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LONDON, January 19, 1781

It was rare for any Cabinet minister to be seated in the presence of the monarch, but the King dispensed with the usual formality and for the first time in his reign permitted his ministers to sit with him around a conference table.¹

Even Samual Adams could scarcely have predicted that his “Mohawk” raid on the tea ships in Boston Harbor could have led to a confrontation between Britain and Russia, yet the key question at that meeting was: Would Catherine enter the war against the British, or could they buy her off with Minorca? With its fine, deep natural harbor and its strategic position in the western Mediterranean, the island would be ideal as a Russian base. Furthermore, Prince Gregory Potemkin, the czarina’s politically powerful lover, had assured the British ambassador in a private talk that the Empress would go to great lengths for it.

In a brash spate of bold diplomacy the King and his ministers had taken an enormous risk. In December they had declared war on Holland—a move that they knew would antagonize Catherine, a move, moreover, that would spread a conflict that had already stretched British resources to the extreme. For Dutch-owned Ceylon would provide a base for the French to support their militant sympathizer, the Sultan Hyder Ali, in fighting the British in Madras. And Dutch-owned South Africa, which included the Cape of Good Hope, must become a serious threat to the sea routes to India.

In addition, it would immediately increase the enemy naval force by twenty ships of the line.

In St. James’s and Whitehall the risks had been finely calculated. It was brinkmanship on the grand scale, but it was decided it was absolutely vital. The Dutch government had ignored all diplomatic efforts to stop it from breaking the British blockade in the Atlantic. In the English Channel their ships were running into French harbors with the copper that was vital to King Louis’ fleet. St. Eustatius, the Holland-owned island in the Caribbean, was a supply base for both the rebels and the two enemy powers. From the cover of Amsterdam and other ports, John Paul Jones, the rebel privateer, was executing daring raids on British shipping.

To the British government the naval blockade was an issue of top policy priority, for the shortage it created kept enemy ships out of action in the dockyards—critically important with the narrow balance of naval power. The stubborn attitude of the Dutch government gave the British two alternatives: submission on the blockade issue or war, which would give the royal cruisers freedom of action and was more important than the new dangers presented by the Dutch navy.

So the decision was made for war, but the timing was extremely delicate. Holland was planning to join the armed neutrality alliance designed to protect neutral shipping that was being promoted by Russia; as soon as the Dutch government signed, Catherine would be committed to support Holland with armed force.

It was vital, therefore, that Britain should be at war with Holland before she signed, before she became a technical ally. And its reason for the declaration of hostilities must having nothing provocative to do with the issue of neutral shipping.

As the early autumn winds churned the English Channel, Lord Stormont, now Secretary of State for the Northern Department, searched for an adequate excuse. In September he found one. The Amsterdam authorities were negotiating with Congress to supply the rebels with funds, an unfriendly act permitted by a theoretically friendly government. A patrolling British frigate searched a ship on which Henry Laurens, a Congressional delegate, was traveling to Holland. As the cruiser bore down, he saw the danger and threw his papers overboard, but did not put enough weight in the packet. A sailor on one of the frigate’s longboats fished it out of the water before it sank and gave Stormont the proof he needed. After a formal complaint, he issued an ultimatum to the Dutch government. But alerted by news from Holland, he had to act even before his ultimatum expired: Barely hours before the Dutch signed the alliance, the British ambassador was ordered to leave The Hague, and a ship was on its way to the Caribbean with orders to Admiral Sir George Rodney to attack St. Eustatius.

For an administration that was often dilatory it was high-speed action, and it was certainly open to criticism. A state of war existed between Britain and Holland, but during the last days of December the men in St. James’s and Whitehall waited tensely for Catherine’s reaction.

On January 19 the Russian ambassador called on Lord Stormont and handed him a very hostile memorandum from an angry Empress—and the King summoned his Cabinet. This was the crisis, and a great deal depended on how the British reacted to it. Just how much they were gambling was underlined vividly by Lord Sandwich at that tense and anxious meeting. The First Lord of the Admiralty, as he indicated later, was in no doubt what would happen if Russia entered the conflict against Britain. “We shall never again figure as a leading power in Europe,” he declared, “but think ourselves happy if we can drag on for some years a contemptible existence as a commercial state.”

In an attempt to appease the Empress, the government decided to offer her Minorca, which would tempt her, if she “would use her influence . . . to secure peace for Britain” in the war with France and Spain. She did not take the bait, but it removed some of the heat from the crisis, and the Armed Neutrality League decided not to back Holland by force.

In fact, even before Catherine knew about the British declaration of war on Holland, she had already offered formally through her ambassadors to mediate in the main conflict and had been accepted by all three combatants, as was Britain’s request that Austria, which had previously made the same offer, should act as co-mediator.

While Cornwallis’ soldiers were racing Greene’s troops through the mud of Carolina toward the Dan and dying in the fields by Guilford Courthouse, peace plans were being thrashed out in the capitals of Europe. Despite the angry realization of John Adams, then in Paris, that the rebel cause was in danger of being jettisoned, Congress was being pressured by Versailles to compromise.

France made it clear that it was prepared to withdraw its forces from America and for the time being even leave Britain in possession of the territory it already held, provided it evacuated New York—so strongly did the French want to end the war.

All the same, the peace moves did not prevent the departure from Brest of another big fleet in March, this time under the command of the Comte François de Grasse.

In May the ambassadors of the mediators delivered their proposals to the courts of the three combatants. As a starting base they proposed an armistice for a year and a peace conference in Vienna. They conceded the right of Britain to negotiate separately with its American colonies, but—and for the King, who regarded his colonies as a domestic matter, it was an enormous “but”—insisted that any settlement with the rebels should be signed conjointly with the peace agreements with the other powers.

By now the mood in London was once more surging with optimism. The obvious eagerness of France to pull out of the conflict and all the reports of its economic pressures were noted enthusiastically in Whitehall. France was known to be deeply disillusioned by the low morale of Washington’s army, by the mutinies and defections; certainly without it, the British government assumed, the rebel force would disintegrate—a view with which Washington himself agreed. “We’re at the end of our tether,” he was to write in April, 1781. So what was the point in the British negotiating?

’This war, like the last, will prove one of credit,” commented the King jauntily. With the start of the Austro-Russian mediation, the British had ended the separate peace negotiation with Spain, even though Madrid had agreed in principle to the British offer. But now the way things were going, there seemed little point in sacrificing Gibraltar.

At last, in June the British decided to exploit France’s obvious economic difficulties and declined to attend any mediation conference at which their American rebels were present. Heady with the success of the courageous diplomacy of the past few months, the King and his ministers had now grown too bold. It was to be an irony of history, for the American Revolution might have turned out very differently if the proposed peace conference at Vienna had ever been held.

Meanwhile, Germain was pressing Clinton hard for the victory that was now necessary to complete the rosy view of the conflict that was forming in London. In January at the height of the crisis, he had emphasized to him the seriousness of the fact that “our enemies are increased and the states of Holland are to be numbered amongst them. Every exertion must be made to bring the American war to a conclusion . . . the circumstances of this country cannot support a protracted war.”

By May when he still did not know the full extent of the situation in the South, victory through diplomacy and arms seemed very close. Vermont, he believed, was just about to abandon the revolt. “The private accounts I have seen of Ethan Allen’s transactions give me hopes that he is acting under General Haldimand’s directions [from Canada] and that when the season admits of the general’s sending up a body of troops into Vermont, the inhabitants will declare for the King which, with the reduction of the southern provinces must give the death wound to the Rebellion, notwithstanding any assistance the French may be able to give it; and, if that were the case, a general peace would soon follow. . . . As so much depends on our success in America, you cannot be surprised that the eyes of the people of England are turned upon you.”

From Germain’s point of view everything was set for the final climax. With France and Spain weakening, with the Russian threat receding, the situation in America seemed more favorable than it had appeared at any time since 1776. Despite setbacks such as King’s Mountain and Cowpens, the South seemed in London to be near submission. Americans in the King’s service, as Germain had pointed out in March, were “more in number than the whole of the enlisted troops in the service of Congress.”

The one big problem was Clinton, who was not displaying the activity or enthusiasm for the Cabinet’s policy of conquering the South that was evident in Cornwallis’ aggressive campaigning. Germain found himself supporting the views of an active junior general against his wearying commander in chief as he underlined the British American war policy to Clinton with cold clarity. “I am commanded by His Majesty,” he wrote, “to acquaint you that the pushing of our conquests from south to north is to be considered as the chief and principal object of all the forces under your command.”

As always he was months out of date. Since Cornwallis had decided not to chase Greene to South Carolina, there were not many conquests left in the South; but there were troops, and how to use them now became the key point of a conflict between Clinton and Cornwallis that was to prove critical, one of the factors that transformed a situation basically highly favorable to the British into disaster.

At the end of March, as his battered army dressed its wounds and repaired its equipment at Wilmington, North Carolina, Corn-wallis rethought his policy. Despite his failure to set up British control in the Carolinas, his letters reveal a strangely buoyant confidence—a result of Germain’s reassuring letters, a flattering memorial from the House of Commons and the obvious fact that Clinton had lost the confidence of the government. Cornwallis himself was clearly the key general in America and the man who would hand the King the victory he needed.

The method now seemed clear to him. He realized he could never control the South without more support from “our friends.” And since they had now learned how dangerous it could be to display their loyalty if there were an avenging army within reach, as would always be the case while the rebels controlled Virginia, it became obvious to the earl that he must take this province—and quickly, before the summer heat became too intense.

In Virginia he already had an army waiting to help him with what he now saw with a resurging enthusiasm was the key plan to the final crushing of the Revolution. At Portsmouth, just inside the Chesapeake, Benedict Arnold’s small raiding force had been strengthened with heavy reinforcements under Major General William Phillips, now exchanged after his capture at Saratoga.

Washington, avid to capture Arnold, had sent in Lafayette with a small strike force backed by French ships from Rhode Island. But for once old Admiral Arbuthnot had displayed a surprising agility. He had chased the French and had driven them from the Chesapeake. Stripped of his naval cover Lafayette had been forced to keep his distance, though he was still hovering not far away near Richmond.

At Portsmouth, therefore, there were 3,500 British troops with an additional 1,500 soon due to leave from New York. If these men were added to those at Wilmington, Cornwallis would have a force big enough for aggressive operations in Virginia. Early in April he took the first moves to mount his new offensive.

On April 10 the frigate Amphititre sailed from Wilmington with letters for Phillips at Portsmouth and Clinton in New York.

“Now my dear friend,” the earl told Phillips, as though this point had occurred to no one else, “we must have a plan. Without one, we cannot succeed.” His plan was to abandon New York and to concentrate the whole British weight on the Chesapeake, a plan that ignored Canada and the negotiations in Vermont and the whole strategic value of the Hudson. It was thus seen by Clinton as just a little wild.

“I am very anxious to receive Your Excellency’s commands,” Cornwallis wrote Clinton, “being as yet totally in the dark as to the intended operations of the summer.” Until now Clinton, too, had been totally in the dark, for it was hard for him to settle campaign plans until he knew the results of the earl’s lunge into North Carolina.

Cornwallis did not wait to receive the C in C’s commands. At the end of April, after ordering Phillips to bring his force to Petersburg just to the south of the James River below Richmond, he marched to Virginia.

As the news from the South reached New York, Clinton became increasingly horrified.

At first he had been delighted by the news of the Battle of Guilford; even the normally distorted rebel accounts, which arrived before the British versions, suggested that the action had given Cornwallis control of North Carolina. Then he began to learn the truth. He heard that Greene, no longer checked by Cornwallis, was threatening Camden, and although Lord Rawdon had marched out to meet him and forced the rebels back in a very well-fought action at Hobkirk’s Hill, it could be only a matter of time before the town fell to the rebels. The British troops in South Carolina were spread thinly through the province in outposts, raising the truly vital question whether they could fall back on Charleston and save the port. Then Clinton received news that the rebels had struck as far south as Georgia: Augusta was under siege.

That Cornwallis had turned his back on this chaos in the South seemed incredible to Clinton. “I shall dread what may be the consequence of Your Lordship’s move,” he wrote, adding that if the earl had mentioned his plan to join Phillips in his first letter from Wilmington, “I should certainly have endeavoured to have stopped you.”

The commander in chief was in an unhappy situation. Remembering his own experience on detachments, he had deliberately left Cornwallis scope to take what actions the local situation demanded. Cornwallis would never be able to claim, as Burgoyne had claimed, that his orders were too rigid. All the same, Clinton strongly felt he had no right to march to Virginia—or to abandon South Carolina, which he had been specifically ordered not to put at risk—without consultation with his senior general. But even now he still left him leeway and ultimate control of Phillips’ force. “What is done cannot now be altered,” he said and made the best of it.

On May 20 Cornwallis’ column of troops, tired from marching more than three weeks from Wilmington, entered Petersburg. There Phillips’ force—now under the control of Arnold, since Phillips had just died of a fever (although Arnold too, was soon to fall ill and to return to New York)—was camped waiting for him.

Cornwallis assumed command of the combined army and, four days later, put the troops in motion with a purpose that would be contested by no one: an attack on Lafayette, then at Richmond, who had to be destroyed before any serious campaigning could be launched.

The marquis with a much smaller force than Cornwallis’ army backed away and moved toward Maryland—the province from which General Wayne would soon be marching to join him with what remained of the mutinous Pennsylvania Line. It became the same kind of game that Howe had played with Washington after Brandy wine. Lafayette did not want to be too far from the British, hoping to harry them and possibly catch them by some surprise attack if they became exposed; but he could not risk a formal action, and he had to stop Cornwallis from getting between him and Wayne—which was now the earl’s aim.

Cornwallis put his army across the James River, striking north swiftly. Lafayette went north, too, keeping his army 20 miles away, marching parallel until he reached the Rapidan River when he turned west to join Wayne and, after a few days, veered south.

All the time, Cornwallis chased him hard but never quite caught him. Tarleton and his dragoons came in sight of the rebels at one moment, but without the army their scope for action was very limited. At last the earl abandoned the pursuit and dropped down to Williamsburg—as he had told Clinton he would—to wait until he had “the satisfaction of hearing” from the commander in chief.

On June 26, the day after he reached Williamsburg, he heard from Clinton. New York was threatened with a siege by joint rebel and French forces. Cornwallis was, therefore, to “take a defensive station in any healthy situation you choose, be it Williamsburg oi Yorktown” and to send to Manhattan “in succession as soon as you can spare them” some 3,000 troops.

This, as it turned out, was a crucial letter. Unlike the previous correspondence, when the differences between the two men had been displayed at a level of suggestions and opinions, Clinton was giving firm orders—orders with which Cornwallis disagreed. For this reason, either deliberately or subconsciously, he misinterpreted them.

As he now saw it, the British should either concentrate on the Chesapeake, as he had suggested, or forget the whole area. He could see no point in holding “a sickly defensive post in this bay, which will always be exposed to a sudden French attack.” Sullenly, he wrote to New York asking permission to return to Charleston and gave orders for the immediate evacuation of the Williamsburg peninsula.

The next day after a brief but inconclusive clash with Lafayette, who attacked in the belief that most of the British troops were on the far bank of the river, the army crossed the James and marched toward Portsmouth, where Cornwallis planned to embark the troops for New York on board the transports.

He had not been marching long before an appalled letter arrived from Clinton, rebuking him strongly for leaving the strategic Williamsburg peninsula. There was no question of the British abandoning the Chesapeake, Clinton insisted. Cornwallis was to establish a base for ships of the line, and the anchorage the admiral had chosen was Old Point Comfort near Portsmouth. Since he would need working parties of soldiers to do this, he could keep the troops destined for New York until the project was completed.

But Cornwallis’ engineers condemned Old Point Comfort as useless for the purpose. Instead, Cornwallis informed Clinton coldly, “in obedience to the spirit of Your Excellency’s orders,” he proposed to seize and fortify Yorktown and Gloucester, which, from both banks, dominated the mouth of the York River. This was “the only harbor in which we can hope to give effectual protection to line of battle ships.”

At the beginning of August transports sailed up the Chesapeake and started landing the army on the banks of the York River, but Cornwallis was obeying orders he believed misguided from a commander in chief he expected soon to replace. The weather, as always in Virginia in high summer, was excessively hot. The earl’s lack of enthusiasm, coupled with the high temperatures, made the progress of the working parties slow—fatally slow.