“It is time, Canon, that my brother came home.”
What was this?
“I prefer, Mrs Porteus, not to discuss the matter.”
“I must insist.”
He sighed. He must be reasonable. Taking off his spectacles he explained to her, quietly but with remorseless logic why, at present, such a thing was impossible. The political situation; the reputation of the family; the new bishop.
“You surely would not have me do something so . . . reckless to my reputation at the very moment when a new bishop has been installed. A bishop who,” the thought appalled him, “may wish to make changes.”
“Yet I must insist.”
She was leaning against the doorpost. The posture, he could not help thinking, seemed unladylike. And was there a glint of amusement in her eye?
“I have seen the bishop,” she said quietly.
He started violently in his chair.
“You have spoken to him, you mean, Mrs Porteus.”
She nodded.
“Without my permission? Without consulting me?”
“Yes.”
He put his spectacles on again and peered at her. Was such a thing possible?
“You need not concern yourself on his account,” she went on. “The bishop is quite of my opinion. He thinks Ralph should return.”
“But I, Mrs Porteus,” he replied with asperity, “may think otherwise.”
“I hope you will reconsider, then. For if you do not, then I shall leave this house and ask my sister-in-law to take me in at New Street.”
He could not believe his ears. Yet he could see she was serious.
“But . . . my position.”
“Your position, Canon, would only be improved in every way by my brother’s return. I will even,” she added drily, “say you are forgiving and generous. That might secure us another prebend.”
He looked at her cautiously.
“I find your conduct towards me has greatly changed, Mrs Porteus.”
She understood him.
“If you show leniency towards Ralph, Canon, my conduct will always henceforward be as you would wish – as it has been until now,” she said.
“I will consider the matter carefully.”
“Thank you.”
She closed the door quietly as she left. Suddenly she felt very tired. She wondered, idly, if Ralph was worth it.
Another small interview took place in Mr Porteus’s drawing-room a week later. It was between Agnes and Doctor Barnikel. This time it was she who took his hand.
“I am aware, doctor, that you have an attachment to me.”
He did not blush. He bowed his head in silent acknowledgement.
“And before my husband returns,” she went on gently, “I wish you to know that, had circumstances been otherwise,” she gave him an affectionate smile, “had I not been married already, that attachment would have been returned.”
“You honour me.” His voice was husky.
“Thank you, doctor, for always behaving to me not only with such kindness, but with such propriety.”
He was about to speak, when there was a noise at the door.
“Ah.” She smiled. “And now here come the children.”
1830
It was Agnes who made the bargain, and Ralph who honoured it.
“You may think what you like about reform; but I will not go through such trouble again, nor must your children. You must promise me to be patient.”
On his return from exile, Ralph had promised.
“But I never thought,” he said ruefully, “that there’d be no reforms in England for twenty years.”
The first quarter of the nineteenth century was a strange and unhappy period. Afterwards, men liked to remember it for Wellington’s great victories over the French, for the colourful extravagance of the Regency and reign of George IV; for its poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and strange, saturnine Byron, for its novelists: Jane Austen and Walter Scott. But these were the rays of sunlight in a world that was mainly dark.
Ralph had promised. He returned to his work at the school, and gradually, as the months passed, a stiff but polite relationship between him and his brother-in-law was established. They could even disagree.
And there was much to disagree about.
From the battle of Trafalgar, the defeat of Napoleon had taken a decade. At first it had seemed that, like another Caesar, he would rule all Europe.
“He has made a pact with the Czar of Russia,” Barnikel said: “he will rule all Europe and the Czar will rule all the east, including India. Surely now you agree he is a tyrant.”
“I agree that England must oppose him,” Ralph said. “But it is also true that he brings civil and religious freedoms to the countries he conquers when before some of them knew only despotic kings.”
He never allowed himself to say such things to Porteus however.
For years England stood alone: only her navy saved her. Then, slowly the tide began to turn as Arthur Wellesley won the title Wellington by pushing the French out of Portugal and Spain, and Napoleon made the fatal mistake of invading Russia. When he was finally defeated, the people of Sarum wore white cockades in their hats to celebrate the return of the Bourbon kings to France. And when Ralph declined to celebrate the return of the old regime to France, Porteus contented himself with rebuking him mildly.
“You have seen how the Revolution and Napoleon have turned poor Europe upside down,” he reminded him. “You know it is true that the Corsican adventurer has caused the death of nearly one and a quarter million men. Can you not see that, even if the old regimes were imperfect” – this was an astonishing admission from Porteus, Ralph had to admit – “yet the legitimate monarchs of Europe at least preserved order in the world?”
“I agree that all Europe believes so,” Ralph replied. “And that itself may be enough to preserve peace.”
In a way, he knew it was so. For a generation and more, the cause of “legitimacy” – invented by the subtle brain of France’s great statesman Talleyrand – was something more than a reactionary love of the old monarchic regimes. Legitimacy meant order; it meant that upstart adventurers could not overturn the world; it meant a return to peace and prosperity. In good conscience the monarchs of Europe, glad to be rid of Napoleon who had so humiliated them, and destroyed their people, formed new general alliances to preserve a permanent peace throughout Europe, and the religious-minded Czar even tried to start a Holy Alliance dedicated to Christian principles.
But as the years passed, the legitimist cause of the monarchies led to other, less attractive results: the revival of the Inquisition in Spain; the attempt by the Bourbon rulers to return all the South American trade to the old Spanish monopoly, and a general suppression of all dissidents because they might be revolutionaries. They were dark, repressive times.
At home, not even Porteus could pretend that Britain’s own monarchy gave any cause for joy. While Wellington was still struggling to wear down the French in the Iberian peninsula, George III finally went mad and his extravagant son became Regent. The Regency and reign of George IV were marred not only by his wild spending but also by his separation from and quarrels with his wife Queen Caroline. When, at his coronation in front of a large and delighted crowd, she tried to force her way into Westminster Abbey but was turned away at the door, even Porteus acknowledged to Ralph:
“It is hardly surprising that the republicans are encouraged when our monarchy allows such scenes to take place.”
“I’m not sure George IV isn’t a little mad like his father,” Barnikel confided. “His fantasies and vanities grow even stranger than the palace he’s built at Brighton. You know that although he never set foot over the Channel, he has so persuaded himself he fought Bonaparte that he even told Wellington – Wellington if you please – that he led a charge at Waterloo!”
It was in the second decade of the century that a sad rift took place in the Shockley family.
“The truth is that Napoleon broke our friendship with our cousins,” Ralph said generously. He could have blamed Porteus.
For during the long years of Britain’s isolation, Napoleon tried to bring her to her knees by enforcing a trade blockade. Thanks to her navy, the island could block Napoleon’s trade in turn; and for years the extraordinary system continued whereby both sides tried to block trade with third parties while, unofficially, enough English cloth was still getting through to the continent to clothe Napoleon’s armies, whom they were fighting.
The British Navy stopped and searched all merchant shipping including American vessels.
“They don’t admit it, but they want a crack at Canada,” Mason observed, “and they’ll complain about our search ships just to pick a quarrel.”
Whether this was fair or not, it was an added irony that the inconclusive war, in which the United States unsuccessfully attacked Canada and British ships fired upon Washington, actually began after an agreement between the disputing parties had been reached but before news of it had cross the Atlantic.
With the start of hostilities came a furious letter from their cousins, demanding to know what England meant by its action.
“I do not think,” Canon Porteus observed, “that we should reply.” And so the correspondence between Frances Shockley and her cousins ceased.
“It’s up to me to write to them now,” Ralph told Agnes.
But here laziness intervened. He meant to write. He almost did, a dozen times. But the months passed. Then years. The little war drifted to its close. He still meant to write.
In 1823, when England, was so anxious to keep the Bourbon powers from taking over the South America trade, a friendly atmosphere was made between Great Britain and the United States which resulted in the famous doctrine of President Monroe that the United States would tolerate no European rule in its southern sphere of influence.
“Monroe’s our best ally,” Ralph declared; to celebrate the fact he took pen to paper and wrote to his cousins.
He received no reply.
But far more than the situation abroad, however threatening, it was the tragedy at home in England that filled Ralph’s thoughts.
For it was the poor in England who suffered most terribly in those dark years, and nowhere in the countryside was the situation worse than at Sarum.
“I promised not to quarrel with Porteus,” Ralph said to Agnes. “But the truth is that even if I wanted to, I don’t know what can be done.”
The problem was a long-standing one. Nor was it much helped by the Poor Laws or the system of relief known as Speenhamland. This last, begun by the justices of Speenhamland in Berkshire, was a system of supplementing the wages of the poorest workers from parish funds, with the result that often the farmers simply paid them even less – a simple case of good intentions and bad economics.
And even in 1815, when Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, there had been little for the poor at Sarum to rejoice about; for the peace brought with it the worst agricultural conditions in generations. The war had left the government hugely in debt. For years it had also refused to honour its notes with gold, and printed more paper money. There was rampant inflation; bread prices rose sharply while wages did not. A labourer whose wages after the American War of Independence had bought fourteen loaves, could now buy only nine, yet the new income taxes rose, and the poor had to pay.
“The government has borrowed money from the rich: now the poor must pay taxes so that they receive their interest,” Ralph pointed out. In fact, between a third and a half of the government’s revenue went in interest.
Now, however, at the end of the war, the combination of returning soldiers and the ending of huge government war contracts produced both unemployment and a general depression. Corn prices fell. But still this didn’t help the poor. For the landowners in Parliament brought in the Corn Law. Its provisions were simple: at a time when continental Europe had massive surpluses to sell, no one in England might import corn until it had reached the price of eighty shillings a quarter. The landowners would be protected.
“It’s infamous,” Ralph protested. “It actually ensures that the poor will starve.”
“It’s worse than that,” Mason explained to him. “It’s stupid as well. The landowners and farmers themselves can’t sell grain at that price, so they’re no better off either. Everyone loses. The only people profiting are the corn merchants: they’re stockpiling corn to drive the price up quickly, buying cheap imports as soon as they’re allowed to, then reselling for high profit.”
“Then why do the Tory landowners continue to support the Corn Law?”
“Simple,” the merchant told him. “Prejudice and stupidity. They want to control everything, just as they did before the war. They won’t listen to merchants like us, who could explain the benefits of free trade.”
Many times on his visits to Mason and his family, Shockley had been treated to lectures on the subject of free markets and the reduction of tariff barriers, for Mason was a believer in the doctrines of Adam Smith.