By and By

The commissioners’ instructions ran to forty-one articles, and Dartmouth had read every one of them four times, and on the morning of the seventh of April he read them a fifth, at the table in the library in St James’s Square, with the window shut against the rain.

Carlisle, Eden and Johnstone could treat with the Congress, suspend the Acts, restore charters, renounce revenue taxation and offer seats at Westminster. Forty-one articles set out the powers. The thirty-ninth withheld an American legislature independent of Britain’s Parliament and forbade opening the question. Dartmouth had drafted it himself after a morning with the King.

He sanded the copy, and sat looking at the thirty-ninth article for some time.

In the drawer lay Clinton’s secret orders: if France entered the war, leave Philadelphia, return to New York and detach five thousand men for the West Indies. The commissioners did not know. Dartmouth had signed those orders too. Carlisle would arrive with his offer while the army packed to leave the city. Eden called at the office most days, and Dartmouth found it difficult to look at him.

Mr Eden ran the secret service, among other things, and had a correspondent at Paris so near Doctor Franklin that his letters sometimes reached London before the Doctor’s reached the Congress. It was from that correspondent that they knew what the King of France had offered the Americans in December, and on what condition. Dartmouth had read the copy in Mr Eden’s hand. Let the Congress declare the colonies free and independent States, and His Majesty will sign with them the same day. He had read it three times, and then gone across the Park to the Queen’s House and read it to the King, who had listened with his hands behind his back and said at the end only, “And will they?”

“I do not know, sir. They would not in seventy-six.”

“They will not now,” the King had said. “They want their Parliament, not the King of France. I know them better than the King of France does.”

---

He went down to the House at two, through the rain.

He knew before he reached it that something was afoot, because there were carriages all the way along from Whitehall, and a crowd at the door of the Lords, and in the lobby a crush of members of the other House trying to get to the bar, and ladies, which there were not on ordinary days. Lord Camden met him by the fire in the passage, looking grey.

“He is here,” Camden said. “He is in the Prince’s Chamber. I have been with him this hour, trying to persuade him home. I might as well persuade the river.” He lowered his voice. “He has hardly been out of his bed since the winter, my lord. He cannot stand without his son. And he has come down in the rain to speak against the Duke’s motion, and I believe it will kill him, and so does he.”

Dartmouth went into the House and took his place, and looked about him, and saw that the House was full as he had never seen it full: the earls’ bench and the barons’ and the bishops’, all crowded, and the steps of the throne crowded with peeresses, and the bar thick with members of the Commons standing, and the old tapestries on the walls above them all, the great faded ships of the Armada going up the Channel in their crescent, with the English ships hanging on their flanks, as they had hung there for more than a century.

Then the doors at the side were opened, and the House stood up.

It did it without anybody telling it to. Dartmouth found himself on his feet with the rest, the whole House, peers and bishops and the Commons at the bar, and a lane opening down the floor towards the earls’ bench as a lane opens in water; and down the lane, very slowly, on crutches, between his son and his son-in-law, came the Earl of Chatham.

He was dressed in black velvet, with a full wig, and he was wrapped in flannel to the knees, and his face under the wig was the colour of the flannel. He had grown very thin. The great hooked nose stood out of his face like a beak, and the eyes beneath it, which had frightened two Houses of Parliament for forty years, moved over the peers as he passed them, and Dartmouth, who had known that look from his own boyhood, from the galleries of the Commons, felt it go over him, and stood a little straighter, as everybody did. The young man on his right arm was his second son, William, a tall pale boy of eighteen who was studying the law and watched his father’s feet as if each step were a sum he had to get right. On the left was Lord Mahon, who had married his eldest daughter, and behind them came the two other sons. They brought him to the earls’ bench and let him down on to it, and he sat, breathing, with his crutches beside him and his hands on them, and the House sat down.

---

The Duke of Richmond moved his address at a little after three.

It was a good address, in its way. Richmond was a good man, in his way: rich and handsome and quick and generous, a duke who believed in annual parliaments and said so in front of the King, and who had moved the motion on Mr Penn’s petition in seventy-five and carried it against the ministry, so that Dartmouth had spent the evening afterwards at the Queen’s House explaining to the King why it did not matter. He moved now that an address be presented to His Majesty, humbly praying him to empower his commissioners to grant to the colonies in North America a Parliament of their own under the Crown, which was the only thing they had asked for that they had not been offered; and to withdraw his fleets and armies from the colonies, so that the commissioners might treat with a free people and not a conquered one; and to do both before the Court of France, which had already offered the Congress a treaty, made the colonies independent by signing it.

He spoke for an hour. He said that the war had already cost more millions than anybody could count, and could not be won. He said that a Parliament in America under the King was a smaller thing than an America under the King of France, and that the House had better choose between them while it still had the choosing. He said that the noble lords on the Treasury bench had been offered peace on these terms in seventy-five, by a petition they had received, and in seventy-six, by a paper they had read, and had refused it each time because they were winning; and that they were not winning now.

Then Dartmouth stood up to answer him, because the American department was his and it was his business, and because there was nobody else on the bench who would do it.

He did not do it well. He never did. He had none of Richmond’s quickness and nothing at all of the man on the earls’ bench; he spoke as he wrote, slowly and plainly and at too great a length, and the House listened to him, as it always did, with the particular patience of men who respect a speaker and wish he would sit down. He said that the King’s commissioners would sail within the fortnight with powers more ample than had ever been given to any commission of the Crown, and he told the House what they were, as far as he was able. He said that the one thing the noble Duke would have them grant was not the King’s to grant, nor the commissioners’, but the Parliament’s, and that it was the opinion of His Majesty’s servants that two Parliaments under one Crown were two Crowns. And he said that to recall the fleet and the army from America in the very month when France was arming at Brest and Toulon would not be to treat with a free people; it would be to tell the King of France that he had only to arm, and Great Britain would go home.

He sat with his hands shaking under his knees. He had just defended keeping an army in America against France. The orders in his drawer sent part of it to the islands. He had distinguished withdrawal from redeployment clearly enough on the way down.

---

Then Lord Chatham rose.

He rose very slowly, with his crutches and his son, and stood, leaning on them, with the House so still that Dartmouth could hear the rain on the windows, and for a while he did not speak at all. When he did his voice was low, and not clear, and the House leaned forward to hear it.

He said that he thanked God that he had been enabled to come there that day, to perform his duty, and to speak on a subject which had so deeply impressed his mind. He said that he was old and infirm, that he had one foot, more than one foot, in the grave. He said that he had risen from his bed to stand up in the cause of his country, perhaps never again to speak in that House.

Some of what came next could not be heard. He lost the thread once, and stopped, and found it. And then the voice came back, for a moment, as it had been: not loud, but filling the room, the voice Dartmouth had heard from the gallery of the Commons as a boy, the voice that had won the last war.

“My lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy!”

He turned, on his crutches, towards the Treasury bench.

He said that he had laid a bill on that table three years ago, in the February of seventy-five, to make the Congress at Philadelphia a lawful assembly under the Crown, and to let the Americans grant their own money by their own consent; and that their lordships had thrown it out at the first reading, without suffering it to lie upon the table. Dartmouth remembered. He had stood up that day and said that he saw no objection to its lying on the table; and then Lord Sandwich had stood up, and he had sat down again, and voted with the rest to throw it out. He wondered whether Chatham remembered that. He thought that very probably he did.

“I would give it them now,” said Chatham. “I would give them everything they ask of us that a son may ask of his father: their charters, their assemblies, their money, their Parliament, if they will have it under their King. I would have given it them before a drop of blood was shed, and I would give it them tomorrow. They are our children, my lords. They are the King’s subjects, and the heirs of our liberties, and we have used them as no father should use his children; and I have said so in Parliament for thirteen years, and I will say so with my last breath.”

He stopped, and breathed, and Dartmouth saw his son’s hand tighten on his arm.

“But I will not give it them on our knees to France,” Chatham said. He turned again, this time towards Richmond. “I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. My lords, His Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon?”

He lifted one hand from the crutch as he said it, a little, towards the walls; and the House, without meaning to, looked up at the tapestries, at the faded ships going up the Channel in their crescent, and looked down again.

“Shall a people that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible. Give America what is America’s, my lords, and give France nothing. Any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!”

He sat down, or was let down, very slowly, on to the bench, with his son’s arm under him; and the House let out its breath, all of it together, and nobody spoke for a moment, and Dartmouth found that his eyes were wet, and that he was ashamed of it, and that he did not care.

---

Lord Temple leaned across to the old man, while the Duke of Richmond was getting up, and said something to him in a low voice. Dartmouth was near enough to hear the answer.

“No, no,” said Chatham, without opening his eyes. “I will do it by and by.”

Richmond answered him gently. He was a good man, and it was not easy, and he did it with every mark of respect. He said that there was not a person present who more sincerely wished than he did that America should remain joined to this country; that he revered the noble earl’s name above any man’s living; but that the noble earl had not told the House how the thing he wished could be done. They could not grant the Americans their Parliament and keep an army in their towns. They could not fight France and America together, and win, with a navy half rotten and a treasury empty. And if the noble earl could show him how the war was to be carried on against both, he would be the first to follow him; but he was convinced that it was now totally impracticable, and that the noble earl’s own great name, which had won the last war, could not win this one.

He sat down. And Lord Chatham, on the earls’ bench, put his hands on his crutches and began to get up to answer him.

He could not. He tried again, and could not, and the third time he got half way, and Dartmouth saw his face change. He saw the old man press one hand flat to his breast, as if he had remembered something there, and then the hand slid away, and the crutch fell, and Chatham fell back across the bench, quite slowly, with his head back and his mouth open and his eyes still open, looking at the roof.

The House rose in a roar.

Men were on their feet everywhere, and some of them were running. The Duke of Cumberland, the King’s brother, who was not received at court, was at the bench before anybody, with his arms under the old man’s shoulders, and Lord Temple, and Lord Stamford, and the sons, William as white as paper and the youngest quicker than any of them, and Lord Mahon; and somebody was calling for air, and somebody for a surgeon, and the strangers were being turned out from the bar, and the ladies on the steps of the throne were standing up and one of them was crying aloud. Dartmouth was on his feet, without knowing that he had stood, and could not get near, and did not try; he stood in his place with his hands clasped and prayed, which was the only thing he had ever been any good at in a crisis, and watched them lift the old man and carry him out between them, his head on his son’s arm and his feet in their flannel, through the side door to the Prince’s Chamber.

He looked round once, in the middle of it, for no reason, and saw Lord Mansfield.

Mansfield had not moved. Every man in the House was standing, every one, except the Lord Chief Justice, who sat in his place with his hands in his lap and his face composed, looking at the bench where the old man had lain, as unmoved as the old man himself; and Dartmouth thought, looking at him, that he had never understood until that moment what it was to have been somebody’s enemy for the best part of forty years.

The House adjourned. There was no question of anything else. Doctor Brocklesby had come, somebody said, and the earl was breathing, and they would carry him to a house in Palace Yard for the night, since he could not be moved further. Dartmouth went out into the rain and stood for some minutes on the steps without his hat, until his servant found him.

---

He went to Downing Street that evening, because he did not know where else to go, and found North in the little room upstairs, alone, with a letter on his knee.

“The King has written,” North said. He did not get up. “He writes very kindly. He is sorry for Lord Chatham’s misfortune, as a Christian. And he wishes to know whether, Lord Chatham being now out of the question, I will not be content to stay.”

Dartmouth sat down.

North looked at the letter. “I asked him in March to send for Chatham,” he said. “Did you know that? I begged him. I told him I would serve under Chatham, in any place, or in none, if he would only send for the one man in England the Americans would believe, and he said that he would sooner lose his Crown than put himself into the hands of that man. And I said, sir, you may do both. And he said no.” He folded the letter. “He has been spared the trouble now. God has been very attentive to His Majesty’s convenience this spring.”

“Frederick.”

“I know. I know.” North put his hand over his eyes. “I am not myself. Go home, William. Say your prayers. You are better at them than I am.”

---

The commissioners sailed from Spithead on the sixteenth, in the Trident, with the forty-one articles and the thirty-ninth among them, and Mrs Eden, and a great deal of baggage, and Lord Carlisle, who wrote verses, very likely writing some. Dartmouth had shaken Mr Eden’s hand at their last meeting, and wished him a good passage, and had not looked at him.

The Earl of Chatham was driven home to Hayes two days later, very slowly, and lay there through April, and the bulletins went up in the coffee houses every morning, and men read them standing.

He died on the eleventh of May, at Hayes, with his son William reading Homer to him, the town said, though the town said a great deal. The Commons voted him a public funeral and a monument in the Abbey that same afternoon, on the motion of Colonel Barré, and the King, who could not prevent it, let it be known that he considered it an offensive measure to himself personally. Dartmouth heard of that from North, who had it from the closet, and did not repeat it to anybody.

He sat in the library that night with the window open on the square, as he had sat on a Sunday in May a year before, after he had written to Sir William Howe that there would be time.

Howe had received it on the sixteenth of August, in the Chesapeake, with his army already in its transports and the Hudson three hundred miles away. It had found him exactly where Dartmouth had decided not to order him not to go. There had not been time. Burgoyne was coming home on his parole to demand an inquiry, and would say in it that he had been abandoned; and he would be right, and Dartmouth would answer for it, as he had known he would since the night he put Howe’s letter beside Burgoyne’s orders and tried the dates again.

He found that he was thinking, instead, of the old man on the earls’ bench, with his eyes shut, saying to Lord Temple that he would do it by and by.

Chatham had meant to answer Richmond. He had put it off a quarter of an hour, because he was tired and another man was speaking, and the quarter of an hour had been all there was. Dartmouth thought about a bill thrown out at its first reading, and a petition received, and forty-one articles with the thirty-ninth among them; and about a thing he had believed for three years and had never once said aloud to the King, because the King had not asked him, and because the moment had never been right, and because there would be time.

He knelt that night and prayed for Chatham, for the King and for Carlisle at sea; and then, at more length, for himself, that he might find the courage to say it, by and by. He remained on his knees after he had finished.