Richard Howe

English admiral

• Born: March 8, 1726
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: August 5, 1799
• Place of death: London, England

One of England’s foremost seamen of the Age of Sail, Howe won several noted victories over the French and Spanish but was unsuccessful in negotiating an end to the American Revolution.

Early Life

Richard Howe was born into a landed family. His grandfather, father, and brothers all distinguished—and enriched—themselves in service to the Whig regime of the eighteenth century. Richard’s grandfather, Sir Scrope Howe, was rewarded for his role in the Glorious Revolution by being created an Irish viscount. The Irish title was purely an honorary one and did not indicate any particular interest in Ireland. Apparently, none of his descendants ever took a seat in the House of Lords in Dublin. Richard Howe’s father, Emanuel Scrope, Second Viscount Howe, loyally was married to Mary Sophia von Kielmansegge, daughter of one of the two mistresses whom King George I brought with him from Germany at the Hanoverian succession. They had five sons and four daughters before the Second Lord Howe died at his post as governor of Barbados in 1735. Richard Howe was their second son.

Like his brothers, Howe was educated at home and, briefly, at Eton before beginning his career of service to the Crown. The navy was a popular choice for second sons of aristocratic families. Though its dangers were too great for the eldest son and heir to the family property, it offered a younger brother the chance to make his own fortune in prize money from the sale of captured ships. Even for a young aristocrat, though, it was a hard and dangerous apprenticeship. Howe joined his first ship, the Severn, at the age of fourteen, at the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1740, the Severn sailed as part of Admiral Anson’s famous round-the-world expedition but turned back after being damaged in a violent storm off Cape Horn. Howe spent the rest of his teenage years sailing and fighting in the Caribbean. His skill and connections gained for him early promotion to lieutenant just after his nineteenth birthday.

Life’s Work

In the Royal Navy of the eighteenth century, promotion to admiral came by strict seniority among the postcaptains. To command a fleet at sea, an officer had to attain that rank as young as possible. The surest way to accomplish that goal was to fight a desperate ship-to-ship action. Ordered back to England in 1745, Howe was given the command of the small sloop Baltimore. Along with another sloop, the Baltimore attacked two larger French frigates the following year. The two English ships were beaten off, but the badly wounded Howe won his promotion to postcaptain just after his twenty-first birthday.

During the years of the peace that soon followed, Howe’s connections kept him constantly employed at sea, where he further developed his skills as commander of several frigates cruising the Caribbean and Mediterranean. By 1775, he was sufficiently senior to command a sixty-gun line-of-battle ship. In a fog off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, Howe’s ship fell in with a larger French battleship sent to reinforce French Canada. Howe was there to thwart the French, and he fired on and captured the ship. Howe’s was officially the “first shot” of the Seven Years’ War, which was to have a profound effect upon Howe’s career. During the rest of the war, Howe began to command groups of ships as commodore of several small squadrons covering expeditions against the French coast. His own ship led the van of Admiral Hawke’s daring and triumphant attack on the French fleet in Quiberon Bay in 1759. Meanwhile, Howe’s eldest brother, a brigadier general in the army, was killed leading British and American troops against the French near Fort Ticonderoga. This made Richard the Fourth Viscount Howe and head of his family. He married the daughter of another military family and ran successfully for a seat in the House of Commons, which he held for the next twenty-five years.

The twelve years of peace between 1763 and 1775 was the longest period of Lord Howe’s life that he spent ashore. He fathered three daughters, held the lucrative political office of treasurer of the navy, and spoke regularly in Parliament. Howe became increasingly concerned with England’s dispute with its North American colonists, with whom he felt a special link. His elder brother, George, had been killed in defense of the colonies against the French and American Indians; the province of Massachusetts had gratefully erected a monument to him in Westminster Abbey. His younger brother William had also distinguished himself serving in the army in America. One of his sisters was an eccentric spinster and occasional chess partner of Benjamin Franklin in London. Meeting secretly at her house in 1774, Howe befriended Franklin and tried secretly to negotiate terms of reconciliation. Offered the naval command in North America, Howe was unenthusiastic about fighting the colonists. Instead, he believed that he and his brother, given joint command of the navy and army and also a commission to negotiate peace and individual pardons, could end the growing rebellion with a minimum of bloodshed. The cabinet agreed, and the Howe brothers arrived in America in the summer of 1776 as both military commanders and peace commissioners. They were too late. Howe had another secret negotiation with Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge at a house on Staten Island, but Congress had voted the Declaration of Independence two months earlier. Howe was neither inclined nor empowered to grant independence, and the talks failed. Still seeking to avoid much bloodshed, Howe imposed a loose blockade of the American coast and transported his brother’s army in successful landings on the Long Island and New York shores and, in 1777, at Elkton, Maryland, for a march on Philadelphia.

When the French joined the war and sent a strong naval squadron to America in 1778, Howe was badly outnumbered. He moored his small fleet in a line across Sandy Hook at the mouth of New York Harbor and resolutely held off the French for eleven days, thus saving the main British base in North America. After reinforcements arrived, Howe went out hunting the French and successfully broke their siege of the British base on Rhode Island. In both cases, the French were outmaneuvered and declined battle. In 1778, the Howes were outraged to be superseded by another peace commission from England and resigned their commands to return home. King George III offered Howe Lord Sandwich’s job as first lord of the Admiralty, but Howe demanded that Lord George Germain also be removed as head of the War Department. Failing that, he and his brother General William Howe went into opposition in Parliament, attacking the ministry’s conduct of the war and defending their record in America.

Like many Whig admirals, Howe refused to serve again at sea until Sandwich was replaced. When Lord North’s ministry finally fell after Yorktown, Howe was given command of the Channel fleet (the navy’s senior command) and a seat in the House of Lords. In September, 1783, he sailed with thirty-three ships of the line to relieve Gibraltar from its four-year siege by the French and Spanish. Outmaneuvering the Franco-Spanish covering fleet of forty-six battleships, Howe escorted 183 transport ships in and out of Gibraltar without a battle.

At the end of the war, Howe was appointed first lord of the Admiralty and member of the cabinet of William Pitt the Younger. He was not happy as a peacetime administrator and drew political attacks on his economy measures. He also opposed the internal reforms of the navy proposed by Sir Charles Middleton, a troublesome subordinate. When the prime minister favored Middleton’s ideas over his own, Howe resigned in 1788. George III made him an earl.

As the foremost admiral of the day, Howe was not allowed to retire. In 1790, at age sixty-four, he resumed command of the Channel fleet during a diplomatic crisis with Spain, and again in 1793 after the outbreak of the war against revolutionary France. In late May, 1794, Howe encountered an equal French fleet in the western approaches to the English Channel. After two days of skillful maneuvering in fog, Howe commanded a formal fleet attack that resulted in what is called the Battle of the Glorious First of June. Howe ordered his captains to break through the French line of battle in an attempt to annihilate the French. He nearly succeeded: Half of the twenty-six French ships surrendered or were dismasted; six were eventually towed into English ports as prizes. England’s first victory of the war caused a stir: George III himself came to Portsmouth to present Howe with a diamond-studded sword worth œ3,000 and later made him a Knight of the Garter. Howe’s captains received the first service medals ever given in the Royal Navy.

Later in 1794, Howe retired to Bath for his health, though remaining in nominal command of the fleet. This arrangement proved to be a mistake, as Howe was too distant to notice the growing discontent of the underpaid sailors. In 1797, the Channel fleet mutinied. Summoned to Portsmouth, Howe courageously went aboard the mutinous ships and negotiated a pay raise for the sailors, who then returned to their duties. This was his final victory. Troubled by gout, Howe turned to mesmerism for relief; he died on August 5, 1799, at the age of seventy-three.

Significance

With his peerages and rewards from a grateful king and nation, Admiral Richard Howe certainly was a younger son who made good. He was popular with his sailors, who nicknamed him “Black Dick” because of his dark complexion. Although generally regarded as a conservative commander, he was associated with several innovations in the navy. As a young officer, he was one of the first to organize his ship’s crew by divisions for better management. As admiral, he drilled his fleets rigorously and perfected the code of flag signals to convey his orders. At New York, Rhode Island, and Gibraltar, he showed himself to be a brilliant tactician who could gain his point by maneuver rather than by bloody battle. In battle, he was calm and determined, even at the First of June, when he was nearly seventy years old.

Howe was not a success as a politician. Long voyages tended to make naval officers taciturn, and Howe was no exception. Warm to his friends, he was neither personable to strangers nor a good public speaker. He never had a following in Parliament. Though genuinely based upon a sentimental attachment to America, his diplomatic efforts in the 1770’s were ill-conceived. To Franklin, they appeared to be little more than an attempt at bribery. Later, Howe was a quarrelsome member of Pitt’s cabinet and was not missed after his resignation.

Several of his strategic decisions have also been faulted as overcautious. He shares the blame of his father for the army’s long cruise to attack Philadelphia in 1777. Had the Howes coordinated their strategy with John Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada, the disaster of Saratoga might have been avoided. On the Glorious First of June, Howe concentrated on attacking the French warships, while failing to capture the vital grain convoy that they were escorting. This mistake may have saved the revolutionary regime. Finally, Howe was an opponent of the strategy of year-round close blockades of enemy fleets in port, which he thought was too dangerous for British ships and crews. Having experienced the first close blockade of Brest under Edward Hawke during 1759, Howe preferred to keep his main fleet in port, a strategy later criticized by John Jervis, earl of St. Vincent, Sir William Cornwallis, and the other great seamen of the Napoleonic Wars. Against Howe’s caution, however, should be set the fact that while fighting in every war of the Hanover Dynasty in the eighteenth century, he never lost a battle at sea.

Bibliography

Buchanan, John. The Road to Valley Forge: How Washington Built the Army That Won the Revolution. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. Traces the development of the American revolutionary army from 1776 to 1778, describing troop movements and battlefield operations. Includes information on British military operations, including the Howe brothers’ role as military commanders and peace commissioners.

Duffy, Michael, and Roger Morriss, eds. The Glorious First of June, 1794: A Naval Battle and Its Aftermath. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2001. Describes the naval battle from both British and French perspectives, including eyewitness accounts of the fighting.

Gruber, Ira D. “Howe Brothers: Richard Earl Howe/Sir William Howe.” In The Reader’s Companion to Military History, edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Gruber, who has written a book on the Howe brothers’ role in the Revolutionary War, describes how the Howes’ hopes for a peaceful settlement of the conflict hampered their ability to wage a successful military campaign.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution. Williamsburg, Va.: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1972. Explores the links between the politics and strategy of the Howes’ mission.

Mahan, Alfred T. The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1892. Reprint. The Influence of Sea Power upon History. New York: Hill & Wang, 1957. This classic work on naval strategy contains detailed narratives and charts for Howe’s actions, as well as shrewd comments on his tactics and strategy.

Rodger, N. A. M. The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1986. Although it mentions Howe only in passing, this is a groundbreaking book of the “new military history” that covers the whole world of life afloat during Howe’s lifetime.

Warner, Oliver. The Glorious First of June. London: B. T. Batsford, 1961. A thorough review of the battle, based on extensive use of primary sources, as well as a thoughtful overview of Howe’s whole career.