positions which he had made, and gave orders to suspend all offensive operations. Wellesley warned him, out in vain, that if he did not attack the French, they would attack him. On the following day Junot came down from his position and assailed the British at Vimiera with great vigour. They came on as usual in heavy columns, but Sir Arthur received them in line, and repulsed them at every point. They lost eighteen hundred men and nearly all their artillery, and retired in confusion, while half of the British army had not been under fire. General Wellesley was eager to follow up the victory, and earnestly entreated Sir H. Burrard for permission to complete the discomfiture of the enemy by cutting off their retreat to Torres Vedras; but that feeble general said enough had been done, and positively prohibited any attempt of the kind. On the following day he was superseded by Sir Hew Dalrymple, an equally incapable commander, and very unpopular besides with the army, on account of his harshness and rudeness both to officers and men; but before he could commence operations, the French general proposed an armistice preparatory to negotiating a capitulation, which was agreed to on terms preposterously favourable to the enemy. This was the unfortunate convention of Cintra, against which public opinion in England was roused to an almost insane fury. Wellington, who had tried in vain to open the eyes of his superior officer to the real state of the French army, expressed his serious disapprobation of several parts of the convention, but his advice was disregarded. Yet, strange to say, it was against him that the popular indignation was mainly directed. "There was a pretty general desire in England," he remarked good-humouredly to a friend, "that a general should be shot after the manner of Admiral Byng; and as I was a politician—the other two not being in parliament—I was of course the person to be shot; which would have been rather hard, as I was the winner of the two battles which had raised the public hopes so high, and had nothing to do with the subsequent proceedings, but as a subordinate negotiator under orders of my superior officers. Even the government seemed inclined to give me up." The soldiers, however, had formed a correct appreciation of his services, and the officers testified their admiration and respect for him by a valuable gift. But it was clear that he could not continue to act with his new superiors, and he accordingly returned to England, and resumed the duties of his Irish secretaryship and his seat in parliament.
The reoccupation of Spain by Napoleon, the total overthrow of the Spanish armies, and the retreat of Sir John Moore to Corunna, speedily followed. The French emperor, regarding the complete subjugation of the Spanish peninsula as certain, drew up a very skilful plan of operations for finishing the work. Soult was ordered to cross the Portuguese frontier from the north, whilst Victor was to march by way of Elvas, and Lapisse from Almeida, and, uniting their forces, were to surround the English corps of ten thousand men which still remained in Portugal, and compel them either to lay down their arms, or to flee to their ships. Soult accordingly descended with thirty thousand men upon the Douro, and took possession of Oporto. If he had advanced at once he might, in all probability, have crushed the British army and captured Lisbon. But he hesitated to proceed till he should hear from his generals, and obtain exact intelligence of the enemy, and his indecision saved Portugal. The English ministry had meanwhile resolved to make another effort to rescue the peninsula from the grasp of the French, and to appoint General Wellesley to the chief command of the new expedition. While Soult hesitated and waited. Sir Arthur landed at Lisbon with a powerful reinforcement of troops, on the 22nd of April, 1809. He lost not a moment in taking measures to avert the danger which was impending over Portugal; and putting himself at the head of twenty-four thousand men, he marched against Soult, who was strongly posted at Oporto. The rapid river Douro, which at this spot is three hundred yards in width, rolled between the French and British armies, and Soult, in anticipation of an attack, had destroyed the floating bridge, removed all the boats to his own side, and was preparing to retire leisurely to Galicia. But in spite of these precautions Sir Arthur, by a bold and masterly piece of strategy, which he called "an exercise of common sense," succeeded in passing a detachment of his troops over the river before Soult had discovered his intentions, and after a brief struggle compelled him to abandon the city with such precipitation that he left behind him his sick and wounded, besides artillery and ammunition. The English general, after this brilliant feat of arms, sat down that evening to the dinner which had been prepared for his adversary. Soult made good his retreat into Galicia, but with the loss of more than a fourth of his army. Sir Arthur intended next to turn his arms against Victor, who was posted in Estremadura, but his troops were suffering severely from sickness, and from the want of shoes, of clothing, and of pay. The commissariat was in a most wretched condition, and the means of transport could not be procured except with the utmost difficulty. To crown his difficulties, Cuesta, the Spanish general, equally obstinate and incompetent, would take no advice, and doggedly insisted on the adoption of his own plans. Sir Arthur, therefore, instead of assailing Victor, was obliged to march into Spain to effect a junction with the Spanish army, and then to proceed towards Madrid. Meanwhile Victor, having received large reinforcements, with Joseph Bonaparte in person at their head, resolved to give battle to the united British and Spanish army. The two armies confronted each other at Talavera. A severe encounter took place on the 27th of July, and the engagement was renewed on the morning of the 28th. The brunt of the battle was sustained by the British, the Spaniards having remained virtually inactive; and though Sir Arthur, with only twenty-six thousand men, of whom many were raw recruits, and all had been without food for nearly two days, had to contend against thirty thousand of the best soldiers in the French service, he repulsed them at all points with heavy loss, and captured several hundreds of prisoners, and seventeen pieces of cannon.
The position of the British army, in spite of this victory, had become exceedingly critical, as great masses of the enemy were gathering round it from various quarters. The approach of Soult, the loss of the pass of Baños, the obstinacy and infatuation of Cuesta, the imbecility of the other Spanish general, Venegas, and the empty state of the military chest and of the commissariat, decided Sir Arthur to retreat again into Portugal; and by a series of prompt and rapid marches and well-arranged combinations, he fell back on Merida, Badajos, and Lisbon, and thus extricated his army from a position of imminent danger. This movement terminated the campaign of 1809.
As soon as the news of the battle of Talavera reached England, Sir Arthur was created Baron Douro of Wellesley and Viscount Wellington of Talavera, and of Wellington in the county of Somerset. But he was violently assailed by the opposition and the press, and but feebly defended by the government, who afforded him very scanty support in his plans for the prosecution of the war, and gave him plainly to understand that the responsibility must rest entirely with himself. Napoleon, alarmed and enraged at the result of the battle of Talavera, resolved to pour an overwhelming mass of troops into Spain, with the hope of crushing his enemies at a blow, and accordingly directed that nine powerful corps, mustering fully two hundred and eighty thousand effective men, under Massena, Soult, and others of his most famous generals, should be assembled in Spain, and but for the preparations for his marriage would have put himself at their head. To meet the shock of this formidable array, Wellington had only fifty-five thousand disposable troops, independent of garrisons and detachments, and including the Portuguese levies now thirty thousand strong, who had been well disciplined by Beresford, and made excellent soldiers. He had been compelled to abandon all hopes of assistance from the Spaniards; and indeed, in the month of November, both the Spanish armies were defeated and almost annihilated, as Wellington said, through "the ignorance, presumption, and mismanagement" of their leaders. Wellington's attention was therefore now directed to the defence of Portugal, the conquest of which was the great object of the French campaign of 1810. The Portuguese, unlike the Spaniards, were loyal to their sovereign, detested the French, and had confidence in the British nation and army. They were therefore sincere and effective allies of England (though the government was captious, troublesome, and inefficient); and Wellington expressed his opinion that, with the aid of the military establishment of Portugal, the country might be defended by a British effective force of thirty thousand men. With prescient eye he had already divined the proper mode of meeting the storm which was about to burst upon him, and had ordered the erection in front of Lisbon of those world-famed lines of Torres Vedras, which furnished an impregnable fastness and a secure retreat, as well as a safe base of operations when he should resume the offensive. By the patriotism of the Portuguese
