One day in the winter of 1782-83, an exiled American neutralist, Peter Van Schaack by name, was browsing through London’s Westminster Abbey when he was startled to see a familiar figure standing before a newly erected monument to Major John André, the young British officer who had collaborated with Benedict Arnold in the unsuccessful scheme to betray West Point. The thickset, hulking-shouldered man who was reading the tribute to the fallen soldier’s “Zeal for his KING and COUNTRY” on the marble face of the cenotaph was Benedict Arnold himself.
“What a spectacle!” Van Schaack’s son and biographer wrote later. “The traitor Arnold, in Westminster Abbey, at the tomb of André, deliberately perusing the monumental inscription, which will transmit to future ages the tale of his own infamy!”
Arnold was not alone. At his side was a young woman. Van Schaack had never met the former Margaret Shippen, the golden-haired Philadelphia aristocrat who a few years before had become the second Mrs. Benedict Arnold; but her appealing features had been described to him. He recognized her at once, and even as he turned from the scene “in disgust,” he must have found himself wondering what it was like to be the wife of the most despised man of his generation. What did life hold, after treason, for the exiled Benedict Arnolds?
