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courthouse at Hanover, eighteen miles north of Richmond. The case took a year and a half to come to trial, but then, in November1763, the proceedings couldn’t have gone better for Maury and his fellow Anglicans. The court ruled that since the king had never agreed to repeal the law of 1748, the vestry had acted illegally in holding back two thirds of Maury’s pay. A hearing to assess damages was set for December 1.
    Parson Maury had clearly chosen well in his attorney—Peter Lyons, a charming Irishman who weighed three hundred pounds but was renowned for his refined courtroom manner. The arithmetic of the case hadn’t been challenged, which meant that the damages hearing would be only a formality. A deputy sheriff named Thomas Johnson could expect a steep fine for not collecting the quota of tobacco due Parson Maury.
    The hearing was only three weeks away, and Johnson had no hope of hiring a distinguished lawyer to represent him. In desperation, he turned to the judge’s son, a young man who had recently taken up the law after failing at everything else. Would this untried lawyer accept fifteen shillings to do his best against Parson Maury and Peter Lyons? Patrick Henry said that he would.
    —
    Maury’s former student, Thomas Jefferson, knew Patrick Henry but wasn’t much impressed by him. They had met in December 1759, during a Christmas house party at the estate of Colonel Nathaniel West Dandridge. Jefferson had just finished his studies at Maury’s school and was headed for William and Mary College in Williamsburg. Patrick Henry was between failures. He had tried farming, and twice he had tried keeping a store. The best that could be said of those attempts was that he had never been declared bankrupt. But at the colonel’s party he was showing no sign of discouragement.
    Thomas Jefferson, gangling and judgmental at sixteen, watched grudgingly as Patrick Henry made himself popular with the other guests. Although he was his elder by only seven years, Henry was married and a father and seemed much older to Thomas. That made his conduct all the more unseemly—being so passionate about dancing and so eager to please. Henry didn’t seem interested in engaging young Jefferson in serious conversation, and Thomas found his manners somewhat coarse.
    A few months later, though, Patrick Henry sought out Thomas on the William and Mary campus with astonishing news. Henry had been reading a lawbook at home between the hours he helpedout at his father-in-law’s tavern. Now he had come to Williamsburg to ask the legal examiners to license him as a lawyer. One had to admire his nerve. For generations, Virginia families had sent their sons to London to study law at the Inns of Court. Young men who couldn’t afford that expense apprenticed themselves for many months with an established lawyer. Here came Patrick Henry announcing that he had borrowed a copy of Coke upon Littleton —the text that James Otis had read and cursed for years. After six weeks of glancing through it, Henry considered himself qualified to open a law office.
    Thomas didn’t know then that Henry enjoyed playing the rustic. From boyhood he had loved to hunt ducks and geese along the Pamunky River, and at eleven and twelve, while other children were anchored in school, he had roamed the countryside. Redhaired and blue-eyed, he had grown into a boy who liked to exaggerate his rural accent. “Naiteral parts,” he would say, “is better than all the larnin’ on yearth.” But in his teens a different Patrick emerged, tutored at home by his Scottish father and by his uncle, the Reverend Patrick Henry, who taught him Latin and Greek along with his catechism. By fifteen Patrick was lying on his bed reading for hours, and the next year, when he was sent to work at his first store, he discovered the joys of conversation. Customers commented that the young clerk seemed beguiled by the thrust and parry of any argument and determined not to let his job get in the