THE ADVENTURES OF TOBY
WEY
BY
GAVIN
SCOTT
INTRODUCTION
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
TOBY WEY
When you come out of London Underground’s Embankment
Station today and face north, looking past the sandwich
shops and Internet cafes towards the Strand and Trafalgar
Square, you are standing on the site of Warren’s Blacking
Factory.
Warren’s was a rat-infested warehouse to which in February
1824 the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens was sent by his
poverty-stricken parents in a desperate bid to help the
family finances.
It didn’t work: while Charles laboured in shame and fury
sticking labels on pots of boot polish, his father John
Dickens was arrested by his creditors and thrown with his
family to the squalor of the Marshalsea debtor’s prison,
leaving the boy to fend for himself. As more than one
student of Dickens’ life has noted it was at this moment
that his childhood was lost, and “all his wanderings
thereafter were a search to regain it”.
But there was another boy in the factory with Charles
Dickens, who until very recently, for reasons which will
become clear in this book, was unknown to history, although
his life was just as extraordinary as that of Charles
Dickens and by many measures more significant.
The boy’s name was Toby Wey, and until January 2005, when a
packet of papers belonging to James Lambert, one of the
owners of Warren’s, was found during restoration work on an
18th
century manor house near
Bourton on the Water in the Cotswolds, Toby’s very
existence was unknown. In September 2005, after some public
controversy, the papers were auctioned at Sotheby’s and
disappeared from public view.
I’m not permitted to reveal who bought them, but the
purchaser, who is herself well-known, feels under an
obligation to give Toby Wey the posthumus fame he deserves.
Because it turns out that this young man was not only the
key to saving Charles Dickens from a life of menial toil,
(and thus bringing us books like David Copperfield, Great
Expectations and Oliver Twist) but had personally succeeded
in escaping from the most dangerous organized criminals in
pre-Victorian London, been the hidden operator of the
notorious chess-playing mechanical Turk, helped George
Stephenson revolutionise world transport with “The Rocket”,
and was the master-mind behind one of the most dramatic
jail breaks ever to occur in British history.
All this before he was twenty two years old.
If I had not personally examined and authenticated the
notes, contemporary documents and journals which constitute
the Toby Wey Collection, it would have been hard to credit
his staggering achievement. But the evidence is
overwhelming: and already information is accumulating to
suggest that after his adventures in England Wey went on to
help bring down a monarchy in France, fought with Garibaldi
to create modern Italy and inspired Jules Verne to create
the character of Captain Nemo in “20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea”.
Thanks to a chance find in a dusty attic a great new
personality has emerged from the depths of time; I invite
the reader to join me in discovering just how breathtaking
that character’s life was.
Gavin Scott
Santa Monica, California
PART ONE
THE CHILDHOOD
OF
TOBY WEY
CHAPTER
ONE
IN WHICH TOBY RISKS
EVERYTHING AND A NORTHUMBERLAND MINER MENDS A
PUMP
Toby was born in the village of Deane in the English county
of Kent to a poor agricultural labourer named Caleb Wey and
his wife Dorothy. The year was 1810, when Napoleon was at
the height of his power, Beethoven was going deaf, the
Spanish Empire was falling apart and James Madison annexing
Florida for the United States.
Women played an important role in Toby’s life, and one of
the first to do so, after his mother and grandmother,
appeared one day when he was playing in small stream which
ran across Deane Common – the undulating, gorse-covered
public land which provided the villagers with grazing for
their animals, firewood and small game.
During the summer the stream was only a few inches deep and
could be dammed with mud to create a small pool in which
leaves would float around in interesting circles. Sometimes
there were ants on these leaves, and Toby would watch,
fascinated, as they ran around the perimeter, trying to
find a way off.
One day as he was looking into the pool a face of a young
girl appeared beside his. Her name was Rachel Stanton, and
she was one year older than Toby, the daughter of a
small-holder on the edge of the village. She reached past
Toby, laid her hand flat on the surface of the water, and
when she pushed down the reflections disappeared. Toby put
his hand into the water likewise and felt the mud squelch
cool around his fingers as his hand touched hers. When the
two children at last withdrew their hands, and the water
cleared, there were their two hand-prints, side by side, on
the bottom of the stream.
From then on Toby and Rachel scared birds together for
local farmers while their parents toiled in the fields,
helped the harvesters bind the sheaves, picked up stones
and acted as baby-sitters for their siblings while the rest
of the family was working in the fields. It was on one of
these occasions – in 1817 - that Toby Wey first clashed
with the powers that be: and made his first ally among
them. It was also the year when Davy Crockett and Andrew
Jackson fought Seminole Indians together in Florida and
Mary Shelley published “Frankenstein”.
The encounter took place because the local squire, Sir
Richard Copthorne, had decided to take his two children,
Harry and Miranda with him as he made the rounds of his
estates. Harry was eleven and Miranda eight; their horses
were named, respectively Demon and Purdy.
As Sir Richard paused to inspect a fence, Miranda and Harry
rode ahead of him and halted on the edge of a wheat field
at the top of the valley which gave a superb view out over
the Kentish weald. It was harvest time, and the field was
thick with men and women cutting the wheat with reaping
hooks and rakes and gathering it in. Toby and Rachel were
in charge of five small babies belonging to their
respective parents and a neighbour: in effect a makeshift
crèche. Rachel was weaving small crowns for the babies out
of wheat stalks and Toby was awarding them to the child who
crawled the fastest across the little nest they had made
for themselves among the straw.
From the top of the hill this nest was invisible among the
wheat stalks.
“I’ll race you,” said Harry suddenly to his sister, and
spurred Demon to gallop down the hill. He would often do
this: he was not as good a rider as Miranda and he had
found that the best way to beat her in a race was to begin
it before she knew it was on.
“Cheat!” shouted Miranda and took off after him.
Toby and Rachel felt the ground shake with the thunder of
the horse’s hooves even before they heard them. When Toby
stood up and looked over the wheat stalks the first thing
he saw was Harry riding straight towards the crèche.
Without thinking he ran forward, uphill towards the horse,
shouting and waving his arms.
To Harry it seemed as if the boy rose of out the earth
itself; he never saw the babies at all. He could not
believe his eyes: the boy, the little ragged boy was
running straight at him.
Demon reared in terror and Harry felt himself rising with
his mount. Then the boy was right in front of him and the
horse was on its hind legs and Harry was flying through the
air and the earth was coming up to meet him and his skull
felt as if something was being hammered into it and he knew
no more.
Toby stared at the fallen boy in horror. He had killed the
squire’s son and it was the end of the world.
And then the Squire himself was riding up on his big bay
mare. “God’s breath,” he said as he swung himself to the
ground where his son lay, blood pouring from his head.
“What happened?”
“I did it,” was what Toby was going to say - but as his
mouth opened another voice spoke.
“It was Harry’s own fault,” said Miranda Copthorne as she
rode up. “He was racing me and Demon saw the babies and
shied.” She pointed to the infants crawling in the stalks
just a few yards away.
For a moment it seemed to Toby that the universe swung,
suspended, and then the dead boy groaned.
“Harry!” said Sir Richard.
As her brother’s eyes opened Miranda’s eyes met Toby’s and
for a moment it seemed that there was perfect communion
between them.
They knew each other.
Five hundred miles away, at Killingworth
in Northumberland, a young brakeman was sitting on a pile
of spars watching a group of engineers try to fail to mend
a steam pump. In principle he was simply an idle spectator:
a brakeman’s job was simply to control the raising and
lowering of the cage which took miners down to the pit face
where the coal was. The pump in question, based on a design
by a Devonshire man Thomas Newcomen, was supposed remove
the water was which steadily seeping into the mine and
preventing the coal being taken out.
As he watched the engineers, the young man came to his own
conclusions about what was wrong with the pump. He decided
that the cistern containing the water the injection of
which into the cylinder condensed the steam hadn’t been
mounted high enough – so it didn’t generate enough
pressure.
It also seemed to him that the hole in the valve through
which the water came was too small – and the combined
result was that the engine lacked enough power.
So when somebody asked him what he made of the engine, he
replied in his thick, almost impenetrable Geordie accent:
“I could alter her, man, and make her draw, and in a week’s
time you’d be at the bottom digging coal.”
This boast, suitably translated, was passed on to Ralph
Dodds, the mine manager, who laughed it off. The brakeman
was completely uneducated, a widower living at home with
his father who had been scalded blind in a mining accident,
and was trying to bring up a small boy on his own. It was
obviously just a hopeful bid for a bit of extra income. His
offer was not taken up.
But after weeks of frustration during which the pit
completely filled up with water and the pump did nothing
more than bang up and down, Dodds concluded it might as
well be given up as scrap – and there was no reason not to
let the brakeman waste his time on it if he wanted to.
To his astonishment the man, instead of responding with
humble gratitude, immediately said he would not work with
any of the engineers who’d laboured on the pump so far, and
would only do it if he was allowed to bring in a gang of
his friends to do it with him. Dodds was so surprised at
the cheek of the demand that he found himself agreeing.
After all, what did he have to lose?
In fact the brakeman’s demand was essential to him having
any chance of success. There was no way the engineers who’d
already failed with the pump would let him succeed.
Whatever he did, they’d sabotage it, simply to protect
their own reputations. If the outsider was going to have a
chance, he had to do it with his own team.
The brakeman and his friends worked for three days and
three nights. They took the whole engine to pieces and
rebuilt it. They raised the height of the water tank by ten
feet. They doubled the size of the injection valve and set
it to shut off earlier. They raised the working steam
pressure from five to ten pounds per square inch.
And when the boiler was stoked and the furnace roaring and
the massive beam rising and falling it was clear to the
watching mine manager that he had made a terrible mistake
in even allowing the experiment, because the pump’s
movements were now so violent they threatened to smash the
pump house itself to pieces.
“She’ll have the house down,” Dodds screamed above the din.
“Shut her off!” But the brakeman, who was a big, solid
fellow, held Dodd away from the controls with a huge arm.
“There’s no load on her yet,” he said. “It’s just a bit of
bounce.”
And gradually, as the level of the water in the mine fell
with each stroke of the pump, and there WAS
a load on the mechanism, the
engine settled into an even rhythm, and continued in that
rhythm for three more days and three more nights – at the
end of which time the pit was dry and the first miners were
ready to go down and start digging coal, just as the
brakeman had predicted.
For this he was given the princely sum of ten pounds, which
he duly shared with them men who had worked with him to
make it possible. But it was not money that the man had
made in those six days at Killingworth: it was his
reputation.
From then on any mine owner in the region with a
problematic engine would call in the brakeman to ask him to
fix it. His name was George Stephenson, and one day he
would play a crucial role in the story of Toby Wey.
CHAPTER
TWO
FATHERS AND
SONS
As Toby grew older he slipped unthinkingly into the world
of work his parents already inhabited, learning how to give
turnips the best chance of surviving snails and weeds, what
wood made the best fence-posts and how to ensure hop-poles
did not rot. This was all the education he seemed to need
and there was no prospect of any other. It seemed destined
he would grow up as an agricultural labourer like his
father and that he would live an obscure and unremarkable
life in the green fastness of the British countryside.
And then something happened which began the awakening of
his mind.
One day Toby was coming home from an afternoon scaring
birds in Hench’s Ten Acre when he found, lying in the
middle of the road and covered in white dust, a copy of the
Bible. It seemed such an outlandish object that it might
have fallen from the sky, though in fact the explanation
was very simple. It had been placed on the roof of a
stage-coach on its way to Dover, preparatory to being put
inside a traveling trunk by a Vicar named Donald
Elphinstone who was en route to his new parish. Elphinstone
had been distracted by the farewells of his mother, and the
Bible lay forgotten and unsecured on the coach roof for
mile after mile of country road, until at last it juddered
off and fell where Toby found it.
On his arrival at his new parish Elphinstone was swept up
by his new patrons, Lord and Lady Simmons, and by the time
he realised his loss was in a position to repair the
deficiency from His Lordship’s library, and so forgot all
about it.
On Toby, the impact of the book was epochal. The slightly
sinister woodcuts of ancient Hebrew prophets and kings
gripped his imagination: he longed to know what each of
them was doing in the pictures, and what they were going to
do next. He took the Bible home and showed it to his
grandmother, Eve, who had learned to read when she was
briefly in domestic service.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”
Eve spelt out, and Toby copied out, his tongue between his
teeth, marveling at the way the shapes on the page became
sounds in his grandmother’s mouth when he showed them to
her.
When he copied “And God said let there be light, and there
was light,” it was as if, in the act of writing he was
creating light himself.
And when he read that God had said “Let the waters under
heaven be gathered together unto one place” he knew exactly
why: because wasn’t that why he had built his dams in the
stream ever since he was small?
As for the two lights in the sky – “God made two great
lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser
light to rule the night” - the sun and the moon suddenly
made sense. They weren’t simply there – they had been put there for a
purpose.
As a side-effect of this revelation Toby fell into the
habit of asking what things were for, and coming up with an
explanation for each of them, sometimes provided by the
Bible and sometimes out of his own head. Simple things at
first – that the rain was for watering the crops and
filling the water-barrel, that the stream was for carrying
away the rain and so on – but more and more complex as time
went on. What was work for? What was the common for? What
was the squire for? What was he for?
Thus he became, without his being aware of it, a
philosopher.
Sometimes, when there was no work in the fields and
sufficient food for survival in the house, Toby and his
father would “ramble off” as his father put it, exploring
the valley and the downs around it. During these rambles
Caleb would teach Toby the names of the trees (chiefly oak,
ash and beech in that vicinity) and the birds which lived
in them. Eve often gave them a list of herbs and flowering
plants to look out for to make up the medicines she brewed
up beside the fire, and with Caleb’s help Toby learned to
recognize them and recite their properties.
Occasionally they encountered one of the golden pheasants
with which Sir Richard had populated the countryside in
response to the growing popularity of shooting, but Toby
knew to leave them strictly alone: the penalty for killing
just one of them was transportation to Australia for seven
years.
Indeed, you could be sent to prison just for being found in
the woods with the equipment – a snare or a net – to kill a
game-bird, and sometimes Caleb and Toby came upon with
Trenton, the game-keeper, whose job it was to catch anyone
so equipped.
But the first time Caleb had met Trenton he’d engaged him
in a conversation about a new kind of moss Caleb had just
found, and the two men got to know one another, and as
Caleb wasn’t carrying anything that marked him as a
poacher, Trenton accepted him as an honest man, and there
was no friction when they met.
(Caleb did set snares and catch game to supplement family
meals, but it was on the common, where this was perfectly
legitimate, and what he usually caught was rabbits.)
Toby listened silently as his father talked to the
gamekeeper, and marveled. The gamekeeper was a much-feared
figure locally, and Toby himself would have run a mile
rather than encounter him, and to see his father talking to
him as an equal, weighing the merits of this or that herb
and exchanging information about the habits of foxes or the
nesting or thrushes, seemed to him utterly wonderful. He
wondered if, when he grew to be a man, he would ever show
such aplomb, such an ability to deal with the dangers of
the world, as his father showed.
It was hard to imagine.
But if the son admired the father, it was an emotion fully
returned. The upwelling of love and astonishment which
Caleb had felt when Toby was born grew stronger with every
year the boy grew. Caleb had often been watching when Toby
played his games with the mud of the stream, gazing at him
with a smile that lingered for hours.
He had heard from Rachel about the way Toby had stood up in
front of the galloping horse to protect the bairns in the
field; and when Toby began to read his happiness knew no
bounds. And whereas Caleb tended to doze through the
vicar’s sermons, he listened avidly to Toby’s versions of
the same stories, which his son often made comprehensible
for him for the first time.
And Toby was able to satisfy Caleb’s curiosity about what
joined the various stories of the Bible together: how Cain
and Abel related to Adam and Eve, for example, and where
someone called Seth came in. It turned out that after a
pause doubtless caused by his disappointment over Cain and
Abel, Adam had fathered a child called Seth when he was a
hundred and thirty years old, and had then, reassured about
the viability of family life, lived another eight hundred
years, procreating all along, until Adam’s offspring filled
the earth; though by the time his descendents included
Noah, God decided that “the wickedness of man was great in
the earth”, and it was time to wipe it all clean with a
flood.
Father and son built an ark three feet long as they studied
this fascinating episode, and that winter carved fifty
animals to populate it.
“I wonder if all the other people in the world besides Noah
and his family were bad?” asked Rachel, as she lined the
animals up for the younger children.
“They must have been,” said Toby’s mother Dorothy, “or why
else would God have sent the flood?”
“Were all the other animals bad, then, the one who didn’t
go in the ark?”
There was a pause.
“Animals aren’t good or bad,” said Toby. “They’re just
animals.”
“Why did God drown them, then?” asked Rachel: and to this
no-one had any reply, though afterwards Toby realised that
if God had wanted to drown the bad people he’d probably
been obliged to drown the animals along with them: they
were necessary victims.
He added this to his fund of knowledge about God.
Meanwhile the man who had fixed the Killingworth pump was
prospering. When the head engineer at Killingworth died in
a pit accident, George Stephenson was given the job at a
salary of one hundred pounds a year, and bought a cottage
to live in near the mine.
He immediately devoted a portion of this money to giving
his sickly son Robert all the education he had had to do
without. Robert had been born in 1803, and was therefore
seven years older than Toby.
George sent Robert first to the village school at Long
Benton, about a mile and a half away from Killingworth: the
fees were fourpence a week, and many of the children came
to school without shoes. When he had learned all he could
here George bought Robert a donkey so he could ride ten
miles into Newcastle to attend Doctor Bruce’s Private
Academy, which was a distinctly middle class institution in
Percy Street.
There was general laughter at the school when Robert first
opened his mouth, so thick was his accent, but he took no
notice and soldiered on, and gradually the accent dropped
away. His father heard the change, and smiled. It was part
of what he was paying for. And the donkey wasn’t just to
save Robert’s thin little legs either: it was because his
father insisted he bring his books home and read them to
him.
George wanted Robert to be educated: but he also wanted
Robert to educate him.
He’d question him in great detail about every lesson, and
then get him to read the textbooks aloud, especially the
ones on chemistry and physics. Over a lifetime of mine work
George had learned a tremendous amount about how machines
worked and he knew in his bones why they worked the way
they did: but he knew nothing about the theory that lay
behind it or the mathematics that lay behind the theories –
and he was determined he WOULD
know.
For George, his son was the key to this, and however long
into the night the pair of them had to work until they both
understood what Robert was being taught, they kept at it
until they had mastered every detail.
Robert did not complain. Living with his father was like
having an immense steam engine in the house with him.
George was so big and so full of energy that raising any
objection to the pressure he exerted seemed as futile as
protesting the existence of a mineshaft. Robert was shaped
by the immensity of his father’s will and adapted to it.
And because his father so patently needed him, waiting at
the cottage door until he returned from school, and
unloading the piles of books like a man handling nuggets of
gold, Robert could hardly feel oppressed.
And if he needed any reminder of why you needed the armour
of knowledge to protect you against the world, he only had
to look at his grand-dad, sitting by the fire, his face
permanently distorted by the steam that had robbed him of
his sight, his empty eyes staring into the flames.
And there was time for relaxation – or relaxation as George
Stephenson defined it. Together, in their spare time,
father and son built a sun dial, an automatically rocking
cradle, a lamp that burned under water, a clockwork
scarecrow and a perpetual motion machine that never worked.
CHAPTER
THREE
TOBY AND
NAPOLEON
“The bells of every church for miles around rang when news
of the victory at Waterloo came through,” Toby wrote in
later years, “and I straightened up from where I was
planting beans in the Crooked Field to ask my father what
it meant “It means Boney’s beaten,” he said. “He won’t be
coming to get you no more”.
Music also heralded the next phase of the process for Toby.
“I was weeding turnips for a farmer named Gibbons when I
heard a hundred voices singing in the distance,” he wrote
later. “Then I ran up to the top of the hill and saw the
returning soldiers on the road from the south: rank after
rank of men in red uniforms and gleaming white webbing.
They were singing was “Lillibulero”.
He stood by the side of the road, silent and wide-eyed, as
the soldiers marched past on the way to army headquarters
at Aldershot to be discharged. Heads high, the tramp of
their feet shook the road and the white dust flew up around
them. A tall sergeant with a fierce mustache winked at Toby
as he passed, but he was too overawed to respond. And at
last the song faded and the plume of dust vanished into the
distance, and the soldiers were gone.
By the time the next harvest came round Toby was beginning
to realise what Napoleon’s defeat really meant. As the
soldiers poured back to the villages from which they came
after a quarter of a century of war against revolutionary
France, there were suddenly more men than there were jobs.
At first farmers simply turned away those they did not
need; then they lowered the wages by a penny a day for
those they did need. Still more men turned up for work.
Wages went down by twopence: no shortage of takers. Down
another penny: men accepted it. What option did they have?
Unless they worked during the harvest time they had little
hope of surviving the winter.
But the landowners were also in for a shock that autumn.
The wheat was harvested, winnowed, bagged and sent out for
sale – only to find that the merchants didn’t want to take
it. Now that peace had come they could bring wheat in from
France and Poland and Germany – wherever they chose. They
could afford to haggle with the farmers – and they did.
The price of corn began to go down.
For Sir Richard Copthorne the timing could not have been
worse - because he was just adding up the bills for
enclosing the Deane Common.
He had partnered with his patron, Lord Thorpe, to take into
private ownership the large area of uncultivated land on
which the local people had been able to graze their animals
and gather their firewood since any of them could remember.
While the price of corn was good it made sense to go to the
expense of putting a bill through parliament to privatize
the Common – but now prices were falling there was no point
in putting it into cultivation – and the legal costs of the
process were just coming in.
“But you must bear your share of the expenses,” his wife
Sophie said. “Otherwise Lord Thorpe won’t even consider
supporting you as a Member.” Sir Richard wanted to be a
parliamentarian, and Lord Thorpe controlled several rotten
boroughs where there were only half a dozen electors, all
of who could be relied on to vote as Lord Thorpe told them.
Lord Thorpe’s wife Emma had been Sophie’s best friend at
finishing school, and it was Sophie who had schemed with
Emma to get Lord Thorpe to consider backing her husband for
parliament.
“Of course I’ll pay up,” said Sir Richard. “But that means
we’ll have to cut back here, and that means you’ll have to
keep better control of the household.” He had been looking
over the account books with Sophie, and it was clear from
their disordered state that she had no real idea of how
much was being spent.
“Shall I do without a Governess?” said a voice from the
hall. The words were spoken by Miranda, eleven years old
now. “I can read perfectly well by myself and Miss
Lankersham is very dull.”
Sir Richard smiled: he found it hard not to when Miranda
was in the vicinity.
“Not to be thought of, Miranda. No daughter of mine’s going
to grow up a fool.”
In saying this, although he did not intend it, Sir Richard
wounded Sophie to the quick. She was not a fool, but she
knew she was not particularly bright, and the challenges of
the printed word, which had in fact nothing to do with her
intelligence, had undermined her confidence in herself
since she was a child.
Besides, Miranda was intelligent, and had had good governesses
since she was a child, and Sophie was a little jealous,
because her husband clearly admired Miranda in a way he did
not admire her. How she wished Harry was here. Harry was no
intellectual, and seemed to feel the same dislike of
printed words and columns of figures as she did: but he’d
been at Eton for a year, and from now on, she knew, she’d
see him only during the holidays. Suddenly she felt very
lonely and rather sorry for herself, and she wanted to hit
back.
“Perhaps you should sell Golden Hind,” she said. “You paid
too much for him in the first place.”
Sir Richard got up. “Do you want me to ride to hounds on a
nag, Madam? See to the household and leave the stables to
me.” And he stalked out of the room and set out on a long
walk to let his irritation dissipate.
In the course of which, much to his surprise, he came upon
six men walking through his fields without leave.
“What the hell were you doing here?” he demanded as they
came level with him. “There’s no work being done in this
field today.”
There was a brief, pregnant pause. Then one of the men
spoke up. “We’re on our way over to the Fifteen Acre, sir,”
he said. “Bailiff wants us there for ditching this
afternoon.”
“Why didn’t you go round by the road, dammit?”
“We should have done, sir,” said another man: Copthorne
recognized him as Caleb Wey. “This way’s longer.”
“Of course it’s longer, you fool,” said Copthorne. “Use
your head next time.” And he strode off.
As they watched him go the men looked at each other,
terrified. Because they had not simply been taking a
foolishly long way round between one farm job and another:
they had been breaking the law.
As well as Caleb and Rachel’s father Thomas Stanton, the
others were Amos Todd, Balthazar Mason and a man named
Henry Brine. The illegal act in which they had been
involved was discussing the formation of a union of
agricultural workers to ask for a return to their former
wages, which had fallen from ten shillings a week in 1815
to seven shillings at the time the six men met together.
In 1799 and again in 1800 Parliament had passed laws known
as the Combination Acts which had made such associations
unlawful. Not only did the law make it illegal for workers
to combine together to ask for shorter hours or higher
wages – it was illegal to even meet to discuss the
possibility.
In fact, this was what Caleb Wey had been explaining to the
others when Sir Richard had come upon them. He knew that
the moment anyone heard they had banded together to improve
their wages they faced penalties ranging from prison to
transportation, and he was telling them it wasn’t worth the
risk. When the Squire strode away and they themselves
tramped on towards the Fifteen Acre, it took some time for
the conversation to resume.
“Well, if that’s true it’s wrong,” said Thomas Stanton.
“How can I feed five people on seven shillin’ a week?”
“I can hardly feed four of us even with the money from the
gates and the sheepfolds,” said Caleb. “But they’ve got us,
Tom: they’ve passed laws agin us even before we’ve moved a
muscle.”
“I say we should challenge ‘em anyhow,” said Henry Brine.
”Stand up and tell them we won’t work for what they’re
offering and we’ll stop anybody else as offers to.”
“And you’ll be inside a prison cell before you know what
hit you,” said Amos. “Besides, how are you going to stop
all those lads come back from the wars from working for
whatever they’ll pay?”
“Frighten ‘em off,” said Balthazar Mason. “Take them behind
a hedge and speak to them straight like.”
“I think we should speak straight to the farmers,” said
Thomas Stanton. “Tell them if they don’t pay decent wages
we’ll set fire to their houses.”
“Then it’s not prison bars you’ll be seeing,” said Caleb.
“It’s a noose. If the soldiers don’t shoot you down first.”
The men tramped on unhappily, and no one spoke until Thomas
Stanton said: “We’re sheep, then, being led to the
slaughter, and all we can do is follow.”
To which no-one had any reply. None of them, of course,
referred to their conversation again when the reached the
Fifteen Acre and the oversight of the Bailiff, but being an
observant man he noted the sullen silence with which they
worked during the long afternoon and formed a shrewd
suspicion as to its cause.
Meanwhile, in the north east, events had been developing
dramatically in relation to two pieces of metal placed side
by side with one another.
Horsedrawn wagons had been pulling trucks full of coal on
wooden rails for hundreds of years. They took them from the
mines to the nearest river or seaport, where the coal was
loaded onto barges and sent off to London or any other
large city where people would pay for it.
When people figured out how to make large amounts of cast
iron cheaply in the 1760’s the wooden rails were replaced
by metal ones.
When stationery steam engines became sufficiently efficient
in the 1780’s mine owners began putting winding gear at the
top of steep hills so the engines could pull the trucks up
these metal rails faster than the horses could manage.
And then a Cornishman named Richard Trevithick, whose hobby
was throwing sledge-hammers over tall buildings, built an
engine that could run up the rails by itself. The problem
was that it didn’t have enough power to pull any
significant weight behind it, its jerky movements tended to
make it fall apart, and it was so heavy it crushed the
cast-iron tracks on which it were supposed to run after a
handful of trips.
This was the situation when George Stephenson got involved.
Because the north east was full of mines that needed to
shift their coal by the most efficient means, plenty of
other local engineers had tried their hand at building
steam-powered coal-hauling vehicles with backing from the
mine-owners: none of them had proved satisfactory.
When George was given the chance to rise to the challenge
he put together a vehicle powered by two cylinders and a
steam boiler eight feet long which was supposed to pull
eight coal-wagons weighing in total thirty tons at four
miles an hour.
His brother Jimmy drove it and his sister-in-law fired the
boiler every morning and kept the cows off the line.
But so relatively weak was this engine that when it proved
unequal to its task Jimmy would call out to his wife to
come and push to get it moving again.
Despite this, once he had established that the hesitant,
breathless beast (as one observer described it) did in fact
work, George kept on tinkering with it.
He attached the wheels together with rods, which made it
run more smoothly.
He turned the exhaust into a chimney and added a blast pipe
which not only cut down the noise of escaping steam but
also gave the engine more power.
He went to a local ironworks and helped the owner work out
how to cast stronger rails which could withstand the weight
of the engine.
When the first machine was as good as he could get it, and
hauling coal reliably from the pithead at Killingworth down
to the wharves of the River Tyne, other colliery owners
came and asked him to build coal-hauling vehicles for them,
and he did.
Altogether he built sixteen engines.
These pieces of equipment were of great interest to the
mining industry, but not to anyone else. Their only purpose
was to haul coal. Unless you had large amounts of coal to
haul there was no reason to concern yourself with them.
They were just another piece of mining gear. That was all.
George Stephenson was a successful Geordie mining engineer,
and so he might have remained, unknown to history. Who
could have imagined anything else?
CHAPTER
FOUR
IN WHICH THE COMMON IS
TAKEN, THE PEOPLE STAND UP FOR THEMSELVES AND SIR RICHARD
FACES A MORAL CHOICE
It was now fourteen months since Caleb’s abortive union
meeting. The turning pages of the calendar had reached
1820, the year Daniel Boone died, Washington Irving
published Rip Van Winkle and James Monroe became President
of the United States. Toby and Rachel were hidden in the
gorse on the common, almost overpowered by the coconut
smell of the blooms, building a house. This was not
something they would have even thought of doing in view of
the outside world, because it was childish, and they were
on the verge of joining the work force. But they were still
children, and the project of building a model of the house
they would one day live in absorbed and satisfied them
both. They worked on the house together with silent,
pre-occupied solemnity.
“There’s not enough room in the kitchen,” said Rachel.
“I’ll want to be baking and the table’s got to be big
enough for you to eat your dinner.”
“You’ll do your baking before I get home,” said Toby. “So
there’s a pie ready for me.”
Rachel met his eyes: he had a point. “But there’s got to be
room for the babies as well,” she remarked. “We want a
table big enough for everybody to sit round.”
Toby thought about this, and nodded, and pulled the end
wall off the kitchen so it could be enlarged.
“Will you get enough so we can all have a proper dinner?”
asked Rachel. Toby nodded confidently: both of them had
noted a lack of proper dinners lately.
“I’m going to have ten shillins a week,” he said, “and two
pigs. Then there’ll be bacon all the time.”
“I’m going to make cheese,” said Rachel. ”Round cheese,
that’ll smoke in the hearth and taste of …”
“Smoke,” said Toby, and they both laughed.
Then a real pig, the one they were supposed to be looking
after, began squealing. Toby came wriggling backwards out
of the gorse to see the bailiff putting a rope around its
neck.
“Leave him alone! That’s our pig!” said Toby.
“Then get him off this land before he’s confiscated,” said
the bailiff.
“But this is the common!” said Toby.
“Not any more it’s not,” said the bailiff. “It’s the
Squire’s now, and Lord Thorpe’s. You’re not allowed on
here.”
Rachel had emerged from the gorse bush now.
“What about the cow?” she demanded.
“Same thing,” said the bailiff. “Off.”
“But we got nowhere to put her,” said Rachel.
“Then you’d better eat her,” said the bailiff. “Go on, the
pair of you. Get those animals off this land.”
Stunned, the children began to lead their respective
animals away.
“And don’t let me catch you coming round here after
firewood,” the bailiff called after them. “No more free
pickings here, understand?”
That night, at the Deane pub, there was no other topic of
conversation; conversation is not the right word: there
were bursts of talk – and then strange, stunned silences.
The common had been part of their lives ever since they
were born; indeed, for as many generations back as any of
them could remember. The idea that it could be taken from
them without them having any say in the matter was almost
inconceivable.
In fact they might have had a say, might even have
counter-petitioned and at least got compensation for their
loss, if they had known what was happening. But Sir Richard
had taken care not to broadcast what he was doing, and as
there were no newspapers circulating among the villagers
there was no way for them to know what was going on in
Parliament whether it concerned them or not. By the time
they heard about it the enclosure was a fait accompli.
“We’ve had the common since Doomsday book,” said John Tree,
the oldest inhabitant. “We’ve always had the common.”
“Well, we ain’t got it no more,” said Amos Todd, “and I
reckon we’ve just got to get used to it.”
“Get used to it!” said Thomas Stanton. “How are we going to
get used to starving? Because that’s what’s going to happen
if we can’t graze a cow or fatten a pig. We can scarce live
on wages now: how are we going to manage when there’s not
even a jug of milk or a bit of bacon to feed the bairns?”
“Have you thought about the winter?” said Balthazar Mason.
“It’s going to be a damned cold winter with no firewood.”
“What do you mean, no firewood?” asked another man.
“Haven’t you heard?” said Caleb. “Bailiff says no gathering
firewood from the common any more: it’s all the Squire’s
and Lord Thorpe’s.”
Silence fell on the gathering: the evenings were still
warm, but all of them knew what awaited them when the snow
began to fall.
“Are we going to put up with it like dogs?” asked Thomas
Stanton.
“What can we do?” said a man named Phillip Lot. “They put
the petition through Parliament, it’s a law now. We can’t
change that.”
“We can get up a petition of our own,” said Thomas Stanton.
“We can petition the Squire.”
“What for?” said a voice. “Asking him to give us it back?
He’s not going to do that.”
“We can ask him for firewood, anyhow,” said Caleb. “And a
bit of grazing. He and that Thorpe don’t need it all, even
if they have got the right of it. Maybe we can persuade
them to let us have a little bit of it back.”
“Who’s going to do that?” asked Phillip Lot. “Be a brave
man goes up to the Squire and starts asking for things.”
There was a silence.
“It’d be a pretty poor sort of feller’d be too frightened
to ask for what he needs to keep his family fed,” said
Thomas Stanton. “I’ll go, if nobody else will.”
Caleb met his eye. “I’ll go as well,” he said. He looked at
Amos, Balthazar and Hendry Brine. The first two nodded;
Henry Brine looked away.
“The wife’s got the fever,” he said. ”I can’t be away from
her now.”
“Anybody else?” said Caleb.
There was no general rush to join.
“I reckon that’s enough,” said Thomas Stanton. “We don’t
want to look like a mob. Now, let’s sit down and figure out
exactly what we want to say.”
Sophie Copthorne was in seventh heaven that afternoon: her
best friend Emma Thorpe had come to visit, and between them
the two women were planning the redesign of the Park. Emma
had recently been seized, under the influence of the
novelist Horace Walpole, by an enthusiasm for all things
Gothick, and she and Sophie had spent the afternoon
planning where a ruin could be built just in view of the
house, and a spot where a hermit’s cave could be excavated,
or at the very least a grotto.
Unusually, Lady Thorpe had come with her husband, and Sir
Richard had had the privilege of taking Charles Thorpe all
over the estate, showing him the stables, the pheasant
covers, the fields and the woods – and of course the common
which their expensive joint efforts had just wrested from
neglect and disuse. But Lord Thorpe, enthusiastic though he
had been about improvement when the enclosure process first
began, was now rather less interested for the same economic
reasons as Sir Richard. At first the Squire had been
relieved: and then Lord Thorpe had mentioned casually that
all they needed to do for the time being was build a wall
round the common and wait for the slump to end. It was all
very well for Lord Thorpe to propose the wall – but how was
sir Richard going to pay his share of it?
But he didn’t say so, because he knew that the member
representing one of Lord Thorpe’s rotten boroughs was at
death’s door – and that Thorpe was poised to offer Sir
Richard the chance to enter parliament at last.
“We need people in the House who’ll make sure property’s
protected,” said Thorpe. “We need people who can be relied
on to back us up in the Lords and not undermine us. I think
you’re the man.”
“I’m flattered, my Lord,” said Sir Richard. “I’m no glib
speechifier, though.”
“God forbid!” said Thorpe. “Once a man comes to like the
sound of his own voice he starts coming up with ideas to
make the world a better place, and ends up a Jacobin. As
far as I’m concerned the less an MP does the better, don’t
you agree?”
Sir Richard did not agree at all, but knew better than to
say so. He’d heard Lord Thorpe quote approvingly the
fellow-nobleman who, when asked if he could think of an
eleventh commandment, suggested “How about Thou shalt not
bother?”
Preoccupied with these thoughts it scarcely registered on
him when in the distance he saw a little knot of people
talking to Harry and Miranda, who had been out riding with
the Thorpe children, Isabella and William. It was only as
he came closer that a feeling of uneasiness came over him.
“Hulloa!” he called. “Who’s this?”
“It’s some of the villagers, Papa,” said Miranda. “They
were asking where they could find you.”
The men looked up at Sir Richard and Lord Thorpe and tugged
at their forelocks deferentially. There was also a child
with them, he noted, a boy, watching the proceedings with
wide, clear eyes.
This was Toby, then aged ten.
“Well, what is it?” asked Sir Richard. But Harry got in
before the men could speak.
“They’re telling you to get off their common, sir, they say
you’ve no damned business there.”
“No, sir!” said one of the men – Stanton, Sir Richard
thought he was called. “That’s not what we’re saying at
all!”
“You saying I’m a liar?” demanded Harry.
“It’s a misunderstanding, Squire,” interposed Caleb
quickly. “We’ve come to ask if we may go on using the
common in spite of the enclosure, sir, just for grazing and
firewood.”
“If they can’t feed their pigs there and graze their cows
they’ll go hungry, Papa,” said Miranda. “Because the wages
are so low. And we don’t really need the land, do we?”
Sir Richard felt mortification wash over him like a cold
bath: Miranda meant well, but to say that in front of the
men themselves – much less in front of Lord Thorpe, was
unwise in the extreme. It was Lord Thorpe who took up the
challenge.
“The nation needs the land, Miss Miranda,” he said. “It’s
been neglected for far too long. That’s why your father and
I took the time and trouble to bring it into our ownership
- as people who have the means to improve it. What happens
to it now is no business of these persons: they no longer
have any rights there, as Parliament has decreed. Isn’t
that right, Sir Richard?”
Half an hour before Sir Richard might had demurred, or at
least prevaricated until he and Thorpe could have discussed
a compromise in private: after all, they had no intention
of improving the land any time soon, and any excuse NOT to
go to the expense of putting up walls would have been very
welcome. But he knew that now his whole political future
hung upon his answer. Any suggestion of weakness, and his
chances of becoming a Member of Parliament would dissipate
like morning mist.
“Quite right, my lord.” He looked down at the men. “And as
for you, marching onto my land, badgering my children and
making demands: that’s the sort of thing that gets you
transported.”
“Bravo, sir,” said his son Harry. “They’re Jacobins, aren’t
they?” Harry had only the vaguest idea what a Jacobin was,
but the term was in vogue as an insult at Eton and it
seemed the perfect moment to use it.
“You’re a fool, Harry,” said Miranda. “You know perfectly
well they’re just worried about their families. You know
that too, Papa, don’t you?”
Which Sir Richard did. But with Charles Thorpe beside him
and his son Harry ready to pounce on the first hint of
weakness, he felt as if he was being squeezed in a vice.
“Sir,” said Caleb. “We don’t mean any harm: but times are
hard and we just want the chance to go on getting our
little bit of firewood and letting the animals graze.”
“It’s not too much to ask is it, sir?” said Stanton. “We
knew nothing about you taking the common till the bailiff
told us to get off it. People have been grazing their
animals there for as long as anybody can remember. It don’t
seem just that a few Members of Parliament can take away
our rights just like that.”
“Not just?” said Sir Richard, because he knew if he did not
intervene now he would lose everything. “Are you saying the
decisions of Parliament aren’t just? Are you setting
yourself up against established authority?”
“No, sir,” said Thomas Stanton, knowing he had made a
tactical error, but Sir Richard talked right over him.
“This country has a King, and a House of Lords and a House
of Commons,” he said. “They are rightly set in authority
over you, and if you set yourself up against them you are,
as my son has just remarked, a damn Jacobin.”
“Well put,” said Lord Thorpe.
“This isn’t politics, sir,” said Caleb, coming to the
defence of his friend. “This is about people having the
chance to fill their bellies and warm their children in the
winter. I reckon they’ve got the right to stand up for
that, don’t you, Squire?”
Sir Richard did know that. It was perfectly true: but Lord
Thorpe spoke up before he had a chance to open his mouth.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” said Lord Thorpe. “This
is a riotous assembly. I hereby declare this a riotous
assembly. Do you concur with me on that, Sir Richard?”
“By God it is,” said Sir Richard. He had no option. Miranda
looked at him, appalled. She looked at the boy who stood
beside his father; the same boy who had stood up in front
of Demon years ago. He was rigid with terror.
“The Justice of the Peace has spoken,” said Lord Thorpe.
“This is a riotous assembly and you may now be shot down
unless you disperse.”
“How can it be an assembly, sir?” said Caleb, “There’s four
of us and a boy come to ask a favour. That’s not an
assembly.”
“Your magistrate has declared it an assembly!” spat Lord
Thorpe, who suddenly felt he was on shaky legal ground and
was furious with the man for exposing the fact. “Or do you
deny the authority of magistrates as well as Parliament and
the King?”
“He’s not denying anyone’s authority,” said Thomas Stanton.
“None of us are. We’re just asking to be treated with a bit
of kindness. But that doesn’t look as if it’s going to
happen.”
At which Harry Copthorne, maddened to a fury, spurred his
horse at Thomas and riding straight at him, slashed him
across the face with his riding crop. As Thomas went down
the horse reared and Harry struck at the man on the other
side: it was Caleb, and the blow caught him across the
right eyebrow. Instantly blood was pouring down his face.
“Leave him!” shouted Toby – and grabbed at Harry’s leg.
“No!” said Caleb, grabbing his son. “Don’t touch him. We
didn’t come here for violence, we didn’t come here for no
assembly, we came to ask for help, and there’s clearly none
to be had.” He assisted Thomas to his feet. “Come on lads,
home.”
There was a moment’s silence: everyone was screwed to the
point of action, and at that moment anything could have
happened. And then the weight of Caleb’s authority sank in,
and the men turned around as he bade them and walked slowly
back across the park the way they had come.
The landed party watched them go and said nothing. The
truth was each of them, in his or her own way, felt
demeaned by the encounter. The simplicity of the men’s
requests, the dignity of their bearing, and their refusal
to be provoked by violence made each of them feel somehow
small and petty.
It was not a state of mind that could be allowed to
continue for more than an instant.
“Well,” said Lord Thorpe, “I think your peasantry need to
be taught a little discipline, don’t you, Richard?”
And there was only one reply the Squire could make to that.
At dinner that night Harry presented the affair as a
glorious battle between stalwart patriots and revolutionary
traitors, with himself in the leading role, but Miranda,
white and pale, said nothing and left the table as soon as
she decently could. When Sophie and Emma had retired to the
drawing room and the men sat over the port, Lord Thorpe
said:
“I’m not sure about that business of riotous assembly.”
“We declared it one,” said Sir Richard.
“I know,” said Lord Thorpe. “But I’m not sure it would
stand up, and it might make both of us look fools.”
“Hmmm,” said Sir Richard, secretly relieved. He could go
and tell Miranda how he was keeping the men from the
consequences of their actions.
“But we’ve got to nail them with something,” Lord Thorpe
went on: “Otherwise you lose all authority. You see that,
don’t you?”
“Of course,” said Sir Richard.
“You spend a lot of time on the bench,” said Thorpe. “What
else could we use?”
For years afterwards Sir Richard wished he had done nothing
except refill Charles Thorpe’s glass with port. Part of his
mind was telling him to do this, telling him to keep his
mouth shut. And some mechanism within him, some automaton
programmed to do nothing but impress and placate this
powerful ally, opened it.
“What about the Combination Acts?” he said.
“Excellent,” said Lord Thorpe, taking the bottle and
filling his glass himself. “But you could hardly describe
that ragged bunch as a union, could you?”
No, you couldn’t. The escape hatch had opened again – all
Sir Richard had to do was go through it, and the whole
incident could just be allowed to fade away. But if he
hadn’t been able to come up with an answer he would have
looked a fool, like someone who didn’t think things through
before he spoke. And that was the last impression he wanted
to give. He cast desperately back in his memory and came up
with – the encounter in the fields.
“I have seen them meeting in secret,” said Sir
Richard.
“What?” said Thorpe. “Seen them, and done nothing about it?”
Damn: wrong move. “Didn’t know it was a meeting at the
time,” Sir Richard said gruffly. “Walked into them in a
field. They had some story they were on their way to see my
bailiff. It’s only now I begin to doubt it.”
“And not before time,” said Lord Thorpe. “Same fellers?”
This time Sir Richard paused, let his mind play over the
scene in the field. “Most of them,” he said. “There was one
who wasn’t here today. Brine, I think his name was. Henry
Brine.”
“Still in the district?” said Thorpe.
“Yes, I believe so,” said Sir Richard.
“But he didn’t come with them to see you face to face.”
“Apparently not.”
“Good. Then we know which one is the weak link.”
Sir Richard swallowed a mouthful of port, and realised he
was supposed to show the initiative here. He was, after
all, on trial.
“The one to suqeeze,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Lord Thorpe. And he refilled both
their glasses.
CHAPTER
FIVE
THE MAJESTY OF THE
LAW
The men walked home in silence. They had walked into the
lion’s den and done what they intended to do, and now they
were leaving, heads held high. But none of them were under
any illusion that they were anything other than marked men.
If it had just been the Squire, and they had been able to
make their request man to man, as they had planned, there
might have been a chance: but the mishap of falling in the
path of the Squire’s children, and him being in the company
of Lord Thorpe had doomed this.
Each of them turned over in his mind how things might have
gone differently, and asked himself whether he should have
volunteered to go in the first place. But the worst they
feared was that it might be difficult to get work for a
time, if the Squire refused to hire them and encouraged
other local farmers to do likewise: they knew that they had
not broken the law, and were certain that once the Squire’s
wrath had cooled all talk of riotous assembly would die
away, because it was ridiculous, and trying to press the
charge would make the Squire look ridiculous.
They knew nothing, of course, about his Parliamentary
ambitions.
***
The evening meal in the cottage that night was a silent
one. Neither Toby nor Caleb wanted to talk about what had
happened, and Dorothy and her mother could draw their own
conclusions from the cut across Caleb’s eye, which Dorothy
cleaned and bound. The younger children, Alice, Michael (by
now Toby had several siblings, including Sam, the baby)
asked some questions, but they were ignored. Toby heard his
parents whispering in bed that night – everyone, of course,
slept in the same room – and he guessed Caleb was
explaining it all, but he fell asleep without picking out
any individual words.
He had frightening dreams that night, but woke up in the
morning with most of the shock of the previous day gone:
with the resiliency of youth his mind turned to the
immediate pursuits of the day, and as he was to lend his
father a hand with the ploughing on the River Field, that
was what occupied him, and he enjoyed every minute of it,
including lending his weight to the plough so that he was
able to watch the rich, chocolate-coloured earth peeling
away in thick strips on either side of the plough’s blade
as if it was a galleon sailing through the sea.
Unknown to the others, Henry Brine was accosted by the
Bailiff on his way to work and taken up to the Hall, where
he was left to wait in the stable-yard for three hours. The
Bailiff had refused to say why he was being summoned, or
what, if anything he was accused of, but had been told to
imply that whatever it was Brine was unlikely ever to see
his wife or children again. During the hours of waiting
Brine’s imagination had run riot, and he asked himself who
had informed on him, and for what, going over everyone who
knew and asking himself who had a grudge against him.
He had recently snared a rabbit on land belonging to a
farmer named Tinson: he feared that was what he was being
arraigned for. He knew he could be hanged for it.
By the time he entered the long, book-lined room with the
tall windows and the two men sitting waiting for him at the
far end, he was in a state of abject terror. When they told
him they had brought him here to give him a chance to save
himself, it was all he could do not to fall on his knees to
thank them. At first the demand that he give evidence of
the efforts of Caleb Wey, Thomas Stanton, Amos and
Balthazar to form an illegal combination simply went past
as a babble of words, and he found himself agreeing to say
anything they wanted. It was only when the Squire began to
write down the date in a large leather-bound accounts book
that it sank in to Henry what he was doing.
Whose idea had the union been? Who had agreed with it
first? Had anyone suggested violence? Had there been an
oath? Who had been selected to head the combination? Was it
in correspondence with any other organisation? What were
its rules?
Of course few of these questions were really relevant. The
men had discussed taking action for better wages several
times, and done nothing about it. But the Combination Laws
forbad even discussions on the subject, and all Thorpe and
Sir Richard wanted was the details that would make the case
convincing.
When it became clear from Brine’s replies that the details
would weaken the case against the men instead of bolstering
it, because nothing had happened except some wild talk, his
position was made clear to him. If he gave them the
evidence they wanted, he would go free. If he did not, he
would be transported to Australia for at least seven years.
Moments later, Brine was listening to Thorpe’s suggestions
as to what might have been said by Wey, Stanton et al, and
Sir Richard was writing down Brine’s version, which was a
slightly garbled parroting of what he’d been told.
Two hours later he left the Hall and on the walk home fell
to his knees and threw up. At home that night he sat silent
and white faced in the corner of the cottage and neither
his wife nor anyone else dared speak to him.
***
The soldiers came to arrest Caleb as he was ploughing the
Middle Hundred two days later. Toby was with him at the
time. At first he imagined the soldiers were on their way
to a battle; as they marched along the road they reminded
him of the ranks he had seen marching back from Waterloo.
He and his father were having their lunch when they caught
sight of the troop, and watched with mild interest as they
came over the hill. Toby had been reading the story of
Moses to Caleb, and his father had been particularly
fascinated by the incident of the burning bush from which
God had spoken to Moses, and by Moses’ reluctance to walk
up Pharoah and demand that he let the Children of Israel go
free.
“I can see why he didn’t want to do that,” he said.
“But it turned out alright,” said Toby. “Because the Lord
sent the plague of frogs and locusts and Pharoah had to
soften his heart.”
“You can’t always rely on plagues,” said Caleb, and Toby
looked at him, wondering what he meant.
And then the soldiers turned off the road and headed up
into the field with the Bailiff leading them, and Toby’s
childhood came to an end.
***
He had wanted to go with his father, but the soldiers had
prevented it, and when the charges were read out Caleb had
told him to go down and tell Dorothy what had happened.
“Tell her I never did it,” he said, “And I’ll be back.”
But that wasn’t the way it happened. The other men were
arrested that day and taken to Tonbridge, to the home of
Josiah Westerfield, the Tonbridge Recorder. There they were
questioned by him and by Richard Copthorne. They admitted
having discussed the fall in agricultural wages and whether
they should join together to try to get wages raised – but
all of them adamantly denied they had formed a combination
and insisted they were innocent of breaking the law. In
fact in what they were admitting they were putting their
heads in a noose, and with the evidence of Henry Brine,
which was in the form of a sworn affidavit, Sir Richard
knew he had them.
He had by now removed all doubts as to the propriety of his
actions from his mind: during the interview with Henry
Brine his whole object was to impress Lord Thorpe with his
determination and thoroughness and getting the statement
that they wanted. Once he had that statement, duly sworn,
he felt he was acting as an agent of the law. He pushed to
the bottom of his mind the means by which the statement had
been obtained and the fact that the words had virtually
been placed in Henry Brine’s mouth: he had sworn testimony
that the law had been broken and it was his duty to punish
the wrongdoers.
The Recorder, not knowing the true nature of Henry Brine’s
confession, accepted it at face value and regarded Caleb,
Thomas and the others as criminals from the first moment he
saw them. He interpreted the expressions on their faces
when Henry Brine was brought into the room to formally
identify them as proof of their guilt. In fact they were
all simply dumb-struck with shock. Brine himself looked as
if he was about to collapse at any moment.
Once the identification was complete, the Recorder ordered
the men to be taken to Tonbridge goal, where they were
stripped, searched and had their heads shorn before being
locked in a room. Here a prison chaplain came to see them
and told them that they were an idle, discontented set of
men who were trying to ruin their masters, when in fact
they were much better off than their masters themselves.
After this they were taken to their individual cells.
These cells were boxes on either side of a narrow corridor,
each box four feet wide and seven feet in length, which
were without windows or any other source of light and whose
walls ran with damp. They were claustrophobic in the
extreme, and became instantly more so when the jailor, at
the end of the corridor, lit a fire with green wood and
filled the place with smoke.
In this place the men waited, without exercise or
occupation, for three weeks until the autumn assizes were
due to open. Within three days Caleb was shivering
violently, sweating profusely and in the grip of a fever.
His family knew none of this. It was only
with the greatest difficulty that they found out where he
had been taken. Dorothy fell to the floor when Toby told
her the news, and then the three other children began to
cry, and Toby began to cry, and Eve tried to comfort them,
and it ended with all of them on their knees on the floor
holding each other and sobbing.
None of them thought to pray. God was the head of the
system which had taken Caleb from them, and the idea that
he would do anything that displeased the Squire or His
Lordship was inconceivable. As to whether Caleb was
innocent of the charge of having planned to form a union,
Dorothy had no idea, not having heard of the Combination
Laws in her life.
Leaving Toby in charge of the children she and Eve walked
the thirty miles to Tonbridge to see Caleb: and were told
no visits were permitted. She and her mother wept and
pleaded with the Sergeant at the gate, who was frankly
moved: but also under strict instructions the prisoners
were to remain incommunicado. Copthorne and his fellow
magistrates wanted no risk of word spreading among the
labourers of the district and some kind of insurrection
beginning on the men’s behalf.
At the very moment that his wife was trying to persuade the
jailer, Caleb was lying thirty feet below her in a fetal
position on the floor of his cell, in a spasm of coughing
so severe blood dribbled out of his mouth when it was over.
And when he was able to breathe normally again, the first
lungful of the smoke-laden air sent him back into a spasm
of coughing.
The accused were provided with Defence Counsel - local
lawyers most of whose work came from county landowners.
They knew they had to go through all the motions of a
proper defence so that the case would proceed smoothly.
They also knew that to actually help a gang of malcontented
labourers get free was tantamount to professional suicide –
and none of them intended to commit professional suicide.
When, on October 14th 1820 (at about the same time William
Gladstone was starting at Eton, Benjamin Disraeli was
becoming a solicitor, and the United States Congress had
agreed to let one new slave state into the Union for every
new free state) a little group of lice-infested,
ague-ridden men, blinking in the light, were hustled into
the courtroom at Tonbridge to face the grand jury.
The grand jury did not consist of their fellow citizens: it
consisted exclusively of magistrates, including Richard
Copthorne, and was presided over by a judge, Mr. Baron
Wilson, whose first Assizes these were. After a long career
at the bar during which his prickly, uneasy personality had
won him scarcely a friend, he had at last been appointed as
a Baron of the Exchequer at the age of fifty five: a
distinction others of similar competence but pleasanter
natures might have been expected to achieve at least a
decade earlier. In short he was a disappointed man, a man
who did not feel he had the respect of his peers, and one
whose first opportunity this was to show himself worthy of
the position that had just been granted him.
That he would give any weight to the arguments of the
Defence Counsel for the accused was unlikely – but he took
it further. Almost as soon as the charges had been read out
he launched into an attack on the accused. He said that
illegal combinations were part of a lawless association
threatening the whole country, and that all men of
property, of whatever party, naturally abhorred them. He
said that the root cause of discontent was “a mania for
diffusing among the lower orders an education wholly
unsuited for their station in society. Education should be
limited to teaching the lower orders their duty towards
God, and beyond that instruction is nothing but a curse.”
The fact that the men before him were either illiterate or
mainly illiterate was unknown to him, and indeed
irrelevant: he was now in full spate. His argument ran over
the origins of the French Revolution, the rise of
Bonaparte, England’s gallant struggle to defeat him and the
fall in the price of corn.
This was how the trial began. It did not get better. The
accused had no right to testify in their own defence and
their lawyers presented their case in the light least
likely to offend the bench. Henry Brine, white as a sheet,
repeated his sworn evidence without once daring to look
towards the men his words were condemning.
At the end of the day all the prisoners were sentenced the
seven years’ transportation to Australia.
When he heard the news Caleb collapsed in the dock. All the
men, now convicted felons, now had their hands and legs
fettered and were taken through the streets of the town to
Tonbridge Goal. The only improvement in their conditions
were that they were now placed in a large common cell, a
little nearer street level, where the air was less foul.
But all of them were too stunned to register the fact. They
simply sat there amid the hubbub of the cells, staring into
space.
They knew little enough of transportation, but that little
was sufficient to quell the strongest soul. The first stage
would be a coach journey down to the nearest port, during
which they would be fettered to the outside of the coach.
At the port they would be transferred to derelict
battleships, known as The Hulks where they would be kept
until a ship could take them to Australia.
Discipline was maintained aboard the Hulks by floggings for
the slightest offence, after which salt was rubbed into the
lacerated flesh.
From these deadly places the surviving prisoners - just one
in three – were moved to the convict ships for the twelve
thousand mile voyage to Australia. Here groups of six men,
all still manacled, would be confined in a berth five feet
six inches square, without occupation, for twenty out of
twenty four hours for a journey which lasted four months.
The food, brutality and filth aboard the transports were
almost as bad as they were aboard the hulks: and at the
other end lay slavery in the wilderness. The Convicts were
sold for one pound sterling to the highest bidder, who then
attempted to get his money’s worth out of him in the seven
years that were theoretically available.
All too frequently seven years were not available. The
convicts gave up the ghost and died in the hundreds.
Misery, the harshness of the climate and above all human
cruelty, swiftly overcame them.
CHAPTER
SIX
TOBY TAKES
ACTION
Meanwhile of course the families of the transported men,
left behind, underwent their own calvaries. In the case of
Caleb’s family, this consisted of virtual starvation.
No farmer in the area, hearing what had happened to her
husband, would employ either Dorothy, her mother or even
the children in any task. In theory, as they approached
destitution, the Parish Poor Relief system would have
provided some minimal support: but Lord Thorpe had told Sir
Richard he felt it would set a bad example if the families
of agitators were looked after at the expense of honest men
and women, and in order to avoid offending him, Sir Richard
found a technicality to deny the relief.
When Caleb was arrested the family had seventeen shillings
in savings, and the pig; but the pig, which could no longer
be grazed on the common, was almost literally a wasting
asset. If it could not be fed it would have to be killed
and once it had been killed it would just be a matter of
time before they were destitute.
Toby soldiered on in a haze of misery lessened only by the
need to work for the family’s survival. He organised two of
his younger siblings, Alice and Michael, to gather twigs
for fuel from along the hedgerows in the public roads.
While Eve looked after the baby, he and his mother went
looking for food: roots they could eat and inedible
chestnuts and acorns they could give to the pig.
During these increasingly desperate searches in which the
tiniest scrap of fuel or edible matter was pounced on as if
it were gold, Toby grew closer to his mother than he had
been since his early childhood, and realised she was in a
state of unrelieved terror, like someone on the edge of a
precipice. Ever since Caleb had appeared in her life he had
shone for her like a sun; every day had been real because
of him. Without him she felt as if the very fabric of her
existence had been torn away from her. She went through the
motions of living, but she was not in control of herself:
she was like an automaton.
Toby began to fear that if she did not see her husband
again she would go mad, and he came to a decision which
would change the course of his life. At whatever cost, he
would get his mother to see Caleb before he was transported
to Australia. He had no idea when he made this resolution
how it would be accomplished, or where his father was at
that moment, or whether they would have to fight their way
into the prison to see him, but it made no difference. He
would accomplish it, or die in the attempt.
He said nothing of this to his mother, but lay awake that
night turning over and over in his mind how to accomplish
it. The next day, on the pretext of going to find a new
source of firewood, he set off across country: and against
the urging of every fibre in his being headed across the
fields and through the woods to Copthorne Hall.
This time there was no question of anyone seeing him and
demanding his purpose: he had decided to be invisible, and
all his intelligence and willpower was directed to this
end. Every yard of shade, every furlong of vegetation,
every dead spot in the landscape, virtually every furrow in
the fields provided him with cover, and at one point he was
within a hundred yards of the Squire in an open pasture and
passed unnoticed. By the time he was in the grounds of the
Hall itself he was so used to concealment, like a man on a
battlefield, that passing unseen through its flower beds,
hedges and trees seemed like child’s play, and all his
attention was on the house, looking for an open window by
which to climb in. But before he had found one he heard her
voice, and knew there would be no need.
Miranda was in the maze.
Toby had no rational reason to think that Miranda Copthorne
would help him – but he was convinced of it. He had
encountered her twice, and come to his own conclusions from
what he had seen, and he trusted them.
He entered the maze.
A voice called out again: a girl’s voice, not Miranda’s.
“I know you’re in there, Miranda,” said the voice. It was
on the other side of the hedge, quite close. And though
this time there was no reply, Toby knew where the silence was coming from. He
could hear Miranda’s suppressed laughter, just yards away
from him to his left. There was no time to follow the
meanders of the maze: he simply pushed his way through the
hedge in the direction he knew her to be.
There was a moment when he came to a halt, trapped there by
the sheer density of the dusty foliage, the sheer spring
resilience of that mass of living things. And then a kind
of madness overtook him and he fought his way through with
like a wild animal and suddenly found himself in the silent
green space in the middle of the maze.
Miranda was sitting on a stone bench, reading a book, as
Toby materialized before her. His clothes were in rags, his
face was blackened and running with blood from
twig-scratches and his hair was full of leaves, but Miranda
neither screamed in fear nor laughed. She knew instantly
who he was and it seemed that his appearance in the middle
of the maze was not a matter for surprise in any way.
Toby met her eyes, and wasted no time with preliminaries.
“Mam has to see Dad before he goes,” he said. “Or she’ll go
mad. Do you understand?
Miranda looked at him. “Yes,” she said.
“She and Gran went to the jail at the start and they
wouldn’t let them see him. I don’t know where he is now and
there’s no money even for a cart.”
“I understand,” said Miranda.
Toby looked at her. He knew that if it were within her
power to help she would. No further persuasion was
necessary.
“Miranda,” said the girl’s voice, very close now. “I know
you’re there.”
Miranda said nothing.
“Come on, Miranda,” said the girl. “Call out, please. I’m
getting tired of this.”
Miranda leant close to Toby. “Go back that way,” she said,
pointing off to her right, “I know where you live. I’ll
find you.”
Toby nodded. “I’m so sorry,” said Miranda. ”I’m so sorry.”
And her eyes filled with tears.
“Miranda!” said the girl, and came into the place. “Got
you!”
But as she came in Toby was gone, vanishing down the dark
green passages as if he had never been.
On the way home Toby saw Rachel before
she saw him, and for the first time in his life did not
want her to see him. He suddenly realised that though he
had asked Miranda to help his mother see his father, he’d
made no request on behalf of Rachel or her family: indeed,
he could hardly have made such a request. Miranda might or
might not be able to get his mother down to wherever Caleb
was, but two families? Or three, or four, if the others
heard about it? The whole scheme would collapse.
And yet Rachel was his soul-mate; she had wept in his arms
when their fathers were taken away, they had comforted each
other as best they could, they had poured out their
bitterness together. How could he not tell her? And if he
told her what would she think of him for trying to get
something for his family which he was not trying to get for
hers?
The truth was in coming to his decision and implementing it
he had given no thought to Rachel or anyone else: he had
been driven single-mindedly by terror of his mother going
mad, and he would have done anything to avert it. But he
could not say that to Rachel. He couldn’t take the risk
that telling her might destroy all his plans.
So for the first time in his life he lied to her. When she
asked him about the scratches on his face he said he’d
fallen down a chestnut tree, and when she dipped the hem of
her dress in the stream and cleaned the dirt and blood from
his face with all the old tenderness, he felt like a
traitor for his silence. And then she sat down with him and
said, very gently, that this was the last time they would
see each other, and he felt as if he had been kicked in the
stomach.
“We’re going to Wales,” she said. “Ma’s family comes from
there, and nobody knows about this there, and we’re going
before the money runs out.”
“Wales,” he repeated, dully.
“I shan’t see you again,” she said. “We’re going tomorrow
morning. I came to say goodbye.”
His guilt robbed him of all spontaneity. He sat there,
stiffly, staring at her – until suddenly her eyes filled
with tears and she threw her arms around him and laid her
head on his shoulder.
“Oh Toby,” she said, “I can’t bear it.” And she began to
sob into his chest.
It was the closest physical contact they had ever had.
Slowly he put his arms around her and felt her thin body
under his fingers, felt her hot tears soaking through his
shirt. And suddenly the dam of his soul burst, and he began
to sob too, as he had never sobbed in his life, and the two
children held each other and wept. All their years
together, all their exploring and building and
story-telling and hiding and seeking seemed to pour out
with their tears, and they seemed to have given each other
permission to cry, to express the grief that all of them
had been trying to hold back since the day this began.
And in the midst of his wracking sobs Toby knew he must
tell the truth, that whatever it cost he must tell Rachel
what he had done and ask her forgiveness, because he could
not live without it, and in broken words and half
understood sentences he told her exactly what had happened
that afternoon, and that he had given no thought to her
father or her mother of even her while he had done it, and
he hadn’t even been going to tell her.
She stayed there, holding him, after the confession was
over, gradually taking command over her own weeping, and
then she pulled back from him and looked him in the eyes.
And leant towards him and kissed him on the forehead. “I
know,” she said. “It’s alright.”
Relief poured through him like balm; like an ocean of balm,
like a great healing flood, sweeping away the guilt and
self disgust which had almost strangled his heart. He took
her in his arms again and held her, and this time they
could feel themselves being healed by each other, all their
old closeness returning.
And then they parted, forever.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
MIRANDA TAKES
ACTION
Miranda faced a moral dilemma too, that
afternoon. As events had unfolded after the encounter with
that little group of frightened farmworkers she had felt
herself growing further and further apart from her father.
She had loved and admired him ever since she could remember
and his very solidity had been part of what made her world
real. When he had buckled under the malign pressure of Lord
Charles Thorpe – for with the clear sight of a child
she could see the psychology of the relationship between
them for what it was – all his solidity seemed to melt
away, as though he had become transparent – and with it the
bulwark he had provided between her and the world beyond.
Now, for the first time, she felt she had to make up her
own mind about right and wrong instead of turning to him
for guidance. It was as if a government had fallen, a whole
system – and she was a citizen free to rebuild society in a
new image. She saw everything her family did, from the way
it breakfasted in the morning to the way it entertained at
night, with fresh eyes, and judged each action by a set of
standards she was creating as she went along.
She was liberated in her soul.
So Toby’s plea was a double-edged sword. On the one hand it
gave her an opportunity to demonstrate her new freedom: on
the other hand she knew that the only way she could hope to
help him would be by going to her father: by acknowledging
the authority from which she had mentally freed herself.
And at the same time she secretly longed to do this:
because she missed her father and the love that had existed
between them.
***
Sir Richard stared at his daughter. “A visit?” he said. “I
don’t understand.”
“He’s been sentenced, hasn’t he?” said Miranda. “He’s
being sent to Australia. What harm would it do to let his
family visit him before he goes?”
“He’s been sent to the hulks at Chatham,” he said. “No
visitors are allowed there.”
“Toby is afraid his mother will go mad if she doesn’t see
his father before he goes.”
“Nonsense. He’s a child. He doesn’t know what he’s talking
about.”
“He’s telling the truth. Please.” There – she’d said it,
she’d delivered herself into his power. “Please let them.”
“It’s not practical,” said Sir Richard. “How is his family
to even get there?”
“In our coach. You can lend it to them.”
“Are you mad, Miranda?” said Sir Richard. “I have them
transported to Australia for combining against me and I’m
supposed to lend them my coach for a family jaunt? I’d be
the laughing stock of the county.”
“You know they weren’t combining against you,” said
Miranda. And suddenly she felt a tornado of anger in her
head and said the unsayable. “You only had them prosecuted
because you were toadying to Lord Thorpe.”
Sir Richard rose to his feet, suddenly very angry.
“I’ll have you whipped for that, young woman,” he said. “I
toady to no man.”
“You toady to him because you want to get into parliament,”
said Miranda. “You’ve condemned four decent men so you can
get up in the House of Commons and make speeches. Haven’t
you?”
Sir Richard’s eyes bulged. He did know it was true. For
fifteen years he’d been a god to this girl, he’d basked in
her love and admiration, had walked taller because this
child, this intelligent, grey-eyed child was his, and
because she loved him. And now she had seen through him,
seen through his mean-spirited ambition, his kow-towing to
a man he secretly despised.
And now she despised him. “Get out,” he said. “Get out of
my sight.” He wished Caleb Wey, Toby Wey and everyone else
connected with the affair clan dead and gone.
***
That night Miranda waited until the household was asleep,
crept down to her father’s study, and searched his desk
until she found a letter of his and some blank paper. Then,
after several false starts, she wrote out a short note in a
fair imitation of her father’s hand and signed it with the
flourish that was his signature.
When she had admired him, she had often copied his
signature because she loved him. Now every movement of her
fingers seemed to express her contempt.
***
The next day she slipped away from her Governess and rode
across t