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

A family of soldiers and sailors

Richard Howe was born in London on 8 March 1726. His mother was descended from a half-sister of King George I, and both his brothers made their names in America: George, the elder, and William, the future general. Richard went briefly to Westminster School and then to Eton, but by 1735 he was at sea in a merchant ship, and on 16 July 1739 he joined the Royal Navy in HMS Pearl.²

His early service read like a tour of the navy's wars. The Westminster School archive records that he sailed with Anson's squadron as far as Cape Horn in 1740, was at the attack on La Guaira in Venezuela in 1743, and was badly wounded in action off the west coast of Scotland in 1746. He was made post-captain on 10 April 1746, before his twenty-first birthday.³

The Seven Years' War

On 8 June 1755, off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, Howe's ship took the French Alcide, one of the first clashes of the war that would become the Seven Years' War. He went on to serve at Rochefort in 1757 and on 20 November 1759 he fought in the Battle of Quiberon Bay. In July 1758 his elder brother George was killed in a skirmish in the woods before the British attack on Fort Carillon, and Richard succeeded him as Viscount Howe in the Irish peerage.⁴

Howe also sat in Parliament as member for Dartmouth from 1757 to 1782, served as a Lord of the Admiralty from 1763 and as Treasurer of the Navy from 1765 to 1770, and in the Falklands crisis of 1770 commanded in the Mediterranean as a rear admiral.⁵

War and peace in America

Howe knew Benjamin Franklin and met him in London in 1774, and when war came he and his brother William were given a commission to make peace as well as war. John Oliphant, in the Gale Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, notes that Richard thought its powers far too narrow. He arrived off Staten Island on 12 July 1776; the talks that began two days later broke down on 11 September.⁶

In between, his ships landed William's army on Long Island on 22 August, though contrary winds kept him from closing the East River in time to stop Washington's escape after the Battle of Long Island. In 1777 he carried the army by sea to the Chesapeake for the campaign that took Philadelphia on 26 September, after the Battle of Brandywine, and his ships forced the Delaware in November. Critics in Britain called the brothers incompetent or too eager for peace; Oliphant argues that the navy at home, kept there by Lord Sandwich, left Howe too few ships for a real blockade.⁷

Disillusioned, as David Aldridge puts it in the Oxford Companion to British History, by the lack of support from ministers, Howe resigned in 1778. He stayed long enough to face the French fleet of the Comte d'Estaing, and his moves that August helped prevent a Franco-American attack on Newport, Rhode Island. He sailed for home in the autumn and refused to serve again under Sandwich.⁸

Gibraltar and the Admiralty

The new ministry of 1782 gave Howe the Channel Fleet on 2 April and a British peerage as Viscount Howe. That autumn he took the fleet to Gibraltar, under siege by France and Spain, and relieved the fortress in October 1782 despite the larger numbers of the French. From 1783 to 1788 he ran the navy as First Lord of the Admiralty, and in 1788 he was created Earl Howe. The Westminster record also credits him with perfecting the navy's signaling code.⁹

The Glorious First of June

When war with Revolutionary France began in 1793 Howe took command of the Channel Fleet again. On 1 June 1794, far out in the Atlantic, he won the Glorious First of June by ordering his ships to break through the French line, while the French fleet was shielding a grain convoy from the United States bound for Brest. Oliphant calls it his great victory, won by piercing the French line.¹⁰

The Sailor's Friend

On 12 March 1796 Howe was made Admiral of the Fleet. A year later, in the spring of 1797, the crews of the Channel Fleet at Spithead mutinied. The old admiral, known as the Sailor's Friend, personally negotiated an end to the mutiny, and that year he received the Garter.¹¹

Aldridge sums him up as imperturbable and highly professional, if notably poor at explaining himself. Howe died in London on 5 August 1799. A monument by John Flaxman stands to him in St Paul's Cathedral, where Horatio Nelson would be buried a few years later.¹²