On 12 June 1808, a few weeks after Spain rose against Napoleon's occupation, the French generals Antoine Lasalle and Pierre Merle attacked the improvised army that Captain General Gregorio de la Cuesta had raised in Valladolid. Cuesta had crossed the Pisuerga at the bridge of Cabezón and drawn up his raw volunteers in a single line with the river at their backs. Lasalle's cavalry broke them at the first shock, the bridge and guns were taken, and Valladolid fell that evening. It was one of the first battles of the Peninsular War.
A rising in Old Castile
In the spring of 1808 Napoleon's troops held Madrid and the roads to France, and in late May and early June the provinces of Spain rose against them. In Valladolid, the British historian Charles Oman writes, the crowd demanded that the captain general, the elderly Gregorio de la Cuesta, lead them; when he hesitated, they set up a gallows outside his house, and he gave way only, it was said, with the rope already round his neck.1
Marshal Bessières, who held northern Spain for the French, sent columns in every direction to put down the risings. William Napier, writing in the 1820s, describes how General Lasalle with a brigade of light cavalry broke a peasant force at Torquemada on 7 June, burned the town and entered Palencia the next day. Oman has Lasalle sacking Torquemada and ransoming Palencia before he reached Cuesta's force at the bridge of Cabezón, where the main road from Burgos to Valladolid crosses the Pisuerga.2
The bridge at their backs
Merle's infantry division joined Lasalle; Oman dates the junction to 11 June and puts their combined strength at 9,000 men, while Napier has Merle meeting Lasalle at Dueñas on the 12th. Against them, according to Oman, Cuesta had only four cannon, some 300 veteran cavalry and 4,000 or 5,000 volunteers from the Valladolid district who had been under arms for no more than a fortnight.3
Oman is scathing about what followed. Instead of destroying or barricading the bridge and holding the far bank, Cuesta led his men across the river and drew them up in a single line with the bridge behind them. On 12 June Lasalle charged and broke them at the first shock: the Spanish cavalry fled, the infantry broke, the bridge and guns were captured, and some hundreds of the recruits were cut down or drowned in the river. Napier records that Cuesta was overthrown with much slaughter and lost his artillery and several thousand muskets.4
After Cabezón
Lasalle occupied Valladolid without opposition the same evening. Oman gives French losses as twelve killed and thirty wounded. With the plains of Old Castile subdued, Lasalle's cavalry stayed to hold them while Merle marched north against Santander.5
Cuesta was not discouraged. Napier notes that he raised another army at Benavente and joined the Galician forces of General Blake to advance again toward Burgos, an advance that ended in defeat at Medina de Rioseco in July. The dates here are Gregorian, used in both Spain and France. Later that year Napoleon came to Spain in person, and one of the battles of his campaign is told in our article on Somosierra.6 › Battle of Medina de Rioseco, 1808
