Richard Howe: the admiral of New York, Gibraltar and the First of June

Richard Howe was silent, awkward and hard to read, and the sailors who served under him adored him. He spent almost sixty years in the Royal Navy, from Anson's voyage to the first great sea battle of the French Revolutionary Wars, and Britannica calls his victory of 1794 one not excelled by any of his successors in that war, not even by Nelson.¹

Early life: a family at sea and in the field

Howe was born in London on 8 March 1726, the second son of Emmanuel Scrope Howe, second Viscount Howe in the Irish peerage. The Dictionary of National Biography writes the year as 1725-6, because in Britain before 1752 the new year began on 25 March, and the inscription on his monument in St Paul's Cathedral gives 19 March 1726, the same day counted in the Gregorian calendar, eleven days ahead of the Julian. His mother was the daughter of the Countess of Darlington, and the Oxford Companion to British History notes that through her he descended from a half-sister of King George I. His father became governor of Barbados in 1732 and died there in 1735.²

His schooling is uncertain. A boy named How or Howe appears in the Westminster School lists for 1731 to 1735, but the DNB's author, the naval historian John Knox Laughton, found the identification doubtful, and it is believed that he went to Eton about 1735. On 16 July 1739 he was entered on the books of HMS Pearl; his lieutenant's certificate later claimed four years in a merchant ship, the Thames, sea time that Laughton thought largely fictitious, though the Gale Encyclopedia of the American Revolution accepts the merchant service.³

In 1740 he sailed with Anson's squadron in the Severn, which was driven back by storms a short way beyond Cape Horn, and he went on to serve in the West Indies, where in 1743 he was at the attack on La Guaira in Venezuela. He passed for lieutenant on 24 May 1744 and was made post-captain on 10 April 1746, at twenty.⁴

The Seven Years' War: the first gun and Quiberon Bay

On 8 June 1755, off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, Howe's ship, the Dunkirk, came up with the French Alcide and took her after a short fight. Laughton calls it the first gun of the war that would become the Seven Years' War, and the Encyclopedia of World Biography the first formal exchange of the French and Indian War.⁵

Howe took part in the raid on Rochefort in 1757. In July 1758 his elder brother George was killed in the woods before Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga), and Richard became fourth Viscount Howe; Laughton dates George's death to 5 July, Britannica to 6 July. On 20 November 1759, in the Magnanime, he led Hawke's fleet into the great victory of Quiberon Bay.⁶ › Battle of Carillon, 1758

He also entered politics. He sat in the House of Commons for Dartmouth until he was raised to the British peerage in 1782; the DNB and the Gale encyclopedia date his first election to 1757, Britannica to 1762. He served on the Board of Admiralty from 1763 and as Treasurer of the Navy from 1765 to 1770.⁷

War and peace in America, 1776 to 1778

Howe knew Benjamin Franklin and had talked with him in London in 1774 about the colonists' grievances, and when war came in 1776 he was sent to command in North America with a joint commission, shared with his brother General William Howe, to make peace as well as war. Britannica sees in him real sympathy for the colonists. But he reached America only after the Declaration of Independence, and Laughton notes that neither Franklin nor Washington would talk privately; the Gale entry dates the failed negotiations from 14 July to 11 September 1776.⁸

His fleet carried and supported the army. It landed William's troops on Long Island on 22 August, though contrary winds kept the ships from cutting off Washington's escape across the East River after the Battle of Long Island. In 1777 he carried the army up Chesapeake Bay for the campaign that took Philadelphia, the campaign of Brandywine, and his ships forced the Delaware in November.⁹

In 1778 France entered the war and sent a powerful squadron under the Comte d'Estaing. Howe, outnumbered, anchored his ships in a strong line at Sandy Hook, and d'Estaing judged he could not get his heavy ships over the bar. Howe then sailed to the defense of Newport, Rhode Island; on 11 August a violent gale scattered both fleets, and the Franco-American attack on Newport failed. Britannica praises his fine combination of caution and calculated daring.¹⁰

He had asked to be relieved as early as November 1777. Bitter at a new peace commission that put the brothers under the Earl of Carlisle, at a starved navy and at what he saw as ministerial scapegoating, he sailed for home at the end of September 1778, on the 25th by the DNB's dating and after the 26th by the Gale encyclopedia's, and refused to serve again while the ministry lasted. The Gale encyclopedia notes that the brothers' record is still controversial: critics called them incompetent or too eager for peace, while Oliphant argues that Lord Sandwich kept too much of the navy at home for a real blockade.¹¹

The relief of Gibraltar, 1782

A new ministry gave Howe the Channel Fleet on 2 April 1782 and made him a British peer as Viscount Howe of Langar. That autumn he took thirty-four ships of the line and a convoy of transports and store ships to Gibraltar, under siege by France and Spain. The allied fleet under Córdova had forty-six ships of the line to Howe's thirty-three, yet Córdova never forced a battle: the store ships got in, the troops were landed by 19 October, and after a distant cannonade on 20 October the allies drew off. Britannica calls the operation brilliantly successful.¹²

Laughton, writing a century later, was more measured: the Spanish fleet was weak and its admiral timid, and against a French fleet of equal numbers under a Suffren the task would have been far harder.¹³

First Lord of the Admiralty

Howe was First Lord of the Admiralty from January to April 1783 and again from December 1783 to 1788, in William Pitt's first ministry. Cutting a war navy down to peacetime made him enemies; pamphlets attacked him as unfeeling and perverse. When he left office in 1788 he was created Earl Howe.¹⁴

His lasting work was in signals. He had been refining a new code of signals for years and exercised the fleet in it during the Spanish crisis of 1790; Laughton judged that in perfecting the code he left a powerful instrument to the younger officers, and cites a letter of 1799 from Nelson to Howe.¹⁵

The Glorious First of June, 1794

When war with Revolutionary France began in 1793, Howe, then sixty-seven, took the Channel Fleet again. In May 1794 he went out to intercept a great convoy of grain coming from the United States to Brest. The French fleet under Rear-Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse came out to protect it, and after partial actions on 28 and 29 May the two fleets met on 1 June, about 430 miles west of Ushant.¹⁶ › Glorious First of June, 1794

Howe signaled each of his ships to steer for the ship opposite, pass under her stern and engage her from the lee side. Only some understood or obeyed, but his flagship, the Queen Charlotte, broke through under the stern of the French flagship Montagne and poured in a broadside at a few feet. The Gale encyclopedia sums up the victory as won by piercing the French line. Six French ships were taken and a seventh, the Vengeur, sank.¹⁷

It was a great victory but not a total one. The grain convoy reached France, as the Royal Museums Greenwich note, and Laughton blames the captain of the fleet, Sir Roger Curtis, for the caution that let more French ships escape while Howe was exhausted. The British public cared little: the prizes were towed into Spithead to wild enthusiasm, and King George III came aboard the Queen Charlotte to present Howe with a diamond-hilted sword. The date of the visit differs: the Royal Museums Greenwich give 26 June, the DNB 20 June.¹⁸

Command style

Contemporaries agreed on his calm and his silence. Horace Walpole, quoted in the DNB, called him "undaunted as a rock and as silent", and the Oxford Companion describes him as imperturbable, highly professional and notably poor at explaining himself. To his enemies he was haughty and inflexible; to his friends kind and generous.¹⁹

His men felt otherwise. The Oxford Companion records his reputation as the Sailor's Friend, and Laughton writes that his crews adored him and that no mutiny or discontent ever occurred in a ship or squadron under his command. Laughton doubted his genius as a tactician, though: he judged the First of June won mainly by the individual superiority of the British ships rather than by Howe's maneuvers.²⁰

Later life and death

In March 1796 Howe became Admiral of the Fleet, on the 12th by the Gale encyclopedia's dating. In the spring of 1797 the crews of the Channel Fleet at Spithead mutinied over pay and food. Howe, who had already resigned, was asked to go to Portsmouth; on 11 May he visited the ships and heard the men's demands, they accepted his assurances, and on 16 May the fleet put to sea. Britannica notes the great influence he showed with the seamen. The same year he received the Order of the Garter.²¹

Disabled by gout, he died in London on 5 August 1799. Laughton records the belief that an experimental electrical treatment drove the gout to his head. The DNB records his burial in the family vault at Langar in Nottinghamshire. A marble monument by John Flaxman, raised at public expense, was put up in the south transept of St Paul's Cathedral in 1811; its inscription remembers the relief of Gibraltar and the victory off Ushant.²²

Legacy and memory

With Howe's death his earldom died out; the barony passed to his eldest daughter, Sophia Charlotte, and the Irish viscountcy to his brother William. The Glorious First of June, the name given to the victory in London, kept him in public memory, and the paintings the battle and the royal visit inspired now hang in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.²³

Read the full story of the Glorious First of June, of the Battle of Long Island his ships made possible, or of Horatio Nelson, the admiral who built on Howe's signals.