The "drunk Hessians" tradition fits very well indeed into the model of many battles where the poor, hard-working, god-fearing, honest and true are pitted almost without hope against a leviathon of invulnerable opposition. Comparisons can be made to the French being loud and celebratory (as if celebrating their victory early) at Agincourt while Henry heard Mass said.

It plays well for the Loyalists to find a tool to differentiate between British factions and the German "foreigners" and blame those differences for the defeat. Similar things happened in offical accounts of Roman armies being defeated by "barbarians" in the last two centuries of the Roman (Western) empire. The Roman political types could not bring themselves to admit that the Legions of Rome could be defeated by savages, so there was always something (or someone) to pin it on - always something conveniently unprovable or someone conveniently dead on the field of battle.