Roderigue Hortalez and Company

Roderigue Hortalez and Company was an enterprise that funneled covert military and financial aid by France and Spain to American revolutionaries prior to the formal alliance of France with the American revolutionary government against Britain.^[1] With the backing of Louis XVI's minister Vergenne, the ruse was organized by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a French playwright, watch-maker, inventor, musician, politician, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms-dealer, and revolutionary.^[2] Through the company, weapons and other war material were directed to help the insurgent Americans fight the British, longtime rival of France which had just defeated France in the Seven Years' War, taking France's North American territory.

Pierre Beaumarchais

Background

See also: French and Indian War

The Seven Years' War had gone badly for France, which had lost nearly all of her North American colonial possessions and had been militarily humiliated by the British. Spain, who had been an ally of France late in the war, had lost the strategically important territory of Florida. Britain, meanwhile, had expanded its colonial territories across large areas of North America.

Dead link In 1773, a jealous nobleman got into a scuffle with Beaumarchais, resulting in the playwright spending ten weeks in jail and losing his citizenship rights.^[3]

To get out of legal trouble Pierre Beaumarchais pledged his services to the king in order to get his civil rights restored.^[4]

In 1774, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes was appointed the foreign minister of France by Louis XVI. Vergennes was strongly anti-England, at one point declaring "England is the natural enemy of France."^[1] His chance to strike at Britain came through Pierre Beaumarchais.

The proposal

Beaumarchais, working as a secret agent, had traveled to London in pursuit of Chevalier d'Eon, an agent of Louis XVI, who had threatened the King with blackmail.^[5] During that period Beaumarchais fell in with the dissolute crowd that surrounded John Wilkes, the Mayor of London. There he received a letter from the Continental Congress, delivered by Arthur Lee. In it Congress suggested to his government that it encourage the rebellion in the Thirteen Colonies by sending secret military aid disguised as a loan. Beaumarchais believed Britain's economy would be significantly crippled without the thirteen colonies.

Opposition

The only major opposition to the plan came from French minister of finance Baron Turgot. He insisted that American independence would occur whether or not France financed the rebellion.^[1] He said the funding would add to the already heavy burden of a general French military and naval buildup and would lead to bankruptcy. Turgot eventually resigned in protest.^[6]

The operation in action

Louis XVI and Vergennes agreed. Both states were unwilling to openly show their support, at least until after the rebellion had successfully begun.^[1][7] Before the Declaration of Independence was even signed, weapons and other necessities were already flowing via the ostensibly neutral Dutch island of St. Eustatius. Muskets, cannons, cannonballs, gunpowder, bombs, mortars, tents, and enough clothing for 30,000 men were sent. This assistance kept American hopes alive during the spring of 1776.^[6]

The rebels welch on payment

Hortalez & Co. conducted business with the Americans from France through Connecticut merchant Silas Deane, who was sharing a covert trade agency with Thomas Morris, the half-brother of Robert Morris (financier). Because this business did not include him, Arthur Lee made it a point that Deane would never be paid his commission on the goods Beaumarchais provided by ensuring that the Frenchman was never paid.

By convincing the committee not to pay its debt in order to avoid creating a trail that could reveal the rebels’ complicity with the French to the British, Lee succeeded in both forcing Deane (who eventually died trying to prove that he was due his rightful compensation) into disgrace and poverty for years and destroying Beaumarchais financially.

In an August 16, 1777, letter from Lee to the "secrete committee of congress", he wrote of Beaumarchais that:

This gentleman is not a merchant, but is known as a political agent, employed by the French Court. Remittances, therefore, to him, so far from covering the business, would create suspicions, or rather satisfy the British Court these suspicions are just. At the same time, his circumstances and situation forbid one to hope, that your property, being once in his hands, could ever be recovered; and, as an attempt to force him to account, would hazard a discover of the whole transaction, this government would, of course, discountenance or forbid it".^[2]