Lord M'reng

The Honourable Lord M′reng, Dr. Trjuk Krjên-magh MP, MtD, OA
Nickname(s)	Srên (潸)
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	Colonel-in-Chief (1855 – 1858) Colonel (1863 – 1870) Colonel-general (1870 – 1881)
Commands held	2nd Regiment of Marines Captain-general of Marines
Battles/wars	Battle of Liang-la
Awards	Order of Authors (posthumously, 1901) Doctor of Mathematics

The Hon. Dr. Trjuk Krjên-magh, Lord M′reng MP, MtD, 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. After entering the administration, he feuded with the Liberals over budget and was dismissed in 1858. He became a doctor of mathematics (MtD) in 1863 for his work on discrete calculus.

Through his connections in the Navy, Trjuk bought the colonelcy in the 2nd Regiment of Marines. He surrendered to the Camians in the Battle of Liang-la but escaped disgrace. He became 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.

Academic work

Trjuk returned to the University of the Pond in 1860 to continue work on discrete calculus. He became a doctor of mathematics from that institution in 1863. He was the second Themiclesian to possess a doctorate in mathematics; not more than ten individuals received this distinction in the 19th century. In 1865, while on military commission, Trjuk 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.

Military career

Having tried and failed to secure a lecturing tour, he appealed in 1865 to the Baron of Na-qrum, prime minister and leader of the Conservative party, for office. Lord of Krungs, there a leading figure, interfered with the appointment. Eventually, Krungs told Conservative magnates he planned to "get rid of him" (from the social scene in Kien-k'ang) by offering him a commission as colonel of the Lower Naval Engineers, a Marines unit stationed on the Isle of Liang. The island was four days from the Themiclesan coast by steamboat.

M′reng desired an office urgently, but he detested the idea of being on Liang, which the Camians threatened to take by force. He appeared before other prominent Conservatives and lobbied their support for a seat in the House of Commons. As the emerging Conservative leader, the Lord of M'i, wanted to reform the party to place more emphasis on integrity and public spirit, he was not offered a different position. After taking the commission, he lingered in Kien-k'ang, unwilling to travel to the island, for several months. The Liberals found out about his reluctance to travel to his post and pressured the Government to order him to set sail in January 1866.

On his first day on the island, he made a serious blunder by accidentally discharging a pistol, killing one of his subordinates. The government sent a government attorney to investigate the homicide, and Trjuk was acquitted only with the intercession of the Barons of the Admiralty. In 1865, he was named Lord M′reng (顭君) for being in public service for 20 years. ′Eng, a Liberal MP, snidely asked if he knew what a gun was, and 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 wrote letters and invited himself to meals, because there was nobody to talk to. The MP also discovered a large pile of letters from the Admiralty in a basket for firewood.

In 1867, the Camians invaded the island in the Battle of Liang-la and blockaded the Bay of Themiclesia. M′reng, without orders to resist, surrendered the island to the Camian forces on the island so quickly as to take them by surprise. While many officers considered his behaviour unbecoming, he was priased by the Conservatives for his sensibility.

After surrendering to the Camians, the Liberal opposition demanded his dismissal, to be rejected by the Conservatives in the upper house. In Nov. 1867, the incumbent Captain-general of Marines accepted a tenure at the City University, creating a vacancy that Na-qrum filled by calling M′reng to the Ministry. M′reng felt so indebted to Na-qrum that he financed his own by-election, but unexpectedly, the electorate, turned out by the local Liberal party, rejected him at the polls.

The Liberal leader, the Lord of Sng′ra′, apologized for the discourtesy of blocking a ministerial by-election but nevertheless expressed distain for the blatantly-political appointment. Other Liberal parliamentarians pointed out that, out of the five colonels then in the Marines, only M′reng was a Conservative. M′reng stood again and was elected without incident in Mik, which was in pocket of the Baron of Trek. As was customary at that time, active military officers called to the Ministry were required to stand in a by-election but did not actually take their seats in the House; this ensured that only the most well-connected and financially secure officers could secure high appointments.

However, M′reng's tenure was cut short by the general election of Mar. 1869, which saw the Liberal Party restored to power with a tremendous majority. He resigned the captaincy-general with Na-qrum's ministry. Coincidentally, his replacement Lord Kram also lost his by-election and had to stand in a safe seat, at great expense. While it has been the Liberal Party's overarching goal to establish a professional military leadership, this goal was shelved during Sng′ra′s second premiership as it focused on assisting the economy deal with the influx of agricultural products resulting from the elimination of tariffs.

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 indecent, 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 sex between naval personnel was "unfounded and Liberal". However, recent scholarship suggests Trjuk was not "a shining beacon of traditional morality in an age when Casaterran homophobia was gaining acceptance in Themiclesia", like some previous authors have argued.

Homosexuality had been pathologized by Casaterran medical scholars, sometimes ascribed with moralistic overtones as degeneracy. As Themiclesian law prohibited interference with a crew member on duty, sailors enjoyed an enormous advantage avoiding allegations of minor misbehaviour, and a frequent one was sexual abuse of marines. Under contemporary law, males cannot be victims of rape, which is viewed as a crime against the family; instance of male-on-male rape were prosecuted as misdemeanours. Thus, the banning of homosexuality was not only motivated by Casaterran moralities and then-accepted medical theories, but also by the Admiralty's desire to protect marines against abuse. 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 active and passive roles, which is not necessarily reflected in intercourse, but courting. The legal immunity of crew members and 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. Thus, while the law forbade a judge from having sex, or even proposing it, with a litigant, for fear of abuse of power, it did not account for the implicit power of a sailor on a ship at sea. Instead, Themiclesian law regarded both sailors and marines as commoners, without a difference in power. This situation has since been corrected, where the ability to coerce is assessed empirically rather than legally.

Death

Trjuk died in 1881, aged 68, to typhoid fever. As a member of the peerage who died during public service, he lay in state at the Court Hall in Kien-k'ang, between May and June 1881. He was unmarried and childless, so his cousin led the hearse from the capital city back to his estate in Tubh, where he was interred. The Inner Administrator and the Magistrate of Tubh were both in attendance at his funeral.

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 opined that nobody else fell to their deaths on that 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 family to replace the expensive imported rug at the theatre and to refund the shocked audience that night. This came to a considerable amount that his family could ill-afford. When criticized for his unsympathetic handling of the incident, he said he was merely implementing "Liberal policy".

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 did occur. 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 conceded 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, abolished that year, prohibited the depiction of peers and gentlemen 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 refused to be in Marines' uniforms, which he claimed was "unfashionable". The abolition of the act allowed the Marines to make a statue of him in uniform; however, because his shape was not in living memory, the statue's body is actually modelled by the sculptor's neighbour.

As the very first doctor of mathematics from that institution, 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.

Titles and honours

• His peerage, the Baronetcy of M′reng, was granted in 1865 for prolonged public service, at the recommendation of the Baron of Na-qrum, prime minister at that time. It reverted to the Crown upon his death in 1880.
• He was made a supernumerary Captain of the Gentlemen of the Household in 1873.

Quotes

• "Sir, you stench of verdigris." — to the Liberal prime minister in 1851. Themiclesian coins were bronze, and to "stench of verdigris" was to evoke the image of money, especially ill-gotten.
• "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."

See also

• Themiclesia