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all. Concentrated for this purpose at Cork, the troops concerned had been given to Sir Arthur Wellesley who in consequence became the archetypal example of the right man in the right place at the right time. And finally, the fact that Britain had been fighting on the side of Spain in the war of 1793-5 had not prevented her from engaging in a variety of actions that had damaged Spanish interests. With Britain continuing to seize French and Dutch possessions around the world - the period 1809-11 saw the capture of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, Mauritius, Dakar and Batavia - it is not to be wondered at that senior figures in the local junta were putting it about ‘that the greatest circumspection was necessary with regard to England, that her views were dangerous, and, notwithstanding her apparent exertions for Spain, that her policy was to be dreaded’.19

Wellesley’s references to Spanish America notwithstanding, the chief focus of Spanish suspicions prior to 1810 was the port city of Cádiz. British interest in Cádiz was so strong as almost to be an obsession. In June 1808 and again in February 1809 there had been offers to give the city the protection of a British garrison, and in the wake of Talavera the issue was raised yet again. Canning proposed that the Junta Central should be informed that the admission of British forces to Cádiz would be integral to any further British advance into Spain. The pretext for this, of course, was that Spanish political and military unreliability was such that no British army could be risked in the interior of Spain unless it was assured of a safe refuge on the coast. But the military logic underlying the proposal was questionable, and the role of Cádiz as the centre of the colonial trade raised further suspicions in the Patriot camp, especially given Britain’s continued presence in Gibraltar and her control of Menorca (which was in British hands from 1708 to 1756, to1763 1782, and1798 to 1802).

For the first two years of the war Cádiz remained the chief territorial point of friction between the British and the Spaniards. Gradually, however, the issue of Spanish America began to supplant it. Initially, there were two basic problems: specie and free trade. From the very beginning of the war, indeed, Canning had maintained that, because of the shortage of specie that affected Great Britain, her ability to aid the Spaniards would be contingent on gaining access to American silver. His response to Spanish demands for help was therefore to request the Junta Central for permission to export specie directly from the Spanish colonies, or at least for Britain to be given a share of the vast quantities of bullion that were arriving at Cádiz. The empire was seen by the British government as a means of breaking the Continental Blockade and securing the revenues it needed to continue the war, while it was also conscious that exploitation of the market represented by the Spanish colonies would be a good way of assuaging the concerns of the commercial community in respect of the Orders-in-Council. It was not long, then, before the Foreign Secretary was ordering his representatives in Spain to discuss access to the hitherto exclusive colonial trade and, still more importantly, the produce of the empire’s silver mines. Only limited progress was made, however. The Spaniards did sanction a few purchases of specie, but to demands for trade concessions Seville had but one answer. Recognizing that to relinquish Spain’s commercial monopoly on the empire would equate to severing one of the most important links that bound it together, the Junta Central refused to make any commercial concessions except in return for a guaranteed subsidy (it might also be noted here that the British were already conducting a substantial contraband trade with the Spanish colonies through such entrepôts as Jamaica). Nor was their anxiety wholly selfish, for the shipments of bullion that were arriving at Cádiz were becoming ever more important as the tide of French conquest spread across Spain. Yet the British refused to take account