They got lucky; that pretty much describes one of the "Loyalist" lines of my family, and they got tarred and feathered and run out of town and later on the country. Because NOT having a young man come to the army from the family clearly meant they were evil. (The other ones were slightly more firmly into the territory of "this is a stupid idea and you're all stupid, we don't like the Crown either but this is going to get us all killed*".)

Sooo yeah. >.>


*which, you know, if basically all the powers of Europe hadn't actively attacked the British at that point, entirely likely!