Improbable Patriot

by Harlow Giles Unger

  After reluctantly approving the broad principles of the scheme, the king asked his foreign minister for a more detailed plan. Vergennes then turned to Beaumarchais, who drafted a plot worthy of any he ever devised for Figaro onstage. He proposed that the royal treasury provide him with 1 million livres (about $4 million today) to set up a private foreign company, thus concealing the French government’s involvement from the British. He would then use half the money to buy surplus military supplies from the king’s army — in effect channeling the king’s money back into his treasury via the war ministry while ridding the military of surplus matériel. At the time, French military depots bulged with obsolete arms and ammunition from the Seven Years’ War. Although technological advances had rendered much of the artillery worthless in European warfare, it was more than adequate for American rebels in the wilderness. The French military had, for example, about 400 cannon dating back to the seventeenth century and still bearing the back-to-back double L’s of Louis XIV.

  After using half the king’s money to buy surplus war equipment, Beaumarchais would lend the other half to the American government to purchase supplies from him, thus refilling his coffers with more of the king’s money to buy more war supplies from the king’s army. The Americans would repay the loan and buy all future supplies by filling the empty arms ships with tobacco, rice, indigo, lumber, and other commodities for transport back to Beaumarchais, who would sell them on the French market and recoup the money he had loaned to the Americans. In effect, the king’s initial million-livre investment would find its way back into the royal treasury after only two shipments of arms to America, after which the king — and Beaumarchais — would reap nothing but profits from the arms trade with America.

  Except for King Louis XVI, the comte de Vergennes and sieur de Beaumarchais, no one in France or America would know the ultimate destination of the arms. And when the arms eventually reached American shores, no one in France or America would know exactly how they got there. French shippers, longshoremen, and sailors would know only that they were transferring surplus war matériel from the French homeland to reinforce defenses of the French sugar islands. In some cases, the ships might sail directly from France to America, but in other cases, they would, indeed, sail to the French sugar islands, where smaller ships would then pick up the cargoes to transfer them, ostensibly, to other ports in the French islands — but, in fact, to American ports to the north.

  Although the British would eventually discover the source of some of the supplies and protest to the French government, the French Foreign Office would simply express its regrets but insist that, as a neutral nation, it had no powers to prevent merchants from trading and no way of knowing the destination of old and useless weapons after an infinite number of trades on world markets. In the end, the surplus supplies would simply vanish from France and reappear in America, with no money changing hands and without any contacts between American and French authorities. And while French arms produced a stalemate in the fighting in America, French manufacturers would use the time to resupply the French military with modern equipment and bring French forces to a par with those of the British.

  After Vergennes finished reading the Beaumarchais plot to the king, Louis and his foreign minister stared at each other for several minutes then burst into peals of laughter at Beaumarchais’s preposterously cunning scheme. It was pure Figaro and they loved it — so much so that the king not only agreed to the plan, he authorized Vergennes to enlist his Bourbon cousin the Spanish king in the project. Beaumarchais had convinced Europe’s oldest, most despotic monarchy to support a rebellion against a kindred monarch by commoners who proposed governing their country themselves.

  “Receive all my compliments, sir,” Vergennes wrote to Beaumarchais. “After having assured you of the King’s approbation, mine may not appear very interesting to you; however, I cannot help applauding the wisdom and firmness of your conduct, and of renewing to you the expression of my esteem.”16 Vergennes had several reservations, however: he would not deal directly with American rebels for fear of provoking war with Britain. He and Beaumarchais then worked out a plan whereby the French government would lend rather than give Beaumarchais’s firm the 1 million livres and attempt to coax the Spanish government to do the same. Beaumarchais would then raise an additional 1 million livres of his own from private sources. He would then draw military supplies from French government stocks, which he could either buy outright with cash or replace with approved modern weaponry. In any case, the French government was to have no vested interest in the Beaumarchais company, which would sell its arms to the Americans for tobacco, rice, or other products, which Beaumarchais could resell in French markets. Beaumarchais’s company was to be self-supporting, with Beaumarchais expected to bear any losses but reap all profits.

  Citing the Pacte de Famille, which tied the Bourbon kings of France and Spain by treaty and blood, the king sent word to his cousin the Spanish king to consider matching the French investment. Vergennes wrote to his Spanish counterpart warning that if the English defeated the American rebels, they would almost certainly seize rich Spanish colonies in Florida and the Caribbean, as well as the gold and silver mines of Mexico. By “keeping the flames of the American rebellion burning,” he asserted, Spain and France would keep the British too distracted to attack elsewhere.17 Vergennes predicted that the internecine war would leave both sides exhausted and reduce England to a second-rate power, allowing the Spanish to expand northward along the Mississippi River and the French to repossess Canada. The two Bourbon kings would control almost all of North America and shrink the British colonies to an impotent strip of land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.

  I Wish to Serve Your Country

  as if It Were My Own

  IN MID-JANUARY 1776, when the Beaumarchais scheme was still under consideration at Versailles, America’s portly commander of artillery, General Henry Knox, waddled into Cambridge at the head of an exhausted column. He and his men had just completed an improbable 300-mile journey to Fort Ticonderoga, New York, and back. On their return to Cambridge, they had dragged forty-three cannon and sixteen mortars through the snow, over ice-covered streams and ponds. On the night of March 4 and into the early morning hours of March 5, a force of 2,000 Americans under General John Thomas captured Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston, allowing Knox to put his artillery in positions to rake the entire city and harbor with cannon fire. Two days later, British commander Lord Richard Howe ordered British forces to evacuate Boston, and by March 17, all his troops, along with about 1,000 Loyalists, had boarded British troop ships in the harbor. On March 26, the British fleet sailed off to Halifax, Nova Scotia, leaving Boston and the rest of Massachusetts an independent state in the hands of Americans and their forces.

  When news of the British evacuation of Boston reached Europe, Spanish king Carlos III agreed to match his French cousin’s 1-million-livre investment in the Beaumarchais scheme, and on May 1, Louis XVI signed a check for 1 million livres, with the payee left blank. Before the king turned it over to Beaumarchais, however, Vergennes warned the playwright that the two monarchs “shall have no further hand in the affair because it would compromise the government too much in the eyes of the English.”1 Vergennes reiterated the need for Beaumarchais to raise additional funds from private investors — wealthy aristocrats and merchant bankers — to disguise the royal funds. “In the eyes of the English and American governments, the operation must assume the aspect of a speculation by an individual,” Vergennes declared.

  To appear so, it must be so. We are secretly giving you a million francs. We shall get Spain to contribute an equal sum; with these two millions and the cooperation of other parties who may invest in your enterprise, you will establish a large commercial house and, at your risk, supply America with arms, munitions, equipment, and all other necessary matériel for carrying on a war. Our arsenals will give you arms and ammunition which you can replace or pay for. You will not deman
d money of the Americans because they have none; but you will demand payment from the produce of their soil, and we will help you distribute it in this kingdom. … After our initial support, the operation must afterward feed and support itself; but because we reserve the right to favor its continuance or put an end to its operation, you shall render us a regular accounting of your profits and your losses, and we will determine whether to grant you fresh assistance or discharge you of liability for previous grants.2

  In mid-May 1776, Beaumarchais established a company under the Spanish name “Roderigue Hortalez et Cie.” to conceal its ties to the French government. On June 10, 1776, a month before the Americans declared independence, Beaumarchais signed one of the most valuable receipts in world history — and certainly the most important receipt in American history:

  Received of M. Duvergier, in conformity with the orders of M. de Vergennes, dated the 5th instant … the sum of one million, of which I am to render an account to the said Sieur Comte de Vergennes.

  Caron de Beaumarchais

  Good for a million of livres tournois.

  Paris, June 10, 1776.3

  As a further precaution, Vergennes had asked the French king to make his check out to Vergennes’s fifteen-year-old son Duvergier, who then endorsed it over to Hortalez et Cie. Later in the month, Beaumarchais notified Arthur Lee in a carefully worded letter that omitted any reference to the French government. He wrote it in cipher and addressed it to “Mary Johnston” — Arthur Lee’s code name for all arms transactions.

  “The difficulties I encountered in my negotiations with the minister,” read the deciphered message from Beaumarchais, “have made me decide to form a company that will send the supplies of powder and stores to your friend at Cap François, Santo Domingo, against return cargoes of tobacco.”4 He signed it “Roderigue Hortalez & Co.”

  Two months later in early August, the Spanish ambassador issued a check for 1 million livres to the French treasury and gave Beaumarchais a receipt that permitted him to draw from the Spanish funds. By then, Beaumarchais had also lured several appropriate private investors into the venture from the port cities of Nantes, Le Havre, and Bordeaux — ship charterer Jean-Joseph de Monthieu, the shipowners of Les Frères Mantaudoin, merchant-trader Pelletier Du Doyer, and financier-banker Joseph Peyrera of Bordeaux.

  With Beaumarchais’s huge international political, military, and economic scheme set to begin — and with more than 3 million livres in government and private funds in his accounts — the French playwright approached Vergennes about a delicate problem. It might prove embarrassing to the French king, Beaumarchais suggested calmly, if participants in the scheme learned that the central figure managing their millions was a convicted felon. Vergennes blanched. Within days, the attorney general appeared in court and asked the panel of judges to reverse the financial judgments against Beaumarchais in the La Blache lawsuits, to restore Beaumarchais’s civil rights, and to reinstate him to his seat on the judge’s bench. Without bothering to deliberate, the judges voted unanimously in favor of Beaumarchais, provoking a chorus of cheers among spectators, who hoisted Beaumarchais on their shoulders and carried him out of the courtroom to the nearest tavern.

  “Monsieur le comte,” Beaumarchais exulted to Vergennes. “I have just been judged déblamé [unconvicted], amid a universal concourse of applause. … I have four hundred people around me applauding and embracing me and making an infernal noise, which, to me, sounds like perfect harmony.” Beaumarchais went on to thank the foreign minister and “begged” that his expressions of gratitude be placed at “the feet of the king.”5

  On June 7, 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee — Arthur Lee’s older brother — proposed a resolution in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” After three days of debate, Congress postponed voting on the resolution until July 1, while a committee of five — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman — prepared a formal declaration of independence. On July 2, a British fleet with 150 troop transports sailed into New York Bay, landing the first 10,000 of what would be an army of 23,000 British and 9,000 Hessian troops. On July 4, Congress voted 12–0 for independence, with New York abstaining until its Provincial Congress approved. Informed on July 15 that the New Yorkers had approved the document, Congress voted to have the “Unanimous Declaration” engrossed on parchment. On August 2, fifty-three members of Congress added their signatures to those of John Hancock, the president of Congress, and Charles Thomson, the secretary. Within three weeks, 20,000 British and Hessian troops stormed ashore in Brooklyn, New York, and after five days, they had overrun American defenders, leaving 1,500 of the 5,000-man American force dead or wounded and its two commanding generals, William Alexander of New Jersey and John Sullivan of New Hampshire, prisoners. The British sent Sullivan to Congress in Philadelphia with a proposal for an informal peace conference on Staten Island.

  The slaughter on Long Island began a sharp reversal of American fortunes, with the powerful British army chasing Washington’s army northward to White Plains, then westward across the Hudson River and northern New Jersey through sheets of icy autumn rains toward the Delaware River. They barely made it to safety on the opposite bank in Pennsylvania. By early December, desertions had reduced his army to only about 3,000 men. Sickness left 500 of the 700 Virginians unfit for duty. Only Washington’s foresight in commandeering small craft along the river prevented the British from crossing and annihilating the Americans. British commander General Sir William Howe posted troops at Trenton and Princeton to wait for the river to freeze to cross on foot and wipe out Washington’s crippled army and end the Revolution in the North. The British advance left New York and most of New Jersey in British hands — and the Redcoats almost in sight of the American rebel capital. On December 12, Congress fled Philadelphia for Baltimore and, all but conceding defeat in the struggle for independence, began debating terms of capitulation.

  General Washington’s aide, Colonel Joseph Reed lamented “that something must be attempted to revive our expiring credit. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event.”6 The French chargé d’affaires in London confirmed the plight of Washington’s force in his melancholy report to Foreign Minister Vergennes in Versailles: “The Americans can no longer hold their ground. They have no choice but surrender.”7

  In Paris, Beaumarchais had already begun the enormous task of saving Washington and his Americans by visiting seaports on the Atlantic to find the best facilities for handling large arms shipments to America and to determine sea routes where his ships would be least likely to encounter the British navy and British privateers. After returning to Paris and roaming her streets for a few days, he rented the largest, most lavish Paris town house he could find — large enough to house his family in one part of the structure and the offices of his new enterprise in a separate part. Rather than act secretively and draw the certain attention of curious British spies, he decided to operate so openly in Paris that spies would inevitably conclude that he was simply engaged in conventional foreign trade. For his offices, he settled on the elaborate former Dutch embassy on the rue Vieille du Temple in what is now the Marais district of Paris. The Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, as it was still called, was ornate enough to serve as perfect theater for what would be the most elaborate and costly production of Beaumarchais’s career. From the street, visitors passed through a huge wooden door into a courtyard before crossing to the door of the mansion itself. A reception room opened onto a grand gallery lined by floor-to-ceiling murals. At the other end were sculpted doors that revealed the main salon, with gloriously ornamented window openings and shutters.

  Only a few people knew the true identity of Roderigue Hortalez, among them Gudin, who served as Beaumarchais’s secretary, Gudin’s brother, the cashier, and Beaumarchais’s pregnant Swiss mistress, Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse Willermaulez.
Beaumarchais made an appropriately grand entry every day, nodding his head, smiling, all but bowing to visitors waiting to see him before disappearing into his own office. All ears turned, however, to the huge, hand-carved wooden door marked “Sr. Roderigue Hortalez.”

  A man clouded in mystery, his name elicited hushed whispers of awe from visitors to “Hortalez et Cie.” None had ever had “the honor” of actually seeing him, but everyone recognized his deep, elegant voice in discussions behind closed office doors with Monsieur de Beaumarchais, who marched back and forth, in and out of his own and the banker’s offices throughout the day.

  Like Figaro, Hortalez was a larger-than-life character from the dramatis personae that peopled Beaumarchais’s vast imagination — one that he exulted in playing with an authentic Spanish accent behind the closed door of his office to an audience of visitors who heard but never saw him. Beaumarchais was in his element at Hortalez et Cie., unseen on a world stage, cloaked lavishly in renown, money, and intrigue, alone and unseen, emoting to an invisible audience — often arguing or laughing, soliloquizing stentorian Spanish sounds and replying to himself obsequiously in French: “Oui, Monsieur! Tout de suite, Monsieur.”