The St. Cast affair marked the end of Pitt’s enthusiasm for coastal raids. Inevitably, his relationship with Leicester House broke down.78 In view of the fiasco that had ensued at Saint-Malo, one wonders whether Richard also was tired of his Leicester House entanglements. But despite the complex connections he and his family had in the competing royal households, Richard did not make enemies in court circles, and he remained a firm friend of William Pitt, who demonstrated repeatedly his reliance on Richard’s discretion. Richard’s involvement in Pitt’s project of coastal raids was an apprenticeship in the sinuous interplay between politics and military strategy. Lord Bute, too, felt he could confide in the young commodore. Richard Howe was not a politician or a courtier at heart, but he was someone who could keep a secret.
THE YEAR 1759 at last saw an upturn in fortunes for the British, with a string of victories on land and at sea. Richard returned to his favorite ship, the Magnanime, and joined the Channel Fleet under Admiral Hawke. For some months, the British maintained a close blockade of the French fleet at Brest, waiting for the enemy to emerge and give battle. Finally, in the Battle of Quiberon Bay on November 20, Hawke gained a victory so decisive that the French offered no serious challenge to British control of the sea for the rest of the war.79
The Battle of Quiberon Bay. In 1759, Admiral Hawke’s Channel Fleet prevented a French fleet from escaping the British blockade of Brest in this daring sea battle that was fought dangerously close to shore among the rocks and reefs of Quiberon Bay.
As usual, Richard was in the fore, pursuing and attacking the enemy. The Magnanime lost almost eighty men dead or wounded after a fierce battle among the shoals and rocks of Quiberon Bay. His men revered him for his boldness. A junior officer recalled that there was “an appearance of the greatest joy” on every face when the admiral gave the signal to give chase, and the Magnanime, “one of the fastest ships in the Royal Navy,” put itself at the head of the British squadron.80 “Perhaps there was an element of vengeance in his conduct, an intention to pay the French back for his brother’s death at Ticonderoga,” wrote one historian. Magnanime sank the 80-gun Thésée and left the Formidable a wreck.81 When another enemy ship, the Heros, struck its flag to Howe, then disappeared in the confusion of the battle and the growing darkness, Richard was visibly chagrined. His prize had escaped; he “wrung his hands, and said, ‘We have lost the honour of the day.’ ” His crew members were all sympathy.82 Richard had begun the Seven Years’ War as an able but little-known captain; he finished as a famous commodore with a reputation for daring that made him beloved of British seamen and the British public alike.
Quiberon Bay brought with it the first hint that the war might soon come to an end. When Richard went ashore after the battle to arrange an exchange of prisoners, the governor of Brittany, the Duc d’Aiguillon, suggested that France might be prepared to begin peace negotiations and that Lord Howe would be a proper person to take his proposal to Pitt. So Richard went home aboard the Magnanime, reaching Spithead on Boxing Day in 1759.83
At last, Richard had the opportunity for a holiday with family members. “[W]e staid in Town to see my Brother,” wrote Caroline happily early in the new year; “he came to us vastly well after great fatigue, for he was a Month in his Passage from Sr. Ed. Hawke which is commonly done in 5 or 6 days & he very near lost his ship off the Isle of Wight, it was 5 hours upon a rock.”84 But he was home. And there was more reason to celebrate, for during 1760, Richard’s wife, the young Lady Howe, was pregnant. Perhaps this was why Richard took an unprecedented break from active duty, not returning to sea until the autumn of that year.85 But danger and sadness remained for the family. When the child did not survive, Richard resumed his endless cruises off the coast of France, and William fought on in America.
“What a glorious year this has been!” Caroline had written exultantly in December 1759.86 The triumph at Quiberon Bay was accompanied by other successes around the world: in India, on the Continent, in America. British forces had captured strategically vital Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River in September, in a campaign commanded by Wolfe, now a general. But victory came at a cost; Wolfe was killed on the Plains of Abraham as British redcoats routed the French troops defending Quebec in one of the most famous battle scenes in colonial American history.
For William, Quebec was his hour of conspicuous heroism. He led a small band of light infantry volunteers spearheading the British landing, scrambling in the dark up a steep, rocky cliff above a cove called the Anse-au-Foulon. William and his twenty-four volunteer “forlorn hopes”—he had warned them that this could be a suicide mission—dislodged the hundred-strong guard at the summit and stormed ahead, scattering the remaining defenders and opening the Foulon road for the oncoming British troops. Howe and his men then shouted a spirited “Huzza!” to signal their success to the troops waiting below. William Howe’s ascent of Foulon has been called “one of the most celebrated military achievements in British imperial history,” and it is rightly mentioned in every account of his life.87
By the time William scrambled up the cliff at Quebec, he had seen four years of active service in the war. Like his brothers, he had been involved from the start of hostilities, preparing for a French invasion of the Kentish coast that never occurred back in the winter of 1755–56. Then he had been under the command of his friend James Wolfe, and the two men would finish the war together, for Wolfe at least, at Quebec. In the interim years, their paths diverged and recrossed. William left Wolfe’s 20th Foot sometime in 1756 to join Lieutenant General Robert Anstruther’s new 58th Foot, which had been raised the previous winter. William was promoted to major when he joined the 58th, and he played a leading part in recruiting its first complement of men. By Christmas 1756, he was its lieutenant colonel, a great step forward in his military career. He may not have thought much of his duty, however, for in the year when the war officially got started, he was posted back to the homeland, guarding French prisoners and discouraging an uprising of discontented Cornish tin miners (“tinners”) in the West Country.88
In the spring of 1758, when George was planning his expedition to Ticonderoga and Richard was readying his squadron to raid the French coast, William’s regiment was heading to America to take a second crack at Louisbourg, in Nova Scotia. This campaign had all the wearying aspects of an amphibious expedition fought in an inhospitable environment, a combination that would become all too familiar to William during his career. The troops slowly converged on Halifax from New York, Boston, and Ireland, coping with the typical delays of an Atlantic crossing in early spring. The commander of the campaign, General Jeffrey Amherst, arrived last, in late May, by which time the campaign was two months behind schedule. Then came the difficult business of landing the army on Cape Breton Island, complete with artillery pieces and equipment, under the obstacles of enemy bombardment and a swelling sea.
Once the British forces were established on land, the fall of Louisbourg could be presumed eventually, but the French were not going to give up without a fight. Thus followed a grueling six weeks of neutralizing French outlying posts, suffering sudden enemy counterattacks, and hauling artillery into position to fire at the French men-of-war defending the fort. When Louisbourg surrendered on July 27, one triumphant British onlooker commented, “We had taken the strongest garrison in North America, and opened the road to Canada.”89 The French defenders had fought while knowing their defeat would be a prelude to further British aggression.
After weeks of what was effectively a nasty form of guerrilla warfare, hostility ran high against the French, and they were wise to surrender unconditionally.90 By this time, “civilized” warfare had already been badly compromised; New England rangers serving at Louisbourg scalped French soldiers and Indians in one encounter, and Wolfe noted approvingly that no quarter was given to the Native American combatants who fought with the French—“We cut them to pieces whenever we found them, in return for a thousand acts of cruelty and barbarity.”91
It was
after the Louisbourg campaign that Wolfe wrote fulsomely of William that “His Majesty has not a better soldier in those parts—modest, diligent, and valiant,” noting that William led “the best trained battalion in all America.”92 But one wonders what William’s thoughts were in the month after Louisbourg fell, when his regiment was part of an unpleasant operation to destroy the fishing industry in the Bay of Gaspé. The assignment involved systematically putting to the torch the homes and livelihoods of the French fishing families. The military rationale was that they were destroying food supplies bound for Quebec. Wolfe was at pains not to kill the defenseless inhabitants, but it was hardly an inspirational mission.93
THE CAPTURE OF QUEBEC a year after Louisbourg was a highlight of the American campaign, but little attention has been paid to the fate of the victorious British soldiers who remained there over the winter, William’s 58th Foot among them. The army was not prepared for a six-month stay in Canada during the coldest, darkest months of the year. Shelter was basic; food was of such poor quality that scurvy set in. Sentries froze to death, and parties sent out on snowshoes to gather firewood were ambushed by Native Americans. Hundreds died, and the ground was too frozen to bury them. At Christmastime 1759, when Richard was ensconced in the comforts of London society with his family after the dangers of Quiberon, William and his depleted regiment were making the best of the season on starvation rations in Quebec.94 The British navy could not bring any relief, for the St. Lawrence estuary was frozen until spring.
April 1760 saw an army of seven thousand French, marching overland and intent on recapturing the city. The Battle of St. Foy, bizarrely, reenacted the battle of the previous September, but with the armies reversed. The sick and starving British troops were forced back into the walled city, and casualties were higher than on the day of Wolfe’s victory. Now the French besieged Quebec and the British hung on, waiting to see which flag would be flying on the first man-of-war to enter the St. Lawrence with the spring thaw. On May 9, 1760, HMS Lowestoft, flying the Union Jack, came into view. Six days later, the sight of two more British ships convinced the French commander to end his siege.95 It was the victory at Quiberon Bay the previous November that had ultimately saved Quebec for the British, by ending the French challenge at sea. In the end, it was the supply lines that determined victory or defeat in far-flung America, a lesson that would not be lost on William.
The 58th regiment stayed in America after the relief of Quebec, and William was present when the French surrendered Montreal in September 1760. He must have embarked for home soon afterward, for newspapers announced on October 17 that he had “arrived at the House of Lady Howe, his Mother, in Albemarle-Street, from North-America.”96
Perhaps 1760 marked the first Howe family Christmas gathering in several years, for that autumn saw all seven surviving Howe children in England for the first time since George had departed for America three years earlier. At the end of September, the youngest brother, Captain Thomas Howe, commanding his East Indiaman the Winchelsea, had reached home in a Royal Navy convoy from China.97 And Richard, who had been cruising the western approaches of the English Channel, may also have had leave over the holiday season, because he was injured in late November while observing the demonstration of a new secret weapon.
The circumstance was a test at Woolwich of the newly invented “Smoke-Balls.” One of the balls burst its shell, breaking the arm of an officer, the sword of a lord, the calf of a baronet, and involving the Duke of York in a near-escape as he backed away from the gushing cloud of smoke. But it was Richard rather than his royal protégé the duke who was singled out in the press report. Splinters lodged in the side of Lord Howe, fortunately inflicting only minor injury. His loss would have been “irreparable,” gushed the newspaper.98 For Richard, the accident may have provided a welcome chance for rest and recuperation while his brothers were in town.
None of the brothers chose to stay off duty for long while there was a war on. By the end of March 1761, William was part of an expedition departing England for Belle-Île, an island dominating the Bay of Biscay. The war on the Continent was dragging on; expenses were mounting up. Pleased with the recent naval victories, William Pitt returned to his old scheme of coastal raids. He thought that the seizure of Belle-Île, and the establishment of a British naval base, would divert the French from the fighting in Germany. And as tentative peace negotiations with the French had now begun, it could prove a useful bargaining chip—as indeed it did, in the final treaty.
But the Peace of Paris frustratingly remained two years away.99 George II had died in October 1760, collapsing of a stroke at Kensington Palace. His mourners appeared to be more curious than grief-stricken, for the old king had been uncharismatic and too Germanic for the tastes of many of his British subjects.100 His young grandson George III came to the throne amid a general feeling of national goodwill. But Pitt’s own days as a member of the new king’s government were numbered. His break with Leicester House years earlier was not forgotten or forgiven by George III, and in other quarters he was seen as irresponsibly prolonging an expensive war. Still, for now the expedition to Belle-Île went ahead.
The accession of the new king appeared to do no harm to Lieutenant Colonel William Howe’s prospects for promotion in the army, for he became Brigadier General Howe for the Belle-Île campaign, just as his brother George had been at Ticonderoga. The campaign had all the usual difficulties of an amphibious operation—the countless obstacles to the troops’ landing, the shifting of heavy artillery and equipment, followed by a protracted six-week siege. The fortress fell on June 8, 1761. William had not been in the vanguard this time, for he had been wounded a few days before the final capitulation, his first such mishap.101 The British newspapers were able to publish the worrying news within weeks; Belle-Île was much closer to home than America.
Caroline quickly received letters of reassurance from her younger brother, the first arriving “the day after we heard of his being wounded”; he sent good accounts of himself, “tho’ he was still confined” in early July. By August, she wrote to a friend, “except some remains of lameness, he was perfectly well by his last letters, I cannot learn when we may expect him from Belleisle.”102 It was like Caroline to sound casual about a subject that was so near to her heart. The news of William’s safety was sandwiched in among tidbits about the impending coronation of George III, which was to take place on September 22, 1761. In October, William Pitt, the aggressive wartime leader, would resign from the cabinet in protest over the conduct of the final stages of the war.
But if the nation was in the mood to relax and celebrate, the war seemed to hang on intractably. William was offered the governorship of Belle-Île, perhaps because he had been wounded there. Here was a chance for a less dangerous service, but William declined, “as he preferred to serve in the field as long as the war lasted.” It is not too much to assume that he sought—as the newspaper poets had so colorfully suggested back in 1758—to avenge his brother’s death. His Hanoverian cousin Friedrich von Kielmansegg, whose visit to England had been timed so he could attend the coronation (an event that attracted throngs of tourists), described a gathering of the Howe family in London—the lady mother and her seven surviving children—in January 1762: “[A] very rare occurrence, which is not likely to last long, as all three sons will soon be dispersed in different parts of the world. My Lord Howe will shortly take command of the fleet on the French coast; the second son will probably go with the expedition to the West Indies; and the youngest will sail in February with his ship to East India.”103
The “expedition to the West Indies,” soon to be undertaken by William, was an attack on Havana, Cuba, in 1762. In the eleventh hour before the peace, Spain had entered the war against Britain, hoping to gain Minorca and other advantages from a war-weary British nation, and giving new heart to the French. The Spanish aggression thus seemed to justify a British attack on Cuba.104 In fact, Britain had had its eye on Havana since the days of Queen Elizabeth I, seeing
it as a foothold into the rich opportunities for trade and expansion in Spanish America. Havana was a fortress and a shipyard, but also a flourishing center of trade—an entrepôt for slaves, sugar, foodstuffs, logging, and tobacco, and a sophisticated seaport where a vast service sector looked after the needs of the sailors and traders who came and went. In Spanish Havana, wealthy Cuban merchants and planters mixed with British merchants, for the British had since 1713 been permitted by treaty to engage in the immensely profitable trade of enslaved Africans to Spanish America.105
Now Britain would move to seize this rich prize from the Bourbon monarchs of Spain. Pitt was gone from office; a new ministry headed by Lord Bute, the favorite of the new king, directed the expedition of more than twenty-eight thousand men. Ten thousand were sailors; the army, like the forces under George Lord Howe at Ticonderoga, was a multicultural assemblage of British regulars; five hundred free black militiamen from Jamaica; American mainland provincial troops recruited from New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and South Carolina; and more than two thousand enslaved Africans raised from the plantation labor force of Jamaica. The Jamaican planters, reluctant to risk their human property despite official promises of compensation, preferred to send sick or intractable slaves and insisted that they be used for hard labor rather than being taught the dangerous skill of handling firearms. It was this disparate force that converged on Spanish Cuba.106
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