Liege Lord

He had his boots off when they came.

He had walked home from the Palace by the Green Park, slowly, for the pleasure of it, and let himself in at South Street a little before six, and sat down in the library in his shirt-sleeves with the window open and a volume of Saint Chrysostom on his knee, meaning to read for an hour and dine at eight and go to bed early, which he never did. He had not opened the book. He was thinking about the Prince, who had come back from Woolwich covered in dust and pleased with himself, and about the Queen’s face when she heard him on the stairs, which had changed in a way he had seen it change a hundred times since February and still minded more than he would have admitted to anybody; and he was thinking, too, that he minded it a little less than he had in April, which was something, and that by the winter, when the child came, he might not mind it at all. He was sixty-one. He supposed it was time.

Then there was a horse in the street, ridden hard, and the bell, and voices on the stairs, and the door opened without a knock, and it was one of the Palace grooms, white to the lips, with his hat in his hand, saying that the Queen had been shot at on Constitution Hill, and that she was hurt, and that they had brought her back to the Palace, and that Sir James Clark had been sent for.

Melbourne put on his boots himself. He could not afterwards remember doing it. He remembered only that his hands were perfectly steady and that he had thought, very clearly, while he did it: I left her at half past five.

---

He was at the Palace before seven, and he did not go up.

There was nothing for him to do upstairs, and there were things to be done down, and he had been a minister long enough to know which kind of man he was for. He took the room on the ground floor that the equerries used, at the garden end, with its windows on the lawn and the evening sun lying across the carpet, and he sent for the people who would be needed, and they came.

The Lord Chamberlain came first, back from the station-house in Gardener’s Lane, where the man had been taken; Uxbridge had driven there with Sir Henry Wheatley the moment he heard, and seen him in his cell, and he told Melbourne about it standing by the window, very red in the face, in short sentences, as if he were giving evidence. The man was a boy, Uxbridge said. A pot-boy out of place, eighteen years old or thereabouts, small and slight and perfectly composed. The first words he spoke when the cell door was opened were Is the Queen hurt?, and Uxbridge had asked him how he dared to ask such a question. Then he had talked quite freely. He said that he had been shooting a great deal lately, and was a very good shot with a pistol and a better one with a rifle. He said that the pistols had been given to him on the third of May; and something else besides, which he went on to say was money, and that he could have as much of it as he pleased.

“I said to him,” said Uxbridge, “You have now fulfilled your engagement. And he said, No, I have not.”

Melbourne looked at him.

“That was all,” Uxbridge said. “I said, You have, sir, as far as the attempt goes; and he said nothing to that at all.”

Greville came at a quarter past seven, in evening dress, from somebody’s dinner, with his face the colour of putty and a bundle of papers under his arm that he must have stopped at the Council Office to collect on the way: the Act of 1837, and the orders of 1714, and the forms that had been used at Kensington three years ago, on the June morning when they had all knelt to a girl in a black dress. He laid them on the equerries’ table without being asked and began to sort them, because that was what Greville did with his feelings, and Melbourne was grateful to him and did not say so.

The Home Secretary came; Normanby, very handsome and very pale, with word that the police had found where the man lodged, over the water in Lambeth, and had gone there. Russell came, from the Colonial Office, and stood by the door and said almost nothing; it was five weeks since his uncle had been found in his bed in Norfolk Street with his throat cut, and Melbourne saw in his face that he was thinking of it, and that he was ashamed of thinking of it now. Others came. The room filled, and grew hot, and somebody opened the window on to the garden, and the smell of cut grass came in, and the sound of a blackbird, and, from the other side of the house, from the Mall, a noise like the sea that was London coming to ask.

At half past seven a page brought down a message from Sir Benjamin Brodie, who had been with her since a quarter to seven. Melbourne read it, and folded it, and put it in his pocket, and went on with what he had been saying to Greville about the order of the Council; and Greville, who had been watching his face, went on sorting his papers and did not ask. A little later Melbourne went and stood at the window with his back to the room for some time. Nobody spoke to him.

He did not go up until nine. He had been told, by then, that it would not be long, and that she was sleeping, and that the Prince was with her, and her mother; and there was still nothing for him to do upstairs, except the one thing, which was to be there, in case.

---

He stood in the doorway.

He had not meant to stop there. He had meant to go in; but when he came to the door he found that he could not, and he stood, with his hat in his hand, as if he were waiting to be announced, as he had stood at a hundred doors of hers, in the old days, at Windsor and at Kensington and in this house, until she looked up and saw him and smiled and said, Lord M., and he came in. She did not look up. Her eyes were closed. The Prince was kneeling at her left side with her hand in his, and her mother had the other, and the Baroness stood at the foot of the bed like a sentry; and the doctors had drawn back from her a little, and he understood from that, as one understands such things, without being told.

She died a little after nine, without opening her eyes.

After a while he went in. He went and stood at the foot of the bed beside the Baroness, and looked at her, and found that he was saying something, under his breath, and that it was what he had said to her on a thousand evenings, at the door of her sitting room, when the evening was over and she gave him her hand: Good night, ma’am. He did not know why he said it. He did not suppose that it was a prayer. He had not, as a general thing, much faith in prayers that were said for the dead, and none at all in prayers that were said for himself; but he said it, and it was the only thing that he said to her, and he was glad afterwards that he had.

Then he turned round, because Uxbridge had come in behind him, and gave him his orders. The Privy Council, tonight, at the Council Office, at eleven. The Archbishop, from Lambeth, at once. The Lords Justices: the Lord Chancellor; the Lord President; the Privy Seal; the First Lord of the Admiralty; the Lord Chief Justice. And then he heard himself say it, the King, and was surprised by how easily it came, after three years: as a man takes up an old coat from the back of a chair, and finds that it still fits.

---

At the Home Office the box was on the table.

It was a small deal box with a broken lock, and the Inspector who had broken it stood beside it in his blue coat with his hat under his arm, and took the things out one by one, as if he were laying a table, and named them. A sword, in its scabbard. A powder-flask, with some three ounces of powder in it. A bullet-mould. Five bullets, and twelve or fourteen percussion caps. A razor. Four books. And a cap of black crape, to cover the face, with two red bows sewn on it.

“Two bows is a captain,” the Inspector said. “It’s in the papers, my Lord.”

The papers were in a pocket-book, folded small: four of them, in a round, careful, unformed hand, and the boy had told the Inspector at the station-house that they were his, and that he had meant to destroy them that morning, before he went out, and had forgotten. Normanby passed them to Melbourne one by one across the table, under the lamp, with Russell and the Attorney-General and Fox Maule reading over his shoulders, and nobody said anything for some time.

Young England. Rules and Regulations. Every member to be provided with a brace of pistols, a sword, a rifle and a dagger. Every officer to have a factitious name. Every member, when ordered to meet, to be armed, and to wear a black crape cap with his marks of distinction outside. Any member who could procure a hundred men to be made a captain. No member to be allowed to speak during any debate, nor to ask more than two questions.

Then a list of the principal members, under their factitious names. A President, Gowrie. A Council of twelve, of whom the second was Ernest. Four generals, of whom the third was Augustus. Four captains, of whom the first was Oxonian. Four lieutenants, of whom the last was Albert.

Then three letters, addressed to the boy at the public-houses where he had served, and signed, all three, A. W. Smith, Secretary. The first praised him for answering the Commander-in-Chief’s questions in a straightforward manner. The second praised his speeches, and told a long story about a meeting at which there had been a violent knocking at the door, and the members had covered their faces and cocked their pistols and drawn their swords to receive the enemy, and the enemy had proved to be some little boys, who knocked and ran away. The third was dated the third of April, this year, and was short.

Sir, You are requested to attend to night, as there is an extraordinary meeting to be holden in consequence of having received some communications of an important nature from Hanover. You must attend, and if your master will not give you leave, you must come in defiance of him.

Melbourne read it twice. Then he laid it down on the table, very carefully, as if it might go off.

“It’s a boy’s romance,” Russell said at last, in a low voice. “Look at it. A brace of pistols and a sword and a dagger, and nobody to ask more than two questions. The little boys who knock and run away. He has been reading penny numbers.”

“A boy’s romance with ball in the pistols,” said the Attorney-General.

“The hand is the same in all of them, I think,” Fox Maule said, holding the letters to the lamp. “The rules and the letters. And the hand is a boy’s.”

“Then the boy is the secretary,” said Campbell, “or the secretary writes like a boy. I do not see that it helps us to know which.”

Nobody answered him. Melbourne sat looking at the word on the table in front of him. He found that he was remembering things he had not thought of for years: the select committee of ‘thirty-five, and Hume reading out in the Commons the evidence about the Orange lodges in the army, and the talk that went round the clubs that winter of a duke who meant to be king, and of a niece who was very young, and of what might happen to a very young niece; and the Duke of Cumberland standing up in the Lords with his scarred face and his one good eye and swearing that he would shed the last drop of his blood for her. He remembered that nobody had believed the talk, and that nobody had quite stopped repeating it; and that it had followed the man for thirty years, like a smell, and none of it had ever been established; and that he himself had never known what to think of it, and had made a point of not finding out. He did not believe it now. He found that he did not disbelieve it either. He had been in public life for thirty-four years and had learnt that the two were not the same thing, and that a minister’s duty, very often, was to live between them without moving.

“Nobody is to speak of these,” he said.

Normanby looked up.

“Nobody,” Melbourne said. “Not tonight, and not tomorrow, and not until they are read in court, if they ever are. They are evidence, and evidence is not for the newspapers; Campbell will tell you so. And tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock, the Lords Justices of this kingdom are going to proclaim the King of Hanover King of England from the balcony at St James’s, and I will not have that word in the Chronicle at breakfast. Not in that letter. Not in that hand.” He pushed the papers back across the table. “Lock them up. Seal them. Let the Inspector swear to them. And let us see the boy.”

---

They brought him up from the station-house a little before eleven, between two constables, and stood him at the end of the table in the lamplight.

He was smaller than Melbourne had expected; five feet four, perhaps, and slight, with a light complexion and a face that would have been called pleasant behind a bar, in a brown coat that had been brushed. He held himself very straight, with his chin up. He did not look frightened. He looked at the faces round the table, one after another, with a kind of bright attention, as if he were being introduced; and when he came to Melbourne’s face he stopped, and Melbourne saw that he knew who it was, from the prints.

“Is the Queen hurt?” he said.

It was a perfectly ordinary voice. A London voice, a little thin, with a little Birmingham under it. Nobody answered him. Normanby looked down at his papers; the Attorney-General looked at the boy; and Melbourne, who had come into the room meaning to say nothing at all, and to let the Home Secretary and the lawyers do what lawyers did, heard himself answer.

“The Queen is dead.”

The boy looked at him. Then he stretched out both his arms, wide, towards the table, with the hands open, and held them there for a moment, and let them fall to his sides.

That was all. He did not speak. His face did not change, or not in any way that Melbourne could read; and Melbourne, who had spent his life reading faces across tables, at Cabinets and at dinners and in the House, and was generally thought to be good at it, sat and looked at that one and could not read it at all. It might have been sorrow. It might have been the gesture of a man who means to say, I am very sorry, and has not the words. It might have been an actor’s, made for the gallery, by a boy who had spent his short life behind a bar watching other people be looked at and had decided to be looked at himself. It might have been triumph. It might have been nothing; a thing a body does when it does not know what to do. Melbourne looked at it, and looked at it, and it told him nothing, and he understood, sitting there, that he would think about it for the rest of his life and that it would never tell him anything, and that nobody else in the room would ever know any more about it than he did.

The constables took the boy out. The Home Secretary signed something. The lawyers began to talk in low voices about the depositions, and the warrant, and Newgate in the morning, and whether the charge must be laid as high treason under the statute of Edward the Third or might be laid as murder; and Melbourne found that he was composing, in his head, without meaning to, the account of the boy that he would give to the Queen tomorrow afternoon, when he brought her the boxes. He had it nearly finished. An impudent, horrid little vermin of a man, ma’am, who stretched out his arms at me as if he were sorry, and I do not believe he knows himself whether he was. It was a good sentence. She would have liked it. She liked him to be indignant on her behalf; it made her laugh.

He stopped composing it. He got up, and took his hat, and said that he was wanted at the Council Office, which was true.

---

The Archbishop had come over the river from Lambeth in his carriage, at seventy-four, in his apron and his gaiters, with a parcel on his knee; and when the Lords Justices were assembled in the Council Chamber, at a little after half past eleven, round the long table under the candles, with Greville at the foot of it and the door shut, he laid the parcel on the table and unwrapped it with his old fingers and took out a packet, sealed with three seals in red wax bearing the arms of Hanover.

“This was deposited with me,” the Archbishop said, “under the Act, in the autumn of ‘thirty-seven, by His Majesty’s man of business in London. It came from Hanover. I was asked to keep it, and I have kept it, in my strong-box at Lambeth, and I have not opened it. I believe I am to give it to your Lordships.”

So he had deposited one. Melbourne, who had never asked, sat and looked at the seals and thought that the King of Hanover had sat down in his own palace, in the autumn of ‘thirty-seven, three months into his niece’s reign, with the Act of their Parliament in front of him, and considered what should be done in England if she died; and had done it, and sealed it, and sent it; and had said nothing to anybody about it for three years. There was nothing wrong in it. The Act had invited him to do exactly that. It had been passed for no other purpose, and any careful heir would have done the same, and the King of Hanover was nothing if not careful. But Melbourne found that he did not like the seals, and did not like himself for not liking them.

The Lord Chancellor broke them, in front of them all, and unfolded the paper, and read it aloud. It was short. It was in English, and in a clerk’s hand, with the signature at the foot in another, large and black and slanting: Ernest Augustus. It recited the Act; and it named, to act with the Lords Justices of the Act until the King’s arrival, one person, and one only.

Arthur, Duke of Wellington.

There was a silence round the table. Then Lansdowne said, very quietly, “Well. He has chosen the one man in England whom none of us can object to.”

They sent to Apsley House. It stood at the top of Constitution Hill, at the corner by the arch, looking down the road where it had happened; the messenger would ride past the place to get there. The Duke came at half past twelve, in a blue coat buttoned to the throat, upright, with the stiff careful walk of a man who has been very ill in the winter and has told his doctors that he will walk as he pleases. He was seventy-one. He had been, in February, by Greville’s account, a ruin. He did not look like a ruin now. He came in, and bowed to the Archbishop, and looked round the table at the seven of them, five of whom were Melbourne’s Cabinet, and then at Melbourne; and Melbourne got up, and gave him the paper, and he read it, and gave it back.

“I told your Lordships in ‘thirty-seven,” the Duke said, “that the King ought to choose his own Lords Justices, and not have them put upon him. I did not expect to be taken at my word.” He sat down, in the chair they had kept for him, at the Archbishop’s left. “I am very sorry, Melbourne. I am very sorry indeed. She was a brave little thing. Now what is to be done?”

---

What was to be done was the proclamation, and they did it with Greville’s forms of ‘thirty-seven in front of them, altering what had to be altered, which was not much.

Greville read out the 1837 form clause by clause, and they went through it, and nobody hurried. Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God to call to His mercy our late Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria, of blessed and glorious memory, by whose decease the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is solely and rightfully come to the High and Mighty Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, King of Hanover. There had been a clause in ‘thirty-seven saving the rights of any issue of the late King which might be born of his Queen, since nobody could then be perfectly sure that there would be none; and Denman, the Lord Chief Justice, asked in his precise way whether some such clause ought not to stand now.

“No,” Melbourne said. “There is no issue to save.”

Denman looked at him, and said, “No. I beg your pardon,” and they struck it out.

There was the matter of the name. The King had been christened Ernest Augustus, and signed so, and the paper on the table was signed so; and Greville, who had spent the evening among the precedents and was not going to be cheated of them, said that King George the First had been christened George Lewis and proclaimed as George, by the first of his names only, and that King George the Fourth had been christened George Augustus Frederick and proclaimed the same way. So they proclaimed him by the first. Our only lawful and rightful Liege Lord Ernest the First, by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.

“And America?” said Lansdowne, with his pen lifted. “She was Queen there too.”

They looked at the form. It did not mention America. It had not mentioned it in ‘thirty-seven either, any more than it had mentioned Hanover in ‘twenty or in ‘thirty; and Greville, without being asked, said that the American Charter forbade any minister or council of Great Britain to advise the Crown in the government of the Union, and that he had always supposed the Americans proclaimed their own.

“Then let them,” Melbourne said. “It is not ours to say. We proclaim him where we can.” And nobody at the table thought any more about it, then, because there was a great deal else; and the words went into the form as they had stood in 1837, with America left out of them, as it had been left out before.

At the end, the old ending. To whom we acknowledge all faith and constant obedience, with all hearty and humble affection; beseeching God, by whom kings and queens do reign, to bless the Royal Prince Ernest with long and happy years to reign over us.

Greville read it out. He read it very well, in his dry voice, and nobody looked at anybody when he came to the long and happy years; and the Lords Justices signed it, the Archbishop first, and then the Chancellor, and then the rest of them in order, Melbourne among them, and the Duke last, in a hand as steady as a clerk’s, and the councillors who had come signed after them; and it was ordered that the heralds should read it at St James’s at ten in the morning.

Then the letters. The Lords Justices wrote to the King, a letter of a page, in the forms; the Archbishop wrote; Melbourne wrote, as the King’s First Lord, three lines, and found it the hardest letter he had ever written in his life and could not afterwards have said a word of what was in it. Palmerston, who had come over from the Foreign Office, had a Queen’s Messenger waiting in the courtyard, booted, with his bag; and at a quarter to two in the morning, under the lamps in Whitehall, Melbourne watched the man go: down the steps, and into the chaise, and away towards the river and the Dover road, to post through the night to the coast for the morning packet, and cross to Calais, and post through Flanders to the Belgian railway, and take it as far as it ran, and post on from there, through Aachen and Cologne and across Westphalia, day and night, for three days or four, to tell a man who did not know it yet that he was King of England.

The chaise turned the corner. The sound of it went on for a little while after it had gone, and then stopped.

---

He did not go to bed. He went home to South Street at four, in the early light, with the birds loud in the Park, and sat in the library in the chair he had sat in at six o’clock the evening before, with Saint Chrysostom still on the table where he had left it, and did not read.

At ten he stood at a window of the Presence Chamber at St James’s, with the other Lords Justices and the Privy Council, and watched the heralds come out on the balcony above Friary Court in their tabards, and the trumpeters lift their trumpets, and Garter read the proclamation to a crowd that filled the court and the street beyond it and stood in perfect silence. Three years ago, in this place, at the end of the same words, the crowd had not cheered until Lansdowne gave them the signal from the window, and then they had cheered the girl at the window for a long time. Lansdowne gave the signal again. A few voices answered it, near the front, and stopped. The guns began in the Park, and a long way off, at the Tower, the other guns answered them; and the heralds went down to their carriages, to read it again at Charing Cross, and at Temple Bar, and in the City; and the crowd stood where it was, and did not go home, and did not cheer.

The Duke of Sussex, who had given her away in February, stood at the next window and wept without any concealment at all.

---

At noon the Lords met in the Painted Chamber, where they had sat since the fire, to swear allegiance to the King.

They came up to the table one by one, in no particular order, the bishops and the dukes and the new men and the old, and took the oath at the table, and kissed the book, and signed the roll, and went back to their places; and across the lobby, in the old House of Lords where the Commons had sat since the fire, the Speaker had sworn first and the Commons were swearing after him, and would be swearing till evening. It was very quiet. There were black coats everywhere, borrowed and old and hastily dyed, and the light came in from the high windows on to the red benches as it always did, as if nothing had happened.

Melbourne’s turn came. He went up to the table, and laid his hand on the book, and said it.

I do sincerely promise and swear, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Ernest. So help me God.

He kissed the book. He signed the roll. He went back to his place on the front bench, and sat down, and folded his arms; and it came to him, sitting there, while the next man went up, that he had just said the name for the first time with the title in front of it, and that it had been perfectly easy, as the forms were always perfectly easy, which was what they were for. The forms had held. All night they had held, every one of them, the Act and the paper and the proclamation and the oath, exactly as they had been made to hold, by men who had foreseen everything except what it would be like. The transition had been clean. There was not a lawyer in England who could have found a flaw in it.

He thought of the messenger, who would be in the middle of the Channel by now, with his bag on his knees and the sea going by, carrying the clean transition to Hanover.

He thought of the boy’s arms, held out wide across the table, and falling.

And he thought that the King did not know it yet. Nobody in Hanover knew it, and in America they would not know it for a month and more; and wherever the news had not yet come, she was still alive, and being prayed for, and written to. The messenger was carrying the end of that across Europe as fast as horses and steam could take him, and the steamers would carry it the other way, and by the end of the year there would be nowhere left in the world where she was alive. The next man came back from the table. Another went up. Melbourne sat with his arms folded, and his face, which the House had always found so amused, was not amused; and the light lay on the red benches; and the Lords went on swearing, one by one, until it was done.