Lord M'reng

The Honourable Lord M′reng, Dr. Trjuk Krjên-magh MP, MPhD, OA
Native name	筑柬寞
Born	(1812-12-30)December 30, 1812
Died	May 2, 1881(1881-05-02) (aged 68) Kien-k'ang, Themiclesia
Buried	c. 3 km south of Tubh Railway Station, Tubh County, Inner Region
Allegiance	Themiclesia
Service/branch	Militia of Mhje′ and Marines
Years of service	1855 – 1858, 1863 – 1881
Rank	MP & Second Class (rural election) Colonel-in-Chief (1855 – 1858) Colonel (1863 – 1870) Colonel-General (1870 – 1881)
Commands held	Marshal of Mhje′ 2nd Regiment of Marines Captain-General of Marines
Battles/wars	Battle of Liang-la
Awards	Order of Authors (posthumously, 1901) Doctor of Mathematics (posthumously, Academia Shinasthana, 1905)

The Hon. Lord M′reng, Dr. Trjuk Krjên-magh MP, PhD, OA (Shinasthana: 筑柬寞, Dec. 30, 1812 – May 2, 1881) was a Themiclesian mathematician, legislator, civil servant, and military officer. He was born the second son of the Lord of Nrak in 1812 in the Inner Region and was a member of parliament between 1847 and 1854 in Tubh, for the Conservative Party. The Conservatives in opposition, he lost his seat in 1854 without entering the ministry. He became the Director of Education of Mhjeh the following year then moved to the Marshal of Mhjeh. A staunch Conservative, he entered a prolonged feud with the Liberal Secretary of State for War over budget and was dismissed in 1858. He became a doctor of mathematics in 1860, working on discrete calculus. Through his connections in the Navy, he became the colonel of the 2nd Regiment of Marines, thereas surrendering to the Camians in the Battle of Liang-la. Shortly after a public inquiry, he was promoted to Captain-General, where he entered another feud with the Admiralty and the future prime minister the Lord of Krungh, and there he remained until his death in 1881.

Military career

Marines

Trjuk returned to the University of the Pond in 1860 to pursue a doctorate in mathematics, working on his long-beloved field of discrete calculus. He became a doctor of mathematics from that institution in 1862. Having tried and failed to secure a tenure in that institution, he again appealed to the Ministry of Administration for a public office, but his prolonged disagreement with the Lord of Krungh, who was by this time a leading figure in the Conservative Party, prevented a rapid appointment. Eventually, Krungh told the Executive Committee he planned to "get rid of him" (from the social scene in Kien-k'ang) by arranging his appointment as colonel of the 2nd Regiment of Marines, which was stationed on the Isle of Liang. On the one hand, Trjuk wanted an appointment soon, as his seniority in the Civil Service would expire soon if he was not in some sort of office, but he detested the idea of being on Liang, which the Camians threatened to take. Trjuk appeared before the Executive Committee and stated the "colonelcy can be offered to a starving pauper and be still rejected," while making dissenting speeches to aristocrats and other party leaders. Eventually, he was forced to accept the position. After the appointment, he lingered in Kien-k'ang, unwilling to travel to the island, for several months. The government ordered him to set sail in March 1864, after irrepressable Liberal derision and caricature of his refusal to take up his commission, which was threatening the image of the Conservative Party.

On his first day in office, Trjuk made a serious blunder by playing and accidentally discharging a pistol, killing one of his subordinates. The government sent a tribune (government attorney) to investigate the homicide, and Trjuk was duly acquitted by the House of Lords, on the grounds that he did not know how a pistol worked or that it was dangerous. In 1865, Trjuk was made Lord M′reng (顭君) on completing 20 years of public service, as the brother of a sitting peer. Liberal MP ′jang said it was "20 years of public disservice". The latter, invited to visit Trjuk, asked the same if he even knew what a gun was. He replied, "I am glad to say I have never seen a gun before. It is obvious our social spheres have been widely different." Asked what he did during the day, he said he invited himself to lunch and dinner every day on the empty island, because there was nobody to talk to. The MP also discovered a large pile of letters from the Admiralty in a basket for firewood. He later disclosed all he heard and saw to journalists, who hounded the government for his replacement. Yet since his was a Parliamentary appointment, the Admiralty was powerless to move him, and the House of Lords was unwilling to set the precedent of removing an aristocrat from office on the grounds of incompetence. On the other hand, Trjuk also arranged for broad publication for his monograph Insular Calculus (mocking his isolation on Liang), which was a success amongst academics in the 1860s and 70s.

After surrendering to the Camians, the Commons Liberals demanded his immediate dismissal for refusing to fight. The Conservative majority rejected an impeachment, after the House of Lords said they would not at all consider the removal of an aristocrat from office. However, he lost an election in 1870 for a seat in parliament. Krungh, his eternal enemy, played a cruel prank on him—he was made Captain-General of Marines, enlarging job that he hated. Trjuk was so frustrated that at one point he considered suicide. Over the next few years, Trjuk gave up on the thought of obtaining a ministerial office, which became progressively remote as Krungh became the leader of the New Conservative faction that was gaining traction amongst peers. Trjuk began to table legislation at the House of Commons relating to his portfolio rather than antagonize Krungh. Ironically, this made him a more popular person in the party. By 1875, Trjuk was tabling a considerable number of bills to repeal a number of disliked rules in the Marine Corps. In 1878, he managed to abolish the hated militia fine, which was a fine levied on marines with the excuse that they fail to participate in five days' drilling at their home towns' militias. Civilians simply claimed a "lame leg", and this was never contested, but this was not possible for marines for obvious reasons. Trjuk delivered a memorable speech at the Commons:

[...] I am by profession a mathematician, but it does not require a mathematician to see that every calendar year is approximately 365 and a quarter days. For this entire time, marines are employed aboard the Consolidated Fleet and other needy places, not permitted to leave. It seems impossible, to my mind at any rate, that they could have five days outside of the calendar year to discharge their natural and civic duties at militia musters. I would beg this house, for that reason, to make a statute excusing them from that duty, and they will ever remember the grace of Parliament, and so on and so forth...

Personal life

Sexuality

Main article: Sexual orientation and gender identity in the Themiclesian military

Trjuk was an open homosexual throughout his public life. While he was against lurid language in public, believing it to be disrespectful, he fought with Admiral Trat over homosexual intercourse on ships, which the Admiralty was desirous to prevent in the 1870s. He said the prohibition of gay sex was "unfounded and Liberal".

However, recent scholars have pointed out that Trjuk was not "a shining beacon of traditional morality" in an age when Casaterran homophobia was gaining acceptance in Themiclesia. For decades, homosexuality had been pathologized by Casaterran medical scholars, described with moralistic overtones as mental degeneracy. At sea, it was also legally prohibited to interfere with a sailor on duty. This gave sailors an enormous advantage avoiding allegations of minor misbehaviour, and a frequent one was sexual abuse of marines. This is because under Themiclesian law a male person cannot be a victim of rape, which is viewed as a crime against the family; when an instance of male-on-male rape occurred, it was prosecuted as a misdemeanour, as much as an unwanted grab. The offender was often required to pay nothing more than an apology. Thus, the banning of homosexuality was not only motivated by Casaterran moralities and then-accepted medical theories, but also by marines' sensitivities in the 1800s. The Admiralty had proposed a total ban on homosexual intercourse in 1870, but Trjuk refused to propose the same for the Marines.

Homosexual intercourse in Themiclesia historically implied a categorization into an active and passive roles, which is not necessarily reflective of actual intercourse, but accosting and courting. The legal immunity of sailors and realities of naval routines meant marines often had no recourse to prevent unwanted advances, especially when sexual assault may have multiple perpetrators or accessories. After the fact, most chose to stay silent for fear of stigmatization. While modern scholarship would state that sailors were in a position of power in this relationship, the bureaucracy of the Themiclesian government regarded both sailors and marines as commoners, without a difference in power. Thus, while the law strictly forbids a judge from having sex, or even proposing it, with a female litigant, for fear of abuse of power, it fails to account for the implicit power of a sailor on an active ship, which is not found in the law or not intended by the law. This situation has since been corrected, where power is assessed objectively rather than legally, but after Trjuk's era.

What is interesting therefore is Trjuk's position. As a blue-blooded aristocrat, he was free to advance on anyone he wished to, except superior aristocrats. His liberty would have been well-aware to him. In the context of power relations in the navy, though he was Captain-general of Marines, he was on the empowered side of the sexual scene, not the disempowered side, due to his sheer status. He enjoyed an immunity higher than sailors, being the son of a peer and brother, by blood, to another peer. While there is no evidence that Trjuk ever forced marines to have sex with him, his lack of sympathy for them is readily explained by his privileged upbringing, where a sexual partner would have been more than forthcoming. Additionally, if he did, it is likely he could never be punished for it, since he was entitled to a trial by the House of Lords, many of whose members were accustomed to having this sort of access in their daily lives, in the sexual context and others.

Death

Trjuk died in 1881, aged 68, to typhoid fever.

Scandal

Theatre incident

On Jun. 2, 1873, Trjuk was at the Oriental Opera when two marines came in with a message, waving at him from the balcony. Trjuk was too embarrassed to acknowledge them, since they were standing in front of the audience. One ran down the staircase but fell, dying on the spot. The performance stopped, and lights were brought in. The public noticed that Trjuk was in the theatre and called on him to do something. Trjuk told the public that nobody else fell on the staircase, so it was the marine's own fault for falling and dying. While Trjuk later petitioned Parliament to pay for his funeral at public expense, he also invoiced the marine's heir to replace the expensive imported rug at the theatre and refund the shocked audience that night. This came to a considerable amount of money that his heir could ill-afford. When criticized for his unsympathetic handling of the incident, he said he was "a good Liberal, for we must all be responsible for what we cost each other."

Snubbing the Master-general

Trjuk personally hated the Master-general of the Ordnance. On Christmas 1877, he invited the Master-general to "his house" for a dinner party, which he held at his quayside house in the New District. Not knowing that Trjuk had a quayside house, the Master-general took a present to his house on address, which was empty. Feeling snubbed, he tossed the present over the garden walls and left. Next month at the Admiralty's graden party, Trjuk made it known that the Master-general had missed his dinner and provoked the latter's indignant response. However, the officers around Trjuk all said that the dinner happened, and the Master-general did not remember correctly. Trjuk then asked where exactly the Master-general visited, and to the response a great laughter broke out on the grounds, that the Master-general did not know that "fasionable people" had moved the social scene to the New District in 1871. The Master-general stormed out of the party and sued Trjuk for wasting his money on the present, which he gave on condition that the Master-general would repeat in open court why he had lost the present.

Commemoration

For his achievements in mathematics, he was posthumously inducted into the Order of Authors in 1905. In 1925, 44 years after his death, the Marine Corps paid for a statue of him at the Naval Academy. The Personal Images Act, which was abolished in 1925, prohibited the depiction of peers and high-ranking civil servants without their permission, or that of their next of kin, after their deaths. His elder brother's son forbade his depiction in uniform that the Marine Corps wanted, since Trjuk himself made a point about Marines' uniforms being "unfashionable" and refusing to wear it. The abolition of the act allowed the Marines to make a statue of him wearing their uniforms; however, because his shape was not in living memory, the statue's body is actually modelled by a different person. As a doctor of mathematics, the Mathematics Department of the Army Academy annually presents a box of chalk at the foot of his statue, which is promptly removed by the Marines.

Quotes

• "Sir, you stench of verdigris." — to the Liberal prime minister in 1851. Themiclesian coins were made of bronze, and to stench of verdigris was to evoke the image of money.
• "Mhje′ Prefecture is made more noble by the absence of a great amount of Liberals in its bosom, and its nonsensical expositions about equality in its mouth."
• "The first allegiance of the aristocracy is towards the little people in the streets and in the fields. By their vileness they ennoble us." — to fellow Conservative MP Hjen Gap, in a division.
• "With the prolongation of this Liberal government, we move from aristocracy to plutocracy, where power is measured by wealth and not merit." — to his constituents in the general election of 1854.
• "Sir, you commit treason if you fight this hour, and it is my unenviable duty to stop you." — to a fellow officer in the 2nd Regiment of Marines, before discharging a pistol on him.
• "I beg your pardon that I must shoot you. Please charge all convalescence costs to my estate agent." — to another fellow officer who wanted to engage the Camians, shooting him in the foot. The pistol flew out of his hand and left a scar on his left forehead.
• "This is a democratic isle, and we are a democratic force. Two commanders outweigh one." — to the commander of the 624th Signals Company and 81th Land Battalion of Naval Engineers, discussing whether they should surrender to the Camian forces.
• "Even if I surrender and soil your name a thousand times, I am the fittest man to be Captain-General, for I have been a member of parliament."
• "I am honoured to defend your pay-rise. To my mind there is no greater honour than to improve the condition of those who undergo the worst of conditions."
• "My lords and gentlemen, if each of you grant an amount equal to one percent of your personal income to my forces, they shall eternally be in your debt and thereof grateful to our high and august Parliament. At a stroke of your pen, you have power to improve their condition immesurably." — in his speech arguing for a 9-pence pay-rise for marines.
• "And because the populace continue to migrate to the coast, the cost of land continues to rise. Land being the source of many products, the cost of things in the vicinity also rises commensurately. The increase in the price of things is projected to be 13.2 per cent over the next six years; if nothing else, I ask humbly this house to adjust our salaries according to this figure."
• "The Master-General of the Ordnance: a pimp without a harlot, and so therefor his own harlot. And he is still worse than either, for he is of the middling sort." — on the Master-General of the Ordnance, who rejected one of his papers for new cannons.
• "The 20-year term of service must be abolished forthwith. It is cruel and drives recruits away, making the public gossip of innocent men as freaks of nature." — before the Council of Protonotaries, 1873, arguing that the standard 20-year term of service should be abolished.
• "I have lived an aristocratic life and done right things for lesser, lower individuals assigned to my custody. I think I may face my noble ancestors and friends with no shame." — on his deathbed.

See also

• Themiclesia