“The General himself in his wife’s cloaths”

Looking back over the sources about Thomas and Margaret Gage that came to light in the late 1800s, as quoted yesterday, reveals some clear patterns.

Some of Gen. Gage’s junior officers really didn’t like how he handled the crisis in Massachusetts. To be sure, Gage wasn’t the only commander in history to inspire such contempt. And he definitely didn’t manage the crisis successfully.

The letter from Margaret Gage’s friend makes it likely that she did express regret that a bloody civil war was breaking out in North America. Again, she was not unique in dreading that event. Almost everybody said a war would be horrible—with most adding that therefore the other side should back down.

Above all, it’s striking how much ideas of gender played into the criticism of the Gages. John Andrews wrote that army officers called Gen. Gage “an Old Woman” because he was too lenient on the locals. When Margaret Gage arrived in Portsmouth, England, in September 1775, the St. James’s Chronicle newspaper printed this snarky comment:

We are assured that it is not General Gage’s wife who is arrived from Boston, but the General himself in his wife’s cloaths. His wife is left behind, invested with the supreme command, and will prove a much more formidable enemy to the Americans than her husband, who has been beaten twice abroad and every day grows more and more contemptible at home.

I quote that from Herbert Hughes’s Chronicle of Chester (1975).

Some of the Gages’ critics complained that Margaret thrust herself into Thomas’s affairs. “He was governed by his wife,” groused Maj. James Wemyss. She “said she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen,” whispered Whitshed Keene. Her brothers and brother-in-law got positions on the general’s staff that could have gone to other officers (including those who passed on complaints about her).

But others criticized Mrs. Gage for showing too much feminine desire—encouraging her friends to organize a ball inside Boston, wearing a daring turquerie-style gown in her painting by Copley, which that anonymous engraver in 1776 appears to have caricatured by portraying her bare-breasted. As a woman, Margaret was vulnerable to criticism from both sides.

Another way gender played a role in this story is that being a woman probably did allow Margaret Gage to express her sadness about the coming conflict, to lament the big loss of life at Bunker Hill and sympathize with the divided loyalties of Janet Montgomery. An eighteenth-century gentleman like Thomas Gage, or like John Adams, was supposed to keep his emotions in check. Mrs. Gage was freer to say she wished her husband didn’t have to kill Americans than he was.

But no critical contemporaries accused Margaret Gage of betraying her husband and the Crown. No one said she befriended Massachusetts Patriots in the one year she lived in the province, much less forged close connections. 

Nonetheless, by the first decades of the twentieth century the idea developed that Margaret Gage had leaked her husband’s plan for the march to Concord to the Patriots. And of course, if she really did that, she would have kept it secret, so there would be very little evidence for us to find.

COMING UP: A treacherous hypothesis.