destroyed in the war with England:  her commerce and revenues had been mortally wounded by the alliance with France and the maladministration of Godoy.  Ferdinand was detained a prisoner in France.  There was no natural leader or chief, around whom the whole energies of the nation might be expected to rally.  It was amidst such adverse circumstances that the Spanish people rose everywhere, smarting under intolerable wrongs, against a French army, already 80,000 strong, in possession of half the fortresses of the country, and in perfect communication with the mighty resources of Napoleon.

There are authors who still delight to undervalue the motives of this great national movement; according to whom the commercial classes rose chiefly, if not solely, from their resentment of the pecuniary losses inflicted on them by Godoy’s alliance with the author of the “continental system”; the priesthood because Godoy had impoverished the church, and they feared that a Buonapartean government would pursue the same course to a much greater extent; the peasantry because their priests commanded them.  All these influences unquestionably operated, and all strongly; but who can believe in the absence of others infinitely above these, and common to all the Spaniards who, during six years, fought and bled, and saw their towns ruined and their soil a waste, that they might vindicate their birthright, the independence of their nation?  Nor can similar praise be refused to the great majority of the Portuguese.  Napoleon summoned a body of the nobles of that kingdom also to meet him early in the year at Bayonne:  they obeyed, and being addressed by the haughty usurper in person, resisted all his efforts to cajole them into an imitation of the Spanish Notables, who at the same time and place accepted Joseph for their King.  They were in consequence retained as prisoners in France during the war which followed; but their fate operated as a new stimulus upon the general feeling of their countrymen at home, already well prepared for insurrection by the brutal oppression of Junot.

The Spanish arms were at first exposed to many reverses; the rawness of their levies, and the insulated nature of their movements, being disadvantages of which it was not difficult for the experienced Generals and overpowering numbers of the French to reap a full and bloody harvest.  After various petty skirmishes, in which the insurgents of Arragon were worsted by Lefebre Desnouettes, and those of Navarre and Biscay by Bessieres, the latter officer came upon the united armies of Castile, Leon and Galicia, commanded by the Generals Cuesta and Blake, on the 14th of July, at Riosecco, and defeated them in a desperate action, in which not less than 20,000 Spaniards died.  This calamitous battle it was which opened the gates of Madrid to the intrusive king—­whose arrival in that capital on the 20th of the same month has already been mentioned.