In the Proper Form

They came to him together at three, the Home Secretary and the Lord Chamberlain, which told him before either of them had opened his mouth that it was a thing for which neither wished to answer alone.

He received them in the library, standing, at the long window, with the fog outside so thick that the garden had gone and there was nothing in the glass but his own face and the lamp behind it. He did not ask them to sit. Normanby was very pale, as he always was, and very handsome, as he always was, and had been at the Home Office since eleven with the Council and a boy; and Uxbridge, who had charge of the palaces and everything in them, was redder in the face than the fog accounted for, and stood a little behind the other, as a man stands behind a taller man in a high wind.

“Well, my Lord,” said the King to Normanby. “Tell me about the boy.”

Normanby told him. The King listened without interrupting, with his good eye on Normanby’s face and his hands behind his back, as he had listened to the reports of officers for fifty years, and asked his questions at the end.

How had the boy got in? Over the garden wall, sir, from Constitution Hill, on the Monday night, and in at a window on the north side.

Over the wall from the Hill. At what part of the wall? Normanby did not know exactly. Uxbridge did. Near the north gate, sir; the wooden gate of the north wing, a little above it, where the wall was lowest.

The King said nothing to that for a moment.

How long had he been in the house? Since the Monday night, he said, sir; lying up in the day in empty rooms and going down to the kitchens at night for what he could find. Forty servants in the house, and not one of them had seen him.

What had he taken? Nothing, sir.

Where had he been? Everywhere, sir. The throne room; he said he had sat on the throne. The kitchens. The State rooms. And Her late Majesty’s private rooms on the north side, which had been shut since the end of June by the Lord Chamberlain’s order: by a door from the back passage that the housemaids had used while Her Majesty lived there, and that nobody had thought to lock afterwards, because nobody had supposed that anybody would want to go in.

“Nobody had supposed,” said the King.

Uxbridge said that the door was locked now, and every door on the north side with it, and the keys in his own office, and that he took the fault upon himself entirely and begged His Majesty to believe that it should not happen again.

“It has happened twice,” said the King. “It happened two years ago, with the same boy, I am told, and the same palace, and I suppose the same promise. I do not want your fault, my Lord. I want the wall watched.” He turned to Normanby. “I asked in July, Lord Normanby, that the walls of my palaces should be watched by night, and the road on the Hill by day, by soldiers. I was told that it would alarm the public, and that the House of Commons would not permit soldiers in a public road. I was given a constable. There has been a constable on the Hill since June, by your own account. The boy went over the wall behind him.”

Normanby said, with great respect, that the Commissioners would put two constables at the wall by night from tonight, and a patrol in the garden, and that the Lord Chamberlain’s people would go round the house every hour; and that the Cabinet would consider again, at once, whatever further measures His Majesty thought necessary, and would lay them before His Majesty within the week.

“You will lay them before me,” said the King, “and I shall approve them, and they will be insufficient, and I shall be told that anything more would alarm the public. I know how it goes, my Lord. I am not a young man.” He was quiet a moment. “What did he want?”

“To see the rooms, sir. He told the Council so. He said that he wished to see Her late Majesty’s rooms, and particularly her dressing room, so that he could write a book about them.” Normanby hesitated. “Two doctors have seen him, sir, and cannot say whether he is mad. The magistrates will deal with him as a rogue and vagabond, and he will go to the House of Correction for three months, with hard labour.”

“To see the rooms,” the King said.

He turned back to the window, where there was nothing to see but the fog and his own face.

“And who else has been to see them? Since June?”

It was Uxbridge who answered, after a little pause, because it was his business. “Nobody, sir, by my order. Except that His Royal Highness Prince Albert came to the Palace this morning, and asked to be taken up to the dressing room where the boy was found, and was taken. He was there about a quarter of an hour, sir, alone. He did not go into the bedroom. Then he went away again.”

The King said nothing for some time.

He had never been in those rooms. He had not been inside the Palace since he came back to England. He had his own apartments here, at St James’s, which he had kept for twenty years against everybody who had wanted them; and the Palace was hers. It had been hers since the summer she came to the throne. She had moved into it within three weeks of her accession, because it was new and light and her own, and nobody had lived in it before her; and it would very likely be his, one day, if he lived, and his son’s after him, and he had not yet been able to bring himself to give a single order about it. He had told Uxbridge in June to shut the rooms and touch nothing until he gave directions. He had not given any. He had found, every time he took up the pen to give them, that there was something else in the box that required his attention first.

A boy of sixteen had gone over the wall and found the door. And the young man from Coburg had gone in that morning and looked at where the boy had lain. The King understood that perfectly well. He thought that if he had been twenty-one and a widower, he might have done the same. He thought the better of the young man for it, and did not say so, and did not expect that he ever would.

“Her things are still in those rooms?”

“Everything, sir, as it was left. By your order.”

“Then they are to be packed,” said the King. “All of them. Her clothes and her books and her papers and whatever is on her table, everything that was hers and not the Crown’s; by her own women, if any of them can be found, and by nobody who did not know her. And they are to be sent to her mother, at Belgrave Square, with my compliments, and the rooms shut again, and the keys brought to me. They are her mother’s things now. They should have gone to her in June.” He turned round. “That is all, my Lords. You will let me have the measures for the walls by Monday.”

They bowed, and went. He heard them in the anteroom, through the door, beginning to talk at once in low voices, with relief, as men talk who have been let off something; and he stood at the window a long time after they had gone, in the fog, thinking about a boy lying under a sofa in the dark, in the room where his niece used to dress, and about the young man who had gone to look at the place; and about his own son, who was twenty-one too, and could not have seen the room if he had been taken into it, and would have asked to be told what it was like.

---

He decided about the precedence on the Tuesday, at his table, with the pencil.

He had had it in mind since June. He had had it in mind, if he was honest, since February, when the girl had done it in a temper because the Lords had struck it out of the Bill and her uncle of Hanover had refused his consent to it; when she had taken the thing that Parliament had refused and given it with her own hand, by a warrant under her own sign manual, to the young man she was marrying, so that she should not be seen to have been crossed. He had thought it a girl’s temper then, and an impropriety, and had said so; he had not thought it worth more than a letter. It had not mattered, in February. In February the King of Hanover had been a foreign sovereign who had not set foot in England since she came to the throne, and could stand or walk wherever he was put.

It mattered now. By that warrant the young man walked next after the Sovereign, everywhere in England, in every room, except in Parliament and the Council. That was to say, next after the King. That was to say, before the King’s brothers, Sussex and Cambridge, who were the sons of George the Third; and before the King’s son.

He had not said so to anybody, and he did not intend to. But he had thought, in November, when Frederica’s letters began to come in her woman’s hand, that George would have to come to England, some time, to be shown; that the country must see its heir, and know him, and get used to him, blind as he was, before the day came when it would need to; and he had seen it, quite clearly, at the table, with the pencil in his hand: George being led into a room in London by the arm, on some great occasion, a drawing room, a christening, a funeral, by somebody who would tell him where to stand; and being told to stand behind his cousin’s widower, by a warrant of his cousin’s, because she had been angry with the House of Lords in February. And George would ask, in his gentle voice, why. And somebody would have to tell him.

That could not be. Nothing else about it mattered to the King very much; but that could not be.

He sent for Normanby, and told him that he wished a warrant prepared revoking the warrant of the fourth of March, and gave his reason in one sentence, which was that the precedence of the royal family in England was a matter for the King and was settled by long usage, and that he did not propose to have it unsettled by an instrument which Parliament had refused to make law. Normanby went away and consulted the Prime Minister, as the King had known he would, and came back on the Thursday and said that the Prime Minister and the law officers were agreed that the warrant was a personal grant of the late Sovereign, under her sign manual, and within the prerogative to revoke, and that His Majesty’s ministers did not feel able to advise His Majesty against it; and then, after a pause, that the Prime Minister had desired him to ask whether His Majesty would wish to write to His Royal Highness himself, before the instrument was published.

“No,” said the King.

Normanby waited, very correctly, to see whether there was a reason; and there was, but the King did not give it to him. A letter would have had to say why. It would have had to say that the King did not dispute the young man’s rank, or his marriage, or his grief, or his conduct, which had been perfectly correct since June, more correct than the King had looked for; that it was nothing to do with any of that; that it was to do with a blind young man in Hanover who would one day have to be told where to stand. And the King did not discuss his son with anybody. He had never once discussed George’s eyes with a living soul but George and his mother and the doctors, and he did not intend to begin with a Coburg boy of twenty-one in a letter that would be shown to Stockmar.

He signed the warrant on the Monday, the fourteenth, in the black hand, Ernest R., and Normanby countersigned it, and it went to the Gazette. He did not write.

---

The counties came in through the first fortnight of December, as he had known they would, and they came in Tory, as he had known they would; and it was not enough.

He kept the count every evening, at his table, from the Crown Office lists, in the clerk’s dry neat hand, with the pencil: a column for his ministers and their friends, and a column for the others, and the doubtful in the margin with a query against each. The English counties went Tory almost to a man. Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, the whole of the south; Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Warwick, the West Riding by a few hundred, which nobody had expected. He marked each one with a small firm cross, and felt each time a small firm satisfaction, like a man hearing his own guns. But the boroughs had come in first, and the boroughs were Whig, and Radical, which was worse; and Scotland was Whig, and Ireland was O’Connell’s, and O’Connell’s men would vote with anybody who would leave Ireland alone, which was to say with Melbourne; and the crosses in the left-hand column, every evening, when he added them up, were always a few more than the crosses in the right.

By the seventeenth there were only a dozen seats outstanding, from the Highlands and the west of Ireland and the Orkneys, where the writs took a week to arrive and the electors another week to assemble. He added the columns that night twice, and the second time with his spectacles on, to be sure.

Twenty-one.

He sat and looked at it. Twenty-one was the majority by which the House of Commons had refused in January to declare that his niece’s ministers had lost its confidence; the majority Melbourne had put in his answer in October, in that easy hand, as if it were an argument. The King had dissolved that House, and sent the question to the country, and waited six weeks for the country’s answer; and the country had answered it with the same number. As if nothing had happened at all between January and December. As if there had been no tenth of June.

He knew what had happened. He had not needed the newspapers to tell him. The Duke of Wellington came to see him on the Friday, very old and very upright, with his white head and his great nose and his hand on a stick that he would not lean on, the only man in either party who could tell the King anything to his face; and he told him.

“The country has voted for the Queen, sir,” the Duke said. “That is the long and the short of it. Your Majesty’s ministers went to the hustings in black, every man of them, with crape on their hats and her name in every speech, and the Tories could not stand up against it; nobody could have. We could not fight a dead girl. Peel would not try, and he was quite right. If he had said one word against Lord Melbourne that could be taken as a word against her, he would have lost every county in England as well as the towns.” He was silent a moment, looking at the fire. “They have not voted against Your Majesty. They have voted for her. I don’t know that it comes to a different thing, but it is not the same.”

“It comes to twenty-one,” said the King.

“Yes, sir.”

“I said that I would abide by the country’s answer, Duke, and I shall. I am not my brother William.” The King put down the pencil. “It is not a thing I have ever asked for, to be loved. I did not ask it of my regiment, or of the Hanoverians, and I do not ask it of the English. It would be absurd at my age.”

“No, sir,” said the Duke. “I have never asked it either, and I have generally found that I was not.” He got up, slowly, refusing the King’s arm, and stood for a moment by the fire, with his hand on the stick, a very old man in a blue coat. “She was. That is all, sir. She was, and Your Majesty is not, and I am not, and there’s an end of it. The country will get over it. It got over Nelson.” He bowed. “It will take longer than Your Majesty would like.”

---

Melbourne came on the Monday after, the twenty-first, with his long tired handsome face and his easy voice, to lay the returns before him, as if the King had not counted them himself; which the King thought was a piece of impudence and Melbourne very likely thought was a piece of form, and probably both of them were right.

The King received him standing, in the library, by the fire.

“You have your majority, my Lord.”

“Your Majesty’s servants have the confidence of the country, sir,” said Melbourne, “as the returns show. I do not say that it is a large confidence. It is sufficient.”

“So I see,” said the King. He looked at Melbourne for a while with his one eye, and Melbourne looked back at him, without any appearance of discomfort whatever, which was, the King had come to understand, the man’s chief gift, and possibly his only one. Between them lay the two letters of October: the one that had refused, in the drawer of the King’s table, three yards off; and the one that had asked, in some drawer of Melbourne’s, wherever Melbourne kept such things. Neither of them had spoken of either since. Neither of them ever would.

“I shall not ask you again,” said the King.

Melbourne bowed, very slightly. He did not say anything. He was not a man, the King had noticed, who said anything when there was nothing that it would be useful to say; it was the other thing he had in his favour.

“The new Parliament meets on the nineteenth of January,” said the King, “and when the Commons have chosen their Speaker and been sworn, on the twenty-sixth, I shall open it myself. It is my first, and I shall open it in person, as my father did, and read my own speech from my own throne in my own voice; I shall not open it by commission, and I shall not be told that the court is in mourning. You will send me the speech, my Lord, in good time. A fortnight before. So that I may read it.” He paused. “With the pencil.”

“Your Majesty shall have it by the twelfth,” said Melbourne; and the King saw, in the long tired face, for a moment, very far down, something that might have been amusement, or might have been dread, and suspected that it was both.

---

On Christmas Eve the letter came from Hanover in her own hand.

It was not more than a dozen lines, on a half sheet, very faint, in pencil, the letters going down the page at a slant as if the paper had been held on a board on her knees; and it had been a fortnight on the road, by the courier and the packet, with the snow on the Dutch roads, so that it had been written, he worked out, about the tenth. She was a little better. She had been carried to the window every afternoon, and had seen the first snow on the garden; and on Sunday she had heard the bells of the Marktkirche, and had thought of him; and George read to her every evening, and sent his duty. She wished him a happy Christmas. She begged him to take care of himself in the London damp, and not to work too late, which she knew he would not regard; and she was his faithful and loving wife, Frederica.

He read it twice, at his table, by the lamp, which was the most he ever read anything; and then a third time, which he did not remember ever having done with a letter before.

On Christmas Day he went to the Chapel Royal in the morning, alone, in his black, and sat in the closet above the chapel where the Sovereign sat, and heard the service, and the anthem, which was by Handel and very loud, and the Bishop of London’s sermon, which was by the Bishop of London and very long; and he dined alone, at six, because he had refused every invitation, his brother’s and his sister Mary’s, and said that he would rather; and at nine his brother Adolphus came anyway, uninvited, from Cambridge House, with his wig askew and his cheeks red from the frost and a bottle of the Rhine wine that their father had liked, and sat with him by the fire until midnight, and talked in German about Kew.

They talked about Christmas at Kew, sixty years ago, when they were boys: the tree their mother had, which was the first that anybody in England had ever seen, so Adolphus said, and the King did not believe; and the carols in the cold chapel; and their father, before his illness, carving the beef himself at the head of the long table, in his plain blue coat, and asking each of them in turn what they had learned that year, and listening to the answers. There were five of the fifteen left. Adolphus drank to the ones who were not, one by one, by name, which took some time; and the King drank with him, and found that he did not mind it as much as he had expected.

Adolphus did not mention the election, or the Duke of Wellington, or the boy in the Palace, or the precedence, or the Coburg boy, or anything else that the newspapers had been full of for a month, which the King supposed he must have read, since Adolphus read everything. That was the good thing about Adolphus. He had been Viceroy of Hanover for twenty years under three Kings and knew when to talk about Kew.

At midnight he got up to go, and embraced his brother in the German way, and said that Frederica would be better in the spring; he was sure of it; women in that family always were.

---

The letter from Belgrave Square came on the Monday after the holiday, the twenty-eighth, among the boxes, in an envelope addressed in a clear upright hand that he did not at first recognise, and then did.

Sir, I have the honour to request Your Majesty’s gracious permission to return to Germany, to my father’s house, at such time in the coming month as may be agreeable to Your Majesty.

That was all, except the subscription. It did not explain. It did not complain. It did not mention the Gazette, or the rooms, or the boy, or the twenty-ninth of June, or anything at all except the thing it asked, in the proper form, in the fewest words that the form allowed. The King read it twice, and thought that it was the best letter he had had from anybody since he came to England, and that Stockmar had very likely told the young man what to leave out of it.

He took a sheet of paper and began to answer it.

Sir, You have My leave to go when you please. I wish you a good passage, and I

He stopped there, with the pen lifted, and looked at what he had written.

He had meant to put something about her. He did not know what. He had begun the sentence without knowing how it would end, which was a thing he never did; and he sat for some time with the pen over the paper, and the sentence unfinished, in the black hand, going uphill. He thought that he might say that she had been fond of the young man, which was true, and which the young man knew better than he did. He thought that he might say that he had known her since she was a little girl at Kensington, and had been the first of them all to kneel to her, which was also true, and which he had said to the young man once already, in June, at St James’s, and been heard in silence. He thought that he might say that her things had gone to her mother, and that he had given the order himself, the day of the boy; which was true, and which would sound, written down, like a man asking to be thanked.

He did not say any of it. He took a fresh sheet, and wrote the letter again, without the last four words; and signed it, Ernest R.; and sealed it with the running horse, and laid it on the pile for the messenger to Belgrave Square.

Sir, You have My leave to go when you please. I wish you a good passage.

The spoiled sheet he did not throw on the fire. He folded it once, and put it in the drawer of his table, with Frederica’s letters and the letter from America and Melbourne’s answer of October, and the half sheet in pencil from Hanover; and turned the key.

Then he went back to the boxes. There was a second paper on the walls from Normanby, which was still insufficient, and which he approved; and the estimate from the Board of Ordnance for the Palace at Stirling, which was very large, and which he read twice, with great pleasure, and marked for further report; and forty other papers, every one of which he read through with the pencil, every line; and he worked through them all until two in the morning, at his table, by the lamp, with the fire going down and the frost thickening on the long window over the garden, an old man with one eye whom nobody in England loved, doing his duty in the proper form.