They applauded this comment, and each man came up in turn to give me a “brotherly” handshake. When the others had departed, their leader, Hamilton, offered to see me home in his carriage. As we drove to my lodgings, only the sounds of the clopping horse hooves on cobbles broke the silence. Despite the wintry season, you could smell the fresh aroma of salt in the air.

“My dear doctor,” Hamilton addressed me as we moved through the deep black velvet of the Annapolis night. “I wonder if you do understand completely what we meant tonight, in singing that old nursery song for you?”

“Why yes, I think I do,” I told him. “You’ve sung me a charming French song, with a very poor English translation. For in French, I do not need to point out that the word ‘Jacques’ does not mean ‘John’ as it might in English—it means James. And ‘matins’ are not ‘morning bells,’ but a canonical hour of both the Catholic and Anglican Churches—the call to prayer, just after midnight, with the related offices of devotion.

“Brother James,” I went on to suggest, “would be James the Greater, brother of Jesus in Holy Scripture, who founded the first Celtic Church in Spain (Santiago, as they call him there) as well as those ancient parish churches of the French Pyrenees.

“You are mostly Scotsmen here by origin, are you not?” I added. “It seems to me that the Scots, in recent memory, have been aligned with only one dynasty of great power and ancestry, and with whom the Scottish royal families have intermarried on numerous occasions—that is, with the French. There was Mary of Guise, who married the king of Scotland two hundred years ago—and then her daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, who married the French dauphin. And of course, young Mary’s Scottish son, James Stuart, the successor to Queen Elizabeth who became King James I of England.” I turned to Hamilton in the darkness of the carriage, and added, “Given the canon of the song, this is the true ‘James’ that your chantey refers to—is it not?”

“It is,” Hamilton replied quietly. “It is, indeed.”

It took no Doctor of Philosophy to read the meaning in that message. But it did take a bit of initiation into other hidden significance. The Tuesday Club was asking my future aid, as a brother, in the time of their need…

* * *

Franklin paused in his story to look about the room of attentive listeners, then he added with effect, “This very same chanson was delivered to me, only this morning, from Scotland. I at once recognized its import—for nearly thirty years ago, I’d been warned by a club of Scotsmen, an ocean away from here—a warning that has now come home to roost.

“As we know, my friends, for more than one hundred years, the Scots have continually struggled to expel the Hanover usurpers from the throne of England and to restore the Scottish blood. From the English Civil War right down to the battles of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the son of the last King James who tried to seize England again only nine years before my trip to Annapolis!