The English are a people very subject to receive and to cherish false impressions; proud of their credulity as if it were a virtue, the majority will adopt any fallacy, and cling to it with a tenacity proportioned to its grossness. Thus an ignorant contempt for the British soldiery had been long entertained, before the ill success of the expeditions in 1794 and 1799 appeared to justify the general prejudice. The true cause of those failures was not traced, and the excellent discipline afterwards introduced and perfected by the duke of York was despised. England, both at home and abroad, was, in 1808, scorned as a military power, when she possessed, without a frontier to swallow up large armies in expensive fortresses, at least two hundred thousand[2] of the best equipped and best disciplined soldiers in the universe, together with an immense recruiting establishment, and through the medium of the militia, the power of drawing upon the population without limit. It is true that of this number many were necessarily employed in the defence of the colonies, but enough remained to compose a disposable force greater than that with which Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz, and double that with which he conquered Italy. In all the materials of war, the superior ingenuity and skill of the English mechanics were visible, and that intellectual power that distinguishes Great Britain amongst the nations, in science, arts, and literature, was not wanting to her generals in the hour of danger. CHAPTER II. [Sidenote: Nellerto.[3]] [Sidenote: Vide Doblado’s Letters.] For many years antecedent to the French invasion, the royal family of Spain was distracted with domestic quarrels; the son’s hand was against his mother, the father’s against his son, and the court was a scene of continual broils, under cover of which artful men, as is usual in such cases, pushed their own interest forward, while they seemed to act only for the sake of the party whose cause they espoused. Charles IV. attributed this unhappy state of his house to the intrigues of his sister-in-law, the queen of the Two Sicilies. He himself, a weak and inefficient old man, was governed by his wife, and she again by don Manuel Godoy, of whose person she was enamoured even to folly. From the rank of a simple gentleman of the Royal Guards, this person had, through her influence, been raised to the highest dignities; and the title of Prince of the Peace was conferred upon a man whose name must be for ever connected with one of the bloodiest wars that fill the page of history.