War
Authors: Edward Cline
SPARROWHAWK
Book Six
WAR
A novel by
EDWARD CLINE
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-948-7
M P Publishing Limited
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Copyright © 2006 by Edward Cline
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cline, Edward.
Sparrowhawk–war / by Edward Cline.
p. cm. – (Sparrowhawk ; bk. 6)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59692-198-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59692-198-6 (alk. paper)
1. United States–History–Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775–Fiction.
2. United States–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–Fiction. I. Title.
II. Title: War.
PS3553.L544S6275 2006
813’.54—dc22
2006019869
Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith
Cover painting: John Paul Jones on The Bonhomme Richard during its battle with the Serapis, September 23, 1779. (Artist unknown).
Courtesy of The New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with
which one started.”
Ayn Rand, in
Atlas Shrugged
(1957)
T
he engine of tyranny is a blind, indifferent juggernaut, insensible to reason, justice and equity, and so necessarily inimical to them. It matters not the good intentions of the hand that launches it into the affairs of men. Once started, it moves almost of its own volition, corrupting, consuming and destroying everything in its path. It is a fundamentally nihilistic phenomenon. Its power is both centripetal and centrifugal, on one hand drawing its potency from that which it can corrupt; on the other, crushing or flinging aside the incorruptible.
The juggernaut of Parliamentary supremacy collided with the American colonies’ incorruptible sense of liberty, which could be neither crushed nor flung aside. The result was a spectacular explosion: the American Revolution. That explosion was neither necessary nor foreordained. The colonies could have submitted to that supremacy, and existed for a time in a haze of semi-legality, occasional concession, and dependent prosperity. But British-Americans valued their liberty and were willing to claim it whole, come what may. Therefore, the clash between them and the legislative authority of Parliament could be postponed but never resolved. The colonials would not allow their claim to unabridged liberty to be corrupted. In the course of that political transfiguration, they became Americans.
Their original complaint was two-fold: against Parliament, which legislated their shackles; and against King George the Third, who by colonial charter had been empowered to protect them from Parliamentary avarice, caprice and the shackles of economic incarceration. The “patriot king” failed to protect them. He did not suggest, originate or author any of the legislation subsequent to the Declaratory Act meant to bind and pillage the colonies without limit; it was merely his royal pleasure to sign it, although it was within his power to veto it. But, he would be a king, and so he surrendered that executive power to the exigencies of an empire of which he wished to be sovereign, but which, in fact, was Parliament.
This was the nature of the events that followed repeal of the Stamp Act and passage by Parliament of the Declaratory Act in 1766. By 1774, many of the men who had lent their hands to the imposition of an imperial design had come and gone since that repeal and passage. George Grenville. Gone.
Thomas Whateley, his protégé in power. Gone. Charles Townshend, author of the notorious Townshend duties. Dead and gone. And so many more enemies of liberty, as well.
As good as gone had been William Pitt, Lord Privy Seal, whose ministry followed Rockingham’s in 1766, but whose maladies and unpredictable temperament so debilitated him that Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton, and First Lord of the Treasury, became its effective head instead. Grafton, not by his own temperament hostile to the colonies or particularly ambitious, by ineptitude let his party and ministers establish colonial policy and enact legislation that increasingly worsened tensions between the colonies and Britain. His ministry was the epitome of malign neglect.
Uneasy with his political impotence, Grafton resigned, and went into opposition against the next ministry. Later, in Lords, he consistently voted against stringent measures against the colonies. He opposed the ministry he had sworn to support.
This was that of Frederick Lord North, a childhood friend of George the Third, who had succeeded Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or prime minister, on the latter’s death in 1767, and was now First Lord of the Treasury. He was a nondescript, pliant, unimaginative man content to be merely a member of a cabinet, not its head. Frequently, over his twelve-year tenure as prime minister, he begged his royal patron for permission to resign from the onerous post. George would not grant him that relief. Out-maneuvered by both king and party in their quest for conquest of the colonies, his ministry would oversee their loss, and be blamed for it.
In Virginia, gone also were Lieutenant-Governor Francis Fauquier, and his short-reigned successor, Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt. Both had died here, Fauquier in 1768, after ten years in the Palace, Botetourt, in 1770, after only two.
They in turn were followed by the epitome of royal ambition, hauteur, and insolence: John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, Viscount Fincastle, Baron of Blair, of Moulin, and of Tillymount. He arrived in Virginia in September of 1771, after a brief but notorious reign as governor of New York. That man, suspected many Virginians, planned to remain and create his own empire. Liberty-minded burgesses noted the Governor’s appetite for land, particularly in the Ohio Valley and the lands west of it, notwithstanding the Proclamation of 1763. They also noted his arrogance, bad
temper and royally colored presumptions, which were of an abrasive character heretofore unknown to the Virginians in their governors. His wife, Lady Dunmore, and their three daughters and three sons arrived on the
Duchess of Gordon
at Capitol Landing on the York River in February of 1774, and settled themselves in the Palace in Williamsburg with every intention of becoming a royal family by proxy.
It was to be a brief residence.
By the time the Earl’s family arrived in Virginia, and since repeal of the Stamp Act and passage of the Declaratory Act in 1766, Parliament had enacted nearly twenty acts specifically designed to harness the North American colonies, only one of which was repeal of the Townshend duties on all imported British manufactures, except on tea. These were supplemented by Orders in Council approved by the king, to the same end.
The Revenue Act of 1766 followed the Declaratory Act, and disguised new controls with paltry concessions on imported cloth and molasses. The Revenue Act of 1767 imposed the Townshend duties on paint, lead, paper, tea and other imports, and legalized writs of assistance for indemnified customs officers. Accompanying it was an act for creating an American Board of Customs Commissioners, whose purpose was to make customs collection more efficient.
In the same year, Parliament passed an act that suspended the New York Assembly for refusing to vote funds to supply occupying British troops. The Assembly eventually capitulated and voted £2,000. Alexander McDougall, of the Sons of Liberty, was imprisoned for contempt of the Assembly for having called the action a betrayal. In 1768, an Order in Council established four vice-admiralty courts to deal with smuggling and violations of the Revenue Acts and Navigation Laws.
General Thomas Gage garrisoned Boston in October 1768, with two regiments and artillery. Later he moved his headquarters there from New York, replacing Thomas Hutchinson as governor. In 1769, in response to the rebellious behavior of colonials, especially in Massachusetts, Parliament passed resolves that basically treated resistance to its authority as treason, such treason to be determined by trials in Britain. The next year, Parliament repealed the Townshend duties, except on tea.
In Boston, one March night in 1770, a mob of men and boys spoiling for a fight taunted British soldiers sent to protect a sentry and abused them with snowballs, sticks and insults. Someone in the mob yelled, “Why don’t you fire, damn your eyes!” This the soldiers did, mistaking the taunt in the
noisy chaos for an order from their commanding officer. Three of the mob were killed, and two mortally wounded. In late October John Adams defended the commanding officer, Captain Preston and six soldiers, securing acquittal for Preston and four of his men, while two soldiers were branded on their hands and released.
More efficient revenue collection, aided by the navy, only precipitated more resistance. In March of 1772, the Customs schooner
Gaspee
ran aground in Narragansett Bay, was boarded by Rhode Islanders, its crew roughed up and set ashore, and the vessel burned. Its captain was arrested by a local sheriff. It was the third cutter to be destroyed by rebellious colonials. A royal commission of inquiry was named with the power to send those responsible to Britain for trial. The commission adjourned in 1773 for lack of evidence and a paucity of willing witnesses.
News of the commission and its powers caused the creation of permanent intercolonial committees of correspondence among the various colonial legislatures and patriotic organizations to share intelligence of colonial and British actions. In that year all colonial legislatures but those of North Carolina and Pennsylvania voted to establish such committees. In Virginia, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee in March were named by the House of Burgesses to its committee.
In the meantime, the Tea Act, passed in April of that year, which gave the East India Company a monopoly on the sale of the beverage to the colonies, was having predictable consequences. Company stock, in which the government had considerable shares, had fallen in value because of a surplus of tea created by the smuggling of Dutch tea by colonials to bypass the duty on it. The Act gave the Company the ability to undersell even smuggled tea and the power to appoint its own consignees in the colonies. The Company contracted merchantmen to deliver half a million pounds of tea to a select group of merchants in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Charleston.
On the night of December 16th, Samuel Adams signaled a party of men disguised as Mohawk Indians to board the
Dartmouth
and two other merchantmen docked in Boston, and dispose of the tea in their holds. Three hundred and forty-two chests of it were dumped into the harbor, worth over £10,000. The raiders took care not to damage any other goods or property on the vessels. As with the appointed stamp collectors nearly a decade before, most consignees up and down the seaboard were compelled to resign their commissions. “Tea parties” were thrown in many other ports,
and tea that was not destroyed was stored in government warehouses, later to be sold to raise funds for the Revolution.
In late January 1774, Benjamin Franklin, agent for Massachusetts and still working to avert a war between the colonies and the mother country, was summoned before the Privy Council and called a man without honor and a thief by Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn.
The occasion was the publication in the colonies of ten letters by Thomas Hutchinson, then chief justice of Massachusetts, and Andrew Oliver, the colony’s secretary, to Thomas Whateley, the late George Grenville’s protégé, between 1767 and 1769, giving advice on how to deal with the contentious colonies. Franklin had obtained the letters from John Temple, former surveyor-general of customs for North America and now a member of the Board of Customs for America. Franklin sent the letters to Speaker Thomas Cushing in Massachusetts with the proviso that they not be published. Samuel Adams nevertheless published them, resulting in the House petitioning the king for Hutchinson’s and Oliver’s removal from office.
The petition arrived in London about the same time as news of the Boston Tea Party. To avoid a second and perhaps fatal duel between Temple, who was originally suspected of having sent the letters, and Thomas Whateley’s brother, Franklin admitted that he had sent the letters to Boston. After his verbal reprimand by Wedderburn, Franklin was dismissed from his office of deputy postmaster general for America. His treatment by the government convinced him that no reconciliation was possible between the Crown and the American colonies. In March, he left his comfortable rooms on Craven Street near Westminster, never to return.
John Wilkes, however, had returned from his exile and was still contesting against a stubborn Parliament for the seat for Middlesex. He was £4,000 richer from a successful suit against Lord Halifax, who signed the general warrant against him over the
North Briton
affair years before. He was then elected alderman, sheriff and now was lord mayor of London. He was incurring fresh Tory wrath by speaking in defense of the American colonies. John Horne Tooke, an ex-clergyman and founder of the Society for Support of the Bill of Rights, broke with Wilkes in 1771 and founded the Constitutional Society. He, too, championed the American cause from beginning to end.
Ironically, William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, chief justice of the King’s Bench, who advocated the most stringent measures against the
rebellious American colonies, in 1772 found for the freedom of a slave, James Somerset, not to be returned by his owner to Virginia for punishment. Somerset had run away from his visiting master in the metropolis. Mansfield’s decision was misinterpreted by slaves in the colonies as an endorsement of abolition, and moved countless numbers of them to enlist in British ranks at the outset of hostilities years later.
England was host to other ironies, as well. In 1769, James Watt patented a steam engine, using a separate cylinder to condense steam, producing rotary motion for the first time. Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen in 1766, Daniel Rutherford nitrogen in 1772, and Priestley oxygen in 1774. Richard Arkwright patented the water frame to spin cotton in 1768. The Royal Society was abuzz over the experiments of Luigi Galvini, who in 1771 produced an electric current in frogs’ legs.
Thomas Arne was still laboring to digest composer Christoph Gluck’s preface to his 1766 opera “Alceste,” in which the German expressed a philosophy of musical and dramatic elements. Portraitist Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy of Art, in 1774 would soon be challenged by Thomas Gainsborough. Phyllis Wheatley, a young black poetess from Boston, conversant in geography, history, classical literature, and astronomy, traveled to London in 1773 with her master and was a sensation as the “sable muse.” A collection of her verse,
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
, was published the same year. Her work was praised by Washington, Franklin, and Voltaire, and by critics in London and America.
Samuel Johnson, still basking in the glory and proceeds of his
Dictionary
and royal pension, in 1774 published a pamphlet,
The Patriot
, as election publicity for his friend Henry Thrale, member for Southwark and a staunch Grenvillite who wished to retain his seat in the new Parliamentary elections. Johnson, a Tory and no friend of America, would pronounce in his screed: