Ralph had forgotten. It was only a small private school, one of several in Salisbury which had sprung up in recent years, while the choristers’ school had somewhat declined. The fact that, technically, it had a board of governors at all was something which both the school and the governors themselves, who included Forest and the old bishop, had almost forgotten. Five years before, he could have bought the school himself if Porteus had been prepared to advance him the money; but though Frances had urged the idea, the canon had refused.
“There is still, I fear, a certain instability in his character,” he explained, “that makes me feel he is not yet ready for such a responsibility.”
Ralph gazed at Forest now, wondering what was coming.
“I understand you hold certain views,” Lord Forest went on. “Radical views.”
“Such as reform of the rotten boroughs. And I support Mr Fox. Is that what you mean?”
Forest bowed pleasantly.
“I am proud to know Mr Fox very well,” he said suavely. Canon Porteus looked aghast. “Though I by no means always agree with him.” He looked at Ralph thoughtfully. “You also hold republican views?”
“That is my affair,” Ralph snapped.
“Quite so. And there I propose to leave it,” Forest replied equably.
Porteus frowned. Ralph looked at them both.
“Is that all?”
“Almost.” Forest gazed at the ceiling for a moment. “These are difficult times, Mr Shockley,” he went on. “The possibility of a French invasion is always with us. In such circumstances, a man, whatever his views, must be wise.” He paused. “May I have your assurance that, whatever may be your private reflections on these matters, you will not seek to express them to your pupils in the school? You understand me I am sure.”
He did indeed. Nor had he, as far as he could remember, ever tried to convert his pupils to his point of view. Normally he would not have hesitated to agree.
But it was the sight of Porteus, sitting smugly opposite, his own brother-in-law who had obviously taken all this trouble to humiliate him, that infuriated Ralph.
“Do you mean that, even if I am asked my opinion, I should lie?” he asked coldly.
And now Porteus burst out.
“It means, sir, that you will keep your seditious treason to yourself! That you will not attempt to infect the minds of your charges with your infamy.”
“Enough, Porteus,” Lord Forest said mildly but firmly.
But now Ralph was pale with rage. This was just the tyranny he despised.
“I am not obliged to give any undertakings whatever,” he answered furiously.
“Ha!” It was an explosion, half of triumph, half of rage that broke from Porteus.
“Are you sure, Mr Shockley, that you would not prefer to consider this matter?” Forest asked.
“There is nothing to consider.”
Forest sighed.
“Very well. I must tell you Mr Shockley that in my view it would be unwise – most unwise – for you to continue at your post for the time being. Tempers run high on these matters, you know. We must be prudent. I shall speak to the other governors, but you should consider yourself relieved of your post.”
Ralph looked at him in horror. He had not realised it would come to this. Had Forest the power to do such a thing? He tried to remember who, apart from the old bishop, the governors were. But then as he considered Forest’s huge estates and his connections he realised his own folly. Of course Forest could. Trust Porteus to be thorough in such a matter.
“But . . . my wife and children,” he burst out.
“Ah,” Porteus cried. “So you have remembered them.” He turned to Forest. “I shall of course see they are provided for.”
“That will be all, gentlemen,” Forest said. It was an order to depart.
It was Thaddeus Barnikel who managed to discover exactly what had taken place. It was far worse even than he had feared.
“Porteus had already warned several of the boys’ parents; and the bishop,” he told Ralph. “Even without Forest, there would have been demands to remove you that could not have been resisted. He’s done his work thoroughly.”
“And if I go to apologise to him. If I retract?” Ralph asked miserably.
“Too late, I fear. His mind is . . .” he pressed his hands together to demonstrate: “closed like a vice.” He grimaced. “I must tell you that at present, no one in Sarum will employ you.”
It was late that morning that Forest sent for him again. The interview took place in the same room as before.
“I understand Canon Porteus has turned Sarum against you. I had not realised myself how far he intended to go,” Lord Forest confessed.
Ralph nodded sadly.
“It will blow over,” Forest told him. “You must be patient. In the meantime, I think you must consider a post outside Sarum.”
“It seems I must consider anything.”
“Very well. My grandchildren need a tutor and I think you will do. You will be paid the same that you had here, but your wife had best remain at Salisbury.”
It was a good offer. As good as he could hope for at present.
“Are you not afraid I shall make them into revolutionaries?” Ralph asked wryly.
Forest allowed himself a thin smile.
“There is little danger of that.”
“I accept. But I must make it clear that I wish to return to Sarum as soon as possible.”
“That is understood.” Forest looked at him thoughtfully. “In the current political climate, Mr Shockley, you must not deceive yourself. It will take some time.”
Ralph hung his head.
“I fear, Lord Forest, I have been very foolish,” he said frankly.
The parting of Ralph Shockley and his wife was a sad business.
Before him he saw a woman who had not shared his quarrel. But worse than that, he knew she had been right, and now by his foolishness he had wronged her. The sense of guilt made him irritable.
And Agnes saw an immature boy. Could it be, if he was prepared to bring such misery down on her and the children for the sake of a moment’s pride, that he really loved her? It felt to her like a rejection.
“He is, in effect, deliberately leaving me,” she thought. He could not appreciate her very much. “I can only wait then,” she considered, “for him to grow a little wiser, even if he does not really love me.” If he was unstable she must be firm. Aloud she said:
“We shall await you here in Sarum. I hope your return will be soon.”
“You will visit me though.”
She shook her head.
“No. We shall wait for you.”
He saw her intention: to take a superior moral position.
“You may wait a long time,” he snapped.
“I hope not.” Now she looked down. His tone hurt her and, for a moment, she thought she would cry. But she knew she must not. A tearful parting, a moment of weakness shared with him, and he would shift all the blame for his troubles on to Porteus.
So now she was strong and looked at him evenly.
“We shall wait here,” she repeated.
Then she turned and left.
Ralph did not speak to Porteus again, but he did go to see his sister Frances.
“I could not stop him,” she explained sadly. “I tried to argue with him for a whole night.”
He looked at her with a heavy heart. For a moment he thought he could see the light in his sister’s eyes that he had known before her marriage. Then it was gone.
“Pray, my dear brother,” she continued earnestly, “whatever your opinions in the future, for all our sakes let them remain unspoken.”
There was nothing he could say.
It was after he had taken his leave of Frances and his wife that he had a last brief word with Barnikel.
“My wife will be much alone, doctor,” he said. “And I may be gone two years. She will need a friend. May I place her in your care?”
Thaddeus Barnikel swallowed but gave him his hand.
“You may.”
In the year 1804, great events were stirring: events that were critical for Britain.
In January Napoleon changed his plans and decided that the fleet of armed transports he had been preparing would not be strong enough, and that he would need the French navy to accompany them as a protective escort.
It was a powerful fleet, for it contained not only the French navy, but the ships of France’s allies the Spanish as well: a total greater than England’s fleet.
“He will have to engage our navy and smash us first,” Forest explained to Porteus; “That’s his object now. Then he’ll ship his army across, and it will be huge.”
“Our army is still small.”
“It is.”
“So all now rests upon a single naval engagement.”
“When it comes, yes.”
From February to April, King George III suffered another of his bouts of madness.
Then, in May, the feeble ministry led by the well-meaning Addington collapsed and – “by the grace of God” said Porteus – William Pitt returned to power. Ironically, on the same day, May 18, Napoleon Bonaparte in his final departure from the supposed democracy of the French Revolution, crowned himself Emperor.
In the history of England, no man, not even Churchill in the twentieth century, ever assumed for himself during a period in office the heroic status of William Pitt the younger. His thin, meagre form with its long, upward-turning nose, and its nearly impossible angularities (his almost total lack of a posterior caused cartoonists to dub him ‘the bottomless Pitt’) was driven by such concentrated passion, such acute nervous energy, and such a driving and selfless zeal for the cause of his country in its desperate years of crisis, that the House of Commons was not only dominated by him, but awed.
“I think the man lives on his passion and upon air,” Barnikel said to Canon Porteus. He had heard that Pitt’s personal life had been one of great disappointment; but whether his political passion was an outlet for his frustration, or whether it would have been there anyway, he had no means of judging. Of his greatness, and of his firmness of purpose in resisting Napoleon, there was no doubt.
“He has the strength of the prophets, sir,” Porteus answered, “because he serves a noble cause. He is pure.” And it was clear that the canon considered himself cast in the same mould.
The plan by which Pitt saved his country from destruction in the years 1804 to 1806 was twofold. The first object was to form an alliance with the unwilling European powers that would force Napoleon to remove his gathering army from the northern coast of France. His second was to blockade the French navy in port so that they could not get out and destroy England’s own.
At first the alliance seemed harder to achieve. The Europeans had no wish to fight Napoleon again. He had already proved that on the field of battle he was their master. As long as France remained within her natural frontiers on the continent, they would do nothing.
But fortunately there was one hope. Czar Alexander of Russia wanted to expand, north into the Baltic and south to Constantinople. Here Pitt found an ally against the threatening power of France. But he needed more. Austria held back; Prussia, cynically, seemed ready to sell her services, and the right to cross her territory, to the highest bidder.
Napoleon had ninety thousand men at Boulogne, and two thousand transports. Like Emperor Claudius, eighteen hundred years before, he seemed about to sweep all before him on the northern island.
And then, as so often in his meteoric career, Napoleon overreached himself. Not only did he parcel out Germany as casually as if he were cutting up a cake, but in the spring of 1805 he had himself crowned King of Italy. It was too much. The message was clear.
“He means to gobble up all.”
Mighty Austria joined Pitt’s alliance and the stage was set for a massive conflict.
1805:
SEPTEMBER
15
The mission of the little frigate
Euryalus
is seldom recorded in works of general history. Yet no ship in the British navy played a more important role in saving England during the fateful autumn of 1805.
“We were Nelson’s watchdog,” the crew would recall proudly. “We were his extra eye and arm.”
And if he had to serve in the King’s Navy instead of smuggle safely at home in Christchurch, Peter Wilson counted himself lucky that it was this ship, of all the others, that the press gang had taken him to.
For the press gang system was a wholesale business. The press tenders were everywhere in the Channel waters around the Solent. One of their favourite places to lie in wait was near the western tip of the Isle of Wight, ten miles from Christchurch, where they would send gangs aboard every ship entering the port of Southampton to take some of their men. But they raided frequently along the coastal towns as well.