Spanish war the army was thus both larger and better supplied than at any previous time. In anticipation of this Castlereagh had been preparing transports and disposing troops for prompt embarkation, and, after considering an attack on Boulogne, he prepared the expedition to Portugal. He endeavoured to obtain its command for Sir Arthur Wellesley, whose genius he had quickly divined; but he could only prevail so far with the military authorities as to have him appointed to the command of the detachment from Cork which sailed first, to be superseded in due course as the others, with commanders senior to him, should arrive in Portugal. He approved both of the convention of Cintra and the advance of Sir John Moore. Adopting Wellesley's views rather than Moore's, he determined upon a stubborn defence of Portugal, and had prepared reinforcements, when the news of the disaster at Coruña arrived, and the remains of the force returned home. He now carried the cabinet with him in his determination to persevere in the war, raised the forces at Lisbon to twenty thousand men, and sent Wellesley out again on 14 April 1809. He set himself still further to increase the regular army by dividing every regiment of the line into two battalions, the first of volunteer recruits forming the regular army for service at home and abroad, the second to be raised in the different counties by ballot, forming a militia for service at home only. This raised the total forces to 532,000; the plan was in substance carried out, and during the rest of the war worked admirably. The battalions of the regulars supplied the gaps in the Peninsula army; the regulars were fed by volunteering from the militia; the militia was kept up partly by voluntary recruiting and partly by balloting for service.
The prolonged operation of making the base in Portugal first of all impregnable in itself, and then a starting-point for advance into Spain, had now begun; and Castlereagh's statesmanship, which had seen how Napoleon's naval combination in the Baltic might be thwarted by a moderate but promptly disposable force, had thus with similar means prevented any combination in the south. Castlereagh had proved the superiority of his strategy over that of his contemporaries; he had now to show how he could cope with protracted scarcity of transport, of supplies, and of specie. Of these Portugal itself was practically bare: Great Britain had to supply almost everything. But from this time fortune was against him. To complete his scheme of engaging Napoleon's European front at all available points, he proposed to despatch an expedition against its centre and to seize the island of Walcheren. Antwerp was Napoleon's great naval establishment, and there he was building a fleet. In addition to the chance of ending the French naval schemes, a blow in the Low Countries might encourage the German states to further efforts. The plans were prepared by Castlereagh even as early as April 1807, and were brought forward again in April 1809; but the cabinet long resisted and delayed till many opportunities had been lost. But no doubt it was a grave proposal to send nearly forty thousand men to Belgium, when there were already twenty thousand in Portugal and the burden of the war was so heavy. Delay was caused also by the scandals which ousted the Duke of York from the commandership-in-chief, and when the expedition set sail at the end of July 1809, the chance of spurring Prussia and north Germany to action had been destroyed at Wagram. Napoleon had, however, been obliged to denude the Low Countries of troops, and Antwerp seemed open to Castlereagh's great force of thirty-five sail of the line, besides frigates, and nearly forty thousand troops of all arms. Knowing that the attack was unexpected, Castlereagh urged speed on Lord Chatham [see Pitt, John, second Earl], whom the king's influence had placed in command. His plan was to regard the expedition as a coup de main, and to invest Flushing and Antwerp simultaneously. If this were done, there were still good prospects of success. The board of admiralty, however, insisted that Flushing must be taken before Antwerp could be attacked, and the fourteen days that were spent in taking Flushing gave Napoleon time to mature the defence of Antwerp. Dissensions then broke out between the English military and naval commanders (Chatham and Sir Richard John Strachan [q. v.]); fever decimated the troops, and early in September the expedition ignominiously returned home without achieving any part of the brilliant successes at which Castlereagh had aimed. Still, the French themselves recognised that with proper promptitude the British must have seized Antwerp and the French fleet there, and it was on the fever, soon to break out if the expedition delayed, that Napoleon counted for its defeat.
The Walcheren expedition was known to be Castlereagh's scheme. Canning and Wellesley thought that for its sake he had starved the Peninsula expedition, and had sent to Holland troops that were urgently needed in Portugal. Its failure was conspicuously due to incompetence somewhere, and its
