Like many loyalists, Elizabeth and Joshua had to abandon their home and possessions with the outbreak of hostilities. But Joshua had found new opportunities as a refugee in Boston when General Gage appointed him sole auctioneer for the city.8 In addition, his business, Loring & Company, sold spirits to the British officers and troops. The Lorings then followed the British army from Boston to Halifax in March 1776; in June, they were with the fleet when it departed for New York.
In New York, William appointed Joshua Loring commissary of prisoners, an office that paid twenty shillings a day plus a house and rations. It was an attractive post, particularly during wartime, and it was there that rumors of an affair began. In letters written by the same disgruntled loyalists who had complained of William’s gambling and hell-raising, the gossip was quickly conveyed across the ocean to London. Allegedly, Loring’s position as commissary was payment for William’s access to his wife.
By the spring of 1777, word of the affair with Mrs. Loring began making the rounds as transatlantic gossip. An anonymous letter reported, “[O]ur Commander has been enjoying his pleasures while every thing has been going to wreck in the Jerseys,” gambling alongside his “favourite sultana,” the “Boston Lady” who three years earlier was penniless but now lost at cards at the rate of three hundred guineas a night with the utmost complacency. Her husband, the letter-writer added, had also grown rich and “looks fat and contented.”9 Two months later, the Pennsylvania Evening Post waxed poetic about the image of Sir William with his mistress on his arm, viewing his troops on parade:
Without wit, without wisdom, half stupid and drunk,
And rolling along arm in arm with his punk,
The gallant Sir William, who fights all by proxy,
Thus spoke to his soldiers, held up by his doxy. . . .10
Even without the newspapers, the Howe women knew the story during that worrying spring, when news from America was first beginning to go against the brothers. Jane Strachey learned of it at the home of her cousin Lady Clive in Berkeley Square, where a vociferous guest called across the crowded drawing room to tell her of an “affair of gallantry of a certain married man now in America.” Jane tried to look unconcerned, replying before all the listening company that, with his wife an ocean away, General Howe was “much in the right to console himself.” In an age of double standards, she tried to cast Sir William’s indiscretion in a sympathetic light. But she sent her husband a warning: “[A]s all Wives are not liberal in their sentiments on these subjects it is not amiss to tell you that such stories as these do not lose by the distance that they are carried.”11
That year, as the gossip intensified, Mrs. Loring became an oft-cited reason for the sluggish start to General Howe’s campaign. An English newspaper jibed:
Awake, arouse, Sir Billy,
There’s forage in the plain.
Ah, leave your little filly
And open the campaign.12
The story began gaining traction. In July 1777, William’s troops supposedly sweltered aboard ship for two weeks before departing for Philadelphia because Sir William was dallying in New York with the captivating Bostonian. It was even said that his controversial decision to go to Pennsylvania by sea was for the convenience of his mistress, who was pregnant and required “the benefit of sea-air.” By the end of the war, the mushrooming scandal had retrospectively placed Mrs. Loring in bed with William in March 1776, when the American cannon on Dorchester Heights forced the British evacuation of Boston.13
The catch in all this is that the story of the Loring affair was probably not true. A few historians have noted that there is a dearth of evidence for an intimate relationship.14 What makes it still more implausible is that Elizabeth Loring was the niece of a man William Howe regarded as a personal friend. When he arrived in Boston in May 1775, it was not Betsey’s blue eyes that drew him to her; he already knew the Lloyds and the Lorings.
Elizabeth Loring’s uncle, James Lloyd, had saved William Howe’s life seventeen years earlier. Lloyd, an eminent Massachusetts physician who had trained in London hospitals, was a surgeon at the garrison of Castle William in Boston in 1758. When William’s regiment arrived there after the grueling siege at Louisbourg, William, still reeling from the death of his brother George Lord Howe, fell dangerously ill. In later years, he always felt a debt of gratitude toward Dr. Lloyd, to whose care he believed he owed his recovery. At the siege of Havana in 1762, William met and befriended Joshua Loring Jr., whose family was connected to the Massachusetts Lloyds. It was natural, then, that thirteen years later, in 1775, William Howe sought out his old friends Dr. Lloyd and Joshua Loring as soon as he reached Boston.15 This was the means by which he was introduced to twenty-two-year-old Betsey.
Set against the unlikely proposition that General Howe would choose as his mistress the wife of his former comrade-in-arms, and the niece of the doctor who saved his life, is the alternative narrative, held out by purveyors of gossip since 1777. The story has always gone that the arrangement between General Howe and the Lorings followed the stereotype of an officer of high rank awarding a post of profit to a compliant husband. There were other examples of this during the war. General Clinton took Mary Baddeley as a mistress while he was in America. Mrs. Baddeley was the daughter of an Irish country gentleman who had married a lowly carpenter and was consequently rejected by her family. The carpenter became a foot soldier, then worked his way up to sergeant major, stationed at Boston. There he was demoted, rumor had it, because he would not allow his commanding officer to make free with Mary. Clinton took an interest in the man’s misfortune, and Mary became Clinton’s housekeeper. In time, she became his mistress, and her husband benefited.16 General Burgoyne also took with him a mistress, the wife of a subordinate officer, on his ill-fated march to Saratoga. Throughout the campaign, the nature of their relationship was plain for all to see. Just before Saratoga, Burgoyne was described by a critical onlooker as making merry with his mistress, eating and drinking.17 The tale of William Howe and Mrs. Loring, then, seemed to fit easily into the established cliché.
But the Lorings occupied a higher social sphere than the mistresses of Burgoyne and Clinton. Joshua Loring was a logical choice for William to appoint as commissary of prisoners in New York, a man of business who had held other public positions before the war. And whatever their relationship, Elizabeth Loring certainly did not live openly with William Howe, as did the mistresses of Burgoyne and Clinton. William’s household in New York included no women at all, not even among the servants.18 While William resided in New York, the Lorings lived in a house near Harlem. They were not poor or needy: Joshua’s few surviving letters indicate that the family retained the services of enslaved servants during the British occupation. His letters to his wife are caring and affectionate, referring to her virtues as a mother and giving no idea of a disturbance in their relationship. Nor is there any evidence that Elizabeth Loring went to Philadelphia with General Howe. Malicious contemporary gossip was contradictory, claiming simultaneously that she followed her military lover to Pennsylvania and that she was left behind in New York while William found himself a new mistress (or even two) in Philadelphia.19
There is yet another reason why William Howe would have been throwing caution to the winds by taking up with Mrs. Loring: She had a connection, albeit a slender one, with his wife’s social circle at home in London. His prewar post in New Hampshire had placed Joshua Loring in the service of Governor John Wentworth, who had formerly lived in England and knew Fanny Howe’s uncle, the Earl of Strafford. Wentworth and his wife Frances arrived in Boston in August 1775, escaping from patriot activists in New Hampshire. While in the besieged town, they would certainly have mixed socially with both William Howe and the Lorings. Joshua and Elizabeth would shortly name their newborn son John Wentworth Loring, after Joshua’s honorable patron, the New Hampshire governor. The governor’s wife, Mrs. Wentworth, was in London by 1776, where she associated with Fanny Howe.20 The Lorings, then, stood a real chance of bei
ng introduced to Fanny and other members of the Howe family if they had taken refuge in London. If they were not aristocrats, they occupied a social rank similar to that of the Stracheys.
Elizabeth Loring left for England as a loyalist refugee in 1778, the same year that Sir William Howe returned home. She settled with her children in the English countryside in Reading, Berkshire. Joshua continued as commissary of prisoners for the remainder of the war. After the peace, he was reunited with his wife in Berkshire, where they had three more children. When Joshua died in 1789, Elizabeth received a government pension until her death in 1835.
There is no evidence that Elizabeth and William had any contact with each other after they returned to Britain. Her four sons went on to serve in the army and the navy, and in one case the church. Notable was John Wentworth Loring, who gained a knighthood and became an admiral.21 It may be that the Howe patronage can be detected in the successful careers of the Loring boys, but nothing particularly suggestive can be read into that, even should it be true. In later years, there was no evidence that Elizabeth was treated like a woman of notoriety. Wealthy young New Yorker John Aspinwall, great-grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a relative of the Lorings, seemed to think it no indiscretion to meet his cousin, Mrs. Loring’s daughter, during a tour of England in the 1790s, merely commenting that she “Plays very well on the Grand Piano fort.” After Elizabeth’s death, a “Sacred to the Memory” plaque enumerated her virtues as an affectionate wife and mother.22
But false reports can take wings even with an ocean to cross. The story that Sir William Howe was too busy in bed with Elizabeth Loring to fight the enemy reached its peak in the British press in early 1778. “We hear that a great General’s first Sultana,” announced the Public Advertiser, “is an American Lady, whom he bought of her Husband for a Contract.—Alas! poor Old England, how thou art reduced! who must not only pay the Piper, but pay for pimping!”23
Two months later, in March, a letter purporting to be from a gentleman in New York to a private correspondent was printed and distributed as a handbill to members of Parliament. It pointed the finger at General Howe’s alleged illicit affair as a cause of his dereliction of duty.24 The scandal as peddled in the newspapers was eagerly consumed by the reading public, but the handbill itself seems to have made no impression on the august assembly that it targeted. The charge was absurd: Taking a mistress was prevalent in the army, and it had never before been cited as an impediment to valor in the field. In any case, the Mrs. Loring story was not much of a scandal to members of a political elite that included the Duke of Grafton and the husband of Lady Sarah Bunbury. General Howe was married, unlike widowers Burgoyne and Clinton, but even so, the notion that a man should find consolation elsewhere (as Jane Strachey expressed it) while separated from his wife by an ocean was not likely to shock England’s Georgian aristocracy.
The Howe women showed no sign of believing the story. Fanny welcomed William home with tender solicitude, and the Conollys showed no lessening of loyalty. The Stracheys, who can be regarded as a barometer of the mood in the Howe family during the war years, also did not believe it. After her embarrassing exposure to the rumor in her cousin’s drawing room, Jane Strachey appeared to dismiss the whole business, writing indignantly to Henry that “I cannot express to you how much I am provoked at such repeated illiberal low attempts to soil a great Character.” Henry himself directly contradicted the reports. “The News Papers . . . as unjustly accuse [Lord Howe] of Avarice, as I trust they do his Brother of criminal Gallantries.” Writing of the hospitality that the two commanders in chief were obliged to lay on during the winter of 1777–78, Henry said that both the brothers had hosted balls and parties, but that with respect to Sir William, “I never have seen even the smallest Symptom of that sort of Gallantry which your scandalous News Papers attribute to him.”25
The tale of General Howe and Mrs. Loring appears to have been a middle-class preoccupation. It probably was an invention of New York loyalists angry at a war that was supposed to have ended in 1776 but was bungled and mismanaged, so they believed, by the same class of self-serving and decadent aristocrats who had almost lost the last war in the botched campaigns of 1757 and 1758. American loyalists, while not republicans, shared the anxiety of the middling ranks in eighteenth-century Britain and America that the aristocracy were questionable trustees of a nation’s interests. As we have seen, this same concern had become conspicuous early in the Seven Years’ War, when the war effort seemed to founder. And the longer the American War of Independence dragged on, the more such issues grated on the sensibilities of unhappy civilians. The story of Sir William Howe and Mrs. Loring was an important element in the transformation of William from an active and daring young officer to the stereotypical wealthy, decadent court aristocrat with a penchant for ease and luxury. The fatal flaw in the hero who had scaled the heights of Abraham for General Wolfe twenty years earlier was not cowardice—it was lasciviousness. Such a person could not win Britain’s wars for her.
As in the last war, indictments of the commander in chief’s character were made in heavily gendered terms. He was emasculated by the intrusion of the voluptuous Mrs. Loring into his camp and his bed. Her malign influence was frequently couched in terms of drink, indolence, and sleep, making William Howe a Samson who lost his virility to his American Delilah.
Elizabeth Loring, who never uttered a word on her own behalf, became the focus as angry critics of William Howe attacked him in terms that reflected ingrained misogynistic attitudes. One of the most frequently quoted sources on the alleged affair remains the History of New York during the Revolutionary War, written by Judge Thomas Jones, an embittered loyalist. Jones left New York as a refugee in 1781, never to return, and died in England in 1792. His colorful and highly partisan narrative of the American Revolution, in which he seeks to allocate blame for a military defeat that blighted his life, was written during his exile. The manuscript remained in the family until it was published in 1879. Judge Jones’s descendants explained, understandably, that they did not wish to make it available to the public until all persons connected with the narrative and their immediate descendants were dead.26 Its publication ensured that the story of Mrs. Loring and General Howe would live on.
Yet if the Loring affair was pure fantasy, what are we to make of William Howe’s remark to the famous diarist James Boswell at a party in London in May 1779, less than a year after he returned from America? “We talked of Married Men,” recalled the Scotsman. “The General said he thought a husband quite constant must be a cold companion not worth having, and the best is one who, after being away a while, likes his Wife better than any other woman.”27 William’s suggestion—that a happily married virile man will naturally find alternative companionship while separated from his wife—was in keeping with the double standards of the day. The fact that he volunteered such a remark to Boswell at a time when he was aware of what people were saying about him smacks of a guilty conscience.
If William’s remark did betray a consciousness of genuine guilt, it was not on behalf of Elizabeth Loring. There is another, more intriguing possibility: a story, little known at the time and almost forgotten now, concerning Judith Verplanck, the wife of a prominent patriot, whose Wall Street mansion was a salon for redcoats during the British occupation of New York. The Dutch Verplanck family arrived in America in the seventeenth century, when New York was still New Amsterdam, and became prosperous merchants and landowners. The historic family homestead, Mount Gulian, in the Hudson Valley, remains open to visitors. The family’s in-town residence at 3 Wall Street no longer exists, but New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has the Verplanck Room, an installation that re-creates a pre-Revolutionary New York City drawing room. Here are assembled the furnishings and many of the objects that once graced the elegant parlor of the Verplanck townhouse. William must have known well the mahogany Chippendale card table, the rococo silver tea set from London, and the high-backed sofa, for the residence was a favori
te gathering place for British officers.28
Judith Verplanck was a loyal supporter of King George, but her husband, Samuel Verplanck, supported the rebellion. Throughout the war, he resided at their country estate in Fishkill, far up the Hudson River. The Verplancks, like many well-to-do Americans, did not want to lose their property, whichever side won, and it has been suggested that the husband and wife split up at the start of hostilities to ensure a foothold in both camps. But there was more to it than this, for Judith and Samuel continued to live separate lives after the peace. Judith remained in the Wall Street house until her death in 1803. Perhaps Samuel was not pleased that his wife went well beyond the minimal requirements of neutrality, offering liberal hospitality to high-ranking redcoat officers, notably Sir William Howe.29
Like all the Howe men, William enjoyed the company of clever women, and he would find much to attract him in the company of Judith Verplanck. Born Judith Crommelin in Amsterdam, the daughter of a wealthy banker, she was well educated, urbane, and celebrated for her brilliant conversation. Like Caroline Howe, she was also well-read and versed in several languages. Judith had taken the tour of Europe after marrying her cousin Samuel Verplanck, a New York merchant and banker, and by 1763, she had settled down with him in New York.
When Judith and William Howe met, she was in her mid-thirties. No portrait survives, but she was described even in old age as “a lively little lady, often seen walking up Wall Street, dressed in pink satin and in dainty high heeled shoes, with a quaint jewelled watch swinging from her waist.” She sounds rather like Lady Mary Howe as Gainsborough painted her. Judith’s grandson recalled that, when dressed for formal occasions, she powdered her hair and wore diamond earrings, and she was both formidable and comforting, teaching him to declaim in Latin while rewarding him with hot pound cake.30 If we imagine Judith in her silk gown seated among the tea things and the pretty, polished Queen Anne–style furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Verplanck Room, the light of the candles bringing out the warmth of the damask chair coverings and the gilt-framed mirror, it is easy to see why William Howe should have chosen to visit the house on Wall Street so often that he is always described as her particular friend.
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