To the English radicals who supported Wilkes, the American struggle reflected their own struggle to vote and offset the votes of a handful of wealthy owners then reaping infinite financial benefits from the pocket boroughs and rotten boroughs they controlled. The fiery rhetoric of Wilkes and his supporters convinced Arthur Lee the radicals were stronger than they were and that the Tories in Parliament were near collapse. He relayed his misassessment to Richard Henry, who passed it on to Washington.
“The ministerial recruiting business in England,” Richard Henry assured Washington, “has entirely failed them and now they are driven to their last resort to seek for soldiers in the Highlands of Scotland. But it seems the greatest willingness of the people there cannot supply more than one or two thousand men.”30
In addition to his English friends, Wilkes’s band included a curious Frenchman—a sparkling wit who first gained renown as a brilliant watchmaker. Working as an apprentice in his watchmaker-father’s shop in Paris, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais had invented a remarkable new “escapement”—a part of the internal mechanism of clocks and watches that allowed him to produce the first watch small enough to wear on one’s wrist instead of carrying it in one’s pocket. His invention brought him to the attention of the French court, where King Louis XV converted his passion for unusual timepieces into a deluge of orders for wristwatches and a position in the palace for Beaumarchais as the king’s official watchmaker.
Beaumarchais was more than a watchmaker, however. From his mother, an accomplished musician, Beaumarchais had learned musical composition, poetry, and playwriting. By the time he met Arthur Lee in London, Beaumarchais had emerged as France’s most renowned playwright and was in London, ostensibly, to oversee the first English production of his highly acclaimed play, The Barber of Seville.
After meeting the celebrated Frenchman at a John Wilkes salon and learning of his ties to the French king, Arthur Lee assumed his brother’s mantle and asked the playwright to save the American Revolution.
19. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French poet, playwright, and watchmaker, was an effective spy and secret agent for King Louis XV, for whom he masterminded a scheme to defeat Britain by secretly supplying arms and ammunition to American rebels.
CHAPTER 5
An Indispensable Necessity
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS WAS MORE THAN A watchmaker, more than a poet, more than a playwright. He was also a French spy—French king Louis XV’s unofficial “fixer,” who used his status as a playwright to cross international borders and fix particularly difficult royal problems that discretion prevented the king from assigning to military aides.
In London to supervise the English production of his sensational play The Barber of Seville, Beaumarchais was also on a secret mission for the French king to recapture important state documents from a French turncoat—but not just any turncoat. Beaumarchais’s target was Chevalier d’Éon, a fierce swordsman who had served heroically in war as a French army captain and, when the war ended, continued his service to the king as a spy, sometimes appearing as a dashing young officer, other times as a mysterious French beauty. He was a transvestite, and “to serve the king,” Beaumarchais admitted later, “I had to make love to a captain of dragoons.”1
Although Arthur Lee did not know Beaumarchais’s official mission in London, the playwright’s ties to the French court made him the perfect figure Richard Henry Lee had hoped Arthur would find there. Arthur, therefore, waxed eloquent in expounding the American cause to the Frenchman, pointing out that Americans shared the deep hatred felt by the French court for the British. Knowing how French king Louis XV seethed over the disastrous loss of Canada to the British in the Seven Years’ War, Lee said an investment of £100,000 or £200,000 to support the Americans would ensure not only an American victory over the British but the return of Canada to France. Inadvertently or by design, Arthur had uttered the magic words etched on the French royal heart: French recovery of Canada.
Beaumarchais agreed to meet Lee secretly, and in subsequent encounters Lee told Beaumarchais that the Continental Army needed arms, ammunition, and technical assistance as well as funding for its fight for independence. He suggested that the benefits to France of an American victory would stretch far beyond the recovery of Canada. In return for French military aid he promised Beaumarchais that France would reap all the rewards of trade that had enriched England for a century. Then, in what proved a particularly critical meeting between the two, Lee sounded a note that resonated personally in Beaumarchais’s heart, pointing out that anyone who engineered a Franco-American alliance would become a wealthy man.
If there was one thing Beaumarchais adored more than theater, music, fame, and intrigue, it was wealth.
Arthur and Richard Henry Lee purposely ended their fraternal correspondence to avoid arousing British suspicions of Arthur’s activities in London. William served as intermediary between his two brothers, with Richard Henry sending coded messages often disguised as tobacco transactions that made it difficult to discern whether his instructions dealt with the purchases and sales of tobacco or arms. In fact, the Lees were still observing the trade boycott with Britain, and Richard Henry was probably writing in a code he had invented as a boy playing Robin Hood with his brothers in the woods around Stratford Hall.
Immediately after meeting with Arthur Lee, Beaumarchais wrote to French foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes: “The Americans will triumph, but they must be assisted in their struggle.”2 With that, Beaumarchais then sent a passionate address to the king entitled La paix ou la guerre (i.e., Peace or War). A little-known landmark in American history, the document steered France onto the path toward a Franco-American alliance that would ensure the birth of a new nation:
The quarrel between America and England will soon divide the world and change the system of Europe.… I am obliged to warn Your Majesty that the preservation of our possessions in America… depends solely upon this one proposition: we must help the Americans.… If the English triumph over the Americans, their victory will embolden them to expand their empire by seizing the French West Indies. If they lose… they would seize the French West Indies as compensation.… What then is to be done?
Beaumarchais answered his own question, recognizing that France could not afford to war with Britain. But by providing Americans with the right amount of military and financial aid, France could put them “on an equal—but not superior—level of strength with England” and prolong the conflict indefinitely, exhausting them both and rendering them impotent and at the mercy of France “without compromising ourselves. If Your Majesty does not have a more clever man at hand to employ in this matter,” he suggested, “I will undertake and answer for the execution of the arrangement without anyone being compromised.”3
On February 1, 1775, John Wilkes emerged from prison, returned to Parliament, and resumed his attacks on the king, assailing His Royal Highness for declaring Americans to be in rebellion. He called the king’s statement “unfounded, rash, and sanguinary”—one that would “most unjustly draw the sword against America.
But before [the] administration are suffered to plunge this nation into the horrors of civil war, before they are permitted to force Englishmen to sheathe their swords into the bowels of their fellow subjects, I hope this House [of Commons] will seriously weigh… the cause of this dispute.
Wilkes warned that England was doomed to lose a war against “a hearty and courageous people” fighting for their homes and properties in a limitless wilderness with which they alone were intimate. “Do not deceive yourselves,” he shouted at the ministers in Parliament. “The whole continent will be dismembered from Great Britain, and the wide arch of the empire fall.”4
Republished in newspapers across America, the speech provoked cries of “Wilkes and Liberty”—and a grateful acknowledgment from Richard Henry Lee.
“My Lord,” Lee wrote to Wilkes:
Permit the delegates of the pe
ople of twelve Antient Colonies [Georgia had not yet attended the Continental Congress] to pay your Lordship… a just tribute of gratitude and thanks for the virtuous and unsolicited resentment you have shown to the violated rights of a free people.… North America, My Lord, wishes most ardently for a lasting connection with Great Britain on terms of just and equal liberty, less than which generous minds would not offer nor brave and free ones be willing to receive. A cruel war has… been opened against us, and while we prepare to defend ourselves like the descendants of Britons, we still hope that the mediation of wise and good citizens will at length prevail over despotism and restore peace and harmony… to an oppressed and divided empire.5
During the night of June 16, 1775, American troops started building a fortification atop the high ground on Charlestown Peninsula overlooking the harbor across from Boston. When they spotted the structure the next morning, the British ships’ high command ordered ships to land 2,400 men in Charlestown to climb to the summit and tear it down.
Slowed by heavy backpacks, the British ran into a rain of murderous fire from Patriot troops at the summit. Falling back to the water’s edge, the British dropped their packs, fixed bayonets, and resumed their charge, scratching their way upward until the rain of lead diminished, then stopped: the Americans at the top—about 1,600—had run out of ammunition. As British troops reached the summit unimpeded, shrieks of agony rang out across the sky above the harbor as British bayonets wreaked revenge on the defiant Americans.
Both sides paid a heavy price—1,054 British casualties for the victory and 397 Patriot troops in defeat.
Shocked by the savagery at Bunker Hill, Richard Henry Lee doubled his efforts to supply George Washington and the Continental Army. To that end he instructed Connecticut delegate Silas Deane, an experienced merchant-banker, “to repair to the city of New York and there purchase a ship suitable for carrying 20 nine-pounders [cannons] upon one deck… also a sloop suitable to carry ten guns.” They were to be the first ships in what he envisioned growing into an American navy. “If you succeed,” he told Deane, “you will use all possible expedition to procure them to be armed and equipped for the sea… you are to procure powder for both these vessels, and such other military stores as can be had. You will procure cannon… officers and men suitable for these vessels… and able bodied seamen… with all possible dispatch.”6
Because of their experience buying and selling a wide range of goods and services, merchant-bankers such as Deane were logical candidates among the delegates to purchase arms, ammunition, and other materiel for Congress on behalf of the military. Deane’s success in procuring ships for an embryonic navy convinced Richard Henry Lee and the Congress to send him to Europe to purchase arms, ammunition, and other war materiel and, where possible, recruit skilled military officers to train American fighters in the arts of engineering and artillery.
By then Washington had reached Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. Too late to help the troops defending Bunker Hill, he organized as many troops as he could on the Cambridge green. “Between you and me,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, “I think we are in an exceeding dangerous situation as our numbers are not much larger than we suppose… those of the enemy to be… and know not where to look for them.… Their great command of artillery and adequate sources of powder, & c. give them advantages we have only to lament the want of.… If things, therefore, should not turn out as the Congress would wish, I hope they will make proper allowances.”7
Washington added a “P.S.” bemoaning the lack of a hospital with good surgeons for his men. “It rests with the Congress to consider this matter.”8
While the slaughter on Bunker Hill provoked the fury of Richard Henry Lee and those who favored a war for independence, the brutality of defeat inspired reconciliationists to seek peace. Philadelphia’s John Dickinson, the devout Quaker who had stirred colonist resentment against the British with his twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania ten years earlier, now coaxed Congress to let him address an “olive branch” petition to the king:
Attached to your Majesty’s person, family and government with all the devotion that principle and affection can inspire… we solemnly assure your Majesty, that we… most ardently desire the former harmony between her and these colonies may be restored.… We therefore beseech your Majesty that your royal authority and influence may be graciously interposed… to settle peace through every part of your dominions… and that such statutes as more immediately distress any of your Majesty’s colonies be repealed: For by such arrangements as your Majesty’s wisdom can form… your Majesty would receive… every testimony of devotion becoming the most dutiful subjects and the most affectionate colonists.9
After sending Dickinson’s Olive Branch Petition, Congress learned of British plans to send Canadian troops into New York. It responded by authorizing a two-pronged invasion of Canada, one aimed at Montreal, the other at Quebec. Richard Henry Lee, meanwhile, procured twelve to fourteen tons of powder for Washington and proposed “a signal stroke” for installing batteries “at the entrance of the bay of Boston, so as to prevent the egress and regress of any [British] ships whatever… to secure the [British] fleet and army in and before Boston so as to compel a surrender.”10
Washington replied in kindly fashion, reminding Lee that the American army lacked enough powder “to give twenty-five musket cartridges to each man and to serve the artillery in any brisk action one single day. Under these circumstances, I dare say you will agree with me that it would not be very eligible to take a post thirty miles distant by land [across the bay] from this place.”11
With that exchange Lee abandoned his proposal, telling Washington to “rest assured that Congress will do everything in their power to render your most weighty business easy to you.”12 Rather than devise military strategy, Lee would cede that task to Washington and concern himself solely with filling the needs of Washington’s men. To that end he pushed through a proposal to raise the pay of riflemen and their officers before adjourning for a month’s respite to escape Philadelphia’s summer heat and pestilence by returning to his hilltop home in Virginia.
The break proved a disappointment, however. He had assumed burdens that would crush most men. Besides caring for his own large family in Virginia, he worried about his two sons in England. “I have enclosed a packet for my dear boys,” he wrote to his brother William. “On you and my brother [Arthur] I depend solely for the care and protection of my dear boys in this tempestuous season, when I can do little for them. I hope their gratitude and virtue will prevent your having much trouble with them.” And he signed it for himself and his wife, Ann, who had just given birth to a son: “Our best love to Mrs. Lee and kiss your little patriot* for me.”13
While Richard Henry was in Virginia, Patrick Henry had led a force into Williamsburg and made royal governor Lord Dunmore flee the governor’s palace and take refuge on a British man-of-war, where he threatened to send marines to crush all opposition in Virginia. Lee rushed to Williamsburg to meet with Patrick Henry and the colony’s other former burgesses to assume control of government and end 175 years of British rule. They voted to raise three regiments of 1,000 men each to defend the colony against British troops. They also agreed to print £350,000 in Virginia currency and establish an arms production plant in Fredericksburg near the northern Virginia iron mines.
In Philadelphia the Continental Congress reconvened in mid-September 1775 with delegates from Georgia appearing for the first time and uniting all thirteen colonies in convention. Richard Henry returned from Virginia ready to assume more responsibilities with each passing day. On the road back to Philadelphia he had even stopped at Mount Vernon to see “if your lady had any commands,” as he put it to General Washington. “[I] had the pleasure to learn that all were well.”14
Once in Congress Richard Henry assumed a role as Washington’s personal representative and pressed Congress to improve the lot of troops enlisting in the Continental Army. “Y
ou will see in the proceedings of our convention,” he was able to write to Washington, “that they have agreed to raise the pay of our rifle officers and men to the Virginia standard.”15
Washington himself, however, was far from happy. “As we have now nearly completed our lines of defense,” Washington wrote to Lee, “we have nothing more to fear from the enemy provided we can keep our men to their duty.
But it is among the most difficult tasks I ever undertook in my life to induce these people to believe there is… danger till the bayonet is pushed at their breasts.… An unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people… prevails but too generally among the officers… and adds not a little to my difficulties.… There is no such thing as getting officers… to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution.… To curry favor with the men (by whom they were chosen and on whose smiles possibly they may think they may again rely) seems to be one of the principle objects of their attention.16
Washington went on to ask Lee to convince Congress to give him, as commander-in-chief, the power to appoint all officers below the rank of general. Until then the general of each state militia held powers over officer promotions and tended to promote higher-level subordinate officers from that state—all too often relatives, relatives of friends, or men of high standing in the state. The troops themselves elected lower-level officers—again, always men from their own state.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “will stand an equal chance of being promoted according to merit if appointed by the Commander in Chief,” Washington wrote. His suggestion originated the practice of awarding battlefield commissions, which would become official military policy in 1845 at the outbreak of the Mexican War.
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