But the battle is done. British casualties, most of them from Barney’s naval gunnery, are twice those of the Americans, who are not present to be killed. Catching up with them is out of the question; it is an oven of an afternoon. “The victors were too weary,” Cockburn reports later, “the vanquished too swift,” for evening out the casualties. The redcoats rest. As the sun goes down a fresh party is brought forward to enter the city, which Ross expects to be better defended by a regrouped American army.

But the invaders march down Maryland Avenue unopposed toward the Capitol. Not only have the defenders fled; they have looted as they flew: had Dolley Madison not seen to it that George Washington’s portrait was evacuated from the President’s House, it would as likely have fallen to American looters as to British, as did Madison’s dueling pistols. The President’s butler has packed a few last valuables, left the front-door key at the Russian ministry, and gone in search of his employers. Save for one volley from Robert Sewall’s house on Maryland Avenue and 2nd Street N.E., there is no resistance whatever. Sewall’s house is quickly fired with rockets. A few blacks stand about to watch; there are no other Washingtonians in evidence. In vain, as the building burns, Ross orders drumrolls to call for a parley; he is still more inclined to indemnify than to burn. There is no one to reply. No interim authority has been delegated, no orders have been given, no provisions made. Admiral Cockburn is delighted: nothing for it now but to proceed with their business!

But, Muse, before you sing the sack of Washington, say: Can you see, from the heights of Helicon, where is our ancestor all this while, my son’s and mine? For this Marylandiad is no history book, but the epic of Andrew Cook at the midpoint of his life. He was up all night: has he slept through the day’s most epical set piece? Was he lost in the confusion of battle like Stendhal’s Fabrizio at Waterloo? It is past eight; that glare in the east is the Washington Navy Yard, fired by its retreating commandant; those explosions are the fort at Greenleaf Point, ditto. Now it is nine: British demolition teams have broken into the Capitol, chopped its woodwork into kindling, piled up chairs and tables in the Senate and the House, added buckets of rocket powder; Cockburn has seated himself in the place of the Speaker of the House, gaveled for order, and put the mocking question to his men: Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?

Where is A. B. Cook IV?

Why, Henry, there he is, there in the doorway, just entered from the lobby, his throat so full of a heartfelt, self-surprising nay that he can scarcely keep it in! Like Madison, whose near-blundering into British hands he has earlier observed from across the lines of battle, Andrew has been a mere spectator of the Bladensburg debacle. He has not been impressed with Ross’s generalship: after so much prodding and vacillation, the man in Andrew’s opinion made a foolish and bloody decision to attack frontally across that bridge (no doubt in his surprise to find it intact). He could as easily have forded the river upstream and fallen on the Americans’ flank while Cockburn fired his Congreves into their front; British casualties needn’t have been so high. Nevertheless, Andrew has felt personal shame at the panic and rout of the American militia, and contrariwise such admiration for Josh Barney’s resistance that with Cockburn’s permission he has accompanied the wounded commodore back to the Bladensburg tavern pressed into service as a field hospital. It is Andrew who, when Barney complains that Ross’s soldiers don’t know how to bear a stretcher properly, finds four willing sailors from the rocket squad to relieve them, and suggests they soothe their patient en route with fo’c’sle chanteys.

It is not simply Barney’s physical courage that Andrew is moved by, but his particular brand of patriotism: complex, at times self-interested (it was Barney’s vanity, piqued by the promotions of others before himself, that led him earlier to resign his commission in the U.S. Navy for one in the French), but strong and unambiguous where it matters — by contrast, say, with the contemptible soullessness of Secretary Armstrong, or his own confusions, equivocations, blunderings. In this, Barney seems to Andrew a rougher-cast version of Joel Barlow; indeed, they could pass for brothers both in appearance and under the skin. When the commodore thanks him for his attentions and asks whether he hasn’t seen him somewhere before — perhaps in William Patterson’s house a dozen years ago? — Andrew fakes a cockney accent and denies it.

The old man seen to, Andrew makes his way back into Washington, wishing as fervently as ever in his life that he could spit out “this Father business” once and for all and be… himself! By the blaze of Robert Sewall’s house he rides down Maryland Avenue to the Capitol, its windows shot out, its great doors battered open. He contemplates the imminent destruction, not merely of Corinthian columns and marble walls, but of the infant Library of Congress upstairs and the Supreme Court’s law library below; of the records, the files, the archives of the young republic. He passes through the lobby to the House chamber, his head full of the slogans of the American and French revolutions, together with the ideals of the Magna Carta, of English Common Law and parliamentary procedure. Why are these destroying these? Futile as the gesture would have been, when he sees Admiral Cockburn in the Speaker’s chair and hears him call to his rocket-wielding troopers for the question, the nay comes near to bursting from him…

But then it strikes Andrew that the official incumbent of that chair is the man perhaps most singly responsible for the war: Henry Clay, the archhawk of Kentucky, at that moment in Ghent with the peace commissioners to make sure that no Indian Free State is let into the treaty, and brandishing in token of his belligerence a razor-strop made from the skin of Tecumseh. “Aye!” our forefather shouts before the rest, who chorus affirmation. It is exactly ten o’clock. The motion carries; Cockburn raps the gavel; rockets are fired into the piled-up combustibles; the party retires from the blaze and moves down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House and the Treasury Building. Over his shoulder, as he moves on with them, Andrew sees the Capitol of the United States in flames.

Now the men are weary. All but the indefatigable Cockburn complete the night’s work methodically, with little horseplay. If Ross has been less than resolute or brilliant as an attacker, he is an admirable executor of this occupation, for which he has no taste. There are no rapes, no molestations of civilians, no systematic pillaging of private property. Even the looting of the public buildings he keeps to the souvenir level, and he frowningly detaches himself from Cockburn’s high jinks. At the President’s House they find dinner laid out for forty: as Cockburn’s men fall upon the cold meats and Madeira, and the admiral toasts the health of “Jemmy Madison and the prince regent,” and steals “Jemmy’s love letters” from a desk drawer and a cushion from Mrs. Madison’s chair to remind him “of Dolley’s sweet arse,” Ross quietly gives orders to fire the place and move on. The officers retire to Mrs. Suter’s tavern on 15th Street for a late supper; Ross’s frown darkens when the admiral rides roaring in upon the white mule he has been pleased to bestride all day. Such displays Ross regards as dangerous to good discipline and unbefitting the dignity of such events as the destruction of capital cities.

Andrew agrees, though in the contrast of humors between the general and the admiral he sees a paradigm of his own mixed feelings, and he is mindful of the resolve and bold imagination that entitle Cockburn to his present entertainment. Since the firing of the Capitol, Andrew’s heart is still. He quotes here an ironic editorial comment from a British newspaper printed weeks later, when the news reaches London: