Tales From the Tower of London (27 page)

By the time Winifred Maxwell reached the outer gate of the Tower, her friends had all made their way home and her husband had been taken by their maid to the safety of a friend’s home. Within half an hour, she joined him there.

At dawn on 24 February, the guards came to escort the Earls of Derwentwater and Nithsdale and Viscount Kenmore to their execution. Only then did they discover that Lord Maxwell, Earl of Nithsdale, was nowhere to be found. Frantically they sounded the alarm. The Tower was scoured from top to bottom, but there was no sign of William Maxwell. As the search continued, ghoulish crowds were gathering on Tower Hill awaiting the day’s ‘entertainment’. Only a few streets away, two more spectators watched the scene with horror. Lord and Lady Maxwell were watching the horrific drama unfold from an attic window in their safe house.

Viscount Kenmore, commander of the rebel army, went to the scaffold first. Before kneeling down to put his head on the block, he apologised to the crowd for the fact that his clothes did not suit such a sombre occasion, but he had not been allowed to change into something more appropriate. By the time the Earl of Derwentwater mounted the scaffold, a general alarm had been sent out across London. The Earl of Nithsdale must not be allowed to escape. A twenty-four-hour guard was stationed at every road and gate leading out of the city.

But only two days after the executions, a magnificent coach bearing the arms of the ambassador of the Venetian Republic rolled out of London. Inside were the ambassador and two servants in brightly coloured livery. One of them was Lord Maxwell. Through the good graces of the exiled Stuarts, now living in Rome, the ambassador had agreed to escort Maxwell out of England, through the port of Dover, and safely to France.

Although her husband was well on his way to safety, Lady Maxwell’s odyssey was not yet over. Defying the general alarm that had been sent out to apprehend Lord Maxwell, his wife and her unidentified accomplices, she rode back to the family seat in Scotland to secure the family papers she had hidden away in the event that her plans to free her husband had failed. Once the papers were safely in the hands of her husband’s powerful friends, their son’s inheritance would be safe.

In an ironic twist of fate, there is some historical evidence that King George may actually have ordered a reprieve for Lord Maxwell on the same afternoon that his wife was busily helping him escape from the Tower. Even if the king was happy to see Maxwell go free, the jailbreak had made both the earl and his wife fugitives from an entirely new set of charges. So frustrated was the king that he declared the Countess Nithsdale had caused him ‘more mischief than any woman in Christendom’.

Against all the odds Winifred Maxwell finally sailed from Scotland to join her husband in France. Together, they moved to Rome to be near James Edward Stuart, the King Over the Water, whom they had lived, and nearly died, to serve. The rest of their lives were spent in obscurity and near-poverty, but their bravery and devotion to each other left a legacy rich in love. Lord Maxwell died in 1744 at the age of sixty-eight. Five years later, Winifred Maxwell was reunited with her husband in death.

The letter in which Lady Maxwell laid out the harrowing rescue of her husband, along with the brown cloak in which he escaped from the Tower, still survive in the collection of the Duchess of Norfolk, a descendant of Winifred Maxwell.

Few individuals can claim to have significantly changed the course of their nation’s history. Fewer still have inadvertently started one war while attempting to end another. Henry Laurens could legitimately have made both these claims as well as holding the unique honour of being the only American ever imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Henry Laurens was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 6 March 1724. His French Protestant parents had emigrated to the New World some years earlier to escape the deprivations imposed on all Protestants by the Catholic French crown. Henry’s father was a saddle-maker who prospered well enough to provide his son with the best education the colonies had to offer. By the time Henry was twenty years old, his father realised that if the boy was going to climb the ladder of society and business he would have to go abroad to further his education and make whatever social contacts he could.

For three years, beginning in 1744, Henry Laurens lived in London, serving an apprenticeship in the mercantile shipping business. Evidently the lad showed promise. As he was preparing to return to America, a London commercial house wrote to him with the offer of a partnership in their growing business. The letter followed Henry through London to Portsmouth, only missing the ship on which he had booked passage back to the colonies by five hours. Had the letter reached him, the course of his life and the history of three nations would have been irrevocably altered.

Back in Charleston, Henry went into partnership with two other men in a general mercantile partnership, acting as middlemen who arranged to ship their clients’ goods from America to England, bringing British and European goods back to the colonies on the return run. Exporting predominantly raw materials such as unprocessed rice, deerskins, indigo and rum, and importing luxury items including wine, indentured servants and slaves, the firm prospered to the point where, by 1750, Laurens had married Eleanor Ball, started a family and begun to buy sizeable tracts of plantation land around Charleston. If he was to supply rice and indigo to the European market, it made good business sense to produce them himself.

For a decade, Laurens’ business and family prospered, but by 1760 Henry’s conscience and religious convictions brought him to the conclusion that the slave trade was immoral. When his partners objected to the idea of forgoing their most profitable cargo, there was a terrible row. Finally, Henry left the firm, taking with him three ships that were registered in his name. He would continue trading, but now it would be mostly the produce of his own plantations. At thirty-eight years of age, Henry Laurens owned eight plantations covering more than 20,000 acres, three ships and a part-interest in two more vessels.

He now devoted his time to his family and his own enterprises with a staunch morality that brought him an unassailable reputation for honesty, and made numerous enemies in the business world. On three separate occasions Laurens was forced into duels to defend his honour, but on each occasion he refused to fire his pistol.

In 1770, Henry’s wife Eleanor died, leaving her husband to look after the four surviving children of the twelve she had borne him. To escape his grief and provide his two sons with the same advantages that his father had given him, Henry took the boys, Henry Jr and John, to London where he enrolled them in university. After taking a house in Westminster, Henry looked after his shipping business, corresponded with his plantations and cared for the boys and their education. He also took advantage of his extensive business, political and social contacts to argue the case for the American colonies’ growing list of grievances against the crown.

Always a political moderate, Laurens firmly believed the problems between the colonies and the mother country could be solved amicably. Many of his British opposite numbers held the same opinion, and he and his friends petitioned the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the crown itself to do everything possible to ease the increasingly tense political situation in America. Always, Laurens believed the best course of action was not confrontation, but a negotiated settlement that would benefit both Britain and America. If such a solution could be reached, the ties between the two countries would be stronger than ever; if not, the economic damage to both sides could be devastating.

Henry Laurens understood all too well the revolutionary fervour that had already gripped a minority of his countrymen. During the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, mobs incensed at England’s imposition of a tax on imported goods stormed through Charleston, ransacking Laurens’ home in the mistaken belief that he was a royalist agent. In Henry Laurens’ words, these revolutionaries ‘seem forced and impelled to do very improper acts to support a very good cause’.

If Laurens had ample reason to fear America’s revolutionary mob mentality, he also had personal experience of the arbitrary manner used by English bureaucrats when dealing with their colonial subjects. While Laurens was living in England with his sons, the Royal Navy seized two of his ships for a frivolous breach of maritime law. Dutifully running the maze of legalities imposed by the maritime courts, when his case finally came to trial Laurens was so incensed by the court’s rude and insulting behaviour that he leaned across the bench and twisted the judge’s nose. Eventually he managed to get his ships back, and avoid being sent to jail for contempt of court, but the incident probably hastened his return to America. In the autumn of 1774 Henry Laurens and his son John left England, while Henry Jr remained behind to continue his education.

Two weeks before Christmas 1774, Henry Laurens arrived in Charleston, only to discover the story of his altercation with the maritime judge had preceded him. In the super-heated revolutionary atmosphere that now pervaded America, Henry Laurens had become a local hero. Within less than a month of his return, Laurens found himself elected to the First Provisional Congress of South Carolina, established when the old royalist government had been ousted from office only months earlier. Despite his continued advocacy of a negotiated settlement, within six months Laurens was promoted to President of the Congress and appointed President of the twelve-member Council of Safety, charged with overseeing South Carolina’s defences in case of a British attack. The international situation now deteriorated at an ever-accelerating rate. Within six months the war of words spiralled into open fighting. Britain and America were at war and Henry Laurens, along with every other American politician, had been branded a rebel and traitor to the crown. On a personal level, Laurens’ family, like those of so many of his countrymen, was torn apart by war. Henry Jr could not return to America and Henry Sr could not go to England. But for the moment, Laurens had more pressing problems than his own family.

With most of the colonies’ fledgling army and navy scrambling to defend the northern ports of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, the port of Charleston was left dangerously exposed to attack. No troops could be spared from the continental army and South Carolina did not have the money to raise an effective militia of its own. Making the situation worse, many of the able-bodied white men in South Carolina feared that if they left their plantations their slaves would escape or break into open revolt.

Faced with the imminent threat of blockade, Charleston called on Henry Laurens, as the President of the Council of Safety, to oversee construction of fortifications and raise whatever military force he could to defend the city. Laurens agreed, but insisted on a free hand in organising the regiment as he saw fit. Everyone agreed, but they were hardly prepared for Henry Laurens’ proposal. In letters to the South Carolina Congress and the Continental Congress, Laurens envisioned a militia comprised entirely of free blacks and volunteer slaves.

Considering the radical nature of the idea, the amount of high-level support was probably more than Laurens could have hoped for. South Carolina’s representative to the Continental Congress took the idea one step further, suggesting that because plantation owners and overseers ‘must remain at home to prevent revolts among the Negroes . . . [All] the thirteen states should arm three thousand of the most vigorous and enterprising Negroes under the command of white officers.’

Further support came from young Alexander Hamilton, then acting as aide-de-camp to General George Washington. Hamilton wrote, ‘The Negroes will make excellent soldiers . . . [but] this project will have to combat prejudice and self-interest. Contempt for the Blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither on reason or experience. . . . Give them their freedom with their muskets; this will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and have a good influence upon those who remain, by opening the door for their emancipation . . .’

While many slave owners were understandably opposed to the plan, the strongest objection came from George Washington. Washington insisted that Negroes simply could not handle such a complex job of soldiering and threatened to remove Laurens from command of the Charleston defensive project if he persisted with his plan. Although a slave owner himself, Laurens was outraged at Washington’s attitude. Armed with the letters from South Carolina’s congressional representative and Alexander Hamilton, Laurens set about building his black militia as quickly as possible. Charleston was running out of time.

By May 1776 the British had overrun neighbouring Georgia and most of the territory between Savannah and Charleston was seething with red coats who were busily confiscating slaves or urging them into open revolt against their owners. Weeks later, in early June, the British attempted a sea-borne assault on Charleston, but thanks to Laurens and his black soldiers, it was impossible for them to land any troops. Before the end of the month the British gave up and sailed out of Charleston harbour. Henry Laurens was again a local hero, but Washington and his supporters in Congress would never forgive his insubordination.

Had Laurens ever given the matter a second thought, he might have assumed he could escape Washington’s ire simply by staying in South Carolina and continuing the defence of Charleston. If so, he would have been wrong. Swept along on a tide of popular approval, Laurens was elected to the Continental Congress in January 1777. By July of that year Laurens had taken his seat in Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia, and began serving on several important committees despite the opposition of the strong Washingtonian party. At least Laurens had a powerful supporter in the person of John Hancock, author of the Declaration of Independence and President of the Congress. When Hancock stepped down as president in November 1777 his hand-picked successor was Henry Laurens.