A House in Scotland

He wrote the American speech on the Sunday, after church, at his own table in the library, with the November rain on the windows and the fire lit, and it took him the whole of the afternoon.

He had the Governor-General’s letter in front of him while he wrote. He had had it since the middle of September, and had read it, he supposed, twenty times: two sides, in a clear woman’s hand, and at the foot of it the name, John Quincy Adams, written very large and very slowly, across half the width of the sheet, in a hand that looked as if it had been made with the wrong fist. He had wondered about that signature for some days before somebody at the Foreign Office told him that the man had fallen in May and could not use his right arm. He had not known. He had written We shall expect your Report in yours, and the man had sent it him, in his, with the left hand, an inch high, without a word of explanation, and let the King find out for himself what it had cost him. The King had thought about that more than he would have admitted. It was the kind of thing an old soldier did.

The rest of the letter he had not thought well of at all.

Your Majesty will be pleased to recollect. He knew that phrase. He had been hearing it all his life, from ministers and Lords Chancellor and the Clerk of the Council and the secretaries of his brothers; it was the phrase with which an Englishman of a certain kind informed his Sovereign that the Sovereign was wrong, in such a way that the Sovereign could not complain of it. 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. He had recollected it. He had marked it at Kew, with a cross, at the age of twelve, and marked it again in July, and written his letter on the strength of what it did not say. And the American had written back, with the greatest courtesy, to tell him that it said what he had read it as not saying; and that his accession had been made known five days before his command arrived, in a form his ministers had chosen and he had not; and that every officer in America was already sworn to him by an oath to his heirs and successors, as if a King were a kind of estate that passed with the furniture.

I am bound to do. He read that again too. I have laid Your Majesty’s letter before Your Majesty’s American ministers, as I am bound to do. Bound by what? Not by his commission, which was the King’s. Not by his oath, which was to the King. By a convention, a habit of the Americans, unwritten, which the man called a duty, and which made the King’s own Governor-General the servant of a Kentucky lawyer who kept his own slaves and lived in a boarding house.

Very well. The American Parliament met on the seventh of December, and the Governor-General would open it, in the King’s name, with a speech from the throne, as he did every year; and the speech would be read in the King’s name, and would say that the King commanded this and recommended that. The King had looked into it. The speeches were written by the American ministers, every year, and sent up the hill to Government House, and the Governor-General read them out, and nobody in London ever saw them until they were printed. That was the habit. Nobody had ever asked whether it must be so.

He would write it himself.

He wrote it three times. The first time it was too long; the second time it was too angry, and he burned it; the third time it was a single sheet, in his own hand, plain, in the forms, and said what he meant. It began with the late Queen, because any speech in his name must, and he had no wish to be thought to forget her. It went on to his accession. And then it said the thing that the August letter had made him want to say, in a sentence that he wrote very slowly, and read over, and did not alter.

I have commanded My Governor-General to declare to you My Pleasure in these My own Words; and it is My Will that he shall in all things act according to the Directions which he shall from time to time receive from Me.

He sat and looked at that for a long time.

It was not a breach of anything. He had been through the Charter again, with the pencil, to be sure. The Charter said that the King might commission a person to represent him, and stopped; it did not say what the person might be told. It said that the Crown in American affairs acted upon American advice and no other; it did not say that the King might not speak to his own Parliament in his own words. Kings had written their own speeches before. His father had written some of his. And if the American ministers wished to say that the King’s words were not the King’s speech, let them say it, in their own Parliament, to the King’s face, in writing, and see how it looked.

He folded the sheet, and wrote a covering letter of two lines, You will read the enclosed to My Parliament at its meeting, in these Words, and signed both, and sealed them; and on the Monday he gave them to Palmerston for his bag, by the Liverpool steamer of the fourth, to go into the American’s own hand.

Palmerston took the packet and weighed it, as he had weighed the other, and put it in his coat, and did not ask what was in it, and smiled. The King found that he liked him the better for the smile.

---

On the Tuesday week he dissolved the Parliament.

He did it at a Council at St James’s, at two in the afternoon, in the old Council Chamber with the long windows on the Park, with the grey November light coming in and the candles lit at noon: a dozen Privy Councillors standing round the table, Melbourne among them in black, and Greville at the foot with his papers, and the proclamation engrossed and ready. Greville read it. It dissolved the Parliament that had been chosen in the first year of his niece’s reign, and that had outlived her by five months, and declared his royal will and pleasure to call a new one; and it ordered the writs, and named the day, the nineteenth of January, on which the new Parliament should meet at Westminster. The Councillors said nothing. It was not a thing on which Councillors said anything. He signed it, Ernest R., in the black hand, and the Lord Chancellor took it away to be sealed, and it was done.

He had done what the law allowed and required. Nobody could say a word against it. Melbourne had advised it, in the proper form, the week before, with his long tired face and his easy voice, as if it had been his own idea; and the King had let him advise it, and thanked him for the advice. It was entirely correct. And it put the question that Melbourne had declined to answer in October where the King had wanted it from the beginning: not in Melbourne’s hands, or the Cabinet’s, or the House of Commons’, but in the country’s.

Let the country say whether it had confidence in his ministers. He would abide by what it said. He had no intention of doing anything else; he was not his brother William, to dismiss a ministry in a fit of temper at Brighton and have to take it back in the spring. But he had asked his First Lord of the Treasury, in writing, as civilly as he knew how, to resign, and the man had refused him; and the King thought it no more than fair that the man should now go to the country and ask it the same question, and the King should hear the answer. He thought that the country might very well give the answer differently. He had looked at the by-elections since June, all of them, with the pencil. The Tories had won most of them.

That evening he walked alone in the garden at St James’s, in the dark and the wet, for an hour, with his hands behind his back, as he did when he had done a thing and wished to be certain that he had done it rightly. He was certain. He went in and read his boxes.

---

On the Friday night, the thirteenth, the wind got up.

He heard it begin at about eleven, as he sat over his papers: first a long low sound in the chimney, like a man blowing across the mouth of a bottle, and then the windows beginning to work in their old frames, all along the front of the house, rattling and then knocking and then booming, as if somebody were trying them one after another from outside. He put down his pen and listened. By midnight it was a gale. By one it was something more than that. He had heard wind like it twice in his life, once in the Channel in ‘ninety-three, in a transport with half the horses down in the hold, and once on the Weser in a winter he did not like to remember; he had not expected to hear it in London. The whole old brick house shook with it. Somewhere in the Colour Court slates were coming off a roof and smashing on the stones, one after another, like plates dropped by a careless servant; and once there was a long tearing crash from the direction of the Park, which he knew afterwards was a tree going down, an elm, one of the old ones on the Mall, that had been there since Charles the Second.

He did not go to bed. He sat by the fire with the lamp turned down and listened to it, as he had listened to guns once, counting; and he found, at about three in the morning, that he was not thinking about the wind, or the roof, or the Parliament, or America, but about his wife.

She was ill. She had been ill for six years, on and off, and better, and worse, and better, so that he had come to take the letters that said she was better as a man takes the weather; and the letters had changed. They had changed in October. They were shorter. Her hand had gone smaller and less steady, and then, in the last fortnight, they had begun to come in another hand, her woman’s, with only her name at the foot in her own, very faint, as if she had signed them lying down; and they said that she was better, as they always said. She was in the Altes Palais, in the room where she had been born, sixty-two years ago, in the same bed; she had wanted to be moved there in the autumn, and they had moved her. He had not seen her since June. He had written to her every week, and she had written to him, and neither of them had once suggested that he should come; he was King of Great Britain, and had a Parliament to dissolve and a country to wait for, and she would have been the first to tell him so, and had.

And George. George’s eye had been operated upon in September, as Frederica had written, by the famous man, with the knife, with George’s consent and his own; and it had come to nothing. George could see the light from a window when he turned his face to it, as he had always been able to, and a shape that might be a man, and nothing else. He had written to his father himself, by a secretary, that he was not cast down, and that God had willed it, and that he would learn to be King without eyes as other men learned to be King without wits, and that he hoped his father would laugh at that, as he had meant it. The King had not laughed. He had read the letter twice, and put it in the drawer of his table with Frederica’s, and gone on with his boxes.

The wind dropped at about five. He heard it go, the way one hears a crowd go out of a theatre: a long diminishing roar, and then gusts, and then silence, and then, very far off, a cock crowing somewhere in Westminster as if nothing had happened. He went to the window and drew back the curtain. The Park was a mess of branches in the grey light, and men were already out on the Mall with lanterns, looking at the elm, which lay across the road with its roots in the air like a dead horse. He watched them for a while. Then he went to bed for two hours, and got up at eight, and read about the damage in the report the Commissioners of Woods sent him at ten, since he would not read it in the newspapers: roofs and chimneys down from Westminster to Whitechapel, trees in all the parks, barges adrift in the river. He read it through with the pencil, and wrote in the margin that the elm on the Mall was to be replaced, and with an elm.

---

The election began the week after, and he waited.

He found that he was not good at it. He had never been good at waiting; he had been a cavalry officer, and a cavalry officer’s whole trade was to wait for the precise moment and then not wait any longer, and he had always been better at the second half. The writs went out. The candidates went down to the boroughs and the counties, and made their speeches, and treated the electors, and the hustings went up in the market places all over England and Scotland and Ireland, and the polls opened, and the returns began to come in, a few at a time, from the boroughs first: a Whig here, a Tory there, a Radical somewhere in the north who would vote with the Whigs, an O’Connellite from somewhere in the south of Ireland who would vote with anybody who paid him. He had them brought to him every evening from the Crown Office, in a list, in a clerk’s dry neat hand, with the names and the parties and the numbers polled, and he went through them with the pencil and kept a count.

He did not read the newspapers. The lists told him who had been returned. What they had said on the hustings, and what had been said about them, and what had been said about the King, he did not know and did not intend to know. He had told his secretary in June that if there was anything in the newspapers that he ought to know, his ministers would tell him; and his ministers, he had noticed, told him nothing whatever about the newspapers, which he took to mean either that there was nothing in them, or that there was a great deal. Either way he was content not to know. He had lived for thirty years without knowing what the English newspapers said of him, and was in very good health.

The count, at the end of the first week, was even. At the end of the second it was a little better for the Whigs. He did not let that trouble him. The counties had not come in, and the counties were where the Tories were.

---

On the twenty-third, a Monday, Palmerston came to him at noon with Acre.

He came in at the library door with the despatch in his hand and his face alight, and did not wait to be asked to sit; and the King, who had been reading the returns from Lancashire, put them down and held out his hand for the paper, and read it standing, at the window, as Palmerston told it him at the same time, which was a thing the King disliked in other men and found that he did not mind in this one.

The fleet had taken Acre on the third of November. Stopford had brought the ships in close under the walls in the afternoon, closer than anybody had thought ships could go, and had opened on the town with every gun he had; and after two hours of it a shell had gone into the great powder magazine, and the magazine had gone up, with half the garrison round it, so that the smoke stood over the bay like a tree, and the sailors in the ships had felt the shock come out to them through the water; and in the night the Egyptians had marched out, and in the morning the Turks had marched in. The strongest fortress on the coast, that Bonaparte himself had sat down before for two months in ‘ninety-nine and gone away from, had fallen in an afternoon.

“Syria is finished,” said Palmerston. “The Pasha will give it up. He has nothing left to hold it with. The French will make a noise, and give way, as I said; and Guizot will thank God on his knees, in private, that it was not his doing.” He was laughing. “The guns will fire in the Park this afternoon, sir, if Your Majesty pleases.”

“It pleases me very much,” said the King.

They fired at two, from the Park and from the Tower, and he stood at the long window in the library and listened to them, and counted, as he counted every salute, and was happier than he had been since he landed at Greenwich. He thought of Bonaparte sitting outside Acre in ‘ninety-nine, in the heat, with the plague in his camp, while Sidney Smith held the walls against him with a handful of English sailors and Turks; and of the young man he had been himself in that year, at home on half-pay with his face mended and one eye gone, reading about it in the newspapers, which he had still read then, and wishing to God that he had been there. And he thought of the French, now, with their Marseillaise in the theatres and their new fortifications round Paris and their talk of the Rhine, sitting in their Chamber this afternoon or tomorrow with the news in their hands, and finding that the four Powers had done without them, and that the Pasha was finished, and that there was nothing whatever that France could do about it except make a noise.

It was a very good afternoon. He went to the Lancashire returns afterwards in an excellent temper, and found that the Whigs had won two more seats there, and did not much mind.

---

The paper about Stirling came to him on the Thursday, among the boxes, by accident.

It was nothing; it was a return from the Board of Ordnance, of the state and the cost of the barracks of the kingdom, which some clerk had included among the papers for the King’s information because the King had asked, in July, to see everything that concerned the Crown’s property, and had meant it. It ran to forty pages. He read every page, as he read everything, with the pencil, while the rain came down outside; and on the thirty-first page, in a list of the barracks of Scotland, between Fort George and Edinburgh Castle, he found Stirling.

Stirling Castle. Barracks for one battalion of infantry. The Palace of King James the Fifth, in use as quarters for officers and a canteen. The Great Hall, partitioned into three floors, in use as barrack rooms. The Chapel Royal, in use as a store. Repairs required.

He read it twice. Then he put down the pencil, and took off his spectacles, and sat back in his chair, and looked at the fire.

He had never seen Stirling. He had been made Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, and Earl of Armagh, in the same patent, and had never set foot in Teviotdale or in Armagh in his life; Scotland was to him what it was to most Englishmen of his generation, a name on a title and a place where the Stuarts had come from and where his grandfather’s brother had won a battle. But he knew what Stirling was. Every man brought up as a prince knew what Stirling was. It was where the kings of Scotland had been crowned and christened and had kept their court, for two hundred years before the court went south; where James the Sixth had built the Chapel Royal for his son’s christening, which was a store now; where James the Fifth had built a palace in the French manner, with carved figures of kings and gods on its walls, which was a canteen now, where the officers of an infantry battalion ate their dinners and the men drank their beer. It was the seat of the kings. And the British state had made it into a barracks, and partitioned its great hall into three floors to sleep soldiers in, and nobody in two hundred years had thought it worth the trouble to ask whether a King of Scotland might want it back.

He thought about that for a long time, sitting by the fire, while the rain came down.

He had asked for a great many things since June, and been given almost none of them. He had asked for an escort and been given one, and asked for everything else and been refused, in the most respectful language in the world. He had asked for his own speech to be read in his own Parliament across the sea, and did not yet know what his American ministers would make of that, though he could guess. He had asked his First Lord of the Treasury to resign, and been told that the First Lord had the confidence of the House of Commons, as if the House of Commons were the King. In every one of his three kingdoms, except the one he had chosen, there was a Charter or a Parliament or a convention or a minister between him and anything he wished to do; and he understood, better than his ministers supposed, that this was the constitution, and that he must live inside it, and he meant to. But he had not understood, until he read the thirty-first page of a return of barracks, that there was one place in his kingdoms where nothing stood between him and what he wanted, because nobody had ever thought it worth standing there.

Scotland had no Governor-General. It had no Charter of its own. It had no ministers of its own, and no Parliament of its own, and no convention of any kind about where the King might live or what he might do with his own castle; it had a Lord Advocate, and some judges, and a General Assembly of the Kirk, and a great many people who did not like the House of Hanover, and had not liked it for a hundred years, and would not like it any the better for what he was going to do. He did not care whether they liked it. The castle was the Crown’s. It had always been the Crown’s. Nobody would have to be asked.

He would have it back. He would turn the soldiers out, and take down the partitions in the great hall, and put the Chapel Royal back into use as a chapel, and the palace back into use as a palace; and he would go there, and live there for some part of every year, and be King of Scotland in the house of the Scottish kings, in person, with a household and a court, as no King had been in that place since the Stewarts left it. In America he must be a name in a speech that somebody else wrote. In England he must be a man who asked his ministers for reasons and was given them. At Stirling he would be the King.

He took up the pencil again, and wrote in the margin of the thirty-first page, in the large black hand, The King desires a full Report upon the state of Stirling Castle, and an Estimate of the cost of restoring the Palace, the Great Hall and the Chapel Royal for His Majesty’s residence. E.R., and put it back in the box; and then he sat for a while longer by the fire, and was content, in a way that he had not been content since June, and did not quite know why.

---

At the end of the month the letter came from Hanover that he had been expecting since October without letting himself expect it.

It was in her woman’s hand again, the whole of it, and there was no name at the foot at all this time; only a line, in the woman’s hand, saying that Her Majesty had wished to sign it and had not been able to hold the pen, and sent His Majesty her love, and begged him not to be alarmed. The doctors were very attentive. The Queen was in no pain. She slept a great deal, and in the afternoons she was carried to the window to see the garden, and on fine days the sun came in. Prince George read to her in the evenings, from the books he knew by heart.

He read it at his table, at night, by the lamp, twice, which was the most he ever read anything.

Then he sat for a long time without moving. He thought of the room in the Altes Palais, which he knew very well, with its low ceiling and its stove and its two windows on the Leinstrasse; and of the bed she had been born in, and her woman sitting by it, and George in a chair by the window, with his face turned towards the light, saying a book over from memory in the dark that he lived in, for his mother, who was too tired to hold a pen. He thought that she was dying, and that the letter did not say so because she had told her woman not to, and that he could not go to her. The Parliament had been dissolved. The country was voting. His new Parliament would meet in January, and he must open it, in person, at Westminster, because it was his first, and because the whole of England would be watching to see whether he came; and his wife was dying in Hanover, and would very likely be dead before he could get there and back, and had told him, in a letter she could not sign, not to be alarmed.

He was not alarmed. He was an old soldier, and had seen a great many people die, and knew how it went. He put the letter in the drawer with the others, and turned the key.

Then he took a sheet of paper, and wrote to her, in German, a full side, in his own hand; about the gale, and the elm on the Mall, and Acre, and the guns, and how the Whigs were doing in Lancashire, and a castle in Scotland that he meant to have, and to take her to see when she was well, in the summer, when the heather was out on the hills, which he had never seen either. He wrote it as if she would read it. He supposed that George would read it to her, in the evening, by the window, if she was awake; and he wrote it so that George could read it aloud without stopping, and without having to leave anything out.