In His Own Hand

Normanby came at eleven, with a paper.

He was a handsome, nervous, elegant man of forty-three who wrote novels, and who had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, where he had let the prisoners out of the gaols by the hundred to please O’Connell, and Governor of Jamaica before that; and he was now Secretary of State for the Home Department, which was to say the man who answered, under the King, for the peace of the kingdom and the safety of the King’s person, and had answered for it on the tenth of June. The King had received him three times since the twenty-first, and had not yet asked him to sit down. He did not ask him now.

“The verdict of Friday, sir,” Normanby said. “Your Majesty will have had it from Lord Melbourne. Under the Act of the year 1800, the prisoner is to be kept in strict custody until Your Majesty’s pleasure is known. It is the custom of these cases that the Secretary of State signifies Your Majesty’s pleasure that the prisoner be removed to the criminal side of Bethlem Hospital, there to be detained during Your Majesty’s pleasure. I have the warrant here. It wants only Your Majesty’s approbation, and my signature.”

The King held out his hand for it, and Normanby gave it to him, and the King put on his spectacles and read it, every line, with the pencil in his other hand, as he read everything; and Normanby stood in front of the table and waited, and the clock on the chimney-piece ticked, and down in the court the sentries changed.

It was a short paper. There was a name in it, which the King read once. He had decided on the twenty-first of June, at Greenwich, on the water-stairs, that he would not think about the man, because there was nothing to be gained by it and a great deal to be lost, and he had kept to that, as he kept to most things he decided; he had not asked about him, and had not asked to see him, and did not intend to. A man who has been a soldier for fifty years learns that it is not the hand that fired that matters. It is the line that was not held.

“Bethlem,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where they put Hadfield.”

Normanby looked surprised, and then said that Hadfield was there still, he believed. The King remembered Hadfield, as the whole family remembered him: the man who stood up in the pit at Drury Lane in the year 1800 and fired at his father; and how his father had stood up in the box after the shot, and bowed to the house, and waved the Queen back from the door, and sat down again and watched the play to the end, and gone to sleep in the interval, as he always did. He remembered that nobody had been hanged for it, and that the man had been locked up ever since; and that the Parliament had made two laws about it that same summer, in a few weeks, in the days when Parliaments were not afraid of making laws.

He gave Normanby back the paper.

“It is approved,” he said. “Sign it. My pleasure is what you have written there.” And then, as Normanby bowed: “And you will tell me, my Lord, when your Commissioners of Police have answered my paper. I have been waiting for it since Friday.”

---

They answered it on the Wednesday, by Melbourne, who brought the Cabinet’s minute in his pocket and gave it him with his own commentary, in that tired, easy, conversational voice in which the man said everything, as if it were all a matter of no great consequence that might be put right after dinner.

The King was to have his escort. There would be a party of the Life Guards about his carriage whenever he drove out, in the parks or in the streets, and an officer riding at the near wheel; and a second officer, of the police, would ride on the box. That was granted, at once, and very handsomely, and Melbourne said that he hoped His Majesty would find it sufficient.

The rest was refused.

It was not refused in so many words. Nothing was ever refused in so many words in England; the King had known that for sixty years, and had hated it for fifty. The parks could not be closed when the King drove in them, because the parks were the people’s; they had always been open to the people, and the people would resent it, and a King who was resented was in more danger, not less, than a King who drove among his subjects with a good escort. The Cabinet would humbly submit that it would look like fear. There could be no guard of soldiers on Constitution Hill, because a guard of soldiers in a public road in London, by day and by night, was a thing the House of Commons had never permitted and would not begin to permit now; there would be a constable at the place, as there had been since June. There could be no police in plain clothes among the crowds, because a select committee of the House of Commons had condemned the employment of police in plain clothes in ‘thirty-three, after the business of the man Popay, who had gone into the meetings of the Radicals in disguise and egged them on; and the Commissioners had kept to that ever since, and the Cabinet would not ask them to depart from it. And as to a law against assemblies on the routes where the Sovereign drove, that was a matter for Parliament, and the present Parliament was in its last weeks, and nobody could get such a bill through it in August; it must wait for the new Parliament, in the new year, if His Majesty’s ministers then thought it advisable. The Cabinet humbly hoped that His Majesty would be satisfied.

“So,” said the King. “I am to have an escort. And I am to drive in the parks among the people, because a King who is resented is in more danger than a King who is shot. And my police may not wear coats, because a select committee did not like a man called Popay.” He put the minute down. “Do you know, Melbourne, how she died?”

Melbourne was silent.

“I do not mean the pistol. I know about the pistol. I mean the road. The equerries went across the garden, by the short way, to meet the carriage at the gate, because that was how it was done. There were two outriders in front and one behind, and none at the side, because that was how it was done. The Sovereign drove in an open carriage, at an easy pace, along a public road with a wall on one side and railings on the other, so that a man could stand at the railings with his hand in his coat and wait, because that was how it was done, and had always been done, and nobody had ever thought about it, because nothing had ever happened. Now something has happened. And I ask you to think about it, and you tell me about a select committee.” He took off his spectacles and looked at the minister with the one eye. “I am not angry with you, Melbourne. I find that I am not even surprised. I wished only to know. Now I know.”

Melbourne said that he would put His Majesty’s observations before the Cabinet.

“Do,” said the King. “And then put them in the drawer with the rest.”

He drove out on the Thursday, for the first time, with the escort.

He had not meant to go up Constitution Hill. He had told the coachman Hyde Park, and the coachman had gone by the Mall, and turned at the corner below the Palace, and taken the old road up the hill, because it was the road; and the King sat in the open carriage with the Life Guards jingling round it, in the heat, and saw where he was going, and did not stop him. The crowd was on the pavement by the railings, as it always was, at that hour. It went quiet as the carriage came by. He saw the faces turned to him, hundreds of them, and the hats coming off, slowly, as if nobody were quite sure that it ought to be done, and he did not know any of the faces and could not read them, and they did not cheer. Half-way up, by the high wall of the Palace garden, there was a constable standing on the pavement with his hands behind his back; and the King said, “Halt,” and the coachman halted, and the escort halted, clattering, and the officer at the wheel turned round in his saddle with his face gone white.

The King stood up in the carriage.

He stood there for perhaps a minute, upright, in his black coat, with his hat on, and looked at the place: at the wall, and the railings, and the pavement, and the width of the road, and the distance, which was nothing, a few yards, the distance across a room. He looked at it as he had looked at ground all his life, in Flanders and in Germany and on the field days at Hanover; at where a man would stand, and where the carriage would be, and where the men who should have been between them had not been. Then he sat down, and said, “Drive on,” and they drove on, up the hill, and nobody in the crowd said a word.

---

On the Friday Baring came, from the Exchequer, about the Civil List.

He was a solemn, careful, honest man, of the banking family, with a long face and long sentences, and he explained it with great thoroughness, standing, from a paper. The late Queen’s Civil List, by the Act of ‘thirty-seven, ran for her lifetime and for six months after; so that His Majesty’s household was provided for until December, on the late Queen’s terms, and need not be the subject of any present application to Parliament. The present Parliament, by the old law of Queen Anne’s time, would itself expire six months after the demise, unless sooner dissolved; and it was the humble opinion of His Majesty’s ministers that the settlement of the Civil List of the new reign would most properly be made, as it had been made at the beginning of the last three reigns, by a new Parliament, freshly chosen, at its first meeting. There was, besides, the question of the annuity that His Majesty had enjoyed as Duke of Cumberland since the year he was made Duke, which would now, in the opinion of the law officers, merge, or might be thought to merge, or might be thought by some members to merge; and that was a question that would be better taken in the new Parliament also. In the meantime His Majesty would want for nothing.

The King listened to the whole of it without interrupting, which he could see surprised Baring very much.

He understood it perfectly. He had sat in the House of Lords for forty years, and through the Civil Lists of two brothers and a niece; he could have told Baring the figures of every one of them without looking at a paper. He understood that his household was to be kept, until Christmas, at the late Queen’s charge, as if he were her guest; and that his income, and his son’s, and the establishment of his Queen, if she ever came to England, and every pound that the Crown would have to spend for the rest of his reign, were to be settled by a House of Commons not yet chosen, at an election his ministers would conduct, in the winter, after he had had six months in which to show them whether he was the kind of King who deserved to be paid. It was very well done. He would have done it himself, in their place.

“Thank you, Mr Baring,” he said. “Pray tell Lord Melbourne that I understand the arrangement entirely.”

Baring bowed, and looked relieved, and went away, and the King sat for a while at his table, with his hands flat on it, and thought about money: about the annuity that the Radicals had grudged him as Duke of Cumberland, and had been trying for three years to take away from him since he became a foreign King; and about the House of Commons, which held the purse, and had held it since the Revolution, and had held it against every one of his brothers; and about the new Parliament, which would be elected in the winter, and would sit in the spring, and would want something from him before it gave him anything. He thought that it was a lever. He thought that it was a very good lever, and that the man who had put his hand on it, in his easy, tired, conversational way, as if it were a matter of no great consequence, was a better politician than the whole of Hanover put together. He did not hold it against him. He would remember it.

---

There was one of them, at least, whom he liked.

Palmerston had come late on the same Wednesday that Melbourne came, with the Convention that he had signed that day, at the Foreign Office, with the Austrians and the Prussians and the Russians and the Turk, and without the French: four Powers and the Sultan, to make the Pasha of Egypt give up Syria, by force if he would not do it by agreement; and the French not told until it was done. Half the Cabinet had been against it. Holland was against it, and Clarendon, and had put their objection in writing. Melbourne had been against it and had let it go, as he let everything go, because Palmerston had offered to resign if it did not go, and Melbourne would always rather have a war with France than a resignation. Palmerston told the King all this himself, cheerfully, standing at the window, in a blue coat, with his whiskers dyed and his hat in his hand: a man of fifty-five who looked forty, who had been in office for thirty years under every kind of government, and had married Melbourne’s sister in the winter, and did not appear to be afraid of anybody in the world.

“The French will be very angry, sir,” he said. “They will talk of war. They will not make it.”

“And if they make it?”

“Then we shall beat them,” said Palmerston, “which we have done before, as Your Majesty has particular reason to know.”

The King found that he was smiling. It was the first time since Greenwich. He told Palmerston that he approved of the Convention entirely, and that he would ratify it with pleasure, and that it was the first piece of business that any minister had brought him in five weeks that he would have been glad to have done himself; and Palmerston laughed, and bowed, and went away to tell the French ambassador, and the King sat at his table afterwards and thought that the man was a Whig, and a coxcomb, and a scoundrel with women, and the only one of them who had looked the French in the face.

He thought about the French a good deal, that week. He had fought them in Flanders, at twenty-two, and lost the sight of his eye to them, and fought them again for twenty years, in one way or another, until they were beaten; and he had seen the son of Égalité made King of the French in ‘thirty, off the barricades, by the grace of the Paris mob, and had not forgiven Europe for allowing it. It did him good to think of them angry.

---

The letters from Hanover came every week, by the courier, and he read them last, at night, after the boxes.

Schele’s were about the Estates. They had met at last, in sufficient numbers; the towns that had refused to elect had elected, in the end, enough of them, because there was nothing else to be done; and the Estates were going through the law, clause by clause, the law that would settle the business between them, which he had given his word in writing would be finished by the summer, whether he was in Hanover or in London. Schele sent him every clause as it passed, with the votes, and the names of the men who had spoken against it, and the King read them all, with the pencil, and wrote in the margins, and sent them back. It was the old constitution, the one of ‘nineteen, with the things put back into it that he had always meant to put back, and the things kept out of it that he had always meant to keep out: the King’s prerogative whole, and the domains the King’s, and the Estates to advise and to vote the taxes, and not to govern. It was a constitution that a King could keep. He had made it himself, in three years, against the professors and the newspapers and the whole of liberal Germany, and he would keep it.

Frederica’s were about George.

She was better, she said. She was always better; she had been saying she was better for six years. She could walk in the garden at Montbrillant on fine days with a stick and her woman’s arm, and sit in the orangery among her plants. The bells were still tolling for her brother-in-law in Berlin; the whole court was in black for two Kings and a Queen. And George was well, and sent his duty, and was very sorry that his father was so far away, and very proud; and there was a man come to Hanover, an oculist, a very famous man, who had examined George’s eye and thought that something might be done for it with the knife, in September, if George would consent; and George would consent. He wished to see. He said that the heir to three Crowns ought to be able to see them.

The King read that twice.

He thought about his son, who was twenty-one, and tall, and handsome, and played the piano very well, and had not seen anything since he was fourteen; who had lost one eye to an illness and the other to an accident with a purse, at play, like any boy; who would be King of Great Britain and Ireland, and of America, and of Hanover, after him, blind, because there was no law in any of the three that said a blind man could not be King, and the King did not intend that anybody should make one. He had told them so in Hanover. He would tell them so here, if any of them dared to raise it, and he rather thought that some of them would. He wrote to Frederica that George must do as the oculist advised, and that he would pray for it, which he did, that night, on his knees, in the old cold room, for the first time in some years.

---

At the end of July he understood that he had been waiting for America.

He had said so to Melbourne, on the twenty-first of June, at the end of the first audience: then I shall wait and see what they say. He had meant it. He had sat down to wait, in his own house, with his own patience, which was very great when he chose. And he had waited five weeks, and nothing had come from America, and he worked out, one night at the end of July, at his table, with the pencil, that nothing could have come. The news had gone out from Portsmouth on the first of July. It would have reached them in the middle of the month. They would have had a fortnight, by now, to say whatever it was that they were going to say; and whatever they had said would take a fortnight more to cross; and when it came it would come as their answer, which they had considered, among themselves, in their own form, as Melbourne put it, and decided, and sent to him, and he would be asked to approve it.

He did not intend to approve it. He did not intend to receive his own Crown from his own subjects as the subject of a petition.

He took down the Charter from the shelf. It was the copy he had had at Kew, in the schoolroom, when he was twelve, the year it was signed; his tutor had given it him and made him read it through, and he had made his notes in it then, in a child’s hand, and in a man’s hand since, in the margins. He read it through again, the whole of it, with the pencil, slowly, as he read everything; and he found, as he had found before, that it was a very good document, and a very clever one, and that it said a great many things about what his ministers might do, and his Parliaments, and his British ministers in particular, who might not advise him in the government of the Union at all, not by a word; and that on the King himself it said one thing only, in the fourth clause of the second Article, which he had marked at Kew with a child’s cross and marked again since: In American affairs the Crown acts upon the advice of ministers answerable to the Parliament of the Union, and upon no other advice.

He read it three times. Upon no other advice. It forbade him to take advice from London. It did not say what the Crown was to do when no advice came at all.

That was the whole of it. He sat and looked at it under the lamp. His British ministers could not advise him on America; the Charter forbade it, and Melbourne had told him so, very properly, at the first audience, with his eyes on the carpet. His American ministers were three thousand miles away, and had not written, and could not have written yet. In the whole of his three kingdoms there was one place, and one only, where nobody stood at the King’s elbow to tell him what his pleasure was; and it was the place where he had a Governor-General of his own, who held his commission, and was bound to obey it.

Then he would act upon no advice at all. He would write.

---

He wrote it on the first of August, a Saturday, in the morning, at his own table in the library, with the windows shut against the noise of the court, in his own hand, in English, in the large, black, slanting hand that his tutors at Kew had despaired of; and he wrote it twice, because the first time it was too long.

St James’s Palace, 1 August 1840.

Mr Adams,

You will have received, before this reaches you, the account of the death of Our beloved Niece the late Queen, and of Our Accession to the Throne of Our Ancestors.

It is Our Will and Pleasure that you cause Us to be proclaimed in Our United Kingdom of America without delay, at Our Palace in Our City of New Westminster, and in every Province, in the Form which We enclose, and in no other: and that every Officer of Our Crown in America, civil and military, beginning with yourself, take the Oath of Allegiance to Us, by Our Name, and that the Rolls be returned to Us when it is done.

We are aware that the Charter does not permit Our British Ministers to advise Us in the Government of the Union. We have not asked them. We write to you Ourselves, as your King, in Our own Hand; and We shall expect your Report in yours.

Ernest R.

He enclosed the form. He had made it himself, from the London proclamation of the eleventh of June, which Greville had sent him in its fair copy; he had copied it out in his own hand, word for word, and had written America in where London had left it out, and had given himself his whole style, as it would be proclaimed in a country that had never yet heard it. Ernest the First, By the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King of the United Kingdom of America and of His Other Realms and Territories, Defender of the Faith. He looked at that for some time when he had written it. Three Crowns. Two named, and the third, his own, his first, the one he had chosen to live in, folded into the words His Other Realms; and he thought that he would see about that, too, in time, and that he had a great deal of time, because he was sixty-nine and in excellent health and his father had lived to eighty-one.

He folded the letter and the form together, and sealed them with his own seal, and addressed the cover to the Governor-General, and sent for Palmerston.

He did not send for Melbourne. Melbourne had told him that the Charter did not allow it.

Palmerston came at four. He looked at the packet on the table, and at the address on it, and at the King, and his eyebrows went up a very little way and came down again; and the King saw him decide, in the space of a breath, as a good officer decides on ground he has not had time to reconnoitre, not to ask what was in it.

“I wish it to go by your bag, my Lord,” said the King, “to your minister at New Westminster, to be delivered by him into the Governor-General’s own hand, and by nobody else’s. By the first steamer.”

“The Liverpool steamer sails on Tuesday, sir,” said Palmerston. “The new one, the Acadia, for Halifax and Boston. The messenger can go down by the railway on Monday. It will be in New Westminster in three weeks.” He took the packet, and held it a moment, weighing it in his hand. “I take it, sir, that Your Majesty does not require me to know what is in it.”

“The Charter does not permit you to know, my Lord,” said the King. “I have been reading it.”

Palmerston laughed, and bowed, and put the packet in the breast of his coat, and went away with it; and the King sat on at his table in the August afternoon, with the windows shut, and the Charter open in front of him at the second Article, and his pencil in his hand, and was content. He had been King for seven weeks. It was the first thing that he had done in all that time that nobody had told him he might not do.

---

On the Thursday after, the sixth, Schele’s courier came at noon with the law.

The Estates had passed it. They had passed it by a majority, with a vote of thanks to the King, which he had not asked for and found that he liked; and Schele had had it engrossed, on vellum, in German, with the seal of the kingdom hanging from it in its silver box, and sent it to London by a courier who had not stopped, to be signed. The King read it through, the whole of it, though he knew every clause, with the pencil, at his table, while the courier stood by the door in his boots; and then he dipped the pen, and signed it at the foot, Ernst August, in the hand he used for Hanover, and dated it, and sanded it, and gave it back.

Gegeben St. James, den 6. August 1840.

It was done. He had promised them in writing that it would be done by the summer, whether he was in Hanover or in London, and he had kept his word, as he kept it always; and the business of three years, the professors and the protests and the elections that the towns would not hold, was finished, in his own way, with his own name at the foot of it.

He sat for a while when the courier had gone, with his hands on the table, in the warm still room.

He thought of his three kingdoms. In the one that he had chosen, he had that morning given his subjects a constitution of his own making, and they had thanked him for it. In the one in which he had been born, he had been given an escort, and refused everything else, and put on an allowance until Christmas, and told, in the most respectful language in the world, that what he wished was not how it was done. And to the third, which had made itself out of his father’s Crown when he was a boy at Kew, and which he knew from a schoolroom copy of its Charter and from nothing else, he had sent a command, in his own hand; and it was on the sea now, two days out from Liverpool, in the breast of a King’s Messenger’s coat, going west.

He had said that he would wait and see what they said. He had told them, instead, what to say. He thought that it was a better arrangement, and that it would be interesting to see what they made of it; and he took up the next paper in the box, and put on his spectacles, and read it, every line.