ABSTRACT
Two years had passed, years fateful for the English dominions and for English liberty. Lexington, Bunker Hill, Trenton had been fought, an English army had been expelled from Boston; Montreal and Ticonderoga, won so dearly from the French, had been easily captured by rebels. Congress had declared its independence and had sent envoys to treat with France. Lafayette had sailed from France to help the insur gents, Burgoyne from England to supersede Carleton, the most capable English general in America. Lord George Germain, the Sackville of Minden, was conducting our American policy ; George III was garrisoning Gibraltar with Hanoverians, and hiring men, as if they were cattle, from the princes of Hesse, Brunswick, Hanau, Waldeck, Anspach, Anhalt, to shoot down men of English ra,ce 1 and make the name of England a byword on the Continent; 2 Sandwich was reducing the navy almost to vanishing point; and poor Barrington, who disapproved of everything, yet remained in office, moaned impotently at
the reduction of the army at home to under 15,000, when invasion was feared and insurrection rife.1 At first England seemed hardly conscious of the dangerous pass to which the King’s policy was bringing her. As in other wars, the English began by despising their adversary, and could not believe that an army which had humbled the Bourbon power to the dust would find any difficulty in suppressing a few riots among rebels, whom they talked of as poltroons. During the early part of 1776 all interest centred in the great trial by the peers of Chatham’s Tunbridge Wells acquaintance, Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, for bigamy. The sight, wrote Harriot Pitt when she begged to be allowed to go to the trial, in which there was to be ‘nothing improper,’ was to be 4 finer than a coronation.’ Again she wrote when it was over, ‘ it so engaged the attention of everybody that every thing else seemed totally forgot. The name of America was not, I believe, heard during the time it lasted.’2 Even in the government departments concerned with America, says Hutchinson, there were no plans, and the clerks were generally to be found lounging as if nothing important was toward.
