Book One: The Olive Branch Part Five: The Peace of Boston Characters
Chapter Thirty-four
The Dominions Appertaining
King George III. Kew, in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Wednesday, 7 July 1779.
Rather than accept a ministry pledged to end the war, he drafted a message abdicating in favour of the Prince of Wales, then sixteen. He never sent it, and it was seen by nobody until long after his death.
The paper was on the top of the box when he opened it at five, in the Lord Chancellor’s hand, and it had four heads.
He read it standing, by the window, in the first grey light off the river, with his lips moving very slightly, as they did over any paper. Lord Thurlow had the honour to lay before His Majesty the substance of what had passed at his house the evening before, between himself and the Marquess of Rockingham, in the presence of the Duke of Richmond. The Marquess would be ready to undertake His Majesty’s affairs upon the following conditions. First, that His Majesty’s commander-in-chief in America be empowered to propose to the Americans a cessation of arms. Second, that His Majesty be pleased to appoint commissioners to treat with the Congress upon every point in dispute between the two countries, not excepting a legislature in America under the Crown. Third, that the Bill for excluding contractors from the House of Commons be suffered to pass. Fourth, that the Marquess should receive His Majesty’s commands from His Majesty himself, with whom alone he could treat.
The King read it twice, which was once more than it needed. Then he sat down at the table and wrote, at the foot of it, in the small fast hand that never blotted:
The King feels the indignity offered to His Person by such propositions.
He looked at that for a while. It was true; and it was no answer, and he knew it was no answer; and he did not cross it out, but he did not send it either. He folded the paper in three and put it on the left of the table, where things went that were to wait.
Then he did the rest of the box, because it was there.
It had been five days since North went.
He had not believed, until the last, that North would go. He had heard him ask a dozen times, in seventy-three and seventy-five and twice in seventy-seven, and he had always known where to put his hand; and on the Friday in the closet he had put it there, and leaned, and found nothing under it, and it had frightened him more than anything in the newspapers since Saratoga. North had stood in front of him with his heavy, kind, short-sighted face and said that he did not talk of going, he went; and he had gone. He was at Bushy now, with his wife and the empty room at the top of the house, and he signed what Robinson brought him and wrote nothing of his own.
The King did not blame him for the child. He had thirteen of his own, and had lost none, by the mercy of God, and could not think about it for long.
He blamed him for the rest. He had written as much to Lord Thurlow on the Saturday, after the prorogation, and burned the letter, and written a shorter one. Then he had set about finding a First Lord of the Treasury, as a man sets about finding a new coachman when the old one has given notice: methodically, from the top of the list.
There had been Lord Gower, whom North himself had named in June, and who had come to Kew on the Monday and walked with him for an hour by the river and said, with every expression of duty, that he was not equal to it. There had been Lord Weymouth, who had read the Spanish rescript and gone to bed. There had been Lord Thurlow himself, who would have done anything His Majesty asked, and had a voice like the last trump and a face like a thunderstorm and not a friend in the House of Commons; and Lord Thurlow had gone, as the King had asked him to, to the Duke of Grafton, and to Lord Camden, and to Lord Shelburne, to see whether any of them would come in; and they had all told him, in their different manners, the same thing, which was that they would come in with Lord Rockingham or not at all.
And Lord Rockingham would come in on four heads, written in Lord Thurlow’s hand, of which the King could stomach exactly one, and that the one about contractors.
He had said once, to Lord Dartmouth, years ago, in the summer of seventy-five, that there were men he would sooner give up the Crown than send for. He had meant it. He had been thinking of Lord Chatham then, mostly, and of the Duke of Richmond; and of Lord Rockingham too, who had repealed the Stamp Act in sixty-six and called it statesmanship, and had been telling the King what America wanted ever since, as though it were a thing a man could know by being told.
Lord Chatham was dead. The Duke of Richmond had sat at the Lord Chancellor’s table last night, and listened.
At eleven he walked across the lawn to the Dutch house, as he did most mornings, to see the boys at their books.
It was a fine day, very warm, with the river shining through the trees at the bottom of the lawn and the barges going down on the tide. The house was small and red and old-fashioned, with its curly gables, and the elder boys had lived in it with their governors since they were children, at their lessons by six, he hoped, and at their prayers before that. One of them was not there now. William was at sea, thirteen years old and a midshipman in the Prince George under Admiral Digby, because he had wished to be a sailor and the King had thought it would do him good; he had gone in June, in his little uniform, very proud, and the King had found the house very quiet for a week. Frederick was at his German, being designed for Hanover.
The Prince of Wales was at the window of the upper room, with his back to his books, looking at the river.
He turned round when his father came in, and bowed, very gracefully, as he did everything. He was sixteen. He would be seventeen on the twelfth of August. He was tall for his age and handsome, with fair hair and a high colour and a quick, warm, clever, careless face that pleased everybody who looked at it, and he could talk to anybody about anything for as long as they liked, and had never in his life, as far as the King could discover, finished a page of anything that bored him. The Bishop of Lichfield, who had charge of his studies, said that he had excellent parts. The Duke of Montagu, who had charge of everything else, said the same, and added that his Royal Highness was perhaps a little too fond of company. The King did not know what company a boy of sixteen could have at Kew, with two governors and a bishop and the river; and he had found, lately, that he did not altogether wish to know.
They talked for a quarter of an hour about the Latin, which was behind, and about a horse, which the Prince wished to have and was not going to; and the Prince was charming about both, and agreed with everything, and at the end of it kissed his father’s hand with a sort of affectionate impatience, as a young man kisses the hand of an old one who is keeping him from something. The King went back across the lawn with his hands behind him, and did not look round, and knew without looking that the boy was at the window again before he had reached the cedar.
He dined at four with the Queen and the elder children, as he always did, and talked about the hay, which was good this year, and about the Princess Royal’s drawing, which was better; and nobody at the table mentioned America, because nobody ever did unless he did first.
After dinner he went up to the nursery, where the youngest was. Octavius was five months old, and the thirteenth of them, and the King had looked in on him every morning and every evening of those five months, and found each time that he could not look in on him without smiling. He was asleep. He lay on his back with his fists up by his ears, in the attitude of a very small man surrendering, and the King stood over him in the half-dark with the nurse curtseying somewhere behind, and looked at him for a long time.
Then he went down to his room and shut the door, and lit the candles himself, and sat down at the table, and took a sheet of paper, and wrote it.
He did not draft it. He had drafted it already, a hundred times, walking by the river, in bed at five before the light came, in the closet with North; he had only to write it down. He wrote it as a message to the two Houses, in the third person, as such things were written, and in his own hand, because there was nobody in England he could have let see it in any other.
His Majesty during the eighteen years He has sate on the Throne of Great Britain, has had no object so much at heart as the maintainance of the British Constitution, of which the difficulties He has at times met with from His scrupulous attachment to the Rights of Parliament are sufficient proofs.
His Majesty is convinced that the sudden change of Sentiments of one Branch of the Legislature has totally incapacitated Him from either conducting the War with effect, or from obtaining any Peace but on conditions which would prove destructive to the Commerce as well as essential Rights of the British Nation.
His Majesty therefore with much sorrow finds He can be of no further Utility to His Native Country which drives Him to the painful step of quitting it for ever.
In consequence of which Intention His Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain and the Dominions appertaining thereto to His Dearly Beloved Son and lawful Successor, George Prince of Wales, whose endeavours for the Prosperity of the British Empire He hopes may prove more Successful.
He sanded it, and sat back, and read it over.
It was a good paper. It was clear and plain and every word of it was true. Eighteen years. The sudden change of sentiments of one branch of the legislature, which was ninety-seven gentlemen in a thin House on a motion of Mr Hartley’s that nobody had troubled to answer. No further utility. Quitting it for ever. He had thought, walking by the river, where he would go, and the answer had been Hanover, as it must be: the Electorate, the old patrimony of his house, which he had ruled for eighteen years and had never once seen, and which would receive him, he supposed, as a curiosity. He thought of himself in a German palace among strangers, with the English newspapers coming a week late, reading about the peace.
The Dominions appertaining thereto.
He stopped there, and read it again, and found that his hand had gone flat on the table beside the paper, as he had seen Dartmouth’s go, more than once, on the table in the closet.
The Dominions appertaining thereto were America. That was what the phrase meant; that was what it had always meant, in every instrument of every King of England since there had been an America to append. He would be resigning them too. He would be resigning the thirteen colonies, with the rest, to his dearly beloved son, who was sixteen years old and had never finished a page of anything that bored him; and the boy would not govern them, because the boy would not govern anything until he was eighteen, and that was thirteen months off. There was an Act for that. The King had had it passed himself, in sixty-five, after his first illness, when the children were small and he had been afraid: if the Crown came to one of his children under the age of eighteen, the Queen was to be Regent, with a council.
So it would be the Queen, for a year; and after the year, the boy.
He sat back in his chair and thought about that with great care, because it was the kind of thing a man ought to think about with great care, and because he had not, he found, thought about it at all.
Charlotte would be Regent. She would be Regent with a council on which the great officers of state would sit, and the great officers of state would be whoever the Houses would support, and the Houses had shown him in June whom they would support. And she would sign what they put in front of her, as he would not; because she was a good woman, and a sensible one, and loved her children, and had never in her life pretended to understand why her husband would not give the Americans what they asked for, and had said so to him once, in bed, in the dark, and never again. She would sign the cessation of arms. She would sign the commission, in her own neat German hand, in the name of a boy of seventeen who was looking out of a window at Kew. And when the year was up the boy would sign the rest himself, the legislature in America under the Crown and every word of it, for whoever was most amusing at his dinner table; and he would sign it in his father’s name, which was his own.
It would not be peace without the King. It would be the same peace, with the King in Hanover reading about it.
He sat for a long time.
The candles burned down a little. Outside it was quite dark now, and very still, and he could hear the river, and once an owl in the cedar, and once a watchman’s voice on the towpath, very far off, calling something he could not make out.
He thought of his Coronation. He did not often think of it. It had been a long day, and hot, and there had been a great deal of muddle about the order of the procession, and a stone had come loose from the crown during the service and fallen, and been found, and people had made a great deal of it afterwards; but he remembered the oath, because he had read it over every night for a week beforehand to be sure of it, and had meant every word. He had sworn to govern the people of this kingdom, and the dominions thereto belonging, according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on. The statutes in Parliament agreed on. He had sworn to that, before God, at twenty-three, with the crown waiting on the altar; and he had believed then, and believed now, that a man who swore to govern the dominions according to the statutes of one Parliament could not, without perjury, let them make another.
North had never understood that. Dartmouth, who was a religious man, had perhaps understood it and not agreed. Lord Rockingham had never understood anything in his life that could not be said at Newmarket.
And yet he had sworn the other thing too, in the same breath. He had sworn to govern. Not to retire to Hanover and read the newspapers. To govern; whatever was put in front of him, by whoever put it there; to the end.
He took the key off his watch chain, and unlocked the drawer, the left-hand one, and lifted out the bundle of his sisters’ letters, and set them on the table.
The other two were where they always were. The proclamation lay at the bottom, face up, beautifully engrossed, with its ruled space at the foot still empty, waiting for the date and the name; it had been waiting four years next month. On top of it, face down, print to ink, lay the paper from Philadelphia with its long list of his crimes. He had not looked at either of them since the summer of seventy-six. He did not look at them now, except to see that they were there.
He folded his own paper once, along the middle, and laid it on top of the Grievances, face down, as they were.
He put his sisters’ letters back on top, and closed the drawer, and locked it, and put the key back on his watch chain, where it lived.
Then he took a fresh card, and dipped the pen, and wrote.
Kew. July 7. 1779. 40 m. past 11 p.m. The King desires the Marquess of Rockingham will attend him at the Queen’s House on Friday at one o’clock. G.R.
He read that over too. It was very short. It was a great deal shorter than the other paper, and a great deal harder to write, and his hand, he noticed, had not been quite steady at the R; and he thought that if anybody ever asked him which of the two had cost him more, he would not tell them.
He did not wake a messenger. There was no need for it to go before morning. He propped the card against the inkstand, where the page would see it at five, and pinched out the candles one by one with his fingers, because he disliked the smell of a snuffer, and went up through the dark house, past the nursery, where Octavius was asleep, and into his own bed, where the Queen was.
She stirred, and asked him the time, and he told her, and she went back to sleep.
He lay on his back and looked at the dark. He had not changed his mind. He had only, for the first time in his life, run out of men who would do what he thought right; and found that he could not do it himself, and could not give it up either; and so would have to do the other thing, with his own hands, and sign it.
He slept at once, as he always did.