Lord Cornwallis. Whose family owned Cornwallis House on Clifton Hill, and therefore was dear to every Bristol heart.
For Richard, 1776 had been a year of muskets and money; he had ?400 in the Bristol Bank, and the twelve shillings per diem he donated to his father had enabled the Cooper’s Arms to keep its door open when many other taverns had closed theirs for good. Hardship gripped high, middling and low alike. Awful times.
The crime rate had soared beyond belief, and carried with it one peculiar symptom of this bitter, frustrating American war: convicts and the poor-without-a-parish were no longer being shipped to the thirteen colonies and sold there as indentured labor. Time honored and convenient, the practice had enabled the Government to implement the harshest punitive measures in Europe while simultaneously keeping its prison population down. For every Frenchman hanged, ten Englishmen were; for every German hanged, fifteen Englishmen were. An occasional woman was hanged. But the vast majority of those convicted of crimes of lesser degree than highway robbery, blatant murder or arson, were sold in job lots to contractors who hustled them aboard ships-many out of Bristol- transported them to some of the thirteen colonies, and there profitably resold them as white slaves. One difference between them and the black slaves lay in the fact that, theoretically at least, their bondage eventually came to an end. Often, however, it did not, particularly if the slaves were female. Moll Flanders had it good.
Transportation of white indentured labor was largely confined to some of the thirteen colonies because the plantation owners in the West Indies preferred negro labor. They believed that black people were used to the heat, worked better in it-and did not, when looked over, closely resemble the Master and Mistress. Now the transportation system had ground to a halt, but the English courts of quarter session and assizes did not in consequence cease to crack down hard on those accused of even the pettiest crime. English penal law was not designed to protect the rights of a few aristocrats; it was aimed at protecting the rights of all persons who had managed to acquire a modicum of wealth, no matter how small. Thus the prison populations swelled at an alarming rate, castles and old buildings were pressed into service as auxiliary places of detention, and the stream of convicted felons continued to pass in chains through gates both old and new.
At which point one Duncan Campbell, a London contractor and speculator of Scotch origins, conceived the idea of using old naval men o’ war put into ordinary-that is, retired from service-as prisons. He bought one such ship, Censor, moored her in the Thames at the Royal Arsenal, and filled her with 200 male convicts. A new law permitted convicted felons to be put to work on governmental business, and Censor’s felons were required to dredge the river’s reaches along this critical sea road as well as construct new docks-work no free man could be prevailed upon to do unless very well paid. Convict labor cost no more than food and lodging, both of which Mr. Duncan Campbell provided on Censor hulk. There were a few early mistakes; hammocks, Campbell discovered, were not beds suitable for felons, whose chains became badly tangled in their supports. So he switched to shelving for beds, and was able to increase Censor’s complement to 300 prisoners. His Britannic Majesty’s Government was mightily pleased, and happy to pay Campbell for his pains. Surplus felons could be stored on naval hulks until the war was over and wholesale transportation could begin again. What a relief!
To a tavern-keeper the explanation for petty crime was obvious; most of it occurred while its perpetrators were drunk. With the scarcity of jobs, rum or gin became increasingly precious to those who could perceive no ray of hope illuminating their lot. Silk garments, handkerchiefs and fripperies were the hallmark of more affluent folk. Men and women-even children-reduced to begging from the parish took out their rage and frustration in drinking as soon as a coin came their way, and then, drunk, pilfered silk garments, handkerchiefs, fripperies. Things they did not own, could not own. Things the better off prized. Things that-in London and Bristol, at least-might be sold to those who dealt in stolen goods for the price of another drink, another few hours of inebriated well-being. And when they were caught, off to the courts they shuffled to be sentenced to death-or to fourteen years-or, most frequently, to seven years. With the word “transportation” tacked on. Transportation to where? An unanswerable, therefore never asked, question.
As far as Richard was concerned, 1777 ought simply to have been another year of muskets and money, but early in the New Year, while Washington and what troops he had left endured the ordeal of a frightful winter outside Morristown, the Morgans of the Cooper’s Arms received a shock. Mr. James Thistlethwaite abruptly announced his departure from Bristol.
Dick flopped onto a chair, something he did so rarely that his elbows were horny from leaning on the counter. “Leaving?” he asked feebly.
“Aye,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite aggressively, “leaving, damn ye!”
Peg and Mag began to cry; Richard shooed them upstairs with the bewildered William Henry to have their weep in private, then faced the apparently angry Mr. Thistlethwaite. “Jem, ye’re a fixture! Ye cannot leave!”
“I am not a fixture, and I am leaving!”
“Oh, sit down, man, sit down! And stop this prize-fighting posturing! We are not your adversaries,” said Richard. He looked stern. “Sit, Jem, and tell us why.”
“Ahah!” said Mr. Thistlethwaite, doing as bidden. “So you can come out of that timid shell. Does my going mean so much?”
“It is hideous,” said Richard. “Father, give me a beer and Jem some of Cave’s best.”
Dick got up and did as he was told.
“Now what’s amiss?” asked Richard.
“I am fed up, Richard, that is all. I have done my dash in Bristol. Who is there left to lampoon? Old Bishop Newton? I’d not do that to someone with wit enough to call Methodism a bastardized form of popery. And what else can I do to the Corporation? What more stinging quip is there than to say that Sir Abraham Isaac Elton is all jaw and no law, John Vernon is all law and no jaw, and Rowles Scudamore neither law nor jaw? I have exposed Daniel Harson for the Dissenting minister he once was, and John Powell for the medical man on a slaver he once was. No, I have shot my Bristol bolt, and I have a mind to seek greener pastures. So I am off to London.”
How to say tactfully that a shining light in Bristol might find itself obscured by the fog of a place twenty times larger than Bristol? “It is such a vast place,” Richard ventured.
“I have friends there,” Mr. Thistlethwaite countered.
“Ye’ll not change your mind?”
“I will not.”
“Then,” said Dick, reviving a little, “I drink to your good luck and good health, Jem.” He lifted his lip. “At least I will save the expense of quills and ink.”
“You will write to tell us how you are?” asked Richard somewhat later, by which time Mr. Thistlethwaite’s truculence had changed to maudlin self-pity.
“If you write to me.” The Bard of Bristol sniffled, wiped a tear away. “Oh, Richard, the world is a cruel place! And I have a mind to be cruel to it on a larger canvas than Bristol offers.”
Later that evening Richard sat William Henry on his lap and turned the child to face him. At two and a half, he was strongly knit and tall, and had, his father fancied, the face of a stern angel. It was those eyes, of course, so large and unique-truly unique, for no one could remember ever seeing their ale-and-pepper mix-but also the planes of his bones and the perfection of his skin. No matter where he went, people turned to look and marvel at his beauty, and this was not the judgment of a doting parent. By anybody’s standard, William Henry was a ravishing child.
“Mr. Thistlethwaite is going away,” Richard said to his son.
“Away?”
“Aye, to London. We will not see him again very often if at all, William Henry.”
The eyes did not fill with tears, but they changed in a way Richard had learned meant inward grief, secret and sensitive. “He does not like us anymore, Dadda?”
“He likes us very well. But he needs more room than he can find in Bristol, and that has nothing to do with us.”
Listening to them, Peg plucked at the bars of her own cage, a structure as hidden as whatever went on inside William Henry’s mind. After that one vindictive reaction against Richard’s right to touch her, she had disciplined herself into conjugal obedience, and if Richard noticed that her response to his lovemaking was more mechanical than of yore, he had not commented. It was not that she loved him any less; her emotional withdrawal was founded
