SIR ARTHUR WELLESLEY

On Nov. 25, 1808, Sir John Moore, in answer to a question from Lord Castlereagh, wrote the following conclusions as to the practicability of defending Portugal[339]:

‘I can say generally that the frontier of Portugal is not defensible against a superior force. It is an open frontier, all equally rugged, but all equally to be penetrated. If the French succeed in Spain it will be vain to attempt to resist them in Portugal. The Portuguese are without a military force ... no dependence can be placed on any aid that they can give. The British must in that event, I conceive, immediately take steps to evacuate the country. Lisbon is the only port, and therefore the only place from whence the army, with its stores, can embark.... We might check the progress of the enemy while the stores are embarking, and arrangements are being made for taking off the army. Beyond this the defence of Lisbon or of Portugal should not be thought of.’

Four months later, on March 7, 1809, Sir Arthur Wellesley answered the same question, put to him by the same minister, in very different terms.

[p. 287]

‘I have always been of opinion that Portugal might be defended, whatever might be the result of the contest in Spain, and that in the meantime measures adopted for the defence of Portugal would be highly useful to the Spaniards in their contest with the French. My notion was that the Portuguese military establishment ought to be revived, and that in addition to those troops His Majesty ought to employ about 20,000 British troops, including about 4,000 cavalry. My opinion was that, even if Spain should have been conquered, the French would not be able to overrun Portugal with a smaller force than 100,000 men. As long as the contest may continue in Spain, this force [the 20,000 British troops], if it could be placed in a state of activity, would be highly useful to the Spaniards, and might eventually decide the contest.’

Between these two divergent views as to the practicability of defending Portugal, Lord Castlereagh had to make his decision. On it—though he could not be aware of the fact—depended the future of Britain and of Bonaparte. He carefully considered the situation; after the disasters of the Corunna retreat it required some moral courage for a minister to advise the sending of another British army to the Peninsula. Moore’s gloomy prognostications were echoed by many military experts, and there were leading men—soldiers and politicians—who declared that the only thing that now remained to be done was to withdraw Cradock’s 10,000 sabres and bayonets from Lisbon, before the French came near enough to that city to make their embarkation difficult.

Castlereagh resolved to stake his faith on the correctness of Wellesley’s conclusions: all through these years of contest he had made him his most trusted adviser on things military, and now he did not swerve from his confidence. He announced to him, privately in the end of March, and officially on April 2[340], that the experiment of a second expedition to Portugal should[p. 288] be tried, and that he himself should have the conduct of it. Reinforcements should at once be sent out to bring the British army at Lisbon up to a total of 30,000 men—the number to which Wellesley, on consideration, raised the original 20,000 of which he had spoken. Beresford had already sailed, with orders to do all that he could for the reorganization of the disorderly native forces of Portugal. The few regiments in England that were ready for instant embarkation were sent off ere March ended, and began to arrive at Lisbon early in April[341]. Others were rapidly prepared for foreign service; but it was a misfortune that the Corunna battalions were still too sickly and depleted to be able to sail, so that troops who had seen nothing of the first campaign had to be sent out. The majority of them were ‘second battalions’ from the home establishment[342], many of them very weak in numbers and full of young soldiers, as they had been drained in the previous year to fill their first battalions up to full strength. Finally, just behind the first convoys of reinforcements, Wellesley himself set sail from Portsmouth, after resigning his position as Under Secretary for Ireland, which, by a curious anomaly, he had continued to hold all through the campaign of Vimiero, and the proceedings of inquiry concerning the Convention of Cintra. He sailed upon April 14, in the Surveillante frigate, had the narrowest of escapes from shipwreck on the Isle of Wight during the first night of his voyage, but soon obtained favourable winds and reached Lisbon on the twenty-second, after a rapid passage of less than eight days. Just before he started there had been received from Portugal not only the correct intelligence that Soult had stormed Oporto upon March 29, but a false rumour that Victor had been joined by the corps of Sebastiani[343] and[p. 289] had after his victory at Medellin laid siege to Badajoz[344]. If this had been true, the Duke of Belluno would have been strong enough to move against Portugal with 25,000 men, after detaching a competent force to watch the wrecks of Cuesta’s army. Fortunately the whole story was an invention: but it kept Wellesley in a state of feverish anxiety till he reached Lisbon. His fears are shown by the fact that he drew up a memorandum for Lord Castlereagh, setting forth the supposed situation, and asking what he was to do on arriving, if he should find that Cradock had already embarked his troops and quitted Portugal[345]. The Secretary of State, equally harrassed by the false intelligence, replied that he was to make an effort to induce the Spaniards to let him land the army at Cadiz, and, if they should refuse, might reinforce the garrison of Gibraltar to 8,000 men, and bring the rest of the expeditionary force back to England[346].

It was therefore an immense relief to Wellesley to find, when he landed, that the news from Estremadura was false, that Victor had not been reinforced, and that the 1st Corps was lying quiescent at Merida. Soult was still at Oporto, Cradock had not been molested, and the French invasion was at a standstill.

It is comparatively seldom that the historian is able to compare in detail a general’s original conception of a plan of campaign with the actual scheme which he carried out. Still less common is it to find that the commander has placed on record his ideas as to the general policy to be pursued during a war, before he has assumed charge of his army or issued his first orders. It is therefore most fortunate that we have three documents from Wellesley’s hand, written early in 1809, which enable us to understand the principles on which[p. 290] he believed that the Peninsular War should be fought out. These are his Memorandum on the Defence of Portugal, which we have already had occasion to quote, and the two dispatches to Lord Castlereagh and to Mr. Frere which he wrote immediately after his arrival in Lisbon. The first gives us his general view of the war. He believed that an English army of 20,000 or 30,000 men, backed by the levies of Portugal, would be able to maintain itself on the flank of the French army in Spain. Its presence there would paralyse all the offensive actions of the enemy, and enable the Spaniards to make head against the invaders as long as Portugal remained unsubdued. The news that a British army had once more taken the field would, he considered, induce the French to turn their main efforts against Portugal[347], but he believed that considering the geography of the country, the character of its people, and the quality of the British troops, they would fail in their attempt to overrun it. They could not succeed, as he supposed, unless they could set aside 100,000 men for the task, and he did not see how they would ever be able to spare such a large detachment out of the total force which they then possessed in the Peninsula—a force whose numerical strength (in common with all British statesmen and soldiers of the day) he somewhat underrated. Being in the secrets of the Ministry, he was already aware in March that a new war in Germany was about to break out within the next few months. When Austria took the field, Napoleon would not be able to spare a single battalion of reinforcements for Spain. If the Spaniards pursued a reasonable military policy, and occupied the attention of the main armies of the French, the enemy would never be able to detach a force of 100,000 for the invasion of Portugal. He would underrate the numbers required, make his attempt with insufficient resources, and be beaten. When Wellesley landed at Lisbon, and found that Soult had halted at Oporto, that Victor lay quiescent at Merida, and that Lapisse with the troops from Salamanca [p. 291]had gone southward to join the 1st Corps, and so severed the only link which bound together the army in Northern Portugal and the army in Estremadura, he was reassured as to the whole situation. Soult and Victor, isolated as they now were, would each be too weak to beat the Anglo-Portuguese army. They were too far apart to make co-operation between them possible, considering the geography of Central Portugal, and the fact that the whole country behind each was in a state of insurrection[348].

But ‘the best defensive is a vigorous local offensive,’ and Wellesley saw the advantage of the central position of the British army upon the Tagus. A few marches would place it at a point from which it could fall either upon Victor to the right or Soult to the left, before either marshal could be in a position to lend help to his colleague, probably long before he would even be aware that his colleague was in danger. Wellesley could strike at the one or the other, with almost perfect certainty of catching him unreinforced. Ney, it was true, lay behind Soult, but he was known to be entangled in the trammels of the vigorous Galician insurrection. Victor had Sebastiani in his rear, but the 4th Corps was having occupation found for it by the Spanish army of La Mancha. It was improbable that either Soult or Victor, if suddenly attacked, could call up any appreciable reinforcements. Victor, moreover, had Cuesta to observe, and could not move off leaving 20,000 Spaniards behind him. Soult was known to be distracted by Silveira’s operations on the Tamega. Wellesley, therefore, saw that it was well within his power to strike at either of the marshals. He would, of course, be obliged to place a ‘containing force’ in front of the one whom he resolved to leave alone for the present. But this detachment need not be very large, and might be composed for the most part of Portuguese[p. 292] troops: its duty would be to distract, but not to fight the enemy.

On the whole Wellesley thought it would be best to make the first onslaught on Soult. ‘I should prefer an attack on Victor,’ he wrote, two days after landing, ‘in concert with Cuesta, if Soult were not in possession of a fertile province of this kingdom, and of the favourite town of Oporto, of which it is most desirable to deprive him. Any operation upon Victor, connected with Cuesta’s movements, would require time to concert, which may as well be employed in dislodging Soult from the north of Portugal, before bringing the British army to the eastern frontier[349].... I intend to move upon Soult, as soon as I can make some arrangement, on which I can depend, for the defence of the Tagus, to impede or delay Victor’s progress, in case he should come on while I am absent.’ ‘I think it probable,’ he wrote on the same day but in another letter, ‘that Soult will not remain in Portugal when I pass the Mondego: if he does, I shall attack him. If he should retire, I am convinced that it would be most advantageous for the common cause that we should remain on the defensive in the North of Portugal, and act vigorously in co-operation with Cuesta against Victor[350].’

Further forward it was impossible to look: a blow at Soult, followed by another at Victor, was all that could at present be contemplated. Wellesley was directed, by the formal instructions which he had received from Castlereagh, to do all that was possible to clear Portugal and the frontier provinces of Spain from the enemy, but not to strike deep into the Peninsula till he should have received permission from home to do so. Nevertheless he had devoted some thought to the remoter possibilities of the situation. If Portugal were preserved, and Soult and Victor beaten off, more ambitious combinations might become possible. He expressed his conviction that the French occupa[p. 293]tion of Spain would only be endangered when a very large force, acting in unison under the guidance of a single mind, should be brought together. The co-operation of the English army and that of Cuesta ‘might be the groundwork of further measures of the same and a more extended description[351].’ He was under no delusions as to the easiness of the task before him: he did not hurry on in thought, to dream of the expulsion of the French from the Peninsula as a goal already in sight. But he believed that he and his army ‘might be highly useful to the Spaniards and might eventually decide the contest[352].’

It is the survey of documents such as these that enables us to appreciate Wellesley at his best. He had gauged perfectly well the situation and difficulties of the French. He saw exactly how much was in his own power. The whole history of the Peninsular War for the next two years is foreseen in his prophetic statement, that with 30,000 British troops and the Portuguese levies he would guarantee to hold his own against any force of less than 100,000 French, and that he did not think that the enemy would find it easy to collect an army of that size to send against him. This is precisely what he accomplished: for the first fifteen months after his arrival he held with ease that frontier which Moore had described as ‘indefensible against a superior force.’ When at last Napoleon, free from all other continental troubles, launched against him an army under Masséna, which almost reached the figure[353] that he had described as irresistible in 1809, he showed in 1810-11 that he had built up resources for himself which enabled him to beat off even that number of enemies. Though four-fifths of Spain had been subdued, he held his own, because he had grasped the fundamental truth that (to use his own words) ‘the more ground the French hold down, the weaker will they be at any given point.’ In short, he had fathomed the great secret, that Napoleon’s[p. 294] military power—vast as it was—had its limits: that the Emperor could not send to Spain a force sufficient to hold down every province of a thoroughly disaffected country, and also to provide (over and above the garrisons) a field army large enough to beat the Anglo-Portuguese and capture Lisbon. If the French dispersed their divisions, and kept down the vast tracts of conquered territory, they had no force left with which to take the offensive against Portugal: if they massed their armies, they had to give up broad regions, which immediately relapsed into insurrection and required to be subdued again. This was as true in the beginning of the war as in the end. In 1809 the army that forced Wellesley to retreat after Talavera was only produced by evacuating the whole province of Galicia, which passed back into the hands of the insurgents. In 1812, in a similar way, the overpowering force which beat him back from Burgos, had been gathered only by surrendering to the Spanish Government the whole of the four kingdoms of Andalusia. On the other hand, during the long periods when the enemy had dispersed himself, and was garrisoning the whole south and centre of Spain, e.g. for the first six months of 1810, and for the last six months of 1811, Wellesley held his own on the Portuguese frontier in complete confidence, assured that no sufficient force could be brought up against him, till the enemy either procured new troops from France or gave up some great section of the regions which he was holding down. A detailed insight into the future is impossible to any general, however great, but already in April 1809 Wellesley had grasped the main outlines of the war that was to be.

Before passing on to the details of the campaign on the Douro, with which Wellesley’s long series of victories began, it is well to take a glance at the man himself, as he sat at his desk in Lisbon dictating the orders that were to change the face of the war.

Arthur Wellesley was now within a few days of completing his fortieth year. He was a slight but wiry man of middle stature, with a long face, an aquiline nose, and a keen but cold grey eye. Owning an iron constitution on which no climate or season seemed to make the least impression, he was physically fit for all the work that lay before him—work more fatiguing[p. 295] than that which falls to most generals. For in the Peninsula he was required, as it soon appeared, to be almost as much of a statesman as of a general; while at the same time, owing to the inexperience of the British officers of that day in warfare on a large scale, he was obliged for some time to discharge for himself many of the duties which properly fall to the lot of the chief of the staff, the commissary-general, the paymaster-general, and the quartermaster-general in a well organized army. No amount of toil, bodily or mental, appeared too much for that active and alert mind, or for the body which seven years of service in India seemed to have tanned and hardened rather than to have relaxed. During the whole of his Peninsular campaigns, from 1808 to 1814, he was never prostrated by any serious ailment. Autumn rains, summer heat, the cold of winter, had no power over him. He could put up with a very small allowance of sleep, and when necessary could snatch useful moments of repose, at any moment of the twenty-four hours when no pressing duty chanced to be on hand. His manner of life was simple and austere in the extreme; no commander-in-chief ever travelled with less baggage, or could be content with more Spartan fare. Long after his wars were over the habit of bleak frugality clung to him, and in his old age men wondered at the bare and comfortless surroundings that he chose for himself, and at the scanty meals that sustained his spare but active frame. Officers who had long served in India were generally supposed to contract habits of luxury and display, but Wellesley was the exception that proved the rule. He hated show of any kind; after the first few days of the campaign of 1809 he discarded the escort which was wont to accompany the commander-in-chief. It was on very rare occasions that he was seen in his full uniform: the army knew him best in the plain blue frock coat, the small featherless cocked hat, and the short cape, which have been handed down to us in a hundred drawings. Not unfrequently he would ride about among his cantonments dressed like a civilian in a round hat and grey trousers[354]. He was as careless about the dress of his subordinates as about his[p. 296] own, and there probably never existed an army in which so little fuss was made about unessential trappings as that which served in the Peninsula from 1809 to 1814[355]. Nothing could be less showy than its head-quarters’ staff—a small group of blue-coated officers, with an orderly dragoon or two, riding in the wake of the dark cape and low glazed cocked hat of the most unpretentious of chiefs. It contrasted in the strangest way with the plumes and gold lace of the French marshals and their elaborately ornate staffs[356].

Considered as a man Wellesley had his defects and his limitations; we shall have ere long to draw attention to some of them. But from the intellectual point of view he commands our undivided admiration as a practical soldier[357]. A careful study of his dispatches leaves us in a state of wonder at the imbecility of the school of writers—mostly continental—who have continued to assert for the last eighty years that he was no more than a man of ordinary abilities, who had an unfair share of good luck, and was presented with a series of victories by the mistakes and jealousies of the generals opposed to him. Such assertions are the results of blind ignorance and prejudice. When found in English writers they merely reflect the bitter hatred that was felt toward Wellesley by his political opponents during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. In French military authors they only represent the resentful[p. 297] carpings of the vanquished army, which preferred to think that it was beaten by anything rather than by the ability of the conqueror. In 1820 every retired colonel across the Channel was ready to demonstrate that Toulouse was an English defeat, that Talavera was a drawn battle, and that Wellesley was over-rash or over-cautious, a fool or a coward, according as their thesis of the moment might demand[358]. They were but echoing their Emperor’s rancorous remark to Soult, on the hillside of La Belle Alliance, when after telling the Marshal that he only thought his old adversary a good general because he had been beaten by him, he added, ‘Et moi, je vous dis que Wellington est un mauvais général, et que les Anglais sont de mauvaises troupes[359].’

Bonaparte consistently refused to do justice to the abilities of the Duke. He regarded him as a bitter personal enemy, and his whole attitude towards Wellesley was expressed in the scandalous legacy to Cantillon[360] which disgraces his last will and testament. In strict conformity with their master’s pose, his followers, literary and military, have refused to see anything great in the victor of June 18, 1815. Even to the present day too many historians from the other side of the straits continue to follow in the steps of Thiers, and to express wonder at the inexplicable triumphs of the mediocre general who routed in succession all the best marshals of France.

To clear away any lingering doubts as to Wellesley’s extraordinary ability, the student of history has only to read a few of his more notable dispatches. The man who could write the two Memoranda to Castlereagh dated September 5, 1808, and March 7, 1809[361], foresaw the whole future of the Peninsular War. To know, at that early stage of the struggle, that the Spaniards would be beaten when—and wherever they offered battle, that the French, in spite of their victories, would never[p. 298] be able to conquer and hold down the entire country, that 30,000 British troops would be able to defend Portugal against any force that could be collected against them, required the mind of a soldier of the first class. When the earliest of those memoranda was written, most Englishmen believed that the Spaniards were about to deliver their country by their own arms: Wellesley saw that the notion was vain and absurd. When, on the other hand, he wrote the second, the idea was abroad that all was lost, that after Corunna no second British army would be sent to the Peninsula, and that Portugal was indefensible. Far from sharing these gloomy views he asks for 30,000 men, and states that though Spain may be overrun, though the Portuguese army may be in a state of hopeless disarray, he yet hopes with this handful of men to maintain the struggle, and eventually to decide the contest. How many generals has the world seen who could have framed such a prophecy, and have verified it?

To talk of the good fortune of Wellesley, of his ‘lucky star,’ is absurd. He had, like other generals, his occasional uncovenanted mercies and happy chances: but few commanders had more strokes of undeserved disappointment, or saw more of their plans frustrated by a stupid subordinate, an unexpected turn of the weather, an incalculable accident, or a piece of false news. He had his fair proportion of the chances of war, good and bad, and no more. If fortune was with him at Oporto in 1809, or at El Bodon in 1811, how many were the occasions on which she played him scurvy tricks? A few examples may suffice. In May 1809 he might have captured the whole of Soult’s army, if Silveira had but obeyed orders and occup............