The
Democrat
By Olly Wyatt
The Democrat
Olly Wyatt
Copyright 2011 by Olly Wyatt
Smashwords Edition
www.ollywyatt.co.uk
www.thedemocrat.org.uk
For film rights, see author’s website.
The right of Olly Wyatt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (e-book) 978-1-4661-6748-3
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover Image: Bust of Thomas Muir of Huntershill (1765-1799)
Alexander Stoddart, sculptor, 2003
Bishopbriggs Library,
(East Dunbartonshire Leisure and Culture Trust)
Photographer, James Higgins.
Contents
I
55˚ 55' N
004˚ 10' W
As Thomas Muir returned to the opening page of Mozart’s last piano sonata, the final notes lingered like echoes from the recent past and in the fusion of beginnings and endings, he lamented that the composer that year had been lost to an unmarked grave.
Then, he remembered his lift into Glasgow.
Outside, the coach had gone. Lapslie, their lodger had left without him.
A little resigned, his spirits resumed when sunlight briefly lit up a grove of blustered oaks to the east but just as he thought it not too bleak a day to walk to the city, rain began to tap against the window.
A few minutes later, he was pacing down the lane against a stiff westerly. The coach was just visible but slowly shrinking into the distance. Then, the rain turned to stair rods and between a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, his client’s case crept into his mind.
At Glasgow’s half-built Miller Street, the winds were tempestuous and a barricade, stating ‘no entry’, stopped him in his tracks. The court case was imminent. He had to ignore the warning. His usual short cut was required more than ever but the storm was sweeping away scaffolding and whilst he ran along the abandoned street, masonry plummeted from a fourth floor tenement.
Deeper into the city, his chambers appeared to him through a wash of spray from the gust-bitten river Clyde. He had made it. Just in time. Gathersby, his clerk, knocked on the dressing room door and handed him a note as he quickly changed into his advocate’s gown. New evidence, he wondered. Well, in a sense, yes.
‘June 1792.
Dear Mr Muir,
I’ll not be attending court today. Those in power have already made up their mind over my fate. The courts are a farce. I appreciate you not charging.
Soon, thanks to you, I will be an American.’
It was signed J. Lambert; the woman he was supposed to be representing.
He quickly dressed. A verdict of guilty would be passed in absentia, her home would be ransacked and ports would be informed of the attempted escape.
‘I suspect she’s long gone,’ said Gathersby, ‘it was a young lad who delivered the letter. Her son I suspect…’
‘And who’s going to look after him?’ Muir replied.
‘You can’t help everyone. They’ll go over later on.’
‘Gathersby! If they can’t afford legal fees, how on earth are they going to afford passage to America?’
Muir waited sometime for an answer but none was forthcoming. ‘The law should represent people not divide them.’
Marching back out along the banks of the Clyde with his gowns flapping in the wind, the anger he felt conveyed itself in the rigging as it beat against the spars but as he watched a sailor up on the third yardarm trying to tie back canvas that anger transformed into concern.
Scared of heights, he could barely watch and he spared a thought for the poor folk caught in it at sea, especially Mrs Lambert. He could do nothing for her now; she would have to battle the elements alone. Scotland should be hers, he thought; the air, the glens, the lochs, the rain, the people she loved.
Rereading the note, he realised that by ‘thanks to you’, she meant that what would have been spent on legal fees could pay for her Atlantic crossing. For a moment, he regretted shouting at Gathersby but he was still unsure they’d have enough money for them all to emigrate. She might have avoided transportation aboard a coffin ship, for throwing one stone at a British soldier, but she hadn’t avoided the loss of her entire family.
He prayed for her safety but her rejection of his profession intruded upon his meditation. The law had made him who he had now become. Was it really a farce? That it was being used merely to ‘legitimise’ the clearance of ordinary Scots outraged him.
He had not become an advocate to facilitate injustice.
Imagining Lambert’s face, he wondered how someone he’d never seen could cause him so much self-doubt. Why was he thinking of her at all? They had never met nor were likely to. In a matter of weeks, the Atlantic Ocean would separate them.
His mind could wander.
With no court case, he was far too early for his next appointment. For some reason unbeknown to him, his friend Professor Anderson wanted to meet him at two in the morning.
It was only just going dark so he stopped on Drygate Bridge. The rioters he’d witnessed there five years earlier appeared in his imaginings, swarming the occasional merchant that passed by before disappearing without a trace as they’d done all those years before. With the rioting in Edinburgh, in recent weeks, they had surfaced in his mind and he wondered whether this was to be another summer of discontent like that of half a decade ago.
Then just an adolescent, he recalled breaching his curfew time at Hunters’ Hill, the family home, to watch the gathering masses as they marched from Calton just outside Glasgow to the city’s cathedral where, coincidentally, he was to meet Professor Anderson.
And it was on Drygate Bridge that they met resistance to their complaints against wage cuts. Newspapers had put their numbers at somewhere near ten thousand. He hadn’t been able to get close on the night of the riot but had heard firing from afar.
Three days later, he’d seen James Granger, the union leader, being whipped through the streets. Six protesters were shot dead, scores more were injured. His friend, Skirving, had told him that the soldiers each received new shoes and socks for crushing the troubles. Granger would still be serving his sentence of exile, now five years in with two to go. Along the stonework, Muir noticed indents scored from musket shots, each a chalk mark on Granger's prison wall, he thought.
His experience of that half decade had been quite different. As undergraduates crossed the bridge, returning from their evening lectures, he recalled the shame he’d felt telling his parents he’d been kicked out of Glasgow University. Contemplating Mrs Lambert again, he was starting to wonder whether finishing his degree in Edinburgh was worth the bother. She shouldn’t have thrown the stone but what other avenues of protest were available to her, and anyway, it could hardly be compared with firing upon defenceless individuals. If only people had a means of protest that was legal, he thought, they wouldn’t have to resort to rioting and law breaking to make their views known. Then, the ‘powers that be’, would have to listen rather than cart the discontented off to some foreign land, emptying Scotland of its people.
He headed for Glasgow Cathedral. The storms had been relentless for the past fortnight and the professor was keen to test his latest invention indoors. A blue flame lit up the altar. At its base, Anderson lay on his back fiddling beneath his contraption before spotting his former student out of the corner of his eye.
‘Ah! You’re late. The air intake’s giving me jip again.’
Closing in, Muir was aghast. ‘You’re lying on the sacred stone of St. Ninian; this is a place of worship.’
Anderson rolled his eyes upwards. ‘What good has that done us?' He blew into the varnished paper balloon, aiding the gas-gills, without the slightest intention of listening to a possible answer from his former student. 'Professor Miller and I told you to leave divinity behind. This will save more lives than a thousand prayers. Dare to think for yourself my lad and inventions you shall have!’
A bundle of leaflets, poking out of a cage, rubbed against Anderson's ear. ‘It will carry newspapers and manifestos over encircling enemy troops. Have you read the message?’
‘It’s in German.’
The professor sighed. ‘I will translate! Over hills, dales and lines of hostile troops, I float majestic bearing the laws of God and Nature to oppressed men!’
As the echo returned down the nave, he reduced the gas output and lit a six-inch fuse leading to the cage latch.
‘Let it go then!’
Anderson stood up and towered over his former student talking more to the top of his head than his face. ‘Not until you’ve put yourself in the shoes of French soldiers tired of the old regime, or enemies of the revolution, ready to defect.’
He rubbed his eyes. His tiredness was not imagined.
‘Êtes-vous prêt?’
Muir nodded and as the balloon ascended, it lit up the saints, who until then, had been sleeping. Those few hallowed seconds ended though as the scrape and clank of a lifted door latch ricocheted around the cathedral. An almighty draft then sent the balloon towards some flags. Their delighted faces contorted as they saw a squat man, who they quickly identified as the churchwarden, marching towards them as if carried in on the very same breeze.
‘What are you doing? You’ll set the bloody flags alight!’
Anderson turned the warden’s accusation back where it had come from.
‘If you hadn’t let that blasted draft in, it’d be nowhere near the bloody flags.’
Leaflets rained down on them.
Once they’d settled, Anderson patted the churchwarden on the shoulder.
Reading one of them, the warden declared the entire operation, ‘blasphemous’.
Anderson smiled. ‘Now, now, what you meant to say is, this is progress!’ He then insisted upon a nightcap at his house.
The warden choked pointing at the balloon. ‘What about that monstrosity?’
Now at the opposite end of the cathedral, Anderson shouted past Muir who was pacing towards him, ‘it’ll be down in the morning once the airs warmed and reduced the pressure difference.’
‘You scientists think you know everything.’
‘Good night.’ Anderson closed the door before adding ‘God bless,’ on the other side.
Now alone, the churchwarden watched the balloon spontaneously ignite, briefly lighting up the face of Christ before plummeting downwards and smashing on the mosaic floor. Having only just recovered from that, from above, he was horrified to see light intensifying.
The heavens hadn’t opened.
Far from it, flames were trickling up the union jacks.
Breakfast at Professor Anderson’s was never dull but Muir was still in two minds whether to take up the offer of a trip to Culloden, to see at first hand, in Anderson’s words, the legacy of the rampage inflicted by British forces nearly half a century ago.
‘I’ve made notes on The Lyon in Mourning.’
Muir stopped chewing a piece of bacon, ‘the what?’
‘It documents their suffering. I’ll show you it sometime.’
Rather incapable of concentrating on complexities so soon after a pre-dawn session of heavy drinking, his concentration drifted to studying the chair he was sat on. The arms ended with eagle’s heads and the legs, with eagle’s claws. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating until Anderson explained, ‘it’s an American import, now, what about Culloden?’
Muir strove to match Anderson’s enthusiasm with what he thought was a good dose of common sense, ‘is there really much point travelling all that way north to see an emptied glen?’
‘Of course! Only then will you understand the madness of it all.’
If truth be told, Muir didn’t want to be away from Elisabeth for an entire week but he concluded that such romantic reasoning would have gone down even more badly than advocating common sense.
Anderson stretched his arms upwards. ‘I’d like to settle this dispute with a contest.’
‘My breakfast’s barely been introduced to my stomach.’
‘I’ll provide armour. If I win, you’ll carry my bags to Culloden. If you win, you can choose whether to come or not.’
‘And you’ll carry your own bags if I decide to go?’
‘Perhaps...’
In the drawing room, Anderson opened a cabinet; two suits of fencing armour fell out. Muir reluctantly removed a pair of pariser swords from the wall. As he turned around, the professor was trying desperately to pull on his fencing trousers but the alcohol of the early hours was getting the better of him. Hopping around trying to insert his other leg, he tripped and fell flat on his face, thankfully, onto the rug that would mark the boundary of their duel. Undeterred and with seams close to breaking point, the sixty-seven year old got back on his feet and tapped the dead bluebottles out from his mesh visor.
‘He, who first strikes his opponents five times, wins.'
‘What’s that on my jacket?’
‘Miller’s blood. He survived don’t worry. Ready? On guard!’
Anderson saluted his blade upwards and advanced. At the last minute, Muir stepped to one side. His tutor went flying and as he passed, Muir struck him on the shoulder. They returned to their starting positions where ensued, the longest of duels interrupted by numerous changes of engagement. Eventually, the professor was forced on to his left side and his former student hit him two more times in the torso.
Back at their starting positions, this time, Anderson didn’t salute and whilst his opponent had his sword in the air, the Professor stepped forward and struck Muir under the arm. Overwhelmed by the bad sportsmanship, Muir upped his game and locked blades forcing Anderson off the rug hitting him twice as he ploughed into the empty cabinet where the fencing suits had once hung. Closing the doors with Anderson still on the inside was tempting.
Instead, Muir offered a hand to his old friend.
Culloden was to be a choice not an obligation.
‘Well done, but don’t forget how I beat you in that boxing match, it was my sixtieth birthday party if I’m not mistaken. I knocked out a man half my age.’
‘Those classes were a spectacle. I’ll give you that. Waking up to a hall full of artisans all wondering whether you’d killed me, was a defining moment of my first year.’
They both caught their breath.
‘I fear those days are coming to an end, though. The universities are closing in on themselves, what with the threat from France. Some topics are not up for discussion according to our current chancellor.’
‘Is it time to learn from life, not these ivory towers?’
‘Thomas, you do know Miller was Adam Smith’s favourite student?’
‘Apparently so…’
‘And you were Miller’s?’
Muir tried to look out at Glasgow from the Georgian window but saw only Anderson’s reflection looking across at him.
Silence consumed the room.
Yet in his mind, an objection formed against being placed within the same lineage as Smith, a philosopher who, he thought, saw the wealth of nations only through the prism of ruthless individualism.
His train of thought, however, was interrupted by Anderson. ‘Miller saw in you more than a Church of Scotland probationer! That’s why we dragged you out of divinity, into law! He sees in you now, an advocate able to fight against the corrosive conservatism that plagues our country, someone with a fine mind but also a strong heart that’ll counter the insensitivities of those in power. Only you and a few others were willing to fight the corruption in the Law department that I so objected to.’
‘We all paid the price.’
‘Was Edinburgh University that bad?’
Muir laughed briefly and then found focus in the cityscape.
‘I’m not sure the legal system is working anymore, professor.’
Anderson put his hand on his student’s shoulder. ‘You mentioned the stone thrower absconding. Don’t let one case put you off. What are your plans?’
‘A meeting with Reverend Palmer, then, another court case, later on in the week.’
‘Another stone thrower?’
Muir nodded.
‘Perhaps his attendance will reinstate your faith in the law.’
‘If he turns up you’re assuming, even when they do, regardless of how articulate I am, the judges rule against us.’
Anderson frowned. ‘They’re in the pay of the government. That’s why. But you can’t give in to the tyranny.’
In Edinburgh, Muir and Reverend Palmer walked through Charlotte Square. Its renaming, they commented, was a shoddy attempt to disassociate the place from the King’s unpopularity. The old name, George Square, was still legible in the stonework. In the centre, officers were dismantling an effigy of Henry Dundas. Muir told Palmer that the people had nicknamed Dundas, ‘Harry the ninth, the uncrowned King of Scotland.’ He was not a particularly enlightened individual, they agreed, given that he’d repeatedly blocked attempts to ban the slave trade.
On the outskirts, revolutionary slogans had been daubed along the walls.
‘Damn the King.’
‘Down with the government!’
Soldiers scrubbed at them, but half-heartedly.
Muir walked to where he’d stood during the riot. Amongst the foul language, he recalled the more hard-hitting protests demanding that individuals enter into contracts to produce governments. A woman next to him of considerable wit, he recalled, insisted that it was a pretty business indeed for a king to be allowed eight hundred thousand pounds a year for making wars and giving away places.
Leaving the memories of that eventful night, he pointed out to Palmer the sooty charred branches where the effigy of Henry Dundas had hung. The inferno had made a chimney through the heart of the oak tree, blackening branches and incinerating leaves all the way up to the canopy, as if winter had come early.
‘One of the protesters shouted, there’s more worth in one honest man to society, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. He said all hereditary government is in its nature tyrannical. Thousands rioted, Palmer, for three long days. I only caught the tail end of it. One of those accused of stone throwing is Alexander Lockie. As his barrister, I’ll do my best to reduce sentencing, but it could be fourteen years transportation!’
Palmer grumbled. The late June sun slipped behind the only cloud in the sky. It was still far too hot though to be wearing vestments and gowns.
‘The protesters were quoting this booklet,’ Muir pulled out a dog-eared copy of Paine’s Rights of Man. Sections had been underlined whilst waiting for Anderson the other day. ‘What do you think of this, a direct quote…? The act called the Bill of Rights is but a bargain, which the parts of the government made with each other to divide powers, profits and privileges. You’ll have so much and I’ll have the rest, and with respect to the nation, it’s said, for your share you’ll have the right of petitioning.’
Whilst listening, Palmer noticed a senior officer, who was overseeing the cleanup operation, turn his attention to the booklet, ‘you’re being listened to.’
‘What?’ Peering upwards Muir slipped the booklet into his lapel pocket before making haste. ‘I’ve memorised it anyway. Paine goes on to state, this being the case, the Bill of Rights is more proper, a Bill of Wrongs, and insult. Do you agree, Reverend?’
Palmer turned to see whether they were being followed before speaking. ‘Parliament’s been coalescing with aristocratic tyranny for years. The election of its members isn’t free, fair or frequent but after this, Paine and I part company. I’m no revolutionary. I am a man of God. Paine isn’t.’
He had trod this ground with Palmer before.
‘But Reverend, your good friend Mr Priestley has synthesised revolution and Christianity. He supports the French revolution.’
‘I like Priestley, but I don’t agree with everything he says. The House of Commons is there to defend the people against the Lords and the King.’
Muir thought of Mrs Lambert’s criticism.
‘And what about the judiciary?’
‘If they mistreat the people, yes them too. It’s through petitioning that the Commons learns of the people’s complaints. It’s therefore, our duty to petition parliament, to give it its purpose. Petitioning isn’t a mockery of man’s real political power, as Paine would have it. Burke understands it more than Paine does. The question is whether our petitions and grievances are addressed after they’re made.’
They walked into a dingy tavern off Charlotte Square.
‘What of republicanism?’
Palmer wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘I see nothing humane in killing a King.’
‘Louis isn’t dead yet.’
‘That’s just a matter of time though isn’t it?’
‘One of my clients absconded from trial yesterday because of the lack of representation in the courts. I found myself…’
‘Agreeing?’
‘Well, yes. There doesn't seem to be anywhere that offers justice for the people.’
‘Perhaps if politics is a branch of morals as I believe it is, then changing that’s our duty.’
Now with a seat, Palmer described how he saw things in his friend’s country. ‘You have to cross your own border to England to have any chance of petitioning the King. No Royal has visited Scotland in the last seventy years or so. Yet, you’re compelled to be their subjects. It’s not surprising the people are so angry with them. You are too young...’
Muir got up and left his friend, mid sentence.
Whilst he went to the bar, Palmer noticed whom Muir had spotted.
The senior officer was talking to two old men.
One had an amputated leg.
The officer checked their identities to see if they had the booklet.
Utterly ridiculous, Palmer thought; surely, he had the wisdom to remember how many legs his suspect had. It did, however, buy them a little more time.
‘You dispensed with Paine?’ asked Palmer on Muir’s return.
‘Leave it to me. You were about to say something before?’
Palmer’s concerns were replaced by an enthusiasm for the drink he was handed. Checking its quality, he couldn’t help noticing the wrinkles on his hands, that were absent in Muir's.
‘I was saying that you’re too young to remember the American war. I was fifteen when it started. That old man with half a leg, I bet, went over there to fight. Particularly horrific, it was. First three years, nothing was offered to the Americans but slavery and death. Unconditional submission was the language avowed by the ministers of the British Crown. For three years, victory hung in suspense. The British Army possessed and abandoned Boston, New York and Philadelphia.’
Palmer sipped from his glass of Ferintosh; the whisky fired him up some more.
‘German mercenaries were ransacked to dragoon America into unconditional submission. Domestic insurrections were excited among the slaves; they were encouraged to kill their masters. Even the native Indians were brought into it; their known rule of warfare, the undistinguishing massacre of all ages, sexes and conditions. Women and children were shut up in their houses and set aflame. Cornfields ready for the sickle, were roasted. Horses and cattle had their tongues cut out and were left to long agonising deaths.’
Palmer’s sermonic, almost biblical descriptions were curbed as he watched the senior officer continuing his search in the darker corners of the tavern, but his suspicions were put on hold as their friend arrived. Skirving spotted Palmer as his eyes adjusted to the drab light. More used to open fields, he had to stoop beneath the tavern beams to order from the bar.
‘We’re talking about the American war. Was about to ask Muir whether he knew what stopped it? Our prime minister, before he was elected, recommended associations all over the country. Twenty-nine counties petitioned parliament to procure redress and state their objections to the war. You know what happened?’
Now with a drink, Skirving imitated his friends’ enthusiasm by sitting on the edge of his seat. He was about to hazard a guess when they were intruded upon. The senior officer took one look at Muir, grinned ominously and pulled him up by the jacket shoulder.
‘What exactly are you looking for, officer?’
‘Seditious material...’
‘Search my jacket too, if you like.’
Every pocket was searched but he found nothing and left.
Another reassuring gulp of whisky seeped into Palmer’s headspace. ‘Have you joined a magicians’ club? Where’s that booklet?’
‘The Rights of Man’s in safe hands.’ Muir tapped his nose in secrecy. ‘You were saying… about the American War.’
‘Go on, Skirving, you’re itching to finish the story.’
Like Palmer, Skirving inspected the quality of his whisky inadvertently spotting Muir through the golden haze. ‘In short, once the people petitioned, Britain stopped fighting the war. Two hundred thousand died but it would have been a lot more had we not started petitioning for peace. Talking of which, believe I may have befriended a collared dove, though, I’m not sure whether it’s just a pigeon.’
He unbuttoned his jacket and revealed a chick peering out of his inside pocket.
Over in Fife, whilst Muir and Anderson had been drinking until the early hours, Skirving had been up before the sun tending to his orchard, picking the under ripened apples off the ground whilst enjoying the rhapsody of birdsong that triumphantly spoke louder than the past winds; the woodpigeon’s coo, the blackbirds’ territorial chatter, the swallows' swoop into the cider house thatch that had lain empty all winter.
Skirving recalled how they glided past his ears as he wheeled a half barrowful under the eaves.
What world they’d been to in his absence he knew nothing of, it was as much of a mystery as the storm’s resting place, but every summer his swallows returned as predictably as the bursting of the hedgerows. Despite the storm, nothing seemed to have cooled in the night. It was, he sensed, going to be the hottest day of the year so far. As he circled the orchard boundary for more fallen apples, he chanced upon something struggling on the grass. Its wings were featherless, closer to limbs, with hair as soft as eiderdown and a scrawny neck that leant backwards as it looked up at Skirving, the giant towering overhead.
‘A pigeon or a dove chick, perhaps,’ Skirving muttered, looking for plumage with his whisky hand just as he had done with the dawn sun coming up over his shoulder. And it was that light that shone upon an upturned nest struggling in the waves of long grass, like a capsized boat on the ocean.
He described righting it with his other hand. In its shadow, two bird eggs lay smashed against each other whilst a bloody yoke had dribbled down the blades of grass, a wholesome breakfast for something nearby, he thought. Whilst preoccupied with the nest, the chick had tried to make distance away from him but it couldn’t lift its wings over the apples and eventually gave up its flurry with independence as it found itself scooped up in a hand, plonked back into its nest and taken into the kitchen to the delight of Skirving's wife and their eight children.
Now twelve hours later, at least one of Skirving's two companions found the chick intriguing as it sat content in the jacket pocket, for, it was all medicine for Muir who’d hidden his fear of the senior officer as well as he’d hidden the booklet. Whilst he recreated Skirving's morning in his mind, he laughed at something he always associated with his friend; a lifelong insistence not to eat apples imported from England. Palmer, on the other hand, was more convinced by his own lengthy narrative that now seemed a world away, than either Skirving or the bird.
‘How about…’ Palmer waited for his friends’ attention remembering his days at the pulpit. ‘How about we set up a society to petition parliament?’
The chick looked at him as if it was also being asked.
Palmer requested that Skirving button up his jacket.
‘That’s what this city lacks; somewhere to meet that doesn’t involve drinking yourself senseless, litigating or…’
‘Praying?’
‘Yes, oh very good, Muir. I’m not just a reverend you know. Get the next round in’.
Muir picked up their empty glasses.
‘I’ll go and rescue Paine.’
Palmer banged his glass on the table in disbelief. ‘You left him with the barmaid? A drinker he might be, but to leave the rights of man in the hands of a woman, whatever next?’
‘It avoided wrongful arrest didn’t it?’
‘What about my idea?’
Muir ignored him. He thought it a good one but he hadn’t given up on being an advocate just yet. That said Palmer’s idea seemed to chime with Lambert’s conviction. Perhaps he just didn’t want to acknowledge it as Palmer’s. Heading to the bar, he noticed some legal colleagues standing around Francis Martin-Shore. What they will have thought of him being searched he did not know but he sensed that rumours would soon be spreading. That he, of all people a fellow advocate, was allegedly on the wrong side of the law. He tried to listen in on their conversation whilst catching the barmaid’s eye.
Francis would represent the prosecution against him and Lockie, the stone thrower, later that week. Watching the barmaid, Francis noticed him ordering more than just three double whiskies.
‘Good luck with the case, Mr Muir.’
‘I’ll need it more than you, Francis. It must be nearly impossible to lose a case with the British establishment and King George III on your side. The sentence was decided when the stone landed, I’m sorry to say. Argument will not play its part.’
Francis surveyed the barmaid’s behind as she continued to search for something.
‘It’s strange how I win all my cases whilst…’
‘Have you ever tried representing the underdog, the disenfranchised, the poor? I’ll happily swap clients tomorrow.’
Francis finished his drink, ‘I leave the representation of the poor to their poor advocates.’
‘Good day, Francis. God forbid I interrupt your riveting debate on the intricacies of feudal land law.’
What was supposed to be their Parthian shots didn't quite turn out that way, for, when the barmaid returned, Francis smelt a rat.
‘What’s that?’
‘Paine’s Right’s of Man.’
‘That’s illegal.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Yes it is!’
From the periphery of the group, appeared Henry Erskine who left a private conversation with an older advocate to provide advocacy for a younger one, thankfully, Muir.
‘It isn’t illegal!’
Francis cowered pathetically and prepared to leave.
‘There’s only a proclamation against it being read.’
‘Thank you, Henry. And a proclamation is not a law.’
‘Right, learn laws properly Francis.’
Francis turned to Muir at the door. ‘See you tomorrow in court. How’s Elisabeth, by the way?'
'Fine... far as I know.'
'I haven't seen you together for some time. But you must be in Glasgow a lot. Well, send her my love, won't you?'
As Francis left, Palmer walked over belatedly to defend his friend but law was not his forte. Instead, he saw it as an ideal opportunity to advocate his new venture. ‘Mr Erskine, a new society for the people is being created. Will it have your support?’
Muir glared at Palmer, aware that like oil and water, the legal profession and a corresponding society, would not mix willingly.
Erskine thought a little. ‘That would depend… in principle, perhaps. I’ll have to give it more thought.’
It was a little darker outside but the night’s stealing of day was a drawn out affair at this time of year in Edinburgh. Passing across fields beneath the castle, Skirving recalled from his childhood how the North Loch, just a few decades ago, submerged the fields and the reed-fringed pathways they now walked along. It entertained Palmer, the Englander, who still had it in his mind as they passed up the steep ravine leading to the Royal Mile.
Muir, though, sensed they were being followed again.
Down the Mile, they passed posters notifying folk of tax increases.
Some were scored through with blades.
They then turned into Writer’s Court to enter Lucky Wilson’s tavern. Having found a seat, Muir tilted back his head to down his drink and felt a hand on his shoulder.
Not another search, he feared. Welcomingly however, an eloquent voice started up in his right ear. ‘What was it Adam Smith said; the use of a standing army in times of peace is to defend the liberty of the press? Clearly, that soldier in the last pub wasn’t as well versed on Smith as you or I. More is the pity.’
‘You followed us, James?’
‘You’re quick walkers and hard of hearing too. I called you twice.’
The man sat down. To Palmer, he looked like he hadn’t eaten for days.
‘Skirving, Reverend Palmer, this is my dear friend, James Tytler. Son of a minister…’ Muir added the latter comment sensing Palmer's premature judgments forming.
‘And you follow the teachings of God like your father?’
‘I’m a writer, Reverend.’
‘You’re modest. He’s a qualified surgeon.’
Tytler put them in the picture. ‘I no longer practice. No profits can be made unless you’ve capital. I rent a pharmacy in Leith.’
Muir gave his glass to Tytler. ‘Here. Have some. You undersell yourself. This man compiled the seventeen-seventy-six edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica!’
Tytler refused the generosity. ‘And they paid me the wages of a labourer for doing so. Perhaps because I called on the British not to pay their taxes! I now write on electricity, believe it has a future.’
Palmer was intrigued, having abandoned the judgments he’d initially made. ‘I should introduce you to Mr Priestley. You could work out how to store and use it at will. You’ll have to converse by letter though, he has left these shores.’
‘Why so?’
‘Commemorating the fall of the Bastille, Priestley held a dinner party, that evening, the mob found out about it, marched to his house, destroyed his library, manuscripts, apparatus, the lot. England’s no place for him. He sailed to America. I can give you his address though. He writes.’
Muir let Palmer finish and then inquired, ‘Tytler, you still manufacturing magnesia?’
‘No. My business partner seems to have made a fortune out of my chemical capabilities. Without me in the contract, I should add.’
‘Oh well, your achievements in aeronautics will always be attached to your name. Tell my friends.’
‘I constructed a contraption thirty foot in diameter and forty foot high, the Edinburgh Fire Balloon, it was known as. Filled it with the best hydrogen I could source. Half the city joined me in the Sanctuary for the big day. My creditors feared I’d be off, escaping to the Americas like Mr Priestley. As it happened, the basket narrowly missed hitting the sanctuary wall. Within minutes, I’d landed on a dunghill a few hundred yards from the launch site, near enough to hear the crowds laughing and jeering at me. Lunardi might've won the ladies, but he didn’t take the record like Balloon Tytler. I was the first balloonist in the known world, three weeks before Lunardi.’
When Tytler’s drink arrived, they chinked glasses and Muir described his balloon antics in Glasgow cathedral with the Professor.
Skirving then entered the conversation, ‘what’s your next enterprise?’
‘I’m writing a System of Surgery, the doctor I’m writing for wants the credits but there’s not much I can do about that.’
‘You’re writing it, surely you’re the author?’
‘When you’ve no money, the world doesn’t work like that... ...also starting a newspaper: The Edinburgh Monthly Intelligencer. These are exciting times.’
Reverend Palmer sat more upright. ‘Mr Tytler, we intend to set up a society.’
Muir closed his eyes discouragingly but Palmer was not affected. ‘…That makes no distinction between rich and poor, educated, uneducated. We’ll welcome labourers, artisans, doctors, the classically educated, anyone wishing to improve society. Will your paper support us? Advertise meetings? Argue our case?’
Tytler laughed so much his hat nearly fell off. ‘You’ll have a hard time getting it. House of Parliament’s made up of a vile junta of aristocrats, there’s not a common man in the Commons!’
‘Yes. Good point, Tytler. Hang on a moment, Palmer…’ Muir was irritated. ‘…I haven’t even agreed to the society yet!’
‘What’s your background?’ enquired Tytler.
‘Reverend Palmer went to Eton, then Cambridge.’ Muir said it hoping Palmer’s privilege might put Tytler off.
‘And you want to better the commoner’s lot? Only one from those places who does, I bet.’
‘I’ll put you in touch with Priestley. He’s just discovered something in the air. They call it oxygen.’
Tytler beckoned the others towards him. ‘Something in the air, right here, revolution by the sounds of it.’
Skirving hadn’t blinked for several minutes, so intrigued was he by the talk.
‘No. No, I’m no revolutionary,’ Palmer clarified.
‘Palmer, all in good time remember I’ve my legal career to think about. Not all of us are practically retired like you.’
At his lodgings on Carrubber’s Close a few days later, Muir sat at his desk preparing the court case he’d deliver that afternoon, mere spadework, digging out arcane laws from dusty statute books.
As he sat there, the sun found its way between the high-sided walls, down the close and into his study window. Like a sundial, the chimney opposite, by the shadow it cast, told him it was somewhere near midday.
That moment also coincided with the scent of Elisabeth’s perfume as she entered the study.
Fragrances were the only thing she could tolerate being French and it was that thought that stirred in Muir a need to retreat to the Advocates’ library.
She hung over his shoulders to read the defence.
Muir explained to whom it referred.
‘Alexandra Lockie. Not that plebeian who threw stones at our troops?’
He shuddered at Elisabeth’s disregard for those poorer than her, a considerable proportion of the population. She had inherited status into one of the wealthiest families of Edinburgh; the Andrews. Her father was a judge and his father a judge before that.
‘Elisabeth, my clients may have no money but they’re entitled to legal representation, whatever their class.’
‘How’s she paying you, by favour?’
He struggled to remind himself why he was involved with her and refused wholeheartedly to accept that it was to get a foothold into the legal establishment, but searching for other factors and not finding them he had to concede that this was the dominant reason.
His ego mitigated against his conscience but without much success. In the end, he was drained of the energy required to explain to her that the name she’d misheard as Alexandra was in fact, Alexander, a man not a woman.
Now in the Edinburgh office, he watched the minute hand as it rotated from five past, to twenty five to three. It seemed symbiotic with his dwindling affection towards Elisabeth.
Other cases would have been brought forward now, pushing Lockie’s to the back of the queue, no way to impress the judge, he thought.
It was then that Gathersby waltzed in with a smile from ear to ear. ‘It appears your client’s fled, in Lambert’s footsteps. This note was left yesterday. I’ve been in Glasgow, only just found it at the bottom of this pile of post. He thanks you for your assistance but considers that even with the best advocate in the world he’d not see Scotland again, what with Lord Braxfield against him. Sorry you were the last to know, thought it prudent to inform the court and prosecution first. Francis Martin-Shore, that is.’
Muir handed over all of his hard work. ‘Another easy win for Francis... Lockie’s only charged with throwing a stone, like Mrs Lambert.’
Gathersby took the case file, bound it in string, scrawled ‘Lockie’ down the spine and kicked the wheeled stepladders to the other side of the bookshelf.
He filed the folder on the top shelf before looking down. ‘Oh Muir, in summing up, the judge made it known that he wanted to see you about the case.’
‘Was it Andrews?’
‘Yes, now don’t keep your future father-in-law waiting...’
‘For my sake or the chambers?’
Gathersby was so preoccupied with getting down safely that he nearly missed Muir’s quip.
Descending the ladder, he sent a case file flying after snagging it on a jacket button.
‘Good catch. Who did I drop?’
‘Henderson, the murder charge, my first ever case.’
‘Your first win, also, don't forget. That doesn’t happen every day. Your advocacy saved his life. It's not all a lost cause.'
Walking towards court, Muir wondered whether Gathersby had dropped Henderson’s file on purpose to lift his spirits. The public gallows on the grass-market that he walked passed had not wrung Henderson’s neck thanks to him. However, success years ago, offering the darkest of souls a ray of light, did little to annul the frustration he felt with Alexander Lockie. He’d implied his guilt by disappearing and defying the legal process but in his private mitigation of the occurrence, Muir remembered Lambert’s assertion that in effect, these were show trials and no one was ever given a proper hearing.
Sickened by the legal establishment’s effective collusion with the government, he decided to bypass going into court to go straight home. He felt bad about his negative thoughts towards Elisabeth. She had been neglected due to his workload and he wanted to make it up to her. She might also have some tips on how best to approach her father.
As he past the court, though, Judge Andrews called him from a first floor window. ‘If you just sign these papers Thomas, it means it’s all done and dusted. Either way, he’s out of the country and the more of them out, the better. Breed like rabbits, have no grasp of monogamy, no hope of bettering themselves. Don’t you agree?’
The water carriers, filling up at the public well, shook their heads but had no say.
Inside, he signed the papers for Judge Andrews.
‘How’s my daughter?’
‘That’s where I was going. To surprise her...’
‘Why you work for no fee is beyond me. If you earned a little more you'd really be able to surprise her wouldn't you, and me, in the long run.’
Laughter from the top floor window welcomed him home. The curtains he’d drawn earlier had been pulled together and bellowed outwards. A water carrier at the front door had grown frustrated that he couldn’t supply the building. Turning the key, Muir found the door bolted from the inside. Annoyed at being denied access to his own home, he strode down the alleyway, around the back and scaled the pan tiles over a first floor kitchen. Lifting the lower window, something he’d done countless times returning from the tavern having forgotten his keys, he tumbled into the communal hallway. The laughs from his bedroom stopped abruptly. As every floorboard creaked under the weight of his hastening steps, so too did his mattress that he and Elisabeth had bought three months earlier to consecrate their union. Only for the first time, it was not he who was engaged in that intimacy.
He opened the bedroom door. The culprits were half under the duvet. Who was her accomplice, he wondered. Francis Martin-Shore turned and looked straight at him, still embroiled in his guilty intimacy with Elisabeth, like a key stuck in a lock. Elisabeth pitched a sympathetic smile Muir's way but he was numb to the world. She lashed out. 'If you’d earned enough money, you might have stood a better chance of keeping me. You're perpetually poor, Thomas. It won't do.'
Muir turned to Francis, 'we’ll settle this the next time we're in court.’
After a stiff drink in the tavern on Carrubber's Close, Muir walked up around the back of Salisbury crags. Peering over the cliff edge, he watched a wine laden horse and cart pass along the track. From above, in his alcoholic stupor, the cart seemed shaped almost like a coffin. The drink had annulled the vertigo he normally felt. From the tavern, he'd brought with him a half-full bottle of whisky. In the subsequent haze, it had plummeted the hundreds of feet down to the track below. He now hoped the horse wouldn’t stand on the shards and looked for blood in its tracks as it passed. Edinburgh seemed indifferent to his woes. Perhaps he had helped others before helping Elisabeth. Perhaps he had driven her to betray him by insisting that the poor receive as much legal representation as the rich. Did he only have himself to blame, he wondered.
His legs and feet hung over the precipice. One action would change everything utterly. Then the falling would quicken until the ground crashed through him. The man directing the horse and cart was now probably too far away to hear his body hit the track. Thankfully, though, Muir awoke to find that he’d fallen backwards, not forwards. The chill of an easterly breeze and a sun that had just set sobered him up a little. It was time to return to Carrubber's Close, not to his place but to a nearby tavern.
A few hours later, six emptied glasses of whisky had stacked themselves around him like the turrets of a castle under siege. Apart from Palmer, there was only one other man inside. The Balblair had long since passed Muir's lips and the remaining dregs had hardened, defying gravity in the upturned ones. At least in the tavern, he couldn't do himself any permanent damage, Palmer thought. The Reverend had listened to the unholy allegory and now sought to urge him on.
‘Look to the future! In half an hour’s time our first meeting will be under way.’
‘What first meeting?’
‘The one Tytler advertised in his newspaper, yesterday.’
Muir struggled to focus on a miniscule advert in the Intelligencer.
‘The Society for the Friends of the People...’
‘Who’ll answer that? This rag has no readership but us.’
‘They’ve really got to you haven’t they? And these whiskies are handing you over to the advocates of gloom.’
‘Leave me be.’
A few minutes later, he left. No sooner had the door settled on its hinges than it was swung to one side again. Palmer darted out to look for him, first left down to the gardens and then right into the old town. The Reverend’s sight had diminished in recent years and it took some time to distinguish his friend’s silhouette down the close, lit up by the cloudy oil lamps from a neighbouring tavern. The auburn shoulder length hair was unmistakeably Muir’s but what he failed to see was that the only other man in the pub had also come outside and was watching the spectacle from a distance, with the copy of Tytler’s Intelligencer in his hand. As Palmer approached Muir, the sobs and splutters confirmed that it was, indeed, his friend. Streetwalkers were drawn to his vulnerability. Darker souls might have taken their anger out on them but not his, and before long, Palmer had freed Muir from them.
‘Are you going to let two half baked aristocrats halt the people’s progress, Mr Muir? For that’s what I think of Elisabeth and Francis. And that’s what you’re doing by letting them get to you.’
Water cascaded above them from a cracked drain. Palmer studied the blackened sandstone as he worked out how to get Muir back on his side.
‘That’s what’s been going on since time immemorial, the frivolities of the rich debasing the needs of our fellow men. Leave the cause now, and you’re just helping them.'
A light kindled in Muir’s eye. Palmer suspected it was a prelude to his friend’s second volte-face of the evening. Over the next few minutes, he watched him regain his composure, as did the man who stood outside the tavern. Muir thought through the ramifications of Elisabeth’s affair. His position at the chambers would become untenable with her father’s influence. Judge Andrews would certainly side with his daughter despite the finger of blame pointing directly at her.
The legal system had no concern for objective truths.
There were only partnerships, between clients and advocates, parents and offspring.
Perhaps other avenues of employment were not just desirable, but necessary. Whilst he considered his options, Palmer thumbed through a few replies he’d received concerning the meeting. Muir then noticed a press-gang drag four young men out of Mathew’s Tavern further down the lane.
‘These letters are from a joiner, a tobacconist and two weavers. You can always rely on the weavers.’
As Palmer spoke, Muir watched the men being dragged down the street, out of their past lives and into ones of uncertainty and brutality. The letters could have been from them for all he knew. Something had to be done to stop this slavery. He remembered Granger and the weavers’ protests.
When Palmer got to the end of the last letter, he looked up. Muir had gone. The Reverend walked out of the close to find his friend marching towards the Berean Meeting House.
The space where Palmer once stood was now occupied by the man from the tavern. Curious to the details of their discussion, he began to question the streetwalkers who were still loitering close by and keen to do business.
Inside, a hive of activity met Palmer and Muir, fears they’d entered the wrong meeting-room faded when they spotted copies of Tytler’s paper. The Leith man then embraced them in either arm, before spilling much of his tankard down Muir’s gown. To compensate, Muir finished the ale and made his way to the lectern, spotting the Member of Parliament for Inverness in the crowd. He couldn’t quite decide whether the MP’s attendance was a good thing or not. But that he had travelled overnight gave the society a degree of status and potential.
The last few hours had brought into focus the injustice he had felt over the years. Now more than ever it felt personal. At the lectern, he waited for the conversations to end remembering again Lambert’s scepticism in those few seconds.
‘The danger to the success of reforms is in attempting them before the principles are laid out. The advantages, resulting from reform, must be,’ he hesitated, ‘sufficiently seen and understood. I welcome you all to establish those principles and goals.’
A man started clapping, a little earlier than Muir expected, he then recognised him as Dr Martins, his friend from school.
‘As for our methods, I insist that they are moderate, legal, peaceable and constitutional...’
Palmer interrupted Muir. ‘Perhaps it is wise for those who support militancy, to leave our society now, for violence has no place here.’
Muir looked at the crowd of forty or so people, imagining what lives they led. The bearded man that afternoon was perhaps repairing a loom, loose threads still on his clothes. By him, the tobacconist who’d closed his shop early to get to the meeting, next along a watchmaker, keeping pace of proceedings. Considering Palmer’s guidance, the MP for Inverness seemed to take a couple of steps to the door. But after deliberating, he stayed. And as time passed, Muir was encouraged by the fact that nobody left. Tytler’s readers were decent folk.
Palmer then set the scene for the direction of his narrative, ‘a few decades ago, the government fought against a people struggling for their liberty. Those people were the Americans. As my good friend, Gerrald told me, the Americans tasted the sweets of independence and refused to accept that freedom as a boon, which they’d firmly established as a right. Nearly all people now think the British government were wrong to fight this once popular war. Once the fighting stopped, Mr Burke obtained a reform to diminish the Crown’s influence and to deal with a corrupt legislature. For, it was only a corrupt legislature that would support the war without the support of the nation. The work of reform is not over but we’re in good company. Our own prime minister, Mr Pitt, was an advocate of reform until power brought an end to that. Before the revolution in France, no man would speak ill of reform. When the Bastille fell, it was vilified as if it were revolutionary. We’re not a revolutionary movement, nor will we have anything to do with those factions, frauds and villainies that have succeeded the revolution and steered it off course into anarchy.’
Catching his breath, Palmer stopped for a moment. Muir though wanted to keep the momentum going, ‘gentlemen, law knows no distinction of persons. A beggar is as entitled to pursue reform as much as Mr Burke or Mr Pitt. The question is whether it’s done legally. A reform of Parliament by petition will be our only method for it was the Bill of Rights that intended to banish despotism. One of its most sacred clauses is the inalienable claim of the citizens to petition Parliament. When that claim is removed, the state is reduced to despotism. We will, therefore, exercise this long lost right. But first we must agree what our complaints are.’
The man whom they recognised as a weaver raised his hand. ‘My pay’s been going down month on month whilst the taxes I pay are constantly rising. I see no benefits from these taxes; they pay for wars in which my fellow men are slaughtered. I see no share of the lands acquired in these expeditions. These lands go to the lords.’
The crowds groaned in agreement. Muir made notes on the lectern and agreed, adding, ‘you’re constantly taxed without being represented, as were the Americans. They did something about it. So shall we. The war swelled our national debt to two hundred and seventy nine million pounds, so Reverend Palmer tells me. It is us, the people that are left to pay it off. We’re constantly compelled to obey laws to which we never gave assent. Aren’t these the very definitions of slavery?’
The crowds raised their spirits and cheered whilst the cabinetmaker cleared his throat. When things had quietened, he began. ‘I work a skilled trade, I’m good at my job too, yet I’ve no vote as I’ve no property.’
The old man next to him let no silence prevail. ‘Even if we had the vote, there’s only an election every seven years. I’ll probably be dead by the next one. They need to be more regular; we need to do away with the septennial act. Seven years wait for a new government! That’s too long. It’s strangling any possibility of democracy.’
Then, an old woman leant forwards on her walking stick. After much delay, she spoke in broken mutterings. ‘What of the numerous deaths your protests will cause… when sailors start mutinying… and naval officers start hanging them? … You thought that through?’
Muir thought of the four men who he'd just seen press ganged that evening but he hadn’t prepared for dissenters and was lost for words. This was hidden, however, by a man in the crowds, who was still holding onto Palmer’s copy of the Intelligencer. ‘Madame, I’m sure you’ve sons serving in the British Navy, not by choice I hasten to speculate, but you can’t blame this organisation for the wrongful methods of another now can you?’ After the debate, Muir spoke personally to a number of people but cut the last conversation short to catch the man who had helped him.
‘Thank you for your defence, pleased to meet you.’
‘Sorry? You’ll have to speak up.’
Muir repeated himself.
‘I’m Robert Watt, a wine merchant by trade.’
‘Welcome to the society.’
They shook hands.
Watt seemed a little nervous. ‘Thank you but I must rest; it has been a busy week.’
They made their way out whilst talking but eventually Watt lost Muir’s attention to a little fellow; it was the churchwarden. He wondered whether it was Tytler’s rag or Professor Anderson’s propaganda that had converted the least likely of conscripts to the cause.
Returning to his lodgings directly opposite, Watt sat at the writing desk by the window. Below, barrel runners were restocking the cellar hatch and crowds of workers gathered in the street, circling Muir and Palmer who spoke enthusiastically to them whilst locking the meetinghouse doors. From his window, Watt listened. Those on the street talked of how they might achieve equal representation and then moved onto demanding fairer taxes. He guessed that the others were weavers but couldn’t be sure. The society, Watt believed, was enamouring the weak in understanding and he resented the fact that he'd had to learn from private study whilst these folk could learn publicly en masse. He despised too, the sense that his independent thought would be lost to a general consensus. As he wrote a letter, he heard Muir shout up at him. Returning the greeting, he gestured that he was tired and wanted to be left alone.
Distantly, he watched the old woman berate Muir again. This time Watt would not intervene. Far from it, correspondences had to be written. The nature of his letter could not warrant the use of his own name. He looked for something to mask his identity. In the same instant, a beer barrel rolled off the wagon and into Muir. It would have knocked him to the ground, had it not been for the weavers who half steadied its momentum. As it was secured again, Watt read J.B. on one end. With a dip of the quill, he signed off his note with those letters. When the ink had dried, he reread what he'd written.
‘To the Home Secretary, Robert Dundas, I offer to put my wide knowledge of the reform societies at the disposal of the Home Office. I insist upon confidentiality of all future correspondence. Your diligent spy, J. B.’