Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  The next few years followed the Arnolds’ pattern of overreaching and underachieving. They took an aristocratic step up by moving the family to a town house featuring a wine cellar in Gloucester Place, in the Marylebone district of central London.579 But Arnold could not follow up on the goodwill he had earned in the Caribbean. His suggestion that he lead an expedition to liberate Peru, Chile, and Mexico from Spanish control was hardly taken seriously by Prime Minister William Pitt.580

  There was one benefit from his Caribbean exploits, however. The Arnolds collected land grants for 13,400 acres among “the waste lands of the crown in Upper Canada,” and because of the general’s “gallant and meritorious services in Guadaloupe,” they were exempted from the requirement that they live in the area.581 The Canadian land certainly wouldn’t bring quick money, though. So Arnold climbed into debt to finance privateers to seek fortune on the oceans. They would travel without Arnold, since his gout would not allow it. Arnold would have to trust in others.

  Peggy hated the idea. As it turned out, she was right to distrust what she called “the vile privateers.”582 She believed the captains cheated Arnold out of fifty thousand pounds, leaving him and his family desperately overextended.

  While the older boys were beginning their military careers and sending back reports of steady progress, Peggy’s frail daughter Sophia was frightening her parents. Arnold wrote in March 1798 that twelve-year-old Sophia, “though not sick, is very delicate and we have . . . to take her from school for the country air.”583 Two years later Sophia suffered what her mother called “a kind of paralytic stroke, which deprived her of the use of her legs, and extended up her back.”584 “After some severe remedies of blistering etc., she was in a degree restored to the use of her limbs, but one leg still remains without any sense of feeling,” Peggy wrote. “After trying every means to restore it, the medical team ordered her to the seas, for the purpose of using the warm sea bath.”

  A governess helped take care of Sophia, who stayed with the Fitches in the English Channel town of Brighton and seemed to improve. Her mother, meanwhile, remained in London and worried. “I dread another attack which might prove fatal,” she wrote.

  Peggy’s mental health was now tenuous at best. She seemed scattered and forgetful. In a letter, Arnold noted “a fullness of habits which frequently affects her head more or less with a giddiness.”585

  Arnold, on the other hand, seemed fully aware that his own world was steadily crumbling. “He is, at present, in the most harassed, wretched shape I have ever seen him in,” Peggy wrote to their son Edward. “Disappointed in his highly raised expectations, harassed by the sailors who are loudly demanding their prize money, when in fact their advances have greatly exceeded anything that is due to them, . . . he knows not which way to turn himself.”586 But Peggy threw in a teaspoon of token optimism: “As we have often been extracted from difficulties, I trust we shall get over our present embarrassments.”

  But Arnold would not. The vigorous warrior’s health collapsed, and he suffered from “a general dropsy and a disease in the lungs.” Unable to swallow or speak for three days, he died at his Gloucester Place home, whose lease had been given up by him and Peggy just the week before because they could no longer afford it.587 His wife and the Fitch sisters were with him when he passed away at age sixty on June 14, 1801.588

  Peggy buried him at St. Mary’s Church of Battersea, an unassuming suburb across the Thames. The basement crypt was reasonably priced, and she put him next to his friend William Fitch, whose name had been lent to Arnold’s youngest son and who, like Arnold’s eldest son, had died from combat wounds in Jamaica.

  Arnold appointed his wife as “executrix” of his will, a testament to her talent for finances, which far exceeded his own. But that role also left her with a final insult, since Arnold’s will provided money to the teenaged John Sage, product of his infidelity. Peggy was so wracked by emotions that she asked her friend Ann Fitch to write to her father with the news of Arnold’s death. “She evinces upon this occasion—as you know she has done upon many trying ones before—that fortitude and resignation which in a superior and well-regulated mind only is capable of existing,” Fitch wrote.589

  But when Peggy’s “well-regulated mind” felt capable of writing, it confessed to brother-in-law Neddy Burd that “I sometimes fear that my reason will give way.”590 And to make it crystal clear that her husband had long tortured her soul, she added: “My sufferings are not of the present moment only. 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.”

  Now Peggy was a widow at age forty-one. The woman who had worried about “unmanning” her husband was now manless. But she wasn’t free of his legacy, or his debts. Though she had always hated her husband’s irresponsible speculation, she knew in her heart that life and love were always gambles. “Matrimony,” she wrote her father, “is but a lottery.”591

  CHAPTER 20

  The Keepsake

  Soon after Peggy was widowed, the crush of her husband’s debts pushed her thoughts toward suicide. “At one period, when I viewed everything through a false medium, I fancied that nothing but the sacrifice of my life would benefit my children, for that my wretchedness embittered every moment of their lives,” she wrote her father. “And dreadful to say, I was many times on the point of making the sacrifice.”592 However, she added: “Nothing more strongly proves to myself the deprivation of my reason; for situated as they are, my life is most valuable to them, as the remainder of my days will be devoted to them and their advancement and welfare.”

  And indeed the rest of Peggy’s days demonstrated her determination to provide for her children, to push them forward to success. These days also demonstrated Peggy’s essential contradiction, as a woman who complained of physical ailments and loss of reason but energetically and brilliantly maneuvered through complex financial straits to steer her family to safety.

  Moving out of Gloucester Place to “a small but very neat house” on Bryanston Street, Peggy was forced to sell off many of her possessions, including her wine and some furniture that was “chiefly made by myself.”593 With creditors laying siege from all directions, she set a price and paid for any of Arnold’s personal items that she refused to give up, including one of his old shirts. Likewise, “a little family pride” compelled her to hold on to her silver.594

  In an irony not lost on Peggy, she acquired cheaper furniture for her Bryanston Street home through her maid, “who is now a more independent woman than her mistress.”595 Although she was a society woman, Peggy was not particularly obsessed with possessions except for sewing supplies, perhaps, and a few other items of sentimental value. Peggy understood that money and its trappings translated into social standing, and she feared the loss of that. “The want of a carriage I shall most feel, not only in point of comfort but of respectability,” she admitted.596

  Some aspects of her old life were gone forever, but she thought the important ones could be saved. “I trust that my character is so firmly established that, notwithstanding the great change in my situation, I shall not lose any rank in society, except among the gay and very fashionable part of my acquaintance, to whose pleasures I cannot administer, and with characters of this description I have no longer a wish to associate.”597

  Peggy took pains to stay in the good graces of powerful men, and indeed her sons’ military careers were helped by the family’s longstanding friendship with Lord Cornwallis, which had flowered when he and Arnold sailed across the Atlantic together. Peggy had a stranger relationship with Peter Moore, an up-and-coming politician who was Arnold’s partner in the privateering venture. Peggy found Moore useless in helping her untangle the business—“more the man of words than deeds”—but she carefully avoided making an enemy of him.598

  For some reason, possibly jealousy, Moore’s wife became Peggy�
�s antagonist. “A long time ago,” Peggy wrote her son Edward, “he wrote me a very long and handsome letter, which she opened, and suppressed. She says she opened it by mistake, and suppressed it from the fear of my suspecting it to have been done from motives of curiosity. This is but a bad excuse, but I have thought proper to accept it.”599

  She told Moore about the incident, though, “to account for my never noticing his letter, which probably required a reply.” Of Mrs. Moore, Peggy added: “With some good traits in her character, she has a great many peculiarities which render her less amiable than could be wished. But we must take the world as we find [it], and it does not do to investigate characters too closely.” Peggy had no time for intrigue. At this stage in her life, her mission was financial survival.

  Her sons Edward and James, serving in the British army, lived on their salaries and let her keep their pensions for the family’s use. Peggy had protected herself years before Arnold’s death by arranging for her father to help her invest her own British pension payments—“to preserve that money sacredly for my children.”600 When she asked her father for assistance, Peggy had made clear that Arnold, whom her father no doubt despised, would have no access to the money—that it was held “in the name of my agent, for which I am credited on his books.”601 In their letters about finding the best interest rate, the father and daughter never noted the oddity of depositing the crown’s treason payments in the Bank of North America, chartered by the United States Congress.602 Nor did the Bank of North America seem to ask any troublesome questions.

  One member of the Shippen family was far from helpful. Peggy calculated that her brother Edward owed her four thousand pounds in principal and interest on an old, unpaid loan. But she never saw the money, and her father resisted her pleas to help her collect it.603

  Another useless financial foray was Mount Pleasant, the beautiful Philadelphia estate whose purchase had proved to Edward Shippen how fervently Arnold wished to wed his daughter. The mansion was seized by authorities after Arnold’s treason, but Peggy arranged for her father to buy it back for them, with their interest kept secret. In 1785, Peggy instructed her father to try to sell it, since land prices were falling and the estate might be seized again if anyone found out the real owner. But eighteen years later, in 1803, the investment was draped in confusion. The estate that had once represented Peggy’s grand prospects was a symbol only of grim futility. “I presume from your not mentioning the subject that I am never to expect to derive any advantage from the Mount Pleasant estate,” she wrote her father. “I should like, however, to know in what manner it has been disposed of.”604

  Peggy was looking for money wherever she could find it, including the Canadian wilderness. She wrote firmly to her stepsons Richard and Henry, prodding them to claim the family’s lands: “I hope you will be able to have the lands located soon and eligibly, as I am told they are rising greatly in value.”605

  But the real weight around Peggy’s neck was Arnold’s privateering disaster, in which sailors and businessmen were demanding payment, whether they were owed it or not. Peggy was her best hardheaded self, refusing to pay claims she viewed as false, and finding a way to honor those that were valid. She waged a two-year legal battle with a man she referred to as The Swede, a shipowner who claimed thousands of pounds for the loss of cargo and detention of his vessel. Her lawyer triumphed in court over the Swede’s, saving her family from ruin. “Had they succeeded, ten times the property I have would not have satisfied their demand,” Peggy wrote.606

  Detailing the financial “troubles and difficulties” in a note to her stepsons, she bragged: “I believe I may without vanity say that there are few women that could have so far conquered them as I have done. . . . I have not reserved for myself a bottle of wine or even a teaspoon that I have not paid for.”607 And she made clear that her primary aim had been to preserve the family honor: “To you I have rendered an essential service; I have rescued your father’s memory from disrespect, by paying all his just debts; and his children will now never have the mortification of being reproached with his speculations having hurt anybody beyond his own family.”608

  Yet around the time that Peggy vanquished the Swede and tasted victory over her husband’s debts, her health precipitously declined. She was suffering from what she called “the dreaded evil, a cancer.”609 Her illness put further pressure on the arrangements she had made for her children, and it is clear from her letters that she felt desperate to put them in the best possible position before she died. The children she once jokingly described as “little plagues” were her greatest pleasures. And in the end, they were her triumph and her legacy.

  She treated her two surviving stepsons, Richard and Henry, with the utmost courtesy, sending them their father’s locks of hair, sleeve buttons, and shoebuckles as keepsakes after his death. She admonished them for their harsh criticism of their father, and gave stepmotherly advice to Richard, advising him not to marry “till you are enabled to support her in a comfortable style.”610 Both brothers ultimately wed and had children in Canada, becoming merchants and maintaining vast landholdings as a result of the crown’s grants. Peggy’s attentive letters across the ocean also made sure the needs of Benedict Arnold’s sister Hannah were addressed. Hannah died in her nephew Henry’s home in 1803.

  Peggy’s letters voiced stern tolerance for “the Boy”—Arnold’s other son in Canada, John Sage, who was treated like a brother by Richard and Henry. “The Boy who is with you,” she wrote, “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.”611

  Her own offspring filled her correspondence, as they filled her heart. In the worst times, she wrote, “Such children compensate for a thousand ills.”612 All four of Peggy’s sons embarked on military careers.613 Her firstborn, Edward, went to India, and his departure in 1800 was torturous to Peggy. “My darling Edward leaves me in about ten days, to try his fortune in the East,” she wrote. “His death could scarcely be a more severe stroke.”614 She predicted that she would never see him again, and she was right.

  Edward, who at six months of age was in the same bedroom as his mad mother and George Washington on that remarkable day in 1780, experienced a short but interesting adulthood. A lieutenant in the Sixth Bengal Cavalry, he served as the paymaster of Muttra and, according to one historical account, “gave food largely and secretly to the suffering people during a famine.”615 Edward never married, but when he died in 1813 at age thirty-three, he provided in his will for “a native woman living with me.”616

  Asia must have seemed like a new and promising world to children whose parents had struggled so spectacularly on two other continents. Both Edward’s brother George and his sister Sophia followed him to India. George rose to lieutenant colonel in the Second Bengal Cavalry before his death in 1828. He married a British woman and had a child with her, but like his brother he also had relations with a “native woman.” His will remembered both the native woman and the daughter they had together. Peggy’s half-Indian granddaughter eventually immigrated to Ireland and married a British architect.617

  Sophia’s fate was particularly surprising. Though much beloved, she was weak of constitution and possessed only “a moderate share of beauty,” according to her mother. And she spent much of her time in the company of much older women. She seemed destined to become a “spinster” or “old maid.” Sophia’s brothers Edward and George summoned her to India so they could take care of her. She also may have been part of the “fishing fleet”—a slang term for women who came to India to hook a husband among the white soldiers and businessmen there.618

  In India, Sophia met a young widowed officer named Pownoll Phipps, a friend of her brother Edward. According to family history, Sophia became terribly ill, seemed near death, and asked to marry Phipps before her demise. He agreed, and after their wedding she regained her health—a brilliant recovery that seemed reminiscent
of her mother’s sudden restoration to health back at Robinson House, though probably not as opportunistic. Sophia not only gave her husband fifteen good years of marriage but bore him five children. The Phippses brought their family to England, where they became active in Christian evangelism. She died of tuberculosis in 1828.

  Peggy’s second-born son, James, who bore the strongest resemblance to his father, served in the Royal Engineers in Malta, Egypt, and the Caribbean. In the South American country of Suriname, James suffered a leg wound while leading the successful storming of a fort, and for that act of heroism he was awarded a sword valued at one hundred pounds. He commanded engineers in Canada and, according to one story, visited his family’s old house in St. John and wept as he entered. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general and served as an aide to King William IV. His marriage to a woman from the Isle of Wight resulted in no children, and he died in 1854.

  Peggy’s youngest, William, was less of a wanderer. He served as a captain in the 19th Royal Lancers and became a country gentleman and justice of the peace in Buckinghamshire, west of London. One of his sons, William Trail Arnold, seemed to inherit the bravery of his grandparents. A captain, he was killed in 1855 while assaulting the Russian defenses at Sevastopol during the Crimean War. His nephew, Peggy’s great-grandson, was Theodore Stephenson, a British major general in World War I.

  If a person’s descendants and friends serve as their measure in life, Peggy stands tall. And when she began showing severe symptoms of uterine cancer in 1803, she found herself surrounded and soothed by love. She told her stepsons that she suffered from “an internal complaint, under which I had long labored, increased to a degree highly alarming. For the last ten weeks I have been entirely precluded from the use of animal food, wine, beer, and any other thing that can enrich the blood—and have been almost entirely confined to a recumbent posture.”619 To Betsy, she called it a “complaint of the womb,” and added, “My complaint is quite local, as my general health was never better.”620 In fact, she said, she was “restored to a perfect serenity of mind, and a degree of contentment, that some time ago I thought it impossible for me ever to regain. . . . The kindness I have and still continue to receive from my friends here is very uncommon.”621