Hi folks

I'm writing an article for a new Spanish online history site and have come across an interesting divergence of views.

The guy that I'm writing it for has given me a copy of an unpublished paper that he wrote concerning the British presence in Spain in which he discusses the difference between the Guerra de Independencia and The Peninsular War - in effect, the same War, fought by the same Allied armies, in the same countries but they were two different wars.

The first was a War against the French oppressor by the Spanish people and he suggests - in my opinion wholly incorrectly at just about every level - that the will of the Spanish people would have finally won through and the French would have been defeated.

The second War was a much more strategic affair, broadly foisted on the Iberian Peninsular as a way of maintaining the pan-European trading empires and broadly to stop any one country - other than perhaps Britain - from gaining the ascendancy across those parts of the world that they did not already administer in some way.

Now most of the second part I have sorted out - arguments on both sides of that hypothesis - but I'm looking for a more detailed argument about the first part, the juxtaposition of the Allied intervention in the Peninsular against the Guerra de Independencia.

Does anybody know of a British source or sources dealing with how the Spanish saw the War please?