Bunker Hill

Later that year he sailed for London with a wooden box containing the ultimate trophy: a withered hunk of his own tarred-and-feathered flesh.
    On January 12, 1775, Malcom attended the levee at St. James’s, where he knelt before King George III and handed His Majesty a petition. What Malcom wanted more than anything else, he informed the king, was to return to Boston and resume his duties as a customs official—but not as just any customs official. He wanted to be made “a single Knight of the Tar . . . for I like the smell of it.”

CHAPTER TWO

    Poor Unhappy Boston
    O n Friday, May 13, 1774, a British sloop-of-war approached the lighthouse at the entrance to Boston Harbor. She was the
Lively
, twenty-eight days from England, with a notable passenger: Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the military in North America and soon to be the new royal governor of Massachusetts.
    Gage, fifty-four, had spent much of the last decade stationed in New York City, but in his youth he had seen more than his share of death on the battlefields of Europe and the New World. At twenty-five he was at Fontenoy (in what is today Belgium), where after politely conferring across a narrow divide about when to begin the fighting, opposing British and French armies killed or wounded about fifteen thousand of one another. A year later, in 1746, he witnessed the brutal suppression of the Scottish Highland clans at Culloden. Nine years after that, he was in Pennsylvania with a young provincial officer named George Washington at the onset of the French and Indian War. Both Gage and Washington served under General Edward Braddock during the disastrous Battle of the Monongahela near modern Pittsburgh. As the British army marched through the dense American wilderness, a deadly barrage erupted from unseen French and Indian forces. Bullets riddled Gage’s coat and grazed his eyebrow and stomach and wounded his horse, but somehow, like Washington, he survived. Applying some of the lessons learned in that humiliating defeat, Gage helped to establish a regiment of light infantry whose dress and tactics were better adapted to the guerilla-style fighting of the frontier. But all of this innovation went for naught when in 1758 Gage’s superior officer, General James Abercromby, ordered an ill-advised assault on a fortified French position at Fort Ticonderoga that resulted in two thousand needless casualties.
    Once given his own command, Gage showed a reluctance to fight. In 1759, while his good friend James Wolfe died in glorious triumph at Quebec, Gage dithered in Albany, apparently oblivious to orders to march on a French fort at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence. Despite talk of a censure, his close friend the commander in chief General Jeffrey Amherst had him installed as military governor of Montreal.
    By that time Gage had married the beautiful Margaret Kemble of New Jersey. Her grandfather had been a merchant in Turkey; her grandmother had been Greek. Add some French and English blood, and it was no wonder that she radiated a bewitching exoticism, a sad and contemplative hauteur that is still discernible in the portraits of her that have survived. Gage, her senior by fourteen years, personified the English gentleman. With a straight and elegant nose on a slender face, he was a most upright and world-weary man. His friends were devoted to him, but no one matched the loyalty of his older brother, William, the famously absentminded viscount whose influence within the British ministry had helped to elevate Gage to the highest military rung in America.
    For the last ten years Gage’s duties as commander in chief had kept him in New York, where he and Margaret had lived in what was described as “conjugal felicity.” By the spring of 1773 their two eldest sons, Harry and John, were enrolled at Gage’s alma mater, Westminster School in London; in June, Gage and Margaret, who was once again pregnant, sailed with the rest of the family for England. It was Gage’s first trip home in seventeen years.
    He was disturbed to discover that London had changed almost beyond recognition while he’d been in America. In a letter to General Frederick Haldimand, who was serving in his stead in New York, he compared London to Constantinople or “any city I had never seen.” The bureaucracy that had evolved during the last decade and a half as Britain attempted to maintain control over its expanding empire was not only large; it was