by Edward Cline
Hugh nodded in agreement. “Well, we have both faced small enemies, and large, my friend. Now, we shall face one together.”
* * *
Chapter 2: The Paladin
While men in the colonies talked and wrote about the Resolves, Patrick Henry, and the ominous nature of the Stamp Act, and allowed their fears, outrage, and disaffection to guide their thoughts and actions, the mood in London was quite the opposite. Grenville’s ministry was doomed, and as the prime minister was being maneuvered into resignation in July, men were jockeying for the right to form a new government or for a place in it. The colonials passed the days, weeks, and months of the summer of 1765 in grim anticipation of their own actions and the Crown’s; their cousins in England passed them in a frustrating stalemate of ambitious obstinacy. In the corridors and closets of power, there was much bickering, posturing, and conniving; much activity, but little action.
The Duke of Cumberland, burdened with a variety of uncomfortable maladies and a discreet reluctance to embroil himself in affairs that would rob him of his diversions, served on Grenville’s departure as prime minister pro tempore, and worked closely if unsuccessfully with the aging Duke of Newcastle to assemble a ministry acceptable to both George the Third and the King of Commoners, William Pitt. Pitt, emerging from his disabling melancholia lucid enough to manage for a time the direction of his career and ambition, twice overcame his painful gout to be taken by sedan chair to see the king, but refused to form a ministry unless he could bring into it his brother-in-law, Lord Temple. The king could not sanction any ministry that counted among its principals a man who had so openly supported the loathsome John Wilkes, who had suggested that the king was a fool and a liar. The two monarchs could not agree on other terms of rapprochement, leaving the kingmakers, power-brokers, and hopefuls for preferments muttering imprecations and scurrying to find a willing substitute for Pitt.
Baron Garnet Kenrick and Sir Dogmael Jones remained aloof from the imbroglio over who was to succeed Grenville. The Kenricks departed London to spend the season in Danvers, while Jones divided his time between Danvers and London. In the city, he performed his tutorial duties at Serjeants’ Inn, argued a number of cases at the King’s Bench during Trinity term — representing clients prosecuted under statutory censorship — and monitored the contest for ministerial succession.
In early July, after Grenville had gone, Jones journeyed to Danvers to report developments in London to his patron.
“Domestic relations are in a furtive dither, milord,” he said as he and Garnet Kenrick rode leisurely on horseback through the Danvers estate on an inspection tour. “Cumberland is lumbering — Ah! There’s the germ of a scandalously picturesque doggerel! I must complete it and submit it to the newspapers! — lumbering, as I said, between Richmond and Windsor Great Lodges, between all the baiting, hooting parties like a blindfolded bear at the Southwark Fair, shackled to the wishes of his nephew the king, taunted with morsels by his friends, nipped at his heels by mongrels from the Grenville and Bedford kennels. What a thankless task! Mr. Pitt interviewed twice with the king, but formally declined to head a new government unless Lord Temple could be brought into it without His Majesty making a face, and Lord Bute banished beyond influence to the Hebrides, and Bedford and anyone who supported the Treaty of Paris he negotiated absolutely barred from a place in administration. Temple, in any event, rebuffed his own sponsors and refused the Treasury, for many reasons to be sure, but chief among them his unwillingness to become his brother-in-law’s mute valet in policy. What a conundrum of siblings!” laughed Jones.
He took a puff on his pipe, then continued. “Everyone but Mr. Pitt labors under the suspicion that His Majesty continues to seek the devilish advice of Lord Bute. To allay that suspicion, he has graciously agreed to remove from their places a number of Scottish lords, including Bute’s brother. A very plaid promise, that!” Jones shook his head. “And, everyone wishes Mr. Pitt to succeed Mr. Grenville, milord, even His Majesty, but his terms are either too offensive or too strenuous. It is common knowledge that he is not open to concession. Nonetheless, it is tried. To appease him, Justice Pratt may be elevated to Lords. Newcastle is willing to follow Marlborough as Lord Privy Seal. A program was drawn up, I understand, designed to seduce Mr. Pitt: An alliance with Prussia, repeal of the cider and American stamp taxes, nullification of general warrants by the Commons, restitution or reinstatement of army officers who did not vote to Mr. Grenville’s liking — in short, a deliberate and thorough repudiation of the whole of Mr. Grenville’s program, which, I needn’t point out to you, milord,” added Jones with dark humor, “was endorsed by His Majesty, except for the Regency Bill, of course.”
Jones glanced over at his patron. “There is more, milord. Shall I wait until we have had dinner to continue?”
Garnet Kenrick grimaced. “Thank you for asking, Mr. Jones. But, go on. My appetite can endure it.”
“Very well. Charles Townshend will very likely agree to gild his fingers as the new Paymaster. His cousin of the same name may find a place on the Admiralty Board. Mr. Dowdeswell is to be the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, although he is keen only to see repeal of the cider tax. Grafton has accepted appointment as Secretary of State for the North, provided Mr. Pitt can be lured into the government. General Conway will be Secretary for the South. Charles Yorke is playing the demure maiden over becoming Attorney-General. He is especially desired by the king for his declamatory skills in the Commons.” Jones paused. “As for Lord Rockingham, his sole political experience as Lord of the Bedchamber cannot help but be reflected in his role as First Lord of the Treasury.” He sighed. “I would grieve for my country, milord, but only after a long, hearty laugh. All in all, it has been a very amusing entertainment, a circus of decorous turpitude.”
The Baron frowned. “I have not made his acquaintance. How old is Lord Rockingham?”
“Thirty-five, milord,” answered Jones. “Much older than your son, who is so much wiser.” He tapped his forehead with the stem of his pipe. “He is without a program, in a manner of speaking, quite saddleless in his principles. Wealthy, of course, a member of the Jockey Club. Well, I have spoken with him — made his acquaintance at a congress of anti-Grenvillites — and am of the opinion that as prime minister, he will be good for only one-half turn around the Ascot course before he winds himself and is tumbled by the headlong imperatives of empire and ineptitude. I expect to compose many letters to the newspapers about his anxious term, and refer to it as the ‘Rocking-Horse Ministry.’”
“You would make a cruelly just satirist, Mr. Jones,” remarked the Baron with a chuckle. Then he was silent for a while as they rode on, except to comment on the neatness of the fields. At length, he asked, “What is my brother up to? He must be in the thick of things.”
Jones spoke freely about the Earl of Danvers, as he knew he could to the man’s brother. “I have heard that he is circulating the notion that Mr. Pitt ought to be awarded a peerage, too. His minions, Sir Henoch and Mr. Hillier, in the meantime, are busy advancing the notion among members of the Commons that should Mr. Pitt accept a peerage, it would be a gross betrayal of his friends and of liberty.” Jones scoffed. “The devil’s advocate for chastity and modesty at work there, I should say!”
The Baron frowned in perplexity for a moment. Then his face brightened. “Ah! I see what they are up to! Mr. Pitt as Earl Something-or-other in Lords would remove him from the Commons, where he is most effective and feared. And, his party there would become rudderless and embittered. What an insidious ruse!”
“Insidious, milord? Agreed,” said Jones. “And effective, if it can be accomplished. However, unless he is also afflicted with the vanity of omnipotence, I don’t see Mr. Pitt falling for it.”
Soon after he returned to London a week later, Jones was visited in his new rooms near the Serjeants’ Inn by two messengers. The first, from Benjamin Worley at Lion Key, brought him a thick parcel from Captain John Ramshaw of the Sparrowhawk, now waiting in
queue in the Pool of London. Jones opened it immediately and found in it a printed copy of the Virginia Resolves and Hugh Kenrick’s long letter describing their passage in the House of Burgesses.
The Resolves caused Jones to gasp in happy shock, the letter caused him to chuckle in grim admiration of the frankness of the Resolves’ advocates. He frowned, though, when he read that part of Hugh’s narrative that briefly mentioned the assault on him by John Chiswell, another burgess.
“That was, I contend,” wrote Hugh, “a measure of the last argument Parliament and the Loyalists here have in their arsenal of persuasion on this or any other legislative matter. I beg this favor of you, my honorable friend, that you do not mention this incident to my parents. (I have sent my father copies of everything now in your hands, even a copy of this letter, from which I have omitted mention of it.) I do not wish them to become alarmed about my safety. I relate the incident to you so that you may properly gauge the level of feeling in these parts about Crown authority. As you will deduce from the addresses of Mr. Randolph and his party, there exist here sundry and numerous allies of those in the Commons who will become your opponents when this matter arrests the attention of the House when it reconvenes in December, as surely it must. Undoubtedly, repeal of this act, or at least consideration of its mitigation, will occupy much of your and their time and energy, leading to sittings late at night and early in the morning.… Manus hæc infensa tyrannis.…”
“This hand is also hostile to tyranny,” mused Jones to himself. He turned to read the transcripts that had accompanied the letter and the Resolves. An hour later, he finished reading and turned over the last page. Then he pounded the page with a fist. My God! he thought. These men put the best of us to shame! “If this be treason, then make the most of it!” he said out loud, and laughed quietly at the ease with which he pronounced those words. “May George the Third profit by their example!” What a sublime insult, he thought, and a well-deserved one! Mr. Henry, he thought, you have my salute! Such sentiments, uttered here by you or me, would see either of us clapped in irons within five minutes of a motion to censure and expel! For what offense? For having made an address to the throne of right and reason!
Jones put the papers aside on his desk and sat to gaze out his window at London. He loved the city. He doubted he could ever be persuaded to exchange living here for a chance to settle in America. But, he thought: Though I love my country, I am willing to help midwife the birth of another, for another country…another kingdom…is the only logical consequence of these speeches, and of the Resolves, and of the spirit that made them.…
The second messenger, a haughty, liveried creature, called on Jones near dusk, and presented him with an invitation to a levee the next afternoon at the Bloomsbury residence of John Russell, the Duke of Bedford.
A levee was an 18th-century social occasion, one of whose purposes, especially in politics, was the nose-counting of friends and allies. It could be as formal or informal as the host wished. He could circulate among his nervous, smiling, expectant guests and confer his approval or disapproval with a kind word or pointed inattention. Or, he could allow his guests to group themselves in their own familiar circles of colleagues, associates, and cronies, letting them chat away until any one or number of them were summoned to briefly converse with him. At royal and aristocratic levees, an attendee insolent enough to approach the host was sure to be rebuffed. Even prime ministers and lord chancellors could not speak to a king or a member of the royal peerage unless spoken to. Ladies and gentlemen of the lower strata often held levees in the morning, in their bedchambers, and served coffee and repartee while their servants flitted about preparing their employers for public appearance. Royal and aristocratic levees rarely stooped to that level of discriminating intimacy.
Jones audited the servant who stood in the study of his new rooms by the Inns of Court. He had just moved here and wondered how the Duke of Bedford had learned so quickly of his new residence. His servant was a tall, rough-looking fellow sporting an immaculate white wig, white stockings, silver-buckled shoes, green breeches, and a belaced green frock coat. He did not seem to be comfortable in the garb. He had been instructed, he said, to wait for a reply and stood patiently at a distance from Jones’s writing desk. Jones imagined that he had seen this man somewhere before, but put the thought out of his head because not even he paid much attention to the faces of lackeys. He opened and read the invitation, which had been sealed with the wax arms of the Duke of Bedford. He looked up from the invitation, crossed his legs, and asked, “Am I to be entertained at this midday soiree of caitiffs, or to provide the entertainment?”
The servant frowned, uncertain how to reply. Jones perceived a sly, offended intelligence in the blank blue eyes. “I do not know, sir,” replied the man. “His lordship did not enlighten me about the purpose of the invitation.”
Jones narrowed his eyes and hummed in thought. “Well, no matter. I have braved the entire House. I see no reason why I should endure a conclave of soused louts.” He held out the invitation. “Please inform his grace that I cannot oblige him, as I have a previous engagement with the Duchess of Britannia.” When the servant blinked in surprise, he added, “It is to a masque, you see. My hostess is to appear as Lady Liberty, and I shall go in the raiment of Algernon Sydney.” He smiled and waved the invitation once again. “His grace will understand the import of my regrets, and excuse it, if you do not.”
The messenger made an oddly pained face. “As you wish, sir.” He stepped forward, took the invitation, stepped back, bowed slightly, and said, “Good day to you, sir.” He turned smartly and left the room.
When he heard his foyer door close, Jones rose and went to his window, which faced Chancery Lane. He saw the man emerge from the apartments and step into a waiting sedan chair. Jones grabbed his cane and hat and rushed from his rooms and down the stairs to the street. Another sedan chair and two lounging porters were across the way. He handed the lead porter half a crown and instructed the pair to follow the chair that had just left. The porters lifted the conveyance before he could close its door and were off in a trot that jolted him against the backrest.
When he recovered, he observed from the window that the messenger’s chair was headed for Fleet Street, when its porters should have gone north on Chancery to Holborn, which led to the Duke’s residence. On Fleet, the porters turned right onto the Strand, and jogged straight up the darkening thoroughfare towards Charing Cross and Whitehall. Jones’s own porters pursued at a discreet distance.
Some twenty minutes later, the messenger’s chair came to a halt at the gate of Windridge Court, the walled residence of the Earl of Danvers. When his chair had been set down, the messenger stepped out, paid the lead porter, and strode through the open gate into the courtyard. He saw the man remove his hat and wig and stuff the wig into a coat pocket. Jones’s porters had slowed to a walk. Before they could come abreast of the first sedan chair, the barrister leaned out the window and ordered them to return him to Chancery Lane.
As the porters toted him back down the noisy Strand, the member for Swansditch thought it odd that he should be invited into the enemy’s camp — and falsely invited, no less. His presence at the levee would have been as flagrantly incongruous as would John Wilkes’s. During the degrading squabble over who was to follow Grenville, the Duke of Bedford and his family let it be known what kind of policy they would follow in office, one that moved beyond the status quo to become actively hostile to liberty both in England and in the colonies. Jones was certain that Bedford knew his positions on the Stamp Act, on Wilkes, on general warrants, and a host of other issues. The Earl of Danvers was in the Duke’s camp, as were his men in the Commons, Sir Henoch Pannell and Crispin Hillier. Grenville himself would likely be at the affair, and even some men who had been asked to join Rockingham’s ministry, such as Charles Yorke.
Jones tapped his chin with the cane handle in thought. He wondered what had been the purpose of the false invitation. What had the Ear
l in mind for him? Compromise, or humiliation? Had it become known by his allies in the Commons that he, Sir Dogmael Jones, had attended the Duke’s levee, he would have been compromised, for it would be assumed that some sort of voting arrangement would have been sought by him between him and the Duke’s party, with a promised reward of some kind. Further, he would surely have been humiliated, for the Duke would have had him escorted to the door, and perhaps none too gently tossed from that regal portal of preference.
The ruse had failed for a single reason, thought Jones, at least to the messenger’s mind: He had referred to his putative employer as his lordship, rather than his grace. Jones suspected that the man would keep that faux pas to himself. It had been a clever, carefully plotted prank, enacted for some devilishly important end. Its failure would greatly upset the Earl; he would be outraged if he ever learned that it had failed because his servant had had a slip of mind.
Jones shrugged as the sedan chair dipped and swayed from the porters’ exertions. He would have declined the invitation even had the Duke sent his carriage around for him. What a quaint adventure! He was so pleased with this bit of detective work that he had the porters stop outside the Lovely Ducks Tavern while he dashed inside and bought them each a flask of rum, and rewarded them at the end of their labors with another half crown.
Jones pondered the paradox of Charles Yorke. There was a man, he thought, whose commitment to liberty was skewed by ambition. He had exchanged some letters with the former and perhaps future Attorney-General since the recess on the legality of general warrants and other constitutional matters. The spare, academic, but cordial exchange convinced him that Yorke, whom he conceded possessed a fine mind and an enviable stock of legal knowledge, harbored an ambivalence on constitutional questions rooted in an ambition dependent on precedent, not principle, on the status quo in law and government, a status quo in which he had risen steadily for thirty years and which he was obsessed with preserving. Yorke, he concluded, wished to be a part of that status quo. Yorke so detested Wilkes that he had been willing to endorse the alleged legality of general warrants, when Jones knew that Yorke did not much credit his own arguments for them.