Wellesley commanded one of Cathcart’s divisions, and was given a steady brigadier called Richard Stewart as his second-in-command, ‘a kind of dry nurse’, as Wellesley put it. He landed an advance guard near Copenhagen on 16 August 1807, and the rest of the army followed to lay siege to the Danish capital. When a relief column appeared, he was sent to deal with it and good-humouredly put Stewart in his place by saying ‘Come, come, ’tis my turn now.’ By 3 September he had cleared the whole island of Zeeland of Danish regulars and militia, at a cost to his division of only 6 killed and 115 wounded. The city surrendered on 8 September after a brief bombardment, which Wellesley disliked, arguing that ‘we might have taken the capital with greater ease’.20 He helped negotiate the terms of a capitulation that gave the British the Danish fleet of eighteen ships of the line, and allowed a British occupation force to remain until the fleet had been towed to British ports and damage to British property had been repaired. On 14 September he asked Cathcart for permission to return home. He had been ‘very uncertain and very indifferent’ over whether he should retain the chief secretaryship, but now found that he had not been replaced and that ‘there is much to do in Ireland. The long nights are approaching fast, and if I am to have any concern in the government of that country, it is desirable that I should be there.’21 Cathcart made no objection, and he returned to England at the end of the month.
Although the Copenhagen expedition taught Wellesley little, it had one important legacy. Major General Thomas Grosvenor had taken his favourite mare on the expedition, Lady Catherine, sired by John Bull out of a mare by the Rutland Arabian. She was found to be in foal and was sent home, and at Eaton Hall, home of Grosvenor’s cousin, Earl Grosvenor, she foaled a strong chestnut colt called Copenhagen. He was bought by the Hon. Charles Stewart, Wellesley’s adjutant-general in the Peninsula, who sold him to Wellesley. He became Wellesley’s favourite charger, and survived the Peninsula and Waterloo, where he came close to braining his master with an ill-tempered kick when he dismounted after the battle. Copenhagen retired to Stratfield Saye, and was a great favourite with Kitty, who used to feed him bread, so that he regularly approached lady visitors ‘with the most confiding familiarity’. He died in 1836 and lies buried at Stratfield Saye beneath a Turkey Oak in Ice-House Paddock. ‘There may have been many faster horses, no doubt many handsomer,’ said Wellesley, ‘but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.’22
The autumn saw Wellesley back in Dublin, where Kitty was heavily pregnant: she gave birth to their second son, Charles, on 16 January 1808. Wellesley busied himself with tithes, education, police reform and corn exports, and still hoped that it might be possible ‘to obliterate, as far as the law will allow us, the distinction between Protestants and Catholics’. He strove to promote ‘mild government’ and criticised absentee landlords, but it was clear that serious reform was out of the question, and he longed to be away from Dublin and back on campaign.
He was summoned to Westminster, where he received the thanks of parliament for his work in Denmark. He spoke out again in support of Richard, and defended the army’s conduct in Denmark and the taking of the Danish fleet. He continued to advise the government on the many military projects that floated into view and then sank beneath the waves of impracticability. First there was to be an expedition to Sweden. Then there was talk of a Franco-Russian descent on India against which preparations must be made. And then nationalists in Spain’s South American colonies were to be encouraged to rise up with British support. Wellesley did not approve of ‘revolutionising any country for a political object’ and disapproved of republican constitutions ‘too regularly constructed to ever answer any practical effect’. Besides, it would not do to stir up in Caracas what one sought to put down in Cork. However, he had been promoted lieutenant general on 25 April, and was now senior enough to be given command of a force of 9,000 men earmarked for an expedition to South America, where it would assist the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda, then living in exile in London. The precedents were not encouraging, for Lieutenant General John Whitelock, forced to surrender his own tiny expedition at Buenos Aires, had just been court-martialled and cashiered. But once again fate intervened, and Wellesley was given a new objective, a good deal nearer home.
Seizure of the Danish fleet may have shocked the tender-hearted in Britain, but it had also irritated Napoleon, who now determined to secure the Portuguese fleet. Spain, its government effectively in the hands of the first minister Manuel Godoy, was an unenthusiastic ally of France, and Godoy agreed to give a French army under General Andoche Junot free passage across Spain to reach Portugal. Junot struck in November 1808, and covered the last 300 miles of his journey in just fourteen days, narrowly missing the Portuguese court. The Portuguese regent, Prince John, had been encouraged by Britain to withstand the French. He hesitated, but was eventually evacuated to the Portuguese colony of Brazil while the fleet fled to Britain. Although the Portuguese initially welcomed the French, they were soon alienated by the invaders’ behaviour. Oporto declared itself independent of France and elected a junta, headed by its bishop. There were risings elsewhere, which confined the French to Lisbon and a handful of fortresses, and the junta in Oporto appealed for British help.
Napoleon was also strengthening his grip on Spain, now full of French troops ostensibly sent there to support Junot. Popular pressure forced the corrupt and conservative King Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand. But Napoleon wanted to be rid of the Bourbons altogether, and he lured the whole royal family to Bayonne. There, Charles declared that he had abdicated against his will, compelling Ferdinand to step down in his favour. He promptly surrendered the crown to Napoleon, who proclaimed his brother Joseph King of Spain. On 2 May 1808, even before this process was complete, the inhabitants of Madrid attacked the French garrison. Although the rising in the capital was brutally repressed, it sparked off a general insurrection throughout the country. Many civilian officials and military officers argued that it was folly to fight the French, but improvised provincial juntas took on the leadership of what Spaniards call the ‘War of Liberation’.
‘That unlucky war ruined me,’ Napoleon acknowledged frankly in later life, because:
it divided my resources, obliged me to multiply my efforts, and caused my principles to be assailed … it destroyed my moral power in Europe, rendered my embarrassments more complicated, and opened a school for the English soldiers.23
He believed that intervention in Spain was correct both from the strategic point of view, for the British would have moved in to fill any vacuum, and because the Spaniards themselves deserved better government. It was, he maintained, his methods that let him down. His constant intervention placed Joseph, personally quite popular with many of his subjects, who spoke of him as ‘Uncle Joe’, in an impossible position. In 1809 Joseph offered to abdicate, complaining that ‘I have no real power beyond Madrid, and even in Madrid I am every day counteracted.’ Napoleon was reluctant to delegate authority, and in mid-1811, he maintained six separate armies in Spain, under commanders who usually got on badly, not only with one another but also with their subordinates. For the French, the war in Spain was indeed an ulcer, always irritating and ultimately debilitating.
British historians often tend to depict the Peninsular War as an Anglo-French conflict in which the Spanish occasionally appear as tardy and incompetent British allies. The truth is very different. French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula provoked a fierce nationalist reaction that involved many men who would normally have played no role in politics. A French cavalry officer thought that the Spaniards were motivated solely by ‘religious patriotism’. They had neither discipline nor knowledge of the laws of war, and ‘had but one sentiment, to revenge, by every possible means, the wrongs the French had done to their country’.24 One French officer saw a hospital in which four hundred men had been hacked to pieces and fifty-three buried alive, and on another occasion a single French soldier was left alive, though with
his ears cut off, to testify to the murder and mutilation of 1,200 of his wounded comrades: the experience drove him mad.
Women fought too: the young Augustina Zaragoza famously rallied her countrymen during the sieges of Zaragoza in 1808 and 1809. Ensign John Mills of the Coldstream Guards thought her very ugly, ‘dressed in a jacket, turned up with red … She had half-boots, and pantaloons … I had forgot to mention, a huge cutlass, which hung by her side.’25 The juntas kept regular armies in the field, though often with much difficulty, and in July a French corps was captured at Bailén in the south. But where the Spanish could not wage war on a large scale, they fought it on a smaller one, and it is no accident that this form of war is still known by the Spanish word for ‘little war’ – guerrilla. Guerrilla leaders included priests, noblemen and smugglers. They fought not only the French but also the Josefinos, those of their countrymen who had thrown in their lot with Joseph Bonaparte, and the conflict took on many of the uglier aspects of a civil war. British officers who served in Spain noted that their reception ranged from wild excitement to silent hostility. John Mills wrote from Madrid that: ‘The men and women (particularly the latter) hug us in the street and call us their preservers’, while there was ‘universal gloom’ in Valladolid. Although Joseph’s Spain remained at war with Britain, in June 1808, the juntas sent representatives to London where, like their Portuguese counterparts, they asked for British assistance.
George Canning declared that ‘Britain would proceed upon the principle that any nation in Europe which stirs up with a determination to oppose [France] immediately becomes our ally.’26 Wellesley told the cabinet that this was ‘a crisis in which a great effort might be made with advantage’, and emphasised that his own force at Cork could easily be sent to the Peninsula rather than to Venezuela. Before the end of the month, he was ‘closing the government in such a manner that I may give it up, and taking the command of a corps for service’.27 The Venezuelan patriot, Miranda, became so agitated when Wellesley told him the news in a London street that ‘he was so loud and angry, that I told him I would walk on first a little that we might not attract the notice of everybody passing’. ‘You will be lost, nothing can save you,’ shouted Miranda. ‘That, however, is your affair; but what grieves me is that there was never such an opportunity thrown away.’28
Wellesley handed over his Irish responsibilities to John Wilson Croker, MP for Downpatrick, and prepared to take his little army to Portugal. One evening the two men were musing over the port in the Wellesleys’ Harley Street dining-room after Kitty had retired upstairs to the drawing-room. Conversation on the Dublin Water Bill palled, and Sir Arthur fell silent. Croker asked him what he was thinking about. Wellesley replied:
Why, to say the truth, I am thinking of the French that I am going to fight. I have not seen them since the campaign in Flanders, when they were capital soldiers, and a dozen years of victory under Bonaparte must have made them better still. They have, besides, it seems, a new system of strategy which has out-manoeuvred and overwhelmed all the armies of Europe. ’Tis enough to make one thoughtful, but no matter: my die is cast, they may overwhelm me, but I don’t think they will out-manoeuvre me. First, because I am not afraid of them as everyone else seems to be; and secondly, because, if what I hear of their system of manoeuvres is true, I think it a false one against steady troops.29
He said his farewells, staying with his sister Anne, now married to Charles Smith of Hampton, her first husband having died in 1794, and with the home secretary Lord Hawkesbury. On his way to Holyhead to catch the Dublin packet, he called on the Ladies of Llangollen, who gave him a Spanish prayer book from which he could study the language. His mind was already running in the groove of military detail. The troops at Cork were to be landed frequently from their transports as ‘it will tend much to the health of the men and make them feel less unpleasantly the heat and confinement’, and ‘small tin kettles’ were to be procured for the coming campaign.30
On 12 July 1808 he sailed in HMS Donegal, soon shifting to the faster HMS Crocodile. It took him a week to reach La Coruña, where he heard encouraging news of Spanish successes, and told Castlereagh that: ‘It is impossible to convey to you an idea of the sentiment which prevails here in favour of the Spanish cause.’31 He was to be reinforced by a contingent from Gibraltar under Major General Sir Brent Spencer, designated his second-in-command, to whom he outlined his strategy in a letter written aboard Crocodile off the mouth of the Tagus on 26 July. Whether or not the Spanish prospered in their struggle, ‘nothing we can do can be so useful to them as to get possession of and organise a good army in Portugal … whether Spain is to continue or to fail, Portugal is an object, and your presence here is most necessary’.32 This plan, in so many respects a classic example of an expeditionary strategy that combined sea-power with a reluctance to engage a major land power in a theatre where its strength could be concentrated, formed the basis of his conduct during the whole Peninsular war, and was to influence him during the Waterloo campaign of 1815. British command of the sea would guarantee a line of communication to Portugal, and a firm base there would enable the British to operate in Spain, taking as much or as little of the war as they chose. Wellesley also told Spencer that:
I did not know what the words ‘second-in-command’ meant … that I alone commanded the army … that … I would treat … him … with the most entire confidence, and would leave none of my views or intentions unexplained; but that I would have no second-in-command in the sense of his having anything like superintending control …33
The question of command was soon raised once more. Wellesley stopped briefly at Oporto, where he made arrangements with the bishop for the supply of oxen and mules to the army. Then, after discussions with Admiral Sir Charles Cotton, he prepared to land his army amidst the thunderous surf of Mondego Bay, a hundred miles north of Lisbon, for the Tagus estuary contained not only French-manned vessels, but also a Russian fleet whose attitude was uncertain.
In Mondego Bay, Wellesley received a letter from Castlereagh containing both good news and bad. The army in Portugal was to be increased by the addition of 15,000 men, including a force under Lieutenant General Sir John Moore, which had previously been dispatched to Sweden. Both the king and the Duke of York had already complained that Wellesley was too junior to command the expedition, and its reinforcement made his supersession inevitable. He was told that Sir Hew Dalrymple was to be sent out to command, with Sir Harry Burrard as his second-in-command; and four more lieutenant generals, all senior to Wellesley, were to make their way to Portugal. Sir Arthur sent a courteous reply to Castlereagh, thanking him for his support and emphasising that he would do his best to ensure the army’s success regardless of his own position, and would not hurry ahead with operations before his seniors arrived ‘in order that I may acquire the credit of the success’. He was, however, more candid in a latter to the Duke of Richmond: ‘I hope that I shall have beat latter before any of them arrive, and then they may do as they please with me.’34
His first steps were entirely characteristic. A General Order stressed that Portugal was friendly territory and its inhabitants were to be treated accordingly. Their ‘religious prejudices’ were to be respected, with officers removing their hats, soldiers saluting and sentries presenting arms when the Host passed them in the streets. A stirring proclamation to the people of Portugal announced that his men had landed ‘with every sentiment of faith, friendship and honour’, and were wholly committed to ‘the noble struggle against the tyranny and usurpation of France’.35 He met Major General Bernadino Freire, the local Portuguese commander, arranged for his men to be given 5,000 muskets and sets of infantry equipment, and appointed Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Trant, British military agent in Portugal (described by Wellesley as ‘a very good officer, but as drunken a dog as ever lived’) as his liaison officer with Freire.
On 10 August Wellesley marched from Mondego Bay to Leiria with some 15,000 soldiers. It was a hard journey for heavily laden men
who were not yet acclimatised to the heat of a Portuguese summer. At Leiria, Wellesley had a disagreement with Freire over the best route to Lisbon, and it was eventually agreed that Wellesley would take with him 1,600 Portuguese under Trant. Wellesley was badly off for cavalry, which made effective reconnaissance difficult, but knew that he faced two French armies, one under Delaborde, blocking the Lisbon road at Obidos, two days march to the south, and another under Loison, away to the east, where it had been dealing roughly with Portuguese insurgents. Wellesley suspected that even if they united, these two forces would not outnumber him, and so he pushed on down the Lisbon road. The first contact of the campaign took place on 15 August 1808 at Brilos, near Obidos. A company of the 95th Rifles drove in a French outpost, but pushed on too far and collided with the enemy rearguard, losing an officer and twenty-six men in the process. Wellesley’s brother-in-law, Captain Hercules Pakenham, was slightly wounded.
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