Charles J. Esdaile has researched a very timely topic and has written a text that is smooth to read and at a level that can be highly recommended not only to amateur military historians and university undergraduates, but also to all members of graduate research departments in history. Esdaile has set out to write a book which first explains the “readiness position” of the ancien régime army in Spain and the reforms attempted by Godoy, a man who, although not particularly brilliant (some have said not even bright), did as well as could be expected given the political milieu of the Spanish Court in the years from 1792 until the fall of Charles IV in 1808. The rest of this book (chapter 3, “The Army and the Revolution, May-September 1808”; chapter 4, “The War of the Junta Central ”; and chapter 5, “The Army of the Liberals, 1810-1814”) is devoted to an unfolding drama concerning the Spanish Royal Army as it staggers, and sometimes fights, its way through to 1814 which saw liberation from the French and the return of the Spanish Bourbons.
The second part of the book is written in a more relaxed, even racy style, that is often so absorbing that it approaches the level of a good “thriller. ” Those reading on this subject for the first time will wonder from time to time, as the text unfolds, if the Spanish Army, or Spain itself, will survive at all! Even a jaded professor such as myself had to give “three cheers” on finishing the last page of the text. And the final sentence is one that clearly leads to further thought: “In Spain as in so many countries, war was indeed the midwife of Revolution” (p. 200).
The bibliography is complete both in primary research materials and in published sources. Readers will be able to make good use of the four appendixes: “Order of Battle of the Spanish Army, 1788”; “Order of Battle of the Spanish Army, 1808”; “Regiments of the New Creation”; and “Order of Battle of the Spanish Army, 1814.” For those of us who train graduate students this book fills an important lacuna in English-language literature. We have here a brilliant book of a modest 232 pages that can serve us well as a starting or a stopping point, depending on whether we operate on one side or the other, chronologically, of the Wars of the Revolution.
