In domestic affairs Great Britain was divided.The Whigs and Tories were carrying on a warfare shameless beyond even the bitter partisan strife of later days.In Parliament the Whigs cheered at military defeats which might serve to discredit the Tory Government.The navy was torn by faction.When, in 1778, the Whig Admiral Keppel fought an indecisive naval battle off Ushant and was afterwards accused by one of his officers, Sir Hugh Palliser, of not pressing the enemy hard enough, party passion was invoked.The Whigs were for Keppel, the Tories for Palliser, and the London mob was Whig.When Keppel was acquitted there were riotous demonstrations; the house of Palliser was wrecked, and he himself barely escaped with his life.Whig naval officers declared that they had no chance of fair treatment at the hands of a Tory Admiralty, and Lord Howe, among others, now refused to serve.For a time British supremacy on the sea disappeared and it was only regained in April, 1782, when the Tory Admiral Rodney won a great victory in the West Indies against the French.
A spirit of violence was abroad in England.The disabilities of the Roman Catholics were a gross scandal.They might not vote or hold public office.Yet when, in 1780, Parliament passed a bill removing some of their burdens dreadful riots broke out in London.A fanatic, Lord George Gordon, led a mob to Westminster and, as Dr.Johnson expressed it, "insulted" both Houses of Parliament.The cowed ministry did nothing to check the disturbance.The mob burned Newgate jail, released the prisoners from this and other prisons, and made a deliberate attempt to destroy London by fire.Order was restored under the personal direction of the King, who, with all his faults, was no coward.
At the same time the Irish Parliament, under Protestant lead, was making a Declaration of Independence which, in 1782, England was obliged to admit by formal act of Parliament.For the time being, though the two monarchies had the same king, Ireland, in name at least, was free of England.
Washington's enemy thus had embarrassments enough.Yet these very years, 1779 and 1780, were the years in which he came nearest to despair.The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion.As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult.The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally.Whatever Great Britain's difficulties about finance they were light compared with Washington's.In time the "continental dollar" was worth only two cents.Yet soldiers long had to take this money at its face value for their pay, with the result that the pay for three months would scarcely buy a pair of boots.There is little wonder that more than once Washington had to face formidable mutiny among his troops.The only ones on whom he could rely were the regulars enlisted by Congress and carefully trained.The worth of the militia, he said, "depends entirely on the prospects of the day; if favorable, they throng to you; if not, they will not move." They played a chief part in the prosperous campaign of 1777, when Burgoyne was beaten.In the next year, before Newport, they wholly failed General Sullivan and deserted shamelessly to their homes.
By 1779 the fighting had shifted to the South.Washington personally remained in the North to guard the Hudson and to watch the British in New York.He sent La Fayette to France in January, 1779, there to urge not merely naval but military aid on a great scale.La Fayette came back after an absence of a little over a year and in the end France promised eight thousand men who should be under Washington's control as completely as if they were American soldiers.The older nation accepted the principle that the officers in the younger nation which she was helping should rank in their grade before her own.It was a magnanimity reciprocated nearly a century and a half later when a great American army in Europe was placed under the supreme command of a Marshal of France.
