Page:The Marquess Cornwallis and the Consolidation of British Rule.djvu/17

Rh and regretted the contest, but under a sense of military duty he accepted the post. Two years afterwards we find him in England. He returned to America in April, 1778, but again came home and threw up his command; not from any conviction of the injustice of the war, but owing to the illness of Lady Cornwallis, who pined in the absence of her husband and died at Culford, the family place, on February 14, 1779.

This sad event decided him to return to active service, and he was again employed in America till his surrender at York Town. The late Sir John Kaye holds the opinion that our success in America had become hopeless even before the first arrival of Cornwallis. And the prospect became still darker when the chief command was entrusted to Sir Henry Clinton in succession to Sir William Howe. According to the late Lord Stanhope, we should not have laid the foundations of our Empire in Bengal but for Clive, and the historian adds that had Clive lived we might not have lost our American colonies; or at least their independence would have been attained in some other way. While it is almost needless to state that in America we had no heaven-born general on our side, it is fair to add that Cornwallis met and fairly defeated the colonists on at least three occasions.

When the English forces had evacuated Philadelphia with some loss of stores and more loss of honour, Cornwallis, in his first campaign, repulsed the Americans who were closing round his rear with no