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He thinks the recent political defeats a natural result of his management.… Mr. Adams regards Lincoln as a vulgar man, unfitted both by education and nature for the post of President, and one whose administration will not be much praised in the future.1

Ordinarily, Adams would never have confided in a gossipy malcontent like Moran. But despite having made a large circle of acquaintances during the past eighteen months, he felt as friendless as the day he arrived in London. The U.S. minister in Spain, Carl Schurz, pitied his social isolation. Adams “performed his social duties with punctilious care,” Schurz wrote after a brief visit to England, but was not “a shining figure on festive occasions [and] lacked the gifts of personal magnetism or sympathetic charm that would draw men to him.”2 His wife, Abigail, felt upstaged by the social success of the American expatriate Mrs. Russell Sturgis, whose soirées were a feature of the season.

The frustration and sense of alienation at the American legation were not all that dissimilar to the loneliness experienced by Lord Lyons and his staff in Washington. Lyons’s new first attaché, twenty-five-year-old Edward Malet, had been warned by his friend William Kennedy, who had been seconded to the legation in September, to prepare himself for ghastly weather and few distractions.15.1 “However,” Kennedy added, “there is lots of work to do and so one has no time to walk about or grumble, especially as we dine every night with [the minister].”3 Since Malet had been serving as an unpaid attaché at the British legation in Petropolis, Brazil, where Emperor Pedro II kept his summer residence, he could hardly wait to experience the so-called discomforts of Washington. A salary of £300, and his promotion to “the most important mission next to the Embassies,” were, Malet wrote happily to his parents, more than enough compensation.

Lord Lyons’s dislike of change, particularly with regard to his own staff, made him prickly toward Malet at first, even though the young attaché’s background echoed his own. Malet’s father, Sir Alexander, was currently serving his tenth year as minister to the German Federation, placing upon his son the same burdens of expectation and family tradition that had overshadowed Lyons’s early career.4 This unacknowledged connection between them may have been another reason why Lyons was so much harder on Malet than on the others. Malet often had his draft letters returned for rewriting, accompanied by such acerbic comments as “Brevity is the soul of wit, but I object to absolute nonsense—L.”5

Malet found that Kennedy had not been exaggerating about the long hours. “I have only visited one American house,” he wrote to his mother after a month in the capital. The glorious days of the “Buccaneers” were already over. Rarely stopping for lunch, the attachés’ first break from their desks came at 7:00 P.M., when they dashed to Willard’s to gulp down as many cocktails as they could before returning to the legation at eight for dinner with Lyons. In addition to the daily bundles of diplomatic correspondence that required copying and filing, the attachés were also handling hundreds of cases on behalf of British subjects who were seeking redress or protection from various authorities; and in the past year a large number of cases had arisen that concerned missing, conscripted, injured, or dead British volunteers. Most weeknights Malet was obliged to return to the chancery after dinner and continue working until past midnight. But his situation was different from Henry Adams’s in one important respect: the presence of ten bachelors gave the legation in Washington a rather hearty feel, not unlike an undergraduate college or an officers’ mess. There was none of the poisonous claustrophobia that infected the legation in London. Nor did Malet have to live with his parents; he was able to rent a spacious house with Kennedy just down the street from the legation, at 227 H Street North.