The harshest criticism for the British failure to end the American Revolution fell upon two men who at one crucial moment during the war seemed most likely to succeed: Richard and William Howe. In The Howe Dynasty, her impressive account of the rise of the Howe family from relative obscurity early in the eighteenth century to positions of prestige and power during the reign of George III, Julie Flavell provides fresh insight into a privileged society that supported a distant war with little chance of success.
Indeed, the British perspective on the conflict is one of the book’s greatest strengths. American readers may think that independence was largely the result of Washington’s dogged determination not to be defeated, but Flavell urges them to consider the other side. In her narrative the British leaders turn out not to have been incompetent fools. Like so many imperial officials over the centuries, however, they were locked into traditional, self-serving assumptions about their own power that blinded them to the social and cultural realities in distant dominions.
Although Flavell’s account introduces many different family members over several generations, she shows that the Howes’ greatest successes and failures depended chiefly on three brothers who became national celebrities. George Howe served with distinction during the Seven Years’ War and died in 1758 leading his troops against the French near Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. His courage earned him the respect of the colonists, and the Massachusetts legislature gratefully funded a monument in his honor at Westminster Abbey. Richard gained fame as an admiral, while William became the commander-in-chief of the British army in America. They were aristocrats and members of Parliament, and it came as no surprise that after Gage was called home in 1775, the king selected Richard and William to end the rebellion. Although William had earlier expressed reservations about the rationale for a full-scale war in America, he put them aside when presented with the opportunity to command a huge expeditionary force. Like other British military officers, he assumed that restoring order in the colonies would not be difficult. “I may safely assert,” he declared, “that the insurgents are very few, in comparison with the whole of the people.”