While Pembroke was going through the agony of seeing Englishmen run wild, his cousin Oliver was having a much different reaction to martial law. He was serving as second-in-command to a certified military hero, Gordon Dewberry Ramsay, who had galloped in the lead during the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava and won England's highest honor for doing so, the Victoria Cross. He served in Jamaica as a police inspector, and because he was a hearty type, Croome worked well with him, assisting in the floggings, the shootings and the hangings. Like Ramsay, he believed that the honor of the white man had been traduced by the blacks, that Baptists had scorned the established church, and that almost every black had insulted the queen. Under those circumstances, mercy was unwarranted and almost any punishment that Ramsay meted out was justified.
Ramsay, carrying a small stick like a baton, would march through a village and peremptorily order his men: 'Give that one a dozen,' whereupon the metaled cat would be applied on the spot. Several times he growled: 'That one looks a bad lot. Give him a score,' and the man would be thrashed.
On one occasion he was watching the application of fifty lashes to a thin black man who had given no offense, when at the forty-seventh blow the man grimaced from the unbearable pain. In a rage Ramsay shouted: 'That man bared his teeth at me. Take him down and hang him.'
Croome saw nothing wrong in these excesses, for no matter what preposterous act of revenge Ramsay engaged in, like the hanging of scores without even the pretense of a trial, he approved, for as he told Ramsay repeatedly: 'They took arms against the queen. They deserve whatever you give them,' and he applauded when any black men who seemed to have an ugly countenance received proper punishment. 'That one looks an evil fellow,' Ramsay would cry, pointing with his baton. 'Hang him.'
Jason Pembroke, having witnessed Hobbs behaving no better, had at least questioned his mental stability, but Oliver Croome saw nothing wrong with what Ramsay was doing, and even helped him rampage through St. Thomas dispensing blind revenge. Once as the pair watched a black woman receiving a hundred strokes of the cat, Ramsay said: 'She was heard by three different people to speak ill of The Queen's Advice,' and Croome said: 'You do well to halt such treason.'
An admiring newspaperman who traveled for some days with Ramsay and Croome wrote:
These stalwarts, who are protecting the safety of all white men and women in the island, have with them a huge sailor from one of the ships who is a master-hand at flogging. Every stroke he applies lands with a resounding 'Whoosh' and a dozen from his mighty right arm equal two score from someone else. I saw him give seventy of his best to one man, and when he was finished, the criminal could barely stand erect, and a man near me said: 'He'll go bent for life.'
Of the routine hangings, Hobbs and Ramsay accounted for about two hundred.
On the last day of October 1865, Governor Eyre, a humane man at heart and unaware of the terrible havoc Hobbs and Ramsay had been creating, ended martial law except for those already under arrest, and what was more important, granted a general amnesty.
[ ]
...It was an honorable debate focused on the dishonorable behavior of men like Hobbs and Ramsay, a gigantic intellectual and moral confrontation centered upon a relatively minor historical figure like Eyre. Eventually it involved newspapers, orations in Parliament, the bold intercession of Britain's greatest jurists, and even the columns of Punch, which chimed in early with clever rhymes proving that they, like most of the establishment, were solidly behind Eyre...
His chance meeting with Carlyle and Tennyson so disoriented Jason that on the drive back to Cavendish Square he listened attentively as Oliver tried to persuade him to abandon his allegiance to the men trying to persecute Eyre and join the vast majority of patriots who were defending him: 'Jason, Eyre's one of us. He represents all that's good in England, all that's safe and proper - our church ... our queen ... How can you turn your back on everything the Pembrokes have stood for through the centuries? Eyre represents us, he defends us against the hordes ... and we must rally round.'
The hammering continued without respite, forcing Jason to question the propriety of heckling a man whom so many sensible people considered a wronged governor and a brave one. In an effort to defend himself he asked: 'But the brutality during martial law? You saw Ramsay. I was with Hobbs. Those men, supposed to be officers, behaved like beasts.'
'Jason! It was war. Black brutes against all we held dear. I saw no excess. Harsh punishment for evil acts, nothing more.'
'You lack judgment if you saw no excess in Ramsay's behavior.'
'But even if I grant that, it in no way touches the governor. He was not there. He did not condone their behavior. And certainly he did not order it.'
'What was that again? He himself was not culpable? Not personally?'
'No! No! And he did terminate martial law as soon as possible. He stands guiltless, and you must call off your dogs.'
The final word on these hectic events was one which, had it been anticipated, might have saved Jamaica its travail and Great Britain the bitterness of its inflamed debate. Not long after the turbulence at St. Thomas-in-the-East, both Colonel Hobbs, the laughing monster with whom Pembroke had served, and Police Inspector Ramsay, whose savage behavior Croome approved, committed suicide, the first by shooting himself, the second by leaping off a steamship in mid-ocean. Competent medical experts judged that the men had already been insane when performing their atrocities but that no one had noticed, because when martial law rages, insanity becomes the norm.
[PB: Also in this chapter Michener describes Cardigan in some detail and follows up with a rant against him (and Tennyson, Dickens, Carlyle and others) from the mouth of his John Stuart Mill. See p.137 — 9. Excerpt here.]
Such is his notoriety in the historical record that he is still frequently named in modern accounts, as here where he is decribed as "probably the most vicious" of soldiers and militiamen in Jamaica. [AWKWARD — REWRITE]
Governor Eyre... ordered the arrest of a colored opposition politician named George Gordon on charges of inciting the rebellion. Gordon was a well-known figure who frequently communicated with a number of British liberals in London. In what would later become one of the most controversial responses to the insurrection, Eyre had Gordon transported into the jurisdiction in which he had declared martial law. A military commission tried and hanged Gordon six days after he had surrendered to authorities.
Soldiers and militiamen took the atmosphere of violent recrimination considerably further than even Eyre seems to have intended. A provost-marshal named Duberry Ramsay was probably the most vicious. Ramsay was named the head of a prison camp during the martial law period, and in this capacity he sadistically whipped scores of prisoners and executed dozens summarily on the barest and flimsiest of evidence. Ramsay made possible the successful prosecution of Gordon by inducing prisoners in his camp to testify against Gordon in the military commission at which Gordon was tried.
[Source: Review by John Fabian Wit of R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Crisis of Legal Framework (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), in Harvard Law Review, 2007, Vol. 120, pp. 754 -- 797. Wit is Professor of Law and History, Columbia University. For a longer extract, see here. The entire review is here (accessed 29.12.2016).]