Wellington in The Peninsula
FROM PORTUGAL TO THE PYRENEES
- Survey of Wellington’s Iberian campaign, through Portugal, Spain and France.
- Key battles studied in depth, also the life of the soldier and background matters.
- The lecturer is the leading expert on battles of the Peninsular War.
- A long but well-paced tour with a lot of driving. Some quite demanding walking on sites. Conventional sight-seeing is left to independent time.
Ascribing the eventual downfall of Napoleon to a single event is a dubious historical exercise, but here goes: his own decision in 1807, when he was at the height of his power, to plug the gap in the blockade which excluded British shipping from continental Europe.
The gap was Portugal, Great Britain’s long-time ally and trading partner. Marching French troops to Portugal through a hitherto submissive Spain provoked the Spanish people into bitter revolt, and Britain, seeing a relatively low-risk way of causing discomfort to France, committed troops to the Iberian Peninsula.
That the British would hang on in there for six years until they swept the French over the Pyrenees and defeated them in France itself was anticipated by no one – not Napoleon, because he was used to quick and decisive victories, nor the British, because there was fierce opposition to the war in Parliament and sustained criticism of the campaign in the country.
Nevertheless, the British under Wellington never lost a major battle, and, aided by Spanish guerillas, succeeded in tying down huge numbers of French troops and infecting Napoleon with his ‘Spanish ulcer’. Wellington developed a range of tactics which amounted to the elixir of success which had eluded Napoleon’s other opponents, and emerged as the only general of the Napoleonic Wars to rival Bonaparte himself for military genius. A master both of battlefield tactics and long-term strategy, he had an extraordinary capacity for logistical and administrative detail and for cool-headedness. And by chipping away for so long without significant reverse, he gave heart to the conquered and cowering capitals elsewhere in Europe.
The War also has a significance for British history beyond its immediate achievements. The prestige of her armies had been at a low ebb after a century with few moments of glory and quite a lot of embarrassments. Indeed, England had not been considered internationally as a significant military power since the loss of French territories in the fifteenth century. The Peninsular War changed all that. Here at last was a saga of sustained success, albeit with some setbacks, and of great deeds of valour, albeit with episodes of barbarity and indiscipline. And, ultimately, there was victory, as has tended to be the case, by and large, ever since.
As a group, the battlefields of the Peninsula constitute the most dramatic and illuminating of the redcoat era, and we see them in the company of the most knowledgeable of the war’s historians, Ian Fletcher. They are spread across an extraordinary variety of terrain and climate, from sun-baked plains to misty mountain passes. This tour will provide vistas of breath-taking beauty, and cities and villages which have scarcely changed in two hundred years.