What will one do for love?

On 10 September 1547, two regents met in a field east of Edinburgh and tried to settle a marriage by cannon. On 10 September 1846, almost three centuries later to the day, a poor Cambridge machinist was granted a patent for a machine born of watching his wife sew. One story is about a crown that would not take no for an answer. The other is about a household that could not afford to keep sewing by hand. Both ask the same question: what will one do for love—or for the thing one has decided to call love?

Henry VIII wanted his son Edward married to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. The Treaty of Greenwich of 1543 was the polite version. The Scots rejected it and looked to France. Henry died in January 1547. His brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector for the nine-year-old Edward VI, did not drop the project. He wanted the marriage and an English-style reformation of the Scottish church. When talk failed, he marched. James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, governed for five-year-old Mary. So the last full-scale battle between the independent kingdoms of England and Scotland was fought by two men acting for children who could not yet choose.

Somerset brought about 16,800 fighting men, a heavy gun train, German arquebusiers, some 6,000 horse, and a fleet of about thirty ships. Arran had more men—most estimates sit near 22,000 to 23,000, some higher—chiefly pikemen, Highland archers, and light Border horse. On 9 September the Scottish cavalry was broken in a foolish, chivalric challenge on Falside Hill. On the morning of the 10th Arran left a strong position west of the Esk and came on in pike columns, perhaps fearing the English would seize the Inveresk slopes, perhaps mistaking a movement toward the guns for a retreat to the ships. English warships raked his left. Field guns, arquebuses, and bows found the crowded columns. The Scots drove off a cavalry charge and nearly took the royal standard, then stalled under fire from three sides and broke. The pursuit ran for miles toward Edinburgh and Leith. The Esk ran red. English dead numbered a few hundred. Scottish dead were in the thousands; Huntly’s figure of about 6,000 is more credible than the English claim of 14,000 or 15,000. Scotland called it Black Saturday.

Somerset occupied ground and planted garrisons. He did not get the girl. Mary was moved, then sent to France in 1548 to marry the Dauphin. The Auld Alliance was renewed. The occupation bled the English treasury. Peace came in 1551. The marriage England had sought at the point of a pike never happened. Pinkie was militarily modern—infantry, horse, field artillery, and naval guns used together—and politically barren. That is what a dynasty will do when it confuses alliance with affection.

Elias Howe Jr. was not a duke. He was born in 1819 in Spencer, Massachusetts, a journeyman machinist, later in Cambridge, poor. His wife Elizabeth took in sewing. Earlier patented machines existed; John Greenough’s 1842 patent was the first American sewing-machine grant. Most of them made a chainstitch. Howe watched his wife and decided a machine should not copy the motion of a human arm. George Fisher boarded the family and put in $500 for a half-share. By April 1845 Howe had a working model that sewed two woollen suits. On 10 September 1846 he received U.S. Patent 4,750, the fifth American sewing-machine patent and the first for a practical lockstitch: a curved eye-pointed needle on a vibrating arm, thread from a spool, a shuttle with a second thread locking the loop, and an automatic feed. About 250 stitches a minute. He did not invent the eye-pointed needle. He made the combination work.

American tailors were cold. Howe’s brother Amasa took the idea to England. William Thomas bought rights and patented there that December. The English venture failed. Howe came home in debt. Elizabeth died in 1849. Isaac Singer and others sold machines on the same lockstitch principle. Howe spent years in court. The courts held his patent basic. In 1856 the makers formed a patent pool. Howe took royalties—commonly given as five dollars a machine in the United States and one dollar on exports—and over the life of the patent, extended to 1867, on the order of two million dollars. He later built machines at Bridgeport, showed them at expositions, took a Paris gold medal and the Légion d’honneur. Singer sold the household machine. Howe established the stitch.

It is easy to over- sweeten this. Howe was not a saint of domestic piety. He became rich by defending a patent, not by putting a machine in every kitchen. Manchester’s mills were already a fact of the textile age; Howe’s lockstitch was an American mechanical solution that industry and later the home adopted. Still, the origin is not a treaty. It is a man who could not watch his wife’s hands work forever without trying to change the work.

Set the two Septembers side by side and the word love splits. Somerset’s love was policy: a child-bride as instrument of union and reform, enforced by combined arms on the Esk. Howe’s was narrower and more honest: a wife sewing because there was no other money, and a mind that refused to treat her labour as unchangeable. One campaign kidnapped a kingdom’s future and lost the prize. The other began in a rented room and, after ruin, lawsuits, and a grave, altered how cloth is joined.

What will one do for love? Some will burn a country to secure a marriage that never takes place. Some will stay at the bench until a needle and a shuttle lock two threads. History is not obliged to prefer the second. It is obliged to notice that they are not the same thing. Within 60 years of the battle, England and Scotland united, remaining so today.

Decoding “states’ rights” as the phrase is used now

When the SAVE Act is discussed, the reply is often that “states’ rights” are being brushed aside: Washington must not dictate how a state runs its elections. The echo is old. Before the Civil War the same words were used to defend a state’s right to keep people as property. Then and now the slogan is thinner than it sounds.

A democracy has a duty of care over the roll. Who may vote is not a local folkway like a county fair rule. It is the boundary of the political community. Australia learned that the ordinary way. Into the early 1980s a person did not have to be a citizen to vote; British subjects and permanent residents could sit on the roll. The Hawke government required citizenship and grandfathered those already enrolled. That is a world away from an undocumented registrant, or a system that treats photo ID as an outrage. A permanent resident is known to the state. An unverified ballot is not.

Used as a shield, “states’ rights” often means: do not look too closely at the practice. Slavery was defended that way. It was also a bad bargain next to open labour and capital. Rome, for all its cruelty, still treated bondage as a legal condition many people passed through. After Spartacus was destroyed in 71 BC—legions in the field, then some six thousand crosses along the Appian Way—Rome did not slam the legal door. A slave remained a res under the master’s power, but the peculium let skilled and urban slaves handle money as if it were theirs and buy freedom. Formal manumission could make a libertus a citizen with duties to a patron. Race was not the test. A Greek tutor and a mine slave were both servi.

South Carolina was already a different machine in 1738. The 1712 code treated Negroes, Indians (except allied free Indians), mulattoes and mustizoes as “absolute slaves” and “chattels personal,” status following the mother, unfit for English common law. After the Stono Rebellion of 1739 the Negro Act of 1740 locked the system: no independent plots or hire, no assembly, no writing, no drums, manumission only by act of the legislature, any white man empowered to stop a Black person off the plantation, killing a slave reduced to a fine. That code, not the older one, ran to 1865.

Rome answered revolt with steel and left the statutes elastic. Carolina answered revolt with a statute and closed the exits. A century later the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott (1857), could not find a free man free because of race. That is the fruit of a closed racial caste, not of “states’ rights” as a neutral principle.

The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 after a Jewish revolt against Rome. It was not sacked because Jews were “one in six” in the city of Rome. Mixing that episode with Carolina’s Black majority only muddies the point. The point is simpler. When “states’ rights” means a state may keep an unverifiable roll, or once meant a state may keep a man as a chattel with no path out, the phrase is doing offensive work. Government that asks for proof of citizenship is not inventing a new tyranny. It is doing the duty the older slogan was written to dodge.

Rome and Carolina shared the word slave. They did not share the method. Citizenship and the ballot are the same kind of line. Either the line is real, or “rights” is only a costume for the practice you refuse to defend in plain speech.

THE PAYMASTERS NOW WRITE THE CHEQUES

A 2026 companion to a 2016 column on induction, lampoon and the funded press

Ten years ago I wrote that I had stopped sending letters to the local papers. They published abusive copy under my name and refused the letters that were not abusive — the ones that argued for small government and limited spending. I am not a social conservative. I am an economic one. When I spoke to the journalists they seethed. I said then that the problem was smaller than “the culture of the left.” It sat in how journalists were inducted, how they were trained, what the work pressures were, and who paid them.

The antecedents have not aged. They have been institutionalised.

In 2016 the paymasters were proprietors, advertisers and the social set that sets the newsroom temperature. In 2026 the Commonwealth has joined them as a direct employer of private newsrooms. That is not a metaphor. It is a line item.

Direct endowments

The Albanese government’s News Media Assistance Program now puts nearly one hundred million dollars in grants through the news sector. The centrepiece is the Journalism Assistance Fund: $67.6 million, GST exclusive, paid as a wage subsidy of $13,000 a year — $39,000 over three years — for each eligible full-time journalist producing “core news” online. Applications opened in November 2025 and closed in twenty-eight days because the money was gone. One hundred and eighty-five publishers were funded. More than two thousand journalists now have a slice of their salary underwritten by the taxpayer through to June 2028.

The largest cheques did not go to the bush weekly that cannot pay a cadet. They went to the mastheads that already cover Canberra. Nine, through Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment, took about $16.1 million. Seven took $5.6 million. West Australian Newspapers took $4.1 million. The Conversation, Private Media, Capital Brief, The Daily Aus and Mamamia were on the list. Opinion and editorial are formally excluded from the eligible content. That is a neat distinction on paper. In a newsroom it is the same payroll.

There is more. A News Innovation Fund of up to $31.5 million. A $12 million News Media Relief Program before that. Thirty-three million over three years for the Australian Associated Press. A mandated $3 million a year of Commonwealth advertising into regional newspapers. And in August 2026 Parliament passed the News Bargaining Incentive: a 2.5 per cent charge on the Australian digital advertising revenue of Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn unless they strike commercial deals with local publishers. The Treasury’s own papers put the flow at $200–250 million a year if the platforms deal, and more if they do not and the charge is collected and redistributed. The old Bargaining Code let a platform walk away by dropping news. The new law closes that door. The state now sits between Silicon Valley and the Australian newsroom as allocator.

Jobs in the communications portfolio

The public payroll around all of this has not shrunk. For 2026–27 the ABC is appropriated $1.288 billion from government, with average staffing of 4,454. SBS takes about $367 million from government, with staffing a little under 1,370. Together the two public broadcasters draw roughly $1.65 billion a year from the taxpayer. That is before a single Journalism Assistance Fund dollar is counted.

Inside the portfolio itself the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts is budgeted at 2,264 average staff in 2026–27, up from 2,172. The Australian Communications and Media Authority rises from 704 to 731. The portfolio as a whole sits at about 13,380. That is the official communications machinery — the people who write the grant guidelines, assess the applications, administer the bargaining incentive and explain why none of this is influence.

It is not only Canberra. Queensland’s government communications, media and marketing workforce has been counted at 1,260 — more PR officers than disability support workers in that state, and more than the number of working journalists the Australia Institute found living in Queensland. The Commonwealth has spent the last four years converting contractors into public servants and adding roles. Communications is one of the occupations that grows when government grows. Public relations professionals nationally are projected to keep growing faster than the labour force as a whole. The induction I described in 2016 now has a career path, a classification and a superannuation scheme.

What the 2016 column already knew

The left learned that lying about an opponent and lampooning him limits his success. That was true of Palin and Abbott. It was true of Kennett, Newman and O’Farrell. It remains the method. A conservative who talks about spending is still a cartoon. A government that writes the wage subsidy is a friend of public-interest journalism.

They also learned that a figure they support can be excused almost anything if the blame can be diverted. In 2016 the published letter was a call to arms dressed as an excuse note. The form has not changed. The subject has. Do not blame the grant for the coverage. Do not blame the minister for the masthead. Do not blame Islam, we were told then; do not blame the endowment, we are told now. The Communications Minister says the support is “not conditional on what stories are written,” and that to suggest otherwise is an insult to journalists. That is the same sentence every patron has used since Whitlam made the first introductions.

When Chinese cash helped roll Howard in 2007, I wrote that China had gone too far, and that there was nothing new about Carr or Dastyari — both bought and paid for, as the ALP had sought communist support since Whitlam. The Liberals, I said, probably had similar problems among the fifty-five bed-wetters. The phrase outlived the parliament. It is still the insult conservative factions throw at one another. What it named was hesitation: the habit of keeping options open until after they have ceased to be options. Turnbull did not temporise. He dithered. The party that replaced him has not recovered a reputation for limited government. It has recovered a talent for internal weather reports.

The Daily Mail headline I called a misjudgement of Malcolm Farr proportions was a small instance of a large habit: extract the line that flatters the room, bury the question that does not. Bolt was right to put the question then. The questions now are simpler, and still unwelcome. Who signs the journalist’s wage? Who writes the grant guideline that defines “core news”? Who sits in the communications portfolio and calls that independence?

Small government, still

I have not become a social conservative in the decade since. I still believe government should be smaller and spend less. A state that part-pays two thousand private journalists, fully pays four and a half thousand at the ABC, and staffs a communications portfolio in the thousands, is not a small state. It is a state that has decided the press is a service to be procured.

The local papers that would not print a non-abusive conservative letter did not need a grant program to teach them the lesson. They already knew which letters were safe. The grant program does not invent that instinct. It funds it, professionalises it, and calls the result diversity.

For some, in 2016, the Sex Party had more credibility. The joke has worn. Credibility now belongs to whoever is not on the payroll — and to the reader who still notices when the abusive letter is printed and the other one is not.