This story has become part of the folklore of the American Revolution. But it is not taken seriously by military historians. William’s original plan was to bypass the American main defenses, break through the enemy’s left flank, and attack the American rear, while other British forces mounted a frontal assault against the fortification itself. Instead, the light infantry and grenadiers led by William were driven back by a murderous round of fire from the reinforced rail fences that stood in front of and to the left of the advancing British soldiers. William’s troops crashed into each other in the smoke and confusion, and he had to abandon the flank attack, turning it into a feint and concentrating on the frontal assault. Two more charges ensued against the American ramparts—and Breed’s Hill was theirs at last, a peak so insignificant that the battle became named after the more conspicuous Bunker Hill just behind it.4
More than thirty years after the war, Light-Horse Harry Lee would claim that William Howe emerged from the battle with what would now be termed post-traumatic stress disorder. It was rather late in William’s career, however, for him to succumb to combat fatigue. He was a veteran of two wars, with a reputation for carelessness where his personal safety was concerned; he had famously led the “forlorn hopes” up the cliffs to the Plains of Abraham in the battle for Quebec in 1759. At Bunker Hill, he had stood entirely alone for almost a minute in front of the rail fence after the blast of fire had mown down his staff around him, his breeches spattered with the blood of his men. Several times, he allowed himself to be a clear target for rebel marksmen as he turned his back on them and returned to his troops, before leading the charge again. Miraculously, he sustained only a slight injury on one foot. His “gallant behavior” on that day, reported one officer, charmed his men.5 Historians who relate his command decisions during the War of Independence to his supposed trauma at Bunker Hill would do better to explore fully his lengthy military career, which is typically consigned to a paragraph, or at most a few pages, in books on the Howe brothers in the War of Independence.6 As we will see, it was William’s earlier experience of amphibious and irregular warfare in America during the Seven Years’ War, and his personal impressions of the fighting skills of colonial Americans, that informed his subsequent conduct of the campaign against the rebellion.
Ironically, William’s own words have been quoted against him to support the notion that he was scarred psychologically at Bunker Hill. In his report on the battle to the adjutant general, writing of the incident at the rail fence when his troops were torn apart by American fire, William wrote, “[T]here was a Moment that I never felt before.” If he had foreseen how often this line would be used by his critics and by posterity to depict him as a victim of nerves, he undoubtedly would have scored it out.7 It has been interpreted as a conviction that he was about to die, but what he actually felt was that he was about to lose control over his men, who might refuse to continue their advance. He completed his sentence with the words “[B]ut by the gallantry of the Officers it was all recover’d and the Attack carried.” General Henry Clinton, also present at the action, made a similar report: “[O]fficers told me they could not command their men and I never saw so great a [want] of order.”8
Clinton, in fact, is the source of an additional sustained criticism of William’s generalship on that grueling day. At the planning stage of the battle, Clinton had reasoned that since Breed’s Hill was on the Charlestown Peninsula, why not land troops on the narrow isthmus connecting it to the mainland, thus neatly cutting off the rebel retreat while also pinning them down from the front? Clinton claimed in his surviving papers that he had suggested this, but he was ignored.9 It has been cited by historians as more evidence of the complacency and lack of imagination in British strategic planning that resulted in disaster.
Superficially, this strategy sounds strong, but historian Thomas Fleming, in a highly detailed account of the battle, showed that William lacked the specialized flat-bottomed boats, with raised sides to protect troops from enemy fire, that would be needed for amphibious operations in the shallow tidal waters around the isthmus. Howe had indeed noticed the shortage within a few weeks of landing in Boston, writing three separate letters about it to alert his brother Richard and his superiors at home.10
On the day that William wrote the first of these letters, General Gage, still commander in chief in Boston, wrote a dispatch reporting the same problem.11 Newly arrived Major General Howe had evidently drawn Gage’s attention to the deficiency, but it was too late. Just five days later, the Battle of Bunker Hill suddenly confronted the British. Without flat-bottomed boats, the army would have to ferry the roughly 2,400 soldiers in navy rowboats, which would leave them unprotected from enemy fire while crossing. William therefore landed them at Morton’s Point, as far out of range as possible from the American troops. The choice of Morton’s Point was a good alternative; it took the Americans on Breed’s Hill by surprise, and their cannons were facing in the wrong direction.12
General Clinton claimed that his advice about the isthmus was ignored because his fellow generals thought him ignorant of warfare in America.13 But what the general lacked was experience with amphibious warfare. Most of his military service had been in Germany during the Seven Years’ War. He could not match the expertise of William Howe (or his naval brother) in amphibious operations, which played a role in eighteenth-century American warfare that was equally as significant as the more glamorous wilderness fighting pioneered by George Howe and others. This is important to remember, because Henry Clinton has become a highly influential reference for the performances of the Howe brothers in the War of Independence. In 1778, he became commander in chief of the British forces in America. After he retired, he composed an extensive apologia defending his conduct of the war, which only became accessible to historians in 1925.14
Clinton’s lengthy self-exculpations, which contrast sharply with the reticence of the Howes, make him an irresistible source in assessing British failures, but one that must be used with great caution. He was hardly a disinterested witness. During the war, Clinton was busy broadcasting his own version of events in letters to London, seeking to promote his career and managing his image with those who mattered. In his many letters home, he complained, excused himself, and sometimes sought to chip away at the reputations of his fellow generals. His boosterism would have ramifications far beyond the offices at Whitehall. As we shall see, private gossip about the war conveyed in the letters of British officers serving in America was regular fare over the card tables of London’s aristocracy. It became part of the “talk of the town” and was integral to Caroline’s experience of the home front as she managed the images of her brothers commanding the army and navy overseas.
William did not try to evade criticism of the Battle of Bunker Hill, admitting that it was a pyrrhic victory for the British. In his official report of the battle to the adjutant general of the army, he spoke of “the fatal Consequences of this action—92 Officers killed & wounded—a most dreadfull Account—,” adding, “I freely confess to you, when I look to the consequences of it, in the loss of so many brave Officers, I do it with horror—The Success is too dearly bought__”15
WORD OF THE BATTLE was greeted with alarm by the Howe women. Fanny “dropt down as dead, on hearing of the engagement, before she cd. know whether [William] was safe or not,” wrote Caroline.16 At the time, Fanny was still in Ireland at Castletown, the estate of her brother Tom Conolly and his wife Lady Louisa. Also at Castletown was Louisa’s sister, the scandalous Lady Sarah Bunbury. She was waiting for her divorce to be granted—the denouement of her well-publicized extramarital affair that had resulted in the birth of her illegitimate daughter. Although Lady Sarah knew and liked William Howe, she was more strong-minded than Fanny on receiving the news of the battle. She recalled, “[P]oor little Mrs Howe fainted away with only the shock of the word action, and could not for a long time believe her husband was alive till luckily his letter came.”17 Lady Louisa described the gloomy family scene in earl
y August: “[A]ll our spirits are depressed with the bloody action in America, where, thank God, our friends have escaped; but so desperate an engagement as they have had is really a public calamity.”18
Lady Louisa Conolly’s letter also gives us a glimpse of another Howe woman on the home front, William’s sister Mary, who was at Castletown that summer with her husband, General Pitt. More than twelve years earlier, during the previous war, Mary had only recovered very slowly from the death of her then-fiancé, Sir John Armytage. Now her nerves were once again stretched to their limit at the thought of a beloved brother standing alone on a hillside she had never heard of, facing a barrage of fire.
The aftermath of Bunker Hill raises the curtain on the reality behind the media-constructed image of the Howes, promulgated in the Seven Years’ War, as a stoic British military family. Julie Howe, third of the four sisters, was the most vulnerable of the siblings. She had always lived with her mother, Lady Charlotte Howe. Contemporary letters reveal her as emotionally dependent on her family to an unusual degree. When her brother Thomas died in 1771, a friend wrote, “I have not heard in what manner Miss Howe supports this stroke, her affection for him used to hurt her health extremely, upon every absence. How will it stand this last separation!”19 Thomas had lived with Julie and their mother whenever he was home from seafaring, and after his death, Julie’s health suffered in what was probably an emotional breakdown. A year later, Caroline described her younger sister as “continuing in much in the same state of head.” Julie came to stay at Grafton Street over Christmastide 1772 with her “head & nerves as bad as ever,” but Caroline trusted that she would settle down “when the first flurry” of her arrival was over. The new year came and went with Julie no better, “her nerves still dreadfully weak,” Caroline confided to her friend.20
It is not surprising, then, that two and a half years later, the news of Bunker Hill hit Julie hard. She “has at times suffered as much as has poor Mrs [Fanny] Howe,” wrote Caroline to Lady Spencer at the end of the summer of 1775. An indistinct portrait of Julie comes through in Caroline’s letters: her “gentle Tone of voice,” which made it a pleasure to hear her sing (if only she could be persuaded to perform), her strong attachments to old friends and family, the messages of love and admiration to Lord and Lady Spencer that she conveyed so frequently in her elder sister’s letter closings that Caroline sometimes lost patience.21
Older and steadier, Caroline was protective of this sister who did not seem born to endure the rigors of a military family. It was probably to get her away from news of the war that Julie was dispatched in 1776 to Scotland, where Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, met her walking in the woods around Douglas Castle.22 Sitting in London waiting to hear news could become oppressive, as Caroline knew from long experience.
Caroline was staying with her Aunt Juliana Page at Battlesden, where her intelligence about Bunker Hill arrived in suspenseful fits and starts. On July 20, she wrote to Lady Spencer about a report in an Irish newspaper of a battle at Boston. “It is supposed, my dear Lady Spencer, that there is no truth, in the paragraph.”23 But just days later, General Gage’s report of the battle surfaced in the London Gazette.24 On the evening of July 26, the Duchess of Bedford descended upon Caroline from nearby Woburn Abbey, bursting to discuss the bloody engagement, despite having “no particulars only a General account just arrived, that we had 70 officers killed; sad sad work indeed!” The next day, newspapers had reached the neighborhood of Battlesden, and, more important, an express message arrived from Richard containing only the terse assurance that William had written to say he was safe and well. Lady Howe sent Caroline a slightly fuller account of William’s letter: “The attack was a very severe one, for the Americans were very strong by position & numbers, they being well entrenched.” “He has lost Sherwin his Aid de Camp,” added Caroline unhappily, “who was a very useful & trusty officer.”25
A week later, Richard himself arrived at Battlesden with the full contents of William’s letter, describing how he and his small corps of regulars had been assigned the unpleasant duty of clearing up the aftermath of the battle, gathering up the wounded, and burying the dead.26 William was “just beyond the entrenchments from whence he had drove the provincials,” noted Caroline, where he and “his little army not 2000 men” had remained since the battle seven days earlier. Caroline wrote to Lady Spencer, “What horrid work it all is! & how much more of it may we not expect. [D]id you observe that 12 officers attending upon William were either killed or wounded[?]; We every instant suppose fresh accounts may come, but nothing can be satisfactory unless proposals for an accommodation.” Yet she ended the letter on a note of reassurance, writing, “[D]o not be uneasy about me, you know I always hope the best, I mean with regard to William’s safety, for as I said before, as to the general matter nothing except peace can be good.”27
Caroline continued unflinchingly to reassure others as the gory details omitted in William’s own dispatches came out in the newspapers. “I hope you did not long suffer for us,” she wrote to Lady Spencer, “sensible as I am to your goodness & feeling for us all, you may depend ever upon the earliest intelligence I can give you.” In the same letter, she expressed her gratified pride that William had just been appointed commander in chief in America, replacing General Gage. “Everything said of William’s behaviour & conduct is more flattering than you can imagine, & with regard to him (if he escapes) we have nothing to wish but that he may be the means of a satisfactory peace being made, I fear that cannot be immediately.”28
Caroline cleverly used William’s promotion to reassure Fanny, who returned to London in late August with Mary Pitt. “I wish to encourage [her] in the hope his situation is a safer one from his having the Chief command,” she confided to Lady Spencer.29 Fanny thought his elevation would preserve him from exposure to the dreaded “bush fighting,” the wilderness-style warfare that had filled the newspapers during the Seven Years’ War.30 Caroline, of course, knew that William was by no means safe; George had been a brigadier general when he was shot down at Ticonderoga.
THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL took place almost twenty years to the day after Richard Howe’s heroic capture of the Alcide in the fog off Newfoundland at the start of the last war. But on that hot afternoon in Massachusetts, British soldiers were not up against France, their ancestral enemy. Men who had served side by side in the last war were now pitted against one another in what was a civil conflict. John Stark and Israel Putnam, commanding on the American side at Bunker Hill, had served with Rogers’ Rangers in the Seven Years’ War, and Putnam, like William Howe, had been at Havana in 1762. Both Americans had been with George Howe when he died at Ticonderoga.
On June 17, 1775, almost seventeen years since he and George Lord Howe had planned the attack on Ticonderoga as they lay on a bearskin looking at the stars, John Stark was shouting orders to colonial volunteers on the opposite side of the murderous rail fence.31 A story trickled back to the women of the Howe clan that the Americans had deliberately spared William as he stood alone before the barricade. “I don’t know if their avoiding him is true or not, but it’s very moving if it is,” pronounced Lady Sarah Bunbury, who was horrified at the thought of a bloody conflict “among one’s own people almost.” She reflected the view of many when she called it so “vile & fruitless a service, where [General Howe] may be killed & cannot get any honour.”32
Caroline knew that in this war against ramshackle British colonists, William’s hero status could not be taken for granted. She wrote in a self-conscious vein to Lady Spencer of General Howe’s persisting popularity, “tho[ugh] employed in a service so odious.”33 In the coming years, Caroline would be sure to broadcast in influential social spheres whatever news or intelligence enhanced her brother’s reputation. As his sister, it was her duty.
From the start of 1775, when news from America made it clear that the leaders in the Continental Congress were not backing down, the British public had become uneasy at the looming confli
ct. In the ensuing months, there was a flurry of petitions on both sides of the issue—loyal addresses supporting the government, and appeals for conciliation—that revealed the divisions within the nation.34 Many who had no sympathy for American constitutional claims nevertheless hoped that a full war could be avoided. There was widespread concern that fighting in America would disrupt the British economy; still worse, it might expose the nation to attack from its traditional French enemy. The newspapers spoke of the “Butchery of a Civil War” as distinguished from a war against foreign enemies.35 Within Parliament, Thomas Howard, Earl of Effingham, created a buzz in May 1775 when he announced in the House of Lords that he would not serve in America. He refused to partake of “the guilt of enslaving my country, and embruing my hands in the blood of her sons.”36 Even Lord Chatham withdrew his son, John Pitt, from the army in early 1776. Beyond Parliament, others wrote and spoke in favor of the colonial cause, including naval officer John Cartwright, who had served under Richard Howe in the Seven Years’ War but would refuse to serve in the new war.
Nevertheless, the majority of Britons wanted the American challenge to British authority to be suppressed, quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible. Everywhere in London, heated debates over the American question could be heard—in the coffeehouses, taverns, clubs, and even in the parlors of the growing middle class. In May 1775, the London Chronicle ran a fictitious vignette called “The City Patriot: A Breakfast Scene,” in which a fashionable husband and wife, teacups in hand, argued over the crisis. The husband championed the plight of the oppressed colonists, while the strong-minded wife was the “rational” supporter of Lord North’s administration.37 The debate raged everywhere across the great city.
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