A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [30]
The Central American disputes were still under negotiation, however, when Seward arrived in London on May 20, 1859. The city had grown blacker, noisier, and more frantic since Seward’s visit in his youth. Its population had increased from 900,000 to more than 3 million. Horse-drawn omnibuses, carriages, and wagons bumped and jostled one another and pedestrians on some of the most congested streets in the world; a thousand vehicles an hour crossed over London Bridge.6 Nor was London the dirty, unregulated city of a generation before. The Great Stink of 1858 (a mini–heat wave “cooked” the raw sewage in the Thames, sending noxious fumes through the city) had forced city planners to begin an ambitious sewer and water system for the capital. The squares and parks were just as Seward remembered, but these green spaces were now dwarfed by a new set of landmarks. The Gothic architecture of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament (after the great fire of 1834) seemed especially foreign to him compared to the neoclassical government buildings of Washington. This was a bold, even arrogant London that dared other cities to emulate its style.
As Weed predicted, Seward’s arrival was eagerly anticipated by the denizens of Fleet Street and Westminster, who assumed that he was visiting England to cement his relationship with the country’s leaders ahead of his election to the presidency. That it might be curiosity rather than admiration behind the scramble to make the acquaintance of the great Anglophobe never seemed to occur to Seward. He peppered his letters to his wife, Frances, with exclamations of excitement that so many famous figures wished to meet him. The morning after his first London ball, he boasted that he had “conversed with royalties and nobles, ad infinitum.” There were “Princesses and Princes, and Dukes and Duchesses of the royal party, Indian Princes, and all the Diplomatic Corps. It was a thorough jam—like the Napier ball.”7
Seward owed his initial entrée into London society to the Napiers, who had taken great pains to introduce him to their friends and relations. By the time the Season was in full swing, he was on nodding terms with every senior politician and fashionable hostess in London. Lord Napier also prepared Seward for his presentation to the Queen, sending him to his own tailor, shoemaker, and hatter. But as memorable as the occasion was for the unabashed republican, Seward was more star-struck by his visit to Stafford House to meet the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. “The Duchess is the most accomplished lady in England. I could not tell you how kind and gracious she was to me,” he wrote to his wife. “She detained me after the party had left, and we had a long, and most agreeable tete-a-tete.” Believing Seward’s abolitionism to be sincere, the duchess ordered her relations to show him the same hospitality; her daughter and son-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, her brother, the Earl of Carlisle, and her cousin, the Duke of Devonshire, dutifully opened their houses to Seward, the last being anxious to repay him for the courtesy shown to his son, Lord Frederick Cavendish. By the beginning of June, Seward was able to reel off the names and titles of society figures as though they had been his friends for years: “I dined with the Earl of Carlisle, and a large party of nobles and statesmen of the Liberal class. It would be tedious to recount [all] their names,” he wrote to Frances in early June: “Lord Granville, Lord and Lady Shaftsbury [sic], Lord and Lady Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, Mr. Delane, editor of The Times, and others. It was a most agreeable party.”8
The polite conversations around the table were merely a façade; behind the scenes,