Empire

by Edward Cline

  Turley and Curle had much in common in their characters, but neither man was eager to cultivate the other’s friendship. They remained strangers, too, for both had secrets they did not think it wise to share. Curle was a little afraid of Turley, for Turley was a mystery, a contradiction, and still a stranger to him. Turley was not afraid of Curle, whom he regarded as a sniveling, fawning toady with his own score of scandals to hide.

  When Jared Turley left, Curle clucked his tongue and said to Dolman, “There goes a wicked man, Mr. Dolman. Overflowing with himself is Mr. Hunt, I should say. I swear, I don’t know what his lordship sees in him.”

  “Perhaps, himself,” mused the steward, who quickly added, once he realized what he had said, “which is not to say that his lordship is himself wicked.”

  But it was too late. Curle narrowed his eyes and stared at Dolman. “Of course not,” he said with mocking reassurance. “You could not have meant that.”

  * * *

  Jared Turley, alias “Mr. Hunt,” caught Sir Henoch Pannell mounting a hackney at the gate of Bucklad House, and handed that man there a letter from the Earl. Pannell was on his way to the Commons, presumed that “Mr. Hunt” had waited for him to emerge, and eyed him suspiciously. “Mr. Hunt” tipped his hat, Sir Henoch nodded in acknowledgement, and the two went their separate ways. Turley engaged a sedan chair at Charing Cross, and was conveyed to the post-office, where he deposited and paid for the rest of the letters. From there he was conveyed to the Turk’s Head Tavern in Soho. He smiled in happy contentment that he had not let on to Sir Henoch that he, too, had seen the caricature in the London Weekly Journal, and chuckled in instant amusement. That he had managed to conceal his contempt for and envy of the man convinced Turley that he had some power over that corpulent member for Canovan. His success in this ruse reaffirmed his conviction that he was among the right people and a part of the natural order of things.

  At the Turk’s Head, he ordered port and cold meats, read some other newspapers, and planned the rest of his evening. He felt the need of female companionship, and knew that he would need to seek and perhaps satisfy it beyond the realm of Windridge Court; the Earl was likewise adamant that his son should not entertain himself within the walls of that realm. Although the staff of Windridge Court was at his beck and call, Turley did not trust them enough to honor a conspiracy of silence, should he have ever brought a willing lady back to his quarters. Well, there were plenty of taverns and inns that reserved rooms for just that purpose, and numerous idle ladies who could be persuaded to enter them for the price of a few glasses of brandy.

  While he was plotting the course of his evening, Jared Turley heard a man exclaim, on the other side of the partition, that the British government “approached nearest to perfection than anything that experience has ever shown us, or history has related!”

  Jared Turley smiled again, and wrung up the impudent courage to stand on his chair and peek over the partition. There he saw a huge, ungainly man holding court over a table of other men. He saw the other men nod or exclaim in agreement. He sat down again, and silently toasted the stranger with his glass of port.

  Jared Turley, factotum and servant-without-livery, did not know that the speaker was Samuel Johnson, and that the company was the regular Monday evening meeting of the Literary Club. Indeed, he did not know that such a group of men existed, and that it was a part of the country’s intellectual and literary establishment. Had he been aware of such an establishment, he would have assumed that it had little more influence over the course of history than did cricket or boxing, and that it was the diversion of men who talked and wrote. He would have scoffed at the assertion that power such as was practiced by the Earl and by men like Sir Henoch Pannell derived from or was sanctioned by men like Johnson and a host of thinkers who Turley would never discover.

  Turley was one of those men who received, without reservation and without judgment, the few scraps of ideas, tossed from the tables of such lights, as happened to come his way. He saw no conflict between the stranger’s pronouncement and the tone and content of the Earl’s letter to Sir Henoch. He did not think it was possible to draw any conclusion from these phenomena but that, laying the one thing next to the other, this was the natural order of things. The pronouncement, heard and endorsed by a younger man in that company, Edmund Burke, an intellectual who was about to become the private secretary of the man who would succeed George Grenville, was to Turley but a pouncet-box that sat atop a keg of gun powder.

  And because he did not think it necessary to project a wider grasp of men, ideas, and their roots than this, Jared Turley could not imagine that such a closure could possibly be the death of him. He could never know that Samuel Johnson would have held him in contempt, should he have contrived to engage that man in conversation, for while the “Great Cham” did not often tolerate disagreement with his pronouncements, neither did he admire servile agreement.

  PART II

  Chapter 1: The Flambeaux

  On March 8th, the House of Lords passed the Stamp Act without amendment or dissent. On the 22nd, George the Third, indisposed with illness, assented by commission the Act, which was to go into effect the following November. Two more acts, passed in May, also received his assent: the American Mutiny or Quartering Act, which required colonial legislatures to provide the army, without charge, with barracks, housing, and necessities; and the American Trade Act, which added more enumerated items to the Revenue Act of 1764, but granted the colonials leave to send iron and lumber as ballast and product to Ireland without duty. George had protested, and pressured George Grenville to revise, a stipulation in the original Quartering Act that soldiers and offices could be billeted in private homes; inns, ordinaries, taverns, and outbuildings such as barns were substituted instead, even though these, too, were private property. George sensed that such a requirement would surely rile his subjects and lead to unpleasantness. But a man who merely senses potential difficulties without further probing the cause of his uneasiness remains essentially blind to their fundamental causes. In this respect, George the Third was no more enlightened than was George Grenville.

  The unpleasantness was to be caused by another thing altogether. News of the two additional acts did not reach the colonies until long after that of the Stamp Act. Beginning in April, candles of awareness sprang up in fits and starts in every North American colony, lit by men who acted as flambeaux: moral men, thoughtful men, well-read men, selfish men, men anxious about what loomed on the horizons of their lives; men who, like Thomas Paine, were also in search of a reasonable ethic. The flambeaux of any liberal society are its thinkers, its intellectuals, men who concern themselves with the causes and character of their civilization. They can transmit the received wisdom of their age, or refine it, or become independent of it and found new schools of thought. They can sustain their society, or call for its prudent alteration, or lead it to tyranny. They can revolt against incipient tyranny, or rebel against it, or acquiesce.

  To rebel and to revolt are not synonymous actions. To rebel is to protest a power, campaign to exact certain concessions from it, fail or succeed in the effort, but in the end leave the power intact with greater or reduced legitimacy. To revolt is to throw off that power and replace it with one compatible with one’s ends.

  The flambeaux of the colonies were rebels. They did not wish to overthrow Parliament or abolish the monarchy; they could not conceive of a better polity than the one that existed. When they examined the politics of Spain, France, Germany, and even the Netherlands, they counted themselves fortunate. They merely wished to be left alone to live and prosper under the shield of Britannia. But they were not willing to become slaves. They and the candles they lit were men who were, as Colonel Barré warned insensate and indifferent minds in the Commons, “jealous of their liberties” under that shield, “ready to vindicate them if ever they were violated.” Those minds chose not to believe him. But across an ocean the flambeaux and the candles joined together to create a conflagr
ation. The brightest and most fiery flambeau burned in the Virginia House of Burgesses, spread to the other colonies, and imparted a new color to the flames that roared up in those venues of the empire. The ferocity of the conflagration took both England and its loyalists in the colonies by surprise. Parliament counted on familiar docility in the colonials; the colonials counted on a recognition of injustice and an admission of their appeals to reason. Neither was forthcoming. The result was a test of wills.

  George Grenville was dismissed from office in July, long before the Crown felt the heat of the first flames of that conflagration. He fumbled the Regency Bill by contradicting George the Third, whose bloc in the Commons altered the legislation to his own satisfaction and got it passed, much as Grenville had pushed through his Stamp Act. Even before Grenville was dismissed, wrangling had begun over who would be the next first minister. By the time Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham, was accepted as First Lord of the Treasury to replace Grenville — who went into opposition as the member for Buckingham borough — the Board of Trade, the Privy Council, members of Parliament, merchants, colonial agents, and correspondents were receiving the first reports of trouble in the colonies from colonial governors, Crown officers, colonial merchants, and worried friends. While Rockingham struggled to put together a ministry friendly to all parties, including the king, and to lure William Pitt out of seclusion and into a place in the government, half a year would pass before Parliament and the government acknowledged that they faced an open and possibly disastrous rebellion.

  * * *

  “Do you think it will mean war?”

  Jack Frake glanced up at Etáin with a bemused, startled smile, wondering what had prompted her question. Then he realized that she had been studying him as he re-read the documents before him on his desk, documents loaned to him by Hugh Kenrick. In the pile were transcripts of speeches made in the Commons, together with notes and observations made by Hugh’s friend Dogmael Jones. With the documents were a copy of the Stamp Act in the form of it sent to the House of Lords, and a copy of the caricature.

  It was late April. The Tacitus had called on Caxton the day before, bringing with it a thick parcel of correspondence for Hugh. He had come this morning to Morland and showed his friend everything in it. Jack and Hugh had talked for hours. Etáin was present for most of Hugh’s visit, but did not join in. Hugh left in mid-afternoon, and the day had passed. Jack repaired to his study to complete some plantation business. When he did not come to her for their evening stroll around the house and to the York River’s edge — a habit they had established when the evenings were pleasant — she fixed some tea and took it to the study. She recognized the documents on his desk, and, after pouring him a cup from the pot, paused to note the pensive, faraway look on her husband’s face.

  Jack asked, “Why would you think it could mean war, Etáin?”

  “It is the way you looked, just a moment ago.”

  Jack shook his head. “No, it will not mean war. Heads may be bloodied, and men threatened, and property destroyed.” He paused, and he tried to sound reassuring. “War will come, but not for some time. Not for years.”

  Etáin sat down in a chair opposite the desk. “When other men catch up with you,” she said. It was not a question.

  Jack smiled. “If you wish to put it that way.”

  “Then they will look as you just did.”

  “How did I look?”

  “Sad,” said Etáin after a moment. “Resigned. Determined.”

  “Yes,” replied Jack. “Then, there will be war.”

  Etáin pointed to the documents resting between her husband’s elbows. “I know what is in those papers, Jack. And I do not understand why it must take so long for other men to see what they mean. You can see it. And Hugh, and Mr. Reisdale, once he reads them. Even Mr. Proudlocks. You have convinced me that it can only end one way. In war.”

  Jack cocked his head in thought. “The idea has occurred to many of those others, Etáin. However, they do not believe it will be necessary. I hope it will not be necessary. Hugh’s friend in the Commons, Mr. Jones,” he said, tapping one of the pages before him with a finger, “made reference to it. Nature will, in time, persuade them of the necessity. It is a larger conflict than mere politics. Mr. Jones, I believe, understands this. Other men, such as this Colonel Barré, almost understand it.”

  “Hugh does not think war will be necessary. I heard him tell you so.”

  “That is because he knows men in England who reason as we do. He believes they can make a difference, that they can persuade Mr. Grenville and his party to recognize a folly, or a contradiction. But, to put it as you do, those same men must also ‘catch up.’” Jack smiled, almost happily, and leaned forward to read from another page. “It is a tempting belief. Listen to what Mr. Jones said to them in the Commons, Etáin. It’s wonderful. ‘For perhaps they are not Englishmen after all, but the inhabitants of another kingdom.’” He shook his head in appreciation. “That is something I would like to have been there to hear.”

  Etáin smiled in return, pleased with the sentiment, pleased that something in the ominous pile of papers could cause her husband to smile. “Mr. Jones, it would seem, has less distance to travel than most.”

  Jack nodded. “Yes. But that short distance may be the hardest ground for him to travel. And for Hugh. I do not envy them.”

  “You do not believe, though, that he can make a difference.”

  “No. Not he alone, nor a regiment of men like him. If he could, then Parliament would not have passed the act at all. This is another kingdom,” he said. He paused to grin in memory, and to look up at the framed sketches that Hugh had drawn for him, and then down to a pair of volumes on a bookshelf beneath the pictures. “This is Hyperborea, Etáin. What was the world of my friend Redmagne’s imagination was becoming a reality even while he lived. I wish he and Skelly could be here to witness its birth.”

  In the candlelight, Etáin saw the wistful, regretful look on her husband’s face. It was the first time she had heard him wish for anything. She said, “They are here, Jack. You are here.” She rose and went around the desk. She stood behind him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and rested her cheek on his hair. “They gave me you.”

  Jack raised a hand and clasped it over one of Etáin’s. “I loved those men,” he said quietly.

  “As you should have,” said Etáin. “As you still do, my north. They did not die in vain. You are here. You brought their spirit with you, here. It was transported as much as you were. There is no distance to be traveled between you and them.” She paused. “Nor between us.”

  He remembered the day when the Sparrowhawk sailed from Falmouth, and he wore an iron collar around his neck, and he stood on the deck, watching England drift away. He gripped Etáin’s hand in gratitude and acknowledgment.

  They remained like that for a while.

  Etáin asked, after a moment, “What are you thinking?”

  Jack said, “When I was with Colonel Massie and General Braddock in Pennsylvania, there was a British officer who rode back into that carnage after the army had fled across the river. He was brave, and rode back for a very strange reason. It was not to rescue any of his fellows; that was beyond hope, for they were all dead or dying, or the wounded among them were being dispatched by the Indians by then. He rode back among the looting, scalping, screaming savages, over all the mounds of redcoats, through all the abandoned baggage wagons and artillery, to retrieve a single thing.”

  “What?”

  “His regiment’s day book. That was all. And he came back with it, without a scratch.”

  “That was a brave act. What made you think of that?”

  Jack shook his head slightly. “It’s a measure of the determination of what may be our future enemies. Of what we may need to face, now, and in the future. And they will want to salvage an empire.” He paused, and changed the subject. “Hugh will speak in the House next month. He will give Barret at the Courier
a copy of the act to publish in the next issue.” He picked up the caricature and studied it. “That, and this. Also, he met a man during the last session who plans to run for burgess. He’s planning something with that person. He would not tell me what. You heard him. He will not even confide with Mr. Cullis.”

  “He will speak against the act?”

  Jack chuckled. “Most assuredly, he will speak against it. He asked that we be there to hear him and to witness what they have planned together.”

  “Who is this other man?”

  “I know only that he is from Hanover, or Louisa County. Hugh mentioned his name: Patrick Henry. I think he was the one who was mixed up in that parson’s suit some years ago.” Jack turned, put his hands on Etáin’s waist, and sat her on his lap. “In the meantime, I will send for Mr. Reisdale, and Mr. Vishonn, and the others, and make my own speeches. Explain to them in my own words what this act means, and what they must think of doing.”

  “What must they think of doing?”

  “As a beginning, teach our ‘mother country’ that she needs us more than we need her.” Jack paused, then added, “If that lesson is accomplished, the next one will be to enlighten our friends here, to move them to examine more closely those needs, and to spurn them.”

  Etáin ran a lingering hand over her husband’s face. Gone from his eyes now were the sadness and resignation; only the determination remained. She thought that she would like Hugh to make a sketch of Jack’s face as it looked now.

  Jack was almost oblivious to his wife’s loving scrutiny. He said, more to himself than to her, “Even should we successfully defy this act, we would remain captives of the Crown.” He reached over again for the caricature and waved it once in the air. “You were right about Mr. Jones, Etáin. He has less distance to travel. He captured our predicament precisely. He knows.”

  Etáin took the caricature from his hand and studied it. “Yes, he did. But who is the sleeping man here?” she asked. “I heard you and Hugh laughing about him.”