Part 57 (1/2)

There was a company of agreeable English ladies and gentlemen.

They played games in the evening after dinner, as you might expect of a company of American boys and girls of sixteen or eighteen years old.

Mr. Grenfell was a famous sportsman. His house was filled with the trophies of his skill in hunting. I was told that he had crossed the Channel in a row-boat.

Sir John Lubbock invited me to breakfast with him a few days afterward in St. James Square. There I met a large number of scientific men, among them the President of the Geographical Society, and the Presidents or Heads of several other of the important British Societies. I was presented to all these gentlemen. But I found I could not easily understand the names, when they were presented. Englishmen usually, even when they speak the language exactly as we do, have a peculiar p.r.o.nunciation of names, which makes it very hard for an American ear to catch them. I could not very well say, ”What name did you say?” or ask the host to repeat himself. So I was obliged to spend the hour in ignorance of the special dignity of most of the ill.u.s.trious persons whom I met.

Just behind my chair hung a full-length portrait of Admiral Boscawen, a famous naval officer connected with our early history. For him was named the town of Boscawen in New Hamps.h.i.+re, where Daniel Webster practised law. The house where we were had been his. I think he was in some way akin to the host.

I sailed for home on Wednesday. The Friday night before, I dined with Moreton Frewen, Esq., an accomplished English gentleman, well known on this side of the Atlantic. Mr. Frewen had been very kind and hospitable to me, as he had been to many Americans. He deserves the grat.i.tude of both nations for what he has done to promote good feeling between the two countries by his courtesy to Americans of all parties and ways of thinking. He has helped make the leading men of both countries know each other. From that knowledge has commonly followed a hearty liking for each other.

I mention this dinner, as I did the visit to Mr. Grenfell, because of its connection with a very interesting transaction.

The guests at the dinner were Sir Julian Pauncefote, afterward Lord Pauncefote, the British Amba.s.sador to the United States, who was then at home on a brief visit; Sir Seymour Blaine, an old military officer who had won, as I was told, great distinction in the East, and two Spanish n.o.blemen.

The soldier told several very interesting stories of his military life, and of what happened to him in his early days.

Of these I remember two. He said that when he was a young officer, scarcely more than a boy, he was invited by the Duke of Wellington, with other officers, to a great ball at Apsley House. Late in the evening, after the guests had left the supper room, and it was pretty well deserted, he felt a desire for another gla.s.s of wine. There was n.o.body in the supper room. He was just pouring out a gla.s.s of champagne for himself, when he heard a voice behind him. ”Youngster, what are you doing?” He turned round. It was the Duke. He said, ”I am getting a gla.s.s of wine.” To this the Duke replied, ”You ought to be up-stairs dancing. There are but two things, Sir, for a boy like you to be doing. One is fighting; the other dancing with the girls. As for me I'm going to bed.” Thereupon the Duke pa.s.sed round the table; touched a spring which opened a secret door, in what was apparently a set of book-shelves, and disappeared.

Sir Seymour Blaine told another story which, I dare say, is well known. But I have never seen it in print. He said that just before the Battle of Talavera when the Duke, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, was in command in Spain, the English and French armies had been marching for many days on parallel lines, neither quite liking to attack the other, and neither having got the advantage in position which they were seeking.

At last, one day, when everybody was pretty weary with the fatigues of the march, the Duke summoned some of his leading officers together and said to them: ”You see that clump of trees (pointing to one a good distance away, but in sight from where they stood)--when the head of the French column reaches that clump of trees, attack. As for me I'm going to sleep under this bush.” Thereupon the great soldier lay down, all his arrangements being made, and everything being in readiness, and took his nap while the great battle of Talavera-- on which the fate of Spain and perhaps the fate of Europe depended--was begun. This adds another instance to the list of the occasions to which Mr. Everett refers when he speaks of Webster's sleeping soundly the night before his great reply to Hayne.

”So the great Conde' slept on the eve of the battle of Rocroi; so Alexander slept on the eve of the battle of Arbela; and so they awoke to deeds of immortal fame!”

But this dinner of Mr. Frewen's had a very interesting consequence.

As I took leave of him at his door about eleven o'clock, he asked me if there were anything more he could do for me. I said, ”No, unless you happen to know the Lord Bishop of London.

I have a great longing to see the Bradford Ma.n.u.script before I go home. It is in the Bishop's Library. I went to Fulham the other day, but found the Bishop was gone. I had supposed the Library was a half-public one. I asked the servant who came to the door for the librarian. He told me there was no such officer, and that it was treated in all respects as a private library. But I should be very glad if I could get an opportunity to see it.” Mr. Frewen answered, ”I do not myself know the Bishop. But Mr. Grenfell, at whose house you spent Sunday, a little while ago, is his nephew by marriage.

He is in Scotland. But if I can reach him, I will procure for you a letter to his uncle.” That was Friday. Sunday morning there came a note from Mr. Grenfell to the Bishop. I enclosed it to his Lords.h.i.+p in one from myself, in which I said that if it were agreeable to him, I would call at Fulham the next Tuesday, at an hour which I fixed. I got a courteous reply from the Bishop, in which he said that he would be glad to show me the ”log of the Mayflower,” as he called it. I kept the appointment, and found the Bishop with the book in his hand. He received me very courteously, and showed me a little of the palace. He said that there had been a Bishop's palace on that spot for more than a thousand years.

I took the precious ma.n.u.script in my hands, and examined it with an almost religious reverence. I had delivered the address at Plymouth, the twenty-first of December, 1895, on the occasion of the two hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims upon the rock. In preparing for that duty I read carefully, with renewed enthusiasm and delight, the n.o.ble and touching story as told by Governor Bradford. I declared then that this precious history ought to be in no other custody than that of their children.

There have been several attempts to procure the return of the ma.n.u.script to this country. Mr. Winthrop, in 1860, through the venerable John Sinclair, Archdeacon, urged the Bishop of London to give it up, and proposed that the Prince of Wales, then just coming to this country, should take it across the Atlantic and present it to the people of Ma.s.sachusetts. The Attorney-General, Sir Fitzroy Kelley, approved the plan, and said it would be an exceptional act of grace, a most interesting action, and that he heartily wished the success of the application.

But the Bishop refused. Again, in 1869, John Lothrop Motley, the Minister to England, who had a great and deserved influence there, repeated the proposition, at the suggestion of that most accomplished scholar, Justin Winsor. But his appeal had the same fate. The Bishop gave no encouragement, and said, as had been said nine years before, that the property could not be alienated without an Act of Parliament. Mr. Winsor planned to repeat the attempt on his visit to England in 1887.

When he was at Fulham the Bishop was absent, and he was obliged to go home without seeing him in person.

In 1881, at the time of the death of President Garfield, Benjamin Scott, Chamberlain of London, proposed again in the newspapers that the rest.i.tution should be made. But nothing came of it.

When I went abroad I determined to visit the locality on the borders of Lincolns.h.i.+re and Yorks.h.i.+re, from which Bradford and Brewster and Robinson, the three leaders of the Pilgrims, came, and where their first church was formed, and the places in Amsterdam and Leyden where the emigrants spent thirteen years. But I longed especially to see the ma.n.u.script of Bradford at Fulham, which then seemed to me, as it now seems to me, the most precious ma.n.u.script on earth, unless we could recover one of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from the pen of the Evangelist.

The desire to get it back grew and grew during the voyage across the Atlantic. I did not know how such a proposition would be received in England. A few days after I landed I made a call on John Morley. I asked him whether he thought the thing could be done. He inquired carefully into the story, took down from his shelf the excellent though brief life of Bradford in Leslie Stephen's ”Biographical Dictionary,” and told me he thought the book ought to come back to us, and that he should be glad to do anything in his power to help.

It was my fortune, a week or two after, to sit next to Mr.

Bayard at a dinner given to Mr. Collins, by the American consuls in Great Britain. I took occasion to tell him the story, and he gave me the a.s.surance, which he afterward so abundantly and successfully fulfilled, of his powerful aid. I was compelled, by the health of one of the party with whom I was travelling, to go to the Continent almost immediately, and was disappointed in the hope of an early return to England.

After looking at the volume and reading the records on the flyleaf, I said: ”My Lord, I am going to say something which you may think rather audacious. I think this book ought to go back to Ma.s.sachusetts. n.o.body knows how it got over here.

Some people think it was carried off by Governor Hutchinson, the Tory Governor; other people think it was carried off by British soldiers when Boston was evacuated; but in either case the property would not have changed. Or, if you treat it as booty, in which last case, I suppose, by the law of nations ordinary property does change, no civilized nation in modern times applies that principle to the property of libraries and inst.i.tutions of learning.”

The Bishop said: ”I did not know you cared anything about it.”

”Why,” said I, ”if there were in existence in England a history of King Alfred's reign for thirty years, written by his own hand, it would not be more precious in the eyes of Englishmen than this ma.n.u.script is to us.”

”Well,” said he, ”I think myself that it ought to go back, and if it depended on me it would have gone back before this.

But many of the Americans who have been here have been commercial people, and did not seem to care much about it except as a curiosity. I suppose I ought not to give it up on my own authority. It belongs to me in my official capacity, and not as private or personal property. I think I ought to consult the Archbishop of Canterbury. And, indeed,” he added, ”I think I ought to speak to the Queen about it. We should not do such a thing behind Her Majesty's back.”