Taking charge of the Ladies’ Charitable Society meant that Caroline was assuming a public role for the first time in her life. She was required to hire new staff, manage conflicts among the little team of caseworkers, oversee the budget, smooth the ruffled feathers of aristocratic patrons who felt their contributions were underappreciated, and solve trivial issues of places and spaces for record storage and society meetings. Lady Spencer thought it was all to the good; Caroline’s trait of “active benevolence,” she wrote, had been kept hidden from the world.27
Inevitably, Caroline was pressured to do more. Lady Spencer hinted that the organization required “a Dictator to be chosen to settle every thing—I am delighted to see that you are at present that in effect tho’ not in name.” By no means, replied Caroline, backing away from the hint: “[I]ndeed I am forced to lead much more than I like or would do, but if I meddle at all I cannot help doing it in earnest,” for, like her brothers, she was by nature systematic and thorough.28
During a Howe family gathering at her mother’s house in Albemarle Street, Caroline was obliged to compose a long letter on charity business to Lady Spencer. Writing in the midst of them all—the Dowager Lady Howe and Julie, brothers William and Richard with their wives Fanny and Mary, and sister Mary with her husband General Pitt—Caroline remarked longingly that when Lady Spencer returned to town, “I shall feel again, what it is to be at Liberty.” But a few weeks later, she was still busy, working out a filing system that would enable efficient retrieval of the society’s growing archive of letters.29
In a world where private charities were organized and directed by men, the Ladies’ Society was conspicuous for its almost entirely female management. More than thirty ladies sat on the two committees, and the membership list was sprinkled with titles. Of the five “Lady Presidents” selected to direct the committees in early December, three were ladies by right as well as by nature: Lady Mayne, Lady Dartmouth, and Lady Caroline Egerton.30
We have seen that this was a period when aristocratic women were being blamed for a growing moral decline, with figures like the Duchess of Grafton held up as cases in point. But the women who dedicated their time to the Ladies’ Society were more typical of their era and their class. After a Sunday evening meeting, one wrote, “I could not help reflecting with how much more real pleasure [we] retired to [our] pillows after a Sunday evening spent in this manner, than if it had been passed amidst the gay tumult of the world.”31
The privileged lifestyles of the society members were underpinned by numerous domestic servants, but this did not mean that they felt free of family responsibilities. Lady Charlotte Finch, for example, widowed with two children, was also royal governess to the young Princesses Charlotte, Augusta, and Elizabeth, the daughters of George III. In attendance at the royal nursery morning and evening, she was nevertheless keen to contribute to the Ladies’ Society whenever she could. Caroline explained that she was restricted to times when she was satisfied that “her Children will be properly taken care of & etc. so that she can be at her ease.” Lady Spencer still had two children at home, and a duty to try to produce more. Lord Spencer did not want her to overexert herself attending committee meetings, and she would not deny him—he was, of course, her “lord,” as she always called him. Caroline was understanding: “If Lord Spencer objects to your coming to our committee we must submit, tho’ the common doing there, is no very great Fatigue.”32
The most heroic mother of the group was Frances Legge, Lady Dartmouth. Indefatigable in her role as Lady President of the Society, she was religious, unpretentious, cheerful, and kind. Both she and her husband, Lord Dartmouth, the American Secretary of State, stood out as a devoted couple in a world of matrimonial cynicism.33 Although Frances and Caroline had long known one another from a distance, it was the Ladies’ Charitable Society that brought them together. In early autumn of 1774, the two met continually between committee meetings, sometimes for hours at a time.34 Lady Dartmouth was heavily pregnant, and on October 5, 1774, she gave birth to her ninth child.35
HISTORIANS HAVE LONG PUZZLED over how Admiral Howe became involved in the secret negotiations of Benjamin Franklin’s “Journal.” His most recent biographer, David Syrett, declared the whole business to be “shrouded in veils of mystery created by a lack of information.” He has concluded that the reason Howe became involved, and at whose instigation, “can only be guessed at.”36 The obvious assumption has been that he was somehow approached by Lord Dartmouth. But as one Franklin scholar admitted, “[W]e have found no direct link between the Admiral and Dartmouth.”37 The direct link was not, however, to be found in the papers of politicians but rather by triangulating seemingly domestic and private events in Caroline’s letters with the other known facts of the timeline of Franklin’s negotiations with Richard Howe.
On November 1, 1774, Caroline wrote to Lady Spencer: “Ly. Dartmouth’s little Girl has been dying since you went of something like St Ant:[hony’s] fire, & the [christen]ing put off.”38 Lady Spencer had been in town the previous week. Since her departure, the Dartmouth baby had fallen seriously ill, probably with scarlet fever. The christening, scheduled for October 28, was to be a grand affair in which Queen Charlotte and the Countess of Strafford were to stand as godparents. Instead, on that day little Charlotte Legge was fighting for her life, and the family physician, Dr. John Fothergill, was in constant attendance. The crisis had come on suddenly; just the day before, Lord Dartmouth had been at court, publicizing his happiness at the arrival of his first and only daughter.39
As if by some unlucky conjunction of the stars, news of the Suffolk County Resolves in America reached London on the very day of the canceled christening. Suffolk County in Massachusetts had seized the initiative in opposing the Coercive Acts, ratifying a set of local resolves that declared the British acts illegal and unconstitutional, and threatening armed resistance. When the patriot courier Paul Revere delivered the resolves to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September, the Congress endorsed them as a show of solidarity with Massachusetts. But the endorsement of the extreme document was a disaster for watching politicians in London, who had hoped the Continental Congress would be a moderating influence on American opinion. A visitor to the American Department in Whitehall described the beleaguered Lord Dartmouth as “thunderstruck,” carrying on his duties despite the crisis at home. “[T]hey have declared war against us: they will not suffer any sort of treaty,” cried Dartmouth as he reeled from the shock.40
As the American secretary, Lord Dartmouth was the cabinet member who most favored conciliation. In the spring of 1774, he had wanted to soften the Coercive Acts with the repeal of the tea duty that had caused all the trouble.41 Over the summer, he had been receiving disturbing reports from the colonies that the Coercive Acts had not had their desired effect.42 Rather than restoring order to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the legislation was spreading disaffection and rallying the other colonies to its cause. The Continental Congress was seen by most British statesmen as a dangerous development, an illegal organization that would lead to unreasonable assertions of American autonomy. But the peaceable Dartmouth saw it as a possible way of negotiating a solution to the crisis. In his well-meaning, diffident manner, he wrote:
I am not without hopes that some good may arise out of it [the Congress], and illegal as it is, if it should chalk out any reasonable line of accommodation, or make any moderate or temperate proposal, I should in my own private opinion think it wise in government to overlook the irregularity of the proceeding, and catch at the opportunity of putting our unhappy differences into some mode of discussion.43
Dartmouth had penned these hopeful lines at the end of August. Now, at the end of October, the Continental Congress looked set to disappoint him by its endorsement of the Suffolk County Resolves. Of course, the Congress had not yet sent the outcome of its own deliberations—it might yet offer a more moderate position—but there was no time to lose. Dartmouth urgently needed a formula for conciliation that he
could press in cabinet meetings, one that stood a credible chance of appealing to the broad body of opinion in the colonies. The obvious person to turn to was Benjamin Franklin.
As we have seen, Dartmouth had already sent his undersecretary John Pownall to sound out Franklin in August. But approaching him openly was impossible. Franklin was known to be a key figure in the crisis, and his comings and goings attracted public notice. Dartmouth’s predicament was illustrated in the chain of events that ensued when radical Bostonian patriot Josiah Quincy arrived in London in late November. Quincy insinuated himself into the offices of Lords North and Dartmouth for just an hour or so, but that was enough to create trouble. The newspapers blew it out of proportion, reporting that Quincy had had “a long Conference with the Secretaries of State,” sparking rumors of a government climbdown.44 This made it even more impossible for Dartmouth, as a cabinet member, to be seen consulting with Franklin. In addition, Dartmouth probably did not want his hawkish cabinet associates to be aware that he was exploring terms with the notorious American.
An unexpected opportunity, then, was created by the timing of his baby’s illness—for, as Caroline’s letters reveal, it discreetly drew into the beleaguered Dartmouth’s home two people who could assist his project of peacemaking: Caroline and Dr. Fothergill. Fothergill shared Dartmouth’s enthusiasm both for the American Continental Congress as a vehicle for peace, and for Benjamin Franklin as someone who could facilitate it. Now the physician found the ideal opportunity to become a discreet go-between for the American secretary and Franklin, for the Dartmouth baby would require medical attention for many weeks to come.45
Caroline was an excellent companion in a sickroom. No doubt she listened sympathetically in the Dartmouth nursery as the worried mother weighed up the relative merits of camphor or boiling vinegar as a means of containing the infection.46 But as a Howe woman, she was naturally also drawn into the urgent discussions in the drawing room between Dartmouth and Fothergill over the recent bad news from America.
Dr. Fothergill would wait another month from the start of the baby’s illness to approach his friend Franklin on Dartmouth’s behalf. Franklin’s “Journal” reveals that Caroline acted immediately, contriving unsuccessfully to set up a game of chess with him in early November, in the midst of the medical crisis in the Dartmouth home, for motives that would remain unclear for many weeks.
Little Charlotte had recovered enough for the christening to go ahead on November 8, but she was still under the watchful care of Dr. Fothergill in early December when he and David Barclay asked Franklin to draw up his “Hints.”47 At the same time, Franklin found himself once again importuned by Mr. Raper to call upon Mrs. Howe, this time in a manner not to be refused. Meeting at another Royal Society event, Mr. Raper “put me in Mind of my Promise [to play chess with Mrs. Howe],” recalled Franklin, “and that I had not kept it, and would have me name a Day when he said he would call for me and conduct me.” This time, he was not left to find his own way; Mr. Raper personally escorted him to Caroline’s residence. “I had not the least Apprehension that any political Business could have any Connection with this new Acquaintance,” recalled the bemused Dr. Franklin when he knocked on the door of Number 12 Grafton Street on December 2, 1774.48
Benjamin Franklin might have guessed that “political Business” was afoot had he realized the connections between Mrs. Howe and the other parties urging him to join the peace process. He did not know, any more than his biographers did, that Caroline Howe visited regularly with Lord and Lady Dartmouth. He did not know that Thomas Villiers—the government contact to whom David Barclay proposed to convey his “Hints”—was an old and intimate friend of Caroline Howe and her husband, John. Mr. Raper of the Royal Society was another long-standing friend of the entire Howe family. Even the figures circling Franklin over the summer led back to the Howes. John Pownall, Dartmouth’s undersecretary, who consulted Franklin back in August, was a member of the mixed-sex Ladies’ Club that met at Almack’s.49 Jonathan Shipley and his family, who had provided a refuge for Franklin in their Twyford home after his ordeal at the Cockpit, were relatives of the Howes and Lady Spencer.50
The Shipley ladies visited regularly at Grafton Street. Their connection was most significant, for they would have conveyed to Caroline the hopes of pro-Americans in London that the Continental Congress would open a door to talks. In a London awash with rumors of conciliation, as well as schemes of armed repression, Caroline was well versed in the political trends, and when fate brought her together with Lord Dartmouth and Dr. Fothergill in the home of a sick baby in early November, she was primed to become involved.
The timing of Caroline’s involvement with the peace initiative clears up another longstanding conundrum: a promise made, and then broken, by William Howe to his Nottingham constituents. In the first half of October 1774, William was in the midst of running for reelection to Parliament in Nottingham. There were many voters in his constituency who were sympathetic to the colonial cause. General Howe publicly condemned the Coercive Acts as unnecessarily harsh and assured the voters of Nottingham that he would not serve in America.51
There was understandable rage in Nottingham when, just months later, he went back on his word. On February 10, the day that William was officially appointed to his military post in Boston, an angry Nottingham grocer named Samuel Kirk wrote him an embarrassing letter reminding him of his election promise. Brushing aside William’s excuse that he was commanded by King George and could not refuse, Kirk recalled the stance taken by the late George Augustus Lord Howe in the House of Commons against the subsidy treaties twenty years earlier. The then-Lord Howe had “dared to act in opposition to a Court,” wrote Mr, Kirk bluntly, adding that William fell short of the standards of his heroic brother.52 Ever since, the episode has remained as a blot on William’s reputation.
If William wasn’t exactly lying in Nottingham, argues a major biographer of the Howe brothers, he was at least deliberately altering his views to suit his audience. In January 1775, he let Lords North and Dartmouth know privately that he was willing, after all, to serve in America, while continuing publicly to assert that he would not. This has been seen as a shrewd, if somewhat disingenuous, move by a man who hoped to advance his career despite his ambiguous feelings about the conflict. It has been assumed that William’s January bid to serve in America was made independently of his brother Richard, and perhaps with the salve to his conscience that the American crisis might be patched up without bloodshed.53
Yet William had made his promise to the Nottingham voters weeks before his sister had been drawn into the secret consultations at the Dartmouth home. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he spoke the words. While the elections were in full sway, in mid-October, Caroline was regretting that Richard had been unable to accompany William to Nottingham, because the admiral was obliged to appear at his own constituency of Dartmouth.54 Ideally, the family had hoped that Richard could have been present to give his support to William’s campaign. The family had planned for the brothers to act in solidarity at Nottingham. It is unbelievable, then, that William would have made such a forthright statement on the American crisis at Nottingham—one with major implications for his career and that of his brother—if it were not in accord with the views of the Howe family members at the time.
William’s private communication to members of government in January did not come out of the blue, as past historians have assumed, and it fits with the chronology of Caroline’s involvement in Franklin’s secret negotiations. By mid-October, Dartmouth’s American Department was pushing the notion of replacing General Thomas Gage, in command of British regiments in Boston, who was blamed for mismanaging the rebellious colony of Massachusetts. General Amherst, who had served with great success in America during the last war and was a popular figure in the colonies, was proposed as his replacement. Along with Amherst, the cabinet considered sending two major generals. The notes of the cabinet meeting mention no names, but William Howe was
an obvious candidate.55 Everyone remembered George Howe’s popularity, which still lent charisma to the Howe name in the colonies.
It is entirely possible that when Lord Dartmouth met Mrs. Howe and Dr. Fothergill in his home at the end of October 1774, the three would discuss not only the chances of a negotiated solution to the crisis but also the role that the military leaders on the ground might play in the proceedings, issues that were then uppermost in the mind of the American secretary. Within days, Caroline took steps to draw Benjamin Franklin to her door. Her views on a military posting for her brothers in the conflicted colonies were already beginning to change.
Franklin’s journal of his secret negotiations shows that he was aware that William was being considered for the American command before the end of 1774. This has puzzled historians, who have argued that there is no evidence surviving in government correspondence to indicate that General Howe’s name had been put forward at this stage.56 In fact, Franklin’s source was the London newspapers, which since November had been publishing rumors that William would be appointed commander in chief in place of Gage, who was to be recalled “on account of his Tameness.”57 Well before January 1775, someone was at pains to publicize the notion that a Howe would, after all, be serving in America.
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