Washington Irving
Page 39
Despite “the bustle and agitation of public life,” Irving was well received at court, and he gladhanded easily with the diplomatic and royal crowd. He was pleased to see two old acquaintances, Sir Robert Peel—now prime minister—and the foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, with whom he and McLane had negotiated in 1831. The three chatted casually of the ongoing dispute between their countries over the northeastern border between Maine and New Brunswick, which was nearing resolution with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.7
Official obligations completed, Irving made the short train trip to Birmingham. He and Sarah Van Wart, whom he hadn't seen in ten years, “clasped in each others arms without speaking,” their eyes welling with tears. There had been a similarly emotional meeting several days earlier in London, when Irving had knocked on the door of 50 Albemarle Street. John Murray III, the publisher's thirty-four-year-old son, had escorted Irving into the familiar drawing room where he was reunited with the Prince of Booksellers, bent and crippled with rheumatism and leaning on his butler for support, but still as sharp-eyed and wry as ever. Irving choked back tears, barely able to speak, and was rescued by a sympathetic Mrs. Murray, who swooped in and eased them into conversation. It was their first face-to-face meeting since their estrangement; it was also the last. John Murray II died the following June, aged sixty-five.8
After two days in Birmingham, Irving returned to London for a stay at Westminster Abbey as the guest of the Foreign Office. Walking to his room each evening, he strolled through the vaulted passages and long arcades of the cloisters he had written of in The Sketch Book a lifetime before. The coincidence was not lost on him. “Am I always to have my dreams turned into realities?” he wrote.9
He hoped to enjoy the solitude, but there were too many obligations. He attended the queen's grand ball, considered the social event of the year, where he noted that the only person who didn't seem to be having any fun was the young queen, who was constantly pushing her crown up off her forehead.10
Irving left for France on May 21, taking with him Hector Ames, a young man he had hired as part of his legation staff and whose sister had married Washington's nephew Irving Van Wart in 1839. He wasn't quite family, but he was close enough.
At Le Havre and Rouen, Irving was overcome with emotion; these were the familiar places he and Peter had strolled, and Washington broke down as he walked through a church garden Peter had frequented. “My dear, dear Brother,” he wrote sadly, “as I write the tears are gushing from my eyes.”11 Happier times and new memories awaited him in Paris, where his niece Sarah Storrow and her newborn daughter were ready to receive him.
Once there, the American minister to France, Lewis Cass, enthusiastically took Irving by the hand and steered him through diplomatic circles, proudly presenting him to King Louis-Philippe, whose coronation Irving had witnessed twelve years earlier. The flamboyant young chevalier of 1830 was now a slightly hunched middle-aged man, dressed in simple black clothes and pantaloons, and under constant surveillance after attempts on his life. The ministers and the king spoke mostly of the United States and its relations with Canada, Texas, and Mexico—a discussion that made Irving only more homesick.
Chatting with royalty and dining at fancy diplomatic dinners no longer excited Irving. As he sat at an elegant dinner in one of Paris's fanciest hotels, he could barely stifle a yawn. It was a scene, said Irving, “that would have enchanted me in my greener years of inexperience and romance,” but now, “I have grown too wise to be duped by such delusions…. It is wonderful how much more diffi-cult it is to astonish or amuse me then when I was last in Europe. It is possible I may have gathered wisdom under the philosophic shades of Sleepy Hollow… amidst all the splendors of London and Paris, I find my imagination refuses to take fire, and my heart still yearns after dear little Sunnyside.”12
Irving arrived in Madrid on July 25 after four hot days of travel. He had arranged to move into the same rooms in the hotel of the duke of San Lorenzo that were being vacated by the previous American minister, Aaron Vail. Irving assumed the lease, purchased all of Vail's furniture, and retained all of Vail's domestic staff. The house was farther from the public walks than Irving preferred, but it was big—“a wilderness of nooks and corners, and dark corners and crinkum crankums, such as abound in old Spanish houses”13—and he liked it. It also provided good company, as the other half of the hotel was occupied by the Brazilian resident minister Cavalcanti de Albuquerque and his American wife, whom Irving quickly grew to adore.
“I look forward to experiencing great satisfaction from the society of the young gentlemen who form my diplomatic household,” Irving predicted to his sister. “It really appears to me that I could not have been better off for companions in their relative positions.” Irving had known Hamilton for some time—the young man had lived with his parents in Tarrytown, near Sunnyside—and he was pleasantly impressed with Hamilton's drive and ability, calling him “full of life, activity, and intelligence; with great self possession and an excellent address.”14 Well-spoken and good-looking, Hamilton was the ideal right-hand man for Irving's Spanish adventure, filling the same role Irving had played for Louis McLane.
As for Carson Brevoort, Irving was pleased to have him nearby for more than diplomatic reasons. “My heart warms toward him. He seems like a new link in our old friendship,” Irving told Henry Brevoort tenderly, “which commenced when we were both his age or even younger, and which I have always felt as something almost fraternal.” The final member of his staff, Hector Ames, was “amiable” and “intelligent” but almost frustratingly quiet. “[He] sits in his corner of the carriage and says nothing,” Irving shrugged.15
As his young charges put the makeshift embassy in order, Irving went to pay his respects to Count Almodóvar, the Spanish minister of foreign affairs. Irving needed an appointment to formally present his credentials to the Spanish government, but he also required some off-the-record advice on how and to whom his official papers should be proffered. It was a touchy issue, reflective of the tumultuous state of Spanish affairs.
In 1842 twelve-year-old Queen Isabella II was queen in name only. She could not formally assume the throne until she turned fourteen, her “age of majority.” For the last nine years, the Spanish had clashed bitterly over whether Isabella had a right to rule in the first place. The conflict began in 1833, when the dying King Ferdinand VII, still without a male heir, had issued the Pragmatic Sanction, overturning the Salic law of 1713 that excluded women from the Spanish throne. That had cleared the way for his daughter Isabella, but had infuriated his brother, Don Carlos, who asserted his own right to the throne. For the next seven years, he and his Carlist supporters tried to take it by force.
In the meantime, Isabella's mother, Maria Christina, had been appointed queen regent, ruling Spain on her daughter's behalf—a brief reign that ended ignominiously. Egged on in her opposition to constitutional reforms by her uncle, King Louis-Philippe of France—who had his own plans for the Spanish throne—Maria Christina lost popular support. Fortunately, Isabella had a more devoted follower and defender in the dynamic general Espartero, who engineered the defeat of the Carlists in 1840, and drove Don Carlos out of the country. With the dust of war barely settled, Espartero and the queen regent clashed over politics, and the increasingly unpopular Maria Christina abdicated her regency, abandoned her children, and hurried to exile in France.
A mother deserting her children was bad enough, but the worst was yet to come. In October 1841 angry supporters of the exiled Maria Christina stormed the palace in an attempt to kidnap Isabella and her sisters. A gunfight erupted, but the girls remained safely barricaded in their bedroom with their governess. Espartero dealt harshly with the ringleaders of the attempted kidnapping, and Maria Christina, though declaring she had neither known of nor assented to the plan, remained with her uncle in Paris, stoking further unrest between Spain and France. It was perfectly suited to Irving's sense of the dramatic, and his heart went out to poor abandoned Isabella and her sisters
. “Great heavens how much their mother has to answer for!” he wrote to Catharine. “How unworthily she has proved herself of her great trusts!”16
“Spain now enjoys a breathing spell,” Irving concluded, “and I hope may be enabled to regulate her internal affairs and recover from the exhausting effects of her civil wars.” But the drama had created a diplomatic dilemma for Irving and his fellow ministers—namely, when presenting their credentials, who should they consider the official representative of the Spanish government: Isabella, the queen who was not yet of age, or Espartero, the acting regent? Irving's orders from Webster were explicit; he was to present them to the queen. Yet Webster had also advised Irving to “regulate [his] conduct by circumstances.” The new French minister, who had insisted on ignoring the regent and going directly to the queen, was rebuked by the Spanish government. The minister left Madrid in an angry huff, threatening to remove the French seal from the doors of the embassy in protest.17
Irving consulted with Almodóvar, and on August 1 Irving and Albuquerque—both dressed in full diplomatic uniform—presented themselves at the palace of Buena Vista, home of the regent, credentials in hand. Albuquerque, skeptical of the legitimacy of the regent, yet worried about offending, waited to see what the American minister would do. Irving had no doubt on how to proceed; in his mind, Espartero was the constitutional ruler of the country until the queen came of age. “I do but echo the sentiments of the President,” Irving said to Espartero in Spanish, “in accompanying it with assurances of the high respect and regard of my Government, for the Sovereign of this Country; for its political institutions and for its People.” With a bow, he laid his credentials in the regent's hands. Irving's words had the desired effect. Impressed, Espartero accepted the papers and welcomed Irving graciously. Following Irving's lead, Albuquerque and other ministers presented their credentials to the regent first.18
Escorted by Almodóvar, Irving and Albuquerque were then driven to the royal palace for a conference with the queen. They ascended the grand staircase, still scarred from the assault on the queen's bedroom ten months before—“What must have been the feelings of those poor children on listening from their apartment to the horrid tumult?” Irving shuddered—and waited in the salon until, at last, Isabella stepped into the room. Irving, who had promised to give his nieces detailed descriptions of royalty, sized up the queen carefully: “She is nearly twelve years of age & is sufficiently well grown for her years. She has a somewhat fair complexion; quite pale, with bluish or light grey eyes; a grave demeanor but a graceful deportment. I could not but regard her with deep interest, knowing what important interests depended upon the life of this fragile little being, and to what a stormy and precarious carreer she might be destined.” Dressed in black and mourning the recent death of a cousin, Isabella looked to Irving like one of the ghosts he had written of in Knickerbocker, “gliding noiselessly like a shadow through the silent and twilight apartments of that great edifice, and looking so pale and almost melancholy!” The queen received him courteously. After a brief audience, Irving bowed and took his leave. He breathed a sigh of relief; it was over. His pragmatic approach had won the approval of both regent and queen, and had put the United States in a favorable light. “I feel installed in my official station and begin to realize that I am actually a Minister,” he wrote.19
To his surprise, things were so slow during his first weeks in office that Irving was convinced he had landed an ideal post, with good pay, few responsibilities, and plenty of time for writing. “I shall go on with other literary matters that I have in hand, and trust that my present residence in Spain, like my former one, will be highly favorable for the exercise of the pen,” he told Catharine.20 His diplomatic duties consisted mainly of socializing with the Albuquerques, conversing with Espartero's dark-eyed wife—“affable, graceful and engaging,” he observed appreciatively—and chumming up to the genial, though somewhat bumbling, Sir Arthur Aston, the British minister.
As he moved within diplomatic circles, Irving was surprised by how many were familiar with his books. “I must say, from every person with whom I have had any intercourse since my arrival I have experienced the most marked respect and cordial good will,” he wrote. “All claim me an acquaintance from my writings, and all welcome me as a ‘friend of Spain.’”21The Alhambra was a particular favorite. “I find that little work continually acting as a passport for me to the good graces of the Spaniards,” he noted.22
Irving received news regularly from Sunnyside, where Catharine had taken over from Ebenezer as head of the household. Washington and his niece Sarah Storrow also began a weekly correspondence. It was hard work for the new wife and mother, who frequently apologized for writing what she was certain were boring letters. “Your letters could not be too frequent for me, nor their contents trivial,” Irving assured Sarah. Every Thursday, he looked for a letter from her and sulked if one failed to arrive.
In late summer came word from Ebenezer that attempts to negotiate a continued publishing agreement with Lea & Blanchard had failed. With no American publisher to keep the presses cranking, Irving was in danger of going out of print. He found the prospect depressing. “Everything behind me seems to have turned to chaff and stubble,” he confessed to Ebenezer, “and if I desire any further progress from literature, it must be by the further exercise of my pen.” Of more immediate concern was the loss of the annual salary the prior agreement had generated. “I find my home resources are drying up in various quarters,” he wrote Pierre in a mild panic, and urged his nephew to stabilize his investments. He promised Pierre that as soon as his books arrived in Madrid he would continue work on his biography of George Washington.23
In early September Irving and his boys vacated Vail's apartments in favor of the house of the marquis de Mos on Calle Victor Hugo. Leaving the company of Mrs. Albuquerque was perhaps the most difficult part of the move, but Irving wanted to be closer to the public walks and the other legations. The house was enormous—“I have such a range of salons that it gives me quite an appetite to walk from my study to the dining room,” he joked24—but his own octagon-shaped room was cozier than the one in Vail's house, with high windows mounted in a cupola to let in light, and a connected study overlooking a run-down garden.
Despite assurances from Pierre that his finances were improving, Irving fretted about money. The stress made writing difficult, which put him in an irritable mood. An invitation from Sarah Storrow to visit her in Paris was brusquely dismissed. “I require, to get my mind in order, to have it undisturbed by any project of change of place; and to keep it in order, that I should remain on my working ground.” But his pen remained stationary, and he was plagued by the fear that he might never write again. “On my contemplated literary campaign depends much of the ease and comfort of my after life,” he moaned.25
To distract himself, he planned his first diplomatic dinner, which he hoped to host in his new quarters in late September. It would be a small gathering of ten—“a number which, if I can help it, I will never exceed,” he declared—but as his first official function as a host, Irving was determined to make a good impression, even as he tried to keep costs down. His experience as the de facto minister in the English legation twelve years prior had taught him that outof-pocket expenses were unlikely to be reimbursed by the U.S. Department of State, and this time he was determined to keep his own expenses to a minimum. His dinners would be tasteful, but modest. Hamilton set an elegant round table using the silver, candelabras, and good china Thomas Storrow had selected for him in Paris; Irving barked orders at the cook; and painters and masons scrambled to touch up the place at the last minute. To Irving's enormous relief, the evening was a success. “Dinners like this, social, tasteful, yet unpretending I can afford to give with tolerable frequency,” he wrote with satisfaction.26
Back in Washington, D.C., however, it looked as if Irving had dropped off the map. He had sent Webster three dispatches and one private letter in August, but by his dinner party on Septe
mber 30 he hadn't written to the secretary of state in more than a month. Webster was understandably curious and had asked one of Irving's nieces about him. Irving prickled when he learned of the inquiry, worried that Webster thought his silence meant he was slacking—which wasn't far from the truth. In a letter to his niece, he responded to the question: “As yet my mission has called for but little exertion of diplomatic skill, there being no questions of moment between the governments, and I not being disposed to make much smoke where there is but little fuel. If any question of difficulty or delicacy should arise, however, I will task my abilities, such as they are, to the utmost, to prevent Mr Webster from finding his confidence misplaced.”27 It didn't take long before Irving proved Webster's confidence in him to be warranted. Within a week, he was writing the secretary a carefully worded dispatch on official issues. Over the next three months, he wrote ten more.
The benevolent ruler of Sunnyside was an indulgent patriarch to his diplomatic family of Hamilton, Brevoort, and Ames. When the boys requested extended leave in October for a five-week trip through the Andalusia region, Irving willingly assented—then spent the next month in “solitary dignity,” pacing the empty house like a nervous parent. He had both the quiet and the time he needed to write, but preferred the opera instead.
“I had hoped before this to have become completely launched in my literary tasks,” he admitted to his niece in early November, “but some how or other I have not yet been able to enter into them with spirit…. It is comforting to think, therefore, that I have ‘Uncle Sam’ to take care of me, and I hope the good old gentleman will not ‘let go of my hand’ until I am once more able to take care of myself; if that will ever be.” Until the creative spark returned, Irving considered the possibility of issuing an author's revised edition of his complete works, and asked Ebenezer to send copies of all his books. His time for such a project, however, was about to run out; Uncle Sam had need of him.28