Peninsular War (1808-1814): Wellington in Spain and Portugal

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) was the struggle for the Iberian Peninsula between Napoleonic France and an alliance of Spain, Portugal and Britain. It began as a French takeover of Portugal and Spain and became a long national war marked by popular uprisings, guerrilla fighting and the campaigns of the British commander Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington. Napoleon is reported to have called it his “Spanish ulcer”, a wound that slowly drained his empire.

Background and causes

After the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon was determined to close every European port to Britain under his Continental System. Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally, refused to comply fully. By the Treaty of Fontainebleau in October 1807, France and Spain agreed to invade and divide Portugal, and a French army under General Jean-Andoche Junot marched through Spain and entered Lisbon on 30 November 1807. The Portuguese royal family had sailed for Brazil under British protection a day earlier.

Spain was then ruled by the weak King Charles IV and his unpopular chief minister Manuel de Godoy. Under cover of the Portuguese operation, tens of thousands of French troops entered Spain and occupied key fortresses. In March 1808 a riot at Aranjuez forced Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand VII. Napoleon then summoned both kings to Bayonne in France, where in May 1808 he pressured them into giving up the throne and installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain.

The rising of 1808

On 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against the French garrison. The revolt was crushed, and many prisoners were executed the next day, events later depicted by Francisco de Goya in his paintings The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808. News of the rising and of the abdications spread across Spain, and provincial juntas (committees) declared war on France.

In July 1808 a French army under General Pierre Dupont was surrounded and forced to surrender at Bailen in Andalusia, with some 17,000-18,000 men taken prisoner. It was the first major surrender of a Napoleonic army in the field and shocked Europe. Joseph fled Madrid. In Portugal, Wellesley landed with a British force, defeated Junot at Vimeiro on 21 August 1808, and the French agreed to evacuate Portugal under the controversial Convention of Cintra.

Napoleon intervenes

In November 1808 Napoleon came to Spain himself with about 200,000 men. He scattered the Spanish armies and retook Madrid in early December. A British army under Sir John Moore advanced into northern Spain, then retreated through the mountains of Galicia in winter. At the Battle of Corunna on 16 January 1809 Moore’s rearguard held off the French long enough for the army to be evacuated by sea, but Moore was killed.

Napoleon left Spain in January 1809 to deal with Austria and never returned. Meanwhile the city of Zaragoza endured two sieges; the second, ending in February 1809, cost tens of thousands of lives among soldiers and civilians.

Wellington’s campaigns

Wellesley returned to Portugal in April 1809, drove Marshal Soult out of Porto in May and advanced into Spain. At Talavera on 27–28 July 1809 his Anglo-Spanish army repulsed the French, and he was made Viscount Wellington, but he soon fell back to Portugal.

In 1810 Marshal Andre Massena invaded Portugal with a large army. Wellington checked him at Bussaco on 27 September 1810 and then withdrew behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, a chain of forts built in secret north of Lisbon. The defence of Portugal depended on its own people as much as on the British. The Portuguese army was rebuilt under the British general William Carr Beresford and fought alongside British brigades, while Wellington ordered the population north of Lisbon to abandon their homes and destroy food the French could use. This scorched-earth policy saved Lisbon but caused great suffering among Portuguese civilians, thousands of whom died of hunger and disease behind the lines. Unable to break through and starving in a stripped countryside, Massena retreated in March 1811 after losing perhaps 25,000 men, many to hunger and disease.

In 1811 the war became a hard-fought stalemate on the Spanish-Portuguese border. Wellington beat Massena again at Fuentes de Onoro in May, and on 16 May 1811 an allied army under Beresford fought Soult at Albuera, one of the bloodiest battles of the war in proportion to the numbers engaged. In eastern Spain, meanwhile, Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet captured Tarragona in 1811 and Valencia in January 1812, the most successful French campaigns of the war.

In 1812 Wellington took the offensive. He stormed the border fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo in January and Badajoz in April, where his troops sacked the town after the assault. On 22 July 1812 he won a brilliant victory at Salamanca and entered Madrid in August, though a failed siege of Burgos forced him to withdraw to Portugal for the winter.

The decisive campaign came in 1813. With many French troops withdrawn for the war in Germany after the French invasion of Russia, Wellington advanced across northern Spain and routed King Joseph’s army at Vitoria on 21 June 1813, capturing its baggage train and artillery. The French were pushed back over the Pyrenees, and in October 1813 Wellington’s army crossed the Bidassoa river into France. San Sebastian had been taken by storm in August, and Pamplona surrendered at the end of October. The allies won further battles on the Nivelle in November and the Nive in December 1813, and at Orthez in February 1814. Wellington insisted that his troops pay for their supplies in France, which helped keep the local population quiet, and he sent most of the Spanish troops home to prevent revenge on French civilians.

The guerrilla war

Alongside the regular armies, Spanish irregular bands fought what they called the guerrilla, or “little war”. Leaders such as Francisco Espoz y Mina in Navarre and Juan Martin Diez, known as “El Empecinado”, attacked convoys, intercepted couriers and killed isolated soldiers. The French replied with harsh reprisals, and both sides committed atrocities, later recorded by Goya in his series of prints The Disasters of War.

Historians debate how much the guerrillas achieved militarily, but they forced the French to keep large numbers of troops on garrison and escort duty, making it hard to concentrate against Wellington. At its peak France had well over 200,000 soldiers in the Peninsula.

Key people

• Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, commander of the Anglo-Portuguese army, whose victories made his reputation before Waterloo.
• Napoleon, who started the war and commanded in Spain only in the winter of 1808–1809.
• Joseph Bonaparte, the French-installed King of Spain from 1808 to 1813.
• Ferdinand VII, the Spanish king held in France throughout the war and restored in 1814.
• Andre Massena and Nicolas Soult, two of the French marshals who fought Wellington.
• Sir John Moore, the British general killed at Corunna.

Consequences

The war ended in April 1814 after the Battle of Toulouse on 10 April, fought before news arrived that Napoleon had abdicated on 6 April. The Peninsula had cost France a large army and great sums of money at a time when it needed both elsewhere, and it gave Britain a land campaign in which to wear down Napoleon’s forces.

Cadiz itself had been besieged by the French from February 1810 to August 1812 but, supplied by sea and protected by its position, was never taken. In Spain, the patriot parliament meeting in besieged Cadiz, the Cortes of Cadiz, adopted a liberal constitution on 19 March 1812, one of the most influential of its age. On his return in 1814 Ferdinand VII abolished it and restored absolute rule, beginning decades of conflict between liberals and conservatives. The collapse of royal authority in Spain also set off independence movements in Spanish America, beginning with juntas such as the May Revolution in Buenos Aires in 1810. Portugal’s royal court stayed in Rio de Janeiro until 1821, a step on the road to Brazilian independence.

Myths and facts

• “Britain won the war alone.” British accounts long focused on Wellington, but Spanish and Portuguese armies, militias and guerrillas did much of the fighting and suffered most of the losses.
• “The guerrillas were all patriots.” Many bands fought for national and religious reasons, but some were little more than bandits, and peasants often suffered from both sides.
• “Napoleon was beaten in Spain.” The Peninsula seriously weakened him, but his empire collapsed mainly after the disaster in Russia and the defeats in Germany in 1813.

Timeline

• 1807, 30 November: Junot’s French army enters Lisbon.
• 1808, 2 May: Uprising in Madrid against the French.
• 1808, 19-22 July: Dupont’s army surrenders at Bailen.
• 1808, 21 August: Wellesley defeats Junot at Vimeiro.
• 1809, 16 January: Battle of Corunna; Moore is killed.
• 1809, 27-28 July: Battle of Talavera.
• 1810, October: Massena reaches the Lines of Torres Vedras.
• 1812, 22 July: Wellington’s victory at Salamanca.
• 1813, 21 June: Battle of Vitoria.
• 1814, 10 April: Battle of Toulouse ends the fighting.

Why it matters

The Peninsular War tied down hundreds of thousands of French troops for six years and gave Napoleon’s enemies their first sustained success on land. It made Wellington the commander who would face Napoleon at Waterloo, gave the world the word guerrilla, and reshaped the politics of Spain, Portugal and their American empires for a century.