Defiant Brides (30 page)

In late May 1824, Lucy fell ill with an infection that intensified with each passing week. At 3 a.m. on June 20, 1824, she died. Lucy was sixty-eight years of age. During her last moments, Lucy imagined she was again young and attending a ball with “her Harry”—the greatest joy she had ever known.

Six months before his own passing, Henry had written Lucy from Boston, “It would have afforded me great and sincere satisfaction, were we together.”
³¹

Perhaps, at last, they were.

Although Knox’s death shattered Lucy’s zest for life, widowhood had prompted Peggy Arnold to rally. The former Philadelphia belle’s evolution from the fragile, compliant bride of the American traitor to a restrained wife was remarkable enough, but what followed was even more surprising: a revelation of strengths Peggy long held in reserve.

Her transition was born of necessity. Less than two weeks after Arnold’s death, Peggy’s friend Ann Fitch wrote Judge Shippen about her courage, praising the new widow for her “fortitude and resignation.”
³²
Peggy, nevertheless, resented that her late husband had left his financial affairs entirely in her hands. She wished, as she wrote her stepsons Richard and Henry, that “your dear Father did not join some male friend of respectability in the executorship.”
³³
With help and advice from family friend Daniel Coxe, Peggy soon learned the truth: Arnold’s debts outweighed his assets. Horrified, Peggy immediately reduced her expensive lifestyle.

Essentially, she had been dealt a double blow. In addition to the “loss of a husband whose affection for me was unbounded,” as she wrote her brother-in-law, Edward Burd, she was “left in very embarrassed circumstances with a little dependent family.” The creditors could readily seize her annual pension of £500 and the £110 awarded each of her five children. Reminding Burd that her own brother, Neddy, had lost part of her investment years earlier, she hoped to draw on whatever remained. “I cannot suppose but that my present unhappy situation will be taken into consideration upon this occasion,” Peggy observed. “Have the goodness, my dear Mr. Burd, to tell me candidly what dependence I may reasonably place upon this resource.” Never, she admitted, had she “felt myself so helpless.”
³⁴

Left unsaid was a provision in Arnold’s will that also rocked Peggy to the core—the request for a certain John Sage of New Brunswick, to receive land, an income, and education. The fourteen year old was subsequently assumed to be Arnold’s illegitimate son, sired during his first trip to Saint John with an unnamed Native American of that community. Recently, historian Barry Wilson observed that the date of Sage’s birth mitigates against that since Arnold’s arrival in Saint John in December 1785 was only four months before Sage’s birth on April 14, 1786. Other theories abound. Among them that Sage was the product of Arnold’s liaison with a mistress carried aboard his ship from Great Britain, or that he was Arnold’s grandson and had been sired by seventeen-year-old Benedict Jr., who brought the child to Connecticut.
³⁵

Whether true or not, Peggy was shocked by the discovery of his existence and by Arnold’s remembrance of Sage in his will. “My sufferings are not of the present only,” was Peggy’s one oblique comment about it to her brother-in-law Burd. “Years of unhappiness have passed, I had cast my lot, complaints were unavailing and you and my other friends are ignorant of the many causes of uneasiness I have had.”
³⁶

Nor would she specify the nature of those sorrows with Judge Shippen, who, through deft political maneuvering, had risen in 1799 to become Pennsylvania’s chief Supreme Court justice. Instead Peggy’s letter focused upon her ongoing symptoms of ill health: a certain “confusion in my head resembling what I can suppose would be the sensations of anybody extremely drunk.” Some physicians attributed her indisposition to earlier illnesses, she explained, others to nerves, frayed by a “long loss of rest, anxiety of mind, the irreparable loss of a most tender and affectionate husband, and the total change of my circumstances and mode of living.”
³⁷

Even so, Peggy vowed to fulfill two goals. “I am making every exertion to keep up as much as possible the respectability of the family,” she explained to her son Edward, “determined . . . that the fortunes of my children shall not be marred by the change in our situation.”
³⁸

On June 2, 1802, Peggy thanked Judge Shippen for his financial assistance and his invitation for her to return to Philadelphia, but she had decided to postpone any decision “till I see how this business will terminate.” In any case, she wrote, she would “take no measures that are not directed by prudence.”
³⁹

By autumn 1802, Peggy had reduced expenses by auctioning off her furniture, silver, and other valuable possessions and by renting the townhouse at Gloucester Place. “I am now living in a very small house in Bryanston Street, using furniture purchased from Carolow; who is now a more independent woman than her mistress,” she informed her stepsons.
⁴⁰
Her two eldest sons, Edward and James, she added, had donated their pensions to help finance their younger brothers’ educations.

The following October, after spending the summer in the country with friends, Peggy wrote her father that she had decided against living in rural England. Without the financial means to socialize with the local gentry, life would be “too lonely for either my dear girl [her daughter Sophia] or myself.” Nor would life in a country town suit her, for its residents were “chiefly composed of card playing, tattling old maids and people wholly unaccustomed to genteel life.” Instead, Peggy would remain in London near friends and those “who know how to manage.” There she could “live as cheap, as in almost any other part of England.” Admittedly that would mean certain sacrifices, the most painful of which was “the want of a carriage.”
⁴¹

In a justified—if uncharacteristically self-congratulatory—letter of November 1802 Peggy wrote her stepsons that she had accomplished “the settlement of the most troublesome business that had ever devolved upon a female.” She had paid all of Arnold’s “
ascertained
debts within a few hundred pounds” (italics in original) and would soon eliminate the rest.
⁴²
That letter probably surprised Arnold’s sons. Having remained ignorant of their father’s financial struggles, Peggy continued, they knew “so little his heart, his motives, and his embarrassed circumstances, as to be induced to write him in a style to wound, and distress him.”
⁴³

The “boy who is with you,” as she referred to John Sage, “ought to be taught, by his own labor, to procure his own livelihood. He ought never to have been brought up with any other ideas.” Nevertheless she would arrange for his receipt of the promised Canadian lands.
⁴⁴
Chagrined that no one in the family—Arnold’s stepsons, his children with Peggy, or herself—“will ever have the value of a guinea from their dear father’s property,” she still believed that repayment of Arnold’s debts would restore his honor.
⁴⁵
Moreover, she also intended to help support her sister-in-law, Hannah. “I will never suffer the sister of my husband to want,” she added, vowing to “supply her from my own little income.”
⁴⁶

This was a newly empowered Peggy. Nor, she explained, did she have plans to return to Philadelphia. “My anxiety to get your little brothers on in life, will deprive me on this gratification,” she explained.
⁴⁷
Her eldest son, Edward, would serve in the British army in Bengal; her second son, James, an army officer was then stationed in Tinmouth; seventeen-year-old George studied at London’s New Royal Military College; eight-year-old William attended a boarding school; and her frail daughter, Sophia, still lived with her at home.

And, indeed, within another year Peggy had paid off the rest of Arnold’s debts “and not reserved even a towel or a tea spoon” she wrote Edward. The one remaining problem was her “indifferent”—but actually frightening—state of health.
⁴⁸
Six months earlier, on July 3, 1803, Peggy confided to Betsy that she had consulted two doctors “in the female line.” Their diagnosis was “a complaint of the womb” that obliged her to “keep almost constantly in a recumbent posture.”
⁴⁹
Soon afterwards the physicians refined their diagnosis to “the dreaded evil, a cancer.” Lately, she added, “I have . . . been much worse, in consequence of a very large tumor.”
⁵⁰

That same July day Peggy explained to her father, Judge Shippen, “To prevent another [tumor] is now the great object, but I am not much encouraged to hope for success.”
⁵¹
Alarmed, her friends brought her to the countryside as she reclined on a seat in the carriage.

By May, Peggy’s letter to her sister Betsy was even more piteous: “I have been indeed very near death, my dear sister, and my complaints are such, as to give me but little hope of long continuing an inhabitant of this world.” Opium had become her painkiller. “Nevertheless, I do not suffer my spirits to overcome me,” Peggy insisted. “I have much to be thankful for—most particularly for the very uncommon attention and kindness that I hourly experience from my numerous friends. . . . I have the best advice that London can afford, and am constantly attended by two of the most eminent physicians.”
⁵²

On July 5, 1804, Daniel Coxe, the friend who advised Peggy on finances after Arnold’s death and often visited her at Bryanston Street, wrote Judge Shippen that his once-lovely daughter “now lies on a sick bed, very painful and alarming . . . looking so ill as to shock me. She was not able to write to you or would have [done] it—She begged me to say for her all duty & affection to you and her sisters.”
⁵³

Six weeks later, on August 24, Peggy, forty-four, died.

So it was that two defiant brides of the Revolution met death much as they had lived their lives—one clinging to youthful memories of love, the other with the resignation and steely will of a seasoned martyr.

AFTER LUCY’S DEATH, HER
daughters hoped to memorialize her as one of the legendary patriot wives of the American Revolution.

The name of General Henry Knox was already honored. In 1791, citizens in Eastern Tennessee’s Great Valley had renamed their largest town Knoxville. The 1802 establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, modeled at least in part upon the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment, also fulfilled one of their father’s earliest dreams. Written accounts of the Revolution had praised Knox for his character as well as for his contributions to the American cause. “To praise him for his military talents alone would be to deprive him of the eulogium he merits; a man of understanding, gay, sincere, and honest—it is impossible to know without esteeming him, or to see without loving him,” wrote the Marquis of Chastellux.
¹

Chief Justice John Marshall’s five-volume
Life of George Washington
praised Knox for his “past services and an unquestioned integrity . . . sound understanding.”
²
By 1834, William Sullivan’s
Familiar Letters
on Public Characters and Public Events
recalled that Knox’s “face had a noble expression, and was capable of displaying the most benignant feeling. . . . This was the true character of his heart. . . . The mind of Knox was powerful, rapid and decisive. . . . He had a brilliant imagination, and no less brilliant modes of expression.”
³

Yet, it would not be until 1848 that a remembrance of Lucy Flucker Knox finally appeared as a chapter in Elizabeth Ellett’s
Women of the American Revolution.
The author, unable to locate the Knox children, had based her portrait upon information from Maine congressman Lorenzo Sabine, editor of the
Eastport Sentinel
and author of the 1847 book
The American Loyalists.
Ellett’s chapter on Lucy Knox was a “brief & somewhat inaccurate account” of their mother, complained daughter Lucy to her sister Caroline in February 1849.
⁴
Although Ellett had extolled their mother’s intellect for its “high order,” she also wrote that Mrs. Knox had said that if she had to live her life over, she would have been “more of a wife, more of a mother, more of a woman.”
⁵
That admission infuriated the Knoxes’ eldest daughter. “Now whatever may have been her fondness in former days for the world & its attractions—I am well assured that they never led her to neglect her own family,” she wrote to Caroline.
⁶

Immediately after the publication of
Women of the American Revolution
, Lucy wrote to Ellett, who immediately “begged” for more information.
⁷
By then, Lucy’s comments had been incorporated into Ellett’s
Godey’s Lady’s Book
article, “Sketch of Mrs. Henry Knox.” But once again, Lucy thought that her mother had been unjustly represented. Although Ellett described Mrs. Knox as a “remarkable woman,”
⁸
Lucy wrote her sister, she “said some things which I never thought of saying, such as the influence of my mother . . . over the minds of General & Mrs. Washington, which I certainly never asserted.”
⁹

Privately, Lucy Knox Thatcher blamed herself for not knowing more about her mother’s life. “When our dear mother was yet with us, I did not take the pains, I . . . ought to have done to inform myself of a thousand particulars of her eventual life,” she admitted to her sister. “Anecdotes I have none. Do you recall any?”
¹⁰

Apparently Caroline had none or, if she did, they never appeared in print. By then, she had been twice widowed. Ultimately Caroline’s marriage to James Swan had been unhappy, terminating with his 1834 death. Two years later, she married Senator John Holmes, with whom she lived happily, if all too briefly, until he died, in 1843.