14 - Plunder on the Peninsula: British Soldiers and Local Civilians during the Peninsular War, 1808–1813

Summary

ON 17 July 1815 the Prince Regent signed a Royal Warrant granting the British army that served under the Duke of Wellington in Portugal, Spain and France from 1809 to 1814 the sum of £800,000 ‘for the ordinance, arms, stores, magazines, shipping and other booty captured by it from the enemy’. This was the only prize the British soldiers of the Peninsular War were ever formally granted by the Crown. Yet behind this ‘official prize’ were thousands of other stories of British plunder, including objects taken from Spanish and Portuguese civilians.

All regular armies in the Peninsular War – French, Spanish, Portuguese and British – plundered the local inhabitants. The plunder practised by the French invasion and occupation forces has always, and justifiably so, overshadowed the behaviour of the British army. When Napoleon's Imperial troops crossed the Pyrenees, in the words of Charles Esdaile, they ‘fell upon the Peninsula like wolves’. Public merchandise and estates were confiscated, crippling war contributions were levied on the provinces, harvests requisitioned, and church property and valuables seized. In the face of popular resistance, guerrilla warfare and spiralling cycles of insurgency and counter-insurgency, French troops committed atrocities against civilians and razed villages, towns, churches and monasteries to the ground, looting as they did. The most outrageous looting, however, came from the top. Napoleon demanded nothing less than fifty paintings for the Louvre, while marshals and generals in the provinces acted with impunity, lining their own pockets and stealing national treasures.