Curtain.

NOTES TO THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

BURGOYNE

General John Burgoyne, who is presented in this play for the first time (as far as I am aware) on the English stage, is not a conventional stage soldier, but as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be.  His objection to profane swearing is not borrowed from Mr. Gilbert’s H. M. S. Pinafore:  it is taken from the Code of Instructions drawn up by himself for his officers when he introduced Light Horse into the English army.  His opinion that English soldiers should be treated as thinking beings was no doubt as unwelcome to the military authorities of his time, when nothing was thought of ordering a soldier a thousand lashes, as it will be to those modern victims of the flagellation neurosis who are so anxious to revive that discredited sport.  His military reports are very clever as criticisms, and are humane and enlightened within certain aristocratic limits, best illustrated perhaps by his declaration, which now sounds so curious, that he should blush to ask for promotion on any other ground than that of family influence.  As a parliamentary candidate, Burgoyne took our common expression “fighting an election” so very literally that he led his supporters to the poll at Preston in 1768 with a loaded pistol in each hand, and won the seat, though he was fined 1,000 pounds, and denounced by Junius, for the pistols.

It is only within quite recent years that any general recognition has become possible for the feeling that led Burgoyne, a professed enemy of oppression in India and elsewhere, to accept his American command when so many other officers threw up their commissions rather than serve in a civil war against the Colonies.  His biographer De Fonblanque, writing in 1876, evidently regarded his position as indefensible.  Nowadays, it is sufficient to say that Burgoyne was an Imperialist.  He sympathized with the colonists; but when they proposed as a remedy the disruption of the Empire, he regarded that as a step backward in civilization.  As he put it to the House of Commons, “while we remember that we are contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must also remember that we are contending in this crisis for the fate of the British Empire.”  Eighty-four years after his defeat, his republican conquerors themselves engaged in a civil war for the integrity of their Union.  In 1886 the Whigs who represented the anti-Burgoyne tradition of American Independence in English politics, abandoned Gladstone and made common cause with their political opponents in defence of the Union between England and Ireland.  Only the other day England sent 200,000 men into the field south of the equator to fight out the question whether South Africa should develop as a Federation of British Colonies or as an independent Afrikander United States.  In all these cases the Unionists who were detached from their parties were called renegades,