Bunker Hill

appallingly inefficient. Gage spent his days in “a perpetual hunt,” trying to find officials who were just as assiduously trying to find him. No wonder the ministry had appeared so vacillating and indecisive in its dealings with the Americans. No one seemed to be in charge.
    In welcome contrast to all this troubling change were his family’s two ancestral estates—Highmeadow on his mother’s side in Gloucestershire and Firle on his father’s side in Sussex. Both were still the inviting retreats they’d been when he was a boy, and it was at Highmeadow that their sixth child, Charlotte Margaret, was born in the summer of 1773. By the end of the year, Gage appears to have decided that it was time to make England his family’s permanent home. Then, in January 1774, came word of the Boston Tea Party, and Gage was wanted in London for his expertise in colonial affairs.
    On January 29 Gage attended a hearing at the Cockpit, an octagonal room in Whitehall Palace that had once served as a cockfighting arena for Henry VIII and later, renovated by the architect Inigo Jones, as a small theater. The Cockpit now served as the judicial chamber for the king’s Privy Council, and with tensions between Britain and the American colonies approaching a crisis, this was where Benjamin Franklin, agent for Massachusetts, presented a petition from the province’s legislature requesting the removal of Governor Thomas Hutchinson.
    A year before Franklin had leaked some letters written by Hutchinson and other colonial officials to patriot leaders in Boston. That the letters were private and had been acquired through undoubtedly nefarious means did nothing to quell the outrage they incited among the people of Massachusetts. According to Samuel Adams, the letters provided incontrovertible proof that the governor had been assisting the ministry “in their designs of establishing arbitrary power.”
    Franklin, no keen revolutionary, had originally hoped that the letters would demonstrate that Hutchinson, not the British government, was responsible for Boston’s troubles. With Hutchinson serving as the scapegoat, relations between the colonists and Britain might begin to improve. Franklin, however, had made a catastrophic miscalculation.
    Representing the ministry at the hearing in the Cockpit was Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn. Wedderburn had a reputation for eloquence and mockery, and the privy councillors had invited a large number of spectators sympathetic to the crown who, along with Thomas Gage, had packed themselves into this intimate, theatrical space for what promised to be the political equivalent of a blood sport.
    For the next hour, Franklin, silent and stone-faced, endured an unceasing stream of abuse from Wedderburn as many of those surrounding the two men laughed and applauded. Franklin was, according to Wedderburn, not only a deceitful thief; he was the “first mover and prime conductor” of all the unrest in Boston and even had secret ambitions to succeed Hutchinson as governor.
    Gage had known Franklin since the Braddock campaign back in 1755, when the Boston-born Philadelphian had helped to assemble the many horses and wagons necessary to transport the troops and provisions into the Pennsylvania wilderness. The general seems to have been both fascinated and troubled by the spectacle of the sixty-eight-year-old polymath in an antiquated wig being ridiculed by a bellowing lawyer and a crowd of Britain’s most influential politicians. “The Doctor was so abused,” Gage wrote, “his conduct and character so cut and mangled, I wonder he had confidence to stand it; and the whole audience, which was humorous, to a man against him.” No matter what anyone thought of Franklin’s role in the controversy, the encounter did not bode well for the future of British-American relations.
    On February 4 Gage was admitted into the inner sanctum of the British Empire: the small, richly furnished room known as the King’s Closet at St. James’s Palace, where he found himself in the presence of George III. For the colonists in America, the king represented their most cherished link to Britain. George III, it was said, remained steadfast in his love for his American subjects. It was the king’s advisers in the ministry who were the problem. Several years before, the Boston lawyer James Otis had given voice to the fantasy that would have solved everything: If only England “was sunk in the sea so that the king and his