Book Two: Constitution Hill Part Four: The First Winter Characters
Chapter Twenty-one
The Confidence of the House
Lord Melbourne. London, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Monday, 28 September 1840.
The crisis of the reign was not a single event with a date but a sustained contest over a set of questions, and the questions matter because they were real. Ernest asked whether the King was obliged to accept any ministry that claimed the confidence of Parliament, or whether he retained a genuine choice.
They met at three, in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, round the long table with the green cloth and the inkstands; and for some time nobody said anything at all.
Melbourne knew why. He had known since the week before, when John Russell came back from Woburn with his mouth set and asked for a Cabinet, which was a thing John Russell did not do; and he supposed that most of the men round the table knew it too, or knew enough to be afraid of it, and that this was why they were all looking at the inkstands. John Russell meant to stand up to Palmerston. He meant to say, in so many words, at this table, that the Convention of July was carrying the country into a war with France for the sake of the Sultan of Turkey, and that it must be stopped; and if he was overruled he meant to resign, and to say so in the House of Commons, and to take half the party with him. Palmerston meant to be overruled by nobody. And between them, at the head of the table, in the chair with arms, sat the First Lord of the Treasury, who had not slept properly for a fortnight, and had told Russell so in a letter, and wished with his whole heart that both of them were somewhere else.
The silence went on. Somebody coughed. Macaulay, who could not bear a silence, opened his mouth and shut it again.
“We must consider,” Melbourne said at last, “about the time to which Parliament should be prorogued.”
He heard it as he said it. It was the dullest sentence that had ever been spoken in that room, and he had chosen it for its dullness, as a man will put his hand on the nearest chair in a dark room; and John Russell took it up at once, as Melbourne had known he would, and turned it round, and handed it back.
“I presume,” said Russell, in his small precise voice, “that we must consider whether Parliament should be called together, rather than when it should be prorogued. As matters are now going, it seems to me that we may find ourselves at war with France at any moment, and it is time we considered it.” He turned his head. “I should like to know your opinion, Melbourne.”
Melbourne did not give it. He did not have one that he could have given at that table without breaking something; and there was another long silence, until somebody asked Palmerston what his latest accounts were. And Palmerston, who had been waiting for exactly that question with the patience of a man fishing, took a great bundle of letters out of his coat and began to read them aloud: despatches from Constantinople, and from Alexandria, and from the Admiral off the coast of Syria, in his light easy pleasant voice, one after another, with the dates, and the names of the Pasha’s generals, and the number of the Turkish levies, and the state of the roads in the Lebanon.
The room was warm. The September sun came in at the long windows on the garden side and lay across the green cloth. Palmerston’s voice went on, and on, and on.
When Melbourne opened his eyes, John Russell was standing up.
He had been asleep. He knew it at once, and knew, by the way nobody was looking at him, that everybody else knew it too. He had no idea how long. Palmerston had finished his papers, and put them away, and Russell had begun; and Melbourne sat up a little in his chair, and put his hand over his mouth as if he were considering something deeply, and listened.
It was a remarkable speech. He thought afterwards that it was the best he had ever heard Russell make, in the House or out of it. Russell spoke for a quarter of an hour, standing, with his hand on the back of his chair, and put both sides of the case so exactly, and so fairly, and with such a deadly air of having been fair, that by the end of it there was nothing left of Palmerston’s side but Palmerston; and then he sat down, and threw himself back in his chair, and waited. And Palmerston got up, and answered him for twenty minutes, with the whole of his charm and the whole of his contempt, about France, and her weakness, and her bluster, and the two hundred thousand Prussians on the Rhine, and all the Powers of Europe against her, and the folly of being frightened by the noise of a Paris newspaper; and Holland, who was sitting next to Melbourne with his gouty foot on a stool, said in a loud whisper that it was the violence of ‘ninety-three, and everybody heard him.
Then Russell took out a slip of paper and read what he proposed: a message of thanks to the French for their efforts with the Pasha, and a meeting of the ministers of the four Powers to reopen the negotiation. Minto said that he did not see how men who had approved the Convention could now turn round on it. Russell said, very quietly, that the events at Alexandria had made all the difference. Macaulay talked about France in a loud voice, as he supposed a Secretary at War ought to talk about France, and was not listened to. The Chancellor said nothing. Baring said nothing. Labouchere agreed with whoever had spoken last. And Melbourne, at the head of the table, with his hand over his mouth, said nothing either, and was perfectly aware that his saying nothing was the only thing in the room that anybody would remember.
At seven they agreed that it would be disrespectful to Lansdowne, who was on the road from Bowood, to decide anything in his absence, and adjourned until Thursday. Then they all went to dine at Palmerston’s, as had been arranged a week before, and were very civil to one another over the soup.
He walked home afterwards, alone, up St James’s Street in the dark, and was ashamed of himself, which he had learned long ago was a thing that could be borne if one walked fast enough.
He knew what he was. He had known it all his life, and he had never minded, because what he was had generally done very well. He was a man who did not like to decide things, and who had found, in forty years of public life, that most things which men insisted on deciding settled themselves very nicely if they were left alone; and he had made a career and a reputation out of leaving them alone, with an air, and a joke, and his feet on the table. Why not leave it alone? He had said it so often that it had become a saying about him, and he had never been ashamed of it, because it had generally been right.
It was not right now. He could feel that it was not, as a man feels the ice under his feet change its note. The Convention was signed; the fleets were off the Syrian coast; Napier was landing marines at Beirut and printing proclamations to the mountaineers; the French were arming, and fortifying Paris, and singing in the theatres; and the King of the French, who did not want a war, was being pushed towards one by a minister who did not want one either, but could not afford to be seen not to want it. And in his own Cabinet Russell and Palmerston were about to pull the Government in half between them, and the only man who could have stopped them had fallen asleep at the table.
And at St James’s, half a mile away, there was a King who read everything.
That was the thought that kept him awake that night, in the big bed in South Street: not the French, or Mehemet Ali, or even Russell; but the King. The King had the minute. Holland and Clarendon had laid their dissent from the Convention before the Sovereign in July, as was their right, in writing, with their reasons; and the Sovereign had taken it, and read it, as he read everything, with his pencil, and had kept it. The King knew that the Cabinet was divided. He had known since July. And the King had a habit, which Melbourne had been learning about since June, of finding out what went on in Cabinets by means which Melbourne had never been able to discover, and of letting a minister know that he had found it out in a single sentence, at the end of an audience, without any emphasis at all.
He would know about this afternoon by Wednesday. He would know that the Prime Minister had slept.
He knew by Tuesday.
Melbourne went to St James’s at three, with the boxes, on the business of the Princess Augusta’s funeral; for the King’s sister had died on the twenty-second, at Clarence House, at seventy-one, quietly, after a long illness, the gentlest of all the old King’s daughters; and the court was in black for her on top of the black for the Queen, and the Earl Marshal had his orders to settle. The King received him in the library, in mourning, very upright, with his face set and older; and Melbourne, who had never in his life seen the King grieve for anybody and had not been sure that he could, saw that he was grieving now, for the sister who had written to him faithfully for forty years, wherever he was; and he was sorry, and said so, and the King thanked him without looking at him.
They settled the funeral. St George’s, on Friday, at night, as usual; the King would not attend, as the Sovereign did not; one of her brothers would be chief mourner. The King went through the Earl Marshal’s order line by line, with his pencil, and altered one thing, which was the hour. Then he took off his spectacles and folded them, and Melbourne got up to go.
“I am told,” said the King, “that my Cabinet sat yesterday for four hours and decided nothing.”
Melbourne stood with the boxes under his arm.
“It adjourned, sir, until Lord Lansdowne should be in town. It was thought more respectful.”
“So.” The King looked up at him with the one good eye. “I am told also that my First Lord of the Treasury fell asleep while my Foreign Secretary was reading the despatches.” He said it without any expression whatever, as he might have mentioned the weather. “I do not complain of it, Melbourne. I have slept at councils of war, in my time, and they were none the worse. I mention it only so that you will know that I have been told.”
Melbourne bowed. There was nothing whatever to say, and he had the sense not to try.
The adjourned Cabinet met on the Thursday with Lansdowne in his place, and decided, after a great deal of talk, that Palmerston should sound the ambassadors about an approach to France, on a paper of Metternich’s as the peg; and the next morning there was a leading article in the Chronicle, savagely abusive of France, that everybody in London believed Palmerston had written himself, and Russell came to South Street white with anger and said that all his confidence in the man was gone. Melbourne soothed him. He was very good at soothing. He told Russell that if he went out, his going would be ipso facto the dissolution of the Government, and that he could not think Russell wished to give the Tories the government of the country in the middle of a war scare, with a King on the throne who would be delighted to have them; and Russell, who was a Whig before he was anything else, went away soothed, and did not resign. Melbourne went to bed and lay awake and thought that he had done it again.
October was all news, and all of it bad for somebody. On the third came Beirut, taken by the fleet, the Egyptians out of it, and Palmerston walking about the Foreign Office with the despatch in his hand like a man who has won a horse race. On the seventeenth came the news from Paris that a madman called Darmès had fired a carbine at the King of the French on the quay by the Tuileries, two days before, and missed, and been taken; and the King of England, who had not been heard to say a kind word of the King of the French in thirty years, sent Melbourne a note in his own hand, the same afternoon, observing that Louis-Philippe drove about Paris with an escort of cavalry, and was alive. On the twenty-fifth, a Sunday, came the news that Thiers had resigned in Paris, and that Louis-Philippe would have a ministry of peace; and Palmerston said at dinner that he had told them so, which he had.
And on the twenty-second, between the second and the third, Holland died.
It was done in a few hours. He had been perfectly well. He had been at the Cabinet on the Thursday before, with his foot on its stool, arguing with Palmerston across the table with all the old sweetness and all the old obstinacy; he had had a dozen people at his table at Holland House every night that month, and talked to all of them, and laughed at his own gout. On the Thursday he was taken ill. Within a few hours he was dead, at sixty-six, with the doctors on the stairs; and his page said afterwards that the last thing he said, an hour before the end, with his hand on the boy’s arm, was: Edgar, these Syrian affairs will be too much for me. Mehemet Ali will kill me.
Melbourne heard that sentence on the Friday, from Allen, in the library at Holland House, where he had driven out at once when the note came; and he went and stood at the long window that looked over the park, with his back to the room and the dead man’s chair empty beside the fire, and laughed, because it was exactly like Holland, and then could not stop, and Allen went out and left him.
It was not only Holland. It was the house. He had been going to Holland House for forty years, since he was a young man in debt with a wife who threw things; it was the place in London where he had always been sure of dinner and conversation and the latest book and somebody to quarrel with, and of Holland at the head of the table, gouty and sweet and indefatigable, making everybody feel more intelligent than they were. It would close now. Lady Holland could not keep it up alone, and would not try; she would go into the town and be disagreeable to everybody from a smaller house, and the great library and the long gallery and the gardens would be shut, and the dinners would stop. Forty years of the best talk in England, gone in an afternoon, because an old man’s heart had stopped over Mehemet Ali.
He found that he was thinking about the girl. He had not let himself do that for some weeks. He thought that this was how it went when one was old, and that he had better get used to it: that the doors closed one after another, quietly, the Queen’s and Holland’s and whatever was next, and one went on walking along the passage past them, because there was nothing else to do, until there was only the one door left at the end.
The King’s letter came on the following Tuesday, the twenty-seventh, at eleven in the morning, by one of the King’s pages in a black coat, to South Street, while Melbourne was still at breakfast.
He knew the hand on the cover. He had come to know it very well since June: large, black, slanting, going uphill across the paper, with the long angry tails on the letters that the old King’s tutors at Kew had despaired of. He opened it at the table, with the butter knife, and read it, and laid it down beside his plate, and finished his tea, and read it again.
It was a short letter. It was perfectly civil. It might have been written by a careful man to a careful tenant.
My Lord,
I have observed with great concern the differences which exist among My Servants upon the affairs of the East, and which have been made known to Me in writing since the month of July. I am informed that one of My Secretaries of State has more than once been prepared to resign his Office upon this question, and that the Cabinet has met repeatedly without arriving at any Resolution. The death of Lord Holland, which I sincerely regret, removes from it a Minister of great experience at a time when it can ill spare one.
I cannot think that a Government so divided, and supported in the House of Commons by so small a Majority, possesses that confidence which is necessary to the conduct of My affairs at a moment of so much danger. I have therefore thought it right to acquaint you that it would be agreeable to Me that you should place your Resignation, and that of your Colleagues, in My hands.
I remain, My Lord, your affectionate
Ernest R.
Your affectionate. Melbourne looked at that for a long time. Then he folded the letter, and put it in his pocket, and went upstairs and put on his coat, and walked down to Downing Street in the October sunshine, past the Horse Guards, very slowly; and at Downing Street he sent for John Russell and Lansdowne, and nobody else, and shut the door.
They read it, one after the other, standing at the window, and Lansdowne gave it back to him first, without a word, and sat down, and looked at the carpet.
“Well,” said Russell at last. “He has asked.”
“He has asked.”
“He has not dismissed us.”
“No,” said Melbourne. “He is not William. William dismissed me in ‘thirty-four, at Brighton, in a morning, and sent for the Duke, and the Duke sent for Peel from Rome, and Peel came home and dissolved and lost, and I was back in five months, and William had to swallow me. This one has read all that, I imagine, in the newspapers, at Hanover, with his pencil.” He sat down at the table. “He has not dismissed us, because to dismiss us he must have somebody to send for. He has asked us to go of our own accord, so that he need not send for anybody. If we go, he has a ministry to make, and Peel to make it, and it will be Peel’s affair and not his. If we do not go, he has asked, and been refused, and nobody knows it but the three of us.”
“And Peel?” said Lansdowne, from his chair.
Melbourne thought about Peel. He had sat opposite him in the Commons and across from him at dinners for twenty years, and had never liked him, and had never once known him do a mean thing. He thought of Peel in June, getting up in the House after Russell had moved the Address of condolence, in his black, with his thumbs out of his waistcoat for once and his hands at his sides, and speaking for three minutes about the Queen in a voice that Melbourne had never heard him use; and of Peel sitting silent through the whole of the session after it, letting the Government through on division after division that he could have won, because he would not, so the whole House understood without his saying it, be seen to profit by a murder. He thought of what the country would say of a Tory Minister who came into office in the autumn because the new King had turned out the dead Queen’s ministers four months after her funeral, with her husband still in London and her coffin hardly cold in the vault at Windsor.
“Peel will not come in,” he said, “over the Queen’s coffin. He would not be thanked for it by a single man in England, and he knows it better than I do. If the King sends for him, he will go to St James’s and kneel and kiss hands and tell the King, with the greatest respect, that he cannot undertake His Majesty’s government in the present House of Commons, and go home. And the King knows that too. That is why he has written to me, and not to Peel.”
Russell was silent for a moment. Then he said, in his small precise voice, “Then you will refuse.”
“I shall answer,” said Melbourne, “that I have the confidence of the House of Commons, which is true, which voted in January by twenty-one that I had not lost it, and which has never been asked since. I shall answer that the differences in the Cabinet are such as every Cabinet has, and that the Cabinet is in no danger of breaking up, which is very nearly true, John, if you will be so good as to make it so. And I shall answer that I cannot advise His Majesty to accept a resignation which I have not tendered.” He took the letter out of his pocket again and laid it on the table, under his hand. “And then nobody is to speak of this. Not to your wives. Not at Brooks’s. Not to Palmerston, who would tell it to Lady Palmerston, who would tell it to the whole of London by Thursday. Not to the Duke. Not to Greville, above all, who writes everything down. It is between the King and the three of us, and it is to stay there.”
Lansdowne looked up. “It will come out.”
“Very likely,” said Melbourne. “Everything does, in the end. But it will come out as a story, years from now, that somebody heard from somebody’s aunt, and nobody will be able to prove it; and that will do no harm to anybody, least of all to the Crown. What I will not have is that it should come out now, as a fact, in the newspapers, in the first autumn of this reign, that the King tried to turn out his niece’s ministers before she had been dead five months, and was refused. That would do the Crown more harm than anything that has happened to it since the tenth of June. And it is still the Crown, Lansdowne, whoever is wearing it.”
He wrote the answer that evening at South Street, at his own table, in his own hand, and it took him three hours and eleven sheets of paper, and was a page and a half long when it was done.
Lord Melbourne presents his humble duty to Your Majesty, and has had the honour to receive Your Majesty’s letter of this morning.
Lord Melbourne cannot conceal from Your Majesty that there have been, and are, considerable differences of opinion among Your Majesty’s servants upon the affairs of the Levant; nor that they have been expressed, as is their duty, with frankness. But Lord Melbourne humbly submits that such differences are not new in any Cabinet, and that they have not prevented, and will not prevent, Your Majesty’s servants from conducting Your Majesty’s affairs with unanimity in action. The recent intelligence from Syria and from Paris has, in Lord Melbourne’s humble opinion, greatly diminished the danger which Your Majesty apprehends.
Your Majesty’s servants retain, so far as Lord Melbourne is able to judge, the confidence of the House of Commons, which in January last refused by a majority of twenty-one to declare that they had lost it, and which has not since been invited to express any contrary opinion. While they retain it, Lord Melbourne does not conceive that it would be consistent with his duty to Your Majesty, or to the country, to tender a resignation which the state of public affairs does not require; nor does he believe that any person whom Your Majesty might be pleased to call upon would at present undertake Your Majesty’s government with the support of that House.
Lord Melbourne will at all times hold himself at Your Majesty’s commands; and he begs to assure Your Majesty of his most dutiful attachment to Your Majesty’s person and Crown.
He read it through four times. He struck out in Lord Melbourne’s humble opinion and put it back. He thought of adding a sentence about Holland, and did not, because it would have been answering the King’s sentence about Holland, and he could not trust himself to do that civilly. He thought of adding a sentence about the Queen, and did not do that either, for the same reason, a great deal more strongly. Then he sealed it with his own seal, and sent it down to St James’s by his own servant, at ten at night, and sat on at the table in his shirt-sleeves, by the fire, with the King’s letter open in front of him.
Your affectionate.
He took it, after a while, and folded it again along its folds, and opened the drawer of the table, the small drawer on the right where he kept the things he did not want and could not burn: some letters of his mother’s, and a lock of his son’s hair, and a note in a round childish hand on Palace paper, three lines, that had come to him on the morning after the coronation two years ago and that he had never shown anybody. He put the King’s letter in on top of them, and shut the drawer, and turned the key, and put the key on his watch chain.
The King did not answer.
Melbourne waited for it all the next day, and the day after that; for a summons, or a note, or a second letter, or a message by the Lord Chamberlain that His Majesty had sent for Sir Robert Peel. Nothing came. He went to St James’s on the Thursday with the boxes, at the ordinary hour, as if nothing had happened, and was received in the library, as usual, and stood, as usual, while the King went through the boxes, every paper, with the spectacles and the pencil; and at the end of it the King took off his spectacles, and folded them, and Melbourne waited.
“The Parliament dies on the tenth of December, whether I dissolve it or not,” said the King. “So I am advised by the Clerk of the Council.”
“That is the law, sir. By the Acts of King William and Queen Anne it outlives the demise by six months, and no longer.”
“So.” The King looked at the window. “Then I shall not keep it waiting. You will advise me, my Lord, when the writs can be got out, so that my new Parliament may meet in January. I should like to see the country.”
Melbourne bowed. He understood perfectly. The King had asked, and been refused, and had not argued; and now he would do what the law allowed, and must do before December in any case, and would let the country answer the question that Melbourne had declined to. It was entirely proper. Nobody could have said a word against it. It was what Melbourne would have advised himself, in a week or two, if he had been asked, and he had been going to.
“I will see the Clerk of the Council this afternoon, sir,” he said.
“Do,” said the King. And then, as Melbourne bowed again and turned to go, the King said, without any emphasis whatever, looking at the papers on his table: “I had your letter, my Lord. It was very well written. You write a great deal better than you sleep.”
Melbourne went out. In the passage, under the old dark pictures, he stopped for a moment, and put his hand on the wall, which was cold, and stood there; and found, to his surprise, that he was not angry, or frightened, or even very much ashamed. He was something else, which it took him the length of the passage to put a name to. He was interested. It was a long time since a Sovereign had interested him, and the last one had been a girl of eighteen at Kensington, in a black dress, standing very straight.
He went down the stairs and out into the Colour Court, where the sentries were changing, and the leaves from the Park were blowing in under the gate, and walked back to Downing Street to see the Clerk of the Council about the writs.