Bunker Hill

complicated when it was revealed that one of the people they all trusted was a spy.
    —
    As early as November, Paul Revere was approached by someone whom he described as having “connections with the Tory party but was a Whig at heart.” This unnamed patriot with ties to the loyalists was, in all probability, the twenty-four-year-old bookseller Henry Knox, who had recently married the dark-haired and beautiful Lucy Flucker, daughter of the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker. Knox’s marriage to a member of Boston’s loyalist aristocracy may have given him access to the inner workings of the Gage administration, but there was also his bookstore on Cornhill. Frequented by officers of both the British army and navy, the London Bookstore reflected Knox’s personal interest in military matters (he was an officer in the town’s artillery company), and Knox often found himself in conversation with some of Gage’s intimates. At one point he overheard a naval officer revealing that the sailors aboard His Majesty’s ships in Boston “were grown so uneasy and tumultuous, that it was with great difficulty they could govern them.” The army officer he was talking to responded that they were having, if anything, even more trouble with the soldiers. By January, this tidbit of information was being repeated by patriots throughout Boston and beyond.
    That fall, the patriots had formed a secret committee composed of around thirty men—mostly artisans and mechanics and including Paul Revere—who kept a watchful eye on the movements of the British. The mechanics met regularly at the Green Dragon Tavern and reported their findings to Warren, Hancock, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Church, and a handful of others. Knox informed Revere that the “meetings were discovered,” and as proof, repeated almost word for word what had been said during a meeting at the Green Dragon just the night before. Revere and the others tried changing the venue of their meetings, but soon discovered that “all our transactions were communicated to Governor Gage.”
    Knox also revealed that even the supposedly secret proceedings of the Provincial Congress were known to his father-in-law. “It was then a common opinion,” Revere wrote, “that there was a traitor in the Provincial Congress, and that Gage was possessed of all their secrets.” The question was who.
    By the winter of 1775 the core group of patriot leaders had spent an intense, emotionally exhausting decade together; they were markedly different sorts of people, but they were all part of a political brotherhood that had come to define their lives. None of them appears to have wanted to face the possibility that there was a Judas in their midst.
    They knew that Gage (as had Hutchinson before him) had made overtures to just about all of them. Joseph Warren appears to have genuinely liked the general, and in a letter written to Josiah Quincy in late November even admitted to having had several “private conversations” with Gage, whom he described as “a man of honest, upright principles, and one desirous of accommodating the difference between Great Britain and her colonies in a just and honorable way.” If this was true, wasn’t it possible to claim that leaking supposed secrets to the British might actually work to the patriots’ advantage if the information allowed the two sides to come to a mutually beneficial resolution?
    Back in 1768, as master of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge, Warren had shown a willingness to reach out to the British regulars who had recently arrived in Boston. Up until that point, Warren’s efforts to elevate St. Andrew’s to grand lodge status had been stymied by Boston’s older and more well-to-do St. John’s Masonic Lodge, whose members had shown nothing but scorn for the upstart rival. By forming a temporary alliance with the British soldiers who were masons, Warren was able to gain the support he needed to put his own lodge on an equal footing with St. John’s. Never losing sight of his ultimate goal, Warren had forged a successful partnership with those who, by all rights, should have been his enemies.
    Eight years later, Warren demonstrated a similar pragmatism in his willingness to confide in Thomas Gage. In fact, after events came to a violent head at Lexington and Concord, Warren wrote to Gage and essentially apologized for not having told him more. “I have many things which I wish to say to your Excellency,” he wrote, “and most