Yet it was the very day after the successful battle of Three Rivers that Adam Shockley decided the English cause was lost.
He was a small fellow, barely sixteen years old, and he was sitting very quietly with the other prisoners. When he had been taken the day before it had amused the men that the musket they took from him was so much larger than he was.
He was not only small, he was narrow – there was no other word for it. It was not only his thin face, and close-set eyes, not only his thin, spidery hands; his whole body seemed not more than a foot across at the shoulder.
Yet – Shockley noticed it about nearly all the prisoners – the boy had a sort of inner calm about him, not at all like the boisterous good nature of his own men. His dark eyes stared at his captors without fear or anger; it was almost as if he pitied them.
His name was John Hillier.
Feeling sorry for the boy, Shockley strode over to him.
“You have a Wiltshire name, Mr Hillier,’ he said with a smile. “Plenty of Hilliers around Sarum where I come from.”
The boy nodded calmly.
“My grandfather left Wiltshire,” he replied, gazing at Adam without either respect or insolence.
“Oh. Why was that?”
“His wife’s family turned Quakers, captain. They were more welcome in Pennsylvania than England.” He spoke with the quiet assurance that it was England who had lost by their move. “Then my grandfather went to join them after.”
Shockley thought of the little community of Quakers he remembered at Wilton. They had been tolerated – just. He couldn’t say he blamed the Hilliers and their Quaker relations for leaving.
“But you and your family, you are not Quakers?”
“No,” he said simply. “Quakers don’t fight. I do.”
“And what do you hope to gain from this fighting, Mr Hillier?” he asked pleasantly.
The boy looked at him in surprise.
“Freedom,” he said simply.
Shockley would have liked to sit down beside him to talk, but thought that, as an officer, he should not; and so their conversation was conducted in this strange fashion, with the young captive sitting on the ground and the bluff British officer standing in front of him. Despite this, they spoke easily enough.
“Tell me then, Mr Hillier, what is the freedom you seek?”
“That no man should be taxed without representation, sir. That all men should be free and entitled to vote. These are both English common law, I believe, and written in Magna Carta. These liberties were denied us by the king.”
Shockley almost burst out laughing; but checked himself in time.
Neither common law – that collection of ancient uses which protected a man’s property and gave even a serf a right to be tried before he was hung, nor the great charter that Archbishop Langton had drawn up between King John and his barons had a word to say about representation and tax, let alone voting. The very idea was absurd. But he could see that the boy believed it and so for the time being he said nothing.
He tried another tack.
“You say you accept the English laws, Mr Hillier, yet you deny the authority of the king. How can you be an Englishman then?”
“How is the king one,” the boy retorted bitterly, “when he sends German mercenaries against us?”
But Adam countered swiftly.
“And ’tis well known you seek an alliance with England’s greatest enemy, France.”
Now Hillier did not reply, but Shockley was not trying to confound him. He returned therefore to the general argument.
“What if, Mr Hillier, those rights you speak of were not to be found in common law and the charter?” he asked gently. “What would be your argument then?”
The boy thought, but only for a moment.
“There are natural laws, above those made by man; God gave us reason, and reason tells us these things are just.”
Adam stared at him. It was astounding. He knew from his schooldays, and from his subsequent reading that such arguments could be made. Aristotle, two thousand years before, had spoken of universal law; the great Churchman Aquinas had named it too – though strictly subservient to Divine Law, as revealed in the Bible, that in turn came from God’s Eternal Law, which no man could know. It was one thing for philosophers to speculate about such matters, or for clergymen turned sceptics to ridicule the rule of bishops behind closed doors; but here was this young fellow unblushingly using such grand philosophical language in the belief that it gave him the right to deny the authority of Parliament and the king. It sounded like anarchy. Yet the young fellow spoke so quietly.
It was now that young Hillier drew from his pocket a small pamphlet. Its title was
Common Sense
by the radical writer Tom Paine.
“There’s much in here that explains our cause,” he stated. “Read it, if you wish.”
Adam had heard of the pamphlet. It had been written the previous year and copies had spread all over the colony. It was plain sedition, he had heard. He shook his head. He wanted to hear from the boy himself.
“What authority do you accept, then?”
“My conscience,” he said simply.
There Adam saw the whole matter with absolute clarity. The fact that John Hillier’s constitutional arguments were incorrect – it was this that had infuriated the English Parliament about the rebels more than anything else; the fact that he was using ideas of freedom and justice over which philosophers could argue; the fact that he knew nothing of the centuries of subtle adjustment between the authority and rights of Church, State and individual, of the arguments of the Reformation, the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution: none of these mattered. The struggles of the old world, though they had produced a measure of freedom, would be forgotten in the new.
He looked down with fascination at the boy. He seemed sensible enough.
“But if we do as you say, then, the people themselves would rule,” he said. “Are you not afraid of that?”
And now it was John Hillier who stared at him in astonishment.
“Why should I be?”
The conversation haunted him.
As they prepared for the offensive down the Hudson river to New York, and as his fellow officers predicted sweeping victories, his own sense of foreboding would not leave him. True, they were a well-trained force. When the order for the infantry to advance was given: “Spring up”: no regiment in the line did so with more energy than the gallant 62nd. Already the jaunty little regiment was known as the Springers. He had even done what he could to train them in the more flexible fighting methods that were needed in that rough terrain. Only General Howe had done so before, when he had taken seven companies for some combat training on Salisbury Plain three years before. But so much was missing. It was not just the parade ground tactics: nor the interrupted supply lines and poorly coordinated higher command. It was in the hearts of the men.
“We pay our men poorly, and then we deduct their uniforms, their utensils, everything imaginable from their pay. They know no one cares for their welfare. And no chaplains care for their souls,” he complained to his colonel. “Only the Wesleyans we so despise seem to take an interest in the poor soldier.”
“The rebels are worse supplied. Even the Americans begrudge them food, because they pay for it with their own worthless paper money,” the colonel countered.
But in his heart Adam was thinking:
“They can lose a dozen campaigns; but if they don’t want us here, then one day they’ll win the war.”
He wrote to his father:
We have left Fort St George in splendid order, in a force under Burgoyne of about 8,000 men: Major Harnage has brought his wife and the general is encumbered with no less than six members, of Parliament. The men march well; and each company is allowed three women.
We have, so far, been successful against the enemy in every encounter; though we lost 200 men in the swamps around Ticonderoga, which we took, most of them falling to the sharpshooters who take a constant toll of our staunch parade ground fellows. There seems little we can do about it.
Our supplies are beginning to run somewhat low.
And now it was October. Tomorrow they would fight again at Stillwater.
It was two and a half weeks since their first battle at Stillwater and they had remained in the camp at Freeman’s Farm ever since. It had been a victory for the British, of course. They took the farm in a hard day’s fighting, attacking the place in three columns and in classic style. There was only one problem: the 62nd in the centre column had been almost destroyed.
Four times they had charged the Americans, with bayonets fixed, and forced them to retreat into the woods; and four times they had run into the sharpshooters who lurked there, not only concealed on the ground, but up in the trees as well. It was a dastardly way of fighting: and highly effective. Major Harnage was carried from the field badly wounded; the adjutant, a lieutenant and four ensigns were killed. By sunset, only sixty men of the 62nd were fit for further duty.
The red coats had won, but at a cost they could not afford.
And still the supplies had not come.
On the night of October 6,1777, Captain Shockley slept badly. Where was General Howe with his great force? Where was Clinton with his much needed supplies and reinforcements? Nowhere, it seemed. He got up in the morning feeling despondent.
For much of the battle known as Saratoga, Adam Shockley was a spectator; for the 62nd, being so reduced in numbers, was left to guard the camp when, at about noon on October 7, General Burgoyne ordered the advance.
At first it seemed the British might prevail. Until, that was, the American second in command, Arnold, having been confined to camp by General Gates after a quarrel, disobeyed orders, leaped on his horse, placed himself at the head of three regiments he knew well and, without so much as a by-your-leave, smashed clean through the British centre and stormed the British redoubt.
From the camp above, Shockley watched in horror.
Darkness gave them the chance to abandon the camp for a piece of high ground by the river. The next day the Americans covered their right flank and they withdrew to Saratoga, leaving their wounded to the rebels. The day after that, the Americans came round behind them. It poured with rain. There were sharpshooters everywhere.
It was on this day, October 9, that Captain Adam Shockley, while inspecting a barricade that a party of his men were erecting, felt a sudden blow in the shoulder followed, a moment later, by a seering, red hot pain and looked up in astonishment to find himself lying on the ground and his uniform covered with blood, before he fainted.
A sharpshooter had got him.
Five days later, when Saratoga capitulated, Captain Adam Shockley, fortunate to be only wounded in the shoulder, was one of the handful of men who remained of the five hundred and forty-one who had constituted the 62nd regiment.
Of the few who did remain, some in the next two years were sent to Virginia, others escaped to New York. The regimental band defected to the rebels and served in a Boston regiment. In 1782, the Springers regiment was reconstituted and by chance, when regiments of the line were given county titles that year, were called The Wiltshire Regiment.
The defeat at Saratoga was a turning point. From that time on, though the fighting continued, until Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the British Government looked not for victory, but for the least damaging peace they could negotiate. America was going to be lost.
He only received one letter from his father at this time. It was very brief, and informed Adam that his second wife had died, leaving him alone with his two children.
His own captivity lasted a little over a year. He was not badly treated; indeed his captors and he had many discussions and he left them finally with a sense of friendship that surprised him.
But at last, in the spring of 1779, with the wound in his shoulder nearly healed, Captain Adam Shockley returned, for the first time in over twenty years, to his family home in Sarum.
He wondered what he would find there.
A damp March wind from the west, small grey clouds chasing across a clear, pale blue sky. Sweeping ridges of brown earth and short grass, neatly arranged into large fields marked off by walls of loose grey stone.
The stagecoach: four fine horses, well-matched, two chestnut and two greys, driver and a man in the coachman’s box both in tall hats, almost conical; up front three chilled passengers, one a woman, their faces reddened by the wind; one man behind gazing down at the huge open basket where the luggage was stowed. Inside, four men paying full fare, sitting in comfort on leather upholstery, windows pulled up, very warm. The huge wheels gliding smoothly.
The Bristol to Bath stagecoach was indeed a fine, rapid and fashionable conveyance as it rolled easily along the turnpike road.