TWO MONUMENTS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

BY SIR CHARLES P. LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.

In Westminster Abbey, towards the western end of the nave, on the northern side, stands a monument of rather special interest at the present day, upon which there is this inscription:

‘The Province of Massachusets Bay in New England, by an order of the great and general Court bearing date Feb. 1st, 1759, caused this monument to be erected to the memory of George Augustus Lord Viscount Howe, Brigadier General of His Majesty’s forces in America, who was slain July the 6th, 1758, on the march to Ticonderoga, in the 34th year of his age: in testimony of the sense they had of his services and military virtues, and of the affection their officers and soldiers bore to his command. He lived respected and beloved, the public regretted his loss, to his family it is irreparable.’

Dean Stanley, in his ‘Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey’ (1869 ed.), makes the following reference to this monument, which apparently stood, at the date when he wrote, in the south aisle of the nave: ‘Massachusetts and Ticonderoga, not yet divided from us, appear on the monument in the South aisle of the Nave erected to Viscount Howe, the unsuccessful elder brother of the famous Admiral.’ It is difficult to understand why the Dean used the curiously infelicitous term ‘unsuccessful’ in this case. The word might have been applied with some accuracy to the younger soldier brother, Sir William Howe, most successful in his early military career, but not so in the War of American Independence, though even in that war he was a constant winner of battles; but unless to die young is, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, to be considered a mark of failure, no word could be more inappropriate to a man whose life, according to the notice of him in the Annual Register for 1758, presumably written by Edmund Burke, ‘was long enough for his honour, but not for his country.’

He was the eldest of three brothers. The second was the famous Admiral, ‘Black Dick,’ the hero of ‘The Glorious First of June,’ which we recalled on the occasion of the late great sea-fight in the North Sea. The third was the general already mentioned. They were a notable trio, but the eldest, the shortest lived, the ‘unsuccessful’ one of the three, had in him the promise of greatness of the rarest kind. It would be difficult to pick out any man whose death called forth such a consensus of eulogy. Possibly he was felix opportunitate mortis. Possibly the same might be said of his friend Wolfe, who was killed in his thirty-third year, as Howe in his thirty-fourth. But assuredly, had these two men lived on, there would have been a different story to tell of England and America.

Dean Stanley writes of Wolfe’s friendship for Lord Howe the Admiral, quoting Horace Walpole’s words, that they were ‘friends to each other as cannon to gunpowder’; but Wolfe’s friendship for the ‘unsuccessful’ brother must have been as great; his admiration for him at any rate was unbounded. Wolfe was no great respecter of persons; he was somewhat impatient and critical of other commanders, but—‘If my Lord Howe had lived, I should have been very happy to have received his orders.’ In Wolfe’s eyes Howe was ‘the very best officer in the King’s service,’ ‘the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time.’ And so said they all: there was no dissentient voice, no whisper of criticism, no trace of jealousy. General Abercromby, to whom Howe was second in command, in reporting his death, wrote, ‘He was, very deservedly, universally beloved and respected throughout the whole army.’ Pitt’s testimony ran that ‘he was by the universal voice of army and people a character of ancient times, a complete model of military virtue in all its branches.’ Robert Rogers, the bold leader of the Rangers, in whose company Howe learnt the art of North American bush fighting, wrote of him as a ‘noble and brave officer,’ ‘universally beloved by both officers and soldiers of the army’; while the members of the Massachusetts House of Assembly, no great lovers of the redcoats from home, and close-fisted enough in ordinary dealings, voted £250 for a monument to the Englishman, whose character had impressed them all, and whose person their soldiers dearly loved.

Howe had been made colonel of the lately raised Royal Americans, the ancestors of the 60th Rifles, the famous King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the command of the 55th Regiment. Pitt then appointed him to be brigadier to General Abercromby, who, in 1758, was placed in chief command of the Central Advance on Canada, along the line of Lake George and Lake Champlain. Abercromby neither was, nor had the reputation of being, a first-rate general, and Lord Chesterfield was no doubt roughly accurate when he wrote, ‘Abercromby is to be the sedentary and not the acting commander.’ The inspiration and the motive force were to come from Howe. Early in July 1758 the army, consisting of over 6000 regulars and some 9000 provincials, was carried on bateaux and whaleboats to the northern end of Lake George, where, near the outlet of that lake into Lake Champlain, stood the immediate objective, the French fort of Ticonderoga. The force was landed, an advance was made through dense forest and scrub, Lord Howe with a party of Rangers was leading the principal column, they stumbled across a French reconnoitring party, there was a skirmish, and Howe was killed. ‘The French lost above three hundred men, and we, though successful, lost as much as it was possible to lose in one.’ That is one of the many comments made upon the incident, all on the same note. Here is another: ‘In Lord Howe the soul of General Abercromby’s army seemed to expire.’ Two days later Abercromby ordered a headlong, blundering assault upon the works of the fort, which ended in terrible losses and complete repulse.

In his dispatch of August 26, 1915, reporting upon the operations at the Dardanelles up to that date, Sir Ian Hamilton wrote:

‘Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood has been the soul of Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post. Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least every soldier in the force believes he is known to his chief.’

Here we have something like a modern counterpart, happily still with us, of Lord Howe.

It is at once the glory of the British Empire, and its chief source of strength, that it contains within it so many diverse elements, all co-operating for the common weal, all owing free and willing allegiance to one sovereign. Many races combine to make the great community which we call by the strangely inaccurate term of Empire; and the British race itself, in the process of transplantation, has developed different types in differing lands, climates, and surroundings. The home Briton, born and bred within the four seas of the United Kingdom, necessarily differs somewhat in character and physique from the Briton of the Canadian prairies or the Australian backblocks. The Canadian Briton again differs from the Australasian or South African, while among Australasians the Australian is of one type, the New Zealander of another. All supplement each other; all contribute to the common stock some ingredient which the others have not, and the sum total is greater and richer than if the units of which it is composed were all alike and uniform. On the other hand, diversities demand wise handling, or they may become a source not of strength, but of weakness. It is as easy to drift farther apart as to come closer, to exaggerate differences as to minimise them. Every citizen of the Empire is a missionary of the Empire, for by the individual citizens the types are judged. The home Briton who visits Australia leaves behind him a good or bad taste for England among the Australians with whom he has been brought into contact. The Australian who comes to the Old Country gives to Australia among the people of the Old Country a better or a worse name. But of necessity the leaders are most potent in mission work, and among the leaders those who lead armed men on active service; who are in touch with them day by day in the camp, on the march, in the trenches or on the open battlefield; on whom it devolves to enforce discipline, and with whom it rests whether or not discipline means friction. It is impossible to measure the amount of lasting good which is wrought when overseas soldiers associate tact and sympathy with home leadership or, on the other hand, the mischief which results from want of personal assimilation. It is not by any means military capacity alone that makes the soul of an Empire army. We are all beginning to know each other, to value each other, to make allowances for each other, to an extent which was impossible before steamers multiplied the coming and going of men, and turned uncertain and spasmodic into regular and assured communication. Doubts can be at once set at rest and misapprehensions promptly removed by the use of the submarine cable. Moreover, this familiarising process, and the annihilation of distance, is a progressive matter. Every year leaves us rather closer to one another than we were the year before. If, even under these favourable modern conditions, the personal element still plays a most important part, it was all-important in the middle years of the eighteenth century.

In the Seven Years’ War, when, in the words of Frederick the Great, England, having been long in labour, had at length brought forth a man, that man, William Pitt, set himself to fight France in America, and sent out what were for the time comparatively large armies to conquer Canada. He called upon the British North American colonies to co-operate and raise their levies; and inasmuch as his appeal was made in wise and tactful terms, and the colonies realised that for once England would not leave them in the lurch, they, or some of them, answered to the call with patriotism and goodwill. Thus regular soldiers from England, in greater numbers than ever before, came among the colonists, and provincial regiments were raised to march and fight side by side with the troops of the line. Then was seen and felt in its fullest extent the difference between the home Briton and his brother beyond the seas, at a time when the divergence was most pronounced. The regulars were very regular, the Provincials were very provincial; from a military point of view the two bodies of men were at opposite poles. The Provincials knew nothing of training or discipline; they were nondescript, temporary soldiers of small democracies; they were farmers enlisted for the campaign, their term of service in any case not exceeding one year: few had uniforms, some brought guns with them, some had none to bring: the officers were in effect chosen by the men. The troops of the line, on the other hand, imported into the backwoods of North America the stiffness and rigidity of European dress, discipline, and tactics in the eighteenth century, and between the officers and soldiers there was a great gulf fixed, as between the ranks of society in Europe.

It was but natural that these officers should regard the provincial soldiery with disdain, and that a corresponding resentment should be felt in the provincial ranks. Some of the greatest soldiers of the day were not exempt from this partisan feeling. After the disaster to Braddock’s force in 1755, Washington, who had been present on the field and who contrasted the conduct of the Virginians in the fight with that of the regulars, wrote in the bitterest terms of the latter. Wolfe, on the other hand, had, in 1758, no words strong enough to express his disgust at the shortcomings of the American soldiers. ‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive.’ If these were the views of the foremost men of the day in the colonial levies and in the regular army respectively, it must be presumed that the lesser men felt at least as strongly. Mrs. Grant, the authoress of ‘Memoirs of an American Lady,’ a book which was published at New York, in 1809, speaks of the ‘secret contempt’ with which ‘many officers justly esteemed, possessed of capacity, learning, and much knowledge, both of the usages of the world and the art of war ... regarded the blunt simplicity and plain appearance of the settlers’; and among the officers who came out from England there must have been a large proportion whose contempt was not unspoken or unnoticed.

It was not merely a case of friction between the professional soldier and the amateur, the one looking down upon the other, and the other resenting the airs of the superior person. The mischief was deeper seated. The northern colonies of British America were cradled in centrifugal traditions: a large proportion of the first colonists had come out to be rid of the Home Government, its discipline and its control. Puritanism was the dominant religious and political creed; and the surroundings, except at a few town centres, were of a stern and simple kind. Among men and women born and reared on these lines, and into their family circles, came regimental officers from England, many, if not most, of whom had been bred in the ways of fashionable English Society, which, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was not, to say the least of it, characterised by high tone or scrupulous refinement. The settlers in the New World, by the mere fact of their removal out of the Old World into the wilderness, had preserved for themselves and their descendants the old-time feeling and modes of thought in the Old World, and to them the new leaven from an up-to-date Old World was a leaven of unrighteousness. Mrs. Grant was the daughter of an officer in the 55th Regiment, Howe’s own regiment, but she had spent her childhood in the American atmosphere, and had been mainly brought up in a Dutch family. Consequently she tells us that she was ‘a little ashamed of having a military father,’ and writes of ‘the scarlet coat, which I had been taught to consider as the symbol of wickedness.’ It was to some extent as though Cavaliers and Roundheads had come to life again, and were jostling one another, while fighting under the same flag and for the same cause, as a prelude to once more springing at each other’s throats.

At this time and place a man of the type of Lord Howe was an almost priceless asset to the cause of Imperial Unity—a cause which can never stand still, but either declines or goes forward, and goes forward only through intelligent appreciation of existing conditions and active sympathy with living men. Of high social standing in England, and acknowledged military reputation, he set himself, by precept and still more by personal example, to the work of assimilation.

‘This gallant man,’ says the Annual Register for 1758, ‘from the moment he landed in America, had wisely conformed and made his regiment conform to the kind of service which the country required. He did not suffer any under him to encumber themselves with superfluous baggage; he himself set the example and fared like a common soldier. The first to encounter danger, to endure hunger, to support fatigue; rigid in his discipline but easy in his manners, his officers and soldiers readily obeyed the commander, because they loved the man.’

Wolfe wrote of him as a man ‘whom nature has formed for the war of this country,’ and Mrs. Grant, that he was ‘above the pedantry of holding up standards of military rules, where it was impossible to enforce them, and the narrow spirit of preferring the modes of his own country to those proved by experience to suit that in which he was to act.’ She christens him ‘This young Lycurgus of the camp.’

Under Howe everything was literally cut down to meet the exigencies of American warfare. Gold and scarlet was laid aside: baggage was reduced to a minimum: the muskets were shortened: their barrels were darkened: the skirts of the long regimental coats were cut off: Indian leggings were brought into use. Wolfe writes in May 1758, ‘Our clothes, our arms, our accoutrements, nay even our shoes and stockings are all improper for this country. Lord Howe is so well convinced of it that he has taken away all the men’s breeches.’ A French writer tells us that the officers and men were only allowed one shirt apiece. ‘Lord H. set the example, by himself washing his own dirty shirt, and drying it in the sun, while he in the meantime wore nothing but his coat.’ And here is the unkindest cut of all—in Mrs. Grant’s words:

‘The greatest privation to the young and vain yet remained. Hair well dressed, and in great quantity, was then considered as the greatest possible ornament, which those who had it took the utmost care to display to advantage, and to wear in a bag or queue, whichever they fancied. Lord Howe’s was fine and very abundant; he, however, cropped it and ordered every one else to do the same.’

In all things the commander set the example: he never asked his officers or men to do anything or to give up anything which he did not do or give up himself. Thus his regiment of regulars was set in order for backwood fighting and, what was more, it was attuned to the ways of the land and of the people of the land. ‘They were ever after considered as an example to the whole American Army.’

Mrs. Grant tells a story, which Francis Parkman has repeated in his delightful ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ of Lord Howe giving a dinner to his officers in his tent. The furniture consisted of logs of wood and bearskins, ‘and presently the servants set down a large dish of pork and pease.’ Howe pulled a sheath with a knife and fork in it out of his pocket, and proceeded to carve the meat. The officers ‘sat in a kind of awkward suspense’ for want of knives and forks, until Howe, after expressing surprise that they did not possess ‘portable implements’ of the kind, ‘finally relieved them from their embarrassment, by distributing to each a case the same as his own, which he had provided for that purpose.’ The real point of the story is that, if Howe had been an ordinary man, his dinner would probably have been resented by the officers as an impertinent practical joke. But he was not an ordinary man; among his officers and soldiers he was like King David: ‘Whatsoever the king did pleased all the people.’

Albany in New York State was always the base for expeditions against Canada, by the central route, which lay along the line of water communication. In war time through Albany regiments came and went, and in and around it they congregated and encamped. Albany was pre-eminently a centre for the old New York families of Dutch descent. On the upper waters of the Hudson and the lower reaches of the Mohawk River, which joins the Hudson a little above Albany, were the estates of the ‘patroons’ of the Dutch régime, and here their descendants lived and thrived. Mrs. Grant, in her Memoirs, tells of the lives and surroundings of one of the foremost of these families, the Schuylers, whose homes were in Albany and to the north of it in the district known as ‘The Flats.’ In her book an old Mrs. Schuyler (‘Aunt Schuyler’) is the central figure, as she was in the year 1758 the central figure of the Schuyler clan. The book tells of Lord Howe’s intimacy with the family, though he never took up his quarters with them, for he ‘always lay in his tent with the regiment which he commanded’; how the old lady loved him almost as a son, how sadly and affectionately she sped him on his last advance, and her grief when the news came that he was killed. ‘Aunt Schuyler ... had the utmost esteem for him, and the greatest hope that he would at some future period redress all those evils that had formerly impeded the service; and perhaps plant the British standard on the walls of Quebec.’ We have drawn for us the contrast between the good and bad type of officer, the gentleman and the bully, though both may be efficient fighting men. Returning to his friends on one occasion, Howe found to his great indignation that in his absence Captain Charles Lee had come through and, ‘as if he were in a conquered country,’ commandeered the loyal old lady’s stock and property, without having the necessary warrants for his high-handed proceedings. Lee’s next visit was after the fight at Ticonderoga, when he was brought back a wounded man to be nursed by those whom he had browbeaten and robbed. He was a king’s officer; but it is difficult to deduce from his case the moral that conduct such as his brought on the Revolution, seeing that he became a general in the Revolutionary army, of great though somewhat dubious reputation.

In 1757 and 1758 Lord Howe was winning the love and esteem of all who came into contact with him in America. In 1759 the Assembly of Massachusetts voted the monument to his memory. In 1765 the men of Boston were rioting against the Stamp Act, and in 1773 throwing cargoes of tea into Boston harbour. In 1775 came open war with the Mother Country and the fight of Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill hardest of hard fighters among the Americans was Israel Putnam: he had been by Howe’s side when the latter was killed. The night before his death Howe had been in company with John Stark, noted among the New Hampshire Rangers who followed Robert Rogers. It was Stark who, in 1777, planned and won the fight at Bennington, which was the beginning of the end of Burgoyne’s army. A young member of the Schuyler group, who had taken Howe to their hearts, was Philip Schuyler, afterwards one of the best known and most trusted of the Revolutionary leaders. Probably England and America had drifted too far apart at the time of the Seven Years’ War for any human influence to bring them wholly into line again. Yet, had Howes been multiplied and English statesmen and commanders been modelled on his lines, the parting might well have been postponed and been less bitter when it came. He stands out in history as one who in his day did all that man could do to bring the Colonies and the Mother Country closer together; and he is a type of the Englishmen who are still wanted to-day, and who happily are not wanting, as shown by the love and confidence borne towards Sir William Birdwood by the splendid fighting men from the Southern Seas, whom he led to less and yet to more than victory.

Just over a year from the date of Lord Howe’s death and Abercromby’s repulse at Ticonderoga, a much abler general than Abercromby, Jeffrey Amherst, marched once more against the fort. The French abandoned their entrenchments in front of it, of which Amherst promptly took possession; and a rearguard, left to hold the fort itself, after two or three days’ artillery fire, blew it up and left the ruins to be occupied by Amherst’s army. As the death of Lord Howe had immediately preceded Abercromby’s attack, so a day before the second enterprise ended successfully, another officer, well known in the army and in English Society, though not comparable with Lord Howe, was killed. An entry in Knox’s Historical Journal runs: ‘The Honourable Colonel Townshend was picked off to-day in the trenches by a cannon shot; he is very deservedly lamented by the General and the army’; a later entry mentions that his body was taken to Albany for burial. On the south side of the nave of Westminster Abbey, much farther up towards the Chancel than the place where the monument to Lord Howe stands, will be found a monument—

‘erected by a disconsolate parent, The Lady Viscountess Townshend, to the memory of her fifth son, The Honble. Lt.-Colonel Roger Townshend, who was killed by a cannon ball on the 25th of July 1759 in the 28th year of his age, as he was reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderagoe in North America ... tho’ premature his death, his life was glorious, enrolling him with the names of those immortal statesmen and commanders whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of this comprehensive and successful war have extended the commerce, enlarged the Dominion, and upheld the Majesty of these Kingdoms beyond the idea of any former age.’

The monument is an elaborate one, and the eulogy is obviously exaggerated. Horace Walpole would evidently have had it otherwise. In his ‘Short Notes of My Life’ he tells us, ‘I gave my Lady Townshend an epitaph and design for a tomb for her youngest son, killed at Ticonderoga; neither was used.’ He also gives us to understand that the mother was not so disconsolate as the monument asserts:

‘My Lady Townshend, who has not learning enough to copy a Spartan mother, has lost her youngest son. I saw her this morning—her affectation is on t’other side; she affects grief—but not so much for the son she has lost, as for t’other that she may lose.’

And again, ‘Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given her a hint that her hero George may be mortal too.’ Whatever may have been the mother’s preferences, the two brothers loved each other dearly. A few weeks before he was killed, Roger Townshend wrote to George Townshend’s wife to tell her of her husband’s safe arrival at Halifax from England in the best of health, and how he had sent him supplies of fresh vegetables to make up for the long sea-voyage. The letter continues:

‘My opinion of General Amherst as an honest good man, and my attachment to him as a soldier I thought would never allow me to wish that I might serve under any other person in America, but the tie of brother and friend united is too powerful, and I confess nothing ever gave me more real concern than not being employed on the same expedition.’

In turn we have George Townshend writing sadly before the fall of Quebec of the news of his brother’s death; and after Quebec had fallen, on the eve of his return to England, he writes to Amherst:

‘I hear I have got Barrington’s regiment. Alas, what a Bouquet this had been a year or two hence for poor Roger. I assure you I return thoroughly wounded from America. I loved him sincerely.’

George Townshend, the eldest son, whom Walpole clearly did not love, was Wolfe’s well-known brigadier, to whom Quebec capitulated, and around whom so much controversy gathered. He ended as a Marquess and a Field-Marshal, and there is no reason to doubt that he was a competent soldier. So also evidently was the younger brother. Amherst appointed him to be one of the two Deputy Adjutant-Generals of his army, his own brother, Colonel Amherst, being the other. We read of him in connection with the training of the Provincial regiments, and as commanding a detachment of Rangers sent to reconnoitre along Lake George. Amherst wrote to Wolfe that he had intended to send him home with dispatches after the fall of Ticonderoga, that his loss ‘marred the enjoyment I should otherwise have had in the reduction of the place.’ We may set him down as one of the might-have-beens, and Dean Stanley would presumably have classed him as the unsuccessful brother. If he had marked military ability, it has assuredly remained in the family; for those who read the epitaph upon his monument in Westminster Abbey, with its reference to a comprehensive war and upholding the majesty of these kingdoms, will carry their thoughts across the seas from North America to Mesopotamia, from Ticonderoga to Kut.[1]

FOOTNOTES