All these malignant efforts Wellington viewed with indifference. “Every leading man,” he said, “was sure to be accused of criminal personal ambition, and, if he was conscious of the charge being false, the accusation did no harm.” Nevertheless his position was thereby rendered more difficult, and these intrigues were accompanied by other mischiefs of long standing and springing from a different source, but even of a more serious character, for the spirit of captious discontent had reached the inferior magistracy, who endeavoured to excite the people against the military generally. Complaints came in from all quarters of outrages on the part of the troops, some too true, but many of them false, or frivolous; and when the English general ordered courts-martial for the trial of the accused, the magistrates refused to attend as witnesses, because Portuguese custom rendered such an attendance degrading, and by Portuguese law a magistrate’s written testimony was efficient in courts-martial. Wellington in vain assured them that English law would not suffer him to punish men upon such testimony; in vain he pointed out the mischief which must infallibly overwhelm the country if the soldiers discovered they might thus do evil with impunity. He offered to send in each case, lists of Portuguese witnesses required that they might be summoned by the native authorities, but nothing could overcome the obstinacy of the magistrates; they answered that his method was insolent; and with a sullen malignity they continued to accumulate charges against the troops, to refuse attendance in the courts, and to call the soldiers, their own as well as the British, “licensed spoliators of the community.” For a time the generous nature of the poor people, resisted all these combining causes of discontent; neither real injuries nor the exaggerations, nor the falsehoods of those who attempted to stir up wrath, produced any visible effect upon the great bulk of the population; yet by degrees affection for the British cooled, and Wellington expressed his fears that a civil war would commence between the Portuguese people on the one hand, and the troops of both nations on the other. Wherefore his activity was redoubled to draw, while he could still controul affairs, all the military strength to a head, and to make such an irruption into Spain as would establish a new base of operations beyond the power of such fatal dissensions. [Sidenote: March.]