Wellesley landed at Lisbon on April 22, and was received with the utmost demonstrations of joy and confidence. He found not only the capital but the whole country in a state of tumult, if not of anarchy, due to a growing despair of the national cause. His arrival rekindled the embers of patriotism, and on May 5 he reviewed at Coimbra a body of troops consisting of 17,000 British and Germans, with about 8,000 Portuguese. The next day he marched towards the Douro, and on the 14th he effected the passage of that river in the face of the French army occupying Oporto, which the British forthwith recaptured. Soult beat a hasty and disorderly retreat into Galicia. Having driven Soult out of Portugal, the British general was encouraged to undertake a further advance into Spain, where Joseph with Victor and Sébastiani had collected a much larger army to bar the approaches to Madrid than Wellesley, relying on Spanish intelligence, had been led to expect. During June and the first days of July, he moved by Abrantes and the Tagus valley as far as Plasencia, little knowing that Soult was about to sweep round his rear, with 50,000 men, and intercept his communications with Lisbon. On July 10 he held a conference with the Spanish general Cuesta, who insisted on making an aggressive movement with his own troops only, and met with a repulse.
THE TALAVERA CAMPAIGN.
On the 27th, the combined armies of Wellesley and Cuesta, numbering respectively about 20,000 British and 35,000 Spanish, confronted 46,000 French troops, under Victor, in a strong position behind Talavera.45 The Spanish forces occupied the right and the British the left of this position. Joseph was present, and disregarding the counsels of Jourdan, his proper military adviser, authorised Victor to assume the offensive. He failed in two preliminary attacks on the 27th, but renewed them on the 28th, when a general engagement ensued. The whole brunt of the battle fell upon the British troops, who gallantly withstood a desperate onset, first on their left and then on their centre and right, until the French quitted the field in confusion. The Spaniards, posted in entrenchments nearer Talavera itself, did and suffered comparatively little. Some of their regiments fled disgracefully, but the rest held their ground, and Wellesley in his despatch spoke favourably of their behaviour.46 Perhaps the part which they played may be roughly estimated by their losses, amounting to 1,200, as compared with 6,268 British and nearly 9,000 French. Wellesley, after further experience of Spanish co-operation, made up his mind to dispense with it altogether in future.
The victory of Talavera won for Wellesley the rank of viscount, to which he was raised on September 4, with the title of Wellington. Although the victory revived the respect of foreign nations for the prowess of British arms, it was otherwise fruitless, and its sequel was fairly open to criticism. Wellesley found that Soult, with Ney and Mortier, had circumvented him, and that he must retreat through Esdremadura, on the south of the Tagus, upon Badajoz. Cuesta, who had advocated bolder counsels, undertook to guard the rear, and to protect the British wounded at Talavera. But he soon found it necessary to abandon that position. Fifteen hundred of the wounded were left behind, and were humanely treated by the French generals. Wellesley's retreat over the mountains was attended with great hardship and loss, for want of supplies either from Spain or from the coast, and his long encampment in the malarious valley of the Guadiana about Badajoz swelled the number of his sick to a frightful extent. It was not until December, when it got into better cantonments on Portuguese soil, that the British army, triumphant at Talavera, recovered either its health or its moral. Napoleon boasted, in a memorandum to be inserted in the Paris journals, that Wellington had really been beaten in Spain, and that "if affairs there had been properly conducted not an Englishman would have escaped". Without going quite so far as this, the parliamentary opposition in England made the least of the victory and the most of the retreat, which unfortunately coincided in time with the wreck of the Walcheren expedition. Even Wellington's best friends in England began to lose heart, as did many of his own officers. He remained undaunted, and having established his headquarters on the high ground between the Tagus and the Douro, meditated designs which, slowly matured, bore good fruit in later years.
It is difficult to understand the inaction of Wellington for so many months after the Talavera campaign, without taking into account not only the difficulty of obtaining sufficient recruits and stores from England after the waste of both at the mouth of the Scheldt, but the greatly increased strength of the French in Spain during the long interval between the Wagram campaign and the Russian expedition. At the close of 1809 all the fortresses of Spain had fallen into the enemy's hands, and all her principal armies had been defeated and dispersed in successive battles of which the greatest was that of Ocaña in the month of November. Suchet was master of Aragon and the east of Spain, nor was he dislodged from it until the end of the war; Andalusia was nearly conquered; Cadiz was only saved by the self-reliant courage of the Duc d'Albuquerque, baffling the intrigues and treachery of the supreme junta there assembled; and Napoleon was preparing a fresh army to overrun Portugal, under the command of Masséna. The Perceval ministry, in which Liverpool had taken Castlereagh's post of secretary for war and the colonies, adopting an optimistic tone at home, practically told Wellington that he must shift for himself; and he braced himself up to do so with extraordinary fortitude.
He remained watching the gathering storm from the heights of Guarda, south-west of Almeida, and commanding two great roads from Spain into Portugal, but his thoughts were equally fixed upon the vast and famous lines of Torres Vedras, which he was constructing for the defence of Lisbon. His force, including the Portuguese regulars, did not exceed 50,000 men; that of the French under Ney, Reynier, and Junot consisted of about 70,000, but they were not equally capable of being concentrated on a single point. The Portuguese militia, too, were being gradually disciplined, and the Portuguese civil authorities were being gradually schooled into the new lesson of sweeping their own country bare of all supplies before the coming French invasion. Wellington did not even strike a blow to save Ciudad Rodrigo, which Masséna took on July 10, 1810. But it was no part of his plan that Almeida should capitulate, as it did shortly afterwards, partly owing to the accidental explosion of a magazine, and partly as was suspected, to an act of treachery. Still, Masséna delayed until urged by Napoleon, and deceived by false intelligence, he launched forth, at the beginning of September, on an enterprise which proved fatal to his reputation. Both he and Wellington issued appeals to the Portuguese nation, the contrast between which is significant. The French marshal, echoing the prevailing note of his master's proclamation, denounced Great Britain as the enemy of all Europe; Wellington called upon the Portuguese to remember their actual experience of French rapacity and outrage.
BUSSACO AND TORRES VEDRAS.
The object of Masséna was to reach Coimbra before Wellington. His manœuvres to outflank Wellington's left were skilfully devised, but the British army marched steadily down the valley of the Mondego, carrying with it the population of the district, and took its stand on the ridge of Bussaco, north of Coimbra, barring Masséna's progress. There was fought, on September 27, 1810, a battle as deadly as that of Talavera, and more decisive in its consequences. The French,