A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [371]
Rose was, as usual, desperately seasick during the Channel crossing: “I got a bench on deck, and seated my maid and lay with my head on her lap.” She arrived back at 34 Sackville Street on August 1 to find London almost empty. “The season [is] over.… Houses shut up. Streets blocked with baggage,” she wrote with a tinge of regret. Georgiana Walker, the Confederate exile in Bermuda, had recently arrived with her children and was staying in lodgings on the floor below (she had come to England to consult an ophthalmologist about her younger daughter’s failing eyesight). The glamour surrounding Rose as she made her final farewells put Georgiana in awe of her: “The Lords and Ladies and Duchesses are her constant visitors,” she wrote in her diary, “and her invitations to dinner parties and balls innumerable.”16 James Mason was also leaving town: “I propose for the next two or three months to visit different points in England and in Ireland, not to return to London unless specially called,” he informed Benjamin on August 4.17
Charles Francis Adams was about to go on holiday as well, albeit with reluctance. He liked London when it was empty; “to me it is usually a period of the most pleasant relief and satisfaction,” he wrote in his diary. “Were my family contented I would cheerfully remain, at least during the warm weather.”18 But the family was most definitely not contented: “Mary and I are plotting to make sure that this be our last season,” Henry wrote to Charles Francis Jr. “All this however is as yet unknown to the family, and much depends on Loo.” Loo was Henry’s married sister, Louise Kuhn, who had come with her husband, Charles, in July for an extended visit.19 Ironically, Henry did not need his sister’s help to persuade their father. Adams was longing for a “release from a continuance at this post before another season.”20
Now that the era of perpetual crisis had passed, both Charles Francis Adams and Henry were restless. Neither felt that English society had learned to treat the Adams family with the proper respect. Rose Greenhow, at least, knew how to feed the Adams amour propre. Fearlessly, she visited the legation on July 11, shortly before her departure for the South, to procure a parole for Lieutenant Wilson, one of the Alabama’s officers who needed medical attention. Adams was unable to resist her flattery and handed her one of the few victories during her time in England.
Rose spent her final evening in London with her daughter Florence. “Until the last minute she had hoped that I would not go,” she wrote in her diary. “But alas, inexorable destiny seems to impel me on.”21 Mason accompanied Rose to Glasgow where the blockade runner the Condor—the newest addition to the blockade-running fleet of Alexander Collie, an English shipbuilder—was preparing to leave on August 10. The commander was Captain William N. W. Hewett, the captain who had taken Mason and Slidell to England after the conclusion of the Trent affair. He was using the alias Samuel S. Ridge. “I like his looks and am quite sure he will not lose his vessel if courage and coolness will save it,” decided Rose. Only when she was completely alone on board did the enormity of the decision to leave begin to weigh upon her. “A sad, sick feeling crept over me of parting, perhaps forever, from many very dear to me,” she wrote. “A few months before I had landed as a stranger; I will not say in a foreign land, for it was the land of my ancestors.… But I was literally a stranger in the land of my fathers and a feeling of cold isolation was upon me.”22
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Henry Hotze had