The Sparrowhawk Companion

by Edward Cline

  Cimourdain, Gauvain, Lantenac—the giants who move Ninety-Three, are credible, arresting, convincing characters integrated in a three-way conflict rarely matched in literature in the plotting and climax of the novel (except by Rand herself in We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged). All three could be said to be uncompromisingly idealistic and moved solely by their ideals: Lantenac, the ruthless royalist, by his vision of a restored monarchy; Cimourdain and Gauvain, the dedicated republicans, by opposing spirits of the Revolution.

  But, as Rand noted in her introduction, Hugo was not able to imbue his giants with credible, convincing intellects. “His fire, his eloquence, his emotional power seemed to desert him when he had to deal with theoretical subjects.”5 Thus, the political dialogue between these three seems flat and stale when compared with the rest of the novel (although that dialogue is in another literary galaxy when compared with what passes for modern political discourse, in fiction and in real life). Given Hugo’s less-than-grand polemics in the novel that were responsible for a momentous event (including the acerbic, yet oddly vapid exchanges between Marat, Danton, and Robespierre earlier in the novel), and he understood the French Revolution at least as well as did its actual provocateurs, it is little wonder that the French Revolution failed.

  One task in writing the Sparrowhawk novels was to project the growth of the ideas behind the Revolution in its heroes, to make the ideas as real and credible as the heroes. This meant introducing the principal heroes, Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, at a period of their lives when ideas would have an almost immediate influence on them, and when their hold on their own lives and identities as independent beings was most crucial. Because they refuse to surrender those things, they are able to proceed, step by step, to each stage of maturation to become independent, self-contained men.

  That task complemented the task of rendering all the characters, especially Frake and Kenrick, credible representatives of the ideas they represented or expounded, and to bring those ideas to life, as well. The degree to which readers of the series have expressed an emotional attachment (or revulsion) to these characters, is a measure of the success in making those characters real. To elicit an emotional, personal response to a character in a reader is also a measure of how convincing that character is. It reveals another thing, as well: the character of the reader himself.

  Hugo wrote about the Convention: “These were all tragedies begun by giants and finished by dwarfs.”6 Elsewhere, he observed: “When greatness is a crime, it is a sign of the reign of the little.”7

  America today is being finished off by such dwarfs, in philosophy, in politics, in the arts, and especially in literature. The dwarfs are nearsighted and wish to reduce everyone to their epistemological state and to share their subjectivist or nihilistic metaphysics. They assert that since none of the Founders was “perfect”—since Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry owned slaves, for example—then America is flawed, if not founded on fraud, fabrication, or myth, and so the ideas that inspired its origins are therefore dishonest, invalid, or arbitrary, and may be discarded.

  This is the modern method of argumentation and persuasion: to attack the ideas by attacking the man, and presumably discredit the ideas as well as the man. It could be called refutation through irrelevancies. Most modern readers are inured to such circuitous sleights-of-mind, otherwise known as sophistry, having encountered little else in their education, in politics, or in the press.

  It is such dishonesty and nearsightedness, promulgated by those intellectual dwarfs, especially in our universities, that I wished to correct and banish by offering an epic of giants (chiefly to preserve my own sanity, and as a vehicle of justice to the men of the Revolution), by arming a reader with an eagle’s perspective on the Revolution, to inculcate a vision of man not possible in the choking swamp fog of modern culture. Sparrowhawk, a novel written in an age when such epics are disdained by the intellectual and literary establishment, has enjoyed a success measured by its enthusiastic reception by a reading public desperate for relief from modern subjectivism and in search of reason, a success that renders the odds against the novel’s appearance and value irrelevant. That success has been personally encouraging and gratifying.

  The series is, to borrow the title of a Terence Rattigan play about another hero, my “bequest to the nation.” It was my “mistress” for thirteen years; I denied it nothing and devoted most of my conscious hours to researching and writing it. Book Six: War was finished in the spring of 2005. It has been difficult to begin another literary project, such as a third Roaring Twenties detective novel, my having completed the first two novels of that genre before beginning Sparrowhawk. Researching and recreating the 1920’s served as training to investigate and recreate the eighteenth century.

  Sparrowhawk is my fourth series, for a total of fifteen novels. Sparrowhawk itself is over two thousand pages or some seven million words in length. When I create a hero, I cannot let him go until I have developed him to his fullest. And when I reach that point, then his story is complete. There will be no further Merritt Fury or Chess Hanrahan adventures or cases; perhaps there will be a third Cyrus Skeen novel, ending, appropriately, with the stock market crash of 1929.

  1. Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans. (New York: Bantam, 1962), 122.

  2. Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers, Tore Boeckmann, ed. (New York: Plume, 2000), 53.

  3. Hugo, Ninety-Three, 122.

  4. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans.

  5. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans.

  6. Hugo, Ninety-Three, 122.

  7. Victor Hugo in “Genius and Taste,” from his “Postscriptum de Ma Vie,” in Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography, Lorenzo O’Rourke, trans. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1907).

  LACUNÆ AND ARTISTIC LICENSE

  by Edward Cline

  [lacuna n. (pl. ~ æ or ~ as). Hiatus, blank, missing portion

  (esp. in ancient MS., book, etc.; empty part.)

  —Concise Oxford Dictionary]

  Someone may ask about Sparrowhawk: If one of my purposes were to recreate a world of heroes and the era that saw the birth of the United States, how can one create one’s own world in a historical novel, when one’s characters must conform to the historical record?

  The answer is: When there is no historical record for them to conform to. Moreover, the question is asked on the premise that it is impossible to recreate a historical period and also write a Romantic novel in which the characters exercise volition and can choose and pursue their values in that period. It certainly is an achievable literary goal, and Sparrowhawk sets no precedent in this regard. Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas (père) and other nineteenth–century novelists and playwrights did it without risking the charge that they rewrote history.

  And, there is a certain irrelevancy to the question. One doesn’t choose to write a Romantic-historical novel solely to recreate a particular period. One may as well write a history. If the period is important to one’s fiction-writing purposes—and certainly the pre-Revolutionary period in the American colonies and Britain was integral to mine—then the characters one creates must be able to act freely in it, just as they should in a story set in one’s own time.

  In writing Sparrowhawk, it was important for me to heed and respect the historical record, because my characters are depicted as contributing to some of the events of the time. In recreating the events in the Virginia General Assembly and the House of Commons, for example, it was crucial that they be portrayed objectively and in character. This meant availing myself of the extant records and journals of both institutions.

  And in those records and journals I discovered significant gaps. Of course, there were no such members of the Commons as Dogmael Jones and Henoch Pannell, no rotten boroughs as Swansditch and Canovan. On this side of the Atlantic, there was no such county as Queen Anne in Virginia, and no burgesses by the
names of Hugh Kenrick and Edgar Cullis to represent it in the General Assembly. The boroughs, county, and characters are all pure creations.

  But, it was not a journalistic, naturalistic novel I wished to write. The gaps in the historical record made it easier for me to recreate the culture and politics of the period in Romantic terms, and to fill those gaps with my story. As Ayn Rand noted in her Introduction to Hugo’s Ninety-Three, “To a Romanticist, a background is just a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country.”1 A background is similar to a theatrical setting, a stage on which men may think and act in a plotted story. The props, the costumes, the lighting, and so on, are all a means of establishing time and place, merely “special effects” subsumed by the story. (Today, special effects in film and on the stage are becoming the dominant focus, at the expense of the story, when there is one.)

  While the records of Parliament in Sparrowhawk’s period are abundant (though still incomplete), there is a paucity of records of the General Assembly, and what exists of them is colorless and dry, thick with the yawn-inducing minutiæ of mundane, unimportant issues. On the other hand, in reading the accounts of the debates in Parliament on the Stamp Act, one encounters a startling mix of eloquence and rude manners, unbridled passion and sly connivance.

  Where the record was incomplete, I relied on secondary sources, such as diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts to reconstruct events. Even then, I had to fall back on my deductive powers and imagination when the records were lacking or so vague or sketchy as to be useless. For example, the numbers of the Virginia Gazette, published in Williamsburg, that might have reported what actually happened in the General Assembly in May 1765 when Patrick Henry introduced his Resolves, are missing. Furthermore, I found that I had to write Henry’s “Cæsar had his Brutus” speech, because there is no written record of it, only memorable fragments recalled by men years after the event.

  Let me cite two important events: the debates on the Stamp Act in Parliament, and the debates over the Stamp Act Resolves in the General Assembly, dramatized in Book Four: Empire.

  Many of the actual speeches made by George Grenville, Isaac Barré, and other actual members of the Commons are excerpted in the novel. The two major fictive speeches made by Dogmael Jones and Henoch Pannell represent the fundamental, opposing positions taken by the parties; Pannell’s an expression of contempt for the colonies, Jones’s a spirited defense of them. But, the climax of the debates was the vote on the Stamp Act. The record shows that it was unanimous, with no dissenting votes noted.

  Jones, of course, would have voted against the Act, and his would have been the single, lone dissent. To “conform” to the actual record, and to underscore the venality rife in the Commons at that time, I have Grenville’s secretary bribe the House clerk not to record Jones’s dissenting vote in the official journal.

  Hugh Kenrick calls the General Assembly a “cameo” of Parliament. Complementing the absence of Jones’s dissenting vote in the Commons journal was the subsequent expunction of Patrick Henry’s fifth Resolve, and probably the sixth and seventh, as well, from the Burgesses’s journal. There are contradictory accounts on whether or not the sixth and seventh were even introduced, debated, and voted on, one by an anonymous Frenchman who witnessed the debates, the other by Lieutenant-Governor Francis Fauquier in his official report to the Board of Trade in London.

  The contradictory accounts create a unique lacuna. Which account is true? Whose veracity, the Frenchman’s or the Lieutenant-Governor’s, should one place more weight on? Without any supporting evidence one way or the other, and in this instance there is none, it is anyone’s educated guess about what actually happened. One would think that such an epochal event would have been meticulously documented. But, either it was not, or if it was, the records perished, or are molding undiscovered in someone’s attic or in some library’s special collections.

  The greater gap was the means by which all seven of Henry’s Resolves were broadcast to colonial newspapers outside of Virginia. There is no record of who was responsible for sending them. Henry at that time was a freshman burgess for his county, and it is doubtful that he knew any of the editors of those newspapers. Accounts of the event and biographies of the principal actors simply gloss over the subject. (My own unsupported theory is that it was Richard Henry Lee, burgess for Westmoreland County, who, because of the animus between him and the conservative Tidewater gentry that controlled the House, was not present during the Resolves debates that spring but who published his own protest of the Stamp Act.)

  The Resolves, to our knowledge, were not reported in the Virginia Gazette, which was controlled by the Lieutenant-Governor, who dissolved the Assembly over the Resolves. The numbers of the Gazette from that period are missing. Perhaps one of Henry’s allies in the House was responsible. The evidence of responsibility is simply absent. So, I hit upon a means for the Resolves to be sent “abroad.”

  It was important that I devise a means of disseminating the Resolves, for they served to unite the colonies for the first time in a common cause, which was to challenge Parliamentary authority. I date the true beginning of the Revolution to the summer of 1765.

  Let us examine Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Speech as I dramatize it in Book Four: Empire of Sparrowhawk together with a historian’s account of the actual event. I will use excerpts from Carl Bridenbaugh’s Seat of Empire: The Political Role of Eighteenth Century Williamsburg (1950, Colonial Williamsburg Press, pp. 60-65).

  Bridenbaugh writes that an anonymous Frenchman reports his arrival [from York County] in the House of Burgesses just as Patrick Henry rose to deliver his “Cæsar had his Brutus” speech. The Frenchman claims in his diary that Henry apologized for his remarks to Speaker Robinson. However, there is no reason to ascribe any veracity or accuracy to his report, especially since he did not report important episodes during the debates. For example, he reports that the sixth and seventh Resolves were “hotly debated,” although Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier claims they were not debated. Who is to be believed?

  Bridenbaugh writes, “They [either Henry and his House allies, or just his allies] carefully saw to it that copies of the four recorded Resolves plus the one expunged and the two withheld were sent to Philadelphia correspondents for use where they would do the most good. From this metropolis they were dispatched by water to Rhode Island, and six of them made their first appearance in Samuel Hall’s Newport Mercury for June 24, 1765.” Who was responsible? There is no record of responsibility extant. The Boston Gazette on July 1, together with other colonial newspapers, printed all seven Resolves.

  Bridenbaugh’s entire account of the session of May 1765 is skeptical, if not deprecatory, of virtually every fact he presents in it, especially when he discusses Henry. But his account is but one of several I consulted while putting together the data to write Chapter 9: The Resolves, in Part Two of Book Four.

  One possible reason that no one living then claimed responsibility for disseminating the Resolves to the other colonies is that he could have been charged with treason or sedition by the Crown. If Samuel Hall of the Newport Mercury received signed correspondence from the party or parties who sent him the Resolves, it has not survived. If it had survived, this and other gaps in the historical record would have been filled, and we would have more conclusive knowledge of what happened.

  Fans of the Sparrowhawk series have pleaded with me to continue it, but they must be content with its fiery conclusion on the York River in September of 1775. I accomplished in the last chapters of Book Six what I had set out to do. One can imagine that the epic could be extended indefinitely, but to attempt that would be, for me, a pointless anticlimax and a violation of the story’s integrity. As it stands, in terms of its plot and theme, the series goes full circle to its beginnings in Books One and Two.

  1. Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three, Lowell Bair, trans. (New York:
Bantam, 1962),

  SPARROWHAWK CHARACTER, SHIP,

  AND PLANTATION STAFF LISTS

  Compiled by Edward Cline

  At the beginning of Book One, Parson Robert Parmley advises young Jack Frake: “If ever you must choose a name or symbol for something important, think on it most earnestly.”

  I heeded his advice. One of the pleasanter research tasks of Sparrowhawk was the creation of over 370 character and place names. The etymological root meaning of Jack’s surname is “man warrior,” from the Old English “freake,” which in turn meant a man who was exceptional or outstanding. Friends have remarked that Frake is too harsh sounding. But harshness is what I sought; the harsher, or blunter the name, the more memorable it would be. The root meaning of Hugh Kenrick’s surname is “man hero.” Researching and choosing their names from among a dozen candidates required my best attention, because they are the principal heroes of the series; I needed to be comfortable working with them over the course of what would become the approximately seven million words in the series.

  Most of the names of the principal characters required nearly the same degree of attention and selectivity, chosen from a long list of candidates I compiled chiefly from ships’ passenger rosters of the eighteenth century, and many from other sources. Most of the character and place names in the series are contemporaneous with the eighteenth century. When I could not find a character name I was happy with, I invented one; and if the invented name were not strictly contemporaneous, then it had to be credibly so.

  For space reasons, I cannot discuss the root meanings or associations of all 370 names, so I will highlight only a handful here. Many of the characters appear in only one or two Books; others occur in all six.