Sarum (160 page)

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Authors: Edward Rutherfurd

BOOK: Sarum
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One sad event had taken place just after his arrival there: his mother had died.
His father wrote to him gloomily about it and warned him that, although there would in time be something due to him from certain interests she had with her family, the funds would take time to come through and would in any case be small.
He was surprised, within the year, to hear from Jonathan that he had married again and that his new wife was already pregnant. There had been no more word in his father’s letters about the funds coming to him; and he had not cared to ask.
So he had settled down, on the lush and sultry island of Dominica, to several years of garrison duty where the only military activity was to train men in parade ground tactics that he suspected would be useless for anything but a set-piece battle, and the only casualties from such tropical sicknesses as malaria.
In this enforced and enervating idleness, until he struck up his friendship with Madame Leroux, Adam Shockley had two principal sources of pleasure. The first was his correspondence with his father.
Jonathan Shockley wrote well. His caustic wit, which had sometimes been daunting and confusing to Adam as a boy, came through far better in his letters to his son now that Adam was a man. He kept Adam abreast of Sarum affairs – of the weakened cloth trade, the doings of Mr Harris, and the scandal of young Lord Pembroke temporarily deserting his young wife – so that Adam could almost feel he was back in the close and hearing his father’s voice. He often gave him useful information, too, about more general political affairs.
Above all, he served as a conduit for his son’s other newfound pleasure. For Adam now developed a taste for books.
“I have made a late start upon my education,” he confessed to one of the other lieutenants, “but the truth is I have never enjoyed any kind of learning until now.”
Very soon, half of what he could save from his pay was going on purchases of books, which Jonathan willingly sent out to him, often with his own pungent comments upon them. Father and son wrote to each other on the merits of Dr Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary. Numerous lighter works – Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
, and Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
arrived; then heavier matter: Clarendon’s great volumes of history, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, and the more recent philosophical works of Hume and Bishop Berkeley. He even read Voltaire, and admired that great man’s mockery of the confusion and humbug of the day’s organised religion.
“With great minds for company, a man is never lonely,” Adam concluded.
Jonathan’s comments on political events too were thought provoking. One letter which came soon after the American colony had protested about the English Parliament’s levying of a stamp duty tax on them, always remained in Adam’s mind.
 
I was vastly amused to hear that the colonists’ ambassador – I know not how else to describe the man – Mr Benjamin Franklin, being in London at the time the said Stamp Act was first brought in, made haste to procure for three of his friends positions as stamp masters, which I am assured would have given them little exertion but a handsome income each of £300 a year!
And now, my dear Adam, I shall give you my view of the American colony which, I am proud to say, is shared by none.
For ’tis clear to me that the most foolish thing we ever did was to beat the French so handsomely. The gentlemen of the colony, having no great threat made against them any more will soon be grown indifferent to England for whose army, and the expense thereof, they will think themselves no longer in need. There’s the rub. Excuses will be found, but they’ll not pay taxes across the ocean.
And then – the government will try to compell them. ’Tis there that you will next fight.
 
But today it was a far more important letter he was awaiting.
She had been his mistress for nearly a year. It was a situation that suited them both. But, as she had said to him quite frankly, it was time that she married again. And since, she pointed out, there appeared to be no prospect of her doing so on Dominica, it was time for her to move on.
“I shall go to a French island,” she told him, looking into his eyes a little sadly.
The message could not be clearer. If he wished to marry her, he must say so. But on a lieutenant’s pay and her tiny income, it was impossible.
On a captain’s pay, it might be done. Furthermore, a captaincy was becoming available shortly. The price was seven hundred pounds. He had two hundred saved.
That was why he had written with urgency to his father to enquire what sums might be due to him from his mother’s family.
The mail the packet was bringing would be in his hands by morning.
 
My dear Son,
You naturally ask whether there is some money due to you from your mother.
It was a matter I had long meant to acquaint you with yet which, I must confess, had escaped my memory these last few years – namely, that when you determined upon gaining a commission before you went to India, it was necessary to purchase the same at a cost of £400.
What neither I nor your mother told you at that time was that such a sum was not readily available; and accordingly it was agreed that it should be borrowed from Sir George Forest, which loan, thanks to the high opinion he had of you, was made at no interest, but upon condition that, upon the decease of either one of us, the loan should be repaid forthwith.
Your mother had from her family a portion of £500. I have accordingly repaid Sir George Forest’s loan of £400, and the remaining £100, my dear boy, is at your service. Pray let me know how and where you wish to receive it.
Yr affectionate father J.S.
 
They had not told him.
Madame Leroux left two weeks later.
It was three months after that, that several of the troops began to go down with malaria.
 
1777:
OCTOBER
6
 
It was the eve of battle. Below them on the left flowed the Hudson River; on their right was the battered little group of buildings called Freeman’s Farm. On the opposite high ground, three hundred yards away, lay Gates and the American rebels. Eight miles behind them, Saratoga. The place before them was called Stillwater.
It was the eve of battle, and Captain Adam Shockley felt uneasy.
The essence of the plan, a good and sound plan which, faced with the dithering incompetence of Lord North and his ministers, had been drawn up by George III himself, was that General Howe and his large force should come from the south while General Burgoyne came down from Canada. The two should then meet and trap the American rebels against the east coast. Howe had delayed in Philadelphia.
“Some say he cares more for the rebel cause than our own,” complained one of his fellow officers to Shockley.
Whatever Howe’s reason, the plan was already half ruined and the forces at Stillwater were now waiting, with increasing desperation, for General Clinton to come up through Albany with urgently needed supplies.
But for ill-luck, Captain Adam Shockley would not have been there at all.
By 1769, when the regiment – or rather the handful of officers and seventy-five troops remaining after their sickness in the tropics – had returned to build up its strength again in Ireland, Adam Shockley was suffering from malaria. The voyage home and a rest at the barracks restored him, but at thirty-five he felt himself to be middle-aged. Nonetheless, he set about the business of recruiting, and at the same time tried to build up his own strength. He walked, rode, and drank little, and although he suffered a few minor relapses, pronounced himself fit enough to carry on. Since the regiment was so short of men, no one suggested he should give up his duties.
The recruiting was slow. In the years that followed, out of four hundred and sixty-four recruits, one hundred and five deserted; but still the numbers were steadily growing, and it was enough.
“It’s the old hands like me who hold things toether,” he declared with perfect truth. The army was full of men like him – middle-aged lieutenants who could not afford higher commissions but who knew the regiment and had seen service. “I daresay I shall die a poor lieutenant,” he said with resignation.
His opportunity came out of the blue – a letter from Fiennes Wilson, now a powerful man in the East India Company, working with Warren Hastings who had become the greatest man in India. It offered him a post in the company:
 
We are looking for a man of sense and judgement and Sir George Forest recommended your name to us.
I remember your visit here in the glorious days of Plassey, as does Mr Hastings.
The position would not make you a nabob, but would certainly be rewarding.
 
He could not go; the doctor he consulted was adamant.
“You’ve spent your time in a hot climate, Mr Shockley, and you’ve already paid the price. If you go to India now, I can’t answer for you. You mustn’t think of it. Only a cold climate for you, sir, now. The colder the better.”
He had remained in Ireland and it was from there that he had watched the situation in America grow worse, just as his father had predicted. When the dumping of excess tea into the American market to aid the finances of the East India Company had sparked off the Boston Tea Party, he was not surprised. As the skirmishes of Lexington and Concord gave way to the fighting at Bunker Hill and Boston, he rejoiced. It must mean action – his one chance of promotion. If there must be fighting, he hoped it would be a campaign of interest, and he was full of curiosity when he learned that Generals Gates and Lee, both former British officers, were leading rebel forces and were being joined by a new and powerful figure, Washington, the landowner from Virginia.
The regiment was ready. After what seemed to Shockley an endless delay, in April 1776 they left the west of Ireland for Quebec.
Not, of course, that there was any question of the rebels succeeding. Why, more than half the colony was loyal to the British crown. New York alone was supplying fifteen thousand regular and eight thousand five hundred militia to the British army, when Washington had about twelve thousand under his own command.
“Besides,” the major assured Shockley, “I know something of this Washington. The only reason he’s against us is that our ministers denied him, and others like him, the right to conquer tracts of their own in Ohio. The man’s a gentleman. His brother married into a family with six million acres – think of it, Shockley.”
“Yet he leads the rebels,” Adam pointed out.
“Rabble. And I dare say Washington knows it.” He smiled knowingly. “I’ll tell you a thing. I know a merchant in England that corresponded with him once, this Washington. Sent me a copy of some of the fellow’s words: look at this.” And he produced a small piece of paper on which a single sentence was written:
 
Mankind when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.
 
“There, sir. Now don’t tell me that when Washington has tried to wring a few concessions from our ministers, he won’t abandon these cursed radicals to their fate.”
Shockey had heard that part of the reason why the southern states had started to fight was in the hope of repudiating their debts to English merchants. The men of the north, he supposed, wanted to escape taxes. But the air of blustering confidence amongst some of his fellow officers worried him. He had a feeling the American rebels would turn out to be more tenacious than that.
In June 1776, under the command of Brigadier General Fraser, the 62nd helped to hold off and then scatter two thousand of the rebels who had advanced upon the town of Sorel on the St Lawrence river. Two hundred rebel prisoners were taken. After this victory, known as the Battle of Three Rivers, part of the British force, under General Burgoyne, moved down to Fort St John.
It was a successful action. The 62nd had distinguished itself, and to his great delight, Adam Shockley at last found himself promoted to captain.
“We’ve driven the rebels out of Canada,” Burgoyne told his new captain. “Now we’ll crush them above New York.”
One other event had occurred meanwhile, that seemed to give the lie to this confident boast. For a month after Three Rivers, thirteen provinces in North America took the flag of the stars and stripes and made their Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration called forth one of Jonathan Shockley’s most characteristic letters from Sarum:
 
As to this Declaration of Independence, I confess myself utterly astonished. That all men are born free and equal is an assertion against the history and constitution of every civilised country.
There’s not a word of such a thing in Magna Carta to be sure.
Then the assertion that all men have the right to the pursuit of happiness; I cannot imagine why it should be thought so. Certainly there’s no word about happiness in the Bible, nor in any of the canons of the Christian religion. Indeed, I scarcely think our Puritans in England would have tolerated such a notion for a moment; for your Calvinist makes a virtue of being miserable upon every opportunity.
No, my dear Adam, these are the vapourings of enthusiasts and demagogues, and soon will pass.
 

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