While his comrades in the Twenty-Ninth Regiment were camping on the Boston Common or meeting their new neighbors, Private William Clark was spending his time with literature: his own. Two months after his arrival in Boston, Clark announced that his play, The Miser. Or The Soldier’s Humour. A Comedy of Three Acts, was available for purchase by subscription. The broadside announcing the subscription included a brief and nearly correct Latin tag: Non possunt placeto omnibus, “I can’t please everyone.” Presumably, Clark acquired enough subscriptions to publish his play, since the following February, the printer Ezekiel Russell advertised in all the Boston papers that he had just published The Miser and would sell it, with a blue paper cover, for eight pence. Sadly, no copies remain for us to read today. Russell may not have printed many. The short run was likely read until it fell apart and then, like many cheaply printed pamphlets, reused as toilet paper. Such a fate might have been particularly appealing to some Bostonians. In the winter of 1769, not many residents were likely eager to read about “the soldier’s humour.”
Private William Clark seemed to have a flair for drama off the page as well. In May 1769, he had a shouting match with the Boston watch. When stopped on the street, he threatened to burn down the town workhouse and all of Boston with it. As the watchman arrested him and brought him to the local lockup, Clark swore he’d have his revenge on the entire town.
It took Clark only a month to stage an even more melodramatic scene with Boston locals. One June day in 1769, 75-year-old Joseph Lasenby was shocked, upon entering his married daughter’s house, to find Clark in bed with his 20-year-old granddaughter, Mary Nowell. The elderly Son of Liberty ordered Clark out of the house, but the insouciant soldier declined to leave. He had every right to sleep with Mary, Clark asserted. After all, she was his wife, he told the astonished old man, and he was going nowhere without her.
Clark may have been stretching the truth a bit. Mary said they had been married one evening “by a person who was drest as a priest.” In fact, they were not married until four months after being caught in flagrante. But married they were, much to the distress of Mary’s parents. So devastated were they, the Boston Evening-Post claimed, that the news of the affair “much impaired their health.” Two weeks after the marriage, Mary’s father had a showdown with his new son-in-law. Clark shoved a loaded pistol into Joseph Nowell’s chest, Joseph pressed charges, and after many adjournments, in April 1770 Clark found himself in jail until he could pay a 40-shilling fine.