Wellington (18 page)

Thirdly, he had to deal with the backwash of British politics. Lord Portland’s government, weakened by the failure of an expedition sent to the disease-ridden island of Walcheren off the coast of Holland, fell in 1809 amidst such recrimination that Castlereagh fought a duel with George Canning. Neither found themselves in the new Tory administration headed by Spencer Perceval. Lord Liverpool took over from Castlereagh as secretary of state for war, and Richard Wellesley replaced Canning at the foreign office. William Wellesley-Pole went off to be chief secretary of Ireland, and Henry Wellesley (unhappily denying that he was the father of his wife’s latest child), took over as British representative to the central junta. Wellington suspected that the new government would not last for long, but had decided that he would serve under ‘any administration that may employ me’, and opined that ‘the Spirit of Party in England’ was to blame for ‘all the misfortunes of the present reign’.
¹⁸
He was more right than he knew, for in the opposition’s eyes, he was simply part of the hated clan jobbing in Spain as they had in India, and as one hostile politician observed, ‘the Wellesleys will now be beat if they are attacked properly…’

Wellington was not helped by the fact that the opposition was well represented in the army. His second-in-command, Sir Brent Spencer, a great favourite at court, was drawn into indiscretions at the royal dinner parties he attended when on leave. His adjutant-general, Charles Stewart, was ‘a sad
brouillon
and a mischief-maker’. Even the redoubtable Robert Craufurd of the Light Division, who had been forgiven by Wellington for receiving a well-merited rebuff by the French up on the River Coa, was a notable ‘croaker’, complaining about the conduct of the campaign. There was no censorship of mail, and officers of all ranks wrote frank letters home. Some could not understand why they had not gone on to Madrid and ended the war, and others resented the long period of inactivity. Wellington was exasperated by it all: ‘as soon as an accident happens, every man who can write, and has a friend who can read, sits down to write his account of what he does not know …’
¹⁹

Whatever might happen in Westminster, it was in Portugal that Wellington expected the next blow. Portuguese peasants toiled under the supervision of his engineers to embellish the landscape with the bastions and ravelins, tenailles and fausse-brayes beloved of classical fortification. The sheer scale of their achievement is striking even today. Above the town of Torres Vedras one of the forts has been well restored, and from its ramparts one can see similar works on the neighbouring hillsides; the term field fortifications somehow does not catch the scope of it all. Much of the army was less onerously employed, and Wellington maintained his unrelenting efforts to make of it the instrument he sought. The commandant of Lisbon was urged not to allow British officers to sit, with their hats on, on the stage at theatres. Lieutenant William Pearse of the 45
^th
had been ‘honourably acquitted’ of ungentlemanly conduct in a brawl in a brothel, and the court was bidden to reword its verdict as Wellington was sure that there was ‘no officer upon the General Court Martial who wishes to connect the term Honour with the act of going to a Brothel’.
²⁰
An officer was told that ‘I cannot give leave to any officer whose health does not require his return to England, or who has business to transact which cannot be done by another, or which cannot be delayed’, and Wellington trusted ‘that I shall be spared the pain of again refusing you’.
²¹

Although Wellington was never on quite the same terms with Liverpool that he had been with Castlereagh, they had been friends in private life, which undoubtedly helped, and the formal ‘My Lord’ which opened Wellington’s first letters – like that of 21 November 1809, lamenting that English newspapers contained accurate reports of the strength and disposition of his army – was soon the more comfortable ‘My dear Lord’. In January 1810 he reported that his men were ‘a better army than they were some months ago’, though he feared that ‘they will slip through my fingers … when I shall be involved in any nice operation with a powerful enemy to my front’.
²²

That powerful enemy materialised in the spring of 1810. Marshal André Massena, with a total of 138,000 men, perhaps half of them in his field army, had been ordered to retake Portugal. He began by seizing the Spanish fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo, which commanded the northern route into Portugal, on 10 July, and followed on to take its Portuguese counterpart, Almeida, on 28 August after a mortar bomb ignited a train of powder from a damaged keg and blew the main magazine sky-high. Then he advanced into Portugal down the Mondega valley harassed by the
ordenanza
as he went. Wellington knew the ground well, and on 26 September blocked the French advance in formidably strong position, a long steep-sided ridge running from the village of Busaco to the Mondego. Busaco is a formidable position: it is hard simply to keep one’s feet on parts of the ridge, and toiling up it, even in the cooler days of September, with musket and pack, must have been almost unbearable. The two armies were roughly equal at about 48,000 apiece, and Massena sought to gain local superiority by concentrating his attack, launched early on a foggy morning, on a narrow axis, with Reynier’s corps assaulting south of Busaco and Marshal Ney’s making for the village itself. He had a brief glimmer of hope when the capable General Foy broke through part of 1/45
^th
and three Portuguese battalions to reach the crest, but Wellington had already ordered a British division to move up and Foy’s men were dispatched back down the hill.

Wellington, galloping along the long, straight road that runs through the trees along the top of the ridge, was always ready to direct counter-thrusts, but his divisional commanders had things well in hand. Major General Craufurd of the Light Division launched his own counter-attack with a great shout of: ‘Fifty-Second, avenge Moore!’ The French lost over 4,500 men to Wellington’s 1,252, and did not resume the attack, but slipped past the ridge, through defiles which, owing to a misunderstanding, the Portuguese militia were not watching.

Wellington had to fall back to avoid being cut off from his base, but he was not sorry to do so because, as he wrote to Liverpool on 30 September 1810:

This movement has afforded me a favourable opportunity of showing the enemy the description of troops of which this army is composed; it has brought the Portuguese levies into action with the enemy for the first time in an advantageous situation; and they have proved that the trouble which has been taken with them has not been thrown away, and that they are worthy of contending in the same ranks with British troops …
²³

The French entered the undefended city of Coimbra on 1 October and continued to follow Wellington, only to have the garrison of Coimbra and the sick in the hospitals there captured in a well-timed raid by the bibulous Colonel Nicholas Trant and his Portuguese. Had Massena but known it, this was a foretaste of what was to come. The weather broke on 7 October, and Wellington’s army began to enter the lines of Torres Vedras the following day. The forts were held by Portuguese militia, a corps of Spanish regulars, and 2,500 British marines and gunners, leaving Wellington’s field army free to meet any French attempt to break through. Massena stayed up at Sobral for ten days, and then fell back onto a position between Santarem and Rio Major, where his men, skilled at living off the country and with no regard for the plight of the Portuguese, astonished Wellington by somehow finding enough to eat. He told Liverpool that it was ‘an extraordinary instance of what a French army can do … I could not maintain one division in the district where they have maintained not less than 60,000 men and 20,000 animals for more than 2 months.’
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It could not last. Although Massena was reinforced by some 11,000 men under D’Erlon late in December, he was never strong enough to attack the lines, and sickness, hunger and attacks by Portuguese irregulars were costing him 500 men a week. In March 1811, he slid away to the north-west, abandoning most of his vehicles and hamstringing all surplus animals. There was a sharp little action on the River Coa on 3 April, and Massena reached Almeida on the 11
^th
, after a campaign lasting eleven months that had cost him perhaps 30,000 men.

The next phase of the war centred upon the frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo in the north, and Badajoz further south. The latter had been taken by Soult, thrusting up from Andalusia, in March, and Wellington entrusted Beresford with the task of besieging it while he concentrated on Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo. Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo were three days apart for Wellington at his hard-riding best. That spring Wellington was responsible for a force at Cádiz under the reliable Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham, who had just beaten the French at Barossa; Beresford’s allied army in Extremadura; and his own force in Old Castile. Each faced an enemy who was potentially stronger, and both Wellington and Beresford relied on lines of communication running back to Lisbon.

There were two major battles at this juncture, both of them hard-won allied victories, as the French sought to raise the sieges of Badajoz and Almeida. On 3 May 1811, Massena attacked Wellington at Fuentes de Oñoro, south of Almeida, and renewed his efforts on the 5
^th
. This was not a carefully stage-managed defensive battle like Busaco, and there were some very dangerous moments. One of them came when the inexperienced 7
^th
Division was caught out in the open by a superior French force. But Robert Craufurd of the Light Division rose brilliantly to the occasion, rescued the 7
^th
, and then extricated his own troops in a remarkable display of disciplined minor tactics.

The battle ended with a bloody fight for Fuentes itself. Private Thomas Pococke of the 71
^st
, an actor who had enlisted after falling victim to stage-fright, described what happened in his own part of the field:

A bayonet went through between my side and my clothes, to my knapsack, which stopped its progress. The Frenchman to whom the bayonet belonged fell, pierced by a ball from my rear-rank man. While freeing myself from the bayonet, a ball took off part of my right shoulder wing, and killed my rear rank man, who fell upon me.

He fired 107 rounds that day, and his shoulder was ‘as black as coal’ from his musket’s recoil. The Connaught Rangers played a distinguished part in capturing the village, and Pococke saw them lying ‘two and three deep of dead and wounded’.
²⁵
The 79
^th
was also badly cut up in Fuentes, and despite his manifold cares Wellington found time to write to their colonel, whose son had been mortally wounded commanding it.

You will always regret and lament his loss, I am convinced; but I hope you will derive some consolation from the reflection that he fell in the performance of his duty, at the head of your brave regiment, loved and respected by all who knew him, in an action in which, if possible, British troops surpassed every thing they had ever done before, and of which the result was most creditable to His Majesty’s arms.
²⁶

Having failed in his attempt to relieve Almeida, Massena sent word to the city’s governor, ordering him to blow up the magazine and escape. Three French soldiers set off with messages, disguised as peasants; two were caught and shot as spies, but the third succeeded. The resourceful governor, Major General Brennier, fired a pre-arranged signal, three salvoes at five-minute intervals, to tell Massena that the order had been received, and led his men to safety on a dark night, crossing an unguarded bridge at Barba del Puerco. Wellington was furious, calling failure to intercept the French ‘the most disgraceful military event that has yet occurred to us’. He told Liverpool that he might have prevented it had he been on the spot, but having deployed two divisions and a brigade to prevent the escape of 1,400 men, he was confident that all was well. Then he returned to a familiar theme. ‘I am obliged to be every where,’ he grumbled, ‘and if absent from any operation, something goes wrong.’
²⁷

He blamed Lieutenant Colonel Bevan of the 4
^th
Regiment, who had been ordered to the bridge. In fact the order had been written out by the notoriously incompetent Lieutenant General Sir William Erskine, who had stuffed it into his pocket with his snuff box and forgot about it. By the time Bevan received the order, it was midnight. Had he broken camp and marched immediately, he could have reached the bridge on time, but he waited till dawn, and it was too late: Brennier was across. Erskine told Wellington that the 4
^th
had got lost – which is what Wellington reported in his dispatch to Liverpool. Bevan begged for an enquiry, but Wellington decided to court-martial him instead. Although a trial might have brought out some of the case in Bevan’s failure, he did not wait for it, and blew his brains out. Wellington was widely blamed for Bevan’s suicide, but if he sensed the climate, he paid no attention to it. He wrote sharply to Major General Alexander Campbell, a close friend of the Prince Regent’s, warning him that the army was full of ‘the desire to be forward in engaging the enemy’; but he would do better to show ‘a cool, discriminating judgement in action’.
²⁸
He was even more frank when writing to his brother William Wellesley-Pole that: ‘there is nothing so stupid as a gallant officer’.
²⁹

Wellington’s conviction that things inevitably went wrong if he was not present was reinforced by events further south. On his orders, Beresford had begun to besiege the powerful fortress of Badajoz on 5 May 1811. His efforts were not simply hampered by the great strength of the place, but by the fact that he was pitifully short of heavy guns, and had to rely on elderly pieces borrowed from Elvas. Beresford soon heard that Soult was on his way to relieve Badajoz, and so he temporarily abandoned the siege and marched out to meet him. The local Spanish army commanders, Blake and Castaños, agreed to fight under Beresford’s command, and on 16 May he faced the French on a low ridge near the village of Albuera. Soult pinned Beresford to his position by a frontal feint, and then threw his whole weight against the allied right. Although British sources are often disdainful of Spanish battlefield performance, there is no doubt that the dogged courage of Zaya’s division, on Beresford’s right, checked the initial French assault, allowing time for Stewart’s division to come up.