Of all the reasons for delay which were valid on November 20th there was now none left unremoved save the most important of all. The Emperor had not yet made his intentions known; though pressed to declare his will by every letter sent by his brother or by Soult, he gave no answer as to a general plan of campaign. Several of his dispatches had reached Madrid: they were full of details as to the troops which he was sending across the Pyrenees, they contained some advice as to finance, and some rebukes for the King concerning petty matters of administration[121], but there was no permission, still less any order, to invade Andalusia or Portugal; nor did Napoleon deign to state that he was, or was not, coming to Spain in person. It was only when Joseph received the first dispatch opening up the matter of the divorce of Josephine[122], that he was able to guess that, with such an affair on hand, his brother would not set out for the Peninsula during the winter or the early spring. [121] The Emperor scolds his brother for not sending to Paris the flags taken at Ocaña, and for calling Sebastiani’s 3rd Division ‘the Polish division’ instead of ‘the division of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw!’ [122] In a dispatch dated from the Trianon on Dec. 17. By the middle of December Joseph had made up his mind that it would be politic to attack Andalusia without delay. He had won over Soult to his ideas--the Marshal having now abandoned the plan, which he had urged so strongly in the autumn, that Lisbon not Seville should be the objective of the next French advance. It is easy to understand the King’s point of view--he wished rather to complete the conquest of his own realm, by subduing its wealthiest and most populous province, than to do his brother’s work in Portugal, where he had no personal interest. It is less obvious why Soult concurred with him--as a great strategist he should have envisaged the situation from the military rather than the political point of view. Apparently Joseph had won him over by giving him all that he asked, and treating him with effusive courtesy: their old quarrels of the preceding summer had been entirely forgotten. At any rate Soult had now become the ardent advocate of the invasion of Andalusia, though--as his predecessor Jourdan tersely puts it--‘the English army being now the only organized force in a state to face the imperial troops, and its presence in the Peninsula being the thing that sustained the Spanish government and gave confidence to the Spanish people, I imagine that we ought to have set ourselves to destroy that army, rather than to have disseminated our troops in garrisoning the whole surface of Spain[123].’ The same thought was in the Emperor’s mind when he wrote in January--too late to stop the Andalusian expedition--that ‘the only danger in Spain is the English army; the rest are partisans who can never hold the field against us[124].’ [123] Jourdan, _Mémoires_, p. 294.