enty-three
casualties and lost besides four hundred prisoners. The British loss
was five hundred and thirty-seven casualties and fourteen prisoners.
The attack had failed, but news soon came which made the reverse
unimportant. Burgoyne and his whole army had surrendered at Saratoga.

CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST GREAT BRITISH DISASTER

John Burgoyne, in a measure a soldier of fortune, was the younger son of
an impoverished baronet, but he had married the daughter of the powerful
Earl of Derby and was well known in London society as a man of fashion
and also as a man of letters, whose plays had a certain vogue. His will,
in which he describes himself as a humble Christian, who, in spite of
many faults, had never forgotten God, shows that he was serious minded.
He sat in the House of Commons for Preston and, though he used the
language of a courtier and spoke of himself as lying at the King's feet
to await his commands, he was a Whig, the friend of Fox and others
whom the King regarded as his enemies. One of his plays describes the
difficulties of getting the English to join the army of George III. We
have the smartly dressed recruit as a decoy to suggest an easy life in
the army. Victory and glory are so certain that a tailor stands with his
feet on the neck of the King of France. The decks of captured ships swim
with punch and are clotted with gold dust, and happy soldiers play
with diamonds as if they were marbles. The senators of England, says
Burgoyne, care chiefly to make sure of good game laws for their own
pleasure. The worthless son of one of them, who sets out on the long
drive to his father's seat in the country, spends an hour in "yawning,
picking his teeth and damning his journey" and when once on the way
drives with such fury that the route is marked by "yelping dogs,
broken-backed pigs and dismembered geese."

It was under this playwright and satirist, who had some skill as a
soldier, that the British cause now received a blow from which it never
recovered. Burgoyne had taken part in driving the Americans from
Canada in 1776 and had spent the following winter in England using his
influence to secure an independent command. To his later undoing he
succeeded. It was he, and not, as had been expected, General Carleton,
who was appointed to lead the expedition of 1777 from Canada to the
Hudson. Burgoyne was given instructions so rigid as to be an insult to
his intelligence. He was to do one thing and only one th