Book Two: Constitution Hill Part Two: Constitution Hill Characters
Chapter Ten
An Old Soldier
Ernest I. London, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Sunday, 21 June 1840.
Queen Victoria was assassinated in 1840, and Ernest acceded at sixty-nine. The event determined his historical position. Without it he would have remained a reactionary prince with a separate German kingdom, remembered, if at all, as a footnote to Victoria's reign. With it he became a monarch able to argue that events had confirmed his view of what constitutional monarchy exposed a sovereign to.
He came up the river on the flood, as George the First had come, and landed where George the First had landed, at the water-stairs below the Hospital at Greenwich; and he had chosen that himself, at Rotterdam, with the chart open on the cabin table, because a thing that had been done once in the right way did not need to be thought out again.
The steamer had brought him over in the night from the Maas. He had not slept. He had sat on deck in his cloak with his back to the funnel, as he had sat out the nights on outpost in Flanders forty-seven years ago, and watched the dark go grey over the Essex marshes, and the river narrow, and the shipping thicken, until there were masts on both banks as far as he could see and the smoke of London lay ahead of them across the whole of the sky. He had not been in England for three years. He had left it in June of ‘thirty-seven, within the week after he knelt to her at Kensington, the first of them all, before Sussex, before the Archbishop, before anybody; and he had gone to his own kingdom and not looked back, because there had been nothing to look back for. He was sixty-nine. He had been sixty-nine for sixteen days.
There were people on the stairs, and more on the terrace above, and a great many more along the river wall and on the lawns before the Hospital, in black; and old men in blue coats with one arm or one leg, the pensioners, drawn up in two lines with their hats in their hands. Somebody had told them to cheer. They did not cheer. They took off their hats as he came up the stairs, and stood bareheaded, and said nothing, and he went up between them in the uniform of a general of hussars with the crape on his arm and on his sword-knot, very straight, with his hand at the salute, looking at them with his one eye; and he was perfectly aware of what the silence meant, and did not mind it, and would not have known how to mind it, after thirty years. He had been hissed in these streets. He had been hooted at Kensington three years ago, on the day he knelt to her, by people who supposed that he had come to snatch something out of her hands. He had been accused in print of every crime in the decalogue, and some that were not in it. A silent crowd was a civil crowd, by comparison, and he saluted it as such.
His brother of Cambridge was on the terrace, in black, with his wig a little askew and his eyes red, and embraced him there in front of everybody, in the German way, which was like Adolphus. The Lord Chamberlain was there, and the Master of the Horse, and an officer of the Blues with an escort drawn up on the gravel; and the carriages were waiting with the black hammercloths on them, and the horses in black plumes. He got into the first carriage alone. He had not asked for anybody, and he did not want anybody. They drove off at a walk, and then at a trot, through the town, and along the Kent road towards London, with the escort jingling round them and the dust coming up white off the road, past market gardens and brickfields and new streets of little houses with black cloth in the windows, all the long dirty way into the town.
He had been at Hanover when the messenger came.
It had been a Sunday evening, the fourteenth, a week ago today. He had been in the Altes Palais, in the room where his wife lay ill, reading to her, which he did every evening when he was at home and she could bear it; and the court was already in black, for the King of Prussia, her sister’s husband, who had died the Sunday before. He had heard the post-horn in the Leinstrasse, and a carriage at the door, and English voices on the stairs; and he had known, before the door opened, what it must be, because there was only one thing in the world that would send an English Queen’s Messenger galloping into Hanover on a Sunday night. He had gone out to the man on the landing, so that Frederica should not hear it in her bed; and the man had gone down on his knee on the landing, in his dust, and given him the bag.
There had been three letters in it. There had been the Lords Justices’, a page in the forms, very properly done, recording the death of Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace on the tenth, a little after nine in the evening, of a wound received that afternoon, and the death with her of the child; and his proclamation as King, ordered for the next morning at St James’s; and their humble duty. There had been the Archbishop’s, which was longer, and kind, and he had not finished it. And there had been three lines from Melbourne, which said nothing at all, and were the only one of the three that he had read twice.
He had stood on the landing with the letters in his hand for some time. Then he had gone back in to Frederica, and sat down by her bed, and told her; and she had wept, being a woman, and he had held her hand while she did it. He had not wept. He did not, as a rule. But he had sat there by her bed in the dark for a long while after she slept, with the letters on his knee, thinking about his brother Edward’s child, whom he had first seen at Kensington when he came home from Berlin, a small obstinate girl of nine who curtseyed to him because she was told to and looked at him as if she had been told something else; and about the girl in the black dress three years ago, standing very straight with the Council on its knees round her, whose hand he had kissed, and who had looked at him, as he kissed it, with a little cold fear in her face that she had not troubled to hide. He had not blamed her for the fear. He had been told what she had been told about him. He had only wished, on that morning and on several mornings since, that somebody had told her something else.
On the Tuesday he had left Hanover. He had left the government with Schele, who could be trusted to do nothing, and his son with his mother, since George could see nothing and was of no use on a road; and he had given the Estates his word, in writing, that the business between them would be finished by the summer whether he was in Hanover or in London, and signed it, and sealed it, and gone. Four days on the road, by Minden and Osnabrück and over the Dutch frontier, in the heat, changing horses at every post without getting out, and eating in the carriage; and the night on the water; and now the Kent road.
The drive in took an hour and three-quarters. He sat upright in the carriage the whole way and looked at London through the window, and London looked at him.
It had changed, a little, in three years. There were more of the new houses, and more of the railway, which he had seen being cut at Deptford, the arches marching away over the market gardens towards London Bridge; and at the bridge over the river at Westminster there was the great raw site of the new Houses of Parliament on the left, with its coffer-dam and its scaffolding and its stacks of stone, where the old Houses had burnt six years ago and the new ones were not yet out of the ground. He looked at it for some time. He had sat in those Houses for nearly forty years, and spoken in them, briefly, as seldom as possible, and voted against everything that had been done in them since the Peace; and he thought, looking at the scaffolding, that it was very like the English to burn down their own Parliament by accident and then take twenty years to build a better one, and he did not know whether he admired it or not.
Then up Parliament Street, and up Whitehall, past the Horse Guards, where the sentries came to the present; and past the Banqueting House on the right, where they had cut off King Charles’s head on a January morning, out of the first-floor window, on a scaffold in the street, with a crowd watching. The English did not speak of it now. They had made a saint of him afterwards, and put him in the Prayer Book, and gone on doing to his successors, a piece at a time and by Act of Parliament, what they had done to him with an axe in an afternoon. The King looked at the window as he passed it. He had always looked at it, all his life, whenever he passed it, and he always would.
St James’s received him as it had received him every year of his life in London: the old brick gatehouse with its clock, the Colour Court, the dark low passages, the smell of it. They had put his own apartments ready. He had known that they would. He had kept them when the Queen’s people asked for them for her mother; he had kept them through a year of letters from her ministers and his own man of business, and offers, and compromises, and a proposal to wall off his library, which he had refused as he had refused all the rest; and the Whigs had said in their newspapers that it was the act of a dog in a manger, and Melbourne had said, he had heard, that he supposed the King of Hanover kept the house because there were such things going on in England that it might be necessary for him to return to it. The King had kept it because it was his. Here it was, the house, and here he was, and the library was as he had left it, with his books on the shelves and his papers in their presses and the dust-sheets just taken off, and a fire laid, in June, because the old rooms were cold in every season; and he walked through it to the window, and stood there in his uniform with his hands behind his back, and looked down into the court, and was King.
Melbourne came at seven.
He came in black, and bowed in the doorway, and came forward and knelt and kissed hands, as he had kissed hers; a big heavy man of sixty-one with a handsome ruined face that the King had disliked for twenty years, and grey in it now that had not been there in ‘thirty-seven. The King gave him his hand, and let him kiss it, and told him to get up, and to sit, since he had evidently not slept either.
He asked his questions. He had them ready; he had made a list of them at Osnabrück in pencil, on the back of a post-bill, and he had it in his pocket, though he did not need to look at it. What had the Lords Justices done in his name for eleven days? Melbourne told him: the proclamation; the letters; the orders for the mourning; the two Houses sworn; the Council’s orders for the prayers of the Church; the man committed to Newgate for his trial; and nothing else, since the Act forbade them almost everything else and they had had no wish to do any of the rest. The King approved it. He asked how they had proclaimed him, and Melbourne told him, and told him about the name; that they had proclaimed him by the first of his names, as King George the First had been proclaimed by his, and had not liked to choose for him beyond that. The King said that they had chosen rightly. He had been Ernest to his mother and Ernest in the army and Ernest to everybody who had ever known him well enough to curse him by name; and the other name, Augustus, had come with it from the old Elector who founded the house, his great-great-great-grandfather, who had had both; and it could stay in the christening register, where it had done no harm for sixty-nine years.
He asked about the Duke, and Melbourne told him that the Duke had come in at midnight from Apsley House to sit with the Lords Justices, and had sat with them every day since, and had said, on being shown the paper, that he had not expected to be taken at his word. The King very nearly smiled. He had named Wellington in ‘thirty-seven, at Hanover, with the Act of their Parliament in front of him, on a September evening, with a pen, after a quarter of an hour’s thought; and he had named him alone because there had never been anybody else. They had served in Flanders, the two of them, in the same bad year, under the same bad generals, as young men; and Wellington was the only Englishman he had ever known who had never once in forty years tried to persuade him of anything.
He asked about the funeral.
Melbourne said that the arrangements waited on His Majesty’s pleasure. The Earl Marshal had drawn up the order, after the precedents; St George’s, at Windsor, at night, as was usual; the body to go down from Buckingham Palace by road on the night before. And there was the question of His Majesty’s own attendance, on which the Earl Marshal did not presume to advise.
“She did not go to my brother’s,” the King said. “She was eighteen, and a woman, and Queen a fortnight, and they told her the Sovereign did not follow a coffin, and she did not. It was the right form. I shall keep it.” He thought of the road to Windsor at night, behind a hearse, among people who would hiss at him in the dark where he could not see their faces; and put the thought away, because it had nothing to do with the form. “Who walks?”
“Her husband, Sir. As the Prince Leopold walked for Princess Charlotte.”
“Yes,” said the King. “That is right also.” He did not like it. He did not like anything that the Coburgs did, or that was done for them, and he had not liked Leopold walking in 1817 any more than he would like this one walking now; but there was no other form, and he did not propose to make one.
He asked about the carriage, and the equerries, and how it had come about that a man could stand six paces from the Sovereign of this country on her own road, in her own capital, at six in the afternoon, with two pistols, and fire twice, and nobody between them; and Melbourne told him, with his eyes on the carpet, about the equerries who had gone across the garden. The King listened, and said nothing, and made a note. He would come back to that. He did not, then, ask anything about the man; and Melbourne, who must have expected to be asked, did not offer to tell him, and the King noticed that, too, and let it go.
At the end he asked about America.
“Your Majesty’s American ministers will do what is necessary,” Melbourne said, “in their own form. The Charter does not allow a British minister to advise Your Majesty in the government of the Union. It is not for me to say how they will proceed.”
“No,” said the King. “So I understand. I have read the Charter.” He had read it in 1783, when he was twelve, at Kew, in the schoolroom, because his tutor had thought it would be good for him; and he had read it again since, more than once, with a pencil. “Then I shall wait and see what they say.”
He let Melbourne go at half past eight. Melbourne went out backwards, and bowed at the door, and the King saw his face as he turned in the passage, in the light of the sconces, and it was the face of a man who has been ill for a long time and does not expect to get better; and the King found that he was sorry for him, which he had not expected, and did not care for.
On the Monday, at one, he held his Council.
It was in the old Council Chamber, with the tall windows on the Park and the light coming in grey through them, for it had clouded over in the night; a long table and a great many men in black at it, and more standing at the walls. The Lords Justices sat at the head, the eight of them: the Archbishop, very old; the Chancellor; Lansdowne; the Privy Seal; Melbourne; the Admiralty; the Chief Justice; and the Duke, upright, in his blue coat, with his face set. When the King came in they all rose, and the Chancellor came round the table and knelt, and gave back to him, in a few sentences that somebody had written out in the forms, the authority that they had held in his name since the tenth of June; and the Archbishop knelt after him, and then the others, one by one, the Duke last, kissing his hand. The Duke’s hand shook a little. His own did not.
Then he made his declaration. Melbourne had written it. He had brought it on the Sunday evening in his pocket, and left it with him, two short paragraphs on a single sheet, and the King had read it in bed at midnight and found that it was the declaration the girl had made at Kensington in ‘thirty-seven, which Melbourne had also written, with the words changed that had to be changed; and he had understood that Melbourne meant this as a kindness, or as a test, and that it did not much matter which. He read it now, standing, at the head of the table, in his own voice, which the English had always complained they could not follow and which he had never troubled to change.
The severe and afflicting loss which the Nation has sustained by the death of Her Majesty, my beloved Niece, has devolved upon me the duty of administering the Government of this Empire. This awful responsibility is imposed upon me so suddenly, and at so late a period of my life, that I should feel myself utterly oppressed by the burthen, were I not sustained by the hope that Divine Providence, which has called me to this work, will give me strength for the performance of it.
He had looked for some time, the night before, at so late a period of my life, where she had said so early, and had wondered whether Melbourne meant it as an insolence. He had decided that it did not signify whether he did. It was true. He had kept it.
When he had done, he took the oath for the security of the Church of Scotland, which every sovereign took at his first Council and which he had seen taken by his brother William and by the girl; and signed it, in his large black hand, Ernest R., the first time he had written it on an English paper. Then the Privy Councillors came up to take the oaths, his brothers first, Sussex and Cambridge, kneeling, Sussex with his great face swollen and his skull-cap in his hand, weeping openly, as Sussex did everything; and after them the rest, all the long line of them, Whigs and Tories and bishops and judges, kneeling to him one after another and kissing his hand and getting up again, as they had knelt to her. He looked at every face. He knew most of them. He knew what most of them had said of him, in print and out of it, for thirty years; and he gave each of them his hand, and looked at each of them with his good eye while they kissed it, and saw them remember what they had said, and was satisfied.
He received the Prince at four.
The Lord Chamberlain had asked whether His Majesty would see His Royal Highness in the Council Chamber or privately; and the King had said privately, in the library, standing, which was the form for a person of royal rank in mourning who was not of the family; and then he had considered, and said that the Prince was of the family, his brother Edward’s daughter’s husband, and should be received as one. But still in the library, and still standing.
The young man came in, in black, and bowed, very correctly, and stood. The King had not seen him since he was a boy of sixteen at Kensington, in the spring of ‘thirty-six, when the Coburgs had brought their two princes over to be looked at; he remembered a pale plump boy who fell asleep after dinner. This was not that boy. This was a tall thin young man of twenty with a grey face and the eyes of somebody who has not been to bed for a fortnight except to lie in it; and he stood in front of the King with his hands at his sides and waited, as he had evidently been told to wait, to be spoken to.
The King spoke to him in German. He had not meant to. He had meant to say the proper things in English, which he had settled on in the carriage, and dismiss him; but when he opened his mouth it was German that came, his own language, the language of his mother and of his own house and of everything in his life that had been his.
I knew her when she was so big, he said, and showed the size with his hand. At Kensington, a little girl. She was very angry with the world, and she stamped her foot at it. I was the first of all of them to kneel to her, at her Council. Did you know that? Before the Archbishop. Before anybody.
The young man said that he had not known it.
Well. It is so. The King found that his voice had gone wrong, and stopped, and waited until it came right, looking past the young man’s head at the window, where it had begun to rain. Then he held out his hand; and the young man, after a moment, took it; and the King held it hard, in his own large hard old hand, for some time, without saying anything at all, while the rain ran down the window behind them.
Then he let it go.
You will be chief mourner at Windsor, he said, in German still, but in another voice. It is the custom, for the husband. The Prince Leopold walked for the Princess Charlotte. The Earl Marshal will tell you what is to be done. I shall not go. The Sovereign does not.
The young man bowed.
That is all, said the King. God keep you.
He did not say anything about the young man’s place, or the warrant that she had given him in March, or the precedence that her Parliament had refused him and he himself had refused him, or what was now to become of him, or where he was to live, or on what; he had not intended to, and he did not. The young man did not ask. He bowed again, and went out backwards to the door, and turned there, and was gone; and the King stood where he was, by the window, with his hands behind his back, for a while after the door had closed, and then went and sat down at his table, and rang for his secretary, and asked for the boxes.
He worked until midnight.
He read everything. He had always read everything, at Hanover, every paper that came to him for his name, every line of it, with a pencil, before he signed; it was the only way he knew to be a king, and he did not intend to learn another at sixty-nine. There were a great many papers. There were warrants and commissions and appointments that had waited since the tenth; orders for the mourning; the Earl Marshal’s order for the funeral, which he went through clause by clause and altered in two places; a letter from Schele, by the courier that had followed him from Hanover, about the Estates, and one from Frederica, in her own hand, very shaky, which he put by to read last.
There were no newspapers. His secretary, who was new to London, had put the evening papers in with the boxes, as he supposed was done; and the King had them taken out again, without looking at them, and told the man that he would not see a newspaper, English or German, now or at any time, and that if anything was in them that he ought to know, his ministers would tell him, which was what ministers were for. He had not read an English newspaper of his own accord for thirty years. He did not propose to begin.
At midnight he read Frederica’s letter, which said that she was a little better, and that George had been to the Garten that afternoon, led by his servant, and had asked after his father; and that the whole of Hanover was in black, and the bells had been rung for him, and the Estates had sent an address. He read it twice, which was the second thing he had read twice that week. Then he put it in the drawer of the table, and blew out the candles but one, and sat on in the old cold room with the fire burning low in the grate in June, an old soldier in a hussar’s uniform under the mourning, King of three kingdoms, of which he had been born in one, and had chosen one, and had not yet been told by the third whether it would have him; and outside, beyond the court and the gatehouse and the dark Park, London went about its business without him, as it always had, and he did not care.