A History Of The British Army – Vol. VIII – (1811-1812)

Hon. Sir John William Fortescue

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782891352
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Sir John Fortescue holds a pre-eminent place amongst British military historians, his enduring fame and legacy resting mainly on his life's work "The History of the British Army", issued in 20 volumes, which took him some 30 years to complete. In scope and breadth it is such that no modern scholar has attempted to cover such a large and diverse subject in its entirety; but Sir John did so and with aplomb, leading to a readable and comprehensive study.
This eight volume covers the period from 1811-12, having drawn the invading French forces into a trap before the fortified lines of Torres Vedras the British Army under Wellington set about expelling his foe from the land of his Portuguese allies. Despite much skill and bravery on the part of their French foes, the Duke of Wellington and his British troops pushed them back in some disarray and with heavy loss. The French however regrouped quickly and almost inflicted a serious reverse on the British forces at the battle of Fuentes d'Oñoro, but the determined resistance of the British army ensured that the French would never return to Portugal as anything other than as prisoners of war. Sir John does not miss the actions and manoeuvres in the other provinces of Spain, French successes in the east were balanced by losses in the south at the battle of Barossa and the failed siege of Tarifa. Across the Atlantic British naval high-handedness allied with American opportunism began to simmer over into the War of 1812 as the British would be caught fighting on two fronts and their Canadian citizens would face annexation into the United States. Written as always with superb detail and authority, Fortescue blends the political machinations with the movements of the British Armies across the globe and the glory gained by the troops in Spain and Portugal.
ARMY AND NAVY GAZETTE.—"The whole volume is admirable; it is equally the work of a great student and of an impartial historian."
A MUST READ for any military enthusiast.

BOOK XIV

CHAPTER I—THE PENINSULA—1810-1811

Perceval’s failure to strengthen his Cabinet—The King’s illness—Perceval retains power under the Regency—Palmerston’s measures for recruiting the Army—Bank-notes made legal tender—Weariness of Napoleon’s rule on the Continent—Discontent of his lieutenants—Bernadotte elected Crown Prince of Sweden—Alienation of Russia from France—Napoleon’s recruiting measures—Situation of the French armies in Spain—Napoleon’s refusal to appoint a commander-in-Chief in the Peninsula—His redistribution of commands in Spain—Winter operations in Catalonia, 1810-1811—Recapture of Figueras by the Spaniards—Macdonald besieges Figueras—Soult ordered to march northward to the help of Masséna—He advances to Olivença—Fall of Olivença—Soult invests Badajoz—Death of Romana—Soult defeats Mendizabal at San Cristobal—Difficulties of Wellington; his generals—Delay of reinforcements; lack of specie—Maladministration in Portugal—Insanity of his Military Secretary—Obstinate immobility of Masséna—D’Erlon marches to reopen communication with Masséna—D’Erlon’s failure and its causes—Masséna resolves to retreat—Extreme skill of his dispositions—Wellington begins the pursuit—He sends Beresford with two divisions towards Badajoz—Soult captures Badajoz, and starts for Andalusia

1810

The Parliamentary session of 1810, after endless wrangles not only over the enquiry into the Walcheren expedition but also over a question of privilege which arose out of it, came to an end on the 21st of June. Though the Government had suffered more than one defeat, Perceval had on the whole passed triumphantly through his first trials as Prime Minister, and had greatly increased his parliamentary influence. None the less was he alive to the importance of strengthening his administration, and he strove accordingly to bring in Castlereagh and Canning. Wellesley and Liverpool, with rare self-denial, offered to make way for them; and, when this offer had been negatived by the Cabinet, Yorke and Ryder proposed to sacrifice themselves in their stead. The negotiations, however, alike with Castlereagh, with Canning and with Lord Sidmouth, who was also approached by Perceval, ended abortively; and by the end of September it was clear that the Government must stand or fall as it was. A few weeks later Princess Amelia, youngest and best-beloved daughter of George the Third, died of consumption;{1} and the stroke of this sorrow threw the King into what proved to be incurable insanity. For a short time his condition fluctuated between better and worse; but by the middle of December it was evident that a Regency must come; and Perceval, following the precedent of Pitt in 1788, determined that the Regent’s powers should be limited for a time by Act of Parliament. The Opposition, with which the Prince of Wales was closely allied, strove desperately to defeat the measure; but Perceval by astonishing dexterity and courage contrived to carry it, and calmly awaited his dismissal by the incensed Regent. “By God, they shall not remain an hour,” the Prince had said only a week before he assumed his new authority; but a few days sufficed to change his mind. On the 4th of{2} February he informed Perceval that he should retain his present advisers, lest the shock of a change of Ministers should impede his father’s recovery.

1811

Parliament was formally opened on the 12th of February by a speech from the Throne, which spoke highly of Wellington’s services, and resolutely of the intention to prosecute operations in the Peninsula. The Opposition, by the mouths of Lord Grenville, Whitbread and others, of course declared continuance of the struggle in that quarter to be hopeless, though Grenville, at least, admitted the skill and prudence of the General; but these criticisms carried no weight; and, when on the 4th of March Palmerston brought forward the Army Estimates, Canning seized the occasion to make a vigorous and effective defence of the Government’s military policy. Then arose the question of providing soldiers for the war, concerning which the Staff at the Horse Guards had been greatly exercised. “Nothing,” to quote the words of one of them,{3} had been done to keep the “machine going” during the past session; and ordinary recruiting would not suffice to make good even two-thirds of the casualties. Palmerston duly faced these facts; and, after reckoning the average annual losses at twenty-two to twenty-three thousand men and the annual average of recruits enlisted at fifteen thousand, he brought in measures for turning over a fixed draft of about ten thousand every year from the Militia to the Army, and for replenishing the Militia by ordinary recruiting instead of by the ballot. Moreover, in deference to the representations of Wellington, the allowance hitherto made to the wives and families of Militiamen was discontinued in respect of all recruits raised after the passing of the Act, saving only in the case of ballotted men who accepted service as principals.

In the matter of men, therefore, all was safely assured for the future of the war; in the matter of money it was not so. The last months of 181 o had brought with them an acute financial crisis, which was ascribed mainly to excessive and unsound speculation, but was ultimately due to the depreciation of the currency, which had been intensified by the Government’s large purchases of gold for the war in Spain. The actual panic was brought about by the appearance of a report by a Committee of the House of Commons, which recommended the resumption of cash-payments within two years. This recommendation was rejected by the Commons; and the failure of a large number of merchants was averted by a grant of six millions of Exchequer bills for their relief. But the whole question was raised anew in June 1811through a notice circulated by a landlord, Lord King, to his tenants, to the effect that he would no longer receive bank-notes at their nominal value in payment of rent, but would demand gold or paper estimated by the price of gold. Lord King disclaimed all motives for his action except those of justice and patriotism; but it was pointed out in debate that bank-notes had from the first been accepted at their face-value solely from patriotic feeling. Pitt, according to Perceval, had even in 1797 considered the expediency of making such acceptance compulsory, and had abstained from doing so upon the assurance of the merchants that such a measure was unnecessary. When, however, men of rank, wealth, and character rejected bank-notes and demanded gold, the only alternative was to make bank-notes legal tender, which was accordingly done by Act of Parliament in July. Thus was England finally committed to a forced paper-currency; and the fact furnished a significant comment upon Wellington’s complaints against Ministers for failing to supply him with specie.

To turn now to the great enemy, Napoleon appears to have thought in 1810that his work of subduing Europe was nearly done; and indeed the year 1811 was the quietest that he spent during the whole of his reign as Consul or Emperor. France, being no extreme sufferer from the Continental Blockade, was fairly tranquil and contented; and even the subject states might with proper management have become so likewise. Napoleon’s administration in many countries, most notably in Italy and Western Germany, was a great improvement upon that of the former rulers; and, but for the incessant exactions of men and money, his government might very well have gained popularity. But it never occurred to Napoleon to win the hearts of the people whom he had subjugated. To him they were instruments not children, tributaries not subjects, for his whole Empire was little more to him than an organised coalition for the overthrow of England. Hence, even where his rule was welcomed, it generated no enthusiasm, while in all other countries there was eager longing for the day of deliverance. Holland could never be patient of a foreign yoke; Belgium and the Western Provinces of the Rhine resented the levying of money and men for French objects; all districts abutting on the North Sea and the Baltic groaned under the scourge of the Blockade. Moreover, even where Napoleon’s sway had been most beneficent, the abolition of feudal dues and the construction of good roads had brought people together, and had inspired both Germans and Italians with the ideal of a new life as united nations. In a word the component parts of his Empire had had enough of his schooling, and yearned for independence.

The Emperor, however, was aware of none of these tendencies, except in so far as they revealed themselves through the conduct of his lieutenants; and then he interpreted them simply as examples of individual perversity. Murat in Naples, Joseph in Spain, and Louis in Holland held views of their kingship which differed widely from those of their lord paramount, each one of them being eager, though not quite in the same fashion, to be an actual and sovereign ruler. How Napoleon treated Joseph we have already in some measure seen. In 1810, after endless quarrels with his brother Louis, he harassed him into abdication{4} of the throne of Holland, and annexed that country to France. Murat, so far, had dissembled his intentions, which were none the less to be manifested in due time. Jerome, King of Westphalia, more cunning than Louis, served his great brother in the matter of exactions in order the better to indulge his own passion for luxury and display, and thereby brought loathing upon the Imperial rule. Even Eugene Beauharnais, viceroy in Upper Italy and the most loyal of Napoleon’s lieutenants, required an occasional reminder from the Emperor that Italy was a secondary matter, and that France must come first of all.{5}

As regards the neighbours of the French Empire, Austria was considered by Napoleon to be safely attached to him through his marriage with the Archduchess Marie Louise; and he did not realise the rapid growth of Prussia into a dangerous enemy. This latter country had reformed herself from within, and reorganised her resources through the inspiration of her national genius; thereby stimulating the rise of new ideas and new ambitions essentially German, which were vehemently hostile to France from the very first, and were destined two generations later to be fatal to her. Such were the fruits of the Emperor’s policy towards Prussia, which he had conceived and intended to be one of practical annihilation. In Sweden likewise he had made a fatal mistake. Gustavus the Fourth had been dethroned in favour of his childless uncle, the Duke of Sudermania, who ascended the throne as Charles the Thirteenth, with the Prince of Augustenburg as his heir-presumptive. This latter died on the 18th of May 1810, when the Swedes asked for Bernadotte to succeed him, as one who was a Marshal of France and connected by marriage with the Imperial family.{6} Napoleon did not love arrangements that were not of his own suggestion, and offered the crown of Sweden to Eugene; but upon his stepson’s refusal he allowed Bernadotte to accept it, thereby establishing in power a man who had always been jealous of him, and who could now claim the right to independent action as the elect of the Swedish people. Vain, pushing, and ambitious, wooing popularity as the breath of his nostrils and hungry for great station, Bernadotte, on taking over the government early in 1811, was in no hurry to incur odium with his new subjects by enforcing the Continental System. For the moment he could not avert a declaration of war by Sweden against England; but such a declaration could always be reduced to a matter of form; and, if he decided to cut himself free from the French alliance, he could safely fall back on the support of Russia.

For Russia by this time had been converted from the friend into the enemy of France. Alexander had gained all that he immediately sought from the French alliance; and the Continental System was now causing such industrial and financial distress in his dominions as to make the burden intolerable. For a time this grievance might have been borne, if the French operations in the Peninsula had been successful in closing the whole of European ports to England; but so far they had completely failed. The British were still holding their own in Portugal; the Spanish insurrection was still vigorously alive and, since the development of guerilla warfare on a large scale, was for military purposes more formidable than ever. Napoleon, living increasingly in a land of dreams, amused himself in September 1810 by projecting an invasion of the Channel Islands with ninety thousand men; and on the 3rd of November he gave orders as to what should be done in Portugal after the embarkation of the British.{7} But he continually impressed on the Tsar that the question of war or peace between France and Russia lay with him to decide. Let his Imperial brother but enforce the Continental System rigidly, and in another year or less England would be forced to come to terms.{8} She was already in distress, he declared, and not untruly, looking to the financial crisis of 1810; bankruptcies were multiplying; exchange was twenty-five per cent against her; and her banks and her manufacturers were in despair. Napoleon did not reflect that Russian men of business were suffering even more than the British.

At the same time he did not conceal from himself that the Tsar was showing signs of ill-will. French produce had been excluded from Russia’s latest acquisitions, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia; and Napoleon actually sounded Austria as to her inclination to wrest these provinces from Russia by force of arms. By the end of February 1811 he had reached the length of writing to the Tsar that Alexander’s friendship for him had come to an end, and that the alliance of Tilsit was known in Europe to be a thing of the past. A fortnight later he instructed his ambassador at St. Petersburg to represent that he sought no kind of quarrel with Russia, but would be compelled to make war upon her if she came to an understanding with England; and a few days after this again, upon the pretext that the English were making preparations for a great movement in the Baltic, he increased the garrison of Dantzig to twelve thousand men. At the same time he began to reinforce heavily Davoust’s army in Germany, and to take other preliminary steps towards a Russian campaign. He explained that he did not desire to fight Russia, but only to take up an offensive position, while he could still do so without provoking hostilities. To all intent he was already resolved to aim at the Tsar the great stroke, which in the following year brought about his own ruin.{9}

“Next year’s conscription will be added to this year’s as soon as January comes,” he wrote to Davoust on the 24th of March: “this will cost me much money and will show you the importance of procuring for me as much, and demanding from me as little, as possible.” The phrase was characteristic of Napoleon. No man was ever more frugal of money or more lavish of men. Between September 1805 and April 1807 he had called up from France alone four hundred and twenty thousand men; and the age of conscripts at the moment of incorporation fell from twenty and a quarter in 1804 to eighteen and a half in 1807. In March 1808 he summoned eighty thousand more recruits, in September 1808 one hundred and sixty thousand, in January 1809 eighty thousand, in April thirty thousand, and in September thirty-six thousand, making altogether over eight hundred thousand recruits drawn from France alone in less than five years.

By 1810 he had so far anticipated the conscription of that year that it could give him nothing; but he contrived to raise forty thousand boys, from sixteen to nineteen years of age, drawing them in advance from the lists of 1812, 1813, and 1814. Finally in January 1811 he called up one hundred and twenty thousand men, about one-fourth of them from Italy and Holland, and the remainder from France; so that it seems to be actually true that in less than six years he took from France close upon nine hundred thousand men. In addition to these he had of course foreign mercenaries and auxiliary troops of all nations, Polish, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, to the number of two or three hundred thousand; but he could not really trust any except the French, and he was rapidly coming to the end of them. Already their quality had deteriorated greatly, while the mortality, owing to the youth of the recruits, was appalling. Moreover, in spite of many effusive orders and utterances, Napoleon took no care of his soldiers. He did not pay them; he did not feed them; he did not clothe them; he made no sufficient provision for the sick and wounded; and his hospitals and medical service were a disgrace to his name. The inevitable result was that his losses in men were gigantic, and by 1811this was beginning to tell seriously against him. “Refractoriness,” to use the technical term, self-mutilation, and desertion among conscripts already prevailed to a dangerous extent, and were not to be checked by the most merciless severity. It is too often forgotten by the panegyrists of Napoleon that he was the most wasteful of commanders, and that a long war was consequently to him a fatal war. It is commonly said that he was overthrown by the campaigns in Russia and Spain. This is but half of the truth. It was Russia’s refusal to make peace after Austerlitz which marked the beginning of his downfall, for his army never recovered from the losses of the Polish campaign.

Such was the condition of Napoleon and of his armed forces at the end of 181 o. For the Peninsular campaign of that year, it will be remembered, he had hoped to bring troops from Andalusia and even from Aragon to bear upon the British army from the east, while Masséna descended upon it from the north. These combinations had failed completely, and the final situation towards the close of the year had been as follows: Suchet with the Third Corps, or Army of Aragon, was awaiting the return of Macdonald and the Seventh Corps from Gerona in order to besiege Tortosa; Sébastiani with the Fourth Corps was kept fully occupied by insurgents in Murcia and Valencia; Victor and the First Corps were tied down to the siege of Cadiz; Masséna with the Second, Sixth, and Eighth Corps lay opposite to Wellington at Santarém, unable to move forward and unwilling to move back; and the Fifth Corps under Mortier, though nominally free for work in any quarter, was subject to constant distraction of a part of its strength by the raids of Ballesteros and of insurgent bands on the western side of Cadiz. Over and above these troops there were the garrisons of the northern provinces and, as a mobile force, two divisions of the Young Guard, which had been moved into Old Castile, besides General Serra’s division on the borders of Leon and Galicia. Lastly there was the so-called Army of the Centre, the twenty thousand men which constituted the sole force under King Joseph’s own command, and which were none too many for the task of holding Madrid and New Castile in subjection.

Napoleon’s intelligence as to the progress of events in the Peninsula was very imperfect and much belated, owing to the interception of French messengers by the Spanish guerilla bands; and it frequently happened that the earliest information of his own troops came to him from the English newspapers. Moreover, even when the letters of his Generals did come to his hand, they so habitually reported smooth things in preference to the truth that they can have been of little service to him. It is not quite clear why he did not himself pay a visit to the Peninsula in 1811, except that, as he said, he would require six months to do what was necessary in Portugal, and that there was no reckoning what might happen in Europe if he buried himself in so remote a corner for half a year. He was, it is true, active in his military preparations in Eastern Europe, though these might well have been deferred until affairs in Spain had been set upon a sounderfooting. Since, however, he could not go to the Peninsula in person, it must have been abun...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• BOOK XIV
• CHAPTER II-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER III-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER IV-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER V-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER VI-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER VII-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER VIII-THE PENINSULA-1811
• CHAPTER IX-EUROPE/AMERICA-1811-1812
• CHAPTER X-THE PENINSULA-1811-1812
• CHAPTER XI-THE PENINSULA-1812
• CHAPTER XII-THE PENINSULA-1812
• CHAPTER XIII-THE PENINSULA-1812
• CHAPTER XIV-THE PENINSULA-1812
• CHAPTER XV-THE PENINSULA-1812
• CHAPTER XVI-AMERICA/CANADA-1812
• CHAPTER XVII-THE PENINSULA-1812
• CHAPTER XVIII-THE PENINSULA-1812
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II