The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

Admiralty in March. “It will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.” A soldier caught trading his musket for a jug of New England Kill-Devil could draw five hundred lashes with a nine-cord cat, enough to lay bare the ribs and kidneys. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Foot—the Royal Welch Fusiliers—recorded in his diary that many men “are intoxicated daily” and that two had died of alcohol poisoning in a single night. “When the soldiers are in a state of intoxication,” he added, “they are frequently induced to desert.”

      And desert they did. Drunk or sober, redcoats were lured by Americans who offered farm-smock disguises, escape horses, and three hundred acres to any absconding regular. Estimates of British Army desertions over the past year ranged from 120 to more than 200. Five-guinea rewards were advertised by company officers in the Boston Post-Boy for the likes of Private Will Gibbs, “about 5 feet 7 inches high, and of a fair complexion,” last seen wearing a round hat and a brown coat trimmed in blue. The problem was even worse for naval captains: more than twenty thousand British seamen had jumped ship in American ports since early in the century, and nearly another eighty thousand—almost 14 percent of all jack-tars who served—would abscond during the coming war, including those who deserted in home waters. Many had been forced into service by press gangs, while some detested the harsh life at sea; all resented the paltry nineteen shillings a month paid seamen since the reign of Charles II. Boston was particularly notorious for desertion, and the Royal Navy ships now blockading the harbor had remained at anchor through the winter with their gunports caulked and their topmasts housed against the weather, unable to berth for fear of mass defections.

      Floggings, and worse, had limited deterrence. Private Valentine Duckett, barely twenty-one, had been sentenced to die after a three-day trial for desertion in the fall. “I am now to finish a life, which by the equitable law of my country, I just forfeited,” he told his comrades while being lashed to a stake on the beach below the Common. A six-man firing squad botched the job even at eight yards’ range, but after a coup de grâce to the head, the entire army was ordered to march “in a slow, solemn step” to view Private Duckett in his coffin. Private William Ferguson of the 10th Foot, a former tailor now dressed in a white shroud, suffered a similar fate on December 24. The execution, a lieutenant observed, was “the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas.” On March 13, Gage commuted the death sentence of Private Robert Vaughan, but after more soldiers deserted the next day, the high command announced that this would be “the last man he will pardon.” Vaughan took advantage of his reprieve to flee again a month later, this time without getting caught.

      By contrast, many young British officers hankered for action. Among them was a tall, dark-eyed captain in the King’s Own, the eldest son of a vicar from County Antrim. William Glanville Evelyn, now thirty-three and still unmarried, had a shark-fin nose, a dimpled chin, and the faint spatter of smallpox scars across his cheeks. He had soldiered for the king since the age of eighteen and was ever alert for the patron and cash needed to secure his next promotion; most army commissions came with a price tag, ensuring that only the better sort filled the officer ranks. (A lieutenant colonelcy in a foot regiment might cost £3,500.) In one of the sixteen surviving letters he would write from America, Evelyn assured his father that he was “pretty well known” to General Gage and that other senior officers in Boston had been “very civil to me.” The 4th Foot—raised a century earlier and designated the King’s Own to honor George I in 1714—was serving the empire at a critical moment in a vital place. To properly dress the part, Evelyn had asked that a Bedford Street cloth merchant in London send out scarlet, white, and blue material for two new uniforms, plus “the proper quantity of regimental buttons,” a pair of epaulettes, and two hats “with silver buttons.”

      Nine months of duty in Boston had showed young Glanville Evelyn that a New England posting was not all hardship and tedium. “We get plenty of turtle, pineapple, and Madeira,” he wrote. “The weather is delightful beyond description.” Yet his contempt for the Americans had increased week by week. “There does not exist so great a set of rascals and poltroons,” he told his father a month after arriving in Boston. By October 1774, he had concluded that “a civil war must inevitably happen in the course of a few months, or Great Britain might forever give up America.” By December he fully shared his government’s conviction that “a few enterprising, ambitious demagogues” had incited the insurrection; moreover, he believed that many thousands of loyalists were “inclined to our side,” though they would not “openly declare themselves” until the Crown asserted its full authority. “Never,” he wrote, “did any nation so much deserve to be made an example of to future ages.” As his soldiers practiced their sharpshooting and beat their drums to annoy the Jonathans, Evelyn’s greatest worry was that “unsteadiness” in Lord North’s ministry might lead to a political settlement that spared the Americans from imperial wrath. “We only fear they will avail themselves of the clemency and generosity of the English,” he wrote a cousin in London, “and evade the chastisement due to unexampled villainy, and which we are so impatiently waiting to inflict.”

      With the early arrival of spring, the chances of a pernicious peace faded. Captain Evelyn was glad. Blood had risen in his gorge. “The hour is now very nigh in which this affair will be brought to a crisis,” he told his father. “The resolutions we expect are by this time upon the water, which are to determine the fate of Great Britain and America.… We shall shortly receive such orders as will authorize us to scourge the rebellion with rods of iron.” As usual, he signed his letter, “Yours ever affectionate, W.G.E.”

      The expected orders arrived on Friday, April 14, when a burly, flush-faced dragoon captain bounded into Boston from the Nautilus. He had been sent ahead to Massachusetts to buy mounts for his regiment, now following on the high seas from Ireland, but his first task was to deliver a sealed dispatch marked “SECRET” to Province House. Striding past the budding elms and up the broad front steps beneath the gaze of the copper Indian on the roof, the captain handed over the document, saluted, and wandered off to look at horseflesh.

      Upon breaking the seal, Gage found a twenty-four-paragraph letter from Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer, written with the cocksure clarity of a man who slept in his own bed every night three thousand miles from trouble. Drafted on January 27, in consultation with the king and North’s cabinet, the order had remained in Dartmouth’s desk for weeks while events played out in London, including those futile conversations with Dr. Franklin, Parliament’s minuet with the monarch at St. James’s Palace, and the introduction of more punitive legislation. Further weeks passed while ill-tempered westerly gales kept Nautilus and her companion sloop Falcon pinned to the south coast of England. But at last the fatal command had arrived:

      The violences committed by those who have taken up arms in Massachusetts have appeared to me as the acts of a rude rabble, without concert, without conduct; and therefore I think that a small force now, if put to the test, would be able to conquer them.… It is the opinion of the King’s servants, in which His Majesty concurs, that the essential step to be taken toward reestablishing government would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors in the provincial congress, whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.

      There was more: reinforcements were en route, though hardly the twenty thousand that Gage thought necessary. Twice Dartmouth conceded that “your own judgment and discretion” must shape any operation; yet, with proper preparation and secrecy, “it can hardly fail of success, and will perhaps be accomplished without bloodshed.… Any efforts on their part to encounter a regular force cannot be very formidable.” It was agreed in London that Gage had demonstrated restraint to the point of lamentable indulgence; now he must be firm, come what may. “The king’s dignity and the honor and safety of the empire require that in such a situation, force should be repelled by force.”

      Although clear enough, this dispatch from Dartmouth was actually a duplicate. The original, with appended documents, was aboard the Falcon, and Gage, ever scrupulous, ever cautious, would await that vessel’s arrival in Boston before striking. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do, and orders flew from Province House. Newly repaired navy longboats were to be lashed to the sterns of the Somerset, Boyne, and Asia for quick repositioning. The fortifications at Boston Neck, the slender isthmus leading into the town from