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and that it was invariably necessary for the British to do all the fighting. And the siege of Burgos and the miserable winter retreat that followed found Wellington blaming the setback on the Spaniards and suggesting that their battered regular armies had failed to do enough to tie down his various French opponents. For these disappointments both sides had their own explanations. Time and again all the Spaniards saw of the British was their disappearing backs as they fled for the safety of their refuge of the moment, while loudly protesting the need to defend Portugal. This suggested that their allies did not have their hearts in the struggle, or, at least, that they were quite content for Spain to do the bulk of the fighting, in which respect it should be remembered that there were long periods - from August 1809 to July 1810, for example - when Wellington’s forces hardly fired a single shot. Spanish disappointment was also fuelled by the influence of an ever-optimistic, not to mention wildly irresponsible, press, which consistently overestimated the number of British troops available for action. Encountering a group of Spanish soldiers on the Portuguese frontier in 1810, one British officer wrote:

They knew little of . . . the regular practice of war; they knew only that we had not fired a shot by their side since the battle of Talavera, that our companions in arms under Sir John Moore had fled through the strong country of Galicia without fighting two years before, and their angry and contemptuous looks told us plainly that they expected that we should retire through Portugal . . . with similar precipitation.14

As for the British, the Spaniards were, or so it seemed, incompetent, cowardly and unreliable, a judgement that was backed by their armies being beaten on almost every occasion that they took the field. The British viewed all this through the lens of the ‘black legend’: thanks to centuries of obscurantist Catholicism, Spain was backward, her leaders corrupt and her people cowed and apathetic. Irritation and disappointment therefore reaffirmed the already strong British sense of cultural superiority, and this expressed itself at best as haughtiness and arrogance, and at worst as outbursts of savagery that saw several liberated towns - most notably Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastián - brutally put to the sack. Even Wellington was by no means immune to the general sense of cultural superiority. ‘The Spaniard,’ he wrote to his aide-de-camp, Lord Burghersh, ‘is an undisciplined savage who obeys no law, despises all authority, feels no gratitude for benefits conferred or favours received, and is always ready with his knife or firelock to commit murder.’15 In the wake of the retreat from Burgos, in particular, his anger knew no bounds:

I have never yet known the Spanish army do anything, much less do anything well . . . A few rascals called guerrillas attack one quarter of their number and sometimes succeed and sometimes not, but as for any regular operation, I have not heard of such a thing and successful [sic] in the whole course of the war. 16

Such attitudes engendered a greater degree of suspicion and resentment among the Spaniards, increasing the likelihood that honest cooperation with the British would not be forthcoming. At the same time, by a variety of means, of which the greatest and most devious was appointing Wellington to be commander-in-chief of the Spanish armies in September 1812 (see below), the Spaniards sought to secure control of the operations of the Anglo-Portuguese army and keep it linked to operations in Spain. Yet these manoeuvres caused further outrage in Wellington’s headquarters, and led to angry accusations of political interference. It was a vicious circle, and the mutual incomprehension which marked the relationship between the rival armed forces continued to fester until the end of the war.

To disappointment on the battlefield was added a variety of political and diplomatic problems. Chief amongst these was the burgeoning controversy that surrounded the linked