But when he wanders off into politics, English or Spanish, Napier is a less trustworthy guide. All his views are coloured by the fact that he was a bitter enemy of the Tories of his own day. The kinsman not only of Charles James Fox, but of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he could never look with unprejudiced eyes on their political opponents. Canning and Spencer Perceval were in his ideas men capable of any folly, any gratuitous perversity. Castlereagh’s splendid services to England are ignored: it would be impossible to discover from the pages of the _Peninsular War_ that this was the man who picked out Wellington for the command in Spain, and kept him there in spite of all manner of opposition. Nor is this all: Napier was also one of those strange Englishmen who, notwithstanding all the evidence that lay before them, believed that Napoleon Bonaparte was a beneficent character, thwarted in his designs for the regeneration of Europe by the obstinate and narrow-minded opposition of the British Government. In his preface, he goes so far as to say that the Tories fought the Emperor not because he was the dangerous enemy of the British Empire, but because he was the champion of Democracy, and they the champions of caste and privilege. When the tidings of Napoleon’s death at St. Helena reached him (as readers of his _Life_ will remember), he cast himself down on his sofa and wept for three hours! Hence it was that, in dealing with the Tory ministries, he is ever a captious and unkind critic, while for the Emperor he displays a respect that seems very strange in an enthusiastic friend of political liberty. Every one who has read the first chapters of his great work must see that Bonaparte gets off with slight reproof for his monstrous act of treachery at Bayonne, and for the even more disgusting months of hypocritical friendship that had preceded it. While pouring scorn on Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, the silly father and the rebellious son, whose quarrels were the Emperor’s opportunity, Napier forgets to rise to the proper point of indignation in dealing with the false friend who betrayed them. He almost writes as if there were some excuse for the crimes of robbery and kidnapping, if the victim were an imbecile or a bigot, or an undutiful son. The prejudice in favour of the Emperor goes so far that he even endeavours to justify obvious political and military mistakes in his conduct of the Peninsular War, by throwing all the blame on the way in which his marshals executed his orders, and neglecting to point out that the orders themselves were impracticable.