Bunker Hill

family were saved” and brought to America. With England gone, the colonies could have their beloved king all to themselves, without the bother of that conniving and corrupt ministry and Parliament.
    But as quickly became clear to Gage, the king was no uninvolved figurehead. With bulging, heavily lidded eyes, the king questioned him closely about Boston and Massachusetts. The general, not normally the most assertive of men, seems to have been temporarily intoxicated by his proximity to ultimate power. “He says,” George III reported to Lord North, “they will be lions, whilst we are lambs, but if we take the resolute part they will undoubtedly prove very meek.” Gage maintained that only four regiments of soldiers were “sufficient to prevent any disturbance.” The king urged North to meet with Gage and “hear his ideas as to the mode of compelling Boston to submit to whatever may be thought necessary.”
    Gage left the king with the impression that he was ready “at a day’s notice” to return to America and implement whatever “coercive measures” were required. In actuality, he had deep reservations about returning to the colonies, particularly when it came to Massachusetts. “America is a mere bully,” he’d written back in 1770, “from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.” He might talk tough to the king, but he was by nature a kind and forgiving man. For a military officer, he had an unusual abhorrence for confrontation and, in his mid-fifties, with a total of three children attending schools in England, ample reason not to return to America.
    His wife, however, felt differently. After only half a year in England, Margaret already missed her native land. She may have wanted her new child to meet her family back in America. Given the growing sense of urgency surrounding Britain’s response to the Tea Party, Gage eventually decided that between the demands of his country and his wife, he had no choice but to return to America as military commander and royal governor of Massachusetts.
    —
    Once the
Lively
had sailed past the lighthouse set amid the cluster of little islands called the Brewsters (which the Pilgrims had named 153 years before for their lay minister William Brewster), the twenty-gun sloop-of-war headed north between Lovells Island to starboard and Georges Island to port. Up ahead, past Thompson, Spectacle, and Long islands to the west, was the cliff-faced oval of Castle William, where the British flag with its red St. George and blue St. Andrew crosses flew above the stone walls of a fort. About three miles beyond that Gage could see the rounded eminence of Boston’s Beacon Hill, surrounded by a bristle of spires and ship masts.
    For the next four days, Gage remained at the Castle, where he learned what he could from the tea consignees, whose confinement to the fort’s living quarters was now approaching six months. Also present at the Castle was Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was soon to leave for London. Hutchinson, sixty-two, had come to represent all that the patriots claimed was wrong with the British Empire. In reality, he was far more sympathetic to the plight of provincial Massachusetts than his enemies ever allowed. Back in 1765 he had privately criticized the Stamp Act; he had also had reservations about many of the ministry’s subsequent actions. But rather than constantly challenge Parliament’s right to dictate policy, as the patriots insisted on doing, he felt it was in the colony’s best interests to work through proper governmental channels. At his house in Milton he had created his own version of an English country estate, where he watched in increasing bewilderment as the inhabitants of the province he loved above all else came to view him as a grasping and scheming traitor.
    Hutchinson and the tea consignees reported that Boston was in turmoil. Word of the Port Act, the first of several measures Gage was to enforce over the course of the next few months, had preceded the general by three days. The town was to be sealed off from almost all commercial activity until such time as “peace and obedience to the laws shall be so far restored.” By June 1, no ships requiring customs oversight were to enter Boston Harbor. By June 15, no ships were allowed to leave. With a fleet of British naval vessels patrolling a twenty-five-mile swath of coastline extending from Point Shirley to the north and Point Allerton to the south,