by Edward Cline
“No, Hugh. I have not seen her in months, nor written her. Nor has your father.”
“Thank you.”
Alice Tallmadge had composed a melody to go with the words of a doggerel, “Out of the Tavern.” On Twelfth Night, after supper, she entertained her family and neighbors with a performance of it on a pianoforte in the sitting room. Taking sips between stanzas from a glass of rum punch, she sang, in a pleasant, contralto voice:
Out of the tavern I’ve just stepped tonight.
Street! You are caught in a very bad light!
Right hand and left hand are both out of place!
Street! You are drunk, ’tis a very clear case!
Moon! ’tis a very queer figure you cut;
One eye is staring, while the other is shut!
Tipsy, I see, and you are greatly to blame.
Old as you are, ’tis a horrible shame!
Then the street lamps, what a scandalous sight!
None of them soberly standing upright.
Rocking and staggering! Why, upon my word!
Each of the lamps is as drunk as a lord!
All is confusion! Now isn’t it odd,
That I am the only thing sober abroad?
Sure it is rash with this crew to remain!
Better go into the tavern again!
Alice earned a round of laughter and applause from the company. While she bowed in acknowledgement, Hugh remarked to his father, who sat beside him, “What an appropriate Parliamentary psalm that would make! Amending the title, of course, to ‘Out of the Commons’! Shall I propose it to the House chaplain? I can see it now, he intoning those words for all those pious, bowed heads before they proceeded to their rancorous business!”
Garnet Kenrick smiled without humor at the jest. He had never known his son to be so bitter. He wished it were in his power to make things right for him. He wondered what Hugh would say in Parliament, when it reconvened after the holidays.
Chapter 16: The Riddle
The holiday cheer that animated men since Christmas was spent in members of Parliament by the time they reassembled in Westminster in mid-January 1775. The seasonal good will they might have bestowed upon their friends, families, neighbors, servants and tenants dissolved in a wink on the question of what to do about the rebellious North American colonies, a friendly sprite that vanished in the glum presence of niggling obstinacy and offended parochialism.
Hugh Kenrick was disconcerted by the abrupt transition from the constant benevolence of his family to the passive belligerence of the men he encountered again in the Commons. He sought to acquaint himself with those who were in the least sympathetic with the colonial cause. He found them, but soon realized that most of them were men of disparate parts; no glue held them together as a bloc, and no consistency could be found in their positions.
He vented his exasperation on his father one afternoon while they supped together in the Purgatory Tavern after leaving the Commons. “I do not understand how these people can proclaim the liberties of the colonies, but in the next breath demand that the Crown assert its authority over them at the price of suspending those liberties.”
“Have patience with them, Hugh,” cautioned his father. “They haven’t your advantage.”
Hugh scoffed. “What advantage have I?”
“You have lived a…freer life than most of your colleagues in the House. In Virginia.” Garnet Kenrick paused. “And a more valorous one, in the cause of liberty.”
Hugh smiled and nodded in acknowledgement of the compliment. “That may be said of Mr. Jones, as well.”
“Of course,” agreed his father. “Every year, I have remarked it to your mother, on the anniversary of his murder.”
“I am beginning to appreciate the contempt he held for the House.” Then he shook his head. “It is as though they had ridden on pentagonal wheels all their lives, father, and could not conceive of round ones! Or, having conceived of them, are opposed to them! They are comfortable with the vexations of conditional liberty, with the fetters and shackles of proscription and regulation, and nurture an envious resentment of anyone who does not wish to be similarly hobbled.”
“It is an appropriate riddle you posit, Hugh,” sighed the Baron, “but I fear I have no answer to it.” Garnet Kenrick’s expression brightened then. He paused to lean back in his chair and study his son with new interest, as though a mystery of his own had just been solved. “The answer to it rests in you, son. I believe it has lain there, undiscovered, all these years…from the very first,” he mused, as he remembered his six-year-old son fighting John Hamlyn to reclaim his brass top from the thief in Green Park, where the city had thronged one evening to celebrate another peace, in another age, it seemed. He paused again, and leaned closer over the table and added softly, in a confidential near-whisper, “Surely you know that a riddle is composed by its creator for an answer he already knows.” He smiled and reached over to pat his son’s shoulder. “You have the answer to that riddle, and to your others, as well. Some day, you’ll find the words. And then you may tell me.”
And Hugh was thrust back in memory to the day in Glorious Swain’s garret, after the Pippins had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to the pillory and penal servitude for a crime they did not commit. He remembered Swain, the gentle but menacing sage, telling him: “You do not know what you are. The name for you has not yet been devised. The answer lies in you, and only you can put it into the right words. Someday, you will….”
Hugh blinked in wonder at the memory, and then in astonishment for how much two men who had never met had in common. He raised his glass of ale, and in the first warm gesture he had made in weeks, said, “A toast to you, father, and to the five hundred of you who do not sit in the Commons.”
This time it was his father who stared back in astonishment, and blushed in acknowledgement of the compliment.
* * *
From that day on, Hugh had the sense that he was waiting for something to dawn on him, and that the answer depended on his diligent presence in the Commons. He did not think of it in those terms; it was a vague premonition he was unable to articulate. He sensed that when it happened, it would be momentous. He did, however, note a growing distance between himself and the men and events in the Commons, a distance measured by impatience and indifference, coupled with a reluctance to let them color his judgment of the Commons and the men who sat in it. He wondered if it was connected somehow with his estrangement from Reverdy. He initially thought the notion absurd.
He experienced that conflict when he spoke with the most promising advocate of the colonial cause in the Commons, Lord Rockingham’s man, Edmund Burke, with whom Hugh initiated a tentative and guarded acquaintance. Burke found time in his busy schedule to reciprocate the interest, chiefly because the new member for Swansditch had also represented his Virginia county in the General Assembly. In the Commons lobby Burke introduced him to Henry Cruger, a merchant and his fellow member for Bristol, the second largest commercial port in the nation. “Born in New York,” remarked Burke, “and an alumnus of King’s College there.”
Cruger, a large, garrulous man, shook Hugh’s hand. “Sir, have no fear! Mr. Burke and I shall endeavor to persuade the House to follow reason,” he said with a laugh, “he eloquently, and I plainly, in what he has called a rhetorical flanking movement, to catch the mob unawares here on both sides!”
* * *
On January 20, Hugh stood near the bar in Lords and heard Chatham introduce a motion to withdraw troops from Boston, and his speech urging reconciliation with the colonies. When Pitt touched on Boston and the coercive measurements taken against Massachusetts for the opposition there to Crown authority, he said, “The indiscriminate hand of vengeance has lumped together innocent and guilty, with all the formalities of hostility has blocked up the town, and reduced to beggary and famine thirty thousand inhabitants…. But His Majesty is advised that the union in America cannot last. Ministers have more eyes than I, and should have more ears; but
with all the information I have been able to procure, I can pronounce it a union, solid, permanent, and effectual…. ” He discussed the futility of what amounted to martial law in Massachusetts. “…Proceed not to such coercion, such prescriptions; cease your indiscriminate inflictions; amerce not thirty thousand; oppress not three millions, for the fault of forty or fifty individuals. Such severity of injustice must forever render incurable the wounds you have already given your colonies; you irritate them to unappeasable rancor. What though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers possessing valor, liberty and resistance?”
Hugh’s hopes rose when he heard Chatham proclaim: “The spirit which now resists your taxation in America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in England…and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English Constitution; the same spirit which established the great fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties — that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.”
And Chatham caused Hugh to remember the speech that Isaac Barré made in the Commons years ago in debate over the Stamp Act, a transcript of which speech Dogmael Jones had sent him. But he remembered it with regret. Chatham said, “Let this distinction remain forever ascertained: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is ours…. I recognize to the Americans their supreme unalienable right to their property, a right which they are justified in the defence of to the last extremity…. When your lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own…. I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world — that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal.”
Chatham prudently blamed the king’s ministers for the present crisis, not the king himself. After all these years, even after the Wilkes affair, the king still could do no wrong, though some men in and out of Parliament said in private that he could and had done wrong, since he had signed all the measures that were responsible for the crisis. He warned that the bad counsel he was receiving would lead to disaster. “I will not say that the King is betrayed, but I will pronounce that the kingdom is undone.”
When Chatham resumed his seat, the chamber was quiet. Hugh glanced around the place — he saw his uncle, the Earl of Danvers, seated in a line of berobed figures, all of them still as death — and thought that it was a silence of petulance, not of persuasion or speechlessness.
The motion to require General Gage to withdraw his troops from Boston was defeated in that chamber by a humiliating and telling majority.
On February 9, the Commons approved an address to the king advising him that “a state of war” existed between the mother country and the colonies. Hugh was one of a tiny minority in the House who voted against it. He accosted Edmund Burke hurrying from the House to rendezvous in Lords with his patron, Lord Rockingham. “You know, sir, that the address just endorsed by our House is an implicit recognition of American independence.”
Startled, the member for Bristol glanced at Hugh, and peered at him for a long moment through the diminished light of a cloudy day. He removed his spectacles and chewed thoughtfully on the end of one ear-catch. At length, he queried, “How so, sir?”
“America is another country, another kingdom. A nation may declare war on another nation, not on its own kith and kin,” Hugh answered. “May I ask how you voted?”
“Why, against it, of course.”
“As did I, sir. But, we erred in that action. It occurred to me just a moment ago that we ought to have voted for it.”
“Why?”
“To agree with the majority that America is another nation.”
“What novel reasoning,” mused Burke. Then he smiled grimly, and gestured with his spectacles as he replied, “Well, I shall endeavor at some future point to dissuade the majority of that notion. I am laboring on some corrective measures to introduce as resolutions. I hope you will vote for them. You could not err in endorsing them. They are the only salvation I can conceive.” He nodded once, then turned and hurried off to his appointment, leaving Hugh with the sudden certainty that the member for Bristol disapproved of that notion.
On February 22 Hugh took pleasure in voting for John Wilkes’s resolution to expunge from the House record of the last Parliament the resolution that he was incapable of sitting in the Commons. The House defeated the motion, but that event did not rob Hugh of the satisfaction. It was what Dogmael Jones would have done.
On the evening of March 22, Edmund Burke rose to speak for over three hours on why Lord North’s colonial policies were foolhardy, how those policies violated the Constitution, and how the “spirit of American liberty,” even though it might be admitted that it was at variance with the English spirit, could be accommodated with conciliation and concession. Hugh sat listening with special attention, and midway through Burke’s oratory, glanced up at the gallery to his father, and shook his head once.
In the lobby of the House, Hugh was oblivious to the jostling of him by members rushing out at the late hour for home, supper, and drink. His thoughts were abruptly broken by a jovial greeting. “Well, milord,” proclaimed a boisterous voice, “I had expected you to second Mr. Burke with a speech at least half as long as his! I must say I am very disappointed that you did not. I took particular pains to remain awake throughout his elevated oratory, tempted though I was to emulate so many of my colleagues, and stretch out over some empty seats to nap! Did you not notice that as the hours went by, Mr. Burke’s audience diminished by half?”
Hugh stopped to look at the speaker. He was so deep in his own thoughts that it took a moment for the face and name of the member for Canovan to register. With Sir Henoch Pannell stood Crispin Hillier, his uncle’s man for Onyxcombe. Hugh blinked once, then said to Pannell, “If you were indeed awake during his oration, sir, you will recall that Mr. Burke noted that ‘A great empire and little minds go ill together.’ You, sir, are another little mind, and with your fellows, you have doomed the empire. Good evening.” He brushed past Pannell and went outside to wait for his father outside the lobby.
Pannell sniffed once at the slight. “Well, what do you think of that?” he asked of his companion. “What airs! It is no wonder to me that his lordship does not like him!”
Hillier cocked his head with a wan smile. “You must own, sir, that you have the enervating habit of intruding on others’ cogitations. I myself have complained of it often enough.”
Pitt, Burke, Wilkes, and all the others who professed affection for the colonies and championed their cause, Hugh realized now, had futilely committed their allegiances between Britain and America. He could not see any of them grasping that futility. He could no longer endure witnessing that division, for it could have only one end. Because they could not reconcile the elements of that division, and because they wished to retain Crown authority over America, the logic of the events must end in a choice of force.
He recalled Burke’s assertion, early in his speech, that the colonists were not only “devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles.” He did not think that was entirely true. There was a difference between the English and American ideas of liberty. He thought that the answer to the impossibility of reconciliation — indeed, the root cause of the conflict — lay in that difference. What was it?
It was futile to imagine reconciliation, he thought, because there were two radically different and clashing notions of liberty: the notion of it handed down and preserved, in some respects
, in the Constitution, common law, and tradition; and that notion of it proclaimed by the colonies.
He was done here. He had nothing to say here. All these men would be deaf to his logic for liberty, as he had witnessed Burke and Chatham struggle to convey. The speeches of the colonies’ advocates were inexorably bound in the logic of force. He was still deep in these thoughts when his father tapped him on the shoulder outside the lobby door to let him know that he had joined him.
They walked slowly from the Commons, through Westminster Hall, to the Palace Yard to find a hackney to take them back to Chelsea. Hugh felt a dull sadness, one rooted in a profound indifference, wishing he could care, but knowing that he could not. By the time they reached the Yard, Hugh said, “I am going home, father,” he announced, “on the next available vessel.”
His father said, “But, son, you have not spoken in the Commons, as you wished to.”
Hugh could only reply, “No longer. There is nothing to say. Nothing I could say would make a difference. Even if I possessed the skill of Cicero, it would be useless there. They want to hold the colonies within the empire, but it cannot be done. And Mr. Burke noted himself that even should the Crown conquer America, what it would possess at the end would not be what it had fought for. It would be a ruined land — depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest.” He paused. “His very words. You heard him. And, even with that wisdom, the House voted against his conciliation resolutions, overwhelmingly.” He shrugged. “But, because the Crown will not be able to conquer America, that is more likely a description of this country, after the contest.”
“Yes. That is all true,” remarked Garnet Kenrick. He sighed and added with irony, “Well, I suppose you must resign the seat, and I must reelect myself to it.”
This remark caused Hugh to remember Wilkes’s diatribe against the corruption that had denied him his seat in the House, and Sir Henoch’s smug boast at Windridge Court that he could reelect himself to his own, and Jones’s disdain for the House, and his own father’s sentiments. And he remembered something else his father had said, years ago: “It is a corrupt system, our Parliament, but we shall attempt to either overcome the corruption, or make it work for us…for liberty.” He knew now that neither was possible. After listening to the debates these past months, and observing how insipid was the opposition, he concluded that he had nothing to say here, because whatever he could say, would have no effect. Corruption worked only for the corrupted; corruption could not sire its antipode, virtuous liberty.