What If the Queen Should Die? by John-Paul Flintoff

Author:John-Paul Flintoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783522590
Publisher: Unbound

Chapter 14

Priceless Impertinence

‘My lord,’ said Arbuthnot, welcoming the Lord Treasurer to his rooms. ‘It’s an honour to see you again. We had started to believe you would never come. How did you find Her Majesty?’

But Oxford had not, as they assumed, been with the Queen. He’d bumped into Swift on the stairs, and then been joined, unwillingly, by a shabby fellow who called himself General Robert Hunter.

‘Hunter? I thought you were in America?’ said Gay.

Hunter looked delighted to be recognised.

‘I returned from New York, at some hazard, as soon as I heard that England is in upheaval.’ He added that he wanted to improve his acquaintance with the men who would matter in future – not to renew it with those who were on their way out.

‘The last time we met, sir, you told me your scheme to settle the American colonies with a lot of Germans. You set off, as I recall, with some three thousand. Was the journey a success?’

‘A great success. We lost a few elderly passengers, but gained plenty of newborns.’

‘These Germans had lost their homes to the French, is that right?’

‘You have astounding powers of memory.’

‘And you put them to work?’

The general nodded.

‘Wonderful, wonderful,’ said Gay. ‘As you know, we shall be settling a few Germans here, soon. Perhaps you can advise how we can bring that off with best success.’

General Hunter sighed. ‘Germans are good Christians, sir, and hard workers, but they are not easy to control. Soon after we arrived a portion of them abandoned me to establish their own settlement many miles inland, at a place the Mohawk people call Schoharie.’

‘Could you not fetch them back?’

‘That’s harder to achieve in America, sir, than you . . . than many would imagine who have never been there. Schoharie County lies a great distance inland. No roads lead there, only Indian footpaths. When they arrived, they had little to eat but boiled grass and leaves off the trees . . . but last year they produced their own crop of wheat. They had to carry it twenty miles to grind it, at Schenectady, but their celebrations surpassed any others I have heard of.’

Gay looked around him and saw that his friends’ smiles looked forced. They didn’t share his interest in the American.

But the General, not noticing, persisted in his onslaught. ‘The Queen, in her wisdom, supposing these Germans to be handsomely settled sent her agent to grant deeds of land. This agent arrived at last and issued an order that householders come to him with details of the land they owned. The poor ignorant souls were struck like with thunder! Alarmed by the appearance of the Queen’s agent – he had lost an eye some years previously – they supposed his command was a trick to get themselves under the hateful yoke of tyrannical landholders, to be again enslaved, so soon after they’d tasted liberty. In short, they resolved to kill him.

‘The next morning, they surrounded his house, carrying guns, pitch-forks and hoes, demanding him alive or dead.

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