Authors: Richard Holmes
With Moore’s death and the wounding of Sir David Baird at La Coruña, command of British forces in Portugal devolved upon Lieutenant General Sir John Cradock, and the government was gloomy about his prospects. On 7 March Wellesley sent Castlereagh a memorandum on the defence of Portugal. He argued that a British army of not less than 30,000 men, well supplied with artillery and cavalry (‘because the Portuguese military establishment must necessarily be deficient in these two branches’), working closely with the Portuguese army, which should be restructured under British command, could defend Portugal even if Spain remained in French hands, and its presence would lend valuable support to the Spanish.
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The government took the hint, and proposed to the king that Wellesley should be appointed, arguing that, as it was unlikely that substantial reinforcements would be sent to Portugal, Wellesley’s lack of seniority did not matter. The king, previously hostile to Wellesley, had welcomed him at a levée the previous year, where he told a deputation from the City’s Common Council that ‘it is inconsistent with the principles of British justice to pronounce judgement without previous investigation’. Having stood by Wellesley in adversity, the king remained supportive as his fortune changed. The fact that the Duke of York had had to resign temporarily as commander-in-chief because of the indiscretions of his former mistress, Mary Anne Clarke, may have helped. Whatever the reason, Wellesley was being given a second chance.
T
HE LETTER
formally appointing Wellesley to command in Portugal arrived on 6 April 1809, and warned him that the defence of that country was his primary concern: he was not to mount operations in Spain without the government’s authority. He set about his preparations, moving Kitty to Malvern Wells, organising aides-de-camp and horses, and, if Harriette Wilson is to be believed, calling on her twice. Although he would have to accept the subordinate commanders given him by Horse Guards, he might have expected that Lieutenant General Henry, Lord Paget, would be sent out to command the cavalry. Paget had distinguished himself on the Coruña campaign, and was probably the best senior cavalry officer in the army. However, on 6 March, he ran away with Arthur’s sister-in-law, Lady Charlotte Wellesley, wife of his brother Henry, although he had several children and Charlotte four of her own. This upset ensured that Paget could not serve under Arthur, at least for the moment. Lastly, just before he sailed, Kitty lent her brother Henry money to pay his gambling debts and could not settle her household accounts. A disappointed tradesman approached Sir Arthur, who was furious. The episode did not simply spoil their last days together but, in Elizabeth Longford’s words, ‘were to haunt Kitty’s journal during the long months ahead, and Arthur’s memory for the rest of their married life’.
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Wellesley sailed from Portsmouth aboard HMS
Surveillante
on 14 April in the teeth of a howling gale. That night an aide-de-camp came to tell him that the captain was sure that the vessel would founder: ‘In that case,’ replied Sir Arthur, ‘I shall not take off my boots.’
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He reached Lisbon on 22 April and found the city in carnival mood, though, like most of his men, he found it ‘the most Horrible Place that ever was seen’. Private William Wheeler of the 51
st
Regiment was even more derogatory:
What an ignorant superstitious, priest-ridden, dirty, lousy set of devils are the Portuguese. Without seeing them it is impossible to conceive there exists a people in Europe so debased. The filthiest pig sty is a palace to the filthy houses in this dirty stinking city, and all the dirt made in the houses is thrown into the streets, where it remains baking for months until a storm of rain washes it away.
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Mindful of the pain of his own recent supercession, Wellesley relieved the torpid Cradock, an old friend, as gently as he could, suggesting that ‘it might possibly be more agreeable and convenient to you to see me here than with the army’, and in 1819 he was instrumental in gaining him a peerage.
Wellesley’s plight was not encouraging. Marshal Soult had overrun northern Portugal: he was at Oporto with perhaps 20,000 men, and was supported by Marshal Ney in Galicia with as many more. Marshal Victor had an even larger army at Mérida, in the Spanish province of Extremadura, ready to enter Portugal by the valleys of the Tagus to the north, or the Guadiana to the south. Although Wellesley’s friend Lieutenant General Sir William Beresford had been appointed to command the Portuguese army with the rank of marshal in that service, it would take time, and a generous admixture of British officers and equipment, for his army to reach full efficiency. As always logistics would drive operations, and Wellesley was busy assembling oxen, mules and horses.
Within two days of arriving, he had decided to leave a detachment to watch Victor, while a larger force, under Beresford, would prevent Soult from moving eastwards to join him. Meanwhile Wellesley, with almost 20,000 men, would head for Oporto to deal with Soult. Although he did not manage to trap Soult south of the city as he had hoped, he reached the Douro on 12 May. However, Soult had blown up the bridges and secured almost all of the boats in the area, and was strongly posted behind the wide river. Wellesley heard that there was a damaged ferry four miles upstream that could be brought back into service, and sent a brigade to cross there. Four intact wine barges, their presence disclosed by a patriotic barber, were brought across from the northern bank. They could take perhaps 600 men an hour into Oporto itself, and the troops could hold out in the walled bishop’s seminary on the river as the force built up. Wellesley launched the operation at 10.30 that morning with the laconic words ‘Well, let the men cross.’
By the time the French reacted, the seminary was securely held, and its garrison was supported by the fire of Wellesley’s guns from the southern bank. After two attacks were beaten off, the French abandoned Oporto, and with it 70 guns and 1,500 of their men in the hospital. In the next week, Wellesley proceeded to elbow Soult out of northern Portugal. Indeed, had it not been for the gallant seizure of a damaged bridge over the Cavado near Salamonde by a party of hand-picked grenadiers under Major Dulong, briefed for the task by Soult in person, a great part of the French army might have been captured. As it was, the results of the campaign were impressive: Soult had lost 4,000 men and all his guns and baggage; Wellesley had less than 500 casualties.
On 18 May Wellesley had been told by Major General Mackenzie that Victor had crossed the border from Spain, and swung south to face him. The rumour proved false, however, and Wellesley was able to pause at Abrantes to repair damaged wagons and gun-carriages. He also needed to repair discipline, having told Castlereagh on 31 May that his army was ‘a rabble who cannot bear success any more than Sir J. Moore’s army could bear failure’.
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On 17 June 1809, he wrote more fully from Abrantes, saying that it was ‘impossible to describe the irregularities and outrages committed by the troops’. He argued that men were induced to do their duty by fear of punishment and hope of reward. But his own powers were very limited: real authority lay with Horse Guards. He had ‘not the power of rewarding, or promising a reward to a single officer in the army’, complaining that he had no patronage for the ‘incitement of the Officers under my command’. His ability to punish was also sharply circumscribed: regimental courts-martial were not severe enough, and he was in urgent need of more provost staff – he wrote admiringly of the French
gendarmerie
– to help preserve order.
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Even before he moved against Soult, Wellesley had written to both the junta of Extremadura in Spain and to Don Gregorio de la Cuesta, captain general of the province, warning them that his first task was to secure Portugal. Having done so, he would then move by way of Elvas, the Portuguese fortress opposite Badajoz on the Spanish side of the frontier, to join Cuesta’s army in an attack on Victor. It was decided that the two armies would meet in the Guadiana valley east of Badajoz, and on 10 July 1809 Wellesley rode to meet Cuesta in the village of Miravete, not far from the Tagus bridge at Almaraz. It was one of those meetings that went wrong from the start. Cuesta was expecting him early in the afternoon, and had formed up part of his army for his ally’s inspection. But Wellesley’s guide got lost, so they arrived long after dark. Cuesta was roused and the guard of honour turned out to be inspected by torchlight. Wellesley concluded that, however brave the Spanish might be, they were neither well-equipped nor well-drilled.
In a quotation so finely-tuned that it is used by almost everybody who writes about the subject, Philip Guedalla describes how: ‘Composed in equal parts of pride and failing health, [Cuesta] was the embodiment of Spain at its very worst – old, proud, incompetent and ailing …’
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Rising seventy, and knocked about when his own cavalry had ridden over him at Medellín not long before, Cuesta travelled in a large coach drawn by nine mules, and was hoisted into the saddle when battle seemed imminent. Wellesley complained repeatedly of the impossibility of persuading him to honour any agreement, and later told John Hookham Frere, British envoy to the central junta, that his troops had nothing to eat while the Spanish army had plenty. The situation was intolerable.
So it was; but it was not straightforward. Cuesta had been commissioned long before Wellesley was born, and did not take kindly to being hustled in his own country by a young general to whom he could not speak except through an interpreter. He knew (though apparently Wellesley did not), that Hookham Frere had proposed to the junta that Wellesley should assume overall command of the Anglo-Spanish force, and that Cuesta should be replaced by another Spanish general. Also, the interpreter was Cuesta’s chief of staff, Major General Odonoju, his family name once O’Donohue, who was a descendent of one of the ‘wild geese’, Irish Catholics who had taken service in Spain after the Protestant William Ill’s victory in Ireland in 1691. Guedalla suggests that Odonoju was ‘a friendly reminiscence of Dublin’. But it is more likely that his relationship with Wellesley was coloured by less comfortable overtones as a son of the ascendancy met a dispossessed scion of an older Ireland.
After a long and difficult discussion it was agreed that Wellesley, with 35,000 men, and Cuesta, with 20,000, would meet on 21 July at Oropesa, thirty miles west of Talavera, where Victor was posted with over 20,000 Frenchmen. General Sebastiani had another French army, 22,000 strong, about 75 miles south of Madrid, but Cuesta had ordered a Spanish force under General Venegas to fix Sebastiani in that area, and to report if Sebastiani managed to disengage. This plan would allow Wellesley and Cuesta to attack Victor before he could be reinforced, and it began well. On the 22
nd
, the allied advanced guards pushed the French back through Talavera, and Victor took up a position on the little river Alberche, which joins the Tagus near Talavera, to its east. Wellesley and Cuesta agreed that on the 23
rd
, the Spanish would attack from the west while the British turned Victor’s flank from the north. The British were ready to attack before dawn, but there was no sign of the Spanish; when Wellesley rode south to find the old gentleman, he was told that the Spanish were too tired to fight that day. Cuesta agreed to move on the 24
th
, but Victor slipped away during the night.
Things now went from bad to worse. Cuesta pursued Victor towards Toledo only to discover that Sebastiani, playing agile bull to his arthritic matador, had dodged Venegas and joined Victor, who had also been reinforced from Madrid: Joseph Bonaparte had arrived to take command in person with Marshal Jourdan as his chief of staff. Wellesley had not followed the Spanish. He had got wind of Sebastiani’s approach, and, more seriously, was so short of food because ‘the people of this part of Spain are either unwilling or unable to supply’ it, that he had to warn Castlereagh that ‘till I am supplied … I cannot continue my operations in Spain’.
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He even considered withdrawing into Portugal, but it was clear that he could not do so now: Cuesta was recoiling westwards, with the French in hot pursuit. Wellesley pushed two of his four divisions across the Alberche to support his allies, and on the 27
th
, begged Cuesta, by some accounts on bended knee, to cross the river so that both armies could fight side by side on its western bank.
At last Cuesta consented, and Wellesley and Odonoju agreed final dispositions. The Spanish would hold the southern end of the line, by far its strongest section, their right flank anchored on the Tagus and the walled town of Talavera, as far as a prominent hill called the Pajar de Vergara. From there, the British would hold the west bank of the Portina brook, no obstacle in itself, but a useful guide to alignment, and their line was to run northwards, along the eastern edge of the Medellín hill, towards the mountains. While the armies were redeploying, Wellesley rode to a stoutly-built farmhouse just east of the Alberche, dismounted in its courtyard and ascended the stone tower that gives the house its present name, Las Torres. French skirmishers, who had crossed the river quietly, surprised some of his troops nearby, and, probably because he was concentrating on his telescope, which narrowed his field of view, he did not see them until it was almost too late. Wellesley pounded along the upstairs corridor from the tower and leapt down the stairs to escape. He jumped onto his horse and was away with the shots of the skirmishers popping away behind him. Years later, he told Gleig that he was grateful to the grooms, who had ‘behaved with perfect steadiness. They took no notice of what was passing outside, but sat upon their horses, holding ours … If the French had been cool, they might have taken us all …’
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