Once in London, Beaumarchais immediately called on his old friend Lord Rochford, who had been British ambassador to Spain and befriended Beaumarchais when the playwright was in Madrid. Now Britain’s Foreign Secretary and close confidant of King George III, Rochford had enjoyed singing duets in harmony with Beaumarchais when the two were in Madrid and rejoiced at the chance to resume their songfests in London. The playwright was equally enthusiastic and used each interval between songs to refill His Lordship’s wine glass and extract state secrets from his devotee. After one evening of wine and song, the ever-effusive Rochford indicated that d’Eon frequented the home of the rebellious John Wilkes, a bitter parliamentary opponent of the king and an outspoken supporter of the rebellious American colonists. Like Beaumarchais, Wilkes had been the perpetual victim of what Rousseau called the inequalities among men in a class society. Twenty-seven years older than Beaumarchais, Wilkes had won election to Parliament in 1757, at the age of thirty-two, only to land in prison for seditious libel after founding an anti-Tory weekly and criticizing a speech by King George II. Released because of parliamentary privilege, he was expelled from Parliament on trumped-up charges that he was the anonymous author of a second libelous article. Declared an outlaw, he fled to France, but returned to face trial and again went to prison. His Middlesex constituency reelected him three times, only to have Parliament invalidate each of his elections and provoke rioting among his constituents. The rioting spread to London’s lower- and middle-class neighborhoods, which saw Wilkes as a champion of commoners and the disenfranchised majority.
When American colonists began boycotting British imports to protest Parliament’s heavy duties on tea and other staples, English merchants joined the Wilkes camp and, under the banner of “Wilkes and Liberty,” elected him, successively, alderman of London in 1770, sheriff in 1771, and lord mayor in 1774 — a post he still held when he first met Beaumarchais. After the Minutemen fired the shots at Lexington, Wilkes became an open advocate of American independence and a secret agent for Boston’s Sons of Liberty. As each of the colonies established a “committee of correspondence,” it turned to him to help find military aid overseas.
“For a long time,” Wilkes mocked the British monarch, “the king has done me the honor of hating me. On my side, I have always rendered him the justice of despising him.”12
After Beaumarchais’s old friend Théveneau de Morande had introduced the French playwright to Wilkes, the latter immediately invited the celebrated creator of Figaro to his dinner table, where Beaumarchais pretended to feign disinterest in d’Eon and sat in rapt attention as dissident Americans talked of the latest developments in the struggle for freedom in their homeland. The Second Continental Congress had convened in Philadelphia and declared the colonies in a “state of defense” and invited “fellow sufferers” in Canada to join the struggle. It declared the Patriot forces laying siege to Boston a “Continental Army” and voted to raise six companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to join them. It appointed as commander in chief Virginia’s George Washington — the man who had ignited the Anglo-French conflagration in North America eighteen years earlier and set off the worldwide Seven Years’ War.
Before Washington reached Massachusetts, however, the British commanding general in Boston declared martial law and proclaimed the Americans besieging the city to be rebels and traitors — subject to summary hanging if taken prisoner. On June 17, the British spotted Patriots building a fort atop Breed’s Hill on the Charlestown peninsula across the harbor from Boston. British ships landed 2,400 troops and laid a barrage on the hilltop as the Redcoats edged up the slope. A murderous rain of Patriot fire forced the British to retreat. A second attempt to scale the hill met with similar results. On the third attempt, the British discarded their extra gear and charged up the hill with bayonets fixed. The firing from the top gradually diminished — and then ceased. The Americans had run out of powder. The British overran the hilltop and assaulted and captured neighboring Bunker Hill. When they were done, 100 dead and 267 wounded Americans lay strewn across the two hilltops, but the assault had cost the British 1,045 casualties and elevated their American victims to martyrdom. Bunker Hill became a cause célèbre for anti-British colonists.
Two weeks later, on July 3, 1775, Washington arrived in nearby Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army, only to find his 14,500 troops in danger of annihilation. They were out of arms and ammunition. With enough powder to issue only nine cartridges per man, Washington sent a desperate plea to Congress: “I need not enlarge on our melancholy situation,” he wrote to President John Hancock. “It is sufficient to say that the existence of the Army and salvation of the country depends upon something being done for our relief both speedy and effectual and that our situation be kept a profound secret.”13
Congress responded with two resolutions that left Parliament and the king utterly confused — along with quite a few Americans, including George Washington. On July 5, Congress passed an “Olive Branch Petition” that expressed deep attachment to King George III and great hopes for restoring harmonious relations with Britain. But the following day, it issued a “Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms” and declared Americans ready to die rather than live enslaved under the very monarch it had claimed to venerate the previous day. The contradictory congressional declarations confused the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, the comte de Vergennes, and left English foreign minister Lord Rochford — as well as his friend Beaumarchais — completely “puzzled … by what is going on in America.”14
D’Eon was too skilled an agent not to sense the real purpose of Beaumarchais’s visit to the Wilkes house, and, according to Gudin, he “paid the most delicate attention to Beaumarchais. … He had a woman’s voice … and confessed with tears that he was a woman. It appeared that was to be d’Eon’s strategy with Beaumarchais.” Comparing himself to Joan of Arc, he displayed scars from battle wounds on his legs and appealed to Beaumarchais as a “guardian angel” for help in his dispute with Versailles.15 Always an admirer of good acting, Beaumarchais agreed to meet the chevalier privately the next day and then turned his attention to the interesting American appeals for arms. Before ending his service as America’s colonial agent in London and returning home, Benjamin Franklin had turned London into a center for American agents to “treat with English, Dutch and French armorers and merchants to furnish and ship war matériel to the colonies.”
16 A few merchants were already selling small quantities of arms to the American rebels, but the American War of Independence was obviously doomed without huge infusions that only an experienced arms trader such as Beaumarchais could provide. In discussions with Americans at Wilkes’s home, he sensed an opportunity to use the skills he had acquired with Pâris-Duverney to improve his fortune and help the Americans. With more than 1,000 miles of unprotected coastline, the rebels had no difficulty finding isolated beaches where small ships could land supplies undetected by British authorities. Long Island’s north shore, he learned, had already been the site of several landings, including one with 10,000 pounds of powder for Connecticut rebels. One ship from Bayonne, France, had carried about thirty tons of powder to a landing site in Rhode Island, near Providence. Some French arms dealers were shipping arms to the French West Indies under the guise of resupplying French troops. Then, when British cruisers were out of sight, they set sail for St. Eustatius or some other Dutch isle, where American vessels ostensibly picking up shipments of sugarcane would pick up arms as well and bury them in their holds beneath the stacks of cane stalks.
After several dinners together at Wilkes’s home, d’Eon came to Beaumarchais’s lodgings, where the two spies talked forthrightly. D’Eon “drank, smoked and swore like a German horseman,”17 not only reiterating his financial demands but insisting on his right to return to France without risk of retaliation by the French government. He particularly feared imprisonment in the Bastille.
“But Monsieur,” Beaum
archais assured him, “ the French government does not put women in the Bastille.” The playwright went on to explain that if d’Eon returned to France as a woman, her gender would render her immune from prosecution and punishment, although she would also lose certain civil rights accorded only to men. After much parrying, the two agreed on monetary terms, and, with d’Eon looking on, the playwright penned what seemed to be a letter to the king on d’Eon’s behalf:
One’s heart can only pity this creature who is persecuted so much yet is of a gender to which everything is usually forgiven. I presume to assure you that treating this astonishing creature with skill and kindness will restore her fealty as a loyal subject who will return all the papers relating to the late king on reasonable terms.18
The letter was as much a ruse as d’Eon’s continual costume changes. Beaumarchais sent the letter to Vergennes knowing it would never reach the king’s eyes because of the impertinent use of “you” instead of Votre Majesté. Vergennes immediately understood what Beaumarchais had done and sent him a confidential note approving the terms, but reminding the playwright “not to neglect to impress upon your Amazon … not to reenter the kingdom [of France] in other than women’s clothes.” Under no circumstance was she to wear her cross of Saint Louis in women’s clothes.19
Beaumarchais made a quick round-trip to Versailles to retrieve d’Eon’s official amnesty papers and money, but when the two met to make the exchange, d’Eon withheld key documents. The ever-suspicious Beaumarchais — still the deft juggler of his youth — proved equally cunning by slipping blank paper amid the currency notes to shortchange d’Eon without diminishing the size of the money pack.
Beaumarchais sent d’Eon a sarcastic note the next morning, beginning, “Ma pauvre Chevalière or whatever it pleases you to be with me . …” He then demanded that d’Eon surrender all the documents if he/she wanted all his/her money. The chevalier agreed.
“She conducted me to her house,” Beaumarchais wrote to Vergennes, “and drew from beneath the flooring five cardboard boxes, well sealed and labeled ‘secret papers, to be remitted to the King alone.’ ”20
With a coach waiting to carry him and the documents to the English Channel and a boat to France, Beaumarchais handed d’Eon a large deck of currency — actually dealing out the bills to prove they contained no blank paper — then rode off to the coast. After recounting it later, however, d’Eon found the packet 40,000 livres short. Beaumarchais’s quick hands had removed them even as he dealt them — “to obtain some further advantages … over this impetuous and cunning creature.”21
The infuriated d’Eon retaliated by telling all of London that she and Beaumarchais were lovers. He published a letter he said he had sent to the playwright:
By a blind confidence in you and your promise, I disclosed the mystery of my sex to you: Out of gratitude, I gave you my portrait, and you promised me yours. There have been many other engagements between us … including our approaching marriage. But according to what I hear from Paris, this was mere persiflage on your part. … That would be contemptible and a breach of faith. … Why did I not remember that men are only on earth to deceive the credulity of girls and women.22
When Beaumarchais returned to London, he found himself the target of a barrage of jokes, which failed to undermine his own sense of humor. “Every one tells me that this crazy woman is mad about me,” he wrote to Vergennes. “She thinks I have treated her with contempt. … Who the devil would ever have imagined that, to serve the king in this affair, I would have to become the gallant knight of a captain of dragoons? This adventure has become absurd.”23
The “adventure” came to an abrupt end, with d’Eon sending letters to Vergennes abusing Beaumarchais, but evoking only gales of laughter at the palace. Both Vergennes and Beaumarchais ignored the letters, and Beaumarchais withheld all further payments to — and all contact with — the chevalier.24
Beaumarchais’s “triumph” over d’Eon did not come without its costs, however. During his absence in London, his father, André Caron, had taken advantage of his son’s absence to marry the housekeeper — a price she had demanded for her sexual favors. Unfortunately, the marathon bedroom adventures that followed the wedding proved too much for the old man, and he died — but not before signing a paper acknowledging an enormous financial debt to his widow-to-be. Although Caron had no legal basis for willing his son’s money, the housekeeper threatened to sue Beaumarchais and again drag his name in the mud of a public scandal. He gave her 6,000 livres (about $25,000 today) to disappear in silence.
Plotting and Pocketing
IN THE COURSE OF his encounters with d’Eon at the Wilkes salon, Beaumarchais formed his first friendship with an American — a superbly educated Virginian, who seemed more English than American. A member of the storied Lee family, Arthur Lee had been born at the family’s eastern Virginia estate, Stratford, in 1740, but spent most of the next forty years abroad, studying at Eton for six years before earning a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, traveling on the continent, and then earning a law degree at London’s Inns of Court. Mentored at one time or another by Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Adam Smith, and other British luminaries, he returned to Virginia for a brief but unsuccessful attempt to practice medicine. While there, he plunged into the growing political and economic disputes with the mother country, writing a series of letters to American and British newspapers, gaining some celebrity as a pamphleteer, and winning the friendship of such American dissidents as Boston’s Samuel Adams and Philadelphia’s John Dickinson. He returned to England in 1770, and when Massachusetts named Benjamin Franklin as colonial agent in London, Samuel Adams helped win Arthur Lee’s appointment as Franklin’s assistant and designated successor.
Lee had just won admission to the London bar when the world heard the shots at Lexington in the spring of 1775. Invited with other Americans to celebrate at John Wilkes’s lodgings, he met and quickly attached himself to Beaumarchais. Poised, charming, and witty, Lee was more than eloquent in expounding the American cause: the deep hatred for Britain that Americans now shared with the French; the desperate need for arms, ammunition, technical assistance, and funding in the fight for liberty and independence; and the advantages to France of American independence.
Arthur Lee replaced Benjamin Franklin as American agent in London and was first to enlist Beaumarchais in the American fight for independence.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“We offer France, as reward for its secret aid,” Lee promised Beaumarchais, “a secret treaty of commerce. This treaty will give France, for a certain number of years after peace is established, all the advantages of that commerce with which for a century America has enriched England. This trade will pass to France, and in addition, we agree to guarantee French possessions [in the West Indies] to the full extent of our power.”1 Beaumarchais immediately envisioned opportunities to profit from the sale of both arms to America during the war, and a wide range of French merchandise in the peace that would follow if he helped the Americans win their independence from Britain.
American independence was inevitable, Lee argued. At best, the British would be able to muster forces of 25,000 to 40,000 men. The Americans were raising an army of 50,000, with 50,000 other able-bodied men ready to volunteer to fight at their side. If the French refused to provide aid, the Americans would obtain it from other nations, who would then reap the wealth from unfettered trade with America after the war. Lee also warned that if, through lack of French aid, the Americans lost the war, Britain would emerge as the world’s most powerful nation militarily and economically. As such, it would almost certainly extend its North American empire across the West Indies, seizing the French Caribbean islands that provided France with sugar — at that time, its most important import.
Lured by the prospects of huge personal profits at first, Beaumarchais planned to convince Vergennes that the near-bankrupt French treasury stood to profit handsomely if the Americans won independence from Britain and
awarded France special trading privileges. But as the summer’s conversations with Arthur Lee progressed, another motive crept into Beaumarchais’s thinking as he envisioned selling arms to the Americans: he grew genuinely sympathetic to the plight of simple American farmers — commoners like himself — defending their homes, fields, and fruits of their labor from plunder by powerful, insensitive English aristocrats in Parliament — much as he had defended his home from seizure by powerful, insensitive French aristocrats in Paris.
“Go to France, Monsieur,” Lee urged Beaumarchais. “Go to France and display this picture of affairs. I am going to shut myself up in the country until you return. … Tell your ministers that I am prepared to follow you, if necessary, in order to confirm in Paris this statement of the case.”2
“The Americans will triumph,” Beaumarchais now wrote passionately to the comte de Vergennes, “but they must be assisted in their struggle, for if they lose, they will turn against us for not having helped them. We are not yet ready for war ourselves, but we must prepare and, while doing so, we must send secret aid to the Americans in the most prudent way.”3
Beaumarchais’s letter to Vergennes opened a stream of secret correspondence between the two, culminating in a massive Beaumarchais proposal addressed to the king himself. Called La paix ou la guerre — “Peace or War” — and addressed Au Roi seul — “To the King alone” — it is one of the most important and least known documents of the American Revolutionary War. It put France on the path toward the alliance with the American revolutionaries that ensured their victory over England and the birth of a free and independent new nation: the United States of America.
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