Now saddled with the awesome job of holding the radically factionalised congress together, Laurens continued to petition the English government to recognise America as a sovereign state while simultaneously supporting the continental army in its war against Britain. It was a no-win situation and even Congress could not form a consensus on the best course of action. Political infighting and personal interests kept congressmen continually at each others’ throats and the majority of them refused to cooperate with Henry Laurens simply because he had defied General Washington.
To be fair to all concerned, the American Congress of 1777 was operating against impossible odds. As Washington’s army met with one defeat after another, congressional membership sometimes dropped as low as fifteen and political allegiances shifted almost daily. Still, Laurens did his best to make some kind of progress, often working twenty hours a day. Always personally sensitive and moral to the point of being stiff-necked, as tempers frayed on all sides, Laurens’ contentious relations with the congressmen continued to deteriorate. When Congress proposed an alliance with England’s enemy, France, Laurens insisted that the Dutch would make better allies. He referred to the French as ‘artful, specious half-friends’, and pointed out that Holland, although Britain’s ally, had continually expressed its disapproval over the handling of the American colonies. Furthermore, the Dutch were wealthy, had a far stronger naval power than the French, and (like America) were also largely Protestant. But Laurens’ arguments fell on deaf ears. Either because they firmly believed the French would make better allies than the Dutch, or simply to spite Henry Laurens, Congress would not back a Dutch treaty. If Henry Laurens wanted to strike a deal with the Dutch, he would have to shoulder the entire affair himself.
After a year of battling and backstabbing, Henry Laurens could no longer hold up under the pressure of his job. In December 1778 he resigned as President of the American Continental Congress. In a letter, he stated that he did not approve of the manner in which business was transacted in Congress, accusing his fellow congressmen of ‘venality, peculation and fraud’. He did, however, retain his seat as South Carolina’s representative and began making cautious overtures to the Dutch for aid in America’s war with the British. After more than two years of delicate manoeuvring, the Dutch agreed to resume trade with the United States and provide a $10,000,000 war loan. It was a major coup, but congress remained unimpressed. Laurens had negotiated the deal, now he could work out how to get the treaty to Holland for ratification.
In an emergency session of Congress, Henry Laurens was appointed the United States’ first Ambassador to The Netherlands. The appointment was hardly an honour. He had no choice but to try to run the naval blockade that choked off America’s Atlantic coast and get the treaty ratified by himself. For their part, fellow members of Congress were glad to be rid of Henry Laurens.
On 30 August 1780 Laurens boarded the
Mercury
, a merchant brigantine based in Philadelphia. With him was a waterproof briefcase containing a draft of the Dutch–American treaty and papers identifying him as the US Ambassador to The Netherlands. As the ship slipped out to sea, Laurens was under no delusion as to his chances of making it across the Atlantic without running into Britain’s Royal Navy. Up and down the coast and all across the ocean the American navy had been subjected to the same trouncing at sea as the continental army had been taking on land. Only pure luck would see the
Mercury
safely to Holland.
Clinging to the coast as long as possible, the
Mercury
sailed north along New England, creeping slowly towards Canadian waters. Once in the cold, fog-bound sea around Newfoundland the ship broke away from land and headed into the vast ocean – directly into the path of the British naval frigate
Vestal
. As the heavily armed gunboat bore down on the unarmed merchantman, Laurens was torn as to what to do. If he destroyed the treaty, his mission was ruined even if the
Mercury
was not seized; on the other hand, if the ship were taken and the papers discovered, it would almost certainly mean his life. Only when it became obvious that the
Mercury
was being forced to ‘heave-to’ did Laurens toss his diplomatic pouch overboard. But it was too late. As the
Vestal
eased alongside the American ship a British sailor spotted the oilskin pouch bobbing in the water. As British sailors swarmed over the railings of the
Mercury
the pouch was fished out of the water with a boarding pike. The papers were all the evidence the British needed. The
Mercury
was an enemy ship on a mission of war. Henry Laurens was taken into custody on ‘suspicion of high treason’.
When the
Vestal
reached London, Laurens was immediately taken to Whitehall to be interrogated and formally charged. The contents of the diplomatic pouch made the British authorities fully aware of the importance of their prisoner and his mission. The joint Secretaries of State would carry out questioning and, in deference to his high office Laurens would not be subjected to a public trial. He was, however, mercilessly grilled for more than three weeks. Throughout the questioning, Laurens steadfastly insisted that his title as Ambassador and former President of the Continental Congress gave him diplomatic immunity from prosecution. Even in the face of repeated threats of hanging, Laurens refused to answer any questions about his mission, the interim American government or any other questions – the exact intent of which seemed unclear. The British, however, saw the matter differently. Since there had been no formal recognition of the new American government, Henry Laurens was a rebel, pure and simple. He was still officially a subject of the British Crown and therefore guilty of high treason.
Still, Laurens refused to cooperate. No matter. The draft of the treaty was all the evidence the court needed. The rebels were negotiating with Britain’s Dutch allies. This was a clear act of treason on the part of the colonials and a betrayal of loyalty tantamount to an act of war by the Dutch.
On 6 October, Henry Laurens was convicted of high treason and told that his status as a convicted traitor made it impossible for him to be exchanged as a prisoner of war. He was sentenced by the Secretary for State who, in consideration of Laurens’ diplomatic status, told him, ‘You are to be sent to the Tower of London, not a prison, you must have no idea of a prison.’ Laurens may not have understood the difference between the Tower and a common prison, but to the English authorities it was clear; the rebel American was being treated as though he were nobility.
If Laurens’ sentence was more than equitable by eighteenth-century standards, the punishment meted out to the Dutch was both swift and brutal. The combined might of the Royal Navy on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, along with thousands of regular army troops fighting in nearby France, descended on Holland with a fury. Within weeks Dutch defences were broken and their navy was left a burning wreck. American relations with Holland were nearly destroyed and there would be no monetary aid for the colonies. And both America and Holland blamed the débâcle on Henry Laurens.
As Holland and the proposed alliance went down in flames, Henry Laurens was transferred from his temporary quarters to the Tower of London. In what must have been one of history’s most peculiar displays of good will, when Laurens’ carriage pulled through the outer gates and on to Tower Green, it was greeted by dozens of armed wardens merrily singing ‘Yankee Doodle’. He dismounted from the carriage stone-faced, to be led to the Lieutenant of the Tower. The Lieutenant General, Mr Vernon, told Laurens that rather than being placed in one of the damp, ancient cells he would be quartered in a warden’s house located on the Parade, one of the most public areas of the Tower complex. Unimpressed, Laurens was even more disheartened when he was shown to his rooms.
According to a letter written to a friend in London, Laurens was ‘shut up in two small rooms . . . a warder my constant companion; and a [guard with a] fixed bayonet under my window’. Laurens’ situation seemed to worsen when, according to the same letter, ‘I discovered I was to pay rent for my little rooms, find my own meat and drink, bedding, coal, candles &c.’ However awful Laurens thought his punishment was, he could not have known that such treatment was normally reserved for respected political prisoners of the highest calibre.
Certainly the conditions of Laurens’ captivity were more lenient than a convicted spy and traitor had any right to expect. He was allowed frequent visits from his son, Henry, whom he had not seen for six years, along with any other guests who chose to visit him. Old friends, business associates and members of the government sympathetic to the American cause flowed in and out of the Tower in a constant stream. With them they brought gifts of food and good wine, which Laurens dutifully shared with his guards and Lieutenant Vernon and his family. The notoriety of the Tower’s latest guest also brought the curious and bored aristocratic glitterati that constantly sought out new and novel diversions – a category into which Henry Laurens definitely fell. Among the more scandalous characters to frequent his rooms were Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, and her lover Lady Ann Erskine.
Whenever possible, Laurens plied his visitors with the cause of American independence. He urged influential businessmen and politicians like Edmund Burke to urge the king and government to bring the hostilities to an end. The sooner the war ended, he argued, the sooner relations between the two countries could return to normal – and if the conflict did not stop soon, the economic and political damage to both sides could be irreparable.
Word of Laurens’ pleas evidently spread and found fertile ground. Both Edmund Burke, in England, and Benjamin Franklin, in America, began petitioning the crown for Laurens’ release. Despite his advancing age and deteriorating health, the government twice refused to grant a pardon – insisting that pardon would come only if Laurens agreed to help the British win the war in America. The price was unacceptable. Laurens would remain in the Tower and continue petitioning anyone who would listen to him.
To support his position, and that of America, Laurens began turning out a stream of letters and articles for what was called ‘the rebel press’: a chain of London underground newspapers sympathetic to the American cause. To get the letters out of the Tower and into the right hands, Laurens enlisted the aid of Elizabeth Vernon, the teenage daughter of the Lieutenant General of the Tower. Week after week, Elizabeth smuggled Laurens’ manuscripts past the eyes of her father’s guards. Swept up in the thrill of clandestine meetings, spy games and secret messages, the impressionable girl soon found herself passionately involved with the middle-aged revolutionary. Inevitably, the all-too-frequent meetings aroused the guards’ suspicions and the situation was reported to Vernon. Overnight, Laurens’ privileges and lenient treatment disappeared. He was subjected to random searches for paper and ink, and periods of harsh deprivation followed even minor infractions of the rules. Even the occasional walk through the Tower grounds was now prohibited.
On 19 October 1781, one year and two weeks after Henry Laurens entered the Tower, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his contingent of the British colonial forces in America to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, effectively ending the American Revolutionary War. Ten weeks later, the pleas of Edmund Burke and Benjamin Franklin were answered; Henry Laurens was released on parole, ostensibly for health reasons, pending final settlement of the war. On his release, he was presented with a bill for £100 to pay the cost of maintaining a guard on his rooms for the past fifty-four weeks. Insisting he had not personally employed the guard, Laurens declined to honour the bill.
With the dawn of the new year, Laurens travelled to Bath to take the spa waters for his health. While there he took time to have his portrait painted by John Singleton Copley, the most famous portrait painter of his day and an expatriate American. By June 1782 word came that Henry Laurens was to be unconditionally released in exchange for none other than Lord Cornwallis who, ironically, had long held the title of Constable of the Tower.
As Laurens prepared to return to the newly independent United States, a letter arrived from Benjamin Franklin requesting that he join the American peace delegation in Paris. The diplomatic mission already included Franklin, John Adams and John Jay and while they were capable of negotiating a treaty between America and Great Britain, Laurens was the only American diplomat who had spent any significant amount of time in England. His insights into the British character would be an invaluable asset. Laurens dutifully changed his plans and attended the negotiating sessions and the signing of the preliminaries of the Treaty of Paris in September 1782. But before the final draft could be signed, Franklin had yet another assignment for Laurens. He was to return to London where he would serve as America’s first, if unofficial, ambassador to the Court of St James. The war was over, Laurens had been released from the Tower, but he just could not escape the British.
For the next eighteen months Henry Laurens shuttled back and forth between Paris and London carrying out the tasks of an ambassador, trying to rebuild the shattered relations between the two countries. Whenever his duties allowed, he spent time with old friends like Edmund Burke and his former trading associates, but records indicate that he also visited Lieutenant General Vernon, his wife and daughter Elizabeth at the Tower. Finally, in 1784, Henry Laurens was given permission to return home. His ship landed in New York on 3 August and by January he was back in Charleston – but it was not to be a joyous homecoming.
The war had ravaged Laurens’ plantations with a loss estimated at more than £45,000. If more bad news were possible after already having suffered so much, Laurens now learned that his son John had been killed in the closing days of the war. Bitter and despondent, Laurens occupied his time writing a book about his adventures entitled
A Narrative of the Capture of Henry Laurens, of his Confinement in the Tower of London
. It was not particularly complimentary. But evidently there were a few good memories to compensate for all the pain and suffering. Somewhere along the way, friends and associates on both sides of the Atlantic had taken to calling him ‘Tower’ Laurens and the nickname seems to have genuinely amused him.