Revolution (37 page)

They were gathered in the supper room. Hugh also sat down and opened his own mail. In addition to a copy of Jones’s speech, there was a long letter from Jones on the conduct of the Commons. “He writes that the House will probably pass a declaratory bill, as well, one that would assert Parliament’s authority over every matter whatsoever.” “
Whatsoever
,” Hugh mused. He looked up from the letter. “He writes that this term will negate repeal, if it is passed.”

“That’s the spoiler I mentioned,” commented Ramshaw.

Hugh impatiently put the letter aside and stood up excitedly. “Still, can you imagine hearing Jones’s speech in the House? Mr. Grenville’s soul must have curdled! And all those ‘rude and spiteful insects’ must have clicked and buzzed furiously! And think of it, Jack!” he said, laughing. “He cadged
you
! He doesn’t even mention my silly pamphlet on chimney swifts!”

Jack Frake chuckled, “Your friend there is my friend, on that point alone.”

Etáin had finished the speech. She rose and bussed her husband. “He is a remarkably brave man, to have used your words in Parliament,” she said. Her face brightened. “Why, this Mr. Jones spoke for Virginia! He spoke for us. In Parliament!”

“One could look at it that way,” agreed Hugh. “What a triumph!”

Etáin clapped her hands together. “Jack, let us celebrate your maiden speech in Parliament with a grand supper! Tomorrow! We’ll invite all our friends. I will entertain with music, and I am sure Reverdy will volunteer her voice, as well.” She glanced at Hugh, who said he would ask his wife.

Jack Frake laughed. “If you insist. We will celebrate.” He glanced at Ramshaw. “You will stay here, sir, if your business allows it.”

“It does, and I will, thank you.”

Hugh Kenrick rode back to Meum Hall and to Reverdy. In his study, he told her the news, and gave her Jones’s papers to read. “I remember him,” she said to him when she was finished, “from the time he spoke against the
Stamp Act.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I cannot believe he was allowed to say these things in the House without giving many in it the vapors. It is such a churlish place that I am sure some members would have called for his expulsion.”

Hugh shrugged, and nodded to the letter on his wife’s lap. “He does not mention any recriminations for having said them.” He scoffed. “Perhaps the House was so stunned, it was at a loss to devise a penalty.”

Reverdy put the speech and letter aside and studied her husband for a moment. “Do you envy Mr. Frake for having been favored by him on such an occasion?”

“Not at all. Well, yes, I do envy him. But, not in any malicious way. He wrote the better essay. I must credit Mr. Jones with the judgment.” Hugh looked pensive. “Strange sentiment, envy. It is almost synonymous with bitterness. But I am not bitter.” He told her about Etáin’s proposed grand supper to celebrate the speech and the possibility of repeal. Reverdy eagerly agreed to sing.

Reece Vishonn had also received mail, delivered to him by a servant from the King’s Arms tavern. His agent in London sent him a statement of accounts and a report on the debates in Parliament, in which his agent said that repeal was very close to passage. The news so excited him that he rode to Morland Hall. “Haven’t I said it all along?” he laughed. “They would see reason!”

“Have they?” queried Jack Frake.

Vishonn waved the caution away. “Oh, you are always looking under tree stumps for possums, Mr. Frake!” He paused to sip the sherry his host had served him. “Although my agent does caution that, if repeal passes, we should not consider it a victory over Parliament, lest the ministry hear of our jubilation, and look darkly on our behavior.”

“If repeal passes, it won’t be a victory, Mr. Vishonn, and there will be little cause for jubilation.”

The master of Enderly stuck out his lower lip in thought. “Reconciliation, then?”

Jack Frake shook his head. “Not even that. You have read my pamphlet. You would be wise to consult it again.”

In town, Vishonn called on Arthur Stannard, the tobacco agent, and apprised him of the news. Stannard, too, had received a letter from his superiors in London, reporting on the progress of the debates on repeal. Vishonn related to him Jack Frake’s comments. “What do you think, sir? If it is not a victory, and if it is not reconciliation, what could it be?”

Stannard laughed as though it should have been obvious. “Mr. Frake is right, for once. It is neither. What it is, is a truce, an acknowledgement of an inexpediency. We have not heard the last of it, sir. The declaratory bill that may pass with repeal will set accounts straight. Parliament will not let the colonies go. You may count on it.”

The next evening’s supper at Morland Hall was attended by the Kenricks, Thomas Reisdale, John Proudlocks, Jock Frazer, Ramshaw, and Steven Safford. Jack Frake endured two rounds of toasts to him.

In addition to speculation about repeal, they discussed Richard Bland’s own pamphlet, published in March,
An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies
. Neither Jack Frake nor Hugh Kenrick thought much of it. John Proudlocks commented, “In it, he goes up and down tedious hills in circles of logic, never coming to rest, never reaching a conclusion, because I believe he is afraid of the end to which his logic leads him.”

Thomas Reisdale nodded agreement, “It would be interesting to hear him discourse on Mr. Frake’s pamphlet. But probably he would be so outraged by it that, instead, he would call for Mr. Frake to be put into the stocks.”

“Very true,” agreed Hugh. “He does not care for the conclusions.” He scoffed. “Well, he was among the objectors to Mr. Henry’s resolves last session, and Mr. Henry and I and our party correctly predicted that he and others would attempt to take credit for having discovered our rights.”

They discussed the General Assembly. In early February Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier announced in the
Virginia Gazette
its proroguement from March until May. Hugh said, “Very likely he will delay the Assembly until he is certain there is no cause for trouble. I do not expect to see a new sitting until the fall. ”

“He and their nabs on the Council tremble,” said Jock Frazer.

Hugh noted, “There has been talk in Williamsburg that some burgesses will invite a Maryland printer to begin a new
Gazette
, to answer the Governor’s
Gazette
. That ought to be interesting. The Governor would not then have a monopoly on the news.”

News, thought Jack Frake, as the company turned to other subjects. The next few years will bring us much news, and little of it will be cause for celebration.

Etáin glanced at her husband at that moment, and guessed his thoughts.

* * *

The news came.

News of repeal began filtering into the colonies as early as late April, and throughout May. Early in June Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier received a packet of correspondence from the Board of Trade. In it were copies of the Repeal and Declaratory Acts. On June 13th, in the
Virginia Gazette,
he formally announced repeal, and the Act was reprinted in that paper. It was also reprinted in the new competing
Gazette
, published independently by William Rind of Maryland. Its masthead boasted, “Open to all Parties, but Influenced by None.” It was the first free press in the colony’s history.

A ball was held in the Capitol to celebrate the news. Reece Vishonn and his family, and other prominent families from Caxton, attended. Hugh Kenrick agreed to attend, knowing that Reverdy was hungry for such an event. He noted that, despite the Lieutenant-Governor’s best efforts and strenuous cautions, most attendees treated repeal as a victory.

Repeal was celebrated in all the colonies with balls, fireworks, and parades. Countless toasts were made to George the Third and his family, to Parliament, to Rockingham and his ministers, to all the friends of the colonies in London who had a hand in repeal. Few men paid attention to the accompanying Declaratory Act. Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick observed this neglect, and knew that Sir Dogmael Jones was right to say in the Commons, that only “a few of them, and fewer of us, will see in such a sibling act the foundation of a more ruinous and angry contention than they believe the Crown is capable of handling, except in the manner of Turks.”

On May 10th, John Robinson, Speaker of the House of Burgesses and Treasurer, died. His death was, of course, reported by both
Gazettes
. The late Treasurer’s books were finally examined, and it was discovered that he had loaned many prominent planters the notes he was required by law to have destroyed years before, leaving his own and the colony’s accounts in debt for over £100,000. Fauquier, whose friend he was, could no longer postpone the separation of the Speaker and Treasurer’s offices.

On May 16th, Fauquier prorogued the General Assembly to July.

That summer, Robinson’s father-in-law, Colonel John Chiswell, whom Hugh had dueled on horseback in Caxton, got into a drunken argument with a Scottish merchant, Robert Routledge, in a tavern near the Cumberland County courthouse, and ran him through with a sword, killing him. He was arrested for murder by the sheriff and was to be imprisoned in Williamsburg to await trial in the General Court. Three judges of that court — who were also members of the Governor’s Council — intervened and
arranged for Chiswell’s bail. This extralegal action was also reported in both
Gazettes
, revealing to Virginians the scope of the Old Guard’s influence throughout the colony. In his Williamsburg home, Chiswell, not long afterward, put a pistol to his head and committed suicide.

Shortly after the
Sparrowhawk
left Caxton in early May for West Point to unload and load cargo, the
Busy
arrived. Its new captain, George Requardt, inquired at Richard Ivy’s tobacco inspection office after the residence of Hugh Kenrick, and was given directions. Requardt hired a mount at the Gramatan Inn and rode to Meum Hall. After he had introduced himself to Hugh, he conveyed his family’s regards, and handed him a parcel of mail. Hugh invited him to stay at Meum Hall for the duration of his business in Caxton, and introduced him to Reverdy. Requardt accepted the invitation, and asked his host to send one of his servants for his baggage.

One of the letters was from Hugh’s father. It was short, and dwelt on two pieces of news: repeal of the Stamp Act, and the murder of Dogmael Jones.

“Oh!” cried Hugh, and the pain of his exclamation was so loud that Reverdy rushed into his study, alarmed and frightened, for she had never before heard him in such agony. “Hugh! What is it? Some terrible news of your family?”

Hugh stood over his desk, resting on his arms, his head bowed. “My darling, they have killed him! They have murdered Mr. Jones!” He looked up at her. There were tears in his eyes. “You were right. There
were
recriminations. The bastards!”

Some days later, Hugh sat on the veranda of his porch, sketching, first in pencil, then in crayon, a portrait of Dogmael Jones, member for Swansditch, sergeant-at-law at the King’s Bench, as he remembered him. When he was satisfied with the likeness, he said quietly, “
Fiat lux
, my friend.” He had the cooper frame the portrait, and placed it on the wall at the end of his collective sketches of the Society of the Pippin.

On June 6th, Parliament passed a new revenue act that was more pernicious than was the Stamp Act. No one, not Hugh Kenrick, not Jack Frake, nor even the House of Burgesses and Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier, would learn of it until the end of July. In that month, William Pitt was elevated to the peerage as the Earl of Chatham. He left the Commons, where he wielded the most influence, for Lords, where he wielded none. In August he acceded to the request of the king and formed a ministry to replace Lord Rockingham’s. Pitt’s ministry, which lasted a year and a half, was more a
mongrel government than was Rockingham’s, composed as it was of antagonistic parties and personalities. And it was a greater disaster, for Pitt was absent for most of its duration. His ministry was thus steered, not by him, but by those who wished to put teeth in the Declaratory Act in all colonial matters whatsoever.

It was the beginning of the end.