I.
“To-morrow is Valentine’s Day. You are mine. I have chose you out among the rest, the reason is I love you best—so, my Dear, God bless you. I wish you Health and Happiness.”—Isabella Cleghorn to Capt. Joseph Hynson, in a letter from London dated the 13th of February, 1777, intercepted in the general post-office by the British Secret Service, and now preserved among the Auckland MSS. in King’s College, Cambridge.
Isabella Cleghorn? Who was she that her valentine fancies should weigh with nations and be treasured in the archives of a State? A factor in the birth of the American republic? Let those so minded review the evidence and construct an answer to suit themselves.
When the events of our Revolutionary war destroyed commerce with the mother country, it followed in nature, if obscurely, that Joseph Hynson, a young Maryland sea-captain, employed in the London carrying trade, should find his occupation gone. Beating about in search of a new one suited to his taste, Hynson shortly betook himself to France, there to solicit from the American Commissioners some maritime employment in the service of Congress. Several well-known Marylanders in Paris at the time vouched for the newcomer as an able seaman and an honest man. The Commissioners, glad to find a trusty hand, enrolled him among their elect, and Hynson soon received from them orders to cross over to Dover, there secretly to purchase a good cutter-sloop. This vessel, he was told, he should presently command on a voyage across the Atlantic, bearing despatches to Congress.
Once arrived on English soil, it is far from strange that the lively mariner should have longed for a glimpse of old haunts. The circumspect gentlemen in Paris would hardly have smiled, however, upon their emissary’s sally into the heart of London; and his visit to his friends the Jumps, at their house in Stepney Causeway, spoke little for his sense of responsibility.
Mrs. Jump, Hynson’s friend, received him with tender rejoicing. Robert, her son, echoed the welcome, and pretty little Miss Cleghorn, neighbor and intimate of the household, promptly surrendered her heart to the handsome sailor. Hynson, “a lusty and a black-looking fellow,” with a salt-water gallantry very potent in the feminine eye, warmed under influences so generous. Discretion melted within him, and before his departure for Dover he had acquainted his hostess with the secret in his charge. Anxiety as great as her affection now filled the good woman’s mind. Sympathizing in private with the American cause, she yet dreaded so dangerous a service for one she loved. And when, in the newness of her trouble, Mr. Vardill, an American clergyman supposedly “disaffected,” chanced to call upon her, her distracted wits could not conceal from his astuteness quite all that loyalty to Hynson demanded.
As Fate would have it, this Vardill, good rebel though he seemed to be, lived, as a matter of fact, “chiefly on his Majesty’s bounty.” Windfalls such as Mrs. Jump had provided might be turned to excellent use in his own and his master’s interest. Lord North, to whose ante-chamber he accordingly ran with his news, pronounced “the farther prosecution of the business a matter of the utmost importance.” And from that instant Joseph Hynson’s every act came under the surveillance of spies, agents assailed him with every artifice of corruption, his most careless note was scrutinized in its passage through the mails; and, finally, poor Isabella’s innocent, schoolgirl love letters seldom came inviolate to the eyes for which alone they were intended.
“My Lord, I take the liberty of sending to you the enclosed Letter from Captain Hynson to his Mistress.... The writing on one side of the Letter is part of a rough draft of a Letter which his Mistress wrote to him,”
says Vardill to North, February 10, 1777. Hynson’s letter is a mere impersonal account of his safe arrival in Dover, but Isabella’s “rough draft,” scrawled on the back of her lover’s page, seems yet warm with the pressure of the hand that wrote by the flicker of Mrs. Jump’s firelight:
“——for my Part I have not slept one hour since your (departure).” [Vardill, in his hasty theft, tore away the sheet so closely as to sacrifice the end of each line.] “I come over (to the Jumps’) as often as I can, but not with such (frequency) as I us’d, for I detest the kitchen and the Arm chair (now). We all do. You will make (us) very happy if you will (come) and fill it up again, for Gods Sake Come home for I am (like) one out of their sences about you.... For Gods sake write to me, ... for I am wreatched all (ways). Did you think that Id spare a Groat for Postage. No, not even if I been distressed for it. Mrs. Jump (would) lend it me, so don’t let that be your Excuse, as I (think) you Cant have forgot me in a week. Write——, and send to Mrs. Jump, and Come home——”
A second sad little letter, dated February 13, met another fate. Intercepted and copied in the General Post-Office, it was then restored scatheless to the mail and allowed to go its way. The copy alone is found in the Auckland MSS.
“To Captain Hynson, Ship Tavern, Dover:
“I rec’d your kind Letter which affords me great pleasure, as it allways does to hear from them that I so dearly love. I should have wrote to you before but Mrs. Jump said I must wait a Day or two, but with great Anxiety I waited.... I have been in great distress about you. Night and Day you are Never out of my Thoughts, my dear Hynson. I must leave off, for I was not certain whether I should write or no.... My dear Hynson, write to me as often as you can, for that’s all the happiness I have, to hear from you——”
Two days later, in a sudden access of fear of the dangerous adventure the nature of which her lover was concealing from her, Isabella wrote again:
“——Dear Hynson, I am afraid you are going to engage in such a thing that will be a means for us to never met again. Oh Hynson, as you will not be open and candid enough to tell me what plan you are upon, I must submit—I long to see you.”
Others, writing to Hynson from the house in Stepney Causeway, confirm Isabella’s account of her melancholy. “As to poor Bell, you have not been out of her head since you have been gone,” Mrs. Jump wrote him, while Robert added a postscript merely to say:
“Bell’s kind love (she bother’d me so I could not help it).”
In a letter of his own Robert wrote:
“As to my Sister Bell’s Behaviour, for Mamma has adopted her [as a] daughter.... She has been nowhere but to Mrs. Hazelden’s and our house since you went, and you have all this time engrossed all her Thoughts and Discourses.”
And a casual visitor to the household contributed, banteringly:
“I am now sitting beside Mrs. Jump and your fair Isabella, who sends off a Letter to you, and we shall all plague you till we have you again by the Fireside with us, for we can’t spare You. You are a happy Fellow to be so necessary to the Happiness of the Fair. I long to crack a bottle with you once more, and could wish that the summer was come, that we might have a little Junketting about the Country together.”
Hynson himself, writing from Dover to Mrs. Jump, said teasingly, for Isabella’s overhearing:
“You desire me to come back to be tormented by that little Girl, but that is out of the question.”
Yet when a day or two passed without bringing news of the “little Girl,” he grew uneasy, especially in view of the chance of having to quit the country without a farewell message from her.
“Our vessel is not yet ready,” [he told Robert] “but I expect her every minute, when I shall proceed to France, where I long to be.... I am engaged in a manner very agreeable to myself. I shall have an Opportunity now of exerting myself in my Country’s Cause, which is the height of my Ambition.... If I don’t get a letter from Bell this evening I shall sit down in the morning and write her a Discharge.”
But the coveted letter, delayed, probably, by secret-service Philistines, arrived in the nick of time to prevent so desperate a measure:
“Dear Mother,” [wrote its recipient to Mrs. Jump], “I received your kind Letter Thursday night ... and on Friday Night one from that little Rogue Belle. I have been reading them ever since.... I have wrote a long Letter to Bell, which I hope she will pay some attention to, as I should not write in the manner I have done if she were indifferent to me. Tell her to be a good Girl.... The reason of my stiling you Mother, is, Bob says you have adopted Bell your Daughter, and if she is a good Girl I must call her Sister—or something else.”
At last, after many vexatious delays, the vessel was secured and Hynson set sail for France, the haven of his ambition. But his final thought was for Isabella:
“I have enclosed a letter to my little Girl,” [he wrote to a friend,] “which I shall desire your care of. You will take care it goes to Mrs. Jump.”
And the first mail coming from Havre after Hynson’s arrival there brought under the eye of the English agent a packet for “Miss Isabella Cleghorn”—a long letter full of good-humored chatter about men, women, and fashions, but ending very seriously with this significant passage:
“My Dear Girl: ... I don’t doubt but if I have success my present situation will be very advantageous ... when I shall be able to receive you with open arms. Till then I shall only wish to hear from you. I shall lose no opportunity of writing to you.... Believe me to be at all times, yours affectionately,
JOS. HYNSON.”
So, very simply, moved this obscure love-affair of long ago. Yet the thought that its consequences might involve the destinies of nations may often have passed through its hero’s mind—a mind essentially intriguing and filled with keen ambition untrammelled by doubt. Nor was the man’s assurance without its legitimate base. Trusted, on the one hand with an important mission in his country’s service, promised the care of affairs of yet greater weight, and cognizant of a multitude of secrets of state, Hynson wielded no inconsiderable power. And when, on the other hand, the chief ministers of the throne completed the circle of his influence by making him an object of flattering solicitations, he felt that his hour was indeed come, and wrote, in frank exultation:
“I now think myself a man of consequence, and am very happy.”
And now for the bias of the man. In the matter of politics, Hynson, like many a greater statesman, hoped for reconciliation without separation. Colonial independence thrown into the scale, his respect for the integrity of the kingdom weighed heavily against it, and this delicate balance of his public principles gave to his private interests a possibly decisive importance. England, the centre of royal government, commanded his abstract veneration. England, Isabella’s home, held his heart and his pleasure. “He hopes ... to entitle Himself to a Competence and to sit down in England, where he has a Connection which he is anxious to resume,” the King learned from his agents. To that tune the royal money-bags forthwith jingled cunningly.