Arthur Lee was a doctor, lawyer, spy, diplomat, and member of the influential Lee family of Virginia. He was born on December 20, 1740, at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County to Thomas Lee and Hannah Harrison Ludwell, who hailed from one of the most prominent families in Virginia. His siblings included Thomas Ludwell Lee, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, William Lee, and Hannah Lee Corbin. An elite education at Eton College in England and the University of Edinburgh prepared Lee to practice medicine, but his inclination and talents drove him into the trenches of opposition politics. From February to April 1768 he published a series of ten letters under the pseudonym “Monitor” in Rind’s Virginia Gazette in opposition to the Townshend Acts imposed by Parliament that likely influenced the creation of George Mason and George Washington’s 1769 nonimportation plan. Lee sailed for London in the summer of 1768, where as an ally of Massachusetts Patriot Samuel Adams and London radical John Wilkes, he expertly used the press to interpret American grievances for the British public. Lee soon emerged as the chief advocate for the Patriot cause in Britain and used his connections in the city to collect intelligence for the Committee of Secret Correspondence created by the Continental Congress. As a diplomat, he secured vital French support during the American Revolution (1775–1783), serving with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane on the commission that secured the 1778 Treaty of Alliance, though strife with his fellow diplomats abridged his political prospects. After the Revolution, Lee persisted in public service with unfailing integrity, settling finally in Urbanna, where he died on December 12, 1792.
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