Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  1 Jackson, II, 360-1.

  1807-8, touched chords of feeling throughout the long-divided Reich.

  In Prussia, where Frederick William III had entrusted the government of a ruined State to the liberal administrator, Stein, Napoleon had been quick to stamp out—as he supposed—the reviving flame of patriotism. In December, 1808, Stein, proscribed by imperial decree as "an enemy to France and the Confederation of the Rhine," was forced to fly to Austria. Here, like other apostles of a German revival, he found what seemed at the time the only focus for the latent nationalism of his race. The Court of Vienna might be frivolous, hidebound and incurably inefficient. Yet, despite two defeats in the past thirteen years Austria, was still a great Power. For centuries the rampart of Christendom against the Turk, compounded of half a dozen fighting races—Teutons, Magyars, Tyrolese, Croats, Czechs, Poles—she could put an army of more than 300,000 well-trained men into the field. After Austerlitz she had played a waiting part, watching the Russian campaign in Poland with what seemed to Englishmen a craven neutrality and participating in the outward forms of Napoleon's New Order. She had accepted his Continental System, closed her ports to Britain's trade and even declared war on her. Yet all the while she was secretly preparing for a renewal of a struggle which she knew to be inevitable. In the summer of 1808, encouraged by the news from Spain, she had established a National Landwehr, embodying the French conception of a nation in arms. Under the direction of the Archduke Charles—the ablest soldier in central Europe—her arsenals were being replenished, her artillery re-horsed and her army reorganised in corps d'armee on the Revolutionary model. And while they continued to return soft answers to Napoleon's remonstrances, the young Emperor Francis and his Minister, Count Stadion, patiently prepared for war. After the fall of the Spanish Bourbons it seemed their only hope. In the autumn of 1808 they opened secret negotiations with England.

  It was this circumstance, prematurely alluded to in London a month before Corunna, that brought matters to a head. It had been the chief reason that had sent Napoleon hurrying back from Spain to Paris. Once more the old protagonists, Teuton and Gaul, were moving into the lists, and it was to England's interest to ensure if not to precipitate the clash. Though her statesmen, grown cautious, refused Austria's request for another subsidy on the ground of prior commitments in Spain, they made it plain that they would assist a war against the common enemy with all their forces.

  For, where his idol Pitt had thrice failed, Canning saw his chance to overthrow the Revolution militant by a fourth and final coalition. Though Russia and Prussia still dallied in the tyrant's camp, Austrian blows in the Danube and British constancy in the Peninsula might again reanimate Europe. For this reason the Foreign Secretary, resenting Moore's retreat to Galicia, had wanted to ignore his demand for empty transports and send them out filled with troops to hold Corunna. Later he had persuaded his colleagues to hurry away a division to Cadiz to serve as the focus of a new offensive in Andalusia. But this had shipwrecked on the Spaniards invincible suspicion of the heretic " rubios" as they called the British, from their fancied resemblance to Judas Iscariot.1 After waiting five weeks cooped up in their transports while the Governor of Cadiz and the Supreme Junta made excuses to keep them out of the port, the troops were recalled to Lisbon.

  By this time Ministers had resolved to concentrate their effort in Portugal. To this they were persuaded by Castlereagh's persistent advocacy of a report drawn up by Sir Arthur Wellesley. Its thesis was that, with a Portuguese army disciplined by British officers and drill sergeants, 20,000 or at the most 30,000 British troops could hold Lisbon against anything up to 100,000 French. What particularly commended this plan to the Government was its modest demand on man-power; indeed its author stated that any larger force would at present be out of question since everything it needed would have to come from England—arms, ammunition, ordnance, clothing, accoutrements, even flour and oats.

  Apart from reluctance to commit the country's entire striking force for a second time to so unpopular a theatre of war, the Government had an additional reason for wishing to husband the Army. With European hostilities imminent, it needed men elsewhere. On the one hand the agents of Austria and the German patriots were pressing for a British diversion on the Dutch or Friesian coast to draw off forces that would otherwise be used on the Danube and Elbe. On the other the Admiralty had been issuing repeated warnings that Napoleon was planning an invasion of England or Ireland from Antwerp. Ever since Canning had blighted his Baltic design the revengeful Corsican had been building a battlefleet in the Scheldt, whose new dockyards he vaunted as a pistol pointed at the head of England. It was a quarter from which England was far more vulnerable than from the shallow harbours of the Channel and the storm-bound ports of the Bay of Biscay.

  The moment offered an opportunity that might never recur for

  1 Always depicted in Spanish ecclesiastical art with red hair. "We had this additional claim to be called rubios," wrote Wellesley, "that we wore red coats."—Stanhope, Conversations, 104.

  nipping such a project in the bud. There were ten French ships of the line already in service in the Scheldt, ten more building at Antwerp and Flushing and several more believed to be on the stocks. On March 24th, 1809, Sir David Dundas, the new Commander-in-Chief, was summoned to the Cabinet and asked if he could furnish 16,000 troops for an immediate attack on Walcheren and Flushing. The stiff old Scots martinet, however, was not encouraging; several more months, he held, would be needed before the first-line battalions had recovered from Corunna. Like Pitt and Melville before them, Portland and his colleagues still found the country's military forces too small for her opportunities. For nearly two years Castlereagh had been doing everything possible—within the limits of a stubbornly libertarian system—to increase the strength of the Army. But the casualties of the campaign of 1808 had been heavy, and at the New Year the total of effectives stood at only 200,000, of whom 22,000 were serving in the Mediterranean and 63,000 more beyond the Atlantic or Indian Oceans.1

  The Government, therefore, decided to abandon the idea of a sudden raid and prepare for a major expedition at midsummer. By that time the Corunna veterans would be ready for the field and at least 16,000 militiamen recruited to the Line by a recent Act of Castlereagh's. By then, too, it was hoped that Austrian victories, a rising in Germany and a successful British campaign in Portugal would be making such inroads on French reserves that the defence of Antwerp against a large force would be impracticable.

  The situation was further complicated by the French fleet's escape from Brest. For some days fears were felt for Ireland; then the missing vessels were located under the batteries of Aix Roads close to the Spanish frontier. The Channel Fleet under Lord Gambier followed and resumed its watch, but the enemy's presence in that exposed spot was disturbing. For his ships, which included ten of the line, constituted a threat not only to communications with Portugal but also to the West Indies, where an offensive had just opened against the French colonies. In the middle of March England had learnt that Lieutenant-General Beckwith with 10,000 troops from Barbados had captured Martinique. Further expeditions were known to be preparing against the neighbouring islands, and great importance was attached to them in the City which, since the closing of the Continent, had grown increasingly dependent on the West Indian trade and correspondingly sensitive to privateers. Any reinforcement of the islands which harboured the latter would be certain to have unfortunate repercussions.

  1 Fortescue, VII, 33-5.

  The Cabinet therefore adopted drastic measures. On April 3rd Captain Lord Cochrane of the Imperieuse frigate arrived in the Basque Roads with a special mission from the First Lord to drive the French battleships from their anchorage with fireships and explosion vessels. Thereafter events followed one another at dramatic speed. On the 8th the Archduke Charles issued a proclamation to the German people announcing that his army was marching to secure their liberties and inviting them to repudiate their puppet rulers. At the same ti
me the Tyrolese mountaineers rose against the pro-French monarchy of Bavaria and, renouncing the laws imposed upon them since the Peace of Pressburg, reaffirmed their ancient allegiance to the Hapsburgs. Within a few days they had compelled the surrender of 6000 French and Bavarians.

  On the night the Austrians crossed the Inn Cochrane launched his explosion vessels and fireships against the French. Since his arrival in the Fleet words had passed between him and Gambier, who bitterly resented the younger officer's presence and the extraordinary mission on which Lord Mulgrave had sent him. The Commander-in-Chief not only felt deeply affronted, but he deplored the form of warfare which the Cabinet had adopted. He was a man of deep and—as some felt—misdirected religious feelings,1 which had already been outraged by the part he had been forced to play in the bombardment of Copenhagen. To destroy an anchored fleet at night with infernal machines struck him as diabolical. What he disliked even more was the proposal to use battleships against shore defences in shoal water at the instance of a subordinate; it outraged all his notions of naval strategy and discipline.

  The night of April nth was black and stormy. Cochrane with a lieutenant and four seamen manned the leading vessel in which fifteen hundred barrels of gunpowder had been cased with logs topped by thousands of grenades and shells. Behind her came another explosion vessel and nineteen fireships. As they approached the formidable boom which guarded the French fleet, their crews lit the fuses and swarmed into the boats to begin their long, hazardous pull back against gale and tide to the Imperieuse. Only a few of the fireships reached the enemy's line, but their moral effect, as Cochrane had foreseen, was terrific. Cutting their cables to escape the surge of flame and explosion, the French battleships drifted helplessly away from the protection of the Fort Aix batteries on to the Palles shoal. By the morning of the 12th all but two were aground.

  1Too much of a psalm-singing man." Lady Elizabeth to Augustus Foster, 17th April, 1809. Two Duchesses, 324.

  But the British Fleet, a dozen miles distant, never moved. Instead of going in to engage, it remained aloof and unconcerned on the horizon. All morning Cochrane kept signalling that the enemy was at its mercy. At last, as the French flagship was being re-floated, he went in to engage with his solitary frigate and, destroying one stranded giant himself, by dint of distress signals stung the angry Gambier into dispatching three battleships which finished off three more. The fight was then called off by the Admiral's orders.

  Thus—though the country hailed it as a victory and Gambier was honourably acquitted by the Court Martial which the indignant Cochrane demanded, and even received the thanks of Parliament—a chance was missed of inflicting a more shattering blow to Napoleon's hopes than any to be expected from the large and costly army now being laboriously assembled. The weapon of sea power, so potent in the hands of genius, lost its edge when wielded by the unimaginative and irresolute. Like Duckworth in the Dardanelles, Gambier—a brave and capable officer in subordinate station—proved unworthy of Nelson's heritage. With the latter's death and the retirement of Cornwallis, Barham and St. Vincent, something seemed to have passed from the great Service. Yet its basic power remained—the stranglehold round Europe's coasts behind which Britain's growing trade and armies continued to move freely and unmolested.

  Less than a week after that fiery night in Aix Roads Sir Arthur Wellesley crossed the Bay on Ins way to Portugal. Officially exonerated by the Court of Enquiry on the Cintra Convention, he had been appointed Do the command of the expeditionary force after a tussle in the Cabinet. The clamour of the mob and the threat of the halter had not shaken his nerve, and he remained the same cool customer he had always been. Sailing from Portsmouth on April 15th he was warned on the first night at sea that his ship was in danger of foundering. " Oh, in that case," he remarked, "I shall not take off my boots!"

  Since Corunna the 10,000 British left in Portugal under Sir John Cradock had been expecting a French advance on Lisbon and an early recall to England. Admiral Berkeley, arriving in the Tagus in January, was so despondent that he hardly dared disembark his family.1 Fortunately the French were too preoccupied in supporting themselves in the barren Iberian hills to show much enterprise. Not till the end of March did Soult appear before Oporto. The

  1 H. M. C. Bathurst, 82. See also Schaumann, 150; Fortescue, VII, 118, 140-1; Leslie, 91-4, 98-9.

  city was stormed and sacked on the 29th, a day after Marshal Victor, about the same distance from the Portuguese capital to the east, routed the Spanish Army of Estremadura at Medellin.

  But by that time the Government had made up its mind to hold Portugal, and reinforcements were on their way. A treaty signed with the Regency had placed the Portuguese army under British training and discipline, and Major-General Beresford, the former commander of the Madeira garrison, had been appointed to lead it. During the first two weeks of April British troops poured into Lisbon, whose malodorous, half-oriental streets became filled with gaping redcoats, stumbling among the famous dunghills1 and dead horses and dodging the slop-pails, while dashing ensigns in new regimentals, shading their eyes in the unwonted glare, exchanged glances with the black-eyed lasses at the windows or peered curiously through the grilles of convents. As each new contingent disembarked, making the vast, gimcrack palaces on the water-front echo with the sound of ordered muskets, others marched out towards the camps in the sandy hills to the north. The almond trees along the wayside were flowering against the deep blue of the Iberian spring, the orange groves shining with golden fruit and white blossom and the air was full of fragrance.

  On April 22nd, 1809—the day after William Lord opened his new cricket ground at St. John's Wood, Marylebone—Wellesley landed at Lisbon, having made the voyage from Portsmouth in a week. With 20,000 British, 3000 Hanoverians of the King's German Legion and 16,000 uncertain Portuguese regulars, his chances did not look rosy. A hundred and sixty miles to the north Soult with 23,000 veterans was menacing Lisbon from Oporto, while Victor, with 25,000 more, having routed the Spaniards at Medellin, threatened it from the east. Between them lay General Lapisse with another 6000 near Ciudad Rodrigo. A further 200,000 French troops were scattered about the Peninsula, mostly in garrison.

  Yet, as Wellesley saw, the situation had its possibilities. Considerable forces had recently been recalled to France, and, as the war in Germany intensified, more were likely to follow. The Marshals whom Napoleon had left behind had been curiously slow to exploit their advantages and, absorbed in supply difficulties and personal rivalries, had fallen far behind the time-table set them. And neither of the two widely-separated armies facing Lisbon were concentrated for immediate battle. Instead both were spread out

  1 These were particularly offensive at the moment owing to the tidy-minded French having shot 10,000 pariah dogs, the traditional scavengers 01 the city—an example of the danger of over-hasty reform in ancient communities.—Broughton, I, 9. Sec also Boothby, 234-8, 246-7; Tomkinson, xxx, I; Burgoync, 35; Schaumann, 148-9; Leslie, 78.

  over the countryside. For Revolutionary licence in billets and the Revolutionary principle of making war support war were having their usual result. The storming of Oporto had been accompanied by an orgy of drunken rape and murder, and British patrols reconnoitring to the north found houses and churches wrecked, householders murdered and their furniture lying smashed in the streets, altars and sanctuaries rifled and tombs polluted. Outside Oliveira the dangling bodies of the priest, the chief magistrate and the town clerk testified to the thoroughness of the Napoleonic doctrine of hostage.1 Everywhere the Portuguese peasantry, who would otherwise have regarded the coming of the French with indifference, were roaming the hills in angry, restless groups.

  It was Wellesley's way, like Napoleon's, never to let his own difficulties obscure his enemy's. He divined that the very weakness of his forces and their previous inaction had put the French off their guard. If he was quick enough, he might be able to overwhelm and expel one of the two armies threatening Portugal before its commander realised its
peril. Selecting Soult's army as the smaller, he ordered an immediate concentration at Coimbra on the Mondego river, ninety miles to the north of Lisbon. From here it was little more than four days march to Oporto.

  On May ist—his fortieth birthday—the victor of Vimiero rode out of the pine woods into Coimbra amidst cheering crowds and showers of rose leaves and flowers.2 By the fourth he had assembled in the town 16,000 British and 2400 Portuguese. Only a few fine regiments like the 29th remained of the force that had beaten Junot; the rest of the old Peninsula army had returned to England after Corunna. Most of the men were young soldiers and militiamen hastily drafted into second battalions. Wellesley resolved, therefore, to keep them under his immediate eye and strike with a compact force at the main body of the French—then estimated at some 13,000 —in Oporto. A subsidiary corps of 6000, mostly Portuguese, under Beresford, was to strike north-eastwards to Lamego to guard the army's right flank and if possible, prevent the enemy's retreat into Spain along the northern bank of the Douro. 4500 British and 7000 Portuguese were left in central Portugal to guard the Tagus against Victor.

  The advance began on May 7th as soon as transport arrangements were complete. During the next three days the army covered nearly fifty miles. At dawn on the 10th, in the course of a turning move-

  1 Leslie, 108-9; See also Fortescue, VII, 134; Schaumann, 155-6; Burgoyne, 42; Tomkinson, 7; Boothby, 259-60.

  2 Burgoyne, 39.

  merit along the coast its advanced guard nearly succeeded in surprising and surrounding an enemy force on the heaths near the mouth of the Vouga. On the nth after a brisk encounter, it drove back 4500 French from the heights above Grijon. By nightfall it had reached the little town of Villa Nova on the wooded banks of the Douro opposite Oporto.