Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  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.”54

  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.

  12

  “An Irresistible but Invisible Force”

  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.

  In 1794, Knox had instructed his housewright to “build the house plain without carving or other expensive ornament.”1 After Lucy conversed with her Philadelphia friend Anne Willing Bingham, who had once lived in France, though, she added several ideas to the plan. Lucy also decided to name the estate Montpelier after another house owned by a French family that she and Knox once visited.

  The mansion was massive. Within its four stories—each three-thousand square feet—were nineteen rooms and twenty-four fireplaces, making Montpelier larger “than any other private house from Philadelphia to Passamaquoddy,” as Knox’s awed attorney Henry Jackson later observed.2 Reminiscent of Philadelphian and Georgian architecture, its colossal dimensions also reflected Lucy and Henry’s personal bulk, aristocratic tastes, and fondness for entertainment.

  Every aspect of Montpelier was symmetrical. From the front stairs, guests entered the high-ceilinged, lemon-yellow Oval Room. Above its double fireplaces hung portraits of Washington and Knox, beneath which stood a handsome Sheraton card table and a polished wood bureau, or travel case, a gift from Lafayette. Two globes—one terrestrial, the other celestial—flanked the front door. Twin side chambers housed drawing rooms, a dining room, and Henry’s library of over 1,500 volumes, one-third of them in French. A central door at the back of the Oval Room opened onto a hall with double flying staircases that led to the bedrooms. One early visitor to Montpelier described it as “a handsome, though not a magnificent structure; neatly, if not sumptuously furnished; sufficiently spacious for the accommodation of a numerous family, with additional lodging for . . . seven or eight friends, or even more.”3

  To celebrate, the Knoxes invited residents of Thomaston to a house-warming. “On July Fourth, we had a small company of upwards of 500 people,” Henry drolly wrote Henry Jackson.4 To feed their guests, Montpelier’s chef roasted an ox and, throughout the day harpsichord music, played by the Knox’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, enhanced the elegance of the affair.

  By dawn some guests had already arrived. “Men, women and children poured in until the house was completely filled, and babies without number were placed on different beds. . . . It was altogether an amusing scene,” young Lucy recalled. “The house was so much larger than anything they had seen before . . . the subject of wonder, every object, having the attraction of novelty.”5 There was only one sour note: the theft that day of Henry’s gold watch and two of Lucy’s silver cups.

  Added to the colorful mix of visitors were members of the Tarrantines, American natives of the Penobscot tribe, who camped upon Montpelier’s lawn. For days after the party, the Tarrantines remained on the grounds, eating at Montpelier’s expense until even Knox grew impatient. “Now we have had a good visit, and you had better go home,” he finally declared.6

  Their long stay and the thefts of July 4 set Lucy on edge. Although a kind, generous mistress to her servants, Knox’s wife quickly acquired a reputation for haughtiness towards locals. One often-told story involved an outing during which Lucy’s carriage broke do
wn. As she awaited help from Montpelier, a kindly neighbor invited her to rest in her home. Stiffly, Lucy replied that she preferred to wait outside. Then she stood proudly in the mud until her servants arrived.

  Henry, in contrast, endeared himself to Thomaston’s residents. Yet it was often known that the former American general would “plan more in a day than could be executed in a year,” and Maine proved no exception.7 Among his dizzying number of enterprises was a new wharf on the St. George, a lime works, brick manufacture, livestock farm, saw mills, lumbering businesses, and a shipyard. Dozens of workers—carpenters, coopers, joiners, blacksmiths, masons, ship builders, and lumberjacks—consequently swarmed over Montpelier with questions and requests for cash and supplies.

  “When this great and good man left the Federal cabinet, he became victim to anticipation,” his younger Massachusetts colleague, Senator Harrison Gray Otis, later observed. “His own palace raised in the woods was a beau ideal only of the ‘castles in the air’ which floated in his ardent imagination.” The scope and size of his project, Otis reflected, “were worthy of Peter the Great, and would have required no inconsiderable portion of Peter’s resources to be carried out.”8

  In lieu of those resources, Knox invited others to invest in his enterprises, hoping especially to interest his wealthy business partner and friend, William Bingham. If he and his beautiful wife, Anne, visited Montpelier that summer, Knox promised they would find Lucy beaming “in her retirement,” as hostess of a magnificent estate.9 Bingham declined the invitation. Saddled with more Maine lands than he could sell, he instead offered Knox’s investment plans to Sir Francis Baring in London.

  Lucy, disappointed that her friend Anne would not visit and longing for urbane company that first summer, was consequently thrilled when the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt arrived for a visit in early autumn. After contributing to the American Revolution, he had returned to France and served briefly as president of the French National Assembly. During the subsequent Reign of Terror, Rochefoucauld had fled so quickly he had no time to pack. “I have three dukedoms on my head, and not a whole coat on my back,” the threadbare noble muttered while at Montpelier.10 Knox, accordingly, outfitted the duke in new clothes. Recalling that and other kindnesses from Lucy, Rochefoucauld wrote that the Knoxes had treated him with “the same kind concern as if I had been a near relation.”11

  In his journal, later published as Travels through the United States of North America, he described Knox’s wife as “a lady of whom you conceive a still higher opinion the longer you are acquainted with her. Seeing her in Philadelphia, you think of her only as a fortunate player of whist; in her house in the country, you discover she possesses sprightliness, knowledge, a good heart, and an excellent understanding.”12

  Regardless of that “excellent understanding,” Lucy’s brashness often offended others. Among them was Sir Baring’s twenty-one-year-old son, Alexander, the future Baron Ashburton, who, at his father’s insistence, sailed from England to Massachusetts in late 1795 to investigate Bingham’s description of Knox’s investment opportunity. Soon after his arrival, Lucy, who then happened to be in Boston, demanded an introduction. “General Knox is in Philadelphia but I have been introduced to his wife at her desire by Mr. Codman,” the young man tartly reported to one of his London business partners.13

  Soon after Knox’s return from Philadelphia for the funeral of his long-ailing brother, William, Alexander met the former secretary of war. Immediately, the young Englishman liked him. Knox contributed so much to Maine that, once it became a state, Alexander believed the citizens “will certainly elect him governor. I hope he will affix himself there [Maine], but fear he is too much the man of the world for so retired a life.”14 Ultimately Alexander agreed to purchase two and a half million acres of land and, the following August, joined William and Anne Bingham for a visit to Montpelier.

  As usual, Lucy and Henry welcomed their guests with open arms. During that visit, the Reverend Paul Coffin also stopped by Montpelier, just after Knox, Bingham, and Baring had left for a tour of the Waldo Patent. Lucy, her children, and her guest Anne, her daughters and sister had remained at the estate. For weeks a punishing heat wave had plagued Maine, but according to Rev. Coffin, Montpelier’s “ventilators” were so efficient that he was “almost frozen for three hours.” During a “merry” dinner with wine, “the little misses talking French in a gay mood, Mrs. Bingham was sensible, had been in France, could talk of European politics and give the history of the family of the late king of France.”15

  Beneath that gaiety lay grief. Five months earlier on April 21, 1796, the Knoxes’ three-year-old Augusta Henrietta and eighteen-month-old Marcus William Bingham became ill with “putrid sore throat,” today called diphtheria. Soon afterwards six-year-old George Washington Knox also sickened. On Saturday, April 23, the two youngest children died. “Seven healthy, blooming children have been torn almost as suddenly from the same fond parents, who, with lacerated hearts, hang over the bed of another child, laboring under the same disease,” reported the Columbian Centinel.16 Miraculously, little George managed to survive.

  Six months later, the Knoxes were tested again. Rumors attributed the establishment of their winter residence in Boston to Lucy’s need for company, but that may not have been entirely true. “I hope the time is not far distant when you will cease these peregrinations. Mrs. Knox, I know, would be glad to reside at Montpelier,” General Daniel Cobb teased Henry, “but your attachment to the social pleasures of the city are not so easily overcome. . . . I fear we shall never see you fixed till you have grown so old as to be useless to yourself and friends.”17

  Ultimately the couple did remain “fixed” in Boston that winter, but not as Cobb imagined. Instead, they were bowed with grief over a second illness and, finally, the death of George Washington Knox. “We find ourselves afflicted by an irresistible but invisible force to whom we must submit,” an anguished Henry wrote President Washington. In contrast to Knox’s abiding faith in God, Lucy found no comfort in religion. The loss, Henry haltingly observed, “is almost too great for the inconsolable mother who will go mourning to her grave.”18

  Afterwards, Lucy shunned all reminders of death, including a certain cemetery that lay within sight of Montpelier containing graves of Maine’s early settlers. Years earlier Knox had attempted to locate the site of the mansion far from the graveyard, but that would have placed it in a marsh. After George’s death, Lucy could no longer bear to look at it. Tearfully, she pleaded with Knox to have the gravestones of the cemetery removed. Vehemently, Henry protested. One day while he traveled, Lucy, nevertheless, ordered servants to take away the headstones and cover all traces of the graves.

  Denial and distraction became Lucy’s painkillers, aided by devotion to her children, dedication as a hostess, and dependence upon “her Henry” for love and solace.

  During the spring and summer, guests from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia filled Montpelier’s nineteen rooms. “A hundred beds were made, and ox and twenty sheep often slaughtered in a week and twenty saddle horses and corresponding carriages kept to accommodate guests and sojourners,” recalled local historian Cyrus Eaton.19 To outsiders, the Knoxes’ generosity and extravagance soon became legendary. Years later, their eldest daughter, Lucy, attributed her father’s largesse to his desire to please others. “His heart,” as she put it, “was always much larger than his purse.”20 Reports of the Knoxes’ extravagant entertainments soon drifted back to Boston, prompting Henry’s horrified attorney, Henry Jackson, to reprimand him for living “in the style of an Eastern Nabob,” or governor of an Indian province.21

  Guests, nevertheless, were obliged to pay a price for their surroundings by indulging Lucy at the card and chess tables. Contrary to Henry’s earlier request, she had continued with those games, accompanied by bets with petty cash. Years later, daughter Lucy recalled a typical evening at Montpelier. Her mother nightly “spread tables of cards and other games and partook of them willingly her
self.” In contrast, Henry was “scarcely a looker on; preferring to converse with those who were not engaged at play; and thus on foot walking from one circle to the other with his cheerful smile and affable speech did he make his guest happy, and himself beloved.”22

  In early 1804, the twenty-three-year-old newlywed Anna Cutts confirmed Lucy’s obsession with games. That April, to her sister, Dolley Madison, Anna reported from Boston that “Madame Knox, although very haughty, I find pleasant and sensible. Chess is now her mania, which she plays extremely well, only too often for my fancy . . . every morning after breakfast, there is a summons from her ladyship, which, if I attend, pins me to her apron-string until time to dress for dinner, after which she retires, again inviting me to battle. Out of twenty-one games, in only two, and a drawn game, has she shown me any mercy; she is certainly the most successful player I have ever encountered.”23

  Today Lucy would probably be considered a victim of an obsessive-compulsive behavior disorder, a psychological means of reducing anxieties through the numbing repetition of an activity.

  In contrast was Knox’s geniality. A familiar and popular figure in Thomaston, Knox often walked through town dressed in black, a gold-headed cane in one hand, the other wrapped in a silk handkerchief to conceal his finger-stub scars from his youthful gun accident. According to historian Eaton, the former secretary of war “loved to see everyone happy, and could sympathize with people of every class and condition, rejoice in their prosperity, and aid them in adversity.”24 Eaton’s praise was probably excessive, colored by Knox’s many gifts to Thomaston, among them a church, its glass, and a bell that he ordered from Boston’s Paul Revere.