They were glad to face the end.
They saw it and cheered it! Since England was waiting only for
its own moment to strike, they were eager to strike first.
They telegraphed the news to the Minister, who was staying with
Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire. How Mr. Adams took it,
is told in the "Lives" of Lord Houghton and William E. Forster
who was one of the Fryston party. The moment was for him the
crisis of his diplomatic career; for the secretaries it was
merely the beginning of another intolerable delay, as though they
were a military outpost waiting orders to quit an abandoned
position. At the moment of sharpest suspense, the Prince Consort
sickened and died. Portland Place at Christmas in a black fog was
never a rosy landscape, but in 1861 the most hardened Londoner
lost his ruddiness. The private secretary had one source of
comfort denied to them -- he should not be private secretary
long.
He was mistaken -- of course! He had been mistaken at every
point of his education, and, on this point, he kept up the same
mistake for nearly seven years longer, always deluded by the
notion that the end was near. To him the Trent Affair was nothing
but one of many affairs which he had to copy in a delicate round
hand into his books, yet it had one or two results personal to
him which left no trace on the Legation records.
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