Free The Great Cat Massacre by Gareth Rubin Page A

could have sent for a translator, who would have told him what was afoot, but he was enjoying his game of chess too much to start sending for interpreters willy-nilly. Instead, he folded up the note and put it in his pocket.
    Washington, unaware of how close he had come to being discovered, led his troops, with the element of surprise intact. They were aided by the fact that, because it was Boxing Day many of the Hessians were asleep, hungover or still drunk from the previous day’s carousing. The colonists captured or killed two-thirds of them, with the remainder scattering into the countryside. Not only was it a vital propaganda victory, the captured supplies were hugely important to the survival of the American forces as fighting men.
    The battle was the turning point in the secession of the American colonies.
THE LUCKY HAT – WASHINGTON RIDES AWAY, 1777
    In the 1940s, a document was discovered in the Public Record Office in London. It was written by one Major Patrick Ferguson, a renowned shot in the British Army who had fought the revolutionary forces in the American colonies. He described how, one day, he encountered an American patrol. One officer was wearing a ‘remarkably large cocked hat’ and he considered shooting the man but, since the American had his back to Ferguson, it would have been ungentlemanly and so the Briton let him ride off, unmolested. It was later revealed that the man was Washington.
    Ferguson was later killed in battle, after which his killers urinated on his corpse and then ‘ill used’ it – although the records do not specify how. He was, however, buried next to his mistress, Virginia Sal.

TOO MUCH AIR – FAILING TO DISPOSE OF THE SECRET TREATY, 1780
    Henry Laurens was the first president of the Continental Congress – in effect making him the first president of America. In September 1780, two years after his term in office ended, he was on board the packet ship
Mercury
, sailing from the Netherlands to America. It was the middle of the American War of Independence and when a British frigate spotted his vessel off the coast of Newfoundland it was ordered to stop. As it did so, a British sailor, Michael Fitton, saw a man fall into the water from the American ship. He cried, ‘Man overboard!’ and the British made to save the man. But when they pulled him out of the water, they found that he was actually a large bag full of papers and weighed down with lead shot but, because the bag was also full of air, it had not sunk.
    When the British read the papers, they found a secret treaty between the Dutch and the Americans, which Laurens had negotiated; the Dutch were offering commercial support for the Americans. Had Laurens simply thrown the papers over the side without the bag, they would have been at the bottom of the ocean before the British could do anything about it.
    Discovery of the treaty led to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, a four-year conflict, which largely consisted of Britain pummelling the Dutch forces. Laurens was duly arrested, taken back to London and imprisoned in the Tower – the only American ever to have that honour. He was later released in a prisoner swap for a British general, Lord Cornwallis.
    Shortly before Laurens began crying out for freedom for the American colonists from the wicked shackles of British rule, he was the greatest slave-trader in North America; in the 1750s alone, he had sold 8,000 enslaved Africans.
SCAREDY CATS – THE LAST INVASION OF BRITAIN, 1797
    Across Britain, history teachers are lying to children, telling them the nation was last invaded by a foreign force in 1066. In fact, the French landed a full regiment of men in 1797 in an attempt to take over the country. Of all the places to try it, just outside Fishguard in southwest Wales seems unlikely, but then the whole thing was pretty strange.
    The Napoleonic Wars at the end of the eighteenth century saw Britain and France at each other’s throats on land and sea. Getting carried away, the