In 1757, the king, disgusted with the way the war in America was going, had dissolved the cabinet and tried to form a new one. In particular, he wanted to remove William Pitt as Secretary of State. He asked Sackville to support a new government he was forming. Sackville replied decorously but defiantly: he believed Pitt to be the ablest politician in the country, who had the clearest vision for managing the war, and who lacked only the authority to implement his ideas. He would support Pitt. Pitt, meanwhile, was firmly in the camp of the Prince of Wales. In aligning himself with Pitt, Sackville was turning his back on the monarch he had once fought alongside. There was no possibility of the king approving his bid to become Secretary of War.
The king’s effort to rebuild the cabinet failed; Pitt returned with even more power—a greater mandate for running the war as he saw fit—and, as a reward for Sackville’s loyalty, Pitt chose him to work alongside him as Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance. From an office in the Tower of London, Sackville oversaw the arming and equipping of the British military. He worked closely with Jean-Louis Ligonier, the commander in chief of the armed forces, whom he had known from his first sojourn in Ireland. Ligonier was a distinguished gentleman in his seventies. He enjoyed Sackville’s personality, the bracing force of it. Sackville spent time at Ligonier’s green and serene estate in Surrey, Cobham Park, where the younger man held forth on strategy, pushing for alliances with Prussia and several German states.
The tactical question facing Pitt, Ligonier, Sackville, and others in the British hierarchy was how extensive the war would be, and where to put resources. The conflict involved much more than Britain and France. Austria, Sweden, Russia and various German states were also ranged in a complex struggle for territory and power. Pitt’s vision was to see beyond the traditional European theater; he recognized that Britain could best negotiate the complexity—could break out of the medieval power struggle and into a new era of empire—by striking hard at France’s colonial outposts. Doing so would put to best use Britain’s chief advantage: the world’s largest navy. Under his guidance, over the next three years British forces defeated the French in India, winning control of the province of Bengal, and went on to overwhelm French outposts in Africa and on the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe.
Meanwhile, Sackville and others believed that the French would not commit huge numbers of troops to North America; they gambled forcefully, shipping 25,000 soldiers to America, and decided to push hard against French strongholds in Canada. One result of this was the buildup of forces in Albany, with which Abraham Yates contended. Another was the decision by the French to give up on the Forks of the Ohio. A third was the decision to recall Loudoun. Yet again, military leaders wanted Sackville to go to America. Yet again he was able to dodge; he preferred to deploy in Europe, and Pitt wanted him there as well.
The strategy of going at the colonies hinged on Pitt’s gambit of simultaneously playing the traditional game of warfare in Europe, which would require the French to keep the bulk of their army on the continent. But if England reigned supreme at sea, France had the largest army in Europe, so England needed to rely heavily on alliances. Foremost among Britain’s allies was Frederick II, king of Prussia, who, in 1756, faced with imminent invasion by French, Russian and Austrian forces, had launched the preventive strike that had begun the current phase of European war.
Under the alliance Frederick entered into with England, both sides agreed that the vigorous, thirty-eight-year-old German prince Ferdinand of Brunswick would lead the combined armies. George Sackville headed off into the German hinterland to attend Ferdinand’s army. Initially, he was second-in-command of English forces, under the British aristocrat Charles Spencer, the Duke of Marlborough. When Marlborough died unexpectedly, Sackville was promoted to lead the British forces.
Thus he found himself looking down into the plain of Minden, with the village and the River Weser in the distance, as two massive armies prepared to throw themselves at one another. Ferdinand set things in motion by directing a maneuver that seemed to the French general, the Marquis de Contades, to indicate that he had divided his army, weakening it. Contade had boat bridges erected across the river and ordered his men over them and into battle. Three times the French charged; three times the British and German forces repulsed them. Then Ferdinand ordered the counterattack. The French lines fell back and began to collapse. A victory would be a great thing, but a rout, which seemed to be in the offing, would conceivably lead the French to negotiate an end to the war. It was time for the cavalry to come thundering down the slope, decimating the enemy.
Sackville, who did not have a view of the action from his hillside position, suddenly saw a rider approaching. Colonel Fitzroy, a twenty-two-year-old nobleman, shouted Prince Ferdinand’s orders: Sackville was to lead the cavalry in a charge.
Sackville didn’t order a charge.
Shortly after, another messenger appeared and delivered the order to charge.
Sackville didn’t charge.
Eventually, after getting a third message, he did. By then the battle was nearly over. The English and Prussian forces had won a solid victory—enough that, when news of it reached England, bonfires were lit in every street in celebration. But the rout that could have forced France to beg for peace never happened.
The allied officers met for dinner the evening after the battle. When Sackville entered the room, with a relaxed demeanor, Prince Ferdinand said to the others (French being the common tongue among gentlemen), “Voilà cet homme autant à son aise comme s’il avoit fait des merveilles!”—(Look at this man completely at ease, as if he had done something wondrous!).
Over the course of the next month the failure of Sackville to carry out the order to charge became the most talked-about event in England. Every level of society became absorbed with the story of the high-born aristocrat, famed for his military prowess, his ambition and his aggression, who was recently being talked about as a possible future prime minister, who shrank back shockingly at the moment his country needed him, who failed to attack not once but two times, and whose failure meant that war would drag on. The combination of the irony and the high stakes involved, noted one contemporary account, “kindled up such a blaze of indignation in the minds of the people, as admitted of no temperament or control,” so that “an abhorrence and detestation of Lord George Sackville as a coward and a traitor became the universal passion, which acted by contagion, infecting all degree of people from the cottage to the throne.” Sackville effigies were burned. He was lampooned in the press and in drawing rooms, referred to as “a damned chicken-hearted soldier” and “a stinking coward.” Seemingly overnight, George Sackville became the most hated man in England.
But why? What, people around the country wanted to know, could possibly have accounted for his behavior?
The day after the battle, Sackville gave Prince Ferdinand his explanation. He said the first two messengers had given slightly different orders—one telling him to advance with the British cavalry only, the other with all the allied cavalry—and in addition he was confused because, from where he stood, he could not see the battle and didn’t comprehend the situation. He insisted that very little time was lost by his delay—no more than eight minutes.
Ferdinand—arrogant, dandified, ferret-faced—responded with disgust. He said he was “mortified,” for “I gave you the opportunity to decide the fate of the day.”
Sackville did as honor required and offered his resignation to his superiors in London. The gesture was a formality; he was shocked—and began to realize the scope of the reaction in England—when his resignation was immediately accepted.
He wrote to Pitt, saying he hoped he could count on his backing. Pitt’s reply was as frank as a politician’s could be: “I find myself under the painful necessity of declaring my infinite concern, at not having been able to find . . . any room . . . for me to offer support.”
Sackville’s natural aggression immediately asserted itself. He told Pitt he wanted a court-
martial, a forum in which he could lay out his defense, after which he would be seen to have acted honorably. Pitt replied that he should be careful in what he wished for, for “delusion might prove dangerous.”
The court-martial dragged on for months and, as Pitt had predicted, served to keep the sport of Sackville-bashing alive among the populace. Newspapers continued to malign him, some accusing him of unsubstantiated and wildly unrelated crimes, including sodomy. The king stripped him of his military rank and office. His father, who had once before been humiliated by his son’s actions, retreated deeper into the confines of Knole House, permanently retired now from public life.
The government called a parade of witnesses in the trial, including the officers who had brought Ferdinand’s orders to Sackville. One commented that, after he delivered the orders, “Lord Sackville seemed not to understand them, and asked how it was to be done?” The officer repeated and elaborated; still Sackville seemed not to comprehend. The picture the witnesses painted was of a man who had willfully but inexplicably disobeyed an order.
Sackville served as his own attorney. He was vigorous, incisive, flamboyant. He cross-examined witnesses, skewered them over inconsistencies. He seemed to onlookers perfectly confident in his case and his method.
It was to no avail. The court found him “guilty of having disobeyed the orders of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick,” and declared him to be “unfit to serve his Majesty in any military Capacity whatever.” In predicting the outcome, William Pitt was not only assessing the overall mood of the country; it was obvious to any practical-minded politician that had the court ruled in Sackville’s favor it would have created a split between Britain and Prussia, with devastating consequences for the war effort.
Not only was he found guilty, Sackville narrowly escaped being executed for his crime. A nobleman with knowledge of the affair later said that Sackville’s father had made personal appeals to some of the judges, thus saving his son’s life.
George II was said to be furious that Sackville was not hanged. He therefore decreed his own additional punishment. Sackville was barred from attendance at the royal court, and the sentence against him was to be read aloud to every British soldier around the world, so that they might understand that offenses such as Sackville had committed “are Subject to Censures much worse than Death, to a Man who has any Sense of Honour.”
Sackville gave a strong closing statement in his defense, but it did little to explain his behavior. Nothing he said seemed to jive with the man he had been throughout his whole career to that point. Indeed, the ferocious anger of the British people seemed partly tied to the inexplicability.
What, then, was the reason for his refusal to carry out the order? It could not have been cowardice. Those with deep knowledge of British politics speculated that his conduct may have had to do with the power struggle between the Prince of Wales and the king. Sackville went to the Continent as the special emissary of the Prince of Wales, and the prince distrusted Ferdinand. Sackville had spent weeks before the battle sending the prince critical reports of Ferdinand’s military movements and decisions, making a case that he was maneuvering in a way that benefited Prussia over Britain. Although he would have been honor-bound to withold such an explanation from the public, his action at Minden may have been an attempt to carry out the wishes of the Prince of Wales and to thwart both Ferdinand and King George II.
As it turned out, it misfired. His failure to lead the cavalry charge on the retreating French army had disastrous consequences for England and for him. His life had been one long, steady ascent to the heights of power, honor and influence in the British Empire. And a single decision—or nondecision—had wiped it all away. The political gossip Horace Walpole was among those who had thought Sackville was on the verge of becoming prime minister, only to lose everything. He penned what he expected would serve as Sackville’s political epitaph: “So finishes a career of a man who was within ten minutes of being the first man in the Profession in the Kingdom.”
George Sackville’s blunder extended the British war against France that had been started by George Washington’s blunder. Both men were fighting on the same side, though as time went on Washington’s regard for Britain waned. Abraham Yates, meanwhile, came to feel outright animosity for the British. And Venture, while fully aware that the war was going on—he could see the sails of privateers in the Sound and hear the talk of soldiers who stopped in New London as they were being shipped northward—did not find that it affected his life, or even that it mattered to him. Indeed, while the other three men used the war to maneuver for personal advantage and honor, there was no deep sense of patriotism in their involvement. That was because the Seven Years’ War, as it would become known, or the French and Indian War, as its American theater would be called, was not a revolution or a civil war; it didn’t spring from idealism or long-standing grudges, the sorts of things that would roil up into tavern brawls. It was a global chess game that they were all caught up in, cool and abstract. In such wars, the greatest scheming takes place not between adversaries but among those on the same side, as they use the conflict for their own advancement.
But Cornplanter, who was a young man by the time of the war’s end, was the exception. For him—for the Senecas, for the Iroquois, for all the native tribes in the affected regions of North America—the power struggle between the two European nations was about their land, their way of life, their relations with one another. For them, it did ignite feelings of patriotism and even spirituality, the selfless impulse to protect their sacred homeland.
Cornplanter came of age during the war; it shaped him as a man and a fighter. Though he had not yet entered the historical record by the war’s end, his uncle and mentor, Guyasuta, had, and it is likely that at some point the son of Gah-hon-no-neh, lineage matron of the Seneca Wolf Clan, was at his side. In this time of rapidly shifting political ground, Guyasuta was a warrior-diplomat, traveling widely to ensure that the Senecas kept what was theirs. Along with the Half King Tanacharison, Guyasuta had guided George Washington to the French at Fort Le Boeuf in 1753. Then, with other Senecas, he had taken the other side and fought with the French at the Forks of the Ohio, defeating Braddock’s army.
From Cornplanter’s perspective, what unfolded through the 1750s and into the 1760s was not a contest between the English and the French, but a vastly more complicated flow of events, involving many players across more than a thousand miles of territory, with the lush and ravined valley of the Genesee, his homeland, at the center. He learned early on of the array of tribes between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, how they related to one another, and how those relationships were evolving. The Munsee, for one, had originally lived in small, scattered villages away to the east, in the Delaware River valley and north as far as the area around Manhattan Island; they were the people who had had the closest contact with the Dutch in New Amsterdam, and who had “sold” Manhattan, as later history would have it, though from their side the agreement would have meant something more like a defensive alliance. Since the Munsee lacked a cohesive structure, which made it difficult to deal as a group with European settlers, they had, long before Cornplanter’s time, entered into a relationship with the Iroquois League. The Iroquois would act on their behalf as diplomats with the Europeans and, if necessary, would fight on their behalf. As a boy, Cornplanter learned the story of Deganawidah and Hiawatha bringing the Law of Peace, which bound the nations of the Iroquois together into their league. Bringing the Munsee under Iroquois protection was a way of extending the peace. Neither of the two Indian nations looked at the arrangement as an act of conquest, but it was certainly one of dominance. Under the terms of this agreement, the Munsee became, according to the logic and language of both groups, symbolically, “women.” They agreed to give up the manly work of fighting. The pact between them even involved a ceremony in which Munsee put on women’s things—“petticoats” and jewelry—as a sign of their acceptance of their subordinate role.
Over the course of the next century the Munsee were steadily pushed out of their traditional homelands by white settlement and moved westward across Pennsylvania. When they came to live in the Ohio Country, their subordination to the Iroquois was still in effect; along with the Shawnee who also inhabited the area, and were likewise subordinated to the Iroquois, they held to their agreement not to go to war. Since many Senecas now also lived in the Ohio Country, they were the Iroquois tribe responsible for the protection of the subordinate peoples. The more than two hundred miles of forest trails between the traditional Seneca homeland and the Ohio Country did not stop the Senecas from moving between the two areas. Cornplanter’s uncle, Guyasuta, traversed it, and so presumably did Cornplanter.
As Cornplanter came of age, he would have shared in the growing concern to maintain Iroquois authority over the Munsee, for with the pact that gave the Iroquois their dominance came the pressure to maintain the strength to protect, whether through diplomacy or warfare. Cornplanter absorbed lessons of power management as he watched his uncle and the Half King, the leaders of the Senecas in the Ohio Country, demonstrate to the Munsee that they were in charge.
For decades the Iroquois had managed affairs with both the French and the English. Sometimes they played the two off against one another. They also used the looseness of their tribal structure to advantage. If one nation of the Iroquois—or even a single village—found it useful to side with the French, they did so, even if others backed the English. Thus the Mohawks, who lived closest to English settlement, tended to side with the English, while the Senecas, whose territory abutted the French, backed them. In this way individual villages were able to play for immediate practical advantage, but at the same time the Iroquois as a confederacy worked to ensure that neither of the two European powers became ascendant.
Revolution Song Page 14
