Captain Peck’s “Intelligence”

On 23 Aug 1770, the Rev. Ezra Stiles of Newport wrote in his diary about a conversation with a sea captain named William Augustus Peck.

Born about 1723 and based in Newport, Peck had commanded a privateer in the last war, advertising for sailors in the 28 June 1762 Boston Post-Boy. His wife Mehitabel had died in September 1766, and he’d married Mary Hammond the following June. In 1769 he’d endured a difficult voyage to Amsterdam, as reported in the 18 September Boston Chronicle.

On this day Peck was back from Britain with surprising news:

Capt. Wm. Augustus Peck this day visited me. He brought my Books from London: he tells me there is a secret Intelligence office in London in [blank] street where the Jews live. It has subsisted about four years & has thirty clerks: it is supported by the Ministry: & has settled a correspondence in all parts of America—has four Correspond’ts in Boston, & two in Newport, one of which is Mr. Geo. Rome Mercht. to each of whom the Ministry exhibit Stipends.

George Rome had arrived in Rhode Island in 1761 as an agent of the London mercantile firm of Champion and Hayley. (George Hayley’s wife Mary was a sister of John Wilkes, a hero to American Whigs—but they still resented depending on credit from his firm.) Rome collected what money he could, invested in whaling and other ventures, and within a short time was one of the richest men in Newport. By the late 1760s he was spending most of his time at his rich country estate.

With his family in Britain, business interests, and Anglicanism, Rome was a natural friend of the royal government. In 1767 he wrote a letter criticizing Rhode Island’s form of government and rule of law. Seven years later, that letter was included in the packet leaked from London by Benjamin Franklin, which got him into deep trouble with the local Whigs. In 1775, Rome was one of the people Mary Butler thought could deliver a ciphered letter from her lover, Dr. Benjamin Church, into Boston.

There is, however, no evidence that Rome received a stipend from the British government—much less for the enterprise Stiles described:

As it appears in London, it is intirely a Jew Affair—a Jew Compting House, & is unknown in London. Capt. Peck sailed to London in a Vessel of the Jews & by this fell into the hands of the Jews there, dined with sundrey [?], and not being strong for American rights, they used to open before him; in compa[ny]. he heard one Mr Clark I think speak of their secret Intelligence office—& upon Peck’s questioning, &c., he colored up and diverted the Discourse. Capt. Peck says, that this office boasted of having Intelligence of every Occurrence of any consequence in America.

Stiles was, as I’ve previously written, a sucker for stories that fit his political outlook—in this case, the belief that there was a conspiracy in London to restrict North American colonists’ rights. Stiles knew the leaders of the Jewish community in Newport, but he wasn’t close to them, and was willing to view them as agents of that conspiracy.

Peck’s rumor is an obvious falsehood, an early example of the myth of an international Jewish cabal. It’s a measure of Stiles’s gullibility that he wrote that all down. Even more dismaying, of course, is that this sort of lie is being circulated in the U.S. of A. today.

Madam Hayley in Massachusetts

The latest issue of the online journal Common-place includes Amanda Bowie Moniz’s article about Mary Wilkes Hayley (c. 1728-1808) and her time in Boston shortly after the Revolution. Hayley was the younger sister of John Wilkes, the English radical politician whom the Boston Whigs admired in the 1760s. She was also the widow of a merchant with substantial business in America, and no qualms about collecting the debts that her trading partners owed her.

Moniz writes:

In May 1784, Mrs. Hayley arrived in Boston. Before she set sail, she had already made a savvy decision to shape Americans’ perceptions of her. According to a newspaper report, she had bought the American frigate, the Delaware, which had been captured by Britain during the Revolutionary War, and had renamed it the United States. (It sailed under Captain James Scott, who was often employed by John Hancock [and would eventually be the second husband of Dolly Hancock].)

The stunt paid off. Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina. Here, Americans were seeing somebody very different from the woman they met through business correspondence or the London press. This visitor was neither an aggressive merchant nor an object of ridicule but an enlightened friend of the new republic.

As Abigail Adams wrote, “nothing but the ardent desire she had to visit a Country so distinguished for its noble and ardent defence of the rights of Mankind could have tempted her at her advanced age to have undertaken a sea voyage.” . . .

Ever alert to burnish her image, in October 1784, on the third anniversary of Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, Mrs. Hayley commemorated the American victory with “a very brilliant firework” display in her garden. She again signaled her political sympathies when, with much pomp, she presented John Hancock with a new chariot. The gesture, one newspaper explained, “was a mark of her respect for the good conduct of this great patriot during the war.” In addition, she helped fund a variety of public and charitable projects—a very uncommon role for a woman. She contributed to a meeting house in Charlestown [the old one had burned during the Battle of Bunker Hill]; gave three pounds to a fund for improvements to the Boston Common; was a founding member of the Massachusetts Humane Society, an organization devoted to the rescue and resuscitation of drowning victims; donated blankets to Boston prisoners and wood to Boston's poor.

Samuel Breck, born in Boston in 1771, provides a more eccentric portrait of Hayley, perhaps exaggerated by the passage of years:

She had certainly passed her grand climacteric, and in her mouth was a single tooth of an ebon color. Her favorite dress was a red cloth riding-habit and black beaver hat. In these she looked very like an old man. . . .

This most excellent woman had surrounded herself with a menagerie, so that the court-yard was filled with cockatoos, poll-parrots, and monkeys. . . . She gave frequent dinners, at which I was often invited. We were sometimes annoyed by her monkeys and other pets, which, like spoilt children, were brought into the parlour at the fruit-dessert to gather nuts and gorge with raisins and apples. It was the custom at her table to place a well-filled punch-bowl in the centre as soon as the last cloth was removed. Surrounded by the choicest wines, there stood the huge vessel, always brought in with a little parade. On one occasion, when this ample bowl occupied its accustomed place, a mischievous monkey who was skipping about the table seized the wig of an Amsterdam merchant, old Mr. de Neuville, and, running to the bowl, soused it in.

In 1786 Hayley married a British-born merchant in Boston named Patrick Jeffrey. The marriage didn’t last, and people gossiped that he “treated her with great brutality.” Six years later the former Madam Hayley returned to England without her young husband or much of her old property. Jeffrey bought Thomas Hutchinson’s former estate in Milton from James Warren, husband of Mercy Warren, and in the late 1800s Edmund J. Baker wrote a history of that estate which said:

He had the furniture, library, paintings, plate, relics, and ornaments that had graced the mansion of his wife’s first husband while an alderman and a mayor of London. With his two housekeepers and a retinue of servants he kept up a magnificent style of living. Dr. [Charles] Jarvis, the leading politician, Robert Hollowell [Gardiner], and the late Governor [William] Eustis were members of the club that dined with him weekly.

Jarvis and Eustis were leading Democratic politicians, which might give a hint to Jeffrey’s own politics.