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The Peninsular War
By Charles Esdaile Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2003 Charles Esdaile
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9236-1
CHAPTER 1
Lisbon
THE ORIGINS OF THE PENINSULAR WAR
Weary, ragged and dishevelled, the French troops crested the rise. Gleaming in the distance, they could see the broad waters of the River Tagus, with, beside them, the towers of Lisbon. To reach this spot near the town of Sacavem, they had endured weeks of forced marching in torrential rain across some of the roughest country in the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, thousands of their comrades had fallen by the wayside, all that was left being a handful of picked grenadiers. Still worse, it was all for nothing. Another European capital was on the point of falling to Napoleon, true, but the chief prize was vanishing before the invaders' very eyes, the Tagus being filled with the sails of a large convoy of shipping heading for the open sea. Going with them were the Portuguese royal family, the Portuguese navy, the contents of the treasury, and thousands of the country's leading citizens. Napoleon, in short, had been foiled.
But why had the emperor intervened in Iberia? Admirers of the emperor have on the whole sought to explain his actions in the context of either political idealism (the desire to extend the benefits of the French Revolution), family loyalty (the need to find thrones for Napoleon's numerous brothers and sisters) or strategic necessity (the strategic demands of a war that was none of his own making). For their opponents, meanwhile, the answer lies rather in dreams of conquest, hatred of the Bourbons, dissatisfaction with Spain as an ally, and the character of the emperor himself. Whichever view is taken, there is general agreement that in the summer of 1807 he was at the zenith of his power. Master of Holland, Switzerland, northern Italy and a much expanded France, in the autumn of 1805 he had been confronted by Britain, Russia, Austria, Sweden and Naples. In a matter of months, however, crushing victories at Ulm and Austerlitz (Slavkov) had produced the surrender of Austria; the cession of Venetia to the French-controlled Kingdom of Italy, of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg to Bavaria, and of the Dalmatian littoral to France; the occupation of Naples; the evacuation of all British and Russian forces from the central European theatre; and the conversion of Prussia into a de facto French ally. Russia and Britain, indeed, had themselves considered peace, only for their overtures to founder on Napoleon's ambition, the emperor's conduct in fact becoming so immoderate that within a year Prussia had been forced to go to war to defend her interests. Heavily defeated at Jena and Auerstädt on 14 October 1806, the Prussian armies had then for the most part surrendered without a fight. Having in the meantime occupied Berlin and inaugurated the Continental Blockade – his great master-plan for forcing the British out of the war by economic means – the emperor went on to invade Poland and East Prussia. Repulsed in a bloody draw at Eylau (Bagrationovsk) in early February 1807, on 14 June he secured his revenge, shattering the main Russian army at Friedland (Pravdinsk) and forcing Alexander I to sue for peace.
Negotiated during the famous meeting between Napoleon and Alexander at Tilsit (Sovetsk), the treaties that followed brought with them both a major reorganisation of Eastern Europe and a great increase in Napoleon's power. Already master of Germany, whose constituent states he had reorganised and united in the Confederation of the Rhine, the emperor turned his attention to Poland, whilst at the same time settling scores with Prussia. Thus, the latter was stripped of all her Polish territories, the bulk of these lands being formed into a new vassal state known as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. As for her western lands, these became the basis of the Grand Duchy of Berg and the Kingdom of Westphalia, of which the former was given to Joachim Murat, who was married to Napoleon's younger sister, Caroline, and the latter to his younger brother, Jerome. In the later Treaty of Berlin, meanwhile, the Prussians were also compelled to pay a heavy indemnity and restrict their army to 42,000 men.
With Prussia humbled and Germans and Poles alike firmly incorporated in the Napoleonic system, there yet remained Russia. Unusually for him, Napoleon had in fact treated her with great magnanimity at Tilsit, not only employing his considerable personal charm to captivate the somewhat naive Alexander I, but sparing him the indignity of an indemnity and tossing him a slice of Prussian Poland. Beneath the surface, however, Russia was simply being snared as an instrument of the emperor's purposes. Thus, easily persuaded to join the Continental Blockade – in Russia as elsewhere, resentment of Britain was rife – Alexander also agreed to put pressure on Sweden, Denmark and Austria to do the same, to go to war against Britain, recognise the Napoleonic settlement in the rest of Europe, allow the French to resume control of the much-disputed Ionian Islands, and generally give the emperor carte blanche.
Napoleon, then, was in a commanding position. Russia was friendly, Prussia shattered, and Austria temporarily neutralised. Thrones or other suitable positions had been found for most of the emperor's brothers and sisters as well as a variety of other figures connected with the régime – Joseph was King of Naples, Louis, King of Holland; Jerome, King of Westphalia; Murat and Caroline, Duke and Duchess of Berg; Elise, Duchess of Parma; Eugene de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy; and Marshal Berthier, Prince of Neufchâtel – so that familial duty could be said to have been well satisfied. By the same means, meanwhile, Napoleon had established a network of 'family courts' that could legitimise the Bonaparte dynasty, attract the loyalty of the aristocracy, and promote French culture. Ruling at his whim as they did, Napoleon's satellite rulers could also be expected to remain loyal to his rule, as could those princes who had survived the emperor's earlier reorganisation of Germany.
Setting aside Spain – notionally a close ally, but one that in practice had increasingly to be kept under observation – the one disappointing feature of the situation was the continuing failure to defeat Britain. However, supreme at sea though she was, the latter's position was far from unassailable. Indeed, her strategic difficulties were enormous. In the first place, her only allies were Sweden and Sicily (whither the King and Queen of Naples had fled following the occupation of their mainland domains in 1806), neither of whom possessed the capacity to defend itself unaided, let alone conduct the large-scale military campaigns that Britain needed from coalition partners. On the contrary, both needed defending, when troops were exactly what the British were short of. Whilst the number of men they had under arms had soared, far too many of them were serving in forces that could not be required to serve abroad. Still worse, neither Britain nor her colonies could be entirely stripped of regular troops. Though the British strove to employ local auxiliaries and foreign manpower, the result was that they did not have sufficient men to do very much themselves. Nor was raising a respectable field army the only problem: setting aside the dangers of storm and shipwreck, transporting even the most modest expeditionary force required large numbers of specialised ships, whilst simply getting the forces involved on and off ship was a most complex undertaking.
These difficulties were doubly unfortunate for they forced Britain back on methods of war – above all, blockade and colonial aggrandisement – that could not but antagonise potential partners on the Continent whilst at the same time confirming suspicions that the British were determined to avoid the sort of commitment they required of their allies. Nor were the methods of warfare on which they relied particularly cost-effective: colonial offensives were notoriously wasteful in terms of lives, whilst blockading Europe's coasts inflicted immense wear and tear on the Royal Navy. Some amelioration in the demands on Britain's resources was at hand – by the end of July 1807 expeditionary forces that she had sent to South America and Egypt had capitulated in exchange for their evacuation – but even so the sinews of war were clearly at a premium.
The political foundations of the British war effort were no more solid. In office since March 1807, the Portland administration may have been more committed to the struggle than its predecessor, the so-called Talents, but it was also very vulnerable. Amongst Whigs like Richard Sheridan, Earl Grey and Lord Holland, it was felt that Napoleon personified the cause of progress. In the course of the 1790s, a number of Whigs – most famously Edmund Burke, but also the current Prime Minister, Lord Portland – had become supporters of the war, but this gain had been offset by the defection of a number of disillusioned Tories to the peace party. Meanwhile, if the failure of the talks of 1806 had temporarily silenced the peace party, the Portland administration was also hampered by other factors. The Foreign Secretary, George Canning, was a man of questionable judgement whose determination to defeat the French blinded him to political realities, and made him impatient with more circumspect colleagues. To make matters worse, Portland himself was aged and unwell, whilst the Cabinet also had to run the risk of losing the support of the throne. In ordinary circumstances, the latter would not have been an issue, King George III loathing Napoleon and sharing his ministers' antipathy to the Catholic emancipation that was the foremost domestic issue of the day, but the king was prone to bouts of porphyria that periodically left him completely incapacitated and threatened to replace him with the pro-Whig Prince of Wales.
However, Britain's stability cannot just be measured in terms of Westminster. Just as important was the Continental Blockade. Over the course of time and by dint of changing circumstances, Britain was able to circumvent the effects of the Blockade by developing new markets and building up undercover links with the Continent, but in 1807 it was by no means clear that matters would work out so well, and all the more so as that year had seen the United States move in the direction of a total embargo on all trade with Britain. Hit by both a squeeze on exports and a general increase in the price of raw materials, indeed, many industries were in the grip of a severe slump. Matters being worsened still further by the actions of French commerce raiders and a poor harvest, the handloom weavers of Lancashire mounted an impressive campaign to petition Parliament for a minimum wage, whilst many northern merchants and manufacturers began to organise petitions for peace. Hand in hand with these demands, meanwhile, went others for political change: in the general elections of 1807, for example, Westminster, then the most representative seat in the country, returned the popular demagogues, Sir Francis Burdett and Lord Cochrane, on a platform of electoral reform.
For victory to come, then, Napoleon probably had only to wait. Waiting, however, was not in his nature, and he was in any case obsessed by the constant need to secure fresh triumphs and thereby, as he put it, ensure that he continued to be feared. In consequence, no sooner were the discussions at Tilsit over than he was looking around for a new target. The obvious choice was Portugal. Pretexts for an attack were plentiful: she was not part of the Continental Blockade, had been defaulting on the indemnity she had been paying France since the 'War of the Oranges' of 1801, and had frequently allowed British warships to revictual from her shores. There was much to gain: Portugal possessed wealthy colonies and a substantial fleet. And finally she ought to present few problems: her army was minimal and her ruler, the Prince-Regent, João, notoriously dull-witted.
The result was not long in coming. On 19 July 1807 the emperor sent orders to his Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, to the effect that Portugal was to be instructed to close its ports to Britain's shipping, arrest all British subjects, confiscate all British merchandise, and declare war. Within a few days, meanwhile, word had also gone out to concentrate a large force at Bayonne preparatory to a march on Lisbon. Such a march, of course, could only be made across Spain, but this presented few difficulties. For years the Spanish royal favourite, Manuel de Godoy, had been trying to get Napoleon to intervene in Portugal, and he was delighted with the news. Unsettled by rumours that Fernando IV of Naples was to be persuaded to surrender Sicily to Joseph Bonaparte in exchange for the Balearic Islands, he may also have seen co-operation as a means of propitiating Napoleon. Occupation forces were therefore soon being mobilised in Galicia, León and Extremadura, the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon also being ordered at all times to take his cue from his French counterpart.
Threatened by France and Spain alike, Portugal now found herself in a situation that was perilous in the extreme. Often wrongly stigmatised as a decayed despotism in which obscurantism vied with inefficiency, under the leadership of the Marques de Pombal, the chief minister of José I (1750–1777), she had in fact become the very model of enlightened absolutism. Key reforms included the complete reorganisation of the government of empire and metropolis alike, a great reduction in the power of the Church and the nobility, the establishment of a modern army, and the creation of a modern system of education. The arts and sciences had been encouraged, and everything possible done to stimulate economic development, whether it was through the abolition of religious discrimination, the implementation of measures designed to prevent any erosion of the slave labour-force that worked the estates of Brazil, the introduction of new crops in the empire, the extension of Portugal's role in the slave trade, or the stimulation of Portuguese exports. Pombal had long since vanished from the scene – indeed, he had ended his life in disgrace – but his influence had survived and allowed textiles and the wine trade to thrive. Nor had the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars been much of a setback. There had been war with France from 1793 to 1797 and a brief Spanish invasion in 1801 (see below), but hostilities had been nominal and trade buoyant, whilst the definitive peace treaty had cost her no more than the cession of a small part of the Alentejo and the payment of indemnities to Madrid and Paris.
Napoleon's sudden ultimatum spelled disaster, however. As the eighteenth century had progressed the Brazilian gold, sugar and tobacco that had hitherto been the bedrock of Portugal's well-being had begun either to run out or to fall in value. Some relief was obtained by the discovery of diamonds and an increase in the cultivation of cotton, but even so the emphasis had increasingly begun to shift to the metropolis' own products and manufactures. As Britain took a large part of the wine that was Portugal's chief export, joining the Continental Blockade was unthinkable, and yet fighting France and Spain was not much of an option either: whilst some attempt had been made to reorganise the army since the peace of 1801, no more than twenty thousand men were under arms out of a theoretical total of some forty-eight thousand.
In the circumstances, then, the only hope was either to conciliate Napoleon whilst at the same time avoiding a total breach with London, or to enlist British support while staving off Napoleon. Needless to say, the chief minister – António de Araújo de Azevedo – attempted both courses of action. Thus, whilst Napoleon was told that Portugal was prepared to declare war on Britain and close her ports to her ships, Araújo jibbed at agreeing to arrest her subjects or seize her goods. As for the British, they were secretly informed that hostilities would be confined to form alone, the Portuguese simultaneously requesting their assistance.
Napoleon as yet being unready to go to war – the troops concerned had to be scraped together from a variety of depots all over France, whilst their Spanish counterparts faced enormous logistical difficulties – Lisbon was therefore told that it need only detain British subjects on a provisional basis and sequester rather than confiscate their goods, the original deadline of 2 September also being extended for a further month. Yet this meant nothing: thanks to Britain's recent bombardment of Copenhagen and seizure of the Danish fleet, the emperor was more inclined to severity than ever.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Peninsular War by Charles Esdaile. Copyright © 2003 Charles Esdaile. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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