“He is ready to wish he had never known her”

Charles Bahne just alerted me to a discussion of Margaret and Thomas Gage’s marriage in John Singleton Copley in America, published after (and thus influenced by) Paul Revere’s Ride and its argument that on 18 Apr 1775 Margaret probably gave away Thomas’s secret plans to Dr. Joseph Warren.

That extraordinarily handsome and thorough art book says of Mrs. Gage:

Copley's dark and romantic portrait, in contrast, offers some indication of the despair and loneliness that seems to have defined her married life. Thomas Hutchinson, who stayed at Firle in 1774, proposed that her divided loyalties and yearning to live full-time in New York had become a source of tension between the Gages; he maintained as well that he had seen a letter that the commander had written to her “in which he says he is ready to wish he had never known her.”

But context is everything. Here’s what former governor Hutchinson actually wrote in his diary for 10 Aug 1774 (which of course was well before any possible betrayal to Dr. Warren):

Lady Gage gave me to read a letter to her from General Gage, dated the 26th June, from Salem, in which he says he is ready to wish he had never known her; laments his hard fate in being torn away from his friends, after the difficulty of crossing the Atlantick in the short time of 9 months, and put upon a service in so disagreeable a place, which, though he had been used to difficult service, he seemed to consider as peculiarly disagreeable; wishes Mrs Gage had staid in England, as he advised her; for though it was natural she should desire to see her friends at New York, &c., yet, she could have no sort of satisfaction in New England, amidst riots, disorders, &c.: and the whole letter discovers greater anxiety and distress of mind than what appears from all the accounts we have recd concerning him.

So that wasn’t a “I don’t love you” message. It was a “I love you so much I hate being away from you, and wish I wasn’t thinking of you all the time in this miserable situation, which I hope you won’t suffer with me.” After receiving this latter, Margaret left the family seat at Firle and joined her husband in Boston.

I think we’ve reached a point of circularity, where assumptions about the Gages’ troubled marriage affect authors’ interpretation of the evidence, producing more “evidence” for the assumptions.

ADDENDUM: See the comments for a persuasive reinterpretation of Hutchinson’s diary entry. The main point that this passage doesn’t support the idea of a rift in Thomas and Margaret Gage’s marriage still stands.

The Marriage of Thomas and Margaret Gage

As I described yesterday, the largely very good history Paul Revere’s Ride argues that there’s a strong circumstantial case that Margaret Gage betrayed her husband Thomas, British commander in Boston (shown here), by leaking word of the march to Concord to Dr. Joseph Warren.

Among that evidence, the book says, is “her husband’s decision to send her away from him after the battles, and the failure of their marriage.”

But here’s Gen. Gage’s entry at ThePeerage.com, listing his children with Margaret:

• Maria Theresa Gage d. 21 Apr 1832
• Charlotte Margaret Gage d. Sep 1814
• Harriet Gage d. 1835
• Maj.-Gen. Henry Gage, 3rd Viscount Gage of Castle Island b. 4 Mar 1761, d. 29 Jan 1808
• Louisa Elizabeth Gage b. c 1766, d. 21 Jan 1832
• John Gage b. 23 Dec 1767, d. 24 Dec 1846
• Emily Gage b. 25 Apr 1776, d. 28 Aug 1838
• Admiral Sir William Hall Gage b. 2 Oct 1777, d. 5 Jan 1864

Since Emily Gage was born in late April 1776, Margaret Gage conceived that child around the end of July 1775—months after when Paul Revere’s Ride says her husband “ordered her away from him.”

The Gages probably didn’t realize that Margaret was pregnant when she left Boston in late August. Nevertheless, sending one’s wife out of a besieged town suffering from food shortages and smallpox might actually be a sign of affection. At the very least, I’d want my husband to consider it.

Paul Revere’s Ride errs in saying that “the General remained in America for another long and painful year” after his wife’s departure. Gage received orders to sail back to London on 26 September, and left on 11 October. Some historians suggest he had already sensed those orders were coming, which would have given him another reason to send his family home well before winter.

What about the Gages’ life in England? They retired to Firle Place. (Occasional Boston 1775 guest blogger Charles Bahne sent me that web address, as well as this page with more information.)

I haven’t seen any statement from the Gages’ contemporaries—who loved to gossip—that their marriage failed. In fact, the couple had another child in October 1777, which strongly suggests that they were still acting as husband and wife in every way. They had no more children after that son, but by then Margaret was aged 43.

Thomas Gage died in 1787, having achieved some vindication from how no other generals had been any more victorious in America than he had. Margaret lived to 1824. Of their two children born after the war began, Emily Gage grew up to marry the Earl of Abingdon, and William Hall Gage became an admiral and knight. They’re both thus well documented; he’s even got a Wikipedia page. And they make the evidence for Margaret Gage’s betrayal of her husband look quite thin.

“He was governed by his wife”

According to Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Hackett Fischer, the marriage of Gen. Thomas and Margaret Gage didn’t survive the start of the Revolutionary War:

Before this fatal day, Gage had been devoted to his beautiful and caring wife. But after the Regulars returned from Concord, he ordered her away from him. Margaret was packed aboard a ship called Charming Nancy and sent to Britain, while the General remained in America for another long and painful year.

That estrangement, the book states, is a major part of the “circumstantial evidence [which] strongly suggests” that Margaret Gage leaked word to Dr. Joseph Warren about the march to Concord.

It’s a dramatic theory: Margaret torn between two loyalties, the general betrayed by his closest companion, even the possibility of an extramarital affair between the military wife and the widowed physician. Later authors have seized on the idea as fact, tossing aside the little doubt that Fischer preserved. Old North Church even developed a lesson plan about Margaret Gage’s dilemma.

I thought the theory was very intriguing when I first read Paul Revere’s Ride. After studying the book’s argument more intently, however, I think it overstates the case, misstating some evidence and tilting the rest in favor of that thesis.

For example, the book states, “In 1775, she [Margaret Gage] told a gentleman that ‘she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen.’” That quote comes from former governor Thomas Hutchinson’s diary for 27 July 1775, when he was in London:

Mr Keene called: complains of Gage: says his lady has said she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen. I doubted it. He said he did not, but did not chuse to be quoted for it.

Keene was a member of Parliament in London; he couldn’t have had any contact with Margaret Gage in 1775, and was passing on secondhand information at best. Fischer doesn’t mention Hutchinson’s doubt.

Paul Revere’s Ride states, “The well-informed Roxbury clergyman William Gordon wrote that Dr. Warren’s spy was ‘a daughter of liberty unequally yoked in the point of politics.’” Actually, as I discussed back here, that was Gordon’s description of a woman who told Samuel Adams about the British plans “a few days” before 18 April.

Page 95 quotes the diary of the Rev. Jeremy Belknap about Warren consulting “the person who had been retained, and got intelligence of their whole design.” However, a footnote on page 387 dismisses a detail from that same diary entry which points away from Margaret Gage, arguing that Belknap’s information “was merely a rumor he heard in the American camp six months later.”

It’s true that Charles Stedman’s 1794 history of the war describes how Col. Percy warned Gage that he’d heard Bostonians discussing the goal of the march (“the cannon at Concord”), and how “The general said that his confidence had been betrayed, for that he had communicated his design to one person only besides his lordship.”

It’s also true that Maj. James Wemyss later criticized his commander this way:

Lient.-General Gage, a commander-in-chief of moderate abilities, but altogether deficient in military knowledge. Timid and undecided in every emergency, he was very unfit to command, at a time of resistance and approaching rebellion to the mother country. He was governed by his wife, a handsome American; her brothers and relatives held all the staff appointments in the army, and were with less abilities, as weak characters as himself.

But I haven’t read any British officers accusing Margaret Gage of choosing America over Britain, as opposed to hoping there wouldn’t be bloodshed. And if Gen. Gage had told his top-secret plans only to his wife, that means he hadn’t told his confidential secretary, Samuel Kemble; his intelligence manager, Maj. Stephen Kemble; his second-in-command, Gen. Frederick Haldimand; or any other military or political colleagues—rather extraordinary for an eighteenth-century gentleman.

Margaret Gage may well have felt torn between supporting her husband’s military mission and wishing to spare the country where she had grown up. However, unlike the character from Shakespeare she quoted after the Battle of Bunker Hill, she wasn’t torn between her family of birth and her husband—they were on the same side. Indeed, we might wonder why historians suspect Margaret Gage’s loyalties but not those of her two brothers on Gage’s staff, who were in the same situation as she.

Finally, there’s the evidence of the Gages’ marriage.

TOMORROW: “he ordered her away from him”?

“Which is the side that I must go withal?”

Thomas Gage, British army officer and younger son of a baronet, and Margaret Kemble, daughter of a wealthy New Jersey merchant, married in 1758. He was in North America to fight in the French and Indian War.

In the course of that conflict, Thomas rose to the rank of general, and afterward became the commander-in-chief of all British army forces on the continent. Over fifteen years Margaret had six children (at least—those six survived to adulthood).

Gen. Gage was on his first trip back to England in early 1774 when news of the Boston Tea Party reached London, and was summoned to court to share his expertise on America. For years he had sent letters recommending how to change colonial laws or constitutions to make life easier for the army. George III and his ministers liked what Gage told them and offered him the post of royal governor of Massachusetts. The general promised that he’d bring the obstreperous province to order.

The new governor arrived in May 1774, accompanied by the first of many regiments to be stationed in town. Among his top aides were Maj. Stephen Kemble, a deputy adjutant-general, and Samuel Kemble, confidential secretary; they were Margaret’s brothers. Some of the Gage children were also in Boston, but the oldest appear to have been at boarding schools in England.

On 26 February and then 18 Apr 1775, Gage sent troops out from Boston to search for the defiant Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s artillery and supplies. The provincial forces responded by besieging Boston. On 17 June the two armies fought over the heights of Charlestown, with the British securing the high ground of Bunker Hill in a Pyrrhic victory.

On 1 November, one of Margaret Gage’s friends wrote to her from Perth Amboy (in a letter opened by the British post office seeking intelligence and preserved in government records):

I recollect with horror the bloody scene at Charlestown. Poor Jennet [Montgomery]! I have been told that she charged [Richard] Montgomery to avoid, at any rate, being taken prisoner. A cord, I suppose, she apprehended would finish his exploits. What a dreadful apprehension for a wife; let either side conquer, what heartfelt woe must it occasion! This puts me in mind of a conversation you and I had the day after that dreadful one, when you thought the lines so expressive:

The Sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both; each army hath a hand,
And in their rage,—I having hold of both,—
They whirl asunder, and dismember me.

And again:

Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose,
Assured loss, before the match be played.

Those are lines from Shakespeare’s King John, spoken by Lady Blanch as she feels torn between her husband and her family on opposite sides of a war. Evidently Margaret Gage also felt torn between the royal forces her husband led and the American colonists.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Who Tipped Off Samuel Adams?

The Rev. William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, first published in London in 1788, described Samuel Adams receiving word of the upcoming British march in April 1775:

A daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics, sent word, by a trusty hand, to Mr. Samuel Adams, residing in company with Mr. [John] Hancock at Lexington, about thirteen miles from Charlestown, that the troops were coming out in a few days.

Mr. Adams inferred from the number to be employed, that these [stores in Concord] were the objects, and not himself and Mr. Hancock, who might more easily be seized in a private way by a few armed individuals, than by a large body of troops that must march, for miles together, under the eyes of the public.

Gordon, a minister in Roxbury in 1775, probably got his information from Adams himself, like other anecdotes. It’s interesting that the messenger went directly to Adams and not to Hancock, who was then the head of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Adams’s confidence that he and Hancock weren’t the targets of the army march might have been increased by hindsight; on 19 April, as troops were approaching, he advocated getting far out of their way.

The “unequally yoked” phrase comes from Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, which both Gordon and Adams knew well: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” That allusion implies that while Adams’s informant supported the Patriot cause (“A daughter of liberty”), her husband didn’t—so perhaps he was high up in the royal government, privy to Gen. Thomas Gage’s planning.

This woman sent her warning “a few days” before the march to Concord, around the same time that other Patriots were departing Boston, fearing arrest, perhaps because Gage had received new orders from London. She seems also to have had a good idea of the number of soldiers the general planned to send. Col. Percy reportedly recalled Gage saying that he’d told only one other person of his plans for the Concord march before revealing them to his top officers on the evening of 18 Apr 1775.

Several authors have suggested that Gen. Gage’s New York-born wife, Margaret (shown above in a John S. Copley portrait), was Adams’s informant. Some have gone on to suggest, with no additional evidence, that she also spoke to Dr. Joseph Warren on 18 April 1775. According to Paul Revere, after the doctor had been told about several signs of a British troop movement, he checked with one more important, confidential source before setting off the Massachusetts alarm system. But Revere never hinted (and maybe never knew) if that source was female.

The general sent Margaret Gage home by herself soon after the war started. Some historians view that as a sign that he had come to suspect her. Of course, he was getting her out of a besieged town, so that action might have been a sign of affection rather than alienation. According to David Hackett Fischer, the Gages’ relationship was bad after 1775. According to John R. Alden, “no indication of an estrangement between the Gages because of the events of 1775 has been brought forward.”

A few other women fit Gordon’s vague description of a “daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics.” I can think of Esther Sewall, wife of Attorney General Jonathan Sewall and sister of Dorothy Quincy, and Hannah Quincy, wife of Advocate General Samuel Quincy. (Before you wonder, Samuel was a cousin of Esther and Dorothy.) But those ladies and their husbands were unlikely to have been privy to Gage’s secret military planning.