The old man struggled to get on the boat. He had a long journey ahead, from London, sailing down the Thames to the estuary and beyond it, thousands of miles of the Atlantic Ocean until the packet boat reached Boston. The passenger, prematurely aged from alcohol and opium, poverty and stress, had not been to the land of his birth since the British defeat at Yorktown eight years earlier, in 1781.
He never made it to the Thames estuary, let alone Boston: he was found dead in bed. Considering how frail he was, needing help to board, no one was surprised. Almost everyone was surprised when a diamond-studded snuffbox with a miniature portrait of Louis XVI on the lid was found in his cabin; the captain was not, having been regaled by the man for hours before boarding - heavy rains prevented the packet boat from leaving on time - with anecdotes of his tenure as the first ambassador to France sent by the new, independent country of the United States of America.
Silas Deane was buried in a local church and the packet boat sailed on. News spread quickly: John Brown Cutting, an American in London, sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was only too aware of Deane, having been taken to a French warehouse where hundreds, possibly thousands of rifles were stored, rusting away, the wooden stocks rotten. In Jefferson's opinion, Deane was little more than a 'wretched' example of a 'departure from right'.
There was a man in London other than John Brown Cutting who had known Deane far better: Deane taught him for a year in a Connecticut schoolhouse; Deane, a Yale graduate, taught by day and studied for the bar at night. His student, just as ambitious (if not more so) ran away to Surinam while Deane settled for practising the law - then marrying the widow of a wealthy client.
Edward Bancroft was born in Massachusetts in 1745. When he was two, his father had his final epileptic fit. Mary Ely Bancroft was pregnant with her second child and would not remarry for several years. Her second husband was David Bull, who ran a well-regarded tavern in Hartford, Connecticut. Bancroft helped his stepfather run the Bunch of Grapes when he was not at school. After the appearance of several younger siblings, his mother died of smallpox. David Bull married again and almost immediately - the bride was pregnant. Bancroft may have decided that leaving Hartford was a good idea at this point and accordingly, went to study medicine with a doctor - as was the custom of the day - in Killingly, Connecticut. But Bancroft was not happy and after he heard that sugar plantations in Surinam needed men with medical training, the teenager ran off.
Bancroft was delighted by the exotic flora and fauna that surrounded him in South America, but horrified by the terrible injuries he treated: slaves with machetes cut sugar cane and accidents were inevitable. (He opposed slavery staunchly for the rest of his life.) But he was committed to staying in Surinam until he had saved enough to study medicine in London. He may or may not have decided while there to publish his observations (along with letters to his younger brother in Connecticut) as a means of raising badly-needed funds.
Aware of Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity, Bancroft wrote to Franklin from Surinam despite never having met him to tell him about a local eel that gave electric shocks. Franklin replied and despite the age gap, the men became friends. They would meet in London, where Bancroft would proved himself a good friend when Franklin was kicked out of the United Kingdom for his views. Bancroft stayed in London, a married man now with children, living and practising medicine in Downing Street, then a street of medical men. There is every reason to believe that he and Franklin made arrangements with regards to the American cause; letters from Franklin were sent to a 'Mr. Edwards' to a mutual friend in London, publisher Ralph Griffiths, best known for getting into hot water after publishing Fanny Hill. (Amusingly, Griffiths was accused of 'corrupting the King's subjects', amusing because Fanny Hill was a best-seller; clearly, the King's subjects did not mind being corrupted in the least.) Griffiths, who in keeping with his liberal views - he did his best to promote women writers, those 'ingenious and learned ladies' he met - was in favour of American liberty. Bancroft went to Griffiths' country house at Turnham Green (then a village and beyond that, countryside) to collect the letters.
Franklin was instrumental to the decision to send Silas Deane to France as the first American ambassador, aware that Bancroft and Deane knew one another. Conveniently, Deane did not speak a word of French, convenient because he needed a translator. And who better to send than someone Deane knew? Bancroft had taught himself to speak fluent French in Surinam.
Thomas Jefferson would have been the first American ambassador had his wife not been ill. Deane, on his second wife (the socially prominent Elizabeth Saltonstall), was visibly impatient with her, ill as she was with tuberculosis. When Washington planned to call on her in Connecticut, she must have protested to Deane, then in New York. He was not moved. ('You will entertain General Washington.')
Deane arrived in France within days of the Declaration of Independence being signed. On his way to Paris he spent his time buying lace-trimmed shirts with his male travelling companion and bottles of a good Bordeaux, which he hid in anticipation of his arrival in Paris to avoid paying tax. (He was caught.)
Bancroft was caught, too. He had been observed going to and from Turnham Green and was summoned to the Admiralty for what must have been an exceedingly unpleasant meeting. Bancroft had been entrusted by Franklin to spy on the French court at Versailles; now he would do that as a double agent, paid by the British government to spy on Franklin, Deane and others. He was to report to a man he had known well in Surinam, a man who had married a rich Dutch widow for her sugar plantation: Paul Wentworth. Wentworth too was on his way to Paris and Bancroft would report to him. He had no choice: as a British subject living in London and siding with the American cause, he had placed himself in a very dangerous position: treason was a capital crime.
Bancroft and Deane moved into the house at Passy (outside Paris) first, joined by an elderly Franklin, his brilliance as evident as ever and a Virginian named Arthur Lee. Lee had been born into privilege, the same family that would produce Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Arthur Lee attended Eton, the University of Edinburgh (to study medicine), then read law in London, passing the bar. Lee too was brilliant, but unlike Franklin and Bancroft, markedly unstable. (Deane's fine mind had earned him, the son of a blacksmith, not one but two full scholarships to Yale College.) Lee quickly decided that he loathed Bancroft - all they had in common was a detestation of slavery - and complained endlessly to Franklin. Franklin simply tuned him out, even when Lee insisted (quite rightly, as it turned out) that Bancroft was a British spy.
Deane was hardly a diplomat, not only refusing to learn French (Bancroft translated), he loathed Paris, telling Paul Wentworth he vastly preferred Connecticut. But Bancroft had the time of his life. He may have encouraged Deane to join him in making financial speculations (much to the displeasure of George III heard). And there were other diversions: much to the horror of priggish Abigail Adams, Bancroft brought his mistress to dinner. Oddly, considering she was not from the top tier of American society, Mrs. Adams looked down on Bancroft, criticising him for liberally sprinkling his food with cayenne pepper. What she did not know was that Bancroft, as a double agent, may have feared for his life and well into the 19th century, cayenne pepper was considered an antidote to poison.
Bancroft had more than a passing knowledge of poison. When he left Surinam for London, Bancroft not only took tree bark that would make him a fortune as a dyestuff, but quite likely a local poison, curare. The Indians in Surinam dipped arrowheads in curare; if the wound didn't get you, the curare certainly would. Curare is powerful, weakening skeletal muscles at best, causing death by paralysing the diaphragm at worst. Bancroft was not alone in his knowledge of curare; there was even a chemist in the Strand (London) who sold it, relevant because Silas Deane was almost certainly poisoned on his way back to America in 1789.
Why would Bancroft want to kill his old friend? Most likely, Deane knew that Bancroft was backing two horses. Deane certainly met Paul Wentworth, and repeatedly, much to the latter's dismay: 'God save me from this man.' Wentworth was a British spy despite his American connections; Bancroft reported to Wentworth, picking up and dropping off messages under a tree on the grounds of the Tuileries Palace (it had not burned yet) every Tuesday. Why would Deane, the American ambassador, have consorted with Wentworth, and repeatedly? (Deane was cleared posthumously by Congress of lining his pockets in France posthumously, but given the rotting weapons Jefferson saw in the warehouse, weapons that ought to have gone to American troops, so desperately in need, makes one wonder what was going on.) Even if Deane had nothing to do with British espionage, he may have known Bancroft spied for the British. In 1789, Deane had lived in poverty for the better part of a decade; private letters in which he expressed doubts over the American cause were published on the eve of the Battle of Yorktown, the resultant opprobrium barring him from returning to America for years. His clothes were shabby; worse, he lived with a prostitute, seemingly addicted to drink as well as laudanum (tincture of opium). Deane would have to support himself in America. And there was an opportunity in a canal being built that he wished to take part of. Where did he propose to get the money? Bancroft was a wealthy man. Did he, despite orders to contrary, spy for the Americans when he was in France? He certainly spied for the French, making his the first American-born triple spy. That would not have gone down well in Whitehall. If Deane discovered that Bancroft had deceived his British paymasters with the Americans and the French, there would have been trouble, serious trouble. Bancroft may have decided that Deane was a proverbial loose cannon and that he needed to be silenced. Deane had gone to him repeatedly for laudanum; did Bancroft offer him a remedy for seasickness to be taken only after he boarded? (Deane and the captain and crew waited for days for the rain to clear; the laudanum Deane had with him could not have been poison, because Deane would never have set foot on the packet boat.)
Deane was in his early fifties when he died; Bancroft lasted into his eighties. in Margate, His duplicity, much to the horror of his English-born grandson, was exposed by the British government in 1866.
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