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Female Tories served the British as spies and couriers. Lorenda Holmes had carried messages to Howe’s forces in 1776. Captured by rebel committeemen, she was stripped naked and exposed to a patriot crowd but, she wrote, “received no wounds or bruises from them only shame and horror of the mind.” Holmes carried on, helping to slip loyalists through rebel lines into occupied New York City. When the rebels apprehended her a second time, they held her right foot on hot coals until it was badly burned.

It was men and women such as these, said one British commander, that made New York the principal bulwark of royal power and influence in the colonies. The “Gibraltar of North America” he called it—a proud allusion to the royal fortress that was, even as he spoke, standing fast against the combined forces of France and Spain.

“TOUJOURS DE LA GAIETÉ”

Superficially, at least, the British occupation restored some of the prosperity that New York had enjoyed in the 1750s. The city’s rebounding civilian population opened lucrative new markets for area farmers and, after years of nonimportation, for British manufacturers eager to reduce inventories of clothing, hardware, and other finished goods. Provisioning the huge military machine—five hundred ships jammed the harbor within a month after the city’s fall—generated windfall profits for the Waltons, Bayards, Lows, and other Tory merchants. When Parliament authorized a fleet of 120-odd privateers to be fitted out in New York to prey on rebel shipping, it created work for thousands of seamen and attracted immense quantities of goods and money into the local economy. (In one six-month period, between September 1778 and March 1779, privateers came in with 165 prizes worth over six hundred thousand pounds.) Shopkeepers, cloakmakers, milliners, dressmakers, wigmakers, and coachmakers were busy again trying to meet the demand of His Majesty’s officers and their wives for all the comforts of home. There was money to be made, too, in illicit trade between the city and rebel-held areas of Westchester, New Jersey, and Connecticut, despite efforts of authorities on both sides to stamp it out. Alexander Hamilton calculated in 1782 that upstate patriots were buying thirty thousand pounds’ worth of luxuries from New York merchants every year, plus an additional eighty thousand from sources in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. Cartloads of specie were said to arrive in the city every week.

Thanks to this sudden wealth, plus General Howe’s own weakness for extravagant living—“Toujours de la gaiete!” he cried as the occupation got underway—New York’s fashionable classes were soon caught up in a social whirl that would have been unthinkable only a year or two before. Fox-hunting and golf made a fast comeback, dispelling the gloom of republican austerity. Billiards were all the rage at the King’s Head Tavern. Horse racing returned to Hempstead Plains, and its popularity prompted the opening of a new course, Ascot Heath, on the Flatland Plains, five miles east of the Brooklyn ferry. Two rival cricket clubs, the Brooklyn and Greenwich, squared off on Bowling Green or near Cannon’s Tavern on Corlear’s Hook. Ladies and gentlemen of quality entertained themselves with saltwater bathing parties and concerts, and every two weeks at the City Tavern on Broadway there was a “Garrison Assembly” where local girls danced with dashing officers like the young Captain Horatio Nelson—“genuine, smooth-faced, fresh-coloured” Englishmen “of family and consideration” (as the American prisoner of war Alexander Graydon described them). The John Street Theater, renamed the Theatre Royal, reopened in January 1777 with a production of Tom Thumb. Some 150 performances followed over the next half-dozen years, including works by Shakespeare, Garrick, and Sheridan. The actors, mostly officers, were fondly known as “Clinton’s Thespians.” Audiences usually numbered around 750.

Especially lavish festivities accompanied the Queen’s Birthday celebration of 1780,