Patriots (5 page)

—

Governor Bernard understood Hutchinson’s liking for money better than Samuel Adams’ indifference to it. His annual salary totaled twelve hundred pounds, and he enjoyed other perquisites. He had ignored warnings that the people of Massachusetts might be difficult to manage when he had left his previous post as governor of New Jersey, and during his first years in Boston he seemed self-confident. He had all the signs of success—an Oxford education, a career in the law, a wellborn wife. Bostonians had no way of knowing how roughly life had treated Francis Bernard or that behind his placid facade he was full of trepidation.

His father, a clergyman, had died before he was three, and the Reverend Anthony Alsop, who came to Berkshire to replace him, married Francis’ widowed mother when her year of mourning was over. But Bernard’s mother died of smallpox a year later; his stepfather fled to Holland to escape a breach-of-promise suit, and Francis was left with an aunt. The suit was finally settled and Alsop returned to England, where he fell into his garden ditch and was drowned. Francis was thirteen.

Bernard studied at Christ Church, read law at the Middle Temple and married another orphan, who had a powerful uncle. He set out to found a family large enough to defy fate. His wife bore ten children who survived, but tragedy followed into the next generation. When his eldest son was admitted to Westminster, his friends celebrated by tossing the youth in the air on a blanket. He was dumped out, landed on his head and was severely injured.

It was Mrs. Bernard’s uncle, Lord Barrington, the secretary of state for war in London, who arranged for Bernard to be appointed governor of New Jersey, and after two years he bettered his prospects with the move to Massachusetts. By 1763, Bernard was aligned firmly with the Tories. With no divisive issue looming on the horizon, the squabbling had become personal. Servants in the governor’s house reported that he was stingy. The Tories mocked Samuel Adams as “Sammy the Maltster,” and James Otis became “Jemmy” in the conservative
Evening Post:
“Jemmy is a
madman, Jemmy is an ass / Jemmy has a leaden head, and forehead
spread with brass.”

—

During 1763, a quiet interval, George III replaced William Pitt with George Grenville as prime minister. Grenville’s younger sister was married to Pitt, but the brothers-in-law were estranged and Grenville had never won Pitt’s following. Although King George had married and produced an heir, his court was finding that the amiable young man now was impatient with any adviser who dared to contradict him. Soon after Grenville’s appointment, the king was complaining, “When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for
an hour more.” At the end of each interview, the king spurred Grenville on his way, “It is late. Good morrow,
Mr. Greenville. Good morrow, Mr. Greenville.” It was George’s small revenge never to call his prime minister by his right name.

Grenville was dull but also dogged. The war had left England with a deep debt, and he was determined to reduce it. He began to entertain new ideas for raising revenue.

Patrick Henry opposing the Parsons’ Cause in Hanover Court House

VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

W
HILE
George Grenville was struggling with England’s debt in the autumn of 1763, the Reverend James Maury of Fredericksville, Virginia, was worrying over his family’s budget. Bostonians might have found Maury’s preoccupation with money unbecoming in a minister, but Virginians had a less exalted opinion of their clergy. The Church of England had been the established religion from the time the colony was first settled, and the law required
Virginians to take communion twice a year in an Anglican church, although their attendance was rarely enforced. Ministers of other denominations who went to the capital at Williamsburg for a dispensation would be licensed to preach, and the Presbyterians accepted that restriction. Baptists, Methodists and Quakers refused on principle and could expect to be jailed or fined. Sometimes they had their
meetings broken up by the sheriff or by a
Church of England clergyman leading a band of hostile neighbors.

With the Anglican Church enjoying that monopoly, many of its parsons took their positions as sinecures and turned to worldly pleasure. They could be seen at horseraces and cock fights—not always sober—or playing backgammon, billiards and cards. They also went dancing. As one visitor put it, Virginians would dance or die. The current fancy was the jig, which had reached plantation ballrooms by way of the slave quarters.

The Reverend Maury neither gambled nor danced. He eked out a living for his wife and his eleven children by teaching school. In daily life, he also made use of his classical education in naming his slaves—Clio, Cato, Ajax and Cicero. One of his brightest pupils, Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle County, had joined Maury’s classes in 1758, at the age of fifteen. Thomas’ father had died the previous year and left the boy a comfortable estate, but Thomas noticed that Pastor Maury was hard pressed. He seemed harassed by a lack of money and that he often complained about a recent law called the Two Penny Act.

The act’s very name reminded Virginia’s clergymen that they were paid servants of the state. Throughout the colony, each town’s officials—or vestrymen—hired a minister and set his salary. Since the vestry were usually large plantation owners, they paid in tobacco. In 1748, the Virginia House of Burgesses had fixed a parson’s salary at sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco a year, and vestrymen who did not provide that amount could be sued for damages. After the king ratified the legislation, it had become a royal law that only the king himself could undo.

But with the next bad crop, the legislators regretted their generosity. In 1755, and again three years later, they meddled with the quota. Instead of granting a parson the full sixteen thousand pounds—worth about four hundred pounds sterling in 1758—the Burgesses compelled him to accept Virginia’s depreciated paper money at the rate of twopence for every pound of tobacco. As a result, a clergyman was collecting only about one third of what the law had guaranteed him.

Virginia’s parsons were not men to take consolation in the beatitudes; they sued. After one court awarded a parson double his regular pay in damages, the Reverend Maury filed a similar suit in the courthouse at Hanover, eighteen miles north of Richmond. The case took a year and a half to come to trial, but then, in November
1763, the proceedings couldn’t have gone better for Maury and his fellow Anglicans. The court ruled that since the king had never agreed to repeal the law of 1748, the vestry had acted illegally in holding back two thirds of Maury’s pay. A hearing to assess damages was set for December 1.

Parson Maury had clearly chosen well in his attorney—
Peter Lyons, a charming Irishman who weighed three hundred pounds but was renowned for his refined courtroom manner. The arithmetic of the case hadn’t been challenged, which meant that the damages hearing would be only a formality. A deputy sheriff named Thomas Johnson could expect a steep fine for not collecting the quota of tobacco due Parson Maury.

The hearing was only three weeks away, and Johnson had no hope of hiring a distinguished lawyer to represent him. In desperation, he turned to the judge’s son, a young man who had recently taken up the law after failing at everything else. Would this untried lawyer accept fifteen shillings to do his best against Parson Maury and Peter Lyons? Patrick Henry said that he would.

—

Maury’s former student, Thomas Jefferson, knew Patrick Henry but wasn’t much impressed by him. They had met in December 1759, during a Christmas house party at the estate of Colonel Nathaniel West Dandridge. Jefferson had just finished his studies at Maury’s school and was headed for William and Mary College in Williamsburg. Patrick Henry was between failures. He had tried farming, and twice he had tried keeping a store. The best that could be said of those attempts was that he had never been declared bankrupt. But at the colonel’s party he was showing no sign of discouragement.

Thomas Jefferson, gangling and judgmental at sixteen, watched grudgingly as Patrick Henry made himself popular with the other guests. Although he was his elder by only seven years, Henry was married and a father and seemed much older to Thomas. That made his conduct all the more unseemly—being so passionate about dancing and so eager to please. Henry didn’t seem interested in engaging young Jefferson in serious conversation, and Thomas found his manners somewhat coarse.

A few months later, though, Patrick Henry sought out Thomas on the William and Mary campus with astonishing news. Henry had been reading a lawbook at home between the hours he helped
out at his father-in-law’s tavern. Now he had come to Williamsburg to ask the legal examiners to license him as a lawyer. One had to admire his nerve. For generations, Virginia families had sent their sons to London to study law at the Inns of Court. Young men who couldn’t afford that expense apprenticed themselves for many months with an established lawyer. Here came Patrick Henry announcing that he had borrowed a copy of
Coke upon Littleton
—the text that James Otis had read and cursed for years. After six weeks of glancing through it, Henry considered himself qualified to open a law office.

Thomas didn’t know then that Henry enjoyed playing the rustic. From boyhood he had loved to hunt ducks and geese along the Pamunky River, and at eleven and twelve, while other children were anchored in school, he had roamed the countryside. Redhaired and blue-eyed, he had grown into a boy who liked to exaggerate his rural accent. “Naiteral parts,” he would say, “is better than all the larnin’ on yearth.” But in his teens a different Patrick emerged, tutored at home by his Scottish father and by his uncle, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who taught him Latin and Greek along with his catechism. By fifteen Patrick was lying on his bed reading for hours, and the next year, when he was sent to work at his first store, he discovered the joys of conversation. Customers commented that the young clerk seemed beguiled by the thrust and parry of any argument and determined not to let his job get in the way of a good debate.

One day, stretched full length on a sack of salt, he was arguing with his friends when a customer entered the store and asked, “Have you any salt, sir?”

Henry broke off talking only long enough to shake his head. “Just
sold the last peck.”

Henry hadn’t let Thomas Jefferson see his serious side or Thomas had chosen to ignore it. Jefferson certainly didn’t hold out much hope for Henry’s success with the examiners. A candidate for the bar could pick the men to test him, and Thomas knew the lawyers Henry had chosen. They included the Randolph brothers—Peyton, who had studied in London at the Inner Temple, and John, who had studied at Gray’s Inn. Another examiner, Robert Carter Nicholas, was related to the “King” Carter who held three hundred thousand acres of Virginia land. Most distinguished of all
was George Wythe, the lawyer with whom Jefferson hoped one day to serve his apprenticeship.

The four men did not sit as a board, and there were no written tests. Instead, each lawyer interviewed the applicant in his chambers. Afterward at least two of them had to agree to sign his license. As Patrick Henry went off on his rounds, his appearance tended to work against him. He was tall but rather stooped, and his forehead beetled noticeably. Early in life, his red hair had become a scant fringe, and in public he usually wore a wig. His clothes were cheap and he wore them carelessly. But Henry’s eyes were lively under their long lashes, and he had a habit of paying close attention. His jaw was big, his teeth flashing, and his wide mouth always seemed ready to stretch into a grin. Combined with the flash to his eyes, the half-smile gave Henry a considerable appeal.

It was appeal wasted on George Wythe. He asked Henry a few questions, refused to sign his license and bowed him out of his office. John Randolph was also put off by the young man’s lack of polish, but he sensed an original mind and let the examination stretch to several hours. Randolph saw that Henry knew nothing about municipal law, but when they took up natural law and general history his arguments were bold and strong. At one point, challenging his interpretation of the common law, Randolph said, “You defend your opinions well, sir, but now to the law and the testimony.”

He led Henry to a shelf of books and paged through one of them. “You have never seen these books,” Randolph said, “nor this principle of law. Yet you are right and I am wrong. And from this lesson you have given me—you must excuse me for saying it—I will never trust to appearance again.”

Randolph added that if Patrick Henry’s hard work matched his gifts, he could become a valuable member of the legal profession.

That may simply have been a gracious way of yielding to the inevitable, since Randolph seemed to believe that Henry had already obtained the necessary two signatures. In fact he had only one, extorted from kindly Robert Carter Nicholas after much importuning and Henry’s solemn promise to study more law when he returned to Hanover. Thomas Jefferson said afterward that
the Randolph brothers had signed Henry’s license with as much reluctance as good manners permitted them to show. But he granted that while both men lamented Henry’s ignorance, they agreed that he was a young
man of genius.