A Shot Rolling Ship (11 page)

Would things have been so very different if his mother had not died when he was young? Would his father have become such a peripatetic preacher of social change if he had had a stable family life to maintain? Perhaps he would, dragging along his wife as well as his child, for Adam Pearce was a driven man who believed that, with one more push, the world of equality for all that he sought would come to pass. He was as convinced of that in the same way that the religious saw a beckoning paradise, and his conviction was so deep it made it hard for anyone, least of all his son, to point to the flaws in his contentions.

So they had traversed the length and breath of Britain, with no discernable pattern to their travel, on foot when funds were scarce, in a comfortable carriage when Adam Pearce could find a well-heeled sponsor decent enough to
be embarrassed by his prosperity, spreading his brand of gospel, often to willing ears, sometimes to hostile crowds. They called him the Edinburgh Ranter, but Adam Pearce did not rant at all; he often spoke so quietly that those listening had to strain to hear, his words far from bellicose. Neither in speech nor in the many pamphlets he published did he employ venom to challenge the existing state of affairs. He used wit and irony to debunk the present social order, in which a few had plenty, while the rest lived in near starvation. He portrayed it as a farce being played out against the interests of the mass of people, who were fobbed off with the excuse that if things were as they were, that was the way God willed it.

Adam Pearce was most vocally not a religious man, though if pushed he would agree that some kind of superior being must exist, for to imagine otherwise was to take too much of a leap into the unknown. But he subscribed to his old friend Davy Hume’s contention that, just because there was a God that did not make him either benign, competent, willing or able to intercede on behalf of humans seeking succour from the grind of everyday existence. Organised religion he hated; the church in all its guises for the way it took money from the poor and superstitious to sustain priests, ministers and vicars, though his true venom was reserved for the Pope and Bishops. Landlords he castigated for the rents they charged, judges for their endemic hypocrisy, monarchs and their offspring for being no more than a superior form of thief, and politicians for being more concerned with lining their
pockets than making better the lot of their fellow man.

In his early years, like any son, John Pearce thought his father infallible, this made more potent by the fact that they spent almost every waking moment in each other’s company, and though it was skewed by his own ideas, Adam Pearce made time every day, when schooling was impossible, to see to his education. On the rare occasions that they did stop for an extended time, usually a winter spent under a sympathetic roof, proper schooling would be arranged. That was never easy; the making of new friends and the identification of new enemies, usually a fight or two to establish that he was not feeble and could hold his own.

That was coupled with the heaviest burden of all, having to take in the received wisdom of organised schooling that said there was an all-powerful God in heaven, a near divine King on the throne, that England, Scotland or Wales, wherever they happened to be, was a country singularly blessed by the Almighty, that the true task of the budding citizen of this world was to support the present order in all its glory, and to fight and kill the nation’s enemies. In fact, the antithesis of everything his father had raised him to believe.

The philosophy Adam Pearce propounded was not going to be challenged by a child too young to argue, nor did constant repetition of the same refrain produce boredom. He saw the world through his father’s eyes, and it was not until his fourteenth year, after the publication of a particularly uncompromising pamphlet and they had 
been taken up by the law and slung into the Bridewell prison that John Pearce seriously began to question his father’s philosophy. Locked in a barred chamber with near a hundred other offenders, everyone of whom was vocally innocent, John Pearce had seen life at its most raw, and applying his father’s principle to that place, he had found them sadly lacking.

He had never thought that the poor and dispossessed had natural dignity, but exposure to the lowest elements in the mass dispelled the notion that they had any at all. From the warders to the smallest urchin most of those with whom they shared a prison qualified in every way for the soubriquet “dregs of humanity”. In fact that was one commodity they did not have at all; grossly ugly, slatternly females, who evinced no shame in public copulation, who saw soap and water as a danger to health and who were wont to relieve themselves where they stood; the men and boys who were no better, displaying ignorance in the mass, a stupidity backed up by the absolute certainty of the rightness of their obtuse opinions. For such people the filthy straw on which they were obliged to sleep was what they lived with all their miserable lives. Few had any hope of release, in fact John had soon learned that freedom was not sought with much vigour; these were folk content to live in such squalor because, damp, filthy and stinking as it was, it was marginally more secure than life outside.

No person was safe from thieving fingers, and providence was most unkind to those prisoners who were solitary souls from a decent background. At least Adam
Pearce and his son, who had roughed it in their time and had even been at risk of robbery before, could take turns sleeping, so that one was always on watch to keep what few possessions they had to themselves. Not that they kept them for long since they had to be traded with the warders for small privileges in the article of food and the ability to keep clean, or for paper, wax and quill to send out letters to friends and supporters. These asked for assistance to get them released or moved to one of the more comfortable parts of the prison, on the floors above the ground that did not flood with human waste when the rains fell heavy; where proper beds and privacy could be bought for a price, as could decent food fetched in from good local hostelries. There were few things John Pearce dreaded in life, but a return to that was one of them. He was sure, had the men who pursued him that night caught up with him after he had sought refuge in the Pelican, he might have killed them to avoid being incarcerated in such a place again.

He left the coach at a leafy village called Ealing, and walked the rest of the way through open countryside into London, for to go all the way to Charing Cross was too dangerous; it was a place where sharp eyes were on the lookout for debtors, thieves and anyone who had good reason to hide from the law. Inside his coat he had the letter Surgeon Lutyens had written, detailing the circumstances of the Pearce case, and his first stop was at the Lutheran church that was home to his father.

‘I think my son has a notion of my influence with court than is more than the case, Mr Pearce.’

Pastor Lutyens, as he fingered the letter, looked like an older version of his son, with thin grey curly hair, once ginger, that failed to hide a pinkish scalp. He had an upturned nose, pale, almost child-like skin and eyes that, especially when showing surprise, reminded John Pearce of a fish. His accent, guttural and Germanic, was pronounced, his speech imperfect, which explained the way Surgeon Lutyens spoke English; clearly, but with a precision that made it sound as though it was not his native tongue.

‘He was most sure that you would help, sir.’

‘So shall I, Mr Pearce, for apart from Charles-Heinrich’s request I speak, it is Christian duty to do so. All I say is I see the King on few times, and I have been most strong advised not to trouble His Majesty with little things. His health, as I sure you know, is delicate.’

‘I was given to understand he was cured of his ailments.’

‘The problem lurks, Mr Pearce, ready to come back to haunt. Everyone, his ministers and his servants and equerries are at pains great never to excite him, though what we witness from across the Channel, a King murdered and his wife, children and family treated like worst kind of felons, an even state of mind is hard to keep, Ja!’

‘The Queen?’ Pearce asked, for the Pastor, looking wistful, seemed about to launch into a discussion of the state of affairs in Paris.

‘Comes to me more often, and I am many times called
to Windsor to converse with her in native German and listen to her concerns for her soul and those of family. Her sons and daughters give her great worries. Children can be sore trial…’

Pearce coughed, to stop him wandering on to that subject too; the male royal princes were a debauched nuisance, living evidence of the soundness of his father’s ideas on monarchy. The girls he knew nothing about, except that they were unmarried.

‘Will she be well disposed?’

‘I talk with her. And as I often remind good lady what a Christian should do, there is some hope that she will see plea to her husband for clemency as duty, not favour, as my dear son implies.’

‘Can I ask what you think the chances are, sir?’

‘How I say? I do not have strong rights to King’s ear, and do not know how dangerous your father is seen in Court circles, or you. Nor I a reader of such writers as he, but the King is a kind man and listens to Queen. I think he might consent raise warrant that threatens you and your father for an assurance no further incitements will take place.’

‘I doubt my father has health enough for that.’

‘Then you must leave with me, young man.’

‘I must ask for some form of time, sir, since the state of my father’s health is most pressing.’

The pastor shrugged. ‘If your father believe in God, he would know such matters lay in his hands.’

This was no time for a theological discussion, so John
Pearce just said, ‘I must trust you to do what you can, and I assure you I am grateful.’

‘How I contact you if I have any news.’

‘I shall contact you, sir.’

‘If you need a place to lay head, I will be happy provide it.’

‘That is most kind.’

‘Then you could me tell how my fool son is faring at sea.’ Seeing the look of curiosity on Pearce’s face, he added, ‘Perhaps you not know his competence. It far exceeds the needs of Navy, that a place where barbers pass for surgeons, yet he chooses to throw all his prospects of an excellent position.’

‘All I can tell you sir, is that he seemed happy in his station.’

‘Indulgence, Mr Pearce, selfish indulgence. I despair of boy.’

The house he was watching was the same one from which he had so nearly been nabbed on his last visit to London, a narrow yellow-brick residence which sat on the end of a terrace of three-storey abodes in Clerkenwell. It was home to John Horne Tooke, one of the men who had founded the London Corresponding Society, in reality a debating club, the first of many to spring up in the aftermath of the Revolution, a society specifically dedicated to effecting the kind of change they saw taking place in France. 1789 and the fall of the Bastille seemed like another age, yet it had happened less than four years previously; hard to recall now the joy with which that event had been greeted, and not only by those who felt the present system of government in Britain corrupt. Even members of the administration had greeted the upheaval in Paris as the overthrow of a tyranny, while writers and poets had
poured forth a stream of prose and stanzas to celebrate the event.

To Adam Pearce it was like a vindication of all he had argued for, though he was wise enough to see that part of the euphoria in the upper echelons of society was brought on by a sense of relief at the humbling of a long-time foe. They had been at war with France, with few breaks, since the time of Louis XIV, so a Briton could never think of that country without thinking of an enemy. In the last hundred years the list of conflicts was long; the War of the Spanish Succession, the Austrian Succession, Jenkins’s Ear, the Nine Years War, the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, those interspersed with alarms and excursions as some slight on either side, real or imagined, led to an expansion of the army and the fleet.

Even in the periods of peace the people of the British Isles felt threatened by the one nation left that could match her genius for trade. France was the great commercial rival to be fought in Bengal and the Carnatic, Canada, the West Indies, the South Seas, in Belgium, the Rhineland and in any distant outpost where rivalry was endemic to plant the flag of possession. A country larger by far, more populous in the mass, who alone in the world could build a navy to match the Wooden Walls of England. France, a great Catholic nation, could threaten invasion; it was their support that had kept alive the notion of a Jacobite rebellion and the hope that some still harboured of a Stuart restoration. Prior to France the great enemy had been Catholic Spain; she had been humbled by the
defeat of the Armada, never again to threaten the British shore.

The French Revolution was seen as a like event in the life of the country, the laying to rest of an anxiety that the collective imagination had lived with for several lifetimes. No great battle had been fought to bring about a hope of lasting peace, instead the steady drip of war had bankrupted the monarchical tyranny of France. Britain, and her Parliamentary system, rooted in her control of the King and their Protestant faith, had triumphed.

Adam Pearce was suddenly sought after; a man who had spent years preaching a message of equality, who was held to have a greater understanding of the forces unleashed by the events across the Channel, was much in demand. The hand to mouth existence his son had known all his life was gone. No more was he obliged to traverse the streets of some town or city crying out that all should attend to listen to his father, or to pass the hat round a gathering in some rural backwater, a weather eye kept out for the local youths who would certainly rob him of the few pennies and odd sixpence he collected if they could. At the same time he had to take the temperature of the reception, for more than once he and his father had fled a likely spot with sod turfs flying past their ears.

Meetings became publicised events rather than ad hoc gatherings, with agreed fees put up by men of means eager to hear where this new world order would take them, for there was not a soul born who did not think that events in Paris and Versailles would impact in Britain. Change
would come here too, reform that seemed long overdue to the mass of thinking people in the country. It was part anxiety and part hope that made those with much to gain or lose eager to hear what might come to pass. On top of that it seemed every printer in the land wanted the ideas of Adam Pearce in a pamphlet, with money paid per word, and the Edinburgh Ranter was only too happy to oblige, for, carried along by the euphoria, he too was sure that radical change was coming to sclerotic arteries of British life.

It did not last and it was not just what happened in Paris that altered the mood. True, the humbling of Louis and his Queen evoked sympathy, just as the constant drumbeat of revolution gave alarm to those who believed in order. London was suddenly full of émigrés, and they too were looked on with pity, those who extended that to them seeming to quite forget that all their lives they had been part of a system that had trod on the necks of the poor to keep alive their privileges. Yet it was more the alarm of the established order and those who supported it that brought about change. King George, his family and court worried that they would share the fate of Louis and the parasites of Versailles. What great landowner could look with anything other than a jaundiced eye at reports of moves to break up the great French landed estates. The Bishops saw that their silk-lined livings would disappear, just as they had for their Catholic counterparts in France. The commercial interests, the great trading monopolies and the money brokers of the City of London knew that
instability was inimical to profit, and the one salient fact emerging from France was that the box of revolution, once opened, was hard to close.

The tide did not turn suddenly; it was gradual. Within a year speeches damning the excesses of revolution, which would have been howled down twelve months before, were listened to in respectful silence. Clever men like Edmund Burke alluded to the disorder in France, and contrasted it with the settled peace of England, and asked how any good could come of such mayhem. So the rich had been humbled, but had the labourer suddenly become their equal? Was such a thing desirable? Had France really changed, was she no longer a rival to be feared – was she not the same old enemy in another guise? Siren voices played on the fears of the nation. The curse of the papist religion, which Bourbon Kings had determined to force down the throats of Protestant England, was replaced by the fear of no religion at all, for the men leading things across the Channel were Godless creatures.

In that changing climate, Adam Pearce had composed one pamphlet too many, and one too radical. As the French parliamentarians stripped their King of even more power, the Edinburgh Ranter had called for similar measures here. There was nothing new in what he said, he had been saying it for years, but now his voice carried some weight, enough to instil alarm in those who feared his influence. The charge of sedition was invoked, a warrant issued for the arrest of Pearce
père et fils
. One sojourn in the Bridewell was enough prison for any man so they had fled, first to
Holland, then to Paris, where Adam Pearce, soul mate to the Revolution, had been welcomed with open arms.

John Pearce shivered, for, standing so long, and thinking these thoughts, the chill had reached to his marrow. The smoke had been coming out of the house chimneys for a while now; the servants would be up and at their duties, lighting fires in cold rooms, heating water for their betters to wash, cleaning and polishing muddy footwear and feeding themselves a breakfast before seeing to the needs of their master and mistress. Several boys had called to deliver post, which indicated that Horne Tooke was still active. The problem Pearce had was how to get to see him without being observed, for it was approaching that self same door that had nearly seen him nabbed the day he had been forced to flee, ending up in the Pelican. There would be people watching the house now as there had been then, men who knew the faces of those wanted by the law.

It was another boy delivering a letter that gave him the idea, and reasonably familiar with the area in which he was walking he quickly found a coffee house on the edge of Smithfield market in which to sit and compose a note, paper and quill provided by the owner. A Penny Post man was engaged to deliver the note and Pearce, ensconced in a deep booth, sat on a cushioned bench, could think about food and, hard by the London meat market, he could not deny himself a succulent beefsteak. Warmth seeped through his body as the food and the heat of the room drove out the chill. He would have dearly liked to sleep a little, for he had left Pastor Lutyens’ manse well before dawn, but he
dare not. Fortunately the coffee, as well as the continuous babble of those using the coffee house, helped to stave off that desire. There were papers to read, the latest edition of the
Morning Post
and the new
Observer
, and they had despatches from France telling of the latest moves in the National Assembly, plus a list of those newly proscribed by a revolution intent on eating its own.

‘You will look in vain, young fellow, for news of your father.’ The voice, deep and adult, was behind him, and Pearce felt a frisson of fear run through his body, which subsided quickly as he rationalised that anyone wanting to take him up would have just come and got him. ‘I decline to sit with you for reasons that require little explanation.’

‘Horne Tooke.’

‘The same.’

‘You are watched?’

‘Every waking hour, and I fear even during the hours of sleep. I observed as I entered that you were reading a newspaper. Hold it up so that your face is covered.’

‘You will do the same?’

‘No, young John. I have a better way. I talk to myself all the time when out of doors, in the street, sitting in a coffee house or tavern, anywhere I think I can be observed. Sometimes I even wave my arms as if engaged in heated argument. Those who watch me think me touched by madness, I’m sure, but they do not seek another body just because my lips are moving.’

‘Do you have news?’

‘It is not good news. Your father is in prison, put there
I am told for his refusal to keep quiet about the activities of the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was denounced for an article he wrote in the National Assembly by a deputy called Fouché, a Jacobin, but he was not alone in the motion. Nor was your father the only one proscribed that day, though Tom Paine is still at liberty.’

‘He has been more circumspect, no doubt.’

They had a lot in common, Paine and Adam Pearce, but they virulently disagreed about one thing. Paine saw the way the Revolution was going as a necessary catharsis on the way to a better life for all; John’s father, who had originally held the same view, now disagreed, and was vocal in his belief that it was nothing more than the acts of unprincipled men lusting after power.

‘Your note said you left him in poor health.’

‘Incarceration will not improve it.’

‘Turn the page of your newspaper,’ said Horne Tooke before continuing. ‘He still has friends, I’m sure. Perhaps they have done something for him, a private room, food and the like.’

Pearce could have said that such things were of the past, that the prisons of Paris were now too full for private apartments and bought-in food. But it was the other dangers that concerned him most. ‘I was in Paris last September.’

‘Yes, a most deplorable event. It made life very difficult for those of us on the side of the Channel who seek to change things.’

There was a temptation to say how much more difficult it had been for the victims of the September massacres,
to put Horne Tooke’s discomfort in perspective, but he decided that using irony would not at this stage be helpful. Hundreds had been killed, their bloody heads paraded through the streets on pikes, slaughtered by self-appointed tribunals who had set up drum head courts in the prisons themselves. Few hauled before such arbitrary justice had managed to successfully plead innocence or have someone with power intercede to save their life. Most had been brutally murdered out of hand by madmen lusting after the blood of the rich. Only it was not the rich they were killing; certainly the odd aristocrat had been a victim, but the Revolution had, by that time, lost any reason. Some of the victims had been at the tearing down of the Bastille and things had continued, if not at the same pace, with the same result. A farce of a trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, with condemnation a near certainty, that followed incarceration and the daily thought that the next tumbrel to the guillotine would be yours.

‘There must still be people he can appeal to,’ the younger man insisted, ‘those with the power to get him released.’

‘Certainly such people exist. Danton, for one, might intercede and right now he is powerful and getting more so. Marat, we know, once admired your father’s writings, and he might be able to use the power of his paper to change minds.’

That made Pearce wonder just how in touch Horne Tooke was; Danton had sanctioned the murderous storming of the Tuileries, and Marat, in his inflammatory writings, had encouraged the behaviour that led to it. He and
Adam Pearce had fallen out months before and he doubted relations with Danton were much better. Both seemed set on a path to ever more bloodshed, not less, and if they were going to intervene, they would have done so to quash the imprisonment.

‘What are his chances of avoiding arrest if he comes back to England?’

‘Slim John, very slim. He would be required to publicly recant and that is something I doubt he would do.’ Pearce thought of Pastor Lutyens words, that old Adam would have to be silent. That would be hard enough to guarantee; to demand he deny his beliefs was to ask the impossible. ‘But, here we could certainly see him imprisoned in comfort. The Society has funds for just such a purpose. We could get him a private chamber and pay for any medical assistance he may require.’

‘If I could get him to Holland…’

‘Then the Society could support him there.’

‘You sure you could carry this?’

The voice dropped to a deeper tone, adding sincerity to what Horne Tooke said. ‘Your father was a spiritual founder of the Corresponding Society, and he, along with Paine, was one of the leading lights whose beacon we followed. He is therefore a charge upon our conscience, and I assure you no voice would be raised to deny him what he needs. And we do have some influence in Paris. If you wish, I will raise the matter at the next meeting.’