Fusiliers (23 page)

The twenty-four-year-old officer might have seemed an unlikely subject for the earl’s patronage, being the heir to Viscount Strangford, a landowner and clergyman from Ireland. Young Lionel, entering his new regiment, was indeed the only officer of the Welch Fusiliers at that moment with a peerage to looked forward to. The handsome, titled officer had brought some glamour to the Fusiliers
enfin
. The Strangford lands, however, were much diminished and his father’s position as Dean of Derry did not give him great wealth either. Smythe, in other words, was a hard-up aristocrat who relied upon Earl Percy paying the entire
£
550 the cost of his step.

As to why Percy had done it, his motives were neither entirely corrupt nor could they be guaranteed pure. While he had gained a sterling reputation as a soldier, Percy’s private life was wreathed in scandalous rumour. Relations with his wife, the countess, had broken down, and they had not slept together for years. The countess’s friends put it about that Percy had rendered himself impotent, discharging his lifetime’s supply of seed by prodigious masturbation at school and whoring in adulthood. Even if the charge of impotence were false, it was apparent that the earl, who like many of his elevated social stratum had imbibed much about the ancient Greeks, considered the company of beautiful boys to be just as desirable as that of attractive women.

Smythe and other handsome young men sometimes infatuated the noble general. Late in 1777, the paths of this and another Adonis crossed in the 23rd’s Light Company. The other was William Russell, who had been through most of the company’s fights of 1777 as Mecan’s junior lieutenant. Russell was quite unable to afford a commission of any sort, and had first been commissioned in the 5th Regiment at the personal expense of its colonel, Earl Percy. Later he transferred into the 23rd. Russell was known for his looks, but while pretty enough had no real ambition to be a soldier and may in any case have regarded his private financial position as inadequate for such a path. He left the army early in 1778.

Lionel Smythe was a somewhat different case, for at this time certainly he was determined to make a career in the army, and brought a lively intellect as well as a handsome face to the general’s table. He served as one of Percy’s aides-de-camp through most of the New York campaign, a dutiful young man who repaid the general’s generosity with monthly letters from America. Smythe eschewed army politics or gossip in these missives, confining himself to factual accounts of what he had seen. He would thank his patron and flatter him, constantly asking when the general might return to the war and telling him there ‘never was a person that had a people’s affection and gratitude more strongly than your Lordship’. Whatever the gossips might have thought of it, there was no hint of sexual intimacy in the correspondence between Smythe and Percy. In any case, Smythe was probably anxious to avoid calling on Percy’s purse again, for he soon gravitated towards wealthy society in Philadelphia, making connections that would serve him well later.

It is enough to say, then, that the earl assisted the careers of Russell and Smythe because a certain type of gilded youth excited him. His aesthetic sensibilities, sentimentality and love of good company led him to open his purse to Russell or Smythe, and to get desirable postings for those desirable boys, while middle-aged, plain officers of the Fusiliers who claimed his friendship from the time of Boston received a courteous reply to their letters but rarely more.

As the campaign of 1777 came towards its end, Smythe was installed as the commander of the 23rd Light Company and many of its non-commissioned officers were sent to other companies to impart the lessons of their most active campaign. The Light Bobs and grenadiers had been repeatedly engaged since the year began that
January, fighting in raids like Bound Brook or Paoli and major battles such as Brandywine. During the winter of 1777/78 there were many changes, with those who had gained this vital experience transferred to inculcate their parent regiments with the Howe style of fighting. This happened with Thomas Mecan, when he recovered from his wound, and several other officers from the 1st Light Infantry Battalion who had learned such tough lessons during the fights of 1777.

Dansey, commanding the 33rd Light Company, reckoned that the casualties had exceeded the original numbers of the company that had begun campaigning nearly two years previously, with eight other ranks killed, twenty-three wounded and five taken prisoner. ‘I cannot easily
express
to you,’ Dansey wrote to his mother, ‘how thankful we ought to be to heaven that I am still alive and well to write to you at present.’ His company, however, had been particularly roughly handled, suffering losses at Long Island, Pell’s Point, in the Jerseys and Pennsylvania. By contrast, the 5th Light Company, also in the 1st Light Infantry Battalion, had suffered ten men wounded since landing at the Head of Elk at the start of the Philadelphia campaign, the 23rd fewer than that.

Even so, the army’s picked troops had become at last worthy of the name ‘elite’. In two years of campaigning they had been galvanised by Howe’s tactics and ethos, as well as skilfully led in battle by Cornwallis and some excellent battalion commanders. Their spirit was high at the close of 1777, and a pervasive fear of the enemy that had gripped them in 1775 had evaporated in the rush of a dozen battles. One young grenadier officer summed up in a letter home his feelings about the superiority of British soldiers in those chosen corps:

Light Infantry accustomed to fight from tree to tree, or charge even in woods; and grenadiers who after the first fire lose no time in loading again, but rush on, trusting entirely to that most decisive of weapons the bayonet; will ever be superior to any troops the rebels can bring against them.

As for the parent regiments of the light and grenadier companies, the same officer commented, ‘The brigades have been looked upon as nurseries only for the flank corps.’ Inevitably when some battalions are called upon to shed their blood regularly and others hardly at all, it can cause resentment and is not good for the efficiency of that wider army. Howe, though, seemed to lack the enthusiasm to give the rest of his army the same attention he had lavished on those chosen corps. He was apparently indifferent to many of the British line regiments and had
become contemptuous of the Hessians, believing their movements on the battlefield hopelessly slow and their commanders ‘totally unfit for our service’. After 1777, they were largely confined to garrison duties.

When it came to the dozens of regiments of British foot, one or two were allowed to share the laurels of the elite corps, but even Howe’s own regiment, the 23rd, had for the most part marched hither and thither in obscurity during the previous two campaigns.

Since its participation at Long Island, the Royal Welch Fusiliers had not come under heavy fire, losing more men to disease and desertion than enemy action. Instead the Fusiliers, like other regiments, simply fed replacements to their detached light or grenadier companies as required, while bit by bit the weak men died off, the unwilling disappeared and the recruits were tempered into something more solid.

Everything was changing, however, as 1777 drew to an end. On 2 November, official reports in the Tory press confirmed what the other side had been saying for days, that General Burgoyne had been forced to surrender his army at Saratoga, having lost in his struggle to fight his way down the Hudson valley. To inveterate Whigs like Captain Fitzpatrick of the Guards, the conclusions to be drawn from this cataclysm were obvious: ‘If all reasoning and speculation was not exploded one would conclude that an immediate change of Ministry and peace with the
United States
must be the necessary consequence of it.’ But in his desire to pack off the government in London (making way for the letter’s reader, his friend Charles Fox), Fitzpatrick had underestimated the King’s desire to continue the war. Furthermore Burgoyne’s disaster on the Hudson would soon spark intervention by other European powers, changing the complexion of the struggle from an internecine or civil one among English men to a conflict between nations.

All of the variables of the war facing the Fusiliers were thus in a state of flux as 1777 came to a close. Howe’s gamble, his hope for a decisive battle in front of Philadelphia, had failed spectacularly. Not only had he contributed to the surrender of 5,000 redcoats at Saratoga by taking himself off to Pennsylvania, but he had failed to cripple Washington’s corps of the Continental Army, a reality brought home by the battle of Germantown. A man in such a position could not continue to serve. Howe would be going but might still have time to make some changes to his army and his regiment to ensure that they would be ready to face the next campaign without trepidation.

 

TWELVE

 

How Nisbet Balfour Won the Prize

By early December 1777, the army was settled in Philadelphia. A line of outposts had been built to prevent any unpleasant surprises. Foraging expeditions were occasionally conducted, but even these were ‘very peaceable, quite different from our Jersey excursions last year, where we were generally sure of fighting twice a week’.

The shock of Saratoga created a sense that change was imperative – either a general peace or a new system of war. Months of carefully considered correspondence would be required to arrange this, so in the meantime, why take risks? ‘If’, reasoned the Whig Captain Richard Fitzpatrick in a letter to his friend Charles Fox, ‘General Howe attempts anything but securing his army for the winter I shall consider him, after what has happened in the north, a very rash man. But if he lets himself be governed by General Grant I shall not be surprised if we get into some cursed scrape.’

Howe decided to play it safe, all the more so since he was aware that his own time as commander-in-chief was coming to an end. Thus, General Washington’s army was able to spend its winter in cantonments at Valley Forge, just one day’s ride from Philadelphia, without the serious possibility of British attack. Soon after hearing of Saratoga, Howe had requested his recall – a new general would have the task of untangling the Gordian Knot of American affairs.

Philadelphia thus provided agreeable winter quarters, with little risk to life and plentiful possibilities for amusement. It had, before the redcoats’ arrival, been the most populous city in America. Of its 30,000 inhabitants around 8,000 civilians had left, mainly Whigs or
Patriots, call them what you will, to have their places taken by soldiers. Philadelphia’s position on the broad Delaware River had guaranteed its status as a great trading centre. It had also become an important seat of politics and of related trades such as printing. The city’s spoils were divided between Quakers and less religious merchants. Sufficient wealthy families remained, though, for elegant society to be maintained as 1777 ebbed into its dying days.

Officers could find plentiful company at the Bunch of Grapes or the Indian Queen. At Smith’s City Tavern there were assembly rooms large enough to host regular dances. Captain Hale of the grenadiers described the scene there:

Rooms are opened at the City Tavern by a subscription of two days’ pay from each officer, a genteel coffee house where you meet and converse or play from six o’clock to twelve; to prevent any disorders an officer’s Guard from the grenadiers mounts there every evening, Sundays excepted, when the rooms are shut. Tea, coffee, lemonade and orgeat are the only licquors allowed, except on ball nights, when negus is permitted.

As for play, there were quite a few opportunities for men to ruin themselves. Captain Wreden of the Hessian jaegers set up a Faro bank at the city tavern, and there were frequent games of cards or dice. For those enjoying more energetic sport, a cock-pit at Moore’s Alley was the scene of raucous fights.

There was good game too for the fighting cocks of the army, those dandies who sought to win American beauties. Major Lord Cathcart pursued Miss Eliot relentlessly, a match described by one Tory as uniting ‘a fine girl, of good fortune, to a Scottish lord with a moderate one’. Captain Lionel Smythe was on the same social circuit, attending the theatre and dances in the great homes along Water or Market streets. Having been settled with his company of the 23rd, his thoughts were turning to finding a mate, and the principle followed by Cathcart, of uniting American wealth with impoverished title, had much to commend it.

For those who had left their wives in New York or England, or simply wanted some uncomplicated fornication, Philadelphia had possibilities too. Colonel Birch of the light dragoons and Major Williams of the artillery both acquired handsome mistresses during their stay.

General Howe was as fond of the bottle and boudoir as any, but
there were some professional matters that would require his attention before he returned home. It was time to give some thought to his responsibilities as colonel of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, for once he was back in England an exchange of letters to settle some delicate matter would take three months at least. The regiment had scarcely been led for two years since neither of the officers who would naturally provide such direction – the lieutenant colonel or major – had been capable of doing so owing to Bernard’s incapacity and Blakeney’s refusal to leave his parlour in England. It was imperative that the matter be settled before the general left, preferably by installing new men in both posts. General Howe knew by then also that it was the King’s desire that preference be given to officers already serving in America, as a reward for the hardships suffered on campaign.