The British Queen

The House sat on the Saturday until half past ten at night, on the deficit, and Clay brought it home.

It had taken all day. The Chancellor had owned to the deficit on the Friday, in the words that had been settled for him in his own dining room three weeks before, and the Popular Democrats had made of it everything that could be made, which was a great deal, and had sat till nearly two in the morning doing it; and on the Saturday the House came back at ten, in ninety degrees, grey in the face, to give the Exchequer power to put off its payments until the spring. Nobody liked it. Nobody had an alternative. Clay sat on the Treasury bench all day with his long legs crossed and his snuffbox on his knee, and let them talk; and when they had talked enough, and the light was going, and the members were thinking of their suppers, he got up and spoke for twenty minutes, very quietly, in the voice that made the gallery lean forward, about the honour of the Union and the patience of its creditors and the long cool evenings of the autumn in which honourable members might reflect upon both at their own firesides; and they divided, and he had it by eleven.

A member from New York, going out past him in the lobby, said sauve qui peut in a loud voice to nobody in particular. Clay laughed, and agreed with him.

He walked home up the long slope with Stanly and Crabb, too tired to talk, under a sky so thick with heat that there were no stars in it; and at Mrs Arguelles’s he did not play whist, which was a thing that had happened perhaps four times that session, but went straight up, and let Charles take his boots off, and lay down on the bed in his shirt with the window open, and was asleep before Charles had shut the door.

---

Charles woke him at a quarter past one.

There was a gentleman downstairs, Charles said, holding the candle. From the British legation. He had said it would not wait.

Clay knew who it was before he was down the stairs. There was only one gentleman in New Westminster who paid calls at one in the morning, and he paid them because it was the middle of his day: Her Majesty’s minister from London, who rose at sunset and went to bed at dawn, and had been doing so for four years, so that the city said he had never seen the Potomac by daylight and the Potomac would not have known him if he had. He was standing in Mrs Arguelles’s parlour among her dust-sheets, with his hat in his hand: a tall, thin, pale, fastidious man in evening clothes, with a packet under his arm and the face of somebody who had been sick.

“Mr Clay,” he said. “Forgive me. I thought you would rather have it from me tonight than from the newspapers on Monday.” He held out the packet. “The British Queen came into New York this morning, from Portsmouth, with the London papers to the first of July, and my bag. My people at New York sent it on by express. It came in an hour ago. I have come straight here.” He stopped, and Clay saw him make up his mind to say it plainly, as men do who have rehearsed it in a carriage and found that the rehearsal is no use. “The Queen is dead, sir.”

Clay heard it. He stood there, in his shirt and his stocking feet, with Charles behind him holding the candle up, and heard it, and did not at first understand that he had.

“She was shot,” the minister said, “in London, on the tenth of June. In the afternoon, as she drove out with the Prince, on Constitution Hill, below the Palace garden. A young man fired two pistols into the carriage. She was taken back into the Palace and died the same night. And the child with her.” He laid the packet on Mrs Arguelles’s table, among the dust-sheets, very gently, as if it were the thing itself. “The King of Hanover was proclaimed King in London the next morning. He landed in England on the twenty-first. They buried her at Windsor on the thirtieth of June. It is all in the papers. I have brought you the papers.”

Clay sat down. He did not decide to; he found that he had, on the arm of Mrs Arguelles’s sofa, under its dust-sheet.

The tenth of June.

He had been at dinner. That was the first thing he thought, and he was ashamed of it afterwards, and could not help it: on the night of the twenty-seventh of June, in the long room upstairs at the hotel on the Avenue, with the lamps hot over the tables, he had stood at Wise’s right hand with a glass in his fist and given sixty Virginians the Queen again, and the child to come, and they had roared, and drunk it, standing. She had been dead seventeen days. She had been dead the whole time: through the whist, and the dinner, and the speech about the mill, and the letter to Lucretia; dead and buried, very nearly, while they called out the Duke of Virginia! across the tables and Crabb leant over to say in his ear that there was one more life between them and Cumberland. There had not been one more life. There had not been any. He had been drinking to nobody.

“I am very sorry,” the minister said. “I am very sorry, Mr Clay. She was the kindest little creature in the world. I knew her when she was a child at Kensington. I would not have believed it.”

“No,” said Clay.

He got up. He was a Prime Minister; he had been one for nearly four years, and a Speaker for longer, and he knew what to do with his body when there was nothing that it could do. He thanked the minister. He asked whether Lord Palmerston’s dispatch carried any instruction, and the minister said that it carried one: to communicate the melancholy intelligence, with every expression of His Majesty’s government’s sympathy, to the Governor-General and to Her late Majesty’s ministers in America. Nothing else. He had read it four times, in the carriage, by the lamp, to make sure.

“Her late Majesty’s ministers,” said Clay.

“Those are the words.” The minister turned his hat round in his hands. “You will understand, sir, that I am not in a position to call you anything else. Nor anybody in London. The Charter does not permit it, as I understand it; and if it did, I should not dare.”

“No,” Clay said. “Nor should I.”

He saw him out. He stood on Mrs Arguelles’s step in his stocking feet and watched the carriage go down the hill in the dark, with its lamps swinging, towards the river and the legation, where the minister would sit up till dawn, as he always did, writing; and then he went back into the parlour, and took the dust-sheet off a chair, and sat down at the table, and told Charles to bring all the candles there were, and opened the packet.

---

He read until the sky went grey.

It was all there. It was in the Times and the Chronicle and the Morning Post, in black borders, column after column, day after day, from the eleventh of June to the first of July, so that he could follow it, as he had followed things all his life in the London papers, a month late and all at once: the carriage, and the road, and the two shots, and the Prince’s arm; the surgeons, and the bulletins posted at the Palace gate, and the last bulletin, and the bells. The boy in the Home Office. The proclamation at St James’s. The Lords and the Commons taking their oaths, all night and all the next day, in the old rooms they had used since the fire. The King’s landing at Greenwich, in a black coat, in the rain. The procession by torchlight up Constitution Hill, with the Prince walking behind the hearse. And all through it, column after column, like a bell tolling under the type, the addresses: from both Houses, from the Corporation of London, from Oxford and Cambridge, from the Bank, from the Bishops, from the dissenting ministers, from every town in England that had a mayor and a printer, condoling with His Majesty on the loss of his beloved niece and congratulating him on his accession to the throne of his ancestors.

He read the proclamation twice. Ernest the First, by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. He read it a third time, slowly, to be sure that he had not missed anything, and he had not. There was nothing more. There was nothing about America in it at all.

He sat and looked at that for some time.

Then he found, in the Standard of the twentieth of June, a long letter from Mr O’Connell to the people of Ireland, which laid the concoction of this horrible crime at the door of some of the underlings of the Orange-Tory faction, who naturally detested the virtues of their beloved Queen and sighed for the countenance of a monarch whom they deemed to possess opinions and qualities of an opposite character; and a leading article underneath it, from the Standard, calling it the foulest libel ever printed in the English language. He read that twice too. He did not need to be told who the monarch was. Nobody in the Union would need to be told. There was not a member of the House of Commons who had not heard of the Duke of Cumberland, and what was said of him, and not a newspaper in New Westminster that would not have it set in type by Monday night.

At half past four the birds began. He put the papers together in their order, and tied them up again with the minister’s tape, and went up and woke Charles, who had gone to sleep on the stairs, and sent him for hot water, and shaved, and put on a black coat, and walked up the Rise to Government House in the first of the light.

---

Adams was up. He was always up. He was standing in his study at the window, with the shutters folded back and the light coming in grey across the Axis, in an old dressing-gown, with his right arm held against his side in the way he held it now; and he turned round when Clay was shown in, at five in the morning, unannounced, in black, and looked at his face, and did not need to be told anything.

Clay told him anyway. He gave him the papers, and Adams put them on the desk without opening them, and listened to it standing, with his left hand flat on the packet: the tenth of June, and the afternoon, and the child, and the King of Hanover, and the funeral. When Clay had done, he was silent for a long time. Then he turned back to the window, and stood there with his back to the room, and Clay saw his shoulders move once, and then not again.

“I wrote to her on the tenth of June,” Adams said at last, to the window. “On the evening of the tenth of June. About the Imaum’s pearls. I signed it at four in the afternoon, with my left hand, and Mary sealed it, and it went off by the Great Western. I worked it out, afterwards, in the evening. I sat at this desk and worked out what o’clock it would be in London, for no reason, the way one does.” He was silent again. “It would have been after two in the morning. She had been dead five hours. And that letter has crossed the sea to her since, Mr Clay. It will be in London by now. Somebody will have opened it.”

Clay said nothing. There was nothing to say to it, and he had the sense not to try.

Then Adams turned round, and Clay saw that he had done with that, and had put it away somewhere, in whatever place he kept such things; and that what was in his face now was something else, harder and older and very nearly eager, the look of a man who has seen a question that nobody else in the room has seen yet and cannot leave it alone.

“Then it has come,” he said. “It has come in my time, and in yours. The Queen is dead, and her heir is dead with her, and the Crown of Great Britain has gone to the King of Hanover, by their law, and they have proclaimed him in London by their law. And the Crown of this Union? Has it gone with theirs? The succession in America follows the succession in Great Britain, so long as the two remain the same. That is all our Charter says, and it was written by men who supposed that the one would always follow the other as the night the day, and never troubled to say how. Follows, Mr Clay. Follows how? At once, at the moment of her death, in the afternoon, by nothing at all, while we were sitting in this city voting on the army bill? Or afterwards, by some act of ours, which has not been made? By their proclamation, which does not name us? By ours, and if by ours, then whose? And if it has not passed, then to whom does it belong this morning; and whose commission do I hold; and in whose name have you been governing since the tenth of June? And if any man in your House chooses to stand up and say that the two successions are not the same, then by the same clause your House determines it.”

He said it all in one breath, in his high cracked voice, with his left hand shaking a little on the packet; and Clay stood in front of him, in the grey light, and thought that it was the most complete statement of a catastrophe that he had ever heard made, and the most exact, and that the old man had very likely been composing it, in some part of his mind, for thirty years.

“Sir,” Clay said, “the House rises on Tuesday.”

Adams looked at him.

“I have three days,” Clay said, “to carry a House of Commons full of tired men through a sorrow they have only just heard of, and home for the summer, before the fevers come, without one of them standing up on the floor and asking you that question. Because if one of them asks it, sir, the House will answer it, as you have just told me it may, and the answer will be wrong, whichever it is, and it will be in the Votes and Proceedings forever, decided by a majority of eleven on a hot night in July by men who want their dinners.” He held up his hand, before the old man could speak. “I do not say it is not the question. It is the question. I do not say it will not have to be answered. I say that it will not be answered well this week. Let us bury her first. We have not even done that.”

There was a long silence in the study. Somewhere in the house a door opened and shut, and a child’s voice called out, and was hushed.

“You would put it off,” said Adams.

“I would put it off until there is somebody to answer it who knows the answer,” said Clay. “Or until it has answered itself, which questions of this kind very often do, if nobody hurries them. I have never yet seen any harm come of waiting a month in the summer.”

“I have,” Adams said. But he said it without heat; and after a moment he sat down, heavily, in the chair behind his desk, and drew a sheet of paper towards him with his left hand, and looked at it. “Then I will write to Story,” he said. “Today. To Cambridge. It is a question of law before it is anything else, and he is the Chief Justice, and the first lawyer in the Union on the question of how a man’s estate passes under two systems of law at once; and this is that question, if ever there was one, with a Crown for the estate. I will ask him for his opinion. Privately. Not as Chief Justice, but as a man who knows. I can ask a lawyer a question, I suppose, without the House of Commons deciding anything.”

“You can ask him anything you please, sir,” said Clay. “It will be August before he can answer it.”

“Yes,” said Adams. “I had worked that out.” And he called for Mary.

Clay went out into the hall. The door of the study stood open behind him, and he heard the old man begin to dictate, in the high voice, slowly, as Mary’s pen began to scratch: Cambridge. My dear Sir. And then, after a pause, so low that Clay barely heard it: The Queen is dead.

---

The chaplain preached his farewell sermon to the House on the Sunday, in the Commons chamber, as he always did on the last Sunday of a session; and he had written it a week before, and saw no reason to change his text.

On an ordinary Sunday in July there would have been ten or twelve members to hear him. This morning the chamber was full. The news had gone round the boarding houses before breakfast, the way news went round New Westminster, from the legation’s servants to Mrs Arguelles’s cook to every kitchen on Charter Hill; and by ten o’clock the chamber was full, and the galleries were full, and the steps outside were full of people who could not get in, in the heat, with black crape already on their hats, where they had been able to find crape on a Sunday. Clay sat on the Treasury bench, where he never sat on Sundays, because the House expected it of him. Wise sat behind him and wept, quite openly, all through the hymn. Crabb sat beside Wise and did not look at Clay at all.

The chaplain gave out his text from Ecclesiastes, from the ninth chapter, in the voice like a bell. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

He had meant it for the session: for the bills that had failed and the men who had failed with them, and the long patience of the people’s representatives, and the vanity of their labours, and the duty of going home in humility. He had written it so, and he preached it so, word for word, because he was an honest man and had nothing else written. But he had not got very far before he understood, as Clay saw him understand, that the chamber was not hearing the sermon he was preaching. It was hearing another one. Time and chance happeneth to them all. The House sat in the heat and listened to it as if it had been written that morning; and when he came to the verse after it, For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare, there was a sound in the chamber that Clay had never heard there in all his years in it, from the members’ benches and the galleries together, a long, low, broken sound, like a sigh. The chaplain stopped. He stood in the pulpit with his hands on the book, and looked at them, and seemed not to know whether to go on.

Then he said, in a different voice, that they would pray for the soul of their late Sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria, and for the child; and they knelt, all of them, on the floor of the House of Commons, between the benches, and he prayed for her.

In the afternoon the bells began at the Cathedral, slowly, one at a time, and went on until dark.

---

On the Monday he moved the House’s sorrow.

He had written the resolution himself, on the Sunday night, at Mrs Arguelles’s table, with a cold supper at his elbow that he did not eat; and he had written it four times, and taken something out of it every time, until there was nothing left in it that anybody could vote against or make anything of. That this House has received with the deepest sorrow the intelligence of the death of Her late Majesty Queen Victoria, and of the loss with Her Majesty of the hope of an heir of Her Majesty’s body; and that the members of this House, as a mark of their grief and of their veneration for Her Majesty’s memory, will wear mourning for the remainder of the present session. That was all. It did not mention Hanover, or London, or the proclamation of the eleventh of June, or the Charter. It did not mention the King.

He moved it at noon, in a full House, in black, from the Treasury bench, standing; and he spoke to it for a quarter of an hour, and was not afterwards sure that he had ever spoken better. He did not try to. He spoke about her. He said that she had been eighteen when she came to the throne, and twenty-one when she died, and that in the three years between she had never, so far as he knew, done one unkind thing to any subject she had in the world; and that the House had sent her, in March, by a majority of a hundred and three, its congratulations on her marriage, and that he had been proud of it; and that a great many of the members now present had drunk her health, and the health of the child she carried, at a dinner on a June night, not knowing what they did, and that he was one of them; and he sat down. Wise seconded it, in tears. The Opposition’s leader followed, gravely and well, and said nothing that Clay could have wished unsaid. The House passed it without a division, standing.

Then the member from South Carolina got up.

He was the Popular Democrat from the low country who had shouted about the West Indies in March, at the wedding address; and he did not shout now. He said, in a voice that was almost quiet for him, that he had voted for the resolution with all his heart. He said that he wished to ask the Prime Minister a question, which he trusted the Prime Minister would not think out of place on such a day. The London papers, he said, which every member had now read, printed a proclamation of the eleventh of June, by which the late Queen’s uncle was declared King of Great Britain and Ireland. He had read it with care. It said nothing of America. He wished to know whether the Prime Minister proposed to move an address to the new King, as the House had always addressed a new Sovereign; and if not, why not; and if so, to which King it was to be addressed: the King of Great Britain, or some King of America whom nobody had yet proclaimed.

The House went very still. Clay felt it go still around him, as a man in a boat feels the river change under the keel.

He got up slowly, and took his time about it; he put his snuffbox away in his pocket, and looked round the chamber once, from the Speaker’s chair to the galleries and back, so that the members could see him do it.

“Sir,” he said, “the honourable member has asked me a fair question, and I will give him a plain answer. I do not propose an address today. Today the House has a Queen to mourn, and has just done so, with one voice, and I would not have anything else that this House does today stand in the Votes beside that.” He paused. “The London proclamation was made in London, by London’s Council, in London’s form, for London’s Crown. It is London’s business, and from all I can read they have done it very properly. What this Union does, it will do in its own form, and at its own time, and by its own law; and when that time comes, I do not doubt that the House will be told of it, and will know what to say. That time is not tonight, sir. We have only had the news for a day and a half. We have not yet, any of us, so much as put on our black.”

Somebody at the back of the Opposition benches called out Cumberland!

It was a young member, from Pennsylvania, and he went scarlet as soon as he had said it, and would have given a good deal to have it back; but it was said, and it went round the chamber like a spark in dry grass. There were cries of order, and cries of shame, and a member from Ohio on his feet shouting something about the Orange lodges that nobody could hear, and the Speaker on his feet calling for order, and the galleries on their feet to see. Clay stood where he was, in the middle of it, with his hands on the box in front of him, and waited, and did not raise his voice, and did not sit down; and in a minute or two, because he did not sit down, the House began to look at him instead of at itself, and grew quiet again, to hear what he would say.

“I hope,” he said, very gently, “that we shall not hear that word again in this chamber. I hope that we shall not hear it in this city. There is a young man in Newgate who is to be tried for this, in London, by the laws of England, before a jury; and I do not doubt that a great many reasons will be found for what he did, by a great many people; and I do not propose that the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of America shall go about finding him any more. We have our own Queen’s memory to keep. We need not keep Mr O’Connell’s.” He looked round at them. “The orders of the day, sir.”

And the House, because it did not know what else to do, and because it was tired, and because the orders of the day were there, went to the orders of the day.

---

They sat all that night.

There was the army bill, and the navy bill, and the Florida war, and the Treasury workmen who had not been paid since March, and forty small things that had waited since December and would not wait any longer; and the House went at them, in its mourning, in the heat, with the windows open and the moths coming in to the lamps, with the frantic diligence of men who have decided not to think. Clay did not leave the chamber. He sat on the Treasury bench in his black coat through the whole of it, with his snuffbox and a glass of water, and watched; and three times in the night he saw a member get up with the question in his face, and three times he was at the man’s elbow in the lobby before the man had caught the Speaker’s eye, with his hand on his arm and his voice low, and the question did not get asked. The New-York papers came in with the morning mail, full of the news, in black borders; and one of them had a paragraph about the Duke of Cumberland and Mr O’Connell’s letter, under a heading of its own that Clay read and folded and put in his pocket and did not show to anybody. He did not need the word in the House again. He had heard it once.

At dawn the House adjourned for three hours. He came out with Stanly on to the east front in the cool, and they stood for a moment at the top of the steps and looked down the length of the Axis to the Palace at the far end of it, pale in the first light, with every shutter closed; and Stanly, who had said nothing all night, said, “Whose is it now?”

Clay did not pretend not to understand him. “I do not know, my friend,” he said, because it was Stanly, and dawn, and he was very tired. I do not know, and I do not propose to find out before December, and if you love me, you will not ask me again until I have slept.”

---

At two o’clock on the Tuesday afternoon the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of America adjourned itself until the first Monday in December, and the House of Lords did the same.

In an ordinary summer it would have been done in the other way. The Governor-General would have come down from the Rise in his carriage, and sat on the dais in the Lords’ chamber beside the empty throne, and the Commons would have come to the bar, and he would have prorogued them, in the Sovereign’s name. This year nobody knew whose name it would have been; and Clay had seen, on the Sunday night, at Mrs Arguelles’s table, with the cold supper at his elbow, that if both Houses adjourned themselves by their own resolutions, as either House was perfectly entitled to do at any time, then nobody would need to prorogue them at all, in anybody’s name, and the question would not have to be asked of the old man on the Rise until he had his answer from Cambridge. Nothing went up the Rise for the Governor-General’s assent. Whatever needed it could wait for December; and what could not wait, Clay found, on looking, could.

So the Speaker put the question, and the Clerk read the resolution, and the House said aye, and it was done. There was no speech, and no procession, and no guns. The members went out into the Axis in their black coats, in twos and threes, into the white heat of the afternoon, with their carpet-bags already packed at their boarding houses and their seats already taken on the evening train; and in an hour Parliament House was empty, and the doors were shut, and there was nobody on the steps but a sweeper and a dog.

Clay stood on the east front, at the top of the steps, in the heat, and looked down the Axis to the shuttered Palace, and the Cathedral on its ridge, and the long empty ground between, where not three weeks ago the Charter had burned in letters of fire, and the Queen’s cypher had gone out first.

It was done. The House had mourned her and named nobody. It had risen as it was always going to rise, on the day it had always meant to rise, without deciding anything; and it would not sit again for twenty weeks; and in twenty weeks, Clay thought, a great many things could happen that nobody would ever need to decide. He had done it. It was the best piece of management of his life, and nobody would ever know it, and he found, standing on the steps in the sun, that he did not feel in the least like a man who had done a good piece of work. He felt like a man who had held a door shut against the wind for three days and three nights, and knew perfectly well that the wind was still there.

---

He wrote to Lucretia that night, at Mrs Arguelles’s, in the empty house; Stanly and Crabb had gone on the evening train, and the Georgian with them, and Charles was packing nothing.

My dear Lucretia,

You will have heard the news by the time this reaches you, for it will have gone west faster than any letter. I cannot write about it. I gave her health at that dinner, and the child’s, as I told you, and she had been dead seventeen days. I find that I cannot get over that, and I do not suppose I shall.

We rose today. I said I should be with you by the middle of August. I cannot come. There is a great deal to be done here this summer that cannot be done by letter, and nobody else in the city to do it, and I must stay until it is done. I do not know how long that will be. Tell Henry I am sorry, and kiss Julia’s little ones, and tell them their grandfather will bring their presents himself, later than he promised, but bring them.

Your affectionate husband,

H. Clay.

He sealed it, and sat for a long time at the table with the candle, in the silent house, with the windows open on the garden and the frogs going in the canal. Then he took out the paper he had put in his pocket in the House, the New-York paper with the heading he had not shown to anybody, and read it again, and held the corner of it in the candle until it caught, and watched it burn in the saucer, and went to bed.