In the six years since she had seen them, they had changed. The eight-year-old George she had left in Quincy was now fourteen and nearly as tall as his father. He had the rough manners and the awkward bearing of a boy unused to the length of his limbs, but he also had a sensitive, delicate quality, often remarked upon, and dark velvet eyes. Books were his “meat and drink,” his grandmother reported; he read indiscriminately. “Like the bee, he flies from sweet to sweet, always however collecting some honey which he brings home to his hive,” Abigail had written the year before. “He delights his grandfather when he is at home by his readiness to find whatever book he wants in his library, and he will sit down like an old man to hold a conversation upon books for an hour together.” He was special, though his grandparents openly worried he might be odd. “George is a treasure of diamonds,” old John Adams wrote to John Quincy. “He has a genius equal to anything; but like all other genius requires the most delicate management to prevent it from running into eccentricities.” The younger boy was different. Twelve-year-old John was a foot shorter than George and, as John Quincy wrote, “as fat as a little seal.” He swelled with confidence; his grandmother described him as “ardent, active zealous full of fire and spirit.” He had no patience for reading. On the voyage from Boston, the sailors had taught him every knot and taken to calling him “Admiral,” which he loved. However transformed George and John seemed to their parents and Charles, their parents and brother must have been almost unrecognizable to them. Their father, once almost gaunt, had grown stout. Deep lines, permanent marks of worry, pinched his brow and cut from his nose toward his mouth. His round head was nearly completely bald; what little hair he had was close-cropped. Their mother, too, looked older, her long face more etched, her hair streaked with gray. And their little brother, who was a baby when they last saw him, was now a quiet child of nearly eight, poised beyond his years. While they grew up running through the woods of New England, Charles was a child of the imperial court. While they hardly knew their parents, he could interpret their father’s inscrutable expressions. He could read their mother’s mood with a glance. John and George were accustomed to exploring mountains and stony hillsides, to slipping in and out of the houses of their large extended family. They had spent years under the benevolently neglectful tutelage of their grandmother and her sisters. Instead of their schoolwork, they had studied Arabian Nights. Now they found themselves in a small apartment on a crowded block in Cavendish Square, with only the manicured parks to pass for wilderness, in a country with which they had just been at war, and which they had been raised to consider their enemy. They had crossed the Atlantic with one decent suit apiece. Louisa and John Quincy immediately hired tutors to instruct them in handwriting, mathematics, fencing, and dancing. • • • WHILE JOHN QUINCY was busy addressing the issues unresolved at Ghent, Louisa looked for a place to live. It is almost inconceivable that she would have taken on this responsibility prior to John Quincy’s leaving St. Petersburg, only three years before, but much had happened since then. Even the continent seemed to be entering a new order. On June 22, John Quincy received a note from the foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, that the coalition army had destroyed Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Waterloo. Europe was at peace.
She found a house in Ealing, a small village seven miles outside of the city; the salary of an American minister, at least one who was allergic to debt, ruled out finding a decent establishment within London. The countryside held other appeals. Louisa and John Quincy hardly knew what to do with their sons in the city. The family had treated London like tourists, with trips to the theater, St. Paul’s, the Tower of London; they went for walks and flew kites. But the two older boys, restless and bored, chafed at the city’s fashionable avenues and cramped spaces, where the carts clattered over the cobblestones and the cries of voices began with the dustmen at dawn and ended with drunken revelers past midnight. Soon, John Quincy was complaining of the “hurly burly of confusion” his sons now brought into his life. “Their time is not fully employed and mine is so completely taken up that I have none left to attend to them,” he wrote in his diary. Louisa may have had her own unstated reasons for wanting to live at a distance from her old home on Tower Hill. There were painful memories there, the ghosts of friends and family. What remained reminded her of what had changed. She saw the Hewletts a few times, and her much-loved mentor from Berlin, Elizabeth Carysfort, and there were other visits with friendly familiar faces. Even those reunions, though, had something sad and haunting about them. “I have found but few of my old friends in this country and those few much changed,” she told Abigail, “but after so long an absence and under such circumstances I could not expect to find it otherwise.” With some sadness, she wrote that “the change which I perceive is most likely in myself.” Perhaps it was easier, too, to live a little at a distance from the British court and the rest of the diplomatic corps. She was accustomed to being welcomed by rulers and to finding in the court at least one or two intimate friends. But the Regency court was different. King George III, quite insane, was shut away; the prince regent, a self-styled king of frivolity, took no notice of her; and it was a year before Louisa had an opportunity to be presented to the queen. In the meantime, Louisa was more or less shut out of society. From the outside, no doubt, it was easier to see how opulent, giddy, and at times grotesque society was. The ladies she did meet struck her as harsh and arrogant. 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. T
hey 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. • • • SHE 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,
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