Make Known

15. IV. Saturday.

He had Mary write the day and the hour, and then he stood at the window in the dark and could not think of anything to put after them, which had not happened to him above a dozen times in sixty years of keeping the book. He thought of several things. He thought of putting down This day the King is made known, and did not, because it was not yet done and he had a superstition, which he would have denied in public, against writing down what had not yet happened. He thought of putting down the heat, which was going to be very great. In the end he put down nothing, and told Mary that he would finish the entry in the evening, and went down to his breakfast, and ate it, which surprised him.

At half past nine he drove down the Rise to the Palace.

---

He had not been inside it since the tenth of June.

That had been the day itself. He had gone down at noon to see the Imaum’s horses in the stable, and had stood in the stable yard in the sun looking at the grey, and heard the clock over the stable strike one; and he had worked out since, at his desk, with the London papers, that at that stroke it had been a little after six in the afternoon in London, and a boy had been standing on Constitution Hill with a pistol in each hand. He had not been back since. There had been nothing to go back for. The Palace was the Crown’s house, kept by the Crown’s servants against the Crown’s coming; and the house stood at the west end of the Axis with its long low wings and its shallow portico and its shutters closed, and the servants dusted it and aired it and locked it again, year after year, as a family keeps the room of a son at sea.

They had opened it this morning. The shutters were folded back along the whole front, for the first time since June, and the great doors stood open under the portico; and in front of the portico, on the gravel, the workmen had put up their platform the day before, a plain thing of planks, with a rail, and a few yards of black cloth nailed round the front of it, and four chairs. The Clerk was there already, in his black gown, with the folder under his arm, looking very small and very anxious, as if he expected somebody to take it away from him. And in front of the platform, on the gravel and the grass and the whole width of the Axis, as far down towards Charter Hill as Adams could see, there was the crowd.

It was not a large crowd. It was August, and the fever season, and the city was empty, and there had been only one day’s notice in the newspapers. There were perhaps four or five thousand of them. But they had come; and Adams, getting down from the carriage at the foot of the platform steps with his footman’s arm under his good elbow, looked at them and was moved in a way that he had not expected, and did not care for.

They were the people who could not leave. The clerks of the departments, who could not get leave, in their best black coats; and the shopkeepers from the Avenue, who had shut their shops for the morning; and the women, a great many women, in black or in whatever they had that would pass for it, with their parasols up against the sun; and the workmen from the navy yard, and the soldiers from the barracks in their undress, and the boarding-house keepers, and the hack-drivers, and the free coloured people from the alleys behind the Avenue, standing together, a little apart, at the back, as they stood at every public thing in the city; and children everywhere, on their fathers’ shoulders, as children always were, so that they could see. Nobody was cheering. Nobody was talking very much. They stood in the heat on the long white Axis, with the Palace in front of them and the Cathedral on its ridge to the left and Parliament House pale on its hill at their backs, and waited, quietly, as people wait in a churchyard.

He went up the steps and stood at the rail. Clay was there, and the Archbishop, in his lawn sleeves, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was the fourth chair; and they stood, because Adams stood, and the Clerk stood at the front of the platform with his folder, and looked at the Governor-General.

At ten o’clock the clock over the stables struck, and Adams nodded, and the Clerk opened his folder and read.

---

He read it in the same dry flat voice in which he had read it to the Council, without any emphasis at all, and it carried. Adams had not thought that it would. The Clerk was a little man with a little voice, and the Axis was very long; but the morning was perfectly still, without a breath of air, and the crowd was perfectly silent, and the little dry voice went out over their heads and down the Axis, and Adams could see, from the faces turning as it reached them, how far it went.

Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God to call to His mercy our late Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, of blessed and glorious memory, upon the tenth day of June last.

There was a sound at that, in the crowd: not a word, a kind of sigh, low and long, that went back through it like wind through standing corn and was gone. Adams heard it, and stood very still, with his hat in his hand and his right arm held against his side.

By whose decease the Crown of the United Kingdom of America is solely and rightfully come, according to the Charter, to the High and Mighty Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, King of Hanover.

Nobody made any sound at that at all.

We, therefore, the Governor-General, and the Lords and others of His Majesty’s Privy Council for the United Kingdom of America, do now hereby, with one voice and consent of tongue and heart, publish and make known, that the High and Mighty Prince Ernest Augustus is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful Liege Lord, Ernest the First, by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of America, and of His other Realms and Territories.

Publish and make known. Adams listened to the words go out over the crowd, and thought that not one in a hundred of the faces turned up to the platform would notice them, or know what they meant if they did, or care. Make known: not proclaim. The Clerk’s two words in red ink in the margin of a London newspaper, with a query beside them and a reference to the law officers’ fourth paragraph. They did not make the man King. They said so. They said that he was King already, and had been since an afternoon in June, when nobody in this city knew it; and that twelve old men round a table in a hot room yesterday had done nothing whatever except write it down. That was the whole meaning of the morning, and it was in two words that nobody would hear; and Adams found that he did not mind that either. The best law, his father had told him once, is the law that nobody notices.

To whom we do acknowledge all faith and constant obedience, with all hearty and humble affection; beseeching God, by whom Kings and Queens do reign, to bless the Royal Prince Ernest the First with long and happy years to reign over us.

The Clerk stopped. He looked up from the paper, and then, because he did not seem to know what else to do, at Adams; and Adams nodded to him; and he said the last words, which were not in the folder, because everybody knew them, in a voice that cracked a little at the end.

God save the King.

And a few of the crowd said it after him. Not many. A few voices near the front, men’s voices, ragged, and then a few more further back; and then the guns began on Charter Hill.

---

They fired twenty-one, slowly, from the battery on the brow of the hill above Parliament House, a gun every ten seconds, so that the sound came rolling down the length of the Axis over the heads of the crowd and struck the front of the Palace and came back, and the pigeons went up off the roof of the portico in a cloud at the first gun and did not come down again until the last. Adams counted them. He had not meant to; he found that he was doing it, under his breath, as men do. Twenty-one. It was the royal salute, for a King, the number they fired from this same hill every year on the Sovereign’s birthday; and the crowd stood quite still under it, and nobody cheered, and when it was over there was a long silence, and the smoke drifted down the Axis from the hill, white, in the still air, and hung over the crowd.

Then the bandmaster of the Marines, who had been standing at the foot of the platform with his men all this while, in their scarlet, with their instruments in their hands, came up the steps, and saluted, and asked the Governor-General, in a low voice, whether he should play the anthem.

Adams had not thought of it. It came to him, standing at the rail, with the smoke hanging over the crowd, that nobody had thought of it; that it was not in the Clerk’s folder, nor in the law officers’ opinion, nor in Clay’s arrangements, nor in any precedent anywhere, because there was no precedent, because the Union had never in its life made known a King. The bandmaster was waiting. He was a stout red man with a grey moustache, who had played God save the King and God save the Queen on that hill and on these steps a thousand times, on birthdays and Charter Days, for twenty years, and had never once been told not to.

“Not today,” Adams said. “Play it when he can hear it.”

The bandmaster looked at him, and saluted again, and went down the steps; and the band did not play. And the crowd, which had been waiting for it without knowing that it was waiting, understood after a minute or two that there would be nothing more; and began, slowly, to break up and go away, back down the long Axis in the heat, in twos and threes, under their parasols, quietly, as people go away from a churchyard.

At noon, while Adams was in his carriage going up the hill to the Cathedral, the guns on Charter Hill began again. He had not ordered that either. The major of artillery had come to Government House on the Thursday evening, an earnest young man with his sword knocking against everything, to ask what was to be fired for the late Queen, since there was to be a salute for the King; and Adams, who had not known, had said, after a while, that he supposed a gun might be fired for every year of her life, at a minute between, at noon, if the major thought it proper. The major had thought it very proper. So they fired them now, one a minute, slowly, for twenty-one minutes, while the carriage climbed the long white road to the ridge; and Adams sat in the carriage with his hat on his knee and counted them too, and thought, at the end, that it was the same number. Twenty-one for the King who was alive, at ten, in ten seconds apiece; and twenty-one for the girl who was dead, at noon, a minute apiece. The same number of guns. It had not occurred to him on the Thursday. It occurred to him now, and he wished it had not.

---

The Cathedral was full.

It was fuller than the Axis had been, because it was cooler, a little, and because the people who had been on the Axis had come up the hill after him, and because it was a church, and people would come to a church to mourn who would not come to a proclamation to see what they were mourning for. The doors were open, and the steps were full, and the road outside was full; and he went up the nave between them to his stall, with the Archbishop going before him in his lawn, through a silence in which he could hear his own shoes on the stones.

The Archbishop had sent him the order of service on the Wednesday, with a note. The service was to be the common prayers of the Church, with the psalms for the day, and a lesson, and an anthem; and then the prayers for the King’s Majesty, by name, for the first time; and then a short address from the Archbishop himself, which he did not send, and which, the note said, would not be long, and would contain nothing that the Governor-General would find it necessary to answer. Adams had been grateful for the note. He had known the Archbishop for thirty years and had found him, on most occasions, a sound, dull, sensible man who preached orthodox sermons of exactly forty minutes and voted with whatever ministry was in office; and he had wondered, on the Wednesday, what a sound dull sensible man would find to say on such a morning, and been a little afraid of it.

They sang the psalms. They heard the lesson, from the first book of Kings, about Solomon anointed in Gihon while his father lay dying, which somebody had chosen with more learning than tact. They sang the anthem. And then the Archbishop knelt at the desk, and the whole Cathedral knelt with him, with a long rustle and creak of a thousand knees going down on to stone and boards, and he prayed for the King.

O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth; most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lord, King Ernest.

Adams knelt in his stall, with his face in his good hand, and heard it.

He had heard the other prayer in this place six weeks ago, on Charter Day, in the heat, with two thousand fans stopped for a moment: our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria; and the Primate’s own sentence after it, about the hour that was to come, and a safe and joyful deliverance; and two thousand people saying Amen to that as if it had been their own sister. She had been dead for twenty-four days when they said it. He had said it with them. He had been pleased, kneeling here, in a way he would not have admitted to anybody, to think of her opening his letter about the pearls.

Endue him plenteously with heavenly gifts; grant him in health and wealth long to live; strengthen him that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies; and finally, after this life, he may attain everlasting joy and felicity.

Amen, said the Cathedral. It said it quietly, and not warmly, and all together, as people say a thing that has to be said; and Adams said it with them, into his hand, and meant it, which surprised him a good deal more than the breakfast had.

Then the Archbishop went up into the pulpit.

He did not preach. He stood with his hands on the edge of the pulpit and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, an old, heavy, grey man in white lawn, and looked down at the people for a long moment before he spoke; and when he spoke, it was not in his preaching voice, but in a plain one, as a man speaks across a table.

He said that this was not a coronation. He said that the Church of America had no power to make a King, and did not pretend to any, and never would; and that nothing which had been done that morning, at the Palace or in this Cathedral, had made His Majesty King, or could have, or was meant to. His Majesty was King. He had been King of this Union since the hour of the late Queen’s death, by the law of the Union, before any of them knew it; and what they had done this morning was to hear it said aloud, and to pray for him, and for her, and for themselves. This service, he said, confers nothing. It records a thing that God and the law had already done. It asks God’s blessing on it. That is all a church can do, and it is enough, and anybody who tells you otherwise, in this pulpit or out of it, does not understand either the Church or the Charter.

Then he said that they would now pray for the soul of their late Sovereign Lady, and for the child; and they knelt again, and he prayed for her, in the words of the burial service, and the Cathedral was very quiet, and somewhere at the back a woman was crying, steadily, as if she did not expect to stop.

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Adams went home and slept in the afternoon, which he never did, and woke at six with a headache and the light going gold over the Axis, and finished the entry.

Ernest the First made known at the Palace at ten. A salute of twenty-one guns from Charter Hill, and at noon twenty-one minute guns for the late Queen. The Marine band did not play. Service at the Cathedral, the Archbishop presiding; prayers for the King by name, for the first time. The Archbishop said that the service confers nothing. It does not. Neither did the proclamation. Neither did the Council. Nobody has done anything. It is done.

He read it over, in Mary’s hand, at the window, and did not alter it, though he wanted to. He thought that it was the truest thing he had put in the book that summer, and that it frightened him a little, and that he could not have said why to anybody, and that he was not going to try.

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The letter came on the Thursday, the twentieth, at nine o’clock at night.

The British minister brought it himself, as he brought everything that he thought important, at the hour when other men were going to bed and his own day was beginning; and he was shown up to the study, where Adams was sitting with the window open and one candle, not reading, and stood in the doorway in his evening clothes and his black gloves, tall and pale and very correct, with a packet in his hand.

“Your Excellency will forgive the hour,” he said. “This came into Boston on the Monday, by the Acadia, in my bag, and came down to me by express, and I have orders from Lord Palmerston to put it into Your Excellency’s own hand and nobody else’s. It is from the King.” He held it out. “I do not know what is in it. I was not told, and I have not asked. I was given to understand that the Charter did not permit me to know.”

Adams took it in his left hand. It was a thick packet, sealed with black wax and a seal that he did not at first recognise, and then did: not the Great Seal of anything, but a private seal, a horse, running. The cover was addressed in a large, black, slanting, angry hand that went uphill across the paper: To Our Governor-General of Our United Kingdom of America. And underneath, smaller, as if the writer had thought of it afterwards: J. Q. Adams Esq.

“Thank you,” said Adams. “You will forgive me if I do not open it in your presence.”

“I should have been very much surprised if Your Excellency had,” said the minister, and bowed, and went away down the hill to his own night.

---

Adams opened it alone, at the desk, with his left thumb, by the candle.

It was in English, in the King’s own hand, on two sides of a sheet, and it was dated at St James’s on the first of August; and he read it once, quickly, as he read everything the first time, to know what it was, and then again slowly, to know what it said.

Mr Adams,

You will have received, before this reaches you, the account of the death of Our beloved Niece the late Queen, and of Our Accession to the Throne of Our Ancestors.

It is Our Will and Pleasure that you cause Us to be proclaimed in Our United Kingdom of America without delay, at Our Palace in Our City of New Westminster, and in every Province, in the Form which We enclose, and in no other: and that every Officer of Our Crown in America, civil and military, beginning with yourself, take the Oath of Allegiance to Us, by Our Name, and that the Rolls be returned to Us when it is done.

We are aware that the Charter does not permit Our British Ministers to advise Us in the Government of the Union. We have not asked them. We write to you Ourselves, as your King, in Our own Hand; and We shall expect your Report in yours.

Ernest R.

He sat for a long time with it in front of him.

Then he unfolded the enclosure. It was the London proclamation, copied out in the same black slanting hand, word for word, from Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God to God save the King; with the Imperial Crown in it, and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Lord Mayor of London, who was not a person known to the law of the Union; and publish and proclaim; and, at the end, written in where London had left it out, the King’s whole style, as the King wished it read on the steps of the Palace where the Clerk had read another one five days before. King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King of the United Kingdom of America and of His Other Realms and Territories, Defender of the Faith.

Great Britain first. America second, and then the others, and Hanover among them. The exact reverse of the Clerk’s red ink. Adams sat and looked at the two of them side by side, the King’s form in the King’s hand and the Clerk’s printed copy from the Gazette, under the candle; and he thought that it was the most complete statement he had ever seen in his life of the difference between two countries, and that it was made in four words, in the order of two names, and that the King had certainly meant it and the Clerk had very probably not.

We shall expect your Report in yours.

He looked at his right hand, lying on the desk where Mary had laid it, with the fingers half curled, as it had lain since May. The King did not know about the hand. There was no reason why he should. Adams found that he was smiling, a little, in the candlelight, at that; and then that he was not smiling, because it came to him that the King had very likely written the whole letter in the same spirit, not knowing anything about anybody, and not thinking it necessary to know.

---

He did not answer it that night. He did not answer it the next morning either, until he had sent for Clay.

That was the doctrine, and he held to it, in the study at seven in the morning, with the King’s letter on the desk between them, as he would have held to it if it had cost him his commission: that a letter from the King to his Governor-General about the government of the Union was a letter about the government of the Union, and that in the government of the Union the Crown acted upon the advice of its American ministers and upon no other; and that whatever the King meant by writing to him in his own hand and over his ministers’ heads, the Governor-General could not answer the King over his ministers’ heads in turn without becoming exactly what the King wished him to be. So he sent for Clay, and Clay came up the Rise in the cool of the morning, and read the King’s letter standing at the window, twice, and the form, once; and laid them on the desk, and took snuff, and said nothing at all for so long that Adams began to wonder whether he had heard.

“Well,” said Clay at last. “He has asked us to do what we have done.”

“In a form we did not use.”

“In a form we could not have used, sir, if it had come a week sooner.” Clay sat down. “And by an authority that the Charter does not give him, and in words that no American minister advised, and with an oath that nobody need take, since every officer in the Union swore to him in 1835, or 1820, or whenever they swore, without knowing his name. He has commanded us to do a thing that was done five days before his command arrived, in a manner that was impossible, by a road that is closed.” He looked at the letter. “I would answer it very civilly, sir. I would answer it with the greatest civility that the language allows. And I would not argue with it. One does not argue with a letter that has arrived too late. One simply tells it the date.”

Adams dictated the answer at nine, to Mary, at the window, with Clay in the chair by the desk saying nothing; and it took an hour, because he made Mary read every sentence back to him, and altered several, and struck out one entirely, which said what he thought.

Government House, New Westminster, 21 August 1840.

Sire,

I have had the honour to receive, from the hands of Your Majesty’s minister at this place, on the evening of the 20th instant, Your Majesty’s letter of the 1st, written in Your Majesty’s own hand, together with the form of proclamation enclosed in it.

I have the honour to inform Your Majesty that Your Majesty’s accession was made known in the United Kingdom of America on the 15th instant, at Your Majesty’s Palace in this city, by a proclamation of Your Majesty’s Privy Council for the Union, made upon the advice of Your Majesty’s American ministers, in conformity with the opinion of Your Majesty’s law officers; and that it has since been read in the capitals of the Provinces. I have the honour to enclose a copy, for Your Majesty’s information.

Your Majesty’s gracious letter did not reach me until five days after that proclamation was made; and Your Majesty will be pleased to recollect that by the fourth clause of the second Article of the Charter of Union, the Crown in American affairs acts upon the advice of ministers answerable to the Parliament of the Union, and upon no other. I have therefore laid Your Majesty’s letter before Your Majesty’s American ministers, as I am bound to do; and they have desired me to assure Your Majesty of their most dutiful attachment to Your Majesty’s person and Crown.

Your Majesty will be pleased further to learn that every officer of Your Majesty’s Crown in America, civil and military, has sworn allegiance to Your Majesty’s predecessors and to their heirs and successors, and is therefore already, by that oath, Your Majesty’s sworn servant, as I am; and has been since the tenth of June. No further oath is required by the law of the Union, and none has been taken.

I have the honour to be, with the most profound respect, Sire, Your Majesty’s most faithful and most obedient servant and subject,

He signed it himself, with his left hand, slowly, in letters an inch high, across the foot of the sheet: John Quincy Adams. He made Mary write nothing underneath in explanation. Let the King make of the hand what he would.

Clay read it over when it was sealed, and gave it back, and said that it was the most courteous letter he had ever read, and the most complete; and that he would not care to receive it.

---

It went down the hill that afternoon to the British minister, for his bag, and the steamer of the first of September.

The King’s letter Adams kept. He put it, with the form, in the drawer of his desk, the left-hand drawer, where he kept the things that did not belong anywhere else: a note of three lines from Clay about the Imaum’s presents, and a letter from Cambridge in a small quick hand, and a sheet of paper with one word written on it, an inch high, that he had taken down from the window frame on the morning of the proclamation. He laid the King’s letter on top of them, and shut the drawer, and turned the key.

Then he sat at the window in the late sunlight and looked down the hill at the Palace, which had its shutters closed again, and its platform taken down, and its gravel raked; and at the long empty Axis, and the Cathedral on its ridge, and Parliament House pale on its hill, with the grass coming up between the stones of its steps.

Nobody had decided anything. He had presided, and Clay had advised, and Story had written a private letter, and the Clerk had made red marks in a newspaper, and twelve old men had kept silent round a table and then signed their names; and between them, without one of them deciding it, they had settled the oldest question the Union had: whose it was. They had settled that it was the Union’s own, and that the King was its King by its own law and not by anybody’s leave, and that he could command nothing in it except through the men it chose to advise him. They had settled it so quietly that nobody had noticed. The King would notice. Adams thought that it would be a long time before the King stopped noticing.

He thought, too, that it was exactly the way he had spent his whole life saying that a free people should never settle anything: by agreement in a hurry, among a few men, and nothing written down but the result. He had been right about that all his life. He did not think he had been wrong to do it now. He supposed that both things were true, and that this was what it meant to be old.

Nobody has done anything. It is done.

The light went off the Palace, and the first fireflies came out on the Axis, and somewhere down the hill a fiddle began to play the same three tunes it played every night; and he sat on in the dusk, with the key of the drawer in his pocket, and did not ring for the candles.