In January 2006 the Daily Telegraph reported the sale in New York of an eighteenth-century gold box, embossed with the arms of the city, which had been presented along with the freedom of the city to Thomas Gage, commander-inchief of the British Army in North America in 1773. At that point, the report continued, Gage was ‘deeply in love with his American wife’ – Margaret Kemble from New Brunswick – who had given him eleven children. Two years later, Gage was a ‘broken man … estranged from Margaret for ever after she put the land of her birth before her husband and handed his military secrets to Paul Revere’. Gage had planned to send 800 men to Concord with the aim of seizing two revolutionary leaders, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and destroying the weapons which they had been building up at Lexington and Concord. But, being forewarned, Revere famously rode to advise them of Gage's plan. The rest, as they say, is history.

Gage immediately suspected his wife since, other than his fellow officer, she was the only person he had told of his plans. He banished her to England, and although he also returned home six months later, the couple never spoke again. Margaret Gage later ‘confided to a close friend that her feelings were those spoken by Lady Blanche in Shakespeare's King John’:

As the Daily Telegraph reporter put it, behind the sale of this box ‘lies one of the saddest love stories of the American Revolution’. Similar stories could be told for other international wars. The Hundred Years War is no exception. To cite but one variation on the theme: in 1429, as the English in Normandy stepped up their level of security in the wake of the successes of Joan of Arc, the local wife of the English porter and gaoler of the castle of Verneuil fell in love with one of the French prisoners in her husband's care.