Hearing of the disturbance, Washington hastened to the scene, and, leaping from his horse, he seized two burly Virginians by the neck, and held them out at arm's length, at the same time administering a rebuke in words that scattered the combatants as suddenly as a cannonade would have done.
The British army committed many depredations in Boston during the year they held possession of it. They tore out the pulpit and pews of the Old South Church, and converted it into a riding-school for General Burgoyne's light-horse regiment. They took down the North Church and used it for fuel. They used up about three hundred wooden houses in the same way.
In the winter a theatre was established for the entertainment of the British soldiers. At one time a British officer wrote a farce entitled, "The Blockade of Boston," to be played on a given evening. It was a burlesque upon Washington and the American army. It represented the commander-in-chief of the American army as an awkward lout, equipped with a huge wig, and a long, rusty sword, attended by a country booby as orderly sergeant, in a rustic garb, with an old fire-lock seven or eight feet long.
The theatre was filled to overflowing on the night the farce was announced. It happened that, on the same night, General Putnam sent a party of two hundred men to surprise and capture a British guard stationed at Charlestown. His daring exploit was successful, though his men were fired upon by the garrison of the fort. The thunder of artillery caused a British officer to believe that the Yankees were in motion, and he rushed into the theatre, crying, "The Yankees are attacking Bunker Hill!"
At first the audience supposed that this announcement was part of the play. But General Howe, who was present, undeceived them by calling out, "Officers, to your alarm posts!"
The farce turned out to be tragedy, and the curtain fell upon the scene. The audience scattered like a flock of sheep.
The failure of the British to hold Boston was extremely mortifying to General Howe and the English Government. When the king's regiments first took possession of the city, one of the officers wrote home:
"Whenever it comes to blows, he that can run the fastest will think himself well off, believe me. Any two regiments here ought to be decimated if they did not beat in the field the whole force of the Massachusetts Province."
General Gage said to the king, before leaving England to take command of the forces in Boston, "The Americans will be lions so long as the English are lambs. Give me five regiments and I will keep Boston quiet."
When General Burgoyne was sailing into Boston Harbor to join his king's army, and his attention was called to the fact that a few thousand undisciplined "rebels" were besieging a town garrisoned by five or six thousand British regulars, he exclaimed in derision: