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Lazy preparation was a product of these assumptions. Although the coming of hostilities was a predictable consequence of the Coercive Acts of the year before, no measures for military readiness had been undertaken in the interim. The swaggering Sandwich, long an advocate of forceful action, had done nothing as First Lord of the Admiralty to prepare the Navy, essential for transportation and blockade; in fact, he had reduced its strength by 4000 men, or a fifth of the total, as late as December 1774. “We took a step as decisive as the passage of the Rubicon,” General Burgoyne was to say some months later, “and now find ourselves plunged at once in a most serious war without a single requisition, gunpowder excepted, for carrying it on.”

In April 1775, General Gage, upon learning of a large quantity of rebel arms stored at Concord, twenty miles away, took the obvious decision to despatch a force to destroy the stores. Despite his attempted secrecy of movement, the warning signal lights flashed, the messengers rode, the Minute Men gathered at Lexington, exchanged fire and were scattered. While the redcoats marched on to Concord, the alerted countryside rose, men with their muskets poured in from every village and farm, and engaged the returning British troops in relentless pursuit with deadly accuracy of fire until the redcoats themselves had to be rescued by two regiments sent out from Boston. “The horrid Tragedy is commenced,” sadly acknowledged Stephen Sayre when news of the event reached London.

That actual war had commenced beyond retrieval seemed still uncertain in England, and the event inspired a last impassioned appeal to common sense from John Wesley, the Methodist leader. In a letter to Lord Dartmouth on 14 June, he wrote, “Waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask is it common sense to use force toward the Americans? Not 20,000 troops, not treble that number, fighting 3,000 miles away from home and supplies could hope to conquer a nation fighting for liberty.” From the reports of his preachers in America he knew that the colonists were not peasants ready to run at the sight of a redcoat or the sound of a musket, but hardy frontiersmen fit for war. They would not be easily defeated. “No, my Lord, they are terribly united.… For God’s sake,” Wesley concluded, “Remember Rehoboam! Remember Philip the Second! Remember King Charles the First!”

5. “… A Disease; a Delirium”: 1775–83

Crisis does not necessarily purge a system of folly; old habits and attitudes die hard. Conduct of the war by the Government was to be marked by sluggishness, negligence, divided counsel and fatal misjudgments of the opponent. Lax management at home translated into lax generalship in the field. Generals Howe and Burgoyne had been disbelievers to start with; when Howe was in command his indolence became a byword. Other military men doubted the use of land forces to conquer America. The Adjutant-General, General Edward Harvey, had judged the whole project to be “as wild an idea as ever controverted common sense.”

Ministers underestimated the task and the needs. Materials and men were inadequate, ships unseaworthy, too few and short of able seamen; problems of transport and communication were unappreciated in London, where direction of the war was retained at a distance that required of two to three months for letter and reply. Overall, performance was affected by the unpopularity of a war against fellow-subjects. “The ardor of the nation in this cause,” acknowledged Lord North after Lexington and Bunker Hill, “has not arisen to the pitch one could wish.” Meager results in recruiting, with fewer than 200 enlistments in three months, led to the mercenary employment of Hessians from Germany (amounting ultimately to one-third of all British forces in America). While employment of mercenaries was customary in England’s wars at a time when military service was very low in the esteem of the common man, the use of the Hessians did more than anything else to antagonize the colonists,