During a recent battlefield study for the staff of the British Army’s headquarters, the accompanying academic provided the group with a strategic and operational setting to the situation at the end of 1811 and the start of 1812, which set the conditions for Wellington’s strike at Ciudad Rodrigo and for the commencement of his 1812 campaign. The academic in question, who has an excellent grasp of the Peninsular War, did not make the connection that it was the movement of vast numbers of French soldiers to support the campaign on the east coast of Spain that presented Wellington with his vital opportunity. This oversight is symptomatic of a wider failing in many modern histories of the war, which skirt over the campaigns on the east coast or (increasingly) ignore them altogether. Juxtaposed against Wellington’s glorious victories in Iberia it is inevitable that the less celebrated achievements and failures of questionable generals, would be ignored or mentioned merely to denigrate one in order to elevate the other. Quite simply, however, Wellington’s wider achievements cannot be understood without recognising the whole war and where that war fitted into the wider Napoleonic struggle.
The struggle for the east coast of Spain is both fascinating and pivotal to the final outcome of the war in the peninsula; it is also interwoven with events in Iberia and southern France and across the Mediterranean to Sicily, where Britain was committed to holding the island as a strategic naval base and denying it to Napoleon. I am surprised, therefore, that no single work has ever been written on the subject. As ever, I would have liked more space. I am conscious that the first part of the story – the French invasion and advance – is not as detailed as it could be; this is entirely because I wanted to devote more space to the second part – the British (read Anglo-Sicilian) intervention. Some recent and quite excellent works have begun to look more closely at the role of the Royal Navy in supporting (beyond logistic and troop movements) the land forces in Iberia and the naval activity off the east coast of Spain provides us with the best examples of this commitment. I have, therefore, dedicated a separate chapter to this aspect. I have also dedicated a chapter to General Sir John Murray’s court martial for two reasons. Firstly, Murray is the only British general to face a court martial as a result of actions during the Peninsular War and, secondly, because his trial tells us a lot about the loneliness of command, the need for a good team, the differences between the services, and, by 1815, how much John Bull expected military success and would not tolerate failure. The strength of any work of this nature is the availability of good and reliable eyewitness or primary source accounts. There are a number of very good French accounts and, surprisingly perhaps, a number of good Spanish sources too. The British accounts, so prevalent from Wellington’s main army, are rare and I am therefore very grateful to Brooke Calverley for allowing me to use the diary of Tom Scott RA which is, undoubtedly, one of the best low-level sources available. Also important, of course, are the illustrations and I am indebted to Peter Harrington, the curator of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, for his generosity in providing some excellent images. I am also grateful to Rupert Harding at Pen & Sword for asking me to write this book by expanding on my original minor work Wellington´s Forgotten Front. It is a story I have wanted to research and tell for some considerable time and I am grateful for the opportunity. I am also obliged to the staff at the National Archives, the University of Cambridge Library, Nottingham University Library (Manuscripts and Special Collections) and the John Rylands University Library, Manchester.
My special thanks once again to Sarah and Robin King for reading the manuscript and for suggesting some first-rate fine-tuning. Finally, I am hugely indebted and profoundly thankful to José Luis Arcón Domínguez who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the battle of Sagunto, the siege of Valencia and operations in and around Alicante. He has helped me for many years with Spanish and French sources and has been a very valuable source of information, ideas and images for this book, as well as being a good friend.
Nick Lipscombe
Oxford, January 2016