Miss Adams In Love (February 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 2)

Miss Adams In Love

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Authors: Lida Mayo

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February 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 2

 

On the dusty journey in late May, 1785, from Paris to Calais, where they would cross the Channel to Dover, John and Abigail Adams and their nineteen-year-old daughter took turns reading Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia . It was an interesting book, doubly interesting because it had just been presented to them by the author in Paris. Yet very likely their attention wandered. Virginia was far away, London was coming closer by the mile, and they were journeying toward a great adventure.

John Adams, a plump, florid man nearing fifty, was on his way to take up his post as the first American minister to England. When lie went to lake leave at Versailles, the Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s foreign minister, said to him that it was a great thing to be the first American representative “to the country you sprung from. It is a mark!” Adams knew that he was well suited for the post, for he had been representing America in Europe since 1778, first at the court of France, then in the Netherlands, and most recently as one of the three American commissioners in France along with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. But he was disturbed as to the effect in London of his reputation as “the Father of the American Revolution.” When the British ambassador to France told Adams that he would be stared at a good deal, Adams replied that he trembled at the thought of going to London, because he was afraid the English would stare with evil eyes. The shock of the American Revolution was still deeply felt, the wound to British pride still raw. How would he be received by George III?

Abigail Adams, a lively, black-eyed, sharp-featured liitle woman of forty, was also dreading the presentation at court. It would be her first, because in France only lhe families of ambassadors, not ministers, had to appear. The British ambassador had informed Adams that his wife and daughter would have to be presented to Queen Charlotte; moreover, it was etiquette for everybody to wear new clothes for the occasion, and “very rich ones.” Luckily Abigail would be able Io turn for advice on court dress to an American friend long in London, Mrs. John Temple, the daughter of Governor Bowdoin of Massachusetts. Mrs. Temple, who lived on fashionable Grosvenor Square, might also be counted on to help with house-hunting. Mrs. Adams had been in London before; she had spent several weeks there on her arrival from America a year ago, before going on to Paris. She knew that it would not be easy to find as charming a house as the one the Adamses had had outside Paris at Auteuil, with its acres of formal gardens.

 

She would miss Auteuil, she would miss friends like the Marquise de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. Most of all she would miss her seventeen-year-old son John Quincy. After seven years in