If we can maintain ourselves in Portugal, the war will not cease in the Peninsula, and, if the war lasts in the Peninsula, Europe will be saved.
Arthur Wellesley
Never was there such a murderous battle.
Arthur Wellesley
Despite the devastating results of Moore’s campaign, Whitehall deepened its commitment to rescuing the Peninsula from French imperialism. General Arthur Wellesley succinctly explained why: ‘If we can maintain ourselves in Portugal, the war will not cease in the Peninsula, and, if the war lasts in the Peninsula, Europe will be saved.’1 Yet the responses of the Portuguese and Spanish governments to Britain’s commitment differed sharply. Most Portuguese leaders were grateful, pragmatic, and humble; they recognized the British as their nation’s saviors and subordinated their troops to superior British military skills. Britain’s alliance with Portugal gave Britain’s commanders leeway to wage war as they saw fit. They could march, camp, and fight wherever military necessity drew them. British officers trained, equipped, paid, and led the Portuguese troops. Colonel Nicholas Trant created a brigade of light infantry, known as cazadores. The Junta appointed General William Beresford to command Portugal’s army on March 8, 1809. Overall, the choice was fortunate. Although Beresford was a mediocre field general, he was outstanding at organizing, training, supplying, and motivating the Portuguese army. Wellington called Beresford ‘the ablest man I have yet seen with the army … I know of no one fitter for the purpose.’2
Britain and Spain’s Junta, now ensconced in Seville, formally allied with a treaty on January 14, 1809, signed by Foreign Minister George Canning and Ambassador Juan de Apoda. The alliance, however, was cramped. The Junta wanted the British to supply them with unending amounts of money, arms, and troops while giving nothing or little in return. Whitehall opened its treasury and magazines to the Junta. Before the campaign season opened in May 1809, the Spaniards received 20,000 uniforms, 200,000 muskets, and 155 artillery pieces. Yet the Spanish barred British officers from commanding Spanish troops, British soldiers from setting foot in Cádiz, and British merchants from trading in Spanish colonies.
Nonetheless, the Junta did take some positive measures to fight the French and establish legitimacy for itself. On December 28, 1808, the Junta issued a proclamation that had an important impact on the war. It at once encouraged and tried to regulate the guerrilla bands mushrooming across Spain. All bands would be subject to the region’s regular military commander. The Junta would issue officer commissions. No band could accept deserters from the draft or regular regiments. The Junta also tried to transform itself into a more elaborate and legitimate government. On May 22, 1809, the Junta announced that it would hold elections for a Cortés or national assembly within a year.
Meanwhile, in early 1809, French troops were busy conquering or exploiting most of Spain. Pockets of Spanish guerrillas or regular troops resisted across the country, but the largest armies defended the southwest where Seville and Cádiz stood. For now Napoleon ignored that region and ordered a campaign designed to conquer Portugal. French armies would invade Portugal from the north and east. Marshal Nicolas Soult’s 24,000 troops and 20 cannons were deployed around Orense in Spain’s northwestern Galicia region, while Marshal Claude Victor’s 17,500-man corps was deployed around Merida in western Spain. A third force of 9,000 troops led by General Pierre Lapisse screened the Spanish fortress of Cuidad Rodrigo.
Soult opened his campaign first. He swiftly captured the fortress of Chaves, scattered 25,000 militia commanded by General Bernadino Freire at Braga on March 25, then headed west down the Douro River valley toward Oporto. Outgunned nearly two to one, General Francisco da Silveira struggled to keep his 12,000 troops beyond Soult’s relentless advance, but stopped to defend Oporto. The French routed his army and occupied Oporto on March 29. Freire crossed to the Douro River’s south bank then headed up the valley to shelter in the mountains. Soult did not pursue Freire but instead sent forces south to secure positions about midway between Oporto and Coimbra. Soult had about 17,300 troops in and south of Oporto. He deployed General Louis Loison with 6,500 troops at Amarante to guard his eastern flank against Silveira, and garrisoned about 1,500 in key towns leading back to Galicia.
Victor, meanwhile, was stalled at the frontier where he faced Spain’s fortresses of Badajoz and General Antonio Cuesta 23,000-man army. Cuesta attacked Victor at Medellin on March 28, but lost 10,000 troops and retreated far south. This cleared the way for Victor to besiege first Badajoz then Portugal’s fortress of Elvas a score of miles beyond. The trouble was that Victor lacked enough heavy cannons for a proper siege and had to await their arrival. Once he got them and captured those frontier fortresses, he could lead his men down the Tagus River valley and join forces with Soult at Lisbon. That junction never took place.
King George III named Arthur Wellesley to command British forces in Portugal on March 26, 1809. Two key reasons lay behind his choice. First, Wellesley had spearheaded the successful campaign in August 1808 that forced Junot’s capitulation. Second, at Minister for War Castlereagh’s request, Wellesley had penned an analysis on how to defend Portugal that would cost the treasury only £1 million while draining the French empire.3 This bargain price convinced the king and the Cabinet that Portugal was worth fighting for and that Wellesley was the man to lead the effort. Although the actual cost of Britain’s Peninsular War would skyrocket far beyond the estimate, having Wellesley in command proved to be priceless.
Wellesley could not have been happier with Castlereagh’s campaign instructions:
The defense of Portugal you will consider as the first and immediate object of your attention. But, as the security of Portugal can only be effectually provided for in connexion with the defense of the Peninsula … his Majesty … leaves it to your judgment to decide when your army shall be advanced on the frontier of Portugal, how your efforts can be best combined with the Spanish, as well as the Portuguese troops, in support of the common cause.4 Essentially Wellesley was free to do as he pleased, constrained only by circumstances beyond his control such as the relative troop numbers, supplies, and plans of his allies and enemies.
Wellesley stepped onto the Lisbon waterfront on April 22, 1809, and three days later relieved General John Cradock of command of Britain’s 16,000 troops. He enjoyed unity of command when, on April 27, the Junta named him commander-in-chief of Portugal’s army. He got to work transforming the hodgepodge of British and Portuguese regiments into an army. He reorganized his forces into brigades with one Portuguese and two British regiments, and established two brigade divisions commanded initially by Generals John Sherbrooke, Edward Paget, and Rowland Hill, with Stapleton Cotton commanding the 1,500-man cavalry brigade. Wellesley was determined to beat the French at their own tactic of skirmishing by assigning a rifle company to each brigade and ensuring that each regiment’s light infantry company was well trained in marksmanship.
Wellesley assessed the twin threats. Soult’s army appeared to be slowly moving south from Oporto, while Victor’s army had stalled near Badajoz. To block Victor’s advance down the Tagus River valley to Lisbon, Wellesley posted General John Mackenzie with 4,575 British and 7,425 Portuguese troops at Abrantes, while Portuguese troops garrisoned the frontier fortresses of Almeida and Elvas. Wellesley led the rest of his army north to Coimbra, which he reached on May 2. After four days of massing supplies, on May 6, Wellesley ordered Beresford to march northeast with his 4,175 Portuguese and 1,875 British troops toward Viseu in the mountains, where he would turn north. Two days later, Wellesley led 12,821 British and 2,400 Portuguese troops, including 3,134 cavalry, directly north to Oporto. The plan was for Wellington to pin Soult on his front while Beresford arced behind and cut him off.5
The advanced British and French guards clashed at Albegaria Nova on May 10, then at Grijon on May 11; the allies won these skirmishes and inflicted 300 casualties while suffering only half as many. Soult withdrew his outnumbered forces by a pontoon bridge into Oporto on the Douro River’s north bank then dismantled the bridge and brought the components to the north bank.
The allied army reached Vila Nova on the Douro River’s south bank across from Oporto early on May 12. Wellesley lined his 18 cannons atop the high bank to bombard the French positions. A mile upstream a cavalry patrol found a man with a skiff who told them of four wine barges hidden in a cove just across the river. The enterprising troopers sent word to Wellesley, while several scrambled into the skiff and rowed across to retrieve the barges. Wellesley ordered the 3rd Infantry to pack into the barges, cross, and occupy a nearby walled seminary on Oporto’s eastern outskirts. When Soult noticed the redcoats in the seminary, he launched four different attacks against it but the British repulsed each in turn. Scouts found a ferry 4 miles upstream. Wellesley ordered thousands more troops to march there to cross the river. Outflanked, Soult withdrew his army northward.
The following day, Wellesley and his army pursued. Beresford, meanwhile, crossed the Douro River upstream at Lamego on May 10, linked with General Silveira, then veered northwest toward the French army’s rear. Wellesley and Beresford hurried their troops forward to converge on the French. Soult and his men barely escaped the jaws of this trap as they fled to the fortress of Orense in Galicia. Wellesley called off his pursuit.
The triumph of chasing a defeated enemy was soured by stomach-turning scenes along the way. The French were bitter losers. Wellesley and his men were appalled to view ‘many persons hanging in the trees by the sides of the road, executed for no reason that I could learn, excepting they had not been friendly to the French invasion … the route of their column on their retreat could by traced by the smoke of the villages to which they set fire.’6 Yet Wellesley would repeatedly condemn his own troops for looting and worse crimes: ‘They have plundered the country most terribly … They are a rabble.’7 To curb those crimes, he ordered any man caught committing robbery or rape to be hanged ‘some place where they might be seen by the whole column in its march the next.’8
Wellesley had fought a masterly campaign. In a mere two weeks, his forces liberated northern Portugal, won several skirmishes and the battle of Oporto, and inflicted 4,000 casualties, mostly prisoners, on the enemy. The butcher’s bill for all that was astonishingly light. Oporto’s capture cost Wellesley only 23 dead, 98 wounded, and 2 missing; he suffered a couple hundred casualties in the advance toward Oporto and a couple hundred more afterward pursuing Soult. Beresford also lost a few hundred casualties.9 Yet Wellesley lamented not bagging Soult’s entire army, a failure he attributed to subordinates who failed to strictly follow his orders, push their troops forward hard enough, or seize opportunities.10
Wellesley secured Portugal’s northern frontier by garrisoning its fortresses and Oporto with Portuguese troops. On May 22, he led his army south to Abrantes to join forces with McKenzie. From there he intended to march east up the Tagus valley and join Cuesta against Victor. A lack of money or even credit to buy supplies halted Wellesley and his army for nearly a month.11 Then, after finally receiving an infusion of gold and resuming his march, Wellesley had to shed his Portuguese troops at the frontier. The Junta was adamant that they not set foot outside the homeland. It would take more than a year for Wellesley to convince the Junta that France’s threat to Portugal would end only after the allies drove them back over the Pyrenees, and that was most likely if Portuguese troops joined British and Spanish troops against the French anywhere they could find them.
Wellesley led his army from Abrantes on June 24, crossed into Spain on July 4, and rode ahead to meet Cuesta at Almaraz on July 10. His first impressions of his ally were not favorable. Wellesley’s Spanish guides got lost and he was 5 hours late. Cuesta struck Wellesley as frail even for his 70 years, but haughty and boastful. Cuesta was probably overcompensating from shame at being routed by Victor at Medellin, and resentment at British ambassador John Frere’s pressure on the Cádiz Junta to appoint Wellesley commander-in-chief of all Spanish forces. They agreed to join forces at Oropesa, then attack Victor at Talavera, a day’s march eastward. It was vital to decisively strike Victor’s 20,000 troops before General François Sebastiani joined him with 26,000 troops from Madrid, just 70 miles to his rear.
Wellesley returned to his army at Plasencia and led it eastward. Cuesta was waiting at Oropesa when he arrived on July 21. In parallel columns the allied armies marched toward Talavera, which they reached the following evening. After reconnoitering the French position, Wellesley devised a plan whereby the British and Spanish armies crushed the French army between them. Early the next morning, Wellesley deployed his divisions but Cuesta’s were nowhere to be seen. Wellesley angrily postponed the attack. The delay enabled Victor to hastily withdraw.
When Cuesta finally arrived later that day, Wellesley struggled to contain his rage: ‘I find General Cuesta more and more impracticable every day. It is impossible to do business with him, and very uncertain that any operation will succeed in which he has any concern.’12 Cuesta was only the tip of Spain’s institutional, cultural, economic, and social obstacles to Wellesley’s operations. He fumed that ‘the people in this part of Spain are either unable or unwilling to supply [us] and … till I am supplied, I do not think it proper, and indeed I cannot continue my operations in Spain.’13
Having failed to keep his word, the Spanish conception of honor compelled Cuesta to overcompensate in some dramatic fashion. Typically, the results were nearly disastrous. While Wellesley wanted to await reinforcements and supplies at Talavera, Cuesta insisted on seeking the French for battle. When Wellesley demurred, Cuesta led his army eastward on July 24. Cuesta got his wish near Toledo on July 25, when he ran into the combined forces of Victor and Sebastiani, accompanied by King Joseph and Chief of Staff Jean Baptiste Jourdan. With the French hot on his heels, Cuesta hurried his army back to Talavera.
Wellesley, meanwhile, deployed his 20,641 troops with his right flank anchored at Talavera on the Tagus River’s north bank and his left on a low plateau a mile-and-a-half distant. He lined most of his infantry behind a shallow stream that began northeast of the plateau and ran down to the river. Several hundred yards to their rear, he posted the cavalry with orders to charge any French infantry or cavalry that broke through. Batteries studded the front, with most positioned atop the plateau with its sweeping view and cannon-shot range of most French approaches. When Cuesta arrived, Wellesley had him split his 34,800 troops, with most defending Talavera and the rest massed in the valley between the plateau and the foothills of the mountains half a mile beyond.14 Although with 53,000 allied troops to Victor’s 46,138 French, Wellesley enjoyed a manpower edge, he was outgunned 55 to 80 in cannons. More important was the vast quality gap between the first-rate French troops and Wellesley’s British, whom he deemed second-rate, and Cuesta’s Spaniards whom he condemned as little more than an armed mob.15
Victor did not exploit that gap when he ordered his army to attack on July 27, but instead hurled most of his divisions in repeated attacks against the British in the center and on the plateau. He did charge some of his cavalry against the Spanish in the valley. Although the Spanish broke and fled, Victor lacked the reserves to exploit the breakthrough.
Wellesley micromanaged the battle, scribbling orders and thrusting them into the hands of couriers to gallop off to his commanders. General Rowland Hill’s division defended the plateau. Wellesley had him conceal his troops beyond sight and accurate cannon shot of the French, then suddenly emerge, fire a volley, and charge at the enemy struggling up the slope. The French troops broke and ran, leaving 1,300 dead, wounded, and captured behind.
A common need and humanity united the enemy soldiers that evening. One British soldier recalled:
The water in the stream, which in the morning was clear and sweet, was now a pool of blood, heaped over with the dead and dying. There being no alternative, we were compelled to close our eyes and drink the gory stream. The French troops were equally ill off and … came down in thousands … We shook hands with them in the most friendly manner.16
The following day, Victor launched a series of attacks, but the allies managed to repel each. In all, the British lost 5,365 or 1 in 4 men killed, wounded, or missing, the Spanish perhaps a thousand, and the French 7,268.17 Wellesley himself ‘was hit but not hurt & my coat shot through. Almost all the staff are wounded or have had their horses shot. Never was there such a murderous battle.’18
Victor wanted to stay put and await Marshal Soult who promised to sever Wellesley’s supply line at Plasencia. But he received two dispatches that forced him to abruptly change his plans. Soult explained that Spanish resistance and supply shortages delayed his advance on Plasencia. Toledo’s governor reported that Spanish General Francisco Venegas was marching with his army against Madrid. Joseph and his generals reluctantly agreed to withdraw toward the capital.19
Wellesley could not follow up his victory by pursuing Victor ‘because the Men were so fatigued … the want of Provisions is extreme & very distressing, … and I heard of the advance of a French Corps,’ namely Soult. Perhaps worst of all, he lacked confidence in his own men: ‘this is the Worst British Army that ever was in the field.’20 He was even more scathing of his allies, enraged that countless Spanish troops ‘threw away their arms, and ran off in my presence, when they were neither attacked nor threatened with an attack, but frightened, I believe, by their own fire … When these dastardly soldiers run away they plunder everything they meet, and in their flight from Talavera they plundered the baggage of the British army.’21 The Light Division’s arrival the day after the battle was not enough for Wellesley to advance. He had over 4,000 wounded to tend, while severe shortages of forage and food caused ‘the loss of many horses of the cavalry and artillery … [and the] sickness of the army … has increased considerably … Indeed, there are few … officers or soldiers … who … are not more or less affected by dysentery.’22
Cuesta, whose losses were light, did cautiously shadow the French army eastward. Typically he did not get far. He withdrew to Talavera when he learned that Venegas had halted his own advance. Meanwhile, reinforcements swelled French forces guarding approaches to Madrid.
Word reached Wellesley on August 2, that Soult had captured his depot and severed his supply and communication lines at Plasencia. Wellesley quick-marched 18,000 troops westward to Oropesa near Plasencia. Although Soult had only 12,000 troops immediately with him, he was in a powerful position and intelligence reports claimed he had 50,000 troops. When Cuesta joined him, Wellesley called for crossing to the Tagus’s south side at Arzobispo, then hurrying westward to sever Soult’s supply line. Cuesta preferred waiting for Soult to attack them. Wellesley followed his own plan, tailed by Cuesta when Soult’s army approached.
Victor, meanwhile, returned to Talavera then marched on to Arzobispo. Soult found a ford across the Tagus, caught up to Cuesta, and routed him on August 8, killed, wounded, or captured 1,400 Spanish troops and recaptured 14 of the 18 cannons lost at Talavera. Then, on August 11, Sebastiani routed Venegas at Almonacid, inflicting 5,500 casualties while suffering 2,400. Shorn for now of his ally, Wellesley led his battered army’s remnants back to Portugal.
Parliament, desperate for any victory, awarded Wellesley by naming him baron Wellington of Douro and viscount Wellington of Talavera, and granted him £2,000 for each of the next three years. Although pleased by the honor, Wellington was haunted by the campaign’s shortcomings. He was thoroughly disgusted with his Spanish allies, who ‘do not consider … military operations so much as political intrigue and the attainment of petty, political objects.’23 To this, he might have added, except when pride consumed them. He warned the Spanish generals not to attempt and refused to join offensives that fall. He later muttered I told them so after the French routed the separate armies of Generals Antonio Cuesta, Carlos Areizaga, and Vicente Canas y Portocarrio, Duque del Parque, and captured Seville, forcing the Junta to flee to Cádiz. The Spaniards, in turn, insisted that they would have vanquished the French had not Wellington refused to support them. Now the French controlled virtually all of Spain except Cádiz and the western frontier fortresses of Badajoz, Cuidad Rodrigo, and Astorga. And in spring 1810, the French would try to eliminate those holdouts and once again conquer Portugal. Wellington and his army would be waiting.