by Edward Cline
Absent a rigorous system of the principles of liberty, Jones reflected — and he for one believed that the colonials were on the trail of one — Yorke was like so many other men in the Commons and the courts, engorged with rancorous fear when Parliamentary or Crown authority was questioned or challenged. And in Yorke’s character Jones had observed, in both the man’s letters and his speeches in the House, that the fear had spawned a curious, habitual style of malice, one that assaulted its object in the vagaries of legal circumspection. His official opinion on Wilkes’s alleged libel two years ago was that it was not treasonable, but rather a “misdemeanor of the highest nature.” Last March, in the Commons, he had defended the legality of general warrants in Wilkes’s case on the premise that the issue of libel was a matter of abstract law, not one of political or judicial weight.
Jones sighed in tired disgust. And now, he reflected, that constitutional chimera was being courted to hold again the great seal of Attorney-General.
Dusk had already slipped to darkness by the time Jones paid the porters and ascended to his rooms. In his study, he lit two pump lamps — gifts from his elector, Garnet Kenrick — and completed a task interrupted by the messengers. It was a letter to Sir Charles Pratt, chief justice of the Common Pleas, congratulating him on his recent elevation to the peerage. Pratt was now Baron Camden of Camden Place in Kent; Jones had heard the news a day after his return from Danvers. The news disturbed him, for Pratt was one of the few sitting justices he admired. As tactfully as he could, he expressed hope that his elevation to Lords would not dilute Pratt’s devotion to the principles of liberty. “Forgive me the presumption,” he ended the letter, “but I am certain that the honor conferred upon you by His Majesty will not for an instant cause your lordship to doubt the wisdom, efficacy, and necessity of upholding the Constitution.” In other words, thought Jones with a wry twist of his mouth, I hope you have not been bought. He dipped a quill into an inkpot, signed the letter with a flourish, and set it aside to be copied and sealed later. If his new lordship took offense at the hypothetical imputation of corruption, so be it.
During the Parliamentary recess, and in between appearances at the King’s Bench, Jones immersed himself in as many forays for freedom and liberty as he could manage. He offered pro bono counseling to John Bingly, who had continued to publish John Wilkes’s North Briton at great risk to his freedom and solvency. Bingly’s partner, John Williams, had been pilloried in the Palace Yard; Jones had contributed to the fund established by Williams’s supporters to defray his legal expenses. Jones had represented John Entick, whose Monitor publications were being censured by the courts and who was suing the Secretaries of State over general warrants. He had followed closely in the newspapers the course of victories and setbacks of Pascal Paoli and the Corsicans in their fight for freedom from Genoese domination, and wrote letters to the papers inquiring why the government did not lend assistance to the rebels, “if only for practical reasons of strategy,” he pointed out in one published letter, “for if Paoli is crushed, and the Genoese sell their rights to the island to France, British ease of sail in the Mediterranean may in future be had for an extraordinary toll, or perhaps denied altogether.”
At the King’s Bench he had accepted the briefs of two important cases. Richard Hogue, a notorious producer of “interludes” in a variety of unlicensed theater-taverns in London, had in the spring staged a play that incorporated the libretti of sections of Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, an oratorio that celebrated George the Second’s victory during the War of the Austrian Succession. Hogue regarded the piece, which he himself wrote, as an “interlude,” even though it used speaking actors and actresses to advance a vaguely lewd story. He consequently had not bothered to submit the work to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for approval and a license to stage it, as the Dramatic Licensing Act of 1737, enacted to protect political figures from devastating caricature, required of all plays. At its first staging, someone in the audience took exception to the dialogue and lyrics, filed informations with the Lord Chamberlain, and Hogue’s play was closed by bailiffs and Hogue himself arrested and imprisoned.
After he had agreed to represent Hogue, Jones visited Philip Dormer Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, at his residence in Greenwich, to solicit his advice on how to argue this particular case. The Earl had spoken against the Act in debate in Lords, asserting without qualification the right of theatrical satire to immunity from government regulation and suppression. Ridicule, he had argued, was an elemental aspect of the theater, and the bill then before the House represented an infringement not only on liberty but on property, “wit being the property of those who have it.” Jones was inspired to seek the notorious Francophile’s advice because in his private library was a pamphlet containing the Earl’s speech, which he found years before in a St. Paul’s Churchyard bookstall. It had been printed in Dublin, Ireland, and professed to be something found in the closet of a “deceased gentleman” — a standard ruse contrived by pamphleteers to avoid prosecution for having reported a Parliamentary speech.
“Dear me!” the aged statesman had exclaimed after Jones explained the purpose of his call. “I did not think any young person had even heard of that episode!”
Jones smiled and replied, “I am a barrister, your lordship, and laws and their fulminatory origins are my natural interest and obsession.”
Chesterfield had laughed. “Have you seen this circumventing ‘interlude,’ sir, or read the playbook? What is its title?”
Jones looked ironic. “It is called ‘The Beaux’s Pestle,’ your lordship. I have not seen a staging of it, but read the book. It is quite a slender concoction, even though it filches generously from Farquhar and Marlowe, albeit my client admits only to a judicious adaptation of Mr. Handel.”
Chesterfield laughed again. “The advancement of liberty so often is mandated by the freedom of scoundrels!” He studied his caller for a moment. “You do not come to me as a stranger, Sir Dogmael,” he said. “I have read your letters in the Post and Evening Signal, and could not more agree with your points if I had made them myself.” He paused. “I have heard of you, as well. Were you not defending counsel at the trial of those freethinkers some years ago? The ‘Pippins,’ I recollect they were called.”
Jones nodded. “Yes, your lordship. I was their counselor.”
“And you lost that matter.”
“Yes.” Jones’s features darkened with bitter memories. “They were found guilty of seditious libel, but, in truth, they were neither guilty nor scoundrels.” He paused. “Lord Wooten presided.”
“Oh? Grainger the Groundless? Yes, that is correct. I have met him. Rather a cow’s bladder of a man. Well, then I am not surprised that you lost, if he presided. The Crown made an excellent choice in that matter.” Chesterfield glanced for a moment out the study window to his garden. “Then, be prepared to lose again, my good man. I possess no arcane insight into the nature of the Dramatic Licensing Act, which is plainly clear in its wording and allows no leave for interpretation. I cannot imagine any justice who would risk contradicting it, except for Pratt. I agree with you that the Act deserves repeal, for it is contrary to the Constitution, and because it condemns genius to the sponger before it has even set pen to paper. Your Mr. Hogue, apparently, is no genius, but he has been denied his right and opportunity to prove it. And if there are any new Shakespeares among us, I bristle at the thought that they must wait on mediocrity for permission and approval before they might make their presence known to us.” The Earl sighed. “Until the Act is repealed, we must all remain captives of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. I am sorry, but I have no special advice to offer you.” He smiled then. “Sir, your visit is timely. In another day or so, I am to Bath to bathe my physical complaints. However, would you stay to supper? What are your views on this Stamp Act we have so carelessly thrust upon the colonies?” He picked up an ear trumpet and brandished it. “I have not attended Lords in years, sir, for I can no longer hear what is being said in the cha
mber.” Then he grunted in contempt. “There, I am missed for my wit, though not for my wisdom.”
Jones lost the case, as Chesterfield had predicted. “Words were spoken, not sung,” read the decision of the three judges at the King’s Bench, “in between tasteless renditions of dollops of Mr. Handel’s works, and these words, having been spoken in conjunction with actions by the players, communicated a story, one only occasionally interposed by singing accompanied by musicians, though not so frequently or of any duration that the work could be called an opera. Therefore, the work in question is a play, for the exhibition of which to the public for fees or other recompense its author and manager has neglected to apply to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for a reading and license.” The court recommended to the jury that it find Hogue in violation of the Licensing Act, fine him five hundred pounds, and commit him to the King’s Bench Prison for one year. The jury complied.
Jones also lost a second case, that of a young law student from another Inn who had managed to report, verbatim, many of the important speeches made in the Commons the last session. The student secretly sold them to other law students as study aids in contemporary rhetoric. He, too, was served with a general warrant for having violated the ban on public reporting of Parliamentary business. He was found guilty as well of violating Parliamentary privilege, fined one hundred pounds, required to apologize in person to the House when it next sat, and prohibited from pursuing a career in law.
Jones had persuaded Garnet Kenrick to pay most of the student’s fine to keep him out of debtor’s prison — the youth’s tobacconist-shop parents being in no position to pay it themselves — and frequently employed the youth as secretary and amanuensis. And, because the youth had a penchant for law, Jones was making progress in convincing him to emigrate to the colonies, where he could practice it beyond the court’s jurisdiction.
When he could budget the time, Jones attended the intellectual soirées of Elizabeth Montagu and Mrs. Macaulay. He found these tea table discussions less stimulating than the time he spent thinking and writing in the Purgatory, Mitre, and Turk’s Head Taverns. In these busy, smoky environments he had composed most of his anonymously written pamphlets on a variety of subjects, mostly political.
One, entitled “The True Colonial Monarch,” caused a minor sensation among those who worried about the effects of the Stamp Act. In it Jones attacked the Act, and posed the paradox: “By the Revolution of ’89 and the Act of Settlement, Parliament wrested monarchial power from the monarch. If the colonists appeal to His Majesty for protection, for their rights and liberties are guaranteed by his hand in their various charters, is it not implied that they wish His Majesty to reassert and reclaim powers ceded to Parliament? Would they not then be asking him to become again a true sovereign, and not an executive? To subvert the Constitution? To rule them, and in time, us, with the same unmindful recklessness with which Parliament now presumes to rule? If we cannot entrust either the king or Parliament with the shield of liberty, then what might be the solution…?”
Tonight, Jones turned to another chore, that of writing to Garnet Kenrick and his son Hugh, informing them of the change in ministry and the events leading up to it.
He wrote: “…I am suspicious of Mr. Pitt’s devotion to our liberty and that of the colonies. Without casting aspersions on his character, I can only wonder, were he not so distracted by afflictions of the mind and foot, would he not be a worse taskmaster than Mr. Grenville, a greater enemy of the colonists than a friend? You must recall that some time ago, when he was in better health (I believe at the outset of the late war), he stated in the House that he was opposed to encouraging the colonies to manufacture necessities and luxuries for themselves and the mother country, and would sooner blast their every factory and furnace than cause misery and starvation in England.…”
He also discussed the nascent efforts of British merchants and employers to petition the Board of Trade and Parliament to repeal or relax the Stamp Act, for they were anxious that the Act would depress an already reduced trade with the colonies.
Jones brought back with him from Danvers copies of several colonial newspapers forwarded to the Baron by Otis Talbot, the family’s agent in Philadelphia. In one of them, the New York Journal, was a reprint of Paoli’s “Corsican Manifesto,” in which the rebels pledged themselves to die “rather than submit ourselves and posterity to the insupportable yoke of Genoese tyranny and slavery.” The “Manifesto” was accompanied by remarks by the paper’s publisher, who praised the Corsicans as models of virtue for mankind: “Not as you are, but what you ought to be.”
Jones was touched by that sentiment. He carefully underlined it, clipped the item from the paper, and pinned it to the wall over his desk. It both consoled him, and warned him, for while he was endeavoring to be “what he ought to be,” he felt alienated from most men with whom he allied himself in championing liberty, and knew that they were flailing approximations of what they ought to be, unable or unwilling to capture the greater vista of things. He glanced up at the clipping now, then concluded his report on the merchants. “Depend on them to sunder their principles from their purses.”
Under the steady, constant light of the pump lamps, Jones wrote on, not permitting himself to think of a person many leagues away, of Alice Kenrick, his patron’s daughter, who was now seventeen, and with whom he was in love. His discipline faltered, but then he remembered something only after he had finished the letters and put them aside for the law student to copy into his letter book. In a brief postscript to each of them, he reported the adventure of the second messenger.
* * *
It was “Mr. Hunt” — Jared Turley, Basil Kenrick’s reclaimed bastard son, now in his father’s service — who, at his father’s request, laboriously penned the false invitation, sealed it with the wax lifted from the Earl’s own invitation to the Bedford levee, then donned a footman’s livery and delivered it to Jones’s chambers.
When he returned to Windridge Court, Turley first stopped in the kitchen to fortify himself with a dram of whisky before reporting to the Earl in his study. He took the wig from his coat pocket and tossed it contemptuously on the servants’ table; he hated wearing the things, and hated having to don the livery, for he considered a menial’s job beneath him. He longed to change back into his own fine clothes. But he gathered his courage and marched upstairs.
Turley presented himself in an almost military manner, hat removed and tucked under his arm, and stood stiffly at attention, more from fear than from respect. “I regret to report that the…ruse…was not a success, sir,” he said in a dry voice. He produced the spurned invitation from inside his coat and laid it on the Earl’s desk. “The gentleman declined the hospitality.”
One eyebrow of the Earl’s rose in question. “I am sure he declined in so many words, Mr. Hunt. What were they?”
“Rude and cryptic, sir.” Turley repeated from memory Jones’s precise words, omitting his error in address.
“I see. He did not question the authenticity of the invitation?”
“No, sir.”
With a grimace, the Earl took the invitation and methodically tore it to pieces. “Based on your own reports of his arrogant and heated temperament, I was certain the fellow would be foolishly bold enough to accept. Or at least be curious enough to attend.” He tossed the pieces over his shoulder, then thoughtfully drummed the fingers of his hands on the velvet blotter. “Had he accepted, and appeared at the levee, he would have acquired more enemies than he now has — among his own party. And his grace the Duke would have been stung by his rudeness — good word, Mr. Hunt — and indeed entertained the company with Sir Dogmael’s abrupt and deservedly vulgar ejection from the premises on the belief that he was spying on his grace with a forged invitation. He would have been as welcome there as one of the mob of silk-weavers who recently besieged his grace’s residence, but were bloodied and trampled by the Guards and Lord Ancram’s cavalry. Well, you were there with me, Mr. Hunt.”
&
nbsp; Turley winced at the Earl’s use of the proper address, but disguised it with a nod of agreement. “Yes, sir, and had the privilege of tossing a few stones at the scoundrels before they were dispersed by the authorities.” He paused. “I am afraid, though, that it will take more than stones to disperse Sir Dogmael. His patron is your brother, the good Baron.”
The Earl sighed in disappointment. “Well, there will be other occasions. “ He opened a desk drawer, removed five guineas from a box, closed the drawer, and put the coins on the blotter in front of him. “It is not your fault that the jest failed, Mr. Hunt. It was to have been a birthday gift to Sir Henoch, who celebrates his debut in the world tomorrow, and who will accompany me to the levee. He would enjoy the spectacle, and, had we succeeded, Sir Dogmael’s humiliation would have been repayment of some kind for that caricature of Sir Henoch he broadcast. Now, I must settle for some common bauble to present him.” He paused. “I promised you a bonus to carry it out, Mr. Hunt. The jest was only half successful, so you have earned only half the bonus.” The Earl looked away with disdain, and waited.
“Thank you, sir, “ said Turley softly. He took a step closer, picked up the golden coins as quietly as he could, and quickly pocketed them. He stepped back to await dismissal.
The Earl ended the audience with instructions to his son that he begin packing his things for the journey to Danvers, where they would spend the balance of the summer until the fall, when Parliament would prepare to reconvene.
* * *
