This decision secretly pleased his father, who liked the idea of the Morgans’ producing an artisan rather than a tradesman. Besides which, war was a part of life, and guns a part of war. A man who could make and mend them was unlikely to become cannon fodder on a battlefield.

For Richard, the seven years of his apprenticeship were a joy when it came to the work and the learning, even if a trifle on the cheerless side when it came to physical comfort. Like all apprentices, he was not paid, lived in his master’s house, waited on him at his table, dined off the scraps, and slept on the floor. Luckily Senhor Tomas Habitas was a kind master and a superb gunsmith. Though he could make gorgeous dueling pistols and sporting guns, he was shrewd enough to realize that in order to prosper in those areas he must needs be a Manton, and a Manton he could not be outside of London. So he had settled for making the military musket known affectionately to every soldier and marine as “Brown Bess,” all 46 inches of her-be they wood of stock or steel of barrel-brown as a nut.

At nineteen Richard was certificated and moved out of the Habitas household, though not out of the Habitas workshop. There he continued, a master craftsman now, to make Brown Bess. And he married, something he was not allowed to do while an apprentice. His wife was the child of his mother’s brother and therefore his own first cousin, but as the Church of England had no objection to that, he wed his bride in St. James’s church under the auspices of Cousin James-of-the-clergy. Though arranged, it had been a love match, and the couple had only fallen more deeply in love as the years rolled on. Not without some difficulties of nomenclature, for Richard Morgan, son of Richard Morgan and Margaret Biggs, had taken another Margaret Biggs to wife.

While the Habitas gunsmithy had thrived that had not been so awkward, for the young pair lived in a two-roomed rented apartment on Temple Street across the Avon, just around the corner from the Habitas workshop and the Jewish synagogue.