by Edward Cline
“Yes. That is all true,” remarked Garnet Kenrick. He sighed and added with irony, “Well, I suppose you must resign the seat, and I must reelect myself to it.”
This remark caused Hugh to remember Wilkes’s diatribe against the corruption that had denied him his seat in the House, and Sir Henoch’s smug boast at Windridge Court that he could reelect himself to his own, and Jones’s disdain for the House, and his own father’s sentiments. And he remembered something else his father had said, years ago: “It is a corrupt system, our Parliament, but we shall attempt to either overcome the corruption, or make it work for us…for liberty.” He knew now that neither was possible. After listening to the debates these past months, and observing how insipid was the opposition, he concluded that he had nothing to say here, because whatever he could say, would have no effect. Corruption worked only for the corrupted; corruption could not sire its antipode, virtuous liberty.
He wished to return home now, where he would find it.
* * *
Benjamin Worley at Lion Key secured passage for Hugh on the Regulas, a merchantman that would call on Norfolk, Virginia, before continuing on to Savannah and the West Indies with cargo. The vessel was expected to leave the Pool of London in two weeks, and its captain was confident it would reach Virginia in early May.
During his preparations for the voyage, Hugh limited his communication with Reverdy to a short letter advising her that he would seek an annulment of their marriage in a Virginia court. Effney Kenrick gently queried him, “You will not see her again, Hugh?”
“No.”
She did not pursue the subject. In the midst of packing his trunk with books, prints, clothing and other items he had bought in London, it did not occur to Hugh that he had received no reply to his note. It did occur to his parents, and they asked him about it. He shrugged. “I love Britannia, but I am leaving her, as well.” He would say no more about Reverdy. His parents did not raise the subject again.
The morning arrived when his family accompanied Hugh to the Pool of London and Lion Key to bid him farewell. They all silently cursed a thick, dirty fog that enveloped the Keys, thick enough that they could not see halfway across the Thames. Alice Tallmadge gave him a letter to send to her husband Roger in Boston, and Garnet Kenrick gave him a letter to deliver to John Proudlocks in Caxton, and also a bundle of invoice letters to various merchants in Virginia and Maryland to forward. “I don’t expect these to be paid,” said the Baron. “They are just a formality. Perhaps they will see to them after things have been settled, if they are able to.”
The farewells were anxious and melancholy, for they were all certain of war, and did not know when they would unite again. “It may be years, Hugh,” said the Baron.
“It may be years,” Hugh agreed. Then he embraced his mother, bussed his sister Alice, and shook hands with his father and Benjamin Worley, who had accompanied them on the wharf. A crewman from the Regulas came then and requested Hugh to follow him. Hugh tipped his hat once again, then turned and went up the gangboard.
He stood at the shrouds, out of the crew’s way, waving his hat in answer to the waves of his family on the wharf. As the Regulas gained the middle of the Thames, the figures on the wharf and their surroundings became blurs in the fog, and then indistinguishable from it, until all he could see was a darker band of gray beneath a lighter one.
* * *
He could not know it, and would learn of it long after the event, but the day after Hugh listened to Edmund Burke plead with the Commons to see sense and adopt a policy of conciliation with the colonies, another orator, speaking to a much smaller assembly in a plain wooden church atop a hill in Richmond, Virginia, had touched on matters he had wrestled with these last several months.
“It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope…. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?…. For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst and to provide for it….
“It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace — but there is no peace! The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
The speaker glanced around the crowded assembly of men, fellow burgesses all, and in a silence broken only by the patter of rain on the roof above and the rush of it outside the windows, noted the looks of transported speechlessness in the faces. Then he became aware of a murmur of men gathered outside in the rain, a murmur mixed with excitement, anger and exaltation.
Patrick Henry shut his eyes briefly and sighed with the knowledge that his work was done, and that his call to arms would be heeded. He nodded once to the assembly, and took his seat again.
PART II
Chapter 1: The Farewells
No one in Britain would learn of Henry’s speech, a call for the formation of a militia and for taking a “posture of defense” against the Crown, for at least a generation. Hugh Kenrick would hear snatches of it almost immediately when he returned to Caxton, that Henry raised a hand holding an imaginary dagger, and at the end of his last sentence, plunged it into his heart. He would hear many things about the second Virginia Convention and the resolutions Henry introduced in it, all seconded by Richard Henry Lee. He would learn that the one hundred and twenty men who attended the seven-day convention went as elected delegates, not as burgesses, and that Queen Anne County earned the shameful distinction of not having been represented at it.
During the voyage, when it was not raining, Hugh would often pace the deck deep in thought in the stiff, bracing spring winds. The captain and crew of the Regulas began to refer to him as “the worrier.” They knew that he was a man of importance, a Virginia bashaw, a former member of Parliament, and a man not to be toyed with or mocked to his face. They sensed that he was unhappy, perhaps even angry, and that he was not receptive to idle chatter. But Hugh was simply pondering his past and his future — his marriage, his conduct, Meum Hall, Virginia, his life. At times he wondered why no one engaged him in conversation, except, tentatively, the captain of the Regulas. He was not aware of the frown that seemed to be etched on his face.
He could not know that the second Massachusetts provincial congress in Cambridge, dominated by John Hancock and Joseph Warren, had in early February called for the formation of militia. Nor could he know that Lord North’s conciliatory plan, endorsed by the Commons on the same day a bill was introduced for the New England Restraining Act, was ultimately adopted and sent to committee for emendation, but that the Restraining Act passed on the very day he set sail for Virginia. Two weeks later the Act’s provisions, which forbade New England from trading with any nation but Britain and its colonies in the British West Indies, were broadened to include Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina.
He knew only vaguely, through letters his sister Alice had read to him, that his friend Roger Tallmadge was chafing in Boston, commanding a company of soldiers and hoping that his superior, General Gage, would keep his word and allow him to return home in October. But he and Roger were both ignorant of the secret letter sent to Gage in January by Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in which the minister chided the general for asking for 20,000 men to “conquer” Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and claimed that the general’s 4,000 troops were certainly equal to that task. Dartmouth opined that even should the “rude rabble” of troublemakers form the semblance of a disciplined army, a “single action” between them and His Majesty’s forces ought to be a sobering experience for the “rabble,” they having exhausted their resources and resolve in such an encounter.
Da
rtmouth stressed, however, that His Majesty agreed with his ministers that the first important act to reestablish Crown authority in New England was to arrest and imprison the “actors and abettors” of the provincial congress for treason and rebellion. The Secretary of State, like so many in the ministry, was oblivious to both the seriousness of American unrest and the scale of intercolonial organization created by those “actors and abettors,” and wrote to the hapless general: “I must again repeat that any efforts of the people, unprepared to encounter with a regular force, cannot be very formidable; and though such a proceeding should be, according to your own idea of it, a signal for hostilities yet…it will surely be better that a conflict should be brought on, upon such ground, than in a riper state of rebellion.”
He did not know that the rebellion had already reached that state of ripeness. “Absentee hubris!” muttered the general, who did know it.
The Regulas was nearly halfway across the Atlantic when Hugh Kenrick read Edmund Burke’s revised A Vindication of Natural Society, one of the books he bought in London after his first brief meeting with the author in the Commons, but had not found time to read until now. At the end of the tract he encountered a line he thought best applied to his troubling conflicts over the last few months:
“We first throw away the tales along with the rattles of our nurses; those of the priest keep their hold a little longer; those of our governors the longest of all.”
It was true, he thought: As I have grown wiser, I have disowned the rattles, the priests, the governors, and all their tales.
On the other hand, Hugh recollected, Burke’s wisdom did not extend to all subjects. The member for Bristol had remarked to him over supper at Waghorn’s Tavern in Westminster, in response to a dismissive comment of Hugh’s that an atheist was likely more moral than any Christian sitting in the House, “Atheism must be removed root and branch. But, I am otherwise broadly tolerant.”
Hugh, in turn, had replied that such tolerance was generous in the least, given that his supper companion defended an intolerant state church. For his part, he expressed an indifference to God; and more, a moral and scientific objection to the notion of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. “It is a belief that when He completed His creation, He retired from active interference in it. That is as absurdly pointless an enterprise as my having worked to restore my plantation, then retiring in hopes it will not ever fall back into ruin.”
Burke had no reply to that, except to say that he found the analogy odious and repellent to all his “articles of decency and good sense. We are not imbued with a power beyond mere reason, as He is. Further, while He is privileged to measure us, we are neither privileged nor able to measure Him.”
And Hugh remembered Burke’s fellow member for Bristol, Henry Cruger, saying, “Our constituency is the second largest port in this country. It is an interesting town. Perhaps your father’s firm could send us some of his custom. We send serge to the colonies, and fustian, and tobacco pipes, and numerous other manufactures. Cargoes of Negroes are regularly bartered for cargoes of sugar.”
No more, thought Hugh then. Even then, in the emptied chamber of the Commons, in the grand space of Westminster Hall in the evenings, in the hushed silence of the metropolis’s theaters, in the quiet privacy of his room at Cricklegate, he knew that the empire was dissolved, at an end. He did not know it then, and could not know it now, but he often reiterated in his mind now what he had remarked to his father only a month ago, Lord Dartmouth’s advice to General Gage in that secret letter, that force “should be repelled by force.” There was no longer any question in his mind about whose sword had first been unsheathed and raised, and what was the proper response to that action. Reason was powerless against men whose actions were moved by maleficent ends.
And on April 19, neither Hugh, the captain, the crew and passengers of that vessel, a little more than halfway across the Atlantic, would hear the “shot heard ’round the world” on the Lexington Green in Massachusetts.
A week later, on another sunny day, during one of Hugh’s turns on deck, the watch in the crow’s nest alerted the crew to a vessel passing in the opposite direction not a mile away. The captain came up from his cabin and used his spyglass to observe the ship. Hugh happened to be standing beside him. “It’s the Friendly, out of Liverpool,” remarked the captain, handing the glass to Hugh, with whom he had a courteous relationship and whom he had had to supper on numerous occasions. “I know the master, Brian Kelly. She’s heavy in the water, though. Wonder if she was able to unship her cargo.”
“Where does she usually call?” asked Hugh, using the glass to study the indistinct figures moving on the other vessel’s deck, some of which seemed to be women. He could not see the faces that peered back at the Regulas. The sun flashed on glass. He guessed the Regulas was being observed, as well.
“Hampton, Norfolk, and thereabouts,” the captain answered. “Usually imports a hotchpotch of goods, and manages to trade them for profitable bulk for the Indies or home. Bloody nonimportation business! It’s the bane of everyone’s trade! Hope things have calmed down, and Mr. Kelly’s carrying back lumber and lead to Liverpool. Well, I’ve no worry. All I need to unship in Norfolk are you passengers.”
Hugh doubted that the Friendly was carrying exported cargo. The Continental Congress had adopted nonimportation measures effective last December, and all exports to Britain, Ireland and the West Indies were to cease in September. He thought that perhaps Mr. Kelly had been able to negotiate a barter of goods with the Scottish merchants in Norfolk. But he did not say so to the captain. Instead, he replied casually, “Oh, yes. I have noted her mentioned in our Gazette. She trades mostly on the James River, if I am not mistaken.” He and the captain tacitly avoided discussing politics. Benjamin Worley had judiciously warned him that the man was a staunch patriot, and likewise warned the captain that his special passenger was a “patriot in the colonial sense.”
One of the specks on the deck of the Friendly was Etáin Frake. And in Hugh’s baggage in the hold was sheet music he had found in London for her, including some dances and divertimenti by Wolfgang Mozart, arias by the new court composer to Emperor Joseph the Second in Vienna, Italian Antonio Salieri, and some cello concerti by Luigi Boccherini that Hugh was confident Etáin could adapt for her harp.
* * *
In March, the Friendly, after making surreptitious arrangements with merchants in Norfolk for disposal of her cargo of miscellanies, sailed up the York to Yorktown, West Point and finally Caxton, in a furtive quest to unload the balance of it in trade for anything to take back to England. The captain and master of the vessel were not successful; the county committees on the upper James River and on the York were diligent and threatened to seize the cargo for auction if any attempts were made to unship it.
The captain and master decided to take passengers back to England, for ready money only. They received more applications for berths than they had room to accommodate. Many Virginians were electing to go into self-exile, the captain and master observed. They agreed that it was not likely the Friendly would plough these waters again for a long time. One of the first applicants for a berth was a planter in Caxton, Jack Frake, who was sending his wife to Scotland.
Jack Frake had been adamant in his decision to send his wife away. After their initial discussion in October, Etáin ventured the proposal that she go to Philadelphia instead, or New York, or up-country to Richmond or one of the western counties. But Jack insisted that the safest place for her was with her parents in Edinburgh.
“Every one of those towns is likely to be occupied by British troops,” he had countered. “Perhaps even laid waste and their inhabitants left to fend for themselves as beggars. You’ve read the accounts in the Gazettes of how much the people are suffering in Boston. Every port town between New Hampshire and Georgia could be seized by the British, and made to endure the same punishment. As for sending you up-country, the counties there would be at the mercy of Loyalist marauders and Indian
s. No one knows if Dunmore’s peace will hold when war is declared, and there will certainly be no peace with the Loyalists.” He shook his head. “No, the safest place for you is behind enemy lines.”
“And what is the safest place for you, Jack?” she asked, the anger and concern coloring her question with uncharacteristic harshness.
Jack had merely smiled the disarming smile of certitude and finality that had always ended their infrequent arguments, and replied, “There is no safe place for me, while tyrants roam our countryside.”
“No tyrants roam our countryside,” Etáin protested.
“They’ve always roamed it, Etáin. I said as much during the late war, at Mr. Vishonn’s place, when Hugh arrived here.”
“At Enderly.” After a long moment, she sighed. “So you did. It was how you two met.”
“Where you posed your riddle to us.”
That was in the fall. The winter had passed, and early spring arrived. Jack kept a close watch on the ship arrivals and departures posted in the two Gazettes. He remembered when entire pages of the Gazette and the Courier were filled with notices of vessels’ arrivals and summaries of the goods they brought, and of their impending departures, accompanied by solicitations for passengers and cargo to take to England. These notices had dwindled to less than a column.
Then in March the Friendly braved a stop at Caxton. Obedience Robbins, who was in town on business, chanced to have dinner with the master, Brian Kelly, in Safford’s Arms Tavern. Robbins subsequently informed Jack of Kelly’s and the captain’s intentions. Jack, who a week before had observed from the riverfront lawn of the great house the vessel making its way up to West Point, immediately rode into town to accost Kelly and arrange for Etáin’s billet. Kelly said he would raise anchor in two days, once he had victualed his stores for the journey back to England. He would make no more stops before exiting the Capes, except to be inspected for contraband at the mouth of the York by one of His Majesty’s ships.