On October 10, 1775, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage took his last salute as commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America and the next day sailed for England aboard the transport Pallas . As he wound up nearly two decades of dedicated service in the American colonies, almost no one saw him off; and after his arrival in London a fellow officer wrote of him as a “poor wretch [who] is scarcely thought of, he is below contempt …” while other countrymen joked about the possibility of hanging him. For nearly half of those years in the colonies Gage had been the most powerful official on the continent; honest, honorable, a faithful servant of his king, he had given all he had to his task, only to be despised by the Americans and abandoned by the British.

It was ironic that Thomas Gage’s colonial service should have begun and ended with two of the greatest disasters of British arms in North America Braddock’s defeat and the battle for Bunker Hill; yet in the twenty years between those bloody encounters the mood and circumstances in the colonies had altered forever, and forces totally beyond Gage’s capacity to control had swept across the land like a whirlwind, catching him up, helpless, and wrecking his career in the process. (It may have occurred to him that his family, the Gages of Firle in Sussex, had an affinity for losing causes: his forebears had backed King John, Charles I, and James II.)

After attending Westminster, the famous public school, where his fellow scholars included a collection of names that would figure in the Revolution Francis Bernard, John Burgoyne, George Germain, and two of the Howe brothers, George Augustus and Richard Gage (as was then the custom) purchased a lieutenancy, fought the French in Flanders, and helped rout the Scottish clans at Culloden. In 1754 his regiment was posted to America, and in July, 1755, Gage was out in front with the advanced guard when the French and Indians struck General Edward Braddock’s army. Wounded in the belly and the head, with several bullet holes in his coat, he nevertheless organized the rear guard for the retreat after Braddock was mortally wounded. He saw a thousand brave men killed that day, of fifteen hundred who went into action, yet Gage went back for more and was in Abercromby’s suicidal attack on Montcalm at Fort Ticonderoga, where his friend Viscount Howe fell. Out of this wilderness experience came, in 1757, his proposal for a corps of disciplined irregulars Gage’s “chasseurs” the first light-armed regiment in the British army. In 1760 Gage was made governor at Montreal; three years later he took command of British forces in North America.

Gage had demonstrated courage in battle, but he was not regarded as a brilliant commander; nevertheless, he had an aptitude for administration, and it was thought that his marriage to an American—the slender, ambitious Margaret Kemble—might be an asset. So in 1774, while Thomas Hutchinson, the