Defiant Brides (3 page)

“I do not believe there is upon record an instance of a Commander in Chief having so universally endeared himself to those under his command; or . . . who received such signal and flattering proof of their love,” André wrote a friend in England. To demonstrate their devotion, they decided to “give [Howe] as splendid an entertainment as the shortness of the time and our present situation, would allow.”
¹⁸
To accomplish that André and twenty-two other officers contributed over £3,000 for what that gallant dubbed the “Mischianza,” an Italian term meaning a medley or “composition of several parts.”

By the afternoon of the appointed day, May 18, the sun broke through the clouds as if in honor of André’s “splendid entertainment.” Philadelphia was decked out to commemorate the celebration. Ships, docked at the wharves of the Delaware, flew colorful maritime flags. Banners and bunting embellished riverside homes and buildings. At four o’clock throngs of spectators gazed from the shore at the British regatta at full mast, festooned with bunting, flags, and streamers as it tacked towards patriot Joseph Wharton’s abandoned estate to the strains of “God Save the King” wafting from a barge.

At the center of the regatta sailed the battleship
Hussar
, its flags flying in honor of General Howe, who was accompanied by his brooding replacement, Sir Henry Clinton. Trailing the
Hussar
was the
Cornwallis
carrying sixty-year-old General Wilhelm von Knyphausen, commander of the Hessians. At the vessels’ approach to Walnut Grove, seventeen-gun salutes from the
Vigilant
and
Cornwallis
boomed across Wharton’s sweeping lawn. By 6 p.m. the Mischianza’s 423 guests, among them Philadelphia’s neutralists and Loyalists, crossed the lawn to a playing field.

There, colorful, medieval-style tents stood in front of rows of risers, before which sat two groups of seven women in gauzy Turkish dress, representing the Saracens conquered by the crusaders in Palestine centuries before. Among them, according to André’s published account, was Peggy Shippen, one of the fourteen women chosen who “excel in wit, beauty and every accomplishment, those of the
whole World
” (italics in original).
¹⁹

A flourish of trumpets announced the start of the joust between two groups of knights. The first, announced by the clatter of gray horses, carried the seven “Knights of the Blended Rose,” clothed in red and white silk. They were immediately followed by seven “Knights of the Burning Mountain,” clad in black and orange. Clanging lances and clashing swords shattered the air through four rounds of the tournament, culminating in a match between the knights’ two leaders. Suddenly the Marshall of the Field appeared, declaring the tournament a tie and the beauty of the ladies a draw. As the dusty field cleared, the Turkish women paraded into the Wharton mansion, where knights bent in homage to them before admiring crowds. Afterwards, the knights, ladies, and hundreds of guests entered a ballroom embellished with artificial flowers that glowed in the reflected light from eighty-five tall mirrors and countless candles.

“The ball was opened by the Knights and their ladies; and the dances continued till ten o’clock,” André recalled in his report in London’s
Gentleman’s Magazine.
²⁰
After fireworks, and a supper, a ball recommenced, lasting until dawn.

More than two centuries since that night, Peggy’s attendance at the Mischianza has intrigued scholars. Seemingly trivial compared to the horrors of war, Peggy’s appearance has been posited as one more bit of evidence that she helped betray the American cause. Historians who doubted her presence cite a truncated account of the Mischianza that André penned for his sweetheart, Peggy Chew, which tactfully omitted a mention of her social rival, Peggy Shippen. Other scholars, however, point to Peggy Shippen’s presence at the gala as described in André’s long letter of May 23 to a British friend, which subsequently appeared in
Gentleman’s Magazine.
It read: “Peggy—M. Shippen—had been paired with the sixth Knight of the Blended Rose, “Lieut. Sloper, in honour of Mlls. M. Shippen—Squire, Lieutenant Brown—Device, a Heart and Sword; Motto, Honour and the Fair.”
²¹

Another explanation for Peggy’s presence was the likely consequence if Judge Shippen had forbidden her attendance at the Mischianza. Had he done so, family lore insists Peggy would have wept and howled, refusing food and drink until, utterly exhausted, she took to her bed for days. Whenever refused, Peggy reverted to that sort of behavior. High-strung, spirited, and wily, Peggy, according to a family friend, consequently managed to get her way, both as the youngest of the Shippen girls and the “darling of the family circle.”
²²

In spite of her willfulness, Peggy became Edward’s favorite, perhaps as that friend suggested, because she always “made his comfort her leading thought.”
²³
From girlhood, Peggy had commanded the judge’s attentions. Not only had he shared the writings of Pope, Defoe, Addison, Steele, and other commentators with her, but he also encouraged her to read newspapers and political tracts. As his intellectually gifted daughter matured, the judge taught Peggy about foreign trade, investments, accounting, and bookkeeping. Later, Peggy also observed Judge Shippen fuming over Thomas Paine’s 1776
Common Sense
, which called for independence from Great Britain.

Shrewdly, Peggy’s father reminded her that when it came to politics, remaining silent was safer than arousing public scorn for one’s opinions. By late 1776, the patriots suspected Judge Shippen of being a Loyalist. To avoid persecution, he moved his family out of Philadelphia to an obscure farm in Amwell, New Jersey. There, in lieu of formal teas with doting elders, tittering matrons, and fawning beaux, the Shippen daughters—teenagers Mary, Sarah, and Peggy, and their twenty-year-old sister Elizabeth, or Betsy—learned about cows, chickens, and crops. Late that year, when the Shippens briefly returned to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s patriotic authorities, the militant Supreme Executive Council, accused Judge Shippen of being a spy. Placed on parole and forbidden to live more than six miles from Philadelphia, Peggy’s father again hustled his family out of town, this time to nearby Schuylkill Falls. “The scarcity and advance price of every necessary of life makes it extremely difficult for those who have large families, and no share in the present measures to carry through . . . nothing but the strictest frugality will enable us to do it,” the unemployed judge wrote his own father from Schuylkill Falls. There, fortunately, “the wants of our nature are easily supplied, and the rest is but folly and care.”
²⁴

Not, however, according to his teenage daughters, who sorely missed the “folly” of Philadelphia’s social life. Fearing that their former lifestyle was ruined, the Shippens’ eldest daughter, Betsy, wrote her cousin Sarah Yeates in June 1777, “I sincerely . . . [hope] the good times to return, but we must make ourselves as happy as we can till that is the case. . . . I am determined not to suffer myself to be low spirited, as I think it probable we shall have many frights before the summer is over.”
²⁵

By September 26, one of those “frights” would be Howe’s invasion of Philadelphia. Worried that the British would plunder his vacated townhouse, Judge Shippen immediately brought his wife and children back to the city. Self-protection rather than political loyalties now became Edward Shippen’s priority, leading him to hobnob with the British. Peggy, Sally, and Mary were thrilled. Little did it matter that the redcoats had slaughtered hundreds of Americans on the Brandywine, in Paoli, and in nearby Germantown. To the teenage Shippen girls, the social whirl created by Howe’s young, handsome, and urbane British officers was a perfect antidote to the dull months they had spent in the country.

Who, after all, was to say, what was the “right side” of the war, especially after the turmoil, the food shortages, and scarcity of luxuries? Perhaps it would be best for the colonies to return to British rule—or so the girls often overheard their father debate with his Loyalists friends, the Chews, Franks, and Galloways. Like other Revolutionary-era families, the Shippens were politically divided. Peggy’s uncle, Dr. William Shippen, was director general of Military Hospitals for the Revolutionary army and spent that winter at Valley Forge. Dr. Shippen’s cousin, Mary Willing, and her husband, Colonel William Byrd, or Burd, were also patriots. So, too were Dr. Shippen’s brothers-in-law, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, signers of the Declaration of Independence. One of their cousins, Captain Henry “Lighthorse” Lee, became a hero of the Continental army.

Earlier friendships with men who later supported the Revolution further obscured the judge’s true political stance. On September 28, 1774, he had hosted George Washington for dinner. Peggy, then fourteen years old, had attended and was fascinated by the dignified Virginian. Decades later, learning about Washington’s December 1799 death, she wrote her sister Betsy, “Nobody in America could revere his character more than I did.”
²⁶

Nor would Washington forget his earlier friendship with the Shippens. During the winter of 1776, Peggy’s brother Edward V., or Neddy, rashly joined the British army and was captured by the patriots. Ultimately, Washington declared that Judge Shippen’s son had “taken no commission nor done any act that showed him inimical [and] very kindly discharged him.”
²⁷

British officers, too, sometimes inadvertently forged friendships with the enemy. Among these was Peggy’s friend John André. On November 2, 1775, during General Richard Montgomery’s conquest of Fort Saint John, which protected British-held Montreal, twenty-five-year-old André was captured at Lake Champlain and slated to be transported south to Pennsylvania. One stormy December night, the patriots ordered André into a tiny cabin he was to share with one of their peers. His gregarious, rotund companion was Henry Knox, traveling incognito on his way to Fort Ticonderoga. Finding much in common the two young men spent the night talking and regretfully parted the next morning. Only later did André and Knox realize each other’s political affiliation, never suspecting they would meet again under very different circumstances.

By May 1778, that same charismatic André had been released from captivity and had become the chief organizer of British entertainments in Philadelphia. A fierce soldier on the battlefield, the lean twenty-eight year old also inspired admiration from fellow officers because of his fine character, creativity, and wit, a man as comfortable behind a musket as he was dancing a minuet. According to one American observer, the Geneva-educated André “conversed freely on the belles lettres: music, painting, and poetry.”
²⁸
Although novelists later interpreted his gift to Peggy of a gold locket containing strands of his hair as proof of a romantic attachment, contemporary historians believe André was simply a friend. His widely acknowledged sweetheart was a pretty brunette, Peggy Chew, daughter of another prominent but decidedly Loyalist judge, Benjamin Chew.

As her courtly beau, André penned love poems to Peggy Chew but with equal verve also wrote ditties about and sketched portraits of others in their social circle. On one occasion he created fashionable silhouettes of himself and Philadelphia belle Becky Redman. On another he drew a slightly caricatured portrait of Peggy Shippen with high-rolled hair and wearing her Mischianza turban and costume.

The committee of Quakers who visited Judge Shippen on May 18 were not the only ones who disapproved of the Mischianza. In England, the
London Chronicle
complained that the time, effort, and money spent upon those festivities were “nauseous.”
²⁹
To an aging British major, the Mischianza was a “piece of tomfoolery.”
³⁰
Several months after Howe’s return to London, a jeering pamphlet appeared entitled “Strictures Upon the Philadelphia Meschianza [
sic
], or the Triumph of Leaving America Unconquered.” In Philadelphia, Elizabeth Drinker, famously scrawled in her diary, “This day may be remembered by man for the scenes of folly and vanity. . . . How insensible do these people appear, while our land is so greatly desolated and death and sore destruction has overtaken and impends over so many.”
³¹
To eighteenth-century historian Charles Stedman the festivities for General Howe “rivaled the magnificent exhibitions of that vain-glorious monarch and conqueror, Louis XIV of France.”
³²

During the Mischianza, the Continental army also sneered at the festivities. While guests at Wharton’s estate enjoyed a midnight dinner, the British fortifications near Germantown suddenly exploded into flames. Under cover of night, the Marquis de Lafayette and his men had poured kettles of whale oil onto the British barriers, ignited them, and then deftly slipped away.

Stunned, Howe had ordered his officers to the burning fortifications, simultaneously assuring nervous guests that the racket emanated from the gala’s fireworks. Regardless of that embarrassment, André’s subsequent letter to the
Gentleman’s Magazine
defended the Mischianza as a monumental symbol of the army’s allegiance to Howe. The event, he insisted, was “one of the most splendid entertainments, I believe, ever given by an army to their General. But what must be most grateful to Sir W. Howe is the spirit and motives from which it was given.”
³³

Implicitly, André had orchestrated the Mischianza as a rebuke to Lord George Germain, secretary of state for North America, who had ignored Howe’s repeated requests for reinforcements. Without them, Howe had threatened, he would resign. They never arrived. After months of waiting, the disgusted general departed for London on May 24 to defend his role in the American campaign, leaving his querulous subordinate, Sir Henry Clinton, in his place.

For weeks before Howe’s departure, Philadelphians wondered about the future of the British in their city. On May 6, as they woke to the thunder of cannons from the direction of Valley Forge, their anxieties increased. That evening, fireworks blazed through the sky from the patriots’ army camp as Washington’s men celebrated the French alliance of early 1778. Exuberantly, the
Pennsylvania Packet
reported that “the martial appearances of the troops conspired to exhibit a magnificent scene of joy, worthy of great occasion.”
³⁴