by Mark Urban
– ‘Scovell, among several Staff officers, watched it happen’: the journal once more. Scovell was often so careful about what he wrote concerning his master that his remarks might be taken to be the equivalent of rolling his eyes skywards when the orders to attack were cancelled.
4 ‘Major FitzRoy Somerset, ever loyal to his master, detected the insinuations’, in a letter to his brother dated 27 July 1812, BP FmM 4/1/8.
– ‘He looked to his right. The dust still showed the progress of a French force at least a mile away’: standing atop the Teso San Miguel, it is clear that Wellington could not actually see the men of Thomieres’ division moving up, as some writers suggest.
5 ‘the single figure of the British commander who came galloping across the scrub’: according to William Grattan of the 88th in his ‘Adventures with the Connaught Rangers’. D’Urban suggests De Lancey and Sturgeon did keep up with Wellington. The two men are the main sources for what happened at this end of the battlefield.
6 ‘he found his brother-in-law, Major Leigh Clowes’: there is an account of their conversation in the Le Marchant Papers. It is a letter from Clowes to Scovell some years later (LMP Packet 17a, Item 5). Scovell copied Clowes’s letter, added an account of his own and sent them to Le Marchant’s son, Denis.
7 ‘Le Marchant’s heavies had mounted and were deploying into line’: my account is drawn together from Denis Le Marchant’s life of his father, the Le Marchant Papers and R. H. Thoumine’s superb but rather rare biography of the general (Scientific Soldier, Oxford, 1968).
– ‘Cotton lost his temper with the brigade commander and strong words were exchanged’: this was revealed in the biography of Cotton, Memoirs and Correspondence of Field Marshal Viscount Combermere, penned by his widow Mary. It was obliquely confirmed by Tomkinson. I am very grateful to Rory Muir for bringing this curious episode to my attention.
8 ‘One young officer wrote home: “it was a fine sight”’: Lieutenant Norcliffe of the 4th Dragoons, reproduced by Rory Muir in Salamanca 1812. He kindly showed me sections of the manuscript before its publication.
9 ‘Scovell’s brother-in-law could not bring himself to tell Carey that his father was dead’: this touching scene was brought out of the Le Marchant Papers by Thoumine.
10 ‘Wellington’s private verdict’: Dispatches, 25 July 1812.
11 ‘For this Scovell was mentioned in the Salamanca dispatch’: I see no other explanation for the mention than his code-breaking. His activities on 22 July were admirable and risky, but no more so than his actions beside Wellington at half a dozen other major battles, none of which earned him a similar distinction. Clearly there was no sense that the honour was being used to make a long-overdue promotion (as was often the case), since Scovell had received his majority just the previous Spring. Given the difficulties of moving from Major to Lieutenant-Colonel, we can safely assume Scovell would have waited years for it, had Wellington not been extremely grateful for his work during the Salamanca campaign.
* Names given to the light infantry or sharpshooters of French infantry battalions.
† French infantry regiments were divided into line or ‘ligne’ and light, ‘legère’. The distinctions stemmed from eighteenth-century concepts, where armies gave battle in long lines and the light troops were used on the flanks or to the rear, guarding supply routes.
1. DONT. B. 365. EVE. WE. WE. 669. EV. 398. R. DECEIVED. 481. THE. 985. 186. T. 843. 688. AND. COLONEL. S. 174. V. 1024 … IS. THE. 854. ERSON. WHO. MADE. THEM. OUT.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The March to Burgos and Marshal Soult’s Letter
In the aftermath of Salamanca, resentments between Napoleon’s marshals in Spain burned with fearsome intensity. Recriminations, accusations and rhetorical rhodomontades flew between them and their masters. Each sought to distance himself from the latest disaster and to heap the blame on another. No member of the marshalate embodied the spirit of recalcitrance more spectacularly than Nicolas Soult.
Napoleon had decided that this one-time private in the royal army was among his most brilliant generals. Soult was completely confident of his master’s approbation. Moreover, he knew that the emperor had a weakness for bullying the siblings he had placed on several of Europe’s thrones, among them King Joseph of Spain. The marshal could not contemplate abandoning the lucrative viceroyalty he had carved for himself in Andalucia and believed he could play on Napoleon’s ill-will towards his brother Joseph.
Many of Soult’s fellow officers were convinced that this son of a notary from Albi in south-western France deluded himself that he was but a victory away from being made monarch of some unfortunate vassal state. These aspirations had shown themselves in Oporto during the brief occupation of 1809, leading many officers in Spain to deride him as Le Roi Nicolas or the ‘Sultan of Andalucia’.
Soult’s pretensions seem to have been touched off by Napoleon’s decision to give the throne of Naples to another of his favourite subordinates, Marshal Joachim Murat. It was a feature of the intense competition between the emperor’s senior commanders that although a royal title had eluded Soult (Murat, after all, had married into the Bonaparte family) he could use the stewardship of Andalucia to outdo his peers in another area: amassing wealth.
The French system of imposing taxes on Spanish communities following victorious conquests or episodes of revolt was open to abuse, since these exactions often took the form of property carted off by Napoleon’s troops. So intractable was Soult in the view that he should remain the commander in Seville that even following Salamanca the marshal flatly refused to go, despite the fact that Wellington’s advance through the centre of the country made it a very real possibility that he would be cut off from France. King Joseph, meanwhile, sent him more appeals to come north with his army.
As he sat in the Alcazar, Seville’s spectacular Moorish palace, contemplating how best to foil Joseph and preserve his viceregal lifestyle, Soult decided to try an extraordinary gamble. He would write to Napoleon himself, destroy the little credibility Joseph had in the eyes of his own brother and dictate the strategy to be pursued by the entire army in Spain. On 12 August, Soult composed the letter upon which he believed his own fate and that of his nation’s arms in Spain would depend. The question was, how to get it to the emperor without it falling into the wrong hands?
Since no message from Paris had reached his desk for more than four months, Soult knew that sending an overland courier would be risky. Even a squadron of dragoons could not protect such a messenger from parties of insurgents, although he trusted the cipher he used would deny them knowledge of its contents. Soult also must have reasoned that since it would be equally disastrous for his secret missive to fall into King Joseph’s hands, even the strongest of escorts could not protect his dispatch from some curious French officer holding the key to the grand chiffre.
Soult’s solution was to give it to the captain of a French man of war which was sailing from Malaga to Marseilles. Plenty of ships made the run up the Catalan coast unmolested, but there was always the chance that a Royal Navy frigate might intercept and board the vessel.
When it was no more than a few days out of Malaga, the ship carrying Soult’s dispatch was sighted by a Royal Navy cruiser and a chase began. The French captain evidently knew that he was carrying a letter for the emperor himself, but was not aware of its contents. He decided to play it safe and make a run for one of the French-occupied Catalan ports. As soon as he landed, the captain saw to it that the letter was conveyed directly to the commander of the Army of Catalonia, Marshal Suchet. He had done very well for himself in Spain, being the only general officer to receive his marshal’s baton there. Suchet had come by the same hard road as many of the other French commanders: the Italian campaign, the smashing of Austria and Russia in 1805. He was less senior than Soult and perhaps more nervous about remaining high in the emperor’s esteem. Being in possession of the same deciphering table as Soult, a copy en clair was on his desk by 8 September.
&n
bsp; Soult informed the emperor that his brother Joseph was a traitor. According to the marshal, King Joseph had sent emissaries to negotiate with the Spanish government in Cadiz. The reason Joseph wanted him to quit Andalucia, Soult insinuated, was that his deal with the Spanish involved returning the south to their control in return for an accommodation in the rest of the country. The key passage of this denunciation reads: ‘it is my duty to inform your Excellency that I have a fear that all the bad arrangements made [by Joseph] and all the intrigues that have been going on, have the object of forcing the Imperial armies to retreat’. The marshal’s letter showed his gift for melodrama, suggesting that ‘I have thought it necessary to lay my fears before six generals of my army, after having made them take an oath not to reveal what I told them save to the emperor himself.’
‘Perhaps my suspicions are ill-founded,’ Soult concluded oleaginously, ‘but in such a delicate situation it is better to discuss even the worst things … my peace of mind depends on the well-being and service of the emperor and of the safety of the army confided to my command.’
Quite what Suchet’s reaction was at having such an extraordinarily compromising document fall into his hands has not been recorded. Did Soult have such an intimate rapport with Napoleon that he could denigrate Joseph in this way? If so, perhaps Suchet should send the message on its way. On the other hand, as King of Spain, Joseph was his own nominal superior just as he was Soult’s – Suchet knew that forwarding such a message could make him an accessory to treason. He resolved to act quickly.
*
The day that Soult wrote his letter, Wellington’s Army entered Madrid. The British general was a little nervous about taking this portentous step. He knew that the French could still unite a field army large enough to drive him back to the borders of Portugal in which case the ‘Liberation of Madrid’ would be reversed. The political consequences of leaving the Spanish capital to be reoccupied could be serious, but he felt the blow which occupying the city would deal to the entire French enterprise in Spain justified the gamble. Meanwhile, the longer Soult refused to quit the south, the longer Wellington knew he had to hunt the force he had battered at Salamanca, the Army of Portugal.
Joseph’s regime and the class of Spanish sympathizers that had served it did not await the allies’ arrival. The king’s French secretary of state took part in the evacuation of 9 August, noting that ‘all of the French families and those of the compromised Spaniards, who were more worried about the vengeance of their compatriots than the maltreatment of the victors, were rushing to leave the city, and a great many of them, bereft of means of transport or the money to hire it, decided to make the journey by foot’. This crowd, thousands strong, made its way south-east towards Valencia, the nearest city, where the king was setting up his temporary headquarters.
During the last two weeks of August 1812, the British commander was fêted by near-hysterical Madrilenos,* who believed their liberation was irrevocable. The general was never entirely comfortable with displays of public emotion and civic flattery, but he bore it well enough in the line of duty. Everywhere redcoats were greeted with an enthusiastic ‘Viva!’, in the churches Te Deums were sung for the city’s deliverance and Wellington was obliged to sit through numerous tedious panegyrics. The great Spanish master Francisco Goya decided he must paint the conquering hero. Knowing the public clamour to see Wellington’s likeness would be intense, rapid brushwork was the order of the day, so Goya took a portrait of King Joseph on horseback which he had already started and added the British Commander in Chief’s head instead. Goya’s painting was ready for public exhibition on 1 September – a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving for Madrid’s deliverance. Wellington took an instant dislike to it, feeling that the body of the figure in the painting was too heavy altogether, while his own was lean and wiry.
To escape the clamour, the general had moved allied Headquarters to the royal palace, El Escorial. Scovell went in search of the palace’s art treasures, only to discover the the royal residence had been ‘stripped of its jewels and ornaments by the French’. Only frescoes, which even the most rapacious marshal could hardly have carried off, remained. Scovell always took the opportunity to take in the great cultural sights of Iberia and added the Escorial to his list of edifying excursions, along with the great library of the University of Coimbra, Lisbon’s churches and Roman ruins of Merida.
Despite his reluctance to attend further celebrations, on 1 September, Wellington agreed to attend a bullfight in his honour in the amphitheatre close to Madrid’s Alcala gate. This was a most suitable way of celebrating the liberation, since Joseph’s Bonapartist state had banned this traditional sport. Major Scovell, among other staff officers, went with him. While Wellington’s position ensured his invitation to far more functions than he would naturally have wished to attend, it was a rare opportunity for a more lowly officer like Scovell to spend a day enjoying himself after a hard season’s campaigning.
At 4.30 p.m., with the late summer’s heat giving way to a cooler evening, the show began. Ten thousand people were crammed into the amphitheatre and Wellington’s Staff officer looked around at this acme of Spanish spectacles. ‘After parading before Lord Wellington’s box and having roses thrown at them by the ladies (for all the Spanish youth and beauty was there), two of the mounted men returned and the bull was let out amid the acclamations of the people,’ he later jotted in his journal.
The first action of the contest consisted of mounted lancers taunting bulls until the horned beasts charged, usually goring the riders’ steeds. With his love of horses and sense of fair play, Scovell found this revolting, noting that ‘two had their bowels let out, and the most cruel part of the business is that the Rider is not thought any thing of unless the poor animal dies under him’. Matadors on foot then dispatched several more bulls by plunging swords into the shoulders of the swaying, bloodied beasts. Scovell was transfixed by it all and wrote, ‘I never saw a more cruel or a more interesting sight than this is altogether.’
*
Wellington’s attendance at the bullfight may well have been a deliberate ploy to ensure that he was publicly seen just as he was about to begin a bold strategic gamble. On either the same evening or early the next day, his Headquarters was on its way. Scovell and the rest of the Staff headed north out of the city through the Guadarrama mountains and into the plains of northern Castile. A corps under the trusty Rowland Hill was left to guard Madrid while the commander of forces tried to use the bulk of his Army to bring on another battle with the Army of Portugal. Wellington was racing against time. He wanted to hammer this French corps before it could be reinforced. The British drive northwards would end around 135 miles north of the capital, at Burgos.
Wellington’s march to Burgos involved considerable risk. It was based on a sound starting premise: that after Salamanca the 35,000-strong Army of Portugal was still brittle and would collapse if seriously assaulted. The strategy relied, though, on Soult pig-headedly holding on in Andalucia, for if he abandoned the south, he would bring 80,000 troops into play against the allies and threaten any move into north-east Spain, nullifying the allied advantage in numbers and creating the risk that their supply lines back to Portugal might come under attack.
While Wellington’s force pushed north, General Bertrand Clausel, the Army of Portugal’s commander, despaired of the morale of his troops, ‘it is usual to see an army disheartened after a check: but it would be hard to find one whose discouragement is greater than that of these troops’. Unfortunately for Wellington, Clausel kept falling back to avoid battle, and as the British commander pushed forward, the garrison of Burgos got in his way. He could not simply bypass it, since that would leave them free to threaten the rear of his army.
Almost one thousand years before the British general laid eyes on it, Burgos had been a bastion against the Moorish advance into northern Spain. Its castle, positioned at the end of a great spur of upland, dominating the River Arlanzon, was surrounded on three sides by st
eep slopes. When Napoleon saw it in 1808, he admired the natural strength of the spot and ordered that its medieval centre be clad in all manner of modern defences so that it was fit to face the age of gunpowder and breaching batteries. The one easy approach, along the tongue of land behind the citadel, had been blocked by a great redoubt bristling with guns, the Hornwork of San Miguel. A girdle of thick walls surounded its old stone defences. Some 2,000 picked men had been thrown into the place by the French as they retreated.
From the outset, it was apparent to many on the Staff, including Scovell, with his experience of so many reconnaissance missions, that this fortress would not fall easily. And even if it could be taken, how would the allied army be able to maintain this position so far into Spain and hundreds of miles from the safety of the Portuguese border? Doubts must have afflicted Wellington too, but he committed himself to the operation.
On 19 September the fortress was invested by troops of the 6th and 1st Divisions. After the horrors of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, it was asking a great deal of Wellington’s tired army to attempt a third major operation of this kind in one campaigning season. Knowing well the feelings of the regiments that had suffered so horribly in the Great Breach of Badajoz, he decided to excuse the Light, 3rd and 4th Divisions the work at Burgos.
Wellington moved swiftly into attack, ordering the storm of the San Miguel Hornwork on the very first night of his siege. Troops of the 42nd Highlanders, the Black Watch, assaulted the position frontally, but hundreds of casualties stalled their approach. Only the intrepidity of the major placed in command of some light companies sent around the back of the work rescued the storming operation. He managed to break in and take it. That major was none other than Edward Cocks, a one-time colleague of Scovell’s in the intelligence department, who now led the storming parties of the 79th Highlanders. It was typical of this zealous young officer that he put himself forward to lead these Forlorn Hopes and equally obvious that his desire to distinguish himself would be attended by the gravest risks. On 27 September, Major Cocks heard that a rumour was going around the lines that he had been killed. He went into the trenches where British troops were burrowing their way towards the castle’s walls, asking for news: