Not Without Remedy

The House had divided at nine, a hundred and seventy-eight to eighty-nine, against Mr Fox’s motion for the papers, and Lord North had walked home to Downing Street through the fog with his hat pulled down, feeling as he generally felt after a good division, which was tired.

He did not enjoy winning. People supposed he did, because he did it so often and so pleasantly, and he let them suppose it. What he enjoyed was the half-hour afterwards, when the House had emptied and the candles were guttering and he could sit at his own table with his own supper and nobody wanting anything of him; and he had got as far as the soup, and the second glass, and the beginning of a very agreeable letter from one of his daughters about a dancing master, when the servant came up to say that Lord Dartmouth was below and begged to see him.

It was a quarter to twelve. Dartmouth never came anywhere at a quarter to twelve. North put down his spoon.

“Show him up,” he said, “and bring another glass,” and then, when the man had gone, he sat for a moment with his hands flat on the cloth on either side of the plate and looked at them, because he had been in office for eight years and knew what a quarter to twelve was.

---

Dartmouth came in with his hat still in his hand and a letter in the other, and the fog in the folds of his coat, and he did not sit down.

“From Quebec,” he said. “General Carleton. It came in an hour ago.”

North held out his hand for it. Dartmouth gave it to him, and then, because North was short-sighted and the candles were low, took a candle off the sideboard and held it for him, as he had held candles for him when they were boys and North was reading in bed against orders. North read it with his nose a few inches from the page.

It was not long. General Carleton had the honour to inform his lordship that he had learnt from deserters, and had some reason to believe, that the army under General Burgoyne had been obliged to lay down its arms to the rebels near Saratoga, and that General Burgoyne and the whole of his force were prisoners. He had no confirmation. He had thought it his duty to send what he had.

North read it twice. Then he put it face down on the tablecloth beside the soup, and took off his spectacles, and rubbed his eyes.

“Deserters,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Deserters will say anything. It is how one knows they are deserters.” He put his spectacles back on. “Sit down, brother. You look like the ghost in the play.”

Dartmouth sat. North poured him the second glass, which he did not drink, and they sat on either side of the table with the letter between them, and North found that he was waiting, quite calmly, for the thing to become real. It did not. It sat there on the cloth, face down, a sheet of paper from Quebec, and the soup went on steaming, and the dancing master was still on the table under the bread.

“It was my plan,” Dartmouth said.

“It was Burgoyne’s plan. The King made it better, and you sent it, and the Cabinet agreed to it, and I sat in the Cabinet and agreed to it, and if it is anybody’s it is everybody’s, which is to say that it is mine, because I am the one they will ask.” North found that his voice was perfectly steady, which interested him. “Who else knows?”

“The messenger. My under-secretaries. It will be at the levee by tomorrow, whatever we do.”

“Then it will be in the House by four, and I shall be asked about it by Colonel Barré, who will have the air of a man who has been waiting two years to be right.” North looked at the letter. “I shall tell him the truth, I think. It saves a great deal of trouble later. I shall tell him we have unhappy intelligence that is not confirmed.” He paused. “And you will have the Lords, and Lord Chatham, God help you.”

Dartmouth did not smile. North had not really expected him to. He reached across the table and put his hand for a moment on his stepbrother’s sleeve, which was damp.

“Go home, William,” he said. “Say your prayers. Say one for Burgoyne and one for me. I shall be asleep before you reach the Park, I promise you. I can sleep through anything. It is my one talent.”

He was not, though. He sat up after Dartmouth had gone, with the letter and the cold soup, until the candles went out, and then for some time in the dark.

---

At the levee in the morning the King laughed.

The King told the officers that deserters’ tales were cheap, and laughed heartily. They laughed with him. North crossed the room as fast as he could without seeming to hurry and spoke in the low voice reserved for such occasions. His Majesty was wanted in the closet. He waited beside the King’s elbow.

The King looked at him, and stopped laughing, and went into the closet. There was no business. They stood there for a moment, the two of them, in the small room with the fire, and North saw the King’s face, which he had known for thirty years, and saw what the laugh had been for.

“It is true,” the King said.

“I think it very likely, sir.”

“Seven thousand men.” The King said it as if he were reading it from a return. “The best regiments in Canada. The Germans. The artillery.” He stopped. “I wrote the remarks on his plan myself. I gave him the command myself. I told Lord Dartmouth to employ the Indians.”

“Your Majesty did what everybody advised.”

“Everybody advised me to receive a petition, too.” The King looked at the fire. “I shall not be laughed at by Mr Fox. I shall not have it said in the House that the King is beaten in America. Nothing is beaten. The rebels have taken an army, which is a very great misfortune, and it is not the end of anything. You will say so in the House this afternoon.”

“I shall say what I can, sir.”

“You will say that,” said the King, and went back out to the levee, and talked to a bishop about the weather for ten minutes with perfect composure, and North watched him do it and thought, not for the first time, that there was no actor at Drury Lane who could have done it better, and none who would have been paid less for it.

---

The House was full by four.

He had known it would be. He had come down Whitehall in his chair through a crowd that had heard something, nobody knew what, and wanted to hear it again; and the gallery was full, and the bar was full, and the benches were full, and when he came in and sat down in his place on the Treasury bench there was the particular silence of a House that knows a thing and is waiting to be told it.

They were on the army estimates. That was the joke of it, if anybody wanted a joke. The business of the day was money for the army, and it went forward for an hour in the ordinary way, figures and votes and a member for somewhere complaining about the price of forage, until Colonel Barré stood up.

Barré was a big, scarred, half-blind Irishman who had been with Wolfe at Quebec and had a ball in his face to show for it, and he had opposed the war from the beginning in a voice that could be heard in the lobby, and he used it now. He called upon the noble lord, he said, to declare upon his honour what was become of General Burgoyne and his brave troops.

North stood up.

He told the House that the government had received an express from Quebec, with a piece of very unhappy intelligence, which was not authenticated and which he could not therefore declare officially; that if it proved true it was a great misfortune; and that he did not think it right to say more until he knew more. He said it plainly and sat down. He had decided in the night that plainness was all he had.

Barré was on his feet before he was seated. The plan of the campaign, Barré said, had been unworthy of a British minister, and rather too absurd for an Indian chief. To send an army through a wilderness of lakes and forests, three hundred miles from its supplies, to meet another army that had gone the other way by sea, and to call that a junction: he had foretold the event, he said. He had foretold it in this House. Members would remember that he had foretold it.

Members remembered. Barré had foretold most things, and some of them had happened.

Then Mr Fox, who was twenty-eight and had been up all night at Brooks’s and looked, as he always looked, as if he had dressed in the dark and enjoyed it, rose and moved for General Burgoyne’s instructions to be laid before the House, so that the House could see who had sent him; and in the course of it he turned, with a fine sweep of his arm, to the bench below the gangway where Lord George Germain sat without office, and said that he hoped the noble lord who had been urging a harsher war on the ministry for two years was content with the war he had got.

Germain rose. He was not a minister. He did not have to rise. He rose anyway, tall and heavy and perfectly cool, and said that he was content with nothing; that the misfortune, if it was one, was the fruit of half-measures, of a war conducted by ministers who would not call rebellion by its name; and that if the House wished to know who had sent General Burgoyne to Albany with his hands tied, it might ask the noble lord on the Treasury bench, and the noble lord’s brother in the other House.

North stood up again. He had not meant to. He found that he was on his feet.

He said that he would not have the noble lord his brother blamed for a plan the whole Cabinet had approved, and that he claimed his own share of it, and more than his share, because it was his business to answer for the King’s servants in this House and he would answer for them. And then, because he was tired, and because the candles were lit and the House was looking at him, and because it was true, he said that if the laying down of his place and his honours would bring the country one day nearer to peace he would gladly lay them all down that night. He had never wanted the place. He had been dragged to it against his will, and the House knew it, and he would leave it tomorrow if anybody could show him how leaving it would mend anything.

There was a silence. Then somebody on the opposition benches laughed, not unkindly, and somebody else said Hear him, and the House went back to the army estimates and voted them, and Mr Fox’s motion for the instructions was negatived, and at a little after eleven North walked home through the fog again, and did not eat any supper at all.

---

The King’s letter was on his table in the morning.

The letter praised his manly, firm and dignified conduct. Saratoga was very serious, but not without remedy. Levies, Germans, a new campaign followed in the King’s fast hand. North lingered over not without remedy. He could hear the voice that would say it to him if he went to the closet today.

He put it in the drawer with the other one, the one from September.

That one he did not read often. He was in debt, as men of his family generally were, and had let something fall to the King in a low moment; and the King had written from Kew, unasked, to say that if twelve or twenty thousand pounds were needed no other person should be concerned in freeing him. I love you as well as a man of worth as I esteem you as a minister. The money had been paid. He had not asked, and had not refused, either; he had a family. So he was a minister whose debts the King had paid, and he was going to ask the King to let him go.

---

He asked on the Friday, the fifth, in the closet, after the levee.

He did it badly. He had meant to do it well, and had written it out, and the paper was in his pocket; but when he was in the room with the King, and the King was standing with his weight back on his heels in the way he had, waiting to be argued with, North found that he could not remember a word of it, and said instead, rather fast, that he was not equal to his situation and never had been, that he had told His Majesty so a dozen times, that the misfortune in America had come on his watch and the House knew it, that a man less pledged than himself might do more with the House and with the Americans both, and that he humbly begged His Majesty to find somebody else.

The King heard him to the end without interrupting. Then he said, quite gently, “No.”

“Sir…”

“No, my lord. I have heard it before. I heard it in seventy-three and in seventy-five, and I have heard it twice this year, and I shall very likely hear it again before the spring, and the answer will be the same.” The King looked at him with his pale, steady eyes. “You are tired. Of course you are tired. You have carried the House for eight years and you will carry it for eight more, because there is nobody else who can, and you know it, and so does Mr Fox. If you went, whom should I send for? The Duke of Richmond? Lord Rockingham, to give the Americans whatever they ask and call it peace? Lord Chatham, who would have me make war on France and peace with the rebels in the same week, and would not ask my leave for either?” He shook his head. “I will not be forced into the hands of men who would take my Crown off my head to put it on the table at Philadelphia. And I do not believe you would leave me to them. I know you better than that. You may despond. You do not desert.”

North said nothing. The King had found, as he always found, the one place in him where the argument had no answer, which was not his judgement but his affection; and had put his hand on it, quite kindly, and leaned.

“Now,” said the King, in a different voice. “You will want to offer them something. Lord Dartmouth has spoken to me. I know you have been thinking of it.”

“I have, sir.”

“Then think of it over the recess, and bring it to me when the House meets. I do not forbid it. They may have what we can give: their charters, the taxes, every Act since the peace if you like, and pardons, and commissioners to treat with them. But you will not bind yourself to anything before you have shown it to me. And there is one thing they may not have.” He did not say what it was. He did not need to. North had heard him say it in this room so often that he could have said it for him. Two Parliaments under one Crown is two Crowns.

“No, sir,” said North.

“Good,” said the King. “Go to Bushy for Christmas. You will be better at Bushy.”

---

The House adjourned on the tenth until the twentieth of January.

Lord Beauchamp moved it, on the ground that time ought to be given for the men in administration to prepare, which was true and was received as an insult, because it was. Mr Townshend called six weeks’ adjournment at such a moment a very improper and hazardous measure. Sir George Savile said he would be ashamed to face his constituents. Mr Fox and Mr Burke told for the noes and lost, and North sat on the Treasury bench through all of it with his eyes closed, and was accused, by a member for one of the northern counties, of being asleep at the moment his country was being ruined.

He opened his eyes.

“I wish to God I were,” he said, and the House laughed, both sides of it, for the first time in a week; and he closed his eyes again and let it go on.

Dartmouth told him the next evening what Lord Chatham had said in the Lords. The old man had come down on his crutches, as he always came now, wrapped in flannel to the knees, and had stood up against the adjournment and said that ten thousand brave men had fallen victims to ignorance and rashness, and that it did not become the great hereditary council of the nation to retire to its country seats for six weeks in quest of joy and merriment while the real state of public affairs called for grief, mourning and lamentation. The Lords had adjourned anyway.

“He is right, you know,” North said.

“He is usually right,” said Dartmouth. “It is what makes him impossible.”

---

He went down to Bushy on the twentieth, and was better there, as the King had said he would be.

At Bushy the children were all home. His eldest, twenty, argued the opposition case at dinner. North agreed and told him to lower his voice before the servants. A daughter showed him her dancing steps. On Christmas Day the two youngest fell asleep beside the fire, one on each side of the dog. He stayed to watch them for nearly an hour.

Then he went into the library and shut the door and took out his paper, and thought about it.

He wrote it out in the evenings, between Christmas and the New Year, in his own hand, with the fire and one candle and his spectacles on his nose. He did not show it to anybody. It was a list, at first, and then it was the heads of two bills, and he wrote it as he wrote everything, quickly and well, and was surprised by how well, and did not trust it for that reason.

No revenue tax on the colonies. The Acts since 1763 could be suspended or repealed; commissioners could recognise the Congress, grant pardons, restore charters and offer seats in the Commons. He wrote each power on a separate line and left space below.

He sat and looked at the list for a long time. It was a good list. Three years ago it would have ended the quarrel before it began. A year ago it might have ended the war. Now there was an army taken in the woods, and an American at Paris, and a Congress that had said in words of one syllable what it wanted, and this was not it.

He wrote, at the bottom of the list, the thing they wanted. An American Parliament, under the Crown. He looked at it for a while in the candlelight. It was only five words. It would have ended the war, very probably, and the King would sooner lose his Crown than sign it, and had said so, in so many words, in the closet, more than once.

He drew his pen through it carefully, once, so that it could still be read. He supposed somebody would find the paper one day, and he wanted them to know that he had thought of it, and had been the kind of man who crossed it out.

Then he put the paper in his pocket, and blew out the candle, and went back to the drawing room, where the fire had burned down and the dog had got up on to the sofa, which was forbidden, and the two youngest were still asleep; and he sat down beside them in the half-dark and fell asleep himself, at once, as he always could, like a man who has been given leave.