[2] Made lieutenant in 1739,[2] he participated in the 1741 expedition against Cartagena,[2] serving on the frigate Norfolk, under his uncle and future admiral, Captain Thomas Graves.

Seeing as a by-election was held at the same time, the local Tories suspected him to have purposefully and unlawfully impressed eligible voters in order to influence the election on behalf of the Whigs.

[2] Graves's orders were vague, his resources overstretched, and his task, in the words of the Dictionary of National Biography, "perhaps the most ungracious duty that has ever fallen to the lot of a naval officer."

Two months later, on 17 June 1775, his sailors again helped ferry troops, this time to the Charlestown Peninsula, while several of his ships provided fire support for the pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill.

During the Siege of Boston, Admiral Graves, on 6 October 1775, ordered Lieutenant Henry Mowatt, commanding the armed vessel HMS Canceaux, to destroy seaports that were supporting the rebellion.

The trifling nature of their dispute aside, both women were staunch partisans of their husbands to the point that contemporaries mused both were "led", and thus presumably influenced in their capacities as military commanders, by their wives.

[5] Shortly before the Burning of Falmouth, in August 1775, Graves was involved in a public fistfight with Commissioner of Customs Benjamin Hallowell, the climax of an ongoing dispute between the two concerning the hay to be harvested on a small island off Boston.

[6] This episode supported Graves' image as "somewhat severe, of few words, and rough in his manner",[7] inspired satirical poetry and brought him into further disrepute as some of his nephews took it upon themselves to punish Hallowell for having assailed their uncle by subjecting him to a beating and challenging him to a duel.

The young couple married on 30 December 1782 in St. Mary and St. Giles Church, Buckerell with Samuel and Margaret Graves (godfather to the groom and godmother to the bride respectively) as witnesses.

The epitaph inscribed on the aforementioned monument also refers to Graves' charitable efforts, which awarded him the local epithet "The Poor Man's Friend".