Wellington asks Massena for the Ordenanças to be treated as a part of the military establishment of Portugal.
Massena then indicates that, beside others reasons, the Ordenanças don't look like soldiers.
Wellington replies that the French, of all people, shouldn't be talking about 'looking like soldiers'.
No response by Massena, but Wellington never hears about any more Ordenanças being executed (a mass execution of captured Ordenanças was the ignition of all this), more than that, he has news that a few ordenanças were captured and the set free. Massena should have got Wellington's point.

I'm still working out what happened, but this is taken freely from a letter of Wellinton to Miguel Pereira Forjaz, the Portugue Minister of War.

Interestingly enough, Forjaz has passed to Wellington an intention by the Governors of the Kingdom, that a number of French should be also executed, in the same number of the Ordenanças killed. This freaks out Wellington, who indicates, in a circular yet firm manner, the idiocy of the proposal.

Jorge