Peninsular War Research Articles

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812

This essay asks and tries to answer the following question: why were the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage such a sensational and immediate success in 1812? There were many not dissimilar poems on the battles of the Peninsular War and the past glories of Greece but Byron's poem must have both brought into view strong, but partly hidden, resonances within his public and shown them something new. The concluding part of the essay tries to show the link between this ‘newness’ and the whole subsequent development of Byron as a poet.

Assessment of the Lines of Torres Vedras defensive system with visibility analysis

A method to assess the coherence of defensive systems based on the individual and combined visual coverage of fortifications is presented. The case study is the complex fortification system of Lines of Torres Vedras, around Lisbon, Portugal, activated in the first decade of the 19th century to halt the French armies of Napoleon in the Peninsular War. As messages between fortifications are known to have been exchanged visually by semaphore, GIS-based viewshed calculations enabled the assessment of the system's coherence and the exploration of how the undocumented communication with the defensive forces' headquarters in Lisbon might have been achieved. Results show that the defensive system with its two lines was highly effective per se with respect to the visual coverage of the terrain and the exchange of messages between fortifications, but it could have been improved with minor changes to the location of communication devices. It is also found that communication with the headquarters in Lisbon was not adequate, suggesting that additional devices were needed.

The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835. Neil Ramsey.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835. Neil Ramsey.Scott KrawczykScott Krawczyk Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 4Autumn 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24065352 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

CHRISTINE WRIGHT. Wellington's Men in Australia: Peninsular War Veterans and the Making of Empire c. 1820-40. (War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011. Pp. vii, 243. 55.00

The history of settler colonialism is an increasingly lively field, now boasting a journal, Settler Colonial Studies, and provocative schema such as James Belich's contention of an Anglo settler revolution in the early nineteenth century connected to technological and economic change. Christine Wright's welcome addition to the field also contributes to histories of Australia and the British Empire, and may perhaps best be situated in what Australian historian Peter Stanley terms “military social history.” Wright's book, based on her Ph.D. thesis, is an impressively researched prosopographical study of the British army veterans of the Peninsular War who settled in the Australian colonies in the 1820s and 1830s, when there was a rapid expansion of free settlers alongside the continuing system of convict transportation. The Peninsular War, fought in Portugal and Spain from 1808 to 1814, was the latter stages of Britain and its allies' war against Napoleon. The British army had expanded sixfold during the generation-long struggle against revolutionary France, then Napoleon. At war's end there was massive demobilization, with the army reduced from 236,000 soldiers in 1814 to 81,000 in 1819; the navy's reductions were additional to these. Wright demonstrates that large numbers of young men who would not previously have been able to afford to purchase army commissions and promotions were able to raise their social status during the war—that is, if they survived it. Many of the officers who were put on half-pay retainers in the postwar years found that they and their families could not survive on half-pay in Britain's collapsed postwar economy; migration to the settler colonies became an attractive option.

Peninsularity and patriotism: Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808-14

The Peninsular War until recently has failed to receive comprehensive and critical attention from Spanish and British historians, their outputs having been partial, narrative and ideological in nature. While Spanish scholars have contested the meaning of the ‘nation’ forged during the 1808–14 war so bitterly that they have been slow to establish a synthesis, British scholars have tended not to venture beyond Anglocentrism. Starting in the nineteen-fifties, however, modern historical methods began to change this situation. Since the nineteen-nineties a ‘new military history’ approach has influenced Peninsular War historiography, allowing, for the first time, for a ‘total’ history of the conflict.

Visiones británicas del Mundo Atlántico español, c. 1740–1830

As Spain undertook the reform of its peninsular and overseas kingdoms in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, its statesmen often emulated the practices and policies of both their rivals and allies. Given Britain’s emerging maritime and colonial supremacy, it is not surprising that Spanish observers pointed to their long-time rival’s economic policies and institutions with a combination of envy, loathing, and curiosity 3. Yet the interest was far from one-sided. Though British perceptions of Spain were influenced strongly by the still ubiquitous Black Legend, the constant warfare between Spain and Britain, the proximity of their colonial possessions, British commercial ambitions in Spanish American markets, and Spain’s efficacious colonial reforms in the period after 1760 meant that Spain was written about, debated, and discussed in British public life with great frequency and ferocity after 1750. In the period after 1808, British involvement in the Peninsular War and the public interest in the struggles culminating in Spanish American independence led to a revival as well as a renewal of Britain’s fascination with the Spanish Atlantic World, an interest which was maintained until at least 1830. This article offers a brief survey and analysis of British observers perceptions and conceptions of Spain and its empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and how those understandings and perceptions made their way into British debates about population, effective governance, and trade. It seeks to establish that British interest was ubiquitous and surprisingly influential.

Witness to the Peninsular War: Sophia Barnard’s Travels in Andalusia

Este trabajo parte de varios estudios criticos sobre la literatura de viajes para llevar a cabo un analisis de las secciones que Sofia Barnard dedico a Andalucia en Travels in Algeirs [sic] , Spain, &c. , publicado en Londres a mediados de la decada de 1820. Casada con un comerciante, Barnard paso mas de tres anos de su vida en el extranjero. No viajo mucho por Andalucia, pero su relato es sin embargo un valioso testimonio sobre la situacion de la zona durante la Guerra de la Independencia. Visito Cadiz cuando estaba bajo el bombardeo de los franceses en 1811 y unos meses mas tarde estuvo en Algeciras en uno de los viajes de negocios de su marido. Durante su estancia en Gibraltar tambien registro sus impresiones de los refugiados en la colonia britanica, siendo de particular interes su relato de la epidemia que causo muchas muertes en la zona a finales de 1812. Barnard utiliza las convenciones de la literatura de viajes y discursos femeninos y colonialistas para retratar Andalucia no como una tierra byroniana saturada de experiencias placenteras, sino mas bien como un marco lleno de peligros y dificultades donde la viajera protestante puede probar su virtud como madre y esposa, demostrar su inquebrantable fe cristiana, y tambien afirmar la supremacia de Gran Bretana. Las mismas convenciones le permiten justificar su larga residencia en Andalucia en tiempos de guerra presentandose ante sus lectores no como una turista hedonista en busca de lo pintoresco, sino como una sufrida viajera que ha obtenido un beneficio espiritual de sus viajes por esa zona.

The Jesuit as Villain in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

InThe Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

‘Yo lo vi’. Goya witnessing the disasters of war: an appeal to the sentiment of humanity

Editor's NoteThe humanitarian mission maintains its ultimate objective of preventing and alleviating human suffering in situations of extreme crisis. In a different vein from the main subject of this edition- the future of humanitarian action – and using the power of images, Paul Bouvier, ICRC Senior Medical Advisor, brings us back exactly two centuries, to the ‘Peninsular War’ between French, Spanish and British, among the fiercest of the Napoleonic Wars.The artist Francisco de Goya produced a series of etched plates known as The Disasters of War, which offered a hitherto uncommon view of war. By showing the horror and devastation of armed violence, the resulting dehumanization, and the distress and suffering of the victims, he denounced the consequences of war and famine and the ensuing political repression. Goya's lucid, compassionate, yet uncompromising depictions of war and its consequences are not only unique but also highly relevant today. His work is also an outcry and a plea for acts of humanity in the turmoil of armed violence, and anticipates the initiative that Henry Dunant would be prompted to take sixty years later, in Solferino. In a way, Goya announced Dunant.Walking us through a selection of Goya's sketches, Paul Bouvier looks at victims, perpetrators, and eye-witnesses, and discusses how these images relate to the contemporary experience of humanitarian workers faced with the extreme violence of war. The author decrypts Goya’s sketches and relates them to the essence of humanitarian action as a response to human suffering.

Importance of «weak» states during conflicts: Portuguese trade with the United States during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars

AbstractThis paper focuses on the analysis of weak states in the international trading system during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic crises, especially on Portugal's trade relations with the United States. We argue that the previous studies of the trade flows during these conflicts have not paid enough attention on smaller actors. Even though the Peninsular War caused severe disruption of agricultural production in Portugal, the United States, despite its strained relations with an ally of Portugal, Great Britain, became a key supplier for the Portuguese market. Clearly, the threatened position of the peninsula, and the need to supply the troops, awarded the Portuguese some room to manoeuvre in the international markets. Total war was not a constraint for all states — economic necessities trumped political and diplomatic concerns during the era of the first real-world wars. This situation was a temporary one, only to change after the conflict.

Tomas Lopez's Geographic Atlas of Spain in the Peninsular War: A Methodology for Determining Errors

During the Peninsular War, Napoleon's and Wellington's armies were aware of the lack of precision in the maps of Spain and its provinces that appeared in Tomas Lopez's Geographical Atlas of Spain. The errors were due to the non-topographical surveying method he used, which he had learned from his teacher Jean Baptiste Bourguignon D'Anville. To map all of the Spanish provinces, Tomas Lopez divided them into circles of three leagues in diameter (16,718 m), taking a particular town as the centre. He asked the town's priest to draw a map of the territory and to complete a questionnaire that Tomas Lopez sent to him. The priest was to return the two documents after he had completed them. Subsequently, at his desk, Tomas Lopez used the maps and reports as well as other graphic and written sources from various locations to make an outline of each map. Next, he made a mosaic that served as a pattern for drawing the final provincial map. We will see the way that this method was applied in two concrete cases: the villages of Chavaler and Monteagudo, situated in the Spanish province of Soria, and verify their degree of accuracy. We will use the maps drawn by the priests in 1767, the final map of the province which was published in 1804 by Tomás López, and a current map of the province showing the angular and linear errors in Lopez's map.

Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish–American Frontier, 1776–1821 , and: The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple (review)

Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the SpanishAmerican Frontier, 1776-1821. By J. C. A Stagg. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 307. Maps. Cloth, $50.00.)The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple. By Ralph Ketcham. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. 200. Illustrations. Cloth, $23.95.)Reviewed by David PenningtonHistorians have long been interested in James Madison's public service, but this interest has traditionally been confined to his time in Congress and the Constitutional Convention through the time of the diplomatic debacle with England in which he became the only U.S. president to flee the capitol before an invading army. As a result, a complete and accurate appraisal of Madison's accomplishments has remained elusive. J. C. A. Stagg and Ralph Ketcham, two of the most practiced Madison scholars, offer new contributions to the historiography that help complete our understanding of this most revered yet often criticized statesman.Stagg's book, Borderlines in Borderlands, is a determined effort to examine James Madison's diplomacy with Spain and challenge longstanding theories that the president acted in a manner contrary to international law, deploying subversive strategies in West Florida, East Florida, and Texas in order to expand federal territory. In doing so, Stagg calls into question earlier theories that suggested that Madison was inept in matters of foreign policy. Madison did in fact believe the United States had credible claims within these territories, first through independence and the assumption of all territories formerly a part of the British imperial domain, and later as a natural right of a sovereign nation.There was also the 1803 treaty that secured the Louisiana Territory, with which his predecessor Thomas Jefferson further challenged Spain's right to the aforementioned regions. Madison chose to address territorial claims through international law and calculated diplomacy; his strategy was greatly influenced by the hostilities that plagued Europe. Knowing that Spain's defeat by Napoleon and France during the Peninsular War was inevitable, Madison understood that working with Spain, rather than against it, would ensure the successful transition of any disputed territories to the United States. He employed this strategy for several reasons, the most significant of which was the desire to have irrefutable, legally binding agreements in accord with international law that would prevent the continued presence of foreign imperial claims - particularly French and British - to territories in North America. Equally important was Madison's desire to protect the economic development and prosperity of New Orleans and parts of southern Georgia in relation to East Florida.In the event that formal agreements could not be reached with Spain, the president needed to explore the prospect for favorable relations with various local dissident groups who could potentially assume power and displace Spanish authority. To gain a better understanding of regional prospects, Madison dispatched executive agents to observe and make contact with leading revolutionary factions. Stagg emphatically insists these appointees were given specific instructions in accordance with domestic and international law, and consequently they were not covert operatives, jargon, as Stagg points out, that is improperly steeped in the language of the Cold War.Drawing on a vast collection of resources from both U.S. and European archives, Stagg has determined that unforeseen events and the personal ambitions of key characters forced Madison on several occasions to take action, not the other way around. Formally or otherwise, the president did not support civil disobedience in any of Spain's North American territories. In West Florida in 1808, it was American citizens living under Spanish rule who put into motion a series of events designed to break formal ties with Spain, not intending to create a new independent nation, but to force the United States to intervene. …

Guerra de la Independencia e instituciones legítimas: la cuestión de la tiranía

The charge of tyranny was a common place in the political vocabulary during the Peninsular War in Spain (1808-1814). As a concept, in addition to attempting to describe a type of government, sought to influence its conversion into legitimate power. This paper aims to present the issue from two dimensions -descriptive and prescriptive- about the use of the concept of tyranny. Submission Date: 25/01/2010 Acceptance Date: 12/02/2010

BEYOND WORDS: THE NATIONAL SUBLIME AND THE SPANISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE IN EL SECRETO DEL REY CAUTIVO AND UN DÍA DE CÓLERA

BEYOND WORDS: THE NATIONAL SUBLIME AND THE SPANISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE IN EL SECRETO DEL REY CAUTIVO AND UN DÍA DE CÓLERA

The Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792-1815

Owen Connelly claims on the first page of this study that one has to go back to the multi-volume histories of the nineteenth century to find a work which, like that of Antoine Jomini, deals with the wars of both the French Revolution and Napoleon. It seems a bold claim, given the plethora of more recent studies of those wars, not least in English; and yet closer inspection reveals that none of them actually covers the whole period from 1792 to 1815 in the sort of sequential detail that Connelly means here. His present account attempts to fill that gap, and it does so effectively within its comparatively modest scale. It is nicely balanced overall, with nearly half the main text covering the period up to the Brumaire coup of November 1799, including Napoleon's unsuccessful Egyptian campaign of 1798–9. Moreover, it is not so much a technical study for military history specialists, but rather a work of synthesis which draws on a wide range of primary sources (notably the letters, memoirs, and histories of contemporaries) as well as secondary ones, and is aimed at a wide readership. The various military campaigns receive detailed and expert treatment, in broadly chronological order, and with the plain economy of style and humorous irony that readers familiar with the author's earlier writings will appreciate again. Furthermore, those campaigns are related throughout to the wider political history of France, of her allies, and of her enemies at different stages of the wars, during which the French eventually gained mastery of the continental mainland but were steadily eclipsed by the British at sea. One benefit of this approach is that the continuities across the whole period are evident not only in its military history more narrowly defined (armies, weaponry, logistics, and tactics) but also in the impact of war on French society—a wider human experience that affected an entire generation of soldiers and civilians alike. Other countries no doubt underwent the same experience to varying degrees, but the book's principal focus is on France. Even the ferocious Peninsular War of 1807–14 and the legendary horrors of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812 are examined primarily from the French angle.

Ciencia y política durante el reinado de José I (1808-1813): el proyecto de Real Museo de Historia Natural

This paper deals with the Royal Natural History Museum project drawn up by the government of Joseph Bonaparte. It begins by analysing the organization of science at a ministerial level, paying particular attention to the activity of the Interior Ministry. It then goes on to discuss the economic crisis suffered by scientific institutions at that time, analysing its causes and the additional problems introduced by the Peninsular war. The Natural History Museum project was conceived to deal with many of these issues. The Francophiles adopted an organizational model inspired by a similar French institution created during the French Revolution, although they managed to link the new institution with unfinished projects from the Spanish Enlightenment. Although the project studied herein was never passed into law, a similar centre was subsequently developed by the government of Ferdinand VII and formed the starting point of the research institution that has lasted until the present day. The final section of this paper discusses the main reasons that led the Francophile government to suggest the setting up of new scientific institutions, such as that discussed here, despite the critical conditions suffered during most of the reign. This paper reveals and analyses the rhetoric on the usefulness of science developed by the Francophiles in order to obtain legitimacy and to gain support for the new King.

San Martin: Argentine soldier, American hero

Jose de San Martin (1778--1850) was an enigmatic figure--a revolutionary and a conservative, a professional soldier and an intellectual, a taciturn man who nevertheless was able to inspire the peoples of South America to follow his armies and accept his battle strategies. One of the great leaders in the wars for independence, he was a pivotal force in the liberation of Chile and Peru from Spanish rule. In the first full English-language biography of San Martin in more than half a century, John Lynch shines new light on San Martin and on the story of Spanish America's revolutionary wars. Lynch offers a series of dramatic set pieces: the Peninsular War, in which San Martin fought the French and learned his military skills; the crossing of the Andes, when his army battled the forces of nature as well as enemy fire; the confrontation with imperial Spain in Peru; and the standoff with Bolivar which led to San Martin's resignation and exile in Europe. Based on the latest documentation, San Martin enhances our understanding of the modern history of Latin America and one of its most brilliant leaders.

Doctrine and Reform in the British Cavalry, 1880–1918 (review)

Reviewed by: Doctrine and Reform in the British Cavalry, 1880–1918 Steven J. Corvi Doctrine and Reform in the British Cavalry, 1880–1918. By Stephen Badsey. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7546-6467-3. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xviii, 360. $114.95. The Cavalry Debate in the British Army began in the nineteenth century and crested in the early years of the twentieth, with the most heated exchanges taking place in the context of the First World War. Put briefly, the debate concerned what some saw as the ill effects of the supposed domination of the army officer corps by cavalry generals, who were deemed to be particularly opposed to any modernization of the army that would reduce the role of the traditional horse cavalry. This debate is at the root of the famous image of the British Army of the Great War as “lions led by donkeys.” The controversial commander of British forces on the Continent during the war was, after all, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, a cavalry general. Lately, there has been a reaction against the “lions and donkeys” school within the British military history profession and Stephen Badsey, the author of the book under review here, has been one of its more prominent voices. Like other members of the revisionist strand in the debate, he finds the cavalry generals much more innovative and much less resistant to change than critics have charged. This is not Badsey’s first venture into print on the subject. Indeed, his new book is based largely on his 1982 Ph.D. dissertation at Cambridge University, entitled “Fire and Sword: The British Army and the Arme Blanche Controversy, c. 1871–1921.” Badsey is also the author of an essay in the same vein, “Cavalry and the Development of Breakthrough Doctrine” in Paddy Griffith’s British Fighting Methods in the Great War (London: Frank Cass, 1996). Badsey has done for the British cavalry of the Victorian and Great War eras what Ian Fletcher did for its counterpart in the Napoleonic wars, in Galloping at Everything: The British Cavalry in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo 1808–1815 (Staplehurst, U.K.: Spellmount, 1999). Fletcher’s and Badsey’s works both illustrate that, while the visibility of the cavalry arm and its flamboyant nature have made it an easy target for criticism, some of it, of course, warranted, critics have gone on to make the mistaken assumption that the all of the tactical, and operational deficiencies of the British Army during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be laid at the door of the cavalry. The role cavalry should play on the battlefield in the modern wars of the day was the subject of heated debate in army circles. Opinion was pretty much divided into two camps, one of which held that the cavalry would have to incorporate mounted infantry tactics and train to fight on foot with breech-loading rifles as a mobile unit of firepower. The other camp, known colloquially as the “arme blanche” school, took a more traditional view of cavalry on the modern battlefield, seeing it as a shock weapon, employing the knee-to-knee mounted charge with sword or lance as the primary offensive weapon. Badsey writes that “The British cavalry’s doctrinal response to these issues was one of qualified success, as the cavalry adjusted its composition, its weapons and its tactics to provide a viable and sometimes valuable role in warfare up to the end of the First World War, including the use of mounted charges” (p. 2). Furthermore, it can be deduced that the tactics of the cavalry informed armor doctrine and the breakthrough theories of Ernest [End Page 1348] Swinton, J. F. C. Fuller, and Basil Liddell Hart, which, in turn, influenced the thinking of the Wehrmacht armor leader Heinz Guderian, as expounded in his book Achtung Panzer in 1937. There are, however, some broad assessments made by Badsey on the effectiveness of the British cavalry on the Western Front that may require closer examination. He does not discuss the negative impact of the cavalry debate on the British High Command in the early stages of the war, in 1914–1915. The...

A Dirty, Indolent, Priest-Ridden City: British Soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsular War, 1808-1813

Between 1808 and 1813 Lisbon was the gateway for British soldiers entering the Peninsular War. For many British soldiers the Iberian Peninsula was not only their first combat experience but also their first time abroad, with their military service as part of a broader experience of travel and cross-cultural contact. British letters, diaries and memoirs of the Peninsular War have long been used by historians as the basis for military and campaign histories; rarely have they been appreciated as travel and ethnographic accounts, allowing us to explore how British soldiers described, experienced and understood the foreign physical and cultural environments of Portugal and Spain. This article investigates British soldiers' attitudes to Lisbon and its inhabitants. Their writings illuminate the relationship between war, travel and identity; British views on Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula more generally; and the mentalities and cultural values of a broad cohort of young Britons in the early nineteenth century. Most soldiers wrote largely critical and hostile accounts of their time in Lisbon, identifying markers of cultural difference and in so doing revealing their own notions of what it meant to British and civilized.

Fighting words: representing the Napoleonic Wars in the poetry of Hemans and Barbauld

British women’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars was limited in the theaters of warfare, but not in the realms of print. Both the young Felicia Hemans and the older Anna Laetitia Barbauld intervened with poetry in the vigorous public discourse surrounding the ongoing wars with France, albeit with very different motivations and results. Hemans’ little‐studied England and Spain; or, Patriotism and Valour explicitly supports the British participation in the Peninsular War, but runs into complications when Hemans attempts to justify the destruction of past civilizations in the name of Freedom. Despite its immature enthusiasm, Hemans’ poem was well received by critics. Barbauld’s better‐known Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, by contrast, was famously reviled by John Wilson Croker for drawing attention to the costs of war and, even more grievously, foretelling Britain’s eventual decline and overshadowing by the Americas. By putting these two poems back into their wartime contexts and also back into conversation with each other, we can productively explore not only the contributions of each poet to wartime discourse, but also the globalization of the British imagination during the Romantic period.