Setting sail from England for Spain, he was captured on the high seas by a French privateer, and for two months suffered the hardships and indignities of prison life in those times. Upon his release he used all his influence to secure the exchange of the remainder of his vessel's company, and was successful. This prison experience he never forgot.
Three years later (1758) he married Henrietta Leeds, a lady of fine character, and one to whom he was sincerely attached. Indeed, so fearful was he that their married life might not be entirely without jars, that he made a bargain with her, in advance of their marriage, that on all disputed points the adjustment should be according to his judgment. One is at a loss which member of a couple the most to admire, the man who could make such a proposition, or the woman who would bind herself with such bonds! But, like his first marriage, his strange contract with his second wife seems to have led only to happy results.
They settled in Cardington, upon the Howard estate, and for the next seven years led the uneventful life of landed gentry of the times. The husband and wife were united in their efforts to improve the morals and general condition of their tenantry. Rightly believing that the beginning of all reform was to improve the physical condition, Howard spared no expense in rearing new cottages upon new and improved plans, held his tenants removable at will, and through their improved conditions ruled over them with an almost despotic sway, tempered and made bearable in that all his restrictions and requirements were on the line of their temporal and spiritual advancement.
How strange is the making of history! Had the gentle, loving, well-governed, dependent Mrs. Howard lived on, this would no doubt have been the continuation, the aim, and the end of John Howard's life—to constantly advance and improve the interests and condition of his tenantry, and to wisely govern and administer his estate. But it was not so to be. The happy home must be broken up, and the man whom God needed must, through the sting of his own sorrow, be sent out again upon his wanderings to do the work reserved for him in the broad field not of his own choosing. The birth of the only child, a son, preceded the death of its mother by but a few days, and Howard was again alone. To the end of his life he remained a sincere and constant mourner for the wife to whom he owed the happiest, if not the most useful, seven years of his life. It is said by some of his biographers that he always kept the anniversary of her death as a solemn day of fasting and prayer.
Come we now to the point in his career where, all unknown to himself, Howard took up the work which was to startle the whole civilized world, and place his name in the roll of those whose memories die not.
But first let us remember the son whose life began where his mother's ended, and ended where it was well his mother had not lived to see it.
It would seem that the loss of his beloved wife and the sad recollection of his own motherless unloved boyhood, would have made of John Howard a tender and pitiful, as well as devoted father. Such was not the case, if we may judge from the vehemence with which some of his biographers deny the charges of undue severity to the infant, and forgetfulness and neglect of the growing-up boy, and the silence of others on the same subject.
The real truth probably was, so far as we can judge, that the man had nothing in his stiff nature and puritanical education, certainly nothing in his own early life, to make him respond to the uninteresting helplessness of infancy.
So we find him doing his duty by the crying infant of a few months, in a manner which would be amusing if it were not pathetic. He takes him from the nurse, lays him across his knees, and sits unmoved and unmovable until the tempest exhausts itself, and the child is silent from exhaustion, when he hands him solemnly back to the nurse, and feels that, by so much at least, has he cast out of the young child the spice of Old Adam, which is the birthright of us all! A few such experiences, we are told, and the child would at once cease its struggles and be silent. One would surely think it would!
But the silent, lonely man, bereft of the loving companionship of the gentle wife, who would so differently have soothed and silenced the crying infant, could not long bear the solitude of his broken home, and so began the years of wanderings, which lasted as long as his life, and through which he seems so largely to have lost sight of his young son at his most impressionable age, save to provide for his material wants, and to some extent, also, his education. When with him in later years he appears to have enjoyed his society, or at least the evidences which he gave of implicit, unreasoning obedience, illustrated by his remark, "I believe if I told the boy to put his hand in the fire he would obey me."