The events of 1778 made a lasting impression on King George III.  The alliance of France with the Americans created a sort of reflex patriotism which the Government did what it could to foster.  British Imperialism flamed forth as an ideal, one whose purposes must be to crush the French.  The most remarkable episode was the return of the Earl of Chatham, much broken and in precarious health, to the King’s fold.  To the venerable statesman the thought that any one with British blood in his veins should stand by rebels of British blood, or by their French allies, was a cause of rage.  On April 7, 1778, the great Chatham appeared in the House of Lords and spoke for Imperialism and against the Americans and French.  There was a sudden stop in his speaking, and a moment later, confusion, as he fell in a fit.  He never spoke there again, and though he was hurried home and cared for by the doctors as best they could, he died on the eleventh of May.  At the end he reverted to the dominant ideal of his life—­the supremacy of England.  So his chief rival in Parliament, Edmund Burke, who shocked more than half of England by seeming to approve the nascent French Revolution, died execrating it.

The failure of the Commission on Reconciliation to get even an official hearing in America further depressed George III, and there seemed to have flitted through his unsound mind more and more frequent premonitions that England might not win after all.  Having made friendly overtures, which were rejected, he now planned to be more savage than ever.  In 1779 the American privateers won many victories which gave them a reputation out of proportion to the importance of the battles they fought, or the prizes they took.  Chief among the commanders of these vessels was a Scotchman, John Paul Jones, who sailed the Bonhomme Richard and with two companion ships attacked the Serapis and the Scarborough, convoying a company of merchantmen off Flamborough Head.  Night fell, darkness came, the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis kept up bombarding each other at short range.  During a brief pause, Pearson, the British captain, called out, “Have you struck your colors?” at which Jones shouted back, “I have not yet begun to fight.”  Before morning the Serapis surrendered and in the forenoon the victorious Bonhomme Richard sank.  Europe rang with the exploit; not merely those easily thrilled by a spectacular engagement, but those who looked deeper began to ask themselves whether the naval power that must be reckoned with was not rising in the West.

Meanwhile, Washington kept his uncertain army near New York.  The city swarmed with Loyalists, who at one time boasted of having a volunteer organization larger than Washington’s army.  These later years seem to have been the hey-day of the Loyalists in most of the Colonies, although the Patriots passed severe laws against them, sequestrating their property and even banishing them.  In places like New York, where General Clinton maintained a refuge, they stayed on, hoping, as they had done for several years, that the war would soon be over and the King’s authority restored.