As he left it, the Portuguese army consisted of twenty-four regiments of the line, each forming a single battalion of seven companies and 806 men. There were twelve regiments of cavalry, each originally composed of no more than 240 sabres, and three regiments of artillery of eight batteries each, besides a few garrison companies of that arm. After La Lippe’s departure the army had shared in the general decay of strength and organization in the kingdom, which prevailed during the reign of the mad queen Maria, and her son the feeble Prince-Regent John. But the lack of mere numerical strength was not nearly so fatal to its efficiency as the rustiness and rottenness of its internal machinery. Under an octogenarian commander-in-chief, the Duke of Alafoens, every department of the army had been decaying in the latter years of the eighteenth century. All the typical faults of an army of the _ancien régime_ after a long period of peace were developed to the highest possible pitch. Commissions were sold, or given away by intrigue and corruption, often to persons of unsuitable rank and education[243]: promotion was slow and perfectly arbitrary: the pay of the officers was very low, while every incentive to petty jobbing and embezzlement was afforded by the vicious system under which the colonel contracted with the government for his regiment, and the captain with the colonel for his company. In the Portuguese army, as in all others where this antiquated practice prevailed, the temptation to fill the muster-rolls with ‘dead-heads’ and absentees, so that the contractor might save their food and pocket their pay, had been too strong for the ordinary officer to resist. Hence came the empty ranks of the battalions, the ludicrous disproportion of horses to men in the cavalry, the depleted condition of the regimental stores and equipment.