Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790-1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money (Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures)

With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the premises upon which Area Studies were based hav...

Author: Erik Simpson

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With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the premises upon which Area Studies were based have come into question. Starting from the assumption that the study of American literatures can no longer operate on a nation-based or exceptionalist paradigm, the books in this new series work within a comparative framework to interrogate place-based identities and monocular visions. The authors attempt instead to develop new paradigms for literary criticism in historical and contemporary contexts of exchange, circulation and transformation. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures seeks uniquely to further the critical, theoretical and ideational work of the developing field of transatlantic literary studies. Susan Manning is Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Andrew Taylor is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk

Jacket design: Barrie Tullett

Edinburgh

Jacket image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz

ISBN 978 0 7486 3868 0

British Romanticism and Spanish America, 1777–1826 Rewriting Conquest

Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, University of Edinburgh

E d i n b u rg h S t u d i e s i n T r a n s at l a n t i c L i t e r at u r e s Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor

Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, University of Edinburgh

British Romanticism and Spanish America, 1777–1826 Rewriting Conquest Rebecca Cole Heinowitz Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest expands current scholarship about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature to include the significant, but neglected, impact of Spanish America on the Romantic literary and political imagination. Through critical reconsiderations of both canonical and lesser-known Romantic texts, including Helen Maria Williams’s Peru, Robert Southey’s Madoc, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro, and Lord Byron’s The Age of Bronze, Heinowitz reveals the untold story of Romantic-era Britain’s obsession with Spanish America.

Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830 Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money

Erik Simpson

Although historians have traditionally characterized Britain’s relationship with Spanish America as commercial rather than colonial, this study explores the significant rhetorical overlap between formal and informal strategies of rule. In the absence of a coherent imperial policy regarding Spain’s colonies, Britain struggled to justify its actions by means of the problematic assertion that British primacy was authorized by political, cultural, ethical, and even historical identification with the peoples of Spanish America. By examining the ways in which this discourse of British-Spanish American similitude was deployed and increasingly strained throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Heinowitz demonstrates how British writing about Spanish America redefines the anxieties, ambivalences, and contradictions that characterize Romantic imperialism. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College.

Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag, Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells, Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective, Günter Leypoldt Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money, Erik Simpson

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Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830 Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money

◆ ◆ ◆

Erik Simpson

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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For Carolyn and Pete

© Erik Simpson, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3644 0 (hardback) The right of Erik Simpson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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CONTENTS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: Mercenary, Contractor, Volunteer, Slave

1

Ormond’s Fighters: Authorship, Soldiering, and the Transatlantic Charles Brockden Brown Encountering the Mercenary: Native American Auxiliaries, the American Revolution, and Charlotte Smith ‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’: Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and the Romantic Mercenary Loyalty, Independence, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution The Bravos of Venice

130 150

Epilogue: Mercenaries and the Modern Military

169

Bibliography Index

174 193

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, the editors of the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series, have been involved in this project almost from its beginning. My thinking about mercenaries became a book project in large part because of a conversation Susan and I began after I delivered a conference paper in 2002. In the ensuing years, Andrew joined that discussion, and the book took its present shape with their encouragement and guidance. I am delighted that the book has now become part of their series, and I am grateful for their generous collegiality. The book has also benefited from the continuing support of Stuart Curran, Michael Gamer, and Penny Fielding, readers of my dissertation and first book who have remained valuable interlocutors and dear friends. Dahlia Porter and Evan Gottlieb have read chapters of this work and offered insightful comments, as have the readers of Studies in Romanticism, in which a version of Chapter 3 has appeared, and the readers of Edinburgh University Press. Máiréad McElligott has helped the book through the publishing process with precision and grace. I received advice about specific points of law and economics from Timothy Fox, David Jones, Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts, all of whom responded to my questions speedily and with good cheer. The book also profited from the sharp pencils and sharper editorial eyes of Eileen Bartos. Institutional support has come mainly from Grinnell College, which has provided a number of research and travel grants as well as a study leave in support of this project. I also thank the library staffs of the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Van Pelt

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Acknowledgments

[ vii

Library of the University of Pennsylvania, the Beinecke Library of Yale University, the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Main Library of the University of Iowa, and Burling Library of Grinnell College. My parents, Richard and Deborah Simpson, have provided not only love, support, and understanding but also excellent comments on the entire typescript of this book. I am continually struck by how well and how differently they think about writing. In editing as in parenting, they make a very fine team. I dedicate this book to my wife, Carolyn Jacobson, and our son, Peter Simpson. Carolyn read the typescript of the book, much of it more than once, and transformed it with her responses. Pete, truth be told, has read none of the typescript and offered no useful comments thereon. He has, however, pushed elevator buttons flawlessly and with enthusiasm on many evening trips made to retrieve books from my office. The five years he and Carolyn and I have spent together so far have brought joys upon joys, for all of which I am deeply grateful.

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INTRODUCTION: MERCENARY, CONTRACTOR, VOLUNTEER, SLAVE

Fighting for Money: Independence, the Mercenary, and Atlantic Studies The American Declaration of Independence complains that King George III ‘is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries’ to fight in the American colonies. In transit ‘at this time’ between Europe and North America, the mercenaries connect the continents but also signify the decisive break between them, a betrayal of British and colonial consanguinity. On a voyage that enacts the continents’ geographical connection and incipient political separation, the mercenaries invite an approach that, in Paul Gilroy’s formulation, strives to ‘take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis . . . and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective’ (1993: 15). The image of the foreign fighters crossing the ocean also involves a fundamental irony. By introducing foreigners to the fight, the rebel colonists imply, King George has justified their effort to become foreigners themselves.1 The foreignness of the mercenary involves a kind of independence – an ability, for better and for worse, to operate outside of patriotic ideologies.2 Crossing national borders to serve a foreign commander, the mercenary shares the transnational mobility of other Revolutionera figures that have attracted more scholarly attention: the Jew, the gypsy, the pirate, the vagrant, the emigrant, the exile, the absentee, the slave.3 (Edward Said may as well be speaking of the mercenary, for example, when he describes exile as ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their

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Mercenaries in British and American Literature

past’ [2000: 177].)4 The slave, the figure most closely tied to the mercenary in the period’s writing, has commanded the most attention of these in Atlantic studies. This book proposes an alternative, complementary focal point for Atlantic studies in the mercenary. Whereas the slave troubles the rhetoric of liberty through a lack of autonomy and consent, the mercenary raises questions about liberty by embodying its excess.5 The mercenary of popular imagination takes monstrous advantage of modern freedoms by contracting away the ostensibly natural and foundational bonds of civil society. Like the slave, the mercenary obeys a master to whom no connection exists in nation, religion, or affection.6 The mercenary’s choice to serve an alien master (even, in the American Revolutionary context, by crossing the Atlantic) thus stands at once for the overindulgence of freedom and the failure to appreciate its value.7 Though mercenaries raised many concerns similar to those raised by slaves – the displacement of both groups into North America, for example, inspired fears of foreign-aided mass uprisings against the government – seeing the Atlantic world through the figure of the mercenary offers a new view of the intersections of national, commercial, and military systems. Analogous to the transnational ‘traveling genres’ described by Margaret Cohen (2003), the mercenary is a ‘traveling figure’ in two senses: the mercenary embodies the detachment of the individual from the native state, and tracing representations of the mercenary produces literary genealogies shaped by transnational, intertextual relationships. As I have already begun to invoke broader and narrower definitions of mercenary action – as did writers of the period I examine – I will step back to provide some definitional grounding. The word ‘mercenary’ carries a general, pejorative connotation: a mercenary, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a person whose actions are motivated primarily by personal gain, often at the expense of ethics’ (‘mercenary’ 1989). The mercenary embodies a kind of anti-ethical principle serving the basest needs of the self. The narrower sense of ‘mercenary’ as a type of military combatant hardly fares better. The ancient profession of arms carries on to this day, but at least since Machiavelli influentially argued that mercenaries lack loyalty and therefore undermine their employers’ security (an argument to which I will return in Chapter 3), governments have sought to avoid calling their forces ‘mercenaries’, no matter how well they seem to merit the term. Contrarily, opposition groups frequently seek to apply the term to as many forces as possible.


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[3

Today, the categorization of soldiers is much more than a matter of semantics. To be a mercenary may be to sacrifice some of the legal protections accorded to legitimate combatants.8 Article 47 of the 1977 Additional Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions states that ‘[a] mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war’ and proceeds to define a mercenary as any person who (a) Is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; (b) Does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities; (c) Is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party; (d) Is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict; (e) Is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and (f) Has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces. (‘Protocol Additional’ 1977)9

I cite the Protocol not because it offers a stable, neutral definition of the mercenary but rather because it fails to do so, instead offering a reasonable summary of conventional wisdom (here Conventional wisdom) that retains the traces of centuries of debates about the nature and role of mercenary soldiers.10 The six sections of the definition combine relatively straightforward legal provisions – the mercenary must be a foreigner and not on official military duty, for example – with the surprisingly psychological requirement that the mercenary must be ‘motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain’.11 The motivational criterion may seem out of place in an assessment of a soldier’s eligibility for legal protections, but the impenetrably secret motives of mercenaries have long formed the core of arguments against their loyalty and reliability.12 Rather than providing a pragmatic standard for the battlefield, then, this clause affirms the importance of pure motive in military service and thereby differentiates legitimate service from a contractual system that disregards motives. The disregard of motive is, in fact, one of the signal features of modern markets. Adam Smith argued that one of the main


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advantages of markets is precisely their ability to function without dependence on the motives of transacting parties. In one of the most famous passages of The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith writes, ‘[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’ (2003: 23–4). To affirm the importance of combatants’ motives is, among other things, to affirm that legitimate combatants operate outside of and above the sphere of capitalist self-interest. Similar values underlie the requirement that the mercenary be promised ‘material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party’. This clause asserts the regular compensation of armed services personnel to be below market value by definition, which implies that the compensation of regular forces involves more than money. Social capital, prestige, gratitude, and other forms of compensation make up the difference. The mercenary, presumed to serve at market-driven rates, sacrifices such non-monetary compensations in the economy of national gratitude. Hence, for example, arises the feeling among relatives of American contractors killed in Iraq that they and their loved ones have been excluded from the nation’s ritual displays of grief and indebtedness.13 Adam Smith anticipated such effects in The Wealth of Nations. ‘Honour’, Smith wrote, ‘makes a great part of the reward of all honourable professions. In point of pecuniary gain, all things considered, they are generally under-recompensed. . . . Disgrace has the contrary effect’ (2003: 140). The Geneva Protocol extends this logic. To find the soldiers who do not merit the protections afforded to legitimate combatants, the Protocol implies, one must seek out those who make more money. The soldier who enjoys a reasonable expectation of cultural capital – or honor, in Smith’s formulation – will necessarily accept a lower wage, so the parallel markets for national and mercenary soldiers will reveal a telling inverse relationship between cultural and economic capital.14 Naturally, the Protocol does not lay out its logic of cultural compensation so baldly. Nonetheless, when the Protocol veers away from technical definition and into the realms of psychology, morality, and national indebtedness to volunteer soldiers, it participates in a centuries-long tradition of writing about the mercenary soldier by way of psychology and emotion as well as, or instead of, the imperatives of military strategy. The consistency between Smith’s formulation of compensatory honor and the Protocol’s standards for legitimate fighting provides


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Introduction

[5

a basis for considering war as a field of cultural production. I mean this in the sense in which Pierre Bourdieu describes the ‘literary and artistic world’ as ‘ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness’ (1993: 40). The notional underpayment of the volunteer – the idea that legitimate fighting must involve below-market compensation in the short term – involves precisely the dynamic Bourdieu describes in the artistic sector, in which success is suspect and asceticism in this world is the precondition for salvation in the next[. The basis of that success] lies in the economy of cultural production itself, according to which investments are recompensed only if they are in a sense thrown away, like a gift, which can only achieve the most precious return gift, recognition (reconnaissance), so long as it is experienced as a one-way transaction . . . as with the gift, which it converts into pure generosity by masking the expected return-gift . . . . (1993: 101)

The ‘expected return-gift’ masked by the cultural production of military service is the ‘debt of gratitude’ – a debt always owed, never fully satisfied, and never explicitly anticipated by the ideal volunteer.15 Descriptions of the social debts owed to the volunteer and the mercenary reflect this cultural logic. Mainstream political discourse in states with volunteer armies will not present the society’s debt to its veterans as fully paid: the rhetoric of national debt to volunteer soldiers has little to do with the underlying adequacy of veterans’ benefits and everything to do with the need to figure the debt as an ongoing obligation and mark of gratitude. The mercenary commands no such debt, no such gratitude. Anti-mercenary rhetoric characterizes mercenaries as being so fully compensated monetarily that even their deaths merit no ritualized commemoration or even private mourning by their compatriots. In 2004, for example, after the killing and public mutilation of four American contractors in Iraq, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga wrote on his popular website Daily Kos, ‘I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to make war for profit. Screw them’.16 Himself a veteran of the US army, Moulitsas characterizes the dead men as ‘mercenaries’ to signal their unworthiness to command sympathy in death. His logic reflects precisely that implied by English author Charlotte Smith when she learned in 1791 that hundreds of Louis XVI’s armed protectors, the Swiss Guard, had been killed. Smith


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reportedly went ‘so far . . . as saying the Swiss Guard deserved to die’ (Fletcher 2001: 159). (I will examine this report about Smith further in Chapter 2.) The rhetorical annihilation of sympathy for the mercenary is a converse of the unpayable social debt to the volunteer. The mercenary’s death is thus, to many observers, ungrievable. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler discusses the ‘ungrievable lives’ (2004: 148) of those whose dehumanization prior to death allows warring powers to prevent inconvenient mourning after death. Butler proposes to counter this tendency by encouraging sympathy for all people, so that ‘we understand that no “self,” including no national subject, exists apart from an international socius’ (2004: 99). Even Butler’s claim to universal sympathy works through the category of the ‘national subject’, a formulation that indicates the problematic importance of the mercenary’s foreignness to the employing state. This small point is one manifestation of a larger issue: the mercenary’s life is ‘ungrievable’ for reasons that defy the customary logic of left-wing recuperation of marginalized figures as a political strategy. Unlike other people who lead ‘ungrievable lives’ because modern politics requires quiet victims, mercenaries are simultaneously ungrievable and representative of global capitalism in its most unrestrained forms. That is, the difference between the mercenary’s ungrievable life and the lives of other war casualties lies in the perception that the mercenary has chosen to participate, like a volunteer, but has made the choice in a marketplace of allegiances rather than according to the natural dictates of conscience, ethics, or sympathy.17 The assumption that mercenaries perform actions for money that good people would not perform underlies the centuries-old understanding of ‘mercenary’ as a pejorative adjective. Mercenary spouses alter their choices of partners because of the promise of gain; mercenary writers choose saleable genres, styles, or political positions that they would otherwise avoid. The use of ‘mercenary’ signifies the betrayal of an activity that ought to involve higher aims and loyalties; hence we read of mercenary lovers or soldiers or artists but not mercenary plumbers. A plumber who will work for virtually any paying client is not a mercenary but simply a plumber. The underlying logic of mercenary action involves the paradoxical choice to sacrifice choice: the person performing a mercenary action freely engages to bend his or her will to that of an alien commander. In contrast, the idealized volunteer matches outward action to sincere motivation, and such sincerity is demonstrated by the acceptance of


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[7

payments that are relatively low or slow to accrue. The constraint of sincerity explains the mercenary’s ability to serve as the everyman as well as the monstrous limit case of modern commercial society. Every voluntary contract, whether formal or informal, involves a promise to sacrifice choice. The agreement constitutes an assurance that even a sincere change of heart will not alter the contracting party’s behavior. The contracting party’s word is, in that sense, a bond.18 The nature of bonds – social ties as well as promises – informs the opposition between volunteer-based armed forces, especially militias, and forces of full-time professionals, including standing armies often supplemented by mercenary or auxiliary forces. The lines separating these forms of defense shift from debate to debate: standing armies, for example, are sometimes the status quo being defended from contamination by mercenaries while at other times they are grouped with mercenaries as the military props of tyranny. The underlying problem, however, remains largely constant. If a system of defense such as a national militia protects a state from internal tyranny and from external invasion, whereas a full-time professional force gains additional effectiveness from specialization, can a modern state combine sufficient military capability with sufficient safeguards against tyranny? Variations of this question still arise today, but it had special urgency in the eighteenth century: it fed Scottish Enlightenment debates about the application of divided labor in national defense and then debates about the viability of a militia system in the fledgling United States. As the American and French Revolutions transformed the practices of European war, the figure of the mercenary also gained an ability to seem novel and obsolete by turns. This chronological ambiguity is especially relevant to the mercenary’s place in transatlantic studies. Making the case for his influential claim that ‘[t]he AngloAmerican contest is a struggle between two distinct senses of cultural time, British lateness and American earliness’ (1986: 109), Robert Weisbuch writes: American writers required of themselves literary qualities that would set their works apart from European and particularly English literary models. The British told them over and again that they would fail in this endeavor because America lacked a sufficiently full history. (1986: xiii)

The Revolutionary era involved a similar and related contest about English military models, especially the use of standing armies and


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what the Americans called mercenaries.19 The military system of the early United States sought to defy the conventional wisdom that volunteer militias could not defend a large nation. In military affairs as in literature, the American system tried to establish a new method in the face of British skepticism about breaking from tradition. The American commitment to volunteer defense as a new system displacing the European mercenary trade accorded with anti-mercenary folk nationalism within Europe. Johann Gottfried von Herder suffuses his political writings with attacks on mercenary warfare, and in ‘Letters for the Advancement of Humanity’, he connects German linguistic nationalism directly with an argument to rid national defense of the tradition of mercenary soldiering: Bravely and uprightly did the Germans let themselves be hired against each other inside and outside their fatherland, as history shows; friend fought against friend, brother against brother; the fatherland got ruined and was left orphaned. Should not, therefore, besides bravery and uprightness something else be necessary for our fatherland in addition? Light, enlightenment, a noble sense of community; noble pride in not letting oneself be organized by others, but organizing oneself, as other nations have done from time immemorial; in being Germans on our own well-protected piece of territory. (2002: 377, emphasis original)

Herder here couches his anti-mercenary ideology in terms of the modern nationalism he helped create: he envisions Germany as a sovereign, bounded land capable of protecting itself because military volunteerism will result from linguistic unity. Herder follows the passage above with two questions whose answers clarify this link: What encouraged the Greeks to their glorious and most difficult works? The voice of duty and glory. Through what did they think themselves to be superior to all the nations of the earth? Through their cultivated language and what was planted amongst them by means of it. (2002: 378)

Though framing his case as a wish to return to Greek ideals, Herder proposes changes to his own national culture that will banish German mercenary warfare to the past, to be replaced by the modern nation whose ‘voice of duty and glory’ issues from its ‘cultivated language’. A similar urge to place mercenary warfare in the past animated militia movements in Britain and the US, most notably


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[9

in the American Revolution’s resistance to standing armies and mercenaries – which resistance, of course, involved opposition to the German mercenary system that provided George III with troops.20 From this Herderian perspective, the mercenary impulse – having the assets of the nation move literally and figuratively ‘into the service of foreigners’ – represents a departure from an earlier unity of nation, culture, and military forces that must be restored. The Herderian approach became foundational to modern nationalism: in the nationalist’s eyes, the marked transition to national forces during and after the Napoleonic Wars culminates a long process of repatriating military and cultural assets, leaving the mercenary system of the European princely states in the past. As Deborah Avant writes, ‘[m]ercenaries went out of style in the nineteenth century’ (2000: 41).21 In another view, however, the mercenary represented novelty. Adam Smith’s arguments for the division of labor implied that professionalism and specialization would lead to greater efficacy. The application of Smith’s theories to military affairs implied a radical overturning of the ideology of patriotic service, a reversal of the well-established logic that healthy nations would defend themselves with citizen-soldiers whose desire to return to other occupations would ensure their loyalty and prevent them from waging war out of professional self-interest.22 Smith himself lent his support to the Edinburgh-based Poker Club in which Adam Ferguson, Alexander Carlyle, and others argued for Scottish participation in a British national militia, but Smith’s writing gestures towards a military application of the logic of divided labor: however desirable a volunteer militia might be for other reasons, its effectiveness would inevitably be surpassed by that of specialized professional forces, whether native or foreign. The logic of the earlier princely states’ employment of mercenaries was in many ways that of Smithian commerce. One prince had a surplus of money, another a surplus of fighting men; in such circumstances, the hiring of mercenaries arises from comparative advantage, gains from trade, and other principles of classical economics. Whereas earlier discussions of mercenaries’ military value tended to address the efficacy of groups of soldiers whose leaders contracted out their services en masse, the literary works I address in this book reveal an Enlightenment emphasis on the systemic consequences of individual choices – choices about vocation and loyalty. This shift from discussing mercenaries as groups to treating them psychologically as individuals helps to explain the odd fact that as foreign


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mercenaries diminished in military importance, they became more prominent in discussions of social and economic life. The growth of modern commerce conferred a renewed urgency on examining how the expansion of markets and transnational trade might undermine the solidity and unity of national structures. The mercenary could embody symbolically the fearful prospect of modern markets overwhelming patriotic feeling and national traditions. Therefore, anxieties about military organization in commercial nations persisted during and after the general shift from mercenary to national armed forces. In the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century, Machiavelli’s critique of mercenary troops had become conventional wisdom, but so had worries about the ability of citizen militias to defend the modern nation. In Philip Bobbitt’s words, ‘Machiavelli’s hope that reifying the State would encourage loyalty and sacrifice was not misplaced, but his view that a citizen militia relying on these qualities could substitute for mercenaries was’ (2002: 91). Debates about standing armies, militias, and mercenaries provide a transatlantic common ground in the period: on both sides of the Atlantic, many of the same texts and lines of argument underlay the discourse of military policy. As we will see, the literature of the time engaged this discourse by mobilizing literal and metaphorical mercenaries, often at the moment of their passage across the Atlantic. Marrying for Money: ‘The ills that haunt a mercenary match’ I have already argued that the paradoxical choice to sacrifice choice allows the mercenary to embody an excess of freedom as well as an undue willingness to forego self-determination. The mercenary’s presumed moral flaws lie in the initial assertion of freedom (the willingness to accept employment for a foreign commander) and in the subsequent lack of freedom (the willingness to sacrifice autonomy by obeying that commander’s orders). Machiavelli’s doubts about mercenaries from the commander’s perspective, in fact, arise from the fear that the initial freedom will reassert itself, and the mercenary will turn against the commander. I now turn to literary representations of mercenary action and therefore to the ways in which the term ‘mercenary’ was, in the period of the American and French Revolutions, a meeting point of psychological, national, and ideological issues that connected the severed nations of Britain and America. Like Machiavelli’s vision of the mercenary, the literary presentation


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of eligible young women in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transatlantic literature involves a sequence of unusual freedom, a commitment to sacrifice that freedom, and fears of the freedom’s reappearance after the point of contractual commitment.23 In an era that increasingly allowed young people some choice among potential spouses, the unmarried woman came to possess an unusual autonomy in the time between childhood and marriage. She normally used that freedom to enter into a contract in which she sacrificed her legal autonomy, even her legal personhood, almost completely. But even in that compromised legal state, women inspired the fear of what could be done under what Mary Wollstonecraft called ‘the convenient cloke of marriage’ (2008: 300): the fear that the married woman will break the contract by recovering some of the freedoms of the courtship stage, or more – as the married women of Byron’s poems often do, for example – and thus undermine the authority of her commander-husband. However attractive the ideal of declaring independence might have seemed in the contexts of politics or authorship, the institutions and conventions of courtship and marriage were such that the need to sacrifice self-interest was widely assumed. Every marriage involves a declaration of interdependence. Though a traditionalist writer might encourage the young person to be guided by parental advice and a more romantic writer might emphasize the power of feeling, neither would defend a mercenary marriage, a match formed without affection to enrich one of the spouses. For all of the ideological contestation of the idea of marriage – such as its ability to figure for political unions, or its dominant position in discussions of gender roles and child-rearing – the mercenary marriage functioned as one of the most effective shorthand notations for the idea of excessive self-interest. Jay Fliegelman describes the ways in which American Revolutionaries deployed the concepts of political and marital union to explain the drive for independence as something other than pure individualism. In the context of a discussion of self-determination in marriage, Fliegelman writes: The American cause was, in the broadest sense of the term, the cause of ‘union’, of liberty not as a final autonomy but as the freedom to choose one’s bond. Psychologically it was vital to the colonists to believe that they were fighting not the cause of a licentious freedom but that of a glorious volunteerism. (1982: 126)


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Such language produces a complex and sometimes paradoxical role for the mercenary, who embodies ‘the freedom to choose one’s bond’ but not ‘a glorious volunteerism’. Mercenary marriage and its consequences became a staple theme of dramas and the novel in the eighteenth century. For one illustrative example, take Barna Bidwell’s The Mercenary Match, a Tragedy (1785), an American text written in the early years of the post-Revolutionary Republic. A blank verse drama composed during Bidwell’s undergraduate career at Yale University, The Mercenary Match opens with a Prologue protesting that the play will portray no grand political events – no Greek or Roman heroes, no Washington or Benedict Arnold – but rather an incident of common life. The heroine, a Mrs Jenson, opens the play thinking of the days before her marriage: . . . . . . . . little did I then conceive The ills that haunt a mercenary match. (1785: 7, emphasis original)

In this case, the mercenary impulse underlying the marriage is that of her father, not her virtuous husband’s or her own. The father’s covetousness constitutes an original sin that creates a marriage vulnerable to the mercenary machinations of the Iago-like villain and his Roderigo-like dupe. The cheap melodrama of the early acts gains a political overlay when the two admirable men of the play, Mr Jenson and Mr Worthy, engage in a celebration of and prayer for national prosperity: ‘O happy country! Blest United States!’ (1785: 48), exclaims Worthy – just before Jenson is murdered. ‘My God!’ says Worthy after Jenson’s death, ‘Is this in Boston?’ (1785: 54, emphasis original). This is a simple version of a scenario other writers develop in more depth, that of a complacent society discovering mercenary sentiment in its midst. There is no doubt here that characters act from mercenary motives, no sense that the line between those motives and virtuous ones might be difficult to draw. Those complexities would appear, however, in the more intricate plots of novels I examine throughout this book, texts that employ the motif of mercenary marriage not to dismiss it easily but rather to explore its complications: the mercenary side of marrying for love, the equivocal freedoms of the mercenary choice. For the moment, we can linger on the express didactic purpose of Bidwell’s text: for any spectator who, like Mrs Jenson, does not


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understand the ‘ills that haunt a mercenary match’, the play will exhibit them. The implied converse of this moral lesson must involve the relative and absolute happiness of people who marry for love. Like the definition of the mercenary in the Geneva Protocol, the notion of the mercenary match requires not only the promise of an unusually large amount of money but also that money be the primary incentive of the mercenary party. Neither the mercenary soldier nor the mercenary spouse is defined by receiving money. One becomes a mercenary in thought, not action – in the combination of acquisitiveness and the expectation of a payout. In fact, stories of mercenary marriage routinely punish the mercenary parties by rendering them poor as well as miserable: the wealthy party of the mercenary match almost invariably proves profligate. The inability of the mercenary marriage to provide durable wealth suggests that the lesson of such stories is less about fighting worldly acquisitiveness than redirecting it to durable and slow-maturing assets. At its core, the logic of the mercenary match involves the same binary opposition that animates the difference between the mercenary and the legitimate combatant. The good, non-mercenary marriage involves the sacrifice of short-term economic gains in exchange for emotional rewards that will accrue gradually. The mercenary marriage involves paying a compounding interest of misery that erodes the mercenary spouse’s initial gains in lucre. In Bidwell’s play, for example, the mercenary match sacrifices the happiness of the next generation. Just as the proper soldier enjoys the intangible and unending tributes of his nation, the appropriately disinterested spouse can enjoy the financial and spiritual rewards of a healthy marital economy. Writers use the trope of mercenary marriage to signify the breakdown of this economy, the point at which the deceptions of one party constrain the autonomy of others. This constraint generates metaphors of slavery. In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700; 3rd edn 1706), for example, Mary Astell criticizes England for articulating the value of liberty while creating a condition amounting to legal slavery for married women. Constructing an analogy between the power of the sovereign and that of the husband, Astell argues that political subjects have means of seeking relief from tyranny, while wives have none: For whatever may be said against Passive-Obedience in another case, I suppose there’s no Man but likes it very well in this; how much soever


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Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, not Milton himself wou’d cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny. (1706: 27, emphasis original)

Anticipating the objection that wives are not ‘Female Slaves’ because they have some choice in their husbands, Astell argues that women’s volition is compromised by the willingness of men to hide their true motives before marriage: ‘It is the hardest thing in the World’, Astell writes, ‘for a Woman to know that a Man is not Mercenary’ (1706: 36). For Astell, the cloaking involved in mercenary action undermines the validity of marital consent.24 The novelists of the eighteenth century, of course, recognized the peculiar drama and high stakes of the courtship period. Every writer and reader, it seems, perceived the incentives to deception created by the durability of the marriage contract.25 Astell’s presentation of male mercenary ambition as the driving force in mercenary marriages inverts the more common misogynistic sense of the role of deception in courtship: the notion that women use make-up, body-altering underclothing, and other means of temporary deception to deceive men into contracting marriages. This myth is powerfully embodied in the Cinderella stories that circulated widely in eighteenth-century Britain, stories that villainize the deceptions of Cinderella’s stepsisters while celebrating Cinderella’s ability to fit unaided into slippers too small for other women. The deceptions of courtship become relevant to this study as they intersect with literary representations of mercenary fighters. Two texts from the middle of the eighteenth century are especially important to the works I address in the body of this book: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Humphry Clinker (1771), both of which set in motion key elements of mercenary action that later novels will develop more fully. The plot of Pamela builds from Pamela’s refusals of her master’s offers of money in exchange for sex – refusals that prompt the master, Mr. B., repeatedly to increase his offers and finally to marry Pamela, prompting some of the characters, and subsequently many readers of the novel, to accuse Pamela of manipulating her situation to achieve greater gains. Such accusations fuel Henry Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) and many other attacks on the morality of Richardson’s novel. The underlying problem – the difficulty of separating true humility from strategic humility – is precisely that which Astell warns against in her


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description of mercenary marriage. We can view that problem as an outgrowth of the repetition of the Cinderella myth. One of Pamela’s earliest gifts from her master is a set of clothes from his late mother (her late mistress) that includes ‘Three Pair of fine Silk Shoes, two hardly the worse, and just fit for me; for my old Lady had a very little Foot’ (Richardson 2001: 19). The unusual smallness of Pamela’s foot not only connects her to the Cinderella story by foreshadowing her unusual fitness for social advancement but also raises the possibility that Pamela herself perceives and signals the similarity of her position to Cinderella’s. Hence the problem of repetition: can Cinderella be Cinderella if she already knows the Cinderella story? Or does awareness of the strategies implied by knowing that story imply a cunning ambition that knows how to hide itself – the ambition routinely figured as that of the mercenary lover? Such concerns about mercenary marriage appear in countless literary works of the period. Pamela gains special interest for this study in its tendency to embody a general anxiety about metaphorical mercenary action in the persons of literal mercenaries. The first of these is a Swiss hired gun, Mr. Colbrand, whom Mr. B. employs to help control the unruly Pamela. Colbrand’s Swiss nationality associates his tie to Mr. B. with the longstanding presence of Swiss mercenaries in the command of other European forces, with whom they contracted individually or collectively. The mercenary militarism of the Swiss connects to a striking formulation of mercenary marriage at this point in the novel, when the tyrannical housekeeper Mrs. Jewkes tells Pamela of Mr. B.’s plan to accommodate Pamela’s desire for marriage by arranging a match with Colbrand. Pamela writes: Just now the horrid Creature [i.e., Mrs. Jewkes] tells me, as a Secret, that she has reason to think he has found out a Way to satisfy my Scruples: It is, by marrying me to this dreadful Colbrand, and buying me of him on the Wedding-day, for a Sum of Money! – Was ever the like heard? – She says that it will be my Duty to obey my Husband; . . . and that when my Master has paid for me, and I am surrender’d up, the Swiss is to go home again, with the Money, to his former Wife and Children, for she says, it is the Custom of those People to have a Wife in every Nation. (2001: 179, emphasis original)

In the imagination of Mrs. Jewkes, Colbrand’s view of marriage becomes a caricature based closely on negative views of mercenary service. Just as the mercenary Swiss has presumably been willing to


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form contractual alliances to multiple commanders for money, he will now form a marriage contract in addition to the one that represents his commitment to his abandoned homeland. And Colbrand is not the book’s only mercenary. The reader later learns that Mr. B. has fought a duel resulting from the crimes of another European fighter for hire, this time an Italian bravo – a figure, as we will see further in Chapter 5 of this study, who embodies the evils of the mercenary on an individual scale.26 This episode leads Mr. B.’s sister, Lady Davers, to accuse him of inhabiting the character of the bravo himself: ‘We all know, said she, that, since your Italian Duel, you have commenc’d a Bravo; and all your Airs breathe as strongly of the Manslayer as of the Libertine’ (2001: 419, emphasis original). Although Mr. B. defends his conduct in the Italian affair, Lady Davers’ accusation is paired with another charge of faithlessness – libertinism – that is supported by the revelation that Mr. B. has a secret daughter. Colbrand and the Italian bravo thus mix with other characters who illustrate the moral problems of trading exclusive for promiscuous associations. Still, the mercenary motif, largely submerged, is only one among the novel’s many representations of misguided practices among the English upper classes. Although it thus stops short of engaging the mercenary motif as thoroughly as later works would, Pamela illustrates and helped create the ways in which the genre of the novel allowed narratives to grapple simultaneously with the possibilities of characters writing, fighting, and marrying for money. As Catherine Ingrassia has written, Pamela connects the practices of domestic and financial spheres through key terms such as credit, interest, and capital: Pamela ‘manifested the anxieties, possibilities, and instabilities encountered by an eighteenth-century culture grappling with multiple notions of economy’ (1998: 304). It comes as no surprise that writers of subsequent generations on both sides of the Atlantic, under the direct and indirect influence of writers such as Richardson, would see the novel as the primary form in which to explore mercenary action. Hence this study, though drawing on writing in many genres, tends to find its most productive primary texts in the genre of the novel, with the main exceptions in the novelistic long poems of Byron. As much as Pamela roughly anticipates the concerns of the later works I will address, Richardson’s work also illustrates by contrast the new emphasis on mercenary activity in those later works. Even when his characters concern themselves with marrying for money – an action routinely called mercenary marriage, even in earlier texts


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– Richardson seldom uses the word ‘mercenary’ or its variants. (Such terms do not appear at all in Pamela before two fleeting occurrences in Richardson’s 1742 continuation of the novel.) By presenting Pamela’s unrelenting denials of economic ambition and sexual desire, however, Pamela does participate in building the conventional sense of eighteenth-century moralists that, as a pamphlet published on both sides of the Atlantic put it, ‘unhappy Matches are often occasioned by mere mercenary Views in one or both of the Parties, or by the headstrong motives of ill-conducted passion’ ([B. Franklin?] 1750: 5).27 When later writers juxtapose mercenary warfare and mercenary marriage, they invite readers to consider analogies, or breaks in analogies, between the macrocosm of national defense and the microcosm of the formation of marriage contracts. Whereas Pamela invokes mercenaries through the Swiss and Italian stock characters Richardson inherited from earlier writers, Tobias Smollett’s 1771 The Adventures of Humphry Clinker brings the issue up to date and into the context of the British army, and it subtly adds a parallel to mercenary authorship that later authors will develop further. Humphry Clinker responds to the post-Culloden reconsideration of Scottish participation in the British armed forces. This debate about the British military, which involved extensive public commentary on the roles of militia and mercenary soldiers, was the first of a series of historical developments that would drive later works’ engagements with mercenary action. Smollett’s character Obadiah Lismahago, a Scottish lieutenant in the British army whose career seems to have been harmed by individual and national lack of money, brings the popular debates about the British military into the novel’s world, in a way that carefully links military and matrimonial duties and rewards. Most of the novel’s marriages comfortably align affection with economic interest, but Lismahago’s union with Tabitha Bramble is more complicated. The Brambles’ nephew Jery Melford describes Lismahago’s first encounter with the Bramble party: We were immediately interested in behalf of this veteran – Even Tabby’s heart was melted; but our pity was warmed with indignation, when we learned, that in the course of two sanguinary wars, he had been wounded, maimed, mutilated, taken, and enslaved, without ever having attained a higher rank than that of lieutenant . . . . (1998: 189)

Matthew Bramble weeps at this ‘injustice’ and calls it ‘flagrant’, but Lismahago refuses that characterization, explaining that those


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who earned faster promotions ‘bought their preferment with their money’, which he did not have (1998: 189). Lismahago claims to accept this inequity, stating that he performed his duty and expects no compensation beyond his half-pay pension. Lismahago’s insistence that he deserves no further compensation activates the moral economy of volunteerism. Soon after the exchange quoted above, Smollett introduces the two mechanisms of compensating Lismahago that will compete for priority in the novel. The first arises from Lismahago’s captivity narrative: while serving in North America, Lismahago and an ensign Murphy have met ‘a party of Miamis, who carried them away in captivity’ (1998: 193). After undergoing horrific torture, Lismahago has married ‘the squaw Squinkinacoosta’ (1998: 193), remarkable for her abilities to eat, drink, and torture: Lismahago ‘had lived very happily with this accomplished woman for two years, during which she bore him a son’, and after which she died of a fever (1998: 194). Lismahago has gained a kind of status in America that he will not find in Britain: he has been ‘acknowledged first warrior of the Badger tribe’, he says (1998: 194). However, this and his other ‘advantages and honours he was obliged to resign, in consequence of being exchanged for the orator of the community, who had been taken prisoner by the Indians that were in alliance with the English’ (1998: 194). His connection with ‘the Badger tribe’ has thus been sacrificed in a two-layered operation of exchange: first, the payment, by both sides in the war, of Native American ‘allies’ – Lismahago diplomatically eschews calling them ‘mercenaries’ – and then the resulting exchange of prisoners. But Lismahago will cash in as well, by trading on his story to win the affection of Tabitha, which he does in large part by denying the right of Scottish soldiers to claim any glory beyond that allowed to soldiers who have done their duty (1998: 203). He specifically resists taking umbrage at the advantages conferred upon English soldiers because of their superior ‘parliamentary connections’ and ‘greater command of money to smooth the way to . . . success’ (1998: 204).28 Whether Lismahago expresses such sentiments sincerely or strategically, he benefits from the codes of volunteerism, which seek especially to reward those who claim no special reward. The rewards he spurns for his military service do become rewards of marriage and material wealth – the ‘holy bands of mattermoney’, as Smollett puts it in one of the novel’s significant malapropisms (1998: 352) – and these rewards come from attracting the kind of


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patron’s favor that Lismahago has affected to spurn in his military career. Matthew Bramble offers such favor, and he does so explicitly as compensation for Lismahago’s military service: after hearing Lismahago’s plan to move back to America, Bramble ‘thought it very hard, that a man who had served his country with honour, should be driven by necessity to spend his old age, among the refuse of mankind, in such a remote part of the world’ (1998: 267). Bramble thus concludes that the apparent mutual interest between his sister and Lismahago ‘should be encouraged, and improved, if possible, into a matrimonial union; in which case there would be a comfortable provision for both’ (1998: 267). Smollett thus creates a situation in which the military system’s practices and rhetoric become mirrored, transformed, and sometimes reversed in the domestic sphere. Lismahago’s military service and his marriage are deeply connected, but they are not analogous: the former creates the latter, which responds to and compensates for the former. When Smollett alludes to mercenary authorship with a slyly ironic embedded representation of himself as ‘S——’, the benevolent host of ‘a society of authors’ and ‘one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage, and above dependence’ (1998: 124), he completes the interlinking of the three areas that will increasingly concern writers of subsequent decades. These thematic emphases will take on a new concreteness, however, in the age of the American and French Revolutions, as soldiers, sailors, and wartime rhetoric increasingly infiltrate novelistic worlds, as authors increasingly imagine themselves analogous to soldiers, and as marriages continue to provide a microcosmic content that inflects and comments on representations of military affairs. Mercenary Writing and Writing the Mercenary Like other categories of mercenary action, mercenary writing involves the violation of independent sincerity. Whether serving a given political interest or the perceived desires of a mass market, the mercenary writer sacrifices autonomy of voice. Such a writer lives on the wrong side of Immanuel Kant’s dichotomy in Critique of Judgment (1790) between ‘free art’ and ‘craft’, or ‘mercenary art’ (1987: 171, emphases original). Kant’s term for mercenary art, Lohnkunst, literally translates to ‘wage-art’ or ‘salary-art’, but the mercenary metaphor has become a translator’s commonplace.29 By what Bourdieu terms


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the ‘loser wins’ logic of the cultural field, the mercenary’s response to conventional economic incentives involves a sacrifice of cultural capital.30 This logic presents the mercenary artist as necessarily failing to produce the highest art, which must derive from a kind of disinterested, intrinsic genius that lies outside of the marketplace. The writers addressed in this study grappled in various ways with the presumptive association between Kantian wage-art and a devaluing inauthenticity. They perceived this incipient logic of cultural value and understood how their reputations depended on negotiating a balance between economic and artistic success. These issues become clearest in the cases of Walter Scott and Lord Byron, both of whom articulated their struggles with the cultural implications of writing bestsellers. Such issues also inform my approach to Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, writers who explored the possibility that the new American political and economic systems could create new ways of conceiving the professional author’s role. Charlotte Smith expressed related but different concerns involving the tension between women’s ability to sell their books and women’s restricted ability to market themselves or, after marriage, to control the profits resulting from authorship. Many of the literary works I address in this study concern themselves with the means of expression available to writers willingly or unwillingly immersed in the literary marketplace, writers who know they have tenuous claims to Kantian disinterest. The broader story of the movement of authorship from a patronage system to more broad-based funding sources such as subscriptions and then mass markets is well known: this is the narrative in which Samuel Johnson’s 1755 letter to Lord Chesterfield stands as the author’s declaration of independence from the power of patrons to control the production of books.31 In the course of this study, I take up authors of the first generations to inhabit the post-Johnsonian literary landscape, writers who feel and sometimes question the sort of independence brought about by their ability to engage a literary marketplace. I mean, in other words, to examine the ways Johnson’s metaphorical declaration of independence and the declarations of national independence in America and elsewhere produce a contrary urge to seek the prudent limits of independence. Whether conceived as a soldier for hire or as a hack writer, the mercenary represents the outsider who makes these limits visible. Such limits shift over time, as is evident in the etymology of the modern ‘freelance’ writer. Walter Scott coined that term in Ivanhoe


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as ‘Free Lances’, meaning mercenaries, in a conventionally pejorative sense (Scott 2000: 297; ‘freelance’ 1989). The term retained a negative connotation and applied to politicians and other professionals in the nineteenth century, taking on its contemporary, morally neutral sense of a freelancer as ‘[a] person who makes himself or herself available to be engaged for work on particular assignments or projects, rather than being engaged on a long-term or permanent basis by a single employer’ only in the twentieth (‘freelancer’ 1989).32 If we refer today to a writer leaving an unfulfilling office job to attempt a career of freelancing, we signal the ability of the mercenary to transform into a figure of admirable self-sufficiency. The freelance writer does often sacrifice autonomy of voice (conforming to house styles, taking assignments, and so forth) but often gains other kinds of autonomy in exchange: the ability to choose when and how much to work, to feel above the control of any one employer. The notion of the freelance writer draws on the ancient profession of arms but describes peculiarly modern writers, those who find in new literary marketplaces new means of expressing relationships between authorship and money. The prominence of Kantian Lohnkunst (‘mercenary art’) prompted some writers, especially those with other means of financial support, to articulate a vigorous insistence on their own freedom of creation and purity of voice. Others, often those whose need for money was more obvious, invoked one means or another of claiming a selflessness that would ward off accusations of mercenary motives: representing one’s work as a form of national service, for example, or as a form of obligation to one’s family, or even as the result of metaphorical slavery. This book will show authors employing all these devices and more to shield themselves against charges of mercenary writing, often in ways that undermine their claims to a free, independent artistic vocation. All of the main authors examined in this book expressed keen interest in defining their respective relationships to the commercial environment of their times and places, and the authors examined those relationships by writing about multiple, overlapping spheres of mercenary action. In all of these spheres, the mercenary functions as a scapegoat of modern thought: when imagined as an individual choosing affiliations in return for money, the mercenary embodies in extreme form the individualism, independence, and contractualism that build modern commercial societies. Attacks on mercenary soldiering grow stronger in an environment, such as that of Revolutionary America, where people face unusually pressing choices


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about national loyalty. Railing against mercenary marriage becomes necessary when young people gain the ability to choose their spouses. Objections to mercenary authorship feed on the access of writers to a thriving marketplace. A culture’s anti-mercenary rhetoric comprises its stories of modernity’s bad choices. In taking up analogies between the political and strategic role of mercenary soldiers, on the one hand, and the actions of so-called mercenary writers or spouses on the other, this study introduces the underlying issue of synecdoches between private actions and social structures. The slippery connections between microcosmic and macrocosmic mercenary action produce the creative tensions within the texts examined here. The simultaneous identification of and separation between private and public mercenary action constitute a specific case of the broader tendency Ian Duncan identifies in the Waverley novels, which, he writes, represent the historical formation of the modern imperial nation-state in relation to the sentimental formation of the private individual: a homology, a synecdochic equivalence, is asserted between these processes. At the same time a tension, a contradiction, a violence occupies the narrative site of their conjunction – as it is one of disjunction, of dialectical contest. (1992: 15, emphasis original)

Duncan asserts an apparent synecdochic equivalence between the formation of the state and that of the individual, an equivalence that dissolves into tension and contradiction under pressure. This model points to a broader question of whether or how the people of a state mirror the forms and leaders of their government.33 I will argue that Scott and other writers maneuver between two poles of continuity and disjunction between macrocosm and microcosm. The literary genre of the novel, along with the novelistic narrative poem, gave writers around 1800 their most adaptable means of probing relationships between microcosmic and macrocosmic mercenary action. I will argue, for example, that Brown’s Ormond presents the disjunction between the microcosm and macrocosm as a sublimely indescribable menace; as the novel stages an unresolvable argument about the identity and nature of its villainy, the primary threat seems to become the very impermeability of the barrier between individual desires and systematic effects. Smith’s Desmond, on the other hand, calls the reader’s attention to apparently straightforward ways of embodying French Revolutionary and


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other cultural values in microcosmic actions of individual men and women, but the easy oppositions between English and French, mercenary and free ideals descend into confusion and contradiction in the novel’s climactic action sequence. In these and other cases, the characteristics that drive complicated novelistic plots militate against a simple, pejorative presentation of mercenary action in military and civilian life. That is, when confronting mercenaries and mercenary actions, the special ability of the novel to contain many voices and perspectives, a characteristic emphasized by Mikhail Bakhtin and his followers, collides with and undermines the normal ease with which people resist identification with the mercenary. The five chapters of the book mainly address long narrative works by five major writers of the period: Brown, Charlotte Smith, Scott, Byron, and Cooper. These writers present mercenary action with unusual complexity and self-awareness, in every case reaching beyond propaganda to explore the problematic nature of the mercenary. Furthermore, their works invite readers to consider the meeting point of military and civilian manifestations of mercenary action: the nexus of fighting, writing, and marrying for money. When addressing military mercenaries, these writers generally portray armies and soldiers rather than navies and other armed services. Sailors could accrue fortunes by capturing prizes, but navies were not the focus of transatlantic anti-mercenary discourse: the British sailor was an established national emblem in a way that the British soldier was not. A sailor’s prize money represented the depletion of an enemy’s resources and was not guaranteed in advance but instead resulted from perilous action. And the mercenary forces available from other European powers were mainly soldiers. Concerns about mercenary soldiering, however, were ubiquitous, even with regard to regular national armies. In Britain, for example, recruiting shortfalls meant that bonuses became ever more necessary to entice men to enlist.34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had enlisted in 1793, in part because of his debts, compared these bonuses explicitly to payments given to foreign mercenaries in his 1795 lecture ‘On the Present War’: Bounties in truth are offered – great and unexampled bounties – tho’ not always as faithfully paid as magnificently promised. The price of Man-flesh offered to the British Private has almost reached the sum paid to the German Princes – ‘Death’s prime Slave merchants’. (Coleridge 1970–a: 70)35


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For all these reasons, the writers of the time consider the problem of the military mercenary mainly as one of armies, and this book does the same. Using Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (1799) as its central text, Chapter 1 details the transformation of Enlightenment theories of soldiering in the context of the American Revolution and the early American Republic. I argue that the United States’ foundational anti-mercenary ideology – developed in protest of the British use of German soldiers that the colonists called mercenaries – provides an important context for understanding Ormond, whose subplots rely heavily on what we would now call the distinctions between lawful and unlawful combatants, legitimate and illegitimate violence. Brown connects the writing and fighting of his characters to explore the relationships among money, moral action, and the state of the Republic. The minor characters of Ormond include expatriate soldiers and forgers, each of whom tests or exceeds the boundaries of proper action in the service of the new nation, whether in military action or authorship. These characters develop the novel’s concern with forms of fighting and writing detached from a grounding national authority that would provide an essential transparency or reliability. Emphasizing this detachment provides a way to align the well-developed scholarship on Brown’s unreliable narrators with the attention paid more recently to the novel’s figuration of the Republic. I argue that Brown undermines the apparently sympathetic narrative voice of the novel in ways that suggest the frightening paradox of a sourceless conspiracy, a destabilizing force generated in emergent orders such as Smithian capitalism and Madisonian democracy. Mercenary marriage, an important but largely submerged motif in Ormond, becomes central in Chapter 2, which examines novels by Charlotte Smith that place the victims of mercenary marriage in the midst of characters who fight and write for money. This juxtaposition allows such works to illuminate the aforementioned kinship between unaffiliated mercenaries and eligible young women: both occupy a position of unusual autonomy but weaken or eliminate their independence when they exercise that autonomy. The keystone texts of this chapter, Smith’s early novels Desmond (1792) and The Old Manor House (1793), provide a counterpoint to Brown’s concern with the use of force in post-Revolutionary America. Smith sends the novels’ lead male characters into the French and American Revolutions, respectively. Both novels invite the reader to perceive


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structural similarities between the French and British old regimes’ use of mercenary forces and the anti-Revolutionary patriarchy’s support of marriages formed by cruelly mercenary parents and husbands. Smith thus seems to present an easy dichotomy between the mercenary structures of the anti-Revolutionaries and the voluntaristic associations of their opponents. However, the novels complicate the celebration of Revolutionary volunteerism by having their heroes encounter the problems of mercenary action and fail to find a viable alternative, some pure and voluntary means of forming nations and marriages. The alienating potential of warfare also concerns Scott and Byron, the subjects of Chapter 3, who use Quentin Durward and Don Juan, respectively, to imagine a kind of patriotic autonomy available to a soldier in a company of mercenaries. The eponymous heroes of these works find themselves semi-voluntarily serving foreign commanders. Durward and Juan both find ways to separate themselves from their mercenary peers, but the contours of their stories illuminate the authors’ opposed views of the value of local and national attachments. Whereas in Quentin Durward Scott imagines ways for a Scotsman to maintain a grounded local culture even in travel, Byron invokes the United States and George Washington to construct a nationalism growing out of internationalism – a model he recreated in altered form in the cause of Greek independence. Quentin Durward and Don Juan reinforce their respective political models with their presentations of love and marriage; Scott enables his hero to enrich himself through marriage by way of a fairy-tale plot that suppresses the problem of mercenary motivations, and the romantic attachments of Byron’s Don Juan embody a kind of transferrable exclusivity that parallels the wandering course of Juan’s national affiliations. Even Byron contains the presentation of plural marriage to the harem episode of Don Juan; however, James Fenimore Cooper places the threat of bigamy at the centre of his American Revolutionary novel The Spy (1821). The disruptions of political and marital institutions inform Cooper’s vision of an American culture struggling to emerge from European models of legitimate violence and of literary fiction, the latter explicitly exemplified by the works of Scott and Byron. Chapter 4 addresses Cooper’s early novels of the Revolutionary period, especially The Spy. Problems of wartime heroism pervade The Spy, a novel that builds a dialectical relationship between the categories of the spy and the mercenary by placing


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its spy, Harvey Birch, among regular forces, militias, Hessian mercenaries, Native American auxiliaries, Cowboys, and Skinners. In this novel, Cooper imagines the formation of the American Republic in the midst of a menagerie of fighters whose interactions repeatedly bring into question the categories of legitimate and illegitimate violence, rebellion, and deception. The novel’s admirable characters whose families populate the post-Revolutionary United States are those who develop models of private affiliation that, while stopping short of literal bigamy, do involve the cultivation of multiple, nonexclusive attachments. The fifth and final chapter takes up another, much later Cooper novel, The Bravo. The aim of this chapter is not only to offer a further reading of Cooper but also to explore the development of a transatlantic literature about the newly fallen Venetian Republic and its bravos. In this literature, the Venetian bravo – an assassin for hire, either by private parties or by the Gothically secretive and tyrannical government – exhibits the characteristics of the traditionally monstrous mercenary. The figure of the bravo emphasizes the nature of the individual contractor. The bravo also generally comes from within Venetian society, unlike the mercenary, whose identity typically stems from foreignness. For writers in Britain and America, therefore, the bravo becomes, oddly, a foreign figure of the domestic mercenary – one who enters a mercenary life not by migration but as a participant in his nation’s working culture. The literary Venetian bravo rose to prominence in books by British writers such as Matthew Lewis and Samuel Rogers and crossed the Atlantic in Cooper’s novel. This is the final twist in my narrative of the literary mercenary: the paradoxical displacement of the mercenary to a foreign location in order to domesticate the figure. What lies beyond this stage, I argue in closing, is a later, more corporate version of the mercenary: the Pinkerton agent or the Blackwater guard, the member of a private force contracting with the state and acting in parallel to regular forces. The case of The Bravo also helps to clarify the way in which this is a transatlantic study, as Cooper’s novel does not easily occupy the usual categories of American literary difference. J. Hillis Miller describes four reasons to differentiate English and American Romanticisms: that different natural phenomena produce different literatures, that American ‘democratic social structures’ change the nature of American literature, that American literature derives from but distinctly alters European sources, or that differences arise from


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‘one version or another of the doctrine of continued inspiration’ (1991: 220–1). By setting its action in Venice, Cooper ensures that The Bravo resists the first two modes of conceiving a distinctively American literature, Romantic or otherwise: the foreign setting resists any attempt to see the book’s vision as arising out of peculiarly American landscapes or social institutions. Cooper and the novel seem agnostically silent on the book’s relationship to continued inspiration. The remaining logic, that of derivation with a difference, seems most appropriate, but as we will see, the novel puts much more effort into establishing derivation (from Shakespeare and Byron, especially) than difference. Miller himself rejects the ‘notion of an American difference in poetry or criticism’ as ‘an example of misplaced concreteness’, ‘at once too general and too specific’ (1991: 223). The Bravo seems American primarily because Cooper was American, and for readers who know this, because Cooper called it ‘perhaps, in spirit, the most American book I ever wrote’ (Cooper 1960–8: 4/461, emphasis original). The Bravo’s American identity is itself transatlantic: if there is any truth to Cooper’s claim, it lies in the imaginative translation of the novel’s setting, characters, and social institutions to an American environment, a translation that necessarily involves the play of similarity and difference. To consider The Bravo as an American novel involves one variety of what Paul Giles describes as a ‘spatial turn in United States literary studies’ that ‘problematize[s] the geographical integrity of the United States’ and therefore ‘problematize[s] the “natural” affiliation of certain values with a territory that can no longer be regarded as organically complete or self-contained’ (2003: 64). Cooper’s claim of The Bravo’s American essence requires one kind of transnational and transatlantic imagination. The other works I examine involve other kinds, often in the examination of the mercenary’s ability to destabilize national identities, either psychologically (as in Orlando Somerive’s disillusioning encounter with Native American mercenaries) or politically (as in Ormond’s nightmare vision of an America beset from its origins by European mercenary impulses). Scott and Byron, the circulation of whose works itself challenges any notion of a self-contained national literature, both use the mercenary to imagine strikingly independent action in wartime. Byron’s writing and his short-lived military career involve an effort to retranslate new American liberties into the European context, producing a multinational nationalism that ended in the actual hiring


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of mercenary soldiers. Even Cooper’s The Spy, a straightforwardly American novel in many ways The Bravo is not, takes places in a space of ‘neutral ground’ that teems with mercenaries; a space existing outside of clear national control has a population where attachments of people to political institutions have weakened or dissolved. These texts use the mercenary to explore the spaces – sometimes territorial, sometimes psychological – beyond the reach of state power, where the transcendent consciousness of Romanticism finds its strange analogue in the mercenary’s fearful individualism. NOTES

1. The idea of foreignness was often vexed in this context. Linda Colley argues that the American Revolution involved splits within as well as between the contending nations: it was ‘a civil war, not just in the sense that both sides had much in common, but also in that each side was split within itself (1992: 137, emphasis original). And as Paul Giles points out, questions of whether and how Americans could become foreign to Britain persisted long after the war itself, as the impressment controversy during the War of 1812 involved two distinct conceptions of national identity: for the Americans, citizenship was an affiliation which could be chosen and bestowed voluntarily, so that in their eyes British sailors had every right to renounce their fatherland and join the well-paid American ranks; but for the British, then as now, no subject of the king could ever ‘alienate his duty’. (2001: 120) 2. I am turning her words to new purposes, but Sarah Percy states directly that mercenaries ‘are problematic because they make the decision to fight independently’ (2007: 56). 3. For one major study of many such figures, see Linebaugh and Rediker (2000). 4. The connection between the exile and the mercenary gains strength in the roots of the concept of nostalgia, a term coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer and first applied to Swiss mercenaries: ‘To ward off nostalgia, Swiss soldiers were forbidden to play, sing, or even whistle alpine tunes’ (Lowenthal 1985: 10). 5. In fact, as Percy explains, the main obstacle to outlawing mercenary service in the Hague Conventions and other cases has been the ‘longstanding belief in the importance of individual liberty’, especially freedom of movement (2007: 197). 6. For an example of a text calling the same forces ‘slaves’ and ‘mercenaries’, see the 1794 poem by ‘C.’ titled ‘To the Tyrants Infesting France’:


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Freedom’s bold sons can herded slaves oppose? Fear PATRIOT bands the mercenary’s steel? Through wounds and deaths they whelm their wretched foes; From trembling Fortune wrest her traiterous wheel. (‘C.’ 1976: stanza III) 7. Transatlantic relations in the Revolutionary period were framed in part by competing formulations of excessive liberty. British loyalists portrayed independence itself as an excess of liberty that betrayed Americans’ filial obligation to Britain (S. Manning 2002: 21); the mercenary embodied for the Revolutionaries a contrary excess of liberty authorizing the break of national affiliations. 8. The rise of corporate actors on the battlefield has prompted a reconsideration of the role of mercenaries in humanitarian law. For one recent analysis of the legal questions involved, see Fallah (2006). 9. This Protocol was signed with intention to ratify but not ratified by the United States (and a handful of other countries) because of a perception that other parts of it might afford undue protection to terrorist groups. For a presidential argument against ratification in 1987, see Reagan (1987). 10. A stable and neutral definition of the mercenary is notoriously difficult to establish. Thomson remarks that ‘there is no consensus’ on a definition and describes some of the complications involved in finding one (1994: 26–7). Percy devotes a chapter to defining the mercenary; she critiques a number of criteria (including versions of some of those that make up the Geneva Protocol’s definition) and herself argues that mercenaries ‘should be defined by the extent to which they are motivated to fight for a cause’ (2007: 54). 11. For an overview of the classical and Christian traditions of moral opposition to the profit motive, see Muller (2002), Chapter 1. 12. Contrarily, many governments also outlaw pure volunteerism. See, for example, Title 31, Section 1342 of United States federal law, the ‘[l]imitation on voluntary services’, which reads in part, ‘[a]n officer or employee of the United States Government or of the District of Columbia government may not accept voluntary services . . . except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property’ (US Code Collection 2007). For a discussion of this law’s interpretation and limitations, see Tomanelli (2003: 321 and following). For the law’s place in the development of ‘dollar-a-year men’ serving the government in wartime, see Bardeesy (2008). 13. Although many contractors in Iraq have received daily pay in excess of that given to members of the US military, some analysts have expressed uncertainty about whether the regular soldiers ultimately receive less compensation, given the long-term benefits they earn through their service. (For characteristic commentary on such issues, see Matt


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Taibbi’s [2007] allegations of excessive compensation in the Rolling Stone piece ‘The Great Iraq Swindle’, or the commenters’ discussion of ‘mercenaries’ in Iraq following the economist Tyler Cowen’s [2007] post titled ‘Should we use mercenaries at all?’ on the popular blog Marginal Revolution.) From my more theoretical perspective, the relative compensation of the soldiers is less important than the cultural resonance of their compensation. Even if veterans’ benefits make the regular soldiers’ compensation comparable to that of the contractors – a doubtful proposition – the very deferment of regular soldiers’ payment affords them the prestige associated with slow-maturing work in the cultural field. 14. For one example of left-wing critique of the salary difference between regular soldiers and contractors working for the United States in Iraq, see Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s (2006) blog post for The Nation called ‘Iraq for Sale’, which describes a film by that name directed by Robert Greenwald: Greenwald’s film exposes the long-time personal connections between this administration and the profiteers and investigates Blackwater Security Consulting, Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, and CACI International, finding such travesties as truck drivers – told they would be kept out of harm’s way – forced to drive into battle zones unprotected; mercenaries used for combat operations and interrogations and soldiers training civilians to, ultimately, outsource their own jobs at much higher salaries so that friends of the administration can rake in obscene profits. The corresponding assumption that regular military personnel are, by definition, underpaid comes up in a tellingly off-handed way in the recent bestseller Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, in which authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2007) write about appeals to readers’ self-interest: Self-interest isn’t the whole story, of course – especially if we define ‘self-interest’ narrowly, as we often do, in terms of wealth and security. If it were the whole story, no one would ever serve in the armed forces. (2007: 182) Such statements coexist uneasily with reports such as Ann Scott Tyson’s in the Washington Post in 2007 – the same year Made to Stick was published – with the headline ‘Army Offers Big Cash To Keep Key Officers’. 15. Another way to make this point is to say that, by ostensibly accepting compensation below market value, the legitimate soldier steps out of a capitalist model in which a contractual agreement establishes the grounds of reciprocal consent. If both parties improve their standing by


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16.

17.

18.

19.

[ 31

the bargain – as indicated in mainstream economic models of the gains from trade – the bargain reduces or eliminates the need for ongoing reciprocal obligations. Peter Hulme has argued that ‘only under the fetishized social relations of capitalism does reciprocity disappear altogether, however loudly its presence is trumpeted’ (1992: 147). I would say rather that the capitalist contract contains reciprocal obligations and makes them explicit. Moulitsas made this remark on Daily Kos, of which he is the founder and publisher. The remark was not part of one of his own posts but a comment on another author’s article; the article and comment were both posted on 1 April 2004 (Moulitsas Zúniga 2004). When interviewed about the deaths of private contractors in Iraq, logistics director Jack Holly, a retired Marine colonel, told the Washington Post, ‘When you see the number of my people who have been killed, the American public should recognize that every one of them represents an American soldier or Marine or sailor who didn’t have to go in harm’s way’ (Fainaru 2007: A01). Remarkably, even Holly’s request for the sympathy of ‘the American public’ does not attempt to claim that the contractors themselves have grievable lives. Instead, Holly claims that the contractors have earned public gratitude by substituting their own lives for the conventionally grievable lives of regular military forces. A piece in the New York Times offers a different but related approach to provoke reader sympathy for contractors in Iraq: James Risen (2007) writes, ‘The toll of the war on contractors has largely been hidden from public view. About 1,000 have died since the conflict began, and nearly 13,000 have been injured. While some are well compensated for their work in Iraq, many more collect modest wages and provide support services vital to the military’. Risen’s piece does not attempt to explain the connection between low compensation and public sympathy; the logic is so deeply established as to seem self-evident. The contract is generally not a bond, however, in the sense of constraining the parties to do what they have promised to do. In most cases, contracts do not enforce ‘specific performance’ of promised actions but instead set out the penalties for breaking the contract’s promises. In the context of this study, it is anachronistically interesting that courts have resisted enforcing ‘specific performance’ partly by applying the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude. See the fourteenth chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1996) for a foundational discussion of promises and contracts. John Brewer documents the extent of British investment in foreign troops in the eighteenth century and thus the context of the era’s military debates. During the War of Spanish Succession, Brewer notes, over £7 million, or ‘nearly 25 per cent of all money voted for expenditure on the army[,] was assigned to foreign subsidies’. For the period from


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1739 to 1763, the figure is 21 per cent (1989: 32). Brewer argues that the common approach of ‘using army statistics as indicators of military commitment’ is flawed; examining ‘the total number of armed forces’, including foreign troops, reveals that ‘despite quite a small population, Britain was nevertheless able to put a great many men in the field and on the high seas’ (1989: 42). 20. As Thomas Moore began working on the Irish Melodies project that would become an immensely successful work of Romantic-era cultural nationalism, he wrote in a letter to John Stevenson a paragraph that, like Herder’s argument, connects cultural nationalism to antimercenary ideology: I feel very anxious that a work of this kind should be undertaken. We have too long neglected the only talent for which our English neighbours ever deigned to allow us any credit. Our National Music has never been properly collected; and, while the composers of the Continent have enriched their Operas and Sonatas with Melodies borrowed from Ireland, – very often without even the honesty of acknowledgement, – we have left those treasures, in a great degree, unclaimed and fugitive. Thus our Airs, like too many of our countrymen, have, for want of protection at home, passed into the service of foreigners. (2007: 145–6) For some readers, the cultural nationalism of Moore’s letter would be ironic, given the role of Moore’s project in creating an Englishlanguage popular music from the melodies of Ireland. That is, for linguistic nationalists, Moore would have been a primary agent of putting Irish culture ‘into the service of foreigners’. 21. See Thomson for an account of the rise of what she calls ‘mercenarism’ in Europe (1994: 26–35) and also its fall, stemming from the ‘watershed’ US Neutrality Act of 1794 (1994: 79) and marked by ‘a major wave of antimercenarism legislation’ prompted by Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 (1994: 81). 22. As J. G. A. Pocock puts it, ‘[t]he paradox developed in Machiavelli’s argument is that only a part-time soldier can be trusted to possess a fulltime commitment to the war and its purposes. A citizen called to arms, with a home and an occupation (arte) of his own, will wish to end the war and go home, where a mercenary, glad rather than sorry if the war drags on indefinitely, will make no attempt to win it’ (1975: 200). This perspective was developed in the British pamphlet debates about militias in the eighteenth century by writers such as Thomas Whiston, who argued that militiamen tend to economic moderation rather than greed because they ‘[do] not expect a continuance of [their] fortunes by the continuance of war’ (1757: 84). However, soldiers who wished to return home might also exercise too much independence and thereby


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23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

[ 33

neglect fighting the war at hand, as George Washington discovered while trying to lead New England soldiers: ‘Leaving their posts for a few weeks to return home struck them not as desertion, but instead as a wholly sensible exercise of the very freedom they were defending’ (J. Ellis 2007: 32). This similarity grounds a joke in George Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer (1706), where a young woman, Sylvia, dressed as a man, remarks, ‘I will [en]list with Captain Plume; I’m a free-born Englishman and will be a slave in my own way’ (Farquhar 1997: 50). Sylvia speaks of military enlistment at this point, but her marriage to Plume closes the play. Similar ideas are dramatized in Eliza Haywood’s 1726 book The Mercenary Lover; or, The Unfortunate Heiresses. Haywood’s epistolary account is avowedly moralistic, aiming to show ‘[h]ow far are Wealth and Beauty, the two great Idols of the admiring World, from being real Blessings to the Possessors of them!’ (1726: 9). The main female character, Clotilda, made vulnerable by her coquettishness, marries Clitander, a wealthy suitor. They are happy at first but doomed because money is ‘the only Darling of his mercenary Wishes’ (1726: 12). Clitander plots to get the half of Clotilda’s fortune controlled by her sister Althea, only to find that he feels lust for Althea as well. He therefore seduces and impregnates Althea, attempts to trick her into signing over her fortune, and, when discovered in his villainy, kills her and her unborn child (which is, memorably, then presented to Clotilda). In the end, Haywood assures us, Clitander will go to Hell. Fliegelman points out that for both parties, the indissolubility of eighteenth-century marriage, especially in Britain, creates a rigidity that pushes the agreement outside the sphere of the contract, which ‘may be said to be an agreement for which there exist fully defined grounds for its possible dissolution’ (1982: 123). ‘Bravo’ was a loose synonym for ‘mercenary’ in eighteenth-century usage, as illustrated by David Hume’s description in The History of England of King Stephen’s efforts to protect his ‘tottering throne’. Hume writes that Stephen employed ‘great numbers of those bravoes . . . with whom every country in Europe, by reason of the general ill police and turbulent government, extremely abounded. These mercenary troops guarded his throne by the terrors of the sword’ (1851: 1/273). This pamphlet is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but the attribution is questioned in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (1961: 3/74). Smollett reinforces Lismahago’s observations about the relative status of Scottish and English soldiers in the British army by introducing the character of one Brown, who ‘had been bred a weaver’ but ‘from a spirit of idleness and dissipation, enlisted as a soldier in the East-India


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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

Mercenaries in British and American Literature company’ and, by attracting the notice of ‘lord Clive’, gained the preferment by which he has ‘honestly amassed above twelve thousand pounds’ (1998: 265). In addition to Pluhar’s edition of the Critique of Judgment, J. H. Bernard’s translation of the Critique and R. Klein’s translation of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Economimesis’ also use ‘mercenary’ in translating Kant’s ‘Lohnkunst’ (Kant 1951: 146; Derrida 1981: 4). References to the Critique here use Pluhar’s edition (Kant 1987). Closely analogous to aesthetic claims made by Kant’s British contemporaries, this distinction between free and mercenary art has attracted modern critical attention, most notably in Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Economimesis’: ‘It would appear’, writes Derrida, ‘that mimesis and oikonomia could have nothing to do with each other. The point is to demonstrate the contrary, to exhibit the systematic link between the two’ (1981: 3–4). As Derrida puts it, Kant’s ‘hierarchical opposition of liberal art and mercenary art is that of play and work’ (1981: 5); by this logic, salaried art has a lower status because liberal art produces pleasure in itself rather than by the motivating but constraining prospect of payment. The ‘mimesis’ of ‘economimesis’ is a correspondence of process rather than representation: the free poet sacrifices himself to produce extra-economic value. ‘This is a poetic commerce, because God is a poet’ (Derrida 1981: 12). This notion especially applies to the higher altitudes of culture. Bourdieu writes, ‘at least in the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers (as with Symbolist poetry), the economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of “loser wins”, on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies . . .’ (1993: 39). The contemporary debate about the circumstances surrounding Johnson’s letter lies to the side of my point here, but recent commentary includes W. Jackson Bate’s argument that Chesterfield ‘has been popularly and unjustly regarded as a sort of villain in the Johnson story’ (Bate 1998: 245). For a detailed examination of the Johnson– Chesterfield relationship, see Korshin (1970). As Claire Connolly has pointed out to me in conversation, the word maneuver also seems to have expanded from strict military to broad civilian usage. It initially referred to the tactical or strategic movement of troops, vehicles, and such, then took on the general sense of ‘a carefully planned scheme or action’, applying specifically to the marriage market in Maria Edgeworth’s 1809 Tales of Fashionable Life (‘manoeuvre/maneuver’ 1989). This question also lies at the heart of the arguments between Machiavelli and his opponents about the moral obligations of the prince. Machiavelli


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argues for a fundamental break between the obligations of the prince and the subject: ‘a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot possibly exercise all those virtues for which men are called “good”. To preserve the state, he often has to do things against his word, against charity, against humanity, against religion’ (1992: 49). 34. Other recruiting techniques also came into play, including the Quota Acts of 1795 and 1796, as well as the use of press gangs and the notorious ‘crimps’, civilian recruiters who ‘used methods little short of kidnapping’ (Emsley 2000: 60). The means of persuading or coercing men to enlist had earlier provided comic fodder for George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), which provides the epigraph for this introduction. On the economic facts that made recruiting difficult, see Gates (1996: 137). 35. As Jared Richman points out in his 2009 University of Pennsylvania dissertation, less extreme concerns with recruiting tactics also arise in poems about wounded veterans such as Robert Merry’s ‘The Wounded Soldier’ (1795?; Merry 2009) and Wordsworth’s ‘The Female Vagrant’ (1798), where the vagrant’s husband has succumbed in an economically ‘evil time’ to recruiting, as . . . with proud parade, the noisy drum Beat round, to sweep the streets of want and pain. (2008: lines 91–4)


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Chapter 1

ORMOND’ S FIGHTERS: AUTHORSHIP, SOLDIERING, AND THE TRANSATLANTIC CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

‘This project is not a mercenary one’ When Charles Brockden Brown edited the inaugural issue of the Literary Magazine, and American Register in October 1803, he included an ‘Extract from the correspondence of an American traveller in France. Bordeaux, June 23, 1798’ that provides an account of ‘republican marriages’ (‘Extract . . .’ 1803: 72). ‘[Y]ou would almost suppose, that the government means to consider marriage as a military institution’, remarks the ‘American traveller’, ‘but the real cause is, that, of all shews, a military shew is the least expensive, and the government wishes to have as much shew as possible at a small cost’ (‘Extract . . .’ 1803: 72). In the group of women waiting to become brides, the writer notices ‘one of about nineteen years of age, who peculiarly attracted my attention by the superior fineness of her form and eyes, and the great degree of sensibility and soul which marked her countenance’ (‘Extract . . .’ 1803: 72). This sentimental heroine collapses in tears when her turn to marry arrives, and the writer sees why: ‘From the men’s side of the inclosure there hobbled out an old fournisseur, or contractor of the army of Italy, who was to be her spouse’ (‘Extract . . .’ 1803: 72). The American observer finds the marriage cruel but contends that ‘[t]he old fournisseur was so stupid as to appear quite insensible of the great aversion of his young bride, and to consider her tears and agony as the mere common effects of youthful bashfulness and maiden modesty’ (‘Extract . . .’ 1803: 73). This fournisseur is a caricature of the villainous mercenary: a man interested in taking advantage of self-


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serving contracts (whether for fighting or marriage) without regard for emotional attachments. Taken on its own, the maudlin set piece reassures American readers that they can observe this French-Italian monstrosity from a safe geographical and moral distance. Michael Cody has suggested that ‘[if] the Literary Magazine can be seen as a textbook for anything, it is as a reader for a correspondence course in becoming American’ (2004: 24); in this session of the course, the magazine teaches its reader-students the depravity of the foreign mercenary. Elsewhere in the same issue, Brown uses ‘mercenary’ in its broader adjectival sense. The introductory ‘Editor’s Address to the Public’ includes a blunt statement that the ‘project is not a mercenary one’ (Brown 1803a: 5), which betrays the defensiveness created by the commercial, ephemeral nature of the periodical project.1 Brown’s other editorial projects routinely open with similar disavowals, the necessity of which is illustrated by later critics’ willingness to call Brown’s journalistic writing ‘hack work’ and Brown a ‘hack’ (Charvat 1992: 28; Mott 1957: 1/222). Brown’s general comments on class and authorship are well known, especially his argument that ‘[p]overty is far from being a spur to genius; wealth is far less unfriendly, though its influence is certainly not propitious to it. It is the middle class that produces every kind of worth in the greatest abundance’ (Brown 1992: 146). Brown’s interest in the economic basis of authorship borders on the obsessive: the short essay on ‘Authorship’ early in this first issue of the Literary Magazine concerns itself entirely with the respective achievements of authors who have more and less money (Brown 1803b). Throughout his corpus, Brown’s statements on authorship tend to follow this pattern: they proclaim his own economic disinterest while also revealing intense concern with ways that having and earning money affect authorship. I contend that Brown anchors his thinking about broadly ‘mercenary’ action in presentations of mercenary soldiers. By connecting martial and civilian concerns in this way, Brown’s overlapping presentations of writing, fighting, and marrying for money reveal continuities among his novels, periodical journalism, and political writings. These concerns take on special intensity in the links between literal and figurative mercenary action in Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (Brown 1999). But to understand Brown’s deployment of Ormond’s mercenaries, we need first to consider the transatlantic resonance of the mercenary in the late eighteenth century.


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‘[C]ircumstances of cruelty and perfidy’: American Anti-mercenary Ideology and the Shift of 1798 In this context, it is necessary to revisit the mention of mercenaries in the catalogue of grievances against George III in the American Declaration of Independence. The Declaration says that the king is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

Though the colonists already face what they call ‘circumstances of cruelty and perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages’, the clause takes for granted that the employment of mercenaries constitutes an additional grievance against the crown. The special power of the mercenary in the Declaration’s polemic lies in the political rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic during the period leading up to the Declaration. During that time in Britain, supporters of a citizen militia vigorously opposed the use of foreign troops. Following Machiavelli’s classic stance on the issue, such writers contended that mercenary troops would not only lack the allegiance to Britain that natives would possess but also have an incentive to maintain their incomes by prolonging war.2 Citizen soldiers, on the other hand, would support British interests out of native loyalty and self-interest, as soldiers who did not see warfare as a full-time occupation would want to maintain peace to allow themselves to return to their homes and regular occupations.3 And even the supporters of hiring foreign troops seldom argued for their deployment within the nation’s borders. The deployment of foreign soldiers to America thus signaled to the Americans that Britain was to treat the conflict not as an effort to maintain internal order but rather as an engagement with a conventional enemy: ‘“The War is now grown to such a height,” [Lord] North wrote to the king in 1775, “that it must be treated as a foreign war, & that every expedient which would be used in the latter case should be applied in the former”’ (Marston 1987: 51). These expedients included the hiring of foreign troops, especially but not only the many thousands of German troops from six principalities that contracted with George to help suppress the American rebellion.4 The colonists’ designation of these troops, especially the Germans,


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as ‘mercenaries’ was common but not neutral terminology. Coming into the British service by subsidy treaties with their rulers, the German troops could be justified by defenders of the crown as being auxiliaries – troops offered as a group by the prince they served – rather than independently contracting mercenaries (Atwood 1980: 1). This justification did not necessarily improve their standing according to civic humanist political theory: Machiavelli had argued that even mercenaries were preferable to auxiliaries, who are ‘much more dangerous than mercenaries’ because rebellious individual mercenaries would be easier to suppress than a rebellion among already organized auxiliaries. With auxiliaries, writes Machiavelli, ‘you get your ruin ready-made’ (1992: 38).5 Nonetheless, then as now, ‘mercenary’ was a more effective term of abuse than ‘auxiliary’. The pejorative connotations of ‘mercenary’ made the government’s supporters eager to characterize the troops in America as members, allies, or auxiliaries of the British forces, whereas the government’s opponents strove to apply the term ‘mercenary’ as broadly as possible. For present purposes, I am interested primarily in the perspective of the American rebels, for whom ‘mercenary’ was and would remain the operative term. As he sought to reinforce his troops in America, the king initially approached Russia. Jerrilyn Greene Marston explains why: Having recently concluded an expensive war with Turkey, Catherine was left with a huge war debt and a still-mobilized army. What better and cheaper source of large numbers of troops for America, the king and his servants reasoned, than the Russian steppes? (1987: 53)

The Russians were also preferable to Germans in the eyes of the British because, in the words of Captain William Glanville Evelyn, ‘by their not having any connections in this country, and from not understanding the language, they are less likely to be seduced by the artifice and intrigue of these holy hypocrits’ (Atwood 1980: 24).6 The British fully expected to hire at least 20,000 Russian troops, it seems, but Catherine refused flatly, asking whether George might not ‘make use of Hanoverians?’ (Marston 1987: 53). The king’s overture to Catherine was significant in spite of its failure. To the British and the colonists alike, the prospect of Russian forces signaled a British willingness to impose a more ferocious, eastern style of warfare in America.7 The use of foreign troops also had a personal aspect for George: Catherine’s pointed question


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about Hanoverians illustrates a persistent concern of the opposition to George on both sides of the Atlantic: that George himself was more Hanoverian than English, and thereby something of a foreign auxiliary himself – less British, that is, than many of the Americans he sought to fight. This anxiety was hardly alleviated by the fact that, upon Catherine’s refusal to supply Russian troops, George did indeed turn to the more congenial Elector of Hanover: himself.8 So began the development of American anti-mercenary rhetoric that would catalogue the German and Russian soldiers among many groups of expected enemies in the pay of Britain. The language of the American Congress’s final version of the Declaration of Independence leads modern readers to think primarily of the Hessians and other German soldiers as George’s ‘foreign mercenaries’, but in the imagination of many American writers at the time, other groups loomed large. The Declaration, for example, follows its protest against foreign mercenaries closely with the claim that George ‘has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions’. Other writers connected the Germans to ‘Indians’ and other groups still more directly: ‘“I have great reason to think we shall have a severe trial this summer [of 1776],” observed Josiah Bartlett, “with Britons, Hessians, Hanoverians, Indians, negroes and every other butcher the gracious King of Britain can hire against us.”’9 Another letter expressed the same anticipation of the summer of 1776: ‘“From newspapers & private Letters we are assured that next Summer will be a bloody one,” William Hooper wrote to Samuel Johnston, “[t]he Sovereign has declared (we hear) that he will pawn the Jewels of his Crown or humble America. Indians, Negroes, Russians, Hanoverians, & Hessians are talked of as the Instruments to accomplish this blessed purpose.”’10 Edward Gibbon listed ‘Scotch highlanders, Irish papists, Hanoverians, Canadians, [and] Indians’ among the troops to be employed.11 We see in these comments that the fear of George’s willingness to supplement British forces prodded Americans to imagine their enemies in a variety of religious, ethnic, and national categories of otherness.12 Thomas Jefferson’s original phrasing of the Declaration introduces an unusual wrinkle into this process of articulating the otherness of the British mercenaries. As Jefferson initially wrote the clause, it protested against the arrival of ‘not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us’ (quoted in MacCullough 2001: 135). As David


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MacCullough observes, Jefferson’s draft makes this passage ‘the heart of the tragedy, the feeling of betrayal, the “common blood” cause of American outrage’ (2001: 135). Addressing this culminating clause to ‘our British brethren’ rather than their leaders, Jefferson concludes the section in anguish: ‘We must endeavor to forget our former love for them’ (quoted in MacCullough 2001: 135). Congress cut much of this passage, including the mention of Scottish mercenaries, at the request of the Scots James Wilson and John Witherspoon (MacCullough 2001: 135).13 Jefferson’s short-lived phrasing illustrates the ideological entanglements of early American mercenary rhetoric: passages that seem to establish simple binary oppositions between the national self and the mercenary other lead quickly to complicating questions. For example, if ‘our British brethren’ send ‘Scotch’ mercenaries overseas, are Scots excluded from the category of ‘British’? If so, why separate them from the general run of ‘foreign mercenaries’? Or if not, how are Scottish soldiers ‘mercenaries’ in a way that the British troops already in America are not?14 Furthermore, if we apply Jefferson’s categories to the American context, we begin to see the problems that will arise in the Revolutionary War. The colonists’ alliances with African American and Native American auxiliaries would smack of mercenary contracts to many observers; such alliances and the continuing presence of Loyalist opposition to the Revolution would test the strength of the confident ‘we’ that speaks in the Declaration of ‘our common blood’. In their own writing, however, the Revolutionaries generally ignored these complications and presented themselves as railing against mercenaries from a moral high ground. In creating a nation anew, they could claim a position unavailable to the European powers: having never controlled their own military, the American colonists had no national past of participation in the mercenary warfare that had earlier been routine in Europe. In the American politics of the Revolutionary period and the early Republic, citizen militias enjoyed support from all political sides. Employing mercenaries was politically unthinkable, as the abomination even of standing armies ‘became a basic assumption of almost every political leader’ (Schwoerer 1974: 195).15 A modest national army proposed in 1783 to complement the state militias was never formed for fear of ‘the odious specter of the traditional standing army of eighteenthcentury Europe’ (Elkins and McKitrick 1993: 594). If ‘[t]he figure of the absolute monarch . . . is the American Revolution’s constitutive


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other’, as Paul Downes has argued (2002: ix), the absence of a standing army was a safeguard against creeping monarchism. American politics assumed the virtues of a volunteer military structure based on local attachment – the opposite, in its idealized form, of a mercenary state. This volunteer ideology frequently encompassed the notion that all European professional armies were essentially mercenary troops. In Charlotte Smith’s 1792 novel Desmond, to which I will return in Chapter 2, a Frenchman describes the American Revolution as a contest between ‘men who contend for all that is dear to them’ and ‘the disciplined mercenaries of despotism’ (Smith 2001: 106) – meaning the British forces and their auxiliaries. Revolutionary rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic associated professional armies of all sorts with mercenary action and ultimately with political tyranny. This high ground began to erode in 1798. At the height of transatlantic reactionary politics and fears of French invasion, the US established a much larger provision for national armed forces than anyone would have thought possible even months earlier. Though President Adams saw no need for anything like the tens of thousands of new troops now authorized, Hamiltonian centralizers pushed for those troops and more (Elkins and McKitrick 1993: 595–6). Newly and clearly, the US in 1798 moved much closer to the European military model it had long sought to oppose. Brown’s well-known concern with William Godwin’s political theories suggests some ways in which Brown might have understood this shift in American policy – a shift that profoundly breaks with Godwin’s ideals of military organization – and why Brown becomes deeply concerned with secrecy as it affects the role of the military in civil society. We have seen in this book’s introduction how central the secret motivations of mercenaries are to military theory. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793), Godwin probes the inscrutability of human motivations in general: Man, like every other machine the operations of which can be made the object of our senses, may, in a certain sense, be affirmed to consist of two parts, the external and the internal. The form which his actions assume is one thing; the principle from which they flow is another. With the former it is possible we should be acquainted; respecting the latter there is no species of evidence that can adequately inform us. . . . Some philosophers, sensible of the inscrutability of intention, have declared in favour of our attending to nothing but the injury sustained. The humane


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and benevolent Beccaria has treated this as a truth of the utmost importance, ‘unfortunately neglected by the majority of political institutors, and preserved only in the dispassionate speculation of philosophers’. (1985: 649–50)

Elsewhere in Political Justice, Godwin even cites the perception of ‘mercenariness’ as a specific instance of the general problem of inscrutability of motivations.16 This general concern with secrecy undergirds Godwin’s more focused comments on national defense later in Political Justice. Godwin’s vision of a democratic society built on the love of justice allows for the limited exercise of defensive warfare. It does not allow for the professionalization of the soldier. In articulating an unusually extreme version of the argument for national militias over specialized standing armies, Godwin opposes the logic by which military glory functions as an incentive for soldiers to represent their compatriots in military causes. Responding to Rousseau’s patriotic exhortation to self-abnegation – ‘Love your country. Sink the personal existence of individuals in the existence of the community. Make little account of the particular men of whom the society exists, but aim at the general wealth, prosperity, and glory’ – Godwin argues that ‘[t]he lessons of reason on this head are different’.17 Positing that abstract society deserves not ‘the smallest regard’, Godwin values only ‘mak[ing] individual men happy and virtuous’ (1985: 508). Godwin’s argument extends the ordinary pro-militia position, which generally involves some sense that the populace of a nation should have the skills to contribute to its defense, to the point at which it denies the representative function of the soldier entirely. The ideological economy of the soldier’s service to a society that thus becomes indebted depends on some separation between society and soldier, some way to separate the payers and recipients of the social debt. As Godwin puts it, ‘[t]he love of our country has often been found to be a deceitful principle, as its direct tendency is to set the interests of one division of mankind in opposition to another’ (1985: 509); this separation results in war being ‘converted into a trade. One part of the nation pays another part, to murder and be murdered in their stead’ (1985: 510). And this separation is hardly neutral for Godwin: ‘The man that is merely a soldier must always be uncommonly depraved’ (1985: 523). For Godwin, the specialization of the soldier produces secrecy by alienating the soldier from the pursuit of justice: ‘a just and upright


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war’ would have no ‘need of secrecy’, and its soldiers would be freed from ‘implicit faith and military obedience’ and would therefore ‘cease to be machines’ (1985: 521). Godwin’s link between the secrecy and professionalism of the age’s military system clarifies the ways in which many forms of military anti-professionalism, whether directed against standing armies or mercenaries or both, involve related anxieties about privacy and privatization. Godwin’s ideal involves perfect publicity and perfect volunteerism: his vision thus provides an unusually stark ground upon which to see the figure of the mercenary, the soldier imagined both as embodying the reduction of the service ideal to a matter of private contracting and as harboring ultimately uncontrollable secret desires. Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness has long been recognized as a Godwinian novel, though the novel’s mixture of tribute and resistance to Godwin inspires continued debate. Taking up the subtle but important structuring role of mercenaries in Ormond, the balance of this chapter reads the novel as a nightmare vision of the conversion from an ideally transparent, even Godwinian system of defense, one built on open avowals of the needs of justice, to a system based on Smithian trade and exchange. As Godwin knew, a system of trade assumes that citizens’ interests vary and compete; such variance of interests supports the contention that free trade can benefit all participants. The many fighters of Ormond have fallen away from the Godwinian ideal. They bring from Europe experiences of violent methods that, in the Godwinian model, create the necessity of secrecy and the possibility of conspiracy. Thus Brown’s novel explores the fundamental unreadability of a mercenary society. Ormond’s Mercenaries The year 1798 also saw the beginning of Brown’s major literary publications, and Ormond appeared in February of 1799. Ormond is a novel of secrecy and slow revelations. It appears for a long time to have little or nothing to do with military matters, then belatedly allows the reader to understand that some important characters are former soldiers. Set in the time surrounding the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Ormond is epistolary, narrated as a single long letter by Sophia Courtland about her friend Constantia Dudley. Sophia addresses the letter to a mysterious I. E. Rosenberg, who appears to be a potential suitor for Constantia: ‘You are anxious to obtain some knowledge of the history of Constantia Dudley’, opens


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the novel in Sophia’s voice. ‘I am well acquainted with your motives, and allow that they justify your curiosity’ (Brown 1999: 37). Sophia describes the events of Constantia’s life, most notably her acquaintance with Ormond, a charming libertine who eventually tries to rape and murder her, prompting her to kill him with a penknife. Michael Davitt Bell articulates the standard reading of the plot neatly: Ormond is ‘of all Brown’s characters, the most sexually aggressive and the most clearly linked to the ideals and excesses of the French Revolution. All of these forces – depraved idealism, sexual passion and political radicalism – are brought to bear against Constantia’s virtue, against both her virginity and the ideal by which she tries to live’ (1999: 149). The plot’s only military action lies in the past lives of the characters. The most fully characterized soldier in the book is Martinette de Beauvais, who tells Constantia tales of dressing as a man to fight for the American Revolution. Now a Girondin – not one of the more radical Jacobins – Martinette waits in exile during the Terror, but she returns to France in the end, when we also learn that she may be the lost sister of Ormond. The second soldier is a minor character named Baxter, who has fought for England in two wars and thereby gained a lasting Francophobia. The third is Ormond himself, who, though not apparently Russian, has fought for Potemkin and Romanov in the Russian army. All of this military information lies at the plot’s periphery, so the persistence of revealed military experience in the background invites us to wonder why Brown repeatedly connects the domestic side of his novel to European warfare. Part of the answer lies in the single appearance of the word ‘mercenary’ in the novel: before he meets Constantia, Ormond seduces Helena Cleves with Godwinian arguments about personal fidelity triumphing over considerations of financial gain or social propriety. He represents himself as believing that ‘[n]othing [is] more detestable . . . than a mercenary alliance’ (1999: 135). What seems a casual metaphor – such references to mercenary marriages are common in eighteenth-century writing – takes on more significance when we learn that ‘he had embraced, when almost a child, the trade of arms’ (1999: 242) in the aforementioned Russian armies. In his service, we discover, he raped a Tartar girl, killed a friend in a dispute over her, killed the girl as an offering to his dead friend, and then tried to atone for his guilt by killing five Turkish foragers and bringing their heads back to his camp, thereby earning a military commission. We are told that such cruelty


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characterized his military career of eight years. Ormond’s disavowal of a ‘mercenary alliance’ highlights by contrast his literal mercenary past and by extension his capacity for deception and hypocrisy. What might appear an easy villainization of the mercenary in favor of an idealistic ideology of military volunteerism becomes more complicated in light of the other soldiers’ stories, especially that of Martinette, who values her autonomy so much that she vows to keep it unrestrained by ‘friendship or marriage’ (1999: 203). Fittingly, she is also the novel’s consummate volunteer soldier, having followed the example of her husband who ‘tender[ed] his service to the Congress as a volunteer’ in the ‘third year of the Revolutionary War in America’ (1999: 201). Martinette says that, following the French Revolution, ‘the love of liberty’ had prepared her to murder General Brunswick and commit suicide afterwards. She treats the instruments of violence with religious devotion, saying that she has ‘a fusil of two barrels, which is precious beyond any other relic, merely because it enabled [her] to kill thirteen officers at Jernappes’ (1999: 205–6). The sacrifice of social sympathies for a soldier’s capacity for violence is clearest in her claim that two of the officers she killed had been emigrant nobles she ‘knew and loved before the Revolution, but the cause they had since espoused cancelled their claims to mercy’ (1999: 206). Martinette is now an exile herself because she is not of Robespierre’s party: by placing such ruthlessness in a Girondin, Brown emphasizes the physical and emotional violence caused by serving even the more moderate faction in the French Revolutionary cause. We could attribute this portrayal to Brown’s acceptance of the Francophobia of the late 1790s, but the novel’s other prominent former soldier, Baxter, displays that Francophobia in caricature.18 The English veteran Baxter has trouble mustering even minimal sympathy for what he calls ‘a frog-eating Frenchman’ (1999: 87), based on his experience fighting the French for England in wars noted for England’s use of German mercenaries. Like Martinette, Baxter prizes a weapon for the enemies it has slain; in Baxter’s case, it is ‘a hanger that hung at his bedside, and which had hewn many a Hungarian and French hussar to pieces’ (1999: 89). Baxter’s residual hatred of the French ultimately kills him, the narrator tells us, by weakening his resistance to the yellow fever.19 To this point, though the novel’s portrayal of soldiering is remarkably negative, that negativity may seem unsurprising in the work of the Quaker-raised Brown. In the rest of this chapter, I will make two related points, one narrow and one broad, that clarify the stakes of


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Brown’s presentation of soldiering. The narrow point is that critics have discussed this novel as engaging a general post-Revolutionary American context, sometimes with a nod to the especially reactionary sentiment of the late 1790s. I see in Brown’s depiction of soldiering a much more pointed exploration of the consequences of the newly professionalized defense of the United States. My broader point involves using that context to shift our perceptions of the novel’s treatment of writing, forgery, and ultimately the state of the young Republic through the possibility of mercenary narration. I have described how early American culture emphasized grassroots regionalism in both writing and soldiering. In Ormond, Brown depicts the lack of American grass roots. The presentation of convincing forgeries early in the novel undermines the authority of writing, while the characters’ ability to assume new masks and identities – James R. Russo notes that nine of the novel’s characters assume fictitious names (1979: 207) – undermines conventional means of identification. Julia Stern has argued that Ormond ‘exposes the fragile underpinnings of a Founding based on the social death and live burial of those “others” who do not count as citizens’ (1997: 153). Working within the narrower context of the new American military, I would emphasize Brown’s anxiety about what has not been excluded from the new nation. In the centre of the capital city, he portrays Americans as infected not only by yellow fever but also by the national loyalties, vicious prejudices, and the unfeeling cruelty that the novel associates with the European military establishment. In the world of the novel, in other words, there is no separately American populace from which to form a new army pure of European standing armies and mercenaries. We can see here the anxieties that would come to fuel Brown’s imaginative 1803 polemic An Address to the Government of the United States, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French. Published anonymously and narrated by a persona living ‘beyond the mountains’ who writes to ‘the people of the coast’ (1803c: 47), the Address mainly comprises an invented letter from a French advisor to Napoleon urging an attack on the United States. This double forgery allows Brown a mask through which to speak the most paranoid, sensational version of the Federalist critique of Jeffersonian America. The Frenchman perceives a nation of weak resolve compromised by the presence of ‘aliens and enemies within their borders’, meaning the ‘blacks’ and ‘Indians’ (1803c: 45).20 The greater and more subtle danger lies in the internal problem of commercial interest overtaking


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military readiness. Brown’s Frenchman calls the United States ‘a nation of pedlars and shop-keepers’ (1803c: 39), borrowing words by which Adam Smith had described England.21 ‘When the counsel is war’, the Frenchman continues, the Americans ‘prudently reckon the expense’ (1803c: 39). Brown’s Frenchman provides a label for this underlying weakness in the American state: ‘the mercenary passion’ (1803c: 39). Here as elsewhere, Brown’s ultimate point is to rally Americans to a sense of militaristic patriotism, but in so doing, he leads the national imagination through the nightmare vision of a mercenary state. Always aware that mercenary motives would unsettle the authority of his own narration, Brown opens the Address with another of his efforts to establish pure motives. The narrator claims ‘not [to be] instigated by his own interest, for he and his affairs are far remote from the scene of the action; and his property is wholly disentangled from any effect, which the acquisition of the Mississippi, will produce on private conditions’ (1803c: 1). Here our knowledge of Brown’s double forgery in the narration makes the claim rebound on itself. When an author has already fabricated personae – an inlander and a Frenchman – for polemical purposes, what prevents him from fabricating disinterest as well? This is a general problem with rhetorical claims of disinterest: the most interested speakers will have the most incentive to claim disinterest and show the least restraint in doing so. Thus does Brown in his political writing, ostensibly the practical counterweight to his earlier fictions, most resemble his shape-shifting hero Ormond.22 The paradoxical interest in claiming disinterest infects the narration of Ormond as well. Sophia Courtland’s epistolary narrative anchors its morality in three related binary oppositions. Mercenary writing is represented by a character called Thomas Craig, whose forged letters and counterfeit money ruin Constantia’s father; its opposite is the series of sincere, disinterested letters that pass between Sophia and Constantia. Mercenary fighting, literal and metaphorical, is represented by the three soldiers; its opposite is Constantia’s defensive killing of Ormond. Mercenary marriage is represented through Constantia’s opportunity to marry a wealthy Scottish businessman (whom she refuses); its opposite is perhaps again the unusually intense relationship between Sophia and Constantia – or possibly the presumable future marriage of Constantia to I. E. Rosenberg. Again, the sole use of the word mercenary in the novel occurs in Ormond’s rejection of a ‘mercenary alliance’ – or, as he


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uses the phrase, a romantic attachment based on anything but pure motives. With the notion of the mercenary alliance in mind, what can we make of the novel’s frame narrative, that of the letter to Constantia’s presumable suitor? We know nothing of that suitor, I. E. Rosenberg, beyond his seeming Germanness: he is certainly a foreigner, almost certainly European, probably from the nation at the organizational centre of eighteenth-century mercenary warfare and the novel’s fearful Bavarian Illuminati. As little as we know about him, we do know that he is distant enough from Constantia to seek third-party testimony about her and her family. In other words, the outer frame of the novel seems to have little function other than to raise the possibility that Constantia stands on the verge of marrying a man she may not know well, and that Sophia acts as an advocate for that match rather than an impartial narrator. Our narrator is partial to the heroine, and if we set aside Sophia’s attempts at moral interpretation, Constantia’s prospective marriage may appear more like what Ormond calls a mercenary alliance than Sophia would have us believe. If the reader allows the hints of the frame story to unsettle the reliability of Sophia’s narration, the walls she constructs between mercenary and non-mercenary action begin to crumble. Any suggestion of Sophia’s unreliability calls attention to exactly what she attempts to explain away: that the final violent killer in the novel is Constantia herself.23 Thinking of Constantia this way is rare in Brown criticism. Sophia’s narration makes Ormond so monstrous and Constantia so virtuous that readers tend to take Sophia’s justifications at face value. But those justifications are improbable. Constantia claims to have killed Ormond in self-defense with a penknife stroke ‘desperate and at random’ that splits his heart (1999: 274). When the frame narrative suggests that either Constantia or Sophia or the two of them together have shaped Constantia’s story to persuade a European reader, it turns the conventions of Brown’s novel against themselves, for what had appeared to insulate America from foreign intruders actually seems to create a questionable new alliance. As Robert S. Levine has written, ‘Brown’s major romances depict America as a vulnerable new land threatened by an influx of aliens plotting, as is typical of melodramatically conceived villains, to advance their personal interests at the expense of the larger social community’ – and even though Brown’s Americans can also be ‘selfpromoting plotters’, the villains ‘tend to be at an even greater remove from their community’ (1989: 16). Levine does not explore the role


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of the narrative’s originating alien. The Rosenberg frame of Ormond implies that the tale of the expulsion of the European villain Ormond from the relatively virtuous American community is a self-interested production of that very American community – a tale designed to ally a mysterious foreigner to its central character.24 Here we can note another connection between Ormond and Brown’s later political writing. Brown’s characterization of Thomas Jefferson in The British Treaty of 1807 echoes that of Ormond: like his literary counterpart, Jefferson is to Brown ‘a schemer, perpetually occupied with some strange out-of-the-way project’ (1807: 11). Brown opposes Jefferson with rhetoric prizing practical, domestic knowledge over rational abstraction: ‘If any gentleman assume as a principle that mankind can be governed by reason; and insist, notwithstanding the evidence of all history, ancient and modern, sacred and profane, that we may prudently rely on reason for the defence of nations, we would advise him to commence a course of experiments with his own family, and see how far reason will go there’ (1807: 12). Here Brown depicts Jefferson as the Gothic villain of national politics, a latter-day Ormond who cannot distinguish between misguided philosophy and practical knowledge. Even Thomas Jefferson comes off better than James Madison. Brown writes of Madison that ‘[f]rom a defect of firmness in the texture of his mind, and perhaps also from a defect of education, he was not in the habit of recurring always to fixed principles for a decision on conduct and opinions’ (1807: 10). Brown had earlier applied similar language not to the eponymous villain of Ormond but to its ostensible heroine, Constantia: she too has a ‘defect in her character [that] she owed to her . . . education’: ‘She formed her estimate of good and evil on nothing but terrestrial and visible consequences’ (1999: 182), so ‘[a]ll opinions in her mind were mutable’ (1999: 183). This passage forms one of a number of intriguing connections between the ostensibly innocent Constantia and the ostensibly monstrous Martinette. Martinette will soon reveal that a priest once tried to seduce her; she ‘repelled’ his ‘advances’, but her ‘security against his attempts lay in’ his ugliness ‘rather than in the firmness of [her] own principles’ (1999: 196). The language of Brown’s later anti-Jeffersonian political writing is already present in Ormond. Constantia has something like Madison’s flaws just as Ormond has Jefferson’s; this is not to suggest political allegory but rather the subtle undermining of any easy opposition between Constantia’s purity and Ormond’s villainy.25


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A few critics have noted the improbability of Constantia’s and Sophia’s testimonies about Ormond’s death. Russo writes, ‘Sophia’s partial knowledge of Ormond, when viewed in conjunction with her bond of friendship with Constantia, suggests a resulting lack of objectivity if not definite bias’ (1979: 205).26 By concentrating on the recipient of the story, Rosenberg, as well as its tellers, I mean to add a sense of how the novel’s suggestions that Constantia and Sophia may have participated more consciously in the killing than they admit does much more than simply raise questions about narrative reliability. If anything less than purely defensive, Constantia’s penknifestroke cuts through the book’s moral system: it infects Constantia and Sophia with mercenary motives in violent action as well as in the marriage market, blurring the line between the female protagonists and the repulsive soldiers they encounter. In the end, what seems to Stern a final endorsement of women’s ‘sisterly love’ (1997: 229) set against a world of predatory male violence becomes something much more complicated, in which the book’s fog of forgery and imposture expands to engulf the heroine, the narrator, and the reader. If Sophia’s long letter proves a misleading construction meant to assist Constantia into a prudent – perhaps even mercenary – marriage, the purity of the women’s violence, writing, and marital ambitions all come into question, so that we see how closely linked they are to one another. What can be called, following Richard Hofstadter, the novel’s ‘paranoid style’ would encompass even the founding encounter of the narrative. In a novel where everything can be faked, from letters to money to skin to the walls of buildings, the seeming unreliability of Sophia’s narration potentially makes Constantia’s story into the falsehood encompassing all others, and a sign, like the newly militarized America, of a corrupted ideal. Constantia’s alliance with Rosenberg becomes a link between the new Republic and the old centre of soldiers of fortune; a nation founded on opposition to European soldiering finds in its heart a mercenary pulse. The ambiguity of Sophia’s authority and intentions stems largely from her authorial motivation: like Brown in his later political writing, she has obvious strategic reasons to appear unstrategic. Ormond not only undermines its characters’ claims to reliably neutral storytelling but also shows the reader how Sophia’s righteously anti-mercenary stance may be the most effective ideological weapon in a deeply interested account. Attributing Sophia’s narration to a specific persuasive interest rather than to her advocacy and affection for Constantia may seem an act of simple scholarly skepticism, a way of taking the


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obvious unreliability of Ormond’s other characters one step further. In fact, Sophia’s lack of disinterest opens up other possibilities for readers. In this view, the point of reading Ormond’s overlapping narrations is not to locate disinterested sincerity but to examine the rhetoric of disinterest, and then to see how our faith in one claim to anti-mercenary authority affects others in a paranoid world that allows no speaker the presumption of sincerity. Such a world grows out of two underlying fears. One is the fear of reversion. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine urged Americans to revolution, saying, ‘[w]e have it in our power to begin the world over again’ (1984: 66), but Brown’s writing is suffused with the fear that the new world will make itself into the old. In Brown’s earlier Wieland, the character Carwin has left England for Spain, converted to Catholicism (a reversion from a progressive Protestant perspective), and brought his disruptive presence to America (Brown 1998). In Ormond, the parallel threat of reversion to, or re-creation of, Old World institutions lies in the importation of European military models through characters who have served in them. However much the commerce of the new United States relied on harnessing the power of self-interest, the nation’s military mythology rested on an idealistic volunteerism intended to depart from European practice. Americans in 1798 had every reason to perceive a Carwinian reversion in the encroachment of European professionalism into the American military system. The other fear animating the world of Ormond is that represented by the invisible hand conjured by Adam Smith, the hand Gothically separated from a controlling body. The power of the invisible hand lies in its ability to act as a function of every individual’s self-interest but independently of any individual’s knowledge or control, even if social science allows individuals to predict the pressures the hand will apply.27 As Adam Ferguson states in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ‘nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’ (1995: 122); Smith had brought undesigned effects to the centre of economic theory.28 Ormond dramatizes a nightmare version of Ferguson’s statement: the novel traps the reader in epistolarity, in letters that hint at self-interested designs but give the reader no access to a reliably disinterested perspective from which to detect their source. Many critics – notably Steven Watts, Levine, and Downes – have emphasized what is conspiratorial and secretive in Brown’s fictions. They see in Brown’s work the fear of visible and


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performative selves that shield secret authenticity from public view. I contend that the multiplication of unexplained potential conspiracies in Ormond responds to a different, more complex fear: that of a world whose design cannot be comprehended by any human subjectivity. As Darwinian biology would in later years, Smithian economics compelled people to participate in systems that produced the appearance of control without an identifiable source – a world that would always appear conspiratorial but would never provide villains to be found and purged. Smith’s conception that markets thrive on size had a rough parallel in James Madison’s view of the role of interest groups in a large republic. In number 10 of The Federalist, Madison posits the impossibility of ‘giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests’; Madison then argues that the interest of the whole is served by a diversity of interest in its parts (2003: 41).29 Though the Madisonian state does not present a more modern sense of factional competition as an inherent good – a point upon which Gordon S. Wood is right to insist (1987: 92) – it does resemble a Smithian market to the extent that it carefully separates the knowledge and interest of the common citizen from the output of the system. We see the opposite of Madison’s perspective in the guiding fantasy of Brown’s conspirators: a utopian vision that unifies the collective interest and the desires of every constituent of the whole. The Godwinian villain Ludloe in Brown’s ‘Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist’ wishes for a place where ‘justice should be universally understood and practiced . . . [and] the interest of the whole and of the individual should be seen by all to be the same’ (1991: 316). Madison maintained an ultimate faith in a large republic’s ability to find disinterested leaders, a faith that grew harder to sustain during the years when Brown wrote.30 Thus the power of Ormond’s conspirators may disturb readers, but the limits of their power may be even more troubling, in that the conspiracies do not explain or control the book’s violence and menace. Those limits imply a story with no author, a world in which no perspective can rise above the self-interest of individuals and thus comprehend the whole. Capitalism and the post-Madisonian republic both draw their power from this ability to operate as the systematic consolidation of diverse interests, and Brown’s novel – a book frequently faulted for lacking design – is a Gothic narration of the undesigned community of Madisonian competing interests, some avowed and some conspiratorially secret. Rather than encountering a


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conspiracy whose agents can be identified and eliminated, the novel’s characters are subject to an environment that has the affect of conspiracy but cannot be reduced to human intentions.31 Specifically, the novel implies an analogy between its individual representatives of the European mercenary system and a broader mercenary spirit infecting the polis, the novel does not offer readers a simple interpretation of that analogy. The macrocosm could be infecting the microcosm or vice versa; as in the case of the novel’s contagious fevers, the mechanisms of cause and effect lie out of view. NOTES

1. Brown’s defensiveness here is commonplace among authors of the eighteenth century. Its function is illuminated by comparison to a rare case of a writer frankly acknowledging pecuniary self-interest and asking his readers to ignore that self-interest and consider his argument. An anonymous pamphleteer in the British militia debate of 1756 and 1757 argues that the part-time soldiers of a militia could not defend Britain against polished standing armies. The bookseller, he says, is to allow me a Guinea for scribbling a Pamphlet on this Subject; for I am, alas! a Scribbler by Profession. But now, having been so uncommonly ingenuous on my Part, I have a Right to expect an equal Degree of Impartiality from you. I, therefore, as you are Gentlemen, insist that you will instantly forget what I am, and attend only to what I say. (Anon. 1757a: 2) The writer does then ‘forget’ his employment: it is never mentioned again, and it seems unnecessary to the argument of the pamphlet. After seeing criticism of his argument, the same author wrote a second pamphlet that illustrates the utility of having mentioned terms of employment in the first. Here the author imagines himself or herself and the first pamphlet’s critics to be warriors. He accuses a writer in the Monitor of writing ‘like a most unskillful Warrior . . . so entirely bent on wounding his Adversary, that he is unpardonably negligent of his own Safety’ (Anon. 1757b: 2). Then, addressing the Monthly Review’s contention that a paid scribbler should not presume to correct the opinions of Parliament, he responds: How strange a Compliment has [the writer] . . . paid to the British Parliament! in supposing that they would disregard the Reasonings of an honest and ingenious Man, because he had declared he was paid for his Labour . . . . I conclude it to be a Matter of no Consequence, whether I had called myself a Monitor, a Freeholder, a Fool, a Tattler, a Scribbler, or Fishmonger. (Anon. 1757b: 16–17)


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2.

3. 4. 5.

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The author does not, however, call himself or herself a freeholder or a fishmonger, but rather characterizes himself as a paid writer and a metaphorical warrior. By emphasizing his or her own trustworthiness even while working for hire, the author reinforces the endorsement of a full-time standing army. I refer here to a pamphlet debate that reached its greatest intensity during the 1750s, around the beginning of the Seven Years’ War and continued intermittently afterwards. An earlier pamphlet debate provides an instructive point of comparison. During the War of Austrian Succession, a series of pamphlets in 1743 addressed the retention of 16,000 Hanoverian soldiers in the British army. Though some writers then expressed fierce opposition to paying the Hanoverians, their writings lack the theoretical concern about the role of mercenaries in a free state that would characterize the debate in the 1750s. While appeals to nationalism certainly have a place in the earlier debates – one anonymous writer calls a defender of government policy a ‘Hanoverian, either by Birth, Inclination, or Interest’ (Anon. 1743: 30, emphasis original), and the specter of Jacobitism periodically haunts the conversation – the objections to the Hanoverian soldiers are overwhelmingly practical: writers contend the soldiers are overpaid (as shown, in many cases, by tables comparing the costs of mercenaries in 1702 and 1743) and that the mercenaries have taken over too much of the army’s chain of command. For complaints about the chain of command, see especially the pseudonymous Thomas Jones’s A True Dialogue between Thomas Jones, a Trooper, Lately Return’d from Germany; and John Smith, A Serjeant in the First Regiment of Foot Guards. To Which Is Subjoin’d, A Second Letter, Taken from The Constitutional Journal, Concerning Mercenaries (1743). Many pamphlets address the costs of the mercenaries; one of the important early contributions to the debate is the anonymous pamphlet, attributed to the Earl of Chesterfield and Edmund Waller, titled The Case of the Hanover Forces in the Pay of Great-Britain . . . (1743). A pro-government response attributed to Horace Walpole answers that pamphlet with a different accounting of expenses ([Walpole?] 1743). Broadly speaking, critics in 1743 tend to argue that the mercenaries have been employed badly, whereas those of the 1750s address the implications of employing mercenaries at all. I will discuss the British militia debates in more detail in Chapter 3. For estimates of the numbers of troops see Dippel (1977: 118). Machiavelli’s reasons for opposing mercenaries were challenged by Frederick II of Prussia (the Great) in his Anti-Machiavel (1740), written before Frederick ascended the throne. After conceding the merits of Machiavelli’s anti-mercenary positions, Frederick contends that there exist exceptions to the Machiavellian rule: ‘If some kingdoms or


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6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

Mercenaries in British and American Literature empires do not produce enough men for their military needs, necessity obliges them to supplement this deficiency by recourse to mercenaries’ (1981: 85). To avoid the problems Machiavelli describes, says Frederick, one must employ precautions ‘such as carefully mixing them [the mercenaries] with the nationals so as to prevent them from forming a band apart, and by accustoming them to the same order, discipline, and fidelity; with particular attention that the number of foreigners does not exceed the number of nationals’ (1981: 85). We can see Evelyn’s fear of German betrayal from the colonists’ perspective in the American ‘Resolution to Encourage Desertions of Hessian Officers’ penned by Jefferson and adopted in August 1776 (Jefferson 1943: 36). Marston documents this sentiment: ‘The idea that these troops would introduce a ferocious brand of Eastern warfare to America seems not to have troubled the British leaders. Suffolk even remarked callously that the Russians would make “charming Visitors at New-Yorke, and civilize that part of America wonderfully”’ (1987: 53). Marston usefully documents the order and conclusion of these negotiations (1987: 53). See Dippel on the subsequent negotiations by which ‘other German rulers . . . tried to [and often did] get their share of British gold’ (1977: 119). Josiah Bartlett to John Langdon, 19 May 1776, quoted in Marston (1987: 54). Hooper to Johnston, 2 December 1775, quoted in Marston (1987: 55). Gibbon to J. B. Holroyd, 1 August 1775, quoted in Marston (1987: 52). The consistent inclusion of Native American and African American fighters in these catalogs is especially interesting because it was generally wrong. Marston writes: As Lord North explained, ‘there never was any idea of employing the negroes or the Indians, until the Americans had first applied to them’. North’s statement was accurate; the British did not use their Indian allies for offensive action until the colonists had begun to do so, and the use of slaves was not official government policy but rather a desperate expedient resorted to by the troop-starved royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore. Nevertheless, the colonists believed the use of Indians and slaves to be official government policy, and they increasingly laid the responsibility for such barbarity at the door of the sovereign himself. (1987: 55)

13. Jefferson’s slap at the Scots has enjoyed an afterlife, however, largely as a centerpiece of works arguing that Thomas Paine wrote the Declaration. Paine was a virulent Scotophobe, the logic goes, whereas


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14.

15.

16.

17.

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the Scot-tutored Jefferson would not have attacked the Scots. Examples of such arguments include Joel Moody’s Junius Unmasked; or, Thomas Paine the Author of the Letters of Junius, and the Declaration of Independence (1872); Van Buren Denslow’s Modern Thinkers Principally Upon Social Science: What They Think, and Why (1880); and Joseph Lewis’s Thomas Paine: Author of the Declaration of Independence (1947). One cause of Jefferson’s muddled phrasing may be Britain’s attempt to hire the United Provinces’ Scots Brigade, a Dutch outfit involving Scottish officers and pan-European mercenaries (Thomson 1994: 29–30). The Scots Brigade was, in a sense, simultaneously Scottish and foreign to Britain. The importance of this American resistance to military professionalization is eloquently registered in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unpublished essay ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’. Displaying an idealistic sense of the American situation that was partly outdated when he composed the essay in 1819 and 1820, Shelley writes, ‘America holds forth the victorious example of . . . a highly civilized community administered according to republican forms’ (1930: 11). Making the point by contrast, Shelley also imagines the transformation of American society into a nightmarishly tyrannical monarchy, including ‘a great standing army to cut down the people if they murmur’ (1930: 12). His proposal for reform in Britain includes disbanding the standing army (1930: 34), and the latter part of the essay includes meditations on the psychology of individual soldiers. In that context, Godwin claims some insight that he denies others. ‘We are deceived’, he writes, ‘by the apparent mercenariness of mankind, and imagine that the accumulation of wealth is their great object’ when it is actually ‘love of distinction’ (1985: 747). Godwin attributes Rousseau’s sentiments broadly to ‘Du Contrat Social, etc. etc. etc.’, and Godwin does offer a reasonable paraphrase of parts of that work. For present purposes, it is also worth noting that Rousseau elsewhere associates his emphasis on the love of country with his observation of the St Gervais militia in Geneva. He writes in the Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles: I remember being struck in my childhood by a rather simple scene. . . . The St Gervais militia had completed its exercises and, as was the custom, each of the companies ate together: and after supper most of them met in the square of St Gervais, where the officers and soldiers all danced together around the fountain . . . . My father, embracing me, was thrilled in a way that I can still feel and share. ‘Jean-Jacques’, he said to me, ‘love your country. Look at these good Genevans: they are all friends; they are all brothers; joy and


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Mercenaries in British and American Literature harmony reigns among them. You are Genevan. One day you will see other nations, but even if you travel as far as your father has, you will never find any people to match your own’. (1948: 181–2)

18. See Stern for a discussion of the interaction between Baxter and Martinette in terms of its implications for the sexual order of Ormond (Stern 2004: 190–1). 19. Sophia explains that after watching what he mistakenly perceives to be the death of a Frenchman from the yellow fever, Baxter dies of the disease himself, having thrown himself into a panic based on confused national stereotypes. Sophia concludes, ‘[h]is case may be quoted as an example of the force of imagination. He had probably already received, through the medium of the air, or by contact of which he was not conscious, the seeds of this disease. They might perhaps have lain dormant, had not this panic occurred to endow them with activity’ (1999: 93). 20. On this point see Kafer (2004: 193–4). 21. The phrase is famously associated with Smith, that is, although his point in The Wealth of Nations was more subtle: ‘To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers’, he wrote, ‘may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers’ (2003: 779–80). Fittingly, given Brown’s deployment of the phrase, the description of England as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ has also been attributed to Napoleon, but Brown may not have known that. Modern sources trace the attribution to Barry Edward O’Meara’s Napoleon in Exile of 1822, so Brown would have had to know this attribution from another source to have Napoleon in mind in 1803. In O’Meara’s description, Napoleon protests that he did not mean to insult the English by using the phrase, but the wording of his protest shows the potential for shopkeeping to be linked with martial cowardice: ‘Had I meant by this that you were a nation of cowards, you would have reason to be displeased . . . but no such thing was ever intended’ (1822: 2/81). 22. For further analysis of these narrative techniques, see the treatments of Brown’s later novel Clara Howard provided by Jared Gardner, who remarks that Clara Howard ‘suggest[s] the possibility of multiple interpretations cohabiting the literary-political space of the seduction plot and of the nation’ (2000a: 750), and by Michelle Burnham, who concentrates on the ‘interdependency’ of letters and selves in that novel (2004: 263). 23. Craig may also be a killer if the reader trusts Ormond’s multiply filtered account of Dudley’s death. Stern discusses the implications of this fact for formulating Craig’s patricidal guilt (Stern 2004: 192–3).


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24. Another way of putting this part of the argument is to cite Bell’s contention that all of Brown’s major novels involve a similar structure: The four best-known novels of Charles Brockden Brown turn on a contest between two recurring figures: a virtuous but inexperienced protagonist (Clara Wieland, Constantia Dudley, Edgar Huntly, Arthur Mervyn) and an antagonist (Carwin, Ormond, Clithero Edny, Welbeck) whose attitudes and experience threaten the protagonist’s conception of virtue and order. At the center of these novels is a dialectic between innocence and experience or, to use the terms Brown himself preferred, between ‘sincerity’ and ‘duplicity’. (1974: 143) Bell argues that the novels ‘present, in the figure of the antagonist, the logical and duplicitous extreme of that sincerity by which the protagonist attempts to live’ (1974: 143). I suggest that the Rosenberg frame of Ormond implies Constantia’s or Sophia’s adoption of this narrative logic to serve their own purposes. In this view, Ormond is Charles Brockden Brown’s novel about characters writing a Charles Brockden Brown novel. 25. Though Sophia strives to excuse Constantia by citing her youth, Constantia never undergoes a conversion experience; the reader is left to presume her principles remain unsettled when the novel ends. The sentiment that Brown attributes to Constantia and later to Madison, that of valuing ‘terrestrial and visible consequences’ rather than those imposed in a Christian afterlife, seems directly parallel to that which Brown himself expressed in an earlier letter to Joseph Bringhurst. In a passage to which W. M. Verhoeven pays productive attention, Brown writes, ‘Christianity, that is the belief of the divinity of Christ and future retribution, have been pernicious to mankind’ (Verhoeven 2004: 25). Brown’s sentiments on the relative values of ‘terrestrial . . . consequences’ and ‘future retribution’ seem directly at odds in the early letter and the late attack on Madison; the placement of Ormond between those two works would depend on the reader’s evaluation of Sophia’s narrative authority and therefore Constantia’s moral status. 26. Russo (1979) inventively unravels the contradictions in what he considers Constantia’s deeply deceptive story and creates a counternarrative that resolves the contradictions by explaining the fundamental innocence of Ormond and villainy of Constantia. I am not convinced that the novel supports such a thorough rewriting of the narrative, but I share Russo’s sense that Brown invites us to perceive the narration’s fundamental unreliability and to explore its consequences. 27. For more on the Gothicism of the invisible hand, see Stefan Andriopoulos’s ‘The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel’ (Andriopoulos 1999) and Verhoeven’s


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response that Brown’s invisible hand ‘may be unplanned, but it is natural’ (Verhoeven 2004: 29, emphasis original). 28. Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations: This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. (2003: 22) 29. As Paul Downes has noted, Madison resisted Montesquieu’s arguments that republican government could not thrive in a large nation. Madison countered that pessimism with his sense that a larger republic’s diversity of opinion and interest would provide virtue of ‘the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest’ (Madison 2003: 46; Downes 2002: 120–1). 30. See Wood (1987) for much more on this issue. 31. See Wood (1982) for a broader historical survey of commentary on the disjunction between private intention and public effect that includes a brief mention of Brown (Wood 1982: 436).


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Chapter 2

ENCOUNTERING THE MERCENARY: NATIVE AMERICAN AUXILIARIES, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, AND CHARLOTTE SMITH

I have argued that Charles Brockden Brown’s writings present a world of mercenary violence growing out of the European military organizations of the eighteenth century and infiltrating the early United States. This chapter examines another point of transatlantic contact between military organizations: the British general John Burgoyne’s leadership of British troops and foreign auxiliaries, including Native Americans, during the American Revolution. Burgoyne’s command lies at the centre of two incidents that are the foci of this chapter: first, the historical death of Jane McCrea, a Loyalist woman engaged to a Tory officer, perhaps at the hands of Native Americans allied to Burgoyne; and second, the fictional encounter between a British soldier and a Native American mercenary in Charlotte Smith’s 1793 novel The Old Manor House. Both incidents obviously and importantly bring race relations to the forefront of the debates over the British use of mercenaries in the Revolutionary war. The incidents also add to those debates the question of how the rhetoric of freedom and independence collides with the limits of women’s liberty. Jane McCrea and the Mercenaries of Revolutionary Ideology No other single incident catalyzed the anti-mercenary ideology of the American Revolution as did the 1777 death of McCrea, which became one of the rallying points of the American Revolution. In the popular histories that blamed Burgoyne’s allies for the death, Burgoyne did not arrest McCrea’s killers, perhaps because he faced


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‘a mass walkout of braves’ and could not afford their loss (Lancaster 2001: 208).1 Burgoyne defended the lack of an arrest on the grounds that executing the offender would only have caused more violence of the same kind (Hibbert 2002: 174), but his actions led easily to less sympathetic interpretations. It may seem odd that a Loyalist woman became a martyr for the Revolution, but as Richard M. Ketchum points out, even McCrea’s Loyalism could be used against Burgoyne: ‘if Burgoyne could not even protect his own from his hirelings, how could any American family in the vicinity, regardless of political affiliation, age, or sex, expect to be spared?’ (1999: 277). Such sentiments spread quickly, and some accounts credit McCrea’s story with materially assisting the Revolutionary cause. In the words of Fairfax Downey, this ‘image in the minds of men was one of the most compelling stimulants to recruiting the American army ever knew. Nothing except the hiring of Hessian mercenaries by the British matched it in fanning the flames of the Revolution’ (1963: 1).2 The McCrea story and the hiring of the Hessians have much more in common than their propaganda value: for the American rebels, both represented a violation of family structures, the betrayal of what Jefferson called the ‘common blood’ of the warring sides of the American Revolution.3 Retellings of the Jane McCrea story use the sensational tale of a woman betrayed, raped (in some versions), killed and scalped by Wyandot warriors to present the British-led forces as a monstrously unnatural family. According to critics of British strategy on both sides of the Atlantic, the employment of Indian warriors necessarily involved the breakdown of the laws of war. Edmund Burke argued in a Parliamentary speech at the time that to take on Native American allies and hope they would follow European rules of war was like the keeper of royal beasts loosing his charges during a riot on Tower Hill, saying, ‘[m]y gentle lions, my humane bears, my sentimental wolves, my tender-hearted hyenas, go forth; but I exhort ye, as ye are Christians and members of a civilized society, to take care not to hurt man, woman or child’ (Walpole 1955: 28/355–6). Later in the speech, Burke spelled out in lurid terms the circumstances of ‘Miss Mac Ray, murdered by the savages on the day of her marriage with an officer of the King’s troops’ (1996: 3/358).4 This episode has become a standard element of accounts of Native American involvement in the Revolution and, more generally, of the time’s racial politics.5 I want to emphasize the extent to


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which the racial ideology of the Jane McCrea myth intertwined with the anti-mercenary ideology of the Revolutionaries. The propagandistic value of McCrea’s story lies in the parallel betrayals of the institutions of warfare and marriage. The odd fact that the murder of McCrea, a Loyalist, helped to rally recruits for the American army results from the myth’s gentle treatment of the British soldiers. Generally, versions of the McCrea myth sympathetically portray the relationship between McCrea and the British officer, David Jones, to whom she was affianced, and some versions also present Burgoyne as having done his best to manage the impossible task of controlling the viciousness of his allies.6 The underlying goodness of the British figures is essential to making this a story of sentimentalized opposition between mercenary and volunteer ideology: the institutional alliance with the mercenary Wyandot warriors destroys the voluntary alliance between Jones and McCrea. From this perspective, the recruiting function of the story makes sense. The narrative calls Americans to restore the notion of voluntary, national service that the British have compromised in contracting with the Wyandot. At a deeper level, however, the story constitutes a special case of the mercenary complicating the idea of declaring independence. The mix of fraternity and revulsion in the American representations of the British in the Jane McCrea episode stems from the well-documented notion of the American Revolution as a family affair, a war between parties who considered themselves fundamentally related. The American rebellion constituted a rejection of the colonists’ presumed ties to their nation – Britain – especially in the colonists’ relation to the British military. In other words, for all the American insistence on the moral horror of Britain’s use of mercenaries, the colonists themselves, in trading military loyalty for independence, had mirrored the mercenary’s transition from national to constructed affiliation. This is not to ignore the obvious differences between, say, Revolutionary soldiers and Hessian auxiliaries in nationalist terms, but rather to point to the double-edged nature of individual liberty that McCrea’s story brings to light. As we will see, in Smith’s The Old Manor House, her novel of the American Revolution, the idea of mercenary action pervades transatlantic military and domestic life, involving Native American fighters in ways that echo and recontextualize the dynamics of the McCrea story.


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Mercenaries in British and American Literature Indebtedness and the Mercenary: Charlotte Smith’s Atlantic Imagination

We have seen the American Declaration of Independence imagine the progress of foreign mercenaries across the Atlantic during the American Revolution. This chapter focuses on another Atlantic passage of that time, the fictional journey of Orlando Somerive from England to America in Charlotte Smith’s early novel The Old Manor House (1793). A newly commissioned ensign in the British army, Orlando travels to fight the rebellious American Revolutionaries, and Smith likens his transatlantic passage to the passages of African slaves: It was not till they were many miles at sea that Orlando had time to consider his situation: then, the tumult having a little subsided, he saw himself in a little crowded vessel, where nothing could equal the inconvenience to which his soldiers were subjected, but that which the miserable negroes endure in their passage to slavery. (2002: 351)7

A reluctant soldier, Orlando finds himself on this ship because of the limited options available to a young gentleman without means. Orlando seeks to secure financial independence by gaining the favor of a wealthy aunt, Mrs. Rayland, a proudly reactionary woman who supports his entry into military service because ‘with her the age of chivalry did not seem to be passed; for she appeared to consider Orlando as a Damoisell, now about to make his first essay in arms’ (2002: 265). As Jacqueline M. Labbe points out in her editorial note to this latter passage, ‘damoisell’ is usually spelled ‘damoiseau’ and means ‘a young noble not yet made a knight’ (Smith 2002: 265). Labbe suggests that Smith’s spelling hints at Orlando’s emasculation in his dependence on Mrs. Rayland, who threatens to ‘transform[ ] him into a “damsel”’ (Smith 2002: 265). In these two passages quoted from the novel, we see how thoroughly Smith undermines any expectation that Orlando’s entry into the army constitutes an attainment of independent manhood.8 On the contrary, during the period in which Orlando decides to accept his commission and thus to depart for America, Smith presents him as first like a woman and then like a slave. As he travels, Orlando gains insight arising not from his new, symbolic connection to his country but rather through the geographical separation the voyage allows him: again, ‘[i]t was not till they were


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many miles at sea that Orlando had time to consider his situation’. Orlando’s further experience in America will continue to heighten his physical and emotional distance from Britain. Away from his country, he will come to know himself and understand British policy by means of his encounter with another figure of alienation: a Native American mercenary. This chapter will treat The Old Manor House in more detail below; I introduce these passages here to illustrate some of the structures that recur in women’s writing of this period. In Smith’s novel we see not only the connection between the situations of the married woman and the slave – a commonplace comparison of the time, one that Smith uses repeatedly – but also the use of warriors to explore the situation of women, especially of wives. In spite of all the masculine associations of military action, Orlando becomes conspicuously feminized precisely when and because he enters the army. By exhibiting the limited autonomy involved in his military service and in the marriages of Orlando and his sisters, Smith uses the American Revolutionary context to dramatize the complexities of free and mercenary action in military and family affairs.9 Smith generally writes about the constraints of free action in terms of debt. In recent years, Stuart Curran has justified the critical effort to rediscover Smith’s work in part by evoking literary debts to Smith, noting Wordsworth’s comment that Smith was a writer ‘to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’ (Curran 1993: xix). Conventional metaphors of literary debt had unconventional biographical associations in Smith’s case: the debts of her wastrel husband, Benjamin, took Smith to prison with him, and Smith’s autobiographical paratexts characterize her own writing as engendered by two crushing betrayals involving financial obligation. On the one hand, by the doctrine of coverture, Smith could not escape legal responsibility for the debts Benjamin continued to incur, and, on the other, she faced the failure of the trustees of her late father-in-law, a West Indian merchant, to discharge their obligations to convey his estate to her children.10 Smith’s characters frequently face similar problems arising from their own and others’ debts.11 Smith’s self-portrayal as a reluctant author, presenting her works to the public to provide for her children because men have failed to honor their debts, amounts to a refusal to be considered an autonomous author.12 ‘I am well aware’, she writes, quoting Addison’s Cato by way of military analogy, ‘that for a woman – “The Post of Honor


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is a Private Station”’ (1993: 6). Thus she claims to write out of obligation, whether to her children, in many cases, or in the instance of Volume II of Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, to her subscribers, as she must honor ‘the engagement I must feel myself bound by, the moment I had accepted subscriptions’ (1993: 7). In Smith’s private poetry, as Curran writes, ‘particularly in the bulk of her ninety-two Elegiac Sonnets’, the ‘external system [of male power] is an unspecified but pervasive, ominous presence that threatens the autonomy of the self that records it’ (Curran 1993: xxiv). The nature of this threat often involves men’s ability to control the debts owed by and to women. Smith’s denial of her own autonomy involves the dichotomy of the slave and the mercenary, representing radical lack of autonomy and of excessively self-interested autonomy, respectively. In her efforts to shield herself from the stigma of writing for money, Smith argues that the obligations that force her to write have made her a slave, that figure which by definition lacks the autonomy necessary for mercenary action.13 Smith sometimes characterized her professional life as slavery: she wrote in a 1793 letter that she was a ‘slave of the Booksellers’ (2003: 80) and later lamented, ‘I am sick & poor & have a large family to provide for daily in some sort of labour. I am a wretched slave –’ (2003: 455). William Cowper called her ‘[c]hained to her desk like a slave to his oars’ (Cowper 1979–86: 4/218).14 Elsewhere, Smith used the slave metaphor to characterize her status as a wife. She knew that even after separating from her husband, she was ‘still in reality a slave & liable to have [her] bondage renew’d’ (2003: 350) and found ‘in the husband & Brother who ought to support [her] . . . exactly those who have made [her] a slave the greatest part of [her] life’ (2003: 538, emphasis original). Geraldine, the semi-autobiographical heroine of Smith’s 1792 novel Desmond, endures a marriage that connects slavery to the lack of women’s legal control of their persons and property. As Geraldine’s villainous husband descends into ever more spectacular forms of dissipation, Geraldine says, ‘there is no humiliation to which I had not rather submit, than that of considering myself as his slave’ (2001: 331). By characterizing herself and her avatars as metaphorical slaves, Smith guards against accusations that they are instead like mercenaries in opportunistically grasping personal advancement. Earlier in the letter where Geraldine voices her horror of becoming her husband’s slave, for example, she relates the genesis of her marriage in her mother’s process of matchmaking:


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I remember, when a regiment of horse was quartered for some time at Wells, how eagerly she solicited the company of the officers, who were reputed to be men of fortune, while, if any subaltern of inferior expectations, was introduced to her table, how cold, how reluctant were her civilities! (2001: 328)

Characteristically, Geraldine invites the reader to feel resentment on her behalf, but she refuses to express it herself: ‘That I have been most unhappily the victim of this mercenary spirit, I do not, however, mean to make matter of reproach to my mother’ (2001: 328, emphasis original). In this passage, Smith places the ‘mercenary spirit’ in close proximity to soldiers, but aside from the tantalizing suggestion that some of those are soldiers ‘of fortune’, Smith leaves readers to infer a relationship between mercenary sentiment and mercenary soldiering. In many other cases, Smith develops such relationships further, portraying the ‘mercenary spirit’ and that of a contrary volunteerism moving back and forth between military and civilian activity. In the aforementioned preface to Volume II of Elegiac Sonnets, for example – the piece that explains Smith’s obligations to her children and her subscribers – another paragraph explains how her children’s situation has brought the family into contact with the military: Could any of the misfortunes that so rapidly followed [the decision to publish by subscription] have been foreseen, nothing should have induced me to have consented to it – for what expectation could I entertain of resisting such calamities as the detention of their property has brought on my children? Of four sons, all seeking in other climates the competence denied them in this, two were (for that reason) driven from their prospects in the Church to the Army, where one of them was maimed during the first campaign he served in, and is now a lieutenant of invalids. (Smith 1993: 7)

This son, Charles Dyer Smith, had enlisted in 1793 and was wounded that year in the siege of Dunkirk, which occurred shortly after the writing of Desmond and The Old Manor House. Like the fictional Geraldine’s story, the historical Charles’s involves injuries suffered because of reluctant choices. Neither mercenaries nor volunteers, Charles and Geraldine act out of constraint and obligation, out of forms of self-interest they would not freely have not chosen. In both


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cases, Smith presents their stories as commanding the benevolence of sympathetic observers.15 The blend of pride and shame these stories involve – the sense of a higher stature deserved and lost – arises frequently in Smith’s writings and has political implications. As a gentlewoman dispossessed by treachery, Smith could imagine herself playing more than one role in the Revolutionary drama: she could be the liberalminded member of the privileged classes supporting the expansion of freedom as well as the penniless victim of legal tyranny. This conflicted self-presentation relates to and builds on the position of many wives among the English upper classes, women who could experience material plenty without legal control of property or their own persons. (Consider the book contract Smith signed for Desmond in 1792, in which the contracting parties are the publisher and Benjamin Smith, the scoundrel ‘who had long since taken refuge in Scotland under an alias’ [Stanton 1987: 377].)16 Like other opponents of the legal system of the day, Smith illustrated what she saw as the tyrannical tendencies of the system by placing its powers in the hands of fictional tyrants. Smith is unusual, however, in the way she chooses to enmesh her more sympathetic characters, such as Desmond and then Orlando Somerive, in the systems they seek to oppose. Smith created her first sustained treatment of mercenary action in Desmond. Desmond has long been characterized as a product of Smith’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution. In Walter Scott’s 1821 Lives of the Novelists, Smith’s sister, Catherine Dorset, writes that in the early stages of the Revolution, Smith had quitted her cottage near Chichester, and lived sometimes in or near London, but chiefly at Brighthelmstone, where she formed acquaintances with some of the most violent advocates of the French Revolution, and unfortunately caught the contagion, though in direct opposition to the principles she had formerly professed, and to those of her family. (Scott [1821] n.d., ‘Charlotte Smith’: 322)

Dorset takes Smith’s enthusiasm for the Revolution to be unequivocal and takes Desmond to spring directly from this enthusiasm: It was during this paroxysm of political fever that she wrote the novel of Desmond; a work which has been greatly condemned not only on account of its politics, but its immoral tendency. I leave its defence to


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an abler pen, and content myself with regretting its consequences. (Scott [1821] n.d., ‘Charlotte Smith’)

Much more recently, Loraine Fletcher’s 2001 critical biography of Smith also presents Desmond as a straightforward apology for the Revolution, noting that the novel’s ‘four main letter-writers . . . are all liberal to varying degrees on national and sexual politics’, whereas ‘the other side has no serious spokesperson’ (2001: 143). Some recent scholarship detects a more ambivalent treatment of the Revolution in Desmond.17 The ambivalence stems from disjunctions between the freedom ostensibly offered to citizens in the new French society and the limitations of the freedom offered to the novel’s women. In my reading, Smith’s ambivalent treatment of the Revolution is more systematic: while acknowledging Fletcher’s point that Desmond’s primary letter-writers ‘are all liberal to varying degrees on national and sexual politics’, I contend that the novel fundamentally questions the liberal optimism of those voices by constructing and then destroying the fantasy of the new France as a triumph over domestic and national mercenary impulses. Mercenaries figured in the French Revolution primarily through the events surrounding the end of the rule of Louis XVI. On 10 August 1791, ‘a mixture of gards français, new conscripts and civilians entered the Tuileries and killed 600 of Louis’ personal bodyguard, his Swiss, as they were called, though only about a third were Swiss nationals’ (Fletcher 2001: 158). The circumstances invited observers with Revolutionary sympathies to construct an opposition between the forces of the Revolution, representing, on the one hand, a pure volunteerism in the service of the organic nation and, on the other, the Swiss of Louis’s guard, comprising the foreign mercenaries traditionally assumed to be the props of tyranny. (In Hamlet, for one example, William Shakespeare creates a subtle opposition between the beleaguered King Claudius’s reliance on mercenaries for protection – ‘Where is my Switzers? Let them guard the door’ [1997: IV, v, 93] – and the phrase Shakespeare coins in Hamlet’s voice shortly thereafter: ‘yeoman’s service’ [1997: V, ii, 37], which evokes military strength deriving from the connection of yeomen to their land.18) As I have noted in the introduction, Charlotte Smith herself ‘went so far, or so she is reported, as saying the Swiss Guard deserved to die’ (Fletcher 2001: 159). Whether or not Smith made such a remark about the Swiss Guard, she certainly expressed similar sentiments in her fictions, especially in


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the contexts of the American and French Revolutions. In Desmond, for instance, a Frenchman describes the American Revolution as a contest between ‘men who contend for all that is dear to them’ on the American side and on the other ‘the disciplined mercenaries of despotism’ – the British forces and their auxiliaries (2001: 106). And as we have seen, Geraldine has ‘been most unhappily the victim of this mercenary spirit’ (2001: 328). The opposition to ‘mercenary spirit’ in Desmond seems a straightforward manifestation of the pro-Revolutionary ‘political fever’ attributed to Smith. That is, the novel associates mercenary despotism with the French old regime and with the grotesquely irresponsible husband to whom Geraldine is contractually bound. Against these forces, Smith sets the liberty-loving sympathizers of the Revolution, whose voluntary service to the cause marks their selfless virtue. The main embodiment of these values is the eponymous Desmond, an Englishman who falls in love with Geraldine and with Revolutionary France and who is set to become Geraldine’s new husband at the end of the book. Tracing the use of mercenaries in the novel, however, reveals ways in which Smith presents French Revolutionary values as deeply compromised. In the action by which Desmond discovers Geraldine’s dissolute and dying husband, Verney, then arranges to become the protector of Geraldine and her children, Desmond supplements his two English servants with two additional armed men: a Frenchman and a Swiss. When this party comes upon the house containing Verney, it faces an attack by ‘free-booters’ (Smith 2001: 389) who had contracted to support the aristocrats but have now betrayed them, precisely the behavior predicted by anti-mercenary polemic. Nobody in the novel comments on the way in which Desmond’s employment of mercenaries mirrors Verney’s, just as no character comments on Verney’s deathbed signing of the rights to Geraldine and their children over to Desmond without consulting Geraldine – a contractual negotiation that parallels the initial bargain that betrayed her into her terrible marriage.19 If the moral failing of the mercenary is the inability to maintain fidelity to one’s natural allegiance, Desmond’s employment of mercenaries and the nearly simultaneous revelation that he has fathered a child by another woman must trouble the novel’s apparently happy ending.20 So must Desmond’s admission that he is living apart from Geraldine before their marriage: ‘She seems to wish it’, writes Desmond; ‘for, I believe, I sometimes frighten her by my restless


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and vehement temper’ (2001: 413). I take Desmond’s representation of Geraldine’s resistance to be the surest confirmation of Alison Conway’s view that optimistic readings of Desmond’s ending neglect ‘its darker nuances’ (1995: 406). Conway sees those nuances in the silence of Geraldine and the disappearance of Josephine; I mean to extend the argument to allow the bleakness much more scope, as it seeps into the novel’s most directly political and public actions as well as the organization of the final marriage. Even in this novel widely taken to valorize the Revolution’s victory over a corrupt and mercenary aristocracy, the precarious position of the heroine illustrates that women cannot easily escape the control of a system of mercenary contractualism. Again capitalizing on the opposition between the slave and the mercenary, Smith presents Geraldine as she presents her writing self: as able to stand outside the mercenary system only in her (explicitly) slave-like subjugation to her husband. This subjugation, not the Revolution’s vaunted liberty, is the only escape the novel offers from literal and figurative mercenary business; in this world, only the abject stand outside the sphere of influence of mercenary systems. Encounter in America: The Old Manor House . . . . . . . . I could mark That he was clad in military garb, Though faded yet entire. His face was turned Towards the road, yet not as if he sought For any living thing. He appeared Forlorn and desolate, a man cut off From all his kind, and more than half detached From his own nature. (William Wordsworth, ‘The Discharged Soldier’ [1984: 46, l. 53–9])

In these lines from ‘The Discharged Soldier’, an unpublished poem of 1798 later adapted for The Prelude, Wordsworth describes a man whose identity consists almost entirely of alienation. ‘[C]ut off / From all his kind, and more than half detached / From his own nature’, this soldier resists narratives of self-realization and connection to national communities by means of military service. For Wordsworth, the alienation of the veteran from self and nation becomes visible in the return home; this alienating return to defamiliarized ground is one of many conventions Wordsworth may have adapted from


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earlier works by Charlotte Smith. What Smith makes clearer than does Wordsworth is the extent to which this alienation blurs the lines between legitimate and mercenary soldiers. If a lack of authentic dedication to national service defines the mercenary – that is, if the mercenary honors the self more than the cause – then every step of the legitimate soldier away from heartfelt service is a step toward the mercenary. In Smith’s case, the process of the soldier’s alienation involves a transatlantic encounter. Orlando Somerive, the aforementioned hero of The Old Manor House, crosses the Atlantic to fight American rebels in spite of previous assurances that his military commitment would involve no such service. Orlando’s disillusionment with the British conduct of the war involves a corresponding identification, or set of identifications, with people he meets in America. These identifications produce a detachment from his former self-image that late in the novel leads to an alienation from home and homeland, as a destitute Orlando wanders through England, expecting recognition and welcome but finding neither. Like Wordsworth’s discharged soldier, Orlando finds that his voyage away from and back to England has transformed him and his relation to his homeland. Smith’s exploration of alienation in The Old Manor House allows the novel to become much more than a recasting of Desmond in the politically safer setting of the American Revolution. Like its earlier counterpart, The Old Manor House includes many kinds of literal and figurative mercenaries. Unlike Desmond, however, The Old Manor House relies heavily on Atlantic crossings. Smith had already constructed a Revolutionary world infected by mercenary practices in Desmond, but that novel set its action mainly outside of organized military action. The Old Manor House, by contrast, places its hero in the British army and on the battlefields of Revolutionary America, thus allowing the novel explicitly to stage interactions among blindly obedient soldiers, the increasingly alienated hero, and a mercenary ally of the British cause. Thus Smith transforms the abstract concerns of Desmond by engaging the environment of the Jane McCrea story. Like Desmond, The Old Manor House juxtaposes microcosmic and macrocosmic examinations of service and freedom. Before The Old Manor House introduces the mercenaries who symbolize a problematic autonomy, it raises similar issues in its portrayal of women who have gained an uncommon autonomy that they protect fiercely, even to the point of threatening the continuation of their family line


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by refusing what they call ‘unworthy alliances’ (2002: 38). These are the Rayland sisters, and the disposition of their wealth – controlled by the lone surviving sister – drives the novel’s plot. In spite of her traditionalist biases, Mrs. Rayland seems willing to overlook a dissolute older brother and make a younger brother, Orlando Somerive, her heir. In the novel’s first few pages, Smith establishes the Rayland sisters’ insistence on weighing the finances of their family’s marriages. In an ironic reversal that anticipates Jane Austen’s style, Smith writes that Mrs. Rayland has disapproved of Orlando’s father marrying ‘a woman who had nothing to recommend her but beauty, simplicity, and goodness’ (2002: 38). Mr. Somerive’s idealism leads to incomplete happiness: his refusal to marry for money causes a persistent lack of financial independence that constrains the choices of his children. By diminishing the family’s money, for example, Mr. Somerive’s act of independence necessitates his consideration of a mercenary marriage for his daughter. It also brings about his son Orlando’s commission in the army – his only means of making a way in the world compatible with both his need for money and Mrs. Rayland’s notions of propriety. Orlando Somerive sees his military service as an ordeal he will endure to gain his own freedom to marry a poor woman. Having fallen in love with Monimia, a servant of uncertain parentage in Mrs. Rayland’s household, Orlando fights for money so that he need not marry for money: He endeavoured . . . to persuade himself, that the time was not very far distant when, if he was not actually the possessor of Rayland Hall, he should at least have a competency as should enable him to settle in this his native country with his beloved Monimia. He tried to animate his drooping spirits with the idea that, in the profession into which he was now entering, he might find the means of accelerating this happy period . . . . (2002: 249–50)

These considerations grow logically enough from Orlando’s circumstances, but Smith implies a broader concern with economic motives among soldiers by twice calling Orlando’s new profession that of a ‘soldier of fortune’. In the first case, the narrator reveals of his aunt that, ‘[t]hough determined to keep him dependent during her life, and even to send him out as a soldier of fortune, she really meant to give him, at her death, the whole of her landed property’ (2002: 242). Shortly thereafter, Smith writes that Orlando’s mother ‘could not


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comprehend . . . how, if [Mrs. Rayland] meant to make [Orlando] her heir, . . . [she] could determine to send him out in the world a soldier of fortune’ (2002: 247–8). The phrase ‘soldier of fortune’ carried two meanings in Smith’s time. The first is that the phrase was a euphemism for ‘mercenary’. This is the only definition noted in Charles James’s New and Enlarged Military Dictionary of 1802. James defines ‘soldier of fortune’ thus: During the frequent wars which occurred in Italy, before the military profession became so generally prevalent in Europe, it was usual for men of enterprize and reputation to offer their services to the different states that were engaged. They were originally called condottieri, or leaders of reputation. They afterwards extended their services, and under the title of soldiers of fortune, sought for employment in every country, or state, that would pay them. (1805, 2nd edn: n. p., emphasis original)21

James’s 1810 edition of the dictionary, however, also includes another definition of the phrase: ‘a military man who has risen from the ranks by his own merit’ (‘fortune’ 1989).22 This definition seems to explain the surface meaning of the phrase for Smith: the novel does not necessarily say that Orlando is becoming a mercenary, merely that he attempts to make his fortune by soldiering. The hint of the mercenary is nonetheless reinforced because Orlando’s service will soon put him in contact with mercenaries who likewise serve the British crown in opposition to the American rebels. Smith portrays the employment of mercenaries, especially Native American mercenaries, as the practice that epitomizes the immorality and mismanagement of the British war effort. The novel takes Orlando through stages of disillusionment, beginning with his obligation to travel to America after being assured by British partisans that the rebels would be quickly suppressed. The next stage involves the destruction of Orlando’s confidence that ‘the ambition of a soldier is surely glorious ambition; it leads to honour through hardship and danger’ (2002: 277). Orlando’s first opportunity for advancement actually arises not from overcoming hardship but from the possibility that his sister Isabella will enter a mercenary alliance with General Tracy, who will then ‘use his utmost endeavors to procure [Orlando] immediate promotion’ (2002: 291) – one circumstance among many that ties Orlando’s military ambitions to his sisters’ inability to advance by means other than marriage. When Orlando departs for his voyage across the Atlantic, the


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connection between his military service and his sister’s situation deepens. We have already seen the gesture in which Smith feminizes Orlando’s position relative to Mrs. Rayland when she considers him ‘a Damoisell, now about to make his first essay in arms’ (2002: 265). As he proceeds to embark for America, Orlando finds himself in a position similar to his sister’s. Before his departure, he encounters ‘the only daughter of a rich broker of the tribe of Israel’ (2002: 302) who offers Orlando the prospect of an efficient mercenary marriage. This woman gives Orlando an option to choose economic well-being over sincere, spontaneous affection precisely because she has the opposite feelings for him: though he would offer few advantages as a match, ‘the young Jewess, who consulted only her eyes, immediately discovered, by their information, that this stranger was the sweetest, handsomest, most enchanting man in the world’ (2002: 303). The injection of this Jewish woman into the novel serves little purpose on its own, but by moving Orlando fleetingly into a mercenary marriage plot, the episode connects his effort to secure his fortune in the military with his sister Isabella’s agreement to help their family by entering into an explicitly mercenary marriage. Only a handful of pages after his encounter with ‘the young Jewess’, Orlando converses with his father and learns that to Mr. Somerive, ‘[t]he painful idea of sacrificing his daughter to mercenary considerations, was not more supportable than that of leaving her destitute, together with the rest of his family, of a comfortable subsistence’ (2002: 310). In fact, the family’s debate over the fate of Isabella becomes moot when she turns the tables and decides to imitate Orlando more closely than he anticipates: she elopes across the Atlantic with his fellow-soldier Warwick, who gains Orlando’s permission by asking whether Orlando would ‘object to exchange the intended grave Governor for the Soldier of fortune’ (2002: 332). Orlando does not object, though he arguably should: as Labbe states in her note to this passage, ‘[t]he ease with which Orlando gives Warwick “permission” to assail Isabella’s emotional battlements once again points out his inadequacy – here, as a brother’ (Smith 2002: 332). Smith’s choice to reveal Orlando’s moral weakness in a way that sends Isabella across the Atlantic with the army ties Orlando’s situation to Isabella’s. For both siblings, the Atlantic crossing becomes a mix of courage and cowardice, service and selfishness – and what the book portrays as masculine action and feminine dependence. Only in his move to the field of battle will Orlando come to face directly the compromises he has made.


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According to the novel, the conditions of Orlando’s voyage – likened to those on a slave ship, as noted earlier – are so intolerable partly because of war profiteering among British legislators. As Smith pointedly observes, this profiteering stems from and undermines the rhetoric of military glory. Malnutrition and disease needlessly beset the soldiers, she writes: [b]ut it was all for glory. And that the ministry should, in thus purchasing glory, put a little more than was requisite into the pockets of contractors, and destroy as many men by sickness as by the sword, made but little difference in an object so infinitely important; especially when it was known (which, however, Orlando did not know) that messieurs the contractors were for the most part members of parliament, who under other names enjoyed the profits of war. (2002: 354, emphasis original)

Smith’s parenthesis – ‘which, however, Orlando did not know’ – separates the hero from the narrator’s knowledge of this parliamentary misconduct, but also, in this respect and others, allows the reader a broader view than Orlando’s.23 Indeed, Smith allows the reader to see that the novel’s complicated parallel plots serve to generalize this figure of the contractor, the person who uses the cultural capital of some acknowledged good – family allegiance, marriage, patriotism – to form contracts that sacrifice that value to economic self-interest.24 The ability of corrupt contractors to affect Orlando’s experience is one way in which the transatlantic setting of The Old Manor House portrays the reach of systems of mercenary action. Even, or perhaps especially, as Orlando crosses the sea, he finds himself negotiating microcosmic and macrocosmic situations and incentives that reflect what the book calls mercenary behavior. The idea of the mercenary takes on a specifically national aspect when Orlando reaches America, enters the battlefield, and comes to new recognitions that disrupt his sense of the familiar and the foreign. The recognition that makes the familiar seem alien is that of the fact and methods of the British employment of mercenaries; this disorienting discovery is balanced by the kinship Orlando will come to feel with one mercenary soldier. Shortly after the narrator reveals the depredations of parliamentary contactors, Orlando joins the command of John Burgoyne, through whom Smith portrays the problems of the British war effort. A hero of the Seven Years’ War, Burgoyne was associated


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in the context of the American Revolution with a famous defeat: his surrender at Saratoga of nearly 6,000 troops in October 1777 would be the colonists’ greatest victory to that point. Orlando joins Burgoyne’s forces two months before that surrender, in August, and Smith presents Orlando as recognizing the war’s immorality. Not only have the British forces destroyed American towns, but ‘their women and children [have also been] exposed to the tempest of the night, or, what was infinitely more dreadful, to the brutality of the military’ (2002: 361). The suggestion that British soldiers have raped American women presents a startling reversal of Jane McCrea’s story, which also involved Burgoyne and, in some versions, rape. Smith’s invocation of Burgoyne in a context implicating British soldiers in wartime rape reverses the expectations of Smith’s contemporary readers: whereas the rape of Jane McCrea was taken to signify the crimes that Native Americans would commit in wartime – and therefore, presumably, those that British soldiers themselves would not – Smith’s quick reference to a more general military brutality collapses the moral separation between the British forces and their auxiliaries. The novel also deploys conventionally negative rhetoric about ‘the native American auxiliaries who had been called to the aid of the English’ (2002: 364) immediately before Smith gives Orlando his first direct view of Native American mercenaries, who at this point embody the stereotypes of propagandistic sensationalism: they are bloody-minded, have a ‘base avidity for plunder’ (2002: 364), and so forth. On beholding them, writes Smith, Orlando ‘shuddered with horror, and blushed for his country!’ (2002: 365). Smith’s long footnote to this passage offers an editorial commentary on the underlying historical circumstances of Orlando’s experience. Smith begins by quoting David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution (1789) describing the argument made by Britons who opposed the use of Native American auxiliaries ‘that Indians were capricious, inconstant, and intractable; their rapacity insatiate, and their actions cruel and barbarous’ (2002: 364). Shifting to her own editorial voice, Smith first appears to endorse Ramsay’s critique of British war policy, then offers other examples of military misconduct involving American Loyalists and Britons, finally asserting that these crimes of war ‘exceed any thing that happened’ during the French Revolution and that Britons must ‘own, that there are savages of all countries – even of our own!’ (2002: 365). That is, the note begins by attacking ‘Indians’ but quickly refocuses the argument to target Britons.


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Smith’s shift here anticipates one of Orlando’s. Orlando begins to step out of his limited British perspective on the war when his party takes prisoner a Mr. Jamieson, ‘a circumstance that gave Orlando an opportunity he never before had of hearing the American party tell their own story’ (2002: 364). Prompted by Jamieson’s complaints, Orlando feels ‘disgust’ at ‘the ferocity with which these red warriors treated their prisoners’. In the next sentence, however, he perceives an especially attractive young Indian warrior. This man has a ‘more open countenance’ and ‘more gentle manners’ than his fellows, as demonstrated especially by his chivalrous protection of a woman: ‘he had, at the risk of his own life, saved a woman from the fury of his relation the Bloody Captain, when he was on the point of killing her with his tomahawk’ (2002: 365). In other words, as Barbara Tarling has noted, this young warrior, whom the reader will come to know as the Wolf-hunter, has encountered and averted his own version of the Jane McCrea story (Tarling 2008: 83). Smith uses the Wolf-hunter both to assert and to deny the ability of a Native American to partake of the same structures of feeling as Orlando, as in this passage: ‘The secret sympathy between generous minds seems to exist throughout the whole human kind; for this young warrior became soon as much attached to Orlando as his nature allowed him to be to any body’ (Smith 2002: 366). The beginning of the sentence posits a cross-cultural equality of refined feeling; the end reasserts the limitations of the Wolf-hunter’s ‘nature’. Orlando’s next meeting with the Wolf-hunter occurs when a party including the Wolf-hunter captures Orlando and some of his fellows. This meeting brings about a fundamental shift in Orlando’s view of Britain’s conduct of the war by providing him the perspective of a good mercenary. Here again, Smith reinforces general notions of Native American brutality but uses them as a backdrop for the exceptional character of the Wolf-hunter. Although Orlando is initially mistaken when he expects ‘those horrid tortures of which he had heard so many terrific descriptions’ (2002: 380), he has correctly assessed the general situation: although the Wolf-hunter has protected the life of ‘his sworn friend’ Orlando, the Wolf-hunter’s ‘brothers had killed and scalped the rest of the party’ (2002: 380). At this point, Orlando poses a crucial question for the novel’s presentation of the American theatre of war, asking ‘why the Indian warriors had fallen upon a party of their allies and brethren, the soldiers of the king of England’ (2002: 380). The Wolf-hunter’s initial response merits quoting in full, as it


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conveys the two aspects of mercenary action that his fellow warriors embody for Smith: The Wolf-hunter replied, that the English had not dealt fairly with them – that they were promised provisions, rum, and plunder, instead of which they got nothing from the English camp, but had lost some of their best men in defending the lines; and that, the English having thus deceived them, they were no longer their allies, but were going home to their own lands, determined to plunder the stragglers of whatever party they might meet in their own way, to make themselves amends for the loss of time, and the heavier loss of brave warriors that had perished by believing the promises of the great English Captain. (2002: 380)25

Unlike Burke, who had warned Parliament that Native American auxiliaries were wolves and hyenas who could not be restrained from barbaric cruelty in battle, the Wolf-hunter presents a contrary image of Native Americans who initially, and apparently faithfully, accept the terms of a British bargain. In this they resemble Orlando: he, too, has joined the British cause pragmatically but in good faith and has subsequently been alienated by the government’s failures to wage war responsibly. The similarity of these situations produces different but related aspects of the slave–mercenary dichotomy: Orlando endures slave-like conditions, and the Wolf-hunter’s comrades fulfill the stereotype of the disloyal and rapacious mercenary. The Wolf-hunter portrays his people as contractors in a positive sense; they do not pretend to pure volunteerism in the British service, but neither does Orlando. They have made a reasonable bargain with the British and, according to the Wolf-hunter, have initially fulfilled the terms of their contract by fighting in the European mode. Though Burke’s and Smith’s (or the Wolf-hunter’s) statements share the assumption that Native American warriors have a different and morally inferior sense of the rules of war, Smith also uses the Wolfhunter to imagine the Native American warrior as the faithful contractor, the figure who would lay aside his general practices of fighting to maintain his contractual obligations to his allies.26 The killing and scalping that shock Orlando, and that Smith includes to shock the reader, arise from the breach of the contract by the British. To the extent that Smith presents Orlando and the Wolf-hunter as admirable, they are so in their shared alienation from both the British forces and their auxiliaries. Both men enter the war without pretence to disinterested service, and their disillusionments further alienate


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them from the British cause. Such alienation traditionally belongs to the mercenary, but in Smith’s presentation, the British war effort is itself a mercenary operation, in that it the sacrifices sincere commitment to the avarice of its participants at all levels. Alienation from the cause thus becomes a manifestation of personal authenticity. As the Wolf-hunter presents the case, his people become something like the mercenaries of Burkean caricature only after the British forces – themselves undermined by the profiteering of contractors – sully the character of the contractual allegiance. The traditional critique of mercenaries for remaining overly independent and self-guided after contracting to serve a new ruler takes new forms here. The Wolf-hunter’s comrades become the bloody-minded mutineers of anti-mercenary polemic, but only after they themselves have been betrayed. Orlando and the Wolf-hunter, contrarily, exercise the mercenary’s independence to resist the worst efforts of their comrades. For Orlando, independence of thought results in the realization that the American soldiers, rather than the British, are ‘fighting in defense of their liberties (of all those rights which his campaign as a British officer had not made him forget were the most sacred to an Englishman)’ (Smith 2002: 447, emphasis original). In a reformist spirit, Smith presents British values as the means of resisting the British war effort. Smith then turns the novel’s focus from the conduct of war to the treatment of veterans, and thus to the dynamics of service and compensation that bind the state to its volunteers. After gaining his release from the Wolf-hunter, Orlando rejoins the British forces (having narrowly missed his regiment’s surrender at Saratoga), enjoys good treatment in a brief episode of French captivity, and secures passage to England with three men who rob and abandon him. Smith portrays her lone warrior, unkempt and poor, wandering in England, as an embodied test of the generosity of the common people. Orlando’s shoddy treatment by his fellow Britons implies that the faults of the nation extend beyond the political class.27 As he recovers some of his standing, Orlando gains the opportunity to assist a poor veteran, ‘old Thomas’, whom Orlando immediately imagines to have been disabled from acquiring [the common necessaries of life] by having lost his limb in the service of what is called his country, that is, in fighting the battles of its politicians; and having been deprived of his leg to preserve the balance of Europe, has not found in the usual asylum a


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place of rest, to make him such amends as can be made for such a misfortune! (2002: 458)

In the figure of Thomas, Smith portrays the sacrifice of individual to political needs. Thomas has ‘been deprived of his leg to preserve the balance of Europe’; he has lost his own balance in the cause of Europe’s. Orlando, in turn, seeks to address this injustice, ‘to give some relief to the distressed veteran before him’ (2002: 538). Perceiving the state’s failure to compensate Thomas for the sacrifices entailed in his service, Orlando seeks to pay the public debt through private means.28 Orlando’s effort to pay Thomas results in new imbalances of power and new debts when, in the closing section of the novel, Thomas earns his pay by serving as a messenger for Orlando. That is, in spite of Orlando’s initial impulse to relieve the distress of the neglected veteran – to compensate Thomas for services already rendered to the state – Orlando actually pays Thomas for new work. Orlando and the narrator attempt to transform these payments into a gift economy rather than one of wages, as in the moment when Orlando secures ‘by renewed presents the fidelity and future assistance of his two emissaries’ (2002: 461). (The other emissary is Patty, a domestic in the service of Rachel Roker, who assists Orlando in gaining access to her mistress.) In this sequence, Thomas’s and Orlando’s situations begin to converge: the notion that Orlando relieves the suffering of the wounded veteran by giving him ‘presents’ flatters both characters, as it presupposes them to be independent volunteers in the arrangement. The facts of their mutual dependence and of the payments’ power to maintain their mutual loyalty make the mystification of their relationship all the more necessary. This mystification reinforces the importance to the novel of Orlando’s initial impression that, in helping Thomas, he has taken on a responsibility abdicated by the state. When Orlando obscures a straightforward payment for service by ritualizing it as a gift from one independent, voluntary actor to another, he reveals that his actions are not the opposite of what the novel portrays as his government’s cynical recruitment strategies but rather their refined and miniaturized manifestation in private life. As Orlando seeks to find and marry Monimia, we see that, like Desmond in Smith’s previous novel, Orlando seems to escape a mercenary system but applies its principles in constructing the romance of the novel’s resolution. The key to this thematic reversal lies in


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multiple manifestations of the ideas of independence. To structure a novelistic marriage plot around a sympathetically portrayed war of independence is to establish a fundamental tension between the goal of national independence – the breaking of a legal union – and the ideal of sacrificing individual liberty in the contract of marriage. Smith exhibits repeatedly her awareness that in marriage, as in many other legal arrangements, a woman sacrifices more liberty than does a man: that awareness forms the centre of Desmond’s gender relations. In The Old Manor House, however, Orlando’s military service expands the scope of the novel to include the institutional mechanisms by which government constrains the liberties of men, especially in the obedience to the hierarchy of command that Smith, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and many others after them, would take to be serious violations of the liberty of individual conscience.29 Joseph J. Ellis has put this problem in practical terms regarding the American side: ‘the success of the army depended upon instilling a level of discipline that seemed, on the face of it, to defy the very values the American Revolution came to stand for’ (J. Ellis 2007: 32). The Old Manor House places this irony – submitting to a military hierarchy to fight for liberty – alongside the irony of Orlando’s family situation, which presents the idealistic disdain of financial interest as a privilege that must be bought. This is another respect in which Smith generalizes the problems associated with mercenaries: every British soldier must exhibit the mercenary’s willingness to sell his loyalty, to serve some cause in spite of a contrary will. ‘[E]ven the brave and generally humane Fleming’, one of Orlando’s fellow soldiers in America, has allowed his will to be replaced by that of the monarch. ‘[T]he sword is my argument’, he says, ‘and I have sold that to my King, and therefore must use it in his service, whatever and wherever it may be pointed out to me’ (Smith 2002: 363). The Old Manor House is about the making of new wills, in the sense of changed minds but also of legal documents. (The end of the novel even features the punningly named Mrs. Newill and her son William: Will Newill?) To win Monimia’s hand, Orlando needs Mrs. Rayland to form both kinds of new will.30 His challenge at the beginning of the novel is to persuade her to declare him her heir; his challenge at the end, after her death, is to find the document that proves her intentions. Orlando does marry Monimia, but he does so only after a long series of compromises, mistakes, and stratagems that together represent the limits of his character and his environment. In Desmond and The Old Manor House, Smith constructs


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fictional worlds that operate with a fundamental sense of system, of large social structures gradually impinging on the motives and actions of a wide range of characters. Hence arises Smith’s promiscuous use of the term mercenary, as a noun and an adjective signifying the wide-ranging, morally damaging consequences of living within such a world. Smith implies by that usage an investment in the analogy of the marriageable woman seeking a husband and the young man looking for his match among forms of variously compensated military service. For Smith, aspirations to idealism and disinterest are endlessly thwarted by encounters with the mercenary, whether in the form of mercenary fighters – Desmond’s employment of a Swiss henchman, the British alliance with the Wolf-hunter and his colleagues – or mercenary motives, as in the failure of Orlando Somerive’s father to escape the mercenary system by marrying for love. Smith builds her plots from the declarations of dependence that create social and national life. NOTES

1. For an analysis of the evidence underlying the stories of McCrea’s death, see Holden (1913). 2. McCrea’s story certainly became the stuff of propaganda, but the story’s military impact remains a subject of debate. See Brian Burns (1977) for a skeptical view of some aspects of the notion that McCrea’s death functioned as a recruiting tool. 3. This phrase, already noted in Chapter 1, comes from Jefferson’s draft language for the Declaration protesting the use of ‘not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries’. 4. For a reading of these comments about McCrea in relation to other Burkean statements about British policy, including the part of the Reflections on the Revolution in France comparing the French Revolutionaries to ‘a procession of American savages’ (1993: 67), see Gibbons (2003), Chapter 7. 5. Colin G. Calloway (1995) analyzes how the McCrea story ‘rallied American militia at the time and justified American policies in later years’. Calloway remarks that ‘[f]ew Americans remembered, if they ever knew, that if McCrea did die at Indian hands – and even that is debatable – the killers were probably Christian Indians, recruited from the French mission villages on the Saint Lawrence’ (1995: 295). 6. As Namias puts it in her analysis of McCrea’s story as one of ‘female independence run amok’ (1993: 121), few American writers ‘would criticize [Jones’s] character or potential devotion to Jane’ (1993: 124).


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7. Smith adds this footnote to the paragraph: ‘It has lately been alleged in defence of the Slave Trade, that Negroes on board Guineamen are allowed almost as much room as a Soldier in a Transport. – Excellent reasoning!’ (2002: 351, emphasis original). 8. The novel also refers to Orlando by his first name (sometimes to contrast him with his father or older brother), a convention that links him to the female characters and differentiates him from the other adult men, including Orlando’s comrades in arms. 9. Other novels of the time share many of the elements that Smith mobilizes in The Old Manor House, and briefly attending to some of those works, including Smith’s own 1792 work Desmond, can clarify the import of Smith’s mobilization of American mercenaries. For example, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (published in England in 1791, America in 1794), a work nearly contemporaneous with The Old Manor House, shares many of Smith’s thematic concerns and plot elements. Both novels involve women’s transatlantic travel: Rowson’s eponymous heroine semi-voluntarily sails from England to America as the companion of a British soldier at the time of the American Revolution, and Orlando Somerive’s sister Isabella elopes across the Atlantic in The Old Manor House. Both novels teem with military officers, explain the movements of those officers by means of the war, and portray a large number of marriages illustrating a range of affectionate and financial motives for matrimony. That is to say, Charlotte Temple positions itself to explore literal and figurative dimensions of mercenary action, to examine the ways that private actions affect the British and American military forces in the Revolutionary wars, to enact the shifting meaning of the mercenary as it crosses the Atlantic. But on the whole, the novel does not do those things. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), a novel frequently discussed alongside Charlotte Temple, similarly involves a series of variously mercenary marriage plots. The Coquette presents a social scene partly dominated by soldiers, to the extent that Julia Stern remarks on the apparent use of General Richman to stand in for George Washington (1997: 85). Here again, however, Foster does not present military action or military organization in a way that creates concrete and complex analogies between civilian and military models of mercenary action. 10. Take, for example, the reference in Smith’s preface to the sixth edition of Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems to ‘those gentlemen, who, though they acknowledge that all impediments to a division of the estate they have undertaken to manage, are done away – will neither tell me when they will proceed to divide it, or whether they will ever do so at all’ (1993: 6, emphasis original). 11. Jane Austen’s Persuasion introduces a (Charlotte) Smithian element in the character of Mrs. Smith, a widow who has access through a


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network of servants to intelligence about the book’s social world. Like the historical Charlotte Smith, this Mrs. Smith lives in relative poverty because she married an extravagant husband and subsequently cannot move powerful men to resolve outstanding legal claims in her favor. Whereas Admiral and Mrs. Croft provide this novel’s portrait of a deserving couple finding in the Navy a meritocracy that allows husband and wife to deploy their respective talents to good ends, Mrs. Smith provides a contrasting image of a woman unable to obtain what she legally deserves. Like Charlotte Smith, Austen’s Mrs. Smith is beset by debts she cannot collect. Austen’s narrator always describes Mrs. Smith in positive terms, but her actions might cause the reader to resist the descriptions. Though Mrs. Smith believes that her friend Anne Elliot is about to marry a scoundrel – later revealed as such by his mercenary marriage – Mrs. Smith recommends him to Anne. Mrs. Smith explains her duplicity with the dubious claim that truthfulness could not have prevented the marriage; an alternative explanation would involve her express desire to secure the interest of the presumed couple in helping her recover money from her husband’s property in the West Indies. As other critics have noted – Stephen Derry may have been the first (1990: 69) – this situation closely parallels Charlotte Smith’s effort to recover the West Indian property left to her children by her father-in-law. Austen frequently addresses the issue of mercenary marriage: it is, implicitly, the underlying problem of the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, a novel in which Elizabeth Bennet asks her aunt, Mrs. Gardiner, ‘[W]hat is the difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end, and avarice begin?’ (2003: 135). This conversation prepares us for Elizabeth’s ensuing revelation that the attentions to Miss King of Mr. Wickham, who has entered the ——shire Militia after failing to find another profession, were ‘solely and hatefully mercenary’ (2003: 179). The creation of Wickham as a ‘hatefully mercenary’ character and a militiaman builds an intriguing tension between his civilian and military roles at a time when political writers held up the militia as the embodiment of patriotic volunteerism opposed to the evils of literal or figurative mercenary soldiery. Because Austen never articulates the consequences of that tension, the novel gives the reader a more unsettled sense of the British military’s virtues than, for example, the more celebratory Persuasion would later convey. 12. For an important account of Smith’s authorial self-presentation, see Labbe (1994). Joseph F. Bartolomeo highlights an aspect of The Old Manor House that bears on this issue as well: Orlando Somerive and his friend Warwick each have the opportunity to earn money for writing if he will embarrass himself by paying homage to fashionable writers.


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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Mercenaries in British and American Literature Warwick, like Smith, makes the necessary compromises to advance an authorial career; Orlando refuses to do the same (Bartolomeo 1993: 653). We can see the sources of Smith’s defensiveness in her critics’ suspicion of her financial motives, a suspicion that has proved remarkably durable. Judith Phillips Stanton opens her article on ‘Charlotte Smith’s “Literary Business”’ with this sentence, which assumes as given an opposition between actions that cause ‘pride’ and those that generate payments: ‘Although in later years, Charlotte Smith spoke of her “literary career” with pride, it is well known that she wrote for money’ (1987: 375). Thanks to the fight over her father-in-law’s estate, Smith would also gain some experience in the business of literal slavery. When confronted with the possibility that the family’s slaves had dropped in value, she attached cash values to some of them and protested that ‘one Slave named Bennah, tho stated in the Managers Account to be a man, was a very old Woman worth nothing’, so her death was not ‘a disadvantage to the Estate’ (Smith 2003: 353). See Stanton for details about Smith’s efforts to begin and support her sons’ military careers with the necessary front-end financial investment to procure them commissions (1987: 381–2). Stanton also notes that ‘[o]n an undocumented number of occasions [Benjamin] sneaked back into England to claim both her book money and interest money as his own – as it legally was’ (1987: 379). As Eleanor Wikborg points out, the sense of Smith as a radical novelist reaches back to her first readers and reviewers and continues to the present, for a number of good reasons (1997: 322). In finding reasons to resist the radicalism of the novel, Wikborg is joined by critics such as Katherine Ellis (1976), Bowstead (1986), Judith Davis Miller (2001), Binhammer (1999) and Conway (1995). I quote Shakespeare from the Norton edition (1997) unless otherwise noted. The context of Hamlet’s reference to ‘yeoman’s service’ is his explanation to Horatio of the process of forging the order for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be killed: I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair, and laboured much How to forget that learning; but, sir, now It did me yeoman’s service. Wilt thou know Th’effect of what I wrote? (1997: V, ii, 34–7) As Edmond Malone writes in his 1790 edition of Shakespeare, Claudius calls for Switzers ‘because the Swiss in the time of our poet, as at present, were hired to fight the battles of other nations’. Malone, in


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19.

20. 21.

22.

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turn, cites this quip from Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Nashe: ‘Law, logicke, and the Switzers, may be hired to fight for any body’ (Shakespeare 1790: 9/363, emphasis original). Shakespeare seems to introduce Claudius’s Swiss guard solely to associate his illegitimate reign with the use of mercenaries, fighters brought in to support the king because, as the play points out, Prince Hamlet and Laertes both command more popular support. The Norton edition of the plays (1997: ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., based on the Oxford edition) offers this note to Hamlet’s use of ‘yeoman’s service’: ‘English yeomen (free landholders) were famous for military strength, supposedly because they fought for their national interest rather than for base pay’. The OED’s alternative definition of ‘yeoman’s service’ (‘good, efficient, or useful service, such as is rendered by a faithful servant of good standing’) emphasizes the sense of ‘yeoman’ as a high-ranking servant or attendant, but the Norton note seems to capture Hamlet’s usage more precisely (‘yeoman’ 1989). Curran remarks upon the way ‘the novel ends with a litany of possessives by which Desmond expects to reenact the coverture that has already once dehumanized Geraldine Verney’ (Curran 2005: xiv). My argument here is in the same spirit as a narrower point made by Conway about Desmond’s decision to enter a duel to protect Geraldine’s brother from a marital entrapment plot in France: ‘The duel signals Desmond’s lapse from Revolutionary idealism into a chivalric and aristocratic practice. His transgression inscribes itself on the body with a wound which prevents Desmond from writing letters, rendering him voiceless for several weeks’ (Conway 1995: 402). The revelation of this child, incidentally, echoes the discovery of Mr. B.’s daughter in Richardson’s Pamela. I quote from James’s 1805 edition of the same work; the OED definition of ‘soldier of fortune’ includes a slightly abridged version of the same text from the 1802 edition. An earlier military dictionary (1760) by John Almon uses the phrase incidentally, also in the sense of ‘mercenary’ (Almon 1760: 125). Roger B. Manning documents the class overtones of this sense of ‘soldier of fortune’ in his description of the opposition between English and Scottish aristocrats and the ‘professional soldiers’ whom they ‘contemptuously called “soldiers of fortune”’ (R. Manning 2006: 164). The more pejorative sense of the phrase appears in Coleridge’s translation (1800) of Schiller’s The Death of Wallenstein, in which a soldier who will assassinate his superiors says of himself and one colleague: ‘Soldiers of fortune are we – who bids most, He has us’ (Schiller 1864: 666)


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23. Corrupt contracting was also a concern across the Channel: John A. Lynn attributes Napoleon’s rise to power to his recognition that war profiteering through contracting had created a discontented, undersupplied army (2005: 199). 24. In Don Juan, Byron’s narrator raises the subject of corrupt war contracting in the description of the Russian army. The narrator says of the poor construction of the Russian batteries that the flaws may be due to . . . . some contractor’s personal cupidity Saving his soul be cheating in the ware Of homicide. (1980–92: VII/211–13) Byron takes something like Smith’s anti-contractor sentiment and gives it a Mandevillian twist: the capacity of the mercenary soldier or contractor to betray a war effort (private vice) may increase the morality of the enterprise (public virtue). 25. The Wolf-hunter’s ability to provide an apparently disinterested account of his people’s relations with British authorities is echoed in Herder’s nearly contemporary portrayal in ‘Letters for the Advancement of Humanity’ of Native Americans’ ‘naive’ ability to make judgments outside the constraints of simple nationalist ideologies: Now just as every duty of humaneness commands us not to disturb for a child, for a youth, his age in life, the system of his forces and pleasures, likewise it also commands nations such a thing vis-à-vis nations. In this regard several conversations of Europeans, especially missionaries, with foreign peoples, for example, Indians, Americans, please me greatly; the naivest of answers full of good heart and sound understanding were almost always on the side of the foreigners. They answered with childish pertinence and correctness, whereas the Europeans, with the imposing of their arts, ethics, and doctrines, for the most part played the role of worn-out old men who had completely forgotten what was appropriate to a child. (2002: 417) 26. On the rules of war and Native American auxiliaries, see LawsonPeebles (1992). 27. In his 2009 University of Pennsylvania dissertation, Jared Richman contextualizes Orlando’s experience in the literature of the serviceman’s return to Britain. This episode in Smith’s work may have served as a model for the next generation of British novelists – especially Jane Porter in Thaddeus of Warsaw and Walter Scott in Waverley. 28. In this Orlando echoes Matthew Bramble of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, as described in the introduction to this work.


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29. Coleridge takes such a position in ‘The Plot Discovered’ (1795; Coleridge 1970–a: 314) and Shelley in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (Shelley 1930). 30. The adventures by which Orlando eventually succeeds show the novel’s new wills, in both senses, emerging in Gothically transformative ways: lost and found documents, abductions, captivity narratives. Consider by contrast Jane Austen’s novels, in whose fictional worlds new wills form slowly against the inertia of generations, worlds where the central legal issue is generally that of entail – the institutional prohibition of new wills.


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Chapter 3

‘A GOOD ONE THOUGH RATHER FOR THE FOREIGN MARKET’: WALTER SCOTT, LORD BYRON, AND THE ROMANTIC MERCENARY

In the previous chapter, we have seen how Charlotte Smith used analogy and her novelistic imagination to connect her experience to the lives of men in war. Unlike Smith, a number of major British male authors of the time had direct experience of military organizations, if not of warfare itself. Beset by debts and misery in December 1793, Samuel Taylor Coleridge accepted six and a half guineas to become a volunteer private in the 15th Light Dragoons (Holmes 1990: 53).1 Walter Scott helped to form the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons in 1797. Dorothy Wordsworth writes in her journal that when she and her brother William travelled in Scotland in 1803, ‘an invasion was hourly looked for’ (D. Wordsworth 1897: 2/91), and, upon returning home, William joined the Grasmere Volunteers.2 Lord Byron turned from writing about Greece’s freedom to attempting to fight for it. Direct rhetorical engagement with military policy was also an option more readily available to men than women: Coleridge lectured against British recruiting tactics and against standing armies, and Percy Bysshe Shelley addressed methods of military organization in his ‘Philosophical View of Reform’ (Shelley 1930).3 Among these writers, Scott and Byron stand out for engaging most thoroughly the transnational dimensions, especially the transatlantic and European dimensions, of military service.4 Their literary works deal more directly with the European context. In an important sense, therefore, the transatlantic side of Scott and Byron develops mainly as a function of their American influence and legacy, a small piece of which I will explore in my next two chapters through James Fenimore Cooper’s work. America does also play a direct role in


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Scott’s and Byron’s constructions of military action. For Scott, whose works frequently portray Scottish Highlanders by analogy to Native Americans, America’s isolation allows it to avoid some of the pressures of modernity that have destroyed Highland culture and that arise in part from the mutual proximity of European powers. The United States as a nation seldom figures significantly in his fictions; when Scott does address the subject of the new nation, he attributes its success primarily to the modesty of its post-Revolutionary measures – ‘the states arranged their new government so as to make the least possible alteration in the habits of their people’ (1827a: 1/167) – and to its geography, which creates, among other advantages, ‘no necessity of maintaining a large standing army, which has become a necessary condition of the existence of every European power, and weighs most heavily upon its resources’ (1827b: 238). Thus, for Scott, the isolation of the United States of his time maintains some of the idealized separation from modern warfare that his Highlanders have lost. Byron, on the other hand, glorifies the institutional successes of the American government and the role of charismatic leadership in the name of political liberty, as I will argue in more detail below. Scott’s and Byron’s methods of representing military action, however, do suggest commonalities. For one important example, both writers portray the relationship between partisan warfare and individual conscience through the figure of the individual soldier alienated from his cause in battle. We have already seen the process by which the hero of Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793), Orlando Somerive, disillusioned by his nation’s employment of Native American mercenaries, gains a newly disinterested perspective on the war he fights, and he comes to sympathize with the American rebels’ opposition to the British government. In Scott’s Waverley (1814), Edward Waverley deserts his post in the British army to fight in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745; his participation in the war dissolves his Jacobite enthusiasms and reinvigorates his loyalty to the British government. Byron’s eponymous hero in Don Juan (1819–24) fights among the foreign mercenaries in Catherine the Great’s army against the Turks during the pointlessly destructive siege of Ismail; enabled by his independence from national affiliations, he forms a transnational and transformative attachment to a Turkish girl. All three of these alienated soldiers achieve an independence that enables a moral humanitarianism unavailable to other participants in their respective conflicts. Orlando befriends one of his Native American captors; Waverley protects honorable soldiers from harm;


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Juan saves and adopts the Turkish orphan Leila. In all three cases, alienation from a collective cause creates a new, private motivation and thus an ability to act with a broad humanistic morality in a theatre of war. Though their authors write for widely varied political purposes, these heroes exemplify a striking twist in the transition from conventional mercenary ideology to the Romantic literary text. In becoming like mercenaries – individuals acting for their own purposes in defiance of their official commanders – these figures reveal the potential benefits of the mercenary’s secret motives; a benevolent secrecy allows these soldiers to choose compassionate connection on the battlefield. Though Smith, Byron, and Scott also portray mercenaries in a conventionally negative light, these heroes reveal the surprising interconnectedness of the mercenary’s secret life and the Romantic ideal of inspired independence.5 In these texts, wartime becomes the constraining environment that demonstrates the power and limits of the independent, creative mind. The Mercenary Context: Niccolò Machiavelli, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith After Waterloo, the growth of Britain’s standing armies became a pressing concern of reformers. As the 1816 Nottingham Petition to the Prince Regent records, in the year 1792, our Military Establishment consisted of only thirtynine thousand men; in 1816, a year of peace, when the valour of our arms has achieved whatever is necessary for our security, or our honour, it is fixed at One Hundred and Forty-nine Thousand, for purposes, we cannot but suspect, injurious to the Rights of Freemen.6

In the environment of the late Regency, humanist and Enlightenment concerns about the tendencies of standing armies and other military systems returned in force, when the domestic consequences of such systems became more visible as the Napoleonic threat receded. This chapter will turn briefly to the Machiavellian and Enlightenment development of theories about the employment of mercenaries and then return to the work of Scott and Byron. I have earlier mentioned Machiavelli’s contributions to antimercenary rhetoric, but it is worth attending to his reasoning in more detail here. In The Prince (1513), Machiavelli sets out principles that have ever since grounded opposition to the employment of


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mercenary and auxiliary troops.7 ‘Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous’, he writes: Any man who founds his state on mercenaries can never be safe or secure, because they are disunited, ambitious, undisciplined, and untrustworthy – bold fellows among their friends, but cowardly in the face of the enemy; they have no fear of God, nor loyalty to men. They will protect you from ruin only as long as nobody assaults you; in peace you are at their mercy, and in war at the mercy of your enemies. The reason is that they have no other passions or incentives to hold the field, except their desire for a bit of money, and that is not enough to make them die for you. (1992: 34)

For Machiavelli, the soldiers’ willingness to market their military allegiance implies a more general lack of loyalty to their fellows, to their commanders, and to God. This characterization can seem to imply a simple argument that mercenaries reveal their immorality by selling their souls – selling, that is, the right to have sincere, autonomous allegiances to institutions. In Machiavelli’s eyes, however, the problem with mercenaries is that they sell their souls incompletely: their stubbornly independent souls always threaten to reveal themselves in cowardice or rebellion. Machiavelli repeatedly contrasts mercenaries and auxiliaries with the prince’s ‘own armies’, defined as his ‘own subjects, citizens, or dependents’ (1992: 40). In this context, what appears to be a failing of selfhood, the mercenaries’ willingness to bargain away their loyalties, reveals itself as a problematic selfpossession. By coming into being as an economic self, as a party to a contract that replaces the tie between state and subject, the mercenary renders impossible the ideally sacrificial volunteerism by which the prince makes soldiers his ‘own’. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture, the mercenary stood at the intersection of two trajectories: the development and refinement of Enlightenment political economy on the one hand, and on the other a series of wars that raised new questions about the proper roles of militias, auxiliaries, and mercenaries in the British military. The broad, pejorative sense of ‘mercenary’ – the noun or adjective related to the pursuit of gain at the expense of ethics – came into play as writers sought to define the proper boundaries of material pursuit in economies founded upon aggregated self-interest. The narrow meaning of ‘mercenary’ – ‘a soldier paid to serve in a foreign army or other military organization’ – gained prominence as


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commercial societies sought to reconcile their emphasis on individual pursuit of self-interest with the martial values of hierarchical discipline, national affiliation, and self-sacrifice (‘mercenary’ 1989). This tension between economic and military systems of organization gave rise to a split within Scottish Enlightenment thought about standing armies, which represented a martial manifestation of the division of labor.8 Advocates of militia-based domestic defense took a Machiavellian position against full-time professional soldiers as potential instruments of treason and tyranny. On the other hand, as Richard B. Sher has shown, [s]tanding armies were associated with modernity not only because they were literally the products of the modern European nation-state but also because they appeared to embody modern principles of efficiency and economic rationality. Above all, they embodied the principle of division of labor and its corollary, specialization of function, which made for a more efficient army while at the same time threatening to disqualify untrained civilians for effective military service. (Sher 1989: 243)

Thus, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith ‘painted a dismal picture of militias as vastly inferior to standing armies in all periods and places’ (Sher 1989: 245), whereas Adam Ferguson, typically more concerned than was Smith with the drawbacks of modern economics, devoted himself philosophically and politically to a British militia and – after the Militia Act of 1757 deliberately excluded Scots – to Scottish participation in that militia.9 The pro-militia writings of Ferguson and Alexander Carlyle are suffused with anti-mercenary rhetoric that resists standing armies by equating native and foreign professional forces. Ferguson posits in An Essay on the History of Civil Society that national defense suffers from a specialized military force ‘whether these be foreigners or natives’ (1995: 227), and a pamphlet thought to be Carlyle’s argues that ‘it is surely better to be a little less rich and commercial’ than to risk, like the Roman Empire, ‘becom[ing] so luxurious or effeminate, as to leave the use of arms to strangers and mercenaries’ (quoted in Sher 1989: 247).10 In his later university lectures, Ferguson uses ‘Professional Soldiers’ and ‘Mercenary Soldiers’ as synonyms.11 That is, Ferguson and Carlyle attack standing armies by extending the application of commonly held anti-mercenary sentiments to every kind of professional soldiering.12 To argue for the loyalty of Scottish fighters in the aftermath of


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the Jacobite rebellions, Ferguson and Carlyle had to contend with the uncomfortable connection between two facts: a well-known tradition of Scottish men serving as mercenaries in Continental armies and the new development of an internationalist economics in Scotland. The delicate mixing of internationalist economics and nationalist politics at such a moment may help explain Smith’s seemingly incongruous support of the Scottish militia movement, Smith and Ferguson’s mutual use of ‘mercenary’ in its pejorative sense, and Ferguson and Carlyle’s anxiously heated demonization of mercenary warfare.13 Ferguson and Carlyle’s remarks are part of a broader movement that John Robertson has documented: after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, Edinburgh’s Moderate literati began to rekindle Scottish military pride within a Unionist context. Making bedfellows of Unionist economics and martial nostalgia created a vocal rejection of mercenary warfare.14 Establishing Scottish opposition to ‘foreign mercenaries’ enabled Enlightenment Scots not only to describe the boundaries of proper commercialism by contrast, but also to reinforce Scotland’s membership as part of the domestic arena to which the mercenaries were ‘foreign’. These issues, from Scotland’s role in the British military to the role of economic incentives in military life, would persist into the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The application of the issues altered, however, as the wars following the French Revolution changed the role of mercenaries in Europe. Although Britain subsidized the troops of its allies, the scale of the Napoleonic Wars limited the availability of troops for hire from other European powers.15 The need for domestic soldiers was enormous: the British army grew sixfold from 40,000 men in 1789 to roughly a quarter of a million in 1814; the Royal Navy grew even faster; and, by 1804, volunteer units came to comprise almost half a million men (Colley 1992: 287).16 These numbers illustrate the impressive popular response to the national call to arms as well as the nation’s insatiable demand for still more volunteers. The economics of professional soldiering became a matter of growing concern as the British government increased financial incentives for volunteering; the payment or non-payment of soldiers and veterans through bonuses, salaries, and prizes became a frequent subject of public discourse.17 At the same time, writers reminded the populace that selfless service should be reward enough for fighting. The ideology of disinterested volunteer fighting thus existed alongside explicit discussions of recruiting soldiers with money. The resulting tension between the two necessitated discussion of the nature of mercenary activity.


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In this context, Walter Scott emerged as a self-styled modern minstrel. The success of his books added another layer of paradox to the relationship between national writing and fighting: writing about the importance of chivalric self-sacrifice over economic interest became a good way for writers to make money. With a cultivated awareness of the philosophical underpinnings of the mercenary debate and of his own precarious place in the world of commerce, Scott frequently drew comparisons between the soldier’s and the writer’s professions that echo the issues raised in the militia debates. Scott’s imaginative works, of course, allow him the freedoms and ironies of fiction. Using the power of romance to mystify the relationship between fighting and payment, Scott creates a world in which sympathetic soldiers, while retaining the selflessness and national loyalty that Ferguson wanted British fighters to preserve, can be subject to Smithian economic incentives. Scott’s Mercenaries and Quentin Durward Scott’s career led him repeatedly to consider the broad and narrow senses of mercenary action as he wrote about mercenary writing, mercenary fighting, and connections between the two categories. Despite his participation in the book trade and public comments about the sales of his books, Scott opposed writing primarily for profit. He articulated this position by differentiating properly commercial writing, in which acting on honorable motives could incidentally produce wealth, from mercenary writing. Scott was sensitive to allegations that he allowed financial gain to become his primary incentive to authorship: as Jane Millgate has shown, ‘what almost certainly gave Scott greatest pain at the time of Marmion’s publication [in 1808], continued to disturb him twenty years later, and was sedulously omitted from Lockhart’s quotations from the Marmion reviews, was the accusation that Marmion had been written primarily for money’ (1993: 196).18 In the following year, the twenty-oneyear-old Byron would upbraid Scott for writing ‘for hire’ in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809): And thou, too, Scott! resign to minstrels rude The wilder Slogan of a Border feud: Let others spin their meagre lines for hire; Enough for Genius if itself inspire! (Byron 1980–92:1/257)


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Writing to Byron in July 1812, Scott defends himself from what he calls ‘mercenary’ motives: Scott expresses to Byron ‘a wish to clear my personal character from any tinge of mercenary or sordid feeling in the eyes of a contemporary of genius’ (Scott 1932–7: 3/138). Throughout his imaginative works and prose commentaries, Scott would later employ this metaphor of ‘mercenary’ feeling to characterize mercenary soldiers and frequently to link those portrayals to analogous models of paid authorship. Though probably reinforced by his own experience helping form the Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons in 1797 and becoming ‘intoxicated with his new military status’ (J. Sutherland 1998: 66), Scott’s use of military metaphors for authorship reflects a trend of his time. This language, which gained additional prominence during Scott’s authorial career, built upon age-old analogies between pens and swords as well as upon eighteenth-century debates about mercenaries in Britain. In the early nineteenth century, the imperative to examine the commerce of writing and soldiering was reinforced both by the difficulty of recruiting soldiers for Britain’s war with France and by the spectacular new bestseller status of Scott and Byron. As those two writers came to terms with the publicity attendant on their commercial success, each sought to occupy a moral high ground in the new terrain of literary economics. Byron criticized a ‘descent to trade’ that, according to Marlon Ross, ‘is part of a profound transformation that is not fully comprehended by Byron, but which he nervously senses from a disturbing signal: a marked change in the distribution of literary works among different kinds of readers’ (1986: 269). Scott, too, sometimes expressed discomfort with what Ross calls a ‘new conception of readers as a market’ (1986: 269). In Quentin Durward (1823), Scott links that new conception to a parallel development, one that Georg Lukács addresses in The Historical Novel: the shift, during and after the French Revolution, from mercenary to mass armies and the ‘qualitative difference’ between them that is ‘precisely a question of their relations with the mass of the population’ (1983: 23).19 For an anti-Revolutionary observer such as Scott, these national mass armies could represent the dangerous spread of French mob mentality to the military, but at the same time, if properly directed, such armies could connect military service with mass patriotic sentiment in a way that advocates of national militias had long supported, especially in Scotland. In other writings earlier and later than Quentin Durward, Scott continued the Enlightenment tradition of reconciling national service


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and economic gain by differentiating mercenary action from virtuous service that happens to result in personal profit. Scott especially approves of compensation in land rather than cash. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), he writes that the Scotts of Eskdale, a stalwart band, Came trooping down the Todshawhill; By the sword they won their land, And by the sword they hold it still. (IV.x)20

The Scotts of Eskdale have gained their land directly by fighting, but the process could also be less direct. Marlborough, for instance, had been rewarded for his military prowess with Blenheim Palace, and Scott would build Abbotsford with profits from national writing.21 By contrast, mercenaries appear in the Lay as German ‘hackbut-men’ employed by Henry VIII to accompany the English, having ‘sold their blood for foreign pay’ (1995: IV.vi). That the pay is foreign is crucial to Scott’s formulation of mercenary action; payment becomes problematic only when it interferes with familial or national loyalty. The mercenaries have ‘sold their blood’, but the Scotts of Eskdale have enriched theirs. In Ivanhoe, Scott introduces ‘Condottieri’ as ‘mercenaries belonging to no particular nation’ (2000a: 73); they are caricatures of faithlessness.22 Later, in the 1830 Magnum introduction to A Legend of Montrose (1819), Scott describes Scottish soldiers entering into mercenary employment: The contempt of commerce entertained by young men having some pretence to gentility, the poverty of the country of Scotland, the national disposition to wandering and to adventure, all conduced to lead the Scots abroad into the military service of countries which were at war with each other. They were distinguished on the Continent by their bravery; but in adopting the trade of mercenary soldiers, they necessarily injured their national character. (1901a: 14)23

Scott here reinforces his critical distinction between commercial and mercenary action. ‘Contempt of commerce’ and Scotland’s ‘poverty’ both contribute to the mercenary careers of ‘men having some pretence to gentility’; for Scott, a descent to mercenary service results from the lack, not the excess, of proper commercial ambition and


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opportunity.24 This logic allows Scott to contain the mercenaries of Scotland’s past within a framework of economic Unionism. Since the commercial benefits of the union have obviated ‘the poverty of the country of Scotland’, Scott reasons, military loyalty will have followed the northward path of commercial opportunity. Scott acknowledges the participation, and the bravery, of Scots in the ancient profession of arms while implying that the economic benefits of the Union would reunite that bravery with military loyalty to Britain. In Quentin Durward, Scott does not contradict his other statements on mercenaries, but he does complicate them. Here images of writing and fighting create a category of commercial writing that exists between the unrestrained self-interest of the mercenary and the selflessness of volunteerism. This category arises by analogy to the hero’s experience. Scott uses the novel to explore the play between obligation and autonomy in the situation of the Scottish mercenary abroad. By removing direct links between remuneration and writing or fighting, Scott recuperates the idea of the volunteer and adds a twist of Smithian political economy. His good soldiers display their priorities by an attachment to traditional national culture through minstrelsy, the mechanism that for Scott creates an admirable convergence of national writing and fighting. The Providential forces of Scott’s fictional world enable this moral recuperation of the paid soldier by distancing the cause of fighting from the effect of wealth. In Quentin Durward, Scott sets himself the challenge of portraying a hero who retains the affect of a volunteer even as he enters a company of mercenaries and ultimately becomes rich. The novel’s romance plot mystifies the relationship between the mercenary contract and Durward’s eventual reward in a way that allows Durward to maintain the moral standing of the volunteer while negotiating a world of cynical contractualism and Smithian self-interest. Scott thus generates a model of commercial action in which agents can seek and acquire money while avoiding the modes of direct payment that would traditionally constitute mercenary action. The novel also investigates the influence of markets on books and writers. As Scott prepared Quentin Durward for the Magnum edition of his novels in 1830, he wrote to Robert Cadell, his publisher, ‘I thought it one of the worst of the sett but upon going over it I think it a good one though rather for the foreign market’ (1932–7: 11/339).25 Scott here invites an analogy between his book and its hero. Quentin Durward is a soldier of fortune, compelled by


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economic and political circumstances to leave his native Scotland for the Continent. Durward eventually becomes a mercenary, ‘a Scotch archer in the French king’s guard, tempore Louis XI.’ (1932–7: 7/281). When Scott calls the novel ‘a good one though rather for the foreign market’, then, he connects Quentin Durward and Quentin Durward; both must seek their fortunes in the markets that will support them. In both cases, the pay will come from foreign purses, but that payment will be mitigated by emotional connections to the Scottish homeland. Scott emphasizes the role of that patriotic nostalgia by choosing France, ‘tempore Louis XI.’ as the novel’s setting, which places the novel’s action in a timeframe specifically relevant to Machiavelli’s anti-mercenary argument. Machiavelli wrote of what was to him the recent history of France, especially the reign of Louis XI (1461–83): When Charles VII, father of King Louis XI, had freed France from the English by his own energy [virtù] and good luck, he realized how necessary it was to have his own armies, and established laws in his kingdom for training cavalry and infantry. But afterwards his son, King Louis, gave up the infantry and began to hire Swiss . . . . Thus the French armies have become mixed, part mercenary and part native troops. Taken all in all, these troops are much better than mere auxiliaries or mere mercenaries, but they are much inferior to armies of one’s own people. (1992: 39–40)

Scott’s novel supports Machiavelli’s argument about the French military strategy of the time, but it also uses the setting to explore the kinds of autonomy that become available to Durward after he joins a mercenary company. Durward’s heroism stems from his differences from the other members of the company, differences Scott signifies primarily by connecting Durward to minstrelsy.26 In his military service and his private life, Durward’s affection for minstrelsy – for the songs and sentiments of his Scottish ancestors – offers him a kind of moral insulation against the most damaging elements of the world he encounters, even after he has left the company of minstrels. Hence the importance of Durward’s literacy: his uncle La Balafré remarks, ‘To write . . . and read! I cannot believe it – never Durward could write his name that I ever heard of’ (2001: 64). Living in one of Scott’s characteristic worlds in transition from chivalric to mercantile values, Durward reproduces through literary records of minstrelsy the nobler feelings his ancestors could cultivate without


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 101 the benefit of reading. To pass the time performing a mercenary assignment, Durward is still able to sing ‘some of the ancient rude ballads which the old family harper had taught him’ (2001: 122), but that harper is old, and performative minstrelsy seems to be passing away.27 Through his devotion to Scottish song and other pledges of loyalty to his native country, Durward exhibits a cultural nationalism that counters the effects of his employment: because that employment does not require idealistic devotion to Scotland, Durward’s connection to his homeland takes on the affect of volunteerism. At this level, Quentin Durward is a surprisingly Rousseauvian tale about the virtues of unforced affiliation.28 Durward appreciates minstrelsy, then, but like many of Scott’s other protagonists, he does not write or perform songs for audiences. Durward’s relationship to minstrelsy is marked by his distance from two extremes: on one side, his uncle’s skeptical rejection of minstrelsy (he dismisses ‘Robert Bruce or William Wallace in our own true histories’ as ‘all moonshine in the water’ [2001: 65]), and on the other, the idealized past of a minstrel-filled Scotland whose deterioration has forced Durward into the Continental market. This instance is part of a larger pattern. Scott repeatedly creates situations that juxtapose Durward’s economic gain with his refusal of another, unambiguously immoral economic choice. Durward marries Isabelle, Countess of Croye, whose wealth in land attracts him, but he turns down the more liquid wealth, ‘chiefly in gold and jewels’ (2001: 226), of Countess Hameline, Isabelle’s more available companion. Durward also serves as a reluctant mercenary; this choice is mitigated by his fellowship with other Scots and his disdain of service to the ruthless William de la Marck, ‘who slays priests and pilgrims as if they were so many lance-knechts and men-at-arms’ (2001: 48). Such service, Durward says, ‘would be a blot on my father’s scutcheon for ever’ (2001: 48).29 All of these triangulations allow Durward, even as an active mercenary, to maintain the volunteer’s sense of freely choosing his service. Scott’s original introduction to the novel creates a further, suggestively inexact analogy by connecting Durward’s ambivalently mercenary position to Scott’s position as a writer. In that introduction, Scott, as the ‘Author of Waverley’, describes his own circumstances in the economic downturn following the Napoleonic Wars: I am neither so unpopular nor so low in fortune, as not to have my share in the distresses which at present afflict the monied and landed interest


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of these realms. Your authors who live upon a mutton chop may rejoice that it has fallen to three-pence per pound, and, if they have children, gratulate themselves that the peck-loaf may be had for sixpence. But we who belong to the tribe which are ruined by peace and plenty – we who have lands and beeves, and sell what these poor gleaners must buy – we are driven to despair by the very events which would make all Grubstreet illuminate all its attics, if Grub-street could spare candle-ends for the purpose. I therefore put in my proud claim to share in the distresses which only affect the wealthy; and write myself down, with Dogberry, ‘a rich fellow enough,’ but still ‘One who hath had losses.’ (2001: 4)

This description has no merit as economic history; the post-war economy hardly treated poorer Britons so well.30 Scott’s words do function, however, to position the author as a certain kind of writer for money. Like Durward, the author here occupies a carefully surveyed middle ground between two extremes. The author is like but not quite part of ‘the monied and landed interest of these realms’ yet not poor enough to think first of the price of his dinner. Using Grub Street as a synecdoche for the poor shifts the general economic point to a more specific comparison: that between the author and writers who compose their works primarily to meet their immediate financial needs. Thus, the author becomes a literary Durward, part of but not subject to the marketplace of his station and time, an economic being but not a mercenary writer. The connection between author and hero becomes clearest when the author places himself in ‘the tribe which are ruined by peace and plenty’. As we have seen, the ruin of mercenaries ‘by peace and plenty’ was one of the leading reasons – and Machiavelli’s central reason – to oppose substituting mercenaries for citizen soldiers, whose incentive is to create peace and return to non-military employment.31 (Scott reinforces this military point at the beginning of the novel proper, where he reports the infestation of France with foreign mercenaries, ‘the refuse of all other countries’, who in times of unemployment ‘made war on their own account’ and used ‘every species of rapine’ [2001: 24].) In a stroke, the introduction thus connects the hero’s position to the author’s, but it does so with a gentle irony that invites the reader to see a distance between the literal mercenary life of Quentin Durward and the modern, British commercial lives of Scott and his novel. This suggestion of the author’s susceptibility to economic forces and his ability to profit from war fades as the introduction turns


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 103 to a romance of post-Waterloo solidarity, a story that balances the analogy between author and hero with an emphasis on the selfconsciously British author’s ability to form a kind of alliance that is unavailable to his title character. Sensing defensiveness about religion in a Catholic friend whom he visits in France, the author hastens to state his allegiance to fellow Christians across denominational lines. He declares that he has ‘every possible respect for the religious rules of every Christian community, sensible that we address[] the same Deity, on the same grand principle of Salvation, though with different forms’ (2001: 13). Such solidarity guards against a hostility to established institutions that has affected the library of Scott’s host, whose texts ‘had been completely dispersed, in consequence of an ill-judged attempt of the present Marquis, in 1790, to defend his Chateau against a revolutionary mob’ (2001: 20). The author and his host begin the minstrel-like process of gathering a textual tradition – recovering and consolidating the library – thus creating an informal anti-Jacobin alliance against the ‘revolutionary mob’. Although the introduction presents a story specific to the conditions of the author’s time, the novel proper maintains the opposition between, on the one hand, Christian nobles who are loyal to old texts and national stability and, on the other, men who have lost their religious, national, and class bearings. Standing against this solidarity of religious characters with chivalric hearts is the novel’s mercenary, Hayraddin: ‘[m]y proper name’, he says, ‘is Hayraddin Maugrabin, that is, Hayraddin the African Moor’ (2001: 179). A few oddities of his characterization suggest that Hayraddin is not just a stock Moor. For example, despite Hayraddin’s important role in the novel before he dies, and though he bequeaths a substantial sum of money to Durward, neither Durward nor anyone else reflects at the novel’s end on Hayraddin or the transfer of his mercenary profits to Durward. Hayraddin is also educated and irreligious (not Muslim [2001: 178]), though the plot requires neither.32 In Hayraddin, then, we see a character given some of the conventional accoutrements of cultural Moorishness but also a combination of education, irreligion, and radical ideas of personal liberty. These attributes allow Hayraddin to stand in for French Revolutionaries and Godwinian freethinkers, as in his statement to Durward that ‘no chains can bind’ his thoughts, while yours, even when your limbs are free, remain fettered by your laws and your superstitions, your dreams of local attachment, and your


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fantastic visions of civil policy. Such as I are free in spirit when our limbs are chained – You are imprisoned in mind, even when your bodies are most at freedom. (2001: 179)

Scott thus connects Hayraddin’s mercenary profiteering to his politics; in Scott’s view, both represent misdirected attachments to freedom.33 Adopting Godwinian motifs favoring mental liberty and dismissing ‘dreams of local attachment’, Hayraddin is placed in the ideological debates of Scott’s lifetime rather than Durward’s.34 Hayraddin’s dismissal of local attachment allows Scott to return to the opposition between liquid and landed wealth that explains the seemingly dropped plot thread of Hayraddin’s bequest to Durward of a purse of gold pieces. In light of Hayraddin’s dismissal, the bequest rightly and with appropriately little fuss reclaims the produce of the mercenary’s radicalism and redirects it to a hereditary elite that Durward’s marriage restores to its rightful situation. Just as Painite political positions gained their force from abstract ideals that claimed universal rather than local application, Hayraddin’s work detaches his cash income from national service. The interaction between Hayraddin and Durward becomes a defense of Scott’s authorial position, a defense that locates Durward’s and Scott’s moral authority in their ‘local attachment’ to personal and national homes. The incorporation of Hayraddin’s cash into Durward’s estate suggests a Cinderella fantasy of wealth sniffing out true nobility, settling itself on subjects who disavow financial desire. The fantasy celebrates the justice of uneven playing fields; it echoes the reassembly of the family library in Scott’s introduction and anticipates the unequal combat by which Durward wins his bride at the novel’s end. Scott imagines an economics that allows for some of the global flow of Smithian commerce but restricts the abstract freedoms of capitalism by valuing gentlemen’s agreements, patriotic attachments, and the libraries of ancient families.35 The Mercenary and the Volunteer That Scott would create a character to argue against French Revolutionary values is hardly surprising; references to the value of aristocracy and the danger of people rising beyond their place in society pervade Quentin Durward and Scott’s other works. In its exploration of sympathetic mercenaries, Quentin Durward complicates those political positions. As we have seen, the moral balancing


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 105 act of the novel requires Scott to imbue Quentin Durward with the attributes of the volunteer even as he takes on mercenary employment. If, as Stuart Curran has argued, Scott conceives romance as ‘the enchantment of the present by the past’ (Curran 1986: 137), this novel charges the past with the task of enchanting even the mercenary side of the present. To enchant the idea of the mercenary is to create the volunteer, a soldier who agrees to serve a nation in return for the spiritual compensation of the nation’s gratitude. The rhetoric of volunteer soldiering uses economic language – as in ‘debt of gratitude’ – to erase the literal economics of volunteering: the payment of recruitment bonuses, salaries, pensions, and medical services that volunteer soldiers and veterans receive. The distinction between mercenary and volunteer in patriotic rhetoric relies on the figures’ roles in the creation and discharge of debts. The ideal volunteer acts on higher motives than compensation and therefore earns the debt of his compatriots; the mercenary receives payment and then fights to pay off the debt thus created. The sentimentalized dichotomy between the mercenary and the volunteer appears, for one example, in Scott’s 1831 introduction to Quentin Durward, where he asserts: Instead of the high spirit which pressed every man forward in the defence of his country, Louis XI. substituted the exertions of the ever ready mercenary soldier, and persuaded his subjects, among whom the mercantile class began to make a figure, that it was better to leave to mercenaries the risks and labours of war, and to supply the Crown with the means of paying them, than to peril themselves in defence of their own substance. (1901b: 13–14)

Here Scott contrasts the use of mercenaries with ‘the high spirit which pressed every man forward in the defense of his country’: in this formulation, volunteerism becomes universal, natural, and irresistibly powerful. Such pure volunteerism is sullied by Louis XI’s ‘substitut[ion]’ of mercenary soldiers, and the metaphor of substitution emphasizes the association of Louis XI with a modern economic culture of cash exchange. The simple dichotomy of that passage is belied in the novel itself, as in the motto of Chapter 7, ‘The Enrolment’: Justice of Peace. – Here, hand me down the Statute – read the articles – Swear, kiss the book – subscribe, and be a hero;


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Drawing a portion from the public stock For deeds of valour to be done hereafter – Sixpence per day, subsistence and arrears. (Scott 2001: 83)

In this speech, attributed in the novel to ‘The Recruiting Officer’, we see the lines between volunteer and mercenary action blurred or even erased.36 The ‘Justice of Peace’ creates the humor of his speech by moving from volunteer to mercenary economics mid-sentence, pointing out the literal pay of ‘[s]ixpence per day, subsistence and arrears’ for the ‘hero[ism]’ and ‘valour’ of the volunteer. And there is another layer to the joke: the novel’s editors, J. H. Alexander and G. A. M. Wood, point out that the quotation is not from George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706). It rather seems to be one of the many fabricated quotations by which Scott muddies his authorship with fake texts and pen names – noms de guerre, that is, or names of war.37 Even in a novel where authorial attribution can be the stuff of jokes, however, Scott does seek to imagine a kind of competition that allows literary income to be ‘A Prize for Honour’, which is the title of Quentin Durward’s twelfth chapter. As the characters negotiate the disposal of the Countess of Croye’s hand, the Countess protests: ‘I am the daughter of Count Reinold. . . . Would you hold me out as a prize to the best sword-player?’ (2001: 378). Here the specter of antiaristocratic revolution rises in an altered form: we see the Countess’s status subjected to a contest of skill, albeit one limited to gentlemen of ‘unimpeached birth’ (2001: 378). Scott counters this threat with an uncomfortable resolution: the contest proceeds, but privileged participants fix the game – the Countess gives Durward secret information about his opponent’s disguise – and then improvise new rules to change the undesirable outcome. (Durward honorably loses the prize when he guards a good woman, but Lord Crawford intervenes to secure him the Countess nonetheless.) Scott thus incorporates pseudo-economic competition into the novel’s culminating marriage, but he also contains that competition within a system of the nobility’s manipulation of the imagined marketplace for its own interests – and thereby, the novel argues, for the interests of their nations as well. The nearly mercenary marriage thus becomes a volunteer marriage, which, like Scott’s ideal soldiering, can accommodate selfenrichment within the bounds of noble action. In that marriage, Scott rewards Durward with the love and riches


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 107 of a fairy-tale ending in spite of his association with mercenary activity. Scott’s narrator even jokes with the reader about having provided a ‘moral of excellent tendency for the encouragement of all fairhaired, light-eyed, long-legged emigrants from my native country, who might be willing in stirring times to take up the profession of Cavalieros of Fortune’ (2001: 400). The narrator then coyly refuses to describe Durward’s wedding, claiming that modern marriages preserve a privacy different from those of the past, whose ‘bridal minstrelsy continued, as in the “Ancient Mariner,” . . . till morning shone on them’ (2001: 400). Thus minstrelsy returns as the presiding spirit of Durward’s wedding, and Scott’s allusion to Coleridge acts to emphasize the difference between Quentin Durward and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – which takes place outside of a wedding feast, out of range of the bridal minstrelsy that stands in for the social and economic transactions that Scott struggles to address in Quentin Durward. Scott asserts a kind of playful authorial independence through the convention of refusing his readers a wedding description, but the contrast with Coleridge clarifies the extent to which Scott, unlike Coleridge, has already addressed the social transactions of his own marriage plot. By fulfilling and frustrating his paying readership’s generic expectations, Scott argues for his latter-day minstrelsy – producing literary texts based on inherited materials in the explicit interest of a family or nation – as something unlike ideally disinterested authorship but also unlike mercenary activity. Rather than following the conventional Romantic example of disdaining commercial interest per se, Scott employs the retrospective gaze of minstrelsy to particularly modern purposes; this is part of Scott’s broader project in which, as Ross puts it, ‘[t]he minstrel becomes the historian because he is assumed to have been a historian in the past, a past that must itself be mythic since it is lost (literally as there are no documents to verify the myth) to history’ (Ross 1986: 279). In Quentin Durward, the author as minstrel, as a preserver of something past, provides material that inoculates sympathetic readers to the mercenary side of commercial activity, creating a romance of commerce that allows writers and readers a moral participation in economic enterprise.38 The attractions of this romance are clear for Scott, ‘that laureate of the businessman’, as Leslie Fiedler calls him (1960: 177). Nevertheless, even in the plot of Quentin Durward itself, and especially in Scott’s introduction, this paradoxical construction of the paid volunteer rests on unstable ground. In his efforts to justify economic ambition


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as well as in his anxieties about that ambition, Scott recalls the Scottish Enlightenment’s ambivalent commercialism with a notion of a writer, or minstrel, struggling to engage cosmopolitan business without losing a sense of home. Hayraddin and the Byronic Mercenary Before Lord Byron departed on his last journey, that from Cephalonia to Missolonghi to join the Greek Revolutionary cause in the last days of 1823, he absented himself from a farewell dinner to absorb himself in Quentin Durward.39 Byron did not record his reaction to Scott’s novel, but he could hardly have failed to consider the connections and contrasts between Durward’s travel to fight on the Continent and the project he himself was undertaking to assist the forces of Greek resistance to Ottoman rule. Byron may have discovered a more particular interest in the character of Hayraddin, whose characterization includes echoes of Byron’s life and writings. Scott may have known from conversation that Byron indulged a wish to have been like the sixteenth-century Turkish pirate who shared Hayraddin’s name. In a journal entry of 22 November 1813, Byron wrote, ‘a little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an aventure of any lively description. I think I rather would have been Bonneval, Ripperda, Alberoni, Hayreddin, or Horuc Barbarossa, or even Wortley Montague, than Mahomet himself’ (Byron 1973–94: 3/213, emphasis original).40 Even if Scott did not know of this particular piratical fantasy of Byron’s, he knew of Byron’s pirate characters, his self-presentation in eastern clothing, and his semi-autobiographical heroes such as the eponymous Giaour who ‘in Arnaut garb’ leads a band of Albanian mercenaries (Byron 1980–92: 3/59). Moreover, the latter part of Hayraddin’s name, Maugrabin, suggests more than Hayraddin’s phrase ‘the African moor’; it recalls ‘Maugrabee’, the term Byron used in The Bride of Abydos and defined in a note as ‘Moorish mercenaries’ (Byron 1980–92: 3/115 n.3, 437).41 Investing Hayraddin with these attributes and using this vocabulary, Scott prompts his audience to recognize Hayraddin as an exaggerated cousin of the Byronic hero.42 Scott’s character could function in part to associate Byron’s obvious interests in the Islamic world and figures such as the ‘Maugrabee’ with a caricature of Byron’s politics. If Scott meant Hayraddin’s character as a dig at Byron or political


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 109 Byronism, Byron had attacked Scott far more directly. Early in his career, Byron charged Scott with misusing poetry in an effort to appeal to a mass audience by means of a historically inflected cultural nationalism. In the passage from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers quoted above, Byron conflates Scott’s content, the ‘wilder Slogan of a Border feud’, with the state of writing ‘for hire’. For Byron, Scott’s self-association with ‘minstrels rude’ represents an acknowledgement of a debased writing process in which a financially dependent poet celebrates a paying family or nation. Byron sounded this note of anger about mercenary writing throughout his career, but the anger sometimes exists alongside more nuanced explorations of writing and fighting for money, most notably in the cantos of Don Juan that describe the siege of Ismail. The preface to Cantos VI–VIII (1823) includes a vigorous rejoinder to charges of blasphemy leveled at Byron by ‘hirelings’ (Byron 1980–92: 5/297). The poem then describes the Russian forces as containing fighters of ‘various nations’ whom Byron ironically terms ‘volunteers’ as they seek promotion and plunder (VII.138).43 Here Byron develops an opposition between the dependence of the hireling and the independence of the cosmopolite. In his own writing, Byron plays to the tastes of the market but wears his independence ostentatiously by courting controversy, emphasizing his eyewitness authority as a means of breaking with generic conventions, and aligning himself with classical as much as national literary traditions. And just as Scott parallels fighting and marriage, so does Byron, though to different ends: Byron emphasizes parallel ways in which constraining institutions and ideologies ironically create possibilities for independent action. Hence we see his notion in Don Juan that Donna Julia commits adultery because she trusts Platonism and his persistent attention to the ways in which married women possess more sexual liberty than unmarried ones. Here, and more generally, oppositions between Scott and Byron become clear in the light of their many similarities. They were not only, in succession, the two most commercially successful poets in Britain.44 They also shared Scottish backgrounds, a largely amiable relationship in spite of disagreements about politics and religion, and what Leslie Marchand calls ‘a curious mutual admiration’ (1957: 2/530). Both displayed anxiety about serving their political causes by writing rather than fighting – for both, a situation determined partly by foot problems that prevented performing many of the soldierly acts they described. Think of Scott hanging outside a window for


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over an hour to show his arms strong enough to soldier despite the lameness of his legs (J. Sutherland 1998: 51) or Byron repeatedly disavowing poetry in favor of action.45 Scott and Byron both demonstrated a commitment to military action by financing it directly, Scott forming his band of Dragoons in 1797 (J. Sutherland 1998: 66) and Byron supporting Italian Carbonari and then organizing multinational fighters for Greek independence. And they both explored the public function of writers through the figure of the mercenary. Their respective approaches to that figure reveal a fundamental conflict about the importance of national affiliation. Whereas Scott presented national attachment as a saving, literally grounding influence even in Quentin Durward’s company of mercenaries, Byron presents independence from a thoughtless and reflexive patriotism as an intriguing benefit for soldiers who fight for foreign powers. As his devotion to the American and Greek causes illustrates, Byron did not forswear the values of nationalism, but he did explore the virtues of an improvised, independent mode of forming national and, by a similar logic, familial affiliations. This approach leads Byron to a multinational nationalism, a way of developing a sense of cosmopolitan volunteerism that he links to Washington’s leadership of the American rebels and finally, implicitly, to his own actions, including the employment of mercenaries, supporting the Greek effort. The difference between Scott and Byron in valuing local attachment also had a biographical aspect. By the time he wrote Don Juan, Byron had sold Newstead Abbey. Whereas Scott modeled proper economic behavior as enhancing the status of cash income by the acquisition and improvement of land, Byron reversed the process, converting a family estate to cash. Kathryn Sutherland has discussed Scott’s activities at Abbotsford as ‘exchang[ing] the ungentlemanly earnings of novel writing and various clandestine business ventures for the solid representations of lineage and paternal authority’ (K. Sutherland 1987: 99). The contrary motion in Byron’s career is described well by Peter W. Graham, who observes the seemingly ‘perverse’ fact that ‘Byron’s increased keenness for moneymaking coincided with his long-delayed attainment of unencumbered prosperity’ (2004: 34). As Graham explains, ‘the sale of Newstead that freed Byron of debt also stripped him of his status as a landed lord, and a more professional attitude toward authorship may have arisen by default’ (2004: 34–5). That is, for a variety of personal and ideological reasons, Byron


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 111 moved steadily away from the value of ‘local attachment’, a phrase I have discussed in relation to Scott’s Quentin Durward. Byron instead aligns himself with the ideal of the cosmopolite, as in the case of the epigraph to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, attributed in Byron’s text simply to ‘Le Cosmopolite’ and presented in the original French: L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que la première page quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre, que j’ai trouvé également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m’a point été infructueux. Je haïssais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j’ai vécu, m’ont réconcilié avec elle. Quand je n’aurais tiré d’autre bénéfice de mes voyages que celui-là, je n’en regretterais ni les frais, ni les fatigues. (Byron 1980–92: 2/3)46

The transnational perspective Byron expresses by proxy in this passage reveals the distant but meaningful kinship between the cosmopolite and the mercenary, a kinship that stems from their shared independence from nationalist cant.47 This connection may illuminate Byron’s conflicting statements about mercenaries and mercenary actions, from his recurring and vehement denunciations of mercenary writers and soldiers to the complexities of Don Juan’s stint as a mercenary soldier to Byron’s own employment of mercenaries in the cause of Greek independence. Byron contained multitudes: he could attack mercenary action with unequalled fury, then place his fictional alter ego in a mercenary army, and still later become an employer of mercenary soldiers. We can resolve some of the apparent contradictions or tensions in Byron’s writing by making a few key distinctions about mercenary action. Byron generally reserves his most heated remarks for ‘hireling’ writers who sell their words for narrow political purposes, especially when those writers justify British military practices or – not surprisingly – when they attack Byron’s writing on moral or political grounds. The idea of the mercenary soldier, however, inspires profoundly mixed reactions in Byron’s writing. This mixing results from Byron’s fierce loyalty to independence of thought: whereas the hack writer unambiguously sacrifices independence for pay, and Byron portrays some soldiers as doing the same, the mercenary soldier also has the potential to move beyond simple nationalism in a way that Byron finds worth exploring, no matter how objectionable the underlying motives. Byron’s most complex portrayal of a hireling writer arises in


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Canto III of Don Juan, where he presents the caricature of a poet – as others have noted, a fascinating amalgam of Byron himself and his hated rival Robert Southey – who ‘knew the self-loves of the different nations’ and therefore ‘gave the different nations something national’ according to their respective literary and patriotic tastes (III.666, III.674). As Don Juan is to women, so this poet is to nations, undermining the value of an idealized single attachment by expressing such an attachment serially, plurally. In the poet’s song ‘The Isles of Greece’ (or hypothetical song, as it is one he has ‘sung, or would, or could, or should have sung’ [III.785]), Byron holds up the possibility of a sincere poetry of national attachment and gives the poem a qualified endorsement: in these times he might have done much worse: His strain display’d some feeling . . . . (III.788–9)

Byron invites the reader to consider the poem as authentic work arising from the ‘armistice with truth’ (III.664) the poet has attained by removing himself to Lambro’s Greek island, apart from the pay of multinational audiences.48 At the same time, Byron introduces the poem generically as ‘the sort of hymn’ (III.688) the poet would sing to a Greek audience and likens it to works that would please crowds in France, England, Spain, Germany, and Italy. As in his presentation of Juan’s amorous attachments, Byron gives the reader cause for faith and cynicism by turns. In the war cantos of Don Juan, Byron presents an analogue for the hireling writer in Don Juan, who becomes a hireling soldier.49 Juan’s status as a mercenary allows him a detachment from the deceptions of misplaced patriotism and thus allows him to enter one of the novel’s most disinterested and unequivocally positive relationships. This mercenary service begins when Juan and his English counterpart John Johnson stumble into the army of Catherine the Great (Empress Catherine II of Russia) to join the forces besieging the Turkish fort at Ismail. The mercenary tendencies of the ‘volunteer’ fighters come into sharp focus at the end of the siege, when Juan separates himself from Johnson by refusing to abandon the orphan girl, Leila. Johnson argues that ‘no excuse / Will serve when there is plunder in a city’ (VIII.805–6), an attitude shared by their comrades, who rush to take that plunder, since ‘No Hero trusteth wholly to half-pay’ (VIII.824). Though Byron always allows for the possibility of real military


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 113 heroism, its basis here is not national honor, as it often is for Scott, but rather Juan’s independence, seen in his rescue of Leila, from the feelings and actions of his colleagues.50 Juan’s connection with Leila involves the spontaneous, voluntary formation of a family unit, a family unit the narrator invites the reader to find more attractive and sincerely affectionate than the poem’s biological and contractual families. Juan’s ability to form a protectively Platonic attachment to Leila – and to do so in the immediate aftermath of other soldiers violating age taboos in ravishing conquered women – suggests that Juan’s personal freedom from conventional familial as well as national (or imperial, in this case) attachments allows him a disinterested generosity unavailable to his comrades.51 In Byron’s portrayal, personal honor functions best when detached from institutional commitments. Juan can safeguard Leila because, as a familial and military free agent, he lacks both the idealized volunteer’s self-annihilating devotion to a national cause and the self-promotional grasping typical of his fellow mercenaries. Byron then deflates the ideal of the freelance family by having Juan form an attachment to Catherine the Great herself. With a lewd joke, Byron attributes to Catherine a promiscuity of national and sexual attachment: she . . . . . . looked on the match Between these nations as a main of cocks, Wherein she liked her own to stand like rocks. (IX.230–2)

As earlier characterization of Donna Inez, Juan’s mother, Byron uses the lust of women to assert the inability of moral institutions, represented by Plato, to master the ‘controlless core / Of human hearts’ (I.924–5). By lusting for military as well as sexual conquests, Catherine extends the logic of Inez’s adulterousness into the political world. Peter Manning writes that Catherine’s ‘unbroken procession of gigantic and faceless lovers betrays the essential nature of appetite. Because lust recognizes nothing beyond its own compelling drives and obliterates all individual distinctions in seeking satisfaction it is directly related to the destructiveness of war’ (P. Manning 1978: 195). Catherine’s extrainstitutional lust for Juan leads them to form a spontaneous quasi-marriage that becomes the sordid counterpart to Juan’s attachment to Leila, the debasement of independent will that mirrors Catherine’s leadership of a mercenary army.


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As Juan becomes immersed in Catherine’s dissipated world, what becomes apparent – and what may be Byron’s signature approach to the mercenary – is that neither Catherine nor Juan is strictly mercenary in the sense of acting primarily for money, but they share the promiscuity of personal and national attachment that are symptomatic of mercenary tendencies.52 After describing Juan’s affair with Catherine, however, Byron returns to Leila to construct an ambiguous but productive kind of attachment: Don Juan loved her, and she loved him, as Nor brother, father, sister, daughter love. I cannot tell exactly what it was. (X.417–19)

Byron’s only affirmative formulation of this love is expressly political: Juan . . . . loved the infant orphan he had saved, As Patriots (now and then) may love a nation. (X.434–5)

Byron thus analogizes ideal patriotism to a sentiment formed between a Spaniard fighting alongside an Englishman in the Russian army and a girl who has belonged to the enemy. Something like pure patriotism, in other words, arises from the abandonment of national attachment. This paradox lies at the heart of Byron’s sentiments and actions in his attempt to join the cause of Greek independence. Multinational Nationalism: Washington and the Greek Mission Byron repeatedly balanced his cynicism about the practices of modern warfare with admiration of George Washington, as in this stanza that begins to explore the possibility of freedom’s endurance in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be, And Freedom find no champion and no child Such as Columbia saw arise when she Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled? Or must such minds be nourished in the wild, Deep in the unpruned forest, ’midst the roar


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 115 Of cataracts, where nursing Nature smiled On infant Washington? Has Earth no more Such seeds within her breast, or Europe no such shore? (IV.856–64)53

Near the beginning of Don Juan’s ninth Canto, Byron again praises Washington, this time precisely in terms of economic disinterest: Great men have always scorned great recompenses: ... George Washington had thanks and nought beside, Except the all-cloudless Glory (which few men’s is) To free his country. (IX.57–61)

Byron manufactures a nationalist apparatus that sidesteps the problems of adapting the American Revolution to conventional nationalism. The stanza from Childe Harold deploys the mythology of Washington as an ‘undefiled’ child of Columbia herself, rather than of the British colonial operation in the American colonies. The vagueness of the quasi-national ‘Columbia’ neatly solves the problem that colonized America, unlike Ireland or Greece, had no independent national past to fuel nationalist sentiment. When Byron set out on his own nationalist mission to Greece, ironically, his circumstances required him to embrace the complications that he had submerged in celebrating Washington. Though he could imagine himself a Washingtonian patriot, Byron needed to confront the limits of nationalism and volunteerism alike in hiring soldiers, and going to Greece at all required him to violate an act designed to prevent Britons from becoming mercenaries in foreign armies. But he did so with the implicit blessing of the government. In spite of a position of official neutrality, as William St Clair notes, the British Tory government provided informal support to Byron and other philhellenic Britons by ignoring the provisions of the Foreign Enlistment Act, which made it a crime for any British subject to join the armed forces of a foreign country. If the Act had been applied strictly there would have been many fewer Philhellenes. It was noticed, however, that the Act did not make it a crime to intend to join a foreign army and all manner of facilities were provided to allow volunteers to go to Greece when this


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was reckoned to be in the national interest. Byron was to spend many weeks in the Ionian Islands as a virtual guest of the British authorities before he went to Greece. Perhaps legally they should have arrested him. (1972: 136, emphasis original)

This legal point illuminates the larger issues involved in Byron’s devotion to the Greek cause: not only did Byron take up arms in the service of a foreign power, but he also proceeded to hire a group of mercenaries from other nations to assist him. The moment of Byron’s most romantic and idealistic attachment to a nationalist cause became simultaneously that of his most pragmatic concession to mercenary warfare. For Byron, the mercenary’s very detachment from allegiance to a homeland allows some limited immunity to the disease of canting patriotism, as we have seen in Don Juan’s ability to forget military allegiances in saving Leila. When Byron finally went to Greece, he delighted in the multinationalism of his command – ‘my corps outdoes Falstaff’s’, he said; ‘there are English, Germans, French, Maltese, Ragusians, Italians, Neapolitans, Transylvanians, Russians, Suliotes, Moreotes, and Western Greeks’ – and in his being ‘the only regularly paid corps in Greece’ (MacCarthy 2004: 513, emphasis original).54 Where Scott’s military mythology romanticizes a certain kind of mercenary action by associating it with national honor above economic desire, Byron’s lived romance involved a fantasy of achieving nationalist military ends by replacing propagandistic patriotism with cosmopolitan solidarity and good-faith economic dealing. Though the diversity of Byron’s corps was extraordinary, it had roots in earlier philhellenic efforts to assist the Greeks, as St Clair has shown. St Clair describes three groups that predate Byron’s efforts: a ‘Sacred Company’ including ‘Italians, Germans, French, Poles, and a sprinkling of other nationalities’; a ‘Battalion of Philhellenes’ divided into a French-Italian company and a German company; and a ‘German Legion’ (St Clair 1972: 47, 90, 119–26). Pietro Gamba suggested a link between this new economic internationalism with older transnational religious alliances when calling Byron’s fighters ‘a sort of Crusade in miniature’ (quoted in St Clair 1972: 175). Gamba’s metaphor of the Crusade is reinforced by the resemblance of Byron’s catalogue of nationalities here to his earlier description of the fighters whom Don Juan joins, the ‘Russian, Tartar, English, French, Cossacque, / O’er whom Suwarrow shone like a gas lamp’ (VII.362–3), as well as his account of Ali Pasha’s court in Childe


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 117 Harold’s Pilgrimage, where ‘[t]he Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor’, among others, ‘mingled in their many-hued array’ (II.511–12). Byron’s sensitivity to the mercenary side of volunteer soldiering and the selfless autonomy of an individual mercenary perhaps prepared him well for his participation in the Greek fight for independence from Ottoman rule. If Leslie Marchand is right to say that ‘in the end his most noble deed was sending Turkish prisoners home and pleading for more humane treatment on both sides’ (Marchand 1990: 244), Byron proved a more intentional Don Juan, enacting the disinterested humanity that he, Charlotte Smith, and Scott had all given to their characters in wartime. St Clair has documented the disappointment of Byron, and of other foreign philhellenes who travelled to Greece to assist in the fight for independence, as they encountered the deflating reality of the war, a complex struggle among local and religious authorities that had little to do with the idealized vision of ancient Greece that animated the foreigners. Byron’s skepticism about mixing religion and war would have made him even more sensitive than most other philhellenes to the pitfalls of entering such a conflict. His moment of exuberance celebrating his own small multinational army reveals another side to that disappointment. Even as the larger cause of the Greek war disillusioned him, he had built for himself an extreme and more mercenary microcosm of the Washingtonian ideal: a diverse group unified by the charismatic power of the father-leader, Byron himself, who used persuasion, money, and strategy as necessary to appeal to the mercenary and disinterested sides of his followers. For all of Byron’s scathing representations of literal and figurative mercenary action, he found in this late moment of enthusiasm the allure – a temporary, fantastic, and chimerical allure, but a powerful one nonetheless – of the mercenary’s ability to circumvent the cant of nationalism and re-form the nature of voluntary political association. Scott and Byron, cheap reprint editions of whose works pervaded early American print culture, thus provided the Atlantic world with models of mercenary action that revealed in different ways the paradoxes of combining independence and nationalism, liberty and fraternity. These authors offer readers the rhetoric of easy dichotomies between good, disinterested behavior and bad, mercenary behavior, but they also undermine those dichotomies by way of direct and indirect acts of identification with both of their poles. This complex, inward-looking approach to military and civilian morality, and a persistent concern with ideas of mercenary action, became the


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inheritance of Cooper, the primary subject of the next two chapters and perhaps the Atlantic world’s most immediate successor in Scott and Byron’s mode of dramatizing legitimate and illegitimate violence. NOTES

1. Coleridge volunteered under the pseudonym Silas Tomkyn Comberbache (S. T. C.), proved an inept horseman but a devoted nurse to a comrade with smallpox, was discovered as a runaway scholar, and – to circumvent the usual requirements, after an unofficial payment from his brother – was discharged as ‘insane’ in April 1794 (Holmes 1990: 54–8). 2. H. T. Dickinson has pointed to the ways in which schemes for paramilitary volunteer forces were designed to ‘arm the propertied classes while disarming the unreliable poor’. Dickinson argues that such forces, ‘[t]hough never called upon to meet the French . . . did become a major police force for the preservation of internal order . . . [and] an instrument of propaganda’ (1985: 36). 3. Coleridge also engaged mercenary action in his imaginative writing to a degree that would merit sustained attention, though not from a transatlantic perspective. Coleridge’s translations of Schiller’s plays about Albrecht von Wallenstein involve the military loyalties and betrayals of and around Wallenstein, a figure often called a mercenary. (As Sarah Percy explains, he was more exactly part of a ‘military enterprise system’ that did not include ‘pure entrepreneurial mercenaries’ [2007: 88]). Schiller’s plays engage many of the same mercenary-related thematic issues that I describe in other texts here. Coleridge also built the plot of Remorse: A Tragedy around Don Ordonia’s unsuccessful effort to have mercenaries murder his brother, and James McKusick has noted Coleridge’s awareness of the 1778 Wyoming Valley massacre ‘by mercenary Indians allied with the British’ (2005: 114). 4. The wartime context of British Romanticism has been the subject of much excellent work since the turn of the millennium, work that builds on foundational studies such as Betty T. Bennett’s introduction to British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism (1976) and Gillian Russell’s Theatres of War (1995). More recent studies include Phillip Shaw’s edited collection Romantic Wars (2000) and monograph Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002), Simon Bainbridge’s British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003), J. R. Watson’s Romanticism and War (2003), and Stephen C. Behrendt’s British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (2008). Mary A. Favret’s recent publications, including the articles ‘Everyday


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 119 War’ and ‘War in the Air’ (both 2006), anticipate her forthcoming book War at a Distance. 5. The tension between personal independence and military loyalty takes on a more sinister aspect in Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s The Death of Wallenstein, in which the eponymous Wallenstein encourages his friend to betray the Emperor: . . . . . . . Dost thou belong To thine own self? Art thou thine own commander? Stand’s thou, like me, a freeman in the world . . . ? (Schiller 1864: 641) 6. This document resides in the Place Collection of the British Museum (39, vol. 4, p. 85) and is quoted by James K. Chandler in ‘“Wordsworth” after Waterloo’ (1987: 107). 7. Machiavelli’s Italian has no one-word name for the English noun mercenary. Machiavelli uses a variety of adjectival forms, such as soldati mercenarii (meaning ‘mercenary soldiers’) in the title of the twelfth chapter. OED notes that ‘the main sense divisions in English [of “mercenary”], including pejorative application of the adjective, are found already in classical Latin. The earliest use in English refers to the “hireling” (Vulgate mercenarius) of John 10:12’. The specifically military applications of ‘mercenary’ in English develop in the sixteenth century after Machiavelli wrote in 1513, according to OED. More general usages indicating ‘A person who works merely for money or other material reward; a hireling’ date back at least to Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales ( ‘mercenary, n. and a.’ 1989). 8. For more on this subject in the Scottish Enlightenment, aside from sources I note elsewhere, see Sher (1985), Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially Chapter 6; Donald Winch (1978), Adam Smith’s Politics; and Lawrence Delbert Cress (1982), Citizens in Arms. 9. Ferguson provides a different approach to applying the principles of competition to military recruitment in an anonymous 1756 pamphlet. There Ferguson worries that gentlemen are no longer taking military posts because [o]ur Commerce hath . . . affected our Manners. It has increased our Wealth, and Wealth has become in a great measure the Mark of Distinction and Honour. . . . Even our Gentry have learned to estimate Possessions in the same Manner, and we may well be ashamed to own, how few are found in our Army, to whom the Pay is no Temptation. (Ferguson 1756: 8–9) (Smith, in his lecture ‘Of Arms’, argues that this situation naturally arises with the advance of ‘arts and manufactures’, as ‘it falls to the


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meanest to defend the state’ [1956: 261].) Ferguson proposes accommodating the people’s competitive impulse with a system of prize competitions that would lure poachers into the army and rank officers by merit. In this pamphlet we see Ferguson, though steadfast in his desire to maintain a citizen soldiery, attempting to put the economist’s tools of competition and incentive to work in populating the army without fostering what he thought to be a detrimental professionalization of the army. 10. One could cite many writers expressing similar sentiments in Ferguson’s time, but Samuel Johnson does so with unusual clarity and precision in A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775). Johnson writes that by disarming the loyal as well as the disloyal clans of Scotland, the British government had rendered parts of Scotland unable to defend themselves (1984: 98) and broken down a system of broad military readiness: Every man was a soldier, who partook of national confidence, and interested himself in national honour. To lose this spirit, is to lose what no small advantage will compensate. It may likewise deserve to be inquired, whether a great nation ought to be totally commercial? (1984: 99) 11. For example, take the following passage from Ferguson’s lectures: The Husbandman, the Labourer, and the Country Gentleman may in the use of arms and discipline be inferior to the Professional Soldier. But there is no reason why he should be inferior to what a Citizen may be made. He has the advantage of Affection and Principle over the Mercenary Soldier. (quoted in Sher 1989: 256) As Sher explains, Ferguson did accept the necessity of standing armies in polished nations, but he sought to limit their responsibilities to matters that involved ‘specific problems that had little or nothing to do with “national defense” in the traditional sense of that term as the defense of the homeland itself’ (Sher 1989: 255). 12. For more of Carlyle’s argument against the notion that ‘a military spirit is contrary to the interest of a commercial nation’ (1760: 16), see his 1760 pamphlet The Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered. 13. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), for example, Smith writes that ‘a mercenary exchange of good offices’ can take a people only so far, but ‘[s]ociety . . . cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another’ (1994: 86). Similarly, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson uses ‘mercenary’ to indicate the economic shortcomings of earlier societies. In one of many examples, he writes:


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 121 The trader, in rude ages, is short-sighted, fraudulent, and mercenary; but in the progress and advanced state of his art, his views are enlarged, his maxims are established: he becomes punctual, liberal, faithful, and enterprising; and in the period of general corruption, he alone has every virtue, except the force to defend his acquisitions. (1995: 112)

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

Though Smith and Ferguson were at odds about the proper roles of standing armies and militias, ‘mercenary’ is a moral as well as military term for both writers: Smith equates mercenary feeling to ‘read[iness] to hurt and injure’, and Ferguson opposes it to ‘faith[]’ and even to ‘enterpris[e]’. Both writers carefully separate ‘mercenary’ activity from the transactions of modern Scotland and Britain. The effort to unify British national defense came accompanied by a newly intense concern with preventing the flow of mercenaries into or out of the British service. The Select Society of Edinburgh in 1755 examined the question of ‘whether it is consistent with sound politics to allow British subjects to serve as mercenaries in the foreign service?’; as Robertson points out, the question implies the logical converse of ‘English Patriot fixation with foreign mercenaries in the British service’ (1985: 85). Britain did employ some foreign and émigré troops, including Frenchmen who opposed their nation’s Revolution, as well as German, Swiss, and Dutch units, among others. See Chartrand’s two studies for an accounting of such forces (Chartrand 1999, 2000), as well as Gates on Wellington’s ‘polyglot force of 68,000 men’ at Waterloo (1996: 156). For further details on these force levels (Behrendt 2008: 82–3) and analysis of their literary implications, especially for British women poets, see Behrendt (2008). For background on the earlier expansion of Continental armies, especially in the seventeenth century, see Parker (2005) and also Brewer (1994), who relates the growth of the European powers’ forces to the states’ new abilities ‘to raise vast sums of money’ (Brewer 1994: 57). Parker’s essay also provides instructive detail on the logistics of European military professionalization, including the hiring of mercenaries. On the mobilization of Frenchmen after the French Revolution, see Forrest (2005: 65). And for a theoretical argument that numerical accounts such as these are ‘the way an army deterritorializes its soldiers’ in the operation of the ‘war machine’, see Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 387). Coleridge, for one, explicitly compared such recruiting bonuses to the money used to hire German mercenaries, as noted in the introduction. In Lord Byron’s Strength, Jerome Christensen (1993) makes the relevant point that the critical reaction to Marmion was also what prompted Scott to help create the Quarterly Review as a rival to the Edinburgh Review in a way that ‘dramatized the capacity of a commercial


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19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.


society to reproduce the battlefield at the level of culture’ (1993: 147). Christensen writes, ‘Scott’s letters to Canning, to Murray, to George Ellis, and to William Gifford are peppered with military metaphors; he persuaded his collaborators to imagine that they were embarked upon a campaign of mimic warfare’ (1993: 147). I would add that Scott’s long essay ‘On the Present State of Periodical Criticism’ (Scott 1811) in the Edinburgh Annual Register also speaks of the rivalry between the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review and is similarly suffused with military metaphors, while Scott’s public, anonymous voice in the Register strives to convey an independent and ‘moderate’ position: ‘we rejoice in an opportunity of hearing both sides of a political question ably stated and supported’ (1811: 578). Scott’s essay in the Register argues that while the founding of the Edinburgh Review occasioned a shift in periodical criticism away from the ‘mercenary drudgery’ of puffing a bookseller’s titles, it was to a new kind of subservience created by entanglements in party loyalty, though those ‘may not be as potent a bribe to a generous mind as the direct and sordid temptation of ambition or self-interest’ (1811: 562, 577). This example is consistent with Scott’s general tendency to think of ‘mercenary’ motives as economic rather than political, but the essay’s comparison of economic and political departures from neutral disinterest offers another view of Scott’s thinking about authorial independence. For an argument that ‘[t]he factors that make State war total war are closely connected to capitalism’ (1987: 421), and that ‘[t]he Napoleonic code of war represents a turning point that brought together the elements of total war’ (1987: 564), see Deleuze and Guattari (1987). I cite The Lay of the Last Minstrel by canto and stanza from the Wordsworth Poetry Library edition of Scott’s poetical works (Scott 1995). Scott knew Marlborough’s example well: in Waverley, he mentions Marlborough’s Blenheim as a sign of ‘the gratitude of his country’ (1985: 160). Waverley also reveals that the Baron of Bradwardine ‘made some campaigns in foreign service’ (1985: 87), foreshadowing the sympathetic exploration of such service by Scots in Quentin Durward. As mentioned in the introduction, Ivanhoe also contains Scott’s suggestive coinage of ‘Free Lances’, meaning mercenaries. For historical information on the service of English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers abroad, see R. Manning (2006), Chapter 7. The contrast between two of Scott’s characters illustrates this point. Dugald Dalgetty, the main mercenary of A Legend of Montrose, has a certain admirable faith to the oaths he takes as a mercenary, but he is conceited and socially inept, and he straightforwardly chooses his political causes according to his financial interests. Though sometimes


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 123

25.

26.

27.

28.

comically sympathetic, Dalgetty embodies the corruption of mercenary life in ways that Durward does not. On mercenaries in this novel, see Garside (1974) and Chapter 5 of Lincoln (2007). Scott’s comment seems to be based on Quentin Durward’s not selling well in England, though it ‘enjoyed a surprising success in the country where it was set’ (J. Sutherland 1998: 264). While it is difficult to discover the details beneath Scott’s and then Lockhart’s presentation of Quentin Durward’s sales, William St Clair provides some context for their disappointment in its domestic sales. St Clair cites a note from the Constable archives suggesting a first edition of ‘at least 8,180’ copies (2004: 639), roughly in line with the runs of 10,000 for The Monastery (1820), The Abbott (1820), Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1822), and The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). St Clair does not supply a print run for Peveril of the Peak (1822). Among these six novels preceding it, only The Abbott joins Quentin Durward in lacking an immediate second or third edition. On the whole, St Clair’s evidence suggests at least some basis for Scott’s and Lockhart’s remarks (2004: 638–9). William B. Todd and Ann Bowden’s bibliographical work quotes as a headnote Lockhart’s comment on ‘the sensation which [Quentin Durward], on its first appearance, created in Paris’ (1998: 581). Todd and Bowden conclude that ‘[t]hough eventually quite successful, the book at first, coming only four months after Peveril, was regarded by Constable as “too quick for the pocket” and thus the subject of some anxious correspondence’ (1998: 582, emphasis original). Like the good soldier, the good minstrel could achieve economic success as long as he did not seek it primarily, and the rise of the minstrel as a figure for authorship coincided with the intensifying of the militia debates in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In both cases, Scottish and Border writers were central figures. Thus we see (the Englishman) Thomas Percy’s gentlemanly Border minstrels, James Beattie’s dismissal of singing for ‘lucre’ in The Minstrel (1771: I.lxii), Hugh Blair’s assertion that Ossian avoids the sin of ‘covetousness’ (1996: 352), and Robert Burns’s assurance that ‘[n]o mercenary Bard’ writes ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (1999: 83). As the figure of the bard and then the minstrel became widely used metaphors for authorship in the late eighteenth century, writers began routinely to deflect negative associations of minstrelsy with dependence on patrons or clans by working similar routine denials of mercenary motives into the selfrepresentation of the modern minstrel. This mental departure from the mercenary’s duties accords well with the fact that, as Ross has noted, Scott valued romance’s ‘tendency to distract . . . as the primary virtue of the form’ (1986: 272). This Rousseauvian autonomy is central to Fliegelman’s (1982) account of transatlantic political rhetoric in the later eighteenth century.


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29. For more on the contrast between landed and liquid wealth in the Waverley novels, see Poston (1975), who treats that contrast as part of the larger one between ‘the old order of honor and the new order of credit’ (1975: 64). 30. In their notes to the novel, Alexander and Wood point out the ‘severe distresses for the lower classes’ at this time (Scott 2001: 509). Cf. Byron’s commentary on the prominence of debt, taxes, and famine in the same period in Don Juan VII, stanza 45. 31. The argument that soldiers ought to have another full-time profession creates interesting echoes in Coleridge’s argument that an author ought to have an ‘honourable occupation’ aside from writing (1970–b: I/224). 32. In correspondence with me, Evan Gottlieb has pointed out that Hayraddin’s atheism and some other aspects of his characterization align him more with literary presentations (including Scott’s) of gypsies than of Moors. Scott seems to be choosing characteristics of both literary types to suit his purposes in creating Hayraddin. 33. Given the other possible connections of Hayraddin to Byron, which I will address later in this chapter, Scott may also intend an echo of Byron’s opening lines to ‘Sonnet on Chillon’: Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art . . . . (Byron 1980–92: 4/3) Scott wrote at length about the sonnet’s companion poem, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, in The Quarterly Review in 1816. Near the end of that review essay, Scott recommends to Byron that he ‘submit to the discipline of the soul enjoined by religion, and recommended by philosophy’ to acquire ‘the peace of mind necessary for the free and useful exercise of his splendid talents’ (Scott 1816–17: 208). 34. Ross describes Burke and Wordsworth taking positions similar to Scott’s regarding ‘local attachment’, in contrast to Hazlitt, who writes, ‘[p]atriotism, in modern times, and in great states, is and must be the creature of reason and reflection, rather than the offspring of physical or local attachment’ (Ross 1995: 64). 35. Scott’s positioning of himself here resembles an earlier process described by Michael Gamer, who writes that at the beginning of his career as a writer of metrical romances, Scott aimed ‘to attract the voracious consumers of Gothic romances of the previous decade [i.e., the 1790s], while at the same time raising the literary status of romance to that of poetry’ (1993: 523). 36. For another case in which Scott describes a soldier’s mixed incentives to serve, see Captain Cuthbert Clutterbuck’s Introductory Epistle to The Monastery, in which Clutterbuck describes in detail his motivations


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 125 first for military service and then for seeking ‘prize-money’ in letters (2000b: 23). The same themes resurface in the conversation between Clutterbuck and ‘The Author’ in the Introductory Epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel, where the author defends writing as a professional economic activity as long as ‘mere motives of gain’ are not ‘a principal motive for literary exertion’ (1901c: 42). The author likens himself to ‘a soldier who fights’, among other professionals, and acquits himself of having a ‘mercenary disposition’ (1901c: 42, 43). 37. Scott uses the phrase, spelled ‘nomme de guerre’, incidentally on page 42 of the novel. 38. In the ‘Citing the Nation’ chapter of her Acts of Union, Leith Davis (1998) details Scott’s attention to ‘the possibilities [Thomas] Percy raises for translating the close communion between minstrel, aristocratic chief, and audience to the relationship between modern author, patron, and reader’ (1998: 151). 39. Among Byron’s biographers, Fiona MacCarthy (2004) offers the most detailed description of the episode: By 27 December everything was loaded, but the weather was stormy and contrary winds kept the ships in port for another two days. Having abandoned his house at Metaxata, Byron lodged in Argostoli with his banker Charles Hancock who had just, coincidentally, received a copy of Scott’s recently published novel Quentin Durward. Byron fell on this and took it away to his own room, refusing an invitation for a farewell dinner at the mess with the officers of the 8th Regiment, refusing even to join the Hancocks at their table. Hancock recalled how Byron ‘merely came out once or twice to say how much he was entertained, returning to his chamber with a plate of figs in his hand’. He went on reading Quentin Durward even when the wind had shifted and Gamba had already gone on board the bombard. James Kennedy found him alone and still immersed in it when he arrived at Hancock’s house, hoping to catch Byron for a last goodbye. (MacCarthy 2004: 501) In an 1826 letter, Scott would look back on Byron’s subsequent death in Missolonghi – ‘an inestimable loss to the Greek cause’ – and write, ‘Strange that being . . . so rash and precipitate in his own affairs . . . should in those of Greece have displayd the most enlightend practical views and so much knowledge not of men merely but of what is technically calld business. He was certainly a wonderful creature’ (Scott 1932–7: 10/101). The letter is to John B. S. Morritt, dated 7 September 1826. In the letter, the phrase ‘an inestimable loss to the Greek cause’ is a sentiment Scott attributes to a ‘Sir Frederick’ with apparent approval.


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40. Talissa Ford discusses this quotation in the context of Byron’s engagement with piracy (2008: 53). Ford examines Byron’s longstanding interest in piracy as a means of achieving a kind of freedom from territory, nation, and government – a freedom that cannot exist within the national structures of landed society. My argument follows a parallel track, as the mercenary (at least as embodied in Hayraddin) occupies a similar extranational position. 41. Byron takes some license with his definition. Algeria and Tunisia are part of the Maghrib (or Maghreb), from the Arabic for ‘West’. The Maghrib is the ‘[r]egion of North Africa bordering on the Mediterranean Sea’ (‘Maghrib’, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005). ‘Hayraddin’, by the way, seems to be an Anglicization of Khayr ad-Din, the title assumed by the Barbary Pirate Khidr Barbarossa – Redbeard – ‘by whose initiative Algeria and Tunisia became part of the Ottoman Empire’ (‘Barbarossa’, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005). 42. It seems likely that Scott had read the early cantos of Don Juan before or during the composition of Quentin Durward, but his letters and biographies offer no definitive confirmation. In an 1819 letter to John Ballantyne, Scott writes, ‘[i]f Don Juan which I have not seen be worth anything pray send me a copy under Mr Frelings cover’ (Scott 1932–7: 5/419). As Grierson notes, Juan’s first two cantos ‘were published on 15th July 1819’ (Scott 1932–7: 5/419, n.5). I do not mean to overstate the connection between Byron and Hayraddin; Scott stops far short of making the character a simple allegorical figure for the poet. The friendship between the two writers meant that to whatever extent the characterization of Hayraddin would have suggested associations with Byron, the character constitutes an instance of Scott’s general process of presenting historical crisis, in the words of Lukács, as it ‘runs through the centre of the closest human relationships’ (1983: 41). Hayraddin’s meeting with Durward does give a patriotic gentleman the victory over a social and religious radical, but even as it opposes the lives of the two characters, it calls attention to their commonalities, the ways in which Hayraddin’s literal and metaphorical legacies inform the novel’s ending. That is to say, if Scott is on the attack here, he is so in a way that calls for the acknowledgment of personal connections that persist in the face of ideological difference. 43. I cite the verse of Don Juan by canto and line using Jerome J. McGann’s edition of Byron’s Poetical Works (Byron 1980–92), in which Don Juan occupies volume V. As Peter Cochran notes, Byron invents the presence of English mercenaries in the Russian forces to place his alter ego among them: ‘There were far more English mercenaries in the Turkish army – with government help and encouragement; the joke is all part of Byron’s defiant polemic’ (Cochran 2009: 16). 44. In a discussion of Byron that bears on this issue of commercial success,


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 127 Andrew Elfenbein (1995) shrewdly points to the difficulty for popular writers of negotiating the cultural fields described by Pierre Bourdieu in which ‘the inverse relation between economic and symbolic capital’ creates a context where ‘[w]riters aiming for the greatest amount of cultural capital adopt an ethos of art for art’s sake: they are interested in success or failure solely in aesthetic terms, which an elite coterie of other producers define’ (Elfenbein 1995: 6). My argument here largely concerns the ways in which Byron and Scott, well aware of this ‘inverse relation’, sought ways to maintain symbolic capital in spite of their market success. 45. For one example, Byron wrote in an 1813 journal entry, ‘Who would write, who had any thing better to do? “Action – action – action” – said Demosthenes: “Actions – actions,” I say, and not writing, – least of all, rhyme’ (Byron 1973–94: 3/220). McGann quotes this passage when describing at length the ‘recurrent Byronic qualit[y]’ of ‘the conflict in Byron’s mind about his manifest desire for fame’ in poetry as opposed to ‘the talents of action’, to use Byron’s phrase (1976: 6–8). Andrew Rutherford earlier attributed Byron’s mixed feelings about poetry to the inability of a man of his time to integrate his martial and literary ambitions (among others) as he might have, had he been a ‘Renaissance gentleman’ (1965: 1–2), a role Donald H. Reiman more recently characterized as that of an ‘aristocratic revolutionary, an ideal embodied for men of Byron’s generation by such figures as La Fayette and Kosciusko’ (1990: 190). 46. As McGann explains, the passage comes from the book by Fougeret de Monbron of 1753. In his Oxford edition of Byron’s major works, McGann translates the passage thus: The universe is a kind of book of which you have read but one page when you have seen only your own country. I have leafed through a sufficient number to have found them equally bad. This study has not been unprofitable for me. I hated my country. All the peculiarities of the different people among whom I have lived have reconciled me to it. Even if I should have gained no other benefit from my voyages than that one, I should never regret the pains, and the fatigues. (Byron 1986: 1027) 47. For Byron and more generally, this independence of the cosmopolite manifests itself in the ability to see any homeland from a outsider’s perspective, even expressing that vision in the language of the outsider. Such language promises to transform the speaker into something like a new person, a sentiment Germaine de Staël expresses through Prince Castel-Forte in Corinne; or, Italy: ‘To those who know how to appreciate it, the literature of every country reveals a new sphere of ideas. Charles V himself said that a man who knows four languages is worth


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48.

49.

50.

51.


four men’ (Staël 1998: 111, emphasis original). Staël frames this notion positively; she is of the cosmopolite camp. In anti-mercenary ideology, an attachment to multiple nations results in disintegration rather than multiplication: such multiplicity severs the links among man, language, and homeland. For more on the ‘The Isles of Greece’, the song mentioned here, see Malcolm Kelsall’s Byron’s Politics on the complications of the ‘I’ resembling Byron as well as Horace and Southey (1987: 156–9), along with McGann’s extended treatment of how ‘[a]t the poem’s most complex level, we also see through Byron’s satire of Southey into the innermost drama of his own mind’ in ‘Mobility and the Poetics of Historical Ventriloquism’ (McGann 2002: 46, emphasis original). Byron’s use of Southey as his prime example of the mercenary poet in Don Juan and elsewhere is part of a more general shift as Byron turns his mercenary attacks away from Scott toward Southey and Wordsworth. Byron sets Juan’s time among mercenaries in the Russian forces against an attack on British ‘mercenary’ warfare. Canto IX opens with a ferocious sally against the Duke of Wellington that Byron had penned but suppressed in 1819. In August of 1822, Byron wrote to Thomas Moore an explanation of his decision to include the Wellington stanzas at that time. Byron says that ‘these cantos contain a full detail . . . of the siege and assault of Ismael, with much of sarcasm on those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldiery’. ‘With these things and these fellows,’ he continues, ‘it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful odds; but the battle must be fought; and it will be eventually for the good of mankind, whatever it may be for the individual who risks himself’ (Byron 1973–94: 9/191). In his fury, Byron presents himself as a selfless volunteer in the ‘battle [that] must be fought’ for a universal ‘good of mankind’. He balances his willingness to be ‘the individual who risks himself’ against the actions of ‘those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldiery’. As Anne Barton explains, Byron here links his attacks on Wellington to ‘his account of what was done at Ismail by . . . “mercenary soldiery”’ (Barton 1990: 210). In the deal Juan and Johnson subsequently strike, each acknowledges the merit of the other’s perspective, and they come to an agreement by which Johnson ensures Leila’s safety and Juan joins the plundering mission. Graham argues persuasively that the deal allows their complementary attributes to move them both towards the ideal of the ‘cosmopolite’ (Graham 1990: 155–6). On the point of national honor, it is worth noting Byron’s implied critique of British volunteerism through a reference to the Duke of Wellington’s ‘pensions, / Which are the heaviest that our history mentions’ (VIII.391–2). Byron first establishes this familial independence in Canto VIII when


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‘A Good One though Rather for the Foreign Market’ [ 129 Juan and Johnson present themselves to Suwarrow with the two Turkish women who have helped them escape the sultan’s seraglio. When Suwarrow disapproves – ‘I hate recruits with wives’ (VII.560) – Johnson offers the defense that ‘these are the wives of others, / And not our own’ (VIII.562–3), and Suwarrow agrees to take the men into his service. The basis of the compromise between Suwarrow and Johnson is the commonality between the mercenary and the bachelor cosmopolite, two types of free agent that share the independence of action that Suwarrow requires. 52. Byron writes in the following Canto, ‘Alas! how deeply painful is all payment! / Take lives, take wives, take aught except men’s purses’ (X.625–6), and he attributes this sentiment to ‘Machiavel’. Despite the cynicism’s apparently universal application, however, it does not seem to describe the priorities of Catherine or Juan, for all their other flaws. 53. I cite Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by canto and line using McGann’s edition of Byron’s Poetical Works (1980–92), in which it occupies volume II. 54. Eric Strand has addressed Byron’s actions in Greece in the context of market economics, arguing that for Byron, ‘[p]olitical heroism turned out to be . . . a consumerist fantasy’ (Strand 2004: 534).


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Chapter 4

LOYALTY, INDEPENDENCE, AND JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S REVOLUTION

The last two chapters of this book concern themselves centrally with two characters whom James Fenimore Cooper’s novels place at the margins of organized military forces. Harvey Birch of The Spy (1821) works for George Washington to inform the actions of the military but must maintain a careful distance from the forces to remain effective. The central figure of Chapter 5, the Venetian Jacopo Frontoni of The Bravo (1831), similarly, though less admirably, operates alongside the organized forces of his government. These two novels confront many of the problems raised in works such as Scott’s Quentin Durward and Byron’s Don Juan, but Cooper does not separate his heroes from their situations by nationality. The alienation of Cooper’s heroes from their surroundings is more purely a matter of situation and conscience, and in this respect, I will argue in the epilogue, Cooper’s approach anticipates modern debates about mercenary warfare more precisely than those of the other writers discussed in this book. Cooper’s fictions of the American Revolution animate the tension between the values of independence and loyalty by complicating the obvious alignment of the Revolutionaries with independence and their opponents with loyalty. Recognizing that the American rebels needed, somewhat paradoxically, to declare independence and then command loyalty, Cooper portrays both the creation and dissolution of loyalties among the Revolutionary forces and their civilian allies. The formation of the independent United States, Cooper suggests, involves the limitation of the independence of individual Americans as they form their personal and national loyalties. The figure of


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 131 the mercenary represents a kind of independence that breaks the bond between military service and national loyalty, and Cooper constructed his vision of the Revolution in part by placing its actors among many kinds of mercenary warriors. The problem of independence comes to the fore in another of Cooper’s early novels, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1824), in which the hero serves in regular national forces yet is ultimately alienated from them by means of shifting national allegiance. Loosely but clearly based on the life of John Paul Jones, The Pilot celebrates Jones’s extraordinary seamanship and his loyalty to the American cause in spite of his British upbringing and many ties to the antiRevolutionary British establishment. Indeed, the historical Jones’s commitment to the fledgling Continental Navy included condemnations of American sailors who opted out of the regular forces to join the many privateers that carried out parallel missions. ‘Sailing on a privateer was at once more free-wheeling and more lucrative than serving aboard a ship of the Continental Navy’, writes Jones’s biographer Evan Thomas, and Jones blamed Congress for encouraging this process by skimming too much prize money away from the Navy’s sailors (Thomas 2003: 69). Cooper’s assertion of Jones’s disinterested devotion to the American cause seems calculated to separate his hero from any imputation that Jones has crossed the Atlantic and joined an enemy cause as a mercenary – a charge to which European fighters on the American side were susceptible, as illustrated by the Marquis de La Fayette’s celebrated refusal of payment for his contributions to the American cause. Cooper, however, adds a surprising element to this American antimercenary ideology. In The Pilot’s final scene, Jones’s former lieutenant, Edward Griffith, learns of Jones’s death and discusses it with his wife, Cecilia, without revealing Jones’s identity. Griffith reflects to himself: ‘His love of liberty may be more questionable [than his daring]; for if he commenced his deeds in the cause of these free States, they terminated in the service of a despot!’ (1991: 422). When Cecilia asks the man’s name, Griffith explains his vow not to reveal it, and the novel ends thus: ‘Cecilia made no further remark at the time, nor was the subject ever revived between them!’ (1991: 422). In saying that Jones’s deeds ‘terminated in the service of a despot’, Griffith refers to Jones’s 1788 move into the service of Catherine the Great in Russia. Taking the name Pavel Dzhones as a rear admiral in Catherine’s navy, Jones repulsed the Turks in the Liman before becoming a victim of the jealousy and political intrigues of Potemkin


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and others in Catherine’s court. Thomas Jefferson had originally arranged and supported Jones’s move to Russia – a fact the novel suppresses – but the move nonetheless made Jones a troublesome figure in the myth of the American Revolution.1 Though portraying Jones as a liberty-loving volunteer for the American side remained a useful and important ideological strategy, Jones’s movement to the notoriously mercenary service of Catherine made him more like Byron’s Don Juan – a figure whose military service exists precisely to counteract patriotic mythmaking – than like the Washington whom Cooper and Byron both celebrate. At the very end of the novel, the character who had appeared to embody disinterested patriotism instead comes to represent both sides of the mercenary-volunteer dichotomy, as he carries his independence across one national boundary too many. Ending the book on the willful and unproductive silence – ‘nor was the subject ever revived between them!’ – Cooper pointedly leaves the reader to contemplate Jones’s contradictions. Jones’s service in the Russian forces has recently re-emerged as a point of evidence in the debate over the use of private contractors in Iraq. Max Boot, a supporter of the war and more generally of ‘using American might to promote American ideals abroad’ (Boot 2002), argues against those who cite American opposition to Hessian mercenaries in the Revolution as evidence that employing mercenaries is generally anti-American. ‘In fact’, Boot writes, ‘the U.S. has a long tradition of celebrated mercenaries’. He then provides a list of examples that includes three individuals from the Revolutionary period: the Marquis de La Fayette, Baron von Steuben, and ‘John Paul Jones, who, after the American Revolution, was an admiral in the Russian navy’ (Boot 2007). These examples demonstrate the opposite of Boot’s intended point. La Fayette and Steuben were ‘celebrated’, in part, precisely because they warded off imputations of mercenary action by volunteering to serve the American cause without pay. And as Cooper’s text and many others demonstrate, Jones’s Russian service was a complicating factor in, not a cause of, American patriotic celebration. The inaccuracy of Boot’s history underscores the rarity of political defenses of ‘mercenaries’ by that name. Cooper does not mount such a defense, but in The Spy he does portray mercenaries and other characters in ways that illustrate the conceptual problems inherent in a simplistic anti-mercenary ideology. Cooper resists an easy identification of mercenary action with foreign actors, produces a curious mirroring between the ideas of the mercenary and the spy,


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 133 and portrays even George Washington as unable to apprehend disinterested loyalty when he sees it. Even Washington must negotiate a course between what A. N. Kaul calls Cooper’s ‘two extremes between which the American sensibility has attempted through the centuries to locate and identify its destiny: the principle of material advancement and that of ascetic detachment from all material interests’ (1963: 115). In The Spy’s presentation of political and familial life, Cooper produces a world in which complex, multidirectional affiliations survive more readily than single-minded ideological attachments. Selling Secrets: Spies and Mercenaries The Spy brings the figure of Washington directly into a story full of mercenaries, including not only Hessians and Native American warriors, who often appear in tales of the Revolution, but also Cowboys and Skinners – irregular bands of fighters operating in the neutral ground of Westchester County, New York. Cooper sets these figures alongside real and imagined spies, who are likewise thought to have transferred their political allegiances for money. In its placement of mercenaries alongside a series of marriage plots and prefatory remarks on authorship, all centrally concerned with the relationship between money and sincere action, The Spy has much in common with Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, which The Spy narrowly predates. Whereas Scott’s central character becomes a mercenary, however, Cooper’s hero, Harvey Birch, is merely suspected of mercenary motives as he navigates a theatre of war populated by mercenary warriors. Birch lives a life of secret loyalty disguised by apparently mercenary and treasonous behavior. Cooper thus draws on the role of secrecy in anti-mercenary ideology. The classic Machiavellian problem with the mercenary, which I have discussed in Chapter 3, is precisely that the mercenary may harbor secret disloyalty and therefore a readiness to betray the mercenary bargain. In the unabashedly sympathetic view of The Spy’s narrator, Cooper’s spy functions as the reverse of the mercenary. To all the characters but Washington, Harvey Birch is a figure of pure self-interest, both a wily ‘pedlar’ and a base traitor to the American cause. To himself, God, and Washington – and then to a later generation including the novel’s audience – he is the secret agent of a benevolent order, a figure who enacts the larger benevolence of Washington and the Revolution, even when their actions seem cruel


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and inexplicable to outsiders. Cooper’s novel offers the reader a retrospective view in which the bewildering wartime environment of the Revolution reveals its secret moral structure. That moral structure is built upon repeated demonstrations of economic disinterest. Early in the novel, the Virginian Captain Lawton refuses a bribe offered by the Whartons to protect Captain Wharton. Later, when Birch is captured by Revolutionaries who consider him a spy and a traitor, he attempts to buy his release from a trooper who guards him. The trooper responds: Were you the man whose picture is on the gold, I would not listen to such a crime . . . . Go – go – poor wretch, and make your peace with God, for it is he only that can be of service to you now (1997: 204).

The trooper’s reference to the picture on the gold clearly recalls the Biblical Jesus addressing the legitimacy of paying tribute to Caesar by pointing out Caesar’s image on a coin and saying, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (King James Bible, Mark 12: 17). Finally, in the novel’s iconic scene, Birch turns down Washington’s offer to pay him for his services to the Revolutionary cause: ‘not a dollar of your gold will I touch’, he says, for ‘poor America has need of it all!’ (J. F. Cooper 1997: 398). Washington responds to Birch by pledging his friendship and writing Birch a note of tribute in place of the money. The first two instances echo the widely romanticized portrait of the three workingmen who had famously refused the bribes of Major John André, a British officer who conspired with Benedict Arnold and was hanged as a spy. Cooper celebrates the workingmen’s ‘disinterested manner’ in a footnote (1997: 210).2 These two cases also prepare the reader to sympathize with Birch in the third by making Washington’s offer of payment structurally similar to the earlier bribes. These episodes form the backdrop of this anecdote, recorded by Cooper’s daughter, about a merchant who has misunderstood the book: [Cooper] was walking in Broadway, when he saw a gentleman, well known to him, cross the street, and advance to meet him; it was a prominent merchant, a man of money, very well known in Wall street. He came on a friendly errand, to congratulate his acquaintance on the new book and its success. He was loud in its praises . . . . ‘I have one criticism to make, however . . . [T]he character of Harvey is excellent . . . in most


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 135 particulars – but there lies the difficulty – . . . you have given the man no motive! . . . I thought until the last page, that he would be well paid for his services – but just as I expected to see it all made clear as day, he refuses to take the gold General Washington offers him. There was your great mistake – you should have given Harvey some motive!’ (S. Cooper 1965: 31)

Quoting this passage in his introduction to the novel, Wayne Franklin writes, ‘The merchant’s obtuse reading of Cooper’s Revolutionary tale makes it precisely clear why such memories were of vital importance for the early Republic’ (W. Franklin 1997: xxv). Franklin may be right, but this ‘merchant’s obtuse reading’ has unsettling implications for two reasons. First, it features a prominent and wealthy American so deeply involved in financial advancement that he can read and enjoy The Spy without being struck by its bluntest ideological instruments. Second, as misguided as is his reading of Birch’s disinterested service, the stooge’s attitude and language closely mirror those of Washington himself; in the novel, Birch’s noble refusal of payment requires Washington to exhibit at first the same lack of faith in Birch’s true motives.3 (Birch responds that he has not acted for money, and Washington replies, ‘If not for money, what then?’ [J. F. Cooper 1997: 398].) The only additional offense the ‘man of money’ commits is to persist in his misinterpretation after reading of Washington’s conversion to Birch’s point of view. If the merchant’s story demonstrates ‘why such memories were of vital importance for the early Republic’, as Franklin writes, it also demonstrates the inability of Cooper’s heaviest didacticism to make itself understood to a man at the centre of the financial life of that Republic. That is to say, The Spy does not provide a simple answer to the question of how a citizen of the new nation should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and it seems inadequate to say that Washington and God embody similar values, given that Cooper, in his later preface to The Bravo, refers disapprovingly to monarchies ‘in which the sovereign is worshipped as a god’ (1997: 17). Paul Downes has unpacked the relationship between the mystification of monarchy and that of Cooper’s spy, observing that Cooper referred to [The Spy] as immoral and whatever he may have meant by this, it ought to be at least somewhat disconcerting to find that a revolution (and hence a nation) founded on the repudiation of monkish and


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monarchical obfuscation and mystique should be celebrated in literature via the figure of the spy. (2002: 166–7)

The ‘disconcerting’ resemblance of Cooper’s spy to an obfuscating monarch involves the legitimacy of the Revolution’s violence. I have discussed in Chapter 1 the Godwinian ideal of state violence that requires no secrecy. The Spy departs dramatically from that ideal in exploring the layers of secrecy involved in the war’s legitimate and illegitimate violence, including that performed by various types of mercenaries – the fighters most closely associated in American rhetoric with the arbitrary tyranny of the British monarchy. One of the most pronounced of Cooper’s historical distortions, in fact, occurs in his presentation of the violent actors that made the neutral ground of Westchester such a treacherous place for its inhabitants during the fighting that took place there.4 (The ‘neutral ground’ was territory not clearly controlled by either of the contending armies during most of the war.) The historian Sung Bok Kim’s account of Westchester shares many of The Spy’s thematic interests, such as the interplay of altruism and interestedness in the formation of the American Republic. Kim finds in the Revolution-era history of Westchester ‘a story of how the war sapped civilian morale, virtue, and enthusiasm for any public cause – an ironic story of how the campaign to establish a democratic republic founded on public virtue reinforced, at least temporarily, privatism and self-interest’ (1993: 871).5 Cooper portrays some of the tendencies Kim identifies, though always with strands of individuals’ idealized devotion to the American cause intertwined. Cooper’s fiction and Kim’s history differ, however, in the portrayal of regular and irregular armed forces. In Kim’s account, the regular troops and their organized auxiliaries contribute substantially to plundering and other offences against the civilians of the neutral ground. Kim quotes a diary entry from Colonel Stephen Kemble, an aide to the British Major General Sir William Howe: ‘The Country all this time [was] unmercifully pillaged by our Troops, Hessians in particular. No wonder if the country people refused to join us’ (1993: 878). Kim adds that along the British and Hessian soldiers’ roads, ‘[f]riends and foes alike’ were robbed of necessities, and these incursions were made by organized companies. On the other side, ‘[t]he American troops, especially New England units, that were dispatched to check the enemy’s movements and to protect the inhabitants were no less abusive to the civilians and rapacious of


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 137 their property’ (1993: 878). In spite of Washington’s many attempts to rein in these abuses, ‘the behavior of the raw and undisciplined soldiers did not improve fast’ (1993: 879).6 This context reveals Cooper’s gentle treatment of the Hessians, the soldiers who so often attracted the ire of the American rebels and their supporters. In Kim’s account, even soldiers at the centre of the British command blame their forces and their Hessian allies for ‘unmercifully pillag[ing]’ the civilians of the neutral ground. Cooper, on the other hand, portrays the Hessians as sympathetic victims of their leader. In the early battle scene of The Spy, Cooper writes, ‘[i]t was upon the poor vassals of the German tyrant that the shock fell. Disciplined to the most exact obedience, these ill-fated men met the charge bravely’ but hopelessly, and after the charge ‘the few Hessians who escaped unhurt sought protection’ (1997: 84).7 The two sentences immediately following this description blame a band of Cowboys for taking advantage of the battle to loot and abuse the area’s civilians. Cooper’s depictions valorize national allegiance in the abstract: loyal Britons, the American rebels, and the Hessian mercenaries all obey their respective leaders. Even the Hessians’ dual allegiance to ‘the German tyrant’ and the British government does not seem to be a source or reflection of unusual immorality in the soldiers. Cooper’s sympathetic portrayal of most of the novel’s British soldiers takes after Scott’s portraits of warring Scottish and English forces. In Waverley, for example, admirable characters recognize the good hearts of noble enemies and protect them in a non-partisan way. Edward Waverley intervenes in battle on behalf of the English Colonel Talbot, and Waverley’s commander Bonnie Prince Charlie supports this generosity. The Prince’s actions prefigure George Washington’s protection of his enemy Henry Wharton in The Spy. Scott’s presentation of the mirrored nobility of English and Scottish soldiers fosters a Unionist myth with clear utility for Scott. At the time of Waverley’s composition and publication, Scottish and English forces had joined together to oppose Napoleon, and the novel dramatizes a British unity of spirit even in the context of a Jacobite uprising. However, the importation of Scott’s model into the context of the American Revolution, a fundamentally and successfully separatist enterprise, requires Cooper to transform the model’s function. The nature of this transformation becomes visible in the novel’s marriage plots, especially in the disastrous engagement of Sarah Wharton to the British Captain Wellmere, an aspiring bigamist


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whose previous marriage Birch exposes. Willing to take an oath of exclusive loyalty to one woman while harboring a secret and equally exclusive attachment to another, Wellmere reveals himself as the opposite of Birch, who hides his exclusive devotion to the American cause under a cloak of disloyalty. Without even the Hessians’ saving graces of discipline and obedience, Wellmere thus becomes closely analogous to the classic figure of the mercenary. Like the Cowboys and Skinners of the novel, he is willing to form promiscuous contractual attachments rather than respecting his own pledges of loyalty.8 Cooper underscores this parallel in the chaos resulting from Wellmere’s exposure, during which Wellmere escapes because four Skinners arrive to rob the Whartons, who have ‘plate and money enough to make [them] all gentlemen’ (1997: 258). The mercenary fighters thus replace Wellmere’s attack on the Wharton household with one of their own. To a point, therefore, the novel places pledges of exclusive loyalty at the centre of its ideological world. The good soldiers and good spouses of The Spy are those who honor loyalty and exhibit disinterested devotion. The patriotism of Washington and Birch, in fact, is a loyalty so consuming that it causes them explicitly to sacrifice domestic satisfactions, especially in the form of having children, to the demands of the nation. At the same time, the narrative implicitly asks the reader to resist such constrictions of attachment: the structure of the book asks the reader to produce parallel sympathies for husbands and warriors, for women and men, for the patriotic commoner and the great general, for the best feelings called forth by the Revolutionary and the Loyalist causes. The implied reader enjoys a promiscuity of affections denied to Birch and Washington. The Wharton family’s black servant, Caesar, embodies another kind of single-minded commitment. Caesar devotes himself to the Whartons as Washington and Birch devote themselves to their quasifamilial America. Caesar can seem slave-like in some ways, but in the calculus of volunteer and mercenary sentiments that structures the novel, it is significant that he displays an extreme and voluntary attachment to the Wharton family – in other words, that he is not a slave. Cooper does present Caesar as admirably attached to the family but not ideally so: the attachment is naïve, and Cooper reveals Caesar as incapable of inhabiting other and better stations in the social order, especially when he fails comically to maintain his disguise as Henry Wharton. As W. M. Verhoeven puts it, Cooper portrays Caesar ‘as a spoiled, quirky child’ (Verhoeven 1993: 86).


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 139 Caesar presents a positive but infertile example, as he comes marked from the start by his impending obsolescence: The race of blacks of which Caesar was a favourable specimen is becoming very rare. The old family servant, who, born and reared in the dwelling of his master, identified himself with the welfare of those whom it was his lot to serve, is giving place in every direction to that vagrant class which has sprung up within the last thirty years, and whose members roam through the country unfettered by principles, and uninfluenced by attachments. For it is one of the curses of slavery, that its victims become incompetent to the attributes of a freeman. (1997: 41)

This passage begins with an assertion of Caesar’s willingness to conceive his identity and will entirely in terms of his position as ‘family servant’, since he has known no other environment. In opposing this total identification with the served family to the lack of ‘principles’ or ‘attachments’ of ‘blacks’ of the ‘vagrant class’, Cooper produces another variation of the book’s opposition between selfless and selfish service – or, in another view, between voluntaristic and mercenary action. The book’s other volunteers devote themselves to a national cause, but Caesar embodies this devotion on a microcosmic scale, taking the household as his nation and the family as his people. If members of the ‘vagrant class’ Cooper describes have no ‘attachments’, Caesar is hyperattached, to the point of letting his independent will vanish as he ‘identifie[s] himself with the welfare of those whom it was his lot to serve’. The last sentence of the passage I have quoted provides its final and most profound irony: according to Cooper, Caesar’s voluntary, consuming devotion to the family demonstrates that (unlike vagrant former slaves) Caesar possesses ‘the attributes of a freeman’. Caesar’s name is also ironic, as Cooper suggests early on by introducing him as ‘[t]he faithful old black, who had been reared from infancy in the house of his master, and who, as if in mockery of his degraded state, had been complimented with the name of Caesar’ (1997: 20). To say that Caesar has received his name as if in mockery of his condition both raises and avoids the issues in play. If Caesar’s parents named him, was the name doubly ironic, meant to mock the ‘degraded state’ of the family servant rather than the boy himself? If the Whartons named him, did they intend the mockery or did they reveal their insensitivity by naming the boy ‘as if’ mocking him? All of the possibilities seem to involve at some level an act of


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aggression, and they build into the culminating irony that a man named for an expansionist ruler becomes loyal to the tiny quasi-state of the Wharton household. So Cooper asks us to render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar: respect for his childlike devotion, which manifests exclusive loyalty miniaturized for safe consumption. Just as the Gospel story relies on the notion that Caesar should receive only a secondary form of devotion (the payment of the coin rather than of the spirit), The Spy presents Caesar’s single-minded devotion as admirable but infertile, like Washington’s or Birch’s. The Bigamy Solution The novel’s more durable model of devotion is that of refined bigamy: not Wellmere’s effort to create two ostensibly exclusive attachments in secret – the law punishes that kind of divided attachment by ‘[d]eath and dissection’, as the novel informs us (1997: 254) – but rather the ability to cultivate multiple, tiered attachments in political and domestic spheres. The paradigmatic romantic relationship of the novel, the union of Peyton Dunwoodie and Frances Wharton, always involves a third woman: the marriage is enabled by the death of Isabella Singleton, Frances’s rival, but rather than reducing the relationship to simple exclusivity, that death enables the couple to marry and then provide ‘sympathy and refuge’ for Sarah Wharton after Wellmere’s betrayal (1997: 316). We find at the end that the family has even been able to accommodate the relentlessly selfish servant Katy Haynes after the failure of her plans to marry Birch and then Dr Sitgreaves (1997: 403–4). For all the weight the novel places on single-minded devotion, then, its plot does not allow the easy pairing of its characters in exclusive attachments. This is a truth expressed indirectly, as in the raving of Sarah Wharton, after Wellmere’s betrayal, depicting the grave as a place of enforced monogamy: ‘Think you there can be two wives in the grave? No – no – no – one – one – one – only one’ (1997: 265). Her raving insists on one spouse but juxtaposes ‘one’ with ‘no’, introducing a negation she makes explicit later, saying, ‘there are no wives in heaven’ (1997: 281).9 In the world of the living, however, the novel requires the characters who will create the next generation of Americans not only to marry but also to improvise other forms of connection. Similar complexities shape The Spy’s political vision. Early in the novel, Cooper has his characters dramatize the interplay between


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 141 domestic and political liberty in this cheerful conversation between the siblings Sarah, Frances, and (Captain) Henry Wharton, during which they refer to Frances’s future husband, Peyton Dunwoodie, an American Major: ‘It surprises me,’ [said] the Captain, ‘that Peyton, when he procured the release of my father, did not endeavour to detain my sister in the rebel camp.’ ‘That might have endangered his own liberty,’ said the smiling girl [Frances], resuming her seat; ‘you know it is liberty for which Major Dunwoodie is fighting.’ ‘Liberty!’ exclaimed Sarah; ‘very pretty liberty which exchanges one master for fifty.’ ‘The privilege of changing masters at all is a liberty.’ ‘And one you ladies would sometimes be glad to exercise,’ said the Captain. ‘We like, I believe, to have the liberty of choosing who they shall be in the first place,’ said the laughing girl . . . . (1997: 46)

In the joking of this passage, Cooper mobilizes a set of implicit analogies between kinds of marriage and kinds of political relations. Supporting the American rebel cause, Frances portrays subjugation to the British crown as slavery – ‘[t]he privilege of changing masters at all is a liberty’ – and then as a forced marriage: ‘We like, I believe, to have the liberty of choosing who [our masters] shall be in the first place’. Her Loyalist sister, on the other hand, uses the backdrop of marriage to portray rebellion as a betrayal of exclusive commitment: ‘very pretty liberty which exchanges one master for fifty’. The novel works against Sarah’s advocacy of having ‘one master’ in two ways: explicitly through the devastating irony that the secretly married British Colonel Wellmere will betray her faith in exclusive commitment, and implicitly through having Wellmere anticipate success in John Burgoyne’s northern campaign (1997: 26), which will become famous instead for Jane McCrea’s death and a disastrous defeat at Saratoga.10 The novel dramatizes a need for the model of exclusive attachment to be revised and expanded to further the American project. This way of reading The Spy may explain one of its most puzzling aspects: its relatively sympathetic portrayal of the British-allied Hessian troops. As we have seen, Cooper describes the Hessians primarily as victims of their prince – as soldiers of exceptional discipline


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whose main flaw lies in an inflexibility that serves them poorly in the American context. In treating the Hessians so gently, Cooper not only departs from the contemporary accounts of the Hessians’ British commanders but also diverges even more dramatically from the anti-mercenary ideology of the American Revolutionaries. Even the Native American auxiliaries of the British receive gentle treatment in The Spy. The British clergyman Hollister’s fear of ‘being scalped’ by ‘the copper-coloured, savage Indians’ (1997: 288) produces only mockery from the more worldly American Captain Lawton, who replies that ‘if you apprehend the savages, seek them in the ranks of your prince’ (1997: 289). Lawton explains that he refers to the Skinners: More than savages; men who, under the guise of Patriotism, prowl through the community, with a thirst for plunder that is unsatiable, and a love of cruelty that mocks the ingenuity of the Indian. Fellows whose mouths are filled with liberty and equality, and whose hearts are overflowing with cupidity and gall – gentlemen that are yclep’d the Skinners. (1997: 289)

For Lawton, the ‘savage Indians’ represent a geographically and emotionally distant threat, and the novel does not contradict his view, in spite of its suggestive placement of Wellmere on a path that seems to lead to Jane McCrea’s scalp. The attributes conventionally associated with ‘savages’ and with foreign mercenaries shift to the Skinners and Cowboys who, unlike the Hessians and the Native Americans, look and speak like white, patriotic Britons or Americans but act from naked self-interest. As we have seen, Birch contrarily uses the guise of self-interest to cloak his patriotism. What appear to be two ends of a spectrum, however – the devotion of Washington and Birch at one end, the unprincipled opportunism of the dispersed fighters on the other – overlap in the anticipation and event of Birch’s death. Because Birch is suspected of disloyalty, the gallows looms over his life. Although he escapes execution, at one point by setting up a Skinner to be hanged by Cowboys in his place, Birch sacrifices a family life for the state.11 Birch is coupled only with Washington; they even make a home together, in a sense, in a mountain hut that serves as their secret base of operations. According to The Spy, the relationships that will populate the United States of Cooper’s time are those that trade simplicity for limited complexity, gaining robustness by accommodating the effects of war, betrayal,


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 143 and even character defects. What appears to be a simply moralistic tale against the mercenary impulse ultimately suggests that, for better and worse, the most fertile ways of American life involve compromises with worldliness. The Paratexts of The Spy: Cooper, Brown, and Inheritance Cooper applies the relationship between worldly life and national service to his own authorial situation in the paratexts of The Spy, beginning with the prefatory material of the 1821 first edition. Cooper dedicates the novel to James Aitchison, an English friend: Although we are natives of different countries, I feel that I can safely offer to your notice a work, which has been chiefly written with a view to induce love to my own. Attachment to the land of our nativity, is a sentiment so intimately blended with our best feelings, that should I have discovered any weakness in the exhibition of this national partiality, I feel confident, that you, at least, will not judge me harshly; for your liberality to this country is untainted with any irreverence for the institutions of your own. (J. F. Cooper 1821: I/iii)

After a few more lines of text, this dedication is signed, ‘Your assured friend, —— ——’ (1821: I/iii). Like the novel that follows, this dedication mobilizes conventional affirmations of local attachment – the standard basis of anti-mercenary sentiment – but in addition to his own ‘national partiality’, the author proclaims a Waverley-like generosity to his English friend. He claims to resolve the tension between these ideas by universalizing and affirming an abstract value of ‘[a]ttachment to the land of our nativity’. Attachment to a land of nativity is a questionable basis for a novel of the American Revolution, a war of emigrants assisted by the likes of Jones and La Fayette. Chronology adds another wrinkle. Having been born in 1789, Cooper himself could think of an independent United States as ‘the land of [his] nativity’, but his parents could not have. As Franklin points out, the context of The Spy’s publication was one in which Americans were coming to terms with the War of 1812 and therefore expressing a renewed interest in the Revolution as a distant event, ‘about which most Americans alive in 1820 had no firsthand knowledge’ (W. Franklin 2007: 277). The American-born Cooper could have partially stabilized the idea of national nativity with a signature, but the letter is signed


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instead with a blank, which ties it to the novel’s motif of secret identity. The difference between a generalized American associated with the Revolution, on the one hand, and Cooper himself on the other calls attention to the shifting meaning of Revolutionary rhetoric as the United States moved into its second and third generations of independence. The blank space replaces authorship with a cipher, replaces the rootedness voiced in the dedication with the idea of an unmoored controlling voice. The speaker of the dedication becomes, in fact, like a suspected spy: an articulator of safely patriotic sentiments that cloak the presence or absence of underlying authority. In the original preface that followed the dedication, such complications connect to the idea of a national literature and to writing for money, both through the figure of Charles Brockden Brown. In considering the reasons for and against writing a novel set in America, Cooper posits a literary genealogy of one: To begin with the – pros – the ground is untrodden, and will have all the charms of novelty; as yet but one pen of any celebrity has been employed among us in this kind of writing; and as the author is dead, and beyond the hopes and fears of literary rewards and punishments, his countrymen are beginning to discover his merit – but we forget, the latter part of the sentence should have been among the – contras. (J. F. Cooper 1821: I/v)

The reader might guess at this point that Cooper refers to Brown. The identification becomes unambiguous when Cooper refers to Brown’s Edgar Huntly when describing the factors weighing against writing an American novel, in a passage that has become the focus of modern critical discussions of the preface: [A]lthough the English critics not only desire, but invite works that will give an account of American manners, we are sadly afraid they mean nothing but Indian manners; we are apprehensive that the same palate which can relish the cave scene in Edgar Huntly, because it contains an American, a savage, a wild cat, and a tomahawk, in a conjunction that never did, nor ever will occur – will revolt at descriptions here, that portray love as any thing but a brutal passion – patriotism as more than money-making – or men and women without wool. (1821: I.vi–vii)

Details aside, this is a commonplace prefatory sentiment: a statement that the work to follow represents different and higher values


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 145 than those appreciated by most readers of the day. (Wordsworth’s prefaces to Lyrical Ballads are probably the period’s best-known and most refined articulations of similar ideas.) The interest of this passage lies in its more precise ways of mobilizing race, nationality, and money-making through jarring, unexplained transitions that create associational rather than logical meaning. Brown is, of course, central to the passage’s formulation of the literary legacy that Cooper inherits.12 Cooper imagines the reception of The Spy as conditioned by earlier responses to Brown, who has vitiated the palate of the reader’s taste. Both the reference to Brown’s Native American characters and images and Cooper’s suggestion of African American characters (those with ‘wool’) have led readers to use this passage to look past The Spy to the Leatherstocking novels, in which race figures more prominently.13 Franklin goes so far as to posit that ‘it was not in all likelihood The Spy that spurred Cooper to this attack. It was instead The Pioneers, about which he already must have been thinking . . . ’ (W. Franklin 2007: 343). Little has been made, however, of two factors that relate directly to The Spy. These lay the groundwork for the novel’s dichotomy between mercenary and disinterested actions: first, Cooper’s portrayal of Brown’s audience as that of English critics, and second, Cooper’s notion that Brown did not represent ‘patriotism as more than money-making’. Attached to a novel in which secret loyalty to British authorities is the ne plus ultra of criminality in an American man, Cooper’s suggestion that Brown misrepresented the truth of American experience to please English critics carries a sting: it is an accusation of not a literal but a literary high crime. Although The Spy justifies duplicity in the name of disinterested loyalties (Birch’s devotion to Washington, Henry Wharton’s to his family), it insists to the point of defensive obsession on the value of ‘patriotism as more than money-making’, which Cooper accuses Brown of failing to represent – whether in his novels or his person is unclear. In a way, Cooper has a point: as I have argued earlier, Brown’s novels (especially but not only Ormond) teem with literal and figurative mercenaries, often identified as foreigners, whose abundance Brown presents as threatening the existence of disinterested patriotism in the new Republic. As Cooper’s novel proper makes Washington into the nation’s ideal father – ‘all who dwell in this broad land are my children’, he says (1997: 362) – the preface frames Brown as the literary nation’s bad father, the figure who has failed to portray love, patriotism, and characters ‘without wool’ to Cooper’s satisfaction.14 The Spy glorifies


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the metaphorical national paternity of Washington and Birch, but the preface laments the lack of a parallel literary father. The Spy instead announces its debts to British forefathers, especially Shakespeare and Scott, whose words dominate the novel’s chapter mottos. The explicitly British genealogy of the work produces an ironic effect because this preface is attached not to the Leatherstocking novels – books that famously sidestep the issue of Natty Bumppo’s actions during the Revolution – but to The Spy, whose central conflict is transatlantic. As the dedication subtly introduces the complications that arise when Revolutionary Americans think of the land of their nativity, so the preface acknowledges the pain of dislocation and dissipated patrimony. Cooper presents himself as the unwilling inheritor of Brown’s legacy. Taken together, the dedication, preface, and novel create a litany of compromised paternities. The problems of paternity transform a simple opposition between loyal subject and mercenary betrayer into a revelation of the complexities of declaring independence. Cooper added a final layer to these complexities in telling another version of the Birch story in an introduction to The Spy that was written for the 1831 Colburn and Bentley edition, in place of the earlier preface, and was revised for the 1849 Putnam edition. In this introduction, Cooper attributes the story of the spy to ‘an illustrious man’ we know to have been John Jay (W. Franklin 1997: xvii). In this version of the story, the spy refuses payment from Jay in contextual rather than absolute terms: ‘“The country has need of all its means”, he said; “as for myself, I can work, or gain a livelihood in various ways’” (1997: 5). Cooper adds his ‘impression’ that the spy later ‘consented to receive a remuneration for what he had done; but it was not until his country was entirely in a position to bestow it’ (1997: 5). Rather than refusing payment altogether, the spy here accrues the social capital of the warrior who accepts delayed rather than immediate benefits.15 Washington is not directly involved in the transaction. In presenting the reader with two contrasting versions of the story, Cooper reveals how he has edited the story to create the novel’s version. The novel depicts the spy’s refusal of money as absolute, even theological: Washington’s tribute to Birch is a written note that closes, ‘[t]hough man does not, may God reward him for his conduct!’ (1997: 407). But Washington’s note is itself a reward from ‘man’, and one of words rather than money. The note’s importance in human terms becomes clear when it is read by Wharton


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 147 Dunwoodie, the novel’s designated inheritor of legacies, in whose presence Birch improbably dies. Unable to have children of his own, Birch uses the note to transmit his story to the next generation. The contrast between the introduction and the novel proper also involves the replacement of a monetary reward with a tribute of words, as Washington’s note replaces the delayed, dignified cash payment portrayed in the introduction. By means of this contrast, Cooper constructs an implicit story of himself as a professional and national author, having operated in secrecy, like Birch, for the good of the nation. In writing The Spy, he has transformed the reward of Jay’s delayed payment into Washington’s words. Furthermore, by revealing that Washington was not directly involved in the source story, Cooper effectively claims for himself Washington’s tribute to Birch (‘may God reward him for his conduct!’). This invented tribute reveals itself as the story Cooper has transformed into cash when The Spy became a ‘bestseller’ for its debt-ridden author, the book that ‘confirmed his career in letters’ (Schachterle 1991: 184–5). Thus, with the addition of his new introduction – with Cooper’s revelation of himself as the creator of the tribute story – Washington’s role of using rhetoric to direct the flow of national gratitude shifts to Cooper, the man who transforms money into words and, as he does not mention in this context, back into money. When the novel’s 1821 preface gives way to the 1831/1849 introduction, the attack on Charles Brockden Brown’s patriotism disappears, replaced by this new meditation in the manner of Scott on the sources of the historical story. From the changes emerges another role for Cooper: the alchemist who transforms ‘money-making’ into national tribute. Cooper’s vision of that process will take a new turn when he revisits the theme of mercenary action in The Bravo, a novel that takes Byron rather than Scott as its Romantic literary forefather. NOTES

1. See Thomas (2003) on the negotiation between Jefferson and Jones (2003: 267) and on Jones’s Russian experience more generally (Chapters 13–15). 2. See W. Franklin (2007) for an account of the importance of André and his captors to The Spy (2007: 279–82). 3. Kay Seymour House offers an exasperated critique of this aspect of Washington’s character in Cooper’s Americans (House 1965: 214).


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4. George Dekker explains the difference between Scott’s and Cooper’s uses of the phrase ‘neutral ground’. For Scott, ‘“neutral ground” is to be prized as a place where differences are reconciled or temporarily forgotten . . . ; to Cooper it means “No-Man’s-Land”. Thus what is frankly an imitation of a Scott novel seems to be, as well, a sharp critique of Scott’s soft centre’ (Dekker 1967: 33). Dave McTiernan argues that The Spy functions for Cooper as a neutral ground on which to stage an interplay of genres as well as the relationship between form and ideology. Reid combines these perspectives in saying that Cooper’s ‘neutral ground is the battlefield on which plans and experiences contend with one another, and neutrality is a precarious and finally deceptive label for a dynamic field of fiercely partisan, violent, and antagonistic forces – both military and narrative’ (McTiernan 1997: 7). 5. For a more general historical account of Revolutionary Westchester County, see Judd (2005). 6. Kim does describe a change in these behaviors as the war progressed, but only a partial one: To be sure, plundering by the Continental Army declined noticeably as the plan of discipline introduced in 1778 by Friedrich Wilhelm, Baron von Steuben, gradually bore fruit. But the view of the American army as composed of robbers persisted because local militia units, the French army, and such irregular armed groups in American service as the so-called Skinners and Refuges resorted to the practice. The British and Hessian troops’ pillaging activities continued unchecked. (1993: 884) That is, in the progress of the war, the conduct of the Continental Army came more closely to resemble Cooper’s description, though that of the British forces did not. I will return to this point. 7. Also, earlier in the novel, Colonel Wellmere is portrayed as wrong to dismiss the Hessians as ‘mere mercenary troops’ who will be outshone by ‘the really British regiments’ (J. F. Cooper 1997: 26). 8. The revelation of Wellmere’s attempted crime is sidetracked by a discussion of bigamy as a capital offense (J. F. Cooper 1997: 254). While the debate detracts from the scene’s dramatic development, which lies in the betrayal of Sarah Wharton, it also functions to create a more direct connection between Wellmere’s crime and those of political traitors, whose punishments of death by hanging inform many of the book’s conversations and episodes. 9. This phrasing connects Sarah’s raving to the words of Jesus according to Luke: ‘The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage’ (King James Bible, Luke 20: 34–5).


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Loyalty, Independence, and Fenimore Cooper’s Revolution [ 149 10. See Reid (2004) for an analysis of this connection between McCrea’s story and The Spy (2004: 41–6). 11. Threatened by the gallows, the Skinner reveals his lack of personal and political loyalty by offering to betray his fellows, including his ‘own brother’ (J. F. Cooper 1997: 382), or his allegiance to the king, in order to be spared (1997: 384). 12. James D. Wallace has attended to this aspect of the preface, arguing that ‘Brown’s career seems to have contradictory meanings for Cooper . . . . Ultimately the figure of Brown betrays not “the anxiety of influence” but rather Cooper’s anxiety about his own performance, a mingled pride and shame’ (Wallace 1986: 87). This ‘mingled pride and shame’ strikes me as a manifestation of Cooper’s presentation of Brown as the metaphorical father whose son Cooper has not chosen to be. 13. In Master Plots, Jared Gardner offers an astute reading of ‘the slippage in Cooper’s tirade from Indians to blacks’ (2000b: 83), by which Cooper incorrectly implies a notable presence of African Americans in early American fiction. Gardner goes on to argue that ‘this slippage from the Indian tale to the fact of African American men and women is a crucial one, one at the heart of [Cooper’s] invention of the Vanishing American and Cooper’s novels of the 1820s’ (2000b: 83). 14. As Reid points out, Washington proves less than ideal as a father to Birch in the novel: ‘In his relationship with Washington, the Spy finds only further alienation, a social death suggesting the ironic inversion of the security and comfort of a father’s care’ (2004: 62). 15. In this version of the story, where the Birch-figure does receive a financial reward, the spy comes to resemble the real-life captors of Major André – the ‘disinterested’ workingmen mentioned above, who also enjoyed a delayed monetary compensation. As Franklin notes, the compensation of those men had become a hotly debated issue in 1817, when one of them, John Paulding, appealed to the House of Representatives for an increase in the $200 annuity that he and his fellows had been enjoying for thirty-six years, during a time when ‘[s]uch rewards for ordinary men had been highly unusual’. Congressman Benjamin Tallmadge of Connecticut denounced Paulding, charging that the captors ‘had acted out of greed rather than patriotism’. This exchange initiated a vigorous public debate, first about the André case itself, then about ‘the issue of the nation’s general debt to Revolutionary veterans’ (W. Franklin 2007: 279–81).


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Chapter 5

THE BRAVOS OF VENICE

Contract Killing: Venice and the Mercenary Within In writing The Bravo (1831), James Fenimore Cooper returned to the subjects of mercenary action, national affiliation, and failed paternity that he had previously treated in his novels of eighteenthcentury America. In this case, however, Cooper handles those subjects through an explicit geographic displacement, by way of a hero modeled on those of Lord Byron rather than Walter Scott, and with more of a Byronic pessimism about the individual’s ability to escape the effects of systemic corruption. Although The Bravo is set in Venice during the late Venetian Republic, Cooper nonetheless called it, as I have noted in the introduction, ‘perhaps, in spirit, the most American book I ever wrote’ (J. F. Cooper 1960–8: 4/461, emphasis original). As he takes up the figure of the Venetian bravo – an assassin for hire, especially by powerful figures in the government – Cooper turns to imagining America through the situation of a late republic. For British and American writers in the generation before Cooper, the Venetian Republic and its bravos had enabled analysis of a decayed political system whose dissolution remained a fresh memory: Venice had lost its independence to Napoleon in 1797. For some of these writers, America represented the opportunity of the fallen republican spirit to reassert itself. In the Federalist, James Madison argues that Venice fell so far short of the republican ideal that calling Venice a republic reflected ‘the extreme inaccuracy with which the term has been used in political disquisitions’ (2003: 182). Madison himself later calls Venice a republic, but he does so to present it as


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a negative example demonstrating the necessity of governmental checks and balances: ‘Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice . . . . An elective despotism, was not the government we fought for’ (2003: 243). Madison’s point, of course, is that the United States can improve on Venice’s example, an argument that Byron would later make in literature. Byron’s ‘Venice: An Ode’ (1818) laments the history of Venice as ‘[t]hirteen hundred years / Of wealth and glory turn’d to dust and tears’ (Byron 1980–92: 4/201). In the poem’s final lines, Byron encourages the man who still feels devotion to ‘Freedom’ to cross the Atlantic: . . . . . . . o’er the deep Fly, and one current to the ocean add, One spirit to the souls our fathers had, One freeman more, America, to thee! (Byron 1980–92: 4/206)

In this way, Venice takes a place in Byron’s larger narrative of how political liberty finds a new home built by displaced or self-exiled people in the United States. When Cooper takes up the subject of the Venetian bravo, he does so not to envision an American rescue of the republican ideal but rather to bring the anxieties of an established republic to bear on a later American context. Writing half a century after the Revolution, Cooper uses a Venetian setting to signal a break from his concern with the Revolutionary origins of the United States. He does this in part by adding to his source materials an innovative contrast between what he portrays as old and new kinds of mercenaries: a body of foreign mercenary guards who publicly support the tyrannical state apparatus, on the one hand, and on the other the bravo, a native Venetian reputed to carry out unofficial contract killings. In shifting his attention from the organized bodies of foreign mercenaries to solitary natives choosing to operate as mercenary contractors, I argue, The Bravo outlines the shape of later American formulations of mercenary action. To understand Cooper’s innovation, we must first attend to the British tradition of writing about Venice that Cooper engages. Writers of and before Cooper’s time anchor this tradition in Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice and Othello attract frequent references and allusions in later fictions of Venice, along with Thomas Otway’s celebrated play Venice Preserved (1682). (Ben Jonson’s Volpone [1606]


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occasionally appears as well.) In Cooper’s more recent past, Venice had figured prominently in a number of widely read British works such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice (1804), on which Percy Bysshe Shelley draws in the partly Venetian Zastrozzi (1810); and a number of Byron’s works that I will discuss below.1 Samuel Rogers built on the Byronic example with his long blank verse poem Italy, which was published in 1822 and 1828, but which gained its formidable popularity from an illustrated edition in 1830. The influence of Lewis and Radcliffe – including that of Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which also features a contract killing by an Italian bravo – helped the bravo become a staple of Gothic novels such as T. J. Horsley Curties’s The Monk of Udolpho (1807) and Catherine Smith’s Barozzi; or, The Venetian Sorceress (1815).2 In 1831, the year following the publication of Rogers’s illustrated edition of Italy, Cooper published The Bravo, which features thirtyone chapter mottos, all but two attributed to Shakespeare, Byron or Rogers. Cooper thus encouraged his readers to understand the novel as part of a gentlemanly version of the British tradition of imagining Venice. In general, British literary Venice displays the successes and limitations of the Venetian Republic’s efforts to institute a system of legal protections powerful enough to enable commerce and a measure of political liberty. This system produces the ability of Shakespeare’s Shylock to demand recognition of the solidity of his contract with Antonio: as Shylock knows, the validity of contracts allowed the Venetian commercial state to function in spite of animosities among individuals or groups. Shylock and Antonio need not like each other to form a valid compact. The system also enables Othello to obtain a fair hearing even when he is attacked by Brabantio, a leading man of the city. Also central to the Shakespearean vision of Venice, however, are the limitations of this legal equality: Shylock will not only lose his case but also find himself trapped by laws that target Jews unequally, and Othello’s access to official justice cannot protect him fully from the Venetian people’s commonplace bigotries.3 Partly because of Shakespeare’s influence, the British literary imagination of Venice became a primary means of considering how republics fail to live up to their ideals. As Tony Tanner has written, pre-Napoleonic Venice combines the identities of ‘a powerful and enormously rich republic’ and ‘a police state’ (1992: 5).4 There appears to be one major exception to this rule: Otway’s Venice Preserved, an explicit celebration of the defeat in England of the


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Popish Plot and the fall of Shaftesbury and the Whigs. In its political framing, Otway’s play would thus encourage its audience – especially its royal audience – to view the work as supporting the legitimacy and stability of ruling powers. The macrocosmic action of the play derives its energy, however, from the faults of the government, including the creation of a ‘murmuring unpaid army’ (1969: II, iii, 72), which provides the treasonous plotters a basis for optimism. And the microcosmic rebellion, the resistance of the Desdemonalike Belvidera to her father, becomes oddly justified at the end when the father’s closing couplet attributes the tragedy to his own bad conduct: in the last words of the play, he warns ‘all cruel fathers [to] dread my fate’ (1969: V, iv, 37). Otway’s suggestion that a ‘murmuring unpaid army’ constitutes a potentially disruptive political force alludes to the role of Venice and other Italian city-states in the history of mercenary warfare. As Philip Bobbitt has argued, Italian peninsular cities had pioneered the use of professional armed forces organized by condottieri (from the Italian condotta, ‘contract’) who ‘sold their services to the highest bidder’ (2002: 81–2). To muster the resources necessary to maintain a mercenary army, the Italian cities institutionalized the modern military state, conferring power on a state apparatus ‘severed from the prince who brought it into being’ (2002: 82). Thus the state institutionalized its control of the mercenaries but undermined the prince’s power by ‘provid[ing] others with the means of exercising the power they had seized, and legitimat[ing] their doing so’ (2002: 82). With revenues far surpassing those of England, Spain, and France, but a population too small to support an effective militia, Venice was among the centers of this transition (2002: 83), which constituted a fundamental transformation. (Byron emphasizes Venice’s part in this history in The Two Foscari, noting the importance of the condottiere Carmagnola, who fought for the Duke of Milan, then sold his services to Venice, and finally was convicted of treason and beheaded.5) Felix Gilbert argues writers of this period that ‘war was no longer undertaken as a religious duty’; its ‘purpose . . . became financial gain’ (1986: 15). The risk that the condottieri thus organized would seek to overthrow the prince resulted in Machiavelli and others developing the logic of the princely state, in which Florence and then other Italian states moved to form conscripted militias (Bobbitt 2002: 86–7). The fall of the Venetian Republic to the Napoleonic army in 1797 – that is, the triumph of Napoleon’s expansionist, nationalist forces over


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the remains of the Venetian system – brought about a new round of literary interpretations of the flaws of the Venetian approach. While retaining many of Shakespeare’s and Otway’s devices (from character types to details such as secret meetings and meaningful tollings of bells), early nineteenth-century literature about Venice involved a freshly intensive exploration of the conspiratorial and rebellious forces weakening the structure of Venice, whose leaders are presented as cloaking secrecy and absolutism beneath nominally republican institutions. Byron is the central figure in this generation’s portrayal of Venice. I have already mentioned his ‘Venice: An Ode’, with its vision of the ‘freeman’ moving from Venice to America. That poem’s interest in Venice was amplified by the fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818) and by three self-contained works set in Venice: Beppo (1818), the predecessor of Don Juan in the ottava rima comic mode, and two Venetian tragedies, Marino Faliero (1821) and The Two Foscari (1821). The commonality between Beppo and its tragic counterparts lies in the sense that Venetian society creates free agents, people who claim unusual (and often destructive) latitude in configuring their personal and political affiliations. Beppo leaves Venice, falls into the company of pirates, plays the lucrative role of the ‘renegado’ himself, returns to Venice where he is perceived as a Turk, then rejoins the city’s Christian community.6 In Marino Faliero, the eponymous Doge of Venice undergoes a tragic version of Beppo’s transformations: Faliero becomes the enemy of the state when the Venetian Council of Ten fails to punish sufficiently a crude insult to his wife. When his treason is discovered, Faliero is beheaded. Byron’s play gains its energy from the paradoxes of Faliero’s position: he acts treasonably against the state he ostensibly leads, acts in the name of a populist revolt whose actors he despises, and sees his treason simultaneously as a declaration of liberty and as a fated inevitability.7 By functioning both as an extension of the state and as its radically alienated enemy, Faliero takes a place alongside the figure who will more commonly embody these paradoxes in the literary imagination of Venice: the bravo. Literary Bravos: the Byronian Mind and Faliero’s Head In the writings of John Ruskin, whose work arguably culminates nineteenth-century Anglo-American writing about Venice, we can see the figure of the bravo that Ruskin and Cooper inherited from


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their predecessors. Ruskin acquired his taste for Venice from Byron, Wordsworth, and Rogers, among others. Before Ruskin wrote The Stones of Venice, he penned a fragment of a tragedy called Marcolini, composed in the summer of 1836, when he was seventeen and writing in what he called a ‘Byronian’ manner (Ruskin 1886: 410). In retrospect, Ruskin wrote that he had abandoned Marcolini ‘because, when I had described a gondola, a bravo, the heroine Bianca, and moonlight on the Grand Canal, I found I had not much more to say’ (Ruskin 1886: 410–11). Ruskin considered the bravo a stock ingredient of a Venetian tale, an idea that he may have taken most directly from Rogers. Rogers’s own episode called ‘Marcolini’ – a short piece of prose set into the blank verse of Italy – describes the title character as a good young man who finds a valuable scabbard and picks it up, ignorant that its blade had just been used to kill a senator: ‘The Bravo in his flight had thrown away his scabbard; and, smeared with blood, with blood not yet dry, it was now in the belt of Marcolini’ (1830: 86). Convicted and executed on the basis of this compelling circumstantial evidence, Marcolini becomes a figure of wrongfully judged innocence, an innocence formed in contrast to the bravo’s guilt. This Venetian tradition lies in the background when Ruskin expounds on the difference between the soldier and the bravo in the midst of a larger argument about wages in Unto This Last (1860): Philosophically, it does not, at first sight, appear reasonable . . . that a peaceable and rational person, whose trade is buying and selling, should be held in less honour than an unpeaceable and often irrational person, whose trade is slaying. Nevertheless, the consent of mankind has always, in spite of the philosophers, given precedence to the soldier. And this is right. For the soldier’s trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying, but being slain. This, without well knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for. A bravo’s trade is slaying; but the world has never respected bravos more than merchants: the reason it honours the soldier is, because he holds his life at the service of the State. (Ruskin 1985: 175)

Ruskin uses the figure of the bravo (the comparison to whom merchants may well resent) rather than that of the mercenary to make his case, but his logic mirrors that of the more common distinction between legitimate and mercenary soldiers, in which only the regular soldier has a sacrificial aspect that earns the gratitude of the nation. Ruskin captures the spirit of the bravo as a stock villain, an


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independent contractor embodying the worst aspects of the mercenary. Like the mercenary, however, the bravo also attracted writers interested in investing the apparently irredeemable villain with complexities that resist the type. Ruskin drew on an early nineteenth-century literature about bravos that was an outgrowth of one branch of the German Gothic: Räuberromane, or novels of banditry.8 As Agnes Genevieve Murphy explains in her foundational 1935 study of the subject, the heroes of these works – vengeful noblemen who have been treated badly by their societies – take as their source the character Karl Moor in Schiller’s play Die Räuber. As Murphy notes, the settings of this subgenre shift to Venice, thanks to the influence of Heinrich Zschokke’s Abällino, der grosse Bandit (1793; Murphy 1935: 4–5), which Matthew Lewis translated into English and adapted to create The Bravo of Venice. The title of Lewis’s work highlights the role of the bravo, obviously, and the novel’s plot, closely based on Zschokke’s, would leave clear marks on later fictions of Venice. Lewis prepares the reader for the main bravo of his work by contrasting him with five stock bravos who operate in Venice before the hero’s arrival. Although their leader Matteo calls this group ‘banditti’ (M. G. Lewis 1805: 10), they are killers who proudly hold themselves above robbery: as one of the group puts it, ‘among us robbery is unknown. What? Dost take us for common plunderers, for mere thieves . . . and villains of that low, miserable stamp?’ (1805: 41). (In this sense, to classify the fictions of the Venetian bravo among the Räuberromane would be misleading. Many of these are not tales of robbers.) Shortly thereafter, Matteo articulates the skeptical, leveling sentiments of a stereotypical radical. He tells Rosalvo that ‘the Bravo must be above crediting the nurse’s antiquated tales of vice and virtue . . . . We are men, as much as are the Doge and his senators, and have reason as much as they have to lay down the law of right and wrong’ (1805: 43–4). Like the monstrous mercenaries who inhabit other books of the time, Matteo asserts an independence so radical that it breaks the ties of obligation that hold together the fiction’s social world. Addressing Matteo’s successor, Rosalvo, requires a brief overview of Lewis’s plot. Shortly after speaking the words quoted above, Matteo will be killed by Rosalvo, who destroys the group of bravos and takes their claims to superiority even farther: ‘Great as Count Rosalvo, that I can be no longer’; he soliloquizes, ‘but from being great as a Venetian Bravo, what prevents me? – Souls in bliss!’ (1805:


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53). He then vows that ‘posterity shall be compelled to honour that name, which my actions shall render illustrious’ (1805: 54). Taking on the character of Abellino, the bravo, Rosalvo begins brashly to assist a conspiracy of nobles to kill the Doge’s advisors and take over the government. Meanwhile, the Doge is assisted by a newly arrived Florentine named Flodoardo, setting up a climactic confrontation between the Florentine and the bravo. Count Rosalvo then shows himself to have been playing both characters himself – and indeed, to have hidden the Doge’s friends rather than killing them. Upon revealing the conspiracy, Rosalvo restores his good name and marries the niece of the Doge.9 Like Byron’s later character Marino Faliero, Rosalvo plays dual roles, one aligned with the state apparatus and one seeking to undermine it. (Unlike Faliero, Rosalvo at least superficially resolves the conflict by revealing both roles to be masks. Faliero embodies his contradictions to the end.) This duality suggests – for these writers and more generally in the literature of Venice – that the secretive Republic confounds the integrity of its citizens, who must play multiple roles to negotiate their places in the political system. In the social acceptance of masks in public places, and then more dramatically in the act of state-sponsored execution by decapitation, the splitting of the Venetian subject takes on an unsettling literalism. It is for symbolic as well as sensationalistic reasons that the image of the Doge Faliero’s severed head recurs in tales of Venice. Cooper’s Bravo and ‘the rights that come by violence’ Cooper’s The Bravo invokes Faliero’s head when Jacopo Frontoni, the bravo of the title, leads an old fisherman, Antonio, up ‘the wellknown steps, down which the head of the Faliero had rolled’ (J. F. Cooper 1831: 1/166). The image of the head descending the very steps the characters climb reinforces Venice’s status as a place of recapitulation and layered stories. Like Faliero, Jacopo finds that living in Venice requires him to embody contradictory roles. For most of the novel, Cooper presents Jacopo as a Byronic antihero, an assassin with mysterious motives and a deep sense of personal honor. Near the end of the book, we learn that Jacopo is not a bravo at all, in that he has not killed anyone. He has bargained with the government for the release of his father, who is unjustly imprisoned and gravely ill, and in return, Jacopo has allowed himself to be spoken of as the bravo who secretly murders the enemies of the state.


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Jacopo’s transformation results from his friendship with the fisherman Antonio, a war veteran who seeks his grandson’s release from military service. Jacopo attempts to assist Antonio partly by supporting his cause explicitly – Jacopo allows Antonio to win a gondola race, and then joins him in offering to sacrifice the race’s prizes for the grandson’s release – and partly by trying unsuccessfully to convince Antonio to soften his words and thus survive his confrontation with the Venetian Council of Three. When Jacopo witnesses Antonio’s murder by state agents and, as usual, is rumored to have performed the killing himself, Jacopo begins to resist the state more forcefully and thereby gains his death sentence. When his father dies in prison, Jacopo and his friends finally oppose the government. Jacopo thus gains integrity of character but – when he is publicly beheaded as a scapegoat for Antonio’s murder – loses integrity of body. The nature of Jacopo’s divided roles differentiates him from his immediate predecessors in the Venetian tradition. Rather than wearing a public face of loyalty to cover secret motives, Jacopo has a driving private motivation – the protection and care of his imprisoned father – that dictates no clear course of action. The categories of loyalty and treason cannot easily describe Jacopo’s relationship to the state. Even in his pretended role of the bravo, he is rumored to act for the state but outside it, thus breaking the state monopoly on legitimate violence. Furthermore, because he is not the assassin but the rumored assassin, his real role is to control the discourse surrounding the state’s use of force. His character therefore represents a distillation of the mercenary into its psychological essence: not the act of violence but the betrayal of sincerity. Cooper presents Jacopo’s abdication of sincerity as the result and reflection of the state’s. The problem of a government masking its true nature had concerned Cooper as he visited Venice and then witnessed the disappointments of the 1830 July Revolution in France, after which ‘[h]e believed that the government of Louis Philippe professed republican principles while actually aiming toward aristocracy’ (Loveland 1969: 245). In The Bravo, governmental insincerity produces individual insincerity, which in turn makes the populace more difficult to govern, and the novel takes these systemic relations as its subject. Although his story illustrates the suffering and injustice caused by his state’s arbitrary tyranny, Jacopo in his Byronic inscrutability illustrates the limits of the state’s power to control his actions. In Jacopo’s character, the notion that the employment of mercenaries signals the tyranny of the state encounters its contrary, the idea that the


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mercenary embodies an irreducible independence. In conventional Machiavellian anti-mercenary rhetoric, the mercenary’s independence takes the form of disloyalty and dishonor. Jacopo’s independence, however, involves disloyalty to a Venetian government that deserves no loyalty: the bravo’s free agency threatens a state that deserves to be threatened. In his resistance to the machinations of the Venetian ruling powers, Jacopo becomes the means by which Cooper illustrates the limits of statecraft, with implicit logic similar to that of Adam Smith’s in his description of the ‘man of system’: The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it . . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. (A. Smith 1994: 233–4)

In The Bravo, Jacopo displays a constant awareness of his status as one of the state’s chess pieces, in Smith’s metaphor, and of the limitations that status places on his words and actions. The novel’s other sympathetic characters, though often less self-consciously, arrive at a similar awareness: as Charles Hansford Adams puts it, ‘[e]ach of the main characters in The Bravo is engaged in a struggle to assert an individual and social identity apart from the corporate state, to define a self outside the laws’ (1990: 116). Jacopo’s heroism stems from his ability to maintain what Smith calls the ‘principle of motion of [his] own’. During the gondola race that creates his connection to Antonio, in fact, Jacopo asserts his liberty of conscience literally by controlling his own motion. In allowing himself to lose the prize, he gains the moral standing to speak against the state. The race allows him to reverse the logic of his ostensible career as a bravo: whereas the bravo sacrifices claims to sympathy by accepting payment, Jacopo in the race enhances his standing by voluntarily finishing second. Cooper has prepared the reader to judge this event properly by staging


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another race first, in which the narrator presents the crowd as exhibiting a ‘dangerous’ tendency to value success for its own sake: ‘The prize was won, the conquerors were rewarded . . . . Music answered to the roar of cannon and the peals of bells, while sympathy with success, that predominant and so often dangerous principle of our nature, drew shouts even from the disappointed’ (1831: 1/126). The subsequent race, in which Jacopo finishes second, asks the reader to exercise sympathy with more than one sense of loss. Nobly finishing second in a way that signifies a detachment from the wrongheaded authorities staging the contest represents an important Romantic cultural value. As I have argued elsewhere, Romanticera authors wrote frequently about contests and prizes, and some of them, including Wordsworth at various times and James Hogg in The Queen’s Wake, articulated the value of losing the contests of mass culture.10 The logic of cultural capital demands this ability to recognize the proper way to finish second, to deny oneself the prize of the moment to receive more durable, slow-maturing rewards.11 When applied to the figure of the mercenary, this logic justifies the conventional soldier as the figure who finishes second, who sacrifices the mercenary’s prize of market-based compensation for delayed rewards such as honor in civic ceremonies and veterans’ benefits. In portraying Jacopo as finishing second to Antonio nobly and voluntarily, then, Cooper has his bravo exhibit the higher virtues of the volunteer. Yet Jacopo’s noble conduct appears to create a contradiction. He enacts the cultural value of finishing second, but as a bravo, he inhabits one of the classic types of the villain who chooses quick, crass rewards. The revelation near the novel’s end that Jacopo is only an apparent bravo is Cooper’s resolution to this apparent contradiction.12 Far from selling his conscience to murder for personal gain – in the tradition of the literary bravos of Lewis, Rogers, and others – Jacopo has sacrificed his own well-being in support of his father’s. This resolution of the novel’s most pressing problem reveals deeper questions about the nature of national service and individual liberty. The revelation that Jacopo has not killed anyone neatly isolates what had long been the driving factor in the literary idea of the mercenary: the sale of conscience. The novel absolves Jacopo, but the reader may harbor doubts about the rectitude of his actions. These doubts may begin with questions of simple logistics: as the novel leads us to believe that Venetians understand how to contact Jacopo with requests for contract killings, it is difficult to believe that Jacopo


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could have maintained the persona of the bravo wholly without acting as an accessory to political murder. Furthermore, given that attacks on the morality of mercenaries have always involved the conscience of the combatant rather than the act of killing per se, Jacopo’s innocence of murder seems a technicality. Out of loyalty to his father, Jacopo has assisted the state and sold his conscience. In Cooper’s work, the bravo is only one of many figures asked by their patriarchs or patriarchy to act violently in service of the state. Cooper compels the reader of The Bravo to witness two statesponsored killings: the secret murder of Antonio on the water and the public execution of Jacopo. In the former case, as Robert S. Levine observes, ‘[t]he emphasis on the mechanics of the capsizing, coupled with our remote perspective on Antonio’s “heavy plashing,” convey the impersonal efficiency of the Venetian “soulless corporation”’ (J. F. Cooper 1831: 1/238; Levine 1989: 88). In the latter case, Cooper’s narrator manipulates the reader’s expectations in order to increase the shock of Jacopo losing his head by means of a distant and impersonal order from the governing authorities. As much as these violent acts represent the state’s ability to commit mechanical, depersonalized murder, they still present to the reader specific victims and concrete images of their deaths, in contrast to the much more shadowy and abstract violence carried out by agents of the state in other circumstances. This contrast is analogous to the difference between Jacopo and the foreign mercenary guards of the novel, characters whose role is largely mysterious but whose recurring presence reinforces our sense of the government’s power and menace. Whereas the bravo, though deeply compromised and constrained, represents a potential for individual agency and resistance to the state, Cooper’s mercenaries have none of the residual autonomy that made Machiavelli consider mercenaries unreliable. The halberdiers of the ducal guard – along with their cultural counterparts such as a hireling improvisatore (1831: 1/117) and hireling wooers (1831: 1/67) – represent the obedient machinery making manifest the secret will of the state with ‘practised indifference’ (1831: 1/166). These are the characters for whom Cooper reserves the noun ‘mercenary’ (1831: 1/166). If Jacopo’s actions embody one kind of individualistic resistance to the mercenary-supported state, however, another and subtler kind arises in the form of Antonio and his plea that his grandson be excused from military service. The novel’s narrator presents Antonio’s case as self-evidently justified, as a request that the state


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can refuse only when its officers allow their jobs to make them forget the common affections of humanity. Antonio argues that granting his claim would flow naturally from the feelings of ‘fathers and children’ among the senators, while refusing it would signify being ‘heartless, and sold to ambition!’ (1831: 1/187). The narrator uses similar language, as in this explanation of the senator Gradenigo’s refusal of Antonio: ‘The soulless, practised, and specious reasoning of the state, had long since deadened all feeling in the senator, on any subject that touched an interest so vital as the maritime power of the republic’ (1831: 1/81–2). Such simplistic dichotomies cloak the extraordinary nature of and logic behind Antonio’s request. When addressing the powerful, Antonio consistently appeals to ‘justice’, a term whose import he claims to establish in his initial approach to Gradenigo: They have seized the lad in his fourteenth year, and condemned him to the wars with the Infidels, without thought of his tender years, without thought of evil example, without thought of my age and loneliness, and without justice; for his father died in the last battle given to the Turk. (1831: 1/81)

The last clause seems to define Antonio’s sense of ‘justice’: the family has sacrificed the boy’s father to the service of the state, so the state ought not require the further service of the son. Later, when Antonio has won the race and requests his grandson’s release in place of the prize, he argues instead that his own sacrifices support the justice of his request: ‘as Antonio spoke, he pointed to the scars on his halfnaked form; “these are signs of the enmity of the Turk, and I now offer them as so many petitions to the bounty of the senate”’ (1831: 1/155). Antonio resists not only the conscription of his grandson but also the broader logic of volunteer military service by suggesting that his grandson, like a mercenary or like Jacopo, serves the state without sincere attachment to its aims. Antonio thus influences Jacopo and other Venetians to question the logic of individual sacrifice and official gratitude that characterize legitimate military violence in the modern state. Rather than accepting the ideological language that rewards limitless sacrifice to the state with unending ritual gratitude, Antonio asks that the terms of the exchange be limited and concrete. I have given my blood to the state, he argues, and my son has given his life: in exchange, I demand the release of my grandson from further


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service. The terms of this offer are illuminated by the grandson’s lack of the same moral authority to make the request on his own behalf. Only the veteran Antonio can deploy the idea of the state’s obligation to its combat veterans in advancing a claim on the state. In doing so, Antonio refuses to play his proper position in the game of national service and reward. By that game’s normal rules, although direct payments may be involved, the key to the soldier’s proper behavior arises in the notion that the soldier’s service and reward lie outside the realm of demands and exchange. As much as he sentimentalizes the terms of his request, Antonio fundamentally transforms the state’s obligation to the veteran into a negotiation rather than a ritual of giving, into something more like the process of contracting with a mercenary or bravo. He denies the state its prerogative to control the rituals by which it rewards his service. That fact alone would make Antonio sufficiently dangerous to provoke efforts to control him, but he goes further. His request also challenges the notion that military service matures and purifies young men, improving their adult characters. Antonio fears ‘all the temptation, and sin, and dangerous companionship of the galleys’ (1831: 1/155). Jacopo seconds this logic in arguing on Antonio’s behalf that ‘the service will corrupt the tender years of the boy, and make the age of his parent miserable’ (1831: 1/157). Antonio himself uses even more inflammatory language in saying that his grandson is ‘sold to blood’ (1831: 1/106), a phrase that would ordinarily apply to a mercenary or even a slave, and which undermines the usual divisions between violence performed in and outside of the organized military. Antonio’s attempt to subject his grandson’s service to the terms of exchange and negotiation illuminates the role of Jacopo, his surrogate son, in the transaction.13 In a state that lives up to the rhetoric of national service, Antonio’s grandson and the bravo should be opposites, with the grandson furthering his family’s tradition of offering the state its work and even its lives, and the bravo representing the atomistic self-interest that undermines the service ethic. This is precisely the opposition that Ruskin would later outline in contrasting the soldier and the bravo. Instead, Antonio embodies the obsolescence of disinterested military service in Venice. Though he has acquired scars from fighting the Turks, his metaphorical son Jacopo serves the Venetian oligarchy by covering its illicit violence, including the murder of Antonio himself, and his literal grandson seems silently to endorse Antonio’s wish that he be allowed to refuse


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service and break the family’s connection to the Venetian military. Antonio blames the destruction of his family’s will to serve on Venetian expansionism: ‘To me it does not seem clear that Venice, a city built on a few islands, hath any more right to carry her rule into Crete or Candia, than the Turk hath to come here’ (1831: 1/186). ‘I know little’, he continues, ‘of the rights that come by violence’ (1831: 1/187). This last statement is disingenuously modest. Antonio requests his grandson’s release by invoking the ‘rights that come by [the] violence’ he has inflicted and endured. Antonio legitimizes his resistant speech – he declares his independence, we might even say – by evoking the moral economy in which his sacrifices for the state entitle him to recompense. At the same time, he denies the state’s claim to continue the cycle of sacrifice and ritual gratitude that forms the basis of his petition. The reader thus sees a failure of generational transmission, not only in the progeny of Antonio but also in Antonio himself. In a state where the leadership has abandoned itself to self-interest, the sacrificial ethic of national service has lost its claim on Antonio, on Jacopo, and on Antonio’s grandson. The destructiveness of the corrupt leadership also becomes manifest in the state’s interference with love matches – that of Jacopo and a girl named Gelsomina as well as that of Don Camillo Monforte and Violetta Tiepolo – which do not align with the interests of the government. Whereas in other works, such as Charlotte Smith’s novels, parents force children into mercenary marriages, here the state is responsible for similar effects. Jacopo’s bargain with the state forces him to maintain a careful distance from Gelsomina. Violetta, though she manages eventually to marry Don Camillo, must overcome the meddling of the state and flee Venice in the end. In the latter case, Cooper makes the state’s function in loco parentis clear by creating Violetta as a ward of the aforementioned Gradenigo, a member of the Council of Three. Thus we return to the American generational problems raised by the ‘man of money’ misreading The Spy, and by Cooper’s prefatory material to The Bravo. However noble the actions of Antonio or Birch in the service of their respective nations, The Spy and The Bravo together dramatize the difficulties of maintaining even the appearance of disinterested volunteerism as a republic’s founding acts of heroism fade in memory. One consequence of seeing The Bravo through this lens is that the revelation that Jacopo only plays the part of the bravo makes little difference. That revelation may or may not come as a surprise


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to the reader, depending on the works that form the reader’s horizon of expectations. If the reader has the plot of Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice in mind, the innocence of Jacopo arrives as a slight variation on Lewis’s theme. If, on the other hand, the reader follows Cooper’s direct prompts and thinks of Jacopo as primarily a Byronic hero, the absolution of Jacopo’s secret guilt can come as a shock: Byron does not offer such redemption to his tragic heroes. In the combination of Byronic conventions and Lewis’s plot twist, Cooper develops a hybrid Venetian drama, one which reveals the Byronic hero’s secret guilt to be that of the state rather than of the man. The revelation that the guilt manifest in Jacopo’s role as the bravo is systemic rather than personal emphasizes the transformations that have taken place between The Spy and The Bravo, Cooper’s companion novels of secrecy and intrigue. The Spy uses its Revolutionary setting to meditate on the problems of a new republic; The Bravo occupies literary Venice to imagine the consequences of a republic’s endurance. The Spy concludes with the public revelation of Birch’s heroic service to Washington, a service that has involved the sacrifice of family. In The Bravo, Cooper replaces the aged Birch – whose heroism becomes known only in death – with Antonio, a man willing to display the evidence of his service and claim its rewards while he lives. The problem of this imagined Venice is that the state can offer no way for Antonio – as the embodiment of the military ethic that built the state’s power – to create a legacy that allows his successors to resolve their conflicting obligations to their families and to Venice. In The Spy, Washington and Birch have no biological children, and the novel explores other means of transmitting the values of the young Republic. In The Bravo, the older generation of men (especially Jacopo’s father and Antonio) have sons and grandsons, but their interests are irretrievably opposed to the interests of the expansionist Republic. The durability of the Republic has eroded at the level of the family. In other words, although the sentimental thrust of The Bravo leads the reader to attribute the tragic deaths of sympathetic characters to the state’s inability to grant Antonio’s request, the deeper problem lies in the request itself. In seeking to opt out of the cultural economy of service and ritualized reward, Antonio dramatizes the inability of the Republic to transmit a martial service ethic from one generation to the next, a problem that Cooper connects to his American context by way of thematic links to The Spy and the prefatory materials of the later novel. Making the connection through Venice, and a Venice


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framed explicitly as that of the British literary imagination, creates a productive crossing of Robert Weisbuch’s ‘two distinct senses of cultural time’ noted in the introduction to this book: ‘British lateness and American earliness’ (1986: 109). Cooper’s Venetian setting itself signals a concern with a late republic, one that has shifted from the anxieties of a founding period to those of an established state’s sustenance and transmission. To evoke Venice under the banners of Shakespeare, Byron, and Rogers adds to Cooper’s fiction an American sense of British lateness: the idea of a state whose time has passed. The Bravo is a novel of American earliness imagining American lateness. It transfigures the American myth of the republic endlessly being born or renewed by tracing the outlines of American political debates on the map of Venice, the ever-falling and ever-fallen Republic of Anglo-American literary imagination. NOTES

1. Regarding the influence of Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice on Shelley’s Zastrozzi, see Zimansky (1981). 2. Also, as Edith Birkhead noted in her 1921 The Tale of Terror, ‘Lewis’s Venetian bravo was boldly transported to other climes. We find him in Scotland in The Mysterious Bravo, or The Shrine of St. Alstice, a Caledonian Legend [n. d.], and in Austria in The Bravo of Bohemia or The Black Forest [1806]’ (1921: 47). 3. The relevant passage from The Merchant of Venice is this, spoken by the disguised Portia to Shylock: . . . . . . . Tarry, Jew. The law hath yet another hold on you. It is enacted in the laws of Venice, If it be proved against an alien That by direct or indirect attempts He seek the life of any citizen, The party ’gainst which he doth contrive Shall seize one half his goods; the other half Comes to the privy coffer of the state, And the offender’s life lies in the mercy Of the Duke only, ’gainst all other voice – . . . . (1997: IV, I, 342–51) 4. I say ‘pre-Napoleonic’ because the Venetian Republic and its constitution were overthrown by Napoleon’s 1797 invasion. For writers in the early nineteenth century, the recent period punctuating Venice’s fall


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must have provided the impetus for renewed attention to the city. For commentary on one of the most notable responses to Napoleon’s invasion itself, Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’, see Hill (1979). 5. As Byron’s Loredano puts it in the play, Carmagnuola (as the play calls him) . . . was the safeguard of the city. In early life its foe, but, in his manhood, Its saviour first, then victim. (IV, I, 306–8; Byron 1980–92: 6/192) McGann’s note explains the relevant history (Byron 1980–92: 6/638). 6. The comedy of Beppo seems at most tangential to the plays’ explorations of the Venetian political order, but Beppo does add an important aspect to literary Venice by suggesting that Venetian norms can accommodate consensually non-exclusive marriage. After Beppo gets lost at sea and becomes a renegado, he returns to Venice to find his wife securely attached to one of Venice’s ‘Cavalier Serventes’ (stanza 36, Byron 1980–92: 4/140). Just as the plot appears to build to a violent confrontation between the two men, however, they arrange convivially to become and remain friends. 7. In The Two Foscari, the Doge Francis Foscari makes something like the opposite choice, submitting to the rule of law even when submission involves the torture and eventual death of his son. These consequences seem as bad as those of Faliero’s choice, as Foscari notes explicitly (V, i, 231–3; Byron 1980–92: 6/204). 8. As Hale explains, following Murphy, this is one of three subgenres of the German Gothic proposed in the latter part of the nineteenth century and used widely ever since: Die Ritter-, Räuber-, and Schauerroman, or novels of Chivalry, Banditry, and Terror (Hale 2002: 66–7). I have also noted in the introduction Samuel Richardson’s suggestive use of a bravo in Pamela. 9. Recent criticism of Lewis, and especially of The Monk, emphasizes the psychosexual dimensions of Lewis’s work. The potential of applying such an approach to The Bravo of Venice is suggested by a passage from Walter Scott’s journal that Michael Gamer quotes in Romanticism and the Gothic, a ‘description of Lewis being humiliated by the Duke of Dalkeith’: I remember a picture of [Lewis] being handed about at Dalkeith House. It was a miniature I think by Saunders, who had contrived to mufle Lewis’s person in a cloak, and placed some poniard or dark-lanthorn apurtenance (I think) in his hand, so as to give the picture the cast of the Bravo. ‘That like Mat Lewis!’ said Duke Henry, to whom it had been passed in turn; ‘why, that is like a


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Mercenaries in British and American Literature man!’ Imagine the effect! Lewis was at his elbow. (Gamer 2008: 81; Scott 1939–46: 1/6–7)

10.

11. 12.

13.

The mention of ‘the Bravo’ lies to the side of Gamer’s use of the passage, but it illustrates the potential for reading The Bravo of Venice in this context. Count Rosalvo embodies hypermasculine power in two forms, one grotesque and one polished, both of which are revealed to be self-consciously acted roles. As Victor Sage puts it, ‘[t]he joke and the horror is that Abellino and Flodoardo are in fact the same person – the devil and the angel – and the text succeeds in separating them . . . so that the self-conscious fiction bred by the text is that the naïve reader is entirely unaware of the doppelgänger masquerade’ (2006: 60). The underlying character of Rosalvo himself is almost entirely hidden from the reader’s view, a fact about which Lewis coyly jokes at the novel’s end. (Lewis writes that ‘it would be not at all amiss to make Count Rosalvo sit down quietly’ [1805: 337] to relate his story, and Lewis acknowledges that otherwise he will ‘leave much of this tale still involved in mystery’ [1805: 340], but he leaves it to his readers to ask him to write more of Rosalvo’s story.) The novel thus retains its focus on masculinity as a set of acted, invented identities. For more commentary on Lewis, sexuality, and The Monk, see Hogle (1997) and Tuite (1997). Romantic-era prizes and contests are the subject of my 2004 ELH article (Simpson 2004) and, in an expanded form, the fifth chapter of my book Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830 (Simpson 2008). See the introduction for an examination of this logic in Bourdieuvian terms. The connection of this plot reversal to the similar revelation of the apparent bravo’s innocence in Lewis’s The Bravo seems obvious, and readers who encountered both popular works could not have missed the parallel plots. Any influence may be indirect, however. Levine finds good reason for skepticism about Lewis’s direct influence on Cooper in Cooper’s comment to Charles Wilkes: ‘I have not decided on the name [of the novel in progress], but I believe it will be “Bravo.” I find Monk Lewis has a story called “The Bravo of Venice,” which may induce me to choose another title’ (J. F. Cooper 1960–8: 2/80; Levine 1989: 258). I would temper Levine’s skepticism somewhat by noting that Cooper’s account still leaves room for him to read Lewis’s work while he was composing his own, and that authorial denials of obvious influences are sometimes self-serving and unreliable. Levine (1989) discusses ways in which Cooper portrays Antonio as ‘a substitute father’ to Jacopo (1989: 90).


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EPILOGUE: MERCENARIES AND THE MODERN MILITARY

Anglo-American literature about Venice in the early nineteenth century frequently takes on characteristics of revenge tragedy. Otway’s Jaffier, Byron’s Marino Faliero, and Cooper’s Jacopo all face the traditional dilemma of the revenge-tragic hero: how to obtain justice for a wrong committed by the enforcers of law. The failure of governmental legitimacy is marked by Cooper in three forms of force associated with the state: the regular army that no longer inspires the sacrificial devotion of the people, the foreign mercenaries who conventionally signify tyrannical overreaching, and – most notably – bravos, the Venetians who contract with their government to perform secret acts of violence. As lone mercenaries defined not by their foreignness but by their willingness to treat assassination as a contractual occupation, these bravos signal a departure from the mercenaries we have seen in earlier texts, figures whose threat lies significantly in their foreignness. Those mercenaries had been defined primarily by national affiliation, whether in groups (as with Swiss guards or the Hessian companies in the American Revolution) or individually: Quentin Durward’s military identity is fundamentally that of a Scot in France, Don Juan’s that of a Spaniard in the Russian forces, Ormond’s that of a Russian army veteran in America. The few mercenaries not defined by national affiliations mobilize the same fears of the infiltrating other by means of race, as in the case of the Native American mercenaries evoked by Cooper and Charlotte Smith. Setting The Bravo in Venice allows Cooper to present the bravo as a figure entirely native to his political environment – a presentation impossible in an America


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conceived politically as a nation of transplants. This is a move in the direction of modern debates about mercenaries, in which nationality ceases to be the defining feature of the mercenary’s identity. Cooper’s presentation of the bravo as a native and individualistic mercenary, an aspect of the bravo emphasized by contrast with foreign mercenaries and conventional soldiers, paves the way for the transformed mercenary of Anglo-American modernity: the Pinkerton man of the later nineteenth century or the Blackwater contractor in the twenty-first.1 These figures operate for the state, and by contract with the state, but they are generally native-born operatives, sometimes with experience in the regular armed forces. In the terms outlined in this book’s introduction, such contractors participate in a profession that has moved from Scott’s sense of ‘Free Lances’ as foreign mercenaries to the modern model of the freelancer, the practitioner of a trade who chooses variable, contractual affiliations. New debates about the use of domestic contractors draw on concerns that have long been fundamental to the idea of the mercenary. Whether imagined as fighting, writing, or marrying for money, the mercenary is a figure of voluntary alienation, a person who has chosen a path other than the one indicated by disinterested will. That is, the idea of the mercenary involves becoming foreign to the self: the fears of infiltration expressed in anti-mercenary rhetoric involve fears of the native person or the native land choosing to take an alien form. The mercenary’s power as a monster of modern culture, however, results from the recognition of the alien’s proximity to the self. Every party to a contract promises to constrain its future liberty; every marriage requires the sacrifice of old loyalties to new. Having the ability to signify the essence as well as the perversion of modern contractual culture, even of modern individualism, the mercenary proves an unwelcome and persistent stowaway on Atlantic voyages to independence. I will close with brief comments on two constructions of the term ‘mercenary’ from relatively recent history, one from the Vietnam era and one from the time following the 2003 invasion of Iraq led by American and British forces. The first of these cases involves the surprising return of the language of mercenaries, slaves, and volunteers in a debate about military conscription in the United States. The economist Milton Friedman, an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, served on President Nixon’s Advisory Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (known as the Gates Commission), which met from 1969 to 1970 and whose conclusions hastened the cessation of the military draft in the United States. This is Friedman’s


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account of what has become a well-known story in military history about the testimony of General William Westmoreland, then the top commander of American troops in Vietnam, who calls a volunteer force ‘an army of mercenaries’: Like almost all military men who testified, [Westmoreland] testified against a volunteer armed force. In the course of his testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves’. I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries’. But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher’. (Friedman and Friedman 1998: 380)

Friedman’s rhetoric unearths and resists the ordinary distinction between mercenary and non-mercenary categories of paid work. As I have argued in the introduction, and as Friedman surely knew, ‘mercenary’ as a term of argument always involves an implicit opposition between activities that should be governed by market forces and those that should not. Only the latter, ostensibly higher pursuits are ordinarily susceptible to the term ‘mercenary’. Westmoreland creates an even stranger effect by calling undrafted members of the armed forces ‘mercenaries’. This was, after all, a commission exploring the institution of an ‘All-Volunteer Armed Force’. Members of the armed forces who were not drafted – who agreed to serve in exchange for money and other compensation – thus went simultaneously by the normally opposite and exclusive names of volunteer and mercenary. For Westmoreland, who expresses a sentiment unimaginable from a commander in the later all-volunteer force, the volunteer is the mercenary. Friedman and Westmoreland seem to agree that the mercenary and volunteer both derive their existence from an autonomy that separates them from the conscript. The conscript is what Friedman, in a flourish worthy of eighteenthcentury polemic, calls a slave. Though Friedman accepts the usual negative sense of ‘mercenary’ (‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries’), as a laissez-faire economist he also defends the value of self-interested choice in populating the armed forces. Friedman’s dichotomy between slave and mercenary


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illuminates the preconditions of the idea of the mercenary. To become a mercenary soldier in the traditional sense of an independent contractor fighting for money, one must inhabit a society that offers money for fighting, then have the option to choose mercenary soldiering over other ways of life, and finally be able to retain the payments one receives. Friedman tendentiously revises the traditional contrast between mercenary action and free action, emphasizing instead the freedom of economic agents by opposing the mercenary to the slave. As we have seen, subtler presentations of the mercenary as an embodiment of modern economic freedoms have existed for centuries, and they persist today. This representative function of the mercenary as the capitalist contractor par excellence produces the contemporary leftwing insistence on using the term mercenary to describe military contractors in Iraq. For war critics who prefer this terminology, negative connotations of the term mercenary convey essential information about the moral failings of the current war, and any resistance to the term constitutes a duplicitous cover-up. In The New York Review of Books, for instance, David Bromwich argues that to speak ‘of mercenary soldiers as contractors or security’ or ‘employees’ (emphasis original) is to obscure the fundamental nature of their function. As Bromwich (2008) puts it, [t]he point about mercenaries is that you employ them when your army is inadequate to the job assigned. This has been the case from the start in Iraq. But the fact that the mercenaries have been continuously augmented until they now outnumber American troops suggests a truth about the war that falls open to inspection only when we use the accurate word.

Bromwich’s contention that ‘mercenaries’ is ‘the accurate word’ for these fighters is open to dispute. (That they are generally American nationals in the employ of the American government alone disqualifies them from being mercenaries by the Geneva Protocol’s definition.) Such niceties, however, have rarely grounded debates over whether to call a given set of soldiers mercenaries. We can now begin to see why the mercenary becomes a productively problematic figure for a range of political ideologies. For speakers who wish to articulate a politics of inclusion and expanded human sympathy, the mercenary’s ability to symbolize the tyrannical overreaching of the military state makes the mercenary simultaneously


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the destroyer of human ties and also the figure who most severely tests the limits of universalizing politics. If tyranny makes some lives ungrievable, does the recuperation of sympathy for those lives include sympathy for the supposed instruments of tyranny? On the other hand, for speakers who advocate for free markets and strong military nationalism – positions frequently though not necessarily linked – the mercenary embodies an underlying tension between grass-roots economic individualism and the military as a consummately hierarchical and command-based extension of the nation. These episodes are deeply connected to each other. When American and British forces undertook the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, they did so with all-volunteer forces that required reinforcement. Rather than turning to conscription, both governments chose an approach consonant with Friedman’s libertarianism: engaging contractors – or mercenaries, as Bromwich would have it – rather than draftees to provide a temporary increase in forces.2 The episodes together illustrate the continuing ability of the mercenary to function as modernity’s everyman, as in Friedman’s libertarian gesture of identification with the term, as well as modernity’s monster, as in Westmoreland’s sneer at enlisted troops or Bromwich’s insistence that only the word ‘mercenary’ can properly convey the extent of mismanagement he sees in Iraq. The mercenary stands for the ability of freedom to break bonds, but the bonds may be unwelcome constraints or the sustaining ties of social life. The mercenary represents some of the liberties that the modern state still finds most difficult to contain. NOTES

1. See Mockler (1987) on the twentieth-century uses of foreign mercenaries in other parts of the world, especially in Africa. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency played an important role in the US when, according to Robert P. Weiss, ‘the continuous policing of labour was almost the sole responsibility of private detectives until the First World War’ (1986: 88). During that time, The Nation opined that ‘Pinkerton is neither more nor less than the head of a band of mercenaries’ (‘Pinkerton’s Men’ 2007). Frank Morn notes the connections of anti-Pinkerton rhetoric to earlier fears of standing armies and Hessian mercenaries (1982: 104). 2. I have documented the American side of this phenomenon in the introduction. For an example of contemporary coverage of British ‘mercenaries’ in Iraq, see Bruce (2008).


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22/4/10 10:34:19

INDEX

Adams, Charles Hansford, 159 Adams, John, 42 Addison, Joseph, 65–6 African American auxiliaries, soldiers, or mercenaries, 40, 41, 47, 56n Aitchison, James, 143 Alexander, J. H., 106, 124n Almon, John, A New Military Dictionary; Or, the Field of War (1760), 87n American Revolution, 2, 7, 9, 10–11, 19, 21, 24–5, 25–6, 28n, 29n, 38–42, 45, 46, 52, 61–5, 70, 72–83, 83–4n, 88n, 115, 130–47, 147–9n, 151, 165, 169 André, John, 134, 147n, 149n Andriopoulos, Stefan, 59–60n Arnold, Benedict, 12, 134 Astell, Mary, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), 13–15 Austen, Jane, 73, 89n Persuasion (1817), 84–5n Pride and Prejudice (1813), 85n Avant, Deborah, 9 Bainbridge, Simon, 118n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 23 Bardeesy, 29n Bartolomeo, Joseph F., 85–6n Barton, Anne, 128n


Bate, W. Jackson, 34n Beattie, James, The Minstrel (1771), 123n Behrendt, Stephen C., 118n, 121n Bell, Michael Davitt, 45, 59n Bennett, Betty T., 118n Bidwell, Barna, The Mercenary Match, a Tragedy (1785), 12–13 Binhammer, Katherine, 86n Birkhead, Edith, 166n Blackwater private security contractors, 26, 30n, 170 Blair, Hugh, 123n Bobbitt, Philip, 10, 153 Bonaparte, Napoléon, see Napoleon I Boot, Max, 132 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 19–20, 34n, 127n, 168n Bowden, Ann, 123n Bowstead, Diana, 86n bravos, see Italian bravos, soldiers, or mercenaries Brewer, John, 31–2n, 121n Bromwich, David, 172–3 Brown, Charles Brockden, 20, 23, 36–7, 42, 61, 144–7, 149n An Address to the Government of the United States, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French (1803), 47–8

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194 ]

Index

The British Treaty (1807), 50 Clara Howard (1801), 58n Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), 144–5 Literary Magazine, and American Register, 36–7 ‘Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist’ (1803–5), 53 Ormond, or the Secret Witness (1799), 22, 24, 27, 37, 44–54, 58–60n, 145, 169 Wieland; Or, the Transformation (1798), 52 Bruce, Ian, 173n Bruce, Robert, the (or Robert I of Scotland), 101 Burgoyne, John, 61–3, 76–7, 141 Burke, Edmund, 62, 79, 80, 124n Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), 83n Burnham, Michelle, 58n Burns, Brian, 83n Burns, Robert, ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (1786), 123n Butler, Judith, 6 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 11, 16, 20, 23, 25, 27–8, 90–2, 96–7, 108–18, 121–2n, 124n, 125–9n, 132, 147, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 165, 166 Beppo (1818), 154, 167n The Bride of Abydos (1813), 108 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), 111, 114–15, 116–17, 127n, 129n, 154 Don Juan (1819–24), 25, 88n, 91–2, 109, 110, 112–16, 124n, 126n, 128–9n, 130, 132, 154, 169 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), 96–7, 109 The Giaour (1813), 108 Marino Faliero (1821), 154, 169 ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ (1816), 124n ‘Sonnet on Chillon’ (1816), 124n The Two Foscari (1821), 153, 167n ‘Venice: An Ode’ (1818), 151, 154


‘C.’, ‘To the Tyrants Infesting France’, 28–9n Calloway, Colin G., 83n Carlyle, Alexander, 9, 94–5 The Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered (1760), 120n Catherine the Great (Empress Catherine II of Russia), 39–40, 91, 112–14, 129n, 131–2 Chandler, James K., 119 Chartrand, René, 121n Charvat, William, 37 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, 119n Christensen, Jerome, 121–2n Cinderella, 14–15, 104 Cochran, Peter, 126n Cohen, Margaret, 2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 23, 90, 118n Biographia Literaria (1817), 124n ‘On the Present War’ (1795), 23–4, 121n ‘The Plot Discovered’ (1795), 82, 89n Remorse: A Tragedy (1813), 118n ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), 107 translation of Schiller’s The Death of Wallenstein, 87n, 118n, 119n Colley, Linda, 28n, 95 condottieri, 74, 98, 153 Connolly, Claire, 34n Conway, Allison, 71, 86n, 87n Cooper, James Fenimore, 20, 23, 90, 118, 130–3, 154, 158 The Bravo (1831), 26–8, 130, 147, 150–2, 157–66, 166–8n, 169–70 The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1824), 131–2 The Pioneers (1823), 145 The Spy (1821), 25–6, 28, 130, 132–47, 147–9n, 164, 165, 169 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 134–5 Cowen, Tyler, 30n Cowper, William, 66 Cress, Lawrence Delbert, 119n Curran, Stuart, 65, 66, 87n, 105 Curties, T. J. Horsley, The Monk of Udolpho (1807), 152

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Index Davis, Leith, 125n Declaration of Independence, American, 1, 38, 40–1, 56–7n, 64, 83n Dekker, George, 148n Deleuze, Gilles, 121n, 122n Denslow, Van Buren, 57n Derrida, Jacques, 34n Derry, Stephen, 85n Dickinson, H. T., 118n Dippel, Horst, 55n, 56n Dorset, Catherine, 68–9 Downes, Paul, 42, 52–3, 60n, 135 Downey, Fairfax, 62 Duncan, Ian, 22 Edgeworth, Maria, Tales of Fashionable Life (1809), 34n Edinburgh Review, 121–2n Elfenbein, Andrew, 127n Elkins, Stanley, 41, 42 Ellis, Joseph J., 33n, 82 Ellis, Katherine, 86n Emsley, Clive, 35n Fallah, Katherine, 29n Farquhar, George, The Recruiting Officer (1706), 33n, 35n, 106 Favret, Mary A., 118–19n Ferguson, Adam, 9, 96, 120–1n An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), 52, 94–5, 120–1n Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (1756), 119–20n Fiedler, Leslie, 107 Fielding, Henry, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), 14 Fletcher, Loraine, 69 Fliegelman, Jay, 11, 33n, 123n Ford, Talissa, 126n Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 (UK), 32n, 115–16 Forrest, Alan, 121n Foster, Hannah Webster, The Coquette (1797), 84n Franklin, Wayne, 135, 143, 145, 146, 147n, 149n


[ 195

Frederick II of Prussia (the Great), 55–6 freelance writing or ‘free lances’, 20–1, 122n, 170 French Revolution, 7, 22–3, 24–5, 45, 46, 68–71, 77, 83n, 87n, 97, 103, 104, 121n Friedman, Milton, 170–3 Gamba, Pietro, 116, 125n Gamer, Michael, 124n, 167–8n Gardner, Jared, 58n, 149n Garside, P. D., 123n Gates Commission (President Nixon’s Advisory Commission on an AllVolunteer Armed Force), 170–3 Gates, David, 35n, 121n Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocol I, 3–4, 13, 29n, 172 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 1, 9, 38–40 German soldiers or mercenaries (including Hessians), 8–9, 23–4, 26, 38–40, 46, 49, 56n, 62, 63, 98, 116, 121n, 132, 133, 136–8, 141–2, 148n, 169, 173n Gibbons, Luke, 83n Gilbert, Felix, 153 Giles, Paul, 27, 28n Gilroy, Paul, 1 Godwin, William, 42, 44, 45, 53, 103–4, 136 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793), 42–4, 57n Graham, Peter W., 110, 128n Greek Revolution, 25, 90, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115–16, 117, 125n, 129n Greek War of Independence, see Greek Revolution Greenwald, Robert, 30n Grierson, H. J. C., 126n Guattari, Felix, 121n, 122n Hague Conventions, 28n Hale, Terry, 167n Hamilton, Alexander, 42

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196 ]

Index

Haywood, Eliza, The Mercenary Lover; or, The Unfortunate Heiress (1726), 33n Hazlitt, William, 124n Heath, Chip, 30n Heath, Dan, 30n Henry VIII, King of England, 98 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 8–9, 32n ‘Letters for the Advancement of Humanity’ (1793–7), 8, 88n Hessian soldiers or mercenaries, see German soldiers or mercenaries Hibbert, Christopher, 62 Hill, Alan G., 167n Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651), 31n Hofer, Johannes, 28n Hofstadter, Richard, 51 Hogg, James, The Queen’s Wake (1813), 160 Hogle, Jerrold E., 168n Holly, Jack, 31n Holmes, Richard, 90n, 118n House, Kay Seymour, 147n Hulme, Peter, 31n Hume, David, The History of England (1754–62), 33n Ingrassia, Catherine, 16 Iraq War (2003–), American contractors in, 4, 5, 26, 29–30n, 31n, 132, 170, 172–3, 173n Italian bravos, soldiers, or mercenaries, 16, 17, 26–8, 33n, 36–7, 130, 150–2, 154–61, 163–5, 167n, 168n, 169n James, Charles, New and Enlarged Military Dictionary (1802), 74 Jay, John, 146–7 Jefferson, Thomas, 40–1, 50, 56–7n, 62, 83n, 132, 147n ‘Resolution to Encourage Desertions of Hessian Officers’ (1776), 56n Johnson, Samuel A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), 120n


letter to Lord Chesterfield (1755), 20, 34n Jones, John Paul, 131–2, 143, 147n Jonson, Ben, Volpone (1606), 151–2 Judd, Jacob, 148n July Revolution in France (1830), 158 Kafer, Peter, 58n Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment (1790), 19–20, 21, 34n Kaul, A. N., 133 Kelsall, Malcolm, 128 Ketchum, Richard M., 62 Kim, Sun Bok, 136–7, 148n Korshin, Paul J., 34n Kosciuszko, Tadeusz, 127n La Fayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-YvesRoch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de, 127n, 131, 132, 143 Labbe, Jacqueline M., 64, 75, 85n Lafayette, see La Fayette Lawson-Peebles, Robert, 88n Levine, Robert S., 49, 52–3, 161, 168n Lewis, Joseph, 57n Lewis, Matthew, 167–8n The Bravo of Venice (1804), 26, 152, 156–7, 160, 165, 166n, 167–8n The Monk (1796), 152, 167–8n Lincoln, Andrew, 123n Linebaugh, Peter, 28n Louis XI, King of France, 100, 105 Loveland, Anne C., 158 Lowenthal, David, 28n Lukács, Georg, 97, 126n Lynn, John A., 88n MacCarthy, Fiona, 125n McCrea, Jane, 61–3, 72, 77, 78, 83n, 141, 142, 149n MacCullough, David, 40–1 McGann, Jerome J., 127n, 128n, 167n Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince (1513), 2, 10, 32n, 34–5n, 38, 39, 55–6n, 92–3, 94, 100, 102, 119n, 129n, 133, 153, 159, 161 McKitrick, Eric, 41, 42 McKusick, James, 118n

22/4/10 10:34:19

Index McTiernan, Dave, 148n Madison, James, 24, 50, 53, 59n, 60n The Federalist, 53, 150–1 Malone, Edmond, 86–7n Mandeville, Bernard, 88n Manning, Peter, 113 Manning, Roger B., 87n, 122n Manning, Susan, 29n Marchand, Leslie, 109, 117 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of, 98, 122n Marston, Jerrilyn Greene, 39, 56n Merry, Robert, ‘The Wounded Soldier’ (1795?), 35n Militia Act of 1757, 94 Miller, J. Hillis, 26–7 Miller, Judith Davis, 86n Millgate, Jane, 96 Mockler, Anthony, 173n Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 60n Moody, Joel, 57n Moore, Thomas, 32n Irish Melodies (1808–34), 32n Morn, Frank, 173n Mott, Frank Luther, 37 Moulitsas Zúniga, Markos, 5, 31n Muller, Jerry Z., 29n Murphy, Agnes Genevieve, 156, 167n Namias, June, 83n Napoleon I, 47, 58n, 88n, 137, 150, 153–4, 166–7n Napoleonic Wars, 9, 95, 101, 122n, 150, 153–4, 166–7n Nation, The, 173n Native American auxiliaries, soldiers, or mercenaries, 18, 26, 27, 40, 41, 47, 56n, 61–5, 74, 77–80, 83, 88n, 91–2, 118n, 133, 142, 169 navies and naval prizes, 23, 85n, 95, 131–2 ‘neutral ground’, 28, 133, 136–7, 148n Nixon, Richard, 170 nostalgia, 28n, 100 Nottingham Petition to the Prince Regent (1816), 92


[ 197

O’Meara, Barry Edward, Napoleon in Exile (1822), 58n Otway, Thomas, Venice Preserved (1682), 151, 152–3, 154, 169 Paine, Thomas, 56–7n Common Sense (1776), 52 Parker, Geoffrey, 121n Pasha, Ali, 116–17 Paulding, John, 149n Percy, Sarah, 28n, 29n, 118n Percy, Thomas, 123n, 125n Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 26, 170, 173n Pocock, J. G. A., 32n Porter, Jane, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), 88n Poston III, Lawrence, 124n Quarterly Review, 121–2n, 124n Quota Acts of 1795 and 1796, 35n Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), 152 Ramsay, David, History of the American Revolution (1789), 77 Reagan, Ronald, 29n Rediker, Marcus, 28n Reid, Margaret, 148n, 149n Reiman, Donald H., 127n revenge tragedy, 169 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), 14, 15–17, 87n, 167n Richman, Jared, 35n, 88n Risen, James, 31n Robertson, John, 95, 121n Rogers, Samuel, 26, 152, 155, 166 Italy (1822), 152, 160 Ross, Marlon, 97, 123n, 124n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 43, 57n, 101, 123n Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les Spectacles, 57–8n Rowson, Susanna, Charlotte Temple (1791), 84n Ruskin, John, 154–6, 163 Marcolini (composed 1836), 155

22/4/10 10:34:19

198 ]

Index

Ruskin, John (cont.) The Stones of Venice (1851–3), 155 Unto This Last (1860), 155–6 Russell, Gillian, 118n Russian soldiers or mercenaries, 39–40, 45, 56n, 88n, 109, 112–14, 116, 126n, 128n, 131–2, 147n, 169 Russo, James R., 47, 51, 59n Sage, Victor, 168n Said, Edward, 1–2 St Clair, William, 115–16, 117, 123n Saratoga, Battle of (1777), 77, 80, 141 Schachterle, Lance, 147 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von The Death of Wallenstein (1799), 87n, 118n, 119n Die Räuber (1781), 156 Schwoerer, Lois, 41 Scott, Walter, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 90–2, 96–111, 113, 117, 118, 121–2n, 122–7n, 128n, 146, 147, 148n, 150, 170 The Abbott (1820), 123n The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), 123n, 125n Ivanhoe (1819), 20–1, 98, 122n The Journal of Walter Scott, 167–8n Kenilworth (1821), 123n The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), 98 A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, 98, 122–3n Lives of the Novelists (1821), 68–9 Marmion (1808), 96, 121n The Monastery (1820), 123n, 124–5n ‘On the Present State of Periodical Criticism’ (1811), 122n Peveril of the Peak (1822), 123n The Pirate (1822), 123n Quentin Durward (1823), 25, 97–8, 99–109, 122–6n, 130, 133, 169 review of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III and The Prisoner of Chillon, a Dream; and other Poems (1816), 124n


Waverley (1814), 88n, 91, 122n, 137, 143 Scottish soldiers or mercenaries, 9, 17, 18–19, 33–4n, 40–1, 57n, 87n, 94–5, 98–100, 122n, 137 Select Society of Edinburgh, 121n Seven Years’ War, 55n, 76 Shakespeare, William, 27, 146, 152, 154, 166 Hamlet, 69, 86–7n The Merchant of Venice, 151, 152, 166n Othello, 151, 153 Shaw, Phillip, 118n Shelley, Percy Bysshe ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (written 1819–20), 57n, 82, 89n, 90 Zastrozzi (1810), 152, 166n Sher, Richard B., 94, 119n, 120n slavery, 1–2, 13–4, 21, 23, 28–9n, 31n, 33n, 56n, 64–6, 71, 76, 79, 84n, 86n, 138–9, 141, 163, 170–2 Smith, Adam, 3–4, 9, 24, 44, 52–3, 99, 104 ‘Of Arms’, 119–20n The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), 120–1n The Wealth of Nations (1776), 4, 48, 58n, 60n, 94–6, 159 Smith, Catherine, Barozzi; or, The Venetian Sorceress (1815), 152 Smith, Charles Dyer, 67–8 Smith, Charlotte, 5–6, 20, 23, 24–5, 61, 63–83, 83–6n, 88–9n, 90, 92, 117, 164 Desmond (1792), 22–3, 24–5, 42, 66–71, 72, 82, 83, 84n, 87n Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800), 66, 67, 84n The Old Manor House (1793), 24–5, 27, 61, 63–5, 67, 71–83, 84–6n, 88n, 89n, 91, 169 Smollett, Tobias, The Adventures of Humphry Clinker (1771), 14, 17–19, 33–4n, 88n soldiers of fortune, 67, 73–5, 87n Southey, Robert, 112, 128n

22/4/10 10:34:19

Index Staël, Germaine de, Corinne; Or, Italy (1807), 127–8n Stanton, Judith Phillips, 68, 86n Stern, Julia, 47, 51, 58n, 84n Steuben, Frederick William (Augustus), Freiherr von, 132, 148 Strand, Eric, 129n Sutherland, John, 97, 110, 123n Sutherland, Kathryn, 110 Swiss guards, soldiers, or mercenaries, 5–6, 15, 17, 28n, 69–70, 83, 86–7n, 100, 121n, 169 Taibbi, Matt, 29–30n Tallmadge, Benjamin, 149n Tanner, Tony, 152 Tarling, Barbara, 78 Thomas, Evan, 131, 147n Thomson, Janice E., 29n, 32n, 57n Todd, William B., 123n Tomanelli, Steven N., 29n Tuite, Clara, 168n Tyson, Ann Scott, 30n US Neutrality Act of 1794, 32n Vanden Heuvel, Katrina, 30n Venetian Republic, see Venice and the Venetian Republic Venice and the Venetian Republic, 150–66, 166–8n, 169 Verhoeven, W. M., 59–60n, 138 Vietnam War, 170–3 volunteerism, 4–9, 11–12, 18, 25, 29n, 42, 44, 46, 52, 63, 67, 69, 79–81, 85n, 90, 93, 95, 99, 101, 105–7, 109–10, 112, 113, 115–6, 117, 118n, 128n, 132, 138–9, 160, 162, 164, 170–1, 173


[ 199

Wallace, James D., 149n Wallace, William, 101 Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 118n, 119n War of 1812, 28n, 143 War of Austrian Succession, 55n War of Spanish Succession, 31n Washington, George, 12, 25, 33n, 84n, 110, 114–15, 117, 130, 132–5, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145–6, 147, 147n, 149n, 165 Waterloo, Battle of, 121n Watson, J. R., 118n Watts, Steven, 52–3 Weiss, Robert P., 173n Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 121n, 128n Westchester County, New York, 133, 136, 148n Westmoreland, William, 171, 173 Whiston, Thomas, 32n Wikborg, Eleanor, 86 Winch, Donald, 119n Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), 11 Wood, G. A. M., 106, 124n Wood, Gordon S., 53, 60n Wordsworth, Dorothy, 90 Wordsworth, William, 65, 90, 124n, 128n, 155, 160 ‘The Discharged Soldier’ (1798), 71–2 ‘The Female Vagrant’ (1798), 35n ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’ (1807), 167n prefaces (1800 and 1802) to Lyrical Ballads (1798), 145 Zschokke, Heinrich, Abällino, der grosse Bandit (1793), 156

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