William Lee was a descendant of Richard Lee. He was the tenth child of Thomas Lee and his wife, Hannah Ludwell, and a brother of Richard Henry, Francis Lightfoot, and Arthur Lee. He was born at the family seat, "Stratford, " Westmoreland County, Virginia.
Prior to 1766, when Lee was one of a group in Westmoreland County to adopt a vote of thanks to Lord Camden for his opposition to the Stamp Act and to subscribe for a portrait of that statesman, scarcely the vestige of a record exists concerning him. In 1768, accompanied by his brother Arthur, he went to London to engage in mercantile pursuits. There, in 1770, we find him in partnership with the Dennys De Berdts (father and son) and Stephen Sayre. But he did not devote himself exclusively to business.
Both he and his brother Arthur, as likewise Sayre, became deeply mersed in London politics, having thrown themselves enthusiastically into the movement of which John Wilkes was the leader. One outcome was that in 1773 William Lee and Sayre were elected sheriffs of London, and two years later Lee was chosen an alderman of the city. Early in 1777 Lee was appointed by the secret committee of Congress to act jointly with Thomas Morris, sometime incumbent of the office, as commercial agent at Nantes, and in June he crossed over to France to enter upon his duties. At once he encountered a series of complications, not all of his own making, although he made some lively contributions of his own, chiefly the result of a distrust of two of the American commissioners, Franklin and Deane, a distrust sedulously fomented by Arthur Lee, the third commissioner. In short, William Lee and the commercial agency had become inextricably involved in the notorious Lee-Deane controversy.
In the midst of this turmoil Congress, with characteristic ineptitude in foreign affairs, resolved to send representatives to other European courts, and in May 1777, chose William Lee to be commissioner to the courts of Berlin and Vienna. Neither of these courts was disposed to recognize the United States, and all of Lee's polite efforts through two years could not prevail upon them to change their minds. His one diplomatic accomplishment, though quite outside either of his assignments, was the negotiation with John De Neufville, an Amsterdam merchant, of a treaty of commerce between the United States and Holland. This proposed treaty, though never ratified by either party, possesses nevertheless an importance of its own (the American Historical Review, April 1911, pp. 579ff. ) , in addition to having become the ostensible cause of war between England and Holland.
In June 1779, Lee and Izard were recalled, and in September following Arthur Lee was superseded. That William Lee's public career had been mostly a succession of failures is to be ascribed in part to defects of his own temperament, partly to circumstances beyond his control. The diplomatic missions would doubtless have proved abortive under any other person. For the next four years Lee remained abroad, making his residence at Brussels; but in September 1783, he returned to Virginia and retired to his estate at "Green Spring. " His last years were saddened by almost total blindness.
On March 7, 1769, Lee was married to Hannah Philippa Ludwell, eldest daughter of Philip Ludwell of "Green Spring".
