The Sot-Weed Factor (102 page)

But though the twins' extraordinary friend departed, life at Malden never regained its former serenity. Anna remained in a highly nervous state; then in May it became apparent that during their brief cohabitation three months previously, Joan Toast had been impregnated by her husband. Here was a grave matter indeed, for if she carried the fetus to term, the labor of bearing it would surely kill her, and in any event the child would be born diseased; thus despite his sudden passionate desire for fatherhood, which he felt with an intensity that frightened him, Ebenezer was obliged to pray for a spontaneous early abortion. But not only were his prayers unanswered: as if in punishment for his having made them, Anna confessed in midsummer that she too was in a family way, and it took all the resources of the poet's rhetoric to dissuade her from ending her life!

"I -- I'm a
fallen woman!"
she would lament, fascinated by the term. "Wholly disgraced!"

"Wholly," Ebenezer would agree: "as I have been since ever I came to Maryland! You must wed thy shame to mine or see me follow you to the grave!"

So it was that Anna remained at Malden, in relative seclusion, while among the servants and neighboring planters the most scandalous stories ran rife. Once Ebenezer returned ashen-faced from Cambridge and declared: "They're saying 'twas
I
got the twain of you with child!"

"What did you expect?" Anna replied. "They know naught of Henry, and 'tis unlikely I'd take Mister Spurdance for my lover."

"But why
me?"
Ebenezer cried. "Are people so evil-minded by nature? Or is't God's punishment to shame us as if we did in sooth what --"

Anna smiled grimly at his discomposure. "What ever and aye we've blushed to dream of? Haply it is, Eben; but if so, His sentence hath many a precedent. 'Tis the universal doubt of salvages and peasants, whether twins of different sexes have not sinned together in the womb; is't likely they'd think us guiltless now?"

But there is, it would appear, no shame so monstrous that one cannot learn to live with it in time: no visitors called at Malden, and Ebenezer's relations with his domestic staff and field hands grew cold and formal, but neither he nor Anna spoke again of suicide, even when it began to be clear that Burlingame was not going to return. In November Joan Toast died, and her infant daughter as well, from a breech-birth that would have carried off a much stronger woman; grief-stricken, Ebenezer buried the two of them down by the shore, beside his mother. The following January was Anna's term: her brief labor commenced late at night, and in the absence of professional assistance she was delivered of a healthy male child by Grace the cook (who had some experience of midwifery) and the poet himself. There being little likelihood that Andrew Cooke would ever return to Maryland or hear the scandal from a third party, Ebenezer thought it best not to cloud his father's old age with the truth: instead, he wrote that although Joan had expired in childbirth, their baby -- a son christened
Andrew III
-- had lived, and was being cared for by Anna. The old man, needless to say, was overjoyed.

This fiction, once established, had a marked effect on Ebenezer and his sister. Despite her shame, Anna seemed eminently suited in body and mind for motherhood: she had bloomed during pregnancy; her delivery had been easy; now her breasts were rich with milk, and lament as she might, she feasted upon her child as did he upon her, and grew plump and ruddy from the nursing. They did in fact name the child Andrew, and began to consider removing from Malden altogether as soon as feasible, "for the boy's sake. . ."

But this brings us near the end of the history, and it will be necessary to digress for a moment before reaching it if we are to learn the fate of that arch-mischiefmaker John Coode, of the saucy Governor who prosecuted him, and of Lord Baltimore's grand crusade to recover his charter to Maryland, which had been confiscated by King William.

Of Coode, then, whom Nicholson was wont to call "a diminutive Ferguson in point of Government; a Hobbist in point of Religion": already in November of 1694, while Ebenezer was ill and languishing at Malden, the Governor had demanded an account of Coode's disbursement of public revenue and had charged him with, among other misdemeanors, accepting an illegal award of four thousand pounds of tobacco from the Lower House for his services to the Rebellion, stealing the records of his criminal courts for 1691, embezzling public funds in the amount of five hundred thirty-two pounds two shillings and nine-pence as chief of the Protestant Associators (not to mention four hundred more as Receiver General for the Potomac and yet another seven hundred in bills of exchange as Collector for Wicomico River), impersonating a Papist priest and an Anglican rector, conspiring against Governor and King alike, and blaspheming against the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In July of 1696, on the strength of his new evidence, Nicholson instituted proceedings against him and took depositions from divers officials and citizens on the several charges, whereupon his quarry fled to the protection of Andros in Virginia. From there (so went the rumors, for few people claimed ever to have seen him with their own eyes) he communicated secretly with his agents, particularly Gerrard Slye and Sam Scurry -- the former of whom he prompted to publish "Articles of Charge" against Nicholson to the Lords Justices in London, accusing the Governor of everything from Papism and unnatural practices to the murder of one Henry Denton, Clerk of the Council and "material witness to his misdeeds." Despite his problems with privateers in the Bay, Frenchmen on the border, Indians all about the Province, and various murrains and epidemics, Nicholson contrived during this period to found a college in Anne Arundel Town (whose name had become
Annapolis),
defend himself against Slye's charges, and finally, in the summer of 1698, order two sloops and a hundred men to capture Coode and Slye on the Potomac River. The lesser man was apprehended and brought to justice, whereupon he immediately pled coercion by his superior; but Coode himself eluded the trap.

One is pained to learn that at this point matters were removed from the doughty Governor's hands. In an action calculated to solve a number of problems at once, His Majesty commissioned Nicholson to replace his old rival, Sir Edmund Andros, in Virginia, who, having fallen out of royal favor by his attacks on Dr. Blair of William and Mary's College, was demoted to a minor governorship in the West Indies. In January of 1699 (1698 by the old calendar) the transfer was effected, and almost at once Coode was reported to have returned triumphantly to St. Mary's County. Some said he misjudged Nathaniel Blackiston, Nicholson's successor and a nephew of Coode's own brother-in-law, inasmuch as Blackiston actually arrested him in May of the same year; others maintained that such naï
vet
é
was unthinkable in so shrewd an intriguer. It was simple collusion, they claimed, and their cynicism seems justified when one learns that in July of the following year Coode was pardoned and released at his own request, and by 1708 was actually licensed to practice law in the St. Mary's County Court! But another view, less cynical and more subtle, was advanced by Ebenezer Cooke to his sister at the time: no trace had ever been found or mention made of Captain Scurry, he pointed out, since early in the trial of Captain Slye. Was it not entirely within the scope of possibility that the man arrested and pardoned under Coode's name was this same Scurry, either in collusion with Blackiston or otherwise? Ebenezer thought it was, and thus returned to the more basic question: did the "real" John Coode exist at all independently of his several impersonators, or was he merely a fiction created by his supposed collaborators for the purpose of shedding their responsibilities, just as businessmen incorporate limited-liability companies to answer for their adventures?

In any case, one knows that John Coode never attained the grand objectives attributed to him, and neither did that shadowy figure presumed to be at the other pole of morality, Lord Baltimore -- at least not in his lifetime. For however ambiguous Charles Calvert's means and motives, if he existed at all (and if Burlingame did not entirely misrepresent him) one assumes at least that he was anxious to recover his family's proprietary rights to Maryland. This much granted, he must have died in 1715 a doubly disappointed man, for not only was Maryland under the rule of her sixth Royal Governor, but his son and heir, Benedict Leonard Calvert, had two years previously renounced Catholicism in favor of the Church of England, at the expense of his annual allowance of four hundred fifty pounds. It was this very defection, however, that set in progress a swift and dramatic change in the family fortunes: Charles Calvert died on the twentieth of February, and the outcast Benedict Leonard became the fourth Lord Baltimore; but less than two months later, on April 5, Benedict himself passed on, and the title was inherited by his sixteen-year-old son, also named Charles. Now this fifth Lord Baltimore was not only a Protestant like his father, but a handsome, dissolute courtier to boot, so well respected in the royal house for his abilities at pimping and intrigue that in time he became Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. With this array of qualifications in his favor, it took him exactly one month to do what his grandfather had not managed in twenty-five years: in May of 1715, His Majesty George I restored to him the charter of Maryland, its almost monarchic original privileges intact.

These marvels alone, it seems to the Author, are sufficient evidence to convict Mistress Clio on the charge of shamelessness once lodged against her by our poet; what then is one to think on seeing this same young Baltimore, in 1728, offer to Ebenezer Cooke a bona fide commission as Poet and Laureate of Maryland? "On to Hecuba!" as our poet was wont to cry. Or, after the manner of his hybrid metaphors: let us plumb this muse's farce to its final deep and ring the curtain!

First, the Reader must know that after the burst of inspiration which drove him, during his convalescence at Malden in the winter of 1694, to compose not the promised
Marylandiad
but a Hudibrastic exposé
of the ills that had befallen him, Ebenezer wrote no further verse for thirty-four years. Whether this fallowness was owing to the loss of his virginity, dissatisfaction with his talents, absence of inspiration, alteration of his personality, or some more subtle cause, it would be idle presumption to say, but Ebenezer was as astonished as will be the Reader to find that precisely during these decades his fame as a poet increased yearly! The manuscript of his attack on Maryland, one remembers, Ebenezer had taken with him on his shameful flight from Malden and entrusted, via Burlingame, to the captain of the bark
Pilgrim.
At the time, Ebenezer had been apprehensive over its safety and had exacted assurances from Burlingame that the captain would deliver it to a London printer; but in the rush of events thereafter, he forgot the poem entirely, and when, after the christening of Andrew III, Life eased its hold upon his throat, he only wondered disinterestedly whatever became of it.

His slight curiosity was gratified in 1709, when his father sent him a copy of
The Sot-Weed Factor
under the imprint of Benjamin Bragg, at the Sign of the Raven in Paternoster Row! The
Pilgrim
's captain, Andrew explained in an accompanying letter, had delivered the manuscript to some other printer, who, seeing no profit in its publication, had passed it about as a curiosity. In time it had fallen into the hands of Messrs. Oliver, Trent, and Merriweather, Ebenezer's erstwhile companions, who, upon recognizing it as the work of their friend, created such a stir of interest that the printer decided to risk publishing it. At this point, however, Benjamin Bragg got wind of the matter and asserted a prior right to the poem, on the ground that its author was still in his debt for the very paper on which it was penned. There ensued an exchange of mild threats, at the end of which Bragg intimidated his rival into relinquishing the manuscript and brought out an edition of it at
6d.
the copy. The first result, Andrew declared, was a vehement denial from the third Lord Baltimore that he had in any way commissioned Ebenezer Cooke -- a perfect stranger to him -- as Laureate of Maryland or anything else, and a repudiation of the entire contents of the poem. There were even rumors of a libel suit against the poet, to be brought by the Lord Proprietary at such time as the King saw fit to restore him his province; in time, however, the rumors had ceased, for some favorable notices of the poem began to appear that same year. Andrew included one in his letter: "A refreshing change from the usual false panegyrics upon the Plantations. . ." it read in part. ". . . admirable Hudibrastics. . . pointed wit. . . Lord Calvert's loss is Poesy's gain. . ."

"What a feather in thy cap!" Anna cheered upon reading it. "Nay, i'faith, 'tis a very plume, Eben!"

But her brother, surprised as he was to learn of his sudden notoriety, was unimpressed. In fact, he seemed more annoyed than pleased by the review.

"The shallow fop!" he exclaimed. "He nowhere grants the poem's
truth!
'Twas not to wax my name I wrote it, but to wane Maryland's!"

Nevertheless, in the years that followed,
The Sot-Weed Factor
enjoyed a steady popularity among literate Londoners -- though not at all of the sort its author wished for it. Critics spoke of it as a fine example of the satiric extravaganza currently in vogue; they praised its rhymes and wit; they applauded the characterizations and the farcical action -- and not one of them took the poem seriously! Indeed, one writer, commenting on Lord Baltimore's wrath, observed:

It is a curious thing that
Baltimore,
so anxious to persuade us of the elegance of his former Palatinate, should so hardly use that Palatinate's first Poet, when the very poem he despises is our initial proof of
Maryland's
refinement. In sooth, it is no mean Plantation that hath given birth to such delicious wit as Mister Cooke's. . .