by Edward Cline
The novel that tells the story of the young Jack Frake is the beginning of a larger series in which Edward Cline shows the kind of ideas that were responsible for the American Revolution. Instead of presenting us with today’s uninspiring politicians, Sparrowhawk transports us to a world of men like Patrick Henry—and the ideas that made him and others like him possible. It is the defense and preservation of that American character that is the true meaning of patriotism. One feels that the country whose embryonic state we are shown in Sparrowhawk is worth fighting for. I hope that this novel inspires many to fight for the same nation and vision.
1. Electronic correspondence from Edward Cline, April 2007
SPARROWHAWK’S HEROIC VISION OF MAN
by Jena Trammell
Edward Cline’s Sparrowhawk is an unprecedented literary epic dramatizing the intellectual and political origins of the United States. At the center of the epic is the story of two heroic men, Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick, American colonials who recognize that any compromise with British tyranny will destroy American liberties. Books One and Two of Sparrowhawk tell the coming-of-age stories of Cline’s youthful heroes in eighteenth–century England. In Book Three, Jack and Hugh meet for the first time as young landowners in Queen Anne County, Virginia, in 1759. As their characters evolve, their relationship deepens and sustains the story’s plotline and thematic development through the remaining novels. Closely allied in spirit and in their moral convictions, Jack and Hugh part ways only over the strategies necessary to rebuff British authority and preserve American freedoms. Through their portrayals, Cline offers readers a rare experience in modern literature: the thrilling emotional and inspirational experience of understanding historical events through the ideas and actions of morally heroic men.
Cline has stated that one of his central purposes in creating Sparrowhawk was to show the caliber of men who made the American Revolution possible. Such a caliber of men has rarely been shown in American literature. American novels have traditionally depicted anti-heroes, alienated characters who moodily reject or are rejected by society, characters of ill fortune and fate. In modern fiction, popular characters are often “good” detectives or spies who rescue society from inarguably evil criminals and terrorists. With rare exception have American writers dramatized the moral conflicts of distinguished men and women acting purposefully to achieve lives of intellectual and productive accomplishment. In short, the overall body of American literature does not reflect the reality of our nation’s history, nor does it reflect the values of most Americans since the eighteenth century.
Why do we read literature? Because men and women naturally want to know and understand the world and to live meaningful lives. Literary art is a means of experiencing various human values, played out in the actions of characters, and the practical results of those values. Despite a dominant message in American literature that man is helplessly controlled by outside forces and circumstances, the history of the United States has abundant evidence to prove that man has free will to choose his values, to act on his values, to achieve his goals, and to find happiness in life. In dramatizing events in the pre-Revolutionary years, Sparrowhawk helps readers see clearly that the origin of the first moral political system based on individual rights was no chance accident, but the product of men who believed and acted upon the moral principles of freedom and of each person’s right to his own life. This is the inspirational heroism that comes alive in the characters of Jack and Hugh (and other characters) in Sparrowhawk.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle viewed literature as more valuable than history due to literature’s emphasis on universal truths, rather than just particular facts. Aristotle stated that the literary author must represent men’s actions, whether real or imagined, in “accordance with the laws of possibility and probability.” While history tells us what a particular person did or what happened to him, literature can explore the underlying motivations of human actions that lead to particular consequences.1 Following the Aristotelian formula, the emotional and inspirational value of Sparrowhawk spring from its perfect integration of the story’s intellectual themes with its dramatic, suspenseful plot. Cline’s heroes are portrayed as men who honor truth and justice and select their values consciously through a careful process of reasoning. Confidence in their moral values helps them live courageously, meeting each new conflict by demonstrating loyalty to their values.
As heroes embodying tremendous rational and practical virtues, the characters of Jack and Hugh are anything but one-sided and unconvincing. Cline gives them a convincing human reality by emphasizing how they apply their values fully to their lives, while avoiding the common tendency of authors to humanize characters by inventing flaws for them. Aristotle spoke of the device of recognitions in plot development, and the first meeting between Jack and Hugh in Book Three includes a significant moment of the recognition of shared values. In their first conversation, Hugh tells Jack that he has read Hyperborea, the novel penned by Jack’s friend and mentor Redmagne and copied out by Jack himself as a boy. Jack is simply astonished by the revelation. Riding home, he is touched by a new feeling:
For a reason he could not explain to himself, he felt that some new phase of his life was about to begin. By the time he stabled his mount and stepped inside his house, he was smiling in amusement at the thought that it might have something to do with Hugh Kenrick. The younger man had impressed him; that is, surprised him with his agreement with the sentiments he had expressed in the gaming room; had pleased him with the ease with which Kenrick had made his acquaintance; had given him some strange hope of friendship. He had been dubbed a solitary man ever since he was brought to Caxton, and a near-hermit since the deaths of his wife and father-in-law. Well, he thought, solitary men are solitary only because they have not met their companions in character.
In this touch of characterization, the novel emphasizes the consciousness of the hero in regard to his values, preferring solitude to relationships devoid of common values. Later the novel revisits this theme:
After the first breathless astonishment of discovering all that one has in common with another, comes the mutual, happy knowledge that the commonalities overshadow the multitude of differences, and that the former render the latter irrelevant, for they have a deeper, more vigorous foundation for friendship than have happenstance, coincidence, or accident. Such a friendship becomes an inviolate continuum. When it is born, the world seems a saner, cleaner, and more welcoming place. The wearisome, aching partner of loneliness is instantly abandoned and forgotten.
Friendship is both a recognition and a choice for Jack and Hugh, whose volitional consciousness extends to every area of their lives. As the story line advances, Hugh Kenrick is portrayed as a man who genuinely prefers life in a free and more just society to his former, privileged life as an aristocrat in England. He is active in the management of his estate and active in politics, winning a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Unconvinced of Jack’s position on the inevitability of war between the colonies and Britain, Hugh has faith in the power of reason to alleviate and overcome hostilities with Parliament. Reason alone, he believes, will persuade the British of the morality and justice of American independence united in political alliance with England. Hugh’s powerful speeches in the House of Burgesses help speed the Virginia Resolves along to passage despite heavy resistance, aiding Hugh’s conviction that men who know reason will act in accordance with it. As he declares in one rousing speech, “Moral certitude is a virtue itself, and in this instance is a glorious one, because it asserts and affirms, in all those charters and resolves, our natural liberty and the blessings it bestows upon us!”
Hugh’s main mistake can be interpreted as the honest error of an honest man. Hugh properly understands the motivational power of ideas in the lives of men and the critical need to defend moral principles. For example, in Book Four, when Reece Vishonn complains of confusion over the ideas of political philosophers and states his desire for “a politics th
at will spare us the tiresome, pothering complexities of philosophers,” Hugh responds, “That, sir, is neither possible nor advisable. Not possible, for we are, for better or worse, heirs to their work. Not advisable, for then the encroachment of stamps and bayonets will always seem a mystery to us.” While moral and political philosophy can indeed help the colonials understand the enemy’s motivation and anticipate its response, Hugh’s error is to believe that other men, when confronted with reason, will be honest and as willing to accept the truth as he is.
In contrast, Jack Frake is just as settled in his conviction that many men do not respond to reasoned principles but act inconsistently and often blindly according to whim, fear, or the irrational desire for advantage and power over others. Though Jack appreciates Hugh’s ambition to persuade his fellow burgesses and Parliament, and later even pens an argument of his own that Sir Dogmael Jones borrows to address Parliament, Jack never relinquishes the central conviction in his mind: that reconciliation is not possible between free men and those who wish to enslave and control other men. He knows that for other men “to recognize the nature of the coming clash, to know as well as he did that there was no fundamental rapprochement possible between the colonies and England, these men, many of them his close friends, would need to cast off the irrelevant sentiment of filial association, if they were ever to become men of their own making ….”
Jack’s greatness as a character results from his commitment to rationality and his refusal to subordinate a logical appraisal of the facts to anyone’s subjective desires, including his own:
Rational persuasion, Jack sadly knew, would not this time and by itself, awaken in these men that latent capacity. Only a determined violence on their lives could ignite that crucial metamorphosis of self; only a traumatic crisis could wring from them the undiscovered honesty to recognize who they were and what was possible to them, and move them to shed the clinging, comfortable traces of their past lives. Only the glint of approaching bayonets, or the thunder of a volley, or the calculated toss of a torch into their homes would give them long enough pause to allow the truth about themselves and what they were witnessing to seize their beings and awaken in them the true nature of their peril. If Hugh Kenrick, the proudest, most honest, most virtuous, most complete, and most thoroughly rational man he had ever known, could not be persuaded of the logic of events, then how could he expect other men…to be persuaded so soon of that logic?
In Sparrowhawk, the central conflict is seen, not in the struggle between the colonies and England, but in the relationship between Jack and Hugh, two virtuous men pursuing rational values. Though on different roads to their destination, Jack and Hugh recognize the same spirit and soul in one another. For Jack, Hugh is “a self that would never submit to malign authority; a self that was sensitive to the machinations of others, a self trained in the brittle, lacerating society of the aristocracy to be on guard against sly encroachments; a self that was proof against corruption, sloth, and violence; a self that recognized and cherished itself, and so was proud; a self that quietly gloried in its own unobstructed and unconquered existence. A self very much like his own.”
In Sparrowhawk, Cline portrays his heroes with a consistent emphasis on values in action. Each plot event is related to the characters’ moral values, and the plot is tightly structured upon the characters’ pursuit of their values. Absent in Sparrowhawk are pointless plot digressions unrelated to the story’s major themes or “humanizing” touches of characterization that detract from the heroes’ moral stature. As fictional characters, Jack and Hugh achieve a compelling reality through Cline’s focus on the chosen moral values that shape his characters’ minds and motivate their actions. The portrayal of free will, rationality, moral grandeur, and the integrity of the heroes’ souls convince readers that Jack and Hugh indeed represent what is possible to all men.
1. See Chapter 9, Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry (Classical Literary Criticism, London: Penguin, 1965).
“HE WAS THERE”:
THE TRAGEDY OF ROGER TALLMADGE
by Nicholas Provenzo
The value of tragedy in romantic literature rests in its ability to illustrate a warning: Do not choose this—avoid this path. In Sparrowhawk Book Six: War, novelist Edward Cline presents his readers with the tragic death of British Army Captain Roger Tallmadge during the battle of Bunker Hill. Tallmadge’s death at the hands of Sparrowhawk hero Jack Frake is lamentable in that Cline presents Tallmadge as an upright and moral man, yet a man without sufficient vision to boldly and consistently break free of the chains of tyranny that shackle him, as well as the American colonists. Cline presents Tallmadge as dying in the very service of the forces that ensnare him.
To fully appreciate the intricacies of Tallmadge’s tragedy, we must first establish who he is in relationship to Sparrowhawk’s main characters. The neighbor of Hugh Kenrick’s family in England, Tallmadge is married to Hugh’s sister Alice, and he thinks of Hugh as an elder brother and moral exemplar. To Hugh, Tallmadge represents Kenrick’s affinity for his home country—an affinity strained by the crown’s ruthless mistreatment of the American colonists and of Hugh’s martyred Pippins—yet an affinity that exists nevertheless. In fact, Tallmadge’s virtue and sympathy for the plight of the American colonists helps buoy Hugh’s hopes for a possible reconciliation between the colonists and a more civil England.
Tallmadge serves as an artillery officer in the British Army, seeing both combat and attaché duty in Europe, and he faithfully discharges his responsibilities. He is entrusted with the important mission of reconnoitering the American colonies and reporting the state of the colonists’ political sentiments and military readiness to his commander General Gage. When visiting Hugh’s plantation in Virginia, Tallmadge joins him in drawing swords and preventing the looting of Jack Frake’s Morland Hall by arch villain Jared Hunt and his gang of customs men and Royal Marines.
In such instances, Cline presents Tallmadge as acting valiantly in defense of the good, yet in a political and moral universe such as Tallmadge’s, his good deeds cannot go unpunished. He is betrayed by his jealous and scheming subordinate, along with Jared Hunt and his allies, and his treason in Virginia is revealed to General Gage. Hoping to leave military service and return to England and a seat in Parliament, Tallmadge is instead ordered by a magnanimous General Gage to remain in the colonies for another year rather than face the disgrace of certain court-martial in England.
It is at this time that Tallmadge places his tin gorget, a gift from Hugh inscribed with the words “A Paladin for Liberty,” at the bottom of his baggage, a poignant metaphor for his future actions. Tallmadge prepares his men for the inevitable clash with the American colonists and witnesses the British retreat from Lexington and Concord. Tallmadge writes to Hugh of his experiences, and these letters serve to contrast Tallmadge’s own mixed feelings over the injustice of the brewing conflict with his recognition of the grimly determined colonial spirit, as portrayed through his haunting, yet admiring account of a mortally wounded colonial militiaman spitting his last breath in contempt against his would-be overlords at Lexington Green.
Clearly Tallmadge does not want to engage the colonists in battle. He again expresses to Hugh in his letter that he wishes he would be relieved of his command and allowed to return to England, where he believes he can press for the colonial cause in Parliament. And thus it is here where Tallmadge’s choices turn tragic. The time for speaking has long ended; there is no one in power in England willing to even listen to the colonists’ grievances, let alone willing to work to correct them. The machinations of ruthless men have deprived the colonists of their wealth, their freedom, and even the vague pretense that they enjoy the rights of Englishmen.
Worse for Tallmadge, it is precisely his virtues that are exploited for the purpose of subjugating the colonists. His efficacy as a commander, the loyalty he earns from his men, his level head and gallantry under fire are all used in furtherance of a purpose that he does not support. His l
ife is placed in peril, yet he refuses to resign his commission or even acknowledge the possibility of such a choice. It is this failure to act that ultimately costs Tallmadge his life.
As Tallmadge and the redcoats stand upon one end of the battlefield of Bunker Hill, Jack Frake and his company of independent Virginia militiamen stand upon the other. In the contest between these two forces, Frake fires his musket at Tallmadge (whom he does not recognize until after his shot has been fired), striking dead this man who had once saved his home, dined at his table, and had been described as a man of honor by none other than Frake himself. Frake is not a man who sought to kill any Briton, but as one who realizes that their choices made it necessary. Frake’s internal questioning of his actions are short-lived, for he recognizes that Tallmadge willingly allowed himself to be placed between the colonists and their right to their lives, and that such a choice could be paid for only with Tallmadge’s own life.
Thus the tragedy of Roger Tallmadge reveals itself to be the tragedy of the half-fought battle—an internal conflict within a man who acts boldly when evil exists clearly before his eyes, yet who is unable to apply the same principles that initially compelled him to act upon broader and more abstract conflicts. Why would Tallmadge risk himself and his career in order to save Jack Frake’s home, only to dutifully serve with the forces that fought to attack all of the colonists’ homes—and threaten the colonists’ very lives? What mental error permits a man to willingly sacrifice himself in such a grotesque manner? As Frake coldly observes when he reports Tallmadge’s death to a distraught Hugh Kenrick, “[Tallmadge] couldn’t both sympathize with [the colonists’] cause, and help to crush it, too.”
