Heirs and Successors

The boxes were in the hall, four of them, packed and corded, with QUINCY painted on the lids in Mary’s careful capitals: books, and papers, and the pamphlets and documents that came to Government House by every post and that he could neither read nor bear to throw away. They had been packed for a week. The plan had been the plan of every summer: the House up on the twenty-first, a week to clear his desk, and then the family north by the railway and the steamboat to the old house at Quincy, where it was cool, and the sea came up the bay in the afternoons, and a Governor-General could be an old man in a straw hat in his own garden for six weeks without anybody coming up the path to ask him anything.

He stood in the hall on the Wednesday morning, at six, and looked at them.

“Have them unpacked,” he said.

Louisa, who had come down the stairs behind him in her wrapper, said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “All of them?”

“All of them. We are not going to Quincy.” He turned round to her. “I cannot go, Louisa. You may. You should. Take Mary Louisa, and go, and sit by the sea; the heat here will kill you before September.”

“And who will write your letters?” said Louisa; and he did not answer, because there was no answer to that, and she knew it, and went back up the stairs to tell Mary; and by eight o’clock the boxes had been carried back into the study, and uncorded, and the books were going back on to the shelves in the wrong order, and nobody in the house was going anywhere.

---

The city emptied round him that week like a basin with the plug drawn.

The members went first, on the Tuesday night and the Wednesday, by every train and every steamboat and every stage that left the capital, with their carpet-bags and their speeches and their mourning bands; and after them the clerks who could get leave, and the families who could afford the mountains or the sea, and the hotel-keepers’ best waiters, who went to Saratoga; until by the end of the week the Avenue was a white glare with nobody on it at noon but a dog and a water-cart, and the boarding houses on the slope below Charter Hill had their shutters closed and their cards out, Rooms for the Session, and the grass was coming up between the stones in front of Parliament House. Clay stayed. Adams knew that, because Clay came up the Rise on the Friday evening, in his black coat, with his hat in his hand, to say so, and to sit for half an hour in the study with a glass of lemonade, talking of nothing at all, very pleasantly, so that Adams understood he had come to see whether the Governor-General was still in his senses. He was. He told Clay so, in effect, and Clay laughed and went away down the hill again in the dusk to his empty boarding house, where he was, he said, the last man in the mess and the best whist player in the city by default.

And the question sat in the study with Adams, in the heat, all day and every day, and would not go away.

He had stated it to Clay on the Sunday, at dawn, standing at that window, in one breath. He had been ashamed of the breath afterwards, a little; it had been an old man’s speech, made to a younger man who had come up the hill to tell him something sad. But he had not been wrong. It was the question. And because he was a lawyer before he was anything else, and had been one before he was a diplomat, or a minister, or a Governor-General, or anything else that he had been in his long life, he did with it what he had been taught to do at Newburyport more than fifty years ago, in Mr Parsons’s office, at the age of twenty: he took it to pieces.

There were three pieces.

The first was the Crown. Had the Crown of the United Kingdom of America passed, on the afternoon of the tenth of June, with the Crown of Great Britain, to the King of Hanover? By the law of England it had passed in London at the instant of her death; there was no doubt of that, and they had proclaimed him there the next morning in the old form. But the law of England was not the law of the Union, and had not been since 1783; and the proclamation at St James’s had not named the Union, and had not been meant to. If the Crown of the Union had passed, it had passed by some law of the Union’s own. And if it had not passed, then it was somewhere else; and he did not know where.

The second was the act. If it had passed, did it want anything done to it, in America, by Americans, before it was complete: a proclamation, an instrument, an Act of the Parliament of the Union? Or had it passed by itself, entire, at the instant, so that anything America did now could only take notice of what had already happened?

And the third was himself.

---

He had Mary bring him the commission out of the strong-box on the Thursday, and laid it on the desk in front of him, and looked at it for a long time.

It was a fine document. It had been engrossed in London, on vellum, in a clerk’s round hand, by the King’s command on the advice of his American ministers, and sent across the sea in a tin case, in the summer of 1835; and it bore at the head the name of William the Fourth, by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of America, and at the foot his signature, William R., in the old sailor’s sprawling hand; and below that, added at New Westminster when it came, the Great Seal of the Union, which bore no King’s name at all. It appointed Our trusty and well-beloved John Quincy Adams to represent Us within Our United Kingdom of America during Our pleasure. That was all. It did not say whose pleasure, after the King’s. It did not say what became of it when the King who signed it was dead.

The King who signed it had been dead for three years.

He had not thought of that in three years. He thought of it now, with the vellum under his hand: that he had held this office for three years under a commission signed by a dead man, and had read three Speeches from the Throne and assented to two hundred Acts of Parliament and received the credentials of a dozen ministers from foreign courts, all under it; and that nobody had once asked him by what right, and he had never once asked himself. He had assumed. The whole Union had assumed. He was a man who had spent his life despising assumption, in others, and he found, sitting at his desk in his seventy-fourth year with a sheet of vellum and a dead King’s name, that he had been assuming the very thing on which every other thing he did depended.

Then the oath.

He did not have the oath; there was no paper of it. He did not need one. He had sworn it in the drawing room downstairs, on a summer morning in 1835, with his left hand on his mother’s Bible and his right, which had worked then, held up, before the Chief Justice of the day, in a black gown, with his wife and his son’s widow and a dozen members of the Council looking on; and he could have said it now, every word, in the voice he had said it in then. I do sincerely promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King William the Fourth, King of the United Kingdom of America, and to his heirs and successors. He said it to himself, sitting at the desk; and stopped, as he had stopped on the Sunday morning, at the five words at the end, and said them again.

And to his heirs and successors.

He had sworn to King William. He had sworn, in the same breath, to whoever came after King William, and to whoever came after that, without knowing their names, as every officer of the Crown in America had sworn since 1783; and he had never thought about those five words in his life, any more than a man thinks about the floor he stands on. They were in every oath in the Union. They were in the oaths of the judges, and the officers of the army and the navy, and the members of both Houses of Parliament, and the clerks of the custom-houses at Boston and Charleston, and the postmasters, and the sheriffs. They had been put there, he supposed, by men who had sworn oaths to King George in their youth and had wanted to swear as few more as they could; and they were either the whole answer, or they were nothing.

If the Crown of the Union had passed to the King of Hanover at the instant of the Queen’s death, then the King of Hanover was King William’s heir and successor in America, and Adams’s oath ran to him already, and had run to him since the afternoon of the tenth of June, and there was nothing more to be sworn by anybody. If it had not passed, then his oath ran to nobody he could name, and his commission to nobody, and he was an old man in a hot room with a piece of vellum.

He put the commission back in its tin case, and gave it to Mary to put back in the strong-box, and asked her to bring him Blackstone.

---

He read for a week.

He read Blackstone, the first book, on the King’s prerogative, in the old Oxford quarto he had bought in London in 1795, with his own notes in the margins in a young man’s hand: the king never dies. Henry, Edward, or George may die; but the king survives them all. He read it aloud to himself, at the window, and thought that it was a very fine sentence and that it said nothing whatever about two Crowns on one head, because the man who wrote it had never imagined there could be any such thing outside Hanover, and had not cared about Hanover.

He read the Act of Settlement, and the Regency Act of Queen Anne’s time, and the proclamation of 1714, by which King George the First had been proclaimed in London while he was still in Hanover, by Lords Justices acting under a sealed paper, exactly as the King of Hanover had been proclaimed in June; the parallel was so close that he wondered whether anybody in London had noticed it, and supposed that they had, and had been glad of it. He read the Charter. He read the whole of it through, twice, slowly, with Mary turning the pages for him; and then he read the second Article, of the Crown, by itself, nine clauses, every day, morning and evening, until he could have recited it standing on his head.

The succession in America follows the succession in Great Britain, so long as the two remain the same; and if they differ, the Parliament of the Union shall determine it.

He had known the men who wrote that sentence, most of them: his father, and Franklin, and Jay; and Madison, who had drafted the second Article in Philadelphia in the long summers of the negotiation, and had died at Montpelier four years ago, the last of them, at eighty-five, without anybody’s having thought to ask him what he had meant by it. Adams knew what he would have said. Madison would have said that they had meant the succession to follow the British one as a matter of course, without anybody’s having to do anything, so long as the British Parliament did not alter the British succession in a way the Americans did not like; and that the clause about the successions differing had been put in for the case of a Parliament at Westminster that passed over the next heir for some reason of its own, and had never been meant for anything else. He would have said it very gently, in his small dry voice, and he would have been right; and it would have been the opinion of one old man in Virginia about what a room full of men had meant fifty-seven years before, and it would have bound nobody.

Follows. Adams wrote the word on a sheet of paper, with his left hand, in letters an inch high, and pinned the paper to the frame of the window, and looked at it.

---

He looked, too, at what they had done before.

There had been three demises of the Crown since the Charter: in 1820, when the old King died, and in 1830, and in 1837. He had the papers of all three brought up from the strong-room in the cellar, where the Governors-General kept what they did not want and could not destroy; and he went through them with Mary in the second week, on the Tuesday and the Wednesday, in the worst of the heat, with the shutters closed and a wet towel on the back of his neck.

There was nothing in them.

That was to say, there was a great deal in them, and none of it was what he wanted. In 1820, under Clinton, the news had come in March, by the packet, with the London papers; and the Governor-General had written to the Archbishop that the prayers should be altered on the following Sunday to name King George the Fourth, and the Archbishop had altered them; and the House of Commons had sent the new King an address of condolence and congratulation, by a large majority, with a division on a point of wording; and that was all. In 1830, under Marshall, it had been the same, except that there had been no division. And in 1837 it had been himself.

He remembered it perfectly well. He remembered the morning in July, three years ago, when the news came of the old sailor’s death and the girl’s accession; he had been standing at this window. He had sat down at this desk and written a note to the Archbishop about the prayers, with his own right hand, and another to the Prime Minister, who was Clay, and had then gone down to breakfast and told Louisa, who had been born in London, and cried. And the next Sunday the Primate had prayed for our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria, in the Cathedral, for the first time, and Adams had sat in his stall and heard it, and been moved, and thought that the girl was eighteen, and that it was a hard thing to be a Queen at eighteen, and a harder thing to be Queen of a country three thousand miles away that had once made war on your grandfather. And in December the House had sent her its address. And nobody had proclaimed anybody. Nobody had thought of it. The Union had heard that it had a Queen, and prayed for her, and gone on.

He had not proclaimed her. He had not asked whether he ought to. He had not asked whether the Crown of the Union had passed to her on the twentieth of June, when the old King died at Windsor, or at some other time, or by some other means; he had not asked anything at all. He had assumed, as Clinton had assumed, and Marshall, who was the greatest lawyer the Union had ever had and had never in his life assumed anything that he could have proved. And it had been perfectly all right. The Queen had reigned, and the Union had been governed in her name, and every Act he had assented to in her name was good law, and nobody had ever questioned one of them.

He did not know whether that was an answer, or the absence of one. He thought, on the whole, sitting in the dark of the shuttered study on the Wednesday evening with the papers of three reigns on the desk in front of him, that it was the best evidence he had. Three times the Crown had passed, and three times the Union had done nothing but pray, and three times it had worked. It had worked because nobody had been frightened. The old men had died in their beds, at the end of long reigns, with their deaths in the newspapers for weeks beforehand; and their heirs had been men and a girl whom nobody in America had any reason to fear; and so nobody had asked.

This time a girl had been shot dead in the street, with her child in her, and the man the Crown had gone to was the Duke of Cumberland.

---

On the first Friday, the day after he had taken out his commission, he had gone to see her portrait.

It was in a painter’s gallery on the Avenue, a long hot room over a shop, with the paintings hung close on dark red walls and the light coming down from a skylight; and he had heard of it in June, before anything, and meant to go, and not gone. It was Mr Sully’s, from Philadelphia, who had gone over to London two summers ago for the purpose and painted her from the life, at Buckingham Palace, at nineteen, in the first year of her reign. He had brought the picture home with him, and it was being shown in the principal cities of the Union, at a few pence a head. Now it was being shown at a few pence a head with a band of crape across the top of the frame.

She was going up the steps of a throne. That was the picture: a small young woman in white, with a great crimson robe trailing behind her down the steps, turning at the top of them to look back over her shoulder, at the painter, at whoever stood at the foot of the steps; with her lips a little parted, as if she had been called, or were about to say something, and her head lifted on her long neck. It was very well painted. It was too well painted, perhaps; she looked a little too much like an angel and a little too little like the plump small girl he had read about in the London papers, who danced till four in the morning and was cross with her ministers. But the turn of the head was right, he thought. He did not know how he knew, never having seen her. It was the turn of the head of somebody who has heard a sound behind her.

He stood in front of it for a long time, with his hat in his hand. There was nobody else in the gallery but the painter who kept it, an old acquaintance, who stood a little way off and did not interrupt him; and when at last Adams turned away, the painter came up and said, in a low voice, that he did not think the portrait was properly estimated in this country, and that Mr Sully meant to take it back to England.

Adams said that he thought Mr Sully was right, and went home.

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He dictated the entry for that Saturday at four in the morning, standing at the window in the dark, with the fireflies still going on the Axis below and the first grey just coming into the east.

25. IV:30. Saturday.

He stood for a while before he went on. Mary waited with the pen.

Household cares superadded, more and more burdensome with the advance of years. Anxieties for those I am to leave behind. An hourly reminded and daily deepening consciousness of decay in body and mind; an unquenchable thirst for repose, yet a motive for clinging to public life.

“Is that all, Father?” said Mary, after a while.

“No,” said Adams. But he did not go on; and presently she put the pen down, and went to see about his breakfast, and he stood at the window and watched the light come up over the Palace, which had been shut since June.

He thought about the motive. It was a strange thing to have written down, at four in the morning, and he examined it as he would have examined a sentence of somebody else’s. He was seventy-three. He had a right arm that would not lift a pen, and a body that ached in every joint before he was out of bed, and a mind that he could feel going, some days, like a tide going out, slowly, over a long flat beach. He wanted to stop. He wanted it with the whole of himself, as he had wanted very few things in his life: to go to Quincy, and sit in the garden, and read Cicero, and die. And he could not go, because there was a question in the study that nobody else in the Union was going to answer if he did not ask it; and if he was honest, which he tried to be at four in the morning if at no other time, he did not want to go. He wanted to be the man who asked it. He had wanted to be that man all his life. That was the motive. It was not a very creditable one, and he did not propose to put it in the diary.

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The foreign ministers came on the Monday, to condole.

They came together, by arrangement, in their carriages, at noon, in the glare: the Russian, and the Austrian, and the Frenchman, who were all that was left of the corps in the city, the rest having gone north with the members. They wore black and their orders, and were shown into the drawing room, and made him three speeches, of which the Austrian’s was the shortest and the Frenchman’s the most elegant and the Russian’s the most cheerful, since the Russian was a big, kind, rich, comfortable man who had married a girl of sixteen from Georgetown in the spring and had not stopped smiling since. They spoke of the Queen. They spoke of the grief of their own sovereigns, and of Europe, and of the abominable crime, and Adams thanked them in French, which was the only language in which he was ever quite at his ease with ambassadors, and they bowed.

Then the Frenchman, who was a thin, sallow, clever, disagreeable man, and hated the climate and the country and the cooking and very nearly everything in it except his own wit, asked, as they were going, with the most perfect courtesy, a question that he had plainly composed in the carriage.

“Your Excellency will forgive me,” he said. “A point of form. My letters of credence were addressed by His Majesty the King of the French to Her late Majesty, as Queen of this kingdom, and presented to Your Excellency as her representative. They expired, I am instructed, with her. My government will send me new ones. I should be glad to know, for the guidance of my government, to whom they should be addressed.”

The Austrian looked at the carpet. The Russian looked at the ceiling, smiling.

“To His Majesty the King, Monsieur,” said Adams.

“Of course, Excellency. And the style?”

“His Majesty’s style,” said Adams, “will be made known to you, Monsieur, and to your colleagues, by His Majesty’s American ministers, in due form, at the proper time. I should not like to anticipate them.”

The Frenchman bowed very low, and smiled, and went out; and Adams, who had been a diplomat for twenty years before he was anything else, and had answered a great many questions at a great many courts by not answering them, stood in his own drawing room after the carriages had gone and felt the heat come up into his face like a boy’s. He had not anticipated his ministers. He had not anticipated anything. He had simply not known.

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The letter from Cambridge came on the first of August, a Saturday, in the evening post.

He knew the hand on the cover before Mary had it out of the bag: small, quick, upright, a scholar’s hand, with long tails to the letters. He had known it for forty years, since they were both young men at the Massachusetts bar and Story wrote poetry. He had been offered the place on the Court that Story took, in 1811, and had refused it, because he was in St Petersburg and did not want it; and Story had taken it and had become, in thirty years, the first lawyer in the Union and very probably in the English-speaking world, and Chief Justice, and the author of a book on the conflict of laws that the judges of Westminster Hall read with envy. Adams had never once regretted refusing the place. He thought, as he broke the seal with his left thumb, that he was about to regret it now.

He had Mary read it to him, standing, at the window, in the long evening light.

Cambridge, 28 July 1840.

My dear Sir,

I have your letter of the 19th, and I have read it, as you will believe, more times than I have read anything in a long while. I answer you privately, as a friend who happens to sit where I sit, and not as the Court, which has not been asked, and which I pray may never be. You will use this letter as you think fit, and I trust you not to use it as a judgment.

The King is one man, and holds two Crowns, and each of them passes by its own law. That is the whole of the conflict of laws, in a sentence, and I have spent ten years and six hundred pages saying it at greater length. The law of the Union, by the eighth clause of the second Article, has adopted for the American Crown the British rule of descent. It has not adopted the British act of proclamation, nor any British act at all, nor provided any act of its own; and where the Charter provides no act, I do not think the law can require one. The Crown of the Union therefore passed, in my opinion, at the instant of Her late Majesty’s death, to the person on whom the Crown of Great Britain passed at the same instant, there being no difference whatever between the two successions which the Parliament of the Union could be asked to determine. What you proclaim now, you can only record. You cannot make him King of America. He is so already, and has been since the tenth of June.

Your commission is the Crown’s, and not the late King’s, and runs on with the Crown. And your oath, if it was in the common form, as I do not doubt, ran to King William and his heirs and successors; that is to say, from the tenth of June, to King Ernest. You need swear nothing new. Nobody in the Union need swear anything new. The men who wrote those five words into our oaths knew very well what they were doing, whatever else they did not know.

You will say that the Union did nothing in 1837, nor in 1830, nor in 1820, and that this proves nothing. I say that it proves a great deal. Three times the Union did nothing, and three times its sovereign reigned in it, and no court in the land has ever doubted an act done in his name. That is the practice, and the practice is evidence of the law. The only difference this time is that we are afraid; and fear is not a rule of law, though it makes very good law sometimes, when it makes men write down what they had been content to assume.

I should say all this from the bench, if the question came there. I hope it does not. Pray give my respects to Mrs Adams, and believe me, my dear Sir, ever faithfully yours,

Joseph Story.

Mary stopped. Adams stood at the window with his back to her, and his good hand on the sill, and looked down the hill at the Palace, which was going rose and then grey in the last of the light, with its shutters closed.

It was the answer. He had known it was the answer since the Sunday he had worked it out alone, at this window, with the five words in his mouth; he had wanted somebody else to say it. Now somebody had said it, the best somebody in the Union, in a letter of two sides, in a quick small hand, so plainly that a child could follow it; and he found that he was not relieved. He was only very tired, and a little frightened, in a way he could not have explained to Mary or to anybody. It was the answer of one man, privately, in a letter he was trusted not to use. The Court had not been asked. The Parliament had not been asked. The King had not been asked; the King, he supposed, would have very decided views of his own, if anybody asked him. And the Union would act on it, if it acted at all, because one old man in Massachusetts had written to another old man on the Potomac, and the second had believed him.

That was how it would be done. He saw it quite clearly, standing there. It would be done the way the Union did everything: by men agreeing in a hurry, and nobody writing down afterwards what they had agreed or why. He had spent his life fighting that way of doing things. He was going to do it himself.

“Make a fair copy of it, Mary,” he said. “Two copies. I shall keep the original. One copy goes to Mr Clay tonight, by hand, with a note, which I will give you, and the other I shall keep with my commission.” He turned round. “And then put the pen down, my dear, and go to bed. It is late, and I have kept you writing all summer.”

He gave her the note before she went. It was three lines.

My dear Sir, I enclose a letter from Cambridge, in confidence. It answers the question I put to you on the 19th of July. I do not think it answers the one you put to me. J. Q. A.

When she had gone he sat on alone in the study, in the dark, with the window open and the fireflies going on and off on the Axis, and the paper with the one word on it pinned to the window frame, white in the dark, where he could just see it. Follows. He thought that it had followed, then, on the afternoon of the tenth of June, without anybody’s knowing it, three thousand miles away, the way a man’s shadow follows him across a field. And he thought that somewhere in London, very likely, an old man with one good eye had sat down at a table by now with a pen in his hand, and decided something; and that whatever it was, it would come too late to make any difference, and that nobody on either side of the sea knew it yet.