Louisa (25 page)

Ealing, then, was an oasis
. “It is a little Paradise,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. Even the name given to the country house was fortuitous: “Little Boston House.” Their new home stood at the entrance to the long private drive, known as “The Ride,” that ran through the estate to Boston Manor, a massive seventeenth-century Jacobean pile; the Adamses' house was likely the original dowager house on the estate. (The earliest mention of the area, from the twelfth century, spelled Boston as Bordwadestone.) Smaller than the mansion but still spacious, Little Boston House had two-story bay windows flanking the front door, pleasant rooms, sheltering trees, and large gardens of fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables, and “flowers in profusion.” Acres of woods and fields surrounded them. “The situation is beautiful, the house comfortable, and the distance from the great city supportable,” Louisa wrote to Abigail, adding, “we enjoy every agreement that will render the country desirable, and within the compass of our means.”

Rev. John Hewlett recommended
that they send their sons to the Great Ealing School, only a mile from their house, and Louisa and John Quincy immediately enrolled Charles and John as boarders. John
Quincy planned to educate George himself, devising a schedule that involved waking at six to read the Bible in Latin or French before turning to Gibbon or Cicero, but by fall George was begging to be allowed to join his brothers. By October, it was arranged for George to live at home and study with John Quincy at daybreak before walking the mile to school. Almost as soon as the family was reunited, it was divided again—as was typical in the place and time. But with a difference: all her sons were able to come home, and they often did.

At the end of October
, John Quincy was trying to teach George and John how to fire a pistol when the gun, loaded with too much powder, backfired. His right hand was badly injured. With writing hard and painful, he spent all his time reading—only to contract an eye infection ten days later. The pain radiating through the left side of his face sickened him. “It seared me as if four hooks were tearing that side of my face into four quarters,” he wrote. Various remedies were attempted: “physic, the foot bath, and the elder flower tea,” but to no avail. He could not stand light; eventually he could not stand the sound of a human voice. The doctor came and applied six leeches to the skin around his eye, and Louisa and Lucy Houel, her chambermaid, kept the leech wounds bleeding for four or five hours, staying up with John Quincy as he lay feverish, “incessantly employed” in tending to the discharge from the weeping wounds, “not only of the lacrymal humor, but the purulent matter.” Every half hour, Louisa or Lucy had to wash his eye with warm water. They took turns sweeping his eyelashes with a camel-hair paintbrush dipped in lard.

When he was well enough to resume working, Louisa read aloud to him, filed his letters, took dictation for his personal letters, wrote notes for his diary so that the record would remain unbroken. This was all a kind of experiment, John Quincy said, and he became satisfied that she could be trusted. She became his amanuensis not only for his private work but for his public business as well. “From this day,” he wrote in his diary, “she will write for me long and often.”

She was tireless
, as she had to be. While she was nursing and working for her husband, their son John became so ill that he had to be kept home from school for nearly six weeks; she had to care for him, too. Then, at the end of December, all the boys were at home on holiday, and they looked to her to entertain them. “Mr. Adams's time is of too much importance to the public to admit of his attending them himself,” Louisa wrote. Meanwhile, the rest of the house was in turmoil. When John Quincy, his health steadily improving, went into London one day, the servants came to Louisa with “mutual criminations” against one another; soon she found herself looking for a new cook, housemaid, and laundry maid to hire, capably dealing with the fallout. She had always complained that she was too untrained, too poor, too incompetent, and too ignored to be considered useful. At the age of forty, what changed? Partly, her new position reflected necessity and expediency. John Quincy needed a pair of eyes and hands, and he could command hers. At the same time, there had been a test, and she had passed. The most immediate and obvious change brought on by her newfound busyness and quiet confidence was in her health. Not even the bloated leeches were too much for her; only after the night dealing with the lachrymal humor and purulent matter was she faint the next day. At the moment her husband and son needed nursing, her body was stronger than it had ever been.

 • • • 

S
HE
WAS
ONLY
DOING
what her role was supposed to require. A nineteenth-century American wife was expected to run the household, nurse the boys, and subsume herself to her husband. So she did not give herself much credit. While she tended to her husband's work, her own personal correspondence ceased, letters to her piling up unanswered. “Mr. Adams has written you a long letter today which I have assisted,” she wrote to Abigail in late December, “and I think as long as I am occupied in this way you must cease to expect any letters from
me and consider his as from us both.” Nevertheless, without fanfare, she was performing a role she had always doubted she could do. Her sense of being “useful” did not diminish once John Quincy healed and much of the office work transferred to his new secretary, recently arrived from the United States. Her voice became more self-assured. Even her skeptical mother-in-law now found much to admire, and the two women grew more intimate. “Your letters are a treat from which I derive pleasure unalloyed,” Abigail wrote to her in the summer of 1816.

If Louisa did keep a diary during those years, it has been lost. Her letters, though, suggest that she was generally as content as she could be. The family was together in one place, and even often together in one room. John Quincy's task as minister to Great Britain, whatever his initial apprehensions were, was remarkably easy; his most important job was simply not to disturb the peace existing between the two exhausted countries.
Much of his time
, in fact, was spent dealing with outlandish requests from Americans. “One would imagine that the American Legation at London was the Moon of Ariosto, or Milton's Paradise of Fools—the place where things lost upon Earth were to be found,” he wrote to Abigail. They came to him asking to exchange their Revolutionary War paper money, or demanding old familial estates, or help with genealogy. But for the most part, the Adamses' focus was on one another, as a family. Their distance from London isolated them from high society to some extent, but they were somewhat isolated anyway. Instead of accepting (and reciprocating) every invitation, they spent their nights reading aloud
Guy Mannering
and
Waverley
by Sir Walter Scott or the latest novels by Maria Edgeworth.

Their oldest son
, George, looking back ten years later, would remember his time in England as singularly happy. He found school “peculiarly pleasant,” and the sights that London and the countryside offered “fancifal combinations and beautiful associations to the mind.” Charles had a harder time fitting in. Used to the little cosmopolitan world of his school in the Russian court, and younger than all the other
boys, he found it difficult to find his place at the Great Ealing School. The head, Rev. George Nicholas, an Oxford-educated classicist (spoken Latin was his specialty), was considered an excellent teacher, particularly admired for his strictness (his obituary called him “an almost unrivaled disciplinarian”). There was also the matter of being American, which was no small thing, considering that the other students sometimes sang “Rule, Britannia!” on the playground. The first time John Quincy visited Charles and John (George had not yet joined them), he found them “greatly discontented.” But after their first few weeks, there were no more reports of unhappiness. George sometimes brought friends home to dinner, joined a small group known as “The Spy Club” (the future cardinal John Henry Newman, then a classmate, was another member), and helped start a literary magazine. John had a talent for mathematics but preferred playing to studying. “I approve of your eating and sleeping and living together; of your playing football, crickett; running, climbing, leaping, swimming, skating; and have no great objection to your play at marbles,” his grandfather John Adams cheerfully grumbled after receiving one of John's enthusiastic accounts of his life at school. “These are good for your health: but what do you do for your mind?” John managed to get along well even with his would-be enemies. On the playground one day, one of the boys asked him whether he had ever been to Washington, a sly reference to the British burning the city. “No,” retorted John (who had lived in Washington), “but I have been at
New Orleans
”—where the American army destroyed a British attacking force nearly twice its size.

Louisa watched her sons
closely—because she finally could, after so many years apart, and because watching people is what she liked to do. She judged them with a blend of fascination, tenderness, and exacting expectations. Her observations about Charles were typical. “School seems to produce a strange effect on him,” Louisa wrote to Abigail. “He is one of those observing, and imitative children, to whom everything becomes a matter of attention, and attraction. . . . He is not thought so highly of in the school as he merits, and does not improve as much as we had reason to expect.” John Quincy, who had been so exacting from a distance, saw his sons in the flesh and changed his attitude. The messages in the long, stern, didactic letters that he had sent to George and John were, if not forgotten, then at least softened. “I comfort myself with the reflection that they are like other children, and prepare my mind for seeing them, if their lives are spared, get along in the world, like other men,” he wrote to Abigail, though he could not help but add, “I certainly can
imagine
something more flattering than this.”

They were happy, then. The walks through the gentle fields, the novels by the fire, the dinners with the neighbors, the local balls and country dances, the excursions to Windsor and to the theater in London, the evenings of Handel arias—it added up to something like the life that a young woman growing up on Tower Hill might have happily dreamed of. In September 1816, Louisa wrote to Abigail that her husband “never looked so well or so handsome as he does now.”

Around that time, John Quincy wrote her a long poem.

And what are to
the Lover's eye,

The beauties other damsels boast?

Trust me, they pass unheeded by;

Or raise a transient glance at most.

But thine are grappled to my soul;

They beat in every throbbing vein;

Warm with the tide of life they roll,

They tune my nerves, inspire my brain.

Like all of his verse, the poem was a little insipid and the humor awkward, but Louisa had a taste for the era's flowery style, and she laughed easily. She could recognize his affection in his lines. She responded with a poem for him, “On the Portrait of My Husband.”

The Painter's Art would vainly seize . . .

That eye which speaks the soul,

That brow which study gently knits,

That soft attemper'd whole;

That vast variety of Mind,

Capacious, clear, and strong,

Where brilliancy of wit refined.

At Little Boston House, nearly twenty years after they were married, Louisa and John Quincy appeared to have achieved the very domestic happiness that they both had always, frantically, insisted was their greatest desire. The startling thing is that once they had found it in Ealing, Louisa, not John Quincy, was the one who pushed to leave it behind.

2

L
ONDON
HAD
A
CENT
RIPETAL PULL
. “London is uncommonly gay this winter, but we do not partake of its pleasures in consequence of our residence in the country,” Louisa wrote to Abigail. “We begin to find it very inconvenient.” “We” is not quite accurate; her husband found not the distance of London but the very existence of London inconvenient. Once the season began, the invitations arrived in thick flurries, and even though they accepted only a small portion, it still brought them into the city three or four times a week. The balls and large “routs” began at eleven or midnight, the “fashionable hours,” which meant that Louisa and John Quincy were falling into bed in Ealing just before dawn. While he groaned, she smiled. “I cannot conceive how it happens but this mode of life seems to agree perfectly well with me,” Louisa wrote to Abigail, “for I never enjoyed such health, particularly since my marriage and I am only afraid of growing too fat.” She could claim to prefer the quiet contentment of domestic life. But she could not hide the note of thrill in her voice when she wrote, “We are here plunged into the great world.”

Once she was
, though, the old sense of being excluded started to creep in. The seven miles to London came to stand for something
bigger than a long drive. They did not get tickets to Almack's, the most selective subscription ball in London, even though tickets had been offered. They did not go to concerts and the theater as often as she liked. They stood at arm's length. It took nine months to receive a presentation to the queen, and when the day finally arrived, the woman who was supposed to present her, the foreign minister's wife Lady Castlereagh, arrived too late to do the job. The queen herself was gracious but automatic, performing the motions with an almost military routine. “She now stands still and receives the ladies, who simply pass through the room stopping immediately before her Majesty, who addresses a few words to them as they pass,” Louisa described the scene to Abigail. “The room being very small the Ladies do not remain in it five minutes, and I think the present Drawing Rooms, might with great propriety be styled reviews, as the Ladies literally
file off
at the word of command.”

It clearly rankled Louisa to be no more than a member of the march. After attending two parties at Carlton House, the prince regent's London mansion—a house so extravagant that Parliament was forced to bail the prince out of his debts and pay the bills—she sniffed that she was unimpressed. The octagonal room flanked by two staircases was
interesting
, she acknowledged to Abigail, and muslin draperies produced a “pretty effect,” but the whole thing “did not strike me very much, after having witnessed the fetes in Russia upon the return of the Emperor which were infinitely more splendid and in a far better taste.” Still, however much she tried to hold herself aloof, she saw it all with a kind of sad longing. She could mock the way British ladies waltzed, but she could not help finding them “more beautiful than I can describe.” Their beauty “is so irresistible when I see them, I forget everything else.”

It had been half a lifetime since she had been a child in London pretending that she was a duchess. Now finding herself in a crush of British duchesses, she was farther than ever from them. The courtiers
had made room for her in Berlin and St. Petersburg, but in London, the rigid class system kept her pegged down a notch. When John Quincy called on the owners of Boston Manor, he found them “very much occupied,” and they were “not at home” when Louisa left her visiting card. She had all the invitations she could want, but she was still among the thousands of “insignificants” that crowded the aristocratic scrambles and routs. No one bothered to introduce her to the prince regent. “I have been twice to Carlton House by invitation without even receiving a bow from its Master,” she wrote. “I am so much of an old fashionist that I confess I feel very awkward under such circumstances and never know how to behave. I do not like to find myself in a house where I am not acknowledged as an acquaintance.”

It probably did not
help that at Carlton House, the crowd was straining and peering to catch sight of three beautiful American sisters, who arrived at the ball adorned with white ostrich feathers and diamonds. Louisa had known the Caton sisters in Washington, but in London they moved in aristocratic circles that were closed to her. The Catons' names were all over the London rags; they were celebrated for their uncommon beauty and great wealth. It was common gossip that the Duke of Wellington immediately fell in love with the eldest, Marianne, who was there with her husband. As if to make the contrast stark, when John Quincy met the Duke of Wellington for a second time a few weeks later, the duke struggled to remember who the American minister was. Afterward, John Quincy wrote in his diary that Wellington had “forgotten me. . . . This is one of the many incidents from which I can perceive how very small a space my person or my station occupy in the notice of these persons and at these places.”

By October 1816
, Louisa was hunting for a house in London. Ealing “really is too far from London either to be convenient for business or pleasure,” Louisa wrote to Abigail, justifying herself against her husband's wishes to stay put. “The house in which we now live is so comfortable that I despair of finding one in London even at double
the rent I pay for this, or half so convenient,” he wrote in his diary. But she was persistent. She found a place on Gloucester Place, in Portman Square, but the lease fell through. The truth was that she was a social creature, enjoyed the parties, and imagined herself left out. Even after repeated nights of being almost ignored at large parties, she found herself enjoying the balls at least enough to describe them in vivid detail to Abigail. She wanted more.

More than the inconvenient
distance to London may have motivated her house hunt. Ealing was not quite the paradise that John Quincy imagined it was. It was a normal English village in a time of economic crisis. Hundreds of thousands of men had been discharged from the British army and navy following the British defeat of the French at Waterloo, many of them without pensions. Every day, beggars came to the Adamses' door. The Corn Laws of 1815, passed to discourage imports of cheaper foreign grain, kept the price of grain artificially high, and thousands were starving. The
Morning Chronicle
reported that during one week in 1816, no trade at all had passed through the London custom house. After the victory at Waterloo, the country fell into a deep postwar recession. Even the ungodly rich were deeply in debt, living on credit, dancing at splendid parties throughout the night and fearing the dun and bailiff throughout the morning. Each person who asked for money or scraps arrived “with a different hideous tale of misery,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. “The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in this country than in any other that I ever saw”—an implausible observation, considering that he had lived in tsarist Russia. But in Russia the serfs were taken as a matter of course. Here, John Quincy was shocked to see a decently dressed man on the side of the street, dying from hunger. Even Louisa, who generally had an almost willful blindness to other people's poverty, was compelled to comment on the terrible plight of the country. “I am positively assured that the poorer classes of society do not taste meat once in several months and it is
hardly possible to take five steps from your door without being surrounded with well dressed beggars who assure you they have not a bit of bread,” Louisa told Abigail.

 • • • 

T
HERE
MAY
have been
another reason that Louisa was slightly unsettled in Ealing, though it requires speculation. Her decision to start looking at houses in the city coincided with the end of a three-month stay with the Adamses in Ealing by a beautiful eighteen-year-old named Ellen Nicholas. She was the daughter of George Nicholas, the boys' headmaster. As neighbors, she and Louisa had become intimate, constant companions. It's not hard to imagine why. Ellen's mother had died in 1811, and in Ellen Louisa probably saw something of her sisters—and her deceased daughter. They played music together, laughed during church together, dedicated poetry to each other. When Louisa sat for her portrait, she wanted Ellen there, because Ellen put her at ease. But Ellen also had an enchanting effect on Louisa's husband.

He was bewitched by her—her youth and beauty, her sweet manners, her deep dimples when she smiled. Ellen sent John Quincy into “poetical paroxysms,” he wrote in his diary. His tone became almost bewildered: “Something was become indispensable.” He tried writing her a poem, ending it with a burlesque turn—the direction his humor usually went. But the paroxysms went on, and he continued to add verses in his head. These lines, “instead of the ludicrous character of the second, are too serious and even solemn written, as if from a youthful and ardent lover, and expressing sentiments which I neither do nor ought to feel for her,” he wrote in his diary. “The love is all merely poetical, but has so much the appearance of reality that I scruple to show the lines now they are written.”
Some open flirtation
between a man and young woman was permissible in their culture; the style of the time was gallant. Teasingly and seriously, it was acceptable for a
man to acknowledge a woman's looks, openly and even to his wife.
There is no reason
to suspect that John Quincy ever behaved improperly toward Ellen; their relationship appears to have gone no farther than stargazing together in the garden. But the ingenue clearly responded to his attention. “How is the roseate tint of modest diffidence, mantling in my cheeks, at the idea of writing to so august . . . a seigneur,” Ellen wrote to John Quincy the following summer, concluding, “Adieu, my kind friend, sometimes think of your little ‘
favorite
.'” Louisa may not have cared about the special attentions; her husband had never been shy about appreciating the beauty of other women. There is no question she was very fond of Ellen herself, whom she later described as “one of the loveliest girls I ever knew . . . accomplished, beautiful and amiable.” But Louisa was a sensitive creature, and the contrast between the nature of the attention that John Quincy paid to her and to her young friend was stark. The poems that John Quincy wrote to his wife were tender and loving, but they also affectionately poked fun at her middle age and increasingly middling looks. Ellen, on the other hand, flustered him.

Whether or not Louisa
was jealous of Ellen, she knew what jealousy felt like. She was wise about its effects on her own self-worth. “One of the greatest difficulties which we have to contend against in the course of a long life;
is,
what we term Amour propre!” she later wrote.

Which is so exquisitely sensitive, that it is barely possible to praise one person without wounding his neighbor—for that still sly monitor conscience, however it may appear to slumber; always wakes to feeling when aroused by the flattering eulogy of qualities in others, which we know we do not possess ourselves; and the snarling propensity which wrestles within us on such occasions; acts pretty much as matrimonial squabblers do at the interference of another person; on whom
the ire of both the belligerents falls with equal impetuosity, and they make up
their
difference, at the expense of the peace maker.

There was yet another reason that Louisa wanted to move to London, perhaps most important of all. She was open about it. She suggested that John Quincy needed to be in London to help his chances of becoming president.

 • • • 

T
HAT
N
OVEMBER
, 1816
, James Monroe was elected president. Even before then, rumors of his intention to appoint John Quincy secretary of state—“the best office,” wrote John Quincy—had reached London. The position had been the stepping-stone to the presidency for the last three presidents. It was a natural fit: no American in government had more foreign policy experience than John Quincy. It also made sense on political grounds, after three straight Virginians in the role; many said it was time for a northern man. In his diary, John Quincy wrestled with his desire to believe the rumors. “I perceive no propriety in taking any step whatever to seek it,” he wrote anxiously. His wife was not so circumspect. She argued that remaining in Ealing would keep him out of the public eye. The influential Americans who streamed through London were disinclined to make the long, expensive trip to the countryside. He needed to make his presence known.