God Save the King

He was up at five, as he was every morning of his life, and at the window by half past, in the dark, to see what the day was going to be.

It was going to be fine. He could tell that before there was any light, from the stars over the garden, which were hard and small and very many, and from the cold, which came off the glass against his face like the cold off a sword blade; and when the light came, at last, slowly, over the roofs towards Westminster, it came clear and pale and without a cloud, a January sky as clean as a washed slate. He stood and watched it come. He had stood at windows at five in the morning before battles, and before marriages, and before funerals, and had generally found that the weather took no account of any of them; and he found that he was glad of it today, without quite knowing why, as one is glad of a good horse under one on a difficult day.

His man brought the hot water at six and shaved him, carefully, round the scar, as he had been shaved for forty-seven years, and dressed him in the uniform: not the hussar’s, which he had worn at Greenwich in June and on most days since, but the field marshal’s, scarlet and gold, with the Garter riband and the star, and the sword at his side, which had been his father’s. The robes would be put on at Westminster. He looked at himself in the long glass when it was done, with his one eye, and saw a big old man in scarlet, very upright, with white whiskers and a face that a French sabre had laid open, and a French campaign had robbed of its left eye, in the Low Countries forty-seven years ago; and thought, as he thought every morning, that it would have to do, and that it was the face the country had got, and that the country must make what it could of it.

Then he sat down at his table in the library with his coffee and the speech.

---

He had his own copy, the one Melbourne had sent on the twelfth, with the pencil on it and the ink over the pencil, and the line between them in Melbourne’s untidy hand, and his own Approved in the margin. He did not need it. He had read it so often in eleven days that he could have said it with his eyes shut; but he read it through once more, as he read everything, from the beginning, with the pencil in his hand, not to alter it, because he had said that he would read it as it was written and he did not go back on what he said, but to hear it.

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 that twice. Then he read the next sentence, Melbourne’s, the one about affection and sorrow and virtue, once, quickly, as a man passes a house he does not care to look at; and went on.

Under the speech, in the drawer of the table, where he had put it on the Saturday ten days ago and taken it out every evening since, there was the letter from America.

It had come in the minister’s bag from New Westminster, by way of Palmerston, who had brought it down to St James’s himself and laid it on the table and not said one word about it, and gone away smiling: two sides, in the clear woman’s hand of the first letter, and at the foot, across half the sheet, an inch high, in the slow left-handed strokes that the King had learned to know, John Quincy Adams. He had read it on the Saturday, standing, at the window, as he read Palmerston’s despatches; and he had been angrier, for about a quarter of an hour, than he had been since Tournai.

Your Majesty will be pleased to recollect. The man had written it again. He had written it in August, and the King had read it twenty times and hated it every time; and the man knew that, the King was perfectly certain, could not possibly not know it, and had written it again, in the same place, in the same words, about the same clause of the same Article, as a sentry repeats the challenge to a man who has not given the word. I could open it in no other. So his own speech, the one sheet that he had written at this table on the first of November, three times, and burned once, and sealed with his own seal, had not been read by his Governor-General to his Parliament; his Governor-General had read some other thing, by a Kentucky lawyer, in the King’s name, in eighteen inches of snow. He had known that it would be so. He had known it at this table on the first of November, he thought, if he had let himself know it. He had sent it nevertheless, to see what they would do.

And then the next paragraph, which he had read three times on the Saturday, standing at the window, and which he had not understood, and did not understand now.

Your Majesty’s Speech, in Your Majesty’s own words, was this day read to the House of Commons of the Union by Your Majesty’s Prime Minister, every word of it, in a sitting from which strangers were excluded; and that the House heard it in silence, and at the end of it, as I am informed, said with one voice, God save the King.

They had read it, then. Not in the chamber of the Lords, from the throne, by his Governor-General, in his name, as he had commanded; but in their own chamber, by their own minister, with the doors locked, to themselves. Every word of it. And then they had said nothing. And then they had said three words, all together, and gone about their business.

He did not know what that meant. He had sat for a long time, on the Saturday, trying to know. He was an old soldier, and he knew what it meant when a regiment cheered its colonel, and what it meant, which was a different thing, when it cheered him in a certain tone of voice on the morning after he had flogged a man; and he knew the silence of a regiment that has been told something it does not like, and the silence of a regiment that is waiting to be told what to do. He did not know which of those this had been. He had read the paragraph three times, and he did not know whether a House of Commons full of Americans, in a locked room, had been telling their King that they were loyal to him, or telling him that they were loyal to something else that they were pleased to call by his name; and he suspected, sitting at his table with the speech for his own Parliament under his hand, that the Americans did not know either, and had very likely arranged it so that none of them would ever have to.

He put the letter back in the drawer, under the speech, and locked it, and went to put on his gloves.

---

They went down at a quarter to two, in the great gilt coach, behind the eight cream horses.

The creams were Hanoverian. They had come to England, it was said, with his great-great-grandfather, the first George, and been bred at Hampton Court ever since for the State Coach and nothing else, the colour of new butter with white manes, so that every sovereign of his house for more than a hundred and twenty years had gone down to open Parliament behind the horses of Hanover; and he had thought of that when he saw them put to in the yard at St James’s, and had stood a moment looking at them, and had been pleased, as he was pleased by very few things in England. The coach was heavy and slow and smelt of leather and old gilt; it rocked like a ship. The Life Guards rode before and behind, in their cuirasses, with the sun on them. He sat alone in it, in the scarlet, upright, with his hands on his sword hilt, and looked out.

The streets were full. He had not supposed they would be otherwise; London came to everything, Melbourne had once told him, as if it were a fault. They were packed along the Mall under the bare trees and on the Parade and all down Whitehall, men and women and children, in their best and in their worst, on the pavements and in the windows and on the roofs and in the trees; and they were quiet. They were not hostile. He had seen a hostile crowd, in London, in ‘twenty-nine and again in ‘thirty-one, with stones; this was not that. They looked at him. They took off their hats, most of them, the men, as the coach went by, because it was the King’s coach, and the King’s horses, and the King’s Guards, and an Englishman took off his hat to those as he took it off in church; and then they put their hats on again, and looked, and were silent, as he went on down the long road to Westminster in the bright cold, in a lane of faces that turned to follow him and did not say anything at all.

He had been told that it would be so. The Duke had told him, in December, by the fire. She was, and Your Majesty is not. He did not mind it. He had never in his life been cheered by a London crowd and did not expect to begin at sixty-nine. He sat in the coach and looked at them as they looked at him, steadily, with his one eye, and counted, from habit, the windows on the right-hand side of Whitehall, and the guns in the Park as they began to fire behind him, one after another, slow, across the roofs, for the King going down to his Parliament; and they were right, all forty-one, and he was satisfied.

At the Horse Guards, as the coach came under the arch, the Blues on guard presented arms, and somebody among them, against every order that had ever been given in the British army, cheered.

It was one voice, and then a dozen, and then the whole guard, in the dark of the arch, under the clock, a short deep hoarse roar of men who were not supposed to make any sound at all; and then the coach was through, and out into the light of Whitehall, and the silence of the crowd closed over it again like water. He did not turn his head. But he had heard it, and he sat a little straighter for the rest of the way, and he thought that the colonel of the Blues would have something to say to his men that evening, and that the King would see to it that he said nothing at all.

---

They had made a robing room for him out of somebody’s office, at the end of a passage that still smelt of smoke after six years, behind the Painted Chamber; and he put on the robes there, the crimson velvet and the ermine, heavy as chain mail, with four gentlemen fussing at the train; and they brought the crown in on its cushion and showed it to him, and he looked at it.

He did not put it on. He had not been crowned. He would be, when the year of mourning was out and the money had been voted and the Abbey made ready; but he had not been yet, and he would not wear the crown of England on his head until the Archbishop had put it there, and he had given orders that it should be carried before him today, on its cushion, by the Lord Great Chamberlain, and not worn, and that nobody was to make a remark about it. Nobody did. The Lord Great Chamberlain took up the cushion, very carefully, like a man carrying a cake, and they formed the procession in the passage: the heralds in their tabards, and the officers of state, and the cap of maintenance on its staff, and the crown on its cushion; and in front of the King, immediately in front, at his right hand, with the Sword of State held upright before him in both hands, Melbourne.

The King looked at the back of Melbourne’s head as they waited for the doors.

He had wondered whether Melbourne would carry it. It was not a duty that went with any office; the Sovereign gave it to whom he chose, and the King had chosen Melbourne, without being asked and without saying why, and Melbourne had accepted, without asking and without being told. The King thought that Melbourne knew why. Melbourne had carried that sword before her in the Abbey, at her crowning, and before her at the Chapel Royal, at her marriage, and before her every time she had opened a Parliament, which had been three times; and the King had thought that if anybody was to walk in front of him into the Painted Chamber today, carrying a sword that was heavier than it looked, it had better be the man who had last carried it before her, so that the whole of the Lords could see that it was the same sword, and the same man, and a different King. Melbourne had understood that. He was carrying it now very straight, a big old man in crimson and ermine, with his long handsome tired face composed into perfect blankness, as if he had never in his life thought about anything at all.

The doors opened. The trumpets sounded, somewhere ahead, brazen and too loud in the low passage. They went in.

---

The Painted Chamber was not a large room, and it was full.

He had been in it before, in the ‘thirties, as Duke of Cumberland, on the benches, among the peers; he had not been in it since he came back to England. He had never seen it like this. They had hung it with crimson for the day, over the patched and blackened walls, and they had built the throne up at the south end under a canopy, on three steps, gilt and crimson; and the room was packed to the walls with the whole of the peerage of England in its robes, the scarlet and the ermine on every bench, the bishops in their lawn and their black, the judges on the woolsacks in their red and their full-bottomed wigs, the peeresses in a great bank of silk and diamonds and feathers along the side benches, the foreign ministers in a box at the side, glittering with stars; and the light came down on all of it, clear and cold and wintry, from the high windows, and every face in the room turned towards the door as he came in.

They stood. The whole room rose, with a sound like a wave going back down a shingle beach, and stood, and was silent.

He went up the room between them, slowly, behind the sword, with the train dragging at his shoulders, and up the three steps, and turned, and sat down on the throne of England; and the Lords sat down; and the Lord Chancellor stood, and said that it was His Majesty’s pleasure that the Commons be summoned; and Black Rod went out, and they waited.

He sat on the throne and looked at them while they waited, as he had looked at the crowd in the street.

He knew a great many of the faces. He had sat among them for thirty years and quarrelled with most of them. There was Wellington, on the front bench of the Opposition, very old and white and upright, with his great nose, who caught the King’s eye and inclined his head, very slightly, as one soldier to another across a parade ground. There was Brougham, with his twitching face, who had called the King a great many things in print and would call him a great many more. There were the bishops, who had voted against Reform with him in ‘thirty-one, and the Whig dukes, who had not; there was his brother Augustus of Sussex, in his black silk cap under the robes, beaming at nobody, and his brother Adolphus of Cambridge, with his wig straight for once, looking at the King with an expression of such anxious affection that the King had to look away. And there were the peeresses, a great many of them, in their silks and diamonds, every one of whom, he supposed, had loved her, or said so, or would say so tonight at dinner, and every one of whom was looking at him now with the same expression, which was not hostility, and was not loyalty either, but a kind of close, cool, assessing curiosity, as women look at a man who has married again too soon.

He was not afraid of them. He had never been afraid of anything in a room. But he understood, sitting on the throne in the clear winter light, with the crown on its cushion on the step below him and the sword upright at his right hand, that every person in that chamber had come to hear one thing, and was waiting for it, and would go home and talk of nothing else; and that it was not the East, or the French, or China, or the Civil List.

There was a noise in the passage outside, a trampling and pushing, like a crowd coming into a theatre; and the Commons came in.

They came in a rush, as they always did, crowding and jostling to the bar behind their Speaker, in their ordinary coats, a great dark mob of them filling the end of the chamber, two and three hundred of them, pressed together and craning; and at the front of them, very large in his gown and full wig, the Speaker, who bowed; and behind the Speaker, among the front of the crowd, he saw Russell, very small, and Peel, very tall, standing side by side because there was no room to stand otherwise, and not looking at each other.

The Lord Chancellor went up the steps of the throne, and knelt, and held up the speech.

---

The King took it in his left hand, and unfolded it.

It was written large, on stiff paper, in a black clerk’s hand, so that he did not need his spectacles. He held it up a little, to the light, and looked at the first line; and then he looked up from it, over it, at the chamber, at all of them, the peers and the bishops and the peeresses and the Commons at the bar; and he let them wait. Not long. Long enough. He had commanded a regiment, and he knew to a second how long a regiment would stand still for a colonel who had not yet given the word, and how much longer, and when it would begin to fidget. He let them come to the edge of it. Then he began.

“My Lords, and Gentlemen.”

His voice went out into the chamber, and filled it. It was not a beautiful voice. It never had been. It was heavy and harsh, a cavalryman’s voice, built for making itself heard across a field in a wind, with the German in its vowels from half a lifetime among Hanoverian soldiers, though he had been born in London; and it was very loud in that low crimson room, much louder than anybody there had been used to hearing a speech read from that throne.

“I meet you for the first time since My beloved Niece, your late Sovereign, was taken from us,” he read; and stopped.

It was not a long stop. It was perhaps the time it takes to draw one breath. But he did not draw a breath; he simply stopped, with the paper in his hand, and looked at them, over it, with his one eye, at the peers and the peeresses and the Commons pressed at the bar; and the silence in the chamber, which had been the silence of a great many people listening, became for that instant a different silence, the silence of a great many people who have stopped breathing.

“By violence.”

He said it as a sentence is pronounced. He said it slowly, and very distinctly, and not loud; lower, if anything, than the rest, so that they had to lean to hear it, and did lean; and he gave each word its full weight, as a man lays down two coins on a counter one after the other, so that everybody can see what they are. By violence. And he let it lie there, in the silence, for one more moment, so that nobody in the room should be able to pretend afterwards that they had not heard it.

“In the fourth year of her reign.”

And then he read the next sentence, Melbourne’s sentence, at once, without any pause at all, quickly, evenly, in the voice of a clerk reading an inventory of furniture: “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.” It went by them like a carriage in the street. He did not slur a word of it. He did not alter a syllable. Every word that Melbourne had written was read, exactly, in its place, as he had promised. And every person in the chamber had heard what he had done, and knew precisely what it meant: that the King had not said one word of his own; that the King had said everything.

He did not look at Melbourne. He did not need to. He could see, at the edge of his eye, the sword at his right hand, upright, in the big ringed hands; and he saw that it did not move at all, not by a hair, from the first word to the last; and he thought that the man holding it was, after all, a very good servant, and that he would be sorry, in his way, when the man was gone.

Then he read the rest.

He read it in the voice in which he gave orders on a field day, plainly, and well, and without any expression whatever: the accession, and the East, and the Pasha confined to Egypt, and Syria restored, and Acre taken by his fleet, and the peace of Europe preserved, notwithstanding a temporary interruption of the good understanding with France, which he read with no more weight on temporary than on any other word, and which the French minister in his box at the side heard, the King observed, with a face like a man who has been handed a bill. He read China. He read the Civil List, I place unreservedly at your disposal those hereditary revenues which were placed at the disposal of Parliament by My predecessors, in the voice of an officer ordering forage. He read that he relied with confidence upon their wisdom and their loyalty; and that he prayed that the blessing of Almighty God might attend their deliberations; and he folded the paper, and gave it back to the Lord Chancellor, who was kneeling on the step to receive it; and sat for a moment longer, on the throne, looking at them.

Nobody moved. The chamber was perfectly still. He thought that he had never in his life heard a room so full be so silent; and then he thought that he had, once, in June, at the Council at St James’s, when he took the oaths, and the room had been full of men in black who had loved her.

He rose, and the whole room rose with him; and he went down the three steps, and down the room between them, slowly, behind the sword, with the train dragging, and out.

---

In the robing room afterwards, while the four gentlemen fussed at the train again, Melbourne came to him with the sword, and gave it into the hands of the officer whose business it was, and bowed.

“As it was written, my Lord,” said the King.

“As it was written, sir,” said Melbourne.

The King looked at him. The long tired handsome face was perfectly composed; there was nothing in it at all, not reproach, not anger, not anything; and the King, who had read faces across tables and parade grounds and battlefields for fifty years, saw that there was nothing in it because Melbourne had decided that there should be nothing in it, and had the strength to see that there was not, and that this was the most that one man could say to another in a robing room in front of four gentlemen of the household. He thought the better of him for it. He did not say so.

“You carried it very well,” he said instead. “The sword. It is heavier than it looks.”

“It is, sir,” said Melbourne. “I have always found it so.” And he bowed again, and went away down the smoky passage, to his own carriage, and his own Parliament, which would sit that evening on the Address, and in which, the King was well aware, every member who rose would quote two words.

---

The crowd was still there, going back.

It was thinner, and the light was going, and the cold had come down again out of the clear sky as the sun went; and they stood in the dusk along Whitehall and the Parade and the Mall, as they had stood in the afternoon, and took off their hats to the creams and the coach and the Guards, and put them on again, and were silent; and the King sat in the coach with his hands on his sword and looked at them, and counted the lamps being lit along the Mall, and was very tired, and did not let them see it.

They had come almost to St James’s, to the corner by the Marlborough wall, where the crowd was thickest and the coach had to slow almost to a stop at the turn into the Palace yard, when somebody in the crowd called out.

He did not see who. A man’s voice, from the back, from among the people pressed against the wall under the lamps, rough and loud and very clear in the frosty air, so that it went over the heads of everybody and into the coach, through the glass:

“God save the King!”

That was all. Nobody took it up. The crowd did not cheer, or groan, or laugh; it stood exactly as it had stood, silent, with its hats on, and looked at the coach; and the coach went on round the corner and in at the gate, and the gate shut behind it, and the voice did not come again.

He sat in the coach in the dark yard after it had stopped, for a moment, before the footman opened the door, with his hands on his sword.

He did not know what it had meant. He had heard those three words said, he supposed, ten thousand times in his life, in churches and on parade grounds and at the ends of dinners and on the stages of theatres, and had never once in sixty-nine years wondered what anybody meant by them; and in ten days he had had them twice, once in a letter from America and once in the dark at the corner of his own palace, and he could not read either. He did not know whether the man at the back of the crowd had been loyal, or drunk, or mad, or mocking him, or simply the one man in London who had wanted to say it and had not cared who heard; just as he did not know what a House of Commons full of Americans had meant by it in a locked room, with nobody to hear them but themselves. It was the same three words. He had been brought up to think that they meant one thing, and that every man who said them meant it, and he found, at the end of his first winter, that they meant whatever the man saying them chose, and that the King was the one man in his kingdoms who was not allowed to ask which.

The footman opened the door. He got down, slowly, in the scarlet, with the sword, and went in.

---

He worked till two that night, as he always did, at his table in the library, with the lamp, and the boxes, which had come at nine, and the fire.

When the boxes were done he unlocked the drawer, and took out what was in it, and laid it all on the table in front of him under the lamp, in order, as he would have laid out a set of despatches after a campaign to see what it had come to.

Melbourne’s answer of October, in the easy hand: Your Majesty’s servants retain, so far as Lord Melbourne is able to judge, the confidence of the House of Commons. The Crown Office lists of December, with his own crosses in pencil down the margins, and the sum at the foot of the last, 21. Adams’s letter of August, Your Majesty will be pleased to recollect. Adams’s letter of December, I could open it in no other, and God save the King. A half sheet in pencil from Hanover, written on a board on somebody’s knees. A spoiled sheet of his own, folded once, that began Sir, You have My leave to go when you please, and went on, and stopped in the middle of a sentence. And on top of them all, his own copy of the speech of that afternoon, with the pencil and the ink on it, and the two words between the lines in Melbourne’s hand, and his own Approved.

He looked at them for a long time.

He had asked, since June, every question that he knew how to ask. He had asked whether the King might choose his own escort, and been given it. He had asked whether the King might have the Hill watched by soldiers, and been told that he might not, and given a constable. He had asked whether the King’s Governor-General was the King’s servant, in the King’s own hand, and been told by an old man in America, in the most courteous letter in the world, that he was the servant of a Charter. He had asked whether the King might speak to his American Parliament in his own words, and been told that he might not, and had his words read to it nevertheless, by somebody else, behind locked doors. He had asked his First Lord of the Treasury to go, and been told that the First Lord had the confidence of the House of Commons; and asked the country, and been told the same thing, by the same number. He had asked whether the King might say from his throne that his niece had been murdered, and been told that a jury had found that she was not; and whether the King’s Speech might ask for the means to guard the King, and been told that it might not, this year. He had asked for one word, and been given it.

He had been answered every time. That was what he saw, sitting at the table with the papers under the lamp. Not one of his questions had gone unanswered, and not one of the answers had been given by anybody in particular. No minister had decided them, and no Parliament, and no court; they had come back to him from every direction at once, from Melbourne and the Duke and the Cabinet and the jury and the country and the Americans, all the same answer, as if they had all been reading from the same paper, which nobody had written. He had gone round the whole house in the dark, these seven months, trying every door, as a man goes round a strange house at night feeling for the way out; and every door had been locked; and he understood, sitting at the table, that by morning there would be a plan of the house, drawn by somebody, very likely by a great many people, with every locked door marked on it in ink, where before there had only been the dark; and that he had drawn it himself, with his own hands, by trying the doors.

He did not mind. He thought about it, and found that he did not mind at all. He was a soldier, and a soldier who has felt out the enemy’s line in the night, post by post, knows where it is in the morning, and that is worth a great deal, even if he cannot break it. He knew where everything was now. He had not known in June.

He took a clean sheet, and the pencil, and wrote at the head of it, in the large black hand, 1842; and under it, in a list, as he would have written an order of march, the things he would ask for next year. The guard on the Hill. The measures for the Sovereign’s person. A speech in America in his own words, by his own Governor-General, from the throne. Stirling. He looked at the list, and added nothing to it, and struck nothing out. Then he put it on top of the others, and put them all back in the drawer, in order, and locked it, and put the key on his chain.

Then he took another sheet, and wrote to Frederica, in German, in his own hand, a full side, as he wrote to her every week. He told her that he had opened his Parliament, and that the weather had been fine, and the creams had gone very well, and the Blues had cheered him under the arch at the Horse Guards against every order in the army; that he had read his speech as it was written, every word, and that she would hear from the newspapers how he had read it, and should not believe them, or should believe all of it, as she pleased. He told her that he would come to Hanover in the summer, as soon as the session allowed, and see her, and George; and that afterwards, when she was well, they would go together to Scotland, to the castle he had told her of, where the heather would be out on the hills, which he had never seen. He wrote it so that George could read it aloud to her without stopping, and without having to leave anything out.

He sealed it, and put out the lamp, and sat on for a while by the last of the fire in the dark, an old man with one eye, alone, in the library at St James’s, at the end of his first winter.

Outside, in the street, beyond the Palace wall, very faint, somebody was singing as he went home, drunk and happy, in the frost; and the King listened, and could not make out the words, and then could. It was the anthem. It was the old tune that they had sung to his father, and his brothers, and his niece, and would sing now to him, for as long as he lived, and to his son after him, and to whoever came after his son; and it went away down the street towards Pall Mall, getting fainter, and he sat and listened to it until it was gone, and did not know what the man meant by it, and found, for the first time, that he did not need to know.

He went to bed. The boxes would come at nine.