Empire

by Edward Cline

  After bidding last goodbyes to his friends, Henry urged his lean mount on and rode back down Duke of Gloucester Street and into the late afternoon sun. As he passed Bruton Church, he broke into a canter.

  The group stood watching his dwindling figure. George Johnston remarked, “Gentlemen, there goes a weave of the best of us.”

  * * *

  A celebration by the victorious burgesses was held in one of the taverns that night, with fiddlers, country dancing, and an open table of food and punch. A ball at the Governor’s Palace marked the closing of the session. Hugh was invited to both occasions, but attended neither, instead having a supper with his friends in another inn. Here he was regaled by John Ramshaw and Wendel Barret, and granted respectful deference by Jack Frake, Etáin, and Proudlocks. For a reason he could not understand, but for which he chided himself, he was glad, for once, when the time came for them to part, to leave their company.

  When he returned to Mary Gandy’s house near the College late that night, he encountered Edgar Cullis, and wondered about the fickle power of oratory. His colleague meekly announced that he was returning to Caxton in the morning with his father.

  Hugh felt a pang of insult — he was certain that Cullis was afraid of him now — and said, before he could check himself, “I had not intended to reproach you, Mr. Cullis. Not this afternoon, and not now.”

  “You have no right to rebuke me, sir!” snapped Cullis, his eyes flashing angrily. “I voted with my conscience, and that is my business!”

  “Of course,” said Hugh. “But there are two more resolves to introduce.” He paused. “And I heard some talk outside the Capitol about a motion to reconsider the fifth. We are counting on your presence.”

  Cullis shook his head. “I cannot endorse it or the last resolves.” He looked away from Hugh. “Neither will I oppose them.”

  “Very well,” said Hugh. “We will not discuss the matter further.”

  The same speech that could convince some men of a truth and to act on it, he thought, could dissuade others. With the latter, it was not an issue of denying the truth of a thing, but of rebelling against or fearing the conditions necessary to pursue and uphold it, that could cause a man to oppose what he knew was right. He studied Cullis for a moment. The older man sat at the kitchen table, reading a pocket Bible by candlelight. He turned and left him alone, went to his own room, lit some candles, and took out his writing instruments for the task of transcribing Henry’s and his own words in the House today, as well as others spoken in that modern coliseum.

  In the midst of copying what he could remember of Peyton Randolph’s speech, Hugh paused. The truth of one thing would not leave his mind; it had not left it all day. It was his apology to Robinson. It had more than dampened his elation over the victory; it nearly drowned it. He agreed with Henry that an apology by him would have somehow diluted the importance of the resolves, that an apology by Henry himself would likely have given Randolph and the others an excuse to insist on a tempering of the resolves’s language. Hugh did not hold Henry responsible for the necessity of an apology, and would not score him on his inability or refusal to make one. The man had authored the resolves and chosen to risk making himself an object of enmity to accomplish their adoption.

  Hugh understood now why he had been uncomfortable when Henry had ascribed courage to him, why he had been glad to leave the company of his friends this evening. Jack, Etáin, Ramshaw, Proudlocks, and Barret had all looked at him over supper and conversation with more than admiration, with a new esteem he was unable to identify. He resented the granting of that esteem, for what he felt was shame. The nature of the apology troubled him to the core. It had required words, words employed in an expression of dishonesty to protect the honest words of the resolves. It was a lie, he thought, uttered to foster and advance a truth.

  Courage? he scoffed, throwing down his pencil, for an answer to his uneasiness was beginning to dawn on him. He pondered the many forms of courage that that virtue could take. He thought of his friend Roger Tallmadge, picking up the King’s Colors at Minden, and in so doing attracting the enemy’s fire. He thought of Glorious Swain, rushing to protect him on the Charing Cross pillory. Of Jack Frake, on the Sparrowhawk, fighting a French privateer, of grappling with Indians at the Braddock disaster. He thought of Henry today, hurling defiance back at his accusers. He thought of so many instances of courage, but could not convince himself that his own action deserved a place in that family of distinction.

  In time, he remembered the day he refused to apologize to the Duke of Cumberland.

  He fell back in his chair with a cry of pain, struck by the justice of the memory. He sobbed once in protest. Who am I to be called courageous? he thought. Who am I to cite Socrates on virtue, to lecture anyone on words and moral certitude? Who am I to despise cringers and cowards? In one thoughtless moment, I rushed to speak a lie! There was no sincerity in my words, and everyone knew it, everyone knew the purpose of my lie, and I committed a fraud in my own mind and in the minds of those who heard those words! I hated every word I spoke then, and every effort to speak them, yet some maddened, desperate impulse drove me on! Was that courage? What else could Henry have meant by my courage, except that lie? And he and the others saluted me for it!

  He tried to reconcile courage, honor, and his soul, and could not. The blatant fraud of the lie would not let him. I have abased myself, he concluded. Dishonored myself, besmirched my own worth, betrayed that which I once was! I have begun my own corruption, allowed its incubus to begin its work! What I did was a willful choice to bow, to submit, to offer my neck to an unseen sword! If courage was often an unpremeditated act of bravery, how can my life conform to that description?

  Hugh’s mind whirled and tossed in shifting concentric circles of logic and self-reproach that would merge, then fly apart, and duel each other for supremacy over and over again. The resolves were saved, but at what price? He could not think clearly about the apology and a guilt he had never before experienced.

  He stopped pacing when he heard a knock on his door, and was astonished to see that he was on his feet, and had been pacing. He frowned, went to the door, and opened it, expecting to see Cullis. Instead, standing in the diminished candlelight, he saw Jack Frake.

  Jack looked at him with an odd, almost compassionate expression. Hugh heard him say, “Mr. Cullis heard you moving about, and sent me up.” Then Hugh found himself sitting on his bed, and Jack seated opposite him, watching him with intimate concern. Hugh felt a burning sensation on his cheeks, and realized that it was tears, and that his chin and neck were moist with them. The room seemed brighter now; Jack had relit or replaced the candles that had gone out.

  Hugh asked, “Why are you here?”

  “I was…worried about you,” said Jack. “So was Etáin.”

  “Why?”

  “I suspected what it must have cost you, to make that apology to Robinson and the House. I could see it as you spoke today. So could Etáin.”

  “How…could you know…before I knew…?”

  “It was the way you spoke, Hugh. It was not your usual manner.” Jack paused to search for words. “You spoke with a difficulty which you disguised in a…slow, measured pace. You had spoken just before Mr. Henry. It was easy to note the difference, and to guess the cause.” Jack shrugged. “Well, they got their damned apology, but I believe that, in the end, it will be worth less to them than an unsigned tobacco note. But we both presumed that you know you were trying to save the resolves — which I believe you did — and that your apology for Henry was worth even less to you.” Jack smiled briefly. “And then, I remembered something. Your reticence tonight with us — or what Etáin calls a ‘tell-tale shyness’ — it told us that you were not happy with what you thought necessary to do. We had expected to see your wonderfully arrogant self tonight. Instead, we found ourselves toasting a man of reluctant modesty. Only we knew that it was not modesty that could explain why you were so…quiet.” He shook his head. “We knew that
you were troubled, and were certain why.”

  “What did you…remember?” asked Hugh.

  “What you told me about you and the Duke of Cumberland.”

  Hugh leaned forward, and each word he spoke was enunciated as though he wished it was a rod that whipped him. “I committed a crime worse than the treason they accused Mr. Henry of!” he exclaimed. He closed his eyes in agony. “The great thing that was accomplished today — it depended on a lie! And I spoke it! I cannot forgive myself…. ”

  “You gave them what they wanted, pitiful thing that it was,” remarked Jack. “And I am not convinced that this great thing — and it is a great thing, Hugh, the first of many great things, I think — I am not convinced that it needed a lie.” Jack seemed to smile again. “I am not certain that Randolph and the others were prepared to hold the resolves hostage until an apology was paid.” He reached over and put a reassuring hand on Hugh’s shoulder. “Here is the most important thing, my dear friend, and it concerns you and you alone: When you spoke then, you were risking, not your life to save those resolves, but your soul. I had not seen that kind of courage before, not that kind of honor, not that kind of devotion. That…makes you a kind of brother to me, you see. When you spoke the apology, I also envied you the chance to speak it. I envied you the chance, but not the pain.” Jack gripped Hugh’s shoulder and shook it. “The pain, Hugh. I suppose it is a natural thing to feel. But Randolph and Robinson and the others, they could not wound you. You wound yourself. You should not belittle or chastise or punish yourself over the matter.” He paused. “You will collect yourself again, Hugh. If brave men survive their risks, that is all they can do. We honor their memory, if they perish, for we are the heirs of their bravery. And we honor them if they do not, for then we are their beneficiaries, and we can enjoy their company.”

  Hugh asked, “How can you know I will collect myself?”

  Jack smiled sadly, let go of Hugh’s shoulder, and looked away. “I did…after I hanged my friends at Falmouth…. I collected myself before I did that. Before we were separated…before I was taken from the jail and put into that orphanage with bars, Skelly and Redmagne remarked that if they were going to be hanged — and they were certain they would be — they agreed to request that they be hanged together. That was how I knew what I must do…and I was not certain then that I had the courage to do it…. ” Jack seemed to be gazing at a time and place of long ago.

  “Oh, Jack!” whispered Hugh. He stared at his friend, and sat in amazed wonder for the man who could be what he was, a man who some would claim was an accomplice in the murder of Augustus Skelly and Redmagne. Yet here he was, a man with the cleanest soul he had ever known. “Can you forgive me for having forgotten that…?”

  Jack shook his head. “There’s nothing to forgive, Hugh. That was my crisis. This is yours.” He smiled again, then reached inside his coat and took out a folded slip of paper. He handed it to Hugh. “Etáin wanted you to have this. She made me wait while she copied it out. Thinking she would be bored with the House’s business, she brought along one of the books you brought her from London. The works of Thomas Browne. She does not think much of what he writes, but she did find that.” He patted Hugh’s shoulder once more, then rose. “I was right to come here. I bid you goodnight. Your friends look forward to seeing you in the House tomorrow.”

  Hugh smiled weakly. “Yes…. Mr. Henry has gone home.”

  “That should not make a difference, even should Randolph and the others manage to gut his resolves.”

  “Gut them they will try,” mused Hugh. He rose and saw Jack to the door, and shook his hand. “Thank you for coming…Jack,” he said. “It has made a difference…. ”

  He waited until Jack’s footsteps faded away, then returned to the table and opened Etáin’s message. He smiled in gratitude as he read an excerpt from Browne’s essay, “The Heroic Mind”:

  “…Where true fortitude dwells, loyalty, bounty, friendship, and fidelity may be found…. Small and creeping things are the product of petty souls…. Pitiful things are only to be found in the cottages of such breasts. But bright thoughts, clear deeds, constancy, fidelity, bounty, and generous honesty are the gems of noble minds…. ”

  This was followed by Etáin’s signature. That was all.

  Chapter 12: The Old Guard

  That same cloudy, rain-threatening evening, several older House members, and a trio of Council members, met in joyous desperation outside the gate of the Governor’s Palace before they presented themselves and their wives at the ball.

  “Henry has left!”

  “Thank God!”

  “How careless of him!”

  “What hubris!”

  “Support for those resolutions must now collapse!”

  “Well, not quite collapse, as be reduced in strength.”

  “We must persuade those who are left to change their votes. Especially on the fifth resolution. And to agree to a modification of the language of the first four.”

  “Yes…. But I understand that they have two more to introduce.”

  “Let them be read, and even debated! If the House reverses itself on the fifth, those last two, which must be as seditious as the fifth, will fall with it!”

  “Is there a precedent for the House changing its mind on resolutions it has already adopted? I cannot recollect.”

  “On resolutions, I think not. But I am sure that something of the sort was done on a minor matter. We must conform to established practice. We must scour the journals for a precedent.”

  “And if no precedent is to be found…?”

  “Then we must make one, damn it all! We cannot allow those resolutions to go to Parliament and the Board of Trade as they stand!”

  “Why the hugger-mugger over a hotchpotch of articles, sirs? I don’t see that their style can make a difference. Very likely, the Commons committee that receives them will consign them to unread oblivion, or use them to wrap engraved plate to present to His Majesty as a token of mutual comity.”

  “Need I point out, sir, that these resolutions, in their present form, are just a rung or two short of…a declaration of independence from the Crown?”

  “This is true, sir. We want to communicate a statement of legitimate grievance and natural kinship, not a…petition for divorce!”

  “A declaration of independence, did you say? How rude a notion! We don’t want anyone to believe that that is what we are up to. God save us from the very idea! It is a notion to be discouraged at all costs. Why, recall what happened to the Netherlands when those provinces revolted against Spain and cocked their noses at Philip the Second! Their complaints were likewise legitimate, and the petition of redress the nobles presented was likewise ignored, and many of its signers executed. There are some lessons from history to be heeded here, sirs!”

  “I do recall, sir. But the Netherlands won their independence.”

  “After eighty years of misery and war and strife between brother and brother and the Spaniards, too. We should not mount our own hubris and presume that we would be exempt from such a phenomenon.”

  “Well put, sir. But enough talk about what we all agree is a treasonous absurdity! Here is what must be done. Two or three of our party have also left for their homes, and three or four of Henry’s, as well. Before the bell tomorrow morning, we must invite a few of these remaining hot-heads to the committee room and sponge their brows with some cool advice…. ”

  It was only when a strategy had been agreed on, and tasks assigned, that the group’s members breathed easier and allowed themselves to rejoin their wives and the company inside the Palace.

  * * *

  The Chevalier d’Annemours arrived early the next morning to ensure that he found a better place from which to observe the remarkable proceedings than he had had yesterday. He noticed a tall, red-headed youth pacing in the arcade that linked the two halves of the Capitol, and recalled him from the day before as the person who was subjected to the unprovoked outburst by the very substant
ial Attorney-General, Monsieur Randolph, who had also nearly bowled him off his feet and stepped on the toes of other gentlemen on his way out. The Chevalier approached the young man and introduced himself as Alphonse Croisset, commercial agent. The Frenchman had been very careful to maintain that deception throughout his sojourn in the colonies, for one slip of the tongue could get him into trouble with the English government, which, if it ever got wind of his true mission here, could have him locked up as a spy. And rightly so.

  Croisset tried to strike up a friendly conversation with the youth about the House and the drama they had both witnessed the day before, but there was a faraway look in the lad’s eyes, and his replies were distracted and his queries merely courteous. He was helpful, though, and accompanied the inquisitive visitor into the chamber to explain some of the features and functions of the place. They found another person in there, however, sitting at the Clerk’s table. “Excuse me, sir,” said the youth, who then left the side of his companion, passed the railing, and walked up to the lone, richly dressed person.

  This large, florid-faced person was Peter Randolph, Surveyor-General of the southern colonies and a member of the Council, and also a distant cousin of Thomas Jefferson. He was rapidly turning the pages of a bound, oversized tome that was one of the House journals. Jefferson greeted him, and inquired about his purpose.

  Peter Randolph sighed. “Searching for a time when this House negatived its own determination, or at least changed its mind on some matter.”

  “To what end, sir?”

  Randolph shook his head. “To put a stop to some very disturbing business, Master Thomas.”

  Jefferson frowned. “The resolves?”

  Randolph nodded. “Only one. Perhaps others. We shall see.”

  Jefferson did not reply. He stood looking over his cousin’s shoulder as the man pored though one tome, then another. The Surveyor-General did not stop his perusal until he noticed, with some embarrassment, that the public space was filling up with spectators, and that John Randolph and his clerks had arrived and were waiting to prepare the table for the day’s sitting. He put the last tome in its place beneath the table and, without a word to Jefferson or anyone else, rose and left the chamber.