Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [521]
Shockley almost burst out laughing; but checked himself in time.
Neither common law – that collection of ancient uses which protected a man’s property and gave even a serf a right to be tried before he was hung, nor the great charter that Archbishop Langton had drawn up between King John and his barons had a word to say about representation and tax, let alone voting. The very idea was absurd. But he could see that the boy believed it and so for the time being he said nothing.
He tried another tack.
“You say you accept the English laws, Mr Hillier, yet you deny the authority of the king. How can you be an Englishman then?”
“How is the king one,” the boy retorted bitterly, “when he sends German mercenaries against us?”
But Adam countered swiftly.
“And ’tis well known you seek an alliance with England’s greatest enemy, France.”
Now Hillier did not reply, but Shockley was not trying to confound him. He returned therefore to the general argument.
“What if, Mr Hillier, those rights you speak of were not to be found in common law and the charter?” he asked gently. “What would be your argument then?”
The boy thought, but only for a moment.
“There are natural laws, above those made by man; God gave us reason, and reason tells us these things are just.”
Adam stared at him. It was astounding. He knew from his schooldays, and from his subsequent reading that such arguments could be made. Aristotle, two thousand years before, had spoken of universal law; the great Churchman Aquinas had named it too – though strictly subservient to Divine Law, as revealed in the Bible, that in turn came from God’s Eternal Law, which no man could know. It was one thing for philosophers to speculate about such matters, or for clergymen turned sceptics to ridicule the rule of bishops behind closed doors; but here was this young fellow unblushingly using such grand philosophical language in the belief that it gave him the right to deny the authority of Parliament and the king. It sounded like anarchy. Yet the young fellow spoke so quietly.
It was now that young Hillier drew from his pocket a small pamphlet. Its title was Common Sense by the radical writer Tom Paine.
“There’s much in here that explains our cause,” he stated. “Read it, if you wish.”
Adam had heard of the pamphlet. It had been written the previous year and copies had spread all over the colony. It was plain sedition, he had heard. He shook his head. He wanted to hear from the boy himself.
“What authority do you accept, then?”
“My conscience,” he said simply.
There Adam saw the whole matter with absolute clarity. The fact that John Hillier’s constitutional arguments were incorrect – it was this that had infuriated the English Parliament about the rebels more than anything else; the fact that he was using ideas of freedom and justice over which philosophers could argue; the fact that he knew nothing of the centuries of subtle adjustment between the authority and rights of Church, State and individual, of the arguments of the Reformation, the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution: none of these mattered. The struggles of the old world, though they had produced a measure of freedom, would be forgotten in the new.
He looked down with fascination at the boy. He seemed sensible enough.
“But if we do as you say, then, the people themselves would rule,” he said. “Are you not afraid of that?”
And now it was John Hillier who stared at him in astonishment.
“Why should I be?”
The conversation haunted him.
As they prepared for the offensive down the Hudson river to New York, and as his fellow officers predicted sweeping victories, his own sense of foreboding would not leave him. True, they were a well-trained force. When the order for the infantry to advance was given: “Spring up”: no regiment in the line did so with more energy than the gallant 62nd. Already the jaunty little regiment was known