By Violence

The speech went down to St James’s on the Tuesday, as he had promised, in a red box, in a fair copy in the hand of the clerk at the Treasury who wrote the best hand in London; and Melbourne sat in the Cabinet room at Downing Street afterwards with the draft in front of him, the one with everybody’s alterations on it, and looked at it for a long time, as a man looks at a horse he has sold, wondering whether he ought to have.

It was a good speech. He had written a great many of them and knew a good one. It was not long; it said what a speech at the opening of a new Parliament had to say, and very little else. It mourned the Queen. It noticed the King’s accession, in a sentence that had taken the Cabinet two meetings to agree, because Russell had wanted the Throne of these Kingdoms and Lansdowne had wanted the Throne of His ancestors and Melbourne, at the end of the second meeting, had wanted his dinner. It congratulated the country on the settlement of the East, which was Palmerston’s paragraph and read like it: Syria restored to the Sultan, the Pasha confined to Egypt, Acre taken by the fleet, and the peace of Europe preserved, notwithstanding a temporary interruption of the good understanding with France, which was Palmerston’s way of saying that he had been right and the French had been made to know it. It mentioned China, where the war went on. It asked the Commons for the Civil List of the new reign, which had been waiting since July. And it commended the whole to the wisdom of Parliament, and asked the blessing of Almighty God, as speeches did.

The paragraph about the Queen he had written himself, alone, at South Street, at two in the morning, and had not let anybody alter. Russell had tried, at the first meeting, and Melbourne had looked at him across the table until he stopped.

I meet you for the first time since it pleased Almighty God to remove from this world My beloved Niece, your late Sovereign, in the fourth year of her reign. The affection which she had inspired in every class of her subjects, and the universal sorrow with which her loss has been lamented throughout her dominions, are the best testimony to the virtues which adorned her short reign.

He had meant every word. He had thought, writing it, that it was the last thing he would ever be able to do for her, and that it was not very much: two sentences in a speech that an old man who had never loved her would read in a cold room to a Parliament that had; and he had written them as well as he knew how, and then gone to bed, and not slept.

He thought now, in the Cabinet room, with the fog at the windows, that the King would very likely not like the second sentence. He thought that the King would very likely say so. He did not think, then, that it would matter very much.

---

The box came back on the Thursday, at noon, by one of the King’s pages, with the seal broken and the key turned, and Melbourne opened it at his table at Downing Street and saw at once, before he had taken the paper out, that it had been read with the pencil.

It had been read every line. There was a small neat query against Palmerston’s temporary interruption, and the word temporary underlined twice. There was a query against China, in the margin: On whose advice was the war begun? Papers. There was a query against the Civil List, which said Why not in July?, and which Melbourne thought was a very fair question that he had answered in July. The sentence about the accession, which had taken two meetings, had been left exactly as it was, without a mark, which Melbourne found, on the whole, the most alarming thing in the box.

And the paragraph about the Queen had been altered.

The first sentence had a line through the words it pleased Almighty God to remove from this world, a single straight firm line in the black pencil; and after your late Sovereign there was a caret, and above it, in the large uphill hand, two words: was murdered. The second sentence had been struck out entirely, the whole of it, from The affection to her short reign, with two lines, crossed; and in the margin beside it, written very small to fit, and very clear, the King had put a sentence of his own.

The atrocious Crime by which she was taken from us requires that the Person of the Sovereign, and the Peace of My Capital, be better secured than they have been; and I recommend to your earliest Attention such Measures as shall be laid before you for that Purpose.

Melbourne sat and looked at it for some time.

Then he took his own pen, and dipped it, and drew a line through the King’s sentence, neatly, once; and wrote stet in the margin beside his own two, and dotted them underneath, in the way the printers understood, to show that they were to stand; and wrote in the margin of the first sentence, very small, beside murdered, Query: the verdict of the 10th July. Then he put it back in the box, and locked it, and sent it down to St James’s with a note asking for an audience.

He knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was putting his sentence back. He was taking the King’s out. He was doing it in ink, which was permanent, over the King’s pencil, which was not; and he was doing it without a word of explanation, as the King had done it, because if he had begun to explain he would have had to say why the second sentence mattered to him, and he could not say that to anybody, least of all to the King. He supposed that he would have to say it tomorrow.

The answer came back within the hour, by the same page. Tomorrow at three. E.R.

---

The King received him in the library, standing, at the long window, with the box open on the table between them and the paper out of it, lying face up, with the pencil and the ink on it together, like the marks of two men who have been fighting over a field.

He did not ask Melbourne to sit. He seldom did. He stood with his hands behind his back and his scarred face to the light, in his black, with the Garter star, very upright, a big old man with one eye; and Melbourne stood on the other side of the table, a big old man with two, and they looked at each other across the paper as if neither of them had the least intention of being the first to look down at it.

“You have put your sentence back,” said the King.

“I have, sir.”

“I struck it out.”

“Your Majesty did. I have taken the liberty of advising that it stand.” Melbourne kept his voice where he kept it in the Lords, easy and low, as if they were discussing a dinner. “It is the advice of Your Majesty’s servants that the speech should say what the country feels about the late Queen. It is what the country will be listening for. If Your Majesty’s first words to Your Majesty’s first Parliament do not say it, the country will notice that they do not, and will draw its own conclusions, and they will not be conclusions that would be of service to Your Majesty.”

“The country,” said the King. “The country has told me what it feels about the late Queen. It told me in December, at the hustings, by twenty-one. I do not need to tell it back. It is not my sorrow that is in question, my Lord. You may be quite sure of that. It is whether a King’s speech is to be a sermon, or a thing that does some good.” He put out one finger, and laid it on the paper, on his own sentence, under Melbourne’s line. “That does some good. That sentence would put a guard on the Hill.”

“That sentence, sir, would commit Your Majesty’s servants to bring in measures that Your Majesty’s servants have not agreed, and that the House of Commons would not pass if they did,” said Melbourne. “We have considered them since July. We considered them again in December, after the boy at the Palace. We will consider them again whenever Your Majesty desires. But we cannot put them in the speech. A thing in the King’s Speech is a promise of the ministers who advise it; and I will not make Your Majesty promise from the throne what I know we cannot perform. It would be refused, sir, in a division, in the first month of the reign’s first Parliament, with Your Majesty’s own words at the top of it; and that would be a great deal worse for Your Majesty than not asking.”

“Then I shall ask next year.”

“Your Majesty will be entirely within Your Majesty’s rights. And the year after. And one day, very likely, Your Majesty will be given them, when the country has forgotten why it was afraid of them.” He paused. “It will not be this year, sir. It will not be while she is still on the railings.”

The King’s eye moved at that; Melbourne saw it. He wondered whether the King knew about the railings: the bows of crape on the Hill, and the bits of yew, that the servant girls tied there on the tenth of every month and the constables were told to take down and did not. He thought, looking at the King’s face, that the King knew, and had driven past them, and had not been told about them by anybody, and had not needed to be.

“And the other,” said the King. “My first sentence.”

“Murdered,” said Melbourne.

“Yes.”

“Sir, a jury of Englishmen found in July that the boy was not guilty, being insane at the time. In law there has been no murder. There has been a death, and a madman, and Your Majesty’s pleasure, and Bedlam; and that is all the law knows about it, or ever will. If Your Majesty says from the throne that the late Queen was murdered, Your Majesty says from the throne that the jury was wrong; and the jury was Your Majesty’s own court, sitting in Your Majesty’s own name, under Your Majesty’s own judges. I cannot advise it. No minister could.”

The King did not answer at once. He turned his head and looked out of the window, at the garden, where the frost had gone and left the grass sodden and the trees dripping; and Melbourne, who had been in this room on the evening of the tenth of July, with the verdict, remembered what the King had said then, looking at the same window, in the same voice. So. She is dead, and nobody killed her. He had thought at the time that it was the most terrible sentence he had heard in a long life of hearing them. He thought now that the King was remembering it too.

“It did not please Almighty God,” said the King.

“Sir?”

“Your sentence. It pleased Almighty God to remove from this world. It did not please Almighty God. It pleased a boy with two pistols, in a public road, at six in the afternoon, while my ministers’ constables were somewhere else.” He did not raise his voice. He had never once, in seven months, raised it to Melbourne. “I will not stand in front of my Parliament and say that God did it. I am not a pious man, my Lord, but I am not a blasphemer either; and I knew her when she was in her cradle at Kensington, and I was the first of them all to kneel to her, and I will not say to the Lords and Commons of England that it was the will of God that she should be shot in the street by a pot-boy. If that is the form, then the form is a lie, and I will not read it.”

“It is the form, sir,” said Melbourne quietly. “Every speech that has ever told Parliament of a death has said it.”

“Every speech that has ever told Parliament of a death,” said the King, “has been about a death in bed.”

There was a long silence in the library. Melbourne stood and looked at the paper, at the two sentences, the King’s and his own, in pencil and in ink, and the words struck out between them. He found that he had no answer to that. He thought that there was no answer to it, and that the King knew there was none, and had been keeping it for the end, as a good soldier keeps his reserve; and he thought, with a kind of tired admiration that he would not have admitted to anybody, that he had been outmarched.

He did not give up the field. He had never in his life given up a field when there was a ditch left to stand in.

“Then let it say neither, sir,” he said. “Not that God did it, and not that it was murder. Let it say what is true, and no more, and let the jury alone and the Almighty alone.” He took the pen from the inkstand, and leaned over the paper, and looked at the King. “May I?”

The King inclined his head.

Melbourne struck out murdered, and struck out it pleased Almighty God to remove from this world, and wrote between the lines, very small, in his own untidy hand, so that the sentence ran:

I meet you for the first time since My beloved Niece, your late Sovereign, was taken from us by violence, in the fourth year of her reign.

The King leaned over and read it, with his one eye close to the paper.

“By violence,” he said.

“It is true, sir. It accuses nobody. It is not a word the law has an opinion about. And it does not say that God did it.”

The King read it again. Then he straightened, slowly, and stood looking at Melbourne across the table; and Melbourne saw him weigh it, as he weighed everything, with the pencil in his head: the word he had got, against the sentence he had lost, and the sentence of Melbourne’s that would stand.

“And your second sentence stays,” said the King.

“With Your Majesty’s leave.”

“And mine goes.”

“With Your Majesty’s leave. This year.”

The King looked at him a moment longer. Then he took up the pencil, and wrote in the margin, beside the new line, very small, Approved. E.R.; and put the pencil down.

“I shall read it, my Lord,” he said. “As it is written.”

“As it is written, sir,” said Melbourne, and bowed, and took the paper, and went.

He was in the carriage, halfway down Pall Mall, before he understood what he had done; and then he understood it all at once, and sat back against the cushions with his eyes shut, in the fog, and felt it go through him like cold water.

He had won. He had won the text, every line of it that mattered: his sentence stood, the King’s was gone, there was no promise of measures and no word against the jury and no word that a lawyer could take hold of anywhere. He had won it as he had won a hundred arguments in forty years, by finding the one form of words that both sides could sign. And he had given the King, in exchange, one word: violence, in the first sentence of the King’s first speech to the King’s first Parliament. And the King would read it. He would stand up in the Painted Chamber in eleven days’ time, in his robes, with the crown carried before him on its cushion, and the whole of the Lords in front of him and the Commons at the bar and the galleries full of every peeress in London, and he would read the speech as it was written, every word, as he had promised; and he would read that one word, Melbourne knew, as if it were the only word on the page. He would read by violence as a man reads a sentence on a prisoner. And then he would read Melbourne’s sentence after it, the affection which she had inspired, the universal sorrow, the virtues which adorned her short reign, in a voice like a clerk reading an inventory; and every person in that chamber would hear the difference, and know exactly what it meant, and not one of them would ever be able to say that the King had departed by a syllable from the advice of his ministers.

He had won the text. He would lose the tone. He had known men lose to the King in seven months by asking too much and by asking too little, but he had never yet seen anybody beat him by giving him exactly what he asked for, and he did not think that he had done it now.

---

The Prince sailed on the Saturday.

Melbourne did not go to the river. He had said that he would not, and he kept his word, and sat all morning at Downing Street with the Irish estimates and read the same page of them four times. At two o’clock Anson came, straight from the Tower, in his black, with the rain on his shoulders and his face set very hard, and told him: that the Prince had gone by the Hill, of his own choice, and got down at the place, and stood there; and that there had been people at the Tower stairs, two hundred of them, watermen and dockers and women with baskets, nobody had asked them, and they had stood in the rain with their hats off and not said a word; and that the steamer had gone down the river on the tide at a little after eleven.

“Did he say anything?” Melbourne asked. “At the end?”

“He told me not to call him sir any more,” said Anson. “Because there was no reason.” He looked at the fire. “I am afraid I did, my Lord. Twice.”

“So should I have,” said Melbourne.

When Anson had gone he sat for a long time without reading anything. He thought of a boy of twenty in scarlet at the Chapel Royal in the rain, eleven months ago, with his hands shaking, and the Queen coming up the aisle to him on her uncle Sussex’s arm, very small, very composed, looking at nobody but him; and of the Sword of State in his own hands that morning, which he had carried before her up the aisle, and which had been, he remembered, extraordinarily heavy. He thought that he had not done very well by the boy. He thought that nobody had, and that it was not, as the boy had said, exactly anybody’s fault, and that this was the worst thing about it.

---

Palmerston told him about America on the Monday, in his room at the Foreign Office, at the end of a long morning about the French, which was where Palmerston told him everything that mattered.

He had his back to the window, with his hands under his coat-tails and his whiskers shining, and a dispatch in his hand from the minister at New Westminster, which he did not offer to show, and Melbourne did not offer to read.

“Our man there writes,” said Palmerston, “that the American Parliament opened on the seventh of December, in eighteen inches of snow. The Governor-General read a speech in the King’s name, the ordinary speech, written by Clay’s people, about their revenue and their Indian war. And then the American Commons went back to their own chamber, and somebody took notice of strangers, and they turned out the galleries and locked the doors, and sat alone for the better part of an hour; and when they let the strangers back in, there was nothing in their Journal at all.” He looked at the dispatch. “Our man says it is generally believed in the town, under the seal of the most solemn secrecy, that Clay read them something in that hour, without comment, and sat down, and that nobody answered him, and that at the end of it the whole House, the government and the opposition and all, said God save the King, all together, with the doors shut and nobody to hear. He does not know what Clay read them. He says he did not ask, and was not told, and was given to understand that the Charter did not permit him to know.” Palmerston turned the paper over. “There is a letter for the King in the same bag. In the Governor-General’s own hand, I think, from the shape of it. It went down to St James’s on Saturday.”

Melbourne said nothing.

“I carried another packet for him, you know,” said Palmerston, not looking at him. “In November. In his own hand, sealed with his own seal, to be put into Adams’s hand and nobody else’s. He gave it to me himself, on the second, and I sent it by the Liverpool steamer of the fourth. I didn’t ask him what was in it.” He was silent a moment. “I have been wondering since Saturday what Clay read to them in that hour, with the doors locked.”

“Then you had better stop wondering,” said Melbourne.

Palmerston looked round at him.

“I mean it, Harry. I don’t know what was in the packet, and I don’t know what Clay read, and I am not going to know either. Nor are you. We are His Majesty’s ministers in this kingdom, and in that one we are nobody, and the Charter says so, and the King has been reading the Charter, and so, it appears, have the Americans.” He got up, heavily. “If His Majesty sent the American Parliament something in his own hand, and the American Parliament heard it with the doors locked and said God save the King and did nothing whatever about it, and their Governor-General has written to tell him so in the most respectful terms, then His Majesty has had his answer from America, and it is the same answer that he had from us in October and from the country in December, and I don’t propose to add to it. I’ll not know it, Harry. It’s the only thing in the whole business that I am perfectly certain I can do well.”

“No,” said Palmerston, after a moment. “I thought that was probably best.” And he smiled, very slightly, with his quick bright eyes; and they went back to the French.

But Melbourne thought about it, all the way back down Whitehall in the carriage, and all evening; because he understood now what he had not understood on the Friday, standing at the long window in the library with the paper between them. The King had been refused in America. He had been refused by a Governor-General he had never seen, in the most courteous letter in the world, and by a Parliament that had heard his own words read aloud to it, every one, and answered them with three words of loyalty and nothing else. He had been told, by the whole of the Union at once, without anybody’s deciding to tell him, that in that kingdom he might speak only in the words his American ministers wrote. And he had had that letter on the Saturday. And on the Friday before it, in the library, with the paper between them, he had given up his sentence and taken one word, and promised to read the speech as it was written.

He would read it as it was written. Melbourne had no doubt of that at all. In England, too, he might speak only in the words his ministers wrote; he had learned that in October, and in December, and in the library on Friday, and he had borne it, every time, without one raised word. But there was one thing in England that no minister could write for him, and no Charter forbid him, and no jury find against; and the King had found it, as he found everything, by testing every other door first. It was his voice.

---

The Parliament met on the Tuesday, the nineteenth, for the Commons to choose their Speaker and the members of both Houses to be sworn; and it took the week, as it always did, with the old men of the Lords filing up to the table in their dozens to kiss the book, and the new members of the Commons standing about the lobby in their new coats looking for the way in, as new members always did; and Melbourne went down every day and sat on the Treasury bench in the Lords, and was civil to everybody, and slept, a little, in the afternoons.

On the Monday night, the twenty-fifth, he sat late at South Street with the speech.

It had come back engrossed, for the King to read from, in a hand larger and blacker than the clerk’s, so that an old man with one eye could read it by the light of the Painted Chamber at two in the afternoon in January without spectacles; and Melbourne had his own copy of it in front of him on the table, with the candles, and the fire, and the house silent round him, and read it through once more from the beginning, as he had read it a dozen times since Friday, for something that he had missed, and found nothing.

My Lords and Gentlemen,

I meet you for the first time since My beloved Niece, your late Sovereign, was taken from us by violence, in the fourth year of her reign.

He read it aloud, quietly, to the fire, in his own voice, the easy low voice that he had used to her every afternoon for three years with the boxes. It sounded like nothing. It sounded like a sentence in a speech. He tried it again, and tried, this time, to hear it in the other voice, the voice he would hear tomorrow, the harsh heavy voice, with the German in it from half a lifetime among Hanoverian soldiers; and he heard it, quite clearly, by violence, coming down like a sabre, and the Lords sitting under it in their robes, and the silence after.

He put the paper down.

Tomorrow at two he would stand in the Painted Chamber in his robes, at the King’s right hand, beside the throne, and hold the Sword of State upright in front of him, as he had held it before her in the Chapel Royal in February, and in the Abbey before that; and the King would read. And Melbourne would stand there with the sword, with his face perfectly composed, as it had been composed for forty years in front of everything, and hear the King do with his speech precisely what the King had promised to do, which was read it as it was written; and know, as the King would know, and every person in the chamber, that the King had beaten him. Not in a sentence. In a breath; in the length of a pause; in the weight laid on one word, and taken off the next. Nothing that could be written down. Nothing that a minister could advise against, or a Cabinet minute, or a jury try. The tone.

He thought that it was very likely the cleverest thing the King had done in seven months, and that the King had very likely not thought of it as clever at all; that the King would simply stand up and read the words he had been given in the voice in which he felt them, as a soldier would; and that this was what made it unanswerable.

He thought, too, sitting by the dying fire, with the drawer of the table at his elbow and the key on his watch chain, that he would have liked very much to hear her read it. Not this one. Any of them. She had read her speeches beautifully, in that clear small silvery voice that carried to the back of every gallery; she had been proud of it, and had practised, and had asked him afterwards, every time, how she had done, as a child asks after a recitation, and he had always told her that she had done very well, which had always been true.

He did not open the drawer. He sat a while longer, and then put out the candles, and went up to bed, and lay in the dark listening to the rain, and did not sleep; and at four he heard the rain stop, and thought that it would be fine tomorrow, which she would have liked, and the King would not have noticed.