On 21 June 1813, in the Peninsular War, the Marquess of Wellington's British, Portuguese and Spanish army attacked the French army of King Joseph Bonaparte and Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jourdan in the valley of the Zadorra outside Vitoria. Columns crossed the river at bridges the French had failed to destroy, and Sir Thomas Graham's attack in the north cut the main road to France. By evening the French were fleeing toward Pamplona, leaving behind nearly all their artillery, their baggage and the treasure of Joseph's kingdom. The defeat ended French rule in Spain.
The road back to France
Napoleon's disaster in Russia in 1812 changed the war in Spain: early in 1813 French troops were recalled from the peninsula to rebuild the armies in Germany, and Joseph's kingdom was left to fend for itself. Through May and June Wellington kept turning the French flank, crossing the Ebro by a route the French thought impassable, and Joseph abandoned Madrid and fell back to Vitoria with an enormous baggage train. He chose to fight on the Zadorra, hoping that General Bertrand Clausel's Army of the North would reach him in time; it did not.1
Accounts of the two armies differ. Britannica gives Wellington 72,000 men and 90 guns against 57,000 French with 150 guns. The Napoleon and Empire site, a French reference on the period, gives 78,000 allies, including 25,000 Spaniards and 10,000 Portuguese, with 108 guns, against 57,000 French with 140 guns. World History Encyclopedia gives 81,000 allies in one article and puts the French at 65,000 in another.2
Four columns across the Zadorra
The French held a basin ringed by mountains, covered to the north and west by the Zadorra, whose bridges were neither destroyed nor strongly held. Wellington attacked in four columns. In his dispatch of 22 June to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War, he describes Sir Rowland Hill opening the battle on the right by seizing the heights of La Puebla, which the French reinforced too late and failed to retake. In the center, divisions crossed the river by the western bridges and pressed the French left and center back toward Vitoria.3
In the north, Graham's column came down the Bilbao road and around 1 p.m. took the village of Gamarra Mayor, which commanded the main French line of retreat to Bayonne. The Fondation Napoléon's account says it was this pressure on the French right that forced the army to retreat by minor roads east toward Pamplona instead. The French right gave way after heavy fighting, and by 7 p.m. the whole army was in full retreat.4
Guns, baggage and a marshal's baton
The rout swept through Vitoria, where the baggage and camp followers were massed. The Fondation Napoléon's historians write that Joseph was nearly captured, and Jourdan lost his marshal's baton, as World History Encyclopedia and the Queen's Royal Hussars Museum also record. Wellington's dispatch counts 151 guns taken, with all the baggage, provisions and treasure; the Fondation gives nearly 150 guns, the whole artillery park.5
Losses are given differently. Britannica puts the French at about 8,000 killed, wounded and captured and the allies at about 5,000. The Fondation Napoléon gives 7,500 French, a third of them prisoners, and the Queen's Royal Hussars Museum puts the casualties on each side at about 5,000. Many allied soldiers gave up the pursuit to plunder the treasure, which let most of the French army escape. The hussars' museum tells how the men of General Ponsonby's heavy brigade passed a heap of silver dollars untouched, so Ponsonby had the coins collected and gave his 1,500 dragoons five dollars each.6
Pictures from a royal palace
Among the loot were more than 200 paintings that Joseph had taken from the Spanish royal palaces; the Wellington Collection says they had been taken off their stretchers and rolled up in traveling trunks. Wellington's men saved most of them, including works by Velázquez, Titian, Rubens and Brueghel. When Wellington learned where they came from, he offered them back to the restored King Ferdinand VII, who let him keep them; the Wellington Collection says 82 of them hang at Apsley House in London today, English Heritage says 83.7
Vitoria ended Joseph's reign. Ferdinand VII was restored on 11 December 1813, and early in 1814 Wellington carried the war into southern France. His career is told in our biography of the Duke of Wellington, and his last and greatest battle in our article on Waterloo.8
Also on this day
- 1919: Scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. Interned at the British naval base of Scapa Flow after the First World War, the German High Seas Fleet was sunk by its own crews on the orders of Admiral Ludwig von Reuter.
