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By Root 6714 0

of New England to Olde England. The wet weather forced the guests to huddle together in Milnes’s library, whose relatively efficient fireplace made it also double as the breakfast room. By the twenty-seventh, the guests had become restless. Unable to stand the confinement any longer, the group—which included the MP William Forster, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and Austen Henry Layard, the excavator of the ancient city of Nineveh (who had recently put away his tools to become Lord Russell’s undersecretary for foreign affairs)—accepted Milnes’s invitation to brave the rain for a visit to the ruins of Pomfret Castle.

A messenger bearing Moran’s telegram from London tracked Adams down at the ruins. The minister would always remember standing in the persistent drizzle making polite conversation with his fellow guests while in his hand he clutched the news about the Trent. “We had a very dark and muddy walk home,” he recorded. William Forster accompanied him, but Adams did not reveal the contents of the telegram, Forster told his wife, until “as we got in, Adams said, in his cool, quiet way ‘I have got stirring news.’ ” Forster continued: “I think he is as much grieved as I am, and does not think a hundred Masons and Slidells would be worth the effect on us.” The news had spread by dinner, making it a torturous affair. No one knew what to say, and Forster’s attempts to make conversation were so ham-fisted that Adams could not help commenting in his diary: “He is no courtier.” In the end, it was left to a local manufacturer who had been invited to make up the numbers to fill the void, which he did at great length in a diatribe addressed solely to Adams on the iniquities of the Morrill Tariff.60

The next morning, Layard and Forster went to London immediately after breakfast. Adams thought it best to travel by a different train and left at noon. Milnes and his wife were so warm and earnest at the parting that Adams felt rather emotional; it seemed at that moment as though no one in England had ever been so kind to him. He arrived at the legation in the evening to find Henry, Moran, and Wilson overexcited and once again making inappropriate comments to a crowd of visitors. A note from Lord Russell was waiting on Adams’s desk. The hour was late, he realized with a tinge of relief. The meeting would have to wait until tomorrow, giving him a little more time to prepare.

“There was a shade more of gravity visible in his manner, but no ill will,” Adams wrote after the interview on the twenty-ninth. He had decided to be frank with the foreign secretary. “Not a word had been whispered to me about such a project,” he confessed. This seemed to reassure Russell, who then asked whether the Adger had received orders respecting British vessels. Adams replied no, not as far as he knew. There was nothing more to be said by either man. “The conference lasted perhaps ten minutes,” Adams recorded. He could not imagine Seward being as civil in similar circumstances. But he was under no illusions that Lord Russell’s politeness signified an unwillingness to retaliate. During the carriage journey home, Adams wondered if this had been his final visit to the Foreign Office: “On the whole, I scarcely remember a day of greater strain in my life.”61 The press, he saw, was urging the government to stand up for British rights. Even liberal papers like the Manchester Guardian accused the American government of testing “the truth of the adage that it takes two to make a quarrel.”62

Lord Russell described his conversation with Adams at a hastily called cabinet meeting on Friday, November 29. Every member was present, except for the Duke of Argyll, who was on holiday in France. Palmerston was bristling with pugnacious indignation. He had spent the past few days calculating ship distances and totting up troop numbers. Whether Captain Wilkes’s act had been premeditated or not, Palmerston had decided it was time “to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.”63

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7.1 Lyons suspected that Seward and Mercier had only a vague