Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/191

 Wellesley chose the former, and when he had passed the Sierra Guadarrama fresh orders directed him on Salamanca, to which place Wellington had been obliged to fall back. On 8 Nov. the whole army assembled there, consisting of fifty-two thousand British and Portuguese and sixteen thousand Spaniards. The united French armies numbered ninety thousand, some troops having been sent back to the north. Nevertheless, Wellington hoped to maintain himself on the Tormes, and was prepared to fight on his old battlefield. Jourdan, the chief of Joseph's staff, wished to attack him; but Soult thought it better to turn his right flank, like Marmont, but with a wider sweep. This threatened his communications, and on the fifteenth he continued his retreat to Rodrigo. The troops then went into cantonments for the winter. There was no fear of an invasion of Portugal, for the French had lost their ordnance and magazines. In the course of the year nearly three thousand guns had been taken, and nearly twenty thousand French prisoners had been sent to England (Desp. 19 and 23 Nov.;, i. 308).

There had been much misconduct during the retreat, and Wellington issued a general order (28 Nov.) in which he spoke of the discipline of the army as worse than that of any army he had ever read of. This severe and undiscriminating censure of troops whose discipline, as he afterwards declared, was infinitely superior to that of the French was resented (, Life of Sir William Napier, i. 124;, ii. 310). He received the thanks of parliament (27 April) for the capture of Badajoz, and again (3 Dec.) for the subsequent campaign and especially the victory of Salamanca. He was created Marquis of Wellington on 18 Aug. 1812, and 100,000l. was voted for the purchase of estates for him. Wellington Park was bought with part of this grant, the manor of Wellington having been already acquired for him (Suppl. Desp. 21 Sept. and 22 Dec.) He was given 'the Union Jack' as an augmentation of arms, rather to his annoyance, as it seemed ostentatious, and it would scarcely be credited that he had not applied for it; but he was glad at any rate that Lord Wellesley's suggestion had not been adopted—' a French eagle on a scutcheon of pretence' (ib. 7 and 12 Sept.) The prince regent of Portugal made him Marquez de Torres Vedras and Duque da Victoria, and the Spanish regency gave him the orders of San Fernando and the Golden Fleece. On 1 Jan. 1813 he was made colonel of the horse guards, which ended his long connection with the 33rd; and on 4 March he received the Garter, made vacant by the death of Lord Buckingham, whose aide-de-camp he had been.

In December he went to Cadiz, and with the assistance of his brother Henry, the British minister there, he brought about some improvement in the condition of the Spanish armies. The hostility and obstruction which he met with at Lisbon when preparing for the campaign of 1813 obliged him to appeal once more to the prince regent in Brazil (Desp. 12 April 1813). The war with the United States restricted his supplies of corn, and he was near losing his best soldiers for want of money to re-engage them. 'No adequate notion of Wellington's herculean labours can be formed without an intimate knowledge of his financial and political difficulties' (, v. 22). Yet with all this on his hands, we are told by his judge-advocate-general: 'He hunts almost every other day, and then makes up for it by great diligence and instant decision on the intermediate days' (, i. 66).

As the result of his efforts, and of Lord Wellesley's complaints of the sluggish support which the British government had afforded him, Wellington was ready to take the field in May 1813 with a well-equipped army of forty-three thousand British and twenty-seven thousand Portuguese, which was to be assisted in the north by twenty thousand Spaniards; while fifty thousand, including the Anglo-Sicilian force, now under Sir John Murray (1768?-1827) [q. v.], were to give occupation to Suchet on the east coast. During the winter the French troops had been harassed by guerilla warfare, and they had been reduced in numbers, and still more in quality, by drafts to replace the army which had been destroyed in Russia. Soult, whom Napoleon spoke of as 'the only man who understood war in Spain,' had been recalled at Joseph's wish. The king had transferred his court by the emperor's orders to Valladolid. and spread his troops from the Esla to Madrid, though he believed the latter to be the threatened point. Out of 110,000 men, forming the armies of the south, the centre, the north, and Portugal, half were engaged with the revived insurrection in the northern provinces.

Wellington's real intention, which he took care to conceal, was to invade the north of Spain, where he would have the assistance of the Galicians, the insurgent bands, and the British fleet, and would strike the French communications. To turn their positions on the Duero, which had checked him in 1812, part of his army was to cross that river in Portugal, and advance on the north side of