What of Caroline’s other brothers? Thomas, the other mariner in the Howe family, was just twenty-five when war was declared. He had probably been serving on merchant vessels since leaving Eton in 1743. Thomas’s first command was as captain of the East Indiaman the Winchelsea.66 By sailing eastward, he was not, of course, sailing away from war, for Anglo-French rivalry extended to India. The notorious episode of the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756 would be one of several national catastrophes for Britain at the outset of the conflict. But service in the East India Company was not likely to earn glory at home, and Thomas was the only Howe brother who did not emerge from the Seven Years’ War as a national hero.
At the start of the war, William Howe was with the 20th Regiment of Foot, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Wolfe, who would one day achieve fame as the general who captured Quebec from the French. He and William had been stationed together in Scotland in 1750, effectively in an army of occupation following the Jacobite rebellions. By the winter of 1755–56, the 20th Foot was on the Kent coast, seventy miles from London, preparing for a French invasion, for there was ominous activity across the channel at Dunkirk. Wolfe was just two years older than his junior officer Captain William Howe, and the two had sharply contrasting personalities: Wolfe, the only surviving son of an army officer, was hypercritical, moody, and intolerant of others; William, the younger brother in a large family, was easygoing, fun-loving, and affable—“the sweet William,” as Caroline called him.67
Wolfe drilled his men hard, and he and William must have found their relative proximity to London a welcome diversion. The two officers must have gone to the capital whenever they could. There they would have met with other Howe family members. No correspondence survives between Wolfe and George Lord Howe, but their friendship has been presumed by historians because of the close-knit nature of the British officer corps, and Wolfe’s unstinting admiration of George expressed in his letters to others.68 A 1755 letter from Wolfe to his mother, discussing what to do with his unmanageable pack of nine dogs, provides a glimpse of a relationship that was on a familiar footing; he begged her to keep two puppies, promising that “Sancho” would go to Lord Howe.69
Looking beyond the handful of surviving letters, the shared family and social connections of the two men reveal far more about their relationship. They must have known one another well, for their personal lives intermingled in many ways. Wolfe and his parents knew wealthy Sir Gregory Page, and Aunt Juliana and Uncle Thomas Page of Battlesden.70 And General Sir John Mordaunt, a patron and friend of Wolfe, was connected to the Howe circle through the marriage of their Aunt Anne to Colonel Charles Mordaunt.71 The Howe women would have met the young Wolfe frequently in Mordaunt’s London drawing room, for in 1747 Wolfe fell in love with the general’s niece, Elizabeth Lawson, who was also a maid of honor serving alongside Lady Howe at Leicester House. Wolfe pined for Miss Lawson for several years, and Lady Howe, Caroline, William, and George must have listened to his recitals of her many perfections.72
By the time war broke out in 1756, Wolfe was over Elizabeth Lawson. The attention of Wolfe and the Howe brothers during these momentous days was wholly directed toward the conflict with France. As they gathered together in the London homes of the Pages or Lady Howe, the conversation must have been exciting and intense—and frightening—as the young officers exchanged opinions on developments around the globe, the talk at court, and the concerns of senior officers such as the Duke of Cumberland, who as captain-general of the army had a leading role in defense planning. Cumberland had been concerned since the 1755 massacre of Braddock’s Road with the problem of waging war in the wilds of America. The vast forested terrain and indigenous methods of warfare, so successfully adapted by the French, presented new challenges to British troops. Some hoped that British colonists steeped in Indian methods could be put to use, but Cumberland believed that regular British troops must ultimately master wilderness skills in order to achieve victory over France in America.73
Caroline would have frequently been present, for she and her husband stayed with Lady Howe in Albemarle Street when they were in London. No doubt she listened closely; her subsequent correspondence shows that she paid careful attention to her brothers’ military business. For Londoners like Caroline and her mother and sisters, fighting on the colonial frontier was a vivid and bloody drama. In this conflict, America, not Flanders, was to be the new theater of war, and the savages of the New World supposedly practiced warfare with a ferocity unparalleled in the history of Europe.74 If the Howe brothers avoided the gory details of combat in America as they talked in the drawing rooms of family members, the British press did not. Newspapers gave grisly details of actual combat, the facts of which would have been known to British servicemen, who could not contradict them. Accounts proliferated of attacks on Indian settlements with no quarter given, dwellings burned with the inhabitants inside, and scalps taken; and Indian murders of settler women and children on the colonial frontier. Scalpings became the gruesome emblem of Britain’s latest foe in the minds of Britons on the home front. A military family whose conversation always readily turned to the growing war could never entirely avert a visceral consciousness of such horrors.75
The Howe women must have heard from their brothers and their circle of friends in the armed forces that Prime Minister Newcastle and his cabinet were getting it badly wrong as the nation moved toward global war. William Pitt jeered that the ministers “shift and shuffle.” He had been shouting for months that the real objective of the French was not Kent, where William and his regiment under Wolfe were preparing to oppose invasion, but the island of Minorca. And this proved to be true; the French soldiers encamped across the English Channel served as a ruse to divert attention from their true target. In fact, on April 18, 1756, the French landed unopposed on Minorca. Just in case the island should be attacked, Admiral John Byng had been sent there with an ill-conditioned squadron of ten ships, and they were unable to prevent its fall. Byng was arrested as soon as he returned home and was tried for failing to do his utmost to assist the garrison. The ill-fated admiral’s controversial execution on the quarterdeck of his own flagship in Portsmouth Harbor on March 14, 1757, did nothing to quiet the national outrage at seeing the French everywhere victorious.76 Pitt as usual expressed the mood of the nation, pronouncing, “In every quarter of the world we are inferior to France.”77
By the time the news of the fall of Minorca reached London in June 1756, war had already been declared. The nation was soon reeling from more bad news from America. The French had swooped down on Fort Oswego, a western outpost in the colony of New York, capturing it in August. On the continent, the upshot of all the labyrinthine maneuverings after subsidy treaties had resulted in only one British ally, Prussia. Its ruler, Frederick the Great, chose to forestall attacks from his enemies in Russia and Austria by invading Saxony at the end of August 1756, and Britain was now committed to a war on the Continent whether it liked it or not.78
The nation seemed rudderless in its hour of need. Newcastle resigned in November, and a new ministry headed by William Pitt and Whig leader William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, began the next month. Three months later, George Howe was bound for America, a colonel in command of the 3rd battalion in the newly created Royal American Regiment.79 The Royal Americans, raised in the wake of General Edward Braddock’s defeat, were designed to meld the discipline of the British regular with the wilderness qualities of woodland scouts. The regiment was the brainchild of the British-serving Swiss officer Colonel Henry Bouquet, a friend of the Duke of Cumberland.80
George Howe was almost certainly handpicked by the duke to join the Royal Americans. Evidently Cumberland had forgiven the young Lord Howe for voting with Pitt (whom the duke detested) over the subsidy treaty, and for losing his temper at His Grace over a cricket match. As the newly promoted young colonel readied himself to depart for America in late March 1757, Cumberland placed in his hands a letter for the commander in chief in America, John Campbell
, 4th Earl of Loudoun: “You will receive this Letter, by the Hands of Lord Howe, whom the King has been pleased to appoint to one of the American Batt[alion]s in the Room of Colonel Jefferays. I need not recommend him to you as you know him already. You will find him an intelligent, capable & willing officer, & can not help hoping that it will come to his Lot, to command one of the Batt[alion]s, that will be employ’d upon Servi[c]es.”81
There can be no doubt that George was fully aware of the ideas being exchanged between Cumberland and his deputy in America on the army’s urgent need to acquire fighting skills suited to the wildernesses of the New World. George would prove to be a credit to the duke’s sagacity—the perfect choice to enter the kaleidoscope of cultures and peoples that were now assembling to wage a war against the French in America.
Four
World War
The Seven Years’ War was Britain’s first true world war. Three of the Howe brothers—George, Richard, and William—would emerge from the conflict as household names in Britain and America, with reputations as daring men of action and epitomes of English heroism. The Howe family itself would come to be seen as the personification of a stoical British military dynasty. Notably, George Lord Howe’s exploits would make him “the most liked and admired British soldier ever to serve alongside Americans.”1 The dangers and privations experienced by the Howes as they ascended to hero status are largely forgotten today, and they deserve to be revisited. The immense risks and grueling suffering they underwent would be glossed over during the American Revolutionary War by pro-American propagandists.
The war brought military actions in North America, the West Indies, Africa, India, and the Philippines, but Britain would confront its greatest challenges on land in the American theater of operations. Collisions between alien cultures in the hothouse atmosphere of war presented special problems. The British war effort in North America during the Seven Years’ War pulled together a mix of diverse peoples, many of whom had lived in the vicinity of one another with varying degrees of friction and now had to unite against a common foe. These included Native Americans, indispensable to the European armies for their skills in the exotic terrain of the American backwoods; colonial soldiers with their own local notions of military discipline, and their social divergences from the regular British rank and file; backwoods irregulars called rangers, who were another species of colonial fighting man; kilted Highland regiments, relocated from the relatively recent war in the glens of Scotland; and, finally, the British army itself, with its aristocratic officer ranks and redcoat enlisted men, some of whom had signed up to escape a level of poverty almost inconceivable for free whites in the colonies, and who originated not only in the British Isles but also in Europe.2
Britain sent to America about twenty-two thousand army regulars, the largest force it had ever dispatched to those shores.3 Never before had so many been sent to war so far from Britain, and the logistical obstacles were immense. Close cooperation between army and navy—never an easy business—was critical. But for the army and its officers, the greatest problem was adaptation to the conditions of warfare in the American wilderness. The sheer effort of getting armies out into the American wilderness to fight each other was staggering.
A conventional British army moving through hostile territory in Flanders, where George Lord Howe had served during the War of the Austrian Succession, encountered relatively familiar countryside on level roads, with small towns and villages and the possibility of provisions nearby. In stark contrast, the virgin wilderness of frontier America reduced armies to a slow crawl through almost impenetrable forest, involving backbreaking toil, hauling artillery and all of its own food supplies, and sometimes, as in the case of Braddock’s ill-fated expedition, cutting its own road as it went.
Flankers and advance guards were needed by any army no matter where it fought, to protect its peripheries from surprise and harassment, and scouting parties would gather intelligence and harass the enemy in turn. In Europe during the last war, conventional armies had employed native irregular fighters such as the Croatian Pandours—recruited to serve Maria Theresa of Austria—or mastered their techniques, like the French Arquebusiers de Grassin, or the skirmishing Miquelets at Bassignano, both of which George would have seen in action on the Continent.4
But the American wilderness was a challenge on an entirely new scale for the British army. Without any established system of roads, the British invasion of French Canada had to be confined to the two major waterways of the St. Lawrence River, or the Lake George–Lake Champlain–Richelieu River corridor. The latter route necessitated transport by water as well as overland. On the rivers and lakes, whaleboats and bateaux carried the entire army, its stores, and its wagons and artillery. On reaching land, the boats had to be unpacked, all the stores had to be repacked into wagons, and the empty boats themselves were then manhandled through the forest. At the next waterway, the whole process had to be reversed. And throughout it all, each army was dependent on scouts versed in woodlore to guard its flanks and sometimes even to tell it where it was. Armies on both sides got lost in the woods.
In addition, the North American climate posed a major problem for the British army, as standard uniforms proved unsuited to the extremes of heat and cold and the swampy, muddy, and rocky terrain. Soldiers donned Native American moccasins and snowshoes in turn to cope with dramatic seasonal fluctuations, or they stripped to their waistcoats to bear the heat of summer.5
The best guides in such conditions were Native Americans, but the French had always been better than the British at winning and keeping Indian allies. “[R]eally in Effect we have no Indians,” lamented Loudoun to Cumberland in late 1756. Loudoun sought to make up the deficiency with a company of colonial American rangers, for “it is impossible for any Army to Act in this Country,” without one or the other.6 A few months later, Cumberland sent him a young officer whose enthusiasm would lead the way in introducing new fighting techniques to the British army in America: George Lord Howe.
GEORGE REACHED HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, in July 1757 with a Royal Navy squadron sent to reinforce Lord Loudoun, who was planning a strike against Louisbourg, the nearby French fortress and naval support base on the coast of Cape Breton Island. The campaign had to be abandoned, however, because delays and fog had allowed the French to reinforce their position. By August, Loudoun had returned to New York, leaving most of his army to winter in Halifax. George left, too, disembarking at Boston in early August, where the newspapers reported that he was bound inland for “the forts at Lake George.” He probably went directly to Fort Edward on the frontier of New York province, because on September 28 he was made a colonel in the 55th Regiment of Foot stationed there.7
It would be an exciting posting for George. Just a few weeks earlier, Captain Robert Rogers, head of the famed Rogers’ Rangers, had officially launched a company of volunteers, based at Fort Edward, whose remit was to teach British regular soldiers ranging techniques. George had already met Rogers in Halifax, where he and his colonial rangers were serving alongside the British army. They had probably discussed Rogers’s plan to launch an innovative seven-week course to train fifty-five “gentleman” volunteers from the British regiments in wilderness fighting skills. George was too senior to volunteer, but that did not prevent him from diving in; as winter approached, the rangers were on duty patrolling the woods between Fort Edward and the French-held Fort Ticonderoga. “In one of these parties,” wrote Captain Rogers, “My Lord Howe did us the honour to accompany us, being fond, as he expressed himself, to learn our method of marching, ambushing, retreating, &c. and, upon our return, expressed his good opinion of us very generously.”8
Now George began to apply what he was learning from Rogers to his own regiment, the 55th Foot, turning it in effect into a light infantry regiment. The changes were designed to enable the soldiers to move quickly and effectively through the woods. Hat brims were trimmed; hair was cropped short, a practice that aroused derision in a period when gentleme
n wore their hair long. Coats were cut to the waist, heavy braid and sashes were discarded, buckskin and protective leggings replaced army-issue breeches and gaiters. Even muskets were cut down to make them lighter, and the metal barrels were blackened to keep them from flashing in sunlight. Soldiers learned to march, shoot, and ambush in small parties in heavily forested terrain. George was not the only British officer interested in developing light infantry, but he was unparalleled in inspiring a tradition-bound army to adopt the reforms. He was charismatic, beloved by his own soldiers and the provincial Americans alike, and he enforced the changes without respect to rank. The reforms in dress and living arrangements lessened the distinction between officers and men. “You could not distinguish us from common plough men,” wrote one officer.9 When confronted with officers who refused to obey, George had them arrested “for setting a bad example to the army.”10
At home in England, George’s mother, aunt, and sisters waited with great impatience and anxiety for news of their prodigy’s daring activities. The few surviving private letters of George Howe suggest that he was a poor correspondent. In a letter from Albany to his Aunt Juliana Page in March 1758, he began, “You are very good to take any notice of me, for I really do not deserve to be remembered at Battlesden.” He must have known that he was rarely out of their thoughts, but he went on in the same disingenuous vein, saying that he had “deferred writing” in hopes of having a letter to send that was “worth reading.” “I have been cruelly disappointed,” he said, and ended his letter of just four sentences with his respects.11 Juliana must have been cruelly disappointed by the brief contents. George’s own disappointment had been caused by the cancellation of the winter campaign against Fort Ticonderoga that he and Loudoun had been planning.12 A stone fortification constructed by the French at the southern end of Lake Champlain, Ticonderoga was a wilderness outpost of crucial strategic significance in the fight to control the rear of the British colonies.
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