I have been charged with incompetence to understand, and, most unjustly, with a desire to underrate the Spanish resistance; but it is the province of history to record, foolish as well as glorious deeds, that posterity may profit from all: and neither will I mislead those who read my work, nor sacrifice the reputation of my country’s arms to shallow declamation upon the unconquerable spirit of independence. To expose the errors is not to undervalue the fortitude of a noble people; for in their constancy, in the unexampled patience, with which they bore the ills inflicted alike by a ruthless enemy, and by their own sordid governments, the Spaniards were truly noble: but shall I say that they were victorious in their battles, or faithful in their compacts; that they treated their prisoners with humanity; that their Juntas were honest or wise; their generals skilful; their soldiers firm? I speak but the bare truth, when I assert, that they were incapable of defending their own cause! Every action, every correspondence, every proceeding of the six years that the war lasted, rise up in support of this fact; and to assume that an insurrection so conducted did, or could possibly baffle the prodigious power of Napoleon is an illusion. Spain baffle him! Her efforts were amongst the very smallest causes of his failure. Portugal has far greater claims to that glory. Spain furnished the opportunity; but it was England, Austria, Russia, or rather fortune, that struck down that wonderful man. The English, more powerful, more rich, more profuse, perhaps more brave than the ancient Romans; the English, with a fleet, for grandeur and real force, never matched, with a general equal to any emergency, fought as if for their own existence. The Austrians brought four hundred thousand good troops to arrest the conqueror’s progress, the snows of Russia destroyed three hundred thousand of his best soldiers; and finally, when he had lost half a million of veterans, not one of whom died on Spanish ground, Europe, in one vast combination, could only tear the Peninsula from him, by tearing France along with it. What weakness, then, what incredible delusion to point to Spain, with all her follies, and her never-ending defeats, as a proof that a people fighting for independence must be victorious. She was invaded, because she adhered to the great European aristocracy; she was delivered, because England enabled that aristocracy to triumph for a moment, over the principles of the French revolution. BOOK XI. CHAPTER I.