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This chapter discusses the relationship of poetry and the Peninsular War. Robert Southey showed the extent to which the unfolding events in Spain has already been imagined, and written, as romance. Southey was not alone in responding to the war in the Peninsula as already shaped by the representations of ‘poets and romancers.’ The combination of geography and genre in the imaginative shaping of the latest stage of the war was compounded by the fashion for romance produced by the popularity of Walter Scott's poetry which coalesced with the sense of Spain as a land of romance to provide the major poetic framework for the British understanding of the war. The author also examines the poetic use of romance to shape and give meaning to the war, looking at the representational challenges this presented and at the poetic questioning and subversion of this generically inflected understanding of the conflict.

This chapter examines the nature of plunder by the British army in the Peninsular War, and shows that new forms of plunder developed as a result of both cultural perceptions and the specific experience of the Peninsular War. Aside from the British, the French, Spanish, and Portuguese armies also plundered the local inhabitants. They confiscated public merchandise and estates, requisitioned harvests, seized church property and valuables, and levied crippling war contributions on the provinces. French troops committed atrocities against civilians and looted towns and villages, churches and monasteries after razing them to the ground. British soldiers carried out plunder due to necessity, opportunism, and collecting. Yet British plunder was also restrained and facilitated by military, legal, customary, cultural, and environmental factors that converged during the Peninsular War to transform some British soldiers into banditti in red coats.

The polemic between Neo-Classicists of the French mode and younger Romantics was also played out in Spain. Although with an earlier presence, Romanticism took shape in Spain mainly after the restoration of constitutional government in 1833. A few historical novels appeared in the 1820s and 1830s, dealing partly with recent conflicts but also with medieval Spanish themes. The main impetus, however, followed the development of liberal historiography from the 1850s, and the principal expression was Galdós’s ‘Episodios Nacionales’, after 1869, considerably influenced by Balzac and contemporary English novelists. These ‘episodes’ struck existentially into a frequently seamless combination of ongoing historical and fictionalised events, sometimes with the same characters. The five series covered forty-six relatively short volumes which formed a parallel with Galdós’s contemporary novels, themselves infused with recent history. Galdós departed from Scott in his adoption of a continuous chronology for his historical novels, and the disjunction of the narratives differentiated Galdós from the integrated scheme in Tolstoy’s portrayal of Russia’s struggle against Napoleon. Galdós’s first series, written in the 1870s, constitutes an unrelated Spanish parallel to the Russian novel ‘War and Peace’. Valera’s ‘Morsamor’ (1899)—his little-known last novel—combined fantasy with the serious purpose of contrasting the fallen Spain of the 1890s with the great days of conquest and exploration in the sixteenth century, suggesting alternative moralities in the religions of the East.

This chapter discusses the protection program of the Spanish empire, which effectively replaced the previous annexation plans of Britain. It notes that during the Peninsular War, British writing about Spanish America seemed to turn away from previous works that had expressed sympathy for the Spanish American natives with British imperialism. It then studies several works that concealed Britain's unabated interest in starting commercial dominance in Spanish America. The chapter also considers the question of how to present Britain's emancipation efforts as consistent with their promise to protect the Spanish empire.

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) was one of the most colourful and brutal campaigns of the Napoleonic period. It prompted hundreds of veterans from the armies of the participating countries (Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France) to write and publish autobiographies about their experiences. These war memoirs are well-known to historians as rich and compelling sources, but relying on them for direct eyewitness testimony about the experience of war poses significant methodological problems. Military memoirs, including those from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, tend to be written in hindsight and shaped to an unknown extent by selective or traumatised memory. They may be unrepresentative of the majority of experiences, written in very different styles and formats, published immediately after the war, or only made public decades after the author’s death. Taking these challenges as a starting point, this introductory chapter lays out a new methodological framework for ‘what to do with war memoirs’, including considering closely the identities and motives of the authors, tracing the material histories of the books themselves, and employing a comparative, transnational approach to the history of the military memoir genre. It also summarises the relevant historiography, emphasising the lack of attention so far given to Spanish and Portuguese wartime autobiography, and the long-term importance of Peninsular War memoirs as a precedent for the twentieth-century ‘soldier’s tale’.

This final chapter examines the international scope of the Napoleonic war memoir genre. Widespread and often illegal practices of reprinting and translating veterans’ autobiographies ensured that narratives of the Peninsular War circulated extensively across borders throughout the nineteenth century, not only within Europe but also across the Atlantic, to both the United States and Latin America. Peninsular War memoirs became a transnational genre, crossing national and linguistic divides. This did not, however, result in a peaceful shared memory of the war. Instead, the reprinting and translation of memoirs was unequal, with Spanish accounts rarely reaching British and French audiences, and hostile, with foreign soldiers’ tales being severely edited and disputed by translators. This nationalistic reaction to the circulation of military memoirs laid the foundations for enduring grand narratives about what is in British history the Peninsular War, in French history the War in Spain, and in Spanish history the War of Independence.

This chapter examines the works of Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans, whose obsession with war developed out of their engagement with the Peninsular War and whose poetic identities were profoundly shaped by their continued reflection on conflict. The chapter also focuses on one way in which these two writers represented war, the siege. They found in the siege a means of representing to their readership the entirety of modern war. The siege illustrates war's effects on the whole of society and it conflates within one site — the fortress, the citadel, or the walled city — the two spaces poetry frequently strives to link, the scene of conflict and the home. Both writers use the siege to explore the relations between war, gender, and history, exploiting the figure siege's rich allegorical and symbolic potential and ultimately find in it a figure for their own poetic identity.

One prevalent model of the British officer corps is that it was neither sufficiently well trained nor efficient until Wellington forged an effective officer corps in the Peninsula. There are few historians who detect much competence in the officer corps before the Peninsular War, and some who ascribe Britain's limited military contribution to the long wars against France to outright incompetence in the senior officer corps. This chapter re-examines the role of the British officer corps by exploring the continuity of service among senior officers from the 1790s to Waterloo and by assessing the formal and informal ways in which senior officers’ performance was monitored. It distinguishes between the various career trajectories pursued by officers and provides data on the earlier careers of senior officers at Waterloo and of officers more generally in India. It stresses that the experience and military effectiveness of officers in the militia, the regular army and in the East India Company's service differed over time and that an evaluation of their efficiency requires an understanding of their widely differing roles.

Peninsular War veterans often faced a difficult transition back into civilian society after the conflict, receiving inadequate pay and little official commemoration. This led to a common fear, expressed explicitly in their memoirs, that their stories had not been and would not be properly told. This chapter demonstrates that many soldiers-turned-authors deliberately used their autobiographies to take issue with the academic, historical record of the war. It reveals that, in Spain, the first official history of the Peninsular War was written by a group of veterans, who helped to choose the Spanish name for the conflict: la Guerra de la Independencia. It then shows how veterans’ memoirs contributed to the creation of distinct national narratives of the war in Spain, Britain, and France, examining different representations of the ‘Other’, depictions of the guerrilla war and its leaders, and praise or criticism for the regular army.

This book examines the lives of two men—William Gilbert and Thomas Sullivan—one English and the other Irish, whose descendants were destined to make such a mark on the nineteenth century and beyond. The completion of Blackfriars Bridge in 1769 and the development of the area of Southwark, south of the Thames, led to a migration from the slums of Westminster to what many hoped was a brighter future on the other side of the river, and Gilbert was alive to the business potential. Sullivan took part in the battle of Vitoria, which proved to be the turning point of the Peninsular War. Before the end of the century, the names “Gilbert and Sullivan,” William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, would be linked in the most famous partnership in theatre of the Victorian period.

This chapter explores the roots of the modern war memoir genre. It debunks the enduring idea that in the early nineteenth century the Iberian peninsula did not produce military autobiographies, or any autobiographical writing at all, comparable to the output in north-western Europe. Making the argument for a broader definition of ‘war memoir’, it highlights the numerous ephemeral, polemical pamphlets (also known as manifiestos) written by Spanish veterans during the Peninsular War. It presents these military authors as ambitious, high-ranking career officers and shrewd guerrilla leaders, who used memoir-writing as a political tool to defend their actions on the battlefield, assert their suitability for command, and win popular support. In doing so, it emphasises the juridical and bureaucratic origins of Spanish life writing, dating back to colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios and an elite eighteenth-century service culture, as well as the shifts caused during the Peninsular War by the forced abdication of the king and the temporary declaration of freedom of the press.

This chapter explores the concept of soldiers as professional authors, confronting the enduring myth of ‘accidental’ military autobiography. In their prefaces, veterans of the Peninsular War frequently confessed their astonishment at having produced long, descriptive memoirs, professing not to have the slightest literary talent nor education, nor the least authorial ambition, claims that have largely been taken at face value by historians. Using evidence from publishers’ archives, this chapter reveals the immense editing, publishing, and marketing activity that in fact underlay the facade of the simple soldier’s tale. It shows the authors of many Peninsular War memoirs to have been actively involved in the publication of their books, knowledgeable about the industry, and eager for success in the literary rather than military world, raising questions for future historians about the tension between ‘authentic’ eyewitness testimony and edited accounts.

The vast majority of the conflicts in which British soldiers were involved in the period 1750-1815 took place abroad, bringing them into unprecedented contact with foreign cultures and manners. This encounter with ‘the other’ presented a wide range of challenges and dilemmas. These are more noticeable among those who decided to serve in foreign armies, applying in many cases know-how acquired in the British regular army, militia or/and volunteers forces. This chapter will examine some of the experiences of British soldiers who joined as volunteers the Spanish and French forces during the Napoleonic wars. It provides an overview of their motivations to fight under a foreign flag and makes an appraisal of the effects of their engagement on their national loyalties and identities as well as exploring cultural cross-fertilization. Relations with their compatriots in the British army, particularly with military leaders such as Sir John Moore and Lord Wellington, are also considered in order to provide a meaningful sidelight on the way the British authorities conducted the business of war.

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the key points made in the book. It emphasises that a new methodology is needed for analysing Napoleonic war memoirs, and indeed war memoirs in general, one which includes a closer consideration of the active role of veterans as authors, the material history of the book, and a comparative, transnational approach. Seen through these lenses, Peninsular War veterans’ autobiographies and the commercial publishing industry that developed around them over the nineteenth century are responsible for shaping the modern war memoir, and for laying the foundations for the mass popular appeal of tales of soldiers’ war experiences today.

In his “Lectures on Small War” held at the Prussian War College in 1810 and 1811, Clausewitz analyzed small-unit warfare by studying the rebellion in the Vendée (1793–8), the Tyrolean uprising of 1809, and most prominently, the then ongoing Spanish insurrection in the Peninsular War against Napoleonic France. The lectures discuss the organization of small units and the various tactics of small-unit warfare—including the role of advance guards, forward posts, ambushes, and forms of insurgency—and relate these to larger strategic goals and a war’s purpose. Many of the ideas later developed in On War find their first expression in the “Lectures on Small War.”

In 1803 two new translations of Amadis were published: from French, by W. S. Rose, and from Spanish, by Robert Southey. It was through Southey’s editions of Amadis and Palmerin (1807), another Spanish romance, that Keats, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Hazlitt gained their knowledge of the genre. This chapter undertakes the first detailed consideration of Southey’s Amadis and demonstrates that it was heavily dependent upon Anthony Munday’s translation, to an extent not perceived at the time by the critics who praised Southey’s seemingly authentic Elizabethan diction. The translations of Southey and Rose were treated to a detailed assessment by Sir Walter Scott in the Edinburgh Review (1803) and exerted a considerable influence on Scott’s knowledge of medieval literary history and on his novels. The central themes of this chapter are the Romantic preoccupation with the medieval and Elizabethan periods, historical authenticity, and the recreation of the literary past.