Rightly Governing

The note was on the top of the box when he opened it at five, in Dartmouth’s hand, written at Whitehall at a quarter past midnight.

The New York packet was in at Falmouth. She had brought General Howe’s dispatches of the seventh and eighth of July from Staten Island, where the army had landed without opposition on the second, and the General’s brother had not yet arrived with the commission, and the General had the honour to be, and so on. And with the dispatches the General had sent a printed paper from Philadelphia, which Lord Dartmouth begged leave to bring to Kew himself, at whatever hour His Majesty pleased.

The King read the note twice, which was once more than it needed, and wrote his answer on the back of a card.

Kew. Aug. 10. 1776. 12 m. past 5 a.m. Lord Dartmouth may come at ten, and is to bring the paper, and is not to tell me what is in it. G.R.

Then he did the rest of the box, because it was there.

The family spent its summers at Kew now, and he liked it better than anywhere. The house was small and the garden was large, and from the window of the room where he worked he could see the lawn going down to the river, and the river, and the towpath on the far side with the horses on it, and nobody from the town. The two elder boys were across the lawn in the Dutch house with their governors, at their Latin by six, he hoped. The Queen was asleep. The baby, who was Mary and three months old and the eleventh of them, was asleep in the nursery with her nurse, and he had looked in on her on the way down, as he did every morning, and she had looked back at him with the grave suspicion of the very young, and he had found that he was smiling, and gone on down to the boxes.

He did not think about the paper until a quarter to ten. He had found long ago that a thing he was waiting for was no nearer for being thought about, and that the habit of not thinking about it was one of the few in which a King had the advantage of other men, since there was always something else to read.

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Dartmouth came at ten exactly, in a plain dark coat, looking as though he had not slept, which he very likely had not. He had the General’s dispatches in a case under his arm and a single printed sheet in his hand, folded once.

“I am not to tell you what is in it, sir,” he said.

“No.”

“May I tell you what is not?”

The King considered this. It was the kind of question Dartmouth asked, and one reason he valued him.

“You may tell me one thing that is not in it,” he said.

“It is not a declaration of independence, sir.” Dartmouth paused. “The General writes that a motion for independence was put in the Congress on the same day, and lost. By a single colony.”

The King held out his hand for the paper, and Dartmouth gave it to him, and he said that his lordship would find the walk by the river very pleasant at this hour, and that he would send when he was done; and Dartmouth bowed and went out into the garden, and the King sat down at the table by the window and unfolded the sheet.

It was printed close, in two columns, on bad paper, by a printer in Philadelphia called Dunlap. At the head of it it said In Congress, July 4, 1776. At the foot of it, in larger type, it said John Hancock, President. And it was addressed, he saw before he had read a line of it, to him.

---

He read it the way he read everything that mattered, slowly, with his lips moving a very little, so that nothing in it would surprise him later.

It began like a sermon, with the course of human events and a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, and declared that its authors meant not to dissolve the bands which connected them to another people but to demand that the bands be made just. He thought that was well said, and wondered who had said it. It held certain truths to be self-evident, among them that all men were created equal; and he thought of the men who had subscribed it, a good part of whom, he understood, owned other men, and wondered whether that was self-evident to them too, and read on. And then, at the end of the first column, it said: The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations.

He stopped there for a moment. Nobody had ever written that about him. A great many people had written a great many things about his ministers, and about Lord Bute, and about his mother, and about what was said to go on at Carlton House in the years before he was King; and he had read most of them, because he read everything. But he had never seen his own office put at the head of a sentence like that, by men who signed their names to it. The present King of Great Britain. He found that he minded the present most of all. It was a word for a man who would one day be replaced.

Then it began on the charges, and he took them one at a time, as they came, and answered each.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. The Board of Trade read every colonial act and advised him which to refuse. He followed its advice, as his grandfather had. Four years before, Virginia tried a duty on imported negroes. Bristol and Liverpool petitioned against it; he disallowed it. He searched the column for that charge. They had left it out.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly. His governors had, when the Houses defied instructions. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant. Hillsborough’s order about Cambridge. He had thought it foolish. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone. In England he had secured the judges’ commissions against a King’s death. Both Houses thanked him. The Board of Trade had explained why colonial judges must be different. He remembered the explanation. He could not remember why he had accepted it.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies. To guard their own frontier, after a war fought for them, against the French and the Indians, at the cost of the people of England. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. General Gage had been made Governor of the Massachusetts Bay because nobody else could be got to govern it. That was true.

And then the charge he had been waiting for, though he had not known it until he reached it.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

He put the paper down on the table and looked at the river for some time.

The others were his Lords and Commons. The foreign jurisdiction was Parliament’s. They wanted him to protect them from his own Parliament, setting aside an Act because some of his subjects disliked it. He read the charge once more.

No sovereign had withheld assent since Queen Anne. He would not be the next. A King governing by his own judgement against Parliament might be reminded where the last attempt had ended. They knew that, and addressed their complaint to him anyway.

He picked the paper up again.

For imposing Taxes upon us without our Consent, and asserting a power to bind us in all cases whatsoever, though in that Parliament we have no voice. The Declaratory Act stated the constitution. He had told Rockingham so. For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province. Seventy thousand Frenchmen had kept their religion and laws under the Quebec Act. These petitioners wanted their own affairs left alone and condemned him for leaving the Canadians theirs. For taking away, by the late Acts against our chief port and the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, our Charters. He had wanted those Acts. He would assent to them again.

Then the war.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. Charlestown burned in battle. Falmouth had been ill-judged; the admiral was called home. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries. He had made the treaties with Brunswick, Hesse and Hanau himself, and sent Hanoverians to Gibraltar and Minorca to release those garrisons for America. They knew how sovereigns found troops. They had chosen the ugliest name.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us. He had not. Dunmore had threatened something of the kind in a temper, but with no rebellion proclaimed he had done nothing, and none would be proclaimed. The negroes had come to the King’s lines anyway, by the hundred, and the officers had set them to dig. He had excited nothing. They had come without him.

And has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.

He thought of the Mohawk at the levee in April, standing very straight in his blanket among the bishops and the colonels, with the silver gorget at his throat that marked him the King’s friend, who had said that the Six Nations were steady and had long memories. He remembered that he had liked him. He remembered that he had said: good, that is what one wants. He read the charge again and found that he could not see what was wrong with it, except the adjective, and went on.

And then he came to the last of the charges, and read it, and sat still.

And he wages this war upon us even while professing to hear our petitions, turning his armies against a people he still owns for his subjects.

He read it a second time, and then a third.

He had received the petition and sent the army. He had spoken the conciliatory words himself, in the Lords, believing one sentence of them. Now Howe was on Staten Island, with his brother following to hear complaints and grant pardons. The paper from Philadelphia put those orders together. It was true. It was not insolent, or ill-informed; it was simply true, in every particular. He had not expected to be understood so well by people who did not like him.

---

The rest of it was short.

Nor have we forgotten our British brethren. He noticed that they called the people of Britain their brethren, and the Parliament those brethren had elected a jurisdiction foreign to their constitution, and thought that the electors would be interested to learn the distinction. Then the paper turned round, as Dartmouth had warned him it would, and asked for nothing that he had expected it to ask for.

We ask not to be let go, but to be let alone.

They were subjects still. They said so. They would be the subjects of no Parliament in which they were not represented; and they remained, in all their allegiance, the subjects of the King, in whom, rightly governing, our liberties are safe. He read rightly governing twice. It was the condition. It was put very gracefully, in a subordinate clause, the way a lawyer puts the thing he means most; and it meant that their allegiance was his for as long as they judged that he governed rightly, and that they would be the judges.

And then the declaration itself. That these colonies were free and self-governing peoples, under the Crown and no otherwise dependent. That they were entitled to order their own affairs by their own Assemblies, and by an American Parliament of their own.

Two Parliaments, one King. England and Scotland had tried that after James came from Edinburgh. One King lost his head, another his throne; the Union made one Parliament at last. He had gloried in the name of Britain in his first speech. He would not divide its authority again, across an ocean, at the request of men who called him a tyrant.

At the bottom of the sheet, above Mr Hancock’s name and the secretary’s, it was dated, as he had not noticed until now, in the sixteenth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Third.

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He sent for Dartmouth at half past twelve, and Dartmouth came in from the garden with grass on his shoes and stood by the door.

“Well, my lord,” the King said. “They have written me a very long letter to say that they would like me to be their King, and not Parliament’s.”

Dartmouth said nothing, which was the right thing.

“I will not be,” the King said. “You may tell the Cabinet so, if anybody there is in any doubt, though I should be surprised. I am King of Great Britain. There is one Parliament in my dominions and there is going to go on being one.”

“Lord Howe’s commission allows him to hear their grievances, sir. When he arrives.”

“Then he may hear these. They are very fully set out.” The King folded the paper along its crease. “He has no power to give them a Parliament of their own, and I would not give it him if he asked for it. They know that. They wrote this knowing it.” He paused. “Was it read in public?”

“At Philadelphia on the eighth of July, sir, the General hears. In the State House yard. And it will have been sent to every colony.”

“And cheered?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“For what?”

Dartmouth looked at him, and then down at his own shoes, and said honestly that he could not say.

“No,” said the King. “Nor could they, I expect.” He held the paper a moment longer. “You will want to know what answer is to be made.”

“If there is to be one, sir.”

“There is none. General Howe has his orders and Lord Howe has his commission, and between them they have all the answer I have to give.” He did not hold out the paper. Dartmouth, who had come for it, did not ask for it. “The Gazette may print what the General writes. It need not print this. The newspapers will do that by Friday without any help from us.”

When Dartmouth had gone he sat a while longer at the window. Then he went in to dinner at four, and dined with the Queen and the elder children as he always did, and talked about the hay, which was late, and the Prince of Wales’s Latin, which was later; and nobody at the table mentioned America, because nobody ever did unless he did first.

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The proclamation had come down to Kew with his papers in May, as it went up to town with them in the autumn. It lived in whichever table he was writing at, in the left-hand drawer, under a bundle of letters from his sisters, and nobody had seen it since the August before but himself.

He unlocked the drawer that night at eleven and took it out and unfolded it under the candle.

Whereas many of our subjects in divers parts of our colonies and plantations in North America, misled by dangerous and ill-designing men…

He laid the proclamation open in the drawer, its space for date and signature empty. The Philadelphia sheet went on top, face down, print against ink. These were his charges against them, which nobody had heard but Dartmouth, and those were theirs against him. They were both true, he thought. That was what nobody understood. A man could hold both in a drawer under his sisters’ letters, and lock it, and put the key on his watch chain, and go up to bed.

He pinched out the candle with his fingers and went up through the dark house, past the nursery, where Mary was asleep, and into his own bed, where the Queen was.

He slept at once, as he always did. He was awake at half past four, which he never was, and lay in the dark until five with the sentence in his head that he had read three times, the one about the people he still owned for his subjects; and then it was five, and he got up, and read the boxes.