And, in a quiet way, the rumor that there was something more between them has also persisted. No contemporary newspaper ever took up the story, no scandalous gossip was ever committed to letter. William Howe would be discreet when a lady’s reputation was at stake. She would have been no mistress, but his lover. After he returned to England, though, he was moved to send her gifts that some might have thought entailed a certain risk of exposure. In the museum’s reconstructed Verplanck parlor, a single teacup survives from an elegant French porcelain service decorated with blue cornflowers and gold bands—a present from William. But more striking are two paintings in the style of the artist Angelica Kauffmann. The Temptation of Eros depicts a mischievous Cupid urging his suit on a rosy young lady. The Victory of Eros shows the young lady, disheveled, grasping after the departing Cupid, who leaves with a knowing smirk. These telltale pictures still reside in the heart of Judith Verplanck’s drawing room, yet she has virtually disappeared from the drama of William’s personal War of Independence, while the story of Mrs. Loring goes on and on.
The Temptation of Eros and The Victory of Eros. Gifts of William Howe to Judith Verplanck.
By the end of 1777, a fully developed narrative of William Howe’s career as commander in chief in America had emerged, and its basic features have persisted to this day. William lied to his constituents in Nottingham in the election of 1774, promising not to serve in America and then, within a few months, breaking that promise. His ponderous conduct of the war reflected at the least profound character and professional flaws, and, at the worst, a conspiratorial ambition to promote the Howes and their quest to save the empire. He held back from delivering a decisive blow to Washington’s army at Brooklyn. He chose not to attack Washington at White Plains. Despite having superior forces by land and sea, he dragged the war out over two campaigns, inflicting relatively little damage on the Americans and leaving General Burgoyne in the lurch.31 His alleged affair with Mrs. Loring testified to his corruption, his indolence, his incompetence, or all three.
When we contrast the real man with the distorted image of him created during the conflict, it is not too much to say that the American War of Independence robbed William Howe of his identity. The picture of a decadent English aristocrat who was wedded to hidebound military tactics and underestimated Yankee wilderness warcraft would become prevalent in popular narratives of the American Revolution. It was by means of such a caricature that General Howe, commander in chief of the British war effort, would be transformed into a foreigner in the eyes of Americans.
That is the paradox: William Howe, like his brother George Lord Howe, was the type of an eighteenth-century Anglo-American fighting man. In his knowledge and experience of wilderness warfare, his leadership abilities, and his willingness to accept hardship with his men, he had much in common with his adversary, General Washington. In fact, the two are often compared in histories of the war. Both were tall, of a similar age, and both had polished manners and pleasant bearings. Both men served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War—both were known to be fearless in the face of enemy fire—and historians, unaware that William took a bullet at Belle-Île, have asserted that both got through their military service without so much as a scratch.32
Besides outward traits, there were other similarities. William, like Washington, was a foxhunting country gentleman, a product of the rural aristocracy and gentry rather than the court and the West End. Both he and Washington had only a limited formal education. They were pragmatic men, rather than speculative thinkers. Both had quick tempers. Both had endured grueling hardships in the Seven Years’ War. And in 1775, neither had had experience as a commander in chief. On this last count, each had experienced a degree of self-doubt at the start of the war.33 After the war, a Philadelphia woman recalled: “Sir William Howe was a fine figure, full six feet high, and well proportioned—in appearance not unlike his antagonist, General Washington. His manners were graceful and dignified, and he was much beloved by his officers, for his generosity and affability.”34
Ironically, William was actually more egalitarian in manner with his men than was Washington, who was transformed into almost a regal figure as the rebellious Americans discarded their king. This fits with the William who had grown up in a large, boisterous family in the English countryside, down-to-earth and careless of personal comfort, self-contained and convivial by turns. He had fought for king and country to the best of his ability, his fighting spirit quickened by the loss of his brother—in sum, he was the eighteenth-century ideal of an English army officer.
Thirteen
Survival
The Howe brothers returned to England determined to counter the chorus of criticism that had sprung up during their absence, but they would face a maddening mixture of gossip, anonymous press scribblings, and political maneuvering. They needed actions, not words, to redeem themselves. Within a year of their return, they would demand, and receive, a parliamentary inquiry into their command, but it was Richard Howe’s naval exploits that would restore the luster of the Howe name.
William was back in England by the summer of 1778. Lady Mary Coke got word of his return on July 2, the day he reached London. “Sir William Howe . . . has been with his Majesty & I hope graciously received for I cannot believe he has been to blame,” she wrote.1 Unfortunately, Lady Mary’s opinion was not shared by the majority. Nisbet Balfour, back in London later that year, lamented that his former commander in chief’s enemies “have so far succeeded, as to make the world lay it down as a first principle of their faith that he is guilty of something.”2 Friends were rallying to his defense, but the British nation was not accustomed to failure, and William Howe could not escape from this debacle with his reputation intact.
William met with Lord George Germain at his Pall Mall residence soon after his return. The visit was a matter of form, which neither man could possibly have relished. On the same day William appeared at court, and afterward had a private audience with the king. George III sent Lord North a brief account of what had occurred between them. General Howe, he said, had given assurances that neither he nor his brother the admiral would join the political opposition, but since Germain and his secretaries had vilified him, “he must therefore be allowed some means of justifying himself.”
At the same meeting, William strongly disapproved of the government’s plan for a military expedition to the French possession of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. General Clinton, now commander in chief in America, had been ordered to detach five thousand men for the attack on the island. Since France had entered the war in February 1778, Britain was concentrating her forces on the old enemy, and the war in mainland America must take second place. Clinton had also received orders to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York. So determined were ministers to focus on the new theater of war in the Caribbean that they instructed Clinton that he could even abandon New York and retreat to Halifax if he thought it safer.3 William could not be silent as he saw his army put to such a purpose. “[T]here is not so fine an army in the world as the troops in America,” he told the king, adding that the expedition to St. Lucia would succeed, “but end in the destruction of the troops.”4
The attack on St. Lucia was Germain’s idea; perhaps that was what he and William had discussed—or, rather, argued about—when they had met earlier that day. Tragically, William’s prediction that it would end badly for the soldiers who had once served under him was vindicated. The British army would indeed capture St. Lucia by the end of 1778. But the mortality rates for troops serving in the fever-ridden Caribbean—as William knew from personal experience—were so great that about half the men he had commanded in Pennsylvania in 1777–78 were destined to perish within eighteen months of their arrival on the island.5
William, however, was no longer commander in chief. The only task before him now was defending his own honor. A government undersecretary observed that the Howes did not seek to receive thanks so much as to have their names cleared.6 To do this, William required s
ome sort of public gesture. Lord Clarendon, who had worked to obtain Richard’s appointment as peace commissioner in 1776, once again intervened on behalf of the brothers. He wrote to Lord North just ten days after William’s interview with the king, suggesting that since the Howe brothers were both going to withdraw from the war, a tangible mark of royal favor would be appropriate—a peerage, a pension, a peacetime post of some kind.7 Such recognition was routine upon retirement, and it could be taken as evidence that, in the circles where it mattered, the service of the brothers in America was approved.
That summer of 1778, William dutifully showed his face. He attended military camps, he appeared at a royal drawing room at St. James’s Palace, he was at the Nottingham Races and added a silver cup to the annual sweepstakes.8 He wrote to brother-in-law Tom Conolly from Marble Hill House outside of London, where he and Fanny were staying. “I am in an odd state here,” he said, “most graciously received by ye K___& still censured in ye Ministerial Paper, or Morning Post.” There was a kind of forced heartiness in the letter; William must have been quite worn out. He congratulated Tom on his recent winnings at Almack’s, the exclusive gambling club in Pall Mall, and asked about his horses and hounds, adding, “I find Fanny in charming health.”9
Fanny was delighted to have her William home again. “It is pleasant to think of her, poor soul,” wrote Louisa Conolly that summer. “I do, continually, because I saw her in all her distress” while William was overseas.10 Yet Fanny was destined to have her nerves wracked a little longer. No sooner was William restored to his family than he was ill with an abscess in his back. In the days before antibiotics, such infections could be fatal.
Caroline had been spending the month of August as usual with Aunt Juliana Page at Battlesden when she learned that her brother was unwell. “[P]oor William,” she wrote to Lady Spencer, “we heard yesterday has been very bad indeed.” The abscess would have to be opened. Caroline decamped to Marble Hill the very next day, when William was scheduled to go under the surgeon’s knife. Adopting a matter-of-fact tone, she pronounced her brother out of danger forty-eight hours later.11 Despite her protestations that the crisis was over, her handwriting was a nervous scrawl, a testimony to an uncharacteristically overwrought state of mind.
William, however, was in a great deal of pain, confined to a couch while the wound healed. Caroline used this as an excuse to remain at Marble Hill, helping to amuse her younger brother. “At present I am wanted here as a nurse, as I am constantly with him now he’s so well,” she explained. Soon, their mother Charlotte arrived to contribute her own forthright brand of maternal solicitude for “the dear Savage,” as Fanny called him.12 For two weeks, the former commander in chief’s world narrowed down to feather beds, familiar faces, and a comfortable room or two. Marble Hill House, with its trim lawns, fine trees, and spacious classical interiors, was a perfect place to convalesce. Given the circumstances, perhaps illness was a welcome relief.
The Howes concealed William’s ill health from the outside world. Lady Mary Coke seemed entirely unaware of it when she saw five of them, including William, at a party in the home of Lady Blandford in early September. She declared, “Tis the first time I’ve seen Sir William Howe, I think he looks well, he told me we might expect to hear from his Brother Ld. Howe every day.”13 William’s disappearance from the public sphere, however, was quickly noticed by his detractors in the press. General Howe was passing his time resting and relaxing near Richmond, as “unknowing and unknown” to the fashionable and political world as if he had been sent to America to bring home “a Cargo of Yankee Potatoes, instead of British Laurels,” jeered one.14 William, it seemed, was continually caught idling. Even when he was quietly ill, he could not escape negative publicity.
What of the war? The British now faced their global enemy, France, allied with the American colonies in a war likely to spread to the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. At Christmastime in 1777, the North administration had made strenuous efforts to avert a Franco-American alliance. Lord North had sent feelers to Benjamin Franklin in Paris to see whether there might be some way to achieve an immediate peace with America that still preserved a connection with Britain. But it was too late for that; the rebellion’s leaders had independence firmly in their sights.
Now North moved to offer the terms that Richard had sought when he had agreed to act as peace commissioner in 1776. On February 17, 1778, North presented a shocked House of Commons with a bill for a new peace commission, which would be empowered to negotiate directly with the Continental Congress and suspend hostilities. Parliament would renounce its right to tax the colonies for revenue, retaining only the power to impose taxes to regulate trade. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty would be relaxed, and the colonies would be assured greater autonomy in the conduct of their internal affairs. With these concessions, Britain in effect would choose regulation of America’s trade over taxation—an idea mooted by Franklin and others at the start of the conflict but rejected by British statesmen in 1775.15
Upon hearing the details of this spectacular U-turn, the House of Commons was stunned. MPs listened attentively, but “[a] dull melancholy silence for sometime succeeded to this speech.” To the astonished assembly, Lord North declared that “the sentiments he expressed that day, had been those which he had always entertained.” When pro-government MPs spluttered that the bill reversed everything the nation had been fighting for over the previous three years, they were informed that the war had been not for revenue but rather to crush the spirit of independence.16
North’s new legislation passed nevertheless. War with France was popular in a way that the conflict in America had never been. The newspapers screamed that defeating the French in Europe and the West Indies was now the route to ending the American insurgency. A few months later, in June, Lady Mary Coke gleefully reported the first Anglo-French engagement in the English Channel. The French had been bested in the brief exchange. “[W]e are all rejoiced at the news,” she wrote stoutly, trusting that the treacherous French now would be made to repent for their “insolent conduct.”17
The new peace commission, called the Carlisle Commission for its head, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, left England in mid-April and reached Philadelphia by June 6. Unbeknownst to them, however, Lord North had very quickly lost interest in his peace project. His communications with Benjamin Franklin had convinced him that it was almost certain to fail.18 Upon their arrival, the commissioners were both shocked and angry to learn that the British army, adopting a defensive stance in America, was evacuating Philadelphia. Their peace mission had been fatally undermined while they were en route to America.
Both Howe brothers were named to the commission, but William had departed for England two weeks before Carlisle and his delegates had even arrived. And it was understood that Richard also wished to return home. Indeed, Lady Howe had already written on his behalf to Lord Sandwich, citing concerns over his health. It was no surprise, then, when the admiral declined to serve with the new peace delegation. Richard’s leave was granted, pending the arrival of his replacement, Vice Admiral John Byron.19
Meanwhile, however, Richard remained on active duty in America. Philadelphia was evacuated in June, with military equipment and loyalists going by sea while the British army returned to New York overland. The redcoat army, marching in the heat with wagons, artillery, and loyalist refugees, was harassed constantly by a skulking enemy, a campaign of attrition that reached a head on June 28 in an inconclusive clash known as the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse. If Clinton had done well to retreat overland without losing any military baggage, his troops were of a different mind. When they reached their point of embarkation for New York at the end of their arduous march, they sighted Admiral Lord Howe’s ships off the coast of New Jersey. The weary soldiers gave a spontaneous cry of “a Howe! a Howe!—we see one of the Howes again!” a vote of confidence in the brothers that was hardly music to Clinton’s ears.20
On June 29, while his fleet was off th
e New Jersey coast, Richard met a packet ship carrying the news that a squadron of seventeen ships under the command of the French Vice Admiral Charles-Hector, Count D’Estaing, was expected imminently. The packet commander had sighted the fleet at sea and been chased for three days before losing his pursuers.
Up to this point, the British had fought the war in America without fear of danger from the sea. Yankee privateers were an annoyance, but not a serious threat. Now all was changed. The strange new alliance of revolutionary America and despotic France, adversaries in the last war, would try to trap the British army by attacking simultaneously from land and sea. The war would effectively end with the British surrender at Yorktown, in 1781, as a result of the successful execution of this strategy.
Now, in the summer of 1778, British commanders feared for the safety of their position in New York. Reinforcements from home under Vice Admiral Byron were expected, but they had not yet arrived when Richard and General Clinton began making defensive preparations. Rear Admiral James Gambier, sent out by Lord Sandwich, was considered to be incompetent, so he was appointed port captain in New York in order to remove him quietly from operations. Richard was needed.
Between July 8 and 10, it became apparent that D’Estaing’s objective was the British base at Newport, Rhode Island. Units of the Continental Army were also marshaling for a land-based attack on that garrison.21 D’Estaing kept Howe and Clinton guessing for several more weeks, as he appeared to switch among objectives. Now it was New York; now it seemed to be Newport again; now he headed out to sea, destined for who knew where? At the end of July, word reached Richard that Admiral Byron and the crucial reinforcements had been held up by bad weather.22 The situation was looking desperate; the French had superior firepower, and Admiral Howe needed Byron’s ships.
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