Why, Barnikel wondered, was it necessary for the younger man to tease his prickly brother-in-law in this way?
“I daresay after a month of him I should be tempted too,” he considered. Then he looked at Agnes who was now glancing at her husband in mute appeal and thought: “But I should not give in to it.”
An uneasy silence fell over the table. The canon had brought the doctor to witness Ralph’s waywardness. So far he had only been made a fool of. As for Ralph, Barnikel could see very well that, instead of being content with his little victory, he would soon be ready for another passage of words.
They ate a joint of roast beef. Barnikel tried to turn the conversation to other topics. He talked of local matters, of an extraordinary duel he had heard took place at Oxford, of his recent visit to the coast at Brighton where the Prince of Wales was building his outrageous pavilion.
“He is recklessly extravagant,” Porteus said sadly.
“Certainly, but you should see the place he is building,” Barnikel told him. “It’s like an oriental palace for some Indian maharajah.”
“Do you suppose, doctor,” Frances asked, ignoring for once the canon’s look of disapproval, “that he keeps a harem there as well?”
“Not a doubt of it, madam,” he replied with a laugh.
But their attempts to steer the conversation failed. For now the canon was ready to strike again.
Looking sombrely at the doctor, then at his wife and Agnes, he announced quietly:
“It will be a sad day when his father dies. King George III is our last hope.”
It was said matter-of-factly, but it was obviously well calculated. Barnikel saw Ralph Shockley flush and Agnes murmured to him:
“This is how it always begins.”
“Our hope for what?”
“Stability, sir.”
Barnikel saw Agnes looking at him in mute appeal. Ralph’s smile had gone.
“You mean lack of change?” he asked coldly.
“Precisely. I am against religious toleration, because it weakens the Church of England.”
“And reform of Parliament – you are happy that Old Sarum returns two members to Parliament at the whim of its owner while large bodies of men in northern cities have no representatives at all?”
“How members of Parliament do their duty to the king is far more important than who sent them there.”
“And poor half-starved labourers should still live in feudal servitude in England, and men be sold as slaves abroad?” he asked indignantly.
Porteus did not answer. He had set out only to goad Ralph, and he had succeeded, but a small muscle in his pale cheek was flexing irritably.
Ralph’s face had become flushed. He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and glanced at Barnikel. Seeing no look of support he turned to Porteus again.
“Well, I am against ancient despotism,” he said angrily. “And I am for the Rights of Man and Charles James Fox. Perhaps after all,” he went on evenly, “we need a revolution here.”
There was a terrible silence.
Even Agnes, though she knew he did not mean it, was shocked.
“How can you say sucha thing, when Bonaparte himself is across the Channel?” she protested.
“I say it because I see very plainly that England is a tyranny too,” he said acidly, “where the vote is restricted to a few, where religious freedom is not allowed, where the poor have no rights. The French Revolution may have turned into a despotism; but the original idea was good: liberty, equality, fraternity; those are the principles I believe in.”
Now Porteus turned to look at Barnikel. His expression said – “There, I told you so”. But his hand was shaking with anger.
Agnes was gazing at him imploringly. He must try to keep the peace.
“Let me argue against you, Ralph,” he began. “And see, Porteus,” he cried hopefully, “if you do not find my reasoning just.”
And then, for a moment, Barnikel paused. What did he think? Which man did he actually agree with?
When he spoke, it was with perfect certainty.
“The French overturned a despotic king. But in England the very rights we have – imperfect though they may be – do not need to be snatched from a tyrant for they derive from centuries of our history: from Saxon common law, from Magna Carta, from the legislations of our parliaments, from the principles of the new monarchy set up in 1688.
“Are we so wise, have we the right, to throw away our own ancestral privileges for the sake of a Utopia which, in practice, has failed? I say no. Most Englishmen say no. Our monarchy, our Church, are old and noble institutions. They form,” he searched for a word; “they form an organism,” he went on, “like the human body itself. This, sir, is the English nation. Throw that away in the cause of a supposed perfect liberty and you may lose all. Continuity, inherited rights and privileges, sir, are the very things that make a nation. It is breaking with them that sets up tyranny.”
This was the very case made by the great Edmund Burke in his celebrated
Reflections
on the French Revolution. It was the perfect expression of what was acceptable to most thinking Englishmen. It was also, though he did not realise it, the perfect statement of the old world’s view, derived from feudal village, medieval guild, local courts and councils, that liberty is primarily a corporate affair, in contrast to the new world’s view that it is first and foremost an individual business. It was the grand statement of English political compromise.
He blushed. He was not used to making speeches.
“Well said, doctor.” Agnes’s eyes were shining with admiration.
He blushed deeper still.
Even Porteus, still speechless with suppressed fury, bowed stiffly towards him to indicate that he approved of what he had said.
On Ralph it had no effect at all.
“Nonsense,” he cried, “Tom Paine answered that with his
Rights of Man
. Each generation makes its own government. And if you believe in the natural rights of man and in reason, then the only true government is a democracy where every man has a vote. If your traditions don’t give you that, then throw them out of the window.”
Barnikel tried to interrupt him, but Ralph went on furiously.
“As for your monarchy, your inherited peerage, your rotten boroughs, your established Church, what have they to do with democracy? Sweep them away.”
It was the voice of the early revolution. It was insanity. Barnikel buried his face in his hands.
“That is treason.” It was Porteus who spoke, or rather, since his throat was constricted in a white hot fury, hissed the words. “You speak against the king as well as the Church.”
“Your Church,” Ralph retorted. “From which you derive income from – it is five or six benefices?”
Though restrictions had been placed on how far apart the parishes held by a single clergyman might be, it did not stop Porteus having three, in each of which he had a poor curate and from which he derived a modest income. This last jibe was even more insupportable to him than the rest.
“Their income was useful to you,” he thundered, “when I paid for you to go to Oxford.”
“And no doubt you think you have the right to own my opinions because of it,” he shot back furiously.
It was the last straw. Porteus rose. His long thin body shook so violently that the silver on the table rattled.
“Viper!” he screamed. “Viper in the bosom of this family! Ingrate! Traitor! Leave this house, sir. Leave this house at once!”
Only Barnikel, at that moment, had an inkling of the danger Ralph Shockley was now in.
Late evening in the little town of Christchurch. The priory church, with its Norman arches and square tower, dark; the little ruined castle on its mound beside the priory, dark; the river Avon flowing beside both on its way to the silent, shallow harbour inside its protecting headland, also dark; the white swans, nesting on the river bank, hidden in the dark. The houses had lights, but their shutters were mostly closed and so the light of lamps or candles was little more than a bright slit or a flicker above the street. There was a lamp though, glittering in its iron bracket at the corner of the street, lighting the cobbles below.
Now there was light and sound, as the door of an inn opened and Peter Wilson, only a little the worse for drink came out and began to walk down the narrow street towards his home. The door swung closed behind his departing figure, withdrawing the intruding sound and glare of the inn from the intimacy of the quiet shadows in the street.
Peter Wilson was not quite sober but he was happy, having been well paid the day before. He had bought his ring. He felt it in his pocket. He turned the corner.
And now, suddenly, there were too many shadows. They were behind him, before him; one of the shadows had materialised into a large, dark figure, not at all shadowy, who clamped a large hand over his mouth.
Without thinking, he bit the hand. There was a muffled curse.
“Damn the little whelp.”
Then something very hard crashed against the side of his head.
He was down; the sky was very red. A huge pain throbbed at the side of his head. Two fingers were tying his hands. He was not unconscious then, only knocked down. And now he knew what had happened.
“Press gang,” he muttered.
“Right, young sir,” a chuckle just behind his left ear. “Now keep quiet while we get some more or this cudgel will tap you again,” and the said wooden club tapped, painfully, against the rising bruise where he was hit before.
“But,” he said aloud, so they could all hear him, “I’m to be married next week.”
A guffaw of laughter.
“Quiet you fools.” A midshipman.
“You’re to be married, matey, to the King’s Navy.” The same voice, close by his ear again.
“Shsh. Here comes another.”
His hands had been securely tied.
Ralph stayed at Doctor Barnikel’s house while he waited for the storm to blow over.
Agnes and the children remained with Frances Porteus.
Ralph remained cheerful.
“The old stick will get over it,” he told Barnikel as they dined together.
But the doctor was not so sanguine.
“You should go and apologise to him – the sooner the better,” he urged.
Ralph laughed, but refused.
“Doesn’t he owe me an apology too?”
“Perhaps. But you provoked him.”
Ralph went to his work at the school as usual. It did not seem to him so serious a matter.
The next day, when Agnes came to him and demanded: “I beg you, Ralph, to submit to him,” he was furious, however.
“You take sides against me then?”
“No. But I am your wife and you have two children. Canon Porteus has influence here.”
“And I have principles,” he responded petulantly, “even if my wife has not.”
“It is only another week until our own house is ready,” Ralph told Barnikel. “We can manage as we are until then. After that,” he added, “damn Porteus.”
But two days after the quarrel, it was Agnes who approached the doctor in the street and begged him:
“Doctor, if you can, persuade my husband to apologise to Canon Porteus. I fear the consequences if he does not.”
“Do you know what he intends?”
She shook her head sadly.
“No. He is very correct with me, of course. Yet . . . I fear him,” she said simply.
The summons came the next day. It was to Lord Forest’s house.
He had changed remarkably little since the days when Adam Shockley knew him. He was an old man now, but upright. His manners were perfect, and he missed nothing.
There was a second great house, outside Manchester now, as well as the mansion in the north of Wiltshire and the house in Salisbury. But he still spent three months a year at Sarum.
It seemed to Ralph that Lord Forest was ageless and timeless. To his dying day he would remain what he always had been: perfect courtier, careful politician and shrewd investor.
He wondered what Forest wanted with him.
He was ushered by a footman into a small room overlooking the gardens behind the house, which Forest used as a study. Lord Forest was standing in front of the fire, grey-haired, very thin and erect.
Canon Porteus was standing beside him.
Forest greeted him courteously, then asked the two men to sit while he remained where he was. He came straight to the point.
“You know of your family’s long association with us,” he said pleasantly. “And so you will know that my questions are not directed by any malice.” He gave a shrewd glance towards Porteus as he said this. In fact Forest had never forgiven Adam Shockley for refusing his offer; but he had nothing against the young man now before him. “You know I am also,” he continued, “a governor of your school.”