With respect to the first, lord Wellington had made strenuous efforts, and his advice, and remonstrances, had at times saved the armies in the field from destruction; some partial attempts were also made to form troops under British officers in the Spanish service, but to a system like that which England exercised in Portugal, the leading Spaniards would never listen. This was one result of Mr. Canning’s impolitic fostering of the Spanish pride, for it was by no means apparent that the people would have objected to such an arrangement, if it had been prudently urged, before the republican party in the cortes, and the popular press, had filled their minds with alarm upon the subject. The Catalans openly and repeatedly desired to have an English general, and in 1812 colonel Green did organize a small corps there, while Whittingham and Roche formed in the Balearic isles large divisions; colonel Cox had before proposed a like scheme for the north, but it was rejected by lord Wellington, and I have been unable to trace any important service rendered by those officers with their divisions. Their reputation was however quite eclipsed by one Downie, who had passed from the British commissariat into the Spanish service, and the English ministers, taken with his boasting manner, supplied him with uniforms and equipments for a body of cavalry, called the Estremadura Legion, of such an expensive and absurd nature, as to induce a general officer to exclaim on seeing them that “he blushed for the folly of his government.” [Sidenote: Appendix, No. I. Section 4.] When the British ministers found themselves unable to deal with the Spanish regulars, they endeavoured to prop the war by the irregulars. But the increase of this force, which however never exceeded thirty thousand men in arms, gave offence to the regular officers, and amidst these distractions, the soldiers, ill-organized, ill-fed, and quite incapable of moving in the field in large bodies, lost all confidence in their generals. The latter, as in the case of Freire with the Murcian army, generally expected to be beaten in every action, and cared very little about it, because the regency were sure to affirm that they were victorious; and another of those wandering starved naked bands, which they called armies, could be formed from new levies in a month.