ABSTRACT
If any country ever needed a ‘good-news story’, it was Spain in the summer of 1810. In November 1809 the chief Spanish armies had been shattered in the battles of Ocan˜a and Alba de Tormes; in December 1809 the stronghold of Gerona had finally succumbed after anepic siege that had lasted sixmonths; and in late January 1810 the French had overrun Andalucı´a in a three-week blitzkrieg. To military humiliation, meanwhile, had been added political disaster in that the Junta Suprema Central, the provisional government that had been formed following the uprising of 1808, had been overthrown by a coup. Since then, true, the situation had improved a little: Ca´diz – Spain’s third capital in three years – had proved invulnerable to French assault;Badajoz had stoodfirm in the faceof an attempt tobully it into surrender; and governmental authority had been restored through the creation of a council of regency and the convocation of elections to a new national assembly. Yet the dark clouds that beset the country had scarcely been dispelled: if, indeed, they could do even somuch,what remainedof the Spanish armies could clearly hope todonomore than hang on to such territory as remained to the Patriot cause; theAnglo-Portuguese army of LordWellington had in effect withdrawn from the conflict in Spain; and the first newswas starting to arriveof a series of revolutions in theSpanish colonies,with the loss of Andalucı´a, now the financial mainstay of the war. To repeat, then, what was needed was a ‘good-news story’, and that in the shortest possible of orders: as
Spain was waging a people’s war, it followed that morale had to be kept up at all costs.
