At This Hour

He had known since the night before that it was coming, and he told the House so in four sentences, and sat down; and then Mr Burke stood up and the roof came in.

“Oh, Sir,” said Mr Burke, to the Speaker, with both arms in the air, “how have we been deceived! How have we slept night after night, and dreamt of the faith of Spain!”

The Spanish ambassador had called on Weymouth that morning with a formal paper: mediation exhausted, insults to the flag, the King obliged to use the means God had given him. Then he went to pack. They had expected it since April. North sat with his hat over his eyes while Burke demanded an impeachment. He had heard Burke on the faith of Spain, France and ministers. Waiting was the only way through.

Burke pointed along the Treasury bench. North did not need to look up to know at whom.

The House went into one of its confusions, the kind in which forty men speak at once and the Speaker stands up and is not attended to, and North lay back against the bench and looked at the candles through his eyelashes and waited for it to be Barré’s turn, which it was.

“The noble lord,” said Colonel Barré, when he could be heard, “had a broad smile on his countenance. I think I never saw him look more cheerful.”

They laughed at that, on both sides, as they always laughed at Barré, because he had one eye and a terrible face and the best timing in the House. North got up to answer him. He said, as near as he could afterwards remember, that a grave or melancholy brow was not the look best suited to times of danger; that Englishmen were to feel like Englishmen, and not to be easily sunk down; and that if the honourable gentleman would forgive him, he did not intend to sink. Then he sat down again, and the House laughed again, at him this time and not with him, and went on to something else.

He had been smiling. He knew that he had. He had a face that did it; it was too large for its features and too short-sighted for its eyes, and when he was tired it settled into an expression of mild amusement that he had never been able to do anything about, and that had been taken, over the years, for indolence, and cunning, and contempt, and once, by a lady at Bath, for an offer of marriage.

He had a letter in his breast pocket from Anne, which had come up from Bushy by the morning coach, and which said that the little boy’s fever had not broken in the night, and that the physician from Kingston had been and gone and would come again, and that he was not to worry, and was to come home as soon as the House would let him.

---

On the Thursday he moved the Address in answer to the King’s message, and it went through without a division, because nobody in England was for Spain.

Lord John Cavendish seconded it. Then Lord John, who was a dry, careful man and the best of the Rockinghams, rose again, and moved a second address: that His Majesty would be graciously pleased to collect and dispose his fleets and armies as might enable him to exert the whole force of the country against the united powers of the House of Bourbon. Sir George Savile seconded that. It was very well done. It sounded like a vote for the war, and it was a vote to end one, and every man in the House knew which.

It was Jenkinson who asked the question, because somebody had to. Mr Jenkinson rose from further along the bench, smooth and grey and exactly as long in his speeches as was necessary, and asked whether the noble lord’s whole force was meant to include the forces now in America; and Lord John said that it was; and Mr Jenkinson moved that the House do now adjourn, which was the polite way of drowning a thing without being seen to hold its head under. The House divided on it late, by candlelight. A hundred and fifty-six for the adjournment. Eighty against.

He did not go home that night. It was too late for the road, and there would be the King’s answer to the Address to see to in the morning, and he slept for three hours on a sofa in Downing Street in his clothes, as he could always sleep, anywhere, at once.

In the morning there was another letter from Bushy.

He wrote to the King before breakfast, in the third person, as he always wrote to the King, that Lord North hoped His Majesty would excuse him from attending with the Address at St James’s, as he had that morning received an account of the approaching death of his son at Bushy. He read it over. It looked very strange on the paper, that sentence, in his own hand, among the other sentences about the Address and the hour and His Majesty’s convenience. He sanded it and sent it.

The King’s answer caught him on the road at Hammersmith. It was three lines, in the small fast hand, and it was very kind, and he put it in his pocket with Anne’s.

---

The child was called Dudley. He was two years old, and not three weeks over, and the youngest of them by a long way, the one who had come when everybody had supposed there would be no more; and North had been fonder of him, if he was honest, than a man of forty-seven ought to be of anything that could not argue with him.

He was in the small room at the top of the house at Bushy, the one that looked over the park, in a cot with the curtains drawn back because Anne would not have them drawn. He was very hot and very quiet. He knew his father, North thought, for most of the Friday, and for some of the Saturday, and after that it was not possible to say.

North sat by him. There was nothing else to do and he did it. Anne sat on the other side, and the physician from Kingston came and went, and the elder children came to the door and were sent away and came back again: George, who was twenty-one and had opinions; and the girls, who had none, or none that they would say in that room; and Charlotte, who was eight, and stood in the doorway in her nightgown on the Saturday night until her sister carried her off. Outside the window the deer went about in the long June evenings under the chestnuts, as they had when he had sat in this house at Christmas a year and a half ago, writing a list of everything the Americans could be given, with the two youngest asleep on the sofa beside him.

He could not sleep. That was the thing he would remember. He had slept through everything in his life, through the Wilkes riots and the Boston news and two elections and Mr Burke; it was the only talent he had ever been sure of, and it went from him that weekend as if it had never been his. He sat in the chair by the cot with his eyes open, and the night went by outside the window, and in the morning he was still there.

On the Monday he went up to town, because the King had commanded a Cabinet and was to be at it himself.

He did not afterwards remember much of the Cabinet, except the King’s face, and the King’s voice going on very steadily for a long time. The King did not, as a rule, sit with his Cabinet; his ministers met without him and brought him their minutes. He sat with it now at the head of the table with his hands folded, and told his ministers that he had examined himself frequently and severely, and that what he was about to say was the result; that he would never consent to any measure that tended to the dismemberment of his Empire; that before he would hear of any man’s readiness to come into office he would expect to see it signed under that man’s hand that he was resolved to keep the Empire entire, and that no troops should be withdrawn from America, nor any Parliament allowed there but the one that sat at Westminster; and that his servants could hope for his support only by showing zeal, assiduity and activity. Lord Thurlow said something afterwards about the possibility of strengthening the administration. Lord Sandwich said something about the fleet. North sat at the King’s left hand with his spectacles in his fingers and said nothing at all, and when it was over he bowed, and went down to his carriage, and was driven back to Bushy through the dusk.

The boy died a little after three in the morning, with his mother holding his hand.

---

He went to the House on the Tuesday because there was nothing else he could think of to do.

He sat with Anne after breakfast for nearly two hours first. He did not know what he said to her. He knew that she said very little to him, and that at the end of it she told him to go, because the House was sitting and there was the militia bill, and because she could not bear to watch him sit still any longer; and he went, and was driven up the road again in the afternoon heat with the blinds down, and came into the House at about five, and sat down in his place, and Robinson looked at his face once from the bench behind and did not look again.

The militia bill went through its stage without a division. He did not hear a word of it. Then Mr Hartley rose.

David Hartley sat for Hull, and was a decent, earnest, long-winded man with a mechanical turn, who had invented a way of making houses safe from fire with iron plates laid under the floors, and built a house on Putney Heath to set alight with company sitting upstairs, and who had spent the whole of the war proposing to the House, at great length and with columns of figures, that it should make peace. Nobody minded Hartley. Hartley was a fixture, like the clock. The House settled itself to sleep through him as it would settle itself to sleep through a sermon, and North sat on the Treasury bench and looked at the clock, and listened, because for once in his life he could not do anything else.

“Sir,” said Mr Hartley, “I have waited with much anxiety and impatience through the course of the present session, in expectation that some propositions for peace, between this country and America, would have been offered to the consideration of Parliament.”

He went on for an hour. He said that the negotiation for the exchange of prisoners had passed through his hands, and that he had used the occasion, as any man would, to feel the pulses of the parties towards a general accommodation; that it required not the rank of a crowned head to become a mediator; that the Americans had never asked to be anything but what they had always been, and had said so twice to France, and had been answered by ministers with silence. He said that the King’s servants had courted the mediation of Spain, the known ally of France by the Family Compact, and had refused a better one offered them by an English gentleman; and that he wished it to be on the record that it had been offered. He said the Latin for having delivered his soul. And at the end he said that if some terms of peace with America were not proposed before the session ended, he dreaded the consequences; that the first gun to announce the prorogation, without some specific plan of peace offered to America, would make his heart tremble; and that he feared it would shake the Empire to its foundation.

Then he moved two motions. The first was for the papers of the Spanish mediation. The second was for leave to bring in a Bill to enable His Majesty to appoint commissioners, with sufficient powers to treat, consult and agree upon the means of quieting the disorders now subsisting in certain of the colonies, plantations and provinces in North America.

And sat down.

---

It was North’s to answer. Everybody knew it was North’s. It was always North’s; he had answered Hartley a dozen times, in a dozen sessions, in five minutes, without notes, and got a laugh, and the House had gone to dinner.

He did not get up.

He did not decide not to. He sat on the bench with his hands on his knees and looked at the floor of the House, at the worn place in the matting below the table where the clerks’ feet went, and found that there was nothing in him that would stand, and nothing that would speak, and nothing at all, for the moment, that cared which. Behind him he felt Robinson lean forward, and wait, and lean back. Jenkinson looked along the bench at him, and looked away. Germain was not in the House; Germain had gone down into Sussex in a temper at the end of the previous week. Nobody else on the Treasury bench had ever answered Hartley in his life, or thought it worth the trouble, and nobody did now.

The Speaker put the first question, and it was negatived on the voices, because nobody much cared about the papers of the Spanish mediation. Then he put the second.

The Ayes were louder than North had expected. He heard them as if from the next room. The Speaker said that he thought the Ayes had it, and somebody behind North said that the Noes had it, a little late, a little uncertainly, because it was the thing that was always said; and the Speaker ordered the lobby cleared, and the House divided.

The Ayes went forth into the lobby, as the rule was for a new thing, and the Noes kept their seats and were counted where they sat. North kept his. He looked round the benches while the tellers went along them, and saw for the first time how thin the House was, how many of the country gentlemen had gone home to their hay in the expectation of the prorogation, how many of the Treasury’s own men had gone to dinner, thinking it was only Hartley; and how full, in their own small way, were the benches opposite, where the Rockinghams and the Chathamites and the merchants and the men who sat for the ports had stayed, as men stay who have been told to.

The doors were opened. The Ayes came back in, and went on coming, rather longer than he had thought they would.

The tellers came up the floor and stood at the table, four abreast, and bowed, and the one on the right read the numbers, and the Speaker read them again.

Ninety-seven for the motion. Ninety-three against.

---

There was a noise, of course. There is always a noise. It went up from the benches opposite and along the gallery and round the House, the kind of noise a crowd makes at a cock-fight when the wrong bird wins; and in the middle of it Mr Hartley, who had moved a motion for peace with America in every session since the war began and had never once come near carrying it, sat in his place with his papers in his hands and a look on his long face of a man who has been handed a child in the street and does not know what to do with it.

North sat and let the noise go over him, and found that he was waiting for something, and did not know what.

Then he knew what it was. It was the half-hour afterwards. He had told Dartmouth once that he did not enjoy winning anything, only the half-hour afterwards, when it was done and could not be undone and nobody wanted anything of him yet. He had not known until that moment that a man could have the same half-hour out of losing; that it could come over him in the middle of a noise like that, on the Treasury bench, with the House of Commons shouting at him and his son eighteen hours dead, as plainly and as quietly as the first breath a man takes when he comes up out of deep water.

He got up and went out behind the Chair, into the lobby, where it was cooler. Mr Fox came out after him. Fox was thirty, and fat already, and unshaven, and kind when he remembered to be, and he came up to North in the lobby and stood in front of him for a moment, with the noise still coming through the door behind them; and then said, in a low voice, very differently from the voice he used in the House, that he had heard that morning about the boy, and was very sorry for his loss.

North looked at him.

“Which one, Mr Fox?” he said; and then, because Fox had meant it, and because he was ashamed of himself, he put his hand on Fox’s arm for a moment and thanked him, and went down the stairs to his carriage.

---

He wrote to the King that night from Downing Street, as he had written to him a hundred times. He wrote that Lord North had the misfortune to acquaint His Majesty that the House had that day given leave, by four voices, for a Bill to appoint commissioners to treat with America; that the ministry had not opposed it, through Lord North’s fault and nobody else’s; that it was not to be supposed that a Bill brought in on such a vote could be resisted at a later stage by the minister who had let it pass; and that Lord North was therefore under the necessity, which he had represented to His Majesty so often and so long, of humbly begging His Majesty to replace him.

The King’s answer came at nine the next morning from Kew, dated to the minute, in the small fast hand. It said that Lord North’s application to resign at such an hour, when Spain had joined herself to France and the enemy were preparing to land on these shores, was highly unbecoming; that His Majesty could never suppose that he, who had so handsomely stepped forth on the desertion of the Duke of Grafton, would lose all that merit by following so undignified an example; that a vote of ninety-seven gentlemen in a thin House was not the House of Commons; and that Lord North would attend at the Queen’s House on Friday.

He attended on the Friday, and on the Monday after, and on the Friday after that; and on each occasion the King talked to him for an hour, very kindly and very steadily, about the militia, and the fleet, and the Spanish manifesto, and the impossibility of finding anybody else, and the danger to the Empire; and on each occasion North heard him out, and bowed, and said that he could not go on; and went back to Downing Street, and wrote again.

The King spoke of always being his friend as well as his master. He did not mention the debts directly. North knew where the letter lay in Downing Street and could have recited it. He listened, bowed and repeated his request. He had never managed that before. He could not explain what made it possible now.

On the second of July, in the closet, after the levee, the King stood with his weight back on his heels in the way he had, and looked at him with his pale steady eyes, and said that no man had a right to talk of leaving him at this hour.

“No, sir,” said North. “I do not talk of it. I go.”

The King did not say anything for some time. Then he said, in a different voice, that he was sorry for the child. He said it plainly and without ornament, as one father to another, and North believed him, and bowed.

“Then go, my lord,” said the King. “But remember that it is you who desert me, and not I you.”

---

The session ended the next day. He stood at the bar of the Lords among the Commons with his hat in his hand, a little behind the Speaker, while the King read his speech from the throne, and he did not hear any more of it than he had heard of the militia bill. When it was over the King went out by his own door without looking at the bar, and the Commons went back across the lobby to their own House, talking, and the guns began in the Park for the prorogation, one after another, at their proper intervals; and North stood in the Lords’ lobby with the crowd going round him, and counted them, for no reason, and thought of Hartley, who had said that the first of them would make his heart tremble.

He went down to Bushy that night and stayed there.

He would be First Lord until the King found somebody else, and the King would not find anybody quickly, because he would look everywhere but the one place there was to look; so there were boxes, and Robinson came down with them every other day, and North signed what Robinson put in front of him and did not read most of it. The rest of the time he walked in the park, slowly, because he was heavy and the weather was hot, and sat with Anne in the evenings in the long room with the windows open; and after a week or so he found that he could sleep again, a little, in a chair in the afternoon, and was ashamed of it, and slept anyway.

One evening Robinson brought down, with the boxes, the papers from the drawer in Downing Street, since the house would not be North’s much longer. The King’s two letters lay on top, the one that said the business was not without remedy and the one about the debts. Under them was North’s old list of concessions. At its foot he could still read the words he had struck through, An American Parliament, under the Crown. He unfolded it on the library table.

He put it back under the King’s letters, and put the three of them away in the drawer of the library table, and shut the drawer, and went out on to the lawn, where it was still light, and sat down on the bench under the chestnuts where he had read the letter about the debts two summers ago; and the deer came out of the long grass at the far end of the park and stood and looked at him, as they did every evening, as if he had something for them, and after a while went away.