IBERIA WON - Terence McMahon Hughes

Of all the great achievements which make up the sum of British glory, the Peninsular War and its results form one of the grandest, brightest, and most unimpeachable. These gigantic efforts were made in the holy cause of Freedom; they were disinterested in a high and unparalleled degree; their success was uniform, brilliant, and startling; and their guerdon was the liberation and advancement of mankind.

For six years England had constantly employed in the Spanish Peninsula from thirty to seventy thousand of her troops, who besides sustaining combats innumerable, took four great fortresses, attacked or defended in ten important sieges, and were decisively victorious in nineteen pitched battles, killing, wounding, or making prisoners, two hundred thousand of the enemy. She liberally subsidized Spain and Portugal, and maintained the troops of both countries, regular and irregular, with supplies of ammunition, clothing, and arms, while upon her own military operations she expended upwards of one hundred millions sterling. Twice she expelled the French from Portugal, and finally drove them from Spain besides, surmounting and winning step by step the terrific bulwark of the Pyrenees. With her naval squadrons she repeatedly harassed the Invader by well-combined descents upon the coasts, and rescued or preserved Lisbon and Cadiz, Alicante and Carthagena.[2] Her land forces tracked the enemy from Vimieiro to Busaco, from Busaco to Navarre, over some of the most frightfully broken ground in Europe, signally defeating them wherever they came in collision, and sweeping them at times like a wreck before the ocean-wave; and forty thousand of her children fell in the Peninsula to attest her devotion to the cause of Freedom.

In this most memorable liberation of Spain from the French invader, it is the glory of England to have realized with singular exactness the splendid encomium of Livy: ?Esse aliquam in terris gentem quæ suâ impensâ, suo labore ac periculo, bella gerat pro libertate aliorum. Nec hoc finitimis, aut propinquæ vicinitatis hominibus, aut terris continenti junctis præstet. Maria trajiciat: ne quod toto orbe terrarum injustum imperium sit, et ubique jus, fas, lex, potentissima sint.??Hist. lib. xxxiii.

The pre-eminent importance of the War of Independence in Spain, and of the part which England took in that struggle, has been acknowledged by rival French writers, whose love of historic truth was too strong for the countervailing influences of prejudice, passion, and professional jealousy. M. Thiers, in his Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, speaks of it as ?that long and terrible struggle, that great Peninsular war, which lasted more than six years, which exhausted more treasure and drained off a greater tide of human blood than the murderous campaign of Russia, and in which all the most renowned generals and marshals of France were severally defeated, to the surprise of Napoléon, and to the astonishment of the world, by an English general, newly returned from India, whose name was as yet almost a stranger to every mouth.?

?Elle était à juste titre désignée comme la cause première et principale de la chute de Napoléon,? is the remark[3] of General Foy, Histoire de la Guerre de la Péninsule. Avant-propos. And in one of his private letters he says, ?Moscow brought Alexander, Spain brought Wellington, into the walls of our sacred city!?

I am therefore sure of the intrinsic interest of my subject, and am tremulous only about its treatment. Of this much I at least am certain?that no one will exclaim, as Horace did 2,000 years ago: