For once Rose exercised caution in her affairs. There would be no stack of illicit love letters left for detectives to find, no whispers about late-night callers or torrid flirtations with married men.
Her primary and most public suitor was Granville George Leveson-Gower, leader of the House of Lords and a widower. He was eager to wed again and had fixed on Rose, escorting her to balls and parties and debating with her about the war, a pastime she enjoyed despite his troubling positions. Two years earlier, he had written a widely circulated memorandum—one that was said to have influenced the prime minister, Lord Palmerston—against intervention, arguing that recognition “would not by itself remove the blockade” or supply England with cotton and would mostly serve to stimulate the North. Rose believed that only she could change Lord Granville’s mind.
“Our people earnestly desire recognition,” she reminded him one night. “The opinion of a nation who had showed such wonderful capacity for resistance and self-government was entitled to grave consideration.”
They continued the conversation behind the closed doors of her carriage.
But she was more focused on work than romance, shuttling between Paris and London, suffering from seasickness and la grippe, as the French called it, her heart breaking every time she had to leave Little Rose. “Took my child back to the convent and left her sobbing bitterly,” she wrote. “It was a heavy trial to say goodbye. God bless her. My heart is very sad.” News from home depressed her further. While Lee’s army bided its time in winter quarters in Virginia, waiting for spring to break, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman tore through the South, capturing Meridian, Mississippi, and destroying depots, railroads, bridges, locomotives, storefronts, arsenals, hospitals, offices, hotels, and cantonments until the city ceased to exist. It didn’t help, either, that her efforts were often wasted on daft and senseless people, such as Edward George Stanley, fourteenth Lord Derby, who “showed that he was utterly ignorant of everything, save that we had once formed a part of the old United States.” (Her opinion was somewhat rectified when he deemed Rose “the best diplomatist I have ever seen.”)
She was growing tired and short on patience; everything, simply put, began to seem “stupid.” Dinner at Westbourne Terrace was “stupid.” Dinner at the table d’hôte was not only “very stupid” but also “disagreeable.” She endured the tedious company of “le creme de la creme de societie” during a “very stupid” trip to the London zoo. “The most interesting object was a very intelligent but malignant monkey,” she recounted, “which approached more nearly in intelligence to man than was at all comfortable. In fact, I think the Yankee President would have had a goodly feeling of fellowship.”
Another pleasant meeting with Thomas Carlyle during which he praised her “gallant countrymen” was followed by “3 stupid visits.” A visit with Mr. and Mrs. George Watson-Taylor, owners of the island of Montecristo, and their friends left her bored and unimpressed. “They are all stupid,” Rose concluded, “and [I was] right glad when it was time to come home.” An afternoon at the House of Commons was especially disappointing—nothing like her time spent in the Senate gallery back in Washington: “The place assigned for ladies is small and dark and screened from observation by a bronze grating. It is almost impossible to hear. Written up on the wall in the only place where a ray of light penetrates: ‘Silence is especially enjoined,’ which seemed the most absurd idea for a ladies gallery.” Even a charity event at the Grand Hotel was “dull and lifeless,” as the men mingled on one side of the ballroom and the women on the other, with “no conversation going on between the sexes.”
Alone in her hotel room Rose wrote melancholy diary entries, fat tears blurring the ink: “What trifles color life and make it dark as night? Blessed are they who let no human feeling stir their lives. I know I ought not to be miserable and yet I am and tears which I try to keep back flow down my cheek and blind me.” Abruptly she changed tone, scolding herself for revealing too much, even on the page. “Well,” she signed off, “I will put up my paper and hope that tomorrow’s sun will disperse the cloud, which is now heavy upon my soul. “Je suis très misérable ce soir. Au revoir, Mrs. Greenhow, vous êtes très mauvaise compagnie [I am very miserable tonight. Good-bye, Mrs. Greenhow, you are very poor company].”
In public she relied on her default emotions of anger and disgust, as exhibited one night during a party attended by a number of London abolitionists. One guest innocently posed a question: Who was the superior man, President Lincoln or President Davis?
Rose turned to face him and replied, “Sir, if you accept the scientific weight rather than the religious one—and believe man in the beginning was a baboon or an orangutan, and that successive ages of improvement has brought him to this present high state of perfection, almost equaling the God head—I will assume Mr. Lincoln is the beginning of the specimen, Mr. Davis the end.”
The man backed away and did not approach her again.
Another guest, the Reverend Newman Hall, a prominent supporter of the Union, seized the chance to lecture Rose about slavery. She listened for a moment, sipping her sherry, until she could no longer tolerate his unintelligible nonsense.
“Your remarks are so absurd,” she declared, “that I could almost suppose that you could have derived your argument from the romance of Mrs. Beecher Stowe.”
A crowd had gathered around them, turning its collective head to follow the volley of words.
Hall confessed that Mrs. Stowe was, in fact, an inspiration, at which point Rose refused further conversation. “I consider you a subject for compassionate tolerance rather than argument,” she murmured in mock sympathy, “and a candidate for the strait jacket.”
The crowd tittered and hissed.
“What about the massacre at Fort Pillow?” Hall persisted, referring to a recent battle along the Mississippi River in Tennessee, where Confederate troops slaughtered more than three hundred soldiers of the US Colored Troops after they had surrendered. From the North came reports of unimaginable butchery: one man nailed to the boards of a tent so he couldn’t escape when it was set afire; Negro children as young as seven forced to stand and face a rebel firing squad. “If I were a Negro,” he argued, “I would have taken arms!”
The crowd fell silent, making room for Rose’s reply. She hurled her words: “Then I would have shot you with as little compassion as I would a dog. You must excuse me but I do not consider the opinions of a man who confesses Mrs. Stowe as his authority worthy of reputation.”
“The sympathy of England is worth something,” he protested.
“The sympathy of the enlightened classes are all with us. Besides, we attach far less importance to that now than you seem to think. When it is to your interest to recognize us, you will. Our destiny is entirely in our own hands and the events of this war have removed from us all anxiety upon the slavery question. The fate of the slave rests with his Southern Masters, as the Masters with God.”
She allowed Hall one last line: “But will you free him?”
“Never! Either extermination or eternal slavery is his lot, according to the lights before me.”
The crowd parted, letting her pass, flinging whispers at her back. She took a carriage back to her room and turned in for the night, too tired even to cry.