“Will any man endued with common sense,” jeered the London Gazetteer, “believe that a hundred and fifty1 New England militia, defeated eight or nine hundred regular troops and drove them like sheep through the country for six miles? . . . The brutal violence, the savage barbarity . . . are all words designed to exasperate more the people of New England against the King’s troops. . . .”2
It was two days since the first report of the Lexington-Concord conflict had exploded in London—as usual in the form of a reprint from a Massachusetts newspaper, this time the Essex Gazette of Salem. The news story charged British troops with “commencing hostilities,” with being pursued by “our victorious militia” and with “cruelty not less brutal than our venerable ancestors received from the vilest savages of the wilderness. . . .” It attacked the troops for “shooting down the unarmed, the aged and infirm” and for “killing the wounded” and “mangling their bodies in a most shocking manner.”
The whole presentation bore the expert stamp of Samuel Adams. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress had commissioned Captain John Derby to bring the news to London in a fast light packet, sailing in ballast for speed. The ship slipped out of Salem four days after HMS Sukey had left Boston for England with Gage’s official report of the action. But it easily overtook the slower royal naval vessel and anchored at Southampton on Sunday, May 29.
The London press on Monday merely ran the bare story that had been printed in the Essex Gazette. Then, the next day, just as the public was absorbing the shock and beginning to discount the news as a fabrication, depositions of eyewitnesses, including one by a captured British officer, were released.
The same papers carried an appeal to the people of Britain from Joseph Warren, as president of the Provincial Congress, angled carefully to fan popular feeling against the government. “These, brethren,” he declared of the alleged British atrocities, “are marks of ministerial vengeance against this colony for refusing, with her sister colonies, a submission to slavery.”
Carefully, the document avoided criticism of the King, implying strangely that he had nothing to do with the acts of his ministers, who were the truly guilty men. “We profess,” said Warren, “to be his loyal and dutiful subjects; and, so hardly dealt with as we have been, are still ready with our lives and fortunes to defend . . . his crown and dignity; nevertheless, to the persecution and tyranny of his cruel ministry, [we] will not tamely submit. . . .”
The Colonial Office still had no information. Hurriedly, Dartmouth issued a statement through the official London Gazette intended to calm the tremors created by the rebels’ brilliant publicity tactics: “It is proper to inform the public that no advices have yet been received of any such event [the skirmish].”
Promptly, Arthur Lee, one of the Massachusetts agents in London, sent a note around to the newspaper offices “as doubt of authenticity of the account from Salem . . . may arise from a paragraph of the Gazette of this evening.” The originals of the published eyewitness affidavits were, he said, available for inspection at the office of the lord mayor of London, who was, of course, the violently prorebel John Wilkes.
The impact on London was tremendous. Every paper ran the news as its main story with big editorials 3 written, as was the custom, by writers using pen names. Apart from those such as “Politicus” in the Gazetteer, who refused to credit the truth of the reports at all, the commentators used the account of the conflict to show that their own political viewpoint was right: proof of the need for tougher hard-line measures by the government or as evidence of the constant Whig reiteration that the war was unwinnable. “A country two thousand miles long,” asserted “Crito” in the Morning Post, “. . . intersected by rivers, passes, mountains, forests and marshes, where the conquest is . . . over the people, their affections, their hearts and their prejudices. . . . If conquest gives us the command of America we cannot keep it by force; the only possible plan is to burn and destroy it from one end to the other. . . .”
“The sword alone,” insisted a Tory in the Morning Chronicle, “can decide this dispute . . . to prevent the ruin of the British Empire, which will inevitably take place if we are defeated.”
In Lloyd’s and Garraway’s, the city coffeehouses, the news dominated all discussion and created a mood of caution. Prices on the stock market dropped.
The City of London, whose merchants had been badly savaged by the loss of American trade, was a focal point of resistance to the government. Within days, members of the Constitutional Society meeting at the Kings Arms Tavern on Cornhill launched a subscription for the “relief of widows [and] orphans . . . of our beloved American fellow subjects . . . unhumanely murdered by the King’s Troops at or near Lexington and Concord.”
Criticism of the administration in the press was well tolerated, but this was going too far. When the appeal was advertised in the press, the government mounted a prosecution for seditious libel.
Meanwhile, in Whitehall no report had yet been received from Gage, and Dartmouth tried desperately to obtain more information. He sent for Captain Derby, who had brought the news, but the American refused stubbornly to see the Secretary of State.
The King was at Kew Palace when the news was rushed to him on May 29, the day before the press covered it. As always, his reaction was cool.
“I am far from thinking that the General has reason to be displeased,” he wrote. “The object of sending the detatchment was to spike cannon and destroy military stores; this has been effected . . . but with the loss of an equal number of men on both sides—the die is cast. I therefore hope you will not see in this a stronger light than it deserves. . . .”
It was not until June 9, eleven days after the rebel news had reached London, that the Sukey lay off Portland, waiting for a favorable wind. The navy’s Lieutenant Nunn, stalking the deck impatiently with Gage’s dispatches to Dartmouth, hired a passing scow to take him ashore and rushed to London.
In essence Gage confirmed the truth of the rebel account, except that he claimed the Americans fired first at Lexington. The allegations of rebel scalping and ear lopping in Lord Percy’s report, which Gage enclosed, provided a gruesome retort to the American brutality charges.
The government published the official report as fast as it could, holding up the presses of the London Gazette until midnight of the Saturday it was received. Like the rebel version, it caused a spate of publicity and critical press comment.
“Congratulations, Your Lordship,” mocked one writer, recalling Sandwich’s speech in the Lords about American cowardice, “upon the complete triumph you have recently gained over your enemies.”
More serious commentators, however, pointed to the real danger of the crisis. “The French and Spanish,” said a correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, “. . . only wait for a general engagement between the King’s troops and the Provincials. . . .”
The news of a general engagement came fast enough, preceded by a report passed between two becalmed vessels in the Channel that the British under Howe had been defeated in a battle near Boston. On July 25, Gage’s account of Bunker Hill, with its appalling list of casualties, shocked a London that had not yet fully absorbed the impact of the narrow escape from Concord.
In Whitehall and St. James’s, the news precipitated urgent action. Messengers were dispatched to summon a meeting the next day of the Privy Council.
Since the report of Lexington and Concord, the government had been moving in its usual leisurely way toward building up its force in America. The King had written to Hanover, of which he was prince, for 2,000 German troops for garrison duty in the Mediterranean, thus freeing British soldiers for American service. Sir Guy Carleton in Quebec had been told to raise an army of 2,000 Canadians, and money and equipment were already authorized to supply it. A ship with 2,000 stand of arms had been ordered to join Lord Dunmore, still in refuge aboard HMS Fowey in Virginia’s York River, to arm, as Dartmouth put it, “such faithful adherents as shall stand forth in his defense against the lawless rabble. . . .”
Still British ministers saw the militant Americans as “rabble.” Despite Concord, the conflict was still regarded in Whitehall as a series of Adams-organized riots.
The news of Bunker Hill came like a flash revelation, stripping the riot mentality from government thinking. It stopped abruptly the idea that it could stamp out the trouble with a little rearrangement of the peacetime military establishment, bolstered up with some outside help.
Britain was engaged in a full-scale war that it must win fast before France and Spain, now allies, took advantage of it. Already, the Daily Advertiser had pointed out ominously that the French had a “large body of horse and foot within a day’s march of Dunkirk.” Rumors were spreading through London that the Spanish ambassador had been recalled to Madrid for consultation.
On July 26, the day after the news of Bunker Hill reached London, the Cabinet met at 10 Downing Street and, according to a minute roughly scrawled on a page and a half of notepaper, voted to urge the King to establish an army in America of 20,000 men.
The next day the elderly Lord Rochford, Secretary of State for the Southern Department, sent for the French ambassador, the Comte de Guines. In a careful discussion—consisting, so De Guines reported later, of insinuations rather than statements—Rochford warned him against exploiting the Revolution. A strong body of opinion in Britain, indicated the Secretary of State, thought that the easiest way of ending the revolt was to fight France now—and Spain, if it joined the conflict.
These were brave insinuations, for at that moment in the crisis, as the French well knew, Britain was very short of troops. It was now clear that much of the proposed army of 20,000 men, needed to put down the American rebellion, would have to be raised from foreign sources.
The first place the King decided to seek help was Russia. Catherine had indicated to Sir Robert Gunning, British envoy extraordinary in Moscow, that she might be prepared to lend troops. But by the time the royal request to “Sister Kitty” for 20,000 Russian soldiers arrived she had changed her mind—as a result, according to the British ambassador in Berlin, of pressure from Frederick of Prussia.5 She advised Gunning to urge his king to settle the American dispute by peaceful means. “There are moments when we must not be too rigorous,” commented the autocrat of all the Russias. It would, she said, be an ill compliment to him if she consented to a course of action that suggested he was one of those monarchs who could not put down their own rebellions.
By then the London press had already reported on the visit to London in September of the Prince of Hesse-Cassel, one of the German mini-states. Hesse-Cassel had troops that the prince was happy to rent, and although George III also hired men from Hanover and Brunswick, the little state became his main source of troops to support British soldiers in America.
Meanwhile, a lone negotiator had arrived in England from the American Congress at Philadelphia. Just three weeks after the news of Bunker Hill had reached London, Richard Penn, grandson of the celebrated William Penn of Pennsylvania, rode a stagecoach from Bristol to London with a petition begging the King to interpose his authority to assuage mutual fears and jealousies and to negotiate a reconciliation with “his faithful colonists.” Because the Americans knew that the Congress was regarded at St. James’s as an illegal body, the petition was signed on behalf of His Majesty’s subjects in the individual colonies.
Penn had come a long way on his mission, but in London that summer the humble tone of the petition seemed in striking contrast with the “faithful colonists” who had gunned down British troops on the Concord road and Breed’s Hill. It came from a group of men who were now directing the army that was at that minute holding the British under siege in Boston. In fact, news had just arrived that they had appointed the prestigious George Washington to command it.
In view of the background, the petition was asking a great deal of a reactionary monarch who had very firm ideas about the divine right of kings. Penn was wasting his time, and this was soon made very clear. Dartmouth refused to see him, and eventually the American was informed frigidly that since the King did not receive the petition “on the throne,” no answer would be given.
George III was the formal head of the army, and he now took over firm control of the policing operation that had escalated into a war. “I am clear as to one point ...” he told his Premier as soon as he heard of Bunker Hill, “we must persist and not be dismayed by any difficulties that may arise on either side of the Atlantic. I know I am doing my duty and therefore can never wish to retract.”
He recalled Gage, who he now saw was far too mild a man to be commander in chief, and appointed Howe in his place. Since he knew he could not get enough troops to America for a major campaign until the spring, he began planning a minor operation in the mild winter climate of the South. The governors of Virginia and both Carolinas, temporarily in refuge from the revolutionaries, had written to London insisting that there was a large potential of Loyalists just waiting for a chance to fight for the King. What was needed was a Southern landing by a small force of regulars to provide a rallying point, and the army would be augmented by thousands of Americans.
This sounded like good sense, and the King gave orders for the operation to be initiated at once. Meanwhile, he urged Howe to consider moving his army to New York, whose strategic position at the mouth of the Hudson made it a preferable base to Boston, before the winter. But Howe could not act on the royal suggestion because he did not yet have enough ships.
The war in America was by far the biggest overseas operation that Britain had ever mounted, and the whole system of administration and supply was completely inadequate for the task. Patronage and graft were an accepted integral aspect of the whole structure, as indeed they were in politics; military contracts were used to siphon off enormous fortunes.
The navy’s ships were rotten, as Graves complained constantly to the Admiralty, and much of the military equipment was in the same state. The letters from Boston by the artillery Colonel Samuel Cleaveland about the state of his gun carriages make it seem astonishing that he succeeded in getting his cannon into action at all at Bunker Hill.
Even more important, the King’s rigid faith that British troops would quickly put down the rebellion was not shared by his military chiefs. Lord Barrington, the War Secretary, had long insisted that the use of land forces was hopeless, that the only effective action open to them was to use the navy to blockade American ports.
Even as recently as June, Adjutant General Harvey, the most senior staff officer in Whitehall, had declared that “to conquer it [America] by our land forces is as wild an idea as ever contravert-ed common sense.”
General Jeffrey Amherst, the most respected military figure in the country, took roughly the same view. But the King was determined. The whole principle of his sovereignty was at issue. Britain had to win because it was in the right. He was unmoved by the advice of his military chiefs and refused to accept Barrington’s resignation. His attitude to the whole situation was almost religious.
Few wars in history have been launched deliberately in the face of such violent opposition at home.
The City of London, with John Wilkes as its lord mayor, took its passionate objection to British policy in America to lengths that were almost treasonable. When the royal proclamation declaring that anyone aiding the rebels would be prosecuted as traitors was read by the heralds at the Royal Exchange Building, it was hissed by City men.
In Parliament, which assembled in October for the first time since the news of Concord had reached London, the angry Whig opposition moved into the attack once more, lambasting the ministers with the same arguments that they had used so forcefully over the past eighteen months. In the Commons, burly, ruddy Charles James Fox, who could stay up all night gambling with thousands of pounds at Almack’s Club and still speak brilliantly for hours, led the main assault: “I cannot consent to the bloody consequences of so silly a contest about so silly an object, conducted in the silliest manner that history . . . has ever furnished an instance of; and from which we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, misery, disgrace, defeat and ruin.”
Flaying the Premier sitting on the other side of the house, fat, jowly, watching his attacker good-naturedly with his big, bulging eyes, Fox declared scathingly: “Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay Alexander the Great never gained more in one campaign than the noble Lord has lost. He has lost a whole continent.”
But his violent opposition did not deter the King. It was ineffective where it mattered—in the voting at the divisions. The royal political party machine was well geared to secure the majorities needed to approve the King’s proposals for the war in America.
The King realized that against this rising barrage of oratorical brilliance Lord North needed support in the House of Commons, where Dartmouth, being a peer, could not speak. In addition, the new scale of the crisis in America now demanded a strong man to direct it. The moderate Dartmouth, fighting every foot of the way, was forced out of his post as Secretary for the colonies to make way for the hard-line Lord George Germain.6
Cold and austere, Germain was exceptionally tall, with broad, muscular shoulders, and he imparted an impression of supercilious arrogance that offended many people. “By contrast with Lord North who was liked even by his political enemies,” commented Alan Valentine, Germain’s biographer, “Lord George was disliked even by his political allies.”
He was a rather sinister, solitary man, reported by gossipy London to be a homosexual. Later his relationship with the young American Loyalist Benjamin Thompson, who lived in his house and even became his undersecretary, added substance to the rumors. In his office, however, he was briskly efficient and extremely punctual. A striking contrast, noted one of his secretaries, to the amiable, easygoing Dartmouth.
Germain’s appointment was an astonishing lesson in sheer survival, for he had been the focus of a sensational scandal that, by its nature, should have ruined him completely. At the Battle of Minden, he had commanded the cavalry. Ordered to advance under conditions that contraverted basic military principles, Germain sent his troops forward slowly while he checked the orders personally with the commander in chief. By the time his horsemen arrived on the battlefield the enemy was already in flight.
Germain was court-martialed for cowardice and dismissed from the army in disgrace. George II, who hated him because of his friendship with his rebellious grandson, Prince George, ordered the verdict to be read to every unit in the army; he even stripped the privileges from every officer who testified in his support at the hearing.
Ever since, Germain had been taunted by satirists in the press and by his political opponents in the House of Commons. But the rebellious prince had now become King and very gradually, with the royal assistance, Lord George had staged a comeback, topping it with this spectacular leap into one of the senior posts in government. Ironically, he now directed an army in which he was forbidden to serve.
It was an example of the reward of patience, of being in the right place at the right time—and having the right opinions. For Germain was as rigid in his views on the American rebellion as the King.
Scarred by bitter experience, this competent, haughty, calculating man had developed into a fighter the hard way. Immediately, on taking office he demanded equal status with the other two Secretaries of State7—which Dartmouth had been prepared to forgo—and got it. Then he launched a frontal attack on the appalling inefficiency of the Admiralty, bringing him up squarely against Lord Sandwich.
The two men would never have got on under any circumstances. Sandwich, with his immense influence and his traditional rakish tastes, was “one of the boys,” solidly entrenched in the Establishment. Germain was a loner. Now that they were in conflict at the source of power, the natural acrimony was intensified.
So the direction of a major military-naval war across 3,500 miles of ocean was now to be shared, in effect, between two aristocrats in constant bitter combat.
The news that had been flowing into London during the autumn and early winter could have given nothing but anxiety to either of them. British ships had been captured by rebel privateers. In New York Harbor, HMS Asia, the big 64-gun ship of the line, was serving as a kind of floating home for royal sympathizers, such as the publisher of the Tory Rivington’s Gazette, who dared not stay ashore.
In Boston the rebels had captured the lighthouse at the harbor entrance, even though it was garrisoned and regarded as virtually impregnable. In Philadelphia, John Hancock, one of the two archrebels Gage had formally outlawed, had been appointed president of Congress.
From sources right up the eastern seaboard came reports of persecution of people who were still loyal to the King. “Daily,” reported one correspondent from Pennsylvania, “there are examinations before the Committees of His Majesty’s faithful servants branded with the name of Tory.”
It was from Canada, however, that the most serious news was coming. For in August, the rebels, who had withdrawn after garrisoning the forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point in May, had blazed their way in force across America’s northern border.