Charter Day Remarks, 2000
February 5, 2000
Imagine this: the year is 1992. William and Mary has a new president entirely confident of his abilities and entirely ignorant about what the job requires. His first assignment: recruit a new Chancellor.
Where to find a patriot whose passion for liberty recalls General George Washington; a statesman whose commitment to the principle of truth and rule of law reminds a nation of Chief Justice Warren Burger?
The answer? It was simple. Just dash off a letter of invitation to one of the most successful and important leaders of the 20th century. How do you like those odds? Undaunted by the improbable, undeterred by experience, I forged straight ahead. An accident of fate, a possibility, a result of good fortune most certainly. Suffice it to say, I had no back-up plan, and fortunately for this College, never needed one.
For these past seven years, our Chancellor has lifted our spirits, elevated our ambition and given us the privilege of a personal look at genuine greatness.
Lady Thatcher’s tenure as Chancellor has also allowed us to repair finally and firmly a longstanding rupture that we famously trace to July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence was an act of high courage and immense risks, both for those who signed it and for those who fought for its success. And when men act boldly, unforeseen consequences are sure to follow. One such consequence was the bitter end of the College’s long tradition of naming as its chancellor prominent British citizens, a tradition not revived until more than two centuries later when, to our great good fortune, a great lady from Great Britain accepted our invitation to take up the post.
And so, Lady Thatcher, while you may not have known it at the time, you made it possible to repair the longest standing breach between our two nations, a relic of revolution that somehow survived the Treaty of Paris and all our history since. I know that I speak for all at William and Mary when I say we thank you, we really do.
Happily, the people of both our nations now understand what they could not then, that the American Revolution set free the forces of liberty not in this country alone, but for millions around the globe.
On this side of the Atlantic, we celebrate each year a new chapter in the story that began so gloriously on July 4th, 1776. But other dates and other years have a rightful claim to be remembered as signposts on the road to liberty. One such date, the year 1760, has been almost entirely forgotten. Today I propose to finally give that year its due, for 1760, you see, was the year that George III began his reign and that Thomas Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary. Two young men three thousand miles apart began lives of active education, the consequences of which would shock history and shape a new world.
Their educations had many parallels but few similarities and it is in those differences that we see revealed the imperatives which drove America to rebel and caused Britain not to yield.
When we think of George III, vivid images of the mad king come first to mind. And madness was part of his life, but that came later. The young King George, it is hard to imagine now, was a popular hero imbued with a powerful ambition to be a goodly king. With Jefferson, he shared a personal hero King Alfred the Great, who in the Middle Ages brought a real measure of freedom and enlightenment to the English people. With Jefferson, he also saw Charles 1st as a sovereign whose inflexible and expansive definition of the royal prerogative cost the King his life and his people much blood and treasure.
Inspired by such convictions and such heros, George seemed certain to become "the Patriot King." The sovereign who in his dreams raised his country to a new pinnacle of prosperity and power. It was not to be. The would be Patriot King lost his way, lost his dreams, lost forever his hope for an honored place in history. And chief among the reasons for his failure was a teacher. Lord Bute, the great tutor of George’s life, resented deeply the growth of parliamentary power in the wake of the English revolution. It was in the possibility of expanded kingly power that Bute gloried. He taught George to believe, fatally, that dissent was a crime against the throne, that Parliament was a jumped up, bumbling nuisance. He persuaded George to force the resignation of William Pitt the Elder, one of Lady Thatcher’s greatest predecessors. Worse was to come. But we know the rest of the sad story.
How profoundly different was the education of the young Jefferson. When he entered the Wren Yard in March of 1760, he found a mentor far different from Lord Bute. The distinguished historian, Dumas Malone called Professor William Small "the most successful torch bearer of the Enlightenment in Virginia, the man responsible for the liberality of spirit which had come to characterize William and Mary."
How fortunate for humanity was Small’s success in instilling that spirit in his young student. He opened Jefferson’s mind to the wisdom of Bacon, who proclaimed the universal power of reason and to the compelling claims of Locke, who argued with cool reason and crackling passion that only the consent of the governed legitimizes the exercise of public power.
Small saw to it that Jefferson’s education in state craft was not limited to books. He arranged for Jefferson to be invited to small dinner parties hosted by Governor Francis Fauquier and often attended by George Wythe, the Colony’s most brilliant legal mind. The lively political conversation at the Governor’s table taught Jefferson to appreciate the complexities the ironies and the absurdities from which the art of governing in his or any other age can never be separated.
When Jefferson chose the law, Wythe succeeded Small as friend and mentor. Like Small, an intellectual child of the Enlightenment, Wythe taught Jefferson to revere Lord Coke, whose life vividly and whose commentaries powerfully taught the supremacy of law, supremacy to which even a king must kneel.
History is testament to the transforming power of William Small, George Wythe, Francis Fauquier, for they prepared Jefferson for the defining moment of his life that hot summer day in Philadelphia when his colleagues, and I think destiny, summoned him to give eloquence to their convictions, persuasive power to their inward confidence and wings to their sacred honor.
The Declaration of Independence distilled the lessons of Jefferson’s education at William and Mary, his mentors’ advice and his personal liberality into what the future president modestly called "an expression of the American mind." However we choose to define them, Jefferson’s words lit a fire that burns brightly more than two centuries on.
G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that coincidences are "spiritual puns." The events of 1760 were certainly one such. The deeply different educations of two statesmen, George III and Thomas Jefferson, led the one in his folly to lose an empire and convulse his country and the other in his writing to define freedom in a way that changed the world.
I love history. That love blossomed here, encouraged by great teachers of my own: Herald Fowler, Thad Tate, Ludwell Johnson, Bruce McCully. And I love it not only for its own sake but for the practical power it gives to those who seek its counsel in answering wisely contemporary questions. Let me pose two: Does the modern William and Mary still treasure great teaching? Does the spirit of the Enlightenment still abide? To both of those questions my answer is yes, oh yes! And if you want proof, what better answer could I give than the examples of Professors von Baeyer and Sheriff, and of Mr. Swanson and of Mr. McGlothlin. Each is different and in a different place in life, but their words, their work, their dazzling achievements would have warmed the hearts of Small and Wythe.
The secret of William and Mary’s quality, the keys that will unlock answers to questions about its resiliency and its greatness, are really quite simple. Here we define excellence in terms absolute not relative, we respect the indispensable power of tradition and of memory, we believe that women and men have hearts as well as minds and that both require asidious cultivation, and we know that intimate and sustained personal relationships are indispensable to both great teaching and to profound learning.
At William and Mary the age of William Small still lives. The spirit of the Enlightenment is not banished. William and Mary will always be home to men and women who love learning, who care about each other and who ache to achieve at the most sublime level of intellectual and moral excellence.
To the list of great teachers I have known at William and Mary, I would add one more name, that of our Chancellor Lady Thatcher. In her seven years’ service as Chancellor she has argued eloquently for the things that matter: for personal freedom, for economic liberty, for the rule of law, for the indispensable virtues of courage, of decency and of honor. For Anne and me, she has become a treasured friend. But for all of us, she has left a powerful personal portrait composed of great vision, indomitable resolution, genuine intellectual distinction and immense personal kindness.
Hers is a philosophy that George III would have disdained and Thomas Jefferson gladly made his own. At the most profound level, she is one of us.
On this day, in this place, speaking for all of you, I could pay her no higher compliment than this: Lady Thatcher we will never forget the vital lessons that you have taught or cease to feel the powerful inspiration that you have given in the cause of liberal learning, in the service of freedom and in the rich and noble history of the English-speaking peoples.
Seven years ago we could not conceive of your coming, and now we cannot imagine your leaving. You have captured our hearts, strengthened our resolve, and changed our lives and, as a consequence, we will never be the same.
On this Charter Day, a grateful College most reluctantly, most reluctantly, bids you farewell.
