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Abstract
Recent studies on the incorporation of the War of Independence in Spanish literature have provided invaluable insights into the way Spanish writers integrated that terrible conflict into their work. However, another curious angle of the conflict has generally been passed over by students of literary and cultural studies: the view of the Peninsular War voiced by its English-speaking participants. Dozens of memoirs, diaries and histories have been published in multiple languages that attempt to reconstruct, remember, or justify the events of the War. Among the thousands of soldiers who ended up on the Peninsula was a young Irish lad named Robert Blakeney (1789–1858), whose memoir, A Boy in the Peninsular War, offers vivid details about his experiences as a soldier in major battles during the War of Independence. It provides us with an insider's view of a conflict that shook Europe, galvanized Spain, and wove itself into the fabric of Spanish history for more than two hundred years.
Notes
1 Charles Esdaile imagines the moment: ‘C’était le 7 juin 1808 et la poste, qui faisait chaque jour le voyage long et difficile entre le comté lointain de Cornouailles et Londres, venait juste d'entrer dans la capitale de la Grande-Bretagne. Comme elle traversait les rues, elle était enveloppée par tout le bruit et l'agitation qui sont si caractéristiques de la ville, et au début il semblait que son arrivée n’était qu'un fait habituel d'un jour habituel. Mais en l'espace d'un très court instant, cette impression se dissipa. À peine la voiture fut-elle arrêtée qu'une atmosphère d'excitation et même de fête s’éleva autour d'elle. Il y eut des cris et des acclamations, qui ne firent que s'accroître lorsque les principaux occupants du véhicule (un petit groupe d'Espagnols à la tête duquel se trouvait le vicomte de Matarrosa, plus connu en tant que comte de Toreno, titre dont il hérita quelques mois plus tard, et l'universitaire Andrés Angel de la Vega) en descendirent. À eux cinq, ils avaient apporté des nouvelles concernant un événement totalement inattendu, à savoir la révolte contre Napoléon menée par la petite province espagnole des Asturies, et, comme la nouvelle se répandait, ils se retrouvèrent au centre d'une véritable excitation frénétique. Ainsi débuta un été d'hispanophilie qui a rarement, sinon jamais, connu d’équivalent dans l'histoire longue et complexe des relations hispano-britanniques’ (‘La Grande-Bretagne et l'insurrection de 1808’, in L'Espagne en 1808: régénération ou révolution?, ed. Gérard Dufour & Elisabel Larriba [Aix-en-Provence: Univ. de Provence, 2009], 121–47 [p. 121]).
2 José María Queipo de Llano, conde de Toreno, Historia del levantamiento, guerra y revolución de España, 5 vols (Madrid: Tomás Jordán, 1835–1837), I, 188.
3 See A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press (1780–1850) (London: Home & Van Thal, 1949); and Elías Durán de Porras, ‘De l'euphorie à la déception: la presse anglaise face au soulèvement espagnol’, in L'Espagne en 1808: régénération ou révolution?, ed. Dufour & Larriba, 175–206.
4 ‘Relying on the delusive promise that zeal would meet certain reward […]’ (Robert Blakeney, A Boy in the Peninsular War, ed. Julian Sturgis [London: Greenhill Books, 1989 (1st ed. 1899)], 1). Further references to Blakeney are given in parentheses in the text.
5 Three recent books dealing with literature and culture during the period are: María Mercedes Romero Peña, El teatro en Madrid durante la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–1814) (Madrid: FUE, 2006); La Guerra de la Independencia en la cultura española, ed. Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2008); and Ana María Freire López, El teatro español entre la Ilustración y el Romanticismo. Madrid durante la Guerra de la Independencia (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2009). See also David T. Gies, ‘La Pepa Goes to the Theatre’, in 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic Culture and Politics, ed. Stephen Roberts & Adam Sharman (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 178–206.
6 See Rocío Coletes Laspra, ‘Antecedentes de un expolio: testimonios británicos sobre la primera retirada del rey José de Madrid (julio–diciembre 1808)’, Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 21 (2011), 35–58.
7 See, for example, Álvaro Molina & Jesusa Vega, ‘Imágenes de la alteridad: el “pueblo” de Goya y su construcción histórica’, in La Guerra de la Independencia en la cultura española, ed. Álvarez Barrientos, 131–58; and Nigel Glendinning, Goya and His Critics (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1977).
8 While Yuval Noah Harari recognizes that the military memoir was one of the most important forms of eye witness narratives to emerge in the late eighteenth century in The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 190, Neil Ramsey none the less confirms that Peninsular War memoirs have ‘received almost no attention in literary studies beyond passing reference’ (The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 [Burlington: Ashgate, 2011], 10).
9 Graciela Iglesias Rogers, British Liberators in the Age of Napoleon: Volunteering under the Spanish Flag in the Peninsular War (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.
10 Charles Oman, Wellington's Army, 1809–1814 (London: E. Arnold, 1913), and A History of the Peninsular War, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902–30). Oman lists more than 100 memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers who fought on the Peninsula; Robert Burnham, ‘British Memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars’, <http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/eyewitness/c_british.html> (accessed 15 August 2014). Of particular interest are the entries on Hill, Le Marchant, MacKinnon, Boutflower, Buckham, Daniel and Hay. See also: Michael Glover, Wellington's Army in the Peninsula 1808–1814 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1977); Philip J. Haythornthwaite, The Armies of Wellington (London: Arms and Armour, 1994); and Stuart Reid, Wellington's Army in the Peninsula 1809–1814 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004).
11 Rory Muir, At Wellington's Right Hand: The Letters of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon, 1808–1815, Publications of the Army Records Society 21 (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003).
12 George T. Napier, The Early Military Life of General Sir George T. Napier, ed. William Napier (London: John Murray, 1886).
13 The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne: (1807–1816), ed. Roger Norman Buckley (London: The Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1987).
14 Robert Ker Porter, Letters from Portugal and Spain, Written during the March of the British Troops under Sir John Moore, facsimile ed. (Cambridge: Ken Trotman, 1985). Ramsey provides an excellent analysis of Porter's work in The Military Memoir, 81–108.
15 William Weber, With the Guns in the Peninsula: The Peninsula War Journal of Captain William Webber, Royal Artillery, ed. Richard Wollocombe, Preface by M. E. S. Laws (London: Greenhill, 1991).
16 James Hale, Journal of James Hale, late Sergeant in the 9 th Regiment of Foot (Cirencester: Philip Watkins, 1826); transcribed by Peter Catley (Windsor: IX Regiment, 1998).
17 William Tomkinson, The Diary of a Cavalry Officer in the Peninsular War and Waterloo: 1809–1815, ed. James Tomkinson (London: Frederick Muller, 1971).
18 Very short excerpts appear in The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, ed. Max Hastings (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1985), 202, and Eyewitness to History, ed. Peter Carey (Cambridge. MA: Harvard U. P., 1988), 269–70 and 281–83. Ramsey mentions him in The Military Memoir, 105–06. Iglesias takes issue with some of Blakeney's testimony (Iglesias Rogers, British Liberators in the Age of Napoleon, 108–09).
19 John Moore (1761–1809), of Scottish birth, was Lieutenant-General in the British army and died at the Battle of La Coruña in January, 1809. In Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997), Peter Paret discusses the representation of Moore's death in British painting.
20 ‘In this place we were in the immediate neighborhood of foes with whom we so ardently desired to measure swords’ (Blakeney, A Boy in the Peninsular War, 30).
21 Another soldier, James Hale, followed a similar itinerary, which was recorded in the Journal of James Hale, Late Sergeant in the 9 th Regiment of Foot.
22 At another juncture Blakeney writes: ‘My taking the lead was in consequence of the haughty Castilian having been too proud to learn any language but his own’, 219-220. Local officials, particularly in Galicia, refused to collaborate with the British, or indeed, as Theodore Hook recounts, even show ‘obedience or respect’. Theodore Edward Hook, The Life of General, the Right Honourable Sir David Baird, Bart, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1832), 2, 208.
23 Hook, The Life of General, the Right Honourable Sir David Baird, 2, 209.
24 Not everyone shared Blakeney's enthusiasm at this juncture. Hook reports that the Junta de Galicia, far from receiving Sir David Baird's regiment with open arms when the British soldiers arrived in La Coruña in October 1808, ‘refused to sanction the disembarkation of the troops’ and wanted only ‘money and arms’ (Hook, The Life of General, the Right Honourable Sir David Baird, 2, 202).
25 Gregorio García de la Cuesta (1741–1811), Captain General of Castile, fought in Medellín and Talavera, among other campaigns, and published a Manifiesto que presenta a la Europa el Capitán General de los Reales Egércitos (Palma de Mallorca: Miguel Domingo, 1811).
26 José Pascual de Zayas y Chacón (1772–1827), served in campaigns in Talavera, Cádiz and Badajoz, among others.
27 Manuel de Lapeña (fl. 1808–1811), the senior Spanish officer at Cádiz, is generally remembered as incompetent for a series of bad decisions he made during the Barrosa campaign, February–March, 1811.
28 Gabriel Lovett confirms Lapeña's failure to act at a crucial moment in the Battle of Barrosa, which took place six miles south of Chiclana (near Cádiz): ‘The British suffered more than 1,000 casualties. The French lost 2,400 men, including 400 prisoners. During the second phase of the battle General Lapeña had kept his troops on the line of the highway to Cádiz and had inexplicably failed to rush to the aid of his British colleagues. As a result the disgruntled Graham crossed the Santi Petri on the sixth and established himself once more on the island, stating that henceforth he would not collaborate with the Spaniards outside the siege lines. Lapeña followed him there the next day. Due to the lack of cooperation between the Allied forces the expedition had resulted in failure, in spite of the victory that had been achieved on the battlefield of Chiclana. There were angry recriminations between Graham and Lapeña […]’ (Gabriel Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols [New York: New York U. P., 1965], I, 389–90). José Gregorio Cayuela Fernández and José Ángel Gallego Palomares rehabilitate him slightly in La Guerra de la Independencia. Historia bélica, pueblo y nación en España (1808–1814) (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2008), 305–06.
29 ‘The article also trumps the long-held British belief that Spaniards are lazy by citing many of their labours and industry, and instead claims that only Castilians are lazy’ (Ignacio Paz, ‘British Popular Opinion of the Peninsular War: 1808–1814’ <http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/society/c_BritishPopularOpinion.html#_ftn41> (accessed 2 August 2012).
30 Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, II, 791.
31 Ruth McKay deals with some of these issues in ‘Lazy, Improvident People’: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca/London: Cornell U. P., 2006).
32 Blakeney participates in the siege at Badajoz just as the new Constitution of 1812 is being proclaimed in Cádiz (19 March 1812). Hale was also present at the battle and recorded his impressions (Hale, Journal of James Hale, Late Sergeant in the 9 th Regiment of Foot, 62–65).
33 Cayuela Fernández & Gallego Palomares, La Guerra de la Independencia, 435.
34 General Armand Phillipon (1761–1836) was Governor of Badajoz, 1811–1812.
35 Blakeney continues: ‘Firing through the streets and at the windows was incessant, which made it excessively dangerous to move out. When the savages came to a door which had been locked or barricaded, they applied what they called the patent key: this consisted of the muzzles of a dozen firelocks placed close together against that part of the door where the lock was fastened, and the whole fire off together into the house and rooms, regardless of those inside; these salvos were repeated until the doors were shattered, and in this way too several inhabitants were killed. Men, women, and children were shot in the streets for no other apparent reason than pastime; every species of outrage was publicly committed in the houses, churches and streets, and in a manner so brutal that a faithful recital would be too indecent and too shocking to humanity. Not the slightest shadow of order or discipline was maintained; the officers durst not interfere. The infuriated soldiery resembled rather a pack of hell-hounds vomited up from the infernal regions for the extirpation of mankind than what they were but twelve short hours previously—a well-organised, brave, disciplined and obedient British army, and burning only with impatience for what is called glory’ (274). This was hardly the first (or last) time that Blakeney took note of such behaviour by British troops. In 1809, following the march from Bembibre to Cascabellos, he writes: ‘Some of them were a little the worse for liquor—a staggering complaint at that time very prevalent in our army’ (58).
36 ‘It is difficult to describe the scenes of drunkenness and subordination, which were the consequence of such discoveries, nor can any one except those who have witnessed it, form an idea of the state of Soldiers after a successful story. With faces as black and dirty as power can make them, eyes red and inflamed, and with features full of wildness and ferocity, and of the insolence of victory, after a desperately contested struggle, they break into houses, ransack every spot where wine or spirits can be supposed to lie hid, and after repeated intoxicating draughts, begin their work of plunder. Woe to that unfortunate owner of a mansion, if any such remain, who attempts to remonstrate. Discipline being at an end, the whole world seems given up to their indiscriminate rage and plunder’ (The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne, ed. Buckley, 152–53). Blakeney witnessed men, women, and children who had frozen to death in Herrerias following excessive alcohol abuse (‘The unfortunate people must have sucked more of the liquor than their constitutions could support. Intoxication was followed by sleep, from which they awoke no more; they were frozen to death’ [67]). Unsurprisingly, the issue of uncontrolled drunkenness is a constant refrain in the memoirs of soldiers. Emerson recollects: ‘The prisoners taken in this affair were intoxicated, having plundered the inhabitants of the town before its evacuation’ (J. Emerson, ‘Recollections of the Late War in Spain and Portugal’, in Peninsular Sketches; by Actors on the Scene, ed. William Maxwell [Cambridge: Ken Trotman, 1998], 205–42 [p. 209]). Blakeney notes at one juncture how a regiment went through 2,000 bottles of port, claret and brandy in one week: ‘The exhilarating juice of the grape was freely quaffed from out the crystal cup, and the inspiring songs of love and war went joyfully round, and the conclusion of each animating strophe was loudly hailed with choral cheers […]’ (171).
37 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1985).
38 Meacham was a captain in the 28th Regiment, wounded at a battle in Busaco in September, 1810. He knew Spanish from previous service in Menorca, according to Blakeney (144).
39 Cited in Philip J. Haythornthwaite, Brassey's Almanac. The Peninsular War (London: Brassey's, 2004), 9.
40 Paz, ‘British Popular Opinion of the Peninsular War: 1808–1814’ (see above note 29). William Napier had voiced a similar observation in 1828: ‘Before the Peninsula had proved their excellence, the British troops were absurdly under-rated in foreign countries and despised in their own. They could not then move in large bodies so readily as the long practiced French, but the soldier was stigmatised as stupid, the officer ridiculed, and a British army coping with a French one for a single campaign was considered a chimera’ (History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France from the Year 1807 to the Year 1814, 6 vols [London: John Murray, 1828–1840], I, 27).
41 The bibliography on travel writing in Spain is voluminous. See, for example, Carlos García-Romeral Pérez, Bio-biblografía de viajeros españoles (siglo XVIII) (Madrid: Ollero & Ramos, 1997) and Bio-biblografía de viajeros españoles (siglo XIX) (Madrid: Ollero & Ramos, 1999). Other materials are available on the web at: <http://bib.cervantesvirtual.com/portal/viajerosespanoles>.