by Edward Cline
“No, your honor,” replied Hugh. “I will only say that a man fell from his grace as a rational being, or at least demonstrated that he had never attained that state.”
Fauquier blinked once at this reply, and saw that Hugh would not elaborate or explain his answer. “I see,” said the Lieutenant-Governor. “My sympathies, sir. May you heal quickly.”
John Robinson, standing in the center of the burgesses, would not look at Hugh, for he now regretted having dismissed the necessity of apologizing to this young man for his father-in-law’s criminal behavior, both in the House and outside it. His glance fell in the discomfiture of shame.
Hugh Kenrick did not look in his direction. Many of the other burgesses did, in critical appraisal, for news of the assault had spread around the town. They wondered now if the Speaker would try to make amends.
Fauquier shook the incident from his mind, and continued, looking briefly at George Wythe, Peyton Randolph, and the Speaker with ironic disappointment. “I had hoped that wisdom and prudence would prevail in the House over these resolutions. Instead, rash anger and thoughtless bravado seem to have triumphed. So, on that regretful note, and because the House has completed its chores, it is my duty to dissolve the Assembly until November first next, and you are so dissolved. Let us pray that the next Assembly is a more…pacific one. Good morning to you, gentlemen, and Godspeed you back to your homes.”
Fauquier rose, and the seven Council members rose with him. The Lieutenant-Governor said, “God save the King!”
“God save the King!” answered the burgesses and Council members in unison.
Chapter 14: The Solecisms
That evening, in the solitude of his Palace annex office, to the steady, soothing patter of rainfall beyond his open window, Francis Fauquier labored over the draft of a report to the Board of Trade about the state of the colony, new legislation he had signed, and other matters of special interest to the Lords. Among those other matters were the trouble over the murdered Cherokees, the resolutions passed by the House, and the question of John Robinson’s reelection as burgess for King and Queen County, which virtually guaranteed his reappointment as Speaker and Treasurer. The continued union of those two offices was a situation frowned upon by the Lords of Trade, and one they had been for some time hinting that Fauquier move to correct. He hoped that the Lords would allow his stalwart, loyal friend to continue in that dual role.
Robinson’s reelection, though, never before in doubt, was now doubtful, because of the dramatic — and for Fauquier, the near-traumatic — actions taken by the House over the Stamp Act. The Governor dipped his quill and wrote, “There having happened a small altercation” — he paused here, then struck out “altercation” and substituted “alteration,” for he did not wish to overly alarm the Lords — “alteration in the House, there was an attempt to strike all the resolutions off the Journals. The fifth, which was thought the most offensive, was accordingly struck off, but it did not succeed as to the other four.”
He recalled with some irony the ardent assurances by George Wythe and John Robinson in a private audience that the resolves could and would be defeated. He would not blame them now for failing to keep that promise. “I am informed,” he wrote, recalling the brief meeting he had with Wythe, Randolph, and Robinson early this morning before the burgesses began to appear in the House, “the gentlemen had two more resolutions in their pocket, but finding the difficulty they had in carrying the fifth, which was by a single vote, they did not produce them. The more strenuous opposers of this rash heat were the Speaker, the King’s Attorney, and Mr. Wythe, but they were overpowered by the young, hot, and giddy members. In the course of the debates, I have heard that very indecent language was used by a Mr. Henry…. ”
Fauquier glanced at a sheet of paper that was on a corner of his desk. A flickering candle near it allowed him to read some of the words on it. It was a copy of the four resolves that Mr. Randolph’s committee had striven to recast in less offensive language. They had tried, he knew, to accommodate him and the Crown. But, he thought, how much could one tamper with and modify the features and purpose of a musket, and at the end of the experiment still be able to call the thing a musket? They had even, for some reason unfathomable to him, inserted the words “liberties” and “franchises” in the body of the first resolve, where they had not originally occurred, according to Mr. Wythe. Fauquier could only conclude that these conscientious, able men were exhausted by the time they had completed their joint effort. Mr. Randolph had further volunteered this morning that, concerned about the legal ramifications of the resolves and the evidence of their adoption in the House Journal, he had arranged to have removed from it the page that contained the talleys of yesterday’s votes and all mention of debate on the Stamp Act. What loyalty! thought Fauquier. What caution! What prudence!
Fauquier completed the draft to the Board, and after a glass of brandy, turned to the slightly pleasanter task of writing to his friend George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax, president of the Board of Trade when Fauquier was appointed Lieutenant-Governor. His friend was now Secretary of State for the Southern Department. In this report he opined that the resolves did not reflect the “sullen mood” of the colony, but rather that the obdurate character of its citizens was due instead to the post-war depression, the ever-growing debt to British creditors, and the scarcity of specie with which to pay those debts and any within the colony itself. This situation, he wrote, “renders them uneasy, peevish, and ready to murmur at every occurrence.”
Because his office did not permit him to attend the House when it was in session — he could set foot in it only on the House’s invitation — the Governor relied almost exclusively on verbal reports of its actions and behavior from Wythe, Robinson, and Randolph. If he had been able to sit with the spectators over the past two days, he might have seen a link between the reaction of the public to the debates over the resolves and all those other attributed causes of disaffection. It never occurred to him that perhaps the information on which he based many of his own observations was skewed, biased, and even false. He had implicit faith in the veracity of all that was told him by his esteemed informants. If they claimed that the last two resolves had never been introduced, he would never doubt the truthfulness of the claim. And this particular truth meshed harmoniously with his desire to impress the Board and Lord Halifax with the loyalty of the House’s leadership. He was fearful of many things: the wrath of the Board, of George Grenville, of the Privy Council, and of Parliament, when the resolutions at last came into their hands; of the retribution that the colony of Virginia might suffer as a result of that wrath; of the blame that would likely be attached to him for the whole affair.
And so he softened in his reports the harsh news he had for all those powers in faraway London. It was absolutely imperative that he attempt to assuage his own doubts, fears, and reservations. He toyed with the idea of appending to his report to the Board a request to take a leave of absence so that he could return to England for his health and personal business, but decided to delay that plea until he received an answer to the reports.
A question popped unexpectedly into his mind just as the floor clock struck one-thirty in the morning and prompted him, with a yawn and a stretch, to decide to end his labors for the day: What the devil had Hugh Kenrick meant by that cryptic explanation of his injury? He shook his head once to rid his mind of the fuzz that seemed to be accumulating in it. But it was no use; the thought-clogging fuzz simply remained. He rose, extinguished all the candles and sconces, closed the window, and left his office.
* * *
A few days later, while the Governor’s secretary was putting the final touches on the Lieutenant-Governor’s reports to the Board of Trade and Lord Halifax, the Chevalier d’Annemours, who had left Williamsburg to continue on his tour, stopped with some other travelers at a tavern in Newcastle on the Pamunkey River to escape a downpour. Already tired of the constant talk of the Stamp Act, of Patrick Henry, of how none of
them would pay a farthing for a stamp, of how each of them would give his life to protect Henry should he be threatened by the Crown — and also because he did not want to chance being invited to join another card or dice game — he excused himself from his itinerant company and took a table by himself in the crowded, noisy tavern and began to transcribe his hastily taken notes into his diary.
His three days in Williamsburg were the chief subject, and his memory of the sequence of events and the particulars of those events was by now a little foggy, for there was so much to remember and he did not understand the half of it. He expanded his notes and recorded, as best he could in his imperfect English, his impressions of the debates and the moods of the men who participated in them, getting some things wrong, and often, without knowing it, contradicting what was being asserted as fact in the Lieutenant-Governor’s official reports.
He recorded, among other things, that Henry apologized for having insinuated that George the Third was, or could become, a tyrant, while Francis Fauquier made no mention of an apology, for either he was not informed that Henry or anyone else had made one; or, he was informed, and thought it wiser to omit mention of the whole incident. Treason and murder were capital offenses under Crown law, and Fauquier, as viceroy and chief justice of the colony, would certainly have felt it his duty to exercise his authority to rule that, in this instance, Henry was not protected by House immunity from immediate arrest.
So, given that the Board of Trade invariably found fault with Fauquier’s performance, and that Fauquier himself was always alert to ways in which to ingratiate himself with the Lords of Trade, it is a paradox that he did not pursue this serious matter — and pursuing it would assuredly have earned him applause from the Lords of Trade, and perhaps even a special acknowledgment from the king — and limited himself in the report to an oblique reference to the incident, naming “Mr. Henry,” but neither reporting the content of his “indecent language” nor mentioning that he had apologized by proxy for employing it. Perhaps the John Wilkes affair in the Commons over The North Briton left a bad taste in his mind, and he did not wish to repeat such a tumult here. Or perhaps one or all of his informants — Wythe, Randolph, and Robinson — chose to keep him in the dark concerning the details, unsure about how their otherwise amiable Governor might react to them.
It is more than likely that the details of Henry’s transgression were withheld from him. The Chevalier also noted in his diary that the seventh resolve was the subject of “very hot debates”; the knowledgeable Governor reported to the Board that it and the sixth were never introduced. The Chevalier harbored no animus for Patrick Henry, nor any for that man’s enemies; their politics fascinated him only in the abstract. He had nothing to gain by lying or misrepresenting what he had witnessed. He recorded Henry’s apology, or what he believed was his apology, in the spirit of a neutral observer. And the Governor, who either feared telling the whole truth, or did not have the whole truth to tell, merely reported, from a severely abridged perspective, what had been told him by trusted informants and loyal advocates of the status quo.
Had Fauquier and the Chevalier been given the opportunity to compare each other’s reports, they would undoubtedly have noted these and other discrepancies, and wondered how to account for them. On one hand, they might have ended their meeting by trading epithets of liar, fool, and imbecile; on the other, the friendly jousts of faro and loo between Fauquier and Wythe over brandy and good conversation might have altogether ceased, and the Frenchman have left Williamsburg with jolly contempt for the English.
“Alphonse Croisset” completed his tardy diary entries that evening, having courteously rebuffed invitations to cards, and retired to his paid quarters in the tavern. In the morning, after a sleep made fitful by the loud gambling and carousing of the Virginians downstairs, he continued his journey through the dampened countryside, trading mounts and hitching rides on wagons and sulkies as he went, and crossing innumerable streams and rivers. So much of Virginia reminded him of rural France; so many of the great planter estates reminded him of rural England.
Days later, he stopped for a while in the charming capital of Annapolis, Maryland, to note the customs and temper of the people there, and to observe the legislature, which he noted was more rowdy and less beholden to form and dignity than was that of Virginia. In his hurry, though, to catch a ferry across the Bay and to make his way to Philadelphia, he left behind in his lodgings his diary, and did not miss it until days later he searched for it in his traveling bag in order to record his impressions of the most populous city in the colonies. He slapped his forehead first in astonishment for his oversight, again with a sense of loss, and a third time in anger. “Enfer et damnation! Je suis un idiot!”
* * *
“I shall want a few for Mr. Talbot in Philadelphia,” said Hugh. “And a few for Mr. Easley there, also.”
He stood in Wendel Barret’s shop in Caxton, holding a sheet of paper in his hand, and read again with a smile the banner above the seven neatly printed resolves: Resolves Adopted by the Virginia House on May 31, 1765, in Answer to the Recent Stamp Act. Above him, pinned to and dangling from a length of twine strung across the room, were a dozen copies of the document, hung out to dry and wafting in a breeze from an open window. Barret and his apprentices, their faces and aprons smeared with ink, worked feverishly on the press as they printed more copies. One of the apprentices, who was his orphaned grandson, would insert a blank sheet of paper in the bed, Barret would pull on the lever to press the assembled type over and onto it, then lever the press back so that the second apprentice, a younger black slave boy, could remove it and add it to the twine.
Hugh glanced again at the first resolve, searched his memory, then said to the Courier’s publisher, “Mr. Barret, there is a discrepancy in the first resolve. Not a serious one. ‘Liberties’ and ‘franchises’ have been inserted in your version here. They do not occur in the copy I gave you.”
Barret paused long enough to reply, “After I had pressed the first twenty copies, I noted an inconsistency, sir. The words you cite occur in the second resolve, but not in the first. So, I took the liberty of restoring them to their proper place. ’Tis my privilege and franchise as an editor, sir, and I challenge you to contest the inconsistency I have corrected. The first and second resolves are now married!”
Hugh regarded the printer for a moment, then burst out laughing. He shook his head and replied, “You are forgiven the liberty, Mr. Barret, and please forgive me for sounding now like the king. You were right to correct the oversight.”
Barret beamed in triumph, and renewed his task on the press.
Chapter 15: The Soldiers
Hugh Kenrick returned to Meum Hall. He had not liked leaving it for so long a period, and so managed it from Williamsburg with all the attention to detail he exhibited when he inspected his fields.
For a while after his return, however, he was barely aware of Meum Hall, barely aware of his staff as they went about their duties. It was not until he had completed every task associated with the Stamp Act resolves — posting Barret’s copies of the resolves to Talbot and Easley in Philadelphia and copies to his father and Dogmael Jones in England, bidding Captain Ramshaw a safe voyage on the Sparrowhawk when it left Caxton and sailed back down the York River, and finishing his transcriptions of the key speeches in the House — that he felt free to devote his full attention to Meum Hall. And it was only then, when he stopped to rest for a moment before moving on to the next task, and realized that there was no more to do, that he felt the odd feeling that he was in a strange and alien place. He emerged from his obsession to wonder who was the Hugh Kenrick who lived here and commanded the staff.
He dismissed the feeling, attributing it to tiredness, and inspected Meum Hall from top to bottom, from the water tower to Hove Stream. The gutters along the roof had been cleaned, and the branches of the trees near them trimmed. The lead pipes to the kitchen and some of the rooms in the great house from the water tower had be
en installed and tested, and basins for them built and put in place. The water tower itself was now virtually leak-free.
In the fields, the tobacco was nearly a foot high, the rye and wheat were nearly ready to be cradled, the corn and oats were coming up, and the patch crops of hemp and flax were doing well. Henry Zouch had almost completed the order for bricks for the merchant’s warehouse near Richmond; several neat piles of them lined the sides of the brickyard. The conduit had been repaired and assembled, and sat in the fields waiting to be used; the ground was still damp from the most recent rain.
Meum Hall was in better condition than he had expected. Every order and instruction he had given from afar had been carried out. He began the long day of inspection with the confidence that, by day’s end, he would reclaim his sense of ownership of the place. But before Mrs. Chance served him his favorite meal in the supper room that evening, he still felt that something was missing. He felt uneasy about himself, and, at the same time, at peace. He remembered now that the staff and tenants had welcomed him back with some enthusiasm; it was only now that he felt touched by the reception. They had all heard that he played an important role in some great event in the General Assembly; he did not know that they had observed his obsession, and were refraining from asking him questions about the session until they felt it was proper to ask them.
He happened to glance up from the supper table at the group portrait of his family on the wall, and for a moment did not recognize his father, mother, sister, and their servants. In anger with the phenomenon, he pounded the table once with a fist. This should not be, he thought. What is wrong with me?
He went to the library to unpack the crate of books, clothing, and other things that had arrived before he journeyed to Piney Slash to see Patrick Henry. He noticed only now that the crate was gone. He rang for Spears, his valet, and asked him for an explanation. Spears replied that the books had been put up on the shelves, the clothing added to the wardrobe and clothes press, and the plate and silverware stocked in the kitchen.