SH03_Sparrowhawk: Caxton

by Edward Cline

  Hugh turned to Effney Kenrick, saw the admiring worship in her eyes for him, and embraced her. “But you, mother, are as beautiful as ever!”

  She returned the embrace. “My magnificent son!”

  Hugh espied Runcorn and Bridgette over his mother’s head. He disengaged, went to them, and shook the former valet’s hand before the man could protest. Runcorn blinked at the gesture, and blinked again when Hugh bussed a startled, blushing Bridgette on the cheek.

  Then a man stepped into the foyer from a room that adjoined it. He was a lean, elegantly dressed man with more silver in his hair than had Garnet Kenrick, tied in back with a plain ribbon. A pockmarked face and intense black eyes, however, made him look feral and dangerous. Under one arm he held his hat, in the other hand a silver-knobbed, silver-tipped mahogany cane.

  Hugh frowned in surprise and the effort of recognition. “Mr. Jones…?”

  Sir Dogmael Jones, barrister, serjeant-at-law at the King’s Bench, reader of law at the Serjeants’ Inn, and now a bencher or manager of that Inn, nodded in greeting. “Sir Dogmael Jones,” he said, “though mister will suffice, milord.”

  Hugh went to him and offered his hand in greeting. Jones glanced once at it, smiled, then shifted his cane to his other hand so that he could clasp the one offered him. As he shook it, he said, “Welcome home, milord Danvers. Your apparent excellent health and vigorous presence of mind substantiates what your father has told me about you, which is that you have met with much success in Virginia.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Hugh. He studied for a moment the man who had defended his friends in court years ago. “You, too, are looking much wiser.”

  Jones grinned. “Wiser — and bolder. As are you, milord.” He put on his hat, and turned to address Garnet Kenrick. “Milord, I shall take my leave now. I will not intrude upon this occasion.”

  The Baron shook his head. “No, sir. Stay. We have a spare room.”

  Jones shook his head in turn. “Thank you, milord, but, no. I have business I should see to in the City. My protégé there needs counseling on how to present to his students the matter of public places and the laws that govern them. I shall return on the morrow, if that is convenient.”

  “Convenient, and necessary, sir,” said the Baron.

  Dogmael Jones performed a series of brief bows to the Kenricks, followed Runcorn to the front door, and left the house. Hugh glanced at his father in silent inquiry.

  The Baron said, “It will be explained on the morrow, when he returns. No more about it until then. For the moment, we must make amends for your long but profitable absence.”

  “You must tell us more about Meum Hall, and Caxton, and Virginia,” said Effney Kenrick.

  Hugh laughed. “Fewer people live in Caxton than in Chelsea. You could very likely fit them all inside this house.”

  * * *

  Wilkes and liberty. They were to become the slogan, battle cry, and excuse for an extraordinary movement in politics and lamentable excesses by mobs of men who could neither read, nor vote, nor much think.

  The Treaty of Paris, signed in February, 1763, signaled a succession of events that was not to end for twenty years. The blood and treasure expended by Great Britain to acquire an empire, would now be spent on preserving it. How, the lords and ministers of the Crown knew not. Not yet. With the coming of peace, matters submerged by the pressures and exigencies of the Seven Years’ War abruptly bobbed to the surface. In England, the recessional allowed the Crown’s servants to ponder the vexingly delicate problem of how to pay for, govern, and profit from the empire. In the colonies, the hiatus permitted their more thoughtful and inquisitive subjects to more closely examine their relationship with the Crown and their true place in the empire.

  Following soon in the Roilance’s wake were mail packets and merchantmen from the colonies bearing news of a dire event, an event as troubling as the news their captains, passengers, and crews read in the taverns and coffeehouses of Plymouth, Falmouth, Portsmouth, and Dover. The Treaty immediately birthed these events as overtures to everything else: an Indian uprising on the western frontiers, and a Crown rebellion against the British constitution, aided and abetted by Parliament. The uprising, led by Ottawa chief Pontiac, served eventually to provide the Crown with some rationale for more tightly policing and more efficiently exploiting the colonies. The rebellion, sanctioned by First Lord of the Treasury George Grenville and Crown attorneys, prepared the government and Parliament for steps to be taken against fellow citizens, both at home and abroad. Englishmen suddenly found themselves assaulted by terrifying, painted, merciless savages on one hand, and by pale Oxford alumni and gentlemen lawyers on the Privy Council on the other, in both instances for the sake of upholding a status quo.

  The Treaty obliged the French to leave North America, and their departure created a vacuum that was filled by the stern, unyielding policies of British Governor-General and commander-in-chief of North America Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Knight of the Bath. Unlike the French, Amherst refused to patronize the Indians. And when they struck, neither did he wish to employ the colonial militia to check them, for he despised colonial fighting prowess. The Indians, accustomed to being consulted by the generous French, and advised by their agents that the English victory would mean an end to their freedom to roam the forests and rivers at will, bridled at the unresponsiveness of the British. Pontiac persuaded several western tribes to make war on the settlers and British outposts. By May of 1763 every outpost had fallen to their attacks but Detroit and Fort Pitt, which were besieged. Settlers and soldiers alike were butchered indiscriminately, or captured and subjected to torture and grisly death. It was a blind, desperate strike against the new power, against a force which neither side fully comprehended, intended to thwart the inexorable progress of a vigorous culture as it advanced westward. It was doomed to fail, and did, three years later.

  In London, the Treaty was the subject of provocative commentary in private conversation and in political publications, most notably The North Briton, founded in June of 1762 and entirely subsidized by an Opposition lord who, like the majority of London and Liverpool merchants, was angry with the surrender by Lord Bute’s negotiators of Guadeloupe and other British conquests. The North Briton was begun as an answer to Tobias Smollet’s The Briton, a weekly paper whose aim was to justify and explain Bute’s policies. The scathing, immoderate attacks of The North Briton contributed to Bute’s eventual downfall. Its principal editor and contributor, John Wilkes, member for Aylesbury, was a master of innuendo, insinuation, and circumlocution, and said in the paper what he dared not say from his seat in the Commons. He assailed not only the peace arranged by Lord Bute and John Russell, the Duke of Bedford, and the means by which that peace was arrived at and approved in the Commons, but Bute himself, his assumed intimate relationship with George the Third’s mother, the Princess Dowager, and the motives and characters of anyone associated with the “court party.”

  One inviolable tradition of the status quo was never to take the sovereign to task for his policies, actions, or behavior. The king, after all, could do no wrong. Worse still was to suggest, no matter how tactfully, that the king was a liar, a fool, or the dupe of his ministers. In the eyes of the courts and the Act of Settlement, to flout this tradition was to invite the grave charge of seditious libel.

  Having accomplished their purpose, which was Bute’s resignation and the formation of a new administration under Grenville, Lord Temple — who was the new First Lord’s younger brother — and Wilkes were about to cease publication of The North Briton when George the Third, in an address to Parliament, endorsed the terms of the Treaty. A few days later, in April, 1763, Number Forty-five of the paper opined, among other things, that

  …The Minister’s speech of last Tuesday is not to be paralleled in the annals of this country. I am in doubt whether the imposition is greater on the Sovereign, or on the nation….

  Friends and enemies alike of Wilkes knew that the man in doubt was

&nbs
p; doubtless John Wilkes, who explained that “the King’s Speech has always been considered as the speech of the Minister.” By the standards of the day, this was as venomous a shot at the king as could be imagined. The “Minister” spoke for the king, by the king’s leave. Ergo, to doubt the sincerity of the one’s words was to sully the character of the other. Parliament regularly approved the king’s addresses to that body, and composed humble counteraddresses of thanks to him. To have a member of that body subject the king to such criticism was intolerable, his subtle disclaimers notwithstanding.

  Parliament had adjourned until November, but the offense could not be allowed to stand unnoticed and unpunished. Three days after the appearance of Number Forty-five, the Secretaries of State for the Northern and Southern Departments, Lords Egremont and Halifax, jointly signed a general warrant for the “arrest of the authors, printers, and publishers of a seditious and treasonable paper,” The North Briton. No one person was named in the warrant, nor was the specific act of sedition or treason described or identified. The Crown simply wanted to lay hands on Wilkes, then decide at its leisure which charges and action could be credibly and lawfully brought against him that would still his infuriating pen.

  By the time Hugh Kenrick arrived in England, the initial round of the conflict was over. Wilkes was arrested, interrogated by the Secretaries of State, and committed to the Tower — but not before the king’s messengers succumbed to his charm and inadvertently allowed him to destroy the original manuscript of Number Forty-five, and therewith evidence of his authorship of it. He later secured a writ of habeas corpus from Chief Justice Charles Pratt in the Court of Common Pleas, and after two appearances in that court at Westminster Hall was released by Pratt and other judges who upheld his privileged, protected status as a member of the Commons. Wilkes’s attorney had also claimed wrongful commitment to the Tower and questioned the legality of the general warrant, but these arguments were dismissed. That summer, the triumphant Wilkes and the arrested printers filed suits for damages against the Secretaries of State and the Treasury’s solicitor.

  Forgotten by nearly all in the legal and political pandemonium that extraordinary spring and summer was the Treaty of Paris.

  * * *

  “John Wilkes?” asked Hugh. He turned to his father. “You mentioned him briefly in one of your last letters. What has he done?”

  Garnet Kenrick chuckled. “What hasn’t he done?” The Baron searched through some papers on his desk and pulled out a newspaper, then handed it to his son over the desk. It was a copy of The North Briton, Number Forty-five.

  Hugh returned to his chair and read the opening paragraphs on the front sheet of the multipage broadside. He grimaced in doubt, then frowned. He said to Jones, “This is a lesser transgression than what the Pippins were charged with and tried for, Mr. Jones. It is subtle and cutting, to be sure, but I fail to see why the king would take so much offense at it.”

  Jones shrugged. “All true, milord. But the difference is that he is in the Commons, while the Pippins were not. Fundamentally, though, the circumstances do not differ. As the persecution of the Society of the Pippin was a premeditated, arranged affair, achieved in concert with the King’s Bench, so was this action. The government have been wanting to silence him for over a year, ever since Lord Bute’s accession to the throne — if you will allow me the libel.”

  “In my home, it is allowed,” remarked Garnet Kenrick with a smile.

  Hugh put the paper back on his father’s desk. “And what has happened to Mr. Wilkes?”

  The Baron and the barrister took turns retelling each episode of the sequence of events.

  When they were finished, Hugh asked, “And the affair is past?”

  “Oh, no, milord,” said Jones, with a shake of the head. “They have not done with him, not by a whim. Certainly the House will make Mr. Wilkes one of the first orders of the day when it reconvenes in November. His words will be taken down, and if he wishes to remain a member, the House will require him to beg its pardon — on his knees, no less. Not only did he tweak the king’s nose with relative impunity, but very likely he will win his suit against Egremont and Halifax. He cannot be allowed the satisfaction of victory. It would embolden others to emulate him and essay their own breaches of the royal peace. Half a dozen members are eager to make him a premier order of business.”

  “Had he no champions in the Opposition?”

  Garnet Kenrick shrugged, then sighed. “The man is disliked by his allies,” he said. “Mr. Pitt, Lord Rockingham, even Lord Temple, were reluctant to defend him publicly. It was Temple who subsidized the paper, and who has parted ways with his brother, Grenville — much as your uncle and Ihave parted ways. One irony among others is that it was Grenville who helped to promote Mr. Wilkes’s career and material gains, not to mention arranged his candidacy for Aylesbury with Mr. Pitt — who, incidentally, is Grenville’s brother-in-law.”

  “I have met this squinting, cross-eyed wretch, milord,” said Jones. “I paid him a call when he was committed to the Tower. He is the most odious rallying point for liberty one could have the misfortune to encounter. But for his attire, manners, and ready wit, you would take him for a career beggar, or a mad creature released on bad advice from the confines of Bedlam Hospital. He inveigled his way into the profitable acquaintanceship of his patrons, married his money, and more or less purchased his seat for Aylesbury for some seven thousand pounds from that borough’s householders. His dissolute past is legend. Poets and men of letters are as much dazzled by his company as are ladies of commerce, some of whom were present in his well-appointed cell when I called. He can revel in any society. I can imagine him seducing the intellects of the likes of Dr. Johnson and that exalted gossip, Horace Walpole. He is ambitious and capable, and has a certain appeal to the working populace. I have heard that he is planning to publish all forty-five numbers of The North Briton in a single volume, in addition to some questionable parody of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, together with other scurvy prose.” Jones waved a hand once. “But — he is in the right. I would not choose him for constant company, but I admire his audacity.” He paused. “Mr. Pitt and other cold friends of Mr. Wilkes? Well, it is easy to champion a virtuous hero, but much less so a grasping, disreputable rogue. It so happens, however, that it is a rogue who has done a hero’s feat, which in this case is to say what needed to be said in the face of certain official reprisal.”

  Hugh asked, “Do you think he will apologize to the House?”

  “No,” said Jones without hesitation. “In which case, the House most certainly will vote to censure him in some way. Failing that, perhaps the ministerial party among the members will conjure up some other means of ridding their pristine persons of his presence. More likely, though, Mr. Wilkes will hand them the means with the collected North Briton. He is determined to speak freely without fear of recrimination. Rogue or hero, that is what every man ought to strive for as an unassailable liberty. That is why I say they are not done with him.”

  Hugh smiled, and glanced from Jones to his father and back again. He shook his head once and laughed. “I cannot explain it, but you two seem to complement each other. Your association pleases me more than I can say.”

  The two older men laughed in appreciation and gratitude.

  Just then, Alice, fourteen years old, burst into the study to announce dinner. She was a pretty, sandy-haired girl, vivacious and gracile. It also pleased Hugh that she had not forgotten him, and their reunion yesterday afternoon had been as happy as that of the parents and son. In a spontaneous display of affection, she wrapped her arms around Hugh’s neck and kissed him on the cheek, then conferred the same feeling for her father, and finally, to Hugh’s bemused shock, for Dogmael Jones, whom she addressed as “Uncle.”

  Chapter 20: The Member for Swansditch

  “Sir Dogmael and I struck up a long and fruitful correspondence after your departure, Hugh,” Garnet Kenrick said from the head of the dinner table. “Very soon we found that we ag
reed on so

  many matters that we felt we should meet. He became a regular guest at Milgram House, and now here at Cricklegate. We enjoy his company, and he ours. I did not know that a lawyer could be so likable.”

  Jones chuckled as he passed a plate of beef to Effney Kenrick. “And I did not know that a baron’s company could be so agreeable.”

  “All in all,” continued the Baron, “our friendship — and it is that as much as it is an alliance — was propinquitous. At about the time that we were both expressing concern over the heat generated by Mr. Wilkes’s statements, Mr. Ingoldsby went to his final reward. Mr. Worley informed me of it, and I instantly tendered Mr. Jones the idea of his replacing him, provided I moved quickly enough to purchase the seat. He had in the past alluded to a wish to enter politics. However, he lacked the means and the friends who could put him up. I had the means, and a qualified wish to be heard, but lacked both the skill to speak on my feet and the desire to address so many heads. Also, until then, there were no boroughs open to purchase. Your uncle retains control of Onyxcombe and Mr. Hillier. And there you are: Swansditch.”

  Jones leaned forward and remarked to Hugh across the table, “Your father often addresses and refers to me as ‘Mr. Jones.’ It is out of respect for my knighthood. That way, you see, he secures two friends in the guise of one.”

  Everyone at the table laughed, including Alice. Garnet Kenrick waved a fork at the barrister. “There, Hugh, is the reason I want him to speak for us in the Commons. There are few men who could match his quick oratory.”

  Hugh studied the barrister for a moment. “Aside from Mr. Wilkes, sir, why do you wish to sit in the Commons?”

  “I have many reasons, milord,” answered Jones. “First, I wish to see the debates — which in the past I was obliged to pay a crown to audit from the gallery — reported to the public. The public have a right to know what is said and by whom, since it is their pockets and how they may be best emptied that are the subjects of so many debates. Further, I for one am tired of second-guessing the coy, allusive reportage that appears in our newspapers. It is an ancient complaint, mine. Both Houses wish to keep their proceedings sunk in the murky waters of privilege, tradition, and unaccountability. Half my career in the courts has consisted of defending printers and writers who dare drain that swamp of secrecy, or who at least part the cloak of scum floating on top to see what lies beneath. Beginning with the next session, I intend to raise the matter as often as I can entice an ally to second the motion. I fully expect my motion to be ignored or opposed. But I shall persist. I shall bedevil them.”