General William Howe / Richard Howe

Richard Howe

General William Howe

The Siege of Boston was well underway when General William Howe arrived with reinforcements. With him to bolster the war effort were two Generals—Henry Clinton and John Burgoyne. They were pressed into the thick of the combat with hardly time to get their bearings. The troops were encouraged by the sight of fresh combat soldiers but in short order the Redcoats began to rally again. The following conversation takes place in 1798. The brothers, Richard and William are both in retirement.

General William Howe: (Enters his brother’s home and sees him stretched out on a cot.) It’s so good to see you alive and kicking Richard.

Richard Howe: Alive still but hardly kicking.  I was reading just now in my diary. The pages are worn as badly as I am. How are you brother?

William: You know what they say about old soldiers? They die from talking too much so I shall sit here quietly and let you amuse me with the latest news from London.

Richard: Aside from a banality or two about how a lifetime of war changes people, I have very little to tell you.  I do look back often on your stand so long ago against the Intolerable Acts. You shouted out in Parliament that you believed we should bring about peace with the colonies. You were outshouted by your closest friends.

William: I was naive at the time. Clearly, I felt sorry for the ragged, badly trained and underfed

patriots who wanted nothing more than live their own lives in peace. It didn’t take long after the Siege of Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill to come to my senses.  I still wanted the war to end quickly with as few casualties as possible but I felt equally bad for our fallen troops. Still showing myself naïve, I once sent a letter to Mr. Washington hoping he might choose to lay down his arms but the letter was returned saying there was no Mister Washington in the American Army. You see, Richard, I should have addressed the letter to General Washington. Washington’s position was that if Lord Howe had come from London with the authority only to grant pardons, he had come to the wrong place.

Richard: This attitude of the British was typical of everyone from King George down to the sergeants in the field towards Americans. I admit that it was patronizing and disdainful.

William:  Now that we are no longer serving the Crown, I can agree with you on that point. I still wonder at how fragile a military career can be. I was sent to America in May of 1775. My first battles were successful and I was hailed back here as a true hero. Then we began to lose. After failing at a chance to take Washington captive twice during the Battle of Princeton we were overrun by the Americans at almost at every turn. Granted I made a series of mistakes and three years later, in 1778, my resignation had been accepted and I was out of favor with the king and the country.

Richard: I remember how despondent you were. You did get back to work in a training organization to show young men how to fight and stay alive in combat.

William: My career was in reverse. I started doing what I had done so many years earlier but I was feeling useful again. With the outbreak of the French Revolution later, I had a great deal of work to do. Much later, I served as governor to Plymouth, where I remained for a few years.

Richard: Let me ask you, William was it worth it? If you had it to do over, would you do the very same thing?

William: I hope I would have remained somewhat naïve and optimistic. I would still believe that King George was an awful bully and if the war had taught him some valuable lessons, then it would have been worth it.

When his brother Richard died in 1799 without surviving male issue, Howe inherited the Irish titles and became the 5th Viscount Howe until he died on July 12, 1814 at 84 years of age.