There were plenty of small administrative problems to be settled during the winter-rest of 1812-13, which worried Wellington but need not worry the modern student of history, being in themselves trivial. It is well, however, to note that in the spring of 1813 his old complaint about the impossibility of extracting hard cash from the Government, instead of the bank-notes and bills which the Spanish and Portuguese peasantry refused to regard as real money, came practically to an end. By heroic exertions the Chancellor of the Exchequer was scraping together gold enough to send £100,000 a month to Lisbon. A large sum in pagodas had been brought all the way from Madras, and the Mint was busy all the year in melting them down and recoining them as guineas. It was the first time since the ‘Suspension of Cash Payments Act’ of 1797 that any gold of this size had been struck and issued. As the whole output went straight to the Peninsula for the Army, the new coin was generally known as the ‘military guinea.’ Considering that gold was so much sought for in England at the time that a guinea could command 27_s._ in paper, it was no small feat to procure the Indian gold, and to see that the much wanted commodity went abroad without diminution. Wellington could have done with much more gold--six times as much he once observed--but at least he was no longer in the state of absolute bankruptcy in which he had opened the campaign of the preceding year--nor obliged to depend for a few thousand dollars on profits to be made on Egyptian corn which he sold in Lisbon, or impositions of doubtful legality made upon speculators in Commissariat Bonds. The Portuguese troops had their pay still in arrears--but that was not Wellington’s responsibility. The muleteers of the transport train were suffering from being paid in _vales_, which they sold to Lisbon sharks, rather than in the _cruzados novos_ or Pillar Dollars which they craved, and sometimes deserted in not unnatural disgust. But, at the worst, it could not be denied that finance looked a good deal more promising than it had in 1812[354].