which permitted him to evacuate the kingdom. Wellesley returned
to England.

In the spring of 1809 Wellesley was back in Lisbon. He had
persuaded the government that Portugal could be defended and made
the base of operations which should eventually clear the entire
peninsula of the French. They had intrusted the chief command to
him, and now left him free for four years to press his campaigns
to the Spanish capital, and thence to the Pyrenees and beyond
upon the very soil of France itself.

He was watched by two French armies. Soult was at Oporto in the
north, and Victor far up the Tagus Valley, between him and
Madrid. By an unexpected movement, having surprised Soult and
sent him headlong beyond the frontier, Wellesley crossed the
border in quest of Victor. The armies clashed at Talavera, in the
last days of June, in one of the most stubbornly contested
engagements of the war. The English kept possession of the field,
and, though Joseph Bonaparte congratulated his soldiers upon the
glory of the "victory," he knew in his heart, as his greater
brother told him to his face, that the battle was a French
defeat.

Conditions were not yet suited for an advance into Spain, where
the French were gathering in enormous force, with instructions
from Napoleon to "advance upon the English, pursue them without
cessation, beat them, and fling them into the sea." To insure his
forces against the execution of this mandate Wellesley
constructed a crescent of earthworks about Lisbon, "the lines of
Torres Vedras," within which he might take refuge, and under