One month after that day so disastrous for the allies, Lord Howe, favored by chance winds, revictualled, for the third time and almost without a fight, the fortress and the town, under the very eyes of the enemy. Gibraltar remained impregnable. The siege no longer continued except in form." Negotiations were being carried on in Paris, secretly and in private between America and England by Messrs. Oswald and Franklin, and officially between Mr. Grenville and M. de Vergennes. Lord Rockingham had just died, at the age of fifty-two, and the cabinet was re-formed under the leadership of Lord Shelburne, deprived of the brilliancy which Charles Fox had brought to it. The latter seized a pretext to withdraw. {316} He had demanded that the independence of the American colonies should be recognized at once and without relation to a treaty of peace. Lord Shelburne, while admitting the same basis, wished to pursue a more complete negotiation. Fox gave in his resignation, and William Pitt took his place in the cabinet. The first care of Lord Shelburne was to recall Sir Henry Clinton, who was too much compromised in the heat of the American war to be in a position to shape the peace. Party and territorial feuds were grafted on the fertile trunk of national enmities. Everywhere in Georgia and Carolina the ambuscades and reprisals of loyalists and patriots fostered a state of irritation and cruel disorder to which Washington was resolved to put an end. The loyalists of Middletown captured a captain in the service of Congress, and he was hanged. The general-in-chief demanded that the English officer who commanded the detachment should be given up to him. On the refusal of Sir Henry Clinton, who had himself caused the delinquent to be arrested, Washington decided to employ the system of reprisals. Up till then he had studiously avoided it. "I know better than to think of the system of reprisals," he wrote to General Greene; "I am, however, perfectly convinced of this: when one has not the criminal himself at hand, it is the most difficult of all laws to execute. It is impossible that humanity should not intervene in favor of the innocent condemned for the fault of others." The council of war and Congress had, however, adopted the principle and condemned to death Captain Asgill, son of Sir Charles Asgill, an amiable young man of nineteen. Washington seemed to have made up his mind and to have hardened his heart against the appeals of pity. "My resolve," said he, "is based on so long reflection that it will remain immovable. {317} Whatever my feelings of sympathy for the unhappy victim may be, the satisfactory conduct of the enemy can alone cause a ray of hope to arise for him." He delayed, nevertheless, to have the sentence executed. Lady Asgill, in her maternal despair, addressed herself to Marie Antoinette. The latter charged M. de Vergennes to transmit to Congress and to Washington her pressing entreaties in favor of the unfortunate young man. "If I were