insula. In July 1808 the surrender at
Baylen of a French force which had invaded Andalusia gave the first
shock to the power of Napoleon, and the blow was followed by one almost
as severe. Landing at the Mondego with fifteen thousand men, Sir Arthur
Wellesley drove the French army of Portugal from the field of Vimiera,
and forced it to surrender in the Convention of Cintra on the 30th of
August. But the tide of success was soon roughly turned. Napoleon
appeared in Spain with an army of two hundred thousand men; and Moore,
who had advanced from Lisbon to Salamanca to support the Spanish armies,
found them crushed on the Ebro, and was driven to fall hastily back on
the coast. His force saved its honour in a battle before Corunna on the
16th of January 1809, which enabled it to embark in safety; but
elsewhere all seemed lost. The whole of northern and central Spain was
held by the French armies; and even Zaragoza, which had once heroically
repulsed them, submitted after a second equally desperate resistance.

[Sidenote: Wellesley in Portugal.]

The landing of the wreck of Moore's army and the news of the Spanish
defeats turned the temper of England from the wildest hope to the
deepest despair; but Canning remained unmoved. On the day of the
evacuation of Corunna he signed a treaty of alliance with the Junta
which governed Spain in the absence of its king; and the English force
at Lisbon, which had already prepared to leave Portugal, was reinforced
with thirteen thousand fresh troops and placed under the command of Sir
Arthur Wellesley. "Portugal," Wellesley wrote coolly, "may be defended
against any force which the French can bring against it." At this
critical moment the best of the French troops with the Emperor himself
were drawn from the Peninsula to the Danube; for the Spanish rising had
roused Austria as well as England to a renewal of the struggle. When
Marshal Soult therefore threatened Lisbon from the north, Wellesley
marched boldly against him, drove him from Oporto in a disastrous
retreat, and suddenly changing his line of operations, pushed with
twenty thousand men by Abrantes on Madrid. He was joined on the march by
a Spanish force of thirty thousand men; and a bloody action with a
French army of equal force at Talavera in July 1809 restored the renown
of English arms. The losses on both sides were enormous, and the French
fell back at the close of the struggle; but the fruits of the victory
were lost by a su