Chapter 21

Three Generals and a Lady

Two days before the destruction of the Diana off Noddle’s Island, the twenty-eight-gun frigate HMS Cerberus sailed into Boston Harbor with three very special passengers on board. It was one of those small ironies of history that the ship was named for the three-headed dog of Greek and Roman mythology said to guard the gates of hell. One of the three passengers did not reference that mythic beast in his writing, but nonetheless unabashedly referred to himself and his two companions as a “triumvirate of reputation.”¹

The truth of the matter was, however, that none of these three men was particularly pleased to be sailing into the cauldron of occupied Boston. The fact that King George III had dispatched three major generals to North America on the same ship was evidence of his government’s determination to impose a military solution on the errant colonies as well as a less-than-sterling confidence in General Gage. However high their individual opinions of themselves, William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne were to have their hands full.

Dark-complexioned and good-looking, with a martial air, Sir William Howe was the ranking member of the trio. Over time, his girth had slowly expanded as his penchant for high living, women, and gambling increased. He was the younger brother of Lord George Howe, who had given his life on the shores of Lake George during the French and Indian War, and Admiral Richard Howe, who along with their sister had attempted to recruit Benjamin Franklin to the role of peace mediator.

Howe was the only one of the three arriving generals to have previously served in North America. In command of a special unit of light infantry, he had led the way at Quebec as Wolfe’s troops climbed onto the Plains of Abraham. A longtime member of Parliament, Howe had promised his Whig-leaning constituents during the 1774 election campaign that “if he were appointed to a command against the Americans he would refuse.” But when his orders came, Howe went anyway, telling one local critic who hoped his mission would fail, “I was ordered, and could not refuse.”²

Next in order of rank was Henry Clinton, who may have been born in Newfoundland, where his admiral father was for a time the local governor. Those records are sparse and conflicting, but young Clinton later spent considerable time growing up in New York, where his father was again the governor. Sensitive to criticism, stoic in his demeanor, Clinton may have been the best soldier of the three, at least in that he lacked the distractions of Howe’s indulgences and Burgoyne’s flair for theatrics.

Clinton was small of stature and fair-haired. While he lacked the flamboyance to match his scarlet complexion, he had earned a reputation on European battlefields as a brave and skillful soldier who had a particular eye for detail. There was at least one aspect of his career in which he wholeheartedly agreed with William Howe. “I was not a volunteer in that war,” Clinton later wrote of his deployment to North America. “I was ordered by my Sovereign and I obeyed.”³

That left John Burgoyne—the most junior of the threesome in rank but the oldest in age because of his circuitous career path. After early service in the army, Burgoyne eloped with the daughter of the eleventh Earl of Derby, and the couple spent years estranged in poverty on the Continent. After they finally reconciled with her family, Lord Derby used his influence to make up for the time Burgoyne had lost in his army career. Witty and charming, Burgoyne soon commanded a regiment of dragoons, won glory in a cavalry action against Spain near the end of the Seven Years’ War, and after the war’s conclusion continued his seat in Parliament.

Postwar England suited Burgoyne, and he joined London clubs, did his own share of gambling, and even dabbled in literature by writing a play that David Garrick produced in London. When debate in the House of Commons turned to repeal of the tea tax, Burgoyne was firm but hardly a saber rattler. Saying that he looked upon America as a child “we have already spoiled by too much indulgence,” he nonetheless “wished to see America convinced by persuasion, rather than the sword.”⁴

Among the three generals, it was Burgoyne who had the least ties to or sympathy for America. But Burgoyne was definitely not pleased with the prospect of being the lowest-ranking general in a small headquarters overflowing with them. Before sailing from England, Burgoyne made the rounds among George III, Lord North, and others and suggested that the best use of his skills in North America would be not to sit fourth or fifth chair to Gage in Boston but rather to take command himself in New York, which was expecting reinforcements recently embarked from Ireland. It soon appeared that Howe coveted the New York command for himself, but Burgoyne left England with some assurance from the king that if he were not given an independent command he would be allowed to return to England before the winter.⁵

For all the criticism and infamy that would later be heaped upon John Burgoyne after his service in North America, his stint in Boston would best be remembered for a boastful comment he made as the three generals stood by the rail of the Cerberus and learned from a passing ship several days out of Boston that Gage and his troops were besieged on Boston’s promontory. “Well, let us in,” Burgoyne is said to have exclaimed, “and we shall soon make elbow-room.”⁶ The phrase would come back to haunt Burgoyne on more than one occasion.

GENERALS HOWE, CLINTON, AND BURGOYNE had not necessarily been sent to Boston to critique Gage, but neither had they been expected to praise him. It was obvious to any informed observer on both sides that General Gage’s days as commander in chief in North America were numbered. What he might have done differently since returning from England the previous May is open to speculation. The general failures of his forays into the countryside had only stiffened rebel resolve and proven that even a scorched-earth campaign against selected rebel hotbeds was likely to do nothing more than stoke an equally repulsive retaliation—quite likely against Gage’s own headquarters in Boston.

It would be fascinating to have a transcript of the first meeting between General Gage and this “triumvirate of reputation.” When the pleasantries were over, there must have been tough talk about what was to be done and how best to accomplish it. Transports full of troops were arriving, and more were on the way. In fact, just four days after the major generals arrived in Boston, Gage asked Admiral Graves to dispatch a ship to intercept the transports bound from Ireland to New York and direct them instead to Boston as additional reinforcements. So much for Burgoyne’s plan of an independent command in New York!

William Howe seems to have settled into Boston—rough though its conditions were—and been content to await orders from Gage. Henry Clinton and John Burgoyne were antsier. Clinton found “nothing but dismay among the troops on my arrival.” He couldn’t believe that so little was known about the countryside beyond Boston, despite a number of marches into the territory. The detailed tactician in Clinton immediately focused on the heights at Charlestown, to the north across the Charles River, and at Dorchester, to the south beyond Boston Neck. They were essential, Clinton thought, to the safety of Boston and any effort “to have an Entrey into the Country.” An attack in either direction or both directions would, Clinton believed, “shake those poor wretches and probably dislodge them totally, and possibly disperse them for a time.”⁷

Burgoyne was inclined to agree on both counts. He described an army whose troops were “still lost in a sort of stupefaction which the events of the 19th of April had occasioned.” They were alternately filled with frustrations of “censure, anger, or despondency.”⁸ There was no élan or esprit de corps among these troops, as there had been among the dragoons who had charged behind him on the Iberian Peninsula. But they would follow orders. What Burgoyne realized all too quickly was that among the abundance of generals he would neither be giving those orders nor be responsible for implementing a goodly portion of Gage’s—in other words, he was in the situation he had dreaded upon leaving England. Consequently Burgoyne reverted to his part-time avocation—writing.

Rather harmlessly, Burgoyne wrote letters to Lord North, Lord Barrington, and others in England reminding all of the king’s promise that he be allowed to return before winter. Rather creatively, he even suggested to Lord North that along the way he might be permitted to detour to New York and/or Philadelphia “as an individual member of Parliament” to somehow advance the by now largely abandoned “work of conciliation.”⁹ It would have made for high drama had John Burgoyne showed up in Philadelphia and marched into the Continental Congress to confront Samuel Adams and John Hancock, but that didn’t happen.

More ominously for the state of affairs on both sides, what did happen is that Burgoyne also turned his pen to crafting a proclamation for General Gage’s signature. While Henry Clinton eyed the rebel positions beyond Boston and considered the tactics necessary to dislodge them, John Burgoyne simply summoned up the power of his pen and proceeded to attempt to hurry them from those positions with words alone.

Just why Gage gave Burgoyne such free rein is open to question. Gage was certainly not inarticulate, but he may well have thought that he had already tried just about everything else, and no doubt Burgoyne was persuasive in offering his assistance. The resulting proclamation of June 12, 1775, was not Thomas Gage’s finest hour. If it was meant as reconciliation, it did nothing more than drive a wedge deeper between rebels and loyalists. If it was meant as intimidation, its pomposity produced nothing short of guffaws from the rebels it sought to frighten. Even upon its arrival in England, the proclamation was met with chuckles and derision, particularly among Whigs who recognized Burgoyne’s part in it.

“Whereas the infatuated multitude, who have long suffered themselves to be conducted by certain well known incendiaries and traitors, in a fatal progression of crimes against the constitutional authority of the State, have at length proceeded to avowed Rebellion; and the good effects which were expected to arise from the patience and lenity of the King’s Government have been often frustrated, and are now rendered hopeless, by the influence of the same evil counsels; it only remains for those who are invested with supreme rule, as well as for the punishment of the guilty, as the protection of the well-affected, to prove they do not bear the sword in vain.”¹⁰

And those one hundred–plus words were just the opening paragraph. Those who read beyond it and could decipher Burgoyne’s haughty prose found three salient points: first, Gage offered a full pardon to all persons who would lay down their arms and “return to their duties of peaceable subjects.” The only exceptions to this general amnesty were Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whose “offences” Gage and Burgoyne judged to be “of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of condign punishment.” (No record remains if Joseph Warren, arguably the third member of the triad, felt slighted by his exclusion from accusations of flagitiousness.)

Second, having been given full warning, all persons after the date of the proclamation who took up arms or otherwise aided and abetted the rebel cause in any way, even if only by a single secret correspondence, were to be judged “Rebels and Traitors” and treated as such. Finally, Gage declared martial law, citing the provision in the Massachusetts Royal Charter of which Lord Dartmouth had reminded him some months before.¹¹ As might have been expected, Gage’s proclamation landed with a thud.

Damning his new superior with faint praise, Burgoyne wrote to a member of the cabinet that it was no reflection on Gage “to say he is unequal to his present situation, for few characters in the world would be fit for it.” Nevertheless, Burgoyne went on, Gage should have seized Adams and Hancock when he had the chance, adapted his troops to the American style of fighting he knew so well from the French and Indian War, and fortified the high ground above Charlestown and at Dorchester Heights long before Clinton arrived on the scene to scrutinize the matter.¹²

Meanwhile, even before any communications from Howe, Clinton, or Burgoyne made their way back to England, Thomas Gage was increasingly being found wanting on that side of the Atlantic as well. Lord George Germain, who was about to replace Lord Dartmouth as Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote Lord Suffolk, who was Britain’s Secretary of State for the Northern Department (essentially Europe), with a candor that Suffolk had demanded. “I must lament,” Germain told him, “that General Gage, with all his good qualitys, finds himself in a situation of too great importance for his talents.”

As yet knowing only of the carnage during the retreat from Concord, Germain, who had served with both distinction and controversy during the Seven Years’ War, was firm in his opinion that the looming war required “more than common abilities” and that “the distance from the seat of Government necessarily leaves much to the discretion and the resources of the general.” Germain doubted “whether Mr. Gage will venture to take a single step beyond the letter of his instructions, or whether the troops have that opinion of him as to march with confidence of success under his command.”¹³ For General Thomas Gage, it appeared as though time was running out.

DESPITE THE INCREASED TEMPO THAT events around Boston and the arrival of Generals Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne seemed to demand, two questions that traced their roots back to the night of April 18 shadowed Thomas Gage: Was he betrayed in his Concord plans, and was his wife, Margaret, somehow involved? The first question is more difficult to answer even if the marital intrigue of the second has long made a better story.

As previously noted, Gage’s reported admission to Lord Percy late on the night of April 18—that “his confidence had been betrayed, for he had communicated his design to one person only besides his lordship”—was not recorded until Charles Stedman’s British history of the Revolution was published in 1794. If such a conversation indeed occurred, neither Gage nor Percy chose to mention it in their subsequent writings. Gage might well have done so in a self-exculpatory fashion in his after-action reports to Dartmouth or Barrington. Percy, who was low-key and discreet in any written criticism of Gage, was nonetheless prone to candor and might have mentioned it in his many letters to his father and other highly placed correspondents in England. The question must be asked again, did such a solitary confidant exist?

It seems unlikely. Gage may well have thought he was keeping a secret, but circumstantial evidence suggests that it was widely recognized by many people on both sides that a British march of some magnitude was about to get under way. Beyond a solitary confidant, if there were someone in Gage’s inner circle who overtly betrayed the general’s plans to the rebels, the potential list is long. It may well have been someone named Kemble: Gage’s adjutant, Stephen Kemble, or his private secretary, Samuel Kemble. It may have been the messenger who did such an incompetent if not almost treasonous job of alerting Lord Percy’s brigade and Major Pitcairn’s marines to be prepared to march in support of Colonel Smith. It may have been a domestic staff member in the general’s household who overheard Gage dictating Smith’s orders. And it may have been no one at all.

But does Margaret Kemble Gage belong on the list of potential suspects? In the interest of inclusiveness, perhaps, yes, but there is little circumstantial evidence and certainly no direct evidence to keep her there. All the reports branding Margaret Gage a rebel informant come from secondary sources relying on hearsay. The first published indictment seems to be Samuel Adams Drake’s account in the Boston Sunday Herald of July 6, 1879, published more than a century after the events. Drake took an obscure footnote in a book recently published from the letters and papers of John Burgoyne and made it his text.

“He was an amiable well-meaning man of no military or administrative capacity,” Edward de Fonblanque wrote of Gage in that note, “and of a weak character.” Well-meaning, yes, and far from a military genius, but to say after three major campaigns and fifteen years in command of Great Britain’s far-flung outposts throughout North America that Gage lacked military or administrative ability is simply wrong. But then de Fonblanque stuck the fork in: “Among other complaints made against [Gage] was that of being so completely under the influence of his wife as habitually to confide in her his local projects and correspondence with the ministry, which she, it was alleged, as habitually confided to his enemies.”¹⁴

This allegation was repeated in two biographies of Paul Revere, Charles Ferris Gettemy’s The True Story of Paul Revere, published in 1905, and Elbridge Henry Goss’s The Life of Colonel Paul Revere, first published in 1891. Goss repeated Drake’s error of adding Stedman’s secondary account of the Gage-Percy conversation and Gordon’s description of a “daughter of Liberty” and categorically assuming, in Goss’s words, that “this ‘daughter of Liberty’ was undoubtedly the wife of General Gage.”¹⁵ Gettemy went to some lengths to debunk this myth, at one point calling the tale “the most romantic theory that has been advanced to account for the foreknowledge possessed by the patriots relative to the British movements.”¹⁶

If such a circuitous and shadowy trail of dubious facts got Margaret Gage on the list of suspects, what evidence exists to exonerate her? Even the historian David Hackett Fischer, so meticulous and careful in so many things, rather cavalierly brushed off any chance of her innocence by citing “much circumstantial evidence” of her guilt, including “her husband’s decision to send her away from him after the battles, and the failure of their marriage.”¹⁷ Neither of those points stands up very well under scrutiny.

Margaret Gage’s departure from Boston for England on board the Charming Nancy in mid-August was hardly banishment. Thomas Gage wrote to his brother, Lord Gage, as early as May 13, saying that it was his intention to send Margaret and his children home to England.¹⁸ Given Thomas and Margaret’s pleasant year together in England and the grueling year just passed in Boston, who could blame either of them? Boston was full of people—rebels, loyalists, and British soldiers—who could think of little else but escaping its confines and its harsh living conditions. Duty, it is safe to say, was the only thing keeping General Gage himself in town.

At the time Gage wrote his brother of his plans for Margaret’s return, the trio of Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne had not quite arrived in Boston, but Gage was well aware from Dartmouth that they were coming. And he was far too experienced an officer not to know that their appearance was strong evidence that his own days as commander in chief were numbered. It was for Margaret’s well-being and that of their children that he wanted them out of the turmoil of Boston and safely across the Atlantic before the gales of another winter. He knew that he would follow them in due course; indeed, he appears to have heartily wished for that end.

There is no hint in any record that Margaret was anything but relieved to go. The truth of the matter was that the lifestyle to which she had been born and to which she was accustomed was far more readily had in England, particularly as it seemed increasingly likely that her husband would inherit his childless brother’s peerage. To be sure, there were many rebels who chose liberty’s cause over such earthly considerations, but there is nothing in Margaret Kemble Gage’s past to suggest that she might embrace that kind of sacrifice even if she had been so inclined politically. Without a doubt, she was anxious to reunite her children, three of whom she had left in school in England the previous summer as she had followed the general back to Boston. One of those, eleven-year-old William, had died in the interim.

And what of the reported failure of their marriage? Once again, David Hackett Fischer, despite what reservations he may have had, nonetheless summarized the speculation of earlier secondary sources by writing of Gage’s later years, “His shattered marriage with Margaret Gage was never repaired.”¹⁹ There is, however, no direct evidence that it was ever shattered, and circumstantial evidence supports just the opposite.

After leaving Boston, Thomas and Margaret Gage had two more children. Daughter Emily was born in London on April 25, 1776, eight months after Margaret sailed on the Charming Nancy. The timing is such that probably neither Thomas nor Margaret yet knew she was pregnant as they parted, but Margaret was no stranger to childbearing and may have had an inkling. Providentially for her, the Charming Nancy made the eastbound crossing in the very fast time of only twenty-four days.

Their last child, William Hall Gage, was born in England on October 2, 1777, when Margaret was forty-three.²⁰ (As a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and later an Admiral of the Fleet, William Hall Gage would become arguably a greater military commander than his father.) Childbearing is certainly not dispositive of marital bliss; however, short of questioning Margaret’s fidelity, these children are evidence of their continuing intimacy just prior to Margaret’s leaving Boston and well after Thomas returned to England.

There is one further point often raised by those who would condemn Margaret as a rebel spy in General Gage’s bedchamber: a dubious report of Gage’s philandering after he returned to England. This came, some years after the birth of their last child, in the pages of the Town and Country Magazine, a publication best described as one of the leading scandal sheets of the day—one that in later times might have printed headlines proclaiming that aliens rode with Paul Revere. Town and Country’s subtitle termed itself a “universal repository of knowledge, instruction, and entertainment.” Indeed, the story in question spends pages recounting the favors that a fallen young woman bestowed on various military types before her liaison with an older gentleman called “the lenient commander” and presumed by some to be Gage.²¹

Finally, however, Margaret Kemble Gage held the general’s love and esteem—and by all accounts returned it—to their dying days. After Gage died on April 2, 1787, Margaret and the general’s brother, Lord Gage, were named coexecutors of his will. After distributions to their surviving children, Gage left “a considerable part” of his estate “in a trust for his widow during her life.” Margaret outlived the general by almost thirty-seven years, never remarried, and died on February 9, 1824, near the age of ninety years old.²² That Margaret Kemble Gage, glamorous American-born wife of the British commander in chief, should have betrayed her husband and her loyalist upbringing in the rebel cause makes a great story, but it does not hold up under careful scrutiny.²³