DIPLOMACY (1861)
HARDLY a week passed when the newspapers announced that
President Lincoln had selected Charles Francis Adams as his Minister to
England. Once more, silently, Henry put Blackstone back on its shelf.
As Friar Bacon's head sententiously announced many centuries before:
Time had passed! The Civil Law lasted a brief day; the Common Law
prolonged its shadowy existence for a week. The law, altogether, as
path of education, vanished in April, 1861, leaving a million young men
planted in the mud of a lawless world, to begin a new life without
education at all. They asked few questions, but if they had asked
millions they would have got no answers. No one could help. Looking
back on this moment of crisis, nearly fifty years afterwards, one could
only shake one's white beard in silent horror. Mr. Adams once more
intimated that he thought himself entitled to the services of one of
his sons, and he indicated Henry as the only one who could be spared
from more serious duties. Henry packed his trunk again without a word.
He could offer no protest. Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in
his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters. He was at least
no public official, like the thousands of improvised secretaries and
generals who crowded their jealousies and intrigues on the President.
He was not a vulture of carrion--patronage. He knew that his father's
appointment was the result of Governor Seward's personal friendship; he
did not then know that Senator Sumner had opposed it, or the reasons
which Sumner alleged for thinking it unfit; but he could have supplied
proofs enough had Sumner asked for them, the strongest and most
decisive being that, in his opinion, Mr. Adams had chosen a private
secretary far more unfit than his chief. That Mr. Adams was unfit might
well be, since it was hard to find a fit appointment in the list of
possible candidates, except Mr. Sumner himself; and no one knew so well
as this experienced Senator that the weakest of all Mr. Adams's proofs
of fitness was his consent to quit a safe seat in Congress for an
exceedingly unsafe seat in London with no better support than Senator
Sumner, at the head of the Foreign Relations Committee, was likely to
give him. In the family history, its members had taken many a dangerous
risk, but never before had they taken one so desperate.
The private secretary troubled himself not at all about the
unfitness of any one; he knew too little; and, in fact, no one, except
perhaps Mr. Sumner, knew more. The President and Secretary of State
knew least of all. As Secretary of Legation the Executive appointed the
editor of a Chicago newspaper who had applied for the Chicago
Post-Office; a good fellow, universally known as Charley Wilson, who
had not a thought of staying in the post, or of helping the Minister.
The Assistant Secretary was inherited from Buchanan's time, a hard
worker, but socially useless. Mr. Adams made no effort to find
efficient help; perhaps he knew no name to suggest; perhaps he knew too
much of Washington, but he could hardly have hoped to find a staff of
strength in his son.
The private secretary was more passive than his father, for he
knew not where to turn. Sumner alone could have smoothed his path by
giving him letters of introduction, but if Sumner wrote letters, it was
not with the effect of smoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was
engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was
no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into
service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred
thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all
helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves
of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before
Boston State House in the April evenings and march southward, quietly
enough, with the air of business they wore from their cradles, but with
few signs or sounds of excitement. He had time also to go down the
harbor to see his brother Charles quartered in Fort Independence before
being thrown, with a hundred thousand more, into the furnace of the
Army of the Potomac to get educated in a fury of fire. Few things were
for the moment so trivial in importance as the solitary private
secretary crawling down to the wretched old Cunard steamer Niagara at
East Boston to start again for Liverpool. This time the pitcher of
education had gone to the fountain once too often; it was fairly
broken; and the young man had got to meet a hostile world without
defence--or arms.
The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1,
1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if
the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with one cabin-boy in
a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was alone. Had Secretary
Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams the rank of Ambassador and
four times his salary, a palace in London, a staff of trained
secretaries, and personal letters of introduction to the royal family
and the whole peerage, the private secretary would have been cabin-boy
still, with the extra burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate
person in the party, having for master only his father who never
fretted, never dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American
diplomacy was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered
how his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter, 1778,
on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old son John
Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of adventure that had
hardly a parallel for success. He remembered how John Quincy, in 1809,
had sailed for Russia, with himself, a baby of two years old, to cope
with Napoleon and the Czar Alexander single-handed, almost as much of
an adventurer as John Adams before him, and almost as successful. He
thought it natural that the Government should send him out as an
adventurer also, with a twenty-three-year-old son, and he did not even
notice that he left not a friend behind him. No doubt he could depend
on Seward, but on whom could Seward depend? Certainly not on the
Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Relations. Minister Adams had no
friend in the Senate; he could hope for no favors, and he asked none.
He thought it right to play the adventurer as his father and
grandfather had done before him, without a murmur. This was a lofty
view, and for him answered his objects, but it bore hard on cabin-boys,
and when, in time, the young man realized what had happened, he felt it
as a betrayal. He modestly thought himself unfit for the career of
adventurer, and judged his father to be less fit than himself. For the
first time America was posing as the champion of legitimacy and order.
Her representatives should know how to play their role; they should
wear the costume; but, in the mission attached to Mr. Adams in 1861,
the only rag of legitimacy or order was the private secretary, whose
stature was not sufficient to impose awe on the Court and Parliament of
Great Britain.
One inevitable effect of this lesson was to make a victim of
the scholar and to turn him into a harsh judge of his masters. If they
overlooked him, he could hardly overlook them, since they stood with
their whole weight on his body. By way of teaching him quickly, they
sent out their new Minister to Russia in the same ship. Secretary
Seward had occasion to learn the merits of Cassius M. Clay in the
diplomatic service, but Mr. Seward's education profited less than the
private secretary's, Cassius Clay as a teacher having no equal though
possibly some rivals. No young man, not in Government pay, could be
asked to draw, from such lessons, any confidence in himself, and it was
notorious that, for the next two years, the persons were few indeed who
felt, or had reason to feel, any sort of confidence in the Government;
fewest of all among those who were in it. At home, for the most part,
young men went to the war, grumbled and died; in England they might
grumble or not; no one listened.
Above all, the private secretary could not grumble to his
chief. He knew surprisingly little, but that much he did know. He never
labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and
it affected him for life. The habit of reticence--of talking without
meaning--is never effaced. He had to begin it at once. He was already
an adept when the party landed at Liverpool, May 13, 1861, and went
instantly up to London: a family of early Christian martyrs about to be
flung into an arena of lions, under the glad eyes of Tiberius
Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston would have laughed his peculiar
Palmerston laugh at figuring as Tiberius, he would have seen only
evident resemblance in the Christian martyrs, for he had already
arranged the ceremony.
Of what they had to expect, the Minister knew no more than his
son. What he or Mr. Seward or Mr. Sumner may have thought is the affair
of history and their errors concern historians. The errors of a private
secretary concerned no one but himself, and were a large part of his
education. He thought on May 12 that he was going to a friendly
Government and people, true to the anti-slavery principles which had
been their steadiest profession. For a hundred years the chief effort
of his family had aimed at bringing the Government of England into
intelligent cooperation with the objects and interests of America. His
father was about to make a new effort, and this time the chance of
success was promising. The slave States had been the chief apparent
obstacle to good understanding. As for the private secretary himself,
he was, like all Bostonians, instinctively English. He could not
conceive the idea of a hostile England. He supposed himself, as one of
the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere
in the British Islands.
On May 13, he met the official announcement that England
recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new
education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard
College and Germany. He had to learn--the sooner the better--that his
ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in
England--literally no one--doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or
would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often
saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr.
Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power,
but prudently held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had
disappeared. Lord John Russell, as Foreign Secretary, had received the
rebel emissaries, and had decided to recognize their belligerency
before the arrival of Mr. Adams in order to fix the position of the
British Government in advance. The recognition of independence would
then become an understood policy; a matter of time and occasion.
Whatever Minister Adams may have felt, the first effect of this
shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension--a sort of
hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow. Yet he
realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The chances were
great that the whole family would turn round and go home within a few
weeks. The horizon widened out in endless waves of confusion. When he
thought over the subject in the long leisure of later life, he grew
cold at the idea of his situation had his father then shown himself
what Sumner thought him to be--unfit for his post. That the private
secretary was unfit for his--trifling though it were--was proved by his
unreflecting confidence in his father. It never entered his mind that
his father might lose his nerve or his temper, and yet in a subsequent
knowledge of statesmen and diplomats extending over several
generations, he could not certainly point out another who could have
stood such a shock without showing it. He passed this long day, and
tedious journey to London, without once thinking of the possibility
that his father might make a mistake. Whatever the Minister thought,
and certainly his thought was not less active than his son's, he showed
no trace of excitement. His manner was the same as ever; his mind and
temper were as perfectly balanced; not a word escaped; not a nerve
twitched.
The test was final, for no other shock so violent and sudden
could possibly recur. The worst was in full sight. For once the private
secretary knew his own business, which was to imitate his father as
closely as possible and hold his tongue. Dumped thus into Maurigy's
Hotel at the foot of Regent Street, in the midst of a London season,
without a friend or even an acquaintance, he preferred to laugh at his
father's bewilderment before the waiter's "'amhandheggsir" for
breakfast, rather than ask a question or express a doubt. His
situation, if taken seriously, was too appalling to face. Had he known
it better, he would only have thought it worse.
Politically or socially, the outlook was desperate, beyond
retrieving or contesting. Socially, under the best of circumstances, a
newcomer in London society needs years to establish a position, and
Minister Adams had not a week or an hour to spare, while his son had
not even a remote chance of beginning. Politically the prospect looked
even worse, and for Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner it was so; but
for the Minister, on the spot, as he came to realize exactly where he
stood, the danger was not so imminent. Mr. Adams was always one of the
luckiest of men, both in what he achieved and in what he escaped. The
blow, which prostrated Seward and Sumner, passed over him. Lord John
Russell had acted--had probably intended to act--kindly by him in
forestalling his arrival. The blow must have fallen within three
months, and would then have broken him down. The British Ministers were
a little in doubt still--a little ashamed of themselves--and certain to
wait the longer for their next step in proportion to the haste of their
first.
This is not a story of the diplomatic adventures of Charles
Francis Adams, but of his son Henry's adventures in search of an
education, which, if not taken too seriously, tended to humor. The
father's position in London was not altogether bad; the son's was
absurd. Thanks to certain family associations, Charles Francis Adams
naturally looked on all British Ministers as enemies; the only public
occupation of all Adamses for a hundred and fifty years at least, in
their brief intervals of quarrelling with State Street, had been to
quarrel with Downing Street; and the British Government, well used to a
liberal unpopularity abroad, even when officially rude liked to be
personally civil. All diplomatic agents are liable to be put, so to
speak, in a corner, and are none the worse for it. Minister Adams had
nothing in especial to complain of; his position was good while it
lasted, and he had only the chances of war to fear. The son had no such
compensations. Brought over in order to help his father, he could
conceive no way of rendering his father help, but he was clear that his
father had got to help him. To him, the Legation was social ostracism,
terrible beyond anything he had known. Entire solitude in the great
society of London was doubly desperate because his duties as private
secretary required him to know everybody and go with his father and
mother everywhere they needed escort. He had no friend, or even enemy,
to tell him to be patient. Had any one done it, he would surely have
broken out with the reply that patience was the last resource of fools
as well as of sages; if he was to help his father at all, he must do it
at once, for his father would never so much need help again. In fact he
never gave his father the smallest help, unless it were as a footman,
clerk, or a companion for the younger children.
He found himself in a singular situation for one who was to be
useful. As he came to see the situation closer, he began to doubt
whether secretaries were meant to be useful. Wars were too common in
diplomacy to disturb the habits of the diplomat. Most secretaries
detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but useful. At the St.
James's Club, to which the Minister's son could go only as an invited
guest, the most instructive conversation he ever heard among the young
men of his own age who hung about the tables, more helpless than
himself, was: "Quel chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui,
mon cher!" No one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also slow to
assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If the American
Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian Ambassador was in trouble
yesterday, and the Frenchman would be in trouble to-morrow. It would
all come in the day's work. There was nothing professional in worry.
Empires were always tumbling to pieces and diplomats were always
picking them up.
This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff. His
social education was more barren still, and more trying to his vanity.
His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him writhe with
torture. He never forgot the first two or three social functions he
attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett Coutts's in Stratton Place,
where he hid himself in the embrasure of a window and hoped that no one
noticed him; another was a garden-party given by the old anti-slavery
Duchess Dowager of Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister
and Mrs. Adams were kept in conversation by the old Duchess till every
one else went away except the young Duke and his cousins, who set to
playing leap-frog on the lawn. At intervals during the next thirty
years Henry Adams continued to happen upon the Duke, who, singularly
enough, was always playing leap-frog. Still another nightmare he
suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a
terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform
a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the
daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This might seem
humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.
When the end of the season came, the private secretary had not
yet won a private acquaintance, and he hugged himself in his solitude
when the story of the battle of Bull Run appeared in the Times. He felt
only the wish to be more private than ever, for Bull Run was a worse
diplomatic than military disaster. All this is history and can be read
by public schools if they choose; but the curious and unexpected
happened to the Legation, for the effect of Bull Run on them was almost
strengthening. They no longer felt doubt. For the next year they went
on only from week to week, ready to leave England at once, and never
assuming more than three months for their limit. Europe was waiting to
see them go. So certain was the end that no one cared to hurry it.
So far as a private secretary could see, this was all that saved
his father. For many months he looked on himself as lost or finished in
the character of private secretary; and as about to begin, without
further experiment, a final education in the ranks of the Army of the
Potomac where he would find most of his friends enjoying a much
pleasanter life than his own. With this idea uppermost in his mind, he
passed the summer and the autumn, and began the winter. Any winter in
London is a severe trial; one's first winter is the most trying; but
the month of December, 1861, in Mansfield Street, Portland Place, would
have gorged a glutton of gloom.
One afternoon when he was struggling to resist complete nervous
depression in the solitude of Mansfield Street, during the absence of
the Minister and Mrs. Adams on a country visit, Reuter's telegram
announcing the seizure of Mason and Slidell from a British mail-steamer
was brought to the office. All three secretaries, public and private
were there--nervous as wild beasts under the long strain on their
endurance--and all three, though they knew it to be not merely their
order of departure--not merely diplomatic rupture--but a declaration of
war--broke into shouts of delight. They were glad to face the end. They
saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for its own
moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.
They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it, is told
in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster who was one of
the Fryston party. The moment was for him the crisis of his diplomatic
career; for the secretaries it was merely the beginning of another
intolerable delay, as though they were a military outpost waiting
orders to quit an abandoned position. At the moment of sharpest
suspense, the Prince Consort sickened and died. Portland Place at
Christmas in a black fog was never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the
most hardened Londoner lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had
one source of comfort denied to them--he should not be private
secretary long.
He was mistaken--of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same mistake
for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the notion that the
end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing but one of many
affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round hand into his books,
yet it had one or two results personal to him which left no trace on
the Legation records. One of these, and to him the most important, was
to put an end forever to the idea of being "useful." Hitherto, as an
independent and free citizen, not in the employ of the Government, he
had kept up his relations with the American press. He had written
pretty frequently to Henry J. Raymond, and Raymond had used his letters
in the New York Times. He had also become fairly intimate with the two
or three friendly newspapers in London, the Daily News, the Star, the
weekly Spectator; and he had tried to give them news and views that
should have a certain common character, and prevent clash. He had even
gone down to Manchester to study the cotton famine, and wrote a long
account of his visit which his brother Charles had published in the
Boston Courier. Unfortunately it was printed with his name, and
instantly came back upon him in the most crushing shape possible--that
of a long, satirical leader in the London Times. Luckily the Times did
not know its victim to be a part, though not an official, of the
Legation, and lost the chance to make its satire fatal; but he
instantly learned the narrowness of his escape from old Joe Parkes, one
of the traditional busy-bodies of politics, who had haunted London
since 1830, and who, after rushing to the Times office, to tell them
all they did not know about Henry Adams, rushed to the Legation to tell
Adams all he did not want to know about the Times. For a moment Adams
thought his "usefulness" at an end in other respects than in the press,
but a day or two more taught him the value of obscurity. He was totally
unknown; he had not even a club; London was empty; no one thought twice
about the Times article; no one except Joe Parkes ever spoke of it; and
the world had other persons--such as President Lincoln, Secretary
Seward, and Commodore Wilkes--for constant and favorite objects of
ridicule. Henry Adams escaped, but he never tried to be useful again.
The Trent Affair dwarfed individual effort. His education at least had
reached the point of seeing its own proportions. "Surtout point de
zele!" Zeal was too hazardous a profession for a Minister's son to
pursue, as a volunteer manipulator, among Trent Affairs and rebel
cruisers. He wrote no more letters and meddled with no more newspapers,
but he was still young, and felt unkindly towards the editor of the
London Times.
Mr. Delane lost few opportunities of embittering him, and he
felt little or no hope of repaying these attentions; but the Trent
Affair passed like a snowstorm, leaving the Legation, to its surprise,
still in place. Although the private secretary saw in this delay--which
he attributed to Mr. Seward's good sense--no reason for changing his
opinion about the views of the British Government, he had no choice but
to sit down again at his table, and go on copying papers, filing
letters, and reading newspaper accounts of the incapacity of Mr.
Lincoln and the brutality of Mr. Seward--or vice versa. The heavy
months dragged on and winter slowly turned to spring without improving
his position or spirits. Socially he had but one relief; and, to the
end of life, he never forgot the keen gratitude he owed for it. During
this tedious winter and for many months afterwards, the only gleams of
sunshine were on the days he passed at Walton-on-Thames as the guest of
Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis at Mount Felix.
His education had unfortunately little to do with bankers,
although old George Peabody and his partner, Junius Morgan, were strong
allies. Joshua Bates was devoted, and no one could be kinder than
Thomas Baring, whose little dinners in Upper Grosvenor Street were
certainly the best in London; but none offered a refuge to compare with
Mount Felix, and, for the first time, the refuge was a liberal
education. Mrs. Russell Sturgis was one of the women to whom an
intelligent boy attaches himself as closely as he can. Henry Adams was
not a very intelligent boy, and he had no knowledge of the world, but
he knew enough to understand that a cub needed shape. The kind of
education he most required was that of a charming woman, and Mrs.
Russell Sturgis, a dozen years older than himself, could have
good-naturedly trained a school of such, without an effort, and with
infinite advantage to them. Near her he half forgot the anxieties of
Portland Place. During two years of miserable solitude, she was in this
social polar winter, the single source of warmth and light.
Of course the Legation itself was home, and, under such
pressure, life in it could be nothing but united. All the inmates made
common cause, but this was no education. One lived, but was merely
flayed alive. Yet, while this might be exactly true of the younger
members of the household, it was not quite so with the Minister and
Mrs. Adams. Very slowly, but quite steadily, they gained foothold. For
some reason partly connected with American sources, British society had
begun with violent social prejudice against Lincoln, Seward, and all
the Republican leaders except Sumner. Familiar as the whole tribe of
Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity
of the British mind, and weary of the long struggle to teach it its own
interests, the fourth generation could still not quite persuade itself
that this new British prejudice was natural. The private secretary
suspected that Americans in New York and Boston had something to do
with it. The Copperhead was at home in Pall Mall. Naturally the
Englishman was a coarse animal and liked coarseness. Had Lincoln and
Seward been the ruffians supposed, the average Englishman would have
liked them the better. The exceedingly quiet manner and the
unassailable social position of Minister Adams in no way conciliated
them. They chose to ignore him, since they could not ridicule him. Lord
John Russell set the example. Personally the Minister was to be kindly
treated; politically he was negligible; he was there to be put aside.
London and Paris imitated Lord John. Every one waited to see Lincoln
and his hirelings disappear in one vast debacle. All conceived that the
Washington Government would soon crumble, and that Minister Adams would
vanish with the rest.
This situation made Minister Adams an exception among
diplomats. European rulers for the most part fought and treated as
members of one family, and rarely had in view the possibility of total
extinction; but the Governments and society of Europe, for a year at
least, regarded the Washington Government as dead, and its Ministers as
nullities. Minister Adams was better received than most nullities
because he made no noise. Little by little, in private, society took
the habit of accepting him, not so much as a diplomat, but rather as a
member of opposition, or an eminent counsel retained for a foreign
Government. He was to be received and considered; to be cordially
treated as, by birth and manners, one of themselves. This curiously
English way of getting behind a stupidity gave the Minister every
possible advantage over a European diplomat. Barriers of race,
language, birth, habit, ceased to exist. Diplomacy held diplomats apart
in order to save Governments, but Earl Russell could not hold Mr. Adams
apart. He was undistinguishable from a Londoner. In society few
Londoners were so widely at home. None had such double personality and
corresponding double weight.
The singular luck that took him to Fryston to meet the shock of
the Trent Affair under the sympathetic eyes of Monckton Milnes and
William E. Forster never afterwards deserted him. Both Milnes and
Forster needed support and were greatly relieved to be supported. They
saw what the private secretary in May had overlooked, the hopeless
position they were in if the American Minister made a mistake, and,
since his strength was theirs, they lost no time in expressing to all
the world their estimate of the Minister's character. Between them the
Minister was almost safe.
One might discuss long whether, at that moment, Milnes or
Forster were the more valuable ally, since they were influences of
different kinds. Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, possibly
greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for in London
society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a large majority,
and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes. Every bore was used to
talk familiarly about "Dicky Milnes," the "cool of the evening"; and of
course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule
with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in
London, and a maker of men--of a great many men. A word from him went
far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his
almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad,
and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had
written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were
certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches,
chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the
audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere,
knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of Ministers; but
unlike most wits, he held a social position of his own that ended in a
peerage, and he had a house in Upper Brook Street to which most clever
people were exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous,
and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous
to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a
strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of
books, but above all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved
the contacts--perhaps the collisions--of society. Not even Henry
Brougham dared do the things he did, yet Brougham defied rebuff. Milnes
was the good-nature of London; the Gargantuan type of its refinement
and coarseness; the most universal figure of May Fair.
Compared with him, figures like Hayward, or Delane, or
Venables, or Henry Reeve were quite secondary, but William E. Forster
stood in a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May
Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of
Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never
had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a tall, rough,
ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the
Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear--the exterior
roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental
nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker
ancestry, but he was a Friend one degree removed. Sentimental and
emotional he must have been, or he could never have persuaded a
daughter of Dr. Arnold to marry him. Pure gold, without a trace of base
metal; honest, unselfish, practical; he took up the Union cause and
made himself its champion, as a true Yorkshireman was sure to do,
partly because of his Quaker anti-slavery convictions, and partly
because it gave him a practical opening in the House. As a new member,
he needed a field.
Diffidence was not one of Forster's weaknesses. His practical
sense and his personal energy soon established him in leadership, and
made him a powerful champion, not so much for ornament as for work.
With such a manager, the friends of the Union in England began to take
heart. Minister Adams had only to look on as his true champions, the
heavy-weights, came into action, and even the private secretary caught
now and then a stray gleam of encouragement as he saw the ring begin to
clear for these burly Yorkshiremen to stand up in a prize-fight likely
to be as brutal as ever England had known. Milnes and Forster were not
exactly light-weights, but Bright and Cobden were the hardest hitters
in England, and with them for champions the Minister could tackle even
Lord Palmerston without much fear of foul play.
In society John Bright and Richard Cobden were never seen, and
even in Parliament they had no large following. They were classed as
enemies of order,--anarchists,--and anarchists they were if hatred of
the so-called established orders made them so. About them was no sort
of political timidity. They took bluntly the side of the Union against
Palmerston whom they hated. Strangers to London society, they were at
home in the American Legation, delightful dinner-company, talking
always with reckless freedom. Cobden was the milder and more
persuasive; Bright was the more dangerous to approach; but the private
secretary delighted in both, and nourished an ardent wish to see them
talk the same language to Lord John Russell from the gangway of the
House.
With four such allies as these, Minister Adams stood no longer
quite helpless. For the second time the British Ministry felt a little
ashamed of itself after the Trent Affair, as well it might, and
disposed to wait before moving again. Little by little, friends
gathered about the Legation who were no fair-weather companions. The
old anti-slavery, Exeter Hall, Shaftesbury clique turned out to be an
annoying and troublesome enemy, but the Duke of Argyll was one of the
most valuable friends the Minister found, both politically and
socially, and the Duchess was as true as her mother. Even the private
secretary shared faintly in the social profit of this relation, and
never forgot dining one night at the Lodge, and finding himself after
dinner engaged in instructing John Stuart Mill about the peculiar
merits of an American protective system. In spite of all the
probabilities, he convinced himself that it was not the Duke's claret
which led him to this singular form of loquacity; he insisted that it
was the fault of Mr. Mill himself who led him on by assenting to his
point of view. Mr. Mill took no apparent pleasure in dispute, and in
that respect the Duke would perhaps have done better; but the secretary
had to admit that though at other periods of life he was sufficiently
and even amply snubbed by Englishmen, he could never recall a single
occasion during this trying year, when he had to complain of rudeness.
Friendliness he found here and there, but chiefly among his
elders; not among fashionable or socially powerful people, either men
or women; although not even this rule was quite exact, for Frederick
Cavendish's kindness and intimate relations made Devonshire House
almost familiar, and Lyulph Stanley's ardent Americanism created a
certain cordiality with the Stanleys of Alderley whose house was one of
the most frequented in London. Lorne, too, the future Argyll, was
always a friend. Yet the regular course of society led to more literary
intimacies. Sir Charles Trevelyan's house was one of the first to which
young Adams was asked, and with which his friendly relations never
ceased for near half a century, and then only when death stopped them.
Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were intimates. Tom Hughes came into close
alliance. By the time society began to reopen its doors after the death
of the Prince Consort, even the private secretary occasionally saw a
face he knew, although he made no more effort of any kind, but silently
waited the end. Whatever might be the advantages of social relations to
his father and mother, to him the whole business of diplomacy and
society was futile. He meant to go home.