Hugh Kenrick (3 page)

T
WO DAYS AFTER THE FIREWORKS, THE
K
ENRICKS LEFT
L
ONDON
. W
HILE
the Earl owned the house near the York Stairs, he disliked the city, and leased the house to men and women of rank more often than he used it himself. Home for the Kenricks was a great mansion near Danvers, in Dorset, on the south coast close to the fishing and quarry town of Swanage. It would be more correct to say that the estate was Danvers, for the little collection of houses and shops was enclosed by a manor of five thousand acres. Danvers—originally called D’Anvers—began as a settlement of Norman tradesmen and artificers, but over the centuries the nobility’s growing dominions encircled it. All roads passing through the Earl’s lands to Danvers could be tolled by him. The village drew its fresh water from wells on lands bought or seized by the Earl’s predecessors, and so he could charge the village for water. Much of the village’s sustenance was grown, bred, or fattened by cottars and free tenants on the Earl’s lands, and so the Earl profited doubly. The man sent by the freeholders in the neighboring town of Onyxcombe to Parliament was always the Earl’s man.

The Earl of Danvers was a power to contend with.

It had not always been so. After the Norman Conquest, an earl had little or no power; the title was honorific. Dukes had power. Marquises had power. Even lowly barons and baronets had power. In the Middle Ages earldoms proliferated as kings bestowed the status in reward for services rendered them. An earl was presented with a letters-patent, signed by the sovereign, which described the lands, privileges, obligations, and exemptions attached to the title. An earl acquired power by purchasing it from those who wielded it, or by performing some urgent service which left the beneficiary indebted to him.

If Hugh Kenrick was unruly, his ancestors were cravenly duplicitous. An early Kenrick, then a minor Welsh-Saxon nobleman and former vassal of King Harold, recently slain at the Battle of Hastings, was awarded a baronetcy for helping the Normans subdue other Saxons, which necessitated laying waste to villages that did not swear submission to William the Conqueror. There were many such villages in Dornsetta, and Kenrick so thoroughly erased their names from memory that they did not occur in the
exhaustive Domesday Book, compiled by William’s army of roving commissioners to record every taxable entity in the country. He was crueler than even the Normans, for he could live only if no other Saxons were left who had the courage to challenge his treason, and this added a ferocity to his scourge. For the Normans, he exacted tribute from the dependable survivors—the meek, the humble, and the dutiful—and for himself and his descendants, the unquestioning obedience of the yeomen and serfs. For two centuries, no commoner in Danvers dared christen his son Harold.

The baronetcy was inheritable. The first Kenrick’s heirs languished for centuries in complacent obscurity until the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century demanded public commitment. In this thirty-year struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England, Baron Kenrick and his son swore allegiance to whichever side seemed on the verge of winning. The Kenricks rode as men-at-arms with the Yorkist knights at Blore Heath, and together slew six royalist knights. When Yorkist morale collapsed at the Teme River and men began deserting, under cover of darkness the Kenricks went over to Henry VI and the Lancasterians, and had the white rose on their banner dyed red. At Mortimer’s Cross, the Kenricks again threw their lot in with the seemingly unbeatable Yorkists. At dinner one evening, another baron suggested to his colleagues that the Kenricks should replace the white rose on their banner with an impaled chameleon. The baron was found dead in his tent the next morning, his throat cut. Baron Kenrick himself died soon afterward on the Aire River at the battle of Ferrybridge. His son assumed the title.

In the end, Richard III, because of his audacity and ruthlessness, won the allegiance of the new Baron Kenrick and his one hundred foot soldiers, but then lost them when Kenrick, riding with the Earl of Northumberland and other nobles at Bosworth Field, also elected to stand neutral when their king was betrayed by the Stanley brothers and overwhelmed by Henry Tudor’s forces. It became a family fable that young Baron Kenrick found the slain Richard’s crown in a bush on the battlefield, though the witnesses he claimed could attest to this fillet of glory were all fortuitously dead.

The Kenricks’ fortunes rose and fell over a century, until another Baron Kenrick, an impoverished country gentleman and hanger-on at the court of James I, and whose lands and manor were more a burden than an asset, oiled his way into the conspiracy of Lords Cobham and Gray to dethrone the king in favor of Arabella Stuart. He then joined the ranks of others who “confessed” the plot to James. He was rewarded with the
earldom of Danvers. The earldom was created from the dissolution of two rival Dorset baronetcies, whose title holders were also implicated in the plot but permitted to live in exchange of a payment to James of one hundred gold Dutch guilders each. He enjoyed the title for six months, then one winter day died. The letters-patent signed by James allowed a male issue to inherit the title. His son, the new Earl of Danvers, was attacked by the disenfranchised barons, who were defeated in a skirmish. The young earl killed one baron and had the other beheaded by royal decree. After all, the Kenricks had been awarded Danvers by the king himself, and it was a capital offense to oppose the sovereign’s will.

A later Kenrick took no sides in the Civil War, nor for the duration of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, but gave succor to whichever side, Royalist or Roundhead, happened to encamp on his estate. His only active role was to give information to a Roundhead officer about the location and strength of a local unit of the Dorset Clubmen, a militia formed to deter depredations committed by both sides. This information led to the annihilation of the unit by a company of Cromwell’s New Model Army. His suspected sympathies were with Charles II, but the Earl vehemently denied that the king had hidden in Danvers at any time during his six-week flight to the continent.

A grandson of the first Earl, Baron and heir apparent Kenrick, rode with the Duke of Monmouth, nephew of James II, in 1679 and helped to defeat the Scottish Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge. Six years later, as Earl, he helped to rout Monmouth, now a protégé of the late Earl of Shaftesbury and John Locke, at Sedgemoor. The king ordered his nephew beheaded, and Kenrick gave evidence of the rebels’ treachery at the Bloody Assizes, which hanged over two hundred men and sent some eight hundred to Barbados to die in servitude. Many of these men had rallied to Monmouth’s cause when the Duke landed at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, and Kenrick had once quaffed port with them and called them friends. Kenrick was rewarded for his fealty with a writ of perpetuity for his earldom and a majority interest in a rechartered merchant company formerly owned by one of the executed rebels.

The Earl of Danvers labored, as many others did, to persuade philosopher John Locke to come out of exile in Holland and receive the king’s pardon for his role in the rebellion and for his critical remarks on the character and purposes of James II. If Locke could be lured back to English shores, the king’s gratitude would have been boundless, whether or not he
actually intended to pardon the man. His return would have sanctified James’s tyrannical actions and indirectly acknowledged the Stuart’s right to sit on the throne and assume all the absolutist powers he wished to have. But the Earl of Danvers had no better success than had his competitors. His messengers at first could not locate the elusive thinker, but when one did, the man returned to Danvers with a sealed envelope containing a courteous note to the Earl. In it Mr. Locke said that he did not think he had done anything he needed to be pardoned for, and that the Earl’s generous offer of intercession on his behalf was therefore moot.

The stature of the man who could write such a note was beyond the Earl’s ken. He recognized only the slight, the absence of gratitude, and a lost opportunity. From that day on, the Kenricks remained resolutely monarchist, obsessively anti-republican, and only barely tolerant of Whigs.

When James II abdicated the throne under pressure from the Whigs and his nephew William (Prince of Orange and husband of Mary, James’s daughter), the Earl of Danvers lobbied vigorously among the lords and members of the London Convention—there was no sitting Parliament, as there was no king to call one—to have William’s sovereignty legitimized. For this work, Kenrick was appointed to the Board of Trade, and made a lieutenant surveyor of the Cinque Ports.

Clearly, it had been established as a Kenrick family tradition not to risk death, banishment, or insecurity for anything so insubstantial as a belief or a principle.

“Mine has been an unscrupulous family,” remarked eight-year-old Hugh Kenrick to his tutor, who had been assigned the task of teaching the boy his family’s history. The tutor frowned; nothing in his dry recitation of the chronicle could have been interpreted as judgmental. “You may say that, sir,” he said. “I may not.” He paused. “What causes you to reach such an…opinion?”

“My uncle often gets drunk at dinner and talks. And I hear things. And I don’t like the men I see in the portraits in the hallways. You provided me with information. I formed an opinion of it.”

“I see,” said the tutor. “Well, I would advise you not to communicate that opinion to the Earl.”

“I shall restore the family’s honor,” said the boy thoughtfully. “No. I shall introduce it to the family, for the first time.”

“Your father is an honorable man,” broached the tutor, hoping that he was not inferring that the boy’s uncle was in any way dishonorable.

“Yes,” answered Hugh Kenrick tentatively. “Perhaps he is.”

The boy seemed to be reserving an opinion on his father. Still, the tutor decided to drop the subject and move on to the boy’s arithmetic lessons. This kind of talk had a way of reaching the wrong ears, and he could not afford the risk of offending the Earl.

The Earl’s mansion was a great house of granite, roughly shaped in the form of an H, and sat in the middle of ten acres of landscaped grounds. The Earl and Countess and their retainers occupied the eastern half of the H, and his brother and family the western. The segment connecting the two parts contained the offices, libraries, and studies of the brothers. The facade of the eastern length was the front of the mansion, serviced by an immaculately kept cobblestone road a mile in length, flanked by Italian cypresses, which ended in an oval courtyard decorated with a fountain and copies of Roman statues.

The Kenrick brothers were born at Danvers, the Earl three years before his brother, Garnet. Garnet Kenrick was nominally a baron, but neither used nor advertised the title. They did not resemble each other in the least; local gossip had it that they did not share the same father, for while the previous Earl was a bookish man and a model husband—an anomaly in the Kenrick tradition—his wife indulged her fancies for dashing young officers and the vigorous sons of neighboring nobility. The Earl bridled at the notion that his mother was anything but noble and virtuous, and had whipped and banished from Danvers any servant caught repeating the rumor. He had not liked his parents, but that was another issue.

Against his will, the annoying canker of a suspicion sat in the back of his mind that perhaps there was some truth in the forbidden gossip. It was inflamed by boyhood memories of the odd, surreptitious behavior of his fair mother and her gentlemen visitors, especially when his father was away on business or had locked himself in his library to write another tract. If it was in the least true, then it was entirely true, and either he had no legal claim to the title, and his brother had, or his brother had no claim to his, which would leave the earl without a successor. Or, much worse, neither of them had a claim to any title at all. The letters-patent signed by James I specified that, in the event there was no male issue to assume the title and take possession of Danvers, the reigning sovereign had the right to appoint a new earl. The specter of strangers dispossessing the Kenricks haunted Basil Kenrick’s mind and mocked his sense of permanence and posterity. But that was only when melancholy affected his thinking; he allowed himself
no further thought on this subject beyond these simple but terrifying syllogisms.

Garnet Kenrick also harbored the same suspicions, but did not permit them to fester in his mind. It was one of the few subjects he and his brother did not discuss; it was a gentlemen’s understanding not to be named. There had been no instances of attempted blackmail. He knew that their father had had to purchase the silence that surrounded a handful of his and Basil’s youthful indiscretions, but there was otherwise no potential for scandal.

The Danvers servants, among themselves, discreetly referred to the brothers as “Lord Fox” and “Baron Box.” The Earl was tall and thin almost to the point of emaciation, and had a saturnine face that no one ever expected to see smile. He moved quietly, like a ghost, down his mansion’s halls and through his garden paths, and had the unnerving habit of speaking before anyone knew he was present. Garnet Kenrick was also tall, but moved with a robust energy and a sense of purpose. His face was hard, broad, and angular. He smiled with an unaffected benevolence uncommon among the nobility then. He could share a joke with the servants, on occasion solicited their views on practical matters, and generally treated the Earl’s staff with a respectful humanity that granted them some dignity; a notion utterly alien to his brother’s sensibilities.

While Basil Kenrick was an earl, and had a keen, aggressive interest in preserving and extending the influence of his rank, he had not much bothered to develop the faculty for the task. A nobleman, he had been taught, could not be expected to demean himself with the physical and mental labor required to maintain his rank. “We
wear
swords and finery, young Basil,” his father had once told him. “It is not within the definition of a gentleman or a lord to soil his hands or his soul in the
making
of these or any other things.” This attitude did not apply to the writing of books. Basil’s father authored many tracts on such subjects as
The Necessity and Superiority of Nobility
,
The Clergy’s Duties as the Sovereign’s Spiritual Watchmen and Criers
, and
The Planning and Pleasure of Private Parks in a Search for Eden, with Epistles and Analogies on the Flora of the Christian Soul
. The vicar of St. Quarrell’s, the parish church, borrowed liberally from the Earl’s many published tracts for his services. For this flattery, the parish of Danvers was richly endowed by the family. It is no mean compliment to have one’s scrivenings treated on a par with Scripture. Basil Kenrick viewed his father’s authorship of the tracts on his study shelves with respectful, sometimes fearful awe, superstitiously believing that the old
Earl had been bequeathed with a gift of moral knowledge quite beyond his own ken.