Isaac Royall and “the very Day the battle happen’d”

Like the Rev. David McClure, Isaac Royall of Medford was caught by surprise in Boston when the war began.

Earlier this week on Facebook the Royall House and Slave Quarters quoted Royall’s 29 May 1779 letter to his former tutor, the Rev. Samuel Cooke of Menotomy, on how he came to be there:

I packed up my Sea Stores and Cloathes for the passage and came to Boston after attending the public Worship on the Lord’s Day Evening before the Battle of Lexington [i.e., on 16 Apr 1775] to take leave of my children and Friends intending to have gone thence to Salem to embark for Antigua but unfortunately staid in Boston two or three Days and din’d with the Hon’ble Captain [George] Erving the very Day the battle happen’d after which it was impossible to get out of Town for Gen. [Thomas] Gage had issued Orders to prevent any one coming in or going out

Erving was Royall’s son-in-law.

The timing of Royall’s statement matches what Samuel Winship told the Medford committee of safety on 9 Apr 1778:

That, on Sunday before said battle, said Royal went in his coach to Boston, and took with him a pair of pistols and a carabine, but for what end he did not know, nor never heard; that, at the same time, he left in his house two firearms, which Mr. Poor, some days after, carried to Watertown.

However, Royall’s suggestion that Gen. Gage had prevented him from going home to Medford is disingenuous. Gage did make leaving town more difficult, but a lot of people got out. Royall had already planned to leave in the other direction, by sea, and within a few weeks he did.

Royall’s motives and loyalties had become a legal issue in 1778 because the state of Massachusetts was moving to confiscate the property of absentees who supported the British Crown. Royall insisted to some friends in Medford that he wasn’t in that category. Dr. Simon Tufts, for instance, testified:

he knew of nothing said Royal had said or done against the country; but, on the contrary, he believed him to be a friend of the American cause. That said Royal being in Boston at and before the battle of Lexington, the confusion which that battle occasioned in the country made him afraid at that time and afterwards to return home; and that said confusion, which prevailed in Boston, made him afraid to stay there; accordingly he went to Halifax, and from thence retired back into the country, and afterwards went to England.

However, Tufts had received Royall’s power of attorney, giving him every reason to keep the estate from being confiscated.

Peter Tufts testified:

That, about a fortnight before Lexington battle, Colonel Royal told him that it would not do for us to resist Great Britain, for they were too strong for us, and would send over ten thousand Russians, who would subdue us; and that, by his conversation, it appeared to him (the said Tufts) that said Royal was for surrendering up all to Great Britain, rather than make resistance.

Yet Isaac Hall said:

That, the winter before said battle, he went to settle accounts with said Royal, at his house; and that said Royal showed him his arms and accoutrements (which were in very good order), and told him that he determined to stand for his country, &c.

But which country would that be? In the end, Medford’s selectmen ruled that Royall had chosen the side of the Crown and was therefore a Loyalist, making his property vulnerable to confiscation.

Still, as of 1779, Royall was writing to Dr. Tufts to insist that he hoped “to return home as soon as my health will admit of.” He died in Britain two years later, but not from a disease his health was suffering from when he wrote that letter—instead, from smallpox.

How Isaac Royall Came to Endow a Harvard Law Professorship

As historical background for the current controversy over Harvard Law School’s adoption of the Royall family crest, the Harvard University Press recently published a long extract from On the Battlefield of Merit, Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball’s recent institutional history of the school’s first century.

In April 1775, Isaac Royall (1719-1781, shown here) found himself in Boston and cut off by the siege lines from his estate in Medford. Of course, he could have left Boston and gone home if he wanted, but some of his neighbors accused him of leaning toward the Crown—which he did, though not fervently.

Royall evacuated to Halifax even before the British troops left in March 1776, then traveled to London. Yet he kept talking about going back to Medford, and he really didn’t want to lose control of his property in Massachusetts.

In 1778, as the war ground on, the Massachusetts legislature moved to confiscate the property of former royal officials, supporters, and “absentees” who had left with the British. The provincial army had already used some of that property during the siege, including the Royall house, and for the next couple of years the state administered those estates while maintaining their original legal ownership. But this new initiative would lead to permanent seizures. The state planned to sell the estates to finance the war effort.

Loyalists who had relatives, friends, or well-placed attorneys to lobby for them were more successful in fending off attempts to seize their property. In Royall’s case, his advocate was one of his neighbors, Dr. Simon Tufts.

It was only in 1778, long after Royall had “gone voluntarily to our enemies,” that his property was provisionally confiscated and reserved by the Committee of Medford for future heirs, under the watchful eye of Tufts. In contrast, the estates of his Tory sons-in-law, George Erving and William Pepperell, were taken under the “Act to Confiscate the Estates of Certain Notorious Conspirators,” passed April 30, 1779. Furthermore, Royall was not mentioned in the initial three lists of proscribed persons under the Acts of September 1778, April 30, 1779, and September 30, 1779.

To his death in 1781, Royall claimed that only ill health prevented his return and remained outraged at any slur on his loyalty. . . . exiled in Kensington, he made a will on May 26, 1778. It contained generous gifts to his friends, to the church and clergy in Medford, and to the Medford schools, together with a devise of land to the town of Worcester. But it also contained a gift to Harvard College that was to ensure Royall’s lasting fame. The provision reads, “All the remainder of said tract of land in said Granby containing eight or nine hundred acres more or less...I give, devise, and bequeath to the overseers and corporation of Harvard Colledge...to be appropriated towards the endowing a Professor of Laws in said Colledge, or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, whichever the said overseers and Corporation shall judge to be best.”

The will only came to probate in 1786. This delay may not have been accidental. Due to his popularity in Medford, Royall was covered under the “Absentee Act” of April 30, 1779, which provided some procedural protection against confiscation, and it appears that Royall’s devoted friend Simon Tufts—essentially the trustee of Royall’s property—was waiting out events. It was a good strategy. The Treaty of Paris of September 3, 1783, contained provisions that at least promised recovery of loyalist property, and Jay’s Treaty of 1794 further raised hopes. In 1795 Harvard hired a lawyer to begin to locate the land in Royall’s bequest in preparation for sale.

Royall’s bequest to Harvard therefore got that influential institution behind his other heirs’ efforts to keep his property out of the state government’s hands.

In 1786 and 1787 Shays’s Rebellion had taken place in the region around Granby, and the ill feeling against loyalists, absentee landowners, and their well-to-do and politically connected friends persisted. The Harvard lawyer found Royall’s land stripped and occupied by squatters. In 1796, $2,000 was all that could be obtained from the Granby estate. . . . The college invested the money with remarkable success, despite economic adversity, and by 1815 there were a capital fund of $7,593 and interest on hand of $432. . . .

In retrospect, it was lucky for the Law School that the gift in Royall’s will could not be effected until thirty-three years after his death and eleven years after the receipt of the initial $2,000. It was not just about having enough money. In 1775 Harvard designated a bequest from Dr. Ezekiel Hersey of £1,000 to support “two Professors of Anatomy and Surgery, and of the Theory and Practice of Physic.” This was followed by further bequests of £1,000 in 1790 from Hersey’s widow and £500 in 1793 from his brother “for the encouragement and support of a Professor of Surgery and Physic.” After Royall’s death in 1781, the college was therefore occupied with appointing three medical professors and founding its medical school in 1782 and 1783.

Royall’s will gave Harvard the option of a “Professor of Law” or a “Professor of Physick and Anatomy.” In 1782 this would have played right into the development of the new Medical School. By 1815, the Medical School looked relatively secure…

The Boston Globe adds that the Harvard Law School didn’t adopt Royall’s crest as its own symbol until more than a century later, in 1936. Thus, while Royall’s bequest has been effective for two centuries, that school crest is less than eighty years old.

“Great but fruitless interest for the commission in the artillery”

Yesterday I quoted a few phrases from Alexander H. Everett’s address on the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. He spoke in Charlestown “at the request of the young men, without distinction of Party,” according to his lecture’s title page. (Makes you wonder what political dispute had disrupted previous years.)

Here’s a choice passage from Everett about the American artillery, comparing its performance to the fabled British failure:

But where in the mean time are the reinforcements of artillery? Where is Major [Scarborough] Gridley with his battallion? Is he too slumbering in the lap of some beauteous Delilah? Ah, gallant, learned Rumford! could your thorough science, your vigorous and energetic action have done justice to the orders of the veteran hero of Louisburg, there would have been no want of amunition: powder enough would have found its way to the redoubt, and the day might still have been ours. But America must pay the penalty of Col. [Richard] Gridley’s parental partiality, as Britain does of Gen. [Samuel] Cleveland’s superannuated gallantry.—

Col. Richard Gridley, commander of the Massachusetts artillery, had insisted that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress make his youngest son, Scarborough, a major in the regiment. But, as Everett hinted, Scar Gridley wasn’t up to the challenge of the Battle of Bunker Hill. (I’ll discuss that tomorrow.)

Who did Everett think would have done a better job? “Gallant, learned Rumford!” Everett relied on Samuel Swett’s History of Bunker Hill Battle, published about a decade before. Swett in turn appears to have talked to Massachusetts governor John Brooks (1752-1825, shown above), who reported that he’d been on Breed’s Hill on the morning of 17 June 1775 and was sent back to Gen. Artemas Ward’s headquarters ask for reinforcements. Swett wrote:

Maj. Brooks was retained at Cambridge by Ward, till the last reinforcements were sent to Charlestown, when he marched with the two remaining companies of his regiment, and met at the neck the Americans retreating. Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford, attended him as a volunteer. He was assisting the army by his mathematical learning, his estimates and surveys, but had solicited an appointment in vain, and had made great but fruitless interest for the commission in the artillery which was bestowed on Maj. Gridley.

Some authors later wrote that Brooks and Thompson (1753-1814) were schoolmates, others that they were both teen-aged medical trainees under Dr. Simon Tufts. Thompson did briefly go to school in Medford (Brooks’s home town), but he studied medicine under Dr. John Hay of Woburn, not Tufts. Supposedly Brooks and Thompson maintained a friendly correspondence all their lives, but I’ve never seen a citation for any of those letters.

According to modern biographer Sanborn C. Brown, there’s evidence that Thompson was in Woburn on 15 June, and thus less likely to be in Cambridge two days later. Still, authors of the nineteenth century accepted Brooks’s statement that Thompson was tagging along during the Battle of Bunker Hill, having fruitlessly offered to help the American artillery corps.

By the 1800s, Thompson had become famous and respected in Europe as Count Rumford, government administrator and scientist. Why hadn’t the Massachusetts army accepted his services? Why had his home town’s committee of correspondence kept him confined on suspicion of being a Tory? “America must pay the penalty” for that stubbornness, Everett said.

Neither Thompson’s contemporaries behind the American lines nor the nineteenth-century authors knew that in early May Thompson had sent Gen. Thomas Gage a spy report written in invisible ink. Was Thompson really angling for a high rank in the provincial artillery at the same time? Was he hanging around Gen. Ward’s headquarters and accompanying Maj. Brook to the front lines? If so, that wouldn’t have been good for the Americans.