In the months following George’s death, the Howes were portrayed in the press as an iconic English family. The public was aware of this band of soldier-brothers, their sisters, and their inspired mother, and their sufferings struck a chord with a country that was in the midst of a fiercely contested war. One unusually extensive elegy reflected the celebrity George had attained during his brief military career:
Albion with secret pride her son beheld,
Form’d for the senate, or the hostile field;
Youthful in action, but in prudence old;
In counsel steady, and in danger bold;
Next followed a romanticized account of George’s career in America, where he drilled his men on “the ambush-fight” before tragically falling on the battlefield. Finally, the reader is assured that the family will close ranks and avenge him. All three surviving brothers are mentioned by name:
’Tis done! Brave Richard to the fight returns,
The Gauls affrighted fly; their navy burns.
William again shall scour the hostile plain,
And foes shall fly his youthful ire in vain.
Thomas enrag’d shall draw th’avenging steel,
Til Gallia’s sons their triple fury feel.
That these survive imperious Lewis know,
Who bear the terrors, with the name of HOWE.47
It was characteristic of the press to be melodramatic, but the harsh reality for the Howe family was that the savior of the dynasty was dead. Almost no letters from the distaff side of the family survive. Lady Howe, even as she was tilting with Newcastle over the Nottingham seat, wrote briefly to William Pitt: “[T]he ill state of my health has, till now, deprived me of the power of returning you my most gratefull acknowledgements for the obliging part you have taken in my affliction.” She went on to thank him for “all the marks of friendship” she and her family had so often received from him.48 Her drooping words to Pitt were written the day after she penned her disingenuous letter to Newcastle explaining that William would be chosen for Nottingham.
It would be wrong to assume that Lady Howe’s ability to play politics with Newcastle at such a time proceeded from anything more than the conviction that the welfare of her family absolutely required it. During her lifetime, her distress when her sons were in danger was evident in court circles. Unfortunately, her note to Pitt is the only surviving communication from her during this period.
It was not his mother who wrote to console William. In 1758, William, like George, was in America, serving under James Wolfe in an amphibious attack on the French fortress at Louisbourg. After receiving the devastating news about his brother from his sister Caroline and aunt Juliana in late July, he was unable to eat for several days. “I thought he would have been starved,” wrote Wolfe. Lieutenant-Colonel Howe “could not bear to have anyone near him, even of his most intimate friends.” For Wolfe himself, the news was a disaster. “[T]he best soldier in the army,” he wrote of George. “Heavens! What a loss to the country! the bravest, worthiest, and most intelligent man among us!” Thinking of the family at home, Wolfe added, “Poor Mrs Page will die of grief.”49 William came close to doing just that at a stopover at Castle William in Boston, where he almost succumbed to a “severe and dangerous illness.”50
By November, back in Halifax, William finally poured out his feelings in a rare personal letter to his brother Richard:
What a loss we have sustained! If it is a weakness I acknowledge to you the stroke was such to me as I had not firmness to bear. I must wish that yr. Calmness has not felt quite so much. Live & be a Comfort to us all___Remember how much our dependence is on you. If we lose yr. only support left to us we shall fall never to rise again. Excuse me & think of a Family whose only hope now is yr safety.
The letter is most unusual, revealing as it is of William’s sense of vulnerability at this critical moment for the family. It is likely that William barely remembered his father, who left for Barbados when he was a toddler, and he regarded his oldest brother George as the head of the family. But feelings of loss on George’s behalf were mixed in equal parts with alarm over the danger sustained to the family cause. It is striking that twenty-nine-year-old William did not consider himself the equal of his elder brothers; they were the leaders, and he and the rest of the family looked to them.
It was probably Caroline who told William of his mother’s political stratagem at Nottingham. She had written to him twice, he told Richard, two “most excellent letters.” William was not altogether pleased to find himself honored, unasked, with a seat in Parliament while on service abroad, although the same fate had befallen George and Richard in their turns. “Why chuse me for Nottingham?” he wrote. “It cannot be of any service to either of us. They would chuse you instantly without ye. least hesitation. It cannot be a similar case wth. me.”51 But, of course, he bowed to Lady Howe’s wishes.
Now Richard was Lord Howe and head of the family, although he had already established himself in his own right. In September 1757, the year before George’s death, he had performed one of his most celebrated exploits, when he and the helmsman stood alone on the quarterdeck of his ship, the Magnanime. While the rest of the crew lay on the deck, and with the enemy firing shot and shells around him, Richard coolly piloted his vessel to within forty yards of the French fort on the Île d’Aix before bringing up “with a spring on his cable” and commencing such a heavy bombardment that the fort surrendered in half an hour.52 The waters around the fort were supposed to be impossible for navigating large ships, making it out of range of the guns of the Magnanime. But Richard had the assistance of an expert French Huguenot pilot, and he shrewdly calculated that the enemy would offer only minimal resistance. His fellow officers thought him foolhardy, but the capture of the fort at Île d’Aix would become one of his most famous deeds.53
The episode was a single moment of triumph in yet another expedition that had gone very wrong. The objective was an amphibious attack on the French port of Rochefort in the Bay of Biscay. Sir John Mordaunt was in command of the land forces, which included Wolfe’s 20th Regiment of Foot. The naval squadron, under the command of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, consisted of sixteen ships of the line plus transports. Yet Richard Howe’s destruction of the fortifications on the Île d’Aix was the sole accomplishment of this mighty force. After several councils of war, the assembled officers decided not even to attempt the principal objective; some thought the fort at Rochefort was too well defended, others felt a landing would be too difficult.
The reaction at home to the Rochefort expedition was one of shock and despondency. And the press peddled a conspiracy theory that would have resonance for the Howe brothers years later, in another war. The inaction of Sir John Mordaunt, the newspapers hinted, had been deliberate, an attempt to discredit the administration through the failure of an expedition that was the brainchild of Pitt in particular.54 Such notions were not taken seriously in government circles, but the virtual failure of a venture that had cost a million pounds could not go unquestioned. An inquiry and a court-martial followed. Sir John Mordaunt was luckier than Admiral John Byng because his instructions had given him wide discretionary powers and he was acquitted.55 Nevertheless, he lost his favor at court and only his protégé, James Wolfe, and his kinsman, Richard Howe, emerged from the episode with their reputations enhanced.56
History would record 1757 as a year of failures for Britain. Lord Loudoun’s summer campaign against the French naval base at Louisbourg—George Howe’s first posting in America—had been abandoned in July because of delays in the arrival of British reinforcements; the massacre of English prisoners at the surrender of Fort William Henry in August had horrified the nation. The war, many felt, was over for Britain; the nation looked trifling to its European allies and enemies alike.
But for Richard, his triumph at Rochefort was shortly capped by the happiness of courtship and marriage. Mary Hartopp, daughter of the governor of Plymouth, became his wife during a three-month leave ashore. Richar
d seized the opportunity for a wedding when a shortage of provisions had forced him to halt his pursuit of French ships in the Bay of Biscay, and he put in at Plymouth on January 18, 1758.57 When he and the Magnanime put to sea again on April 16, he was a married man.
This was not necessarily a whirlwind romance. Richard and his bride had known each other all their lives. Mary’s father, Chiverton Hartopp, was from Welby, Leicestershire, not far from Langar. The Hartopps and the Howes moved in the same circles. Mr. Hartopp had supported George in his parliamentary campaign in Nottingham a few years earlier, walking the streets of the town with him.58 William, writing to Richard from Halifax in his letter of November 1758, congratulated him in terms that showed that he already knew and liked Mary Hartopp. Richard’s flirtation with Elizabeth Raper at Hanslope a couple of years earlier indicated that he was intent on finding a wife. With so little time ashore, the young ladies among his sisters’ acquaintance—the Miss Rapers and Miss Hartopps—were the most likely candidates. At any rate, it was Caroline who had to break the news to Elizabeth Raper. “Heard from [Mrs. Howe] that Dick was married to a Miss Hartop, thought I should have died, cried heartily, damned him as heartily,” Elizabeth confided to her diary.59 But her regrets were for herself alone. Mary Hartopp would fit in easily with the Howe clan; within a year, Caroline had christened her “Dickess,” and a comfortable, sisterly rapport had been established.60
There was, however, no time for a honeymoon, for 1758 was the year that Richard was singled out by William Pitt for his project of coastal expeditions against France. The objective was to harass the French coast as a diversion for Britain’s continental allies, Frederick the Great of Prussia and Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, who now led the defense of Hanover.
Predictably, once in office, Pitt moved away from his extreme—and simplistic—views on Britain’s engagement in Europe. Under Pitt’s parliamentary leadership, the armies of Britain’s allies continued to receive subsidies. The necessity of sending British troops as well became evident by the spring of 1758.61 But even as Pitt bowed to the reality of British participation in the continental war, he adhered to his dictum that the nation’s greatness resided in her naval power. Raids on the French coast were taken up by Pitt as “his most distinctive contribution to the war.” The Rochefort affair, he believed, had failed in part because the several commanders had been allowed to shelve individual responsibility in long-drawn-out and inconclusive councils of war.62 This would not happen again—Pitt would take charge on a more personal level. In a novel command arrangement, the secretary of state assumed overall direction of the military and naval forces that would carry out the 1758 coastal raids. The naval officer he chose to conduct these operations was none other than Richard Howe, who was promoted to commodore. For Richard to be directly under the control of the minister was sufficiently unusual to cause temporary misunderstanding and affront to Admiral Hawke, who at first believed that Pitt had passed him over for a junior officer.
Portrait of Richard Howe by Thomas Gainsborough, thought to have been painted in 1758. It may have been a gift to his bride, Mary Hartopp.
It has been suggested by Richard Howe’s biographer that he was selected to command these missions because of his experience along the coastline around Normandy and Saint-Malo.63 But Richard was also a good political choice in a year when Pitt found that his loyalty to the “young court” at Leicester House was becoming a headache. The Prince of Wales—the future George III—and his mentor Lord Bute persisted in their opposition to sending British troops to a ground war in Germany, pushing coastal raids as an acceptable alternative. As Pitt in office became increasingly aware that this would not be enough to win the continental war, he found himself walking a tightrope between Leicester House and opponents who thought coastal raids were a waste of money—or, worse, a dangerous leaching of resources from the main theater of war in Europe.64 Richard Howe must have seemed the ideal man for a strategy that needed to find favor with both courts: a skillful and experienced officer whose influential mother was connected closely with both Princess Augusta and Lady Yarmouth.
On June 1, 1758, while George’s army was assembling at Albany, New York, for the Ticonderoga expedition, Richard’s flagship, the 64-gun HMS Essex, sailed from Spithead. The Essex was smaller than the Magnanime and better adapted to coastal raiding. The squadron Richard commanded included another three ships of the line, plus several frigates and transports.65 At the head of the army was Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, grandson of the illustrious first duke. His second-in-command was Major General Lord George Sackville, a Leicester House favorite, although Sackville and Richard would become firm enemies during the course of the expedition.66
The first objective, an amphibious raid on Saint-Malo, was a partial success when a well-executed British landing failed to take the fort but succeeded in destroying considerable enemy shipping. The next objective was the French port of Cherbourg, where, in a sequence of events reminiscent of Rochefort, the army commanders had ordered their troops into the landing craft before calling off the operation at the last minute, citing bad weather and shortages of water and provisions. Richard’s conduct of the naval side of the amphibious operations went “almost without a fault,” but the carping Lord George Sackville, despite knowing little of naval matters, wrote home, criticizing even Richard’s ability to gauge and make use of a fair wind.67
Walpole recorded the story of their falling-out after the return of the expedition. “Lord George Sackville was not among the first to court danger: and Howe, who never made friendship but at the mouth of a cannon, had conceived and expressed a strong aversion to him.” Things came to a head eventually: “They agreed so ill, that one day Lord George putting several questions to Howe, and receiving no answer, said, ‘Mr. Howe, don’t you hear me? I have asked you several questions.’ Howe replied, ‘I don’t love questions.’ ”68 As far as London society was aware, the two men did not speak again for almost twenty years.
When Marlborough and Sackville returned to Portsmouth, dissatisfied with their portion of glory from what Sackville called “buccaneering,” they learned that British troops were finally going to Germany. They then used their influence to place themselves in command of what appeared to offer surer laurels. Leicester House, angry, let down, and determined to shore up the prestige of the coastal raids favored by its royal household, decided on a gesture that would land Richard with an unwelcome level of responsibility. Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of York, younger brother of the Prince of Wales, would join the navy under Richard’s command.69
It was a prestigious honor to have the young prince aboard, and one that Richard surely owed to his mother’s influence, for Princess Augusta was directly involved in the decision.70 But it was expensive; Richard had been subsisting on his officer’s pay, and he found that the prince had been dispatched without a full complement of bedding, linens, and uniforms, which had to be made up out of Richard’s pocket. The debt was never repaid, a circumstance the underpaid and newlywed naval officer never forgot. Worse, though, was the extreme danger of the subsequent coastal expeditions, during which the prince insisted on being by Richard’s side, as cannon fire came down all around them.71
In early August 1758, Richard, commanding twenty-three warships, together with Lieutenant General Thomas Bligh at the head of more than ten thousand troops, launched a second amphibious attack on Cherbourg. It was a success. Everything of value—ships, warehouses, even stone bastions and jetties—was destroyed. On September 3, the expedition reached its next objective: Saint-Malo again. Historians have speculated over this choice, but it was the result of Leicester House intrigue. Lord Bute had proposed it behind Pitt’s back to Richard Howe and the expedition’s quartermaster-general, Clark, one of Bute’s favorites.72 If Richard disliked receiving confidences from both Pitt and Bute, who were now increasingly at odds, he remained characteristically silent.
Saint-Malo did not prove to be a happy choice. The troops landed without op
position several miles west of the town, but bad weather and other obstacles obliged Richard to move his anchorage nine miles westward to the Bay of St. Cast. When the attack was ultimately abandoned, the troops began a poorly directed march to the fleet’s anchorage at St. Cast, under pressure from the approaching enemy. On the morning of September 11, reembarkation at St. Cast began under heavy French fire directed at the remaining troops on the beach and the flat-bottomed boats that had conveyed them. Seeing the oarsmen hesitate as shot and shells poured around them, Richard jumped into his launch and stood, fully exposed to the fire, directing the embarkation of the remaining soldiers, some of whom waded or swam into the sea toward the boats.
It was a bloody day, with between five and seven hundred officers and men of the army killed, and all four naval captains responsible for supervising the embarkation were taken prisoner. The army was blamed for the disaster, as General Bligh had delayed marching the troops to St. Cast. Richard, however—by now the new Lord Howe to the public—came out of the business with an enhanced reputation as a daring commander.73 When the Duke of Newcastle criticized Richard for exposing Prince Edward to danger, the king asked how else the boy could become a proper fighting sailor.74
But the Howes suffered a personal loss in the calamity of St. Cast, for among the dead was youngest sister Mary’s fiancé, Sir John Armytage. A wealthy baronet and a member of Parliament, Sir John was close in age to Mary, who probably met him through her brothers. Armytage had served as a volunteer under the Duke of Marlborough in the amphibious expeditions of June.75 That may have been his undoing, for by the end of August, when Richard was about to embark once more on his coastal raids, Armytage was planning his nuptials to Mary Howe and did not intend to serve this time. Happening to go to court on the day when officers and volunteers were taking leave of the king—so the story goes—the young baronet was caught off guard when His Majesty, assuming he would be volunteering again, asked him “when he meant to set out.” “Tomorrow,” was Sir John’s instant response, for a hint from a king was almost a command. He never returned. For the rest of her life, Mary wore a black collar around her neck that concealed “a splendid brilliant necklace” Sir John had presented to her as a wedding gift.76 More than a year after St. Cast, Horace Walpole noted that “Molly Howe has not done pining for Sir Armitage.”77
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