The Reign of George III. (Continued.) page 7

As spring approached, the English began to show a little return of activity. In April, Lacy, a general of the Pennsylvanian militia, was surprised in an attempt to cut off the supplies from the country to Philadelphia, and to impress men for soldiers. The English made a rapid movement, nearly surrounded his brigade, killed a great number of his men, and secured all his baggage. On the 7th of May, an expedition was sent out to destroy all the American shipping up the Delaware, betwixt Philadelphia and Trenton. Forty-four American vessels were burnt, some of them of considerable size and value; a great quantity of stores and provisions were seized, and a number of men killed. To check such raids, Washington sent out La Fayette, and posted him, with nearly three thousand men, on Barren Hill - a position seven miles in advance of Valley Forge, and with the Schuylkill betwixt it and Washington's own camp. The movement was a most unmilitary one; for it was at the mercy of the enemy, who might send out a much superior force, and, by adroit management, cut off the passage across the Schuylkill, and surround the detachment. But the astounding negligence of Howe was producing an equal recklessness in the American commanders.

La Fayette sate down, on this exposed height, as securely as if he had been in an impregnable fortress. He threw out neither patroles nor pickets. The very night after he had thus foolishly planted himself, Howe sent out five thousand of his best troops, under generals Grant and Grey, to surprise him. They took two different routes, intending to meet in his rear. Grant reached the point proposed for him, in the rear of La Fayette, an hour before sunset. Grey did not make equal expedition. Instead of having cut off Matson's Ford, the only one by which La Fayette could recross the Schuylkill, he was at some distance from it when day broke; and Washington, much more on the alert than his French subordinate, discovered by his telescope the startling position of affairs. He instantly warned La Fayette of his danger, by firing cannon; and the confounded Frenchman fled helter-skelter for the ford. Washington could spare no troops to make a diversion in his favour; for he had only four thousand remaining in camp, and it must depend on which reached the ford first, whether or not he lost nearly half his army at a blow.

Fortunately for him, La Fayette's troops were fresh, and the English ones were tired with their night's march. La Fayette, leaving his cannon, gained the ford, and got over. He then saw that, by activity, there would be time to recover his cannon; and for this purpose, he returned with a detachment, and succeeded in securing them, though he sacrificed some forty or fifty men killed and wounded, besides having some of them taken prisoners. La Fayette then planted his artillery on some rising ground on the further bank of the Schuylkill, and, with Washington in his rear, the English did not attempt to follow him. This was the last transaction of the English army under the command of Howe; and, had that general had the slightest desire to recover his reputation, even at the eleventh hour, it was perfectly possible. By marching his whole army down on Washington, under proper dispositions, he could have routed it with ease, and retired, after all his strange stupidity, with brilliant effect.

At this crisis arrived the brother of Silas Deane, Mr. Simeon Deane, the bearer of the treaty of alliance between France and the United States; and Washington, relieved as from a dismal nightmare, conscious that by the strength of America alone independence could never be attained, issued this general order: - " It has pleased the Almighty Ruler of the universe to raise us up a powerful friend among the princes of the earth: it becomes us, then, to set apart a day for gratefully acknowledging the Divine goodness, and celebrating the important event." This was done; there was public prayer, a general discharge - thirteen rounds - of the artillery in honour of the thirteen United States, and a stunning hurrah of the whole army, " Long live the King of France!"

In the month of April arrived the permission for Sir William Howe to retire, and, although he was one of the five commissioners named for carrying into effect the proposals in lord North's bill, he determined to leave at the earliest day for England. Lord Howe, the admiral, was equally impatient to return, but lord Sandwich had informed him that it would be considered a great misfortune for him to quit his command under present circumstances. This was, in fact, a command for his remaining, which the breaking out of the war with France, and the expected arrival of a French fleet, rendered doubly imperative. The departure of his brother, the general, was contrived to be made as ridiculous, as his services had been worse than useless. Since the battle of Brandywine he had really done nothing but trifle away the time of the army in circumstances of the most vital importance to his nation. From October till May he had lain at Philadelphia, disgusting the inhabitants by his voluptuous somnolence and by the riot and oppression of his soldiers. But now, as though he had shown himself a great conqueror, and had actually suppressed the rebellion, he allowed twenty-two of his principal officers to celebrate his departure in the most absurd manner imaginable. The idea was to represent a tournament in honour of himself and his brother, the admiral, and as this tournament was mingled with other pageantries not strictly feudal, it was termed a Mischianza, the Italian for medley. A space of one hundred and fifty yards square was set out as the arena, which was fitted up in the manner of an ancient field of tournament, and surrounded by the royal troops. The approach to the lists was by an avenue three hundred feet long, over which were thrown two arches, one in honour of each brother. On the top of each arch stood a figure of Fame, bespangled with stars, and blowing from his trumpet the words, " Tes lauriers sont immortels! " These letters, when it became dark, appeared as letters of light. The device for general Howe was also a setting sun, with the motto, " Luco discedens aucto splendore resurqam".

Through this grand avenue marched the two brothers, followed by a numerous train in guise of the seven silken knights of the Blended Rose and seven more of the Burning Mountain, with fourteen damsels dressed in Turkish fashion, each knight having a squire bearing a banner with some device and motto in honour of some lovely damsel. Arrived in the lists, the knights tilted with each other, lord Cathcart taking the lead, his device being Cupid riding on a lion, the motto surmounted by Love; the lady of his device, Miss Auchmuty. After the tournament the knights came into the tea-room, and on their knees received their favours from the ladies of their choice, who were costumed as nymphs of the Blended Rose and the Burning Mountain. Then followed a grand ball and a magnificent supper in a temporary banqueting hall, illumined by eighteen lustres of twenty- four lights each, and the tables displaying four hundred and thirty covers and one thousand two hundred dishes. Twenty-four black slaves, in oriental dresses with silver collars and armlets, were ranged in two lines, and bowed themselves toward the earth as the general and admiral approached the table. Besides all this, and a great deal more, there was a grand regatta on the Delaware, the regimental bands being ranged along the shore, playing " God save the King! "

We have been the more particular in detailing these fooleries, as they show to what a condition of insane superannuation our commanders and officers had sunk at that period. With the nation on the point of losing one of its noblest appanages - with one fine army forced to surrender - with another which had spent its time in feasting and gambling instead of fighting - with war with France declared, and a French fleet and army on its way - so little cognisant were I our officers of the woful disappointment which they had occasioned their country, and of the imbecility of their commander, that they could spend their time in planning and executing these miserable follies. What but defeat and disgrace could be expected from such men? Was there ever a more striking example of the maxim, that " God first drives mad those whom He means to destroy "?

Sir Henry Clinton was appointed to succeed Sir William Howe, and, having arrived in Philadelphia, Howe departed six days after this extraordinary fete in his honour. Scarcely had Clinton assumed the command, when an order arrived from the government at home to abandon Philadelphia, and concentrate his forces at New York. The French fleet under D'Estaing was known to be on its way, and it was considered that we had not a fleet of sufficient strength to beat them back from the mouth of the Delaware. At almost the very moment, therefore, when the English officers were celebrating Howe's departure in the style of a grand triumph, we were about to evacuate Philadelphia in the face of Washington's shoeless and shirtless army, and to give to this movement the appearance of a flight! It is difficult for an Englishman to write of such things at this time, and persuade himself that these people were men of this kingdom, with all the trophies of our Edwards and Henrys, our Cromwells, Marlboroughs, Wolfes, and Clives in their memory.

On the 6th of June - only a fortnight after Howe's departure - the three commissioners, lord Carlisle, Mr. Eden, and governor Johnstone, arrived. They learned with consternation and unspeakable chagrin this order for the evacuation of Philadelphia, and, still more, that so important a dispatch had been kept concealed from them. They complained bitterly in a secret letter to lord George Germaine; and lord Carlisle wrote to a private friend, in equal mortification - " We arrived at this place, after a voyage of six weeks, on Saturday last, and found everything here in great confusion; the army upon the point of leaving the town, and about three thousand of the miserable inhabitants embarked on board of our ships, to convey them from a place where they think they would receive no mercy."

What men, indeed, could conceive so important a war conducted in so imbecile a manner, when they recollected how, in the last war, Chatham had rent away from France Canada, and numbers of their West India Isles; had driven them out of the East Indies, had ravaged their coasts, destroyed their fort at Cherbourg, taken possession of Belleisle, and destroyed the fleets of both France and Spain; and now English ministers were conducting this war with a handful of men, and almost no fleet? Seeing France preparing to send over fleets and armies, and standing paralysed, as though the resources of England were exhausted, instead of having forces enough to hold New York and Philadelphia at the same time, and fleets enough at sea to intercept and disperse any armaments that bankrupt France dared to send forth, how wofully must the consciousness have fallen on them that it is not wealth or people, but genius and a good cause in which live power and glory.

There was not a single circumstance in favour of the commissioners. At the same moment that we were making this disastrous retreat from the hardly-won Philadelphia, publishing our weakness to the world, congress had just received the mighty news of French alliance, French aid, and French ships and troops stearing towards their coasts. Daring and insolent in the worst of times, it was now more than ever contemptuous and imperious. The commissioners came furnished with propositions the most honourable, and favours the most absolute. They were authorised to offer to the Americans that no military forces should be maintained (in the colonies without the consent of the general congress, or of the assembly of a particular state; that England would take measures to discharge the debts of America, and to give full value to its paper money; would admit an agent or agents from the States into the British parliament; and send, if they wished it, agents to sit with them in their assemblies. That each State should have the sole power of settling its revenue, and perfect freedom of internal legislation and government; in fact, everything except total severance from the parent country. Such terms, conceded at the proper time, would have made war impossible; but the proper time was long past, and they were now useless.

The commissioners applied to Washington, through their secretary, Dr. Adam Ferguson, the celebrated, and, after this time, still more celebrated historian and moral philosopher, for a passport to congress, in order to lay the proposals brought by the commissioners before them. But Washington bluntly refused the passport; and only consented to forward the letter, brought by Ferguson to congress, through the common post. Congress took time to deliberate on the contents of the letter, and then returned an answer through their president, that the act of parliament and the forms of the commission all supposed the American States to be still subject to Great Britain, which had long ceased to be fact; and that congress could listen to no overtures from the king of England until he had withdrawn his fleet and armies, and was prepared to treat with them as independent states.

This was a humiliation for the once powerful British empire; a supercilious indifference shown by a body of men who could not find clothes, or shoes, or provisions, or money to pay the few troops which were starving in their camps! The English officers were roused by the insult, out of their childish play at mock tournaments, into a genuine rage. They demanded to be led at once against the force at Valley Forge, and had Clinton complied, Washington must have decamped in haste, or staid to be thoroughly routed. But Clinton, though a superior officer to Howe, was equally bound by the instructions from home, and felt himself tied down, not only to evacuate Philadelphia, but to proceed direct for New York. Once more, red-tapeism rescued Washington.

On the 17th of June the British troops began to march out of Philadelphia. They had been there nearly a month since the departure of Howe - a time long enough to have settled matters at Valley Forge, and now they departed with the expectant enemy at their heels. The van of the Americans entered the city at one end, as the rear of the British passed out at the other. At the same time, Washington had dispatched a brigade under general Maxwell, with Jersey, to break down the bridges, and impede the British by all modes that he could employ, till he could follow with his now rapidly increasing forces, and fall upon their rear. A great number of royalists of Philadelphia, besides those who had been sent by sea, accompanied the indignant British troops; and the treatment of such as ventured to remain, proved that they did not abandon their homes from needless alarm. Washington, before the English marched out of Philadelphia, had entreated congress to offer pardon and protection to all who should remain, assuring them that thousands of people otherwise, and amongst them many valuable citizens, as well as large quantities of property, would be forced out of the city, if this was withheld. But that body was not equal to sentiments at once so magnanimous and politic. Arnold was put into command of the city, and, spite of every endeavour on his part, a system of proscription of the most relentless kind was inaugurated. Some of the inhabitants were stripped of their property, others were cast into prison, and Roberts and Carlisle, two of the leading quakers, and men of excellent characters, were hanged.