Ground of Conciliation

He had put his hand over his mouth before he understood what he had heard, and he kept it there because he did not know what his mouth would do if he took it away.

I have received it, as coming from my subjects.

The King read on, in a voice that was level and well made and carried to the back of the gallery without seeming to try, and Penn did not hear a word of it. He was in a room behind a right-hand door at Whitehall on the twenty-first of August, watching a slight, grave man lay a paper down on a desk with the seal towards himself.

No answer will be given.

For nine weeks he had opened the papers expecting a proclamation. Dartmouth’s sentence had been exact: the petition was received, and there would be no reply. Penn looked down towards the Secretary’s place. He had written the other meaning to Philadelphia, and a ship had carried it there.

Whatever is determined, it will not take the form of a reply to this paper. He had heard that part too. He had thought it was the sort of thing ministers said.

The King’s eyes came up from the estimates and rested on Penn for two or three seconds. Penn gripped the rail. He had last seen that face through a carriage window at Kew, turned towards a field. It passed on now to the peeresses. Penn found that his eyes had filled, and that having been Lieutenant-Governor of a province was of no use to him.

When the King had finished there was a sound that anywhere else would have been cheering, and some of it came from the strangers’ gallery, and Penn was afraid for a moment that some of it was his.

---

Arthur Lee found him afterwards in the Court of Requests and took him by both arms.

“Received,” Lee said. “As from his subjects. In his own mouth. I have said since August that he would be brought to it.”

He had not. He had said in August that the King would never see the paper, and in September that it had been burned; but he said this now with such conviction that Penn could watch him coming to believe it, and found he did not mind. Lee was a man who needed to have been right. There were worse needs.

Burke came past with two members of the Commons and stopped long enough to put a hand on Penn’s shoulder. “Now we shall see,” he said, and went on; and Penn did not know whether it was a promise or a warning, and suspected that Burke did not know either.

He walked home, because he could not have sat still in a coach. The streets were full and none of them knew. The city went on unloading coal, as it had in August, and a boy ran past him with the morning’s papers, which had been printed before the King spoke and were already wrong. At the lodging there was a card from the Duke of Richmond, asking that Mr Penn hold himself at the disposal of the House, and underneath, smaller, as though added at the door: We have him.

Penn did not know who him was. He put the card in his pocket and went up the stairs.

---

Polly was at the window. She had been at the window, he understood, since he went out, because she had known what day it was and had not asked to come, and he had not offered, and they had both been right.

She had come in September, on the first ship that would carry her, against the advice of her mother, two physicians and himself by letter, which had reached Philadelphia the week after she sailed. She was nineteen. She had walked into his lodging off the Strand with a maid and three trunks and a jar of her mother’s quince preserve, looked round the small parlour with its one window, said, “Well, it is not Market Street,” and taken off her bonnet; and from that hour the nine weeks had been possible. He had not told her so. He was not a man who told people things of that kind, and she was not a woman who needed telling, and both of these were among the reasons he had married her.

“Well?” she said.

He told her, badly, in the wrong order, beginning with Dartmouth’s desk and arriving at the King only after some time, and she listened with her hands folded and did not interrupt.

“Then it is received,” she said. “Is that what you were sent for?”

He considered it, because she meant it, and because nobody else in London would think to ask.

“I was sent to put it into the Secretary’s hands, and wait upon an answer. There was never to be an answer. So I suppose I was sent for this.”

“Then you have done it.” She looked at him. “Richard, you have been doing what you were sent for since August, and been miserable about it every day. You might allow yourself one evening.”

He wrote to Philadelphia that night, at the table by the window, with her sewing on the other side of the candle. The first sentence he wrote was that everything was different. He looked at it for some time. He had written a careful letter in August, every line of it true and the whole of it wrong, and he found that he could not bring himself to be careful twice, and he let it stand.

---

For a week the newspapers did not know what grammar to use. The ministerial papers settled on condescension and the opposition papers on acknowledgement, and they threw the words at each other all week; but nobody wrote about America in the past tense of a settled question any more, and that was the change, and Penn held on to it.

On the first of November the Lords addressed the King for a copy of the petition, and on the Monday following Lord Dartmouth laid it before the House by His Majesty’s command, and it was read at the table, all four sides of it, Mr Dickinson’s careful sentences in a clerk’s careful voice. On the Wednesday the House ordered John Penn, Esquire, to attend it on Friday to be examined at the bar.

His brother John was in Philadelphia, being Governor of Pennsylvania, so far as anybody could govern it that autumn. Somebody at the table noticed within the hour, and the order was discharged and another made for Richard Penn, Esquire, and the messenger who brought it to the lodging brought the first one too, by mistake. Polly read them side by side and laughed until she had to sit down, and after a while Penn laughed with her. It was the first thing London had done since August that he understood completely. They had wanted a Penn. They had sent for the one they had heard of.

Richmond gave him dinner on the Thursday at his house in Privy Garden, which looked over the river and had a whole room of plaster gods in it, and went through the next day with him over the wine as though it were a hunt.

“They will want you to say independence,” the Duke said. “Sandwich will try for it three ways and Lyttelton a fourth, which will be indecent. You will not say it, because it is not true, and because it is the one thing they need. Say what you believe. Say it short. If you do not know, say so. Peers cannot abide a witness who knows everything; it puts them in mind of their stewards.” He looked at Penn across the candles as a man looks over a horse. “You did not know, did you? On the twenty-sixth?”

“No, your Grace.”

“Nor did I, nor any man on our side of the House, and I should very much like to know who did. Never mind it. The King has said, from the throne, that the thing came from his subjects. Tomorrow I shall ask the House to say so too. They will find it very hard to say he was wrong.”

Lee had not been asked to the dinner, and sent instead eleven pages headed Answers, which Penn read in bed and put on the fire.

---

The bar of the House of Lords was a rail.

He had expected something of oak and consequence. It was a rail, waist high and painted, worn bright along the top by generations of witnesses and petitioners; and the clerk swore him on a Testament at the end of it, and then he stood behind it with his hands at his sides, because he did not know where else to put them, and the whole length of the chamber opened in front of him. By daylight, and without the King, it was smaller than he remembered. The Armada was still on the walls. The Lord Chancellor sat on the woolsack in a full-bottomed wig with the expression of a man listening to music he does not care for. There were a hundred peers on the benches, which Richmond had told him was a great many for a Friday, and behind him at the bar the members of the Commons who had come to see, and among them Burke’s voice in an undertone.

Lord Dartmouth was on the front bench, on the right of the throne, looking at his hands.

Richmond asked the first questions, standing in his place, in the courteous carrying voice of a man who knows what the answers will be.

“How long have you resided in America?”

“I have resided there four years.”

“How long were you in the government in Pennsylvania?”

“Just two years.”

It was easier than he had feared, because he had only to tell the truth and Richmond had told him the questions. Had he heard of any violence in the election of the Congress? He had not. Were its members capable of conveying the sense of America? He thought them men of character, and capable of it. Was the war carried on by the direction of the Congress, and supported by the inclination of the people, in defence of their liberty?

“This war is levied and carried on by a sense of the defence of their liberties,” Penn said, “as they think.”

He heard the as they think go out into the room and wished it back, and then was glad of it. He was not there to tell the House what was so. He was there to tell it what Philadelphia believed was so, and every man on those benches knew the difference, and would trust him a little further for marking it.

“Do you think they levy and carry on this war for the purpose of establishing an independent empire?”

The room went quiet in a particular way.

“I think they do not carry on the war for independency,” Penn said. “I never heard them breathe sentiments of that nature.”

Then they went on to Pennsylvania, and he found himself giving the House of Lords an inventory. Twenty thousand volunteers in arms when he left, and four thousand five hundred minute men besides. Sixty thousand men fit to bear arms; and what proportion of those would willingly come forth, if necessary? “All, I believe.” Did they make gunpowder? “They have lately.” Brass cannon? “They do, in the city of Philadelphia.” Small arms? “In great numbers, and very complete.” Ships of three or four hundred tons, built very expeditiously. Somewhere about the brass cannon he understood what Richmond was doing. Richmond was not proving to the House that America was loyal. He was proving that it was strong, and leaving their lordships to decide which of the two they would sooner argue with; and it was being done with Penn’s mouth, and he minded it less than he would have in August.

“Did the Congress, and the people in general, seem dissatisfied with the reception their petitions had met with here?”

“The colonies were dissatisfied with the reception of their petitions.” He hesitated, and then said the rest of it, because it was true, and because he had said it to himself so many times at sea. “They had conceived great hopes from that I brought over, which was called the Olive Branch, and I was complimented by my friends upon being the bearer thereof.”

Somebody on the ministry’s benches laughed, not unkindly. Penn felt his face go hot and did not take it back.

“When you delivered this petition, did the Secretary of State ask you any questions relative to that country?”

“None at all.”

He had not meant to look at Dartmouth, and did. The Secretary was still looking at his hands.

“Did he, or any other minister, at any time since your arrival, ask you any questions as to the state or temper of America?”

“I have not been asked any questions by persons in authority.”

That went into the room and stayed there, and Richmond let it stay a moment before he sat down.

---

Then it was Lord Lyttelton’s turn, and the room changed its temperature.

Lyttelton was young and handsome, with a reputation Penn had heard in four coffee-houses in four versions, none of them repeatable, and he had lately come over to the ministry and been given something for it. He asked his questions lounging, one arm along the back of the bench, in the tone of a man at a fair who has already looked at the animal’s teeth.

“Have you ever read the Declaratory Act?”

There was a pause that Penn would remember for the rest of his life.

“I have not read it.”

The noise from the ministry’s benches was not quite laughter. It was the sound of men having something confirmed.

“Then I shall read you its words.” Lyttelton read them slowly, giving each one its weight. “That the colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon, the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain.” He looked up. “Do you think that the colonies assent to those words?”

“The colonies, I believe,” he said slowly, “are inclined to acknowledge the imperial authority of Great Britain. But not in taxation.”

“Do you think they acquiesce in every other sense of the Declaratory Act, except taxation?”

Before he could open his mouth Lord Shelburne was on his feet, objecting, in a voice like a blade coming out of a scabbard, that the witness had told their lordships not two minutes since that he had never read the Act, and was now to be asked to construe it, which they would not ask of a judge without handing him the statute book; and Lyttelton was on his feet saying that the witness had been brought there to give the House the sense of America, and here was the sense of America in question; and the Lord Chancellor, with the expression of a man whose music had grown worse, directed the witness to withdraw.

The doorkeeper offered him a chair, then sat in it when Penn refused. Through the door came the sound of the debate. He could distinguish no words. He stood against the panelling and tried to prepare an answer.

Mr Dickinson would have said yes. Dickinson had said it in his Farmer’s letters and gone on saying it: that Parliament might regulate the trade of the empire and might not tax it, and that a man could hold both those thoughts at once and be loyal and free. John Adams would have said no, at length, and been rude about Lyttelton afterwards in a letter that would be intercepted. The forty-six had signed nothing about the Declaratory Act. They had been very careful not to.

And he thought, last and least willingly, of himself: a proprietor’s grandson whose family held a province by the King’s charter, standing in the King’s House of Lords, who had never once doubted that the King’s Parliament was the King’s Parliament, and who had not read the Act because he had never needed to.

The door opened and the doorkeeper stood up. Penn went back to the bar, and Lyttelton put the question again, word for word.

“I believe,” Penn said, “that the colonies acquiesce in the words of the Declaratory Law.”

On the ministry’s benches somebody made a note. Penn watched the pen move. Forty-six men had signed the petition. None had signed that answer.

Lyttelton asked him whether he knew Mr Harrison. He did; Mr Harrison was a delegate from Virginia. Was Mr Harrison a man of good character? Penn believed him to be so, he had never heard to the contrary; and the ministry’s benches laughed outright, and it was not until he was in the passage again that he remembered Mr Harrison’s intercepted letter in the summer’s papers, the one about the washerwoman’s daughter, and understood that he had just vouched for it before the House of Lords.

Then he was directed to withdraw, and that was the end of his being a witness.

---

Richmond had found him a place in the gallery, and he watched the rest of the day from where he had watched the King.

The Duke moved his motion a little after four, standing very straight and without notes; and Penn, who had watched him drink the better part of three bottles the night before, was impressed in spite of himself.

“To resolve,” Richmond said, “that the matter of the said petition affords ground of conciliation of the unhappy differences subsisting between the mother country and the colonies; and that it is highly necessary that proper steps be immediately taken for attaining so desirable an object.”

He did not argue it long. He reminded their lordships that they had that afternoon heard a gentleman who had governed a province tell them that the colonies did not seek independence, and acquiesced, God help them, in the Declaratory Act; and then he reminded them of what they had heard a fortnight before, from the throne, in a voice they all knew.

“His Majesty has told us that he received this petition as coming from his subjects. I ask your lordships to say nothing that His Majesty has not said. I ask only that you say it in a resolution of this House, so that it may be read in America in your words as well as in his.”

Lord Sandwich answered him for the ministry, and was unexpectedly good: plain, heavy and unhurried, with the manner of a man who ran a navy and was tired of people who did not. To receive a petition, Sandwich said, was a courtesy, and His Majesty was the fountain of courtesy and had extended it. To resolve that a paper from that Congress afforded ground of conciliation was to treat with the Congress; and their lordships might ask themselves what the Congress had in the field, and whom it had made general of it. He had heard a great deal that afternoon about brass cannon. He would add only that the witness had not read the Declaratory Act, and that he did not think the House should make the peace of the empire upon the evidence of a gentleman who had not.

The ministry’s benches made their noise for it, and Penn, in the gallery, felt it go into him like the sentence at Whitehall.

Then Shelburne, and Manchester, and Lord Effingham, who had resigned his commission that year sooner than serve against the Americans, and said so; and Lord Cathcart, and Lyttelton again, at such length that even his own side stopped listening.

The Duke of Grafton did not speak. He sat on the ministers’ bench, the Lord Privy Seal, with the long dark face his family had from King Charles, and did not once look at Sandwich; and Penn, who had heard from Richmond that Grafton had been writing to Lord North since the summer begging him to treat, watched him as a man watches a cat on a wall.

Dartmouth sat with his hands in his lap. Penn waited for him through each speech. When Lyttelton sat down and the Lord Chancellor rose to put the question, Dartmouth stood, bowed to the woolsack, and went out by the door beside the throne, without looking at anybody, like a man who has remembered an appointment. Penn watched the door close behind the slight grey back and understood that he had seen this before: the same man saying as much as he was permitted to say and not one word more. He would never be told what it had cost him.

“As many as are of opinion that this resolution be agreed to,” said the Lord Chancellor, “will say Content.”

The shout surprised everybody, including, Penn thought, the men who were shouting.

“The contrary, Not Content.”

That was loud too, but thinner and more indignant, the noise of men not accustomed to having to make a noise at all; and the Lord Chancellor, who could hear a House as a farmer hears weather, paused before he said that he believed the Contents had it. Sandwich said, flatly, “Not Content,” and the bar was cleared, and the House divided.

It was very like a congregation going up to the rail at communion: old men rising with difficulty and young men without any, and the slow shuffle along the benches, and the bishops in their lawn moving all together like swans; until they did not. Four of them, with Dr Shipley of St Asaph in front, went the other way, and somebody below Penn in the gallery drew a breath in through his teeth.

And then the Duke of Grafton unfolded himself from the ministers’ bench and walked across the chamber, without hurrying, past the table and the clerks and the Lord Chancellor’s back, and took his place among the Contents, and sat down.

There was a noise then for which Penn did not have a word.

The counting went on for a long time. He sat with his hands locked together and would not let himself add anything up, because he had been wrong about everything since August and did not want to be wrong about this in advance. He watched Richmond, standing with the Contents with his arms folded and the look of a man who has money on a horse. He watched the door Dartmouth had gone out by. It did not open.

The Lord Chancellor read the numbers from the paper he was handed, in the voice of a man reading a bill of lading.

“Contents, sixty-one. Not Contents, forty. The Contents have it.”

---

It was dark in Old Palace Yard, and the crowd was larger than it had been for the King, and some of it was cheering for reasons it could not have given. Somebody had lit a bonfire against the Abbey wall and the beadles were putting it out.

Richmond found him on the steps and worked his hand like a pump handle.

“Sixty-one,” he said. “I have sat in that House twenty years and never seen sixty-one on our side of anything. Grafton will be out of the Privy Seal by Monday and as glad of it as a boy let out of school. Four bishops! The King said it, Penn. That was the whole of it. Half of them dared not vote that the King was wrong, and the other half dared not be seen in a minority with Sandwich.”

“Will it bind them?”

“Bind them?” Richmond looked at him almost tenderly. “My dear sir, it binds nobody. North will thank us for our opinion and carry his army estimates in the Commons by a comfortable majority, and the transports will sail for Boston in the spring exactly as they would have done if we had all stayed in bed. But it is in the Journal now. It will cross the Atlantic in our words, and your Congress may make of it what it can.”

Burke came up out of the crowd as the Duke went, with his hat pushed back and his face wet, with rain or with something else.

“I told you we should carry a division,” he said. “And I told you it would not end the war.”

“You did.”

Burke took his hand, briefly and hard.

“It has not ended the war,” he said. “It has done something I did not know it could do, and I do not yet know what. Go home, Mr Penn. Go home and write it down while it is still true.”

---

Polly had waited up, with a shawl round her and the candle nearly out, and when he came in she looked at his face and did not ask.

He told her the numbers, and about Grafton walking across the chamber, and the four bishops, and the Lord Chancellor’s bill of lading; and because he could not help it, about the Declaratory Act and the laughter, and Mr Harrison and the washerwoman’s daughter, and she laughed at that until he laughed too. He did not tell her about Dartmouth going out by the door. He did not know how.

When he had finished she took his hand and put it flat against her, under the shawl, and held it there.

“I have been to a physician in Pall Mall,” she said. “Twice, because I did not believe him the first time.” Her voice was quite steady. “He says the summer. July, perhaps. Perhaps the end of June.”

He did not say anything for a while. There did not seem to be a sentence equal to it, and he had said a great many sentences that day.

“It will be born here,” Polly said after a time. “In England. Had you thought of that?”

He had not. He thought of it now: a child born in London in the summer of seventy-six, to a man whom a decent woman downstairs had told, meaning nothing by it, that he was from there. The child would be from here. Nobody would ever say otherwise to it. It would grow up in a country that had that day resolved, by sixty-one votes to forty, that its father’s errand afforded ground of conciliation; and the resolution would bind nobody, and it would not matter to the child at all.

When she was asleep he wrote to Philadelphia, copying the resolution and the numbers. He added that the vote bound nobody. Then he set down the question about the Declaratory Act and his answer, and begged the Congress’s pardon if he had answered for more than he was sent to. He sealed it.

He blew out the candle and sat by the window in the dark, listening to the river.