The Howe Dynasty

by Julie Flavell

  The 1777 British campaign operated across an area that was far greater by hundreds of miles than the European theaters in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. The armed forces were obliged to deploy over vast tracts of wilderness, to police intricate coastlines, and to maintain communications with a government that was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, rather than just across the English Channel. The resources committed were enormous; the New York campaign had involved a “logistical effort on the oceans” not to be equaled by Britain until 1944.57 The British experience of the Seven Years’ War in America meant that they understood the challenges facing any military operation there, and that experience should have taught caution in the planning of complex strategies such as the one Germain was now pitching to Howe and Burgoyne.

  Twenty years earlier, multipronged attacks against the French enemy in America had been planned in London, and some, of course, had gone awry. A tragic example was the failed mission against Ticonderoga, where George Lord Howe had been killed. Significantly, however, London strategists had made allowance for potential individual failures in the Seven Years’ War. No single American expedition was entirely dependent on the outcome of the others, so if one failed, the others might still succeed.58

  As a veteran of the last war, Germain should have known all this. It is sometimes suggested that he intentionally gave his generals leeway to use their own initiative in a war conducted so far from the metropolis. But we have seen that both his generals had declared in 1775 that they did not want such latitude—they desired an overall commander to be on the spot in America.

  Yet neither general foresaw what lay ahead for the northern army at Saratoga. Significantly, both William Howe and John Burgoyne assumed that the Americans could only put one large army in the field, and all the strategies under consideration revolved around that critical and mistaken assumption. William also presumed that Burgoyne’s army would be capable of standing on its own feet if need be. That chimed in with what he understood to be the modus operandi of the previous war.59

  As William planned his campaign for 1777, slow and inadequate communications remained an issue. But just as bad in William’s mind was Germain’s unwillingness to give “clear, explicit orders.” Instead, he was frustrated by what he called the “[a]mbiguous messages, hints, whispers across the Atlantick” that emanated from the American secretary’s office. Nevertheless, William continued to look for feedback from London as he sent his different plan variants. In late 1776, he requested Germain’s own ideas of how the ensuing campaign should unfold, particularly with respect to the arrival of reinforcements from home, its timing, and its impact on strategy. This was no token request, and William felt aggrieved when it went unanswered. In a draft speech written several years later, he confessed, “[I]t hurt me, that a Solicitation, which appeared to me so dutiful and reasonable, was never thought proper to be complied with.”60 But William deleted this sentence from the final version offered for public consumption. Instead, he faulted Germain for couching his instructions in the form of suggestions that would leave him room to shift the blame onto his commanders in the field if things went wrong.61 It was one thing to give his generals discretion in carrying out their orders; it was quite another to inject ambiguity to evade responsibility for the outcome of those orders.

  When William did hear back from Germain on March 9, he must have been shocked at the contents; he was certainly angry. The king, wrote Germain, was still considering his strategy, and in due course would send Major Balfour to New York with a response. This was in a war where geography meant that anything sent in May at the very latest could have no realistic prospect of affecting events in America. And Howe’s request for fifteen thousand reinforcements was declined. Germain reckoned that Howe had twenty-seven thousand men currently under him—a number that the minister arrived at by including all the sick and the wounded—so he should need fewer than eight thousand after all. Ultimately, William received just three thousand extra men.62

  William had spent the winter in New York, awaiting further word from London, while his army—on the defensive since the rebel victories at Trenton and Princeton—found itself harassed almost daily by an elusive enemy that could not inflict defeat but could deny his troops their comfortable winter quarters and sap morale. He could not have avoided feeling frustrated and restless. Meanwhile, there were determined efforts to enjoy winter quarters. The Queen’s Birthday, for example, was marked in January with fireworks and a ball; there were dinners, receptions, and assemblies of “the Beaus & Belles” of New York City. Officers staged amateur theatricals for their own amusement and for the benefit of servicemen’s widows.63

  But the American victories at Trenton and Princeton forced the British army to draw in its outposts: Food and forage were difficult to find, prices rose, and every detachment sent in search of hay was sure to be drawn into a nasty skirmish. One did not have to venture very far from the city to witness the devastation wrought by the war. Deserted dwellings in a desolate landscape could be seen along the New Jersey shore; the bodies of unburied rebel soldiers were visible in the Long Island countryside. In the vacated New York City homes of wealthy rebels, now claimed by British officers, living quarters were cramped and junior officers complained of having to share a floor with their comrades-in-arms.64 Civilians faced high prices and hardship, and the poorest, many of them Black loyalists, crowded into improvised hovels in a district called “Canvas Town.”65 Henry Strachey sent his wife a description of a winter cooped up in the city—unable to ride because of impassable roads, on constant lookout for a ship from England bearing news.66

  Both William and Richard, as commanders in chief, were nevertheless expected to lay on entertainments for their own officers, their troops, and the local citizenry. That winter, the contrasting personalities of the two brothers began to be noted—the admiral was dignified and reserved, the younger general appeared irresponsible and loved a good time. In fact, William garnered severe censure from New York loyalists for his libertine lifestyle. Their stories, which were conveyed to London in private letters, depicted a general who surrounded himself with “scenes of dissipation and gaming,” gambling for high stakes and losing his temper over his losses, and corrupting his junior officers by his example. “What can the nation expect from a luxurious and licentious army,” raged one angry New Yorker, “and an indolent and dissipated general?”67 In addition, a rumor began to make the rounds of his scandalous affair with a Boston woman named Elizabeth Loring. The story gained wide circulation, with what accuracy we shall see. One junior officer, writing privately about his commander in chief in March 1777, called him a “R__h_ll” (rakehell), a word that would translate today as “hellraiser.” The letter was written just nine days after William received Germain’s letter denying his request for reinforcements.68 It would be almost two more months before William received a decisive official response to his proposals for the next campaign.

  The response finally arrived on May 8, when Major Nisbet Balfour reached New York with a dispatch from Germain that gave William the go-ahead for the action against Philadelphia. This was the point where Germain should have communicated Burgoyne’s plans, but there was no mention of the Canadian army. By now, William himself had already informed General Carleton in Quebec that he could offer little help to Burgoyne. He had also resolved to go to Philadelphia by sea.69

  By traveling entirely by water, William could avoid being harassed by the Continental Army that constantly skulked on his flank, and his communications and supply lines would be secure. He would now have another chance to destroy Washington’s army, because the rebels had to defend Philadelphia. If the mission were a success, the British army would gain control of Pennsylvania’s plentiful granaries, and thus deny them to Washington. And taking Pennsylvania—whose population included pacifist Quakers and neutral German communities of Amish and Mennonites, and where there was reputedly only a mixed commitment to the rebellion—would divide
rebellious New England from its strongest ally in the south, Virginia.70 Even though William had not received everything he’d asked for, he was determined to go ahead with his plan.

  Historians have sometimes wondered how William Howe came up with a strategy that deviated so sharply from the “line of the Hudson” idea that had been the centerpiece of British strategic thinking almost from the start of the war. But the idea of dividing and conquering the colonies by invading the Chesapeake Bay instead of New York and the Hudson had been bruited about in London since 1775.71 By 1777, the war was clearly no longer confined to New England, as strategists had initially envisioned, so encircling that intransigent province made little sense militarily. Amphibious warfare was an advantage the British would do well to exploit in their war against the rebellious seaboard colonies.

  Meanwhile, Germain was getting worried. His last letter to William, written on May 18, which the general received weeks after he had already embarked from New York with his army, approved the expedition to Philadelphia but added the hope that whatever General Howe undertook, “it will be executed in time for you to cooperate” with Burgoyne in the north.72 By this time, it was far too late for William to be ordered to go up the Hudson to meet up with the army heading south from Canada.

  Germain’s May 18 letter has the ring of a last-minute attempt by the American secretary to evade responsibility should the campaign go wrong.73 And in this it had some effect. In late 1778, after William had resigned and gone home, the letter would be published in New York by partisans of Germain, purporting to be proof that General Howe had disobeyed direct orders to support Burgoyne’s expedition. The faithful Nisbet Balfour, still serving in America at the time, rushed in a rage to the printer’s office, declaring, “I am Sir W[illiam] H[owe]’s friend and I shall allow it to go no further.”74 He got no satisfaction, but perhaps it relieved his angry feelings.

  Curiously, in Britain, the false rumor that William Howe had been ordered to go up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne was already spreading by the summer of 1777, even before William and his army had embarked for Philadelphia. In July, British newspapers carried a story that General Howe had received explicit instructions for a rendezvous with General Burgoyne and a conquest of New England before going to Pennsylvania.75 Newspapers published all sorts of nonsense and outright falsehoods, but the articles can be seen as the harbingers of a narrative that never entirely died down: that William had ignored direct orders to meet Burgoyne in Albany.

  The inadequate communication between Germain’s office and the commander in chief that dogged the entire campaign of 1777 was so stark that William wondered aloud two years later in the House of Commons whether a letter from Germain had gone missing that spring.76 Conspiracy theories sprang up to explain the glaring deficiency. An apocryphal story circulated that Christopher D’Oyly had failed to transmit critical orders to William from his chief, Lord George Germain.77 Nisbet Balfour also came under suspicion, for he was known to be Germain’s messenger in early 1777, carrying royal instructions with him when he reached New York from London in May. A story made the rounds that Balfour had also conveyed separate, verbal orders from Germain to William regarding Burgoyne and the Canada expedition, orders that General Howe allegedly ignored.78

  In reality, Balfour’s sole verbal message from Germain was a reproof for General Howe’s too-infrequent communications, a source of immense frustration to the American secretary.79 The written dispatches carried by Balfour approved of the campaign to the south, but they also urged the brothers to conduct raids on the New England coast.80 No doubt Nisbet went beyond his remit and gave Sir William an earful of what was being said about him in the offices of Lord George. The brothers wrote back, coolly declining to undertake the New England coastal raids, stating that they lacked the resources.

  Germain would later claim that the raids on the New England coast were intended as a diversion for Burgoyne, although the dispatches themselves contained no such suggestion.81 There is no doubt that Germain was becoming worried about where the blame would lie if the campaign miscarried. The crucial weakness in the planning was Germain’s failure to issue explicit orders to William to meet up with Burgoyne’s army on the Hudson—or not. Was Burgoyne’s offensive supposed to be a diversion for Howe, or a decisive move to divide the rebellious colonies, or what?

  THE SIMMERING DISCONTENT between Germain and his commander in chief had its parallel within the British nation at large, as the public became aware that the victories hailed at Christmastime had not ended the rebellion. In February, news of the reverses in Trenton and Princeton began to be known around London, and a picture of a faltering British war effort began to take shape: George Washington’s numbers swelling, an emboldened rebel army harassing British troops. Armchair critics in London “began to abuse General Howe in all the coffee houses.” Germain attempted to rally morale in Parliament with a speech outlining his great hopes for the next campaign, but two weeks later, on May 30, Lord Chatham rose in the House of Lords and called for an end to the war. All we have now in America, declaimed the aging Pitt, is “a military station.” After two years of fighting, not one American province had been restored to royal rule. Chatham was supported by the Duke of Grafton, the longstanding friend of Caroline and her brothers.82

  On the night of Lord Chatham’s speech, Caroline happened to be playing cards and winning money at Princess Amelia’s summer residence in Gunnersbury. “Mrs Howe won the rest all lost,” recalled Lady Mary.83 The talk around the card table was of Chatham’s outspoken opposition to the war, but there was no reason for Caroline to be off her game. It was the government, not her brothers, that was under attack. If Chatham thundered that the conquest of the colonies was a chimerical idea, he also said much that echoed the opinions of the Howes themselves: The civil conflict in America threatened to squander the achievements of the Seven Years’ War; the colonists should have their most substantial grievances redressed, their trade and wealth should be retained for Britain, and the danger of an attack from France lurked in the wings and should be averted. Chatham’s motion for peace was easily defeated, but there was a growing concern that “we shall have a French war,” as Walpole confided ominously in a private letter.84

  Caroline could not ignore the fact that admiration for her brothers was turning into hostility at an alarming rate. “[T]he Howes are not in fashion,” wrote Walpole succinctly in June. At the same time, the pro-government Morning Post ran a series of articles calling for the recall of the brothers. “The Howes have received positive orders from Administration to make their play the present campaign,” the Post cried, adding bitingly that they were “not to let the grass grow under their feet,” as they had for the previous two years.85 As the nation registered its powerlessness to quell the colonial uprising, William’s 1776 seizure of New York was downplayed by newspaper scribblers.

  It was Caroline’s job to support her brothers at aristocratic gatherings, where parliamentary business spilled over into the social politics that was the lifeblood of Georgian society. That month, her self-control slipped in a crowded room when she reacted to news of a slight on Admiral Howe. The lucrative post of treasurership of the navy had just fallen vacant; Lord Howe was considered by everyone to be a likely candidate, and yet—Lord North conferred it elsewhere. Horace Walpole described Caroline’s obvious vexation in the midst of the party of polite tea-drinkers: “I tell you, this is irreconcilable,” she exclaimed, in such heated tones that it set her apart from the rest of the company. In the competitive milieu of high politics, the oversight seemed to point to the decline of the Howe influence.86 “[T]he rest of ye world as well as the Howe family are struck with the injustice,” wrote Jane Strachey. The fear was that Lord Howe would resign.87

  Jane’s loyalty could be taken for granted, but Caroline was not going to rely on goodwill alone. She tried to control the narrative as the story took shape in the mouths of society gossips, coaching her friend Lady Spencer on what to say if the subject were to be
brought up in her presence: “[I]f any body talks to you concerning the Treasurer of the Navy matter,” she instructed, “be so good to say, that it was not solicited by my Brother, that he did not refuse it, & that it was not offered him, but that Ld. North knew it would have been accepted by him.” After thinking it over, Caroline hinted at the close of the letter that her friend might as well bring it up herself as wait for it to be raised in conversation: “I had rather every body should know than not what I have said to you.”88

  That was in June. The very next month, General Howe sent home a report of a late start to the campaign, once again giving the impression of a failure to take head-on an army of homespun soldiers. Inaccurate reports circulated in England that when Howe did finally march out to engage the enemy, he found Washington so strongly entrenched that he did not dare to attack, and he lamely retreated back to New York. In reality, William had tried twice to lure Washington from his strongholds in New Jersey, and he had very nearly succeeded on his second attempt when Washington spotted the trap just in time to withdraw.89 Nisbet Balfour wrote dejectedly, “[W]e could only see [Washington] getting up the Hills before us at a Distance. Had he been a few miles further from his stronghold, he would never have got there again.”90 But Balfour’s frustration did not even register at home, where the newspapers reflected national exasperation as they carried the attacks on the brothers to a level that was well beyond the management of a sister.

  The pages of Britain’s newspapers were an important arena in the apportioning of blame or praise for wartime events. A growing readership and a rising middle class meant that in the 1770s there were more than 140 newspapers, magazines, and periodicals in circulation. Available in public houses, clubs, and coffeehouses, they reached a far wider audience than their print runs indicated. Although newspapers of the period had loose political affiliations, they were for the most part independent. In pursuit of the widest possible readership, they expressed a variety of opinions, but they played a distinctive role in purveying metropolitan political trends and opinions to the rest of the nation.91 During the War of Independence, the British press would engage a wide cross section of British society in the debate that raged in Parliament and at court over the government’s handling of the war.