During March 1776, Richard struggled with Lord George over the exact conditions under which he could open talks with the rebellious colonists. Germain was highly optimistic about what the British army could accomplish, and he insisted that talks could not even begin until the vanquished colonists had submitted and acknowledged Parliament’s supreme power in the colonies. Lord North, as always trying to adhere to the middle of the road, agreed that acknowledgment of Britain’s supremacy should be made in due course, but that step need not precede the restoration of peace and the start of negotiations. Lord Dartmouth did not want any American acknowledgment of parliamentary sovereignty to be required. The argument among the three cabinet members over this abstract point became so severe that Lord Dartmouth threatened to go public with his opposition to Lord George’s plan.96 The peaceable-minded Dartmouth had remained in the cabinet as Lord Privy Seal, despite the war he so deplored, to act as Richard’s ally.
The fight over the terms of the peace commission ended with a compromise. As a concession to Dartmouth, the commissioners did not have to demand colonial submission before opening negotiations, but they did have to wait for each colony to request a pardon.97 Richard was being put in a very tight box by Germain, who feared that if the fighting stopped before an acknowledgment of parliamentary sovereignty from the colonists, Britain would never muster the forces to coerce America again. It was now or never. For Germain, this was also a second chance to shine in the public sphere. “The truth was, Lord George,” recalled an undersecretary, “having now collected a vast Force, and having a fair prospect of subduing the Colonies, he wished to subdue them before he treated at all.”98
For his part, Richard would adhere to the letter of his instructions. In the weeks before he embarked for America, he thrashed out certain details in the clauses of his commission with Germain and his secretaries.99 He had no intention of incurring blame on such a momentous undertaking because of vague or imprecise wording. Every military man was aware of the danger of a situation of that kind, where London authorities left themselves the means of evading responsibility for the outcome of a mission through ambiguously worded orders. There had been plenty of examples in the previous war.
George III was keenly aware that Richard chafed under the terms of his instructions as peace commissioner. The king’s affection toward Richard and trust in his integrity are reflected in a curious story. During the convoluted and tense exchanges over the terms of the peace commission, Sir Charles Thompson, one of His Majesty’s Grooms of the Bedchamber, was traveling with Richard and one other companion from Bath to London. They stopped to eat at a pub, and conversation turned to the American crisis. Lord Howe became very angry and declared loudly that he thought Lord North deserved impeachment for his handling of the situation. Then, to the consternation of all present, he added, “[T]here was something infinitely worse, and that was the persevering and invincible obstinacy of the King.”
When next at court, Sir Charles was summoned by the king and grilled on what occurred at the inn. To the horror of the courtier, His Royal Highness was able to quote what was said almost word for word. While Sir Charles, dismayed, stood at respectful attention, the king suddenly laughed. “Well, well,” pronounced George, “every man has a right to his own opinion in public affairs; but I have too high an esteem for Lord Howe not to advise him, through you, at any future time, before he brings his Minister to the scaffold, and inveighs against my ‘persevering and invincible obstinacy,’ to take the precaution of sending the common waiters of an inn out of the room first!”100 Richard had been a favorite with George III since his own brother, the Duke of York, had served aboard the Essex in the last war. The Howes all had a temper, the king knew, but he also knew he could rely on Richard. The king’s final instructions to him as peace commissioner opened with “Our Right Trusty and well Beloved Cousin.”101
It is no wonder that Richard was irritable. He had no room to maneuver. The peace commissioners were empowered to pardon colonies, districts, towns, and individuals, but not before an almost impossible raft of preliminaries were met. These included the cessation of armed struggle, disbandment of rebel armies and all illegal congresses and committees, and assurances of future good behavior. When this was all accomplished, the peace commissioners could call an election for a new legislature, which in turn could apply for relief from the Prohibitory Act. The rehabilitated colonies could confer with the commissioners on agreeing to a form of taxation on easy terms (as Lord North expressed it), based on the formula set out in his conciliatory motion of February 1775.102
John Pownall, Lord Dartmouth’s accomplice in the secret talks with Franklin the previous winter, declared that the commission was “wholly repugnant to all Ideas of conciliation.”103 He was not alone. The Continental Congress had already objected to holding talks under warlike conditions, “with the Bayonet at their Breast,” as they put it. South Carolinian Ralph Izard, hearing the terms in London, pronounced it absurd to send a commission to pardon people before they were conquered. If the British backed up negotiations with an army, he warned, they were more likely to irritate than to pacify.104
But Richard was still willing to try. As one of Germain’s undersecretaries put it, someone had to be commissioner, and, by April 1776 Lord Howe was the only person in the running.105 In the House of Commons, eleven days after Richard’s departure for America, Lord North parried questions about exactly what the peace commission would accomplish by saying the commissioners went “not to treat, but to confer, and to sound, for grounds of peace.” He assured testy MPs that all would be referred to Parliament for its approval.106 The government was aggressively preparing for armed repression, but its prime minister was indulging in a thread of hope for a short war and a lasting peace. Not all in the cabinet felt as hawkish as Germain.
MEMBERS OF THE HOWE FAMILY found themselves simultaneously getting involved in the war effort in America and forming an initiative at home to replace fighting with talks. Their peace-promoting activities made themselves felt in society in a pattern suggestive of Caroline’s influence—in many cases, it was the wife who persuaded the husband to change his politics.
Lady Mary Coke noticed in November 1775 that parliamentary followers of the Duke of Bedford, who took a hardline stance on the colonies, were experiencing internal divisions. Lord Ossory, she wrote, had deserted the Bedfordites for the opposition, and it was rumored that the Duchess of Bedford herself had acquired American sympathies. “[W]ho has converted her I can’t tell you,” added Lady Mary.107 But both the duchess and Lord Ossory led back to Caroline: The Duchess of Bedford was a frequent caller at Battlesden; Lord Ossory was the husband of Caroline’s old friend, the former Duchess of Grafton. When Lord Ossory was finally wooed away from supporting the North administration’s American policy in the autumn of 1775, rumor had it that his wife was to blame.108
Horace Walpole heard that another Bedfordite, Lord Gower, was also questioning the wisdom of coercion, at the urging of his wife.109 Caroline and Lady Gower had been close friends for years, and both ladies came from families whose women were schooled in drawing-room politics. The two women shared political intelligence and kept in close touch.110 In the end, Lord Gower would remain a supporter of government, but the story reflects Caroline’s careful politicking among the wives.
As the nation hovered on the brink of full-scale war, doubts proliferated in many quarters, and men were willing to listen to other ideas. Was the best way to lasting peace to send diplomatic feelers to American leaders, even as outright rebellion was being suppressed? Or would that only serve to signal weakness to the rebellious colonists?
The political give-and-take in the private spheres of drawing rooms and card tables made itself felt in Parliament. In early March 1776, Lord Sandwich made a curious accusation against the Duke of Richmond in the House of Lords. Richmond, he asserted, claimed that some men who served the government, and who publicly supported its American policy, “secretly disapprove” and expres
s their disapproval “in private company.” “I do not pretend to say what company the noble Duke keeps, who so confidentially impart their opinions to him,” concluded Sandwich angrily.111 But Sandwich probably could guess. Richmond kept company with the Howe siblings and their friends, including government members Dartmouth and Hyde.
There can be no doubt that Caroline played a role in the political maneuvering that went on over the winter of 1775–76. Once her brothers were overseas, government contacts treated her as the head of the Howe dynasty, despite the fact that nominally she was nothing more than the widowed sister of the brothers. This was the same role that her mother, Charlotte, now living retired at her residence in Albemarle Street, had occupied during the Seven Years’ War. Lord and Lady Germain issued Caroline an open invitation to their London home: “It is very pleasant to me to be so near Ld. G. Germain I have a general invitation from him & her to dine there every day if I like it, & without sending which is very agreeable, & he promises the instant he hears anything I shall know it,” she declared with satisfaction.112
Caroline suddenly had patronage at her command; she arranged for her relative by marriage, John Collett, to become the British consul in Genoa, writing to Lord Weymouth with the request in the morning and receiving word the same day that “his majesty had graciously consented.”113 Mothers wrote to her, asking her to advance the careers of their sons in the army or navy, as they once did to Charlotte.114 And her old friend Lady Hyde, who had cried on Caroline’s shoulder thirteen years earlier after suffering a miscarriage, was to see a long-standing ambition come to fruition.
In June 1776, Lord Hyde became Earl of Clarendon. His wife Charlotte’s grandfather had been Earl of Clarendon, but the title had gone extinct with his death. For more than twenty years, Lady Hyde had worked indefatigably to make her husband an earl and herself a countess.115 Caroline must have heard all about it many times. Finally, the honor was forthcoming. The Hydes had been part of the team who had worked to send Lord Howe to America, and they apparently earned their reward.
In April, while Richard was making preparations to depart for America, a very private part of the Howe family story resurfaced in a wave of scandal. George’s former lover, Elizabeth Chudleigh, electrified London society by taking center stage in a bigamy trial. In 1769, she had colluded with her legal husband, Augustus John Hervey, to have their reckless secret marriage of twenty-five years earlier declared void.116 She then speedily married her longtime lover, the Duke of Kingston.
Elizabeth had achieved her goal of becoming a duchess, but the title would not stick. When the duke died four years later, in 1773, his relatives disputed his will and charged Elizabeth with bigamy. The ponderous legal process, dragged out over several years, finally reached court in April 1776. Charlotte Fettiplace was obliged to testify, for she had been “in a summerhouse in a garden” in Hampshire, when Chudleigh, still a maid of honor, confessed the secret of her marriage. Charlotte was “exceedingly agitated” on the witness stand, the newspapers reported; her brother Lord Howe accompanied her to the courtroom.117 Richard could hardly avoid supporting his sister, although at the time he was readying his flagship HMS Eagle for departure. He was, after all, head of the family. It was probably something he would rather not have been dragged into, but the trial of the Duchess of Kingston came to overshadow the American crisis.118 The duchess was found guilty, but, ever resourceful, she escaped in a boat to Calais before she could be prevented from leaving the country. She traveled throughout Europe and Russia, a wealthy but increasingly difficult middle-aged woman, until her death more than ten years later.119
With the fleet finally in readiness, Richard would embark at Spithead on May 11, 1776. It has been argued that he landed the contradictory roles of peace commissioner and naval commander in chief in America by systematically concealing from all but a few moderate cabinet members his misgivings about the government’s policy of armed repression. From the start of hostilities in early 1775, he supposedly decided that the only means of being sent to America in order to fulfill his personal project of saving the empire was to consent to go in a military capacity.120 This thesis has been put forward as a significant reason for Britain’s defeat in the war: The Howe game plan supposedly weakened the impact of the British war machine on the untried rebel army in the critical year of 1776. The time would come when Britain faced defeat in America—its only military defeat in modern times—and this story would take root as the nation searched for a reason.
BUT THE HOWES’ QUEST for a middle way at the start of the American Revolution was shared by many in the political establishment. Richard’s opinions, as we have seen, were no secret, and he and his brother had been appointed by the king and Parliament to resolve the conflict one way or the other. When Richard was assigned his dual role, America had not yet declared independence, attitudes toward war-versus-peace were fluctuating even in the highest circles, and many Britons, whatever their political persuasion, hesitated, uncertain, on the brink of embarking on a full-scale war against their fellow subjects. It still seemed the course of wisdom to adopt a flexible posture towards replacing fighting with talks, to carry a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other, as Lord Hyde expressed it to Lord North.121
Richard departed amid a mixture of hope and censure from his political associates. Few thought his peace commission would yield quick results; most were pinning their hopes on military action to check the rebellious spirit in America. In contrast, Edmund Burke, who was opposed to using force against the colonists, concluded cynically that the government intended the Howes to conquer New York, set up a puppet assembly, and then effectively force it to adopt Lord North’s conciliatory proposal.122 Opposition spokesman Charles James Fox believed that Lord George Germain had deliberately prolonged the dispute over the terms of the peace commission in March because he calculated that, by the time Lord Howe reached America, the Congress would have declared independence, scuppering any chance of what Germain took to be fruitless talks.123
The Howe brothers, then, were undertaking a complex mission that stood a significant chance of disappointing expectations on both sides of the conflict. They had never shied away from public service in the past, but this time there was also a private motive. They had lost their eldest brother, George, the dynastic head, in the wilderness of Ticonderoga, fighting to protect Britain’s American empire. The Howe family felt a personal stake in the future of America; now they would set out to ensure that George’s sacrifice had not been in vain.
Nine
Home Front
With the departure of Lord Richard Howe and his fleet, the eyes of the entire nation turned toward America. Even those who neither understood nor cared about arguments over colonial rights could see all around them evidence of the conflict wrought by such seemingly abstract ideas. That spring, royal guardsmen paraded with great pageantry in London’s parks before embarking for service in the colonies. Three redcoat regiments encamped on Wimbledon Common, near the country house of Lord and Lady Spencer, awaiting a royal review before shipping off to the war.1
From May 1776 onward, there would be a lengthy hiatus in military intelligence arriving from America. The epicenter of the war was far-off New York, and news took a month with a favorable wind; going in the other direction, the norm was at least two months. It was common for military communiqués to reach the commanders in the field three or four months after they were dispatched, and some never arrived at all.2 The campaign against New York did not begin until late August, and it concluded in mid-December. Not until the end of 1777 would its full outcome be known in London.
Private mail suffered even greater disruption. The regular post office packet boats that sailed between England and New York or Charleston, South Carolina, were discontinued after October 1775. Only a less reliable wartime service from Halifax, operating under the constant threat of enemy privateers, struggled on. Yet people who were determined to get their letters across the Atlantic found other means of doin
g so, and private letters from America often arrived in Britain ahead of the official dispatches.3 People improvised in many ways; ship captains and crews who manned the vessels crossing and recrossing the Atlantic as part of the British war effort could be prevailed upon to carry mail. Servicemen coming from and going to the front in America carried not only letters but also word-of-mouth news. Junior officers sometimes called upon Caroline in Grafton Street to give her the latest intelligence about her brothers.
The American War of Independence was the third war in which the Howe women saw the brothers go overseas to fight, but it was the first war that has left us a wealth of personal letters that reveal their home-front experiences. Caroline’s own surviving correspondence is enriched by the hitherto-neglected letters of Jane Strachey, whose husband Henry crossed the Atlantic with Richard Lord Howe. The Stracheys and the Howes had moved in separate circles during peacetime, but, as we shall see, the women of the two families would draw close as they shared the anxious wait for word from loved ones.
The prospect of news of her brothers meant that Caroline was reluctant to leave Grafton Street after Parliament broke up for the summer recess on May 23, 1776. British politicians dispersed to their summer estates, but information from America would reach London first, by means of rapid post riders from ships putting in at Falmouth in the west of England or Portsmouth on the south coast. In early June, Caroline begged off paying a day visit to the Spencers, probably at their villa in Wimbledon, explaining that she was expecting her sister-in-law Lady Howe for the day.4 She was still in town in mid-July, attending an evening of dinner and cards hosted by Princess Amelia at her fine Palladian house at Gunnersbury.
The Howe Dynasty Page 25
