Dear God on high, my wife thinks that William Henry will drown in the Avon were he to live in Clifton. Whereas I have a dread foreboding that it is Bristol will kill him. I pray Thee, I beg Thee to protect my son! Grant me this one child! His mother says that there will be no more, and I believe her.
“We will remain at the Cooper’s Arms,” he said to Peg as they rose just before dawn.
Her face lit up, she hugged him in an agony of relief. “Oh, thank you, Richard, thank you!”
The war in America continued to go well for England for some time, despite the fact that a few Tory elements in the Parliament felt strongly enough to secede from the Government as a protest against the King’s policies. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne was told to clear out every rebel in northern New York and demonstrated his tactical prowess by taking Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, a stronghold the rebels had deemed invulnerable. But between the lake and the headwaters of the Hudson River lay a wilderness that Burgoyne traveled at the rate of a mile a day. He lost his luck; so did his diversionary contingent, defeated at Bennington. Horatio Gates had taken over as rebel commander, and had the brilliant Benedict Arnold with him. Twice brought to battle at Bemis Heights, Burgoyne plummeted to final defeat and surrender at Saratoga.
The news of Saratoga rocked all of England to its foundations. Surrender! Somehow Saratoga outweighed all of the victories so far, a mysterious and subtle consequence neither Lord North nor the King had considered. To ordinary Englishmen and Englishwomen, Saratoga said that England was losing the war, that the American rebels owned something the French, Spanish and Dutch did not.
Had Sir William Howe advanced up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne, things might have gone very differently, but Howe had decided to invade Pennsylvania instead. He beat George Washington at Brandywine, then succeeded in capturing Philadelphia and Germantown. The American Congress fled to Pennsylvanian York, which baffled the English in the field—and at home. A people simply did not abandon their capital to the enemy, they defended it to the death! What matter taking Philadelphia when it no longer held the rebel government? Something new was on the face of the earth.
Though Howe’s conquests in Pennsylvania occupied more or less the same time frame as Burgoyne’s campaigns in upper New York, in England they could not compete with defeat at Saratoga. From Saratoga onward, the Parliament started to wonder if England could win this war. The government of Lord North grew defensive, worried too about events in Ireland, blocked from direct trading across the seas and talking about enlisting volunteers to fight the French, allied to the Americans. Well, everybody in London saw through that! If the Irish intended to fight, they would be going to fight the English. Therefore the Irish would have to be conciliated, as the army was 3,000 miles away. Not an easy task with the Tories ruling the House.
In Bristol the economic depression kept on worsening. French and American privateers were sailing the seas and doing better than the English privateers; the Royal Navy was also on the far side of the Western Ocean. Always eager to mount privateers, many Bristol plutocrats contributed money toward transforming merchant vessels into heavily armed floating fortresses. English privateers had done extremely well during the Seven Years’ War against France, so nobody envisioned that this war would see different results.
“But,” said Richard to Mr. James Thistlethwaite in a letter he wrote during the last half of 1778, “our investors have lost disastrously. Bristol launched 21 privateers, but only the two slavers Tartar and Alexander have captured a prize—a French East Indiaman said to be worth £100,000. The shipping trade has declined so much that the Council says the port dues will not cover the Mayor’s salary.
“Highwaymen are everywhere. Even the White Ladies Inn on the Aust turnpike is now deemed too dangerous a journey for a Sunday outing, and Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Trevillian of that eminent Cornish family were held up and robbed in their carriage right outside their residence on Park Street! They lost a gold watch, some very expensive jewelry and a sum of money.
“In short, Jem, things are in a parlous state.”
Mr. Thistlethwaite answered Richard’s letter with remarkable promptitude. Some inimical little Bristol birds were whistling a merry tune, to the effect that Jem Thistlethwaite was not prospering in London. He had turned, they trilled, to hacking for certain publishers and even touting for stationers.
“Richard, how splendid to hear from you! I miss the sight of your comely face, but a letter conjures it up.
“The only difference between a pirate and a privateer is the Letter of Marque from H.M.’s Government, which takes a big share of the profits. What started as a local conflagration has become a world war. English outposts are under attack in nearly all corners of the globe—how can a globe have corners?—even some mighty remote ones.
“I am not surprised that it was two slavers captured the only prize. Especially Alexander and Tartar. Just the right size and weight. 120 men to man 16 guns. Perfect. Besides, slavers sail so well. Fast and maneuverable. And they may as well be doing something, with slaving wellnigh impossible for the duration.
“If Bristol is in dire straits, Liverpool is poised on the brink of a maelstrom. It is a town almost as large as Bristol, yet it has less than a quarter of Bristol’s charitable institutions. Thousands have been thrown on its parishes, which, lacking donations from philanthropists, cannot feed them. They are literally starving, and Lord Penrhyn and his Liverpudlian kind have never heard of the word ‘philanthropy.’ That is what happens in a town whose nabobs are all in the slaving business.
“Though it looks east, London’s million souls are suffering too, Richard. The East India Company is feeling a little pinch, and is very afraid of the French, who are doing quite well by their Yankey allies. The United States of America! A grand title for a loose confederacy of little colonies thrown together by urgent need—need which will pass. Then, I predict, each little colony will go its own way, and the United States of America will dissolve into an unattainable philosophical idea in the minds of a handful of brilliant, enlightened, extremely gifted men. The American colonists will win their war, I have never doubted it, but they will emerge as thirteen different states linked by nothing more solid than a treaty of mutual aid.
“A little whisper you will enjoy, I know. Mr. Henry Cruger, Member of Parliament for Bristol and an American, is rumored to be receiving a pension of at least £1,000 a year from the King for information about Yankey doings. Ironic, is it not? There is Bristol screaming that Cruger is a Yankey spy, when all the time he is spying for England.
“And I will conclude, my very dear Richard, by saying that London air is Beotian air too, not fit for my Attic lungs to respire. However, I am well, quite often too drunk—though the rum is not the equal of Thomas Cave’s.”
A concluding paragraph, thought Richard, putting the letter down, that said the Bristol birds were singing a true song. Poor Jem! Bristol had finite bounds; he had thought to find none in gargantuan London, a city amply provided with its own satirists and in no need of Bristolians.
So the letters with which he continued to inundate Richard contained news Richard had already heard, though he could not bring himself to say so in his replies.
“Oh, Jem!” he exclaimed at the end of 1780 as he read yet another Thistlethwaite missive. “Ye’ve lost your edge!”
