[92] ‘How can you expect that we can buy specie here [London] with the exchange 30 per cent. against us, and guineas selling at 25 shillings?’ Huskisson to Wellington (private), 19th July, 1809. Wellington MSS., see Mr. Fortescue’s British Statesmen of the Great War, p. 254.
[93] For notes on this see Walpole’s Life of Perceval, ii. pp. 207-8.
[94] To Charles Stuart, Dispatches, vii. p. 462.
[95] To Admiral Berkeley, Dispatches, vii. p. 415.
[96] ‘The recent augmentation of your force must be considered as made with reference to the present exigency.... We are very anxious, not with a view of abandoning, but for the purpose of maintaining the contest in the Peninsula for an indefinite time, that when the present crisis shall appear to be over, you should send home the excess of your force, after keeping 30,000 effective rank and file for Portugal, and a sufficient garrison for Cadiz, selecting of course those regiments to be sent home which are least efficient, and consequently least fitted for active service.’
[97] Mr. Fortescue writes: ‘This was unfair. Perceval and Liverpool had deliberately turned their backs upon Pitt’s old policy of spasmodic efforts all over the world, in favour of a steady and persistent feeding of the war in one quarter—the Peninsula. Wellington himself had approved the change in his letters of 1810, had named the amount of money that he wanted, and fixed the figure of the reinforcements that he asked. But in 1811 he never ceased to ask for more men and more money, till Liverpool was obliged to remind him very gently, that he was going far beyond his own estimates.’ He had got to the stage of writing that Government having embarked on the contest, and chosen the best officer they could find, must give him the largest army they could collect, and reinforce it to the utmost, without asking precisely how many men were wanted, and for what precise objects. It was Mr. Fortescue who indicated to me two important passages about Liverpool which are omitted from the printed version of Wellington’s letters to Pole of January 11 and March 31, 1811, in Supplementary Dispatches, vii. pp. 40-3 and 93.
[98] See especially Wellington to Dudley Perceval (the premier’s son), June 6th, 1835, a protest against Napier’s wild misrepresentations.
[99] See Wellington to Beresford from Cartaxo, February 12. (Dispatches, vii. 253.)
[100] Ibid. ‘The cause of the state of deficiency is the old want of money to pay for carriage.’
[101] Their names, San Miguel, Loulé, Candido Xavier, and Manuel de Castro, are given by Fririon (Masséna’s aide-de-camp) in his diary. Major Leslie tells me that he cannot identify them in the Portuguese army-list of 1810, and thinks that two of them at least were only Ordenança officers.