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Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed north. A British fleet under Admiral Howe from New York moved after him, but a series of frustrations intervened, culminating in a furious storm that dispersed both fleets. Battle was averted when, in the gale, d’Estaing’s flagship suffered the loss of masts and rudder, forcing him to retreat into Boston under a makeshift jury rig for repairs. From Boston he sailed away without action, leaving soured hopes and no love. Americans in their disappointment claimed they had been “deserted in a most rascally manner as if the Devil himself were in the French fleet.” To smooth over a riot of bad feeling took earnest effort by Washington and others, but to no great purpose, since d’Estaing was not fortune’s favorite. From Boston he sailed to the West Indies and returned the following year for another joint venture with the Americans: to recapture Savannah, which had been taken by the British the year before. In the fighting, Count d’Estaing was wounded and this assault, too, failed in its purpose. The cherished hope of naval superiority, which should have shut the British off from their supply line, vanished with the last sight of d’Estaing’s masts as they disappeared over the horizon, taking the frustrated Admiral back to France.

*Gibbon had been elected to Parliament as a supporter of the government in 1774.

IX

Low Point of the Revolution

INTERNED in Paris, Admiral Rodney, Britain’s ablest naval officer, was moored far from mast or sail, an admiral without a sea. Frantic in disuse, he tried through friends to be recalled for a private audience with the King, in vain. He wrote to his wife urging her to plead his cause with Sandwich in person and to send his son to speak to Lord North. Sandwich refused to receive Lady Rodney, replying to her letter that it would be politically impossible to give her husband active employment until he had discharged his debts to private creditors and to the Exchequer, referring, it may be supposed, to expenses like the greatcoats for the Greenwich Hospital pensioners, charged to the navy. In an unnecessarily mean letter to the King, Sandwich wrote, “If Sir George Rodney should from his indigence have any temptation to make advantage of purchasing stores or anything else of that sort, he will have no means of doing it at present, as there will be a Commissioner on the spot through whose hands all that business must be transacted.” It was this kind of action that formed his contemporaries’ dislike and generally low opinion of Sandwich as a man. When Rodney was later recalled to active duty, an Admiralty Commissioner was indeed assigned to him to make sure he did not use his post for personal enrichment. No one knew more about taking advantage of purchasing than Sandwich himself, up to his elbows in jobbery throughout his career. Since graft was a way of life to English officials, it is hard to understand why, if the Navy Board found indebtedness so shocking, they made it virtually incumbent on Rodney by paying only half the salary due his rank, possibly on the pretext of his residence abroad. If the Navy Board would “deliver but half of what is due to me as Rear-Admiral of England,” he wrote to his wife in April, 1778, “it would be sufficient to satisfy every body and there would be money to spare besides.” In his letters, he pointed out rather logically that employment was the only method by which he could both serve his country and honorably discharge his debts. Certainly Sandwich seems to have borne some kind of grudge. To leave in disuse at this juncture of renewed war the most dynamic sailor in the Royal Navy, as Rodney was soon dramatically to prove himself, and one moreover willing to serve under Sandwich as First Lord, when most officers at this time, owing to the Keppel affair, were not, was hardly in the national interest. The given reason was that Rodney was too bellicose and likely to allow himself some action that would add Spain to the war, but this seems not to have been a very real fear, for the British were always making slighting