Le Roy le Veult

The Clerk of the Parliaments stood up at the table, in his wig and gown, with the list of the bills in his hand, and turned to the bar, and said it in the old Norman French, as it had been said in that place, or in the place that had burned down six years ago, for four hundred years.

Le Roy le veult.

Melbourne, sitting on the bench below the empty throne in the robes of a Lord Commissioner, with a cocked hat on his head and four other men in the same absurd costume beside him, heard it and did not move. He had been waiting for it all morning. He had known it would come, and when, and in what words, and he had told himself that it was nothing, a form, three words of bad French that meant the King wills it and had meant that for most of the time they had been said. For three years they had not been said. For three years the Clerk had stood at that table at the end of every session and turned to the Commons at the bar and said La Reyne le veult, and Melbourne had sat on this bench, or on the bench beside the throne when she came herself, and had heard it, and had thought, every time, with a small private pleasure that he never told anybody about, that it was a pretty thing to hear, and that it suited her.

Le Roy le veult, said the Clerk again, to the next bill, and the next; and the Commons stood at the bar in their black, with the Speaker in front of them, and heard it, and Melbourne saw one or two of them look at one another. It was the first time in three years. They had last heard it of an old sailor who dozed at Windsor and could not be got to read anything. They heard it now of a King who sat at St James’s, half a mile away, with his spectacles on, reading every line.

Then the Lord Chancellor stood up with the speech.

It was not the King’s speech. It never was; but this time it was not even read in his presence. He had not come. He had let it be known, through the Lord Chamberlain, that the King would not open or close a Parliament while the court was in mourning for his niece, and that he would meet his Parliament when he had a Parliament of his own; and nobody had argued, because it was entirely correct, and because the ministers who might have argued were very glad of it. So the Parliament that had outlived the Queen was sent away by commission, by five old men in cocked hats on a bench in a patched room, and the Lord Chancellor read the speech in a voice like a tired clergyman’s, while the light came down grey from the high windows of the Painted Chamber on to the black of the peers and the black of the Commons and the red of the robes.

My Lords and Gentlemen, we are commanded by His Majesty to release you from further attendance in Parliament, and at the same time to express to you the deep sense which His Majesty entertains of the sympathy which you have shown, in common with all classes of his subjects, under the irreparable loss which the nation has sustained by the death of Her late Majesty.

Irreparable. Melbourne had written that word. He had written the whole speech, at his table in Downing Street, in an afternoon, as he had written the speeches for this ceremony for six years, and he had chosen that word with great care and some pain; and the King had asked him why.

---

It had taken three audiences.

That was the thing that nobody outside the Cabinet knew yet, and that Melbourne had not yet found a way of saying to the Cabinet so that they would understand it. The King made no difficulties. He had made none since he landed. He gave his assents; he received his ministers on the days appointed, and kept them no longer than was necessary, and was never rude, or never more than an old soldier is rude by nature; he signed what was put before him, in his large black slanting hand, and did not lose it, and did not keep it waiting. He held his Councils and read the declarations that were written for him in the words in which they were written. A minister could have gone to the newspapers, if he had been the kind of minister who went to newspapers, and had nothing whatever to tell them.

But he asked.

He asked about everything. He had the speech in his hands on the Thursday before, a sheet and a half of it, and he read it through in front of Melbourne with his spectacles on and a pencil in his hand, every line, while Melbourne stood; and then he began at the beginning and asked his questions, one sentence at a time. Why the deep sense? Why all classes of his subjects, and not merely his subjects; were there classes that had not sympathised? Why was the Levant to be pacified, which was a word for a quarrel, when the Convention of July was an act of war against a rebel and ought to be called one? Why irreparable? Was the loss of a Sovereign ever irreparable, in a monarchy, when the Crown was not lost? Melbourne answered every question. He answered them as well as he had ever answered anything, with reasons and with precedents, and with the light, easy, half-mocking voice that had carried him through thirty years of the House of Lords and three of the late Queen’s tempers; and the King listened to every answer, without interrupting, and wrote something in pencil in the margin, and asked the next question.

At the end of the first audience he gave the speech back and said that he would think about it.

At the end of the second he said that he would like to see the speeches at the prorogations of 1820 and 1830, for comparison, and Melbourne sent them.

At the end of the third, on the Monday, the day before yesterday, the King took off his spectacles, and folded the sheet and a half, and gave it back, and said that it would do. He had not altered one word. Not one. Melbourne had gone through it afterwards in the carriage, with the King’s pencil marks in every margin, a question at every comma, and found that every word of it was his own, exactly as he had written it, including irreparable.

He had sat in the carriage and looked at the marks. And it had come to him, slowly, as things came to him now, that he had just been given the most courteous lesson he had ever had in his life, and that he did not yet know what it was a lesson in. The King had not altered a word. The King had required a reason for every word, and been given one, and accepted it; and he had made it perfectly clear, without saying anything at all, that it was he who had accepted it, and that he need not have, and that next time, or the time after, he might not. He had not refused anything. He had established that he could. It was a thing that no Sovereign had done to Melbourne in his life. The old King had shouted, and dismissed him once, and had to have him back; the girl had cried and given way, or been cross and given way, which came to the same thing; and this one gave way without a sound, and left the pencil marks in the margins, for Melbourne to find.

The Lord Chancellor came to the end of the speech. The Commons bowed, and went out. It was over. The Lords Commissioners got up stiffly, holding on to their hats, and went to the robing room to take off their robes; and Melbourne, unbuttoning the red with fingers that were a little clumsy, found that he was thinking about the Irish Corporations Bill, which had had the royal assent by commission the afternoon before, and to which the King had also, on the Friday, asked to be given a reason for every clause.

There were well over a hundred clauses. Melbourne had not given him the reasons. He had sent the Attorney-General.

---

Palmerston told him about the letter on the Wednesday, at the Foreign Office, at the end of a long morning about the French.

The French were impossible. That was the whole of the morning, and it had been impossible for a month: since the Convention was signed on the fifteenth of July and the French had found out that it had been signed without them, and against their friend the Pasha, and by four Powers of whom one was England and another was Russia. Thiers was talking of war. All Paris was talking of war; the newspapers were full of it, and the cafés, and the Chamber, and they were singing the Marseillaise in the theatres, which they had not done for ten years, and calling up the reserves. And on the Thursday before, by way of an interlude, the Emperor’s nephew had landed at Boulogne from a hired steamer with sixty men in second-hand uniforms, to make himself Emperor of the French in his uncle’s room, and had been taken in the course of the morning by the National Guard, wet to the waist, in the sea, trying to get back to his boat. They said in the clubs that he had brought a tame eagle with him to fly over his head; and then that it was not an eagle at all but a vulture, bought on the quay at Gravesend on the way down the river; and then that it had been seen afterwards in the town, very wet, eating a pork chop. Melbourne did not know how much of that was true. He had laughed at it until he cried, in the Cabinet room, and the Cabinet had looked at him as if he were going mad, which he supposed was possible.

“They will not fight,” Palmerston said, standing at his window with his hands under his coat-tails and his whiskers shining in the sun. “They will make a noise, and fortify Paris, and call each other names in the Chamber, and in the end the King of the French will dismiss Thiers and keep his crown, because Louis-Philippe has kept his crown for ten years by never once doing what he was told was his honour. By the spring the Pasha will be back in Egypt and the French will be telling each other that they meant it to happen. You will see.”

“I hope I shall,” said Melbourne. “I hope I shall see anything, by the spring.” He picked up his hat. “And the King? What does the King say to the French?”

“The King,” said Palmerston, “is the only man in England who is entirely happy about the French. He would like to have them come. He told me so. He said he had fought them at twenty-two and would like to do it again at sixty-nine, before he died, and that he would take the field himself at the head of the Household Cavalry if I could arrange it.” He laughed. “I have told him that I would do my best. He is the most agreeable master I have had in ten years at this Office. He reads everything I send him. He never asks me to change a word.”

“No,” said Melbourne. “He doesn’t, does he.”

Palmerston looked at him sideways, with his quick bright eyes, and seemed about to say something, and said something else.

“I carried a letter for him, you know,” he said, turning back to the window. “Ten days ago. To America. He sent for me on the Saturday and gave me a packet in his own hand, sealed with his own seal, and directed to the Governor-General at New Westminster, and asked me to send it by my bag to our man there, to be put into Adams’s own hand and nobody else’s. It went by the Acadia from Liverpool on the Tuesday. I did not ask him what was in it.” He was silent for a moment. “He told me, when I asked whether he required me to know, that the Charter did not permit me to know. He said he had been reading it.”

Melbourne stood quite still in the middle of the Foreign Secretary’s carpet, with his hat in his hand.

He thought that there was a great deal he could say. He could say that a letter from the Sovereign in his own hand to the Governor-General of America, sent without the knowledge of his American ministers, was very probably a breach of the Charter in itself, and certainly of everything the Charter had been understood to mean for fifty-seven years. He could say that it was probably a command, and that he could guess what command, and that if he was right it would arrive in America at the worst possible moment, in the middle of whatever the Americans had decided to do about their own Crown, and that God alone knew what they would make of it. He could say that the King had found the one door in the whole constitution through which no British minister could follow him, and walked through it, and shut it, and that Palmerston had held his coat.

And he could do nothing whatever about any of it, because the Charter that the King had been reading did not permit him to. He was the King’s First Lord of the Treasury in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In the government of the Union he was nobody. He could not advise the King on America, by a word, without doing the very thing the King had done; and the King knew it, and had known it on the twenty-first of June, when he asked about America at the end of the first audience and Melbourne had looked at the carpet and told him so.

“Then I shall not know it either,” Melbourne said at last.

“No,” said Palmerston. “I thought that was probably best.” And he rang for his secretary, and they went back to the French.

---

On the Thursday he called at Apsley House, to thank the Duke, and found him in the long room on the first floor, sitting by the window that looked down Constitution Hill, with his hands on his stick, looking at nothing.

The Duke had had another seizure in the middle of July. It had been in the newspapers for a day and then out of them, because the Duke had been out in the Park again within the week, to show that he could, and had told his doctors what he thought of them. He had attacked the Canada Bill in the Lords that summer as if he wished to kill it with his own hands, and he had not killed it. He had summoned the Tory peers here, to this room, at the end, and told them in a quarter of an hour why they must let it pass; and they had let it pass, as they always did when he told them, and grumbled about it afterwards, as they always did, and Melbourne had been grateful to him for it and had said so, in the House, which had embarrassed them both.

He sat down in the chair across the window from him, and the Duke looked round, and grunted.

“Well,” said the Duke. “You are through.”

“We are through,” said Melbourne. “Thanks to Your Grace, chiefly.”

“Thanks to nobody. Thanks to Peel not knowing his own mind, and me knowing mine.” The Duke looked at the empty throne, in its black hangings. “You will have to dissolve before Christmas. The Parliament dies in December whether you dissolve it or not.”

“I know it.”

“And he will want to know, before you do, whether you have the confidence of the country. He asked me.” The Duke turned his head from the window and looked at Melbourne with his pale, hard, old eyes. “He asked me last week, at St James’s, how many of the House of Commons were Whigs and how many were Tories and how many were O’Connell’s, and how the ministry had stood on every division of the session. I told him that I had not the least idea, and that he had better ask you. He said that he would. He said it in the most civil way in the world.” He was silent for a moment. “I have served four Kings, Melbourne. This one does not shout. I find that I do not care for it.”

Melbourne said nothing. The Duke turned back to the window, and looked down the hill, along the road, between the wall and the railings, towards the place; and presently Melbourne got up and took his leave, and the Duke gave him two fingers without looking round.

---

On the Saturday Melbourne went to Belgrave Square to see the widower.

He had not been before. He had meant to go every day since the funeral, and had not gone, and had told himself every day that the Prince would not want to see him, which was very likely true and was not the reason. The reason was that he did not want to see the Prince; or not the Prince, but the thing that would be in the room when they were in it together, the thing that neither of them would name. He had dined at her table nearly every night for three years. He had sat on her left hand and talked to her about everything in the world, and made her laugh, and been scolded for falling asleep after dinner; and the Prince had sat on her right hand for four months and listened. They were the two men in England who had been with her most. He was not sure that he could bear to sit in a room with the other one.

He went, in the end, because it was the right thing to do and he had always been better at doing the right thing than at wanting to.

Ingestre House stood at the corner of the square, tall and stuccoed and new, with the plane trees in the garden in the middle of the square very green and dusty in the August heat, and the blinds down on the first floor, where the Duchess of Kent lived. The Prince’s rooms were on the second. A German servant took Melbourne up, and opened a door, and said his name; and the Prince got up from a table by the window, where he had been writing, and came across the room to him with his hand out.

He was thinner. That was the first thing. He had been a handsome, fair young man in February, with a soft face that the women had admired; the face was not soft any more. It had gone sharp and pale over the bones, like the face of a man who has been ill, and the eyes, which were blue and very large, had gone back into it. He was in black. He was quite composed. He gave Melbourne his hand, and thanked him for coming, in his careful English, and asked him to sit down; and Melbourne sat, and looked at the room, which was a plain, square, light room with a piano in it, and a great many books, and a table covered with papers in very neat piles, and nothing on the walls at all.

They talked for a while about the session, and the French. The Prince knew a great deal about the French. He had read everything; he read, Melbourne gathered, nearly all day, the newspapers and the Blue Books and the debates, as if he were preparing for an examination that nobody had set him. He asked sensible questions about the Convention, and listened to the answers, and did not argue; and Melbourne, answering, thought that he was sitting with a man who was keeping himself alive by reading, as some men did it by drinking, and that it would not do for very much longer.

Then the Prince put his hands together on his knee, and looked at them, and said, “Has the King said anything about me, Lord Melbourne?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing at all? In two months?”

“Nothing at all, sir. He has not mentioned your name to me since the twenty-second of June.”

The Prince nodded slowly, as if that were what he had expected, and was a relief.

“I have my precedence,” he said. “By the letters patent of March. Next after the Sovereign, everywhere but in Parliament and the Council. She gave it me.” He said she very quietly, as one steps on a board that may not bear. “I am next after the King now, in every room in England, by her patent. Before his own son. Before his brothers. He cannot like that.”

“No, sir.”

“Can he take it away?”

Melbourne considered lying to him, for about the space of a breath, and did not.

“What the Crown gave by letters patent,” he said, “the Crown may revoke by letters patent. I do not think he will. I am not sure. If he does, sir, he will not ask my opinion first.”

“No.” The Prince looked out of the window, at the plane tree in the garden. “And the thirty thousand pounds?”

“Is yours, sir. The lawyers are agreed on that. Parliament voted it, and the Crown granted it, and nobody can take it away but Parliament, and Parliament will not. Sibthorp himself would not dare.”

The Prince very nearly smiled. Colonel Sibthorp, in January, had been the member who moved to cut it from fifty thousand to thirty, and had been cheered by the Tories for it, and Albert had been very angry, and the Queen had been angrier; she had said she would never forgive the Tories as long as she lived, and Melbourne had told her that she would, and she had not lived long enough to prove him right.

“Then I am a rich foreigner,” the Prince said, “with a house in which I am the guest of my aunt, and a precedence that the King cannot like, in a country where I have no place, and no duty, and no wife.” He said it without any self-pity at all, in the voice of a man reading out an inventory. “Lord Melbourne. Should I go home?”

Melbourne had known that it would come, and had his answer, and found that it was not quite the answer he had brought.

“Not yet, sir,” he said. “Not now. If you go now, in the summer, two months after, they will say that you were driven out by the King, or that you never cared for her, or for this country; and they will say both, in different newspapers, and the second will be the one that is remembered. Wait for the winter. Wait until you have been seen to stay. Then go, if you must, when you choose, and with the King’s leave, asked for and given, in the proper form; and go as her husband, and not as a man who ran away.” He paused. “And if I may say so, sir, wait until you know what you want to go home to.”

The Prince was silent for a long time.

“Stockmar says the same,” he said at last. “Stockmar has gone back to Coburg. He wrote me a letter before he went, of eleven pages, which I have read eleven times. He says the same thing, at greater length.” He turned his head and looked at Melbourne directly, for the first time. “Lord Melbourne. I have read the trial.”

Melbourne waited.

“I have read every word of it. In the Times, and in the Chronicle, and in the Standard. I have read the papers that were found in his box. I have read the third letter.” He did not say what was in the third letter. He did not need to. “I want to ask you one thing, and I want you to answer me as you would answer a man and not a widower. Do you believe it?”

The room was very quiet. Somewhere below, in the Duchess’s rooms, a clock struck the half-hour, and a dog barked once in the square.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Melbourne.

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one I have.” He leant forward, with his hands on his stick, and spoke slowly, because he wanted to be understood, and because it was the truest thing he had said to anybody since June. “I have known that man, sir, or known of him, for thirty years. I have heard every story that was ever told of him, and some of them were true, and most of them were not, and I have never known which were which. I did not believe them. I did not disbelieve them. I made a point of not finding out, because I could not see that anything would be gained by finding out, and I could see a great deal that might be lost. I have lived my whole life between believing and disbelieving things, sir. It is what a minister does. It is very nearly all he does.”

“I cannot do that,” said the Prince.

“No, sir. I know you can’t. It is the difference between us, and I am afraid it does you credit.” Melbourne sat back. “The Treasury Solicitor has been to every public-house in London where that boy ever drew a pint, and found nothing. Whether there was nothing to find, I don’t know. The Attorney-General doesn’t know. The jury didn’t know; they found him mad, which is a way of not knowing. I think it very likely that nobody will ever know, sir, and that you will have to live without knowing, as I shall. I am sorry for it. I am sorrier than I can tell you.”

The Prince looked at him. Then he looked down at his hands, and turned the ring on his finger, round, and round, and round.

“She liked you very much,” he said. “You know that.”

“I know it, sir.”

“She said you were the only person in England who made her laugh when she did not want to.” He stopped turning the ring. “I have not laughed since the tenth of June, Lord Melbourne. I do not mean that as a reproach. I only wished to tell somebody who would understand it.”

Melbourne got up. He found that he could not stay sitting down. He went to the window and stood there, with his back to the room, and looked out at the plane tree in the little garden at the back, and the wall at the end of it, and the backs of the houses beyond, with their blinds down; and the Prince, who had good manners, sat still at the table and let him stand there for as long as he needed, and did not say anything.

When he turned round, the Prince had got up too.

“Thank you for coming,” the Prince said, and gave him his hand. “Please come again. I shall be here, it seems, until the winter.”

---

He walked back. It was not far: across the square, and up Grosvenor Place to the corner, with the long wall of the Palace garden on his right, which he did not look at, and the top of Constitution Hill opening on his right at the end of it, which he did not look at either; and along Piccadilly, in the heat, with his coat over his arm, and was very tired by the time he came to South Street, and sat down in the hall on the porter’s chair, which he had never done in his life, and sat there for a while before he went up.

He thought about the King’s pencil marks.

He thought that he had spent two months waiting for the King to do something, and that the King had done nothing, and that it had taken him all that time to understand that the nothing was the thing. The King observed the forms. The King gave every assent. The King asked for reasons, and was given them, and accepted them, and wrote his questions in the margin in pencil, and kept the paper; and somewhere in a drawer at St James’s there was a pile of papers growing, every one of them with an answer accepted on it in the King’s own hand, and the day would come when the King took them out of the drawer and did not accept one. And in the meantime he had written to America. He had written to America in his own hand, through the one door that nobody could follow him through, and Melbourne would not know what he had written, and could not ask, and must not; and the Americans, who did not know the King, and had not had two months of his pencil, would open it, and read it, and have to decide what to do with it, alone.

He thought of the old man in the Prince’s room, the one in the Prince’s head, and his own, and every newspaper in England: the one who wrote letters to Hanover, or did not; who had been sent communications of an important nature, or had not. And then of the other old man, the real one, at St James’s, in his spectacles, reading every line, asking why. He could not make the two into one man. He had never been able to. He supposed that was the point of the King, if the King had a point: that nobody would ever be able to.

Le Roy le veult. He said it to himself on the porter’s chair, in the cool of the hall, in the old French, very softly; and it sounded quite different from how it had sounded in the Painted Chamber that morning, and he could not have said how.

Then he got up, and went upstairs, and slept for two hours in the afternoon, like the old man he was, and dreamt about nothing at all.