these reservations as to its wisdom, a small British force of 9,000 men was assembled at Cork for an invasion of Venezuela, and Sir Arthur, who had been promoted lieutenant-general on 25 April, was appointed to command it. He set about his plans and preparations with his familiar thoroughness, ‘making out in his own handwriting lists of all the stores required, down to the very number of flints for small arms’. But then came news of a Spanish revolt. On 2 May the people of Madrid turned furiously on the French garrison and shot or stabbed every soldier they could find; and, although the revolt was soon put down by the ruthless fire of French guns, little more than a fortnight later the anger broke out again in other towns, in other provinces. Spanish officials who had collaborated with the French were dragged out into the streets and murdered; governors were lynched; committees were organized; administrative councils known as juntas provinciales were established; troops were enrolled; proclamations, promising support to Prince Ferdinand, heir to the deposed King and Queen of Spain, and death to the French, were read to cheering crowds. When representatives of the Asturian juntas landed in England with appeals for help to a country with which Spain was still officially at war, they were greeted sympathetically; and the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, declared that ‘Britain would proceed upon the principle that any nation in Europe which stirs up with a determination to oppose [France]… becomes immediately our ally.’ The revolt spread to Portugal; and General Junot was forced to concentrate his scattered forces around Lisbon.
General Wellesley immediately recognized – and conveyed his belief to the Cabinet – that here was ‘a crisis in which a great effort might be made with advantage’. It was ‘certain that any measures which [could] distress the French in Spain’ would oblige them to ‘delay for a season’ the execution of their other plans. He proposed that the force being collected at Cork for a landing in Venezuela should be diverted to the Iberian peninsula, much as this would distress General Miranda who, indeed, became so ‘loud and angry’ when he encountered Sir Arthur in the street that Wellesley told him that they should ‘walk on a little so that we might not attract the notice of everybody passing’.6
In the hopes of being given orders for the Peninsula, Wellesley saw to it that instructions were sent to Cork to ensure that the troops there were properly equipped for such a campaign, with adequate transport and cooking equipment, and that, for the sake of their health, they were to be landed frequently from the crowded ships in the harbour.7
In daily expectation of orders to sail, Wellesley handed over the business of the Chief Secretary for Ireland’s office to John Wilson Croker, a garrulous, up-and-coming lawyer and notorious gossip born and educated in Ireland and since 1806 Member of Parliament for Downpatrick.
One evening after dinner in Harley Street, when the two men were sitting over the wine and Lady Wellesley had gone upstairs to the drawing-room, Sir Arthur fell into a ruminative silence. Croker asked him what he was thinking about.
Why, to say the truth,’ he replied, ‘I am thinking of the French that I am going to fight. I have not seen them since the campaign in Flanders, when they were capital soldiers, and a dozen years of victory under Bonaparte must have made them better still. They have besides, it seems, a new system of strategy which has out-manoeuvred and overwhelmed all the armies of Europe. Tis enough to make one thoughtful; but no matter: my die is cast, they may overwhelm me, but I don’t think they will out-manoeuvre me. First, because I am not afraid of them, as everybody else seems to be; and, secondly, because, if what I hear of their system of manoeuvres is true, I think it is a false one against steady troops.’8
Before leaving London for Cork, he went to see various friends and relations in England. He went to dinner at Coombe Wood with Lord Hawkesbury, the Home Secretary; he called upon his sister Anne, whose first husband, a son of Lord Southampton, had died in 1794, and who was now married to Culling Charles Smith of Hampton; on his way to Holyhead he went to Llangollen to see his family’s old friends in their little house there and he came away with a Church of England prayer book in Spanish which had once belonged to the Duke of Ormonde and which he was to study on the voyage out, for linguistic rather than liturgical reasons.9
By the time he returned to London his orders had been given him: he was to drive Junot out of Portugal. On 12 July 1808 he set sail for Corunna in the Donegal, soon transferring to the faster Crocodile, with high hopes of doing so.
Assured by the Spanish authorities in Corunna that the French grip on their country was faltering day by day, General Wellesley sailed on in the Crocodile around the coast of Coruña province, coming up with his transports off Cape Finisterre, then sailing down past the shores of Pontevedra to land in Portugal at Oporto by the mouth of the Douro river.10
The Portuguese were less sanguine than the Spaniards in Corunna; but the Bishop, who was the head of Portugal’s Supreme Junta, was amenable and listened politely to the British General’s request for five hundred mules for the transport of the British army when it landed sixty miles further south in Mondego Bay. The General was most insistent about these animals. Supply, he well knew, would be as vital a consideration in the wide expanses of Spain as it had been in India where, as he said, ‘If I had rice and bullocks I had men, and if I had men I knew I could beat the enemy.’11 The Bishop was clearly surprised by the request for so many animals but agreed to make arrangements to supply them. He was evidently impressed by the bearing and directness of the young General and was clearly much gratified by the proclamation he undertook to give to the Portuguese people, assuring them that their allies, the British, had come to restore their ‘lawful Prince’ to the throne, and guaranteeing the independence of their Kingdom and the preservation of their ‘holy religion’. The General emphasized the need for respect for religious susceptibilities in Portugal in a General Order to his men which forbade them to enter a church during the performance of divine service without permission, and which required them to take off their hats should they wish to enter a place of worship ‘from motives of curiosity’, when a service was not being performed. Officers must remove their hats when the Host passed them in the streets and soldiers must salute. Should the Host pass a guard-post the sentries must turn out and present arms.12 Soldiers were allowed to attend Mass; but, in fact, as the General was to discover: ‘Although we have whole regiments of Irishmen, and of course Roman Catholics, nobody goes to Mass … I have not seen one soldier perform any act of religious worship, excepting making the sign of the cross to induce the people of the country to give them wine.’13
Dismayed as the Bishop may well have been by the irreligion of his allies, he cannot have failed to be gratified by their General’s order as to the respect to be shown to the ‘holy religion’ of his flock. Nor can he have failed to be much gratified, as the General certainly was, by news which reached them from Andalusia.
This news seemed to confirm the blithe optimism of the authorities in Corunna. For east of Córdoba the French General Pierre Antoine Dupont, recently created a count by Napoleon in recognition of his previous successes in the field, had been trapped and forced to surrender by a Spanish force at Baylen.
In expectation of beating the French themselves, the British army, 13,000 strong, began to land on the Portuguese shore of Mondego Bay a hundred miles north of Lisbon in the first week of August 1808. The soldiers, sitting four by four on the thwarts of the heavily laden boats, their packs and muskets gripped tightly between their knees, plunged violently through the Atlantic breakers towards the burning sand of the beach where sailors, the white surf frothing round their thighs, stood naked at the water’s edge, watching the boats sweep forward through the spray. In the instant that the waters rushed back under the foam of a broken wave, the sailors ran out towards the boats to hurl a rope to them.
On shore piles of food and ammunition, equipment and forage lay waiting for transport to take them inland. A harassed German commissary, scribbling an inventory in his notebook, looked in consternation at the guns and wagons, ‘the mountains of ships’ biscuits,
