For a month and more Sir William waited, his troops most of them still upon the ships, until he should first attempt to fulfil his mission of peace and accommodation. His brother, Admiral Lord Howe, joined him there in July. They were authorized to offer unconditional pardon, even now, to all who would submit. The ministers in England could not have chosen commissioners of peace more acceptable to the Americans or more likely to be heard than the Howes. Not only were they men of honor, showing in all that they did the straightforward candor and the instinctive sense of duty that came with their breeding and their training in arms, but they were also brothers of that gallant young soldier who had come over almost twenty years ago to fight the French with Abercrombie, to be loved by every man who became his comrade, and to lose his life untimely fighting forward through the forests which lay about Ticonderoga, a knightly and heroic figure. But they could offer no concessions,—only pardon for utter submission, and, for all their honorable persistency, could find no one in authority among the Americans who would make the too exacting exchange. Their offers of pardon alternated with the movements of their troops and their steady successes in arms. Lord Howe issued his first overture of peace, in the form of a public proclamation offering pardon, immediately upon his arrival with his fleet at Sandy Hook, and followed it up at once with messages to the Congress at Philadelphia. Sir William Howe put his troops ashore on the 22d of August, and made ready to dislodge Washington from the heights of Brooklyn; but on the 23d he too, in his turn, made yet another offer of general pardon, by proclamation. [Illustration: SIR WILLIAM HOWE] On the 27th he drove the American forces on Long Island in on their defences, and rendered the heights at once practically untenable. Washington had but eighteen thousand half-disciplined militiamen with which to hold the town and all the long shores of the open bay and river, and had put ten thousand of them across the river to hold Long Island and the defences on the heights. Sir William had put twenty thousand men ashore for the attack on the heights; and when Washington knew that his advanced guard was driven in, and saw Sir William, mindful of Bunker Hill, bestow his troops, not for an assault, but for an investment of the heights, he perceived at once how easily he might be cut off and trapped there, armed ships lying at hand which might at any moment completely command the river. Immediately, and as secretly as quickly, while a single night held, he withdrew every man and every gun, as suddenly and as successfully as he had seized the heights at Dorchester.