Book One: The Olive Branch Part One: The Petition Characters
Chapter Four
No Answer Will Be Given
Richard Penn. London, in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Monday, 14 August 1775.
The petition reached London in August, when Parliament was not sitting, and the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, advised the King to receive it as a petition from his subjects: receiving it cost nothing, and it spared a ministry divided over America a proclamation of rebellion. George III assented. He received the petition, never answered it, and never changed his mind about the war; he remained committed to the coercion of the colonies.
They came up on the tide with the light going, and the river took four hours to deliver them, and Penn stood at the rail for all four of them because he could not think of anything else to do with his hands.
He had the petition in a flat case under his coat. He had carried it that way across the Atlantic, which was ridiculous, and he knew it was ridiculous, and he had gone on doing it. Twice a day for five weeks he had taken it out and looked at the seal and put it back. There was nothing wrong with the seal. There had never been anything wrong with the seal.
Below Gravesend the shipping thickened until the river was more deck than water, colliers and coasters and the East India ships lying out with their yards crossed, and then the forest of masts at the Pool that he had seen twice before in his life and had forgotten the scale of. The ships did not care. That was the thing he had not remembered. Philadelphia knew what was happening to it every hour of the day. London went on unloading coal.
Lee came up beside him at Limehouse and said nothing for a while, which Penn had already learned to be grateful for. Arthur Lee had been five years in London and had a Virginian’s certainty and a lawyer’s mouth. He had come down to Gravesend to meet the ship and boarded with the pilot, and he had spent the whole of the way up explaining what was going to happen, and he had been wrong about the tide twice.
“You will want to sleep,” Lee said. “They will not see us tomorrow.”
“They may.”
“They will not see us tomorrow, Mr Penn. It is the fourteenth of August.”
Penn understood what he meant and did not want to. The season was over. The Parliament had risen in May and would not sit again until autumn, and every man in England with a house in the country was in it, shooting or thinking about shooting, and the capital in August was a place where nothing was decided because nobody who decided things was there.
He had known that in Philadelphia. It had seemed, in Philadelphia, like a difficulty of scheduling.
The first morning he was awake before six and out before seven, and he bought the newspapers at a stall in the Strand because he could not wait for them to come to the lodging, and he read them standing up in the street like a clerk, and by half past seven he understood that his errand was already finished.
It was not any single thing that was said. It was the grammar.
Every paper, the ministerial ones and the opposition ones alike, wrote about America in the past tense of a settled question. There were columns about the conduct of the war. There were columns about whether the war was being conducted well. There was a long and careful piece about the difficulty of victualling an army at three thousand miles which took as its premise that an army was being victualled at three thousand miles and would go on being victualled there. There was a letter from a gentleman in Yorkshire proposing a subscription for the widows.
Nobody was arguing about whether. The whether had gone somewhere in the six weeks since the news of Charlestown, and what was left was how, and how long, and at what cost, and whose fault.
The casualty lists were what had done it, and it took him three days to see that, and he only saw it because a woman told him.
The battle itself had reached London at the end of July. He had expected that to be the thing. A defeat would have been the thing, a beaten army, a general disgraced, something an opposition could use. But Charlestown had not been a defeat. The ministry could and did call it a victory, and in the narrow sense of ground it was one, and the papers had printed it as one for a week.
Then the lists came.
They came in the ordinary way, department by department, regiment by regiment, and they were printed in full because they were always printed in full, and they went on for columns. Officers first, by name, because that was the convention. Then the men, by number, because that was also the convention. The proportion was what had broken it. There had never been such a proportion. A thousand and more out of something over two thousand engaged, and nineteen officers dead, and the Grenadiers of one regiment gone almost entire, and the names in the lists were the names of families that had houses in the streets Penn was walking down.
His landlady told him this on the third morning, over the kind of conversation a landlady has with a lodger, in which she established where he was from and then wished she had not.
“My sister’s boy was in the Fifty-Second,” she said. “He is not dead. He is at Boston still. She has not slept since the paper.”
“I am very sorry for it.”
“You are from there,” she said. It was not a question and it was not an accusation, and that was the worst of it, because she had no idea she had said anything. “They say it is very hot there in the summer. Hotter than here.”
He said that it was, and went upstairs, and sat on the bed with the case in his hands.
Lee took him to what was left of Franklin’s people, on the fourth evening, in a house off the Strand where they had been meeting for fifteen years and had gone on meeting for five months out of habit after Franklin sailed.
There were six of them. They were courteous and they were pleased to see an American face, and they told him things he needed to know about the offices at Whitehall and the hours the clerks kept and which of the under-secretaries could be relied upon to answer a letter. They gave him better intelligence in two hours than Lee had given him in four days, and he was grateful, and he came away from it more frightened than he had gone in.
One of them, an elderly bookseller with ink on three fingers, walked him to the corner afterwards.
“You will be told a great deal about what is possible,” the bookseller said. “By people who mean it kindly. I will tell you what I think, and you may discount it, because I am old and I have been wrong lately.”
“Please.”
“The Doctor saw it in March. That is why he went. He was the cleverest man in this city for twenty years, he knew everybody worth knowing, he had the ear of half the Lords, and he came to the view that there was nothing here to be had, and he got on a ship.” The bookseller stopped at the corner and looked at him. “Whatever you have got in that case, sir, he could have carried it better than you, and he did not think it worth staying to carry.”
Whitehall, for a week, was a clerk.
The clerk’s name was Mr Dunning and he was about forty and entirely civil and Penn came to know the set of his shoulders better than he knew his own brother’s face. Mr Dunning received him. Mr Dunning took his name. Mr Dunning was very sorry, the Secretary was at Blackheath. Mr Dunning was very sorry, the Secretary was expected but was not come. Mr Dunning would be glad to receive any paper Mr Penn wished to leave and would see that it was laid before the Secretary at the earliest.
“I am instructed to deliver it into his hands.”
“Of course, sir,” said Mr Dunning, who had heard that sentence perhaps four hundred times, and wrote something in a book.
Penn came back the next day and the day after that. He grew to hate the anteroom, which had a window on a courtyard and eleven chairs and a fire that was not lit because it was August, and a smell of wax and dust and old paper that he could recall for the rest of his life. He sat in it for six hours on the Thursday. He learned that there were two doors out of it, and that the one on the left went to the clerks’ room and the one on the right went further in, and that in that week he never once saw the right-hand one opened from the inside.
On the Friday he was left in the anteroom longer than usual and the left-hand door stood open, and he could see into the clerks’ room, and he watched two young men copying a document in a fair round hand, one of them reading and the other writing, working from a marked-up draft with a lawyer’s corrections crawling up the margin in a different ink.
The reader was reading aloud, flat and fast, the way men read who have read the same lines nine times.
“…that there is reason to apprehend that such rebellion hath been much promoted and encouraged by the traitorous correspondence, counsels and comfort of divers wicked and desperate persons within this realm…”
Penn listened to about forty words of it with mild interest and thought: a report out of Boston, or a paper for the law officers about the Boston committees. It was the sort of thing Whitehall produced by the yard. The phrase he caught and kept, because it had a ring to it, was open and avowed rebellion, and he thought it a strong way of putting it, and he thought no more about it at all, and when Mr Dunning came back in he was thinking about whether to try the Duke of Richmond again.
Lord North saw him on the Saturday, for eleven minutes, which was not rudeness. Penn had come to understand that eleven minutes from the First Lord in August was a considerable courtesy and had been arranged by somebody on his behalf, probably one of the merchants.
North was heavier than the prints made him and had a pleasant, sleepy, short-sighted face and a way of looking slightly past you. He was perfectly kind. He said he was glad Mr Penn had had a good crossing. He asked after the health of the province and after Mr Penn’s brother and said something accurate about the Pennsylvania land office that Penn had not expected him to know.
Then he said: “You will forgive me. You are here upon the Congress’s business.”
“I am here to deliver a petition to the King, my lord.”
“Yes.” North looked past him, at the window, with what seemed to be genuine regret. “That is a difficulty, you understand, and it is not a difficulty of my making. The difficulty is the word Congress. His Majesty’s subjects may petition him. There is no question about that, it is the oldest right they have, and nobody in this government would dream of touching it. But a body which has taken an army into the field and appointed a general and issued a currency is not a body of subjects petitioning. It is something else, and the moment we receive a paper from it as though it were a petition, we have said what it is.”
“The paper is signed by forty-six men, my lord, each of them by his own name.”
“Yes,” said North again, and for a moment he looked so tired that Penn felt sorry for him. “That was well done. Whoever thought of that was thinking.”
He stood. The eleven minutes were up.
“I will tell you one thing, Mr Penn, and you may think it cold, and it is not meant coldly. It is not going to be decided by me. I have a Cabinet that is divided upon America and has been for two years, and I have colleagues who would have had a great deal more done than has been done, and I have one colleague at least who wishes the whole thing settled tomorrow by an act of grace. I cannot govern by preferring one of them. So it will be decided elsewhere and I shall carry it out.” He put out his hand. “Good day. I hope the crossing back is smooth.”
Penn walked out into the yard and stood there for a while working out that he had been told something important and being entirely unable to say what.
Burke gave him two hours and Richmond gave him an afternoon, and both of them were magnificent, and neither of them was any use, and by the end of the second one he had understood why.
Burke was agent for New York and had been saying for a decade what Penn had crossed an ocean to say, and said it better. He walked Penn round a room for an hour and a half and was as fine as anything Penn had ever heard, and at the end of it he asked, with real interest, what the temper of the middle colonies was, and listened to the answer, and then said something that Penn turned over for weeks.
“You must not take it ill,” Burke said, “if you find that we are grateful to you. This paper of yours is a very great gift to us. It proves everything we have said for ten years. It proves that there is a party in America that wants nothing but its rights within the empire, that the ministry has been told so, and that the ministry did nothing. We shall use it in November, we shall use it very hard, and I think we shall carry a division with it in the Lords.”
“And will that end the war?”
Burke stopped walking.
“No,” he said. “It will not end the war. It will put the ministry in the wrong. Those are different things and I am obliged to you for making me say so out loud.”
Richmond was the same in a different key, a duke’s version, and he was honest about it sooner. He wanted the petition because it embarrassed the government. He said so within ten minutes, cheerfully, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which in his world it was.
“You are thinking that we are using you,” he said over the wine. “We are. It is not the whole of it. I think this war is wicked and I have said so in the House and I will go on saying it. But you should understand what an opposition is for. We cannot make a peace. We can only make it expensive for them not to.”
The merchants were the only people in London who wanted the thing to succeed for its own sake, and Penn found that harder to bear than the opposition’s frankness.
They came to him. That was the humiliating part. He did not have to seek them out; a deputation of four had come to his lodging on the Friday, three from London and one down from Bristol, and they sat in his small parlour in good coats and told him what the trade was worth and what it had been worth the year before and what it would be worth by Lady Day if this went on.
They had figures. They had beautiful figures. They had the tonnage out of Bristol for six years and the bad debts standing in America at over a million sterling and a list of forty-one houses that would not survive another season of it, and they laid it all out for him with the patience of men who had explained it to ministers and would explain it again.
“We can get you seen,” the Bristol man said. “We cannot get you answered. But we can get you seen, and we would take it kindly if you would let us try, because a petition from the Congress that is received is worth a great deal to us, and a petition from the Congress that is refused is worth nothing at all.”
Penn said he would be grateful for any assistance.
He saw the King once.
It was on Sunday, the twentieth of August, by accident, on a road near Kew where he had gone because Lee said the Secretary might be at the Lodge. The carriages came past at a trot with an escort and the dust went up and Penn stood in at the hedge with everybody else, and there was a face at the near window, turned a little away, looking at something in the field on the other side.
That was all of it. Four seconds, perhaps five. A high colour and a heavy jaw and an expression of nothing in particular, the face of a man being driven somewhere he went every week.
Penn had expected to feel something and found that what he felt was mostly surprise at how ordinary it was. He had been carrying a document addressed to that man for six weeks, in a case, under his coat. He had taken it out twice a day and looked at the seal. And the man went past at a trot on a Sunday afternoon looking at a field, and did not know there was a paper in England with his name at the top of it and forty-six others at the bottom, and would not know until somebody told him, and whoever told him would tell him in a particular way and with a particular face, and everything now depended on which particular way that was.
The carriages went round the bend and the dust came down and the people at the hedge went back to what they had been doing.
Dartmouth saw him on the twenty-first of August, at Whitehall, in the room behind the right-hand door.
It took nine minutes. Penn had prepared for an hour.
The Secretary was a slight, grave, neat man of about fifty with a mild face and the plainest coat Penn had seen on anybody of consequence since he landed, and he stood up when Penn came in, which nobody else had done. He asked Penn to sit. He apologised, without elaborating, for the delay.
Penn said what he had come to say. He had rehearsed it in the anteroom all week and it came out better than he expected: that the Congress had sent a petition, not a remonstrance and not a demand; that it asked for no concession in terms but only for a means of accommodation to be opened; that it was signed by every delegate present, individually; that among those who had signed it were men who had opposed every measure of resistance and had been overborne, and that they had signed it because they believed it; and that the middle colonies, which were not yet in the war in their hearts, would read the answer to it as the answer to everything.
Dartmouth listened to all of it without moving, with his eyes on Penn’s face, and did not once look at the window or at his own papers.
When Penn had finished he said: “May I see it.”
Penn took the case out from under his coat and it came out awkwardly, because it always did, and he put the petition into Dartmouth’s hands.
The Secretary read it. He read the whole of it, which took some minutes, and Penn sat in the silence and listened to a clock somewhere behind him and to the noise off the yard. Once Dartmouth went back a page and read something a second time. Penn could not see which part.
Then he laid it down on the desk, squarely, with the seal towards himself.
“You have discharged your commission, Mr Penn,” he said. “I have it from your hand, as you were instructed.”
“My lord, may I ask what is to be done with it.”
“You may ask.” Dartmouth’s voice did not change at all. “I cannot tell you, because I do not know. It is not in my gift. His Majesty is not at present in town and the Cabinet does not sit again until next week.”
“Will there be an answer?”
There was a pause of perhaps two seconds.
“No answer will be given,” said Lord Dartmouth. “I say that to you now rather than let you wait upon one, because you would wait a long time and I do not think it would be kind. Whatever is determined, it will not take the form of a reply to this paper.”
Penn heard the sentence, and the sentence went into him like cold water, and he did not hear the qualification at all, because the qualification was made of the sort of words that ministers use to say nothing, and he had been hearing those words all week.
He stood. He was, he thought afterwards, adequately composed.
“Then I will not trouble your lordship further.”
“You have not troubled me.” Dartmouth stood as well, and came round the desk, which again nobody had done, and for a moment Penn thought he was going to say something else. He seemed to be about to. Whatever it was, he did not say it. “The paper will be kept safe. Good day to you, Mr Penn.”
At the door Penn looked back once, and the Secretary was standing where he had left him with one hand resting flat on the desk beside the petition, not looking at it, looking at the window, entirely still.
He did not write to Philadelphia for six days, and when he did he wrote a short letter and a true one and got the whole thing wrong.
He wrote that the petition had been delivered into the hands of the Secretary of State on the twenty-first instant, as instructed. He wrote that he had been told, in terms, that no answer would be given. He wrote that the temper of the capital was extremely bad and worse than he had understood it could be, and that he attributed this to the casualty lists of the seventeenth of June rather than to any act of policy, and that he did not think anything would move it for a year. He wrote that the friends of America in the Parliament were in earnest and were not numerous and could not carry anything, and that a motion was intended in November which would be defeated. He wrote that he would remain in London against the possibility of being wanted, and would be glad of any further instruction.
He did not write that it had failed, because he had been raised not to write things like that, and because there was a chance the letter would be opened, and because a small unreasonable part of him was still standing in that room watching a man read the whole of it without moving.
But he thought it. He thought it every day for nine weeks, walking the same four streets in a city where the season had not begun and nobody he needed was in town, waiting for something to be published that never was, checking the papers each morning for a proclamation that did not come and reading its absence as delay.
He had spent two years as the King’s Lieutenant-Governor of Pennsylvania. He had taken the oath. He had signed commissions in that name and heard the toast drunk at his own table four hundred times, and his grandfather had had the province from a king, and every acre of the family’s right in it came out of a royal hand.
And he had crossed an ocean carrying a paper from a body that had put an army in the field, and had argued for it in an anteroom all week, and had been perfectly sincere.
Both of those were true. He could not find the place where one had stopped and the other started. There had been no morning on which he had decided anything.
In London they did not see two things. They saw a proprietor’s grandson running errands for a committee of rebels, and they were civil about it, and the civility was the tell. Nobody argued with him. Burke had been delighted with him and Richmond had been kind to him and North had asked after his brother, and not one of them had treated him as a man who might be persuaded of anything, because he was not from here, and that had been settled about him before he opened his mouth.
You are from there.
He was from there. He had not decided it. It had been decided about him, by three thousand miles of water and by the grammar of a sentence that a decent woman used about her sister’s boy, and he would be sixty years old before he stopped turning it over.
He stayed in London until the Parliament met.