Script for War Room XXII: 1st French Invasion of Portugal (Patreon)

Phew! This was originally just background for Moore's Retreat to Corunna, but it, er... spiralled somewhat. Probably still worth it to explain what Junot was doing in Lisbon though.

I am a bit behind schedule, but it is at least now written, recorded and cut: the only thing I have left to do is fill in the imagery and maps, which shouldn't be too time consuming (he said, optimistically).

**Welcome back to the War Room, where we are sticking with the Peninsular War. For the next few episodes were going to go over the first British intervention in the Peninsular, starting here with the initial French invasion of Portugal and going through to the arrival of the British army on the 1st of August 1808.

This is going to be a pretty wide-ranging video focused above the tactical. That means that, while there are a few battles- some of which are quite famous- we’re not going to be going into as much detail on them in favour of the campaign or operational level.

Again, my main source is Oman’s History of the Peninsular War. This remains an incredible resource, it’s out of copyright and you can find all seven volumes online.

Why Invade Portugal?

The root cause of French operations in the Iberian Peninsula was Napoleon attempting to enforce his Continental System.

This was a set of economic measures intended to cripple Great Britain. Britain was consistently financing and supporting anyone who resisted French imperial ambitions, but Napoleon had no means of exerting military force on it. The Grande Armee could not cross the English Channel in the face of the Royal Navy, especially after the defeat of the combined French-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805.

So the Emperor turned to economic warfare. After the War of the Fourth Coalition neutralised Prussia as a threat and brought Russia over to the French side as an ally, almost the entire European coastline was under direct or indirect French control. With the bulk of British exports flowing into Europe, Napoleon decreed that all ports on the continent be shut to British trade.

This was somewhat reciprocal- Britain was already blockading French ports- but the Emperor believed that cutting off British trade with Europe would cripple the British economy and force them to come to the negotiating table. The fact that cutting British industry out of Europe’s economy would allow France to fill the resulting vacuum on preferential terms was no doubt also an attractive factor.

The Continental System never really worked though: with control of the seas, Great Britain could just shrug its shoulders and trade with the entire rest of the world, smuggling was endemic and ultimately the economic costs fell on France and her increasingly resentful allies. But before the cracks in the system became apparent there were two holes in it.

First, after the Wars of the Third and Fourth Coalitions, Sweden remained at war with France and presented a route by which British goods could enter the Baltic.

Second, Portugal refused to join the Continental System, allowing British goods to filter into Europe via the Iberian Peninsula.

Russia sought to take advantage of Swedish intransigence by invading and eventually annexing Finland.

Junot’s Invasion

Napoleon, meanwhile, set his sights on Portugal. Returning to Paris at the end of July, 1807, the Emperor quickly began to exert pressure on Portugal in concert with his Spanish ally.

August the 12th saw emissaries of the two countries deliver demands to the Portuguese royal family demanding that they should “leave Lisbon, unless by the first of September the Regent had declared war on England, joined his fleet to that of the allied powers [meaning France and her allies], confiscated all British goods in his harbours, and arrested all British subjects within the bounds of his kingdom.”

These were terms that the Prince Regent was not intended to accept, though that didn’t stop him desperately attempting to placate Napoleon and ultimately ticking most of those boxes.

Given the state of Portugal at the time, this is somewhat understandable. Crippled by corruption and barely 30,000 men strong, the Portuguese Army could not be expected to repel an invasion and while there was a militia that could be called up, it was poorly armed, trained and equipped. They were certainly not likely to prove a match for the victorious French veterans of the Grande Armee. The French and Spanish had already imposed their will on Portugal as recently as 1801 in the War of the Oranges.

That said, Portugal had maintained its independence for centuries against its much larger neighbour Spain for good reasons. Geography was on Portugal’s side. Most of the population was concentrated on the coastal plains- 10% of all Portuguese lived in Lisbon itself- and the frontier region was dominated by sparsely inhabited mountains incapable of supporting passing armies. With the main routes covered by the fortresses of Almeida and Elvas in the north and south respectively and the country being open to supply and support from the sea down its entire length in the west, Portugal had significant defensive potential.

This was realised very effectively by Wellington in the following years, but in 1807, the Portuguese didn’t have the will or the means to resist. This can partially be explained by Napoleon’s intimidating image, but it was also the result of the corrosive effects of the Portuguese ancient regime. The Prince Regent John, acting on behalf of his incapable mother Queen Maria, was at best trying to find an impossible balance between his British allies and French aggression and at worst could not conceive that his position as an absolute monarch was not sacrosanct to someone like Napoleon.

On October 27th, 1807, the Emperor concluded the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Spain setting the groundwork for a joint Franco-Spanish invasion of Portugal. On the surface, this was intended to carve Portugal up into a couple of minor kingdoms and a large chunk that would remain under French control until a general peace prevailed over Europe.

In line with this, Napoleon created the 25,000 strong Army of the Gironde under General Junot and despatched it to the Spanish-Portuguese border. Junot was to concentrate in the area of Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, then march on Lisbon via Almeida and Coimbra, supported by smaller Spanish forces striking from Galicia at Porto in the north and from Badajoz at the fortress of Elvas in the south.

There can be no doubt that Lisbon was the most important objective. It was not only the seat of Portuguese power, but contained half the wealth of the country and the only arsenal of meaningful size. With Lisbon in French control, the Portuguese would not have the means to resist.

On October the 18th, Junot’s force crossed the river Bidassoa that forms the border between France and Spain on the Biscay coast. From there it took twenty five days to march the almost 500km to Salamanca. This was not a particularly fast pace and for a modern reader it might be difficult to square the lack of urgency with the approaching winter: Junot arrived at Salamanca on the 12th of November and faced the prospect of crossing the very difficult mountainous terrain of the Portuguese-Spanish border with winter breathing down his neck.

Part of this seems to have been Napoleon’s ignorance of conditions in the Iberian Peninsula. It’s the first of many times that the Emperor will impose orders from afar that treat Iberia as if it were central Europe.

But a more significant element in Junot’s slow progress was that the Army of the Gironde was gathering intelligence as it passed. In Oman’s words:

“The Spaniards would not have been pleased to know that, by Napoleon’s orders, engineer officers were secretly taking sketches of every fortified place and defile that the army passed, and preparing reports as to the resources of all the towns of Old Castille and Leon.”

It’s no coincidence that Junot’s march to Salamanca covered the same ground that a French army might use to march on Madrid.

The reality was that although the Treaty of Fontainebleau was aimed at Portugal, it clearly also set the conditions for a rapid French conquest of Spain. Napoleon was tiring of his Spanish ally. The main contribution Spain had had to offer Imperial France was its naval strength, but that had been shattered at Trafalgar. Without that, the country had little to offer thanks to its poor governance by King Charles IV and his favourite Godoy.

This was by no means a two-way street: Spain had not profited from its alliance with France and it became obvious that she was looking for a way out. Godoy had in fact begun to position Spain for an exit by issuing a proclamation in anticipation of Napoleon’s defeat in the War of the Fourth Coalition. The Emperor of course prevailed, but did not miss Godoy’s rapidly withdrawn statement.

To Napoleon’s mind, Spain would prove a more effective and trustworthy ally under new management. With this in mind, certain clauses of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, such as the concentration of more French troops across the Pyrenees in case of intervention by the British, take on a more sinister aspect.

Junot Marches to Lisbon

That said, although the prospect of a British response to events in the peninsular was just a fig leaf for Napoleon’s designs on Spain, it did need to be taken into account for the Invasion of Portugal.

This, combined with a crisis at the Spanish court, prompted Napoleon to change Junot’s orders. On the 12th of November he received new instructions to hurry up and reach Lisbon before the Portuguese got their act together or the British could respond. The Royal Navy already had Lisbon under blockade due to the Portuguese declaration of war and the presence of a Russian squadron in the harbour, with control of the sea the British could sail troops up from Gibraltar or south from the British Isles to reinforce Portugal if they so chose.

Napoleon’s means of expediting Junot’s attack was to change his line of advance. The original plan called for him to take his 25,000 men on the traditional invasion route towards Lisbon: past the Portuguese fortress of Almeida, then down over 300km of roads to the capital via Coimbra, passing through the mountains of the Serra da Estrela.

This, the Emperor decided, would take too long not only due to the mountainous terrain but because Almeida would need to be reduced if it offered resistance.

So, he plotted another route. Junot was ordered to head south from Salamanca to Alcantara, then cross the border from there and follow the road to Lisbon that ran down the Tagus valley. This avoided the Portuguese border fortresses and cut the distance by about 100km.

But it had two significant consequences. First, the Spanish had prepared magazines at Salamanca to support Junot’s advance on the original route. By changing the line of advance, the French army was abandoning its own line of supply.

That in itself was not uncommon in Napoleon’s art of war. This was a period where disease, starvation and desertion were all major attritional factors that most armies sought to minimise by tethering themselves to their logistics. But this made them slow, ponderous and predictable. One of the hallmarks of the French was their ability to cut themselves loose and live off the land, trading certainty of supply for a decisive advantage in speed.

So, according to Oman, Napoleon didn’t much care that he was ordering Junot to march away from all the stockpiled food at Salamanca:

“He wrote that the army must take the shortest road at all cost, whatever the difficulty of getting supplies. “I will not have march of the army delayed for a single day,” he added; “20,000 can men feed themselves anywhere, even in a desert.””

This might have been a sensible admonition in central Europe or northern Italy if we excuse the hyperbole, but the second consequence of the new route was that Junot was essentially marching into a desert. Accurate maps of the area were few and far between- even the Portuguese showed themselves to be incredibly ignorant of their own country later in the conflict- so it should be no surprise that what seemed plausible on Napoleon’s maps in Paris was not necessarily so in practice.

The road from Salamanca to Alcantara which Junot would have to travel even before turning west to cross the Portuguese frontier was by all standards terrible for an army to negotiate. There were barely any villages for the soldiers to acquire food. The route wound its way through arid, corrugated terrain. It had started raining in November and the army not only had to content with being soaked in the cold mountain winds but everything little stream they had to cross being turned into a raging torrent.

It took the army five days to make the journey- a much faster pace than their leisurely march from the Bidassoa to Salamanca- and it suffered all the way. By the time Junot reached Alcantara he had had to leave all but six of his guns behind, half of the horses in the army had died and a quarter of his infantry was missing, having abandoned the army to look for food.

The only reason he was able to stick to Napoleon’s timetable and cross into Portugal on the 19th of November was that a small Spanish force had arrived at Alcantara to reinforce him. Appropriating everything of use from his allies, Junot was able to issue a couple of days of rations and replace musket cartridges ruined by the rain.

But when he crossed the frontier, to quote Oman again:

“He found, to his surprise, that there was no road suitable for wheeled traffic along the Tagus valley, but only a poor track running along the foot of the mountains to Castello Branco, the sole Portuguese town in this part of the frontier. The march from Alcantara to Abrantes proved even more trying than that from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara.

It was through a treeless wilderness of grey granite, seamed with countless ravines. The rain continued, the torrents were even fuller than before, the country even more desolate than the Spanish side of the border.

It was only after terrible sufferings that the head of the column reached Abrantes on November 23: the rear trailed in on the 26th. All the guns except four Spanish pieces of horse artillery had fallen behind: the cavalry was practically dismounted. Half the infantry was marauding off the road, or resting dead-beat in the few poor villages it had passed.”

It should go without saying that the slightest Portuguese resistance would have precipitated a disaster. But there wasn’t any. Right until the last moment, the Prince Regent clung to the belief that Napoleon could be appeased. Instead of finding the Portuguese army waiting for him at Abrantes, Junot found a supplicating emissary from the government.

Realising that there was nothing to stop him, Junot scraped together about 1500 men still able to march, organised them into 4 battalions and rushed the remaining 120km to Lisbon.

He arrived on November 30th. The Prince Regent had finally realised his situation and fled the city the day before, along with the royal family and a good portion of the nobility and their households- about 10,000 people in total. Escorted by a joint Anglo-Portuguese naval force, the court sailed to Brazil where it established itself in Rio de Janiero.

What remained of the government offered no resistance to Junot’s entry into the capital. The prince Regent had, in fact, encouraged his people not to resist. Oman reflects the resulting disbelief and outrage amongst the Portuguese people:

“[The French] limped in utterly exhausted, their clothes in rags, and their cartridges so soaked through that they could not have fired a shot had they been attacked. If the mob of Lisbon had fallen on them with sticks and stones, the starving invaders must have been driven out of the city.

But nothing of the kind happened, and Junot was able to install himself as governor of Portugal without having to strike a blow. It was ten days before the last of the stragglers came up from the rear, and even more before the artillery appeared and the cavalry began to remount itself with confiscated horses. Meanwhile, the Portuguese were digesting the fact that they had allowed 1,500 famished, half-armed men to seize their capital.”

Junot In Portugal

Unfortunately for the Portuguese nobody emerged to harness and coordinate the rapidly growing rage against the French. Junot provoked a riot on December 13th by replacing the Portuguese flags flying from public buildings with the French flag, but was able to put it down.

Despite no popular support, Junot could count on what remained of the Portuguese government. These remnants were completely prepared to cooperate- whether out of a lack of imagination, a misguided belief that accommodating the French might moderate their actions or simply because they were prepared to cling onto their positions at any cost.

This gave Junot the ability to exploit the existing apparatus of government for the advantage of the French occupation, rather than being forced to build a replacement administration.

He first used this to eliminate the only real threat to his small force: the Portuguese Army. This may have remained supine throughout the entire invasion, but despite its many shortcomings it still represented an armed and organised base that could be exploited by any kind of Portuguese resistance.

So Junot did away it. The most useful part of the army, 6-7 thousand men according to Oman, was marched out of the country to join the Imperial Army as the Portuguese Legion. Many of them deserted as they crossed the Peninsular in the following months, but some of them fought in the first Siege of Saragossa in 1808, before the Legion ended up garrisoned in the Baltic and ultimately took part in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

The rest of the army, those elements that Junot considered to have little to no military value, were simply disbanded and the recruitment apparatus of the regimental cadres dissolved.

Junot’s second major act was to try and fulfil new orders from the Emperor. Napoleon decreed that all the property of the Portuguese who had fled to Brazil be seized and that the country as a whole had to pay a fine to France of 100 million francs.

This could really only ramp up the hatred of the Portuguese for their occupiers. To begin with, there probably wasn’t 100 million francs worth of Portuguese currency still in the country. Much of it had been taken to Brazil in the evacuation and what remained was either well-hidden or distributed in tiny sums across the whole population.

Worse, Junot used French troops to attempt to forcibly collect his requisitions and heavy taxes, leading to a steady stream of violent incidents and military executions. Inevitably, something would eventually break and precipitate armed Portuguese resistance.

Meanwhile, in Spain

The eventually trigger for an uprising in Portugal actually came from events across the border in Spain. Even before Junot had reached Lisbon, Napoleon had already pushed another 25,000 men across the Pyrenees under General Dupont on November the 22nd. On the 8th of January a third Corps led by Marshal Moncey entered Spain with a strength of 30,000.

This put almost 60,000 French troops on the road to Madrid without meeting conditions set by the Treaty of Fontainebleau- which is to say that the British had not intervened and that the Spanish had not been informed.

More alarmingly, other French columns began to appear in areas where they could not conceivably be intended to support Junot’s force in Portugal. On the 10th of February, General Duhesme led 14,000 men in Catalonia, at the other end of the Pyrenees and approached Barcelona.

Naturally this was disconcerting for the Spanish court, but like the Portuguese, they wasted their efforts in trying to placate Napoleon.

On the 16th of February, French troops started seizing the Spanish frontier fortresses by a mixture of speed, surprise and bluff. Oman has some great examples:

At Pamepeluna, French troops quartered in the lower town pretended to be engaged in a snowball fight outside the gates of the Spanish-held citadel before suddenly rushing the sentries, seizing the gatehouse and then letting in a French battalion that was drilling nearby.

In Barcelona on the 29th, the French division marched through the city in review and simply wheeled off their route through the gate of the city fortress and occupied it thanks to the paralysing surprise of the garrison.

On March the 5th, San Sebastian, on the Atlantic coast, surrendered to a French force threatening a storm, the governor of the fortress being under orders from Madrid not to resist. This is particularly galling given that that fortress successfully clung on for a whole month under siege by the British in 1813.

Oman summarises by writing:

“It would be hard, if not impossible, to find in the whole of modern history any incident approaching the cynical effrontery and mean cunning, to these first hostile acts of the French on the territory of their allies.”

Worse, these seizures took place over the course of several weeks. The Spanish court had plenty of time to grapple with the ever increasing obviousness of what was going on, but like the Portuguese a few months earlier, they never made the slightest effort at armed resistance.

On March the 13th, the French Marshal Murat arrived at Burgos as the “Lieutenant of the Emperor”. With yet another corps crossing the border, he had command of about 100,000 troops in Spain, some of whom were already approaching Madrid.

This was finally too much. Godoy evacuated the Spanish court, along with the garrison of Madrid to Aranjuez. However, at this point the soap opera that was Spanish royal politics came to a head.

To cut a very long and complicated story short, when Godoy tried to move the King and Queen on from Aranjuez he precipitated a mob, which though he was trying to abduct them. The angry crowd- including many soldiers from the local garrison- surrounded the royal palace where King Charles IV, terrified he was going to lynched, was convinced to abdicate in favour of his more popular son Ferdinand.

So Ferdinand became Ferdinand the VII, had Godoy arrested, the mob was satisfied and dispersed, but then Ferdinand, being well intentioned but not the sharpest spoon in the drawer, actually went back to Madrid in the belief that if he could only prove himself a valuable ally of Napoleon the French would leave.

In the meantime, Murat had arrived and occupied the capital with 20,000 men and there was a bizarre couple of weeks during which Ferdinand sat in Madrid writing doting letters off to Napoleon, surrounded by increasing numbers of French troops who refused to even acknowledge his accession.

Eventually Ferdinand travelled to Bayonne to meet the Emperor in person. Arriving there on April the 20th, Napoleon demanded that Ferdinand abdicate. When Ferdinand refused, he brought in his father King Charles IV, who he’d had transported up from Madrid with the Queen and Godoy. Charles declared that his own abdication was null and void because it had taken place under duress and demanded that his son hand back the crown.

To his credit, Ferdinand still refused but Napoleon finally broke him down by threatening him with execution. SO, on the 7th of May, Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his father, only for Napoleon to then reveal that Charles IV had already signed a treaty which, quote:

“Resigned all his rights to the throne of Spain and the Indies to the Emperor Napoleon, the only person who in the present state of affairs can re-establish order.”

Thus Napoleon secured the crown of Spain. He promptly handed this to his brother Joseph and the Spanish royal family was confined to decadent imprisonment in France.

All was not well in Spain though: the need to ‘re-establish order’ was a reference to events on the 2nd of May.

Spanish Insurrection

This was the famous Dos de Mayo uprising in Madrid. Murat was attempting to transfer more members of the Royal Family to Bayonne- and effective French captivity- when a crowd sought to prevent the movement. French troops opened fire and sparked off running street-fights between the outnumbered French and the city’s inhabitants.

The French brutally put down the rebellion, regaining control of the city and enacting punishment. In Murat’s words:

“The population of Madrid, led astray, has given itself to revolt and murder. French blood has flowed. It demands vengeance. All those arrested in the uprising, arms in hand, will be shot.”

But the Dos de Mayo precipitated a general uprising across Spain that rapidly coalesced into armed unconventional and later conventional resistance. Although the central government was found wanting, the Spanish provinces took matters into their own hands. Provincial juntas formed, ousting or murdering suspected traitors and French sympathisers, raising levies and forming armies. Significantly, they also started courting support from Great Britain.

Napoleon had planned, hoped for and almost pulled off a fait accompli occupation… now he would be forced to take the gloves off and conquer Spain in the open.

For the time being though, French forces in north-east Spain were relatively secure thanks to their sheer numbers and the slow build-up and dispersed nature of the Spanish provincials.

The story in Portugal was another matter entirely.

Portugal Insurrection

Junot remained in Lisbon in command of the 26,500 strong French occupation force- whose losses had been made good by the arrival of a draft from France- and two of the three Spanish divisions that had participated in the invasion. The 7,000 men of Caraffa’s division were billeted in the Tagus valley near Lisbon and 6,000 men in the north under Belesta garrisoned the city of Porto.

The switch of the Spanish from allies to adversaries rapidly made Junot’s position precarious. At a stroke, all links with the French army in Spain were lost.

His last orders from the Emperor- written before the true emergence of the crisis- had been to reach out east from Almeida and Elvas to establish communication with the French armies advancing from Madrid. Napoleon’s orders were naturally well out of date by the time Junot received them. There were no French forces anywhere near Portugal. Both Loisson in the north and General Avril despatched with a brigade in the south, turned back after finding only Spanish troops prepared to resist them near the border.

Belesta’s division was recalled by the Galician Junta on the 6th of June: Belesta taking the French governor of Porto with him as a prisoner and encouraging the people of the city to resist the French. At a stroke, Junot lost control over northern Portugal except the fortress of Almeida, which was held by Loisson’s division of 7000 men.

Learning of events in Porto when he returned to Almeida, Loisson set out to re-establish control with a couple of battalions and some artillery, but when he realised the danger posed to his small force by Portuguese insurgents ambushing him in the valleys, he fell back on his base.

Junot heard of the crisis in the north on the 9th and immediately moved to neutralise Caraffa’s division before it could follow Belesta’s example. Caraffa himself was summoned to meet Junot and arrested on the spot, almost all of his men scattered along the Tagus found themselves isolated, surrounded and disarmed by French troops before being imprisoned on pontoons in Lisbon’s harbour that would be sunk at the first sign of trouble.

At a stroke, Junot thus dealt with the most immediate threat. The Portuguese themselves were less of a concern: the people could rise up as much as they liked, but Junot had already gutted the Portuguese army and militia, the most capable potential leaders had fled to Brazil and the country’s only arsenal of note was under French control in Lisbon.

A provisional government was formed up in Porto on June 18th, but although it would ultimately raise about 20,000 men, they only had muskets for 5000. The remaining three quarters of the force were armed with pikes and civilian firearms.

This force could barely threaten the concentrated French army, but Junot had too small a force to exert control over the entire country without splitting into hundreds of tiny, vulnerable detachments. Not only that, but he had to factor in the possibility of Spanish attack across the frontier and the ever-present threat of the British landing anywhere along the long coast.

Although he considered abandoning Portugal and retreating through Spain, Junot ultimately settled on maintaining his position at Lisbon and retaining control over the fortresses of Almeida and Elvas. Even coordinating this was difficult: Foy, one of the officers in the French force and a later historian, claims that they sent 20 messengers out from Lisbon to deliver Loisson his orders but only one got through. Luckily for Junot, many of the exposed French detachments had already come to the conclusion that they were in a dangerous position and had started to fall back on the capital under their own initiative.

By mid July, according to Oman,

“Junot’s Army […] held nothing outside the narrow quadrangle of which Setuval, Peniche, Abrantes and Lisbon form the four points. But within that limited space there were now 24,000 good troops, concentrated and ready to strike at the first insurrectionary force that might press in on them.”

The Portuguese did indeed press on this perimeter, but were in no condition to mount offensive operations. After a couple of weeks, Junot decided to strike out to the east and re-establish communications with the fortress of Elvas. Nothing had come through from the French garrison there and it lay on the route that Junot would have to take if he needed to evacuate.

As such, he despatched Loisson to clear the way with 7,000 men. This took him through the town of Evora, now seat of Portuguese junta of Almetejo, where on the 29th of July he found a Portuguese force, along with some Spanish units in support, prepared to resist.

Unfortunately for the Portuguese, they could only dispose of a battalion and a half of properly equipped infantry and most of the 3000 men they deployed were armed with pikes. Loisson broke them at the first charge, then French troops surged over the old medieval walls of Evora and ruthlessly sacked it.

Loisson was soon relieving the siege of Elvas, which had been invested by Portuguese insurgents, but found himself recalled by Junot.

Coming ashore at Mondego Bay, only about 150km north of Lisbon, were the first troops of a British expeditionary force. This posed a huge threat to the French position and Junot understood that he was going to have to fight. Remaining in Lisbon was a sure way to lose what little freedom of action he had, he had to go out and defeat the British to stop them from penning him up inside the city.

For that, he needed Loisson and his men to return to the army as fast as they could.

Conclusion

But that’s going to have to wait for the next episode.

This video has very much been scene-setting for the arrival of Wellesley, but the ability of the French to take advantage of the unpreparedness and disbelief of their opponents the Portuguese and their own allies the Spanish is fascinating.

It’s easy to mock to ancient regimes of Spain and Portugal, and to some extent they do deserve mockery, but it’s not practical to materialise both the will to fight and the means to do so out of thin air. The problems of both governments were deep-running, well entrenched and by the time Napoleon’s intentions became apparent there were no quick fixes.

Despite that, both the Portuguese and Spanish would go on to fight back against the French. In the next episode we’re going to concentrate on the British arrival in Portugal, Wellesley’s battles at Rolica and Vimiero and the very surprising manner in which the French left Portugal.

Thanks for watching, if you’d like to support the channel and see these videos early you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.