The Coward Of Minden: The Affair Of Lord George Sackville

This ranks among the best books I have read in a long while. Piers Mackesy relates but one slice of the life of Lord George Sackville (a.k.a. Lord Germain), best known to Revolutionary War historians as the British Colonial Secretary during the War of Independence, and in doing so, reconstructs beautifully the confusing, incestuous and (in some ways) strangely brilliant atmosphere of Hanoverian Britain. George Sackville was a relatively minor aristocrat whose organizational and military talents won him an appointment as top British cavalry officer in the German campaigns of the Seven Years War 1756-63 (the European theatre of the French and Indian wars). The British army was, at that stage, in coalition with the Prussians, led by Prince Ferdinand. The Weser Valley campaign of 1759 ultimately led to the qualified Prusso-British victory at Minden, in Western Germany. Ferdinand, however, was incensed that Sackville's cavalry hadn't rounded off the victory with a charge-and-pursuit. Though the best contemporary evidence was that Ferdinand, not Sackville, was to blame for this omission, coalition politics (and the German-born King of England, George II) required that Sackville be court-martialled and scapegoated for the affair. Mackesy, whose other principal works have defended Sackville's later prosecution of the war in America, dissects the trial transcript and shows how his so-called "conviction" for cowardice was virtually a dead-letter, and how Sackville's intelligent advocacy persuaded the judges not to impose anything but a notional punishment for something that was, in truth, never his fault. In doing so, Mackesy has a real flair for relating courtroom drama. Mackesy also deals briefly with Sackville's subsequent rehabilitation and readmission into the British inner cabinet under George III. Among other things, he shows how rumors of Sackville's homosexuality may have proven a motivation for some of his detractors, and that many of his American critics have unwisely labelled him as the "Coward of Minden" without understanding the politics behind the court-martial. This might be a nice companion piece for Dudley Pope's "At 12 Mr. Byng Was Shot," which relates a similar, almost contemporaneous court-martial where the result was less felicitous for the defendant.