco Elio was to initiate the mutiny which brought down the Cortes and, with it, the 1812 Constitution.72 His successful pronunciamiento was the first of many which both Spain and her former colonies were to witness over the next 170 years.
The loss of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo spelt the beginning of the end for the French occupation of Spain. Having first destroyed the great bridge over the Tagus at Almaraz in order to sever the communications between Soult’s army in Andalusia and Marmont’s in Leon, Wellington launched an offensive against the latter, scattering it at Salamanca on 22 July 1812.73 He then thrust deep into the interior, compelling Joseph to relinquish Madrid for the second time in four years and pressing on to besiege Burgos. Evacuating the south and bringing his 60 000 troops abreast of the 53 000 in Castile, Soult retook the capital and helped drive off Wellington’s startled forces. Burgos was relieved on 22 October – two days after Napoleon began his fateful retreat from Moscow – and, by mid-November, Wellington’s army had been swept back over the Huebra.74 However, the following May he returned with overwhelming forces, entered Burgos on 13 June and, on the 21st, inflicted a decisive defeat on Joseph and Jourdan at Vitoria.75
Having pushed the French in northern Spain back as far as the Bidassoa, obliging Suchet to evacuate Valencia and Aragon into the bargain, Wellington set about reducing the strongholds of San Sebastian and Pamplona. News of his victory at Vitoria reached Central Europe just as Napoleon, having negotiated a ceasefire with Prussia and Russia, was seeking to persuade Austria not to join the coalition against France. Alarmed by the collapse of the Peninsular front, the emperor dispatched Soult to take command of the battered divisions on the Pyrenees and, between 25 July and 31 August, the marshal launched a determined, if ultimately unsuccessful, counterstroke.76 Subsequently dislodged from positions on the Bidassoa and Nivelle, by February 1814, his army, depleted by battles, desertion and detachments being withdrawn for the eastern front, had retreated as far as the Gave du Pau, leaving a garrison in Bayonne. Narrowly defeated at Orthez,77 as the Allies occupied Bordeaux and invested Bayonne, Soult fell back on Toulouse, where he and Wellington were to fight one last battle.78 Unknown to them, Napoleon had abdicated several days before and the war had officially ended.
Meanwhile, Suchet had been obliged to relinquish all but a few strongholds in Catalonia; and Prince Ferdinand, having signed the Valencay Treaty, was on his way home. Several of the French garrisons were duped into capitulating by the Spaniards, and, promised that they would be released, Suchet trustingly allowed ‘El Deseado’ to proceed. However, Ferdinand intended neither honouring this agreement nor accepting the constraints imposed on the Crown by the liberals’ constitution. On nearing Valencia, he was met by Cardinal de Borbon, President of the Regency, to whom he extended his hand in order to receive the customary, deferential kiss. The cardinal, aware of his office and that the king had yet to swear the constitutional oath, hesitated. ‘Kiss!’, hissed Ferdinand, thrusting his hand into Borbon’s face. The president obeyed.79
Thus commenced the restoration of absolutism and the demise of the 1812 Constitution. Ferdinand entered Valencia in triumph and, within days, General Elio’s pronunciamiento against the Cadiz Cortes occurred. A royal proclamation declared the Cortes and its decrees ‘nil and of no value or effect, now or ever, as if such acts had never taken place’.80 All prominent liberal deputies and reformers were arrested; mobs destroyed memorials, statues and other symbolic tributes to national sovereignty; and known afrancesados were lynched, summarily executed, jailed or ostracized. The clock was turned back, and Spain descended into an era of reactionary, counter-revolutionary terror.
* * *
Notes
1. G.H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain (New York, 1965), I, pp. 22–3.
2. Lovett, Modern Spain, pp. 34–5.
3. See: W. Kaufman, British Policy and the Independence of Latin America (London, 1967); J. Lynch, ‘British Policy and Spanish America, 1783–1808’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 1/1 (1969); E.J. Hamilton, ‘War and Inflation in Spain, 1780–1800’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 59/1 (1944); J. Barbier and H. Klein, ‘Revolutionary Wars and Public Finances: The Madrid Treasury, 1784–1807’, Journal of Economic History, 41/2 (1981); T. Anna, Spain and the Loss of America (Lincoln, NB, 1983).
4. Lovett, Modern Spain, I, pp. 167, 169–72.
5. Lovett, Modern Spain, pp. 290–7.
6. Out of Spain’s 11 000 000 inhabitants, 403 000 were nobles and 170 000 clergy. Together they owned roughly two thirds of the land. See Lovett, Modern Spain, I, p. 38.
7. See Lovett, Modern Spain, I, pp. 233–63: Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (Oxford, 1902–30), I, pp. 140–61.
8. See Lovett, Modern Spain, I, pp. 161–2, 336–45, 357–9; C. Esdaile, The Spanish Army in the Peninsular War (Manchester, 1988), pp. 127–32, 134–6.
9. See Esdaile, Spanish Army, pp. 169–70.
10. See M. Artola, La Burguesia Revolucionara (Madrid, 1973).
11. See J. Polt, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (New York, 1971). Also see C.W. Crawley, ‘English and French Influences in the Cortes of Cadiz’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 6/2 (1939); B. Hamnett, ‘Spanish Constitutionalism and the Impact of the French Revolution, 1808–14’, in H.T. Mason and W. Doyle (eds.), The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness (Gloucester, 1989).
12. Lovett, Modern Spain, I, pp. 89–90.
13. See, for example, O. Hufton, Europe: Privilege and Protest, 1730–89 (London, 1994), pp. 260–71; Lovett, Modern Spain, I, pp. 1–4.
14. See Lovett, Modern Spain, II, pp. 419, 517, 554–609.
15. See M. Artola, Los Afrancesados (Madrid, 1953).
16. Quoted in Esdaile, Spanish Army, p. 125.
17. See Lovett, Modern Spain, I, p. 36.
18. Lovett, Modern Spain, I, p. 299; Esdaile, Spanish Army, pp. 125–6.
19. See NC, XVIII, p. 237.
20. The finest general history of the Peninsular War in English is Oman’s, which is comprehensive and gives due weight to the role of the Spaniards and Portuguese. Other large-scale works are: W.F.P. Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France (6 vols, London, 1876); and J. Gomez de Arteche, Guerra de la Independencia: Historia militar de España de 1808 a 1814 (14 vols, Madrid, 1868–1903). Among more concise and accessible studies is D. Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (London and New York, 1986). French archival material on the Peninsular War is to be found in ASH, C7 1–29 and C8 1–473.
21. WSD, VII, pp. 104–5.
22. C.S.B. Buckland, Metternich and the British Government from 1809 to 1813 (London, 1932), p. 173.
23. British Library, Sir John Moore Papers, Add. MS 57544: ‘Memorandum on the Defence of Portugal’, 25 November 1808.
24. WD, V, p. 261.
25. See, for instance, O. Hufton, Privilege and Protest, pp. 271–83.
26. Esdaile, Spanish Army, p. 139.
27. Oman, History, II, pp. 463–596.
28. WD, V, p. 108.
29. WD, V, p. 258.
30. See, for example, Lovett, Modern Spain, II, p. 536.
31. For some of the rather rash propaganda ploys of the Suprema and its military commanders, see Esdaile, Spanish Army, pp. 137–8.
32. This is exemplified by the fate of General San Juan in December 1808. See Oman, History, I. p. 471.
33. For details of the formation of the Perceval ministry, see R. Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon 1807–15 (New Haven, CT, 1996), pp. 105–10.
34. WD, V, pp. 268–77. Also see WSD, VI, pp. 350–3; and WD, III, pp. 477–8.
35. See J. Stampa, La Crisis de una alianza: La campaña del Tajo de 1809 (Ministry of Defence, Madrid, 1996).
36. Oman, History, III, pp. 74–80.
37. Oman, History, III, pp. 91–6.
38. Oman, History, III, pp. 98–101.
39. Oman, History, III, pp. 19–66.
40. WD, V, pp. 413.
41. See Lovett, Modern Spain, II, p. 527.
42. See J.B. Jourdan, Mémoires Militaires: Guerre d’Espagne (Paris, 1899), p. 294.
43. See Lovett, Modern Spain, II, pp. 527–9.
44. See Oman, History, IV, pp. 91–130.
45. A.F.L.V. de Marmont, Mémoires du Maréchal Marmont, Duc de Raguse de 1792 à 1841 (9 vols, Paris, 1857), IV, pp. 346–7.
46. See Lovett, Modern Spain, II, p. 683; Esdaile, Spanish Army, p. 161.
47. See: M.P. Costeloe, Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain and the Latin-American Revolutions (Cambridge, 1986); J. Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–26 (London, 1973); Anna, Spain and the Loss of America; B. Hamnett, ‘The Appropriation of Mexican Church Wealth by the Spanish Bourbon Government: The Consolidation of the vales reales, 1805–09’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 1/2 (1969).
48. For some details of this gruesome conflict, see Lovett, Modern Spain, II, pp. 666–752.
49. See, for example, NC, XX, p. 146.
