It may be objected to these schemes that they did not allow sufficient consideration to the power of Suchet in Valencia. Mackenzie’s force, of a very heterogeneous kind, was not capable of driving in the detachments of the Army of Aragon, which still lay cantoned along the Xucar, facing the Allies at Alicante. Suchet was able to hold his own, without detaining any of the troops of Soult or of King Joseph from their advance upon Madrid. Mackenzie’s projected expedition against the city of Valencia had no chance of putting a check upon the main manœuvre that the French had in hand. But the use of Ballasteros, whose movement must certainly have exercised an immense restraining power upon Soult and King Joseph, if only it had been carried out, was an experiment of a kind which Wellington had tried before, nearly always with disappointing results. To entrust to a Spanish general an essential part of a wide strategical plan had proved ere now a doubtful expedient. And Ballasteros had always shown himself self-willed if energetic; it was dangerous to reckon upon him as a loyal and intelligent assistant in the great game. And at this moment the captain-general of Andalusia was in the most perverse of moods. His ill temper was caused by the recent appointment of Wellington as commander-in-chief of all the Spanish armies, a measure to which the Cortes had at last consented, after the consequences of the battle of Salamanca and the occupation of Madrid had prepared public opinion for this momentous step. It had been bitterly opposed at the secret session when it was brought forward, but there could no longer be any valid excuse for putting off the obviously necessary policy of combining all military effort in the Peninsula, by placing the control of the whole of the Spanish armies in the hands of one who had shown himself such a master of the art of war.