The Courtesy

When the American had gone Dartmouth stayed where he was, with his hand on the desk beside the paper, and looked at the window because he did not want to look at the paper.

He had been about to say something at the end, and he had not said it. He knew exactly what it was. He had been about to say do not despair of it, which was a thing a Secretary of State could not say to the agent of an assembly that had put an army in the field, and which he had been saying to himself since six o’clock that morning without noticeable effect.

So he had said that no answer would be given, which was true, and that whatever was determined would not take the form of a reply, which was also true, and he had watched Mr Penn hear the first half and not the second. He had seen it go into the man’s face. It was a decent face, tired and careful, and it had closed like a shutter, and Dartmouth had let it close because the alternative was a promise, and he did not know yet whether he could keep one.

He sat down and drew the petition towards him and read it again.

It was a strange document and he had known it would be. He had heard about it from America at the end of July, in letters from men who wrote to him because he had once been kind to them, and they had told him it was coming and that it was the moderates’ work and that it said nothing. They were right. It said nothing with great skill. It asked for no concession in terms, and conceded none. It did not mention the authority of Parliament, which was the whole of the quarrel, because whoever had written it had understood that to mention it was to lose half his signatures before the ink was dry. It prayed for a reconciliation and asked to be told how one might be had.

There was one sentence he had read twice with the American watching him, and he read it a third time now.

Attached to your Majesty’s person, family, and government, with all devotion that principle and affection can inspire.

He turned the paper over and looked at the names. He knew a good many of them. That was the trouble with the American department. You could not run it for three years without coming to know the people you were running it for, and once you knew them you could not stop knowing them.

---

Pownall came in at four with the thing he had been expecting.

John Pownall had been at the business of the colonies since before there was a department for it, and he knew more about them than any man in London, and he had the clerk’s gift of bringing bad news in a voice that suggested it was merely news. He laid a paper on the desk.

“From the Council Office, my lord. They have the Wednesday list.”

Dartmouth read it. The Privy Council would sit at St James’s on Wednesday the twenty-third, at the levee. There were five items of business. The fourth was a proclamation for suppressing rebellion and sedition.

“Who asked for it?”

“Lord Suffolk asked the Lord President, I understand. Lord North did not object.” Pownall paused in the way he did when he was choosing between two true things. “The fair copy goes down to Kew tonight, for His Majesty to see before Wednesday. It is engrossed. It wants the date and the signature.”

“Yes,” said Dartmouth. “I know what it wants.”

He had known about the proclamation since July. Everybody had. Lord North had asked the law officers for it in the second week of July, when the news of Lexington was six weeks old and nobody in London knew there was a petition, because North liked to have his instruments ready, and Thurlow and Wedderburn had drawn it in a week. Dartmouth had read the draft. It was a good piece of work, as Thurlow’s things always were. It said that the King’s subjects in America were in open and avowed rebellion, and that they had been encouraged in it by wicked and desperate persons in this realm, and it commanded every officer of the Crown to suppress the one and discover the other. It had lain in the building for six weeks wanting a date, and he had let it lie, because it was not his to stop and because nobody had asked for it.

Now somebody had, and the date they had asked for was two days after a petition from the same subjects had come into his hands.

A proclamation that the colonists were in open rebellion, signed two days after the King had been handed their petition, would be an answer to the petition. Nobody would call it one. Suffolk would say the two things had nothing to do with each other, and in law he would be right. But it would be read in Philadelphia as an answer, and in New York and in Baltimore and in every county of Pennsylvania where men had signed the thing or had wanted it signed, and they would be right too. We sent a prayer and he proclaimed us traitors. There would be no getting past that sentence. It would be in every newspaper in America by November, and it would do more for the men in the Congress who wanted to be done with the King than anything they could have written themselves.

He had told the American that no answer would be given. He had meant no answer at all.

He took a sheet of paper and wrote to the King.

---

He was home by eight. It was the household’s custom at Blackheath to have prayers at nine and they had waited for him, which they should not have done, and he said so, and his wife said that the children had wanted to wait, which was not true of the two youngest, who were asleep in a chair. He read the psalm for the evening. He could not afterwards have said which it was.

When the house was quiet he sat up in the library with a letter from Mr Newton at Olney that he had not opened, and did not open, and a letter from Dr Wheelock in New Hampshire that he had opened in June and kept on the table since. There was a college in that province with his name on it. He had never seen it. Wheelock had named it for him without asking, six years before, because Dartmouth had raised money for the Indian school, and Wheelock wrote to him every quarter about the boys and the buildings and the price of a winter’s firewood in the woods above the Connecticut River, and in the last letter he had written that he prayed daily for His Majesty and for an end to the present unhappy troubles, and that he did not think the two prayers were in conflict.

Dartmouth did not think so either. He thought that tomorrow morning he was going to have to persuade a man who did.

The reply came at a quarter to eleven, by a groom who had ridden hard and wanted a drink.

It was in the King’s own hand, as all his notes were, small and fast and sloping, and it was headed, as they all were, with the place and the date and the minute of writing, because the King liked to know when things had been done and assumed that everybody else did.

Kew. Aug. 21. 1775. 52 m. past 9 p.m. Lord Dartmouth may come at a quarter before nine. G.R.

He went over the argument in the order he meant to say it. Then he went over it in the order the King would ask it, which was different. Then he put the candle out and sat in the dark for some time, and prayed, briefly and without much eloquence, for the King, and for the forty-six, and for a decent tired man in a lodging somewhere off the Strand who thought he had failed, and then for himself, that he would know when to stop talking.

---

He left at half past six and was at Kew by half past eight, which gave him a quarter of an hour in the carriage at the gate with nothing to do but look at the Pagoda over the trees.

The King had been up since five. He had been riding, and his boots were still on, and there was a dish of tea on the table that had gone cold, and beside it a pen and a standish and a long sheet of parchment, engrossed in a clerk’s best hand, with a space at the foot of it.

“Well, my lord,” the King said. “You have your American’s paper.”

“I have it, sir.”

“You have read it.”

“Every word, sir. Twice.”

“Is there anything in it?”

“Nothing, sir.” Dartmouth had decided in the carriage that he would say this first, because it was true and because the King would find it out in any case. “That is what is in it. It asks for nothing that could be refused and offers nothing that could be accepted. It is the most careful paper I have read in my life.”

The King grunted. He had a heavy face, high-coloured from the morning, and eyes that were rather prominent and did not miss much, and a way of standing with his weight back on his heels that made him look as if he were about to be argued with and did not mind.

“It comes from the Congress.”

“It comes through the Congress, sir. It is signed by forty-six of your Majesty’s subjects, each in his own name, and it calls itself their humble petition. The Congress is named in it once, at the head, as the place where they happened to be sitting when they signed it.”

“Lord North says it cannot be received without receiving the Congress.”

“Lord North says what will keep his colleagues in one room, sir. He has told the American that he does not know which room that is. He has told me that it will be decided elsewhere.” Dartmouth did not look at the parchment. “I took that to mean here.”

The King’s mouth moved very slightly, which was as near as he came to a smile before eleven in the morning.

“Go on.”

“If your Majesty receives it, it costs nothing. Nothing is conceded. No measure is altered and no Act is touched. The army’s orders stand, and the regiments for Boston sail when they were always going to sail. Your Majesty need not answer it. There is nothing in it to answer.” He made himself go slowly. “But if your Majesty signs that on Wednesday, two days after their petition came into my hands, then the petition has been answered, whatever anybody calls it. It will be read in every colony as the answer. And your servants will divide upon it, sir, in public, before Christmas.”

“You would go.”

It was not a question and Dartmouth did not treat it as one.

“I should have to think very seriously about it, sir.”

“You would go.” The King said it flatly, as he said most things, as if he were checking an item on a list. “And Lord North would come to me and say that he could not hold the thing together without you, which is true, because you are the only one of them the merchants trust and the only one the Americans write to. And then he would ask me to let him go, which he asks me twice a year in any case. And I should have to send for somebody.” He did not say for whom. He did not need to. There were men he had said he would sooner give up the Crown than send for, and Dartmouth had heard him say it.

“There is one thing more, sir.”

“There generally is.”

“Mr Penn says that the middle colonies are not yet in the war in their hearts. I believe him. New York is not. Pennsylvania is not. Maryland is not, or not yet. A petition received is a door left open, and men who think a door is open do not burn their boats behind them. A proclamation tells every man in Philadelphia who signed that paper, or wished it well, that he is a rebel already, and may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” He paused. “It divides them, sir, to receive it. It unites them to refuse it. I do not say that is the best reason. I say it is a reason.”

The King walked to the window and stood looking out of it with his hands behind his back. Outside, on the lawn, two of the boys were being walked by their governor towards the river, and one of them was trying to walk on the wet grass rather than the gravel, and being prevented.

“They say they are attached to my person, family and government,” the King said, to the window.

“With all devotion that principle and affection can inspire, sir.”

“Do you believe it?”

Dartmouth had known that this would come, and had decided in the dark at Blackheath that he would not lie about it, because the King could tell, and because it was not a morning on which he wanted to lie.

“I believe some of them believe it, sir. I believe Mr Dickinson believes it, who wrote it. I believe a good many of the men who signed it would give a great deal to be able to go home and say they had been heard.”

“And Mr Adams, of Boston?”

“No, sir.”

“No,” said the King. “Nor do I.”

He came back to the table. He did not pick up the petition, which Dartmouth had laid on the corner of it. He did not look at it. He picked up the parchment instead and read the head of it, standing, with something in his face that Dartmouth recognised after a moment as regret, the regret of a man putting down a good tool he had meant to use.

“Thurlow draws a good paper,” the King said.

“He does, sir.”

“Open and avowed rebellion.” The King read it aloud, quietly, as if to see how it sounded. “That is what it is, you know. That is exactly what it is. You have not persuaded me otherwise and you have not tried, and I am obliged to you for that.” He laid the parchment down. “Very well. It is received. You may say so in the proper way, when the Parliament meets, and not before. I will not have it in the newspapers for two months so that the Duke of Richmond can make speeches about my clemency. I shall not answer it. And understand me, my lord.” He looked at Dartmouth directly, and his eyes were perfectly steady. “I do not do this because I think there is anything in it. I do it because it costs nothing, and because you have asked me, and because I will not have my servants quarrelling over a piece of paper while my army is at Boston. Nothing else is altered.”

“Nothing else, sir.”

“When they have been brought to obedience they may petition me about anything they please. I shall read every word.”

He opened a drawer in the table, put the parchment into it, and shut the drawer.

“It will keep,” he said, and took out his watch and looked at it. “Four minutes, my lord. You have been quicker than Lord Suffolk will be.”

---

He did not go back to London. He went to Bushy, because it was on the way to nowhere he needed to be and because he wanted to tell North himself, before Suffolk did it worse.

North was on the lawn behind the house with two of his children and a dog, in an old coat and no wig, looking like a country parson who had been told he had inherited something and did not yet know whether it was money or debts. They had been boys together. North’s father had married Dartmouth’s mother when they were both small, and they had been brought up in the same house and sent to the same college at Oxford and on the same tour of Europe, where North had been charming to everybody and Dartmouth had gone to church, and they had been fond of each other for forty years without either of them ever quite understanding the other.

North listened to the whole of it without interrupting, and at the end of it he sat down on a bench, rather heavily, and let out a breath.

“So it was decided elsewhere,” he said.

“You said it would be.”

“I say a great many things.” North looked at him with his short-sighted, good-natured eyes. “You have saved my Cabinet, you know. Suffolk will be cross for a week and then he will find something else to be cross about. Sandwich will not care. Gower will say he always thought so. Nobody will resign. That is the most anybody has done for me since January.”

“I have saved your Cabinet a quarrel.”

“In August that is the same thing.” North picked a dead leaf off his knee. “You know what else you have done, I suppose.”

“I have kept a door open.”

“You have made a war that can be fought with a good conscience.” North said it mildly, without any edge at all, which was how he said the things he meant most. “Suffolk wanted to fight it with a proclamation. You have taken away his proclamation and left him his army, and now everybody is satisfied. The King has his war. You have your door. I have my Cabinet. The Americans will have the pleasure of being received and the inconvenience of being shot at, and none of it will be anybody’s fault.” He looked up. “When everybody is satisfied, brother, I generally find I have made a mistake. I do not say you have. I say it is how I would know.”

Dartmouth did not answer. One of the children threw a stick for the dog and the dog did not go after it.

“And you will have to run it now,” North said. “You do see that. Nobody else will be trusted to be gentle about it.”

---

The Privy Council sat at St James’s on the Wednesday at a little after eleven.

Dartmouth was not there. He had business at Whitehall, or told himself he had, and he sat at the desk in the room behind the right-hand door with the dispatches from Boston in front of him and did not read them, and listened to the clock.

At a quarter past eleven the clock struck, and nothing happened.

At half past it struck again, and nothing went on happening.

He thought of the American’s face closing like a shutter. He had been told to say nothing until the Parliament met, and he would say nothing. It was the King’s courtesy and the King’s to announce. But he found that he minded, more than he had expected to, that the man who had carried it three thousand miles would spend nine weeks believing it had failed.

At noon Pownall knocked and came in with a note from the Council Office. Four items. The Parliament on the twenty-sixth of October. Nothing else.

“Thank you,” said Dartmouth.

When Pownall had gone he put the petition in the box and locked it. Then he drew the dispatches from Boston towards him. The first concerned salt pork for the winter. He began to read.