1776

by David McCullough

  1776

  David McCullough

  For Rosalee Barnes McCullough

  Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.

  —General George Washington

  Part I

  The Siege

  The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in.

  —General George Washington

  January 14, 1776

  Chapter One

  Sovereign Duty

  God save Great George our King,

  Long live our noble King,

  God save the King!

  Send him victorious,

  Happy and glorious,

  Long to reign o’er us;

  God save the King!

  ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, October 26, 1775, His Royal Majesty George III, King of England, rode in royal splendor from St. James’s Palace to the Palace of Westminster, there to address the opening of Parliament on the increasingly distressing issue of war in America.

  The day was cool, but clear skies and sunshine, a rarity in London, brightened everything, and the royal cavalcade, spruced and polished, shone to perfection. In an age that had given England such rousing patriotic songs as “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” in a nation that adored ritual and gorgeous pageantry, it was a scene hardly to be improved upon.

  An estimated 60,000 people had turned out. They lined the whole route through St. James’s Park. At Westminster people were packed solid, many having stood since morning, hoping for a glimpse of the King or some of the notables of Parliament. So great was the crush that late-comers had difficulty seeing much of anything.

  One of the many Americans then in London, a Massachusetts Loyalist named Samuel Curwen, found the “mob” outside the door to the House of Lords too much to bear and returned to his lodgings. It was his second failed attempt to see the King. The time before, His Majesty had been passing by in a sedan chair near St. James’s, but reading a newspaper so close to his face that only one hand was showing, “the whitest hand my eyes ever beheld with a very large rose diamond ring,” Loyalist Curwen recorded.

  The King’s procession departed St. James’s at two o’clock, proceeding at walking speed. By tradition, two Horse Grenadiers with swords drawn rode in the lead to clear the way, followed by gleaming coaches filled with nobility, then a clattering of Horse Guards, the Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold livery, and a rank of footmen, also in red and gold. Finally came the King in his colossal golden chariot pulled by eight magnificent cream-colored horses (Hanoverian Creams), a single postilion riding the left lead horse, and six footmen at the side.

  No mortal on earth rode in such style as their King, the English knew. Twenty-four feet in length and thirteen feet high, the royal coach weighed nearly four tons, enough to make the ground tremble when under way. George III had had it built years before, insisting that it be “superb.” Three gilded cherubs on top—symbols of England, Scotland, and Ireland—held high a gilded crown, while over the heavy spoked wheels, front and back, loomed four gilded sea gods, formidable reminders that Britannia ruled the waves. Allegorical scenes on the door panels celebrated the nation’s heritage, and windows were of sufficient size to provide a full view of the crowned sovereign within.

  It was as though the very grandeur, wealth, and weight of the British Empire were rolling past—an empire that by now included Canada, that reached from the seaboard of Massachusetts and Virginia to the Mississippi and beyond, from the Caribbean to the shores of Bengal. London, its population at nearly a million souls, was the largest city in Europe and widely considered the capital of the world.

  ***

  GEORGE III had been twenty-two when, in 1760, he succeeded to the throne, and to a remarkable degree he remained a man of simple tastes and few pretensions. He liked plain food and drank but little, and wine only. Defying fashion, he refused to wear a wig. That the palace at St. James’s had become a bit dowdy bothered him not at all. He rather liked it that way. Socially awkward at Court occasions—many found him disappointingly dull—he preferred puttering about his farms at Windsor dressed in farmer’s clothes. And in notable contrast to much of fashionable society and the Court, where mistresses and infidelities were not only an accepted part of life, but often flaunted, the King remained steadfastly faithful to his very plain Queen, the German princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, with whom by now he had produced ten children. (Ultimately there would be fifteen.) Gossips claimed Farmer George’s chief pleasures were a leg of mutton and his plain little wife.

  But this was hardly fair. Nor was he the unattractive, dim-witted man critics claimed then and afterward. Tall and rather handsome, with clear blue eyes and a generally cheerful expression, George III had a genuine love of music and played both the violin and piano. (His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach and in 1764 had taken tremendous delight in hearing the boy Mozart perform on the organ.) He loved architecture and did quite beautiful architectural drawings of his own. With a good eye for art, he had begun early to assemble his own collection, which by now included works by the contemporary Italian painter Canaletto, as well as watercolors and drawings by such old masters as Poussin and Raphael. He avidly collected books, to the point where he had assembled one of the finest libraries in the world. He adored clocks, ship models, took great interest in things practical, took great interest in astronomy, and founded the Royal Academy of Arts.

  He also had a gift for putting people at their ease. Samuel Johnson, the era’s reigning arbiter of all things of the mind, and no easy judge of men, responded warmly to the “unaffected good nature” of George III. They had met and conversed for the first time when Johnson visited the King’s library, after which Johnson remarked to the librarian, “Sir, they may talk of the King as they will, but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen.”

  Stories that he had been slow to learn, that by age eleven he still could not read, were unfounded. The strange behavior—the so-called “madness” of King George III—for which he would be long remembered, did not come until much later, more than twenty years later, and rather than mental illness, it appears to have been porphyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century.

  Still youthful at thirty-seven, and still hardworking after fifteen years on the throne, he could be notably willful and often shortsighted, but he was sincerely patriotic and everlastingly duty-bound. “George, be aKing, ” his mother had told him. As the crisis in America grew worse, and the opposition in Parliament more strident, he saw clearly that he must play the part of the patriot-king.

  He had never been a soldier. He had never been to America, any more than he had set foot in Scotland or Ireland. But with absolute certainty he knew what must be done. He would trust to Providence and his high sense of duty. America must be made to obey.

  “I have no doubt but the nation at large sees the conduct in America in its true light,” he had written to his Prime Minister, Lord North, “and I am certain any other conduct but compelling obedience would be ruinous and…therefore no consideration could bring me to swerve from the present path which I think myself in duty-bound to follow.”

  In the House of Lords in March of 1775, when challenged on the chances of Britain ever winning a war in America, Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, had looked incredulous. “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify?” he asked. “They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men.” And Lord Sandwich was by no means alone in that opinion. General James Grant, a member of the House of Commons, had boasted that with 5,000 British regulars he could march from one end of the American continent to the other, a claim that was widely quoted.r />
  But in striking contrast, several of the most powerful speakers in Parliament, like the flamboyant Lord Mayor of London, John Wilkes, and the leading Whig intellectual, Edmund Burke, had voiced ardent support for and admiration of the Americans. On March 22, in the House of Commons, Burke had delivered in his heavy Irish brogue one of the longest, most brilliant speeches of his career, calling for conciliation with America.

  Yet for all that, no one in either house, Tory or Whig, denied the supremacy of Parliament in determining what was best for America. Even Edmund Burke in his celebrated speech had referred repeatedly to “our” colonies.

  Convinced that his army at Boston was insufficient, the King had dispatched reinforcements and three of his best major generals: William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton. Howe, a member of Parliament and a Whig, had earlier told his Nottingham constituents that if it came to war in America and he were offered a command, he would decline. But now duty called. “I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness, to serve my country in distress,” he explained. Howe, who had served in America during the Seven Years’ War—or the French and Indian War, as it was known in America—was convinced the “insurgents” were few in number in comparison to those loyal to the Crown.

  War had come on April 19, with the first blood shed at Lexington and Concord near Boston, then savagely on June 17 at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. (The June engagement was commonly known as the Battle of Bunker Hill on both sides of the Atlantic.) British troops remained under siege at Boston and were running short of food and supplies. On July 3, General George Washington of Virginia had taken command of the American “rabble.”

  With 3,000 miles of ocean separating Britain from her American colonies, accounts of such events took a month or more to reach London. By the time the first news of Lexington and Concord arrived, it was the end of May and Parliament had begun its long summer holiday, its members departing London for their country estates.

  When the outcome at Bunker Hill became known in the last week of July, it only hardened the King’s resolve. “We must persist,” he told Lord North. “I know I am doing my duty and therefore can never wish to retract.”

  The ever-obliging North suggested that in view of the situation in America, it might no longer be regarded as a rebellion, but as a “foreign war,” and thus “every expedient” might be employed.

  At a hurried meeting at 10 Downing Street, on July 26, the Cabinet decided to send 2,000 reinforcements to Boston without delay and to have an army of no fewer than 20,000 regulars in America by the following spring.

  Bunker Hill was proclaimed a British victory, which technically it was. But in plain truth His Majesty’s forces, led by General Howe, had suffered more than 1,000 casualties in an appalling slaughter before gaining the high ground. As was observed acidly in both London and Boston, a few more such victories would surely spell ruin for the victors.

  At summer’s end a British ship out of Boston docked at Plymouth bearing 170 sick and wounded officers and soldiers, most of whom had fought at Bunker Hill and “all in great distress,” as described in a vivid published account:

  A few of the men came on shore, when never hardly were seen such objects: some without legs, and others without arms; and their clothes hanging on them like a loose morning gown, so much were they fallen away by sickness and want of nourishment. There were, moreover, near sixty women and children on board, the widows and children of men who were slain. Some of these too exhibited a most shocking spectacle; and even the vessel itself, though very large, was almost intolerable, from the stench arising from the sick and wounded.

  The miseries of the troops still besieged at Boston, and of those Americans loyal to the King who, fearing for their lives, had abandoned everything to find refuge in the town, were also described in letters published in the London papers or in correspondence to friends and relatives in London. In the General Evening Post, one soldier portrayed the scene in Boston as nothing but “melancholy, disease, and death.” Another, whose letter appeared in the Morning Chronicle and Advertiser, described being “almost lost for want of fresh provisions…. We are entirely blocked up…like birds in a cage.”

  John Singleton Copley, the American portrait painter who had left Boston to live in London the year before, read in a letter from his half brother, Henry Pelham:

  It is inconceivable the distress and ruin this unnatural dispute has caused to this town and its inhabitants. Almost every shop and store is shut. No business of any kind is going on…. I am with the multitude rendered very unhappy, the little I collected entirely lost. The clothes upon my back and a few dollars in my pocket are now the only property which I have.

  ***

  DESPITE THE WAR, or more likely because of it, the King remained popular in the country at large and could count on a loyal following in Parliament. Political philosophy, patriotism, and a sense of duty comparable to the King’s own figured strongly in both houses. So, too, did the immense patronage and public money that were his alone to dispense. And if that were not sufficient, there was the outright bribery that had become standard in a blatantly mercenary system not of his making, but that he readily employed to get his way.

  Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but at all levels of society. The clergy and such celebrated observers of the era as Jonathan Swift and Tobias Smollett had long since made it a favorite subject. London, said Smollett, was “the devil’s drawing-room.” Samuel Curwen, the Salem Loyalist, saw dissipation and “vicious indulgence” everywhere he looked, “from the lowest haunts to the most elegant and expensive rendezvous of the noble and polished world.” Feeling a touch of homesickness, Curwen thanked God this was still not so back in New England.

  To much of the press and the opposition in Parliament, the American war and its handling could not have been more misguided. The Evening Post, the most partisan in its denunciations, called the war “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.” The St. James’s Chronicle wrote contemptuously of “a foolish, obstinate, and unrelenting King.”The Crisis, a vehement new paper, attacked “all the gaudy trappings of royalty” and the villainy of the King.

  “What, in God’s name, are ye all about in England? Have you forgot us?” asked a British officer in a letter from Boston published in London’sMorning Chronicle. He wished that all the “violent people” who favored more vigorous measures in America could be sent over to see for themselves. Their vigor would be quickly cooled. “God send us peace and a good fireside in Old England.”

  The King, meanwhile, had recalled General Thomas Gage, his commander-in-chief at Boston, and in his place put the stouthearted William Howe. When, in September, an emissary from the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, Richard Penn, arrived in London with an “Olive Branch Petition” in hand, expressing loyalty to the Crown and requesting, in effect, that the King find a way to reconciliation, George III refused to have anything to do with it.

  Behind the scenes, Lord North had quietly begun negotiations with several German princes of Hesse and Brunswick to hire mercenary troops. And in a confidential note dated October 15, the King reassured the Prime Minister that every means of “distressing America” would meet his approval.

  By the crisp, sunny afternoon of October 26, as George III proceeded on his way to the opening of Parliament, his popularity had never seemed higher. Opposition to the war, as everyone knew, was stronger and more vociferous in London than anywhere in the country, yet here were crowds greater than any since his ascension to the throne. Further, they appeared in the best of spirits, as even the London Public Advertiser took note. Their “looks spoke peace and good humor”; there was “but little hissing”; the King could feel secure “in the affection of his people.”

  ***

  A BOOM OF CANNON saluted His Majesty’s arrival at Westminster, and with the traditional welco
ming formalities performed, the King assumed his place on the throne at the head of the House of Lords, flanked by the peers in their crimson robes. The members of the House of Commons, for whom no seats were provided, remained standing at the rear.

  The magnitude of the moment was lost on no one. As expected, the King’s address would be one of the most important ever delivered by an English monarch.

  He had a good voice that carried well. “The present situation of America, and my constant desire to have your advice, concurrence, and assistance on every important occasion, have determined me to call you thus early together.” America was in open revolt, he declared, and he denounced as traitors those who, by “gross misrepresentation,” labored to inflame his people in America. Theirs was a “desperate conspiracy.” All the time they had been professing loyalty to the parent state, “and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me,” they were preparing for rebellion.

  They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force. They have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers, which they already exercise in the most arbitrary manner…. And although many of these unhappy people may still retain their loyalty…the torrent of violence has been strong enough to compel their acquiescence till a sufficient force shall appear to support them.