While Beresford was doing this good work, and the flower of the Portuguese youth was rushing to arms in the regular army, or in the militia reserve, the regency at Lisbon was going from bad to worse. The Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro had no control over it, and it was divided into parties, which quarrelled over the disposition of the English subsidies as if they were legitimate spoil. There is no need to study the intrigues of these parties, but it is worth notice, that Dom Pedro de Sousa Holstein, better known in after-years as the Duke of Palmella, was despatched to the Spanish junta to claim the Regency of Spain for Donna Carlotta Joaquina the Queen of Portugal, when Portugal could not even defend its own territory. Neither Wellington nor Beresford could work with this factious regency, and the English cabinet had to insist that the English ambassador at Lisbon, Sir Charles Stuart, the son of General the Honourable Sir Charles Stuart, should receive a seat upon the council. His great ability and tact soon made him the master of his colleagues, and a certain portion of the money, sent by England to pay the Portuguese troops, did at last find its way to its proper destination. The Regency, even when thus strengthened, failed to become popular; it was hotly criticized and abused; and the murmuring radical party in Lisbon, which hankered after peace with France, was only suppressed by the deportation of eighteen leading journalists to the Azores in September, 1810. It is little wonder that some opposition to the war existed in 1810, for in that year the most formidable invasion of French troops took place. This was the famous invasion of Masséna. The Portuguese nation showed all the valour of a people, fighting for its very existence as a nation, and when Lord Wellington, on being obliged to retire into the lines of Torres Vedras, commanded the peasants to abandon their homes and leave nothing for the French to subsist upon, they obeyed him with touching fidelity. While Wellington was entrenched within his lines, Beresford established his headquarters at Lisbon, and continued the work of reorganization with the help of a fresh contingent of English regimental officers, which reached him at this time. He proceeded rapidly, but in regular order, and having organized and disciplined the Portuguese regiments in the winter of 1809, he made them into independent Portuguese brigades in the winter of 1810. In all he formed a powerful Portuguese army of twelve infantry brigades, partly commanded by English brigadiers, such as Ashworth, Pack, Bradford, and Archibald Campbell, partly by native officers, such as Le Cor, Fonseca, Palmeirim, and Bernadim Ribeiros, four cavalry brigades, under Povoa and Barbacena, Madden and Hawker, and an artillery park of forty-eight guns under Colonel Alexander Dickson. While Beresford was engaged at Lisbon in organizing the Portuguese army, the Portuguese militia was doing good