On the night of June 6, 1808, two Asturian deputies landed at Falmouth, bringing to England an appeal for help from the local Junta. Never were the messengers of a people attended with less of official pomp. The two Asturians had actually started from the Spanish coast in an open boat; they had been picked up by a casual privateer and brought after nightfall to Falmouth, and by seven o'clock the morning after they landed they were pouring their tale into eager ears at the British Admiralty.

Spain and Great Britain, as a matter of official fact, were at that moment at war, and 5000 troops were on the point of starting to attack the Spanish colonies-the very troops, it may be added, which, two months later, were fighting for Spain at Vimiero! The Asturian deputies, in a sense, had no credentials. They represented no settled government. They spoke not for Spain, but for only a tiny patch of it. Yet these two vagrant Spaniards instantly took captive, not only the shrewd brains of English statesmen, but the generous sympathies of the common people of the three kingdoms.

The rising of Spain against Napoleon was a portent visible to all Europe. It changed the whole aspect of the world's politics. The Asturian deputies were received not merely as the spokesmen of a nation, but as the symbols of a totally new force which had suddenly emerged in the struggle against Napoleon. The British Opposition welcomed them as eagerly as did Ministers. They represented, in a word, a movement which satisfied both the great political parties in England.

The Grenville Ministry, during their brief period of office, abandoned Pitt's policy of costly coalitions. They would not hire by vast subsidies half-hearted governments, moved chiefly by dynastic interests, to oppose Napoleon. As a sign of the new policy, they dismantled the whole transport service of Great Britain.

They saved by this £ 4000 per month; but as Alison-whose arithmetic probably has a Tory complexion- argues, they added eight years to the duration of the Great War, and increased the public debt of Great Britain by £ 400,000,000 sterling! Pitt's policy, that is, would have put 30,000 British troops into the battleline at Friedland against Napoleon; and, in that case, there might have been no Treaty of Tilsit, no Continental system, and no Peninsular War. But even the Grenville Ministry declared that, if a nation awoke to fight for existence and freedom against the new despotism, then England would cast all her wealth and strength into the struggle on its side. Now Spain offered exactly such an example of a national uprising.

The Portland Ministry, at that moment in power, inherited Pitt's coalition policy, and its two leading spirits, Canning and Castlereagh, welcomed the chance of not only aiding a nation against Napoleon, but of destroying a new naval combination against Great Britain.

A new force had arisen in English politics. George Canning was not exactly a Pitt, but as compared with the Addingtons, the Portlands, the Percevals, the Liverpools of the time, he had something of Pitt's scale and much of Pitt's spirit. He was the greatest personal force in the Ministry of which Portland (and afterwards Perceval) was the nominal head. He breathed a new daring and energy into the war. The situation created by the Treaty of Tilsit, the disappearance of all other Powers save France and Russia, and the conspiracy of the two Emperors against the freedom of the rest of the world, might well have daunted even Pitt's lofty courage.

But Canning met the new peril with dauntless spirit; and the speed and decisive force of his counter-stroke at Copenhagen showed that on the side of England, Napoleon was confronted by an opponent with a touch of his own genii-is. It was with equal daring, but more doubtful wisdom, that Canning framed the second Order in Council, levelled at neutrals, which drove the United States into war with England.

Castlereagh, too, strengthened the resolute purpose of the Cabinet to maintain the war. His statesmanship had ni any defects. He lacked Canning's literary gifts and oratorical power; he belonged, indeed, to the inarticulate type of statesman, and is a standing proof of the fact that an almost unintelligible speaker may yet be a great power under a Parliamentary system of government. But he had a cool brain, a keen intellectual vision, an unshaken courage, and a masterful will; and though he finally broke with Canning, and the breach destroyed the Cabinet to which they both belonged, yet he too constituted one of the great personal forces in the statesmanship of England during this period.

Trafalgar, it is to be added, had not quite purged the imaoination of the English statesmen of that day of the terror of invasion. They were persuaded that Napoleon would gather up the broken and scattered navies of Europe, and once more weave them into some o, antic fleet, and so renew with England the great contest for supremacy on the sea. And they had some evidence in support of their fears.

Long afterwards, at St. Helena, Napoleon said it was part of the agreed policy of Tilsit that "the whole maritime forces of the Continent were to be employed against England; and they would muster," he added, " 180 sail of the line. In a few years this force could be raised to 250. With the aid of such a fleet and my numerous flotilla, it was by no means impossible to lead a European army to London. . . . Such was my plan at bottom, which only failed of success from the faults committed in the Spanish war."

Napoleon's St. Helena arithmetic and history need, of course, to be generously discounted. He talked on stilts. His imagination spoke, not his memory, still less his conscience. But it is a curious fact that a secret memorandum submitted to the British Cabinet in January 1808 -- three years after Trafalgar, that is -- reckoned the fleet at the command of Napoleon at no less than 121 sail of the line.

What may be called the right wing of this fleet consisted of the navies of the Northern Powers; and the expeditions to Copenhagen and to Sweden were directed against this section of Napoleon's far-spread naval combination, and, as a matter of fact, destroyed it. The Walcheren expedition was intended to shatter the centre of that somewhat shadowy navy. And, by aiding the Spanish revolt, both Castlereagh and Canning believed they would destroy what may be described as the left wing of Napoleon's new combinations.

The naval effects of the Peninsular War are not usually dwelt upon. Yet that war plucked out of Napoleon's grasp not only the Spanish and Portuguese fleets, which Napoleon himself reckoned at fifty ships of the line; it directly led to the capture of the French ships escaped from Trafalgar, and since that battle lying in Cadiz, and to the surrender of a powerful Russian squadron in the Tagus.

Out of the 180 ships of the line which, as we have seen, Napoleon reckoned the Treaty of Tilsit put at his disposal, at least 100 within two years were captured, destroyed, or turned into the allies of England. And the Peninsular War cost Napoleon fifty out of that hundred, thus justifying the forecast of the English Government.

Spain Calls for Aid

Both political parties in England thus welcomed the appeal from Spain for help; Ministers because it fell within the lines of their settled policy; the Opposition because it satisfied their ideal of a national uprising. The general British public, it is hardly necessary to add, was kindled to a flame of generous sympathy at the spectacle of a nation deserted by its king, and practically without a government or an army, yet rising in audacious revolt against the master of so many legions.

British help for Spain, however, had, in its first steps, much more of generosity than of wisdom. Hostile operations against Spain and her colonies were, of course, at once suspended, and all Spanish prisoners of war wore freed. But Spain was a mosaic of local juntas, all at the moment independent, all in a mood of the highest rage, and all waging war on their own account. British agents were despatched to all these, with offers of help. When the Spanish imagination is left to assess its own worth and needs, its arithmetic easily expands into quite surprising proportions. Thus arms were- asked for armies which existed only in the dreams of excited patriots, and money for operations which were unknown to any sane- art of war.

The Junta of Oporto, for example, which had raised a modest force of 4000 men, asked for arms and equipment for 40,000; and much the same modesty of request existed over the whole area of the Peninsula. With the treasury of England to draw upon, and the self-denial of self-appointed juntas to determine the scale of the drafts, the stream of British assistance flowing into the Peninsula naturally assumed great volume.

In twelve months England had given to Spain £ 2,000,000 in gold, 150 pieces of field-artillery, 200,000 Muskets, 15,000 barrels of gunpowder, 40,000 tents, 10,000 sets of camp equipage, 92,000 uniforms, 356,000 sets of accoutrements, &c., &c. Equipment sufficient, in brief, for an army equal to that of Xerxes was emptied on the Peninsula.

"There is a way of conferring a favour," says Napier, which appears like accepting one; and this secret being discovered by the English Cabinet, the Spaniards soon demanded as a right what they had at first solicited as a boon."

But these lavish supplies found very unwise employment. The British muskets sent to Spain were left to rust, or were even sold to the enemy; the uniforms seldom reached the soldier's back; the gold disappeared in the gaping pockets of corrupt officials. Enough British arms were sent into the Peninsula to well-nigh equip the entire population. Yet, says Napier, "it is a fact that from the beginning to the end of the war, an English musket was rarely seen in the hands of a Spanish soldier."

The typical Spaniard, of course, had, and has, many virtues and not a few vices. Punctuality is an unknown grace with him -- delay a habit -- improvidence a law. He is curiously patient under privations, but to insult he has the alarming sensitiveness of a modern chemical explosive. Insult, indeed, stings him more .deeply than injury, and hate is a more enduring spring of action than the sense of duty or the enthusiasm kindled by a noble cause. Nothing can well be more gaping than his credulity, nothing more jealous than his suspiciousness; and his vanity is on a scale which rivals even his credulity or his jealousy. The Spanish Juntas believed they could overthrow Napoleon without any help from England; nay, they succeeded, at the very end, in persuading themselves that they had performed this surprising feat!

The various provincial councils, taught by many disasters, were at last persuaded that, if Spain was not to remain a mosaic of spluttering and unrelated revolts, the scattered and local insurrections must be knitted into some common scheme of war. So they joined in appointing a Central Junta, which held its sessions at Aranjuez. Spain has produced, and survived, more forms of bad government than perhaps any other country of Europe; but probably the worst instrument of government that ever emerged, even in Spanish history, was this Central Junta. It consisted of thirty persons, twenty-eight of them being priests or nobles.

Its members spent much time in discussing the titles by which they were themselves to be adorned and the salaries they were to receive. Then, having re-established the Inquisition and appointed sundry saints to the command of various armies -- both saints and armies being about equally invisible to the eye of secular common sense -- the members of this remarkable Junta felt they had done enough for the salvation of Spain. Their remaining energies were spent in demanding huge supplies, for which no use could be found, from Great Britain, and in perplexing as much as possible the operations of British generals.

But, with all its defects, the Spanish outbreak gave England the opportunity of meeting the all-conquering legions of France in the shock of land-battle under the most favourable conditions; so it marks a new stage in the great struggle with Napoleon.

Chapter IV: A New Field of War