A Wedding Present

For two months nothing came from England, and in the second of them his son’s wife died.

It was the longest silence from Europe that anybody in New Westminster could remember. The packets came in from Liverpool fifty days out and more, with nothing in their bags newer than the first week of January. The British Queen, the great steamer, had been so knocked about in the December gales that she lay at the Nore with her forward cabins carried away and would not sail again before March, and the Liverpool had not come at all. A Baltimore weekly complained that it had later dates from Palermo than from Liverpool, and Henry Clay, who liked a good complaint, read the sentence aloud at dinner on Saturday to the whole mess. On Sunday evening the great mail came down from New York with the Saturday papers, and it appeared that the Great Western had come in at noon on the very day the Baltimore man went to press, forty-five days later from Europe, with the London papers to the twentieth of February; and the mess laughed at Clay for it all through supper, and he let them, since it cost him nothing and they enjoyed it.

There were six of them at Mrs Arguelles’s that session, in a tall narrow house on the slope below Charter Hill, all Whigs and all but one from south of the Ohio. They breakfasted together at eight and dined together at five and voted together, mostly, in between. Nobody had arranged it. But men who ate breakfast together for five months generally found that they had come to the same opinions by the end of it, and a minister who wished to know how a division would go could do worse than count the boarding houses. Clay had been counting boarding houses for thirty years, and had lived in a good many of them. He was sixty-two, and Prime Minister, and he lived in a boarding house because he always had, and because a house of his own in New Westminster would have had nobody in it at breakfast.

Stanly of North Carolina read the London news aloud after supper, because he had the best voice for it at the table after Clay’s, and was thirty, and liked to be listened to. He read it standing, with his back to the fire and the paper held up to the lamp, and the others sat among the supper things and listened.

He read them the Queen’s speech of the sixteenth of January, which nobody in America had yet seen, telling her Parliament that she meant to marry. He read them the Commons’ vote on the Prince’s allowance: fifty thousand pounds a year asked, as every consort of a queen before him had had, and thirty given, by a hundred and four votes, with Sir Robert Peel and the Tories in the lobby with the Radicals. “To spite her ministers,” said Crabb of Alabama, who knew how such things were done; and Clay, who knew it better than anyone at the table, said that it was very neatly managed and that he would not have cared to be Lord Melbourne on the morning after.

Stanly read them the Lords’ debate on the Prince’s precedence, and how their lordships had struck it out, and how the King of Hanover was said to have refused his consent before it was ever debated. He read them a long sentence of Lord Brougham’s about what must follow if the Queen should die before she had a child, which made the table go quiet for a moment, as such sentences will.

“Then they’d have Cumberland,” Crabb said. Most of America had never learnt to call him anything else. “And so would we. The succession follows the succession. That’s the Charter.”

“She is twenty years old,” said Clay, “and has been married four weeks. Let the poor girl have a year, Crabb, before you crown her uncle.”

They laughed, and Stanly read them the wedding.

It had been on Monday the tenth, at the Chapel Royal of St James’s, in rain. There had been twelve young ladies to carry her train. The Prince had been married in the uniform of a field marshal, which he had been made two days before, and the collar of the Garter, which he had been given in the winter; he had been made an Englishman by Act of Parliament on the Saturday and a Royal Highness on the Thursday before that, and Stanly read out the list in a rising voice, like a man calling a horse’s pedigree at a fair, until the table was laughing again. The Archbishop of Canterbury had married them. The guns had fired in the Park as the ring went on. The sun had come out in the afternoon, and London had called it the Queen’s weather.

Clay listened, and took snuff, and thought about Lucretia.

He had been married forty-one years next month, in her father’s house at Lexington, when he was twenty-one and a lawyer two years in the town and she was eighteen and had a good deal more sense than he had; and nobody had voted him anything, or struck out his precedence, and the sun had shone or not, he could no longer remember which. She was at Ashland. She had never liked New Westminster, and came to it as seldom as she decently could, and he did not blame her. She had five more children in the house now, the eldest of them hardly old enough for school and the youngest a few weeks old; and Clay sat at the supper table at Mrs Arguelles’s, listening to the account of a royal wedding, and thought about that.

---

The letter had come on Thursday the thirteenth of February.

It was from Kentucky, and it said that Henry’s wife was dead. Julia had been brought to bed of her fifth child in January, a boy, and had seemed to be doing well, and then had not; and she had died a fortnight after the birth. She was twenty-five or twenty-six. He found that he did not know which, and that it troubled him more than it should. He had read the letter standing in the hall with his hat still on, and gone upstairs and sat on the edge of his bed and read it again, and then he had gone down to the House, because the House was sitting and he was the Prime Minister.

He had lost six daughters. He did not often count them, and when he did, he found that he counted them by where he had been. Henrietta, when he was new at the bar in Lexington and did not yet know that it could happen. Laura, and then Lucretia, who was fourteen. Then Susan and Eliza in a single year, Eliza on the road east, in Ohio, in the summer heat. And Anne, four years ago in December, in childbed, who had been the best of them all and the one he could talk to. He had been in New Westminster when Anne died. He had been in New Westminster, or on the road to it, for most of his life.

He had not gone home in February. Kentucky was ten days away in winter, the session would not wait, and he had found, at sixty-two, that he had never once decided to put the session first. It had simply always been first, like breakfast. He had written to Lucretia, and to Henry, and he had gone on with the estimates and the thousand small arrangements by which a coalition of men who disagreed about nearly everything was persuaded, every week, to disagree about it a little longer; and the silence from England had gone on around him, and he had hardly noticed it, except to complain of it at table.

So that was what the silence had been, for him: two months without a word from London, and in the middle of it a word from Kentucky. And then, on a Sunday night among the supper things, the Queen’s wedding.

When Stanly had finished, Clay said that he would move an address to the Queen on Tuesday.

“Of congratulation?” said Crabb.

“Of congratulation.” He took snuff. “The Lords will do one, and the House cannot let the Lords be loyal first. And it will make a pleasant afternoon, which the House has not had since Christmas. For once we shall all be of one mind.”

“By God, we shall,” said Stanly.

Clay said that that was rather the point.

---

He gave notice on Monday, and the House cheered him, which it had not done in some weeks.

On Tuesday morning at seven Charles, who belonged to him, brought up his shaving water and the notice paper together, as he always did, and Clay read the paper while Charles shaved him. He found his own motion near the top, and under it, in the small type, an amendment in the name of the member from the Western Reserve:

And we further beg leave to offer to Your Majesty our congratulations that, in the second year of Your Majesty’s reign, the blessings of entire freedom were extended to all Your Majesty’s subjects in the West Indies.

He read it twice. Charles had stopped, with the razor lifted, because Clay had moved his head.

“Go on, Charles,” Clay said, and held still, and Charles went on.

He knew the member from the Western Reserve, as it was his business to know every member of the House: a lean young lawyer of thirty-four or -five, with a Connecticut face and an Ohio coat, who had sat for three years, voted with the ministry on the bank and the tariff, never asked it for anything, and spoken perhaps four times. Every week of the session he brought in petitions from the women of his district, tied up in bundles with tape, and presented them in a dry level voice to a House that had stopped listening before he began. He did not drink, or play cards, or dine out. Clay had once asked him to dinner, and had been answered, very civilly, by return, that he did not dine out.

Clay wiped his face, and wrote a note asking whether the member would oblige him with a few minutes in the library at ten.

---

The library at Parliament House was the best room in the building and the least used, with tall windows and long tables, and the smell of calf bindings and coal smoke. At ten in the morning it had nobody in it but a clerk at the far end. The member from the Western Reserve came at ten precisely and stood until he was asked to sit, and Clay offered him snuff, which he declined, and took some himself, and began.

He began by saying how much he had admired the petitions. He meant it. He generally meant the pleasant things he said; it was one of the reasons they worked. It took great constancy, he said, to bring the same bundles into the same House every week of a session and present them to the same indifference, and he did not know three men in the House who could have done it. Then he said that he would like to ask the member to withdraw his amendment, and would like to tell him why, and would then like the member to tell him why not, and they would both have done their duty and could go down to the House as friends.

The member said that he would be glad to hear Mr Clay’s reasons.

Clay gave them. An address of congratulation, he said, was worth precisely as much as it was unanimous, and no more; a congratulation carried by a majority was a sort of insult. The Lords would be unanimous. If the Commons divided, the division would be printed; it would cross the Atlantic faster than the address, since newspapers were quicker ships than governors’ bags; and it would be read in London as the American House of Commons refusing to congratulate the Queen upon freedom: which was not what the House would mean by it, and was what everybody would take it to mean. And it would do the member’s cause no good whatever. It would put the southern members, on a day meant to be pleasant, in the position of men insulted at a wedding, and the member would spend in one afternoon a good deal of the patience he had spent three years accumulating, and get nothing for it.

“And if you will let the address go up clean,” Clay said, “I will find you a day after Easter for your motion on the trade in the District, and I will sit in the House while you make it.”

The member said that he was obliged to Mr Clay. He said that he had been found a day after Easter last session, and that Easter had come, and then the summer, and the House had risen, and he did not complain of it, because he knew how the business of the House went; but he thought he would not wait for another.

“The Queen did this thing,” he said. “Her Commons in England paid twenty millions for it, and I should have thought her Commons in America could afford to say that it was well done. I do not ask the House to do anything, Mr Clay. I ask it to say that it was well done, on a day when it means to say everything else.”

“There is no such thing in this House,” said Clay, “as only saying.”

“Then the House will have to say no,” said the member. “I think it had better have to.”

Clay looked at him for a while, with the snuffbox open in his hand.

He had a rule, which he had never told anybody, that every man in the House could be moved by something, and that the whole of the art lay in finding out what. In thirty years he had found perhaps four exceptions. He sat in the long quiet room and looked at the fifth: a young man with a Connecticut face, who did not drink, or play cards, or dine out, and wanted nothing that Clay had to give. He found that he liked him. He found, too, that he could do nothing whatever with him, and that the two discoveries had arrived together, as they generally did.

He shut the snuffbox, and thanked the member for his frankness, and said that he hoped they would go down to the House as friends; and the member said that he hoped so too, and went. Clay sat on for a few minutes in the library, alone with the clerk, and then went to find his whip, to count.

---

The House sat at noon.

The chaplain read the prayers, and the House prayed with him for the Queen. The galleries were full. Word had gone round the boarding houses that Mr Clay would speak, and the ladies had come, as they always came when he spoke; they sat in rows in the gallery over the Speaker’s chair in their bonnets and shawls, with their muffs in their laps against the cold of the building, and looked down at the two long rows of benches facing one another across the floor, and at the tall thin man on the front bench of the government side, taking snuff.

The Speaker, Meacham of Ohio, a big slow fair man in a black silk gown, the first Speaker the House had ever taken from beyond the mountains, called the Prime Minister.

Clay rose, and put on his spectacles, and took them off. His first sentences were always homely, and a little halting; his hands moved among the papers on the box as if he had mislaid something there, and the members who did not know him, the new ones, the ones from the far west, looked at one another and wondered what all the fuss had been about. The ones who knew him waited. They had heard it before. They knew that somewhere about the fourth or fifth sentence the hands would be still, and the voice would come down out of the top of his head into the low part of it, and that then there would be no more fidgeting in the House until he sat down.

He told them that the House had had no news from England for two months, and on Sunday evening had had all of it at once, and that for some weeks past he had been obliged to take his opinions on the affairs of Europe from Palermo. He told them that he had been married himself forty-one years next month, and that in all that time this House had never once seen fit to congratulate him, and that he bore it no grudge, and hoped to be more fortunate in the next forty. The galleries laughed, and the House laughed with them, and then his voice came down into its low part and he told them about the Queen.

She was twenty years old, he said. She was the Queen of a great many people who would never see her, and of none, he believed, who wished her more happiness than the people of this Union. She had taken a husband, as every young woman in the land hoped to, and he did not doubt she had been as frightened on the morning as any of them, and as glad by the evening. He hoped that the House, which agreed about so little, might find itself agreed for one afternoon in wishing her joy. And then he read the address, in the voice the ladies came for:

Most Gracious Sovereign, We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of America in Parliament assembled, humbly beg leave to offer to Your Majesty our respectful congratulations on Your Majesty’s marriage with His Royal Highness the Prince Albert; and to assure Your Majesty of our earnest prayer that the union which Your Majesty has formed may be blessed with every happiness, and may long contribute to the happiness of Your Majesty’s people in every part of Your Majesty’s dominions.

He sat down, and the House cheered him for a long time.

Webster seconded. He rose heavily from the bench behind, with a cold that made his great voice sound as if it came up out of a well, and told the House that he had been presented to Her Majesty the summer before, in London, and could assure it that she was very small, and very composed, and had the clearest voice he had ever heard in a palace. The galleries were delighted. Webster made them a handsome period about the one Crown and the two kingdoms, and the two peoples who were one in their loyalty to it, and coughed into his handkerchief, and sat down. Clay, who had known Webster for nearly twenty years and had never yet been able to decide whether he liked him, thought that it was handsomely done, and a great pity about the cold.

The Speaker read the address to the House, and began to put the question. Then the member from the Western Reserve stood up in his place, at the end of the third bench behind the ministers, and the Speaker called him.

He read his words. He read them in the same dry level voice in which he presented his petitions, and the House, which had stopped listening to that voice three years ago, found that it was listening now. He said that on the first of August, eighteen hundred and thirty-eight, in the second year of Her Majesty’s reign, every person held in slavery in her West India colonies had become free; that her Parliament had paid for it, and her people had prayed for it, and that she had assented to it, as she assented to everything her ministers advised, but that it had been done in her name, and was the greatest thing that had been done in her name. He said that he asked the House to do nothing. He asked it only to say that it had been well done, on a day when it was saying so much else. Then he sat down.

Nobody spoke for a moment. It was not the silence of a House that has been moved. Clay knew the difference. It was the silence of a House that has been told something about itself and is deciding whom to blame.

Then a Popular Democrat from the South Carolina low country was on his feet, a man whose name stood in every division list against the ministry and who had never been heard to speak below a shout; and he shouted. He wished to know whether the House was to send the Queen its congratulations on twenty millions of English money paid to ruin her islands. He wished to know whether every gentleman in the House who lived south of the Potomac was to be insulted at the Queen’s own wedding by a member of the Prime Minister’s own party, under the Prime Minister’s own eyes. The government benches called out, and the opposition benches called back, and the Speaker was on his feet calling order, and up in the gallery the ladies leaned forward in their bonnets, delighted again.

Clay rose for the second time, and the noise went down, as it generally did.

He did not quarrel with the gentleman from South Carolina, and he did not quarrel with the member from the Western Reserve. He said that he would not pretend to the honourable member that the subject of his amendment was a small one. It was not small. He had said in the House before, and would say again, that it was the greatest subject in the country, and an evil, and that he hoped to live to see the end of it, though he did not expect to. It was precisely because it was the greatest subject in the country that he would not have it settled by an amendment to a compliment, at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, on the Queen’s wedding. The House was asked, he said, to send Her Majesty a quarrel for a wedding present.

And he would not tell the honourable member, he said, that the House could vote down his words and say nothing by it. It would say something. It would be printed. It would be read in London, and in the Indies, and in the honourable member’s own district, and he was sorry for every reading of it. But the House had not been called together this afternoon to settle that, and could not settle it this afternoon, and should not try. He asked the honourable member, as a friend, to withdraw.

The member from the Western Reserve stood up and said, “I cannot, sir,” and sat down again.

So the Speaker put the question on the amendment, and the Ayes were very few and very loud, and the Noes were a great roar; and the member from the Western Reserve called a division, and the House cleared the floor and went out into the lobbies to be counted.

Clay went out with the Noes, with the South and the West and most of his own front bench, and with a good many northern members who looked at their boots and talked about the weather. He looked about the lobby, as he always did, to see who was in it and who was not; and Webster was not in it. Webster had gone home to his cold half an hour before, while the gentleman from South Carolina was shouting, and would be found in neither list in the morning. Clay thought that it was very well done, and that he had never in his life envied a man a cold before.

The tellers came up to the table and gave in the numbers. Ayes, thirty-eight. Noes, a hundred and forty-one. The amendment was lost. Clay had counted the Ayes as they came back in, as he counted everything, and twenty-six of the thirty-eight sat behind him.

Then the Speaker put the main question, and the address was agreed to without a voice against it. The member from the Western Reserve said Aye with the rest, clearly, as if he had decided to. It was ordered that Mr Speaker should present it to His Excellency the Governor-General, with a request that His Excellency would be pleased to transmit it to Her Majesty; and the House went on to the estimates, and the galleries began to empty.

The address would go up the Rise in the morning in the Speaker’s hands, and across the Atlantic in the Governor-General’s bag, clean, and signed, and unanimous, with no division on it anywhere. The division would go in the newspapers. They were quicker ships.

---

They were very pleased with him at Mrs Arguelles’s that evening. Stanly said that he had never heard the thing better done, and Crabb said that the Queen would never read the division, and Clay said that perhaps she would not, and that the gentlemen of Exeter Hall would read it to her if she did not. They played whist until one. He won, as he generally did, and found that he could not afterwards remember a hand of it.

Upstairs, before he went to bed, he wrote to Henry.

My dear Son, The Queen of England has been married, as you will have seen by the papers before this reaches you, and I moved the address of the House upon it today, and was handsomely seconded, and it will go up to the Governor-General tomorrow to be sent to her. I tell you so because I promised your mother that I would write to you every week whether I had any thing to say or not, and I find tonight that I have nothing to say which you would wish to hear. Kiss the children for me, all five of them. Tell little Henry that I have seen the great steam ship’s picture in a print-shop window, and will bring him one home in the summer. Your affectionate father, H. Clay.

He sanded it, and folded it, and found that he did not want to sleep.

At five he was standing at the window in his dressing-gown. It was still dark, and very cold, and clear. From the slope below Charter Hill the house looked down the whole length of the Axis, open ground and frost, a mile and more of it, down to Columbia Palace at the far end, which everybody called the White House, and which was dark, as it was most nights. Above the Palace, three hundred yards up the Rise, a single window was lit in Government House.

Adams was up, then. The old man was always up. He rose before five in every season, and read his chapters by candlelight, and wrote up his diary, and the whole city knew it, as it knew the hours of the tide. He had been Prime Minister before Clay, for eight years, until Jackson put him out; and then he had come back, after seven more, as the Crown’s representative, above Jackson; and in 1836, when Jackson went home to Tennessee, he had sent for Henry Clay, because there was nobody else who could carry the Commons, and he had made it perfectly clear, without once saying so, that this was the reason. Clay had been his ally for eight years, and Jackson’s opponent for eight more, and his Prime Minister for four; and he did not think that the old man had liked him for a single day of the twenty. He did not hold it against him. It was not a thing the old man did.

The Speaker would carry the address up the Rise at eleven, and the old man would read it, all of it, with great attention, and then he would read the division in the Votes, and he would say nothing whatever about the division to anybody. Clay found that he would have preferred almost anything the old man could say.

He thought of the Queen a moment longer: twenty years old and four weeks married, in a palace he would never see, with her uncle in Hanover who was sixty-eight and would not give way to her husband. Crabb had wanted to crown the uncle.

It was not a question for this session.