Glory and vexation were soon to be his.  On the 17th he drove the French vanguard from Rolica; and when, four days later, Junot hurried up with all his force, the British inflicted on that presumptuous leader a signal defeat at Vimiero.  So bad were Junot’s tactics that his whole force would have been cut off from Torres Vedras, had not Wellesley’s senior officer, Sir Harry Burrard, arrived just in time to take over the command and stop the pursuit.  Thereupon Wellesley sarcastically exclaimed to his staff:  “Gentlemen, nothing now remains to us but to go and shoot red-legged partridges.”  The peculiarities of our war administration were further seen in the supersession of Burrard by Sir Hew Dalrymple, whose chief title to fame is his signing of the Convention of Cintra.

By this strange compact the whole of Junot’s force was to be conveyed from Portugal to France on British ships, while the Russian squadron blockaded in the Tagus was to be held by us in pledge till the peace, the crews being sent on to Russia.  The convention itself was violently attacked by the English public; but it has found a defender in Napier, who dwells on the advantages of getting the French at once out of Portugal, and thus providing a sure base for the operations in Spain.  Seeing, however, that Junot’s men were demoralized by defeat, and that the nearest succouring force was in Navarre, these excuses seem scarcely tenable, except on the ground that, with such commanders as Burrard and Dalrymple, it was certainly desirable to get the French speedily away.

On his side, Napoleon showed much annoyance at Junot’s acceptance of this convention, and remarked:  “I was about to send Junot to a council of war:  but happily the English got the start of me by sending their generals to one, and thus saved me from the pain of punishing an old friend.”  With his customary severity to those who had failed, he frowned on all the officers of the Army of Portugal, and, on landing in France, they were strictly forbidden to come to Paris.  The fate of Dupont and of his chief lieutenants, who were released by the Spaniards, was even harder:  on their return they were condemned to imprisonment.  By such means did Napoleon exact the uttermost from his troops, even in a service so detested as that in Spain ever was.[194]

Despite the blunderings of our War Office, the silly vapourings of the Spaniards, and the insane quarrels of their provincial juntas about precedence and the sharing of English subsidies, the summer of 1808 saw Napoleon’s power stagger under terrible blows.  Not only did he lose Spain and Portugal and the subsidies which they had meekly paid, but most of the 15,000 Spanish troops which had served him on the shores of the Baltic found means to slip away on British ships and put a backbone into the patriotic movements in the north of Spain.  But worst of all was the loss of that moral strength, which he himself reckoned as three-fourths of the whole force in war.  Hitherto