Lord M'reng
The Honourable Lord M′reng, Dr. Truk Krin-mak MP, MtD, OA | |
|---|---|
| Native name | 內史筑 顭君柬寞 |
| Nickname(s) | Srin (潸) |
| Born | December 30, 1812 |
| Died | May 2, 1881 (aged 68) Kien-k'ang, Themiclesia |
| Buried | c. 3 km south of Tubh Railway Station, Tubh County, Inner Region |
| Allegiance | Themiclesia |
| Service/ | 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. Truk Krin-mak, Lord M′reng MP, MtD, OA (Shinasthana: 筑柬寞, rf Truk Krin-maqs; Dec. 30, 1812 – May 2, 1881) was a Themiclesian mathematician, politician, 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 in 1863 for his work on discrete calculus.
In the 1860s, he became a colonel in the Marines, and thereas he surrendered to the Camians in the Battle of Liang-la but ultimately escaped disgrace. In 1867, he joined the Na-qrum Ministry as Captain-general of Marines, resigning that office in 1869 along with the Ministry but retaining his colonelcy. He left the military in 1874 for the publishing industry. In 1878, the Lord of M'i appointed him as Master-general of the Ordnance and promoted him as Secretary to the Board of Trade in 1879. He died in 1880 under a severe case of Pneumonia, that winter having been one of the coldest in the century.
Academic work
Truk 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, Truk 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 Truk 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. Nevertheless, the surrender caused a great dip in the trading value of the Marines' commissions, which garnered him the animosity of most other Marines' officers, whose commissions lost as much as 50% of "float", or the market value of the commission above its face or statutory value.
For his rapid surrender, the Liberals demanded he should lose his commission without compensation, but he was rescued by the Government majority 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 (for an unclear reason) filled by calling M′reng to the Ministry. Na-qrum's appointment utterly shocked the Liberal opposition, which could not approve the appointment of an officer "so unbecoming and uncaring" to high office. 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 Treks. 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. M'reng remained as his regiment's colonel. Lord Kram was reportedly on friendly terms with M'reng, but the two could not agree on the need to teach arithmetic skills to ordinary naval servicepeople: Kram believed that M'reng was labouring under a serious misapprehension about the applicability of basic arithmetic to the quotidian duties of the service.
In 1874, M'reng sold his colonelcy to Dr. Tsit, a doctor of medicine, practitioner, and writer of great fame, for the healthy sum of $10,000, yet Tsit continued to write letters almost every day to M'reng asking for advice over all part of the colonel's duties. M'reng thus complained to his friend, Lord Bram, that he was still effectively running the regiment despite not receiving any of its benefits. This complaint somehow made it to Dr. Tsit, who humourously included $0.20—a day's wage of an enlisted man of the regiment—in every letter he sent to M'reng. He adjusted his remuneration to $0.24 per letter ($0.01 for the return stamp) after Parliament increased the regiment's wages to $0.23 in March 1875: M'reng's annual income was about $40,000 in this period.
In 1878, however, M'reng was back in the fold of public service having secured a seat in the electorate of Kyim and appointed as Master-general of the Ordnance by the Conservative premier, Lord of M'i. As the M'i Ministry (for some reason) did not include a separate Captain-general of Marines, M'reng's portfolio extended to the units of the marine corps, ironically placing Dr. Tsit under him. M'reng famously remarked that he was "now in a position to make the jokes about Dr. Tsit", though he was dismayed to find out that his now-subordinated colonel had moved to Anglia permanently in 1877 and declined to sell the commission. In June 1878, M'reng was given the additional office of Receiver-in-Chief of the Exchequer of the East Territories (東國內大史). In October 1878, M'reng was promoted again as the Secretary to the Board of Trade, whereupon the position of Master-general of the Ordnance was given the young Lord Lu-kas.
Board of Trade
Personal life
Sexuality
Truk 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 Truk 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 Truk 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
Truk 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
Snubbing the Master-general
Truk personally hated the Master-general of the Ordnance. On Christmas 1868, 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 Truk 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, Truk made it known that the Master-general had missed his dinner and provoked the latter's indignant response. However, the officers around Truk all said that the dinner did occur. Truk 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 Truk 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 1975, 94 years after his death, the Marine Corps paid for a life-sized statue of him at the Naval Academy, part of a set of three also containing Lord Nya (Captain-general 1907 – 10) and Col. Sam-mri Per (Captain-general 1915 – 16). Because nobody alive remembered M′reng's physical shape, there not being reliable figures about his height and weight, the statue's body was modelled from Col. Martin Bik, the Captain-general in 1975, leading to the quip that Bik had paid the Marines' money mostly for three statues of himself. This argument is strengthened by the fact that Bik's pervious proposal to make life-sized statues of all Captains-general, including himself, was rejected by the Ministry of Defence in 1974 as "idiotic".
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."