The Jacobites' Apprentice

If a rogue can only tell a lie, and a righteous person can only tell the truth, how is a young, inexperienced person to tell which is which in the swirling politics of an English town divided between loyalty to the Hanoverian King George II, or the "true" king James III in exile on the Continent - the Jacobite faction?  That's the question posed in The Jacobites' Apprentice (#230) by David Ebsworth.

Aran Owen, a young Welsh orphan, is sent by his patron to Manchester in the 1740s where Josiah Redmond thinks Aran will have better opportunities to make his fortune in his brother Titus Redmond's household.  Titus is a merchant with a finger in every pie, although his Catholic faith prohibits him from holding any civic offices.  That doesn't mean that Titus and his wife and older daughters don't meddle in politics; on the contrary, they are amongst the leaders of the local Jacobite faction.  When Aran completes his apprenticeship with the local printer, he is drawn into printing the broadsides and the newspaper supporting the Jacobites, although he finds drawing the illustrations for these the most satisfying part of his work.  As rumors abound that Prince Charles Edward Stuart is about to land somewhere in England Aran runs afoul of the enigmatic Dudley Striker, an agent of the Duke of Newcastle working for the Hanoverian interests.  Striker leaves behind a trail of mysterious deaths and mutilations as he cultivates his sources of information.  Aran has already suffered at his hands; can he protect Titus Redmond and his wife and four daughters as Striker plays his deadly games?  And as Manchester changes hands from the Hanoverians to the Jacobites and back again, who is truly working for the good of the English people?

I found it took me a long time to read this book.  I thought of The Jacobites' Apprentice principally as a political novel as I was reading it; governmental politics, small town politics, and sexual politics all play their role in the story. And that takes time to digest.  Love, loyalty and lies, betrayal and brutality move the story forward and from character to character as events unfold in the Rising of '45 and the specter of a full blown civil war threaten the inhabitants of Manchester.

In many ways, I found Aran Owen to be the least compelling character in the book, and Dudley Striker the most interesting.  His ability to slip in and out of different guises, to strike absolute terror into the hearts of those he encounters, and his uncanny knack for wriggling out of a tight spot with his wits, but if necessary, deadly force make him the ideal operative and double agent.  I don't think that the sentence meted out to him at the end of the book would ever be the final chapter for him...

I did find it interesting as an American reader of this story how many names cropped up in the narrative that were familiar to me in a different context - in the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution.  It impressed me that Mr. Ebsworth had even done his homework on Native American tribes and customs for Dudley Striker's back story growing up in Virginia.

Be warned when you read The Jacobites' Apprentice that the language of the times is quite coarse, but don't let that deter you.  Does Aran eventually figure out for himself who are the rogues and who the righteous?  Hmm.  I wonder...