Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  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

  LONDON HAD A CENTRIPETAL 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 clas
ses 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. • • • THERE 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. • • • THAT NOVEMBER, 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.

  “He laughs at me and says, I do not understand his interest,” Louisa said to Abigail. “You my dear Madam must judge between us, understanding as you do every particular that the situation demands.” John Quincy waited for a letter from Monroe, anxious that it would come and anxious that it would not. Meanwhile, Ealing’s spell was broken. Louisa’s long run of unusually good health ended. She was yet again pregnant. Sick, she stayed shut in the house in Ealing for weeks at a time. The doctor was a frequent visitor; she was bled, given laudanum, and stuck with leeches. The weather mirrored her mood. London was particularly dreary that winter, the fog so thick that pedestrians carried candles in daytime. Nor did Little Boston House seem like such a refuge. The Adamses’ idyllic garden was robbed twice in ten days; hungry thieves carried off their cauliflowers and new heads of lettuce, pulled up their plants, and broke the locks to the shed. In April, the Adamses moved to Craven Street, where the American delegation had its offices. Before they left Little Boston House, John Quincy looked back one last time at the place, and the way of life, that he was leaving behind for good. “I have seldom, perhaps never in the course of my life resided more comfortably than at the house which we now quit, and which I shall probably never see again,” he wrote in his diary that night. In mid-April, the appointment from Monroe finally arrived, and John Quincy accepted. “I find myself not altogether well,” he wrote at the end of April, “and for some days past depressed more in spirits than in health. Every man knows the plague of his own heart. Mine is the impossibility of remaining where I am; and the treacherous prospect of the future. Let me hope.” • • • LOUISA WAS forty-two years old when she boarded the ship at Gravesend to return to the United States. Considering her age and history of unsuccessful pregnancies, she probably knew that she would not be able to make the long ocean crossing without losing the child and endangering her own life.

  John Quincy stayed silent about her situation. In St. Petersburg, he had turned down the appointment to the Supreme Court by saying that he would not risk his pregnant wife’s health for the sake of a public office. But now the stakes had changed; the secretary of state post was a job he actually wanted. He obscured the inconvenient truth of his wife’s condition. To her brother, Thomas Johnson, he mentioned that she was suffering from pleurisy fever “among several other serious complaints.” To a friend, he said that “the state of Mrs. Adams’s health” might keep her in England when he left with his sons. But she sailed. Aboard ship, on June 18, Louisa’s sickness was so severe that she was given fifteen drops of laudanum—a mixture of opium and alcohol. The next day, the doctor administered twenty. For a week, her suffering was extreme. John Quincy described it in his diary with careful, unemotional distance, mentioning her seasickness “with other distressing symptoms.” The next day, June 28, he wrote: “My wife had a quiet night’s rest, and was easy all the morning until past noon when she was again seized with great violence. I was called to her from dinner; she thought herself dying. . . . She was in very severe pain at intervals until near sunset, when she found herself relieved, and the remainder of the evening was free from pain.” That was that. To Abigail, Louisa was blunt. She
had endured, she wrote, “a bad miscarriage at sea.” Why did she risk the child by making the voyage? It is impossible to know for sure. She may not have wanted to stay in London alone, with an ocean between her and her family and few friends to rely on. Or she may have gone because John Quincy was presented with the greatest opportunity of his career, and his life was also hers. She wanted this for him; she understood, as she told Abigail, his interest. It was harder to admit, but it seems that she also wanted it for herself. PART SEVEN