of credibility ensured that the marshals would take the blame for a war
that was in principle unwinnable.
Yet if Napoleon had no intention of returning to Spain, the British
certainly did. Wellesley returned to Portugal in April I809 and began by
defeating Soult at Oporto on I I May. On 28 July came the hard-fought
battle of Talavera, where Wellesley defeated Victor but not without cost,
sustaining s,ooo casualties to the French 7 ,ooo. When Wellesley moved
back into Portugal to head off another thrust from Soult, his Spanish
allies complained vociferously that the British were abandoning them,
just as Moore had allegedly done the year before. London, though,
upheld Wellesley and created him Viscount Wellington for the success at
Talavera. The Spanish were obliged to accept Wellington grudgingly as
an informal supremo of the allied forces. To deal with the triple threat of
Wellington, Spanish regulars and the growing numbers of guerrillas, by
the autumn of I809 Napoleon had committed 350,000 troops to the
Peninsula.
The Peninsular War has sometimes been written up as if it were an
inevitable British response to Napoleon's Continental Blockade and his
blundering into Spain. In fact the decision to intervene in the Iberian
peninsula was a marginal one, for no vital British interests seemed
involved there, unlike, say, the Baltic. Opponents of an expedition to
Spain argued variously that the area did not pose an invasion threat, was
not a source of vital imports, was not a link in the chain of command with
other powers and offered no barrier to French attacks in the Middle and
Far East. Others argued that there could be important economic benefits,
that even if Napoleon bought off or suborned his opponents in northern
Europe, Britain could still fight on in the south, and in sum that a
Peninsular campaign made Britain independent of her allies.
Initially opportunism was the spur: it was an opportunity to strike at
French naval power, for the six Franco-Spanish ships of the line that had
huddled in Cadiz and Vigo since Trafalgar were taken out, as were all
Portuguese warships; the Royal Navy also gained the use of the Atlantic
ports of Lisbon and Oporto. Gradually, though, London became aware of
other implications of the Spanish intervention. They could deny France
the commerce of Latin America- which was why British policy shifted in
these years from encouraging Latin American independence to keeping
the colonies loyal to Spain - and by tying Napoleon up in Spain prevent
him from making any moves against Canada and India. The conjectured
economic benefits did materialize. In Spain British exports rose from
£!.7 million in I807 to just over £6.7 million in I809, and by I812 Spain
was taking one-fifth of British exports. Latin America, too, proved a
marcin
(Marcin)
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