and Italian bankers at outrageously usurious rates in exchange for bills
drawing on the British government. The breakthrough was achieved in
r8rz by the Rothschilds. First Jacob Rothschild bought up many of these
bills at a fraction of their price and took them to London where his
brother Nathan cashed them at the Bank of England at a huge profit.
Then Nathan obtained £8oo,ooo in gold from the East India Company,
sold it on to the British government for Wellington's use, and even
worked out how to get it to Portugal.
Yet it was really Napoleon who won the Peninsular War for the British
at the very moment fortunes were equally poised and there was some
evidence that London was losing heart. Making a disastrous and ill
judged intervention in Spanish affairs, he ordered Marmont to transfer
ro,ooo men to Suchet's army in Valencia and Catalonia. This left
Marmont at Salamanca inferior in numbers to Wellington at the very
time the increasing size of the guerrilla bands meant that by the end of
r8r r the French could never muster an Army of more than 70,000 to deal
with Wellington. It was this that finally allowed the British Army to take
the offensive and remain there.
Napoleon's mistakes in Spain were legion. A wiser man would have
pulled out as soon as he saw the depth of the opposition or at least held a
defensive line north of Madrid, possibly from Mediterranean to Atlantic
on a Catalonia/ Galicia axis. As it was, the Emperor seemed woefully
ignorant of the real problems of campaigning in the peninsula. He
provided insufficient resources to achieve total pacification - admittedly
this would probably have entailed committing most of the Grande Armee
to this one theatre - closed his eyes and ears to the truth, continued his
ludicrous underestimation of Wellington and the British (even at
Waterloo he regarded Wellesley as no more than a 'sepoy general') and
seemed almost wilful in his refusal to make a close study of the politics
and culture of Spain. Until r8rz he directed operations fr om Paris,
invariably making the wrong decisions.
The most egregious of his errors was his failure to appoint a
commander-in-chief in Spain until r8rz. The disastrous decision to hive
off four 'excepted areas' and give them to the marshals - a cynical short
term decision to palliate the unpopularity of Spanish campaigning -
allowed the bickering marshals to become, in effect, autonomous
warlords, and the consequent lack of central control from Madrid in turn
aided Wellington and the guerrillas. Spain thus became what one
observer has described as a 'training ground in disobedience' for the
marshals; when Napoleon finally did the right thing and appointed
Joseph as Commander-in-Chief in Spain, the four marshal-warlords
marcin
(Marcin)
#1