John Deane finished writing his letter at half past eleven. He would post it later. He left his house and went for a walk. He encountered a customs official. The two men talked. The postmaster was nearby. He saw Deane and the customs official and walked towards them. He saluted the customs official in French. He spoke to John Deane in English and cursed him. The postmaster walked away from Deane. He stopped. He walked back toward Deane, turned around and then walked away swearing. John Deane said nothing to the postmaster but put his fingers to his mouth. The postmaster placed his hand on his sword. The two men parted company.
Deane returned home and wrote a postscript to his letter describing the bizarre second encounter with the postmaster. Deane had had enough. He wanted Harrington to intervene conclusively in the matter of the unstable and obstructive postmaster. He wanted the postmaster’s head on a platter. Deane sent the letter via Calais. Once again he made the decision to exclude Robert Daniels from the correspondence. Deane waited for Harrington’s response.
After the exchange, Deane felt optimistic. The speed of the delivery of the mail had increased. John Deane credited his protest with the change in the mail service. Deane wrote to Harrington supplying him with further details of the postmaster’s lunacies. He listed three reputable people, including his own wife, who had been ‘abused by this madman’. Deane asked Harrington for an ‘order’ for the ‘consul of Brussels, directing the magistrates of this town to examine under oath’ witnesses present, mainly shop workers, who had observed the confrontation. Deane relayed to Harrington the gradual stages of his deteriorating relationship with the postmaster. He cited three people of good reputation who circumvented the postmaster to send mail, although Deane admitted that he was not certain whether any of them would ‘stand to it when called’.
Harrington conducted his own investigation. He wrote to a certain dignitary for his opinion. The dignitary informed Harrington that the problem with the postmaster was that he did not come under British jurisdiction. The dignitary informed Harrington that the best person to sort the dispute out was His Majesty’s minister at Brussels. But the dignitary was not convinced that taking the matter any further would serve any decent purpose. The dignitary offered Harrington his own assessment of Deane: ‘I can have no opinion of the man,’ he said, yet warned Harrington that John Deane ‘may possibly give your Lordship trouble inconsiderably’.
Harrington brought the matter before the king. Harrington asked the king his opinion as to whether a formal complaint against the postmaster at Ostend should be made. The king was opposed. The king did not want his government to take action in something that appeared to him to be a personal matter. The king dismissed the complaint as ‘to be of very little consequence’.
Deane received the disappointing news but felt inclined to push a little further. He got a letter from Whitehall. The letter stated that Harrington, ‘was not disposed to trouble the king again’. It warned Deane that he would ‘do well to drop the matter entirely’. It was a redundant warning. John Deane had overstepped the bounds of his authority one too many times. With the casual dismissal of a monarch, John Deane’s career was over. He was recalled to England. He returned to his native country for the final time in October 1738.
John Deane was replaced as commercial consul for the ports of Flanders and Ostend by Daniel Day, the man he had personally recommended to Harrington as his deputy.
Deane’s last letter to Harrington was brief, formal and humble in tone:
I promise, God willing, to embark with my family for England this evening and from the first convenient place of landing shall make the best of my way to Wilford near Nottingham where your Lordship’s commands will always find me.
Part Five: Survivor
22
1746
The irony of John Deane’s dismissal was that it had left him financially secure for perhaps the first time in his life. Deane’s service was rewarded with a generous government pension. By the time of his retirement, John Deane was wealthy enough to buy land, build property and collect rent. Financial security was arguably all John Deane had ever really wanted. He had never sought to be famous. His adventures had always been a means to an end. Whenever John Deane had been dragged into the limelight it was usually by tragic default. It took him an age to learn the value of self-publicity and when John Deane had revealed in print the intimate details of his extraordinary life after Boon Island, it had been mostly in state documents never intended for public consumption. John Deane was an extraordinary writer but a reluctant one it seemed. In his government dispatches he never gave any personal details beyond those pertaining to the task in hand. No family correspondence of John Deane’s appears to have survived. No contemporary likeness of him exists. The rest is semi-darkness, a prosaic pastoral existence interrupted by the odd moment of extreme drama.
Four elements had propelled Deane through a lifetime of adventure: the need to make money, a genuine sense of duty, an authentic (if somewhat Old Testament-inflected) Protestantism and a finely tuned instinct for conspiracy. The latter element dovetailed with a paranoid streak that had ultimately neutered John Deane’s usefulness as a government employee. In his time, Deane had seen plots and conspiracies both where they had existed and where they had not. His enemies of choice had always been the Jacobites. His public and private nightmare was a Jacobite invasion of his beloved homeland. He had successfully exposed Jacobites but had also been written off as a demented Cassandra. He had investigated indistinct and phantom Jacobite plots at the behest of a paymaster more obsessed than even he appeared to be. So there must have been a perverted sense of vindication when, in 1745, all of Deane’s fears took substance in the form of a Jacobite army travelling unopposed through England and marching towards Nottingham.
In 1743 Charles Edward Stuart, the son of James III, arrived in Scotland with foreign backing. The French had provided two warships to take the Stuart prince to Scotland. The ships were badly mauled by storms, compromising what help the French had offered. But Charles Stuart was physically present on British soil and soon became a flesh and blood rallying point for the Jacobite Highland clans. Over the course of the following year, Charles Stuart began to build an army and won a victory over Hanoverian forces at the battle of Prestonpans.
In England, as an army was being assembled to take the fight to Scotland, Nottingham played its part in providing soldiers for the oncoming conflict. The Duke of Kingston had raised 200 mounted troops, many of whom were recruited from Nottingham. The soldiers were paid for by the town’s aristocracy and its wealthy citizens. Kingston and the Duke of Newcastle gave £1,000 each. Lords Middleton, Byron, Howe and Cavendish gave £200 each. Other wealthy gentlemen from the locality donated £200. John Deane was among the contributors. The recruits were physically short men as a dragoon could not be taller than five feet eight. Many were butchers’ apprentices. The recruits would become Kingston’s 10th Light Horse.
On 12 October 1745 Nottingham’s market place filled up with soldiers. The regiment constituted 500 Dutch soldiers and 200 English. On 13 October the regiment advanced towards Scotland.
In November 1745 Charles Stuart felt empowered and emboldened enough to march on London. He led 5,000 men across the Scottish border and into England. The soldiers making their way north and their enemies marching south seemed to miss one another. The Jacobites marched through Carlisle and Manchester on their way to take London and oust George II from the throne of England. By December, Charles Stuart and his Highland army had arrived at Derby, less than fifteen miles from Nottingham.