forth in their honour a choice basin of Sèvres porcelain. At their next stopping-place this object of art appeared on their breakfast table; and their soldierservant, when questioned, admitted that he had thought it too pretty to be left behind them. The lady at once ordered out her horse and groom; rode thirty miles through a hostile country swarming with stragglers; and came back late at night after having restored the piece of china to the rightful owner. "The story," said her husband, "got wind; and the next day every officer in the Division loaded her with praise."

If Wellington could have commanded in America in the year 1776, it may confidently be asserted that, within. ten days after Fort Washington fell, he would have been across the Delaware, which was not more of a river than the Douro;1 and some very high-placed officers would already have been on their way back to Germany in disgrace, beneath the hatches of a return transport. A political opponent, generously attempting to defend Howe from the charge of indifference to crime and outrage, pleaded that he could not venture to hazard the success of the war, so far from England, and in such precarious and critical circumstances, by quarreling with auxiliaries who were nearly as numerous as his own forces.2 But the distance from home, and the important issues dependent on the campaign, were so many additional reasons why the Commander-in-Chief should insist upon being the absolute master in his own household. Howe was so deferential towards his foreign lieutenants, and so heedless of his personal obligations, that he took no effective measures for the protection even of those Loyalists to whom his honour, and that of his brother, had been pledged. The local population, without distinction of party, or regard for political services and merits, was delivered over to the greed and

iThe Douro at Oporto was something more than three hundred yards and the Delaware at Trenton something less than a thousand feet, from bank to bank.

2"History of Europe " in the Annual Register, 1777.

insolence of the Hessians. "Neither age nor sex, Whig or Tory, is spared. Indiscriminate ruin attends every person they met with. Children, old men, and women, left without a blanket to cover them; doors and windows broke to pieces; the houses uninhabitable, and the people without provisions. As a proof of their regard and favour to their friends and wellwishers, they yesterday burned the elegant house of Daniel Cox Esquire, of Trenton Ferry, who has been their constant advocate, and the supporter of Toryism in that part of the country." 1 Ever since the days of Tilly and Wallenstein, and more recently, when Frederic was over-running Saxony, and when his own dominions were being rav aged by the Cossacks, robbery and devastation had been familiar inflictions to the inhabitants of Germany. But this very short taste of the Thirty Years' War was a dose altogether too strong for an English-speaking people. Theirs was a race which did not breed willing and passive victims, but men who fought in defence of home and family more readily and fiercely even than for cause and country. From that time forward, whenever a State was menaced with invasion, the memories of those winter months which the Hessians spent in New Jersey seldom failed to rally the manhood of the whole country-side to the standards of the Revolution.

1 Letter in the American Archives of December 1776. Mr. Daniel Cox retired to New York, where he helped to found the Board of Loyalist Refugees, which consisted of representatives from the different provinces in America. He was placed in the Chair, "to deprive him of the opportunity of speaking, as he has the gift of saying little in many words." His property in New Jersey and Pennsylvania was confiscated after the war, and he died in England. Sabine's American Loyalists.

CHAPTER XI

CHARLES LEE. THE REVOLUTION AT BAY

THE Americans, for the moment, had the Delaware as a protection against the invader; but their general knew that for himself and his army it was not a reprieve, but at the most a respite. Washington reported to his Government that the British intended for Philadelphia. All military men, (he wrote,) were agreed that the line of a river could not be made good for any length of time against a superior force; and the troops that he commanded were far less numerous than those which were opposed to him. His little handful was daily decreasing by sickness; and the loss of Philadelphia,an event which would be "severely felt by the common cause, and would wound the heart of every virtuous American," could only be averted by the prompt, willing, and unsparing exertions of the people. had counted upon those exertions; and he confessed himself cruelly disappointed. The inhabitants of New Jersey, either from fear or disaffection, had with few exceptions refused to take the field against the invader; and even on those who came forward very little dependence was to be placed. Experience, (so he definitely stated,) had brought home to his mind that to rely upon the militia was a perilous, and might ere long prove to be a fatal, delusion.1

Не

Even so, however, Washington ought not to have been at the end of his resources; for there lay within easy reach of him a powerful body of Continental regulars upon whose services he had every title to reckon.

1 Washington's letters of December 12, 1776, to the President of Congress, and to Governor Trumbull of Connecticut.

When, early in November, he transported a portion of his troops into New Jersey, he left General Lee on the east of the river, in charge of a force fully equal to that which marched under his own immediate command. He drew up for that officer's guidance a paper of instructions in which the closing, and the governing, sentence was to the effect that, if the Jerseys were invaded by the main part of the British army, Lee was to come to the rescue with all possible despatch. Within the next ten days the pair of forts, which were called after the two American generals, had successively been captured; nothing short of a concentration of his whole available power could enable Washington even to attempt to hold his own against Cornwallis; and he requested Lee at once to cross the Hudson, bringing all his Continental regiments with him. Four days afterwards, in the secure belief that his order was in course of being obeyed, Washington wrote another most important letter which was intended to meet Lee on his way southwards. But time flew; there were no signs of the approaching reinforcement, nor any satisfactory assurance that Lee had so much as broken up his camp on the Westchester peninsula; and the Commander-inChief could no longer refrain from sending a message which expressed anxiety, and indicated a rising anger. "My former letters," Washington wrote, "were so full and explicit as to the necessity of your marching as early as possible that it is unnecessary to add more on that head. I confess I expected you would have been sooner in motion."1

It might have been thought that such an appeal, indited by such a hand, at a crisis when the very existence of the nation was so gravely imperilled, would have overcome the irresolution of the most unstable and the most perverse among mankind. But Charles Lee, who in his own estimation was made in no common

1 Instructions to Major-General Lee, November 10, 1776. Washington to Lee, Hackensac, November 10; Newark, November 23, and again November 27. Washington to the President of Congress, November 23.

mould, considered himself absolved from all ordinary rules, and even from those laws which constitute the code of military and civic honour. His head, which never could have been a wise one, had been turned by early successes, and was at present kept in a state of effervescence by a great deal of extravagant, and in some cases rather interested, flattery. He was an Englishman of good family; a member of the class which in the eighteenth century almost monopolised the opportunities for advancement and distinction. Lee was an Ensign at sixteen, and he became a Colonel at thirty.1 In Portugal, under Burgoyne, he performed a brilliant feat of arms which won for him the favour and intimacy of his general; and, after the Peace of Paris in 1763, he retired on half-pay, and spent the next few years in the pursuit of bustle and notoriety in whatever quarter of the world events were stirring. Constitutionally unable to stay long in one place, or to remain for many months together in the same mind, Lee rambled over Europe, following that which, (according to his own account,) was the career of a paladin, but which, in the view taken by his matter-of-fact contemporaries, very closely resembled the life of an adventurer. He accepted service as a Major General of King Stanislaus, and fought in aid of the Russians, and against the Turks and the Confederates, in those confused and aimless hostilities which ushered in the first partition of Poland. He is said to have been concerned in a series of desperate, and even mortal, duels. But what he writes about himself is not so told as to conciliate

1 According to his official biography, Lee obtained a commission in the army as a child of eleven; but an unsupported statement, drawn from that work, is not sufficient authority. Lee's mother was a Bunbury of Suffolk, daughter of the third baronet. The sixth baronet married Lady Sarah Lennox. "You ask me," wrote Lady Sarah in the summer of 1775, "what I say to my cousin Lee. Why, I say it is the element for boiling water; and, as I dare say he persuades himself he is acting right, I don't pity him for falling in a cause he thinks glorious, as I fear he will erelong. I shall be very sorry for him; for he has many good and great qualities to make up for his turbulent spirit and vanity, which, to be sure, are his weak side. But everybody has their faults."