Hay, Clara, Helen, and Henry Adams sailed from New York on April 14 aboard the St. Paul. Henry Adams, despite his pronounced cynicism for the nascent McKinley regime, was proud to accompany his dear friend and neighbor as he filled the august place once occupied so ably by Adams’s father. “Thucydides”—one of Hay’s many nicknames for Adams—“was in fine form and gave us the encouragement of his gentle pessimism every day,” Hay told Bill Phillips after the crossing.
As they disembarked at Southampton, they were delighted to see the face of Henry James among the greeters. “This is tremendous and delicious,” James had told Hay when he first learned he was coming to London. “You make the plot of existence thicken more delightfully—even across the hiatus of the Atlantic—than anything I can manage on paper this morning . . . at least until I have embraced you. I long for the hour when I shall come as near as I dare to laying hands with that intent on your inviolable ambassadorial person.”
Four hours later, they were installed at 5 Carlton House Terrace, in a house they had rented from the Earl of Caledon, who also owned a sizable estate in Northern Ireland. Hay had no intention of trying to get by on the $17,000 salary provided by the State Department; not only would he live in the manner to which he was accustomed in the United States, but he would also present himself in a way that would place him on equal footing with those in England who mattered to him most. To do so, he and Clara brought along their own silver, two carriages (a brougham and a landau), and five horses. Before leaving home, Hay had his initials monogrammed on the carriages and harness.
The house was a two-story Georgian, entered from Pall Mall—“very plain on the outside but very nice inside,” Clara wrote her mother. The rear windows overlooked St. James’s Park and Horse Guards Parade. The rooms were furnished with “many fine pictures and plenty of furniture,” Clara observed cheerily. A large, high-ceilinged drawing room was ideal for state occasions. Hay and Clara each had their own bedrooms and morning rooms, and Helen had her own sitting room on the third floor. Upon their arrival, the Hays found the staff already in place: a coachman, two footmen (to whom a third was later added), a butler, three housemaids, a chef, and three kitchen maids.
No foreign minister had ever lived so sumptuously, Hearst’s New York Journal commented. “The scale of expenditure on which he has established his household and the gorgeousness of his entourage cause even the English people to gape.” Maybe not all English people; the Hays’ neighbors were lords, dukes, and earls, and William Waldorf Astor, the expatriate heir to one of America’s greatest fortunes. To be included in this rarefied peerage at such a prestigious address, Hay reportedly paid $5,000 a month, a sum that probably did not include the salaries of the servants.
Before his tenure as ambassador could begin officially, Hay first had to present his credentials to Queen Victoria. On May 3, a royal coach appeared at Carlton House Terrace to carry him and Clara to Paddington Station for the trip by train to Windsor. Clara complained that her bonnet, pink with roses, rubbed on the carriage’s low roof, and as they rolled through the streets of London, her husband roughened the soles of her new boots with his pocket knife so she would not slip while descending the carriage’s velvet-covered steps.
It can be assumed that Hay, as ever, was perfectly and appropriately dressed for the occasion, though his precise wardrobe was not noted. At the end of the nineteenth century, many foreign diplomats still wore military-style tailcoats with gold embroidery, sashes, even plumed hats and swords. But in recent years, the U.S. State Department had directed its envoys to wear “the simple dress of an American citizen.” Court appearances, such as drawing rooms, were evidently a different matter; an invitation Hay received from the Prince and Princess of Wales, for instance, specified: “The ambassador would of course come in his uniform”—the normal court getup of the day being tailcoat, waistcoat, neck cloth, velvet knee breeches, silk stockings, and buckle shoes. (Women wore tiaras and dresses with trains at court.) Hay did not mention whether he wore his court dress or one of his meticulous Bond Street suits for his audience with the queen.
They arrived at Windsor Castle in time for lunch with the prime minister and the Duke of Devonshire. Afterward, first Hay and then Clara were shown to the private apartment of the queen. They had both been “presented” at previous drawing rooms, but this was the first time they conversed directly with Victoria. Each was pleasantly surprised by her kindness. “I had always been told that royalty spoke first,” Hay wrote McKinley, “but she evidently waited for me.” Clara was astonished when the seventy-seven-year-old queen rose and shook her hand. “[S]he struck me as nothing more than a nice little old lady,” Clara recorded. “She seems to have made the same impression on the Ambassador.”
After being properly welcomed, Hay looked forward to a pleasant, engaging, but not too taxing term, and unlike previous American envoys, who were not so well acquainted with London, he had little desire to grandstand for his country or himself. “I have determined to appear in public as little as possible, and resolutely to avoid slobbering over the British,” he informed McKinley.
In the spring of 1897, relations between the United States and Great Britain were not at the kissing stage, but they had come a fair way since Grover Cleveland and Richard Olney’s saber-rattling over Venezuela two years earlier—and an even longer way since the tense days of the Civil War, when the Alabama and other British-built vessels were destroying American shipping. There were still plenty of jingoes in America—Henry Cabot Lodge perhaps the most vocal—who held a grudge against England for the colonial boot prints it had left on American soil and for the persistent smugness of the crown toward all colonies, past and potential. America’s Irish, most of whom voted Democratic, bore no love for England; nor did American silverites, who resented England’s adamant allegiance to the gold standard. But lately the pendulum had begun to swing. Rancor over the Alabama and Venezuela had been mollified by arbitration, and with the election of McKinley, the silverites were melting away. Moreover, as the United States and Great Britain surveyed the globe—the American gaze pausing anxiously on Cuba, in its own backyard, and the British on the recalcitrant Boers in South Africa—the two countries recognized that they shared more than laws and language. On the brink of a new century, rapprochement made more sense than at any time in their respective histories.
As George Smalley had noted, Hay was ideally suited to the job of nurturing friendship—a polite, perspicacious American with no hankering to twist the lion’s tail. In his first months in London, the only issues that demanded immediate diplomatic attention were a perfunctory pledge by the United States to pursue an international agreement on the currency question and a proposal to regulate fur-seal hunting in the Bering Sea. Hay dutifully broached these subjects with the Foreign Office, but when England demurred on both, he did not press, and the new secretary of state, John Sherman, deep in his dotage, did not remonstrate with his ambassador for his lack of aggression.
Hay’s touch was light, borrowed more from the genial William Evarts, under whom he had served in the Rutherford Hayes State Department, than from the confrontational Olney. One of the first things Hay did, once he settled into his offices at 123 Victoria Street, was to order new stationery, changing the heading from “United States Embassy” to “American Embassy”—less muscular, more personal. And the first address he delivered was at the unpompous unveiling of a bust of Sir Walter Scott in Westminster Abbey. “I should have no excuse for appearing,” he said with characteristic modesty, “except as representing for the time being a large section of Walter Scott’s immense constituency.” As a diplomatic overture, it was slight, yet it hit the right notes: American admiration for a cherished British subject, two peoples joined by a common literature. “His ideals are lofty and pure,” Hay said of Scott. “[H]is heroes are brave and strong, not exempt from human infirmities, but always devoted to ends more or less noble.”
The next event on Hay’s calendar was likewise strictly cerem
onial but exponentially grander in scale. The Diamond Jubilee, a celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, was scheduled for the end of June. Every country, dominion, and colony was invited to send military and diplomatic delegations for observances that included services at Westminster Abbey and a royal procession from Buckingham Palace, through the heart of London, to St. Paul’s Cathedral. President McKinley announced that the United States would send an admiral, a general, and one “eminent citizen” as envoys, with Ambassador Hay heading up the mission.
Seizing the opportunity to patch a recent wound, the president named Whitelaw Reid to deliver the American message of congratulations and goodwill to the queen, an offer that Reid accepted enthusiastically. There was only one problem: the full delegation was welcome for the jubilee, but the queen announced that she would receive only one envoy from each delegation at Buckingham Palace. Once again it looked as if Reid would lose the position of honor to Hay. This time, however, Hay humbly surrendered the field, cabling McKinley that Reid ought to be made the head of the American mission. McKinley was relieved and grateful to Hay for solving what surely would have caused an even greater awkwardness in relations between the White House and the Tribune. “Whitelaw would have gone clean daft, if he had arrived here & found that Her Most Gracious would only receive [me],” Hay wrote Lizzie Cameron.
Lizzie had recently been in London, surrounded by her usual courtesans and again at the center of her own drama. Her husband, Don, had decided not to run for reelection; worse, from Lizzie’s standpoint, he announced his intention to sell the house on Lafayette Square and withdraw to Pennsylvania. Her already troubled marriage had reached a new low. “The dark days are coming, I fear,” Lizzie confided to Adams. “I do not mind being out of politics—on the contrary—but to live in Penn[sylvani]a! Well, I won’t. I’ll travel.” Instead of selling the house, Cameron rented it to Vice President Hobart for four years, beginning May 1.
Before Lizzie could make her getaway, she fell gravely ill with influenza. Doctors feared her heart was damaged, though Adams knew the real problem was nervous collapse. “There is a long history of mental weakness and mental struggle,” she admitted to him. “I have always wanted to tell you but I couldn’t.” When Adams had left Washington with Hay in mid-April, he fretted that he might never see her again. She rallied sufficiently to sail to Europe on May 5 with her daughter, Martha. Adams met her at Southampton and escorted her in a train compartment reserved for invalids to Brown’s Hotel in London. When Hay went by to see her, she still looked “poorly,” he wrote Reid in New York. “She seems disturbed about the future.”
After several days in London, Adams took Lizzie to France and installed her in a house on the outskirts of Paris, where she continued to convalesce. “It almost consoles me for the gloom in which your flight plunged London to know you are growing stronger every day,” Hay wrote from Cliveden, where he was a guest, apparently without Clara, at the magnificent country estate of William Astor. “Since you went away there is no news—there never is, after you go.” Here was one more example of what Lizzie would later attempt to dismiss as Hay’s “habit of gallantry,” but he too would have been devastated if she had not survived her latest flight from unhappiness.
Two weeks after Lizzie and Adams departed, Reid with his wife and two teenage children arrived in London. They were met by Elisabeth Reid’s parents, Mrs. and Mrs. Ogden Mills, who had rented a house for them just a few doors down from the Hays on Carlton House Terrace. Bearing the title of special ambassador, Reid conducted himself as if the jubilee were for his benefit alone. The Hays, who were invited to any number of dinners and galas and were given favored seats at St. Paul’s Cathedral for the service in the queen’s honor, were careful not to upstage the Reids and in fact seemed relieved to share some of the wearisome diplomatic responsibilities that bracketed the actual jubilee. “I have succeeded in effacing myself so that I shall have to bring certificates to show I hold a commission,” Hay joked to McKinley.
But even in their conscientious deference, he and Clara took considerable pleasure in chronicling the conduct of the special ambassador and his entourage. Clara mentioned to her mother that while she herself had grown bored mingling with so many lords and ladies (“as they always look alike”), the Reids, on the other hand, “have enjoyed themselves hugely. . . . I do not know who they will associate with when they get home they are so set up by their intercourse with Royalties.”
Hay commented cattily to Adams: “I have seen my friend Whitelaw Reid sitting between two princesses at supper every night, a week running. . . . His rapture had the aliquid amare [bitter flavor] that an end must come, but the memory of it will soothe many an hour of ennui at Ophir Farm. As for Mrs. Oddie [Reid’s mother-in-law], her tiaras got heavier and higher hour by hour, till the ceilings were all too low. . . . I naturally run to slanderous gossip—but I suppose one must once in a while abuse one’s friends. . . . [D]estroy this promptly and tell me you have done so—that I may sleep.”
AT LAST (AND BELATEDLY) the Reids departed. At the beginning of August, Clara and Helen left for America also, to be gone until the fall. Immediately Hay reached out to Lizzie, who had written to invite him to visit her in France. “You dear sweet woman, what can I say to you?” he replied. “To hurt those who love you is as natural to you as to breathe. You know how it breaks my heart to have you ask me to come when I absolutely can’t. . . . Twenty times I have made up my alleged mind to drop everything & go—but then comes a lucid interval and I see that ‘Desertion’ never looks pretty in a court martial. I cannot leave this blessed island.”
Then, recalling their intimacies of six years earlier, he continued: “I walked through Duke Street again today. My heart ached with the vision of the beautiful small feet that caressed the pavement on an errand of mercy so long ago. You are a sweet, sweet woman. There is no other word. You are beautiful, and clever, and splendid, and charming and fascinating and lovely. But you are, more than all, sweet. It is a keen, living sweetness that lifts you up above all others in charm; that makes the sight of you, the sound of your voice, the touch of you, so full of delight. One can never have enough of you, never. It is because you are so sweet, because the memory of you is so entrancing, that I find a dozen spots in this grimy town like Paradise. The vivid beauty of your face the day we came back from Kensington shines out even now in the mist & fog and gloom and makes the whole town throb with pleasure. You sweet Lizzie; the words are forbidden but I say them over and over. You sweet woman—if I had twenty pages, I could fill them with saying, You sweet!”
The same day he wrote Lizzie, he also jotted a brief letter to Clara, whose ship had not yet lost sight of England: “I have a few minutes before breakfast and cannot put them to a better use than writing to you.”
Hay’s life was now more public than ever. Yet there were secrets he would never divulge—as much as he would have liked for them to see the sweet light of day.
CHAPTER 14
Setting the Table
The year that followed was surely one of the best of Hay’s life. His work at the embassy was engaging and quite manageable; the society he kept was as elevated and congenial as he could ever have wished for.
If he made the job seem effortless and enjoyed himself a bit too obviously, his contribution to diplomacy was nonetheless crucial. The comity he fostered during his time as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was unprecedented in the history of the United States and England, and the bond he established set both nations on firmer ground everywhere they chose to venture and in doing so altered the balance of world power for the long haul. What is more, Hay’s experience in London, abbreviated though it turned out to be, prepared him for the greater task ahead—that of secretary of state for a nation whose horizons were expanding by leaps and bounds.
But while Hay would soon play a pivotal role in international relations, he had little to do with setting the table or choosing the guests. By the
time he returned from England in September 1898, the United States had fought a war with Spain, occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and annexed Hawaii. Through all this, Hay’s responsibility was simply to make friends and to pass along the English point of view to Washington. These friends and, moreover, this method of making them—by civil, sociable conversation—would become the cornerstone of his diplomacy, not just with England but with all nations.
Across the Atlantic, the topic that topped all others was the increasing possibility of American military intervention in Cuba. Hay’s familiarity with the situation in Cuba went back nearly thirty years to his time in Madrid, when U.S. Minister Daniel Sickles had tried fruitlessly to persuade Spain to sell the Caribbean island. Later, at the New York Tribune, Hay had written numerous editorials scolding Spain for its oppression of Cuba. More recently, Henry Adams, who had close ties with the Cuban junta for independence in the United States, had shared disturbing accounts of concentration camps, starvation, and extermination inflicted by Spanish soldiers upon Cuban civilians.
Hay did not need to be convinced that the Old World ought to relinquish its colonial possessions in the new, but unlike Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and new Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, he was not impatient to enforce eviction—and certainly not before his government had a better feel for how continental Europe’s powers would respond to this radical invocation of the Monroe Doctrine. To improve his grasp of England’s disposition, he met with Lord Salisbury in October. Afterward he was able to inform McKinley that “we need apprehend no interference from England if it became necessary for us to adopt energetic measures for putting an end to the destruction and slaughter now going on [in Cuba].”
Later in the year, Hay had another conversation, which, while perhaps not as meaty as his exchanges with the prime minister, various cabinet ministers, and members of Parliament, was every bit as valuable. He had made such a superb first impression on Queen Victoria that she invited him and Clara again to Windsor Castle, this time to dine and spend the night. Clara’s letters home painted a colorful picture of Indian servants in turbans and a table “that did not differ from any other well appointed table only we ate off silver and gold plates for hot things—china for cold.” Again Victoria shook Clara’s hand, but it was Hay who captured Her Majesty’s attentions. “Her custom is to have a member of her family on each side of her at dinner,” he wrote proudly to McKinley. “The table was arranged in this way on this occasion; but the Queen sent for the diagram a few minutes before dinner and changed it so that I should sit next to her. She was extremely gracious and talked freely with me for an hour.”
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