Although Albemarle cannot be said to have governed with the tyranny that characterized the German governors of occupied territories in the recent war, he failed to win the people. Those residents of Havana who were able to leave the place, moved into the country or to towns like Villa-Clara. The peasants of the neighborhood, who had carried on a profitable trade with the city in garden and dairy products, fowl, venison, etc., preferred to renounce these profits rather than go to the market and have the British buy what their soil had raised and their hands had tended. The spirit of the people was unanimous in the hatred of the enemy conquerors. Their intemperance, their customs, and even their language irritated them. Altercations that terminated in bloodshed became more and more numerous as time went on. Any act of violence against the British was severely punished, and not a few Cuban "rebels" were executed; the atmosphere of Havana was soon charged with invisible mines that a spark could set off. Complying with the orders of the British government, Albemarle had to exact the payment of certain sums from the population, including the clergy and the religious organizations, and found great difficulty in enforcing these orders. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the feelings of the population were being deliberately hurt, especially by the disregard of the British authorities for the institutions maintained by the clergy. Thus a wave of indignation swept over the city, when the beggars and the sick were ejected from the convent of San Juan de Dios, which was turned into a hospital for the British. Without remuneration they occupied almost one-third of the buildings subject to an ecclesiastical tax, they transformed private residences into jails; they seized merchandise and funds that were owned by the Real Compania de Comercio and when these were claimed as private property, they were returned only after payment of one hundred and seventy-five pesos. As the tension grew crimes committed from vindictiveness increased among the population. M. Savine, the French writer referred to previously, reports that the Guajiros of the mountains poisoned the milk furnished to the garrison. A Cuban "rebel" who had escaped from the jail went about in the part of the island not occupied by the British and preached a "holy war" against the invaders of the island. Conditions were such that Havana might have become at any moment the scene of a new Sicilian Vespers. It was at this time that the Commissary D. Lorenzo de Montalvo wrote to the Minister of War at Madrid under date of October eighteenth, 1762: "The extraordinary mortality of the British troops has reduced them to the state which Your Excellency will see from the included papers. If at this moment eight or ten vessels arrived with two or three thousand men to debark, it would not be forty eight hours before they would capitulate."