Improbable Patriot: The Secret History of Monsieur de Beaumarchais, the French Playwright Who Saved the American Revolution

6: Plotting and Pocketing

6 PlottingandPocketing In the course of his encounters with d’Eon at the Wilkes salon, Beaumarchais formed his first friendship with an American—a superbly educated Virginian, who seemed more English than American. A member of the storied Lee family, Arthur Lee had been born at the family’s eastern Virginia estate, Stratford, in 1740, but spent most of the next forty years abroad, studying at Eton for six years before earning a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, traveling on the continent, and then earning a law degree at London’s Inns of Court. Mentored at one time or another by Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Adam Smith, and other British luminaries, he returned to Virginia for a brief but unsuccessful attempt to practice medicine. While there, he plunged into the growing political and economic disputes with the mother country, writing a series of letters to American and British newspapers,gainingsomecelebrityasa pamphleteer, and winning the friendship of such American dissidents as Boston’s Samuel Adams and Philadelphia’s John Dickinson. He returned to England in 1770, and when Massachusetts named Benjamin Franklin as colonial agent in London, Samuel Adams helped win Arthur Lee’s appointment as Franklin’s assistant and designated successor. Lee had just won admission to the London bar when the world heard the shots at Lexington in the spring of 1775. Invited with other Americans to celebrate at John Wilkes’s lodgings, he met and quickly attached himself to Beaumarchais. Poised, charming, and witty, Lee was more than eloquent in expounding the American cause: the deep hatred for Britain that Americans now shared with the French; the desperate need for arms, QI5JP 96 improbable patriot ammunition, technical assistance, and funding in the fight for liberty and independence; and the advantages to France of American independence. “We offer France, as reward for its secret aid,” Lee promised Beaumarchais , “a secret treaty of commerce. This treaty will give France, for a certain number of years after peace is established, all the advantages of that commerce with which for a century America has enriched England. This trade will pass to France, and in addition, we agree to guarantee French possessions [in the West Indies] to the full extent of our power.”1 Beaumarchais immediately envisioned opportunities to profit from the sale of both arms to America during the war, and a wide range of French merchandise in the peace that would follow if he helped the Americans win their independence from Britain. American independence was inevitable, Lee argued. At best, the British would be able to muster forces of 25,000 to 40,000 men. The Americans were raising an army of 50,000, with 50,000 other able-bodied men ready to volunteer to fight at their side. If the French refused to provide aid, the Arthur Lee replaced Benjamin Franklin as American agent in London and was first to enlist Beaumarchais in the American fight for independence. Library of Congress Plotting and Pocketing 97 Americans would obtain it from other nations, who would then reap the wealth from unfettered trade with America after the war. Lee also warned that if, through lack of French aid, the Americans lost the war, Britain would emerge as the world’s most powerful nation militarily and economically . As such, it would almost certainly extend its North American empire across the West Indies, seizing the French Caribbean islands that provided France with sugar—at that time, its most important import. Lured by the prospects of huge personal profits at first, Beaumarchais planned to convince Vergennes that the near-bankrupt French treasury stood to profit handsomely if the Americans won independence from Britain and awarded France special trading privileges. But as the summer’s conversations with Arthur Lee progressed, another motive crept into Beaumarchais’s thinking as he envisioned selling arms to the Americans: he grew genuinely sympathetic to the plight of simple American farmers —commoners like himself—defending their homes, fields, and fruits of their labor from plunder by powerful, insensitive English aristocrats in Parliament —much as he had defended his home from seizure by powerful, insensitive French aristocrats in Paris. “Go to France, Monsieur,” Lee urged Beaumarchais. “Go to France and display this picture of affairs. I am going to shut myself up in the country until you return. . . . Tell your ministers that I am prepared to follow you, if necessary, in order to confirm in Paris this statement...