‘This gallant man,’ says the Annual Register for 1758, ‘from the moment he landed in America, had wisely conformed and made his regiment conform to the kind of service which the country required. He did not suffer any under him to encumber themselves with superfluous baggage; he himself set the example and fared like a common soldier. The first to encounter danger, to endure hunger, to support fatigue; rigid in his discipline but easy in his manners, his officers and soldiers readily obeyed the commander, because they loved the man.’
Wolfe wrote of him as a man ‘whom nature has formed for the war of this country,’ and Mrs. Grant, that he was ‘above the pedantry of holding up standards of military rules, where it was impossible to enforce them, and the narrow spirit of preferring the modes of his own country to those proved by experience to suit that in which he was to act.’ She christens him ‘This young Lycurgus of the camp.’
Under Howe everything was literally cut down to meet the exigencies of American warfare. Gold and scarlet was laid aside: baggage was reduced to a minimum: the muskets were shortened: their barrels were darkened: the skirts of the long regimental coats were cut off: Indian leggings were brought into use. Wolfe writes in May 1758, ‘Our clothes, our arms, our accoutrements, nay even our shoes and stockings are all improper for this country. Lord Howe is so well convinced of it that he has taken away all the men’s breeches.’ A French writer tells us that the officers and men were only allowed one shirt apiece. ‘Lord H. set the example, by himself washing his own dirty shirt, and drying it in the sun, while he in the meantime wore nothing but his coat.’ And here is the unkindest cut of all—in Mrs. Grant’s words:
‘The greatest privation to the young and vain yet remained. Hair well dressed, and in great quantity, was then considered as the greatest possible ornament, which those who had it took the utmost care to display to advantage, and to wear in a bag or queue, whichever they fancied. Lord Howe’s was fine and very abundant; he, however, cropped it and ordered every one else to do the same.’
In all things the commander set the example: he never asked his officers or men to do anything or to give up anything which he did not do or give up himself. Thus his regiment of regulars was set in order for backwood fighting and, what was more, it was attuned to the ways of the land and of the people of the land. ‘They were ever after considered as an example to the whole American Army.’
Mrs. Grant tells a story, which Francis Parkman has repeated in his delightful ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ of Lord Howe giving a dinner to his officers in his tent. The furniture consisted of logs of wood and bearskins, ‘and presently the servants set down a large dish of pork and pease.’ Howe pulled a sheath with a knife and fork in it out of his pocket, and proceeded to carve the meat. The officers ‘sat in a kind of awkward suspense’ for want of knives and forks, until Howe, after expressing surprise that they did not possess ‘portable implements’ of the kind, ‘finally relieved them from their embarrassment, by distributing to each a case the same as his own, which he had provided for that purpose.’ The real point of the story is that, if Howe had been an ordinary man, his dinner would probably have been resented by the officers as an impertinent practical joke. But he was not an ordinary man; among his officers and soldiers he was like King David: ‘Whatsoever the king did pleased all the people.’
Albany in New York State was always the base for expeditions against Canada, by the central route, which lay along the line of water communication. In war time through Albany regiments came and went, and in and around it they congregated and encamped. Albany was pre-eminently a centre for the old New York families of Dutch descent. On the upper waters of the Hudson and the lower reaches of the Mohawk River, which joins the Hudson a little above Albany, were the estates of the ‘patroons’ of the Dutch régime, and here their descendants lived and thrived. Mrs. Grant, in her Memoirs, tells of the lives and surroundings of one of the foremost of these families, the Schuylers, whose homes were in Albany and to the north of it in the district known as ‘The Flats.’ In her book an old Mrs. Schuyler (‘Aunt Schuyler’) is the central figure, as she was in the year 1758 the central figure of the Schuyler clan. The book tells of Lord Howe’s intimacy with the family, though he never took up his quarters with them, for he ‘always lay in his tent with the regiment which he commanded’; how the old lady loved him almost as a son, how sadly and affectionately she sped him on his last advance, and her grief when the news came that he was killed. ‘Aunt Schuyler ... had the utmost esteem for him, and the greatest hope that he would at some future period redress all those evils that had formerly impeded the service; and perhaps plant the British standard on the walls of Quebec.’ We have drawn for us the contrast between the good and bad type of officer, the gentleman and the bully, though both may be efficient fighting men. Returning to his friends on one occasion, Howe found to his great indignation that in his absence Captain Charles Lee had come through and, ‘as if he were in a conquered country,’ commandeered the loyal old lady’s stock and property, without having the necessary warrants for his high-handed proceedings. Lee’s next visit was after the fight at Ticonderoga, when he was brought back a wounded man to be nursed by those whom he had browbeaten and robbed. He was a king’s officer; but it is difficult to deduce from his case the moral that conduct such as his brought on the Revolution, seeing that he became a general in the Revolutionary army, of great though somewhat dubious reputation.
In 1757 and 1758 Lord Howe was winning the love and esteem of all who came into contact with him in America. In 1759 the Assembly of Massachusetts voted the monument to his memory. In 1765 the men of Boston were rioting against the Stamp Act, and in 1773 throwing cargoes of tea into Boston harbour. In 1775 came open war with the Mother Country and the fight of Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill hardest of hard fighters among the Americans was Israel Putnam: he had been by Howe’s side when the latter was killed. The night before his death Howe had been in company with John Stark, noted among the New Hampshire Rangers who followed Robert Rogers. It was Stark who, in 1777, planned and won the fight at Bennington, which was the beginning of the end of Burgoyne’s army. A young member of the Schuyler group, who had taken Howe to their hearts, was Philip Schuyler, afterwards one of the best known and most trusted of the Revolutionary leaders. Probably England and America had drifted too far apart at the time of the Seven Years’ War for any human influence to bring them wholly into line again. Yet, had Howes been multiplied and English statesmen and commanders been modelled on his lines, the parting might well have been postponed and been less bitter when it came. He stands out in history as one who in his day did all that man could do to bring the Colonies and the Mother Country closer together; and he is a type of the Englishmen who are still wanted to-day, and who happily are not wanting, as shown by the love and confidence borne towards Sir William Birdwood by the splendid fighting men from the Southern Seas, whom he led to less and yet to more than victory.
Just over a year from the date of Lord Howe’s death and Abercromby’s repulse at Ticonderoga, a much abler general than Abercromby, Jeffrey Amherst, marched once more against the fort. The French abandoned their entrenchments in front of it, of which Amherst promptly took possession; and a rearguard, left to hold the fort itself, after two or three days’ artillery fire, blew it up and left the ruins to be occupied by Amherst’s army. As the death of Lord Howe had immediately preceded Abercromby’s attack, so a day before the second enterprise ended successfully, another officer, well known in the army and in English Society, though not comparable with Lord Howe, was killed. An entry in Knox’s Historical Journal runs: ‘The Honourable Colonel Townshend was picked off to-day in the trenches by a cannon shot; he is very deservedly lamented by the General and the army’; a later entry mentions that his body was taken to Albany for burial. On the south side of the nave of Westminster Abbey, much farther up towards the Chancel than the place where the monument to Lord Howe stands, will be found a monument—
‘erected by a disconsolate parent, The Lady Viscountess Townshend, to the memory of her fifth son, The Honble. Lt.-Colonel Roger Townshend, who was killed by a cannon ball on the 25th of July 1759 in the 28th year of his age, as he was reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderagoe in North America ... tho’ premature his death, his life was glorious, enrolling him with the names of those immortal statesmen and commanders whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of this comprehensive and successful war have extended the commerce, enlarged the Dominion, and upheld the Majesty of these Kingdoms beyond the idea of any former age.’