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had made up his mind to fight, even though a guest at the ball had scoffed that the secretary of state “always talks that way when he means to break down.” Russell’s letters from home showed that war was a foregone conclusion over there; The Times was already making arrangements for him to report from Canada. The following night, however, Russell went to Seward’s house for dinner and was greeted by the secretary of state as if the events of the previous day had never happened. Seward smoothly assured him “that everything consistent with US honour would be done” to assuage Britain’s feelings.61 Russell silently disagreed with Seward’s prediction; he thought the public would never stand for it and neither would Congress.62 From his military contacts, Russell heard that the army’s commanders were confident they would whip the British, which he found rather amusing, having recently spent an evening with Captain Leonard Currie, the English assistant adjutant general to General Smith, who told him “amusing stories of utter want of subordination, mutiny in refusing to go on guard or on duty, etc.”63

Seward’s dinner was in full swing when the Europa sailed into Boston Harbor. Quietly and unobtrusively, Captain Conway Seymour boarded the Washington train for the last stage of his journey. He had been traveling for only a few hours when the train came to a shuddering halt in the dark countryside. Hearing that repairs would not take place until the morning, Seymour commandeered a horse and rode all night to Baltimore, where he succeeded in chartering a special train to Washington. Finally, a little before midnight on Wednesday, December 18, the white-faced and exhausted Queen’s messenger climbed the steps of Lord Lyons’s house.

The following day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Lyons presented himself at Seward’s office. (In one of those strange quirks of timing, on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Francis Adams had his meeting with Lord Russell on the same day, at the same hour.) Everything, it seemed to him, depended upon his delivery. He had to persuade the secretary of state to bring his games to an end without provoking him into making some last desperate attempt at bravado. Lord Russell was confident in his minister, but his namesake, William Howard Russell, shuddered to think that peace depended on the shyest man in North America. “Lord Lyons is a very odd sort of man,” he wrote to the editor of The Times on December 20, “and not quite the person to deal with this crisis tho’ he is most diligent, clear headed and straight viewed. He is nervous and afraid of responsibility—and he has no personal influence in Washington because he never goes into American society tho’ he gives dinners very frequently.”64

Lyons was nervous, but he carried himself with surprising aplomb. Seward let him speak without interruption and then asked to know the truth: What would happen if the government refused or requested further discussion? “I told him that my instructions were positive and left me no discretion,” reported Lyons. Seward looked straight at him and begged for more time; he would never be able to bring around Lincoln’s cabinet, let alone the country, in only seven days. Lyons believed him and agreed to return in two days, at which point the clock would be started. He went home feeling that his mission was already lost; he sincerely doubted that two, ten, or twenty days would make a difference. Rear Admiral Milne was sent a coded telegram instructing him to be ready to transport the legation staff to Canada.

When Lyons returned to Seward on Saturday, December 21, he was met with a plea for a couple more days. Ordinarily Lyons never disobeyed orders, but he knew that Seward was in a corner. Lyons had received an assurance from Baron Mercier that France’s letter in support of Britain would be arriving any day. If Seward did not succeed in convincing the president’s cabinet, the United States would be fighting an Anglo-French alliance in the North and the Confederacy in the South. A new appointment was set for Monday the twenty-third