Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  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.

  Yet it was the very day after the successful battle of Three Rivers that Adam Shockley decided the English cause was lost.

  He was a small fellow, barely sixteen years old, and he was sitting very quietly with the other prisoners. When he had been taken the day before it had amused the men that the musket they took from him was so much larger than he was.

  He was not only small, he was narrow – there was no other word for it. It was not only his thin face, and close-set eyes, not only his thin, spidery hands; his whole body seemed not more than a foot across at the shoulder.

  Yet – Shockley noticed it about nearly all the prisoners – the boy had a sort of inner calm about him, not at all like the boisterous good nature of his own men. His dark eyes stared at his captors without fear or anger; it was almost as if he pitied them.

  His name was John Hillier.

  Feeling sorry for the boy, Shockley strode over to him.

  “You have a Wiltshire name, Mr Hillier,’ he said with a smile. “Plenty of Hilliers around Sarum where I come from.”

  The boy nodded calmly.

  “My grandfather left Wiltshire,” he replied, gazing at Adam without either respect or insolence.

  “Oh. Why was that?”

  “His wife’s family turned Quakers, captain. They were more welcome in Pennsylvania than England.” He spoke with the quiet assurance that it was England who had lost by their move. “Then my grandfather went to join them after.”

  Shockley thought of the little community of Quakers he remembered at Wilton. They had been tolerated – just. He couldn’t say he blamed the Hilliers and their Quaker relations for leaving.

  “But you and your family, you are not Quakers?”

  “No,” he said simply. “Quakers don’t fight. I do.”

  “And what do you hope to gain from this fighting, Mr Hillier?” he asked pleasantly.

  The boy looked at him in surprise.

  “Freedom,” he said simply.

  Shockley would have liked to sit down beside him to talk, but thought that, as an officer, he should not; and so their conversation was conducted in this strange fashion, with the young captive sitting on the ground and the bluff British officer standing in front of him. Despite this, they spoke easily enough.

  “Tell me then, Mr Hillier, what is the freedom you seek?”

  “That no man should be taxed without representation, sir. That all men should be free and entitled to vote. These are both English common law, I believe, and written in Magna Carta. These liberties were denied us by the king.”

  Shockley almost burst out laughing; but checked himself in time.

  Neither common law – that collection of ancient uses which protected a man’s property and gave even a serf a right to be tried before he was hung, nor the great charter that Archbishop Langton had drawn up between King John and his barons had a word to say about representation and tax, let alone voting. The very idea was absurd. But he could see that the boy believed it and so for the time being he said nothing.

  He tried another tack.

  “You say you accept the English laws, Mr Hillier, yet you deny the authority of the king. How can you be an Englishman then?”

  “How is the king one,” the boy retorted bitterly, “when he sends German mercenaries against us?”

  But Adam countered swiftly.

  “And ’tis well known you seek an alliance with England’s greatest enemy, France.”

  Now Hillier did not reply, but Shockley was not trying to confound him. He returned therefore to the general argument.

  “What if, Mr Hillier, those rights you speak of were not to be found in common law and the charter?” he asked gently. “What would be your argument then?”

  The boy thought, but only for a moment.

  “There are natural laws, above those made by man; God gave us reason, and reason tells us these things are just.”

  Adam stared at him. It was astounding. He knew from his schooldays, and from his subsequent reading that such arguments could be made. Aristotle, two thousand years before, had spoken of universal law; the great Churchman Aquinas had named it too – though strictly subservient to Divine Law, as revealed in the Bible, that in turn came from God’s Eternal Law, which no man could know. It was one thing for philosophers to speculate about such matters, or for clergymen turned sceptics to ridicule the rule of bishops behind closed doors; but here was this young fellow unblushingly using such grand philosophical language in the belief that it gave him the right to deny the authority of Parliament and the king. It sounded like anarchy. Yet the young fellow spoke so quietly.

  It was now that young Hillier drew from his pocket a small pamphlet. Its title was Common Sense by the radical writer Tom Paine.

  “There’s much in here that explains our cause,” he stated. “Read it, if you wish.”

  Adam had heard of the pamphlet. It had been written the previous year and copies had spread all over the colony. It was plain sedition, he had heard. He shook his head. He wanted to hear from the boy himself.

  “What authority do you accept, then?”

  “My conscience,” he said simply.

  There Adam saw the whole matter with absolute clarity. The fact that John Hillier’s constitutional arguments were incorrect – it was this that had infuriated the English Parliament about the rebels more than anything else; the fact that he was using ideas of freedom and justice over which philosophers could argue; the fact that he knew nothing of the centuries of subtle adjustment between the authority and rights of Church, State and individual, of the arguments of the Reformation, the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution: none of these mattered. The struggles of the old world, though they had produced a measure of freedom, would be forgotten in the new.

  He looked down with fascination at the boy. He seemed sensible enough.

  “But if we do as you say, then, the people themselves would rule,” he said. “Are you not afraid of that?”

  And now it was John Hillier who stared at him in astonishment.

  “Why should I be?”

  The conversation haunted him.

  As they prepared for the offensive down the Hudson river to New York, and as his fellow officers predicted sweeping victories, his own sense of foreboding would not leave him. True, they were a well-trained force. When the order for the infantry to advance was given: “Spring up”: no regiment in the line did so with more energy than the gallant 62nd. Already the jaunty little regiment was known as the Springers. He had even done what he could to train them in the more flexible fighting methods that were needed in that rough terrain. Only General Howe
had done so before, when he had taken seven companies for some combat training on Salisbury Plain three years before. But so much was missing. It was not just the parade ground tactics: nor the interrupted supply lines and poorly coordinated higher command. It was in the hearts of the men.

  “We pay our men poorly, and then we deduct their uniforms, their utensils, everything imaginable from their pay. They know no one cares for their welfare. And no chaplains care for their souls,” he complained to his colonel. “Only the Wesleyans we so despise seem to take an interest in the poor soldier.”

  “The rebels are worse supplied. Even the Americans begrudge them food, because they pay for it with their own worthless paper money,” the colonel countered.

  But in his heart Adam was thinking:

  “They can lose a dozen campaigns; but if they don’t want us here, then one day they’ll win the war.”

  He wrote to his father:

  We have left Fort St George in splendid order, in a force under Burgoyne of about 8,000 men: Major Harnage has brought his wife and the general is encumbered with no less than six members, of Parliament. The men march well; and each company is allowed three women.

  We have, so far, been successful against the enemy in every encounter; though we lost 200 men in the swamps around Ticonderoga, which we took, most of them falling to the sharpshooters who take a constant toll of our staunch parade ground fellows. There seems little we can do about it.

  Our supplies are beginning to run somewhat low.

  And now it was October. Tomorrow they would fight again at Stillwater.

  It was two and a half weeks since their first battle at Stillwater and they had remained in the camp at Freeman’s Farm ever since. It had been a victory for the British, of course. They took the farm in a hard day’s fighting, attacking the place in three columns and in classic style. There was only one problem: the 62nd in the centre column had been almost destroyed.