Great must have been the trouble in his office this year. In October 1778, Sir H. Clinton wrote to Lord G. Germain from New York that he was about to send, as he was ordered, ten thousand men to the West Indies and St. Augustine. ‘After a wound in my humble opinion so fatal to the hopes of any future vigour in this army, I trust, my Lord, you cannot wish to keep me in the mortifying command of it.’ ‘You cannot, I am confident, my Lord, desire that I should remain a mournful witness of the debility of an army at whose head, had I been unshackled by instructions, I might have indulged expectations of rendering serious service to my country.’ Lord G. Germain thought that much good would be done by encouraging the provincial forces, and by promising to the provincial officers half-pay and permanent rank in America. On January 23, 1779, he wrote to Sir H. Clinton: ‘It is likewise his Majesty’s pleasure that you publish and make known to his provincial corps, as also to all others his loyal subjects in America, his gracious intention to support and protect them by making the rank of the officers permanent in America, and allowing them half-pay upon the reduction of their regiments, in the same manner as the officers of British reduced regiments are paid.’ This order for promotion immediately excited the discontent of the officers in the army. In their memorial to Sir H. Clinton they ask him ‘to prevent our being superseded by officers of yesterday who have served under us.’ In 1780 proposals were made to Lord G. Germain to revive the Association of Loyalists in America, ‘so that Government, at a very moderate expense, might be served by a considerable number of men, and Captain Murray offered on behalf of Brigadier Ruggles, who had been Brigadier-General of Provincial Forces in America during the last war, Deputy Surveyor-General of the Woods, and late his Majesty’s council in the province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, to raise and to command a regiment of light dragoons, to be called the King’s American Dragoons.’ Lord G. Germain wrote to Sir H. Clinton, June 7, 1780, from Whitehall: