J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park.

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Wednesday, January 12, 2022

A Closer Look at the Gages

The main thrust of the American Revolution Institute blog posting I pointed to yesterday concerns the subject of the engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”

This print says it was published in London on 7 Sept 1776 by Thomas Hart. Hart didn’t exist, the image bears signs of having been produced in Augsburg, and there’s probably no way to confirm the date.

Regardless, someone went to the trouble of engraving this picture of a woman, her gown flowing and one breast bared, kissing a gentleman holding a sword. Which meant someone believed there would be public demand for such a print. And it all had something to do with Boston around 1776.

The blog post posits:
The man in the print bears a casual resemblance to General Thomas Gage as portrayed by John Singleton Copley in 1768. Gage had commissioned the portrait and when it was complete, sent it home to England. “The Generals Picture was received at home with universal applause,” one of Gage’s aides [John Small] reported to Copley in 1770, “and Looked on by real good Judges as a Masterly performance. It is placed in one of the Capital Apartments of Lord Gage’s house in Arlington Street.”
Gage then commissioned a portrait of his wife, Margaret. Copley painted her in an unusual pose and garments, probably evoking her family roots in eastern Europe. The blog post elaborates:
Part of the attraction of turquerie was that it was sexually suggestive without being lewd. In Copley’s portrait Mrs. Gage is not wearing a corset and reclines in her loose fitting clothes. Copley called it “beyond Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever Drew.” Proud of the portrait, the Gages packed it off to London, where it created a mild sensation when it was displayed.
In January 1773, Benjamin West told Copley: “the portrait of Mrs Gage as a picture has received every praise from the lovers of arts. her Friends did not think the likeness so favourable as they could wish, but Honour’d it as a pice of art.”

Thus, people in London had seen and discussed the Gages’ portraits. They had seen the Gages themselves in 1774, when the general assured King George III that he could bring Massachusetts back under control. They had followed the news from Boston as the conflict got worse. They had seen Gov. Gage return defeated after the outbreak of war and the costly Battle of Bunker Hill, his wife preceding him by a few weeks.

I find that interpretation of “The Hero returned from Boston” as a lampoon of the Gages convincing. In addition to the points in the blog post, the man in the print grips his sword the same way Copley’s general grips his cane. The engraver didn’t show Gage in uniform, but that might have been a satirical step too far, and Gage no longer had a military command, anyway.

The last section of the blog post discusses the supposition that Margaret Gage sympathized with the rebels and even disclosed her husband’s plans to them. Ultimately the author discards that idea (citing some of my own writing on the subject). Along the way the essay acknowledges counterarguments, however, and this passage caught my eye:
A local guest at one of the Gage’s parties attended by British officers wrote in June 1775 that “Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family . . . Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside.”
I didn’t recognize that quotation. Had I missed a source so close to Gage? I had to track this “local guest” down. And here’s what I found.

That’s not a contemporaneous statement from someone who socialized with the Gages. Rather, the historian Henry Bentley Belcher wrote those words in The First American Civil War, published in 1911, summarizing how he perceived rumors and leaks swirling around the Gage household.

What’s the source of that misinterpretation? In 2016 Deborah Gage wrote on the website for Firle Castle, the Gage family seat:
It has long been rumoured that Margaret provided Dr. [Joseph] Warren with the information that the British troops would be moving out the evening of April 19th, 1774 bound for Lexington and Concord, for example as cited in this letter written by Dr. Belcher in June 1775 ‘Entertainment at Providence House, where Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family, were crowded with uniformed men from both fleet and camp. Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside. At any rate whatever was designed in Boston was, it is alleged, known within an hour or two at Medford, at Roxbury, at Cambridge, at Brookline and in every Boston tavern.’
That quotation introduced some big errors. The governor’s mansion, Province House, became “Providence House.” Dr. Henry Bentley became “Dr. Belcher.” And, most important, a statement by a historian in 1911 was put into the pen of someone in 1775.

8 comments:

G. Lovely said...

Sorry, I'm confused. Who cited the "Dr. Belcher" letter? Does it exist?

J. L. Bell said...

There was no Dr. Belcher, and there was no letter. I believe that at some point in researching and writing the Firle Place essay, someone got confused and misinterpreted a summary comment by historian Dr. Henry Bentley to be a period statement. And made other errors: Province House became Providence House, Bentley became Belcher.

Then someone at the American Revolution Institute tried to make sense of that misleading misquotation and concluded that the mythical Dr. Belcher had to be a local (Belcher being a Bay Colony name).

Susan Holloway Scott said...

Excellent sleuthing as usual! It is, however, something of a shock to see Copley's sensitive portrait (one of his best IMHO) of Mrs Gage turned into this coarse caricature; the truth of her appearance was probably somewhere in between the two. I wonder if the the artist of the caricature purposefully coarsened her features to accentuate her "exotic" and non-English ancestry? Though of course it might also simply be chocked up to lack of skill....;)

Charles Bahne said...

Fantastic work, John. You really are the master at sleuthing out these mysteries. Congratulations on a job well done!

One minor correction: The author of the 1911 history was indeed a Henry Belcher. He was British, an Anglican priest; the book makes no mention of a doctoral degree. "Bentley" seems to be a slip of the keyboard. Another common New England name, of course,

I wonder how much Belcher was responsible for inventing the myth about Margaret Gage siding with the rebels, or whether he simply picked up gossip that he'd heard from a century earlier. Of course, if he was working from old rumors, he definitely magnified and metastasized them.

I downloaded a copy of his book from the Internet Archive and look forward to perusing it for other theories that he may have concocted.

Like many authors of his day, Belcher is skimpy on the footnotes, The only source he cites for that paragraph on Mrs. Gage is the Letters of John Andrews, March 18, 1775 [P.S. from March 20]. But that letter from Andrews says nothing about Mrs. Gage. It does say that "the officers and soldiers are a good deal disaffected towards the Governor, thinking, I suppose, that he is partial to the inhabitants...."

One interesting point: Belcher had access to some of the Gage papers before William Clements shipped them off to Michigan. In his preface he talks of his communications with the Gage family; and his book includes several pages of transcriptions of the General's letters.

I wonder if the the Gages of 1911 knew that Belcher was planning to make such derogatory comments about their ancestors!

Of course, as evidenced by the 1776 engraving by "Thomas Hart", the reputation of both the General and Mrs. Gage, in Britain at least, had gone downhill more over a century before Henry Belcher wrote his book.

Keep up the good work, John!


Jack Warren said...


After reading your blog on the American Revolution Institution blog — I wrote the latter — I went back and reviewed my notes on the quotation "“Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family . . . Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside.”

You are quite right that I found this quotation, which was entirely new to me, too, in Deborah Gage's essay on the Firle website, in which she attributed it to a "Dr. Belcher." Naturally I searched for a published source with a letter or other document written by a contemporary Dr. Belcher of Massachusetts who could have written such a thing, but without success. Far too trustingly, I concluded that Deborah Gage must have encountered the quotation in a document among the Gage papers now at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan or in some collection, perhaps at Firle, with which I am not acquainted. I like to think I'm not easily deceived. In hindsight it was the word "uxorious," which I have encountered in eighteenth-century sources but nothing later, that misled me. Samuel Johnson included it in his dictionary, defining it as "submissively fond of a wife; infected with connubial dotage." This is certainly the gist of contemporary criticism of Gage, and when I read the quotation in Deborah Gage's essay I was delighted to find it expressed so explicitly. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any such document, or if there is, we don't have ready access to it in a reliable source.

You are right that Deborah Gage may have found it in The First American Civil War, a two-volume work on the American Revolution published by MacMillan in London in 1911. The author was Henry Belcher (not, as you write, Henry Bentley). Whether he was "Dr. Belcher" is more than I know. On the title page he is identified as "Rector of S. Michael-in-Lewis, Sussex; Fellow of King's College, London" and "Chaplain to the Forces, t.f." I suppose from this he might have been the Reverend Doctor Belcher.

On page 168 of the first volume, Belcher writes "Entertainments at Province House, where Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of high New Jersey family, were crowded with uniformed men from both fleet and camp. Yet suspicion attended this lady as being not too loyal to her husband's party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside. At any rate, whatever was designed in Boston was, it is alleged, known within an hour or two at Medford, at Roxbury, at Cambridge, at Brooklin, and in every Boston tavern."

Like most historical writers a century ago, Belcher provides few citations to support his work, so it is impossible to retrace his steps. He provides two footnotes to this passage. The first simply identifies Margaret Gage, who does not seem to be mentioned elsewhere in his two volumes. The second note offers a quotation, presumably in support of the charge against Margaret Gage, but which in fact offers it no support at all:

"'It seems the officers and solders are a good deal disaffected towards the Governor, thinking, I suppose, he is partial to the inhabitants.' — Letters of John Andrews, formerly Selectman of Boston, p. 401. The Governor's partiality is alleged to have been largely due to his wife."

continued below

Jack Warren said...

continued from above

The question this leaves me with is this. Where did Henry Belcher, a British rector of antiquarian disposition, find the allegations against Margaret Gage to which he alludes? Why did he find them credible, or at least credible enough to repeat? It's hard to say. He was well acquainted with contemporary British histories covering the American war, though he had a low opinion of most of it. He conducted research in the British Museum and corresponded with Viscountess Gage at Firle, who supplied him with extracts from the Gage papers. He apparently did not visit and consult the Gage papers personally. Belcher also made at least two research trips to Boston, where he did some research in the Athenauem and elsewhere.

In Massachusetts he was assisted by Edward, Cornelia, and Fiske Warren, wealthy siblings who were heirs to their father's paper mill fortune. Edward had lived in Lewes, Sussex, for a time and was apparently the connection between Belcher and the family. Edward was an Anglophile, and his siblings were probably Anglophiles as well, and seem likely to have shared Belcher's disdain (which is on full and delightful display in the preface to his first volume) of the filiopiety of what he contemptuously calls the Bancroft School of American history, in which he says American soldiers of the Revolution are elevated to faultless demigods. Belcher was also critical of Gage, Howe, and Burgoyne, but he defends the British Regulars they commanded. He was thus predisposed to dismiss the idea that Americans succeeded in the war on their merits, and to blame Gage and his American wife for the disaster that befell the British army in Massachusetts.

This harder look at Belcher's First American Civil War doesn't get us any closer to Belcher's source, if indeed he had access to documents alleging Margaret Gage's disloyalty to her husband that have eluded our attention.

I have revised the essay on the American Revolution Institute website to remove the erroneous quotation, with a added note about your apt correction, which will lead the most curious readers back here. I don't want to perpetuate the error.

Jack Warren said...

And since I've already taken up so much space, a little more won't hurt:

The dealer from whom we acquired the print suggested that the subjects were probably William Howe and Elizabeth Loring, his New York mistress. Even after setting aside the visual evidence linking the print to the Copley portraits of the Gages, the notion that the subjects are Howe and Mrs. Loring makes no sense. Whenever Howe began his affair with Mrs. Loring, it was not generally known or at least discussed in the British army in New York until the winter of 1776-1777, so if the print actually does date to September 1776 it's simply too early to be Howe and Mrs. Loring. More importantly, Howe did not return to Britain until 1778 and he sailed from Philadelphia, not Boston.

J. L. Bell said...

Thanks to Charles Bahne for spotting my own error about Bentley/Belcher. I’ve made visible corrections in the posting. My apology to G. Lovely for being confusing.

This profile of Belcher reports he received an LL.D. in 1879, so he was indeed “Dr. Belcher.”

Thanks to Jack Warren for the thorough review of the sources. Good spotting on the untenable Howe/Loring identification! Your posting’s introductory remarks about the engravings of Thomas Hart et al. has been making me give every Revolutionary engraved portrait a second look this month.

I don’t think the Rev. Dr. Belcher made up the possibility of Margaret Gage betraying her husband out of whole cloth, but I think he stitched together some very raggedy scraps with a lot of supposition. After eleven years [!] it might be time to spread out the evidence again.