Blows Must Decide

He was awake at five, because he was always awake at five, and he read the speech once more by the candle before anybody came, because he always did that too.

It was four sides in a secretary’s hand, and the Cabinet had settled it on Tuesday, and he had asked for one change and been given it. He knew it nearly by heart. He did not need to read it again and he read it anyway, slowly, with his lips moving very slightly, the way he had been taught to read a thing that would be read aloud: so that nothing in it would surprise him when it came out of his own mouth in front of four hundred people.

He believed one sentence of it. It was the one he had asked for.

The rest was his ministers’. That was as it should be. A speech from the throne was the ministry’s speech, and the King’s voice, and he had never in fifteen years altered a word of one after the Cabinet had settled it, and he did not intend to begin. He had views about that which he did not share with many people. A King who wrote his own speeches would be governing, and a King who governed would sooner or later be reminded by somebody where the last one who had tried it had ended, and the place was on the way to the House of Lords, and he drove past it every time he opened a Parliament.

He put the paper down and sat for a while in the cold, in his dressing gown, with his hands on his knees.

He knew what he would have said. He had known it since August, sentence by sentence, the way you know a road you have ridden many times. He had not written it down. He had not needed to. It went like this:

Those who have long too successfully laboured to inflame my people in America by gross misrepresentations, and to infuse into their minds a system of opinions repugnant to the true constitution of the colonies, and to their subordinate relation to Great Britain, now openly avow their revolt, hostility, and rebellion.

Dartmouth had brought an argument, not a sermon. The King had accepted it and would accept it again. The Cabinet held together; Howe had his orders; the transports were taking up in the river. By spring there would be more soldiers in America. He had checked that nothing in those arrangements had been altered.

He could bear it. He could bear a great deal. It was one of the few things about himself he was entirely sure of.

---

The Queen was up by seven, which was early for her and late for him, and she came and sat with him while he ate, which she did not usually do, and watched him with the shrewd, plain, affectionate face that he had married without having seen it and had never once regretted.

“You are reading it again.”

“I have finished reading it.”

“You have the look.” She was thirty-one and had borne him ten children and was carrying an eleventh, due in the spring, and she had a German directness that the English found unnerving and he found restful. “The look of a man who has to say something he does not like.”

“I have to say a great many things I do not like. It is the whole of the trade.”

“Then this is different.”

He considered telling her it was not. He did not, because she would know, and because he did not lie to her, which was a thing about his marriage that the people who wrote about his marriage had never found out.

“It is a kind speech,” he said. “They have written me a kind speech. And I am going to read it to them as if I meant it, because I have given my word that I would, and because it is the ministry’s speech and not mine, and because it does no harm.” He drank his tea. “And they are going to cheer me for it, some of them. The wrong ones.”

“Then let them cheer,” said the Queen. “It will make a change.”

---

They went down to Westminster in the state coach, which he disliked.

He had commissioned it at twenty-four, newly married, and every ride recalled that judgement. It was gilded inside and out and drawn by eight Hanoverian cream horses. The body hung on leather straps and swayed like a ship. By Whitehall he was faintly sick. He kept his face composed.

The crowds were thick along the way and he looked at them, because they had come out to be looked at.

He could read a London crowd. It was one of the useful things fifteen years had given him. There were cheers, and they were real cheers, mostly, from the people at the front who had come early to cheer; and behind them there were a great many people who had come out to see the horses and were not cheering anything; and here and there, at the corners, there were knots of men in the City way of dress who did not cheer and did not take off their hats, and watched the coach go by with a look he had seen on Mr Wilkes, who was Lord Mayor, God help the City, until the ninth of November.

None of them knew what was in the speech. None of them knew what had become of the petition. That had been his own condition, in August, and it had held for nine weeks, which was longer than he had expected anything in London to hold, and he was proud of it in a small, private way that he would not have admitted to anybody.

They passed the Banqueting House, and he looked at it, as he always did.

---

In the robing room they put the robes on him and the crown, and the crown weighed what it always weighed, which was more than anybody who had not worn it believed. The Lord Chancellor came and knelt and gave him the speech in its bag, and he took it out and looked at the first line, which he knew, and put it back.

Dartmouth was among the peers in the passage, in his robes, small and neat and grave as a curate, and he caught the King’s eye for a moment and then looked down, as he generally did, as if the King’s eye were something he had been given and did not want to be seen holding.

They went in.

The chamber was as full as he had ever seen it. The peers on their benches in scarlet and ermine, the bishops in their lawn, the judges on the woolsacks, and the galleries packed to the cornices with peeresses and their daughters and the strangers who had got places by knowing somebody; and above all of it, on every wall, the old tapestries of the Armada, the English ships harrying the great Spanish fleet up the Channel in faded blues and greens, which had hung there for more than a hundred years and which he had looked at from this chair at the opening of every Parliament of his reign. He had always found them encouraging. They showed what happened to people who came against England, and they were very large.

He sat. The Lord Chancellor stood at his right hand. Black Rod, Sir Francis Molyneux, who had been Black Rod for ten years and walked as if he had been carrying the thing since the Conquest, went off down the corridor to knock on the Commons’ door, and there was the wait that there always was, in which everybody looked at everybody else and the King looked at the tapestries.

Then the Commons came, the way they always came, like a crowd coming out of a playhouse: the Speaker at their head in his black and gold, Sir Fletcher Norton, with his face of a man who had been a lawyer and wished he still were, and behind him three hundred gentlemen in their day clothes, jostling, pressing up to the bar of the House and leaning on it and on each other, because there was never room and there never would be.

He found North at once, because North was large and stood a little apart and was peering at the throne with the screwed-up eyes of a man who could not see it. North looked tired. North always looked tired. North had asked him twice since August to be allowed to go, and twice been told he could not, and had taken it each time with the same rueful good humour, as if the King had declined a dinner.

Near North, and not with him, he found Germain.

Lord George Germain held no office in this government and the King did not intend that he should; the ministry would not stand him, and a man cashiered for Minden was not a man you could give the war to. But he was the only man in the House of Commons who would have written the speech the King wanted to give, and the King had read every word he said in the spring and felt the particular warm loyalty one feels towards a man who says one’s own opinions aloud so that one is not obliged to. He had heard the speech read at the Cockpit the night before and left before the end, which the King had been told by breakfast. He stood at the bar now with his arms folded and his long, clever, disappointed face turned up to the throne, the only man in the chamber who knew, as the King did, what the next ten minutes were going to cost.

The King unfolded the speech.

---

“My Lords, and Gentlemen.”

His voice was good. It had always been good. It was the one accomplishment everybody agreed on; they had made him read aloud for two hours a day from the age of eleven, from Addison and the Bible and the speeches of dead statesmen, and the result was a voice that could fill a room without seeming to be raised, and that never stumbled.

“The present situation of America, and my constant desire to have your advice, concurrence, and assistance on every important occasion, have determined me to call you thus early together.”

“A petition has been laid before me, signed by many of my subjects in America, each of them in his own name, professing their attachment to my person, family and government, and praying that the harmony which formerly subsisted between this kingdom and the colonies may be restored. I have received it, as coming from my subjects.”

There was a noise in the chamber. It was not a loud noise. It was the noise of the better part of four hundred people drawing breath at once, which was a sound he had heard perhaps three times in his life, and it went round the benches and up into the galleries and came back.

They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force; they have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

“It is my earnest desire that the unhappy differences which have arisen may be composed, upon terms consistent with the dignity of this kingdom and the just authority of Parliament; and I have no other object, in all that I do, than the happiness of all my people.”

He looked up, as one did, at the end of a period.

On the bishops’ bench Dr Shipley of St Asaph, who was Dr Franklin’s friend, had his hand to his chest, as if a pain had gone. On the benches of the opposition the Duke of Richmond had turned to say something to Lord Shelburne and had stopped with his mouth open, and the King watched him close it and saw the arithmetic begin behind his eyes: he has received it; then we may use it; then how. Lord Suffolk was looking at the Armada. Dartmouth had not looked up at all.

The rebellious war now levied is become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.

“Whenever my subjects in America shall return to that obedience which is due to the laws, I shall be ready to hear their grievances, and to consider them with the tenderness of a parent.”

Whenever. Return. Obedience. Due. He read each word distinctly. A week of notes to North had put that clause before the grievances. North had called it only the order of words and given way. Let him call it that.

It is now become the part of wisdom, and in its effects of clemency, to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.

“In the meantime, it is my duty, and it will be yours, to provide that the authority of the laws be maintained, and the peace of my colonies restored.”

He went on to the Commons and the estimates, which were the same in every speech of every reign, Gentlemen of the House of Commons, I have ordered the proper estimates for the ensuing year to be laid before you, and as he read them he let his eyes go along the galleries, because he always did, and because the hard part was over.

That was how he saw the man.

He was in the front of the strangers’ gallery on the east side, a gentleman of about forty in a plain brown coat that had been good once, sitting very upright, and he was the only person in the chamber who was not looking at the King as people looked at a King. He was looking at him, the King thought afterwards, trying to find the word, as if the King were a door that had opened. He had one hand flat against his mouth. He did not move it the whole time the King was looking at him, which was two or three seconds, and then the King’s eyes went on along the gallery to the peeresses and he forgot him, very nearly, and came to the end of the speech.

“My Lords, and Gentlemen, I rely upon your wisdom and your temper in the measures which the present state of affairs may make necessary; and I have no doubt that, by your assistance, the troubles which unhappily prevail may be brought to a happy end.”

He folded the paper and gave it back to the Lord Chancellor.

The sound came from the opposition, the City men at the bar, and the strangers’ gallery, where it was quickly hushed. His own benches remained correct and quiet. Germain, at the bar, did not move at all. The King looked at him, once, and Germain looked back, and something passed between them that was very nearly an apology, and the King could not have said afterwards which of them had made it.

---

In the robing room they took the crown off him, and his head felt as it always did afterwards, too light, as if it might float.

Dartmouth came, as he had known Dartmouth would. The others would come later and say the right things; Dartmouth came first and stood just inside the door, small and grave in his robes, and waited to be spoken to.

“I read it as you wrote it, my lord.”

“Your Majesty read it beautifully.”

“I read everything beautifully,” said the King. “It is the one thing they made sure of.” He sat, and let the pages lift the robe off his shoulders, and felt his own size come back to him. “They will have it in Philadelphia by Christmas.”

“By January, sir, with the winds as they are.”

“January, then. And it will change nothing.”

Dartmouth did not answer at once. The King respected him for that. Most men answered him at once.

“It will change what they think we think, sir,” Dartmouth said at last.

“That is not nothing, I suppose.” The King considered it, honestly, because it deserved honest consideration. “It is not much. They think a great many foolish things about what we think, and so do we about them, and I do not see that one more or less will tell at Boston.” He looked up. “The Duke of Richmond is going to make a speech about it.”

“Several, sir. He has asked to examine Mr Penn at the bar of the House.”

“The proprietor’s grandson.” The King had known the name since August and had not until now had a face to put to it. “Is he still in London?”

“He has been in London since August, sir, waiting.” Dartmouth paused. “He was in the gallery this morning.”

The King thought of the brown coat and the hand against the mouth, and the face like a door, and said nothing for a moment.

“Let the Duke examine whom he likes,” he said. “It is his House. I do not suppose Mr Penn will tell them anything they do not know.”

“No, sir. I do not suppose he will.”

---

He wrote to North that night from the Queen’s House, as he wrote to North most nights, at the little table in his own room with the candle at his elbow and the household gone up.

Queen’s House. Oct. 26. 1775. 40 m. past 10 p.m.

He reported that the speech had been well received and asked for the numbers on the address in both Houses. Then he instructed North to press on the estimates. Spring reinforcements must sail in time; the army was to want for nothing the kingdom could supply. He signed it.

He did not write the other thing. He had written it once, to North, a year ago, before any of this, and he remembered the letter exactly, because it was the clearest thing he had ever written and he had never had occasion to take a word of it back.

Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.

He unlocked the drawer.

The proclamation was where he had put it in August. He had brought it up from Kew with his own papers in September and put it in the same place in a different table, and nobody but he knew it was there, not even Dartmouth, who perhaps assumed it had gone back to the Council Office to be forgotten. It was beautifully engrossed. There was a space at the foot of it, ruled, for the date and the name.

He read the first lines by the candle, as he had read them standing at Kew with his boots on.

Whereas many of our subjects in divers parts of our colonies and plantations in North America, misled by dangerous and ill-designing men, and forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them…

It went on, through the disorderly acts and the obstruction of lawful commerce and the oppression of the loyal, to the words he had read aloud at Kew: open and avowed rebellion. It was all true. Every word of it. It would keep.

He put it back, and locked the drawer, and put the key on his watch chain where it lived, and pinched out the candle with his fingers because he disliked the smell of a snuffer. Then he went up through the dark house, past the rooms where the younger of the ten children were asleep, with another coming in the spring, and into his own bed, where the Queen was already asleep.

He slept, as he always slept, at once and without dreaming, and was awake at five.