United We Stand. Divided We Fall.

First guns at sea and a massacre of prisoners; a broken truce that made Drake and Hawkins lifelong enemies of Spain; a treasure still on the bottom; a dying ship that won anyway; and a pass in a boot that saved a fortress and hanged a major. Late September, four centuries of the same themes — cargo, convoy, honour, and who keeps faith once the shooting starts.

Benedict Arnold was a traitor who tried to give West Point to the British. He had intended the death of many. With Major John André, charged with carrying the plans, he achieved one. They met on the night of 21 September 1780. Arnold, commanding the Hudson fortress, had been selling it for £20,000. André came upriver in HMS Vulture, took the maps and the notes on how the defences had been weakened, and took a pass in the name “John Anderson.” American guns drove the Vulture downriver. André had to go overland in civilian clothes with the papers in his stocking. On the morning of the 23rd, three New York militiamen — John Paulding, David Williams and Isaac Van Wart — stopped him near Tarrytown. He first took them for Loyalists, then offered watch and money. They searched him, found the papers, and sent him in. Arnold got word in time and fled to the British. André, taken in disguise with the documents, was tried as a spy, not a prisoner of war, and hanged at Tappan on 2 October. Washington kept West Point. Arnold’s name became the American word for treason. André, young and composed on the scaffold, drew reluctant respect even from some of his captors. Division did its work: one man sold the line; another paid for the meeting.

A year earlier, almost to the day, John Paul Jones said, “I have not yet begun to fight.” Stirring words — and he was already in the middle of a pitched battle. On 23 September 1779, off Flamborough Head, Jones in the converted East Indiaman Bonhomme Richard — named for Franklin’s Poor Richard — met a Baltic convoy with Alliance, Pallas and Vengeance. The escorts were the new 44-gun Serapis under Captain Richard Pearson and Countess of Scarborough. After a ruse with British colours, both sides fired almost together. Two of Jones’s old 18-pounders burst. Outgunned and leaking, he lashed his ship to Serapis so Pearson could not use better sailing and a heavier broadside. The fight ran into the night. When asked if he struck, he gave the line. A grenade down a hatch set off cartridges on Serapis. Pearson struck. Pallas took Countess of Scarborough. Bonhomme Richard was so smashed she sank two days later. Jones shifted his flag to the prize. The convoy escaped, but the Royal Navy had lost two warships in home waters to a rebel squadron. Unity here was oak, lashings and refusal to separate. A dying ship won because its captain would not let the enemy fight at the range that favoured him.

One hundred and thirty-eight years earlier, same stretch of late September, Merchant Royal sank with Spanish gold now valued in the high hundreds of millions, often put over a billion pounds. It was not a battle, except against weather, a leak and broken pumps. On 23 September 1641, off Land’s End, the English merchantman went down. She had spent two years in the West Indies, put into Cádiz leaking, then taken on a Spanish payroll for Flanders — gold, Mexican silver bars, pieces of eight, jewels — on top of her own cargo. Captain John Limbrey and some forty men were taken off by the sister ship Dover Merchant. Eighteen drowned. The wreck was never found. An anchor lifted by a Cornish trawler in 2019 is sometimes claimed as hers; it has not been proved. She is still called the El Dorado of the seas. The gold was too heavy to salvage. Division again, of a blunter kind: hull from pumps, ship from sister, treasure from the men who lived.

Seventy-three years before that, near Veracruz, English ships — branded pirates and slavers by Madrid — fought a losing fight against about thirteen Spanish vessels. Drake escaped. On 23–24 September 1568, John Hawkins’s third slaving and trading voyage into Spain’s American monopoly ended in the harbour of San Juan de Ulúa. Six ships: flagship Jesus of Lübeck, leased from Elizabeth I; Minion; Drake’s little Judith; three smaller craft. They had been selling enslaved Africans and goods along the Spanish Main, often by force, in defiance of the Treaty of Tordesillas. Storm damage sent them in to repair. A Spanish fleet arrived with the new viceroy, Martín Enríquez de Almanza. A truce was agreed so both sides could use the anchorage. The Spanish broke it: boarding parties, shore batteries, a hulk as a platform. Four English ships were sunk or taken. Only Minion and Judith got out. English losses ran to hundreds of men and almost the whole profit of the voyage. Hawkins and Drake called it treachery. Madrid called it the suppression of smugglers. The hatred it planted helped set the tone of later English privateering against Spain. A truce is a form of unity. Break it, and you breed a longer war.

Two hundred and thirty years earlier still, in 1338, the first naval battle of the Hundred Years’ War proved gunpowder useful, but not everything. Off Arnemuiden, usually dated 23 September, five English cogs under John Kingston were carrying wool to Antwerp so Edward III could pay his allies. A French galley fleet under Hugues Quiéret and Nicolas Béhuchet caught them — outnumbered about ten to one, some English still ashore. The flagship Christopher mounted three primitive cannons and one hand-gun: first recorded European use of artillery at sea. Stone and metal at range instead of only arrows, ramming and boarding. It was not enough. After a day’s fighting Kingston surrendered. The French took the ships and the wool, then massacred the prisoners. Chronicles dwell on the handsome Christophe, built at great cost to the English king, and on the crew put to death. The tactical lesson ran against the technological one. Artillery had arrived at sea. Numbers and boarding still decided the day. A small squadron, divided from the shore and from any supporting fleet, died with its new guns.

United we stand. Divided we fall. The proverb is older than any of these fights, and it is not a hymn to sameness. It is a warning about the moment when a line, a hull, a truce or a pass is split from the men who have to hold it. Arnold divided the cause and ran. Jones refused to divide his wreck from Pearson’s stronger ship and took her. Merchant Royal divided from her pumps and her sister and took the gold with her. Hawkins trusted a harbour truce and lost a fleet. Kingston’s five cogs, cut off and outnumbered, learned that the first cannons at sea do not cancel isolation. Late September keeps teaching the same lesson: cargo and convoy matter; honour matters more; and the side that keeps faith after the first shot is the side that still has a fortress, a prize, or a name worth keeping.

When actors fight with writers

In ancient Greece and Rome, the theatre could be brutal, but it had not yet gone as far as Elizabethan London. Playwrights might serve, actors might brawl, and festivals could explode. What they rarely did was meet in a field with rapiers and leave one man dead of a six-inch wound.

The clearest military example is Aeschylus. He fought at Marathon in 490 BC; his brother Cynaegirus died there. Tradition also links him with Salamis and Plataea. He acted in his own plays. The epitaph he is said to have composed for himself mentions Marathon and says nothing about his tragedies. Sophocles held the civic-military office of strategos. That is command, not arena fighting.

Rome usually kept the professions apart. Livy records that professional actors—histriones—were not enrolled in the legions, and that a citizen who took up acting was struck from his tribe. Players of Atellan farce were an exception, because that form stayed closer to amateur performance. Actors and gladiators both carried infamia: legal disgrace. They could not hold certain offices; their testimony and marriage rights were restricted. They were adjacent low-status spectacle trades, not the same job.

Violence still gathered around the theatre. Competition was fierce. Alcibiades punched a rival chorus-producer—and, in some accounts, a chorus boy—in the Theatre of Dionysus during the Great Dionysia. Decades later Meidias punched Demosthenes in the same theatre. Those were political-religious festival assaults, not stage fights. In Rome, actor cliques and their partisans could riot. Livy and later writers describe faction feeling that ran to bloodshed, in the same register as the circus crowds. Audiences pelted performers.

Elizabethan London closed the gap. On 22 September 1598, in the fields at Hoxton—then Hogsden or Hoggesdon Fields, in Shoreditch—the twenty-six-year-old playwright Ben Jonson killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel. Spencer died on the spot from a rapier thrust six inches deep and an inch wide into his right side. Jonson was indicted for manslaughter, pleaded guilty, and escaped the gallows only by claiming benefit of clergy.

Spencer was a rising player with the Admiral’s Men under Philip Henslowe. He already had a violent reputation. In December 1596, in a Shoreditch barber’s house, he drove a still-sheathed rapier into the eye of James Feake, a goldsmith’s son, after Feake threatened him with a candlestick. Feake died three days later. There is no record that Spencer was punished.

The two men had also been locked up together the year before. In 1597 Jonson co-wrote the lost satirical play The Isle of Dogs with Thomas Nashe. The Privy Council judged it seditious, closed the London theatres, and imprisoned Jonson, Spencer, and another actor, Robert Shaa, in the Marshalsea. Nashe fled. The company broke up and Spencer had to find new work. No one recorded why they later fought. Later guesses include leftover anger over that scandal, or Spencer calling Jonson a bricklayer—the trade Jonson had been trained in and disliked.

Years afterwards Jonson told William Drummond that Spencer had challenged him, arrived with a sword ten inches longer than Jonson’s, and wounded him in the arm first. The indictment is colder: Benjamin Johnson, “yeoman,” “feloniously and wilfully” assaulted Spencer in the fields with a rapier worth three shillings and gave him the mortal wound. Spencer “died instantly.”

Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn four days later: “I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly, that is Gabriel, for he is slain in Hogsden Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.”

Jonson was held in Newgate. At the Old Bailey he confessed to manslaughter. The penalty was hanging. He then claimed benefit of clergy: a medieval privilege that, by Elizabeth’s reign, any literate man could use once. He read Psalm 51—the “neck verse”: “Have mercy upon me, O God…” The court recorded that he “read like a clerk,” branded him on the thumb with the letter T, the Tyburn T, and confiscated his goods. He could not use the plea again.

While in prison he converted to Roman Catholicism, possibly under the influence of the Jesuit Thomas Wright, who worked among prisoners. He later returned to the Church of England. The same year his first major success, Every Man in His Humour, was on the stage. Enemies do not seem to have used Spencer’s death against him much afterwards. Some contemporaries thought Spencer had it coming.

Jonson had already, by his own later account, killed a man in single combat while serving in the Low Countries. The 1598 duel is the one that left a mark on his thumb and nearly ended the career that produced Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair.

Aeschylus could fight Persians and still be buried as a soldier. Sophocles could hold a generalship and still be Sophocles. Rome kept actors off the roll of honour. London put the writer and the player in the same marsh and the same field, with steel in their hands.

Today it tends to be certain drugs that spark the violence. That is not limited to actors.

'Deep state' continues playing games in opposition to Trump.

Those games have serious consequences for those doing their job under Trump administration.

Has Massie’s dart landed? Not in the only place that counts. Hegseth is still Secretary of War. The House did not impeach him. Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled Thursday and sent the chamber home until after the midterms, which is how a privileged resolution dies without anyone having to put their name on the knife. Johnson called it a stunt. Massie called it the “Hegseth holiday.” Both descriptions can be true at once.

The dart still drew blood. That is the point of these games.

Massie is not a deep-state apparatchik. He is a lame-duck libertarian who already lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger Hegseth campaigned for. He has spent a career voting no on wars, surveillance, and spending. He aimed at Hegseth rather than Trump because Hegseth is the man executing the orders and ignoring the War Powers clock. That is a constitutional argument, and it is also a political weapon fired by a man with nothing left to lose inside the party. The effect is the same either way: force Republicans onto the record against a wartime secretary weeks before an election, or force leadership to look as if it is hiding. Leadership hid. That is not victory for Massie. It is not clean for the administration either.

The serious consequence is not the 34-page resolution. It is the climate around the people doing the job. A secretary running a seven-month campaign against Iran, a maritime campaign against drug boats, and the seizure of Nicolás Maduro is now spending part of every week answering process attacks, leak stories, and impeachment theatre. Officers and civilians under him learn the lesson fast: anonymous sourcing is safer than loyalty, and the press will treat a casualty-accounting dispute as proof of a cover-up. That is how institutions punish an administration they did not choose, without ever winning a vote.

Look at the Washington Post piece that dropped three days after Massie spoke. The headline machinery said more U.S. troops have died “amid” the Iran war than the Pentagon has disclosed. The body of the story is thinner. Official public count: 18. Anonymous officials: at least 22, maybe 23. Then the caveat the headline does not want: not all of the extra deaths were tied directly to combat in Iran. Some were personnel in the Middle East while the war was on. Hegseth called the story a lie. The paper called it accountability. Readers were invited to hear “they’re hiding bodies in Iran.” What they were given was framing plus unnamed insiders. That is not the same thing as a suppressed battlefield toll. It is the same method used for years against this president and almost never against the last one when the last one’s wars, withdrawals, and body counts were the story.

None of that requires pretending civilian death is imaginary. A school in Minab was hit early. Children died. A preliminary U.S. assessment said America was likely responsible and did not intend the school. Drug-boat strikes have killed people the administration calls traffickers and Massie calls victims of extrajudicial force. Wars kill people who were not the target. The relevant comparison is intent and method. Trump’s Iran and Venezuela campaigns have been notable for constraint by the standards of American expeditionary history: no occupation army, no nation-building brief, no invitation to linger for twenty years. That is not sainthood. It is not the reckless bloodlust the coverage implies either.

Massie wrapped four different fights into one instrument: War Powers on Iran, civilian-harm law, Kelly’s speech, Maduro, and Yemen. Some of that is a real argument about Article I. Some of it is an attempt to criminalize policy. Kelly reminding troops they may refuse unlawful orders is not sedition. Hegseth treating a sitting senator as if he were still on the Navy’s punishment roster was a political error even if the legal theory was clever. Mixing those counts with the war itself is how an impeachment document becomes a press package.

So: did the dart land?

It did not remove Hegseth. It did not stop the war. It did not command a Republican majority. It did force the Speaker to choose between a midterm roll call and a recess, and Johnson chose the recess. It did feed a week of copy in which “impeachment” and “hidden deaths” travelled farther than the caveats. It did tell every official still working the problem that the opposition’s preferred battlefield is process, leaks, and moral vocabulary, not a declaration of war they will not vote and not an alternative strategy they will not own.

That is the game. It has always been the game against this administration. The people under Trump pay for it in time, morale, and the permanent suggestion that doing the job is itself the scandal. Massie threw the dart at Hegseth so it would stick in Trump. It stuck in the news cycle. It did not stick in the statute book. When the House comes back in November, Johnson says the resolution will be tabled. Believe him. Then watch the next leak. That is where the next dart is already being cut.