Defiant Brides Read Free

with Arnold. Through Peggy’s sale of her home, furnishings, and valuable possessions, her youngsters completed their educations, mixed in England’s highest circles, and led lives of character and accomplishment. In various ways, the Arnolds’ four sons and daughter each sought to countermand their father’s notoriety.
    Their eldest son, Edward, served in the 6th Bengal Cavalry, rising to the position of its paymaster in 1806. Horrified by the devastation of a famine in Northern India, Edward anonymously donated warehouses of food to the starving residents of Muttra.
    At eighteen, the second son, James, joined the Corps of Royal Engineers to participate in British campaigns in Malta and the West Indies. Among his heroic deeds was an offer to lead a risky attack in Surinam. “No braver man than my father ever lived, but you know how bitterly he has been condemned for his conduct at West Point,” James reminded his commanding officer. “Permit me, I beg you, to do what I can to redeem the same.” 15 Appointed a lieutenant-general, James was later knighted by King William IV.
    The Arnold’s third son, George, joined the 2nd Bengal Cavalry and held the rank of lieutenant-colonel at the time of his early death in November 1818.
    Their fourth son, William Fitch, became a captain in the 19th Royal Lancers and later retired as a justice of the peace to a country seat in Buckinghamshire. He left six children.
    During the last years of Peggy’s life, her sons Edward and James had volunteered their royal pensions (as well as allowances from Judge Shippen) to help their younger siblings complete their educations. So apparently had the Arnold’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophia. After Judge Shippen’s death, Edward wrote the family asking that Sophia be recompensed. “What must now devolve to her . . . should . . . not only compensate for the loss of her allowance from my grand-father, but add also so considerably to her income.” 16 By 1813, the pretty, cultured, and religious eighteen-year-old Sophia had married Captain Pownall Phipps of the aristocratic Mulgrave family at Muttra. Frail from childhood, Sophia died fifteen years later.
    After Peggy’s death, her children informed their Canadian stepbrothers about family events. Among those letters was one of October 25, 1813, announcing Sophia’s marriage; another, sent a year later, reported Edward’s death and explained that his will left Richard and Henry £1,500 in “affectionate recollection of you both.” 17 On July 30, 1823, during the last years of her life, Sophia wrote to her Uncle Burd that her brother William had just purchased an estate in Buckinghamshire, adding, “We are to pay them a visit, when we leave Bath.” 18
    Another link between the two sets of children were the Canadian lands awarded by the Crown for Arnold’s service to Guadeloupe. Frustrations over their remoteness later led the fifty-six-year-old James Arnold to write his sixty-eight-year-old stepbrother Richard in 1837 that he wished they could “dispose of it to tolerable advantage.” Though land prices might rise in the future, he said, “we may not be here to enjoy the benefit of it.” 19
    Equally frustrating to the heirs were their efforts to salvage Arnold’s reputation. To this day, his name is essentially synonymous with “traitor.” Nor is the former Revolutionary War general’s name connected with any of the battlefields preserved by America’s National Park Service.
    Only one oblique reference to Arnold’s courage at the Battle of Saratoga exists: the Boot Monument, placed at Saratoga National Historic Park in 1887 by a major general of the New York militia. Behind the statue of a left boot of a Revolutionary War officer an inscription reads, “In memory of the ‘most brilliant soldier’ of the Continental army who was desperately wounded on this spot the sally port of Borgoynes [
sic
] Great Western Redoubt, 7th October, 1777 winning for his countrymen the