Portugal, at this juncture, deserted by her government and by her pitiful king, who fled to Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, fell easily into the power of a French army, under Marshal Junot, who was thereupon created Duke of Abrantes, a town on the Portuguese frontier. All Europe cried aloud at these lawless proceedings, and the Spaniards, so long our enemies, with our old allies the Portuguese, were alike filled with fury and resentment. The peasantry flew to arms, and the provinces became filled by bands of guerillas, brave but reckless; so the whole peninsula was full of tumult, treason, bloodshed, and crime. "England," says General Napier, "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 of the best equipped and best disciplined soldiers in the universe, together with an immense recruiting establishment through the medium of the militia." War, not "Peace at any price," was the generous John Bull's motto, and, to aid these patriots, a British army proceeded to the peninsula in June, 1808, under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley. Some sharp fighting ensued along the coast, the prologue to the long and bloody, but glorious drama, that was only to terminate on the plains of Waterloo. On the 21st of August we fought and won the battle of Vimiera, and nine days after followed the convention of Cintra, by which the French troops were compelled to evacuate the ancient Lusitania, and were conveyed home in British ships; but still the marshals of the empire, with vast armies, the heroes of Jena, Austerlitz, and a hundred other battles so glorious to France, were covering all the provinces of Spain, from the steeps of the Pyrenees to the arid plains of Estremadura. "Soldiers, I have need of you," says the emperor, in one of his bulletins. "The hideous presence of the leopard contaminates the peninsula of Spain and Portugal. In terror he must fly before you! Let us bear our triumphal eagles to the pillars of Hercules, for there also we have injuries to avenge! Soldiers, you have surpassed the renown of modern armies, but have you yet equalled the glory of those Romans, who, in one and the same campaign, were victorious upon the Rhine and the Euphrates, in Illyria and upon the Tagus? A long peace and lasting prosperity shall be the reward of your labours." The standard of freedom was first raised among the Asturians, the hardy descendants of the ancient Goths, and in Galicia; then Don José Palafox, by his valiant defence of the crumbling walls of Zaragossa, showed the Spaniards what brave men might do when fighting for their hearths and homes. "In a few days," said Napoleon, boastfully, in the October of 1808, "I go to put myself at the head of my armies, and, with the aid of God, to crown the King of Spain in Madrid, and plant my eagles on the towers of Lisbon."