and which later was cut to pieces at the Battle of Preston. Loudoun was one of the few who came out of the fight unscathed and, shewing that upon occasion he was capable of energy as well as loyalty, promptly he raised a force of more than two thousand new soldiers. When he arrived in New York on the 23rd July, 1756, he found affairs in great confusion. After the care with which Braddock's campaign had been planned for him and the disastrous outcome, the home authorities were now slow to adopt measures to cope with the crisis. Not only Fort DuQuesne but Forts Oswego and Ontario were held by the French, aggressive and confident from their repeated successes. After spending a year in surveying the situation, Loudoun headed an expedition against Louisburg, going as far as Halifax and then, though a caution made to appear the more excessive by inevitable comparison with the dash and reckless courage of Pepperell's earlier and sensationally successful expedition, returned to New York without striking a blow. He had incurred great unpopularity earlier in New York and now in Halifax although in the former, at least, his measures of quartering troops and interference with commerce fairly could be defended on the ground of military necessity. Of more unfortunate importance, the ineptitude and dilatory inefficiency of his Louisburg campaign had drained its defenders from the Hudson Valley, thus permitting a successful and disastrous invasion of the Province of New York by the French and their Indians and Loudoun was peremptorily recalled to England (1757), General Jeffrey Amherst being sent over to take his place. Loudoun's indecision inspired Benjamin Franklin's famous epigram which all down the years, to the few who remember Loudoun, remains inseparably associated with his name: that, "he was like King George upon the signposts, always on horseback but never advancing." There was, however, at least one voice publicly raised on his behalf; an effort was made in England to defend his conduct in America through an anonymous pamphlet published in London the following year entitled "The Conduct of a Noble Commander in America Impartially Reviewed with the genuine Causes of the Discontents at New York and Hallifax," one of the few surviving copies of which is now lodged in the Library of Congress. And it was for this British general with but a year of American experience (and that far from glorious) who never, so far as it is known, set foot on Virginia's soil that the fairest of Piedmont's counties was named during those brief months when his ascendant star glowed with an all too temporary brilliance and hope and expectation ran high. Had the county been organized when first proposed or had its formation been further postponed, it is a fair presumption that another name would have been chosen.