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WEL for the undertaking. The garrison under General Dubrèton, a brave and remarkably skilful officer, made a most vigorous defence, and after spending no less than five weeks before its walls, Wellington was compelled to raise the siege and retire. It was indeed time; for the French generals were straining every nerve to bring up their forces against him from all parts of the peninsula, and he was on the point of being crashed by a concentration of the armies of the north, of the south, and of the centre, amounting to one hundred and fourteen thousand men, while he had only thirty-three thousand under his command. He succeeded, however, by one of the most masterly retreats ever executed in extricating himself from this perilous situation, and in regaining the Portuguese frontier, though his soldiers suffered very severely during the retreat, from fatigue, privation, and the inclemency of the weather. Having distributed his troops in their former quarters within the frontiers of Portugal, Wellington availed himself of the opportunity to pay a visit to Cadiz, where he was well received by the cortes, and obtained from them the temporary command of the Spanish forces, with an abundance of liberal promises that they should be fed and properly equipped out of their own resources. But as a matter of course these engagements were all broken, and the intentions of the British general so entirely thwarted by the government that he was "forced to arrange his plans for the next campaign as if no such bodies as Spanish armies had had any existence." He had meanwhile been created Duke of Vittoria by the Portuguese regency, had been elevated by his own sovereign to the rank of Marquis of Wellington, and had received the thanks of parliament with a grant of £100,000, as an acknowledgment of his eminent services. Faction still continued to disparage his talents and his victories; and the government, while shipping off enormous subsidies to Russia and Germany, had as usual left the peninsular army ill supplied with money, and deficient in clothing, shoes, and even horses and arms. But they were at length roused by Wellington's successes and urgent representations, to make some more earnest efforts to send reinforcements of men, and supplies of necessaries, for the ensuing decisive campaign of 1813. On the other hand, the terrible reverses of Napoleon in the Russian campaign had wrought a remarkable change in the feelings of the Spaniards, and had compelled the emperor to withdraw from the peninsula many regiments of veteran soldiers, and to supply their place by battalions of raw recruits. Soult, too, the ablest of his generals in Spain, had been sent to another quarter where danger seemed more pressing, and Joseph Bonaparte proved himself incapable of understanding, far less of acting upon, his brother's instructions; while, to crown all, the troops having no confidence in Joseph as a leader, and depressed and cowed by their frequent defeats, now shrank from encountering an enemy by whom they had been so often beaten.

The campaign of 1813 was opened by Wellington about the middle of May with little short of two hundred thousand men, of whom forty thousand were British. So confident was he now of success that, on passing the frontier, he rose in his stirrups and waving his hat, exclaimed prophetically, "Farewell, Portugal!" The French, who were still numerically superior, expecting that he would, as formerly, direct his movements by one of the two great roads of Salamanca or Talavera, had made vast preparations to defend the passage of the Douro. But Wellington had formed a very different plan of operations, and by a totally unexpected and most daring and masterly movement, he turned one after another all the positions occupied by the French armies of the centre, of the south, and of the north, and crossed in succession the Tormes, the Douro, the Esla, the Carrion, and the Ebro. Burgos, which had so gallantly resisted and foiled his attack in the last campaign, was hastily blown up at his approach. Driving every thing before him he overtook the retreating French army on the plain of Vittoria, and inflicted upon them the most decisive defeat ever sustained by the French arms since the battle of Blenheim. They were beaten "before the town, in the town, about the town, and out of the town." The slaughter was comparatively inconsiderable, but the moral effect of this victory was overwhelming. "The troops," says General Gazan, the chief of the staff of the French army, "lost all their baggage, all their cannon, all their military chest, all their ammunition, all their papers." All the vast plunder of the peninsula, too, fell into the hands of the victors, and Jourdan's baton, and Joseph's travelling carriage and imperial, filled with prints, drawings, and pictures purloined from the royal galleries, became the trophies of the British general. When the news of this great victory reached England, the prince regent sent to the conqueror the baton of an English field-marshal, in return, as he said, for the staff of Jourdan which Wellington had sent him. The Spanish cortes at the same time created him a duke, and bestowed on him the estate of Soto de Roma in the kingdom of Granada. The rout at Vittoria not only freed the peninsula altogether from the French invaders, but, as Wellington said, "it broke up the armistice at Dresden, and so led to Leipsic and the deliverance of Europe." Pressing on his retreating foes, and giving them no time to rally, Wellington drove them in the utmost confusion to the recesses of the Pyrenees. Meanwhile Napoleon, in great alarm and vexation at the disasters which had overtaken his forces in Spain, had despatched Marshal Soult to the peninsula, with the rank of "lieutenant of the emperor," once more to try his strength against his invincible antagonist. Soult commenced operations with great vigour. Collecting all the troops within reach, he poured them with impetuous valour through the passes of the Pyrenees on the isolated posts of the British. On the 28th of July he fought the sanguinary and unprofitable battle of Sorauren. A succession of combats followed, known by the name of the "Battles of the Pyrenees," in which the allies lost seven thousand and the French thirteen thousand men, and the latter were driven back into their own country, leaving many prisoners, together with the passes in the mountains, in the possession of Lord Wellington. St. Sebastian, after a defence of extraordinary gallantly which cost many lives, was carried by storm on the 31st of August. Wellington next defeated an attempt of the French again to penetrate into Spain at St. Marcial; and on the 7th of October executed a most masterly strategic operation, by crossing the Bidassoa, in the face of the French army posted in a very strong position. On the 31st Pampeluna surrendered, and on the 9th of November Wellington slept for the last time during the war on Spanish ground. Crossing the Nivelle in despite of all the resistance which Soult could make, the British army, which five years before was compelled to take refuge in a corner of Portugal behind the lines of Torres Vedras, having now swept the invaders completely out of the peninsula, bivouacked in uncontested triumph on the soil of France. In the following month it defeated the French in a series of bloody actions under the walls of Bayonne; drove them across the Gave in January, 1814; routed them again at Orthez on the 29th of February; and finally, after a sanguinary struggle, carried Soult's entrenched camp at Toulouse, and compelled him to abandon the town, leaving behind him his wounded, his heavy artillery, and his stores. The tidings of Napoleon's abdication which arrived at this juncture terminated the great peninsular war, in which Britain reaped a rich harvest of glory, and which, in spite of innumerable discouragements and apparently insurmountable obstacles, was carried to a triumphant conclusion by the extraordinary genius of a single man. "Sir Arthur Wellesley originally sailed with a handful of troops on 'an expedition' to Portugal. He returned the commander of such a British army as had never before been seen, and the conqueror in such a war as had never before been maintained. Single-handed, Britain had encountered and defeated those redoubtable legions of France before which continental Europe had hitherto succumbed. She had become a principal in the great European struggle, and by the talents and fortune of her great commander had entitled herself to no second place in the councils of the world." In the course of this memorable contest "Wellington had passed," says M. Maurel, "through all the trials that could be presented by fortune. He had carried on a defensive war, and he had completely succeeded. He had carried on a war of ambuscades and surprisals, and he had also succeeded; he had assumed the offensive, and still he had been successful; he had marched boldly forward without incurring any disaster; and he had conducted long retreats without being broken." He had in succession beaten all the best generals of the emperor—Massena, Ney, Marmont, and Soult; and with only thirty thousand British soldiers under his command he had kept at bay and then defeated in detail the immense armies of Napoleon—swept them out of the peninsula, and finally encamped with his conquering army on the soil of France; achievements far surpassing all that the allied sovereigns had been able to effect with fully a million of troops upon the northern and eastern frontiers, "It was not only his victories and his immense military successes," continues M. Maurel, "that pointed Wellington out to Europe as its champion; he had shown a loftiness of feeling, a simplicity