From the first moment when the Asturian deputies arrived in London, with the news of the insurrection in Northern Spain [June 4], the English Government had been eager to intervene in the Peninsula. The history of the last fifteen years was full of the records of unfortunate expeditions sent out to aid national risings, real or imaginary, against France. They had mostly turned out disastrous failures: it is only necessary to mention the Duke of York’s miserable campaign of 1799 in Holland, Stewart’s invasion of Calabria in 1806, and Whitelock’s disgraceful fiasco at Buenos Ayres in 1807. As a rule the causes of their ill success had been partly incapable leading, partly an exaggerated parsimony in the means employed. Considering the vast power of France, it was futile to throw ashore bodies of five thousand, ten thousand, or even twenty thousand men on the Continent, and to expect them to maintain themselves by the aid of small local insurrections, such as those of the Orange party in Holland or the Calabrian mountaineers. The invasion of Spanish South America, on the hypothesis that its inhabitants were all prepared to revolt against the mother-country--a fiction of General Miranda--had been even more unwise.
The ‘policy of filching sugar islands,’ as Sheridan wittily called it--of sending out expeditions of moderate size, which only inflicted pin-pricks on non-vital portions of the enemy’s dominions--was still in full favour when the Spanish War began. There was hardly a British statesman who rose above such ideas; Pitt and Addington, Fox and Grenville, and the existing Tory government of the Duke of Portland, had all persisted in the same futile plans. At the best such warfare resulted in the picking up of stray colonies, such as Ceylon and Trinidad, the Cape, St. Thomas, or Curaçao: but in 1808 the more important oversea possessions of France and her allies were still unsubdued. At the worst the policy led to checks and disasters small or great, like Duckworth’s failure at Constantinople, the abortive Egyptian expedition of 1807, or the catastrophe of Buenos Ayres. Castlereagh seems to have been the only leading man who dared to contemplate an interference on a large scale in Continental campaigns. His bold scheme for the landing of 60,000 men in Hanover, during the winter of 1805-6, had been foiled partly by the hesitation of his colleagues, partly by the precipitation with which Francis II made peace after Austerlitz[178].