Book Three: The Honest Silence Part Two: The Court of St James's Characters
Chapter Eight
Unopened
Henry Ashton. London, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Sunday, 7 July 1861.
His most consequential act was a silence. The rebel state petitioned him to recognise its adherents as his true subjects in America, and the petition was returned unopened. He said nothing about the American rebellion, in public, for the whole of the war, and the silence destroyed the rebel constitutional case more thoroughly than any argument the Union made.
Then we waited, all of us, for the whole of July.
I do not know how long it takes for a paper to reach a King. I know how long it takes for a paper to reach the Chief Engineer, which is a week if it is a requisition and a year if it is a drawing, and I know how long it takes for a paper to reach the Prime Minister, which depends on who is carrying it. I know now that a paper can be in the same city as Your Majesty for two months and never come nearer to you than the end of a corridor, and that there may be no way of telling from outside whether it is moving or standing still. That summer I did not know any of that. I thought, as Philip thought, that the paper would go in at one door and come out at another with an answer on it, and that the only question was what the answer would be.
Philip came to my lodging once a week, on Saturday evenings, and drank my landlady’s sherry and told me how it was going. He did not tell me how it was being done, and I did not ask. He told me that it was going well. He told me that the gentlemen near the Court who had undertaken it were men of the highest character, and very discreet, and that it had passed out of their hands into other hands, and then into others, and that each time it was a little nearer. He said that the delay was a good sign. He said that if the thing had been going to be refused it would have been refused at once, and that the longer it was kept the more seriously it must be being considered. I said that I hoped he was right, which was not true, and he knew that it was not true, and was kind enough not to say so. We talked about other things. We were careful with each other that summer in a way that we had never needed to be before, and it made us better company than we had ever been, as men are who are both trying hard.
The London papers had the story by the middle of July, or a version of it. They said that the American rebels had sent a petition to the King, and that it had been received, or had not been received, or was being considered by the Privy Council, or by the Cabinet, or by Lord Palmerston personally, or had been sent to Hanover; and the comic paper that had found the joke in June drew the planter in the straw hat again, standing outside a closed door with his cotton bale, and an old porter in livery saying to him through the keyhole that His Majesty was not at home to kingdoms. I cut that one out too. I have it with the others.
On the first Sunday in July I went to the Chapel Royal at St James’s, because a gentleman of the Household whom I had met at a dinner had sent me a ticket, and because the Minister said that I had better go, since it would be noticed if the Union’s Virginian went to church at the King’s chapel and noticed if he did not, and the first was better.
It is a small chapel, smaller than our parish church at home, with a painted ceiling of great age, all squares and gilding, and dark panelling, and the boys of the choir in scarlet and gold. The congregation sits facing across the aisle, and at the west end there is a gallery, and in the gallery is the royal pew. I sat on the south side, among the gentlemen who had been given tickets, and before the service began I looked up at the gallery, as I suppose everybody in the chapel did, and saw Your Majesty come in.
You came in on the Queen’s arm. I mention it because I have since read that Her Majesty was part of the arrangement by which things reached you, and I saw that day that she was part of the arrangement by which you reached things too, and that it was done so naturally that a man who had not been watching for it would not have seen it done at all. She was a small woman, dark, in grey silk, and she did not lead you; she walked beside you, a half-step ahead, and her hand was on your arm and not yours on hers, and you came to the front of the pew and stood, and she stood beside you, and that was all. Behind you came the Prince of Wales, who was eleven, in a short jacket, and two little girls, and a lady with them. The boy looked down into the chapel over the edge of the pew with great interest, until the lady touched his shoulder.
I watched Your Majesty through the whole of the service, and I am not ashamed of it, since I think that everybody in the chapel did the same and that you will have known it. You did not move. You stood for the psalms and knelt for the prayers and sat for the lesson, and between those three positions you were perfectly still, as you had been still in the long room at the levee, and it seemed to me that the stillness was the same, and was not the stillness of a man who has nothing to do but of a man who is doing something very hard. I thought you were listening. I do not know to what.
Then the prayers came to the prayer for the King, and the chaplain read it, as I suppose it is read in that chapel every Sunday of the year: for the King’s most excellent Majesty, by name, and for his dominions, and the chaplain named them, and America among them. And I knelt there on the south side of Your Majesty’s chapel, with my face in my hands, and thought, for the first time, of the chaplains in Charles Town.
I had not thought of it before, and I do not know why not, because it was obvious. The rebels prayed for Your Majesty. Of course they did. Their whole case was that they were loyal, and the first thing a loyal congregation does on a Sunday is to pray for the King; and every church in the five polities that had gone over, every church in King George County, my mother’s church where the company’s flag had been blessed, had prayed for Your Majesty that morning by name, as the chaplain in the Chapel Royal was praying for you, and as the chaplains in the camps round the capital were praying for you, and very likely in the same words. And on the same Sunday the men in those congregations and the men in the camps were preparing to kill each other, and both of them were asking God to keep you, and both of them meant it.
I said the response. I meant it too. I did not know, kneeling there, what Your Majesty made of being prayed for by both sides of a war in the same words on the same morning, and I do not know now, and I do not suppose that anybody does. You knelt in the gallery with the Queen beside you and the boy behind you looking at the ceiling, and you did not move, and when the prayer was finished you rose with the congregation and stood for the hymn, and I could not see your face.
The review was in the last week of July, in Hyde Park, on a Saturday, and half of London went to see it.
I walked up from the Strand through St James’s Park and the Green Park, and came out at the top of Constitution Hill, where there is a stone set in the grass by the roadside, with a railing round it, to mark the place where Queen Victoria was shot in 1840, twenty-one years before; and there was a little crowd round the railing even on that day, reading the inscription, and an old woman selling violets. I stopped and read it too. I did not know then very much about what had happened on that spot, except that it had brought Your Majesty’s father to the throne and so, in the end, Your Majesty; I have read more since. I set it down only because I stood there that morning on my way to see you, and it was the first time I understood that the Crown I had sworn to had come to you by way of a pistol shot on a summer evening, and that nobody had planned any of it.
The troops were drawn up in the Park along the north side of the Ride: the Foot Guards in their bearskins, and the Household Cavalry with the sun on their breastplates, and a battery of artillery, and some regiments of the line, and volunteers in grey and green and every colour you could think of, who had been raised a year or two before in a great hurry because of a fright about the French. There were thousands of people behind the ropes. I found a place on a bench near the saluting point, standing on it, among a great many other men standing on benches, and waited.
You came on horseback. I had not expected that, and I am not sure why not. You rode a tall bay horse, very quiet, and an equerry rode at your near side, a little behind, with a leading rein that ran from his hand to your horse’s bridle, so lightly that I could not see it until the horse turned and the sun caught it. It was part of the ceremony. Nobody looked at it. The equerry rode as though he were simply riding beside you, and you rode as though you were simply riding, very straight, in a red coat and a plumed hat, with your face turned a little towards the troops, and the bands played, and the whole Park cheered, and the cheering went along the lines in front of you like a wave going along a beach.
You took the salute at the saluting point, and the regiments marched past, and I watched you through all of it. When they had passed, the colonel of the Guards rode up to you and saluted and said something, and you answered him, and the men round me on the benches strained to hear what was said, and the man next to me, who had a better place, told us. He said that the King had thanked the colonel and said that the Guards had marched very well. I asked him, I do not know why, whether the King had said “my Guards.” He looked at me as though I were mad. Then he thought about it, and said, “No. No, he didn’t. He said the Guards.” And he went back to watching.
I have no idea what that means, Sir. I am not sure that it means anything. I set it down because I noticed it, and because it seemed to me, standing on my bench in Hyde Park, that a King who would not say “my Guards” to the colonel of his own Foot Guards was a King who had taken a great deal of trouble not to say a great many things, and that it would be very hard for anybody, in any capital, to make him say anything he did not mean to.
The paper came back on the evening of Monday the twelfth of August.
Philip came up the stairs slowly, for the first time since I had known him, and stood in my door with his hat in one hand and in the other a packet, about the size of a quarto volume, wrapped in brown paper and tied with red tape, which had been opened and tied again. He did not say anything. He came in and put the packet on my table under the lamp, and untied the tape, and folded back the brown paper, and showed me what was inside.
It was the petition. I knew it at once, though I had never seen it; it was in a cover of heavy cream-coloured paper, folded and sealed, and the seals were the seals of the American States, three of them, in red wax, with the arms they had taken, and every one of them was whole. It had not been opened. I want to be quite exact about this, because I have heard it said since that it was opened and read and then sealed again, and that the refusal was a pretence. It was not opened. I looked at those seals under the lamp for a long time, and so did Philip, and there was not a crack in any of them, and the wax had the dust on it of having lain somewhere for some weeks.
On top of it, loose, there was a note.
It was a half-sheet of plain white paper, the kind that may be bought at any stationer’s in London, folded once. There was no crest on it and no address and no date. It was written in a clerk’s hand, a good round hand that might have been any clerk’s in any office in the city, in black ink, and it said, in one line:
No such document can be received.
That was all. There was no signature. There was no form of address at the top, no “Sir” and no “Gentlemen,” nothing that said to whom it was written or by whom, nothing that acknowledged that there was anybody at the other end of it to be written to. It did not say that the document had been refused. It did not say that it had been read, or considered, or laid before anybody. It did not say why. It did not say that there were no American States, or that the men who had sent it were rebels, or that they were not. It said that no such document could be received, as one might say that the river could not be crossed at that place, and it said nothing else whatever.
Philip said, “It came back the way it went. Through the same hands. They gave it to me at noon. They did not know any more than this. They said that it was given to them so, as it is now, by the gentleman they had given it to, and that he said he had it so from the gentleman he had given it to, and that none of them knew where it had been in between.” He sat down in my chair. “None of them knows who did it, Harry. None of them knows whether he saw it. None of them knows whether anybody saw it.”
I asked him what he would do.
He said that he would send it home. He said that there would be another, he supposed; that the assembly at Charles Town would not take one note from a clerk for an answer; that they would try again, by other hands, and keep trying. And then he looked at the note on the table under the lamp, and he said, in a different voice, “Do you remember what I said to you at Richmond? That if the King said nothing, his saying nothing would tell us something?”
I said that I remembered.
He said, “I thought it would tell us that he was with us and could not say so.” He picked up the note and read it again, the one line, as though there might be something on the back of it, and there was not. “This does not tell us anything. That is what it tells us.”
I have thought about that note for five years, Sir, and I want to tell Your Majesty plainly what I have thought, and also what I have not allowed myself to think, because I have learned that the second is as important as the first.
I do not know who wrote it. I do not know who decided that it should be written. I have heard it said, in London that summer and in New Westminster afterwards and in a great many places since, that it was Your Majesty’s own decision; and that it was your British ministers’ decision, made without you, on Lord Palmerston’s instructions; and that it was the decision of a secretary near your person, who saw what the paper was and judged that it should never reach you, and sent it back on his own judgement, and has never told anybody. I have heard each of those said with complete confidence by men who were in no position to know. I was in a position to see the seals, and the seals tell me only that nobody opened it. They do not tell me who did not. Nothing tells me that. I have looked, and I have come to believe that the papers that would settle it, if there ever were any, are not to be found, and I have stopped looking. I am not going to guess. I think a man who was in the room when the paper came back, and saw the note, ought to be the last man to guess, and I think that this is the most useful thing I can do for Your Majesty in this whole account: to tell you that I saw it, and that I do not know, and that I will not pretend to.
What I can tell you is what the note did, because I watched it do it, that summer and afterwards.
It did not refuse them. I did not understand that at once. If the paper had come back with a letter saying that the King could not recognise the American States, or that the King considered them rebels, or that the King commanded them to return to their obedience, it would have been an answer; and an answer is addressed to somebody, and a body that can be addressed is a party, and a party can be argued with, and treated with, and in the end, perhaps, recognised. The note did not address anybody. It did not admit that there was anybody to address. It treated the paper as a thing that had arrived at a door where things of its kind were not taken in, and sent it back as a parcel is sent back, unopened, to the place it came from. I understood then what the Minister had meant in the carriage after the levee, when he said “Remarkable,” and what he had meant in June when he said that the most useful thing in the world would be for nothing to happen, very loudly, for a long time. Nothing had happened. It had happened as loudly as anything I have ever seen, though it made no sound at all.
I have one more thing to set down about it, and then I will leave it. When I was a cadet at the Point, the professor who taught us the Charter used to begin his course with the year 1775, and with a petition: the one the colonies sent to King George, asking for redress, which the King received and did not answer. He said that the Union began there, with a paper a King had taken into his hands and then said nothing about, and that the silence had been the making of everything that came after. I thought of that, on the evening of the twelfth of August, with Philip in my chair and the paper on my table, and it seemed to me that the wheel had come round to the same place from the other side. In 1775 a King had received a petition from America and kept silent. In 1861 a King did not receive one, and kept silent. I do not know which of the two silences was the greater. I know that the first one made the country I serve, and that I watched the second one begin to save it.
Philip tied up the packet again, very carefully, with the red tape, and put on his hat. At my door he stopped, as he always did, and said, “Will you tell your Minister?” I said that I supposed I must. He said, “Tell him it came back unopened. He will like that,” and went down the stairs.
I told the Minister in the morning. He listened, as he always listened, and when I had finished he said nothing at all for a very long time; and then he rang for his secretary and said that he would be dining at home that evening, and that he would like the claret that the baronet had left in the cellar, the good one, and that the secretary was to tell nobody why.