[396] Liverpool to Bentinck, March 4. Wellington’s Supplementary Dispatches, vii. p. 300.
[397] Liverpool to Wellington, March 5, ibid., p. 301.
[398] Bentinck to Wellington, February 23, ibid., p. 296.
[399] The answer to Lord Liverpool went off on March 20, that to Bentinck on March 24th.
[400] Whither the 2/67th, a company of artillery, and five companies of De Watteville’s Swiss regiment had been sent, on the news of Blake’s disasters before Valencia. Dispatches, viii. p. 448.
[401] The best source of information about these subsidized corps is the life of Sir Samford Whittingham, who raised and disciplined one of them in Majorca, on the skeletons of the old regiments of Cordova, Burgos, and 5th Granaderos Provinciales. He had only 1,500 men on January 1, 1812, and 2,200 on February 21, but had worked them up to over 3,000 by April. Roche, who had to work on the cadres of Canarias, Alicante, Chinchilla, Voluntarios de Aragon, 2nd of Murcia, and Corona, had 5,500 men ready on March 1, and more by May. Whittingham maintains that his battalions always did their duty far better than other divisions, commanded by officers with unhappy traditions of defeat, and attributes the previous miserable history of the Murcian army to incapacity and poor spirit in high places.
[402] Henry Wellesley to Wellington. Supplementary Dispatches, vii. p. 320.
[403] See as evidence of eagerness Whittingham’s letter to Pellew of May 28 in the former’s Memoirs, p. 161.
[404] Liverpool to Bentinck, 4th March, quoted above.
[405] See Wellington to Lord W. Bentinck in Dispatches, ix. pp. 60-1.