It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness. It was the spring of great hope; it was the winter of no hope at all. We had everything; we had nothing. We were all going straight to heaven; we were all going straight to hell. In short, the time was much like the present, in that everything rested on who you listened to.
There was a king with a big jaw and a queen with a humble face in England, and there was a king with a big jaw and a queen with a beautiful face in France. In both countries it was perfectly clear to these, the ruling class, that all was well.
It was the year 1775. People then, like people now, looked for revelations. There were magic chickens in some places or spirits knocking on tables in others, that would tell you London or the government were going to be destroyed. But there were revelations also coming to the crown from people who lived across the Atlantic, revelations which had no magic. People would soon see that these revelations were far more important than anything the chickens could tell them.
[The next year, 1776, America broke away from England to become a free country on her own.]
France, which was not as religious as England, was moving smoothly down a hill, spending money as fast as she could print it. Her spiritual leaders entertained her by doing such wonderful things as cutting a boy’s hands off, pulling his tongue out with pliers, and then burning his body while he was still alive, because he did not drop to his knees in the rain when a group of religious leaders walked by him from some distance away. I should think that at the time this was happening there were trees growing in France or in a neighbouring country that were already marked to be used to make a machine with a sharp knife in it and a bag to catch the head of the person killed by it. And I should think that on the farms close to Paris there were at that time rough wagons covered with mud, that would be used to carry people to their death at the mercy of those machines. But the ones planning all of this worked quietly at that time, for fear others would think their plans made them enemies of God or guilty of treason.
There was little in England at that time to be proud of either. People were robbed in their homes and in the streets every night in London. Families were told not to leave the city without moving their furniture to some safe place. Robbers by night became city workers by day. One such robber, who was pointed out by another worker, just shot the man in the head and ran. A mail coach was stopped by seven robbers. The guard killed three of them before running out of bullets, and then he was killed himself, after which the other four robbers finished their job in peace. The Mayor of London was robbed in an open park, in front of all his helpers. Prisoners often started fights with the prison guards, and the police would open fire on them. Robbers cut diamond crosses from around the necks of the rich. And men with guns returned fire on a crowd of smugglers after the smugglers started shooting at them. All of this would happen without anyone thinking that there was anything strange about it.
In the middle of all this, the man whose job it was to hang people, and who was never of any real use to anyone, was always busy: first hanging a long line of mixed criminals, then hanging a man on Saturday for breaking into a house on Tuesday; one day burning marks into the hands of people at the prison, and the next day burning leaflets outside the house of government; today taking the life of an awful killer, and tomorrow taking the life of a man who robbed a small coin from a farm boy.
All these things and a thousand more like them happened around the year 1775. There were the farmer and the woodcutter making their plans for a takeover in France, and there were those two men with faces so much the same and their wives with faces so different, each confidently doing what they believed was God’s will. The year 1775 moved the Great ones — and other less great ones that you will meet in this story — along the road that was to change them all.