Defiant Brides (26 page)

Only one member of the president’s remained: America’s secretary of war, who served as Washington’s proxy in his absence. As the death toll climbed in excess of a hundred a day, Philadelphia grew silent. “The streets are lonely to a melancholy degree. The merchants generally have fled . . . the stroke is as heavy as if an army of enemies had possessed the city without plundering it,” Knox wrote Washington.
³¹

From New York, Lucy warned Henry to avoid the center of Philadelphia and stay in nearby Schuylkill Falls. “You [are] not to . . . visit to Philadelphia you cannot go even should the evil abate from this time,” she lectured Henry.
³²
A full month later, she still fretted about Knox, admitting to him that her days were “clouded by the possibility of your being exposed.”
³³
Implied in this was Lucy’s continued frustration over Henry’s dedication to the United States at still another risk to his life.

As usual Knox reassured his wife. With the arrival of November’s cooler temperatures, the epidemic had abated and affairs were returning to normal. “There is hope Congress will meet in Philadelphia,” he wrote. The current international tensions made it “of no small national importance, that it should be known abroad that the government is administered and the legislature is sitting in the very place of which such dreadful reports have been . . . circulated.”
³⁴
To do otherwise would present a weak face to the warring French and British.

By mid-December, newspapers announced that the French had captured, imprisoned, and sold a hundred American sailors into slavery in Algiers. A hue and cry arose across the land, resulting in a March 12, 1794, Congressional appropriation of nearly $700,000 to establish a navy. As secretary of war, Knox was ordered to supervise construction of six high-performance frigates—the USS
United States
, USS
President
, USS
Congress
, USS
Chesapeake
, USS
Constellation
, and USS
Constitution
, or “Old Ironsides.”

By May, Henry felt so hemmed in with duties that he complained to his friend Henry Jackson, “I cannot leave my situation in this critical state of affairs.”
³⁵
In July another crisis, an armed protest by the farmers of western Pennsylvania over an excise tax on whiskey, compounded those frustrations.

After the September 24 birth of Lucy’s twelfth child, Marcus Bingham, Henry finally resolved to retire at the end of the year. “I have never attended to my private affairs, and I have a growing family,” he explained to General Wayne that December of 1794. “I must be more attentive, or an unpleasant old age will be stealing up on me.”
³⁶
One can almost hear Lucy’s pleas behind those words, murmuring about their intended bucolic retirement to Maine.

There, he and Lucy would raise their children without distraction. There too, they might perhaps reform their difficult son, Henry. The Knoxes were not the only ones concerned about the boy. From Hingham in March 1793 Sarah Flucker had written to Lucy that the teenager’s proposed trip to Boston during a school vacation should be discouraged, for there he would likely be “exposed to the temptation of the town which may set aside his present habits of regularity.”
³⁷

Whatever “habits of regularity” young Henry might have acquired at the Derby School did not stick. A year later, he wrote to his father that he had no intention of continuing his education but would make his living as a merchant. Higher education served no purpose, the teenager insisted, other than to understand “mathematics & arithmetic perfectly, which can be obtained without going to college.” “If, sir, I must go,” young Henry threatened, “it will be against my desire.”
³⁸

Although neither knew it, the Knoxes’ unstable finances paralleled the Arnolds’ own. From London on June 26, 1792, the increasingly practical Peggy had shared her concerns with Judge Shippen: “I am extremely anxious to place the little money that we have reserved for my children . . . to give them a good education which in this country [England] is attended with great expense. Will you, my dear sir, give me your advice and assistance to effect this desirable end?”
³⁹

Belying Peggy’s ignorance was her suggestion that her father invest the money she saved from Queen Charlotte’s pension in an annuity. “If I recollect when I was in Philada, your bank produced at least seven percent; and you thought the money perfectly secure,” she wrote to Judge Shippen. Since “bills are now at Par,
should they continue so, or rise,
and you think it eligible for me to place money in Philadelphia, I beg you will have the goodness to draw upon me for £2,000 Sterling.”
⁴⁰
This was no vapid former Philadelphia belle but a shrewd thinker. Having witnessed a series of Arnold’s financial disasters, she had decided she would now invest on her own.

Nevertheless, Peggy continued to defend Arnold. In the next paragraphs of that letter, written several weeks later, she warned Judge Shippen to ignore newspaper reports of Arnold’s death in a duel as merely rumors. The surrounding circumstances behind the rumors, though, had caused her “a great deal of pain.” The trouble began when a certain Lord Lauderdale “had cast some reflections on his [Arnold’s] political character, in the House of Lords.” Although Peggy had advised Arnold to ignore the insult, “this is a subject upon which of course, he is, to me silent,” she glumly admitted. “All that I can obtain from him, are assurances that he will do nothing rashly.”
⁴¹

As a result she summoned “all my fortitude to my aid, to prevent . . . sinking under it, which would unman him and prevent his acting himself.” After Arnold demanded an apology, Lauderdale conceded. The former American general had drafted a formal note for him to sign, but when the noble refused, Arnold challenged him to duel. Arnold’s second was a Lord Hawke, whom Peggy described as “our particular friend.”
⁴²
Lauderdale’s second was the colorful Charles James Fox, former British prime minister and head of the Rockingham Whigs.

At 7 a.m. on Sunday, July 6, 1792, Arnold and Lauderdale stood back to back in a field at Kilbourne Wells, Hampstead, as Peggy cowered in a bed in central London. At a signal, the duelers paced off and turned. Arnold fired and missed, provoking a trembling Lauderdale to insist “he had no enmity to General Arnold.” But still refusing to apologize, the aristocrat invited Arnold to shoot again. Arnold proudly refused, and Peggy explained that Lauderdale had claimed “he did not mean to asperse his character or wound his feelings . . . was sorry for what he had said.”
⁴³

A report in the June 29
Evening Mail
confirmed Peggy’s account and chortled over the Lauderdale side for its amateurish preparations for the duel. “Mr. Fox apologized to Lord Lauderdale for his inexpertise in charging his pistols” and even admitted, “I never fired but once in my life.”
⁴⁴

Nevertheless, the duel and its potentially grim consequences had ripped through Peggy as brutally as a bullet. In the days before it, she had remained silent. “What I suffered for a week is not to be described; the suppression of my feelings, lest I should unman the general almost . . . proved too much for me; and for some hours, my reason was despaired of,” she wrote Judge Shippen a few days later. By the time of her July 6 letter though, she had recovered.
⁴⁵

The intrigue had galvanized London society. To Arnold’s astonishment, other nobles and highly placed men congratulated him for his courage in the face of public insult. Their approval, Peggy boasted to her father, had been “expressed, universally, and particularly by a number of the first characters in the kingdom.” Nor, she added, “am I displeased at the great commendations bestowed on my own conduct upon this trying occasion.”
⁴⁶

Three weeks later, William Pitt the Younger, by then the prime minister and chancellor of the Exchequer, asked the Treasury Department to review General Clinton’s compensation for Arnold’s losses in America. Again Arnold insisted that his half-pay pension was “far from being able to provide for and educate a numerous family of children.”
⁴⁷
After a personal meeting with Pitt, the former general wrote Clinton that the prime minister “appeared very much surprised at the small sum I received and asked for ‘a little time to consider the matter.’” The “little time” turned into weeks, then months, though ultimately nothing changed.
⁴⁸

Still, Arnold, by then fifty-three, would not give up. Gamely, he applied for another military post, but after its rejection, he again decided to strike out on his own. He would do so, he told Peggy, by selling two New Brunswick vessels to fund a privateer with which to attack the French. Filled with enthusiasm, he also wrote his Canadian friend Jonathan Bliss about his plans to sail to the Caribbean for “five or six months” to resume his trade connections.
⁴⁹
Wide-eyed, Peggy, who was again pregnant, listened to her husband’s plans. Nothing she could do or say, she knew, could change them.

Only the stormy weather of March 1794 stalled Arnold’s departure from Falmouth. Nearby, another ship, carrying exiles from the French Reign of Terror, was similarly delayed in the harbor. Among its passengers was the controversial Prince Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, who, learning that an American general was staying in the same inn while waiting for the weather to clear, begged an introduction. Reluctantly Arnold met him but, the Frenchman recalled, “dared not tell me his name.” When Talleyrand asked for letters of introduction in America, Arnold morosely confessed, “I am perhaps the only American who cannot give you letters for his own country. All the relations I had there are now broken. I must never return.” Later, Talleyrand realized his acquaintance was Benedict Arnold. “I must confess that I felt much pity for him, for I witnessed his agony.”
⁵⁰

Later that spring Arnold successfully traded English goods in St. Kitts and on June 4, 1794, headed into the harbor of Pointe-a-Pitre on the Guadeloupe island of Grand-Terre. That same day the French occupied the island, captured Arnold, and cast him onto a prison ship.

In London three weeks later, Peggy delivered a fifth child, William Fitch, named after their American Loyalist friend and neighbor. By August she had learned about Arnold’s capture. “I am now in a state of most extreme misery, from the report of your father’s being a prisoner to the French at Point-a Peter, Guad[e]loupe,” she wrote her stepson Richard in Saint John. “It is contradicted by some gentlemen lately from St. Kitt’s but your father’s last letter to me, being of the first of June, wherein he says he shall set-off the next day for Point-a-Peter, makes it but too probable.”
⁵¹

On August 29, after bribing his guards, Arnold made a daring escape. After squeezing through a cabin window of the prison ship, he shimmied down a rope onto a raft and paddled through shark-infested waters to a small boat, which he rowed to the
Boyne
, a British man-of-war. Soon afterwards he met General Sir Charles “No Flint” Grey, who, oddly enough, had been John André’s commanding officer. In spite of his remembrance of the circumstances surrounding André’s death, Grey was impressed with Arnold. Ultimately, he rewarded Arnold with two posts: volunteer quartermaster for the British fleet and agent for Guadeloupe’s British planters.

With rising hopes for a permanent military position, Arnold lingered in Guadeloupe for a year but finally returned to London in July 1795. To his surprise, Peggy—by then thirty-five years old—had become “very much an invalid” in his absence.
⁵²
He attributed her condition to nerves brought on by his long absence, financial worries, and reports of her mother’s death in Philadelphia. Desperate to restore Peggy to health, Arnold brought her to the baths at Cheltenham and to the ocean near Surrey, but she failed to make a full recovery. In December, while congratulating the Blisses on the birth of another child, Peggy wrote, “For my own part, I am determined to have no more little plagues, as it is so difficult to provide for them in this country.”
⁵³
By spring, she was suffering from edema. The mere act of walking, Peggy complained in a letter to Judge Shippen on May 2, 1796, produced pains in her leg and caused her body to swell, though her appetite was normal and she appeared in “florid health.” As a remedy, her doctors suggested that she consume half portions of food and drink and “never [to] fatigue myself with exercise.”
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Only one event had brightened her life—receipt of Judge Shippen’s portrait. “You could not have bestowed upon me a more valued gift. Repining is useless, but it is surely a hard lot to be so separated from all my relations,” Peggy wrote. “Do not suffer absence to weaken your affection for me,” she pleaded, “though fate has deprived me of the happiness of contributing to the comfort of your latter days, I could sacrifice almost my life to render them easy, and free from care and pain.”
⁵⁵

Disappointments, public and private, had marred Peggy’s defiant marriage. Suddenly, for the first time since her April 8, 1779, wedding to Arnold, the former Philadelphia belle admitted that her union with Arnold had bankrupted her vitality and spirit.

ON JUNE
22, 1795, taut sails and a brisk wind carried Lucy, Henry, and their six youngsters on a sloop through Maine’s Penobscot Bay onto the St. George River. As the vessel neared shore, a mansion came into view. This was Montpelier, the Knoxes’ new home, perched above the river like a great white bird, its nine outbuildings outstretched like welcoming wings.

Lucy was overcome. Here was the palatial house she and Henry had dreamed about for decades, one as imposing as the Washingtons’ Mount Vernon and Jefferson’s Monticello. The setting was equally stately. To the northeast stood deep pine forests; in the distance shimmered an outline of the Camden Mountains, and, slightly west, stood the sleepy town of Thomaston. As the Knoxes disembarked onto the lawn, a committee of local residents rushed forward to welcome them. Behind a gate embellished with an American eagle of the Order of the Cincinnati, loomed the family’s new home, topped by a domed cupola.