Fresh Courage

The hymn book had come down from Olney on the Monday, two copies, as Mr Newton had promised in the winter, in a brown paper parcel with his compliments to Lady Dartmouth written on the outside in a hand that sloped uphill; and Dartmouth had carried one of them about with him ever since, in the pocket of his coat, as another man might have carried a pistol.

He read in it in the carriage on the Wednesday morning, going up from Blackheath to Whitehall for the last time, with the windows down because of the heat and the road white with dust. He read it slowly, holding it a little away from his eyes. Mr Newton had written in February that a much smaller proportion of the hymns than he had at first hoped for were his dear Mr Cowper’s; poor Cowper had been ill again, and could not write, and Newton had had to make up the number himself. Dartmouth thought he could tell which were which without looking at the initials. Newton’s were the hymns of a man who had been a slave-ship’s master on the coast of Guinea and been brought up out of it by the scruff of the neck, and never got over his astonishment; they were loud and plain and sure, and you could sing them in a barn. Cowper’s were quieter. Dartmouth had been at school with Cowper, at Westminster, nearly forty years ago, and remembered him as a small frightened clever boy who was sick before examinations; and he found that he could hear that boy, very clearly, in some of these lines, and that it made them harder to read in a carriage.

There was one he had read four times since Monday. It was called Light Shining out of Darkness, and it began with a line he thought people would still be singing when everyone in the carriage and the Cabinet and the House of Lords was dead:

God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.

He read on to the third verse and stopped, as he had stopped there on Monday and Tuesday, and looked out of the window at the fields going by beyond Deptford, and said the lines over to himself without looking, to be sure he had them.

Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds ye so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break In blessings on your head.

Then he put the book away, because they were coming into the town, and he had a letter to write.

---

The room behind the right-hand door had been his for seven years.

He had come into it in the August of seventy-two, when Lord Hillsborough went out. The Americans had been pleased; Dr Franklin had called within the week, Dr Wheelock had written from New Hampshire, and a young African woman in Boston had sent him a poem, which he had kept. He had known them all before their names filled the dispatches. By evening everything in the room would be left for Lord Shelburne, and he looked about for anything that was his to take home.

The room had not changed. The window still looked on the yard. The clock still stood behind the chair where his visitors sat, so that they heard it and he did not. The anteroom outside still had its eleven chairs.

Mr Knox came in at nine with the box, as he had come in every morning for seven years, a stout, clever, contentious Irishman who had been in Georgia once and never let anybody forget it, and who had argued with Dartmouth about every dispatch he had ever drafted and been right, Dartmouth thought, about half of them. He laid the box on the desk. He did not say anything about the day. He said that the Bahamas wanted a new governor, and that the Board of Ordnance had answered the letter about the Halifax stores at last, and that there was the letter to Sir Henry Clinton to be written, if his lordship wished to write it himself.

“I do,” said Dartmouth. “Thank you, Mr Knox.”

Knox went to the door. He stopped there, with his hand on it, and turned round, and for a moment Dartmouth thought he was going to say something he would have to answer.

“It has been an honour, my lord,” said Knox, gruffly, to the door frame; and went out.

---

He wrote the letter himself, in his own hand, as he had written the first.

Whitehall, 14th July 1779.

Sir,

His Majesty having been pleased to accept the resignation of Lord North, and to call the Marquess of Rockingham to the conduct of his affairs, I am to acquaint you that it is from the Earl of Shelburne that you will hereafter receive the signification of His Majesty’s pleasure respecting the service under your command. Until you shall receive the same, you will continue to act upon the instructions you now have.

I cannot close my correspondence with you without assuring you of the sense I have always entertained of your zeal for His Majesty’s service, and of the difficulties under which you have exerted it.

I am, Sir, your most obedient humble servant,

Dartmouth.

He had thought of putting the other thing in. He had thought of it on the Tuesday night with great seriousness, lying in the dark at Blackheath with his wife asleep beside him: a private paragraph, in his own hand, after the signature, saying to Sir Henry Clinton what he believed about America and had never said. It would have cost him nothing now. Clinton would have read it in New York in September and put it in a drawer, and nobody else would ever have known.

That was the reason he did not do it. It was not Clinton he had to say it to.

He sanded the letter and gave it to the clerk to copy, and signed the copy for the book, and sealed the original, and it went out to Falmouth that afternoon in the mail for the New York packet. And then there was nothing left in the box that was his.

He sat for a while longer. Then he took a sheet of paper and wrote at the top of it, For Lord Shelburne, and under that, in a column, the things the department owed and had not paid. They were not debts of money. They were promises: to the loyal refugees in New York, about their losses; to the Six Nations, about their lands, which he had renewed in the King’s name to Joseph Brant in the spring of seventy-six, and had believed when he renewed it; to the Governor of Nova Scotia, about his roads. He put the Six Nations at the top. He did not know whether Lord Shelburne would read it. He thought it likely that Lord Shelburne would read it with great attention, and remember every word, and do whatever was convenient; but at least it would have been written down, by somebody, before the peace was made, and that was something.

---

North came for him at half past twelve, in his own coach, because they had agreed that they would go to St James’s together.

He was thinner. That was the first thing Dartmouth saw. He had been a heavy man all his life, and he was still a heavy man, but something had gone out of the weight in the last month, so that it hung on him like a borrowed coat; and his face, which had always looked amused, looked now only tired, and very kind. He had his hat on his knees. He did not get out. Dartmouth got in, and the coach went round into Whitehall and up past the Horse Guards towards the Park, and for a while neither of them said anything.

“How is Anne?” said Dartmouth.

“Better than I am. She is better than I am at most things.” North looked out of the window at the Horse Guards. “I have been reading the Psalms, William. You will be pleased to hear it. I did not know there were so many of them.”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“So I found.” North was quiet for a moment. Then he said, without turning his head: “We are beat completely, brother. You know that. We are beat completely, and nothing but health and domestic comfort is left that is worth thinking of. I mean to think of nothing else, for a year at least. I advise you to do the same.”

“I mean to.”

“You will not. You will go home and pray about it.” North turned round and looked at him, and for a moment the old expression came back into his face, the amused one, the one that had been taken for so many years for indolence. “Pray for me too, while you are about it. I have not been able to manage it myself.”

The coach turned in at the gate. There were a great many carriages in the court already, and a great many people on the stairs, because it was known all over the town that the new men were to kiss hands that day, and everybody who had ever wanted anything from a minister had come to see which way to bow.

---

The new men were in the anteroom when they came up.

Dartmouth knew them all, of course; he had sat with most of them in the Lords for twenty-five years and been opposed by most of them for five. Lord Rockingham was there, a slight, pale, delicate man of nearly fifty with a sweet, anxious face and very good clothes, standing by the window with the Duke of Richmond; he looked as though he had been ill and was going to be ill again, and he had said in the Lords so many times what the Americans wanted that Dartmouth had come to know the speech by heart. Lord Camden was there, and the Duke of Grafton, and Lord John Cavendish, and somewhere at the back, talking to nobody, Mr Fox, unshaven, in a coat that had been very fine a week ago. They bowed to him, all of them, very civilly. Lord Rockingham came across the room and took his hand and held it, and said that he hoped Lord Dartmouth would not think the worse of him, and that he had the greatest respect for Lord Dartmouth’s character, as all the world had; and Dartmouth said that he did not think the worse of anybody, and thanked him, and found that it was true.

Lord Shelburne was standing by himself near the door of the closet, as he generally stood by himself, a handsome heavy-lidded man of forty-two in a plum-coloured coat, who had married again the week before and looked, Dartmouth thought, rather less pleased about it than about the seals. Lord Shelburne bowed to him, very low, with a little smile. Shelburne had a smile that everybody mistrusted and nobody could ever say why. Dartmouth bowed back.

“I am told the American papers are in excellent order, my lord,” said Shelburne.

“They are numbered,” said Dartmouth. “Every one.”

“Then I shall begin at the beginning.” Shelburne’s smile did not change. “I have always found that a great deal of time is lost in this country by beginning anywhere else.”

North went in first. He was in the closet about ten minutes. He came out with his face quite composed and his hat under his arm, and walked across the anteroom to Dartmouth, through the new men, who drew back a little to let him pass, as people draw back for a funeral; and he stopped beside his brother and said, in his ordinary voice, so that half the room heard it, “Go in, William. Say your prayers”; and went on out, and down the stairs, and home.

---

The King was standing by the fireplace, where there was no fire, with his weight back on his heels in the way he had.

He looked well. He looked as he always looked, high-coloured and steady and a little tired about the eyes, and he received the seals from Dartmouth’s hands without any expression at all, and laid them on the table beside him, where Lord Shelburne would be given them in a quarter of an hour. Then he said that he was obliged to Lord Dartmouth for his long and faithful services, which he would always remember; and that he hoped Lady Dartmouth was well; and that he understood Lord Lewisham was with his militia, and was glad of it, at such a time. He said all of it kindly, and plainly, and as though he had thought beforehand about what to say, which Dartmouth did not doubt he had.

Then he waited, as he always waited, for Dartmouth to bow and go.

Dartmouth did not go.

He had not known until that moment whether he would. He had prayed about it every night for fourteen months, since the night Chatham died, kneeling on the floor at Blackheath; and every night he had risen from his knees and known that he would not, because the King had not asked him, and because the moment was never right, and because there would be time. There was no more time. The seals were on the table. In a quarter of an hour Lord Shelburne would be standing where he stood, and Dartmouth would be a peer of the realm with a house at Blackheath and a great many sons and no office at all, whose opinion on America was of no more consequence to anybody than the Archbishop’s. He would never stand in this room again on business. It was now or it was never.

Ye fearful saints fresh courage take. He thought that Mr Cowper, who was sick before examinations, had perhaps known something about this.

“Sir,” he said, “may I say one thing more.”

The King looked at him.

“I have never said it to you,” said Dartmouth. “Not in seven years. You never asked me, and I never found the right moment, and I believed there would be time. I am no longer your Majesty’s servant in this, and so I can say it without its being advice, which your Majesty has not asked for, and I do not offer. I only wish your Majesty to have heard it once, from me, before I go.”

The King said nothing. He did not move.

“They should have their Parliament, sir,” said Dartmouth. “Under you. That is all they have ever asked for, and all they will take, and I have believed for four years that they ought to have it. I said otherwise in the House last year, because your Majesty had said otherwise to me, and I have been sorry for it every day since.”

He found that his hand had gone down flat on the table, beside the seals, and he left it there, because he was not sure his knees would answer for him without it.

“Your Majesty says that two Parliaments under one Crown are two Crowns. I have never been able to see it. Your Majesty has had two Parliaments under your Crown since the day you came to the throne: one at Westminster, and one in College Green at Dublin, which was sitting when your great-grandfather was a boy, and has made the laws of Ireland ever since, and taxed Ireland, and voted Ireland’s money to your Majesty’s service, and never once supposed that it had a different King. Your Majesty is King of Ireland. You are not the less King of Great Britain for it. You are Elector of Hanover besides, and have estates there that vote your Majesty’s revenues in German, and nobody in this room has ever thought your Crown divided by it. It is one Crown, sir. It is one Crown with more than one Parliament under it, as it has been since before any of us was born. The Americans are only asking to be Ireland. I do not think it would hurt your Majesty to let them.”

The King did not answer.

He did not say anything at all. He looked at Dartmouth for what seemed a long time with his pale steady eyes, and Dartmouth could not read them, and did not try. Then the King looked down at the seals on the table, and at Dartmouth’s hand beside them; and then he turned his head, and looked at the window.

Dartmouth took his hand off the table. He bowed, very low, and went backwards to the door, as one did, and the King did not turn round; and the last thing he saw of the King of England as his Secretary of State was a heavy, high-coloured, obstinate face in profile against the light, looking out at the July afternoon over St James’s Park as if there were something there that he was trying, with great care, to make out.

---

He did not remember the stairs.

He remembered the court below, and the carriages, and the heat coming up off the stones, and a footman asking him which carriage was his, and his not knowing, because North had taken his own coach home. He walked. He walked down through the Park, in his good coat and his best wig, in the full sun, past the canal and the ducks and the nursemaids and the soldiers, and out at the Horse Guards into Whitehall, and down to the river at the stairs; and there he took a boat, as he had not done since he was a young man, and had himself rowed down to Greenwich on the ebb.

London went by. It went by as it always had, brick and stone and smoke, the churches and the wharves, the ships lying in the Pool with their yards crossed, the colliers unloading, the watermen shouting at each other across the tide; and nobody on any of the wharves knew that the Secretary of State for America had gone out of office that afternoon, or would have cared if they had. The boatman asked him whether he had been at the palace. Dartmouth said that he had. The boatman said that he heard there was a new lot in, and that it was all one to him, there being no new lot yet that had done anything about the price of bread; and Dartmouth agreed that there had not, and gave him a shilling over his fare, and walked up the hill from Greenwich through the park in the evening with his hat in his hand.

They were at supper when he came in. His wife looked at his face and did not ask him anything. Henry and Edward wanted to know whether he had seen the King, and whether the King had said anything, and he said that he had, and that the King had asked after their brother; and Augustus, who was six, wanted to know whether Papa was still a Secretary of State, and was told that he was not, and asked what he was instead, and Dartmouth thought about it, and said that he supposed he was their father, and Augustus seemed to think that would do.

At nine they had prayers, as they always had, the whole household together in the long room with the windows open on to the heath. When the reading was done his wife went to the harpsichord, and opened the new book from Olney on the stand, and they sang the hymn he had been carrying about with him all week; the servants did not know the tune and came in late, and Charlotte, who was four, sang a different one, very loudly, with great satisfaction, all the way through.

Then he knelt, as he had knelt every night of his life, and prayed.

He prayed for the King, first, as he always did, and at more length than usual. He prayed for his brother North and for Anne, and for the soul of their little boy. He prayed for Lord Rockingham, who looked ill, and for Lord Shelburne, who did not, and for Sir Henry Clinton at New York, who would open his letter in six weeks and not know what to make of it. He prayed for the Americans, who had asked for one thing for four years and might now be going to get it, and for the Mohawks, who had been promised another and very likely were not.

And then he came, as he always came at the end, to himself; and knelt there with his head on his hands and waited for the thing he needed to ask for, as he had waited every night for fourteen months, and found, to his very great surprise, that there was nothing there.

He stayed on his knees a while longer, to be sure. Then he said thank you instead, which he could not remember having done for himself in a long time, and got up, and went to bed.