Chapter 18 THE STIMULATING EFFECTS OF TEA

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY was a major subsidizer of the Jesuit mission to Beijing.1 The Jesuits, in turn, interceded with oriental monarchs to secure lucrative commercial favors for the Company, including monopolies on tea, spices, saltpeter (for explosives), silks, and the world’s opium trade. Indeed, according to Reid’s Commerce and Conquest: The Story of the Honourable East India Company, the Company appears to owe its very existence to the Society of Jesus. How this came to be is worth a digression.

Briefly, in 1583, four young commercial travelers – Fitch, Newbery, Leeds, and Storey – set out from London with letters of introduction from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor of China. Somewhere east of the Persian Gulf, they were arrested by the Portuguese for illegally crossing the “line of demarcation.” Pope Alessandro VI (whose mistress, we recall, was Giulia Farnese, Paul Ill’s beautiful sister) had drawn the line in 1493 from the North Pole through the Azores to the South Pole. All lands west of the line he granted to Spain and those east to Portugal.

The four violators were sent in chains to the Portuguese colony of Goa on the western coast of India. In Goa, they were rescued by a fellow countryman, Thomas Stevens. Stevens had influence. He was Rector of the University of Goa, and he was a Jesuit priest. Father Stevens arranged their release, but apparently not without certain conditions. Storey joined the Society of Jesus. Newbery and Leedes accepted posts in the Goan colonial government. Ralph Fitch proceeded on to China, evidently under an Ignatian oath, otherwise the Portuguese Viceroy would not have permitted him to carry on.

In 1591, Fitch returned to England and, like Marco Polo before him, tantalized adventurers with the lucrative possibilities of transporting to the western hemisphere all the oriental splendors he’d seen. Eight years later, on September 24, 1599, with a subscription of a little more than £30, Fitch and several others formed the East India Company.

And now, in 1773, the East India Company was governed by Freemasons, whose Grand Master since 1772 was the ninth Lord Petre (his mastery would continue until 1777). Related to the Stourtons, Norfolks, and Arundells, the Petre family (pronounced “Peter”) was highly esteemed by the Society of Jesus. It was the Petres who, back in the sixteenth century, bankrolled the original Jesuit missions to England.

The East India Company’s most powerful political attaché was Robert Petty, Lord Shelburne. We recall Shelburne as “The Jesuit of Berkeley Square” who worked in 1763 with Lord Bute to conclude the French and Indian Wars with the Treaty of Paris, which isolated England from European alliances and angered the Americans over the western lands. Acting on East India Company’s behalf, Shelburne colluded with the King’s Friends on a scheme designed to disturb the relative peace which had existed between American merchants and England since the repeal of the Townshend Acts in 1770. It went like this.

Stored in the Company’s dockside British warehouses were seventeen million pounds of surplus tea. This tea could not be released for sale until a duty of one shilling per pound was paid to the Crown. If the King would exempt the Company from paying the shilling duty, the Company would sell the tea through special consignees to Americans at prices lower than the colonists were paying for either the dutied English tea or the smuggled Dutch tea. Everyone would win. The American tea-drinkers, still suffering from the depressive effects of the British banking crisis of July 1772, would win. East India Company would win. And with a windfall duty of not one but three shillings a pound, the Crown would win. The only loser would be the colonial tea merchants, who had been enjoying nice profits on both dutied and smuggled tea. The King’s Friends directed Parliament to put the scheme into law, and on May 10, 1773, the “Tea Act” went into effect.

Predictably, the tea merchants reacted in fury. Over the next six months, they pressed the intercolonial network of dissident propagandists to help them mount a protest. What began as an injustice against tea merchants was amplified by the propagandists into a widely-felt injustice against the colonies generally….

THEN, on July 21, 1773, Ganganelli, Clement XIV, abolished the Jesuits “for all eternity.” His brief of disestablishment is entitled Dominus ac Redemptor noster, which is usually translated “God and Our Redeemer.” We should note that “redemptor” also means “revenue agent.” Considering that the brief’s real effect in the long term was a dramatic increase in papal revenues from a new Febronian America, perhaps “God and Our Revenue Agent” would be a more appropriate translation, if not the intended one.

Although Catholic history calls the Disestablishment “a supreme tragedy,” John Carroll more accurately appraised it as the “secularisation” of the Society of Jesus. Thousands of Jesuits now rose to secular prominence throughout the western world, in the arts, sciences, and government. Raimondo Ximenes became a radical Freemason. Alessandro Zorzi from Venice joined the editors of the Italian Encyclopedia. Dr. Boscovich arrived in Paris where his scientific reputation secured him the post of Director of Optics of the French Navy. Esteban Arteaga became a music critic and published a book in Paris entitled The Revolution in the Italian Musical Theatre. We’ve already seen how Professor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin of the Bordeaux College became the physician who gave France the beheading machine named after him. Adam Weishaupt, dismissed from the Jesuit college at Ingolstadt, attracted the fiercer elements of European Rosicrucian Freemasonry into a new secret cult in Bavaria. His “Illuminati,” whose cover was eventually blown in order to convince public opinion that evil secret societies were being diligently unmasked when in fact they were not – was another instance of “blown cover as cover.” Countless other members of the greatest clandestine intelligence agency the world has ever known, now secularized with the jeering approval of its enemies, crossed the Atlantic to help guide Americans through the pains of becoming the first nation expressly designed to be a Febronian, Bellarminian democratic republican Church-State. What an amazing production, all the more impressive for the complete invisibility of its means!

We’ve seen how the Brief of Disestablishment was served upon Lorenzo Ricci in mid-August, and how the General was removed to the English College a few blocks away, where he remained for five weeks, until late September. Interestingly, the Dean of the English College at that time was a thirty-two-year-old Jesuit professor of controversial theology named John Mattingly. Mattingly was an American, said to be the lone American Jesuit in Rome. He was a native of Maryland, a graduate of St. Omer’s, and a dear friend of John Carroll, who (as we know) had departed Rome five months before Ricci’s arrest. Within fifteen years, Carroll would invite Mattingly to become the first president of Georgetown University, an offer Mattingly would decline.

What might Lorenzo Ricci be likely to discuss for five weeks

(a) under a British roof, (b) in the custody of a young American Jesuit, (c) at a time when American merchants were incensed at being cheated out of their tea profits by a new law (d) sponsored by British Freemasons, (e) whose Grand Master happened to be Ricci’s secret servant?

Might the General have been conferring with members of the British East India Company, one of the English College’s major patrons? Might their discussions have involved to which American ports their tea might be most advantageously shipped, and when? Apparently so, for while Ricci was residing at the English College, Parliament authorized the East India Company to ship half a million pounds of tea to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, consigned to a group of specially-chosen merchants.

Might Ricci have been formulating with Carroll’s friend Mat- tingly plans for a demonstration intended to climax the agitations that had been fomented in the colonies since the beginning of his generalate, in 1758? Might he have suggested a spectacular event to occur in, say, Boston Harbor, symbolizing the colonists’ frustrations with England? And might not Parliament respond to this event with vengeful measures designed to push the colonists over the brink of rebellion? Aren’t five weeks sufficient time to script such a “Boston Tea Party,” along with the harsh legal measures with which it might be punished? As well as how the colonists’ violent reaction to the punishment might be coordinated? Outcome suggests that Ricci did more in his five weeks at the English College than languish in custody.

We have seen how the General was taken from the English College to Castel Sant’Angelo, with its secret tunnel to the papal apartments in the Vatican. For many months after his “imprisonment,” Lorenzo Ricci was “questioned by the Inquisition,” according to traditional Church history. But the Inquisition had been administered by Jesuits since 1542. Not surprisingly, the inquisitors pried absolutely no useful information out of Lorenzo Ricci….

IN October of 1773, Austrian officials with drawn bayonets descended upon the Jesuit College in Bruges – the officials were Austrian because Bruges was under the jurisdiction of the Austrian government. They arrested John Carroll and the rest of the college faculty and students. Stripped of his possessions and papers, Carroll was spared further humiliation by the timely intercession of his erstwhile traveling companion Charles Philippe Stourton’s cousin, Henry Howard, Lord Arundell of Wiltshire. The Catholic nobleman escorted Carroll across the English Channel to Wiltshire’s lushly rolling hills. On his family estate near Tisbury, Howard had been constructing a Palladian mansion, New War- dour Castle. One of Carroll’s duties was to write his version of the closing of Bruges College in order to help Henry Howard and other English sponsors of the college win damages from the Austrian government. His principal chore, however, was to administer the Chapel occupying New Wardour Castle’s west wing. In this way Carroll established a connection with Henry Howard’s art agent in Rome, a Jesuit named Francis Thorpe.2 Thorpe was a renowned intelligence-broker, a man whose knowledge of Rome, its happenings and resources, was legendary. His apartment was a favorite meeting place for visiting English nobility, and his favorite English nobleman was Henry Howard.³ Howard had put Father Thorpe in charge of “every detail, every aspect of the Chapel’s design.” Father Thorpe and John Carroll needed no introduction to one another. From the editor’s notes to Carroll’s letters, we learn that Thorpe taught at St. Omer’s during the years John was a student there. Moreover, he was Carroll’s favorite instructor.

These remarkable facts suggest interesting probabilities. From Tisbury, in less than a day, Carroll could reach Benjamin Franklin’s residence in London by stagecoach. Franklin, for his scientific achievements and enlightened egalitarianism, had long been the toast of Europe, a darling of Jesuit intellectuals. He was the exclusive colonial agent now, representing the commercial interests of all thirteen colonies before the Crown. Franklin knew more about America than anyone else living in England, and more about England than any other American. Francis Thorpe knew more about England than anyone else living in Rome, and more about Rome than any other Englishman.

And both men knew John Carroll well. And there Carroll was, for the six months during which time the Tea Act erupted into the most explosive scandal of the revolutionary epoch, poised in Tisbury to facilitate information between these two personal friends of his, geniuses, institutions. But where is the evidence that anything bearing on the American Revolution transpired between Ricci and Thorpe and Carroll and Franklin and Howard and the entire Anglo-American Masonic system? We are left with nothing but clues and outcome, which nonetheless emphatically point to a fruitful collaboration.

During the night of December 16, 1773, a gang of Indians climbed aboard certain ships in Boston Harbor, ripped open three hundred forty-two of the East India Company’s tea-chests and threw overboard their contents, valued at $90,000. Well, they looked like Indians, and witnesses thought they were Indians, but the big open secret was that they were Freemasons in disguise. Perhaps the most succinct statement on the subject appears in respected Masonic historian Arthur Edward Waite’s New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry: “The Boston Tea Party was entirely Masonic, carried out by members of the St. John’s Lodge during an adjourned meeting.”

Parliament reacted to the Boston Tea Party in a way calculated to increase dozens of rolling boulders into a devastating landslide. Without seriously inquiring into who was responsible, and wholly disregarding the offer of more than a hundred Boston merchants to make restitution, Parliament rushed into law a mass of unreasonably punitive legislation – closing the port of Boston to trade, forbidding town meetings without the consent of the governor, denying the Massachusetts legislature the right to choose the governor’s council, providing for the quartering of British and Hessian troops in the colony, and ordering that any officer or soldier of the Crown accused of an act of violence in the performance of his duty should be sent to another colony or to England for what would surely be a sweetheart trial.

To complete the overkill, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which cut off the claims of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and New York to their western lands, and placed these lands, to add insult to injury, under the French Catholic jurisdiction of Quebec.

So exaggeratedly out of proportion to the offense they were framed to punish, these notorious “Intolerable Acts” caused every class of American to sympathize with the Tea Partyers. Suddenly, independence was no longer a radical alternative. The Intolerables rendered independence the subject of sensible, serious conversation as never before.

Governor Hutchinson was recalled to England and was replaced by General Thomas Gage, who brought an army of four thousand men to quarter in Boston. Gage vowed severe discipline. The colonists vowed severe resistance. “The die is cast,” George III wrote to Lord North. “The colonies must either triumph or submit.”

JOHN Carroll left Wardour Castle in May 1774 and sailed for Maryland to reunite with his aged and widowed mother, the former Eleanor Darnall, whom he had not seen in twenty-five years. The history of Eleanor Darnall is the history of Maryland, which bears some reflection here.

In 1625, at about the time young Charles Stuart was inheriting the throne of England from his father, King James I, the Jesuits converted a high government official to Roman Catholicism. That official was Secretary of State George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore. For the sake of appearances – it was deemed inappropriate for a Catholic to serve a Calvinist monarch – Baltimore resigned his post. Meanwhile, behind the scenes the Jesuits perfected an audacious marriage arrangement between Charles, now King Charles I, and a Roman Catholic princess, Henriette-Marie, sister of Louis XIII of France. The marriage purported to be good for Charles’ economic interests. He went out of his way to accommodate the Jesuits. Although a Scottish Calvinist, Charles conducted his monarchy in many respects as though it were Roman Catholic. He systematically weakened England’s foreign policy toward Catholic France, the country of his Queen. He promoted to the highest levels in the Church of England members of the High Church Party, clergymen sympathetic with Roman Catholic ritual and traditions. And he squandered England’s resources in a pointless, Jesuit-engineered war with Spain.

Seven years into his marriage with Henriette-Marie, Charles found himself stuck between personal indebtedness to Ignatian creditors and a stingy Parliament. In hopes of generating tax revenues abroad, he carved a feudal barony out of northern Virginia and granted it to Lord Baltimore. But Baltimore died before developing the grant. The charter passed down to his son, Cecilius Calvert.

Calvert, the new Lord Baltimore, called persecuted emigrants desiring religious and tax freedom to participate in a voyage to a place bearing a name dear to Catholics “Maryland,” after the Blessed Virgin. Baltimore did not neglect appealing to the irreligious niche as well. A number of his advertisements spoke of the limitless opportunities from settling in “Merrie Land.”

On November 22, 1633, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, set sail from London. The passenger list included three Jesuits, sixteen to twenty Roman Catholic gentlemen, several hundred predominantly Protestant slaves and laborers, and Cecilius Calvert’s brother Leonard. Leonard Calvert had been appointed Maryland’s first governor. The voyage of the Ark and the Dove was spiritually directed by a Jesuit priest named Andrew White. Educated at both St. Omer’s and Douai, a professor for twenty years in Portugal, Spain, and Flanders, Andrew White is remembered by the Church as “the Apostle to Maryland.”

Choosing an Andrew for the task was good liturgical cabalah on the part of the Gesu. Andrew was the brother of the apostle Peter, the first Pope, the Rock upon whom Roman Catholicism claims to be established. Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland; King Charles I was a Scot. A personal representative of the king’s brotherly attitude toward Rome could not be more eloquently identified than by the simple name “Andrew.” Andrew White consecrated the Maryland voyage to two Catholic saints: the Virgin Mary, Protectress of the Jesuits, and Ignatius Loyola, only recently decreed Patron Saint of Maryland by Urban VIII, the second pupil of Jesuits to be elected Pope.

The ships were at sea nearly four months. Finally, one hundred twenty-three days from England, on March 25, 1634, the parties reached St. Clements Island in the mouth of the Potomac River.

It was an auspicious day. Not only was March 25 the first day of spring, but also it was the first day of the Julian calendar. (In 1752 the colonies would adopt the Gregorian calendar, which we follow today.) On March 25, Andrew White read the first Roman Mass ever held in any of the original thirteen colonies. Then he formally took possession of the land “for our Saviour and for our Sovereign Lord King of England.”

Maryland historians trace the juridical origins of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States to a Patuxent Indian chieftain’s wigwam, which Andrew White denoted in his diary “the first chapel of Maryland.” White introduced Roman Catholicism to the Patuxents, Anacostics, and Piscataways on real estate that today comprises the District of Columbia. It’s quite probable that the District of Columbia’s executive mansion was termed “White House” less because of a color of exterior paint than out of reverence for the Apostle to Maryland. Every utterance of “White House” should fill the historically knowledgeable Jesuit with pride in his Society’s achievements.

Conversions among the Indians ran high, but the Society enjoyed greater profits evangelizing Protestants. For every Protestant settler converted, the Jesuits won a land grant from Cecilius Calvert. Other lands Calvert retained and passed on to his descendants. Over the generations, Rock Creek Farm with its “Rome,” on which the U.S. Capitol was erected, devolved to the Calvert heiress Eleanor Darnall and her husband, an Irish immigrant whose marriage and abilities had earned enough money to make him a prosperous merchant-planter. It was to this couple, and on this land, that the first American bishop was born in 1735.

Like his older brother Daniel, Jacky Carroll did his earliest schooling at Bohemia Manor, a secret Jesuit academy just down the road. Bohemia Manor had to be run secretly because of anti- Catholic laws resulting from the abdication of Catholic James II and the succession of Protestants William and Mary to the British throne in 1689. The Penal Period in Maryland, which would extend up to the American Revolution, served the black papacy well by inclining affluent Catholic families to send their sons across the Atlantic to take the Jesuit ratio studiorum at St. Omer’s. Indeed, more Americans went to St. Omer’s College in the eighteenth century than to Oxford and Cambridge combined.⁴

At the tender age of thirteen, Jacky sailed to Europe with his even younger cousin, Charles Carroll, for schooling at St. Omer’s. Daniel returned home from there to help manage the family interests he stood to inherit. In 1753, Jacky entered the novitiate of the Jesuits at Watten in the Netherlands. Charles went on to study pre-law at Voltaire’s alma mater, the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1758, Jacky returned to St. Omer’s to teach, while Charles crossed the Channel to England, enrolling in London’s premier school for barristers, the Inner Temple, founded in the fourteenth century by the Knights Templar.⁵

Jacky was ordained to the Jesuit priesthood in 1761. When he learned that St. Omer’s was about to be seized by the French government in preparation for the royal edict suppressing the Jesuits in France, he with other teachers and their pupils moved to Bruges. In 1769, he renounced his Calvert inheritance, sloughed off his nickname, took the extreme Jesuit vow of papal obedience, and began teaching philosophy and theology at the English college in Liège. It was here that he befriended Charles Philippe Stourton, his Grand Tour companion.

JOHN Carroll’s arrival at his mother’s home in Maryland coincided with Paul Revere’s ride to Philadelphia bearing letters from the Boston Committee of Correspondence seeking aid from Charles Thomson’s group in protesting the closing of Boston Harbor. From his mother’s estate at Rock Creek, Carroll dealt with the aftermath of the Tea Act by exercising his “secularised” priestly authority as Prefect of the Sodality. He integrated the Catholics of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia into the movement for independence.

Charles Thomson’s Philadelphia committee sent Boston a letter of support. The committee additionally proposed a congress of deputies from the colonies to (a) consider measures to restore harmony with Great Britain and (b) prevent the dispute from advancing to “an undesirable end.” Thomson then notified all the colonies south of Pennsylvania of his committee’s action. He suggested the necessity of calling a general congress to consider the problem. Combined with a similar call from the Virginia House of Burgesses, his suggestion was approved throughout the colonies. Plans were laid for the First Continental Congress to meet at Philadelphia in September.

On June 1, 1774, the bill closing Boston Harbor went into effect. Thomson’s radicals led Philadelphia in observing a day of mourning. Shops closed, churches held services, the people remained quietly in their homes. On June 8, Thomson and more than nine hundred freeholders petitioned Governor Richard Penn to convene the Pennsylvania Assembly so that it might consider sending delegates to an all-colony congress to explore ways of restoring harmony and peace to the British Empire. The Governor refused their request, which justified Thomson’s taking action outside the established order.

Thomson called for a town meeting to be held on June 18. Nearly 8,000 Philadelphians attended. Boisterously, they resolved that the closing of Boston Harbor was tyrannical, and that a Continental Congress to secure the rights and liberties of the colonies must be convened in Philadelphia.

In July, the Pennsylvania Assembly yielded to Thomson’s popular pressure and agreed to name a delegation to this First Continental Congress. Thomson, however, was not named.

Thanks to the publicity from his “First Citizen/Second Citizen” media production during the first half of 1773, Charles Carroll was named by the Annapolis Committee of Correspondence to be a delegate to the First Continental Congress. But he declined the nomination. He said that his usefulness might be restricted by anti-Catholic sentiment engendered by the Quebec Act (with which Parliament had avenged the Boston Tea Party by giving the western lands of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and New York to Catholic Quebec). He attended the Congress, however, but as an “unofficial consultant” to the Marylanders. Charles Thomson accompanied the Pennsylvanians in the same capacity.

To prepare for the September 5th opening session, delegates began arriving in Philadelphia in late August. They congregated at a well-known radical meeting-place, the elegant mansion of Thomas Mifflin. Mifflin had studied classics under Charles Thomson at Benjamin Franklin’s Academy (later to become University of Pennsylvania). They were close friends. As Mifflin’s houseguest, Thomson was on hand round the clock to greet and confer with the arriving leaders, most of whom already knew him by name. John Adams’ diary entry for August 30th speaks of “much conversation” he and his fellow delegates had with the learned Thomson. He called Thomson “the Sam Adams of Philadelphia,” and “the life of the cause of liberty.”

Thomson and the Carrolls – Charles, Daniel, and John – spent these critical preliminary days lobbying for the inevitability of war. Thomson was already heavily invested in New Jersey’s Batso Furnace. Batso would furnish cannon balls, shot, kettles, spikes and nails to the army through the War Commissioner, who controlled all the executive duties of the military department. The War Commissioner was just the man Lorenzo Ricci needed for the job:

Thomson was elected Secretary of the First Continental Congress, an office he held under the title “Perpetual Secretary” until the United States Constitution was ratified in 1789. He led the delegates through an itemized statement of the American theory of rebellion that culminated in the critical Declaration and Resolves of October 14, 1774.

IT was while the First Continental Congress was deliberating America’s future under British tyranny that Ganganelli, Pope Clement XIV, died his agonizing death (September 22, 1774). When the papacy is vacant, says New Catholic Encyclopedia, the administration and guardianship of the Holy See’s temporal rights – that is, its business affairs – are routinely taken over by the Treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber. The Apostolic Treasurer on the day of Ganganelli’s passing was Cardinal Giovanni Braschi. A fifty-seven-year-old aristocrat of impoverished parentage, Cardinal Braschi was a sterling product of the Jesuit colleges. The ratio stu~ diorum had made of him a distinguished lawyer and diplomat. He had been Apostolic Treasurer when Rothschild began serving the Catholic principality of Hesse-Hanover in 1769. This interesting fact awakens the possibility that the Cardinal and Rothschild had been involved in Ricci’s American project for years. But that is only conjecture. What is beyond conjecture, however, is that until a new pope could be elected, the whole fiscal wealth of the Roman Catholic Church belonged to Braschi and to no one else. Although lacking formal entitlement, Cardinal Braschi would rule as a kind of “virtual” Pontifex Maximus for one of the longest periods of papal vacancy on record.

Day after day after day, the conclave haggled over a single issue – What would the candidates do about the Jesuits? Should Ganganelli’s brief of Disestablishment continue to be enforced or not?

Although Lorenzo Ricci was in detention at Castel Sant’Angelo, we know he could easily hop a tunnel carriage to the Vatican for covert meetings with the Virtual Pope. In a very real way, Braschi was a creation of Ricci’s. Braschi had been made a Cardinal under the sponsorship of Ganganelli, whose own cardinalate was sponsored, as we recall, by Ricci. These two most powerful men on earth, Ricci and Braschi, had been secretly allied for years. And now the turn of events had made them invisible and inaudible. These last precious days in the final bursting-forth of Ricci’s grand strategy afforded ideal conditions for Braschi and Ricci to determine face-to-face with the Rothschild emissaries, out of public sight and mind, how the Vatican’s immense resources – money, men, supplies – would be deployed in the coming months and years. (In October 1774, for example, colonial agent Benjamin Franklin sent England’s most enlightened copywriter, Tom Paine, to beef up the pamphleteers in Philadelphia.)

The days of papal vacancy wore on – thirty, fifty, sixty, seventy- five, a hundred days, a hundred and ten. Finally, after nearly five months of confusion, on February 15, 1775, the one hundred thirty- fourth day, it was announced that Rome had a new Pope. The new pope was a man acceptable to both sides of the Jesuit question. He had tacitly assured the anti-Jesuits that he would continue to enforce Disestablishment, yet the pro-Jesuits knew he would enforce it tenderly because of the great intellectual, political, and spiritual debts he owed the Society. The new pope was best qualified for the papacy because he’d been running the Holy See with Lorenzo Ricci for the past hundred thirty-four days – Giovanni Braschi! Braschi took the papal name Pius VI.

And now plummeted the great avalanche.

ON February 9, 1775 the British Parliament declared Massachusetts to be “in a state of rebellion.” On March 23, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH” oration.

On April 19, at a tense daybreak confrontation on Lexington Green between a group of angry colonists and some eight hundred redcoats, an unseen and unidentified shootist fired on the redcoats from behind a nearby meeting-house. This was the “shot heard ’round the world” – although Ralph Waldo Emerson coined that phrase in his Concord Hymn (1836) to describe a skirmish at Concord Bridge, seven miles away and a few hours later. The air on Lexington Green crackled with exploding gunpowder, and when the smoke cleared, eight colonists lay dead.⁶

As the redcoats returned to Boston, they were attacked by ever-increasing colonial militiamen. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress mobilized 13,600 colonial soldiers and placed Boston under a siege that lasted for almost a year.

To prevent the spread of the Boston carnage to the Quaker province, the Pennsylvania Assembly named Charles Thomson and twelve others to a committee to purchase explosives and munitions – the leading manufacturers of which happened to be Thomson and Charles Carroll.

On May 10, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and named George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

On June 22, Congress voted to issue a continental currency – two million dollars in unsecured bills of credit – to be used in paying the costs of war.

On July 3, George Washington formally assumed command of the Continental Army, about seventeen thousand men gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On July 5, Congress adopted its last humble plea for peace with England, the “Olive Branch Petition,” written by Charles Thomson and John Dickinson. Governor Penn of Pennsylvania personally delivered the Petition to London, but the King’s Friends prevented George III from seeing Penn or even acknowledging the Petition.

On July 6, Congress adopted the Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms, which fell short of asserting independence, but vowed a holy war of liberation from slavery.

On August 23, George III issued a proclamation declaring that all thirteen American colonies were in a state of open rebellion. Two months later, in October, British forces burned Falmouth, what is presently Portland, Maine.

The war was on. But from Lorenzo Ricci’s vantage point, the war was won. There remained only opportunities now for his enemies, the British Crown and the American colonials, to engage in blood-letting hostilities that would eventually separate and exhaust them both. Divide et impera, divide and conquer. What to the British was “the War of American Rebellion,” and to the Americans “the War for Independence,” was to General Ricci “the War of Reunification with Protestant Dissidents.” From it would rise the first Febronian government on earth, a constellation of secular churches called states led by an electorate of laymen properly enlightened by the ratio studiorum and united under the spiritual guidance of Pontifex Maximus, and paying tribute to Rome for the privilege. United … States.

The real war over, there began now the unraveling, which was the historical war, the theatrical war. This would consist of a series of bloody battles mounted by Congress and Crown for the people’s participation, observation, and commemoration. These events would produce Caesarean Rome’s essential emotional cornerstone.

Like Virgil’s Aeneid, epic national heroes would forge a fictitious national legacy. We must not forget Charles Thomson’s candid assessment that the Revolution’s leaders were largely deceptions, men of “supposed wisdom and valor” who were far inferior to “the qualities that have been ascribed to them.”

And there is evidence – admittedly the faintest hint of evidence (as is so often the case with clandestine warriors) – that Lorenzo Ricci communed with these American heroes, and gave them instruction, on their own soil. This evidence is presented in our next chapter.