General Gage Returns to England
General Thomas Gage had been the British commander-in-chief in America for quite a while, and the governor of Massachusetts since 1774. In the summer of 1775, King George III and his cabinet decided to call him back to England. According to the official orders from the Earl of Darmouth, the British Secretary for the Colonies, it was so that the King could consult with him about the Revolution. Dartmouth wrote to Gage on August 2:
From the tenour of your letters of June twenty-fifth, and from the state of affairs after the action of the seventeenth [that is, the Battle of Bunker Hill], the King is led to conclude that you have little expectation of effecting any thing further this campaign, and has therefore commanded me to signify to you His Majesty’s pleasure, that you do, as soon as conveniently may be after you receive this letter, return to England, in order to give His Majesty exact information of every thing, that it may be necessary to prepare, as early as possible, for the operations of the next year, and to suggest to His Majesty such matters in relation thereto, as your knowledge and experience of the service enable you to furnish.
In reality, Gage was simply being replaced. Some people said he had handled things badly; some said it was his fault that the war started, or that things didn’t seem to be going very well for the British so far; some said that he had been too easy on the colonists, while others said he had sometimes been too harsh.
The order for Gage to return to England arrived in Boston on September 26, 1775. He handed over command of the army to General Sir William Howe, and sailed for England aboard the transport ship Pallas, together with a convoy of other ships, on October 12. He arrived in London on November 14.
Sources
American Archives, 4th Series, vol. 3, pp. 7-8, 1594.