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Creed told me this day how when the King was at my Lord Cornwallis's when he went last to Newmarket, that being there on a Sunday, the Duke of Buckingham did in the afternoon to please the King make a bawdy sermon to him out of Canticles, and that my Lord Cornwallis did endeavour to get the King a whore, and that must be a pretty girl the daughter of the parson of the place, but that she did get away, and leaped off of some place and killed herself, which if true is very sad.
In his sesquicentennial address delivered at Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 3, 1925, President Coolidge related this incident which gives us Cornwallis's estimate of the importance of the Trenton victory: "It is recorded that a few evenings after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown a banquet was given by Washington and his staff to the British commander and his staff.
That evening he thought of undertaking a last chance. He would cross the York River in flatboats, land at Gloucester, and march up the country through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. Any one who knew the actual state of that region understood that Cornwallis's plan was crazy; but it is to be judged as the last gallantry of a brave man.
The third desideratum was undisturbed fishery rights on the banks of Newfoundland. Finally, it was expected that a treaty of commerce would be yielded by Great Britain after the peace was made. In 1781 Virginia, alarmed by Cornwallis's invasion, succeeded in carrying a very different set of instructions.
We went a few miles on the road toward Edgeworth Town, till at a tenant's house we heard that my father had passed half an hour ago; that he was riding in company with an officer, supposed to be of Lord Cornwallis's or General Lake's army; that they had taken a short cut, which led into Longford by another entrance: most fortunately, not that at which an armed mob had assembled, expecting the object of their fury.
The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the prelude to Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an irreparable loss because of its depressing effect on the Back Country Tories.
"Truly, Captain Ireton, you have done a thing to make me hate you and myself, as well. But I may not forget my duty, sir." And with this cruel word she was gone. You are not to suppose that the hazards of this hiding place in my Lord Cornwallis's headquarters would keep me from sleeping well and soundly.
But, instead of venturing to carry out Napoleon's orders by challenging Admiral Cornwallis's fleet off Brest, and making a desperate effort to command the channel, Villeneuve now took advantage of his emperors recommendation to return to Cadiz in event of defeat, and set sail for that port in the middle of August.
How little he foresaw that other campaigns were impending, which would give more historical interest to the valley than even Cornwallis's marchings and countermarchings! how little he dreamed of Monitors and Merrimacks in fierce méleé before his own little Hampton! how little, while he sowed the wind that winter, he looked forward to the whirlwind-reaping, of which, indeed, he lived to hear only the first fierce sigh!
It was one of the fallacies that underlay all Napoleon's naval combinations, that he believed that our hard-bitten admirals would behave in this guileless manner. But nothing was further from their cunning. There is a typical order of Cornwallis's which serves well to mark their attitude.
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