A Majority of Nine

Poyntz had died on Wednesday night, and by Thursday morning the Tories had worked out what he was worth.

He had been a Whig, and nearly seventy, and his son-in-law Captain Spencer sat for the government side; and the breath was hardly out of the old man’s body, Melbourne was told, before the Tory whipper-in had sent an express round the clubs to say that nobody, on any account, was to pair with Captain Spencer. A son-in-law in mourning would not come down to the House. If nobody paired with him, his absence was a vote lost to the government on the third night of the China debate, and the Tories, who had been counting the government’s sick for a week, had now begun to count its dead.

Melbourne had laughed when he heard it, because it was the right thing to do with such news and he had always found it the easiest; and then he had stopped laughing, and gone down to the Lords, and come home again, and gone to bed in South Street with the Fathers.

He was reading Chrysostom at one in the morning when the House of Commons was still sitting, because Chrysostom had been dead for fourteen hundred years and had no vote. The candles had burned down on the table by the bed. Letters lay about the counterpane, and newspapers on the floor where he had dropped them, and a folio on his knees; he was sixty-one, and a big man, and he had found that there was no position in which a big man of sixty-one could wait for a division with dignity, and that lying in bed was the least undignified of them. He had told his man to wake him whatever the hour. He did not expect to need waking.

He had not much liked the war. He did not much like the trade it was about. He liked still less the prospect of Peel, and Peel was what the war had become: Sir James Graham’s motion of censure, three nights of it, on the government’s want of foresight in its dealings with China, which was Graham’s way of saying the opium, and the ships, and Captain Elliot at Canton, without having to say whether he would have done otherwise himself. Macaulay had answered him on the first night and made a good speech, which was a relief, since Macaulay had not made one for some time. John Russell’s report to the Queen of the second night, which Melbourne had seen, said that young Mr Gladstone had told the House that the Chinese had a right to poison the wells to keep the English away. Melbourne had read the sentence twice, with real pleasure. He had always thought it the great weakness of the Tories that some of them believed things, and Gladstone believed more things than any man of thirty he had ever met.

But the war was not the question. The question was nine, or ten, or eleven; and the Tories wanted to win the division very much, and wanted office very little, and that was what kept the government alive. Peel would not come in over the Queen’s head, not after last May, when she had refused him her ladies and he had gone away again without his government. The Duke would not make him. The Duke had nearly died in February, of a fit, and had been given up, and had got better in a manner that astonished everybody but himself; Greville said he was a ruin now, and the ruin was back in the Lords by March, making speeches that were better than anybody’s. The Duke would not turn out a government in a war. He did not care for the government, but he cared a great deal about the war.

So the Whigs lived. They lived on the Irish and the Radicals, and on the Tories’ want of appetite, and on a majority of twenty-one in January and whatever it would be tonight; and Melbourne, who had been Prime Minister for the better part of six years, and had never in all that time been entirely sure that he wished to go on being it, lay in bed and read Chrysostom and waited for the numbers.

They came at a little after three. His man brought the note up in his shirt-sleeves, with a candle. It was from John Russell, and it said: 271 to 262.

“Nine,” said Melbourne aloud, to nobody. “Damn.” And then, after a moment, because he was alone and could say it: “Poor old Poyntz.”

He lay back against the pillows. Palmerston had closed the debate, the note said, with a capital speech. Palmerston had been his brother-in-law since December, when he married Emily at last, after twenty years of being her friend; and Melbourne thought that a capital speech at three in the morning was exactly what a brother-in-law was for. Then he blew out the candle, and slept, and did not dream about China at all.

---

There was a Council at the Palace on Friday afternoon for the Order in Council to seize Chinese ships. It was a war, and nobody called it one; and there was a long, grave argument among the Privy Councillors beforehand, conducted in whispers in the anteroom, about whether an Order of so warlike a nature ought to be signed by everyone present, and no precedent exactly in point. It was settled at last, after a great deal of enquiry, that it need not be. Greville, the Clerk of the Council, conducted the enquiry. Greville was known to keep a journal, and Melbourne made it a rule never to say anything in his hearing that he would not have liked to read in it after he was dead, which in practice meant saying very little. He had kept a journal himself, once, as a young man, and burned it, and had never been sorry.

The Queen presided at the head of the table, very small and very upright, and read the Order through to herself before she approved it, which she had not always done when she was eighteen. When it was over and the Councillors had gone, she kept him back.

“Nine,” she said. She was flushed and delighted. “Lord Melbourne, nine! I was so afraid it would be four. I said to Albert at breakfast that it would be four, and he said that I ought not to say such things, as they were bad luck.”

“The Prince is quite right, ma’am. It is very bad luck to say four. One should always say eleven, and be pleasantly surprised by nine.”

She laughed, and told him about poor Mr Poyntz, of whom she had heard, and the shocking thing the Tories had done about Captain Spencer, of which she had also heard; she heard everything now. Then the Prince came in from the garden with the dog at his heels, and bowed to Melbourne, and asked after his health with real attention, and the Queen’s whole face changed. It did not change much. Melbourne had watched it for nearly three years, across dinner tables and the backs of horses and the length of a great many drawing rooms, and he knew the whole small repertory of its changes, and this was a new one.

He had used to ride with her in the afternoons. That had been a great part of his life for three years: two hours on horseback every day, in Windsor Park or along the Row, with the Queen talking about whatever came into her head, and himself beside her, too heavy for it, answering. The Prince rode with her now. It was quite right that he should. Melbourne came to her at four o’clock, and was with her for an hour, and went away; and it was, he found, a little like being a doctor in a house where the patient had recovered. Everyone was very glad to see him. Nobody needed him very much.

He had told her to show the Prince everything. He had told her so more than once: that she should keep nothing back from her husband, that a man who was shut out of his wife’s business would find business elsewhere, and that a young man of the Prince’s parts had better be given something to do before he found something worse. He had meant it. He meant it still. He was aware, with the part of his mind that watched himself and was generally amused by what it saw, that the advice had been given against his own interest, and that he had given it a great deal more readily than he would have given it in anybody else’s.

---

The address from America came in the week before Easter.

It came in a long envelope from the Governor-General at New Westminster, in a hand so cramped and tremulous that Melbourne, when she showed it to him, thought at first that the letter must have been written in a carriage. It had not; the old man’s right hand had shaken for years, they said. He had met John Quincy Adams once, at Holland House, a long time ago, when Adams was the American minister in London and Melbourne was nobody in particular, and he remembered chiefly that Adams had been right about everything all evening and that it had not made him any more agreeable. The letter covering the address was perfectly correct, perfectly brief, and perfectly without warmth, and the address itself was very handsome: the Commons of the United Kingdom of America in Parliament assembled, offering Her Majesty their respectful congratulations on her marriage, with their prayer that it might long contribute to the happiness of her people in every part of her dominions.

“It is very kind of them,” said the Queen. “What am I to answer?”

“I am afraid, ma’am, that I cannot tell you.”

She looked at him. “You always tell me what to answer.”

“Not to America, ma’am.” He spread his hands. “In American affairs Your Majesty acts on the advice of your American ministers, and on no other. Their Charter says so, in so many words. I believe it says it twice. A British minister who advised Your Majesty on an address from the American House of Commons would be doing the one thing their Charter was written to prevent, and the Americans would be perfectly entitled to make a great noise about it. They are very good at noise.”

“But my American ministers are in America.”

“Three thousand miles off, ma’am, and a month behind. It is the most convenient arrangement in the world. It means that in American affairs nobody can tell Your Majesty anything at all.”

The Prince had been standing at the window with the Morning Chronicle. He read the London papers every morning, all of them, in English, slowly and with great care, as he read everything he meant to understand. He turned round now with the paper in his hand.

“There was a division,” he said.

Melbourne had seen it. He had hoped that she would not. The American papers had come in by the same steamer as the Governor-General’s bag and been quicker about their business, as papers always were, and the Chronicle had made a paragraph of them: the American Commons, voting their congratulations to the Queen, had first rejected, by a hundred and forty-one votes to thirty-eight, an amendment to congratulate Her Majesty also on the freedom of her subjects in the West Indies.

The Queen read the paragraph. Melbourne watched her read it.

“They would not say it,” she said. “Why would they not say it?”

“Because a great many of them own slaves, ma’am, and the rest wish to go on sitting in the same House with them.” He said it lightly, because that was how he said everything, and because it was quite true. “The freedom of Your Majesty’s subjects in the West Indies cost twenty millions of money and a great deal of hymn-singing, and it was done in Lord Grey’s time, before yours. It is not a thing the Americans have done, or mean to do, and they did not wish to congratulate you on it, and I do not know that one can altogether blame men for declining to praise in others a thing they have no intention of doing themselves.”

“It was done in my name,” the Queen said. “At the end. The apprentices were freed in my name.”

“It was, ma’am.”

“Then I ought to say something.”

“Your Majesty may say whatever you please. I may not tell you what.”

She turned to her husband. It was done without the least hesitation, as if she had been doing it all her life instead of for nine weeks; and Melbourne, watching, understood a thing that he had somehow not understood until that moment, though it had been in all the papers since January. The Prince had no office. Parliament had declined to give him a place and the King of Hanover had declined to let him have one, and the Lords had struck it out, and he was nothing in England, a naturalised foreigner with a field marshal’s coat and thirty thousand a year. Which meant that he was the only man in England whom the American Charter did not forbid to advise her. It forbade ministers, and officers, and councils. It had not thought of husbands.

They sat down together at her writing table. Melbourne sat by the fire with a book open on his knee and did not read it, and listened, which he had not been asked to do and had not been asked not to.

The Queen wished to say something about the West Indies. The Prince did not think she should. He did not think it was right that she should say nothing, either; he said so plainly, in his careful English, with the faint frown of a man translating his conscience as he went. But to say something, he said, would be to take a side in a quarrel inside her American Parliament, and she could not take a side there without being a party, and a Queen who was a party in America would very soon have no party in America at all. She might thank them for their congratulations. She might say nothing of the rest.

“That is also an answer,” the Prince said. “When it is read, everyone will know what is not in it.”

“Then it is no answer at all.”

“It is the answer that the form allows,” he said. “A form is only a way of agreeing beforehand what may be said. One may still choose the words inside it.”

And it was the Prince, in the end, who chose one. The Queen wrote it out in her own round upright hand, in the third person, as such answers were written: that the Queen had received with sincere pleasure the loyal and dutiful address of the Commons of the United Kingdom of America on the occasion of her marriage, that she thanked them for their congratulations and for their prayers for her happiness and that of the Prince, and that she assured them of her earnest wish for the welfare and happiness of her faithful subjects in America. The Prince read it over her shoulder, and put his finger on the last line, and said something in German too low for Melbourne to hear. She looked up at him. Then she dipped her pen and wrote one word above the line, with a caret, and made a fair copy, so that it read of all her faithful subjects in America.

Melbourne turned a page of his book.

He could have told them that nobody in America would notice it, and that the one man who would notice it was the old man with the shaking hand, who would notice everything, and could do nothing about any of it. He did not tell them. He was not permitted to advise. He sat by the fire and turned another page, and thought that it was the first thing she had done since she was eighteen in which he had had no part at all; and that it had been done very well.

---

They went to Windsor for Easter.

He came to her again at Buckingham Palace at the end of April, on a fine dry afternoon in a very dry April. She was alone, and walking up and down her sitting room, and she began to talk as soon as he was in the door, which meant that something had happened.

The first thing was the Prince’s accident on Easter Monday, which Melbourne had heard about, as everybody had, and which she told him again anyway, all of it. He had gone out with the staghounds on a horse that was too strong for him, a vicious thoroughbred called Tom Bowling, and the horse had bolted with him in the park under her very windows; she had seen him turn it, and turn it again, and then go away through the trees at a dreadful pace and disappear, and she had run to his room to look from its windows and could see nothing, until Mr Cowper rode back to say that he was not hurt. A tree had knocked him off. He had ridden on to the meet at Ascot on another horse, and met her there on the terrace of the stand, very pale, more afraid that she might have been frightened than he had been himself.

“He had said to me that morning, as he went out, that he hoped we should meet again,” she said. “As a joke. I shall never let him say it again.”

Melbourne said that the Prince’s horses had better be chosen for him in future by somebody who did not wish him dead, and she laughed, and then she stopped laughing and stood quite still in the middle of the room and told him the other thing.

She was with child.

She told him crossly, as if it were his fault, or the Prince’s, or the doctors’. She had wished for a year first, she said. Six months at least. She had wished to be happy for a little while, only happy, with nothing to be afraid of; and she had prayed for it, and her prayers had not been answered, and now there would be months and months of being ill and stout and stared at, and then the thing itself, which she had always dreaded more than anything in the world, and which her mother told her was nothing, and which everybody’s mother told everybody was nothing. She was twenty. She would be twenty-one next month. She was very happy, she said, with tears standing in her eyes; she had never been so happy in her life; she only wished that this had not happened yet.

Melbourne stood with his hat in his hand and let her say all of it, which was what she needed, and then told her that she would be quite well, which she needed too, and which he believed. He told her that the whole country would be overjoyed, and that it would be quite right to be overjoyed, and that she must on no account let anybody tell her how she ought to feel about it, least of all her Prime Minister, who had no notion. He told her that the Prince must be the first to be told, if he had not been already; and she said, with great dignity, that the Prince had known for a fortnight, and Melbourne bowed and said that he stood corrected. She laughed again then, damply, and was better.

He knew what the country would say, because he knew what he thought himself, standing in her sitting room with his hat in his hand. The country would not say that it was glad for her. The country would say, in its clubs and its leading articles and its dining rooms, with great relief, that there would now be one more life between the throne and the King of Hanover.

---

He had thought about the King of Hanover for three years, on and off, as one thinks about weather in another county.

Three summers ago, in the first month of her reign, before anyone in the government had yet got used to bowing to a girl, they had brought in a bill. He remembered the morning it was first discussed, in Downing Street with the windows open: Cottenham with the draft, and the old Archbishop, and somebody reading out the precedents of Queen Anne’s time in a voice like a funeral. It was not a long bill. It provided that if the Queen should die while the next heir to the Crown was out of the realm, the Crown’s authority should be exercised until he arrived by certain Lords Justices: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord President, the Lord Privy Seal, the Lord Chief Justice, the heads of the Treasury and of the Admiralty, and any others whom the heir had named beforehand in a paper deposited with them. Whether the King of Hanover had ever troubled to deposit such a paper, Melbourne did not know. He had never asked. It had seemed, at the time, an indelicate question to put to a man about his niece.

It had passed in a few weeks, with very little said in public about why it was needed, because everybody knew. The heir was the King of Hanover, and the King of Hanover lived in Hanover, and between a death in London and a King in London there would be ten days at the least, while a messenger went out to Hanover and the King came back; and in those days somebody must govern, and the somebody must be named in advance, so that there should be no unseemly scramble round a dead girl’s bed. Brougham had said so in the Lords, at length. The Duke had said that the King ought to be allowed to choose his own Lords Justices and not have them imposed upon him, which was very like the Duke. A Radical in the Commons had asked whether a man who had accepted a foreign throne ought not to be barred from this one altogether, and had given notice of a bill to settle the succession on the Duke of Cambridge’s boy instead, and had been heard in a silence so complete that nobody ever spoke of it again.

And there had been the other things in the bill, the restrictions, which nobody had explained because nobody needed to. The Lords Justices could not dissolve Parliament. They could not assent to any bill to alter the succession, or the established Church, in any of the three kingdoms. They could not make a peer. Melbourne had read those clauses with his feet on the fender and had thought how much they said without saying it: that the realm, for ten days, was to be kept exactly as it was, locked like a house whose owner has died, so that whoever was coming from Hanover to take possession should find nothing moved, and should have nothing moved for him either. He had remembered the Orange lodges, and Hume’s committee, and the talk in 1836 of a plot to set the Duke of Cumberland on the throne in the girl’s place, which nobody had proved and nobody had forgotten.

He was himself one of the Lords Justices, as long as he was at the Treasury. He had never once thought of it as anything but a lawyer’s precaution, like the clause in a will that provides for everyone dying in the same carriage accident. It was written for a case that would not arise. The Queen was young and strong and had the constitution of a pony, and she would bury them all.

Now she would have a child. And the child, whatever else it was, would be a life between her and the King of Hanover, and the little Act of 1837 would go back into the statute book with all the other things that Parliament had written in a hurry, for a case that had never come.

---

He went home at six. His carriage went out of the Palace gates and turned, and went up the hill between the long brick wall of the Palace garden and the iron railings of the Green Park, the way he went home most evenings, towards Hyde Park Corner and Park Lane and South Street.

There were people waiting along the railings. There always were, at this hour, in fine weather. They waited there every afternoon to see the Queen drive out, because she drove up this road every afternoon in her open carriage, and they had learnt her hours; and they were waiting now, though she had not come out today, and the light was going yellow over the park behind them. Some of them looked at Melbourne’s carriage as it went by, and saw that it was nobody, and looked away again, back down the hill towards the Palace gates.

He looked at them through the glass as he passed. Clerks, and nursemaids, and two old women with a basket, and a boy sitting on the railings, and a man in a brown coat. Waiting for a girl in a carriage. He thought, with the part of his mind that was always amused, that it was the most English thing in the world, to stand for an hour on a fine evening in order to take off one’s hat to somebody for a quarter of a second; and then he thought, with the other part, which was not amused by anything very much and which he showed to nobody, that he would have stood there himself if he had been a clerk, and that he was not so very different from a clerk, except that he was let in.

The carriage reached the top of the hill and went out under the arch, and the people along the railings dropped out of sight behind him, still looking the other way.