The First Great British Disaster John Burgoyne, in a measure a soldier of fortune, was the younger son of an impoverished baronet, but he had married the daughter of the powerful Earl of Derby and was well known in London society as a man of fashion and also as a man of letters, whose plays…
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Washington and His Comrades: Chapter III
Independence Well-meaning people in England found it difficult to understand the intensity of feeling in America. Britain had piled up a huge debt in driving France from America. Landowners were paying in taxes no less than twenty per cent of their incomes from land. The people who had chiefly benefited by the humiliation of France…
Washington and His Comrades: Chapter II
Boston and Quebec Washington was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the realities of war and had moved in military society. Perhaps it was an advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a regular, for he faced conditions which required an elastic mind. The force besieging Boston consisted at first…
The Eve of the Revolution, Chapter III: The Rights of a Nation
British subjects, by removing to America, cultivating a wilderness, extending the domain, and increasing the wealth, commerce, and power of the mother country, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, ought not, and in fact do not thereby lose their native rights.–Benjamin Franklin. It was the misfortune of Grenville that this “interweaving,” as Pownall…
The Eve of the Revolution, Chapter II: The Burden of Empire
Nothing of note in Parliament, except one slight day on the American taxes.–Horace Walpole. There were plenty of men in England, any time before 1763, who found that an excellent arrangement which permitted them to hold office in the colonies while continuing to reside in London. They were thereby enabled to make debts, and sometimes…