Neither the king’s genius, nor his passions, would permit him to understand the grandeur and vigour of this conception. To change even simple lines of operation suddenly, is at all times a nice affair, but thus to change the whole theatre of operations and regain the initial movements after a defeat, belongs only to master spirits in war. Now the emperor had recommended a concentration of force, and Joseph would not understand this save as applied to the recovery of Madrid; he was uneasy for the frontiers of France; as if Wellington could possibly have invaded that country while a great army menaced Lisbon; in fine he could see nothing but his lost capital on one side, and a disobedient lieutenant on the other, and peremptorily repeated his orders. Then Soult, knowing that his plan could only be effected by union and rapidity, and dreading the responsibility of further delay, took immediate steps to abandon Andalusia; but mortified by this blighting of his fruitful genius, and stung with anger at such a termination to all his political and military labours, his feelings over-mastered his judgment. Instead of tracing the king’s rigid counteraction of his scheme to the narrowness of the monarch’s military genius, he judged it part of a design to secure his own fortune at the expense of his brother, an action quite foreign to Joseph’s honest and passionate nature. Wherefore making known this opinion to six generals, who were sworn to secrecy, unless interrogated by the Emperor, he wrote to the French minister of war expressing his doubts of the king’s loyalty towards the emperor, and founding them on the following facts. 1º. That the extent of Marmont’s defeat had been made known to him only by the reports of the enemy, and the king, after remaining for twenty-three days, without sending any detailed information of the operations in the north of Spain, although the armies were actively engaged, had peremptorily ordered him to abandon Andalusia, saying it was the only resource remaining for the French. To this opinion Soult said he could not subscribe, yet being unable absolutely to disobey the monarch, he was going to make a movement which must finally lead to the loss of all the French conquests in Spain, seeing that it would then be impossible to remain permanently on the Tagus, or even in the Castiles. 2º. This operation ruinous in itself was insisted upon at a time, when the newspapers of Cadiz affirmed, that Joseph’s ambassador at the court of Petersburgh, had joined the Prussian army in the field; that Joseph himself had made secret overtures to the government in the Isla de Leon; that Bernadotte, his brother-in-law, had made a treaty with England and had demanded of the Cortez a guard of Spaniards, a fact confirmed by information obtained through an officer sent with a flag of truce to the English admiral; finally that Moreau and Blucher were at Stockholm, and the aide-de-camp of the former was in London.