Tory refugees, in the bitterness of penury and exile, disseminated the story, (which to them, at any rate, was no legend,) that the British general was in a hurry to exchange the hardships of the open field for a life of sloth and gross self-indulgence beneath the roof of an urban mansion.1

Howe might love ease and pleasure; but he was no selfish voluptuary, and he liked to see others comfortable and happy around him. The return of the Headquarters Staff to New York was followed by ten days of universal jollity, -the harbingers, as everybody anticipated, of a cheerful and plenteous winter. All the town markets were regularly and largely supplied, and cantonments in the provincial districts overflowed with rural luxuries. Good beef, veal, and mutton might be bought at threepence to fourpence a pound; bread was as cheap as in London; and there were apples and peaches for the asking, with cabbages and potatoes in abundance. Our officers amused themselves with pastimes, innocent, questionable, or estimable. Balls were given; faro-tables were set up; and a play was rehearsed at the theatre, which was to be performed for the benefit of families left destitute by soldiers who had fallen in the war. Bright expectations centred themselves round the banquets which were in preparation to celebrate Sir William Howe's approaching investiture as Knight Commander of the Bath; for that rank had been conferred upon him as a reward for his victory on Long Island. Cornwallis, always very indifferent to the titles and honours which were conferred upon himself, did not wish to spend more evenings than he could help in wetting his Commanderin-Chief's red ribbon. Since apparently no fighting was at hand for some months to come, he obtained leave to sail for England; not, like Burgoyne, to push his fortunes, but in order to visit his children and his wife. That poor lady could not endure the separation from

1 Judge Jones's History of New York; Vol. I., chapter viii., pages 171 and 176.

her noble and kind companion, and was perpetually tortured by anxiety for the safety of a life of which her husband was so little chary in battle. Two years afterwards Lady Cornwallis died, if ever woman did, of

a broken heart.

"2

Washington who, according to his unvaried practice, had "a number of small parties out to make discoveries,' very soon perceived that the stress of the campaign was relaxed, and that he might count upon a breathing-space which would enable him to collect his means, to mature his plans, and to refurbish his energies. He felt as the captain of a dismantled vessel, driven by the tempest towards a lee-shore, would feel if the wind veered straight round when he was within a few score fathoms of the rocks. Nor was he yet at the end of his mercies; for the thirteenth of December had another gift in store for him. Lee was still meandering, at his own pace, through the northern townships of New Jersey. The record of his march stands by itself in the annals of modern warfare. After receiving the order to move, he remained stationary for ten days at White Plains; during the next week he travelled less than six miles a day; and then his rate of progress came down to an average of three miles for every twenty-four hours. Tradition avers that General Jomini, the famous writer on Strategy, first introduced himself to the notice of

1 Cornwallis contrived to see his wife in England during the earlier months of 1778, and then returned to America with Lord Carlisle, who was bound thither as a Special Commissioner, and who thus wrote to George Selwyn from Portsmouth: "Poor Lord Cornwallis is going to experience something like what I have felt; for he has brought with him his wife and children, and we embark to-morrow if the wind serves. My heart bleeds for them."

When the ship weighed anchor, Lady Cornwallis returned to her life of solitude. Grief played upon her health, and brought on the illness which killed her. Cornwallis was fetched home in time to be with her at the last; and she begged of him that a thorn tree should be planted above the vault where she was buried, as nearly as possible over her heart, and that no stone should be engraved to her memory. Both wishes were carried out. Correspondence of Marquis Cornwallis; chapter i.

2 Washington to the Council of Safety of Pennsylvania; Head-quarters, Bucks County, December 15, 1776.

PT. II.-VOL. II.

F

Napoleon by naming the precise date when the Emperor would reach a certain point in the map on his way to Jena. But Jomini himself, even if he had Von Moltke to assist him, might well have shrunk from the problem of calculating the moment at which Charles Lee would ultimately have rejoined Washington. The solution of that problem can never be known; for an untoward accident abruptly terminated the leisurely journey. On the twelfth of December Lee left his troops at Vealtown with General Sullivan, who had shown such alacrity in hurrying forward those reinforcements which Schuyler had despatched from Albany, and which Lee had arrested and detained. Lee himself, probably with the notion that his absence from the column might afford an excuse for an another day's halt upon the road, slept that night in a tavern at Baskingridge, under the protection of a small escort, and separated by the distance of more than a league from the bulk of his command. There he lay in bed till eight o'clock on the following morning, when he was aroused for an interview with Major Wilkinson, aide-de-camp of Horatio Gates, who had brought him a message from that officer. Lee passed two hours with Wilkinson, vapouring and growling, and cavilling at the shortcomings of all his fellow-generals. He was in low spirits; for he had recently lost his three best horses; most assuredly not by over-work. At ten he breakfasted, and then, as if the day was still young, he sate down to compose an ornate reply to Gates. "The ingenious manœuvre," he wrote, "of Fort Washington has unhinged the goodly fabric we had been building. There never was so damned a stroke.2 Entre nous, a certain great man is damnably deficient. . . . It is said

1 General Lee's advertisement, offering a reward for the recovery of his horses, is given in the American Archives for December 1776. They were a black, a bay, and a sorrel, none of them over fifteen hands high. 2 Lee had told Colonel Cadwalader that, when he learned the fall of Fort Washington, he was so excited that he tore the hair out of his head. Lambert Cadwalader to Timothy Pickering; May 1822.

the Whigs are determined to set fire to Philadelphia. If they strike this decisive stroke, the day will be our own; but, unless it is done, all chance of liberty in any part of the globe is for ever vanished." The letter was not yet folded when Wilkinson, who was looking from the window, cried out, "Here are the British cavalry."

It so happened that Colonel Harcourt had ridden forth from Lord Cornwallis's head-quarters in the neighbourhood of the Delaware, in order to ascertain for himself what Lee and Sullivan were about. The colonel was never too fine a gentleman to do his own scouting; and he now got his reward; for a Baskingridge Loyalist brought him information of the unique chance which awaited him at the tavern on the cross-roads.1 Harcourt was attended by thirty troopers of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons. It was the same regiment that had followed Lee in his dashing raid across the Tagus on the fifth of October, 1762, -the only unequivocal day of honour in his diversified career. The party was very strongly officered, for they had with them their Colonel, and one of their Cornets; while Banastre Tarleton, then a subaltern in the First Dragoon Guards, and afterwards famous as the cavalry-leader whose deeds of valour and of cruelty alternately illuminated and darkened the later history of the war, panied them as a volunteer. When Harcourt and Tarleton heard the news, they were on fire at the prospect of fun and glory. The young fellows turned their horses' heads for Baskingridge, and arrived there an hour before noon, early enough to find Lee still in his dressing-gown. The house was surrounded, and the glass began to fly as bullets rained in at the windows. The assailants were so skilfully disposed, and made such a din with their carbines, that they produced upon the enemy's nerves an effect of being more than double

accom

1 Colonel Harcourt's presence at Baskingridge is very clearly explained in Sir William Howe's despatch to Lord George Germaine of the twentieth of December 1776.

their actual numbers.1 Lee's escort ran away; and he himself had no choice except to surrender. His behaviour, according to rumour, displayed neither manliness nor dignity; but it is not easy to be taken prisoner heroically. Howe, in his report of the affair, recommended Colonel Harcourt to his Majesty's gracious attention for his infinite address and gallantry; and the compliment was just. Within four minutes after the attack began, Lee, in the garb of a half-dressed slipshod civilian, and mounted on Major Wilkinson's charger, which had been left tethered outside the tavern,

was careering southward amid the little troop of British horsemen; and, during those four minutes, the dragoons had contrived to let off more than a hundred cartridges. There was need for haste. Harcourt had near thirty miles to travel along causeways much less evenly laid than the coach road between Nuneham and Oxford; and the Whigs, in the townships through which he passed on his way to Baskingridge, had risen in arms behind him. During the return journey, his Cornet was shot dead from the saddle by the gun of a Jersey farmer; 2 but Harcourt allowed nothing to divert or to delay him until he had securely lodged his man within the British lines at Pennington.

General Lee's capture was everywhere regarded as an event of first-rate magnitude, and excited an emotion by no means confined to our own islands; for in several European capitals he was personally and familiarly known to military men for whom Washington was only a name. The tidings created extraordinary elation in England, and more particularly throughout those counties which bordered on the Thames valley, where the Harcourt interest was strong, and the Colonel himself

1 Washington, in his official account of the occurrence, spoke of the English Light Horsemen as seventy strong.

2 During more than a century afterwards local tradition pointed to a spot by the roadside where this young officer was said to have been hastily buried. In 1891 the grave was opened, and regimental buttons of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons were found amid the mould.