Treacherous Beauty Page 5

  As Howe’s army approached Philadelphia, André was involved in one of the most shocking episodes of the war, dubbed the Paoli Massacre by Patriots. At about one in the morning on September 21, 1777, Grey’s force surprised enemy troops near Paoli Tavern, west of Philadelphia. To avoid detection, General Grey ordered his soldiers to unload their firearms or remove the flints so they would not fire accidentally. Instead, their weapons of choice were swords and bayonets. In an exceptionally bloody attack, they killed scores of surprised troops—including some who tried to surrender, according to rebel accounts.

  André seemed to be cheered up by the gruesome victory, noting that he and other officers drank “good gin” seized from the American camp. Grey earned the nickname “No Flint” Grey, as well as burnishing his already formidable reputation as a butcher on the battlefield.113 (Today the Grey family name has a more cultured connotation—Earl Grey tea was named for the general’s son.)114

  Less than a week after Paoli, Washington’s army set up camp at Valley Forge, northwest of Philadelphia, and the British marched into a city that the fleeing future president John Adams labeled a “mass of cowardice and Toryism.”115

  André was quartered in what he called a “most sumptuous house” on Philadelphia’s outskirts in Germantown, where the Chew family owned an estate called Cliveden. Benjamin Chew had been arrested and banished from Pennsylvania by Patriot authorities, but his daughter Peggy and other family members were staying at Cliveden, and they welcomed visits by André.

  The estate suddenly became a key battleground in early October, when Washington’s forces attacked Germantown. British troops barricaded themselves behind the estate’s thick brick walls and held up Washington’s troops for hours, depriving the Patriots of a decisive victory. Bodies littered the beautiful garden and grounds of the estate. The Chew family safely avoided the fighting, and André also was uninvolved, having already been transferred into the city proper.116

  Serious fighting was over for the year, and the British prepared for a long winter in Philadelphia.

  For André, the chilly city would be a warm oasis from the war, a chance for an absurd and idyllic frolic with the two Peggys and two Beckys who reigned over what he called “the little society of Third and Fourth Streets.”117

  CHAPTER 4

  The Meschianza

  Heavy snow, sleet, and hail punished British-occupied Philadelphia during the winter of 1777–78. Food was scarce, high-priced, and often spoiled. The Continental Army tried to seal off the city from the countryside, thereby keeping fresh food from reaching the city. Even the conquering warriors were put on reduced rations as some of the provisions stored on British ships were ridden with maggots.

  American prisoners in British custody especially suffered and were routinely denied any food at all for their first few days in jail. Some reportedly ate clay. One jailer purposely spilled broth and other food on the ground to watch the desperate prisoners lap it up.118

  The demand for firewood compelled soldiers to pull apart fences and even houses. Even the Shippens were not immune: British soldiers invaded their stable, removing the wooden ties that held the rafters together.119 Public outrage at firewood raiding by the invaders prompted a barrage of complaints to the British commander, General Howe. Military justice for all manner of crimes was swift, but sometimes excessive. A civilian accused of stealing a piece of linen was sentenced to five hundred lashes in public.

  For many, the winter was excruciating. But for Peggy Shippen, it was wonderful. She and her friends felt neither chill nor hunger nor want. They were warmed by male attention and fed by a constant supply of compliments. Becky Franks summed up their gaiety in a letter:

  You can have no idea of the life of continued amusement I live in. I can scarce have a moment to myself. . . . I am dressed for a ball this evening at Smith’s [City Tavern] where we have one every Thursday. You would not know the room ’tis so much improved. . . . The dress is more ridiculous and pretty than anything I ever saw—great quantities of different colored feathers on the head at a time besides a thousand other things. The hair dressed very high. . . . I spent Tuesday evening at Sir William Howe’s, where we had a concert and dance. . . . No loss for partners, even I am engaged to seven different gentlemen, for you must know ’tis a fixed rule never to dance but two dances at a time with the same person. . . . I’ve been but three evenings alone since we moved to town.120

  Meanwhile, Captain John André had found impressive living quarters in Benjamin Franklin’s three-story brick mansion, where the diplomat-inventor-publisher’s wife had died three years earlier. Franklin was promoting American independence to the French court, but had left behind his books, scientific equipment, and even a portrait of himself painted by Benjamin Wilson.121

  While other British officers formed eating clubs, played cricket, and bet on cockfights, André and his friends put together their own theater troupe. They called themselves Howe’s Thespians. In the years before the British occupation, theater had been strongly discouraged in Philadelphia. The First Continental Congress passed a resolution against “every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horseracing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibition of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”122

  Not bound by this legislation, André and a friend, Captain Oliver DeLancey, took over a cobweb-ridden theater called the Southwark and dressed it up. André painted a backdrop that a theater historian described as “a landscape presenting a distant champagne country and a winding rivulet, extending from the front of the picture to the extreme distance. In the foreground and center, a gentle cascade—the water exquisitely executed—was overshadowed by a group of majestic forest trees.” The much-admired backdrop was used at the theater until its destruction in an 1821 fire.123

  Howe’s Thespians sold all the tickets in advance, with theatergoers warned not to attempt to bribe the doorkeeper for admittance. Thirteen different plays were performed, with André taking minor roles and sometimes writing a prologue to kick off the night’s events.124 Among the plays was William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, an appropriate choice both for its story line about putting down a revolt and its most amusing character, the drunken, dissolute Falstaff.125 The famous Falstaff quotation “The better part of valour is discretion” 126 could have been the motto for British occupiers who preferred to enjoy the city’s comforts rather than venture into the countryside to confront the enemy.

  During the British occupation, Peggy Shippen spent many a delightful hour with André. She visited Southwark to see him onstage and also joined him on sleigh rides around town. When the captain wasn’t working on his latest stage production, he could be found enjoying refreshments or playing the flute at the Shippen house on Fourth Street.

  He sometimes brought along friends such as Lord Rawdon and Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, both of whom offered effusive praise of Peggy, adding to her reputation as an object of tremendous desire. Rawdon, a hero at the Battle of Bunker Hill who would soon become adjutant general of British forces in America and much later would serve as governor-general of India,127 declared that Peggy was the most beautiful woman he had seen in England or America. Hamond, captain of the British warship Roebuck, one of the ships that had tested Philadelphia’s defenses early in the war, said of Peggy, “We were all in love with her.”

  André and Peggy were undoubtedly fond of each other, and writers of historical fiction have succumbed to the temptation to depict them as lovers. But that is far too tidy and fanciful. Most evidence suggests that André’s primary romantic interest was Peggy Chew, not Peggy Shippen. If any British officer in particular won the attention of Peggy Shippen, it may have been Hamond, who was nearly forty years old at the time, more than two decades her senior. One of the most memorable social events of the occupation was a dinner dance aboard the Roebuck, which was bedecked with lanterns and two hundred guests. Peggy Ship
pen sat at Hamond’s right at the dinner table.128

  Hamond’s floating fete featured dancing till dawn. At that event and others, the British officers were having so much fun with the local ladies that there never seemed to be enough hours in the night. André and the others treated the Peggys and Beckys with gentlemanly respect, as far as we know, but they showed a baser and more ravenous interest in other representatives of Philadelphia womanhood. Indeed, it was a period of great licentiousness, from the highest office to the lowest alley. General Howe carried on publicly with a married woman, a fetching blonde named Elizabeth Loring, while he distracted her husband, Joshua, by appointing him as commissioner of prisoners. The husband seemed fully aware of the affair and tolerant of it while using his position to collect bribes from vendors.129 Howe’s heavy drinking and gambling, as well as his affair with Mrs. Loring, were well known on both sides of the Atlantic. After Patriots floated kegs filled with gunpowder down the Delaware River in a futile attempt to damage the British fleet in January 1778, Howe earned special mention in a poem called “The Battle of the Kegs” by Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence:

  Sir William, he, snug as a flea

  Lay all this time a-snoring

  Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm,

  In bed with Mrs. Loring.130

  Many British officers—though not André, as far as is known—followed the womanizing example of their top commander.

  Becky Franks wrote to Peggy Shippen’s cousin Nancy about an encounter with three officers on the street. “After talking a few minutes with me they walked off,” Becky recalled. “There’s a house next door . . . that a Mrs. McKoy lives in, a lady well known to the gentlemen.” In other words, a prostitute.131 Becky said two of the officers “had the impudence to go in while I was looking right at them.” The third officer explained to Becky that he was a married man and would abstain. He told her that his comrades had visited Mrs. McKoy’s home “to look at a tube rose.” This infuriated Becky. “I was never half so angry in my life,” she wrote. “I never think of it but I feel my face glow with rage.”

  Lord Rawdon, who presumably behaved like a gentleman when visiting Peggy Shippen on Fourth Street, was a cad in his own mind, writing a year earlier in New York that British soldiers were as “riotous as satyrs.” He added, “A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished, and they are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation.”132

  In the randy atmosphere of British-held Philadelphia, it was little wonder that two anonymous men thought they might get lucky by placing an advertisement in a local newspaper. It read: “Wanted to live with two single gentlemen: a young woman to act in the capacity of housekeeper, and who can occasionally put her hand to anything. Extravagant wages will be given, and no character required.”133

  The British tactics in the streets of Philadelphia were far more successful than their strategy elsewhere in North America. At first blush, the loss of such a major city would be considered a crushing defeat for the Patriots. But Washington’s army remained intact, if barely, northwest of Philadelphia at Valley Forge. The British had lengthened their supply lines and raised their exposure without dealing a fatal blow to the enemy. Soon after Howe took Philadelphia, the other major British army in the field met a shocking disaster. At Saratoga, New York, in October 1777, General Burgoyne’s entire force surrendered after a decisive attack led by rebel Benedict Arnold. Howe was criticized for settling safely into Philadelphia rather than moving his army north to assist Burgoyne.

  Burgoyne’s defeat brought the French officially into the war on the rebel side. Before Saratoga, the French had confined their support to running guns through a dummy company operated by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, playwright of The Marriage of Figaro. After Saratoga, Benjamin Franklin persuaded the French to send their navy and ground forces.

  As winter turned to spring, it became apparent that the British occupation of Philadelphia would be a short stay. Rather than directly attacking the enemy at Valley Forge, the British nibbled around the edges, setting up a seine in the Schuykill River to try to block shad and other fish from getting to Washington’s camp.134

  Amid backbiting in British military and political circles, Howe was replaced by General Henry Clinton, who was so unenthusiastic about his new job that he wrote to his cousin, the Duke of Newcastle: “I should have wished to avoid the arduous task of attempting to retrieve a game so unfortunately circumstanced.”135 Clinton’s first task was to pull the army out of Philadelphia and return to New York City. But there was much to do before they could leave—including a farewell party for Howe, an extravaganza bigger than anyone’s imagination, except André’s.

  They called it the Meschianza. It was the most shameful carousing amid catastrophe since Nero fiddled while Rome burned. But while Nero’s fiddling in all likelihood is a myth, the Meschianza on May 18, 1778, was real. The party’s name was loosely based on the Italian for medley or mixture, and was chosen because the event would be, as André put it, “a variety of entertainments.” The spelling varied, and included Mischianza, Mischeanza, Mesquinza, and Mesquienza. The name on the specially designed ticket was Meschianza.

  A group of twenty-one officers were to pay a total of 3,312 pounds—roughly twenty-five thousand dollars apiece in today’s currency—to sponsor the celebration, and André would serve as impresario, developing the themes, costumes, decorations, and activities.

  The guest list numbered four hundred, and featured a court of fourteen prominent “knights” and their damsels. The ladies—“selected from the foremost in youth, beauty, and fashion,” according to André—included Peggy Shippen, of course, along with Peggy Chew and both Beckys. In addition, Peggy Shippen’s sisters Sarah and Mary accepted invitations, as did Peggy Chew’s half sister Sarah and Becky Redman’s sister Nancy.

  The ambitions for the event were of such magnitude that André and the young ladies had to scurry to complete their tasks in a month’s time. Armor was impractical for these “knights,” so they were equipped instead with shields and spears to accompany costumes from the French court of Henry IV.

  The ladies’ garments were more exotic, described as Turkish and meant to suggest they were beauties from lands conquered in the Crusades. But to some, the ladies seemed to be dressed as slave girls.136 “They wore turbans spangled and edged with gold or silver, on the right side a veil of the same kind hung as low as the waist, and the left side of the turban was enriched with pearl and tassels of gold or silver and crested with a feather,” André wrote. “The dress was of the polonaise kind and of white silk with long sleeves, the sashes which were worn round the waist and were tied with a large bow on the left side hung very low and were trimmed, spangled and fringed according to the colors of the knight.”137

  The cost of the costumes was mind-boggling. A shop set up in Philadelphia by London’s Coffin and Anderson sold silks and other finery for the Meschianza at an estimated total price of twelve thousand pounds, roughly equivalent to nearly two million dollars in today’s currency.

  The clothing expenses for Edward Shippen’s three daughters were quickly draining his treasury, which was not being replenished as he lost one government position after another and avoided business dealings that might put him in political danger. Beyond the financial costs, the ladies’ participation in the Meschianza posed a serious risk to their fathers’ attempts to avoid direct confrontations or alliances with either side in the war. It’s not clear that the ladies even considered this. Granted, the pressure to marry well was intense. The ladies knew that a flower is most admired in full bloom, and there was no time to waste in finding the right husband. But as the Peggys and Beckys threw their passion and pocketbooks into the Meschianza, their families suffered from the despotism of the debutantes.

  Benjamin Chew, for
example, had been arrested as a suspected Loyalist the previous year, and he was on parole in New Jersey when his daughters began preparing for the great event. Just three days before the Meschianza, the former chief justice won a congressional order allowing him to return to Pennsylvania.138

  Becky Franks’s father, David, was in an especially vulnerable position because he was a Jew who had done business with the British, and therefore was subject to a double dose of prejudice from some Patriots. Franks’s commerce with the crown before the occupation had been aboveboard. In fact, he had to fight to receive payment for the nearly 1.4 million rations he delivered. Yet some independence-minded Philadelphians considered Franks a Tory and thought he should be forced to leave town after Washington’s army returned.139

  Regardless of the risk to their fathers, the Peggys and the Beckys were not to be dissuaded from the pageant of a lifetime.

  André and his theater friend DeLancey were busy turning the confiscated mansion of an exiled Patriot, Joseph Wharton, into the party venue. The mansion, with a gorgeous view of the Delaware River, was decorated with flowers, ribbons, and ornamental candleholders called girandoles. The walls of a large hall were painted “in imitation of Sienna marble,” according to André. Upstairs, four rooms were opened up to form a ballroom. André, meticulously describing his own elaborate designs, wrote that the upstairs was “decorated in a light, elegant style of painting. The ground was a pale blue, paneled with a small gold bead, and in the interior filled with drooping festoons of flowers in their natural colors. . . . These decorations were heightened by eighty-five mirrors, decked with rose-pink silk ribbands, and artificial flowers, and in the intermediate spaces were thirty-four branches with wax-lights, ornamented in a similar manner.”140

  Adjoining the house, a separate banquet hall was specially constructed for the Meschianza, with canvas stretched over framework and painted with scenes. Cut-glass lustres hung from the ceiling, with flowers, ribbons, and other ornament on the walls. Outside, two triumphal arches were installed on the lawn, and an area was staked out for a tournament of knights, with pavilions constructed as viewing areas on two sides.