Script for War Room XXIIIL British Intervention in Portugal (Patreon)

Welcome back to the War Room where we are continuing our look at the first French, or more accurately Hispano-French invasion of Portugal. Like last time, we’re focused above the tactical so while there are a couple of battles in this one they’re not getting the deep dive, we’re looking at operational-strategic stuff.

In the last episode we saw how the French and Spanish conspired to annex Portugal before Napoleon stabbed his Spanish allies in the back and made to occupy the entire Iberian Peninsula.

With the Franco-Spanish alliance now in tatters, the French occupation army in Lisbon under General Junot was cut off and, faced with blossoming resistance from the Portuguese, forced to collapse back on the capital. We left Junot on August the 1st, 1808, as the first British troops began landing in Portugal at Mondego Bay.

The Decision to Intervene

First and foremost, this was an expression of sea-power. With the Royal Navy dominant at sea, blockading the continent and penning up in port the naval vessels of Napoleon and his allies, the British were both secure from French invasion and had maritime freedom of manoeuvre.

This established Great Britain firmly in her role as Napoleon’s nemesis. The Emperor could- and did- march on and conquer his continental opponents, but he was unable to subdue the British or counter their ability to fund and support his enemies. Time and again, France beat down the Austrians, the Prussians and the Russians. Time and again, Britain bankrolled their recoveries and formed yet another coalition.

But Britain’s ability to intervene more directly was limited. Naval dominance and control of the sea are key enablers, but only ever enablers. Land is the decisive domain: the Royal Navy alone could not defeat Napoleon.

But with half the population of France and the need to sustain military commitments across the world from Canada to the Caribbean and India to Ireland, the British army simply couldn’t generate the manpower necessary to challenge Imperial France. Independent British action on the continent could only end in disaster, so the British strategy was to find and support continental allies who would contribute the vast majority of the troops needed.

By 1808, the British had plenty of experience of this, much of which had ended in embarrassing failure. In 1799 the Walcheren Expedition bogged down in the swampy lowlands of the Scheldt estuary thanks to a combination of lethargic leadership and disease. In 1806, about 5000 men landed in southern Italy, aiming to support resistance by Calabrian rebels. Although they stalled French progress and scored a victory at the Battle of Maida, the British force was too small to contest the arrival of Imperial reinforcements and retreated to Sicily. Finally, from 1806-07 British troops engaged in a misguided attempt to seize the Viceroyalty of the River Plate from the Spanish empire, which ended in a disastrous attempt to streetfight their way through Buenos Aires.

None of these adventures had deterred the British: in the worlds of Colonel Nick Lipscombe: “[they] had left a bitter taste and a yearning to notch up a military and foreign policy success.” In July 1808 when the first Spanish delegations began to arrive in London to lobby for assistance against the French, there was already a division of 10,000 men under Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore in the Baltic unsuccessfully seeking to cooperate with the Swedes and another 9,000 men concentrated in southern Ireland under Lieutenant General Arthur Wellesley in preparation to renew operations in South America. On top of these forces, several brigades were stationed in at Harwich and Ramsgate in southern England where they had been gathered for a cancelled raid on French invasion barges at Boulogne and there were detachments already present in the Mediterranean, principally at Gibraltar and near Cadiz.

So the Spanish were somewhat lucky that Britain was not only keen to come to their assistance, but actually had a significant force of about 40,000 men that, with the spectre of a cross-Channel invasion having receded, it was free to commit.

Despite this, the Spanish were not interesting in direct military support. According to Oman:

“Both the [Asturian and Galician Juntas] had been unwise enough to believe that the national rising would suffice to expel the French- whose numbers they much underrated- from Spain. While empowering their envoys to ask for money, arms, and stores, they had ordered them to decline the offer of an auxiliary force. They requested that all available British troops might be directed on Portugal, in order to rouse an insurrection in that country (which was still quiet when they arrived in London), and to prevent the troops of Junot from being employed against the rear of the army of General Blake.”

This was entirely in line with British desires to return to continent and strike a blow against Napoleon. This fact that Spanish could put significant forces into the field and that those forces would be in between the French and British operations at the other end of the peninsular no doubt appealed.

Cork-Corunna-Oporto-Mondego Bay

The first British force to set out was the expedition mustered in Ireland for service in South America. This was under the command of Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington but then a Lieutenant General, who left Cork on July 12th with orders to intervene in Portugal.

Wellesley did so in the belief that he was to command the British army on the peninsula, but despite returning from India as the most experienced and competent general officer available except perhaps for Sir John Moore who was still in the Baltic, this was not the case. As Oman describes:

“There were many respectable lieutenant-generals of enormous seniority and powerful connexions who were eager for foreign service. None of them had Wellesley’s experience of war on a large scale, or had ever moved 40,000 men on the field: but this counted for little at headquarters.”

As such, Wellesley was superseded by not one but three other officers: the expedition as a whole would be commanded by Sir Hew Dalrymple, his second in command would be Sir Harry Burrard and as Sir John Moore was senior to Wellesley, he would act as third in command. But the letters informing Wellesley of these arrangements only arrived in Cork three days after he had left and it would be some time before they caught up to him.

Travelling ahead of his transports in the brig Crocodile, Wellesley arrived at the port of Corunna on July 20th, to get up to date news of events in the peninsula from the Spanish. Corunna is an important entry point into north-west Spain, not far from the Royal Dockyards and fortress at Ferrol, and both locations were starting to receive money, arms and equipment sent by the British.

The news that Wellesley received was mixed. The French had only recently defeated two Spanish forces in detail at the Battle of Medina de Rio, although the Spanish downplayed their losses and the severity of the consequences. Likewise, reports from elsewhere in Spain that the French were being driven out and great victories being won painted an entirely inaccurate, overly optimistic picture of the situation.

That said, Wellesley was not immediately concerned with events in Spain: the Spanish still did not want British assistance in the field, his orders to intervene in Portugal remained unchanged. He was informed about the Portuguese uprising and set out to Oporto to coordinate with the Supreme Junta newly established in Oporto.

On arrival there, Wellesley learned that the Portuguese were very eager for British support. Although the French had fallen back on Lisbon and the Portuguese effectively controlled much of the country, they only had about 6,500 men under arms. 1,500 of these were held back to garrison Oporto, the remaining 5,000 were stationed at Coimbra under Bernadino Friere.

Junot, meanwhile, was believed to have 18,000 men in and around Lisbon- an underestimate of about 6,000- and the Portuguese clearly could not defeat them alone. They needed more muskets and equipment to outfit the thousands of militia they had available and considerable time to bring their reconstituting army up to something approaching basic military competence.

That would be a longer term effort, for now Wellesley was intent on getting his own troops ashore.

In consultation with the Portuguese and Admiral Cotton, who was in command of the Royal Navy off the Portuguese coast, Wellesley had several options for landing his 9000 men.

Oporto itself had extensive harbour infrastructure and represented perhaps the safest option, but it was 200km from Lisbon as the crow flies. The army was not well prepared to supply itself- the attitude from the War Office being that logistics could be easily improvised on the ground- and even though they would be marching through friendly country, Wellesley was well aware of the time and attrition costs of travelling long distances by land.

By contrast, the most dangerous choice would be to disembark close to Lisbon. Attempting to storm the capital directly was suicide thanks to the coastal defences and the rocky Atlantic coast left few options in close proximity. The best location was at Peniche, but this was not only overlooked by a castle controlled by the French, but vulnerable to a rapid concentration by Junot.

It didn’t take long for Wellesley to settle on a middle option. Mondego Bay was halfway between Oporto and Lisbon and although it lacked extensive facilities and was exposed to the Atlantic, it was militarily secure. The nearby fort of Figuera had been seized by the Portuguese and garrisoned with Royal Marines and the Portuguese field force was nearby at Coimbra.

Here we get a fantastic contrast between the experiences of Wellesley and Junot. Thanks to British seapower, Wellesley had significant flexibility in his approach to the campaign. He was certainly restricted to some extent by the terrain and maritime transport was always at the mercy of the weather, but those factors were nothing compared to the struggles that Junot had to contend with crossing the mountainous Spanish-Portuguese border region.

Landings

So the British began to land at Mondego Bay on the 1st of August. Although several men were lost disembarking in the violent surf, the army as a whole was in high spirits. News had reached them of the great Spanish victory at Baylen on the 19th of July: the first time a French Imperial army had been defeated in the field.

Wellesley, however, was less enthused. Not only because he was by nature notably taciturn, but because the orders informing him he was to be superseded had finally caught up with him. At a stroke, he dropped from commanding the army to being fourth in line for that position, something that inevitably rankled given his appreciation of his own military competence relative to Dalrymple and Burrard.

To quote Oman again:

“Many men would have resigned under such a blow, and Wellesley with his unbounded ambition, his strong sense of his deserts, and his well-marked tendency to take offence, must have been boiling over with suppressed indignation. But he felt that to ask to be recalled, because he had been degraded from a commander-in-chief to a mere general of division, would be an unsoldierly act. To Castlereagh [who was the British Secretary for War and one of Wellesley’s allies in government] he merely wrote that “whether he was to command the army or quit it, he would do his best to ensure its success, and would not hurry operations one moment in order to acquire credit before the arrival of his superiors.””

There was certainly plenty of work for him to throw himself into. The first thing to do before the army could set out was to provide for its supply. Despite its critical importance, formal organisation for this was only just starting to develop in the British army. Wellesley had at his disposal two troops of the Irish Wagon Train- later to become the Royal Wagon Corps- entirely because he had insisted they join the expeditionary force.

Along with 500 mules and 300 bullock-carts variously send down from Oporto or requisitioned locally, he was only satisfied with his logistical arrangements by the 9th of August. In this time, another 4,000 men had arrived from Andalusia under General Spencer, bringing Wellesley’s total force to 13,000.

In theory, this could combine with the Portuguese under Friere for a total of 18,000 men, but the Portuguese commander proved unwilling to cooperate.

Leira-Rolica

They advanced together to Leiria, at which point the road to Lisbon split between a coastal route and one running inland through the town of Santarem. Here, Wellesley intended to remain by the coast in order to maintain contact with the fleet, his supporting transports and to be in position to rendezvous with future reinforcements.

Here, Friere disagreed and became remarkably obtuse- refusing to continue, appropriating all the rations stockpiled in Leiria for British use and then bizarrely insisting that he would only continue if the British took it upon themselves to supply him. Exactly why is unclear- Oman suggests he either wanted to retain his independent command or was looking for an excuse to avoid bringing his poorly trained levies into battle with the French.

Despite this, Wellesley did manage to secure maybe 2000 Portuguese troops from Fiere and continued south, learning on the 14th that he was approaching his first meeting with the French.

Junot had learnt of Wellesley’s arrival soon after he landed at Mondego Bay, recalling Loisson’s division from its expedition to Elvas in order to concentrate his army. In the meantime, he sent General Delaborde north with about 5000 men to screen the concentration: Delaborde had orders to observe the British, contain them if possible and be ready to rendezvous with Loisson when he arrived from east.

Delaborde sent 6 companies to reinforce the garrison at Peniche, presumably to help secure his seaward flank against the possibility of more British landings, and determined to make a stand in order to force Wellesley to reveal his strength.

For his part, Wellesley moved forward cautiously, driving in a French outpost in front of Obidos on the 15th. Following up and finding Delaborde drawn up on an isolated hilltop near the village of Rolica the next day, Wellesley saw an opportunity to destroy him through a double envelopment.

He sent two British brigades out on his left and the Portuguese on his right, retaining his remaining four brigades in the centre to fix the French in place. As the British closed in though, Delaborde executed a pre-planned disengagement, slipping out of Wellesley’s grasp and occupying a new position on the hills near Columberia 1 ½ km to his rear.

This essentially wasted the morning of the 16th, forcing Wellesley to pause to reorganise before pressing on. By now, Delaborde had surely had ample opportunity to gauge the strength of the British army ahead of him and, with no news of Loisson’s approach, certainly appears to have taken the risk of giving battle again instead of keeping his distance.

Wellesley made to repeat the morning’s manoeuvre, sending the same forces out to the flanks again, but elements of his fixing force in the centre strayed too close to the French in the wooded defiles of the hills and not only ended up attacking piecemeal, but earlier than Wellesley had intended.

The result was some fierce fighting on the slopes, but inevitably the British pressure and threat of envelopment became too great and Delaborde again disengaged. This was a much more strenuous process than earlier in day, with the French bounding backwards by battalions, but they eventually got away.

To sum up with Oman’s commentary:

“Delaborde had fought a most admirable rearguard action, holding on to the last moment, and escaping by his prompt manoeuvres the very serious risk of being enveloped and captured by the forces of the English, who outnumbered fourfold. But he had lost 600 men and three guns, while his assailants had only suffered to the extent of 474 killed, wounded and prisoners.”

Vimeiro

While the Battle of Rolica was being fought, Loisson was still moving up to meet with Delaborde. He was actually only 20km away at Cercal and Wellesley had an opportunity to advance between Loisson’s division and the main French force around Lisbon. This would have cut them off and exposed them to the risk of defeat in detail, but the British instead marched to the west.

Wellesley had received word that reinforcements were offshore. The two brigades from Harwich and Ramsgate had arrived, totalling another 4000 men. The nearest suitable landing point was Porto Novo, about 20km south-west of Rolica, and Wellesley proceeded to the village of Vimeiro and rendezvous with his reinforcements there, bypassing the French garrison at Perniche in the process.

Meanwhile, Junot was coming up from Lisbon to join Loisson at Cercal. He had left 6,500 men to hold down the capital, guard the imprisoned Spaniards of Caraffa’s Division and man the harbour defences against a possible seaborne descent by the British.

Unsure of Wellesley’s movements after Rolica, Junot returned south to Torres Vedras after collecting Loisson’s Division, arriving there on the 18th. Delaborde, in the meantime, had retreated all the way to Montechique, about 20km past Torres Vedras in the direction of Lisbon, and it was only by the 20th that Junot’s army was concentrated. All in all, the French had 10,300 infantry, 2000 cavalry and 23 guns.

By then, Junot had learned that Wellesley had stopped at Vimeiro. This was only about 10km away from Torres Vedras and he resolved to attack as soon as possible, before any more British troops arrived by sea.

The French set out on the night of the 20th and were approaching Wellesley’s position at Vimeiro by dawn the next day, unaware that their opponent had already been reinforced.

The two brigades had arrived on the 19th and 20th respectively, bringing British strength up to about 16,000 infantry, plus the 2,000 Portuguese, about 500 cavalry and 18 guns.

Also present with the convoy though was Lieutenant General Sir Harry Burrard, on board the sloop Brazen. He superseded Wellesley as army commander, so Wellesley took a boat out to meet him, fill him in as to the details of the army and the campaign so far and to receive orders from his new boss.

To quote Oman:

“Burrard heard him out, and then placed a strong embargo on any further offensive movement. He had learnt that Sir John Moore, with the division from the Baltic, was now off the Portuguese coast, and was resolved not to stir till those troops should have been landed. Being, as it seems, a leisurely sort of man, he resolved to sleep on board his ship for one night more, and to come ashore next morning…”

That night, Wellesley’s picket line detected the approaching French and the army was in its positions and stood to arms an hour before dawn.

The Battle

The village of Vimeiro sits in a valley running through ridgeline running roughly south-west to north-east, presenting three broad areas: the village itself, the western section of ridge and the eastern section.

Judging the most likely direction of French attack to be from the south, Wellesley had deployed 5 brigades on the Western Ridge, leaving two to garrison Vimeiro itself and his final British brigade in reserve behind the village along with the Portuguese.

Having stopped to rest his troops and let them have breakfast, Junot’s army marched into view from the direction of Torres Vedras at about 9 o’clock. Contrary to expectations, it didn’t angle towards the British, but kept travelling north to the east.

Junot, after what Oman describes as a perfunctory reconnaissance, intended to attack Vimeiro with three brigades while sending one on a flank attack to take the Eastern Ridge and turn the British flank.

Wellesley, up on the high ground, quickly grasped Junot’s plan. Confident that the French were not going to attack the Western Ridge, he took all but one of his brigades from that flank and transferred them across to the Eastern Ridge.

The French flanking effort, having to take the longer exterior lines around instead of through the position, would take much longer to reach the ridge than the British working on interior lines, and the redeployment was, for the most part, obscured from French view behind the ridges.

The brigades did have to cross the valley between them though, which allowed Junot to catch sight of them. Suddenly worried about his lone flanking brigade, he detached another brigade from his main effort to reinforce them.

This left him with only two brigades to attack Vimeiro. Despite several attempts, the French columns were repeatedly mauled and thrown back as the British exploited the reverse slopes to deliver sudden, close range volleys that they followed up with bayonet charges. Junot tried to keep the pressure up by committing his reserve of grenadier battalions, but these met the same fate.

His intention had been to synchronise this attack with his flanking effort, but the two brigades he had sent off to his right ended up attacking individually after the fighting down at Vimeiro had already culminated and were also driven back with heavy loss.

The French were unquestionably defeated: in simple terms, Junot had not only attacked a larger opponent in a strong position with reverse slopes and interior lines, but split his force in the process.

The British had suffered 720 casualties against maybe 2000 or more French, but although they were in a prime position to exploit their victory to the hilt and descend onto the shattered French force before it could re-impose order and withdraw, they did not.

Again, Oman sums it up:

“…while the French were striving to rally and to form a new front, the leaden hand of Sir Harry Burrard was laid upon the British army. That leisurely person had only landed on the morning of the twenty-first, and the battle was in full progress before he rode up from the beach to Vimeiro. He had the grace not to interfere with the movements of troops which Wellesley had already ordered but when the victory was won, and his subordinate rode up to him crying “Sir Harry, now is your time to advance, the enemy is completely beaten, and we shall be in Lisbon in three days,” he refused to listen. The army, he said, had done enough for one day, and he intended to wait for the arrival of Sir John Moore and the division from the Baltic before making any further move.”

Burrard was evidently worried that the British brigades were widely dispersed and would become vulnerable to an as yet unseen French reserve if they gave chase. Needless to say, Wellesley was as unhappy about this as Junot was surprised.

The French successfully disengaged and headed back to towards Torres Vedras.

The Convention of Cintra

The day after the battle, Sir Hew Dalrymple arrived and superseded Burrard as the army commander. But when presented with his two subordinates’ competing opinions on the question of pursuit, he sided with Burrard.

As to what to do next, Wellesley’s intended plan of campaign had been to send the imminently arriving 10,000 men from the Baltic to Santarem to cut off Junot’s escape, then to bypass Torres Vedras and rush down to get between them and Lisbon, leaving the French with no choice but to surrender or try and cut their way out against a superior opponent and face the prospect of pursuit through the mountains they had suffered through when they invaded.

Dalrymple instead elected to disembark Moore’s Division at Vimeiro, concentrate the entire army and march on Torres Vedras, a move which would have given Junot the time he needed to recover from the battle, fall back on Lisbon and prepare for a lengthy siege.

This was not, however, Junot’s intention. While Dalrymple, Burrard and Wellesley were arguing about what to do next, the surviving French generals were holding their own council of war.

Believing their force was not in a state to fight another battle, they believed they had three options open to them: fall back to screen Lisbon; evacuate the city, cross the Tagus River and try to escape to the east; or negotiate.

The first two options were quickly discounted: trying to hold on to Lisbon would see them trapped in the city with no prospect of relief and having learnt of the French evacuation of Madrid, the nearest friendly troops they could fall back on to the east were hundreds of kilometres away.

So on the 22nd of August, Junot despatched his cavalry commander Kellerman to Vimeiro with powers to treat and the broad brief of offering to surrender the city of Lisbon in exchange for the safe passage home of the French army.

When he arrived, Kellerman was surprised to find himself talking to Dalrymple instead of Wellesley, who proved to be not only amenable to talks but such a poor negotiator that Kellerman was rapidly able to grasp his over-abundance of caution and take advantage of it.

That said, the prospect of avoiding a long and costly siege of Lisbon was suitably enticing. It made complete military sense to take the French offer. Even Wellesley agreed, now that it was too late to capitalise on his victory at Vimeiro, and Kellerman was informed that they would agree to an immediate suspension of hostilities for 2 days and negotiate the exact details of the French evacuation.

 The British and French hammered out the details over the next few days, signing on the 30th of August what became known as the Convention of Cintra. In short, the French would hand over control of Lisbon and the Portuguese fortresses of Elvas and Almeida to the British and in return, the British would ship them back to France.

Portugal was thus very quickly liberated from French occupation only a month after the British arrived.

Politically, however, this military expediency had significant consequences. Most importantly, the Portuguese were rightfully incensed that they had not been included in the negotiations and expressed their indignation in London via their representatives there, playing up the leniency of the agreement on the French.

There was also a great deal of friction with the border fortresses, not least because the French garrisons there were under siege by Portuguese and Spanish forces without any British troops ever having come anywhere near; but most of all because when they were evacuating Lisbon the French sought to take with them anything that wasn’t nailed down.

For instance, under the convention Junot was permitted to despatch a single officer to France in advance of the evacuation in order to inform the Emperor and prepare their arrival. Junot selected his aide-de-camp Lagrave, who in Oman’s words:

“… took with him for his general’s private profit the most valuable set of books in the Royal Library of Lisbon, fourteen volumes of a manuscript Bible of the fifteenth century, illustrated with miniatures by the best Florentine artists- a gift from King Emanuel to one of the Renaissance popes. Junot’s widow afterwards sold it to the French government for 85,000 francs.”

This kind of barefaced looting was not restricted to the officers and, despite efforts to restrict what the French could take away with them, they made off with considerable amounts of Portuguese money, goods and property.

By the final stages of the embarkation, the remaining French had to be escorted by British soldiers in order to ensure the increasingly angry citizenry of Lisbon didn’t massacre them.

But the French did leave and the Portuguese disbanded their regional Juntas and re-established their regency.

Future British Operations

While the Convention was being negotiated and carried out, Dalrymple was essentially content restricting his activity to administrative minutiae. There was certainly plenty of work to do maintaining the British Army in Portugal and coordinating with the reconstructing Portuguese government, but there was a broader strategic need to think ahead to the next phase of the conflict.

Wellesley, unable to stand Dalrymple’s passivity or be fobbed off with a liaison post to the Spanish, asked for and received permission to return the Britain.

He left Portugal on 20th September and put into Plymouth on the 4th of October, to find that Dalrymple and Burrard had been recalled to London. That left Sir John Moore in command of the army, in whom Wellesley had total confidence.

Unfortunately, the reason for the recall of his two superiors was that news of the Convention of Cintra had not gone down well with the British public. There was to be a Court of Inquiry and being one of the signatories to the treaty, Wellesley was lumped together with Dalrymple and Burrard and found himself firmly in its sights.

Meanwhile, the strategic situation in Peninsular was relatively stable. The British army under Moore remained at Lisbon and the Spanish, buoyed up by their victory at Baylen, seemed to have the French penned in north-eastern Spain and were busy concocting grandiose plans to drive them out completely.

Unfortunately for the Spanish, the French foothold was about to be reinforced by the emperor himself and as much of the Grande Armee as he could spare. Come November, there would be 280,000 French soldiers bearing down on their former ally.

That second French invasion is what we’re going to cover in the next episode, along with how Moore and his comparatively tiny British army managed to scupper Napoleon’s plans.

Hope you all enjoyed this video and found it interesting, if you’d like to watch these a week early and support the channel 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.