was not before time. French skirmishers were already approaching his own lines. They came upon the men of a British brigade as fast asleep in the hot July sun as Cuesta had been and killed many of them before they were fully awake. Many more were killed before they could be rallied; in all Wellesley lost over 400 men before the battle proper began.
He was almost killed himself. He had climbed to the top of a tall building to survey the surrounding countryside beyond the cork and olive groves when, at the very foot of the tower on which he and his staff were standing, French troops suddenly appeared at the base of the wall. Dashing down the steps, they rushed across the courtyard to their horses and galloped away, as the French fired at their backs.
The battle fought at Talavera on 27 and 28 July 1809 was the ‘hardest fighting’ Sir Arthur Wellesley had ‘ever been a party to’.26 Indeed, he declared with unaccustomed hyperbole, ‘it was the hardest fought battle of modern times … Never was there such a Murderous Battle!!’27 He had lost over 5,000 men, inflicting more than 7,000 casualties on the enemy.28 General Sir Alexander Mackenzie, one of the most reliable of his field commanders, whom he had known since his days at the Academy at Angers, had been killed; he himself had been hit in the chest by a spent bullet. During a brief truce in the fierce battle, his soldiers, overcome by heat and thirst, had been driven to run down to drink the brackish water of the stream between the opposing lines before carrying away for burial the bodies of the dead and dying. The day before, Cuesta’s Spanish troops, whose officers seemed to be endlessly smoking cigarettes, suddenly unleashed a terrific volley of musketry fire at some distant French dragoons who were taking occasional shots at their pickets. ‘If they will but fire as well tomorrow,’ Wellesley said to a member of his staff, ‘the day is our own; but as there seems nobody to fire at just now, I wish you would stop it.’29
The officer galloped away to carry out the General’s order; but, before he reached the inexperienced Spanish levies, they had taken sudden fright and had run off in panic to the rear, plundering some British baggage-wagons on their way. General Cuesta, infuriated by the shameful behaviour of his men, gave orders that two hundred of them should be shot after the battle. General Wellesley put in a word for them; but Cuesta insisted that at least forty of them must suffer, and on the morning of the 29th they did.
Throughout the battle General Wellesley had insisted upon carrying out himself most of the duties usually assigned to staff officers as well as being his own intelligence officer; and he had consequently been obliged to ride about from one vantage point to another. Some of his officers questioned the wisdom of this, yet none denied that he had won an undoubted victory – though there were those who considered it a Pyrrhic one – a French army, almost twice as large as his own, had been forced into retreat; and, reinforced by Robert Craufurd’s Light Brigade, which had marched and run over sixty miles in less than twenty-six hours, he was justified in hoping now to move towards Madrid.
Yet this hope was not to be realized: Sir Arthur was informed that another French army was fast approaching and would soon be across his lines of communication with Portugal. His men were disastrously short of supplies as it was; and for this he angrily blamed his selfish and incompetent allies who ‘allowed a brave army, that was rendering gratuitous services to Spain, that was able and willing to pay for everything it received, to starve in the centre of their country … and who refused or omitted to find carriages to remove the officers and soldiers who had been wounded in their service, and obliged me to give up the equipment of the army for the performance of the necessary duties of humanity’.30
‘We are starving and are ill-treated by the Spaniards in every way’, he added, making no allowances for the difficulties of gleaning provisions in a poor countryside already plundered by the French; ‘and a starving army is actually worse than none. The soldiers lose their discipline and their spirit. They plunder even in the presence of their officers.’31 His complaints were echoed by his brother Richard, who had been sent to Spain to represent the British Government in a more authoritative manner than had so far been displayed by John Hookham Frere, the British Minister at Seville. Although Sir Arthur did not think his brother would ‘be able to do any good’, the Marquess was certainly a match in haughtiness for the proudest of hidalgos and did not hesitate to protest that he would ‘not trust the protection of a favourite dog to the whole Spanish army’. And so long as his brother Arthur had cause to complain that his army wanted everything and could get nothing, that the Spanish treated their allies without respect, he ‘might almost say not even as friends’, he agreed that there was no alternative but to retreat towards Portugal.32
Complaining that he had ‘fished in many troubled waters, but Spanish troubled waters [he would] never fish in again’,33 Sir Arthur withdrew through Estremadura towards the Guadiana river and the Portuguese frontier near Badajoz, more annoyed than ever with the Spanish when it transpired that General Cuesta, who had undertaken to look after the 1,500 British wounded left behind in Talavera, had been obliged to abandon them there and march towards him at the approach of the French.
The Spanish authorities, as though wishing to make amends for Cuesta’s having enabled the enemy to take so many prisoners, tendered the British General tokens of their gratitude and regard: they presented him with six Andalusian horses and offered him the rank of Captain-General in their Army, an honour he accepted while declining to accept a Captain-General’s pay. The British Government rewarded him also: he was granted an income of £2,000 for three years, and, with the King’s approval, was created Baron Douro of Wellesley and Viscount Wellington of Talavera.* Lord Wellington had now to justify the honours bestowed upon him.
“They really forget everything when plunder or wine is within their reach.’
ALMOST a hundred thousand men of the Imperial army were marching through France for the Pyrenees. There were rumours that the Emperor himself, having finally overwhelmed the Austrians at Wagram at the beginning of July 1809, would come with them to direct personally the expulsion of his tiresomely persistent enemy from the western peninsula of the Continent which he had otherwise almost made his own.
Wellington was at least spared the personal attention of Napoleon. But there was still ‘a whole host of Marshals’ in Spain, among them Edouard Mortier and Michel Ney as well as Soult, Victor and Kellerman.1
Threatened as he was by the immense power of France, Wellington felt his position also endangered by the reconstruction of the ministry in London and the departure from office of his friend Lord Castlereagh on whose support he had always been able to rely. The new Prime Minister was to be Spencer Perceval, a man of whom little was generally known and scarcely anything known at Wellington’s headquarters in the Peninsula. Nor did Wellington know very much about the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Bathurst, nor the Secretary of War, the Earl of Liverpool. It was not long, however, before it was decided to recall Marquess Wellesley home from Seville to replace Lord Bathurst as Foreign Secretary and to send out his brother Henry as British Minister in Lisbon. So Wellington was able to comfort himself with the thought that by these changes he had at least two friends at court.2
He would need all the support he could contrive to obtain in the months ahead, for his position in the Peninsula, as he well recognized, was an ever more precarious one, while praise in England for his victory at Talavera was being overcast by grumbles that it had merely been the prelude to a defeat. The utter failure of the attempt to seize Antwerp from the French, the withdrawal of most of the troops from Belgium, and the death from malaria of so many more who had been left behind as a garrison, were humiliating enough; but now there was retreat in Spain
