Читать книгу The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson - Страница 18

LONDON, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1775

By late morning on Thursday, October 26, tens of thousands of high-spirited Londoners filled the streets around Parliament, lured by pleasant fall sunshine and the titillating expectation of trouble. Constables clustered outside the Swan tavern at Westminster Bridge and in St. James’s Park, and Foot Guards were issued ten musket cartridges apiece as a precaution. George III was to open a new session of Parliament this afternoon, but an American merchant named Stephen Sayre had been arrested at his Oxford Street house on suspicion of high treason; it was said that Sayre intended to kidnap the king, diverting his hijacked coach to the Tower, where bribed guards would lock the gates behind him and allow seditious rioters to ransack the arsenal. Skeptics declared that if such an outlandish plot existed, the conspirators should be sent to Bedlam asylum rather than to prison. But the authorities took no chances. Sayre himself had been dragged to the Tower, which “raised the curiosity of the public to an extravagant pitch,” the London Public Advertiser reported. “People imagine something very extraordinary is to happen.”

The clock over the main entrance at St. James’s Palace touched two p.m. as the king emerged, swaddled in silk and ermine. “The crowd was very great in the courtyard to see His Majesty get into the state coach,” a Guards lieutenant wrote. “Everybody agrees that His Majesty never went to the House with such universal shouts of applause.” In fact, many hisses could be heard amid the cheers when the royal procession lurched from the palace, led by two horse grenadiers holding drawn swords and three coaches, each pulled by six horses and stuffed with nobles and gentlemen-in-waiting. Behind them followed Horse Guards in red and gold, then trumpeters, Yeomen of the guard, and fourteen liveried footmen in ranks of two. The gilded coach carrying the king was unlike anything in the empire or, perhaps, the world: twenty-four feet long, thirteen feet tall, and weighing four tons, it was drawn—at a glacial pace—by eight Royal Hanoverian Cream horses, each the color of buttermilk and at least fifteen hands high. On the roof, three carved cherubs representing England, Scotland, and Ireland supported a gilt crown, and painted allegorical panels on the doors evoked imperial grandeur. A gilded, fish-tailed sea god sat at each corner above the iron-rimmed wheels to signify Britain’s maritime might—appropriately, since the coach’s tendency to pitch, yaw, and oscillate made riding in it like “tossing in a rough sea,” as a later monarch would complain.

A platoon of constables brought up the rear, scanning the crowd for kidnappers while George settled into his satin-and-velvet cushions. He could hear the hisses as well as the applause, but public disapproval rarely piqued him. He knew that most of his subjects were happy enough that fall. England had never harvested a finer wheat crop, bread prices were down, manufacturing was near full employment, and more money was changing hands in the kingdom “than at any other time since the memory of man,” as Lord Barrington put it. Annual deaths still exceeded christenings in London, but the gap had narrowed and Irish immigrants buoyed the population. Violent crime had dropped, and fewer debtors were being jailed. Life for many might still be nasty, brutish, and short, but less so.

The Americans, by contrast, appeared perpetually angry. How long ago it seemed that Harvard College had offered cash prizes for the best poems commemorating George’s reign—for the best Latin verse in hexameters, the best Latin ode, the best English long verse. The king tried to ignore things that vexed or displeased him, like the petitions from Bristol and Liverpool urging reconciliation, which he consigned to the “Committee of Oblivion,” or the annoying letters from John Wesley, that Methodist, who warned that the Americans “will not be frightened.… They are as strong as you, they are as valiant as you.” In the summer George had refused to receive what the colonials called their Olive Branch Petition, imploring the king to stop the war, repeal the Coercive Acts, and effect “a happy and permanent reconciliation.” He would not treat with rebels.

Lord North warned him that the insurrection had “now grown to such a height that it must be treated as a foreign war.” Casualty reports from Concord and Bunker Hill certainly bore out the first minister, not to mention the sour rumors from Canada. The king had responded in late August with a “Proclamation of Rebellion,” forbidding all commerce with the colonies and requiring every subject to help “in the suppression of such rebellion,” on pain of treason. The provincials were “misled by dangerous and ill designing men,” the king declared, “forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them.” Heralds read the edict at Westminster, Temple Bar, the Royal Exchange, and elsewhere; hisses were heard then, too. He shrugged them off.

British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.

Yet a king must remain steadfast, and George had thrown himself headlong into the role of captain general—studying military texts, visiting summer encampments, reviewing the Guards regiments. He continued to make his lists and his charts, of “ships building and repairing” at various yards; of guard vessels protecting ports and waterways; of “oak timber in store” (more than fifty-seven thousand loads); of royal ships in ordinary—the reserve fleet—including the number of guns mounted. He made more neat columns: of British garrisons abroad from 1764 to 1775; of the commanders of various cavalry units; of all his regiments, including those in Boston, with the number of officers, musicians, and the rank and file tabulated at the bottom of the page and his arithmetic scratchings in the margins.

Finally he sketched an organizational chart of his army in America, using tiny inked boxes hardly bigger than a pinhead, labeled with regimental numbers. Then he gave his draft to a better artist to convert into a smart diagram with copperplate script, symbols in colored pencils, and tiny cannon silhouettes to represent artillery batteries. It helped him to follow that damned American war.

The state coach clopped to a halt. Welcoming guns saluted the monarch’s arrival, rattling windows across Westminster. Horse Guards paraded in Parliament Street to “see that all was quiet,” the Public Advertiser noted. George strode into the former Queen’s Chamber at the southern end of the parliamentary warren, now used by the House of Lords. “Adorned with his crown and regal ornaments,” as the official parliamentary account recorded, he took his seat on a straight-backed throne. “He is tall, square over the shoulders,” an American loyalist in London wrote. “Shows his teeth too much. His countenance is heavy and lifeless, with white eyebrows.” Peers in crimson robes flanked him. On George’s command, the usher of the Black Rod summoned several hundred members of the Commons, who soon stood in the back in their coats and boots, shifting from one foot to the other since there were no benches for them. In his precise, regal voice, the king went straight to the American question.

Those who have long too successfully labored to inflame my people in America … now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion. They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force. They have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

Parliament and the Crown had displayed “moderation and forbearance,” eager to prevent “the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war.” Alas, war had “become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire. I need not dwell upon the fatal effects of the success of such a plan.”

The phrase “fatal effects” seemed to hang in the air. Upturned faces ringed the chamber, every peer and commoner in rapt attention.

“To put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions,” he continued, “I have increased my naval establishment and greatly augmented my land forces.” The full fury of the empire would be unleashed on the rebellion. The government also was considering “friendly offers of foreign assistance,” with treaties likely. He saw “no probability” that the French or other adversaries would intrude in this family squabble. Finally:

When the unhappy and deluded multitudes, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy.

In twenty minutes he was done and out the door, rumbling back to the palace in his monstrous coach.

A few naysayers disparaged the address. Horace Walpole, for one, counted “three or four gross falsehoods.” But the Commons voted with the usual hefty majority to thank His Majesty, noting that “on our firmness or indecision the future fate of the British Empire and of ages yet unborn will depend.” An independent America would be “a dangerous rival,” in which case “it would have been better for this country that America had never been known than that a great consolidated American empire should exist independent of Britain.”

The king could only agree. “Where the cause is just,” he would write, “I can never be dismayed.”

For George and Queen Charlotte, monarchical rhythms changed little from month to month, or year to year. “They both meet in the breakfast room about a half hour after 8. When she goes to the breakfast, she rings for the children,” the king had written in an account of their domestic life. “Every evening after dinner they retire into her apartments to drink coffee, & there they generally spend the remainder of their evening.” He fussed with his collections—barometers, clocks, coins, Handel oratorios—or immersed himself in a book and read aloud passages he found especially pithy. Both kept an orchestra and patronized the opera; he played a creditable flute, harpsichord, and violin. Much of their time in the Queen’s House—the family residence, later called Buckingham Palace—was spent instructing their growing brood in the ways of royalty, as in Charlotte’s letter to George P., the Prince of Wales, read to him by a tutor on his eighth birthday: “Above all things I recommend unto you to fear God.… We are all equal, and become only of consequence by setting good examples to others.”

For those with fine houses in the city’s fashionable squares—Berkeley, Grosvenor, Cavendish—the seating of Parliament intensified London’s social swirl. Parties and dinners were often scheduled for Wednesdays or Saturdays, when the Commons and Lords rarely convened. “Come to London and admire our plumes,” one woman wrote a friend in the provinces. “We sweep the skies! A duchess wears six feathers, a lady four, and every milkmaid one at each corner of her cap.” Gentlewomen’s hair, already piled high, grew higher when Georgiana Spencer, an earl’s daughter, created a three-foot coiffure by fastening horsehair pads to her own tresses; sometimes she decorated the tower with stuffed birds, waxed fruit, or tiny wooden trees and sheep. Hair grew so high that women could ride in closed carriages only by sitting on the floor. Young fops known as “Macaroni” pranced through Pall Mall and St. James’s Street in tight britches, high heels, and oversized buttons, their hair dyed red one day and blue the next. Oxford Magazine defined the Macaroni as “a kind of animal.… It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry … it wenches without passion.”

It also gambled without guilt. If London was “the devil’s drawing room,” in the phrase of author Tobias Smollett, gaming had become a diabolical national passion despite the monarch’s disapproval. Bets could be laid not only on horses, cockfights, and national lottery tickets, but on seemingly any future event, from how long a raindrop took to traverse a windowpane to how long Mr. Jones or Mrs. Smith would live; common wagers involved taking out insurance policies on other people’s lives. Walpole described seeing £10,000 on the table at Almack’s Club, where players wore eyeshades to conceal their emotions and leather cuffs to preserve their laced ruffles, then turned their coats inside out for luck. Military pensioners in Royal Hospital Chelsea were said to bet on lice races, and workmen repairing a floor in Middle Temple Hall found nearly two hundred dice that over the years had fallen between the cracks. “Play at whist, commerce, backgammon, trictrac, or chess,” one society dame advised, “but never at quinze, lou, brag, faro, hazard, or any game of chance.” Few heeded her.

London also had more than five hundred coffeehouses, and it was here that politics generally and the American question specifically might be discussed at any hour. Fratricidal war unsettled many Britons, who found it distasteful, if not unnatural. Some feared an endless war, citing published reports—often wildly exaggerated—that the Americans had two hundred thousand armed men, “well trained, ready to march,” and that gunsmiths outside Philadelphia were turning out five hundred stand of arms every fortnight. (Pennsylvania craftsmen collectively would make only 806 muskets in 1776.) Those sympathetic to the insurrectionists’ cause sometimes donated money to help rebel prisoners. The Duke of Richmond sailed his yacht, reportedly with an American pennant flying, through a British naval squadron.

“I am growing more and more American,” James Boswell had written in August. “I see the unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their assemblies. I think our ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate war.” Others were even more strident, like Lord Mayor John Wilkes, described as “a charming, cross-eyed demagogue” who was elected to Parliament after marriage to an heiress gave him the fortune to bribe enough voters. In answer to the king’s Thursday address, Wilkes, whose noisy radicalism made him enormously popular in the colonies, called the war “unjust, felonious, and murderous.” The Americans, he warned, “will dispute every inch of territory with you, every narrow pass, every strong defile, every Thermopylae, every Bunker Hill.” But opponents of coercion lacked strength and unity. When votes were tallied in the Commons, no faction proved more formidable than the government supporters known as the King’s Friends.

Newspaper resistance to colonial policy proved more obdurate, however. Britain now boasted 140 newspapers, including 17 in London. Thirteen million individual news sheets would be printed across the country in 1775, many of them handed round until the print wore off. A reader of the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser wrote that the “affairs of America engross so much of the attention of the public that every other consideration seems to be laid aside.” The king himself insisted that the latest London and American papers be delivered to him as soon as they arrived. A few publications hewed to the ministerial line. The Royal Gazette, denounced by competitors as the Royal Lying Gazette, promoted the delusions that the colonies would collapse without British trade and that most affluent Americans sought reconciliation. The government encouraged loyalty by paying printers and writers for anti-American screeds, often from the secret service fund and other obscure accounts. Some critics were silenced with cash: the acerbic editor of the Morning Post grew milder in exchange for almost £4,000 slipped under the table.

Yet many British “newspapers went straight for the King,” the historian George Otto Trevelyan later wrote, depicting him as “a bigoted and vindictive prince, whose administration was odious and corrupt.” The war became a cudgel with which political opponents could whack North, Dartmouth, and other government ministers. In early August, the Stamford Mercury printed a table showing that more British officers died at Bunker Hill than in the great Battle of Minden in 1759. Other accounts described hardship and poor morale in the British ranks. The radical Evening Post denounced the war as “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.”

Biographical profiles of American leaders appeared, their heroic attributes often contrasted to the venality of British politicians, even if the portraits were at times ludicrous. A new article in Town and Country told readers how George Washington’s daughter had fled to England after the general’s men slew her loyalist lover. Of greater consequence were loosened restrictions allowing parliamentary debates to be reported without the six-month delay previously required—or without pretending, as one magazine had, that the published transcript was from the “Senate of Lilliput.” The subsequent coverage, as historian Troy O. Bickham would write, “made the American Revolution the first event in which the government’s handling of a controversial conflict was aired before an eager national audience.”

Irked at the dissent, the government had stepped up covert surveillance and intelligence gathering. Suspected rebel sympathizers in London were ordered “narrowly watched,” their neighbors discreetly questioned about irregular activity. The baggage of passengers arriving from North America was searched for rebel correspondence. In a three-room suite off Lombard Street, a growing staff of secret service clerks by mid-September was opening and reading up to a hundred letters a day from the New York mailbags, with or without warrants, including private correspondence from Royal Navy officers and British officials in America. Additional letters were intercepted from foreign diplomats, European bankers, and political opponents trusting enough to rely on the Royal Mail. Especially intriguing correspondence, such as letters addressed to Dr. Franklin or General Lee, was copied and sent to the king and his senior ministers, while the originals went back to the General Post Office for normal delivery. A superintendent complained of overwork in deciphering coded letters and repairing wax seals so that they appeared unbroken. “I had so much to do,” he added in a November memorandum, “that I knew not which way to turn myself.” Despite such “difficulty, pains, and trouble,” the intelligence collected often was disappointingly thin, little more than gossip. George nevertheless carefully noted the time—to the minute, as usual—he received each batch of pilfered mail.

As October spilled into November, the king immersed himself in tactical details of the American war. George received copies not only of ministry dispatches to and from his generals, but also paymaster and commissary instructions. He reviewed intelligence on possible gunpowder shipments from Lisbon, clandestine activities in Amsterdam and Dunkirk, and river inspectors’ reports of suspicious cargoes on the Thames. He was consulted about the choice of commanders, the composition of particular regiments and where they should deploy, and the shipment of salt and candles across the Atlantic. He arranged, at an initial cost of £10,000, for twenty-four hundred German troops to serve at British garrisons in the Mediterranean, freeing regulars there for combat service in North America. He also weighed in on a proposed military assault on the southern colonies; on which widows and orphans of men killed in Boston should receive pensions; and on whether American prisoners should be shipped to India, where the insalubrious British territories were short of white settlers. When Catherine the Great declined to rent him twenty thousand Russian mercenaries—“she had not had the civility to answer in her own hand,” George wrote North “at 2 minutes past 8 p.m.” on November 3—he insisted that German legions could be hired “at a much cheaper rate, besides more expeditiously than if raised at home.” On his orders, the colonel negotiating with various German princelings was told, “Get as many men as you can.… The King is extremely anxious.”

Broad domestic support for the war eased his anxiety, despite the nattering newspapers and rapscallions like the lord mayor. Solid majorities in both the middle and the upper classes disapproved of colonial impertinence. Edward Gibbon, who was just finishing his first volume on the Roman empire’s collapse, wrote in October that the government’s “executive power was driven by the national clamor into the most vigorous and repressive measures.” Many towns across Britain sent endorsements of ministerial policy to London. “It was the war of the people,” North later observed. “It was popular at its commencement, and eagerly embraced by the people and the Parliament.”

Without doubt, the disruption of transatlantic trade injured some London merchants, as well as woolen workers in Norwich and linen weavers in Chester. British exports to America plummeted from almost £3 million in 1774 to barely £220,000 this year. But many other businesses thrived. Britain would be at war for more than half of the years between 1695 and 1815, and there was money to be made in those years by traders and vendors, brokers and wholesalers. “The greater number of them begin to snuff … a lucrative war,” wrote Edmund Burke, the Irish-born political philosopher who represented Bristol in the House of Commons. “War indeed is become a sort of substitute for commerce.” Orders poured in from Germany and the Baltics. New markets emerged in Spain, Russia, and Canada. Military contracts boomed, for uniform cloth, munitions, shipping, and provisions of every sort. “We never knew our manufactures, in general, in a more flourishing state,” a London firm wrote to a former American customer.

For the king, it was all part of what he called “a great national cause.” George “would put heart into the hesitant, stir up the idle, and check the treacherous,” the historian Piers Mackesy later observed. “He never wavered from the chosen object of the war.” If doubters could be bought, he bought them. To North on November 15, he applauded Generals Howe and Burgoyne for their “unanimity and zeal, the two great ingredients that seem to have been wanting in this campaign.” George also sought unanimity and zeal in his ministers, summoning them one by one for audiences in the Royal Closet, his conference room at St. James’s, where he talked much and listened little, bounding from subject to subject but always returning to the need for resolve in America. “We have a warm Parliament but an indolent Cabinet,” wrote Gibbon, who later told a friend, “The higher people are placed, the more gloomy are their countenances, the more melancholy their language.… I fear it arises from their knowledge—a late knowledge—of the difficulty and magnitude of the business.”

That surely was the case for Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer and secretary of state for America. Having started a war, Dartmouth had no appetite to wage it; he now often abandoned Whitehall for the solace of his country estate. Franklin had once considered him “truly a good man,” but one “who does not seem to have strength equal to his wishes.” By early November, the secretary had arranged to leave the American Department by becoming lord privy seal, a pleasant, toothless sinecure. “Lord Dartmouth only stayed long enough,” Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.”

North also showed weakness in the knees. While affecting a determined ferocity toward the Americans—“we propose to exert ourselves using every species of force to reduce them,” he had declared in October—the first minister was weary of relentless opposition attacks, even if they were said to “sink into him like a cannonball into a wool sack.” Just hours after the king opened the new Parliament, North’s wife wrote that the pressure on her husband was “every day more disagreeable. Indeed it will be impossible for him to bear it much longer.” Since hearing of Bunker Hill, he had doubted that Britain could conquer America by force of arms. But when he hinted at resigning, George replied in a note, “You are my sheet anchor.” The king would further add, “It has not been my fate in general to be well served. By you I have, and therefore cannot forget it.” Loyal North would hold fast and true, even as his countenance grew gloomier, his language more melancholy. He “had neither devised the war nor liked it,” Walpole wrote, “but liked his place, whatever he pretended.”

Clearly the king needed another champion for his cause, a minister who shared his conviction that battering the colonies into submission was politically tenable, morally justified, and militarily necessary. And he had just the man in mind.

In a silver-tongued brogue that his English colleagues at times had difficulty deciphering, the bespectacled Edmund Burke, for three hours and twenty minutes on Thursday, November 16, implored the House of Commons to abandon the war. As usual during debates on the American problem, the galleries had been cleared of most spectators. Only “four women of quality and a few foreigners” had been admitted, reported the Morning Chronicle, perhaps after bribing the doorkeeper.

At Burke’s request, the Speaker, in his black gown and full-bottomed wig, ordered peace petitions from clergymen, clothiers, and tradesmen laid on the clerks’ table. Burke lamented “the horrors of a civil war … [that] may terminate in the dismemberment of our empire, or in a barren and ruinous conquest.” He warned that the longer the conflict persisted, the greater the chance “for the interference of the Bourbon powers” in France and Spain. At length he introduced a bill “for composing the present troubles” by suspending any taxes imposed on the Americans unless approved voluntarily by colonial assemblies. As Burke spoke, members squirmed on their benches, murmuring in assent or dissent. Some dozed or wandered out the door to Alice’s coffeehouse or to the barbershop.

Sitting next to Lord North on the Treasury bench to the right of the Speaker’s chair, a tall, dignified man with sharp eyesight despite his sixty years watched intently as more than a dozen speakers stood in turn to offer their opinions. Years before he had been a prominent general, and though now a bit fleshy he retained his military carriage; one colleague described his “long face, rather strong features, clear blue eyes … and a mixture of quickness and a sort of melancholy in his look.” Lord George Germain was known in Parliament for urging that Americans be treated with “a Roman severity,” and this week he had been appointed American secretary to replace the hapless Dartmouth. After nearly thirty-five years in the Commons, he now stood to deliver his first speech not only as a cabinet member but as a man whose bellicose fervor would make him “chief minister for the civil war,” as one British official called him.

He began slowly. Some thought him flustered, though others admired his “pithy, manly sentences.” On “this American business,” he promised to be “decisive, direct, and firm.” Extracting revenue from America was vital. So, too, was parliamentary supremacy. As for the Americans, “they have a right to every liberty which they can enjoy, consistent with the sovereignty and supremacy of this country.

“Let them be happy,” Germain added, in the tone of a man who cared not a whit for their happiness. “Nobody can wish them more so than I do.” He continued:

What I have always held, I now stand in office to maintain. To the questions, what force is necessary? What do you mean to send? I answer … such forces as are necessary to restore, maintain, and establish the power of this country in America, will not be wanting.… If they persist in their appeal to force, the force of the country must be exerted. The spirit of this country will go along with me in that idea, to suppress, to crush such rebellious resistance.

Just before four a.m., after fourteen hours of debate, Burke’s proposal was defeated, two to one. “Pity me, encourage me,” Germain told a friend, “and I will do my best.”

“Some fall so hard, they bound and rise again,” the ubiquitous Walpole observed. Such had been the fate of George Germain, born George Sackville, the youngest son of a duke. He was among Britain’s most controversial public men of the eighteenth century—esteemed, disgraced, rehabilitated, and raised to high office only to tumble once again. Named for his godfather, George I, and raised in a Kent palace with fifty-two staircases and 365 rooms, he had attended Trinity College in Dublin, said to be “half bear-garden and half brothel,” while his father served as lord lieutenant of Ireland. Ambitious and clever, he was an engaging conversationalist who retailed indiscreet stories of the royal family; his fluency in French reputedly put a serrated edge on his English irony. In either language he had a mordant wit, once telling a supplicant, “I find myself debarred the satisfaction of contributing to your happiness and ease.” Diligent, capable, and a deft debater, Sackville kept a large library of books he tended not to read, claiming, “I have not genius sufficient for works of mere imagination.” Married in 1754—his wife called him “my dearest man”—he proved a good father to five children even as tales circulated of his flagrant homosexuality, both a sin and a capital crime in his day.

He found his calling as a soldier, demonstrating what one admirer called “cannon-proof courage.” At the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, he was so far forward in the fighting that after he was shot in the chest his wounds were dressed in the French king’s tent. A year later he pursued Scottish clansmen through the Highlands after their defeat at Culloden, and in 1758, at St. Malo during the Seven Years’ War, he was again wounded while fighting the French. “Nobody stood higher,” Walpole wrote, “nobody has more ambition or more sense.”

Then came the great fall. On August 1, 1759, Lieutenant General Sackville was the senior commander of British forces serving in a coalition army when thirty-seven thousand allied troops battled forty-four thousand Frenchmen near the north German village of Minden. Subordinate to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a man he disliked and distrusted, Sackville failed to move with alacrity when ordered to fling his twenty-four cavalry squadrons against the faltering enemy. The French were defeated anyway, suffering seven thousand casualties in four hours. But they had not been routed. Ferdinand blamed Sackville for the blemished triumph, and a British captain denounced him as a “damned chicken-hearted … stinking coward.”

Recalled to London, smeared by Grub Street newspapers, Sackville appeared before a court-martial board of fifteen generals to argue that Ferdinand’s instructions had been ambiguous and contradictory, that bad terrain had impeded the cavalry, and that only eight minutes had been lost before his reinforcements joined the fight. No matter: he was convicted of disobeying orders and declared “unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatever.” The court fell just short of the two-thirds majority required to execute him. His vindictive monarch, George II, rubbed salt in the wound by ordering the verdict to be written in every regimental orderly book and read out on parade. He was burned in effigy at least once. To his brother-in-law he wrote, “I must live in hopes of better times.”

Those times began a few months later when the old king fell dead of a heart attack while sipping morning chocolate on his toilet, to be succeeded by his grandson, George III, who admired Sackville and permitted him to kiss the new monarch’s hand. The stain of disgrace proved indelible but not disqualifying. In 1765, Sackville gained readmission to the Privy Council, and in 1769 a widowed, childless cousin left him her fortune and estate in Northamptonshire on the condition that he perpetuate her surname. And so, resurrected, he became Lord George Germain. On Sunday mornings, a friend wrote, “he marched out his whole family in grand cavalcade to his parish church,” prepared to upbraid any chorister who sang a false note—“Out of tune, Tom Baker!”—while dispensing sixpence to poor children from his waistcoat pocket. “In punctuality, precision, dispatch, and integrity, he was not to be surpassed,” one associate wrote. Another observed simply, “There was no trash in his mind.”

He completed his rehabilitation by hewing to Crown policy, particularly in aligning himself with ministry hard-liners on colonial matters. A “riotous rabble” was to blame in America, he had told the Commons a year earlier, people who ought “not trouble themselves with politics and government which they do not understand.” He was said by one acolyte to have “all the requisites of a great minister, unless popularity and good luck are to be numbered among them.” North was happy enough to have a brawler at his elbow on the Treasury bench. Though neither held the other in affection—Germain privately called North “a trifling supine minister”—they shared the king’s conviction that defeat in America spelled the end of empire, as the historian Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy later wrote.

The backbiting never ceased, of course. In the tony men’s clubs around St. James’s he was still “Lord Minden” or the “Minden buggering hero.” One witticism held that should the British Army be forced to flee on the battlefield, Germain was the perfect man to lead a retreat. If convivial in private over a glass of claret, in public his mien hardened. Some found him dogmatic, aloof, “quite as cold in his manner as a minister needed be,” in a subordinate’s estimation. A clergyman described “a reserve and haughtiness in Lord George’s manner, which depressed and darkened all that was agreeable and engaging in him.” One biographer later posited that it was “his pride, his remoteness, his intransigence, his indifference, his irony, his disdain, his self-command and self-assurance that inflamed mean minds.”

Even those who felt no rancor toward Germain greeted his appointment with skepticism. He had been accused of many things over the years, with more epithets to come, but no one had ever charged him with statesmanship. Not least among his ministerial challenges was the fact that more than a few of the men now leading the British Army in North America had served with him in the past, at least peripherally, including Howe, Clinton, and Carleton.

Despite the expanding war in the colonies, the American Department remained a modest enterprise. Bookcases, dusty cupboards, and desks upholstered with the usual green baize filled four large rooms on the second floor of the Treasury building in Whitehall. Maps of imperial and plantation geography hung on the white plaster walls. The staff comprised two deputies, a half dozen clerks to scribble dispatches and collate enclosures, a charwoman, and a porter whose apparent function was to make petitioners wait for hours before turning them away completely. The office could draw from a government pool of three dozen messengers, but Germain asked that couriers too obese to ride horseback faster than five miles an hour travel instead by coach. As secretary he was paid just under £2,000 annually, although various perquisites nearly tripled the salary, notably the £5 allotment from every fee paid on various documents signed by the king, including military commissions, licenses to sell trees, and appointments at King’s College in New York. He also was entitled to £3,000 in secret service funds, plus a thousand ounces of white plate. The £13 paid for an office clock—he was uncommonly punctual—and two books of maps came from his private purse.

Germain believed that hard work could heal most ills, and he threw himself into his new role with vigor: issuing commands, rifling through official papers, scratching missives in his jagged, runic hand, the precise time always affixed on his letters to the king. He had long argued that “natural sloth” impeded British administration, especially in the thicket of bureaucracies and office fiefdoms now entangled with centuries of inertia and bad habits. Good habits could help revive efficiency. An admirer described Germain’s executive style as “rapid, yet clear and accurate.… There was no obscurity and ambiguity in his compositions.” His task would be herculean—to direct the longest, largest expeditionary war Britain had ever fought, concocting an effective counterinsurgency strategy while coordinating troops, shipping, naval escorts, and provisions. The small details alone were bewildering. Might the army in Boston want several dozen Tower wall-pieces that could throw a two-ounce ball five hundred yards with precision? When should six thousand new muskets be shipped to Quebec and Virginia? By what means? Were the lower decks in leased Dutch transport ships properly scuttled to avoid suffocating the horses headed across the Atlantic?

Upon arriving at Whitehall in mid-November, Germain found only bad news from America. Several dozen letters from royal governors in the southern colonies showed that the Crown’s efforts to punish Massachusetts had transformed New England grievances into continental resentments. The southern governors believed themselves vulnerable to rude treatment if not assassination, and most had abandoned their capitals for the sanctuary of British warships. “A motley mob … inflamed with liquor” had chased Governor Josiah Martin from his palace in North Carolina. In South Carolina, where rebels had amassed “great quantities of warlike stores,” Governor William Campbell wrote from the man-of-war Cherokee, “I fear it is forgot that His Majesty has any dominions in this part of America.” Official dispatches and other royal mail had been stolen in Florida. Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, had fled from Williamsburg. “My clerk,” he wrote, “is prisoner.” Governor James Wright in Georgia seemed especially rattled. “Liberty gentlemen” had pilfered six tons of his gunpowder and snatched his mail. “I begin to think a King’s governor has little or no business here,” he reported. Rebels in Savannah, he added, included “a parcel of the lowest people, chiefly carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, etc., with a Jew at their head.” Wright’s dispatches grew increasingly frantic. “No troops, no money, no orders or instructions, and a wild multitude gathering fast,” he added. “What can a man do in such a situation?”

Reports from the northern colonies were just as disheartening. A naval captain in Rhode Island wrote of “rebels coming in shoals, armed with muskets, bayonets, sticks and stones,” yelling, “Kill the Tories!” Only a Royal Navy threat to put every insurgent to the sword had restored calm. A Connecticut clergyman warned that malice “against the loyalists is so great and implacable that we fear a general massacre.” Governor John Wentworth had retreated to Boston after a mob demolished his New Hampshire house. In New York, Governor William Tryon had been chased to the Duchess of Gordon in the East River, and the loyal president of King’s College had fled all the way to England. When regulars also boarded ships for safety, rebels ransacked their baggage, looted an ordnance magazine, and made off with shore guns from the batteries in lower Manhattan. “The Americans,” Tryon warned, “from politicians are now becoming soldiers.”

Germain found broad agreement in the government on Britain’s strategic objective—to restore the rebellious colonies to their previous imperial subservience—but disagreement on how best to achieve that goal. How to defeat an enemy that lacked a conventional center of gravity, like a capital city, and relied on armed civilians who were said to be “deep into principles”? Should British forces hunt down and destroy rebel forces in the thirteen colonies and Canada? Strangle the colonies with a naval blockade? Divide and conquer by isolating either New England or the southern colonies? Hold New York City while subduing the affluent middle colonies between Virginia and New Jersey?

Lord North and some others in the cabinet now inclined toward a land rather than a naval war in hopes that it would be quicker, cheaper, and less provocative to the French. Such a strategy would also give greater succor to American loyalists, whom most British officials, Germain among them, still believed constituted a colonial majority. Yet doubts persisted. “The Americans may be reduced by the fleet,” Secretary at War Barrington had written North, “but never can be by the army.” A War Office report warned that fewer than ten thousand regulars in the British Isles could be spared for overseas duty. Given the booming economy, no more than six thousand more were likely to be recruited in time for the 1776 campaign. “Unless it rains men in red coats,” a British official wrote, “I know not where we are to get all we shall want.” Seventeen recruiting parties in Ireland were enlisting only one or two dozen men per week, combined. “This will never do,” wrote General Harvey, the adjutant general. “We are dribletting away the army, & to no purpose.”

Germain soon encountered other aggravations. Army recruiters competed with the Royal Navy and the East India Company for men. A dozen departments administered the army and overseas military logistics, with fitful coordination, when not outright rivalry, among them. Shipwrights resisting new efficiency rules had gone on strike, bringing Portsmouth and most other yards to a standstill; almost 130 were fired, hampering ship construction and repair. Too often the king and his men were forced to make crucial decisions in the dark, or at least the dusk. Voyages from England to America usually took ten weeks, though sometimes fifteen or more; return trips with the prevailing winds typically required six weeks. A minister might wait four months for acknowledgment that his instructions had been received, or he might wait forever: forty packet boats carrying the Royal Mail would be captured or founder in storms during the war. Misunderstanding, misinformation, and untimely orders were inevitable, particularly when London relied on such flawed sources of intelligence as loyalists desperate for Crown support and royal governors banished from their own capitals. “America,” General Harvey said, “is an ugly job.”

Like the man he called “the mildest and best of kings,” Germain often invoked the need for “zeal.” Sensing that the Americans had advantages of time and space, he vowed to bring “the utmost force of this kingdom to finish the rebellion in one campaign” before other European powers could intervene to aid the rebels. If the insurrection was to be crushed in 1776, half measures would never do.

Zeal could be found in the Prohibitory Act, introduced in the Commons by North on November 20. All vessels found trading with the Americans “shall be forfeited to His Majesty, as if the same were the ships and effects of open enemies.” Cargoes taken on the high seas would be considered lawful seizures. Captured American mariners could be pressed into the Royal Navy. American ports were to be blockaded. The act amounted to “a declaration of perpetual war,” one British politician observed, although John Adams would call it an “act of independency” that galvanized American resistance. Parliament overwhelmingly approved the measure, and the king gave his assent on December 22. The king also had approved the Admiralty’s plan to recall Admiral Graves in hopes that his replacement, Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham, a former governor of Newfoundland, would put a spark into the North American squadron.

As for fighting the rebels on land, Germain relied heavily on General Howe’s assessment. An unconventional enemy required original tactics, and Howe’s experience with light infantry and irregular warfare—fighting from “trees, walls, or hedges”—seemed apposite. The commanding general favored squeezing New England between the blockaded ports and the North River, also known as the Hudson, with an offensive launched into New York from Canada once the American interlopers were expelled from Quebec. Germain agreed: a robust fleet must be dispatched to the St. Lawrence, and another to Boston or New York. He immediately pressed the Admiralty to find sufficient ships not only in Britain, but also in Germany and Holland. More combat troops must also be found, from Scotland, Ireland, and the little German principalities.

Germain also knew that for the past two months, the king had been intimately involved in planning another expedition—to the southern colonies, where Scottish émigrés in North Carolina were “said to be well inclined” to the Crown. Within three days of taking office, Germain had adopted this adventure as his own. On the king’s command, seven infantry regiments were to embark in Cork on December 1, with orders “to assist in the suppression of the rebellion.” By late November, His Majesty was informed that Howe and the southern governors had been given authority to raise loyalist troops who would receive British arms and be paid as much as regulars. A commodore, the capable Sir Peter Parker, would escort the expedition to the southern colonies with nine warships and fifteen hundred crewmen. The Admiralty ordered Hawke to Cape Fear on the North Carolina coast to recruit local pilots—with press warrants, if necessary—and to scout for landing sites.

All this was to be “a profound secret,” although, as usual, American agents in London learned of the plan immediately. An assault on the southern colonies would hardly come as a surprise. A recent proposal in the Commons—rejected for the moment—called for sending British regiments to foment slave uprisings, and Governor Dunmore in Virginia had declared that “it is my fixed purpose to arm all my own Negroes and receive all others that will come to me whom I shall declare free.”

Zeal, indeed, would be a hallmark of George Germain’s ministry. More aggressive than his generals, he intended to send them even more reinforcements than they had requested. Howe, facing a grim winter in Boston, praised “the decisive and masterly strokes … effected since your lordship has assumed the conduct of this war.” The American secretary’s moxie was so striking that even the opposition Evening Post predicted he would rise still further in his remarkable rebound to eventually become prime minister. The king was said to be pleased.

Yet amid the green baize desks and the exquisite wall maps in Whitehall, certain truths about the American war remained elusive. Neither Germain nor anyone else in government had carefully analyzed whether Britain’s troop transports, storeships, men-of-war, and other maritime resources could support an ambitious campaign that now included ancillary assaults in the far south and the far north. Little coordination was imposed on one commander in chief in Canada or another in Boston, or with their naval counterparts. Subordinate generals were permitted, even encouraged, to offer their views directly to policy makers in London. Swayed by loyalist exiles and vindictive Crown officials in the colonies, king and cabinet continued to overestimate the breadth and depth of loyal support. No coherent plan obtained to woo the tens of thousands who straddled the fence in America, or to protect those who rejected insurrection but risked severe retaliation from the rebels.

Finally, Germain, like the best of kings he served, could neither grasp the coherence and appeal of revolutionary ideals, nor comprehend the historical headwinds against which Britain now tacked. The American secretary’s lack of “genius sufficient for works of mere imagination” had been acknowledged ironically; that irony would haunt the rest of his days. For now, in a private letter to Howe, he praised the “cordiality & harmony which subsists between you, Clinton, & Burgoyne.” He added:

We want some good news to encourage us to go with the immense expense attending this war.… The providing [of] armies at such a distance is a most difficult undertaking. I do the best I can, and then we must trust to Providence for success.