‘So, we gained a species of triumph,’ Kydd said at length, ‘but have we lost our purpose? Bonaparte has cast us out entirely and now rules Spain. We’ve forfeited our chance to face him on the battlefield and are back where we started, all Europe under his heel.’
Packwood eased into a wry smile. ‘Ah, you don’t know our sepoy general. Wellesley is a tough nut. We may have been thrown out of Spain but not Iberia. The flame of resistance will not go out and Wellesley will stick by Lisbon like a limpet. When the tide turns he’ll lead us back into Spain – and a victory that will be all the sweeter!’
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Author’s Note
The origins of the Peninsular War are an extraordinary mix of greed, betrayal, patriotism, lust for glory and conquest – and more than a few gross miscalculations, which in the end brought impoverishment and despair to an ancient and illustrious nation. It’s a complex and myth-laden story and if, in the process of teasing out the elements, I’ve not included all events or have adjusted times slightly it is only to smooth the way for the reader of this latest Kydd tale rather than provide a footnoted history of this profoundly interesting period.
When Kydd encounters his notable prisoner-of-war in Tavistock this is indeed based on the history of the times, as I found researching newspapers and other archives. Extraordinarily, enemy officers, having given their parole, could live the life of a gentleman, means being found to transfer money to them from home. This was regularly abused with Napoleonic approval, officers breaking their parole in order to return to France, helped in no small way by British smugglers, who found it a lucrative sideline for the outward voyage, receiving their customers from elaborate networks operating for cash-in-hand.
The French officers cynically obeyed the letter of their parole agreement by formally informing the authorities of the withdrawal of their pledge – in a note left on a pillow in their lodgings. As far as I’ve been able to discover, there was never a case of a British officer breaking his parole, the surprisingly numerous escapees from France doing it the hard way from close confinement. As for the attempt on the ship, if the reader cares to take a stroll around the further reaches of Plymouth Hoe they will find a mysterious stone set in the ground with the single incised numeral ‘3’. This marks the spot where, somewhat earlier in the war, a firing squad put an end to three Irish soldiers convicted of an uprising in the Mill Bay prison with a view to making off with a ship in the same way.
A breakout of the French fleet from Brest was still a nightmare. With numerous invasion barges in northern ports and ships-of-the-line building fast – some hundred or more at Bonaparte’s immediate disposal in Europe – all the elements that threatened before Trafalgar only a handful of years previously were still there, and any sortie in strength from the French Atlantic or Mediterranean ports was a feared prospect. It would be a recurring theme of sea warfare foreseeably.
The individuals encountered outside Tyger’s doughty crew are mostly taken from history, and I’ve gone to some lengths to portray their qualities as they have been recorded for, above all, events in this period are character-led. Godoy, for instance: a genius of guile and effrontery, from humble beginnings to entering service in the royal palace at seventeen, he quickly made colonel and became a royal favourite and lover of the Queen. By his early twenties he’d become adjutant general, then field marshal, and in the same year minister for foreign affairs, close counsellor to the autocratic King and then prime minister. It was his bad luck to be at the helm when Napoleon Bonaparte banged on the door of Spain, and, totally out of his depth, was in turn right royally deceived. Most Spanish blame him for the disastrous decision to go to war against Great Britain that ruined Spain’s finances and set her colonies at defiance. Yet he lived on into his eighties in comfortable exile in France, bedecked with honours.
And his master, the King: completely in thrall to Godoy, he abdicated in favour of his son Fernando, hailed by his people as El Deseado, the Desired. Goya’s fearsome portrait of the new King at his accession after liberation gives a clue to his destiny: from the hope of the country and its new liberal constitution, he turned viciously reactionary and absolutist, called by some the basest, most cowardly and selfish king Spain has ever been cursed with. He well earned his new sobriquet of el rey felon, the criminal majesty.
As for Bonaparte, his cupidity over Spain’s imagined wealth from the New World led him into the disastrous endeavour to betray and conquer his ally and crown his brother King of Spain. It would turn into his ‘Spanish Ulcer’ and, jointly with disasters in Eastern Europe, would lead to his downfall. Given his revolutionary hatred of the Bourbon dynasty, he would no doubt be appalled if he knew that, in Spain, the Bourbons in the twenty-first century are very much in evidence in the person of King Felipe VI, through his father Juan Carlos I.
Cadiz is fiercely proud of its heritage, especially so of its role in the creation of the nation’s constitution. The visitor can see many of the locations mentioned in this book for it was never despoiled by the French. A fine maritime museum took my interest, particularly the Trafalgar exhibits, which were very fairly shown, and through many portraits, I came face to face with our main players. The city itself has a veneer of tourism but, particularly in the old city, Moorish relics can be found, and the ancient Gaditano dialect still fills the market air. The naval base occupies to this day its traditional position deep within the marshy inner harbour, and in its library I was thrilled to set eyes on charts of the time and find explanation for many of the questions I came with.
The precise point at which it can be said with certainty that the long Peninsular War had its beginning I do believe can be defined, depending on your point of view. It is either the moment at which Bonaparte decided to turn an ally into a victim and thereby brought upon himself the tribulations that followed, or the point at which the British first landed in support of the Iberians, never to leave until their work was done. I tend to the latter – and not only because it was the Royal Navy that did the deed. The landing by Royal Marines at Figueira da Foz until relieved by Wellesley’s landings, depicted here, was indeed Britain’s first permanent foothold on the peninsula, and the navy, guarding the sea-lanes as efficiently as it did, was able to keep it so until victory was gained.
The terms of the highly questionable Convention of Cintra, so reviled in England, were actually brought about by Kellermann, the astute French negotiator at the talks. Keeping his knowledge of English hidden from Burrard, he learned of the general’s pressing need for a tangible victory and held out for outrageous conditions, including the transport of his entire army, with its flags, honours and loot intact, back to France to continue his war.
It is not so well known that Bonaparte himself came to confront the British intervention, and it is piquant to think that, but for Wellesley’s junior status, it would have been him, not Moore, who would have faced him and his juggernaut army. As it was, Bonaparte noted the headlong retreat with much satisfaction but fatally left the final destruction details to his marshals, abandoning the Spanish winter and mountains for Paris. Soult was no match for Moore, and history took its course with Britain’s only effective army preserved for another day.
The passage back to England for the army through the winter storms of Biscay was a hard one, officers with drawn swords posted to stop the mass of men in the over-packed transports moving about in the savage gales. When the exhausted, dirty, ragged soldiers staggered ashore, people ran from them in horror but at last, after their inhuman march, they had got their rest.