Defiant Brides Read Free Page A

decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General.”
    By the end of nineteenth century, Arnold’s descendants could not find the tombs of Peggy and Benedict. An 1828 letter from Colonel Pownall Phipps indicated that his wife, Sophia Arnold Phipps, and her parents had been “deposited in a vault” within St. Mary’s Church at Battersea, but by 1875, the crypt contained 424 coffins. 20 As they decayed, some of the coffins burst open, impelling the church to bury them beneath a foot of concrete.
    St. Mary’s had retained a plan of the coffin rows, but many of their identification plates, or plaques, had faded over time. After 1920, church officials presented some of them to the Battersea Central Public Library. Others were placed upon the church crypt’s walls and columns. Yet those of Peggy Arnold, Benedict Arnold, and Sophia Arnold Phipps were missing.
    Coffin records at the Battersea Central Public Library under the names “Arnold” and “Phipps” revealed an astonishing lapse. The coffins of Peggy and Sophia had been listed but not the one of Benedict Arnold. Instead, a “Frederick Arnold” had been listed with the death date of June 14, 1801, a mistake or misreading of the former general’s name on his coffin plate, or, perhaps, a deliberate omission.
    In 1976, St. Mary’s added four new stained-glass windows to the ground floor of the church. One, donated by Arnold admirer and apologist Vincent Lindner of New Jersey in honor of Benedict and Peggy Arnold and their daughter, Sophia, hangs in the nave’s westernmost south window. At its center stands a portrait of Arnold, beneath which are a display of the arms of General Washington. Four flags flank the portrait. On the left are two, the first representing the Union flag of 1777, replaced with thirteen stars, and the second, a contemporary American flag. To the right is the Union flag of 1776 with the British emblem and modern Union Jack. An inscription reconciles Arnold’s former political loyalties with the contemporary British-American friendship.
    It reads: “Beneath this church lie buried the bodies of Benedict Arnold, sometimes general in the army of George Washington And of his faithful and beloved wife Margaret Arnold of Pennsylvania And of their Beloved daughter Sophia Matilda Phipps. The two nations whom he served / In turn in the years of their enmity / Have united in enduring Friendship.”
    In 2004 another Arnold admirer, William Stanley of Connecticut, donated a memorial plaque of Peggy and Benedict Arnold to St. Mary’s to replace an earlier one. Upon it their names, as well as their birth and death dates, are listed. Placed in the church basement, the plaque remains visible to anyone entering the door of the church’s day-care center.
    To most Americans, Peggy remains an enigmatic and nearly forgotten figure. Early historians depicted the former Philadelphia belle as a Loyalist whose fondness for British officer John André led her to corrupt Arnold’s political views. By the early twentieth century, members of her family attempted to correct that view. Between 1900 and 1902 Shippen descendant Lewis Burd Walker published a series of articles in the influential
Pennsylvania Magazine of Biography and History
, citing family letters and Peggy’s postwar correspondence to defend her innocence.
    Several writers portrayed Peggy as either an innocent victimized by Arnold’s duplicity or as a wily conniver. In 1941, subsequent to collector William L. Clement’s gift of General Henry Clinton’s wartime papers to the University of Michigan, Mark Van Doren published
The Secret History of the American Revolution
, which exposed Peggy’s royal pension of £500 a year “for her services, which were very meritorious.” Thereafter historians widely agreed that Peggy had been an accomplice in Arnold’s treason. 21 Later novels and films depicted Peggy as a sexual siren, Arnold’s coconspirator, and even as the