Defiant Brides (21 page)

Another protest came from Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke. To consider Arnold for a military leadership role was reprehensible, the influential Burke proclaimed in the Commons, “lest the sentiments of true honor, which every British officer [holds] dearer than life, should be afflicted.”
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In a heated March 6 meeting of the House of Commons, Lord Surrey opposed the idea of “placing at the King’s elbow a man perhaps the most obnoxious to the feelings of the Americans of any in the King’s dominions.”
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Simultaneously, the Tory government, headed by Lords North and Germain, was crumbling. Leading the Whig opposition to continuation of the American Revolution was the golden-tongued parliamentarian, William Pitt the Younger. “A long and obstinate perseverance in a fatal system of war has brought this country to the brink of ruin,” the twenty-two year old declared. “What then is to be done? We can no longer appeal to the reason or feelings of ministers; their conduct [in support of the war] has been in the teeth of reason and feelings. . . . What hath all this purchased for us?—the dismemberment of half the empire and perhaps the extinction of more than half our commerce.”
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To counter those protests, Arnold met with William Petty-FitzMaurice, Earl of Shelburne, to propose a forty-gun frigate with which to battle the Americans. After weeks of silence from Shelburne, Arnold’s proposal was tabled. Public resentment towards Arnold steadily increased. “It is thought that Mr. (commonly called General) Benedict Arnold as soon as the new Ministers are sworn into office, will have it hinted to him that if . . . he does not support his
loyal figure
so often as he has lately done in the Royal presence,” sneered the
Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser
on March 28.”
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Before long, Arnold and Peggy were hissed at when they appeared at the theater and in the streets.

Many American Loyalists also reviled Arnold. One of them, a graying attorney, Peter Van Schaack, recorded his personal aversion to the man whom he encountered during a visit to Westminster Abbey. As he passed a marble memorial inscribed with the words, “Sacred to the Memory of Major John André,” Van Schaack noticed a nearby couple. “It was General Arnold, and the lady was doubtless Mrs. Arnold. They passed to the cenotaph of Major André, where they stood and conversed together. What a spectacle! The traitor, Arnold, in Westminster Abbey, at the tomb of André, deliberately perusing the monumental inscription which will transmit to future ages the tale of his own infamy.”
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Whatever discomfort the couple felt about Andre’s death was carefully concealed from their British and Loyalist friends. Peggy hid hers beneath a veneer of charm, merriment, and wit as Arnold continued efforts to raise his financial prospects. At the likely suggestion of his friend, Cornwallis, he applied for a post with the East India Company. The application was not only rejected but coldly returned by a disgusted American Loyalist.

The year 1783 held other disappointments. Peggy delivered a daughter named Margaret in January, but in August the baby died. By then she was pregnant again. For all her earlier fragility and nervous energy, Arnold’s wife was developing a resilience and fortitude that would have astounded the Shippens. An ornament of London’s aristocratic galas, the twenty-two-year-old blonde spent that spring in social engagements to which she invited her visiting friend, Becky Franks, the bride of Colonel Henry Johnston.

From her home at Killarney Castle, Ireland, the following February, Becky described Peggy to another former Philadelphia belle, Williamina Bond Cadwalader. “I can tell you very little of your American acquaintances as I left the place last August & indeed . . . knew very little of them except Mrs. Arnold,” Becky explained. Peggy had “always behaved more like an affectionate sister than a common friend, she still continues the same. I hear every week or fortnight from her.” In London, as in Philadelphia and New York, Peggy had become immensely popular, “more noticed and more liked than any American that ever came over. She is visited by people of the first rank & invited to all their houses.”
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Friendships and royal pensions were rapidly becoming Peggy’s defense against personal disappointments. Behind closed doors at 18 Portman Square, other sorrows abounded. In March 1784, her fourth child, George, died shortly after his birth. Simultaneously, Arnold, brooding over his half-pay as a retired brigadier general, petitioned the British government for more money. As a former American, Arnold had a right to do so, for in July 1783, Parliament voted into law the Loyalist Claims Commission to recompense those who fled the Revolution. Among Arnold’s claims for reimbursement were expenses he had incurred to outfit his American Legion. Another lost sum of money was the £5,000 he had paid for Mount Pleasant as a wedding gift to Peggy, which Pennsylvania seized after his defection. Shrewdly, Arnold failed to mention that his father-in-law, Judge Shippen, had repurchased the house at auction at his own expense. Slippery too was Arnold’s claim that, because of his agreement with Clinton, he had refused General Washington’s offer for his “command of the American army in South Carolina . . . afterwards given to Greene . . . with the sum of 20,000 pounds.”
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All told, he claimed, the British government owed him £16,125 beyond the £6,365 Clinton had initially paid.

By late April, the Treasury Office had still not responded. Clinton’s payment, Arnold seethed, was “not a full compensation for the loss of my real estate, for risks and services rendered.” Given the additional expense of living in London to reclaim that debt and the “loss of time and difficulty attending it,” Arnold finally withdrew his claim.
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Instead the angry forty-four year old vowed to rely only upon himself. He would do so by establishing an international trading enterprise.

Peggy could not have approved: separations from her husband were as anguishing as transatlantic crossings were dangerous. And she was again pregnant. Moreover, though surrounded by social acquaintances, she had few close friends. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1754, “the General” was busily completing the final touches on a new brig, the
Lord Middlebrook
, for his voyage to New Brunswick. There he intended to sell imports to the influx of Loyalists emigrating there from England and America.

Peggy’s description of her situation must have their worried the Shippens, for by early summer, brother-in-law Edward Burd had arrived in London. Accounts of his visit are brief, only mentioning a shopping trip with Peggy to purchase a china set for his wife. All the while, Burd undoubtedly assessed his sister-in-law. Regardless of the Shippens’ disgust with Arnold (whom Burd had dubbed that “infernal villain”), to Burd, Peggy seemed reasonably content. Not only did she continue to trust Arnold but did so even at the risk of her future security.
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On July 13, with utter disregard for her father’s costly repurchase of Mount Pleasant at auction, Peggy wrote Judge Shippen that “G. Arnold desires you will be so good as to sell it [Mount Pleasant] for as much as you can,” since Arnold was no longer willing “to risk any more money in America.”
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Two weeks later, Peggy bore a frail baby girl, named Sophia. Once assured that mother and child were stable, Burd returned to Philadelphia. The following October, Arnold sailed to the British North American colonies. For months Peggy waited for his letter. By March 6, 1786, wracked with suspense about him, she poured her heart out to Judge Shippen. “I assure you, my dear papa, I find it necessary to summon all my philosophy to my aid, to support myself under my present situation. Separated from and anxious for the fate, of the best of husbands, torn from almost everybody that is dear to me, harassed with a troublesome and expensive lawsuit, having all the General’s business to transact, and feeling that I am in a strange country, without a creature near me that is really interested in my fate, you will not wonder if I am unhappy.”
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For the first time, Peggy admitted the sacrifices she had made as Arnold’s wife and her sense of utter aloneness. Ironically that was the same message her mirror opposite, Lucy Flucker Knox, had once sounded across the Atlantic during the long years of the Revolution.

Events surrounding the proposed peace with Britain meant new challenges for Lucy and Henry Knox. In March 1782, Washington appointed Knox and Gouverneur Morris, the assistant treasurer of the Revolution, as commissioners for a prisoner exchange in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Only reluctantly had Henry complied, for he and Lucy were then watching anxiously over their newborn son, Marcus. In late winter the infant had contracted smallpox and was only slowly recovering. From Elizabethtown, on March 22, Henry anxiously assured Lucy, “Every time I am absent from you I am convinced more & more of the utter improbability of living without you. I hope you and our dear little pledges of love and joy [are well] and that Marcus has entirely recovered of the small pox.”
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That same day Congress approved Washington’s recommendation for Knox’s appointment as a major general, making him, at thirty-three, the youngest man of that rank in the army. Even that promotion did little to cheer Lucy, whose letters dwelt upon her “unspeakable mortification [disappointment]” at Henry’s absence.
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By mid-April, the prisoner exchange at Elizabethtown had attracted national attention when a British officer hanged the American prisoner, Captain Joshua Huddy, during his transfer from New York City. The resultant public clamor for American revenge renewed tensions with the British. Washington, consequently, reestablished army headquarters on the Hudson and appointed Knox the new commander of West Point.

By mid-May, Lucy had left the Biddles’ home, where she and her children had been living, and accompanied Henry to Newburgh, ten miles north of West Point. To her delight, their new home was a handsome fieldstone house once owned by miller John Ellison. Beneath its high-pitched roof and tall chimneys stood a central hall with wood-paneled rooms, providing her and Henry with a gracious location for the dinners and social gatherings they soon hosted.

Like others who had once enjoyed an elite lifestyle, Lucy craved its return and, whenever opportunity arrived, attempted to recreate it. Washington’s orders for a May 31 celebration of the birth of the French dauphin, Louis-Joseph Xavier François, soon provided that opportunity. As he had at Pluckemin, Henry, with Lucy’s guidance, organized the festivities. In preparation for the arrival of hundreds of guests, Knox ordered the construction of a six-hundred-foot colonnade artfully festooned with evergreens, fleur-de-lis, muskets, and bayonets. At noon after a morning of prayers, parades, military displays, and gun salutes, the Washingtons, Governor George Clinton and his Sarah, the Knoxes, and other officers arrived by barge and passed through the Grand Colonnade. A banquet for five hundred guests followed and celebration with “13 toasts, particularly adapted to the festival, were drank, under a discharge of 13 canon,” reported a local paper.
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After “a few bumpers of wine . . . Gen. Washington, who appeared in unusually good spirits, said to his officers, ‘Let us have a dance!’” reported Captain Edwin Eben. Then “the great commander led the dance, in a ‘
gender hop
’ or ‘
stag dance
’ [italics in original] . . . to the favorite old tune ‘Soldier’s Joy.’”
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Another newspaper reported that “Washington attended the ball . . . and with a dignified and graceful air, having Mrs. Knox for his partner, carried down a dance of twenty couple in the arbor on the green grass.”
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By then no one questioned Lucy’s role as the reigning hostess of celebrations, a role she continued to hold in public celebrations during the early Federal period.

When, however, officers of the Continental army began to complain about Congressional failure to deliver back pay, memories of that celebration quickly faded. Even the army’s beloved drillmaster, Baron Von Steuben, felt the financial strain. “It is been owing to him that a substantial discipline has been established in the American Army,” Knox sharply reminded Congressman Samuel Osgood. Lacking a salary, the dedicated Von Steuben had spent so much of his own savings that he “can no longer live without pay.”
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By August, the Knoxes faced a new personal crisis. From Philadelphia where their eight-year-old daughter Lucy attended boarding school, the Biddles reported that the child’s health was rapidly declining. Without further delay Lucy and Henry had her brought to Newburgh, whose fresh Hudson River air they thought would be beneficial. As the girl’s condition improved, however, their infant son, Marcus, grew fussy. Initially Lucy and Henry attributed his symptoms to teething, but soon the baby became seriously ill. By August 25, Knox gloomily wrote his brother William that he would probably “never have the pleasure to see him. A few days, perhaps a few hours may decide his fate.”
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On September 8, Marcus died. “I have the unhappiness, my dear General to inform you of the departure of my precious infant, your god son,” Knox wrote Washington two days later. “In the deep mystery in which all human events are involved, the Supreme Being has been pleased to prevent his expanding innocence from ripening.”
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For nearly a month, Knox stopped writing others. On September 24 he finally conceded to William Alexander (known as Lord Stirling, from his Scottish inheritance) that he had no choice but to accept the child’s death: “The misery inflicted upon us poor mortals appears frequently to be too great to be borne. Yet we wade on.”
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Two weeks later Henry wrote Gouverneur Morris that he had suffered “private affliction, in the loss of a fine child, and the [sickness of] the rest of my family.”
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Lucy was profoundly depressed. Having lost two infants in the space of three years, her dreams of a large, happy family had vanished, as seemingly elusive as the reflected light from a candle sconce. He still hoped, Knox wrote Washington, that Mrs. Knox, by leaning upon the “great principles of reason and religion will be enabled . . . to support this repeated shock to her tender affections.”
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For weeks, he sat by Lucy’s side, reasoning with her and assuring her in time all would be well. Death, he confided to his friend, Benjamin Lincoln, “had with a strong and unrelenting hand seized the youngest of my little flock. My utmost attention and philosophy were necessarily exerted to calm the agitated mind of its wretched mother.”
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