Bretwalda Battles
The Peninsular War
The Madrid Uprising (1808)
by
Oliver Hayes
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Published by Bretwalda Books
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First Published 2012
Copyright Bretwalda Books 2012
Oliver Hayes asserts his moral rights to be regarded as the author of this work.
ISBN 978-1-909099-32-6
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Contents
- The Peninsular War
- The Commanders at Madrid
- Weapons, Soldiers and Tactics
- The French Army
- The Spanish Army
- The Madrid Uprising
- After Madrid
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It could all have been so different. Events turned on a knife edge and they came down on the side of war. It was the events in Madrid on 2 and 3 May 1808 that sparked the Peninsular War in which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would die.
Napoleon Bonarparte, Emperor of the French, was not present in Madrid yet it was his actions that drove events there and he must carry much of the responsibility for what happened. He already had in King Charles of Spain a subservient ally, but that was not enough. When he saw the chance to replace Charles with somebody even more friendly to France he simply could not resist it. The Spanish royal family was thrown into luxurious imprisonment and orders sent to Madrid that those members of the family still in the city were to be sent under guard to France.
Even yet all may have been quiet. But Marshal Murat chose to act with a heavy hand, marching hundreds of French troops to the royal palace. The citizens of Madrid crowded into the streets to watch events. As so often in similar circumstances events took an ugly turn for the worse when jittery troops far from home found themselves confronted by a large number of angry, if unarmed people. A Frenchman - nobody now knows which one - opened fire.
The explosion of bloodshed that followed engulfed the city, leading to hours of savage street fighting. Murat poured men into the city and imposed a brutal martial law that led to hundreds of deaths. The ripples spread out from Madrid as survivors and refugees fled to other towns and cities - their tales of French brutality losing nothing in the telling.
Soon all Spain was awash with rumours, violence and demonstrations. The chaos gradually coalesced into a national uprising to drive out the French. The Peninsular War had begun.
And it all started in Madrid on 2 May 1808.
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The Peninsular War
The Madrid Uprising was the first serious bloodshed in what was to become the Peninsular War, the struggle that wracked the Iberian Peninsula from 1808 to 1814. That war was but one part of the wider Napoleonic Wars that engulfed Europe in a series of wars and campaigns that lasted almost 20 years and stretched from the Atlantic to Moscow and reached overseas to India, the Caribbean and the Near East. But although the Peninsular War was a part of the wider conflict, it had some unique characteristics that made it a peculiarly savage and hard-fought conflict.
In the earlier stages of the Napoleonic Wars, Spain had remained neutral or actively taken the side of France against the various coalitions that sought to crush Napoleon, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the French. Spain saw the opportunity to make gains for herself, while the French had no ambitions south of the Pyrenees. The situation began to change in 1807. Napoleon stood triumphant in Europe having defeated Prussia, Austria and Russia on the battlefield and having cowed the smaller states into submission. His only remaining enemy was Britain, and there he had a problem.
In 1805 Britain's Admiral Nelson had crushed the combined fleets of France and Spain at the Battle of Trafalgar. As a result, Napoleon had no chance of invading Britain with his magnificent army. Instead he sought to bring Britain to peace talks by crippling her trade. By blocking every European port to British merchant ships, Napoleon believed, he would do so much damage to British wealth that peace on his terms would be inevitable. Not all the European countries wanted to join such a blockade, but one by one they succumbed to Napoleon's threats and bluster. By October 1807 only Portugal still refused to join this Continental System, as it was known.
In November, Napoleon agreed a treaty with the Spanish Prime Minister, Manuel de Godoy - who was also the lover of the Spanish Queen Maria Louisa. In return for French troops being allowed to march through Spain to invade Portugal, the Spanish would get the Portuguese fleet and various overseas colonies, and as an added inducement Portugal would be divided into three minor states under Spanish domination.
The Portuguese did not wait about to be destroyed. Queen Maria I fled from Lisbon on 29 November along with her family, the Portuguese fleet, most of the merchant ships and thousands of soldiers. She moved to the Portuguese colony of Brazil where she set up court along with her son and regent John. John, later King John VI, appealed to Britain for help. John left orders in Portugal that there should be no resistance to the French in order to avoid bloodshed. The royal flight was, he said, only temporary and soon all would be right.
The embarkation of the Portuguese Royal Family at Lisbon. Queen Maria and the Regent John fled in the face of overwhelming French force and headed to Brazil from where they appealed to Britain for help.
Napoleon, meanwhile, had become more ambitious. Rather than merely close the Iberian ports to British trade, he now wanted to gain complete control of the Peninsula by merging Portugal into Spain and making his own brother, Joseph, King of Spain. His moves were made slowly. First larger numbers of French soldiers marched into Spain, claiming to be on their way to Portugal to occupy that country. In February Napoleon ordered his men in Spain to seize key Spanish fortresses and military bases using the pretext that they were needed to safeguard the supply lines to the French troops in Portugal.
King Charles IV of Spain began to grow alarmed as the numbers of French troops in Spain and Portugal passed the 100,000 mark, and an ominous 80% of them were in Spain. At the same time Spain was suffering an economic crisis, caused largely by the loss of trade to the American colonies that had followed the Battle of Trafalgar. The populace and many nobles blamed Godoy for the pro-French policy that was causing such poverty and hardship. He was already unpopular, and the French troops entering Spain made him even more so.
In the spring of 1808 Charles, Maria Louisa and Godoy were staying in the small palace at the town of Aranjuez. The trio held discussions about the deteriorating situation, and decided to follow the lead of the Portuguese royal family. Messages were sent to Cadiz ordering the Spanish fleet there to prepare to carry the royal family and court to the Spanish colony of Spain. Spain at this date was at peace with Britain, so the Royal Navy would not intervene, and might even help.
