Henry Strachey, administering the pardons, wrote cheerfully to his wife: “Affairs wear a better Aspect than they have hitherto done. The Proclamation of the 30th of last Month has reformed a Croud of Culprits, and I cannot deliver out the King’s Pardons so fast as they are claimed.” In high good humor, he continued: “One of the Delinquents who came to me the other day for the Pardon, asked me what was the Expence? I answered, ‘You have nothing to pay; this is the King’s free Pardon for all offences committed against His Majesty, down to the present time: it is given, not sold. Go, and sin no more.’ ”99
Let us leave the Howes happy and triumphant as 1776 draws to a close. While a few pointed out that Washington had still not been decisively defeated, and his army had been allowed to escape to New Jersey, instead of remaining bottled up in freezing New England, New York was nevertheless safely in British hands and the rebels were in retreat.100
Caroline ended December with a stream of welcome news of her brothers’ successes. She had been ill a few days before Christmas, but she could not resist going to a dinner at the home of her old friends the D’Oylys, where she could dress informally and be comfortable. There, surrounded by a crowd of guests, she wrote to Lady Spencer that letters had reached the Howe women from the admiral, and the brothers were taking everything before them. William had landed in Connecticut, and, “on his first Landing, part of his army was engaged, as usual with success,” she could not help boasting.
Eleven days after her evening at the D’Oylys’, Caroline received word of the capture of Fort Washington: “[T]wo thousand prisoners,” she exclaimed, “with very little loss on our side.” She could now name her brother “Sr. Wm. Howe,” and she was about to set out for an evening at Princess Amelia’s, where there were prospects of more delightful news of her heroic brothers.101 During December 1776, wherever Caroline went, she would only hear good of her beloved Richard and William.
Eleven
The Tide Turns in America
The year 1777 would be an annus horribilis for the Howe dynasty, surpassed only by the tragedy of George’s death in America in 1758. The Howes saw their status as a military family disintegrate in the third year of the American War of Independence, when the tide turned against Britain. Character assassination by the British press would ultimately play a part in the brothers’ decisions to give up their commands. The chief target was William Howe, though he would never lose a major battle. While William’s star fell, that of his nemesis, General George Washington, steadily ascended on both sides of the Atlantic. The media-driven conspiracy theories that would soon be swirling around the brothers continue to this day to haunt the legacy of the Howe command in America.
As the year opened, the Howe women maintained their customary wartime roles of managing the reputations of their men in influential circles. But all control over the narrative of the brothers’ command would be wrested from the hands of Caroline and her kinswomen by the overwhelmingly negative newspaper coverage that gained traction in mid-1777, feeding the hunger for news in a national readership that was larger than that of any previous war of the century.
Early January, however, saw Caroline still basking in her brothers’ successes. She was in Oxfordshire at Phyllis Court, the Villiers family residence, where an extravagant Gala Week was planned. Lord Villiers and his friends had put together an amateur production of The Provoked Husband, a sentimental comedy by popular playwright Colley Cibber. What was originally intended as a private family entertainment swelled to three separate performances and drew in the surrounding neighborhood. A renowned French actor was engaged to follow up the play with a rendition of Ovid’s “Pygmalion.”1 A detailed and vivid account of the Gala Week has survived in a lady’s journal. It makes no mention at all of the war an ocean away.
Caroline Howe took an active part in the proceedings, assisting as a prompter. Private theatricals were all the rage during the period, giving upper-class women in particular an opportunity to assume a public role without the stigma associated with the commercial stage.2 On this occasion, a debutante played the part of the irresistible statue in “Pygmalion.”3 Her costume was an unlikely one for a marble monument: a gown of pink satin and gauze finished with £12,000 worth of the Villiers family diamonds (nearly £2 million today).
The weeklong gala included musical performances, dancing, and cards. Sisters Charlotte and Mary, and Mary’s husband General Pitt, were there along with Caroline’s political friends. These included members of the Villiers family, of course, who had been involved in Lord Howe’s peace commission, as well as Lord Frederick Cavendish and General Conway.4 The happy atmosphere reflected a national conviction that all was well; the Howe brothers had put an end to the unnatural conflict. In the City of London, they were being toasted as “par nobile fratrum,” a pair of noble brothers.5
Yet even during the holiday season of 1776–77, there was a trickle of criticism. A guest at the Villiers gala whispered a rumor that General Clinton was on his way back to London, discontented with his commander in chief.6 And sandwiched among the praises sung by the British press were carping remarks that the brothers had failed to defeat Washington decisively. In late January, the London Evening Post accused the North administration of exaggerating British successes in America, giving a “false varnish” to their victories. The reality, declared the paper, was that General Howe’s army could not venture very far outside of the city of New York.7
At this stage, such accusations circulated mainly through the medium of gossip rather than print. But transatlantic gossip traveled quickly—so efficiently, in fact, that it even posed problems for military security.8 Private letters from serving officers were sometimes published or read aloud in coffeehouses. Even mere talk could be reported; the gist of a conversation between Nisbet Balfour and an unnamed gentleman in London ended up in the Boston Gazette just a few months later. The press often shadowed what was being said in clubs, eateries, and fashionable salons.9
In early 1777, a few discontented army personnel were muttering that the Howes had deliberately allowed General Washington to escape because the brothers had Whig sympathies. There were also whispers in New York that the Howes were in no hurry to wind up the war because they were making money from it.10 The suspicions were fed by a conviction that the Howes could have easily suppressed the rebellion in 1776, when they were commanders of the largest army Britain had ever assembled in America.
Remarks such as these were being made even within the private circles of the Howe women. In December, Richard Fitzpatrick, a captain in the Foot Guards with close family and social connections to the Howes, was told by an officer just returned from America that General Howe’s latest victory over the rebels had had no important consequences. Fitzpatrick himself thought the New York campaign would end without having dispersed the American army, leaving the outcome of the war uncertain. He concluded: “I Believe Ministers, are not over and above satisfied with the conclusion of this successful campaign.”11
Fitzpatrick’s belief was well-founded. In private, Lord George Germain was irritated with the Howe brothers. William’s dispatch reporting the capture of Fort Washington, which reached London on December 29, displeased him. Major Nisbet Balfour, who had been in Germain’s Whitehall office, had the impression that the American secretary thought William had not slaughtered enough of the defeated rebels. And that was so; Germain saw unnecessary compassion on the part of the commander in chief. In what was a conventional prelude to taking a fort, General Howe had called upon the garrison to surrender, saying he would take no prisoners if the rebels put up a resistance. The rebels did, of course, resist, and William did not execute his threat.12
Germain thought the Howes were too soft. Their joint report as peace commissioners, which arrived at the same time as the dispatch on the capture of Fort Washington, only served to deepen his impression. The brothers sent a copy of their proclamation of November 30, offering pardons to all individuals who would take an oath of loyalty within sixty d
ays. Germain confided to an undersecretary that this latest proclamation would have a bad effect on loyal Americans, who would see the rebels “without distinction put upon the same footing with themselves.” He feared that what he termed “this sentimental manner of making war” would not extinguish the rebellion.13 The American secretary then wrote to both Howes, admonishing them that such liberal terms had to end when the proclamation expired; criminals and rebels must be duly punished.14
By mid-March 1777, Richard, still in New York, was perfectly aware of Germain’s opinion that he and William were using their roles as peace commissioners to let the rebels off lightly. Richard responded to this in full, directly addressing the suspicion that he had pro-American sympathies—“my supposed prejudices,” as he called them. In a patient tone, he explained that he was not inclined to excuse the guilty: “I am of opinion, that Compassion & Forgiveness, ornaments in private Life, if not tempered with justice & Policy, may become Defects in a public Character.” The proclamation of November 30, he asserted, had helped to create a favorable disposition toward the British government within the general American population. Since the rebel leaders in Congress—the chief targets of Germain’s hostility—had already rebuffed several clear calls to negotiate, they would hardly be likely to accept its less favorable terms.15 That was the important point—the proclamation was intended to gain the sympathies of the American populace.
By attempting to win the hearts and minds of Americans, the Howe brothers hoped to deny Washington recruits, and the congressional leaders their power base in the civilian population. In the new year, William began recruiting loyalists to augment his own forces. New York was a fertile province for loyalist soldiers; by early January of 1777, William had two thousand provincials serving in the area. That winter, he offered pardons and bounties to rebel soldiers who would come over to the British lines and serve in a provincial corps.16 During 1777, more than three thousand loyalist soldiers were recruited; in 1778, when the British campaign had shifted to Pennsylvania, the total more than doubled, to more than seven thousand—a significant number of Americans fighting for the king. When Washington fought Howe at the Battle of Brandywine, thirty-five miles from Philadelphia, the American general had roughly twice as many men under his command, but it must be recalled that the recruiting area for the Americans in rebellion was always many times larger than that of the British.17 The competition for resources and men in America would be fierce, and would last as long as the war itself.
THE AMERICAN WAR of Independence was a civil war in which two regimes contended for authority in America—one under the control of the British army and the other under the new United States. The rebellion received active support from roughly forty to forty-five percent of the white population; the number of active loyalists probably ranged between fifteen and twenty percent. A substantial percentage of Americans of European origin—perhaps as many as half overall during the course of the war—simply tried to avoid getting involved.
African Americans, who made up about a fifth of the total population of the thirteen colonies that would become the United States, were drawn into the conflict, but the sides they chose followed a pattern that was inverse to that of white colonists. As many as five thousand Black men are believed to have served in the American armed forces, both volunteers and escaped slaves, but a far greater number of Black colonial Americans thought their best interests lay with the British. It is estimated that fifty-five thousand slaves absconded during the American Revolution. Perhaps a third of them were women. Many of these took up arms in the service of the Crown, joining the British army as fighting men and servants; others followed the British army to perform valuable unskilled labor—cooking, laundering, and nursing.18
The British nation would not take up the abolition of slavery as a popular cause until several years after the American War of Independence, and the British army never had a consistent policy toward the recruiting and arming of slaves. During the war, both sides were apprehensive of alienating their white supporters by adopting a policy of enlisting Black soldiers. Throughout the conflict, however, British officers proposed, and sometimes tried out, plans for including Black Americans in their war effort.19 There was informal cooperation with slaves by the British army throughout the war, and there were instances of officers assisting former slaves to secure their freedom.20 The experience of commanding mixed-race rank-and-file soldiers was familiar to any British officer, like William Howe, who had served in the Caribbean during the Seven Years’ War.
At the start of the American Revolution, in November 1775, eight hundred slaves fled their masters and enlisted in the cause of the king in response to a royal proclamation offering them their freedom. Issued by John Murray, Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, the proclamation offered freedom only to slaves who were the property of rebels, and only to able-bodied men who would serve with the British army. Nevertheless, enslaved Americans were quick to seize an opportunity to escape from servitude, and many of those who joined Dunmore were women and children. The Howe proclamation of November 1776, so deplored by Germain, also resulted in many Black Americans seeking protection behind British lines in New York. Several thousand took refuge in the city.21
Loyalists came from every rank and walk of life in American society; they were not confined to the wealthy and privileged. In London, where loyalist refugees escaping the war arrived in growing numbers, there were artisans, skilled laborers, and tradesmen, as well as ousted royal officials, professionals, and planters.22 The refugees pleaded their cause to the British government and lobbied for continued support for a conflict in which their homes and livelihoods were at stake. The Howe proclamation of November 30 was resented by some loyalists in New York, who thought it too lenient to rebels and criminals, and they complained in writing to Germain.23 In early 1777, their complaints dovetailed with Germain’s own ideas of what was wrong with the Howes’ command.
THE HOWE WOMEN were certainly aware of the buzz of negativity emanating from the office of the American secretary. Anything said by Germain would be readily conveyed to them from a number of sources. Germain’s secretary, Christopher D’Oyly, was their confidential friend. David Garrick, the celebrated actor and playwright, who was part of Lady Spencer’s social set, heard firsthand Germain’s criticism of the brothers, writing that the Howe proclamation “extending Mercy to all without exception has given much offence to L’d: G[eorge] G[ermain]—I speak not from hearsay, but certainty.”
Germain’s innate unsociability in a world that functioned on gossip and networking was taking its toll. Nisbet Balfour was exposed to his irritation when he visited Whitehall: “[T]he ministry were very angry at the last Proclamation,” he confided over a dinner in mid-January.24 Balfour’s personal loyalty to the Howes was public knowledge; as we have seen, the young aide-de-camp was constantly in the company of the Howe women over the winter of 1776–77. Yet Germain spoke his mind freely before the Scots officer. The case of Christopher D’Oyly was similar. It was more than a year after he took up his post in Germain’s office that his close relationship to the Howe family drew comment: “Lady Howe and Mrs D’Oyly always together.”25 That should have been obvious from the start.
Competition among generals serving on the same side is an uninspiring fact of life in most wars. In the Seven Years’ War, the Dowager Lady Howe had looked on at court as Secretary of State William Pitt and King George II made the decision to oust Lord Loudoun as commander in chief in America and replace him with dynamic young generals—including George Lord Howe and General Wolfe. Loudoun, far from the scene of decision-making in London, was unable to defend himself when he was apportioned an unfair share of blame for the string of defeats in 1757. The American War of Independence would see the same inevitable jockeying for command in London, a competition for glory that was played out in the corridors of Whitehall as much as on the battlefields of America.
If Germain was impatient with the Howes, his spleen was also directed t
oward Sir Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec. Carleton had successfully defended Quebec against an American attack over the winter of 1775–76, but in the ensuing campaign, he had not managed to retake Fort Ticonderoga from the rebels, despite successes on Lake Champlain. The ambitious General Burgoyne had been second-in-command on the expedition; by December 1776, he was back in London, quite willing to cast blame on Carleton as he sought an independent command for himself. In Germain, Burgoyne would find a sympathetic ear. Germain had never liked Carleton, who many years earlier had not supported him over the humiliating court-martial that followed his inaction at the Battle of Minden.26
It quickly became the talk of the town that Burgoyne was at odds with his superior in Canada. “Burgoyne is not very communicative, it is easy to perceive that he & Carleton are far from friends. Ld. G[eorge] G[ermain]’s people rail at Sr. Guy most furiously,” observed Captain Richard Fitzpatrick.27 Rivalries and jealousies over the management of the war were food for genteel gossip. Lady Mary Coke, hearing about it at a West End soirée, wrote, “General Carleton did not take the fort at Ticonderoga which all agree might easily have been done.” Now, “they will have the same work to do over again next year,” recorded Lady Mary waspishly, for Carleton had decided to withdraw from the lakes and go into winter quarters in Montreal.28 Drawing-room generals consulted maps of America over their billiard tables, confirming their notions of the vulnerability of the wilderness fortress.
At this time, in New York, William was not thinking about the buzz in Germain’s office. He was deciding on his strategy for the next year. Between the end of November 1776 and mid-January 1777, he wrote home in three substantial letters, reflecting his ideas about the forthcoming campaign. These letters were to become a major strand in the sinuous tale of British mismanagement of the American War of Independence.
The Howe Dynasty Page 31
