Bunker Hill

Wight.”
    Derby let it be known that he had left Salem four days after the departure of the vessel carrying General Gage’s account of Lexington and Concord. But the
Quero
had not only managed to pass the much larger
Sukey
, she had put twelve days between her and the British vessel. This meant that for almost two weeks, the king’s ministers were unable to refute the patriot version of events. Lord Dartmouth grew so frustrated by the seemingly endless wait that on June 1 he penned a letter to Thomas Gage in Boston: “It is very much to be lamented that we have not some account from you of this transaction. . . . We expect the arrival of that vessel with great impatience, but till she arrives I can form no decisive judgment of what has happened.”
    Gage’s account turned out to be quite similar to the provincial version of events. There was the unresolved question of who fired first, but that did not change the fact that men, on both sides, had been killed. Contrary to the ministry’s expectations, the Americans had proved themselves to be more than willing to fight.
    —
    Even as the schooner
Quero
was approaching England with word of Lexington and Concord, Major Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne were headed to Boston on the man-of-war
Cerberus
. Somewhere in the Atlantic, the
Quero
(with her report of Lexington) and the
Cerberus
(with the commanders sent to bolster Gage) passed each other. The irony of three well-known British generals sailing to America on a vessel named for the mythical three-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell was simply too obvious to escape comment in the English press:
    Behold the
Cerberus
the Atlantic plow,
    Her precious cargo—Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe.
    Bow, wow, wow!
    General John Burgoyne, the first named in this little ditty, had both an ego and a way with words. In addition to being a military officer who’d established a reputation for bravery in Europe, he was a playwright, whose
The Maid of the Oaks
had been produced recently in London by David Garrick, and Burgoyne, for one, wasn’t going to let the name of the ship crimp his notorious flair for the dramatic. As the
Cerberus
approached Boston Harbor, she came upon a packet bound for Newport. The two vessels luffed into the wind so that their crews could speak, and Burgoyne shouted out to the packet’s captain, “What news?” The captain responded that Gage’s army in Boston was surrounded by ten thousand country people. Burgoyne cried out in astonishment. “What! Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand king’s troops shut up! Well, let
us
get in, and we’ll soon find elbowroom.” Burgoyne was to regret the boast, to which Gage (when he later heard of it) must have responded with a knowing and weary smile.
    As Gage was well aware, sending Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne (who arrived in Boston on May 25, just in time to witness the debacle at the Battle of Chelsea Creek) was hardly a vote of confidence on the part of the king and Lord North. What’s more, their arrival required him to recount, in all its dreary detail, the even more embarrassing debacle at Lexington and Concord.
    Burgoyne was the showman (and a classmate of Gage’s at Westminster), but it was William Howe who had the reputation as a fighter. When Wolfe led the victorious assault on Quebec during the French and Indian War, he had looked to Howe to find a way to scale the near-vertical cliffs fronting the Plains of Abraham. A year earlier, Howe’s greatly admired older brother George had died in the arms of Israel Putnam at the failed assault at Fort Ticonderoga; indeed, George had been so beloved by the soldiers from Massachusetts that the colony had paid for a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Given both his own and his brother’s legacies in America, William Howe was an inspired choice on the part of the British ministry.
    Henry Clinton was a bit of a mystery to his fellow officers. Although he’d been born in New York, his professional reputation had been made fighting in the European theater of the Seven Years’ War. Intelligent and ambitious, he was also socially awkward (he described himself in a letter written during the passage to Boston as a “shy bitch”) and had a reputation for working badly with his peers—an unfortunate characteristic given that the British army in Boston now had more than its share of major generals.
    By early June, Gage had determined that there was no longer any “prospect of any