Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power Claudia Renton A rich historical biography of ‘those wicked wicked Wyndhams’ – three beautiful, cultured aristocratic sisters born into immense wealth in late Victorian Britain.Mary, Madeline and Pamela – the three Wyndham sisters – were raised surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, in a family famed for its bohemian closeness. The liberal upbringing of these handsome, intelligent daughters of a maverick politician and an artistic but emotionally unstable mother prompted one family to forbid their offspring ever to play with ‘those wild Wyndham children’.In adulthood, the sisters became intimate with ‘the Souls’, an intellectual and flirtatious aristocratic set, whose permissive beliefs scandalised society. Eldest and youngest sister became the objects of press fascination as the confidantes of great statesman – Mary of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour; Pamela of the Liberal politician Edward Grey. Madeline had the only happy marriage of the three.Their lives were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day: Oscar Wilde, who fell in love with their cousin Bosie Douglas; Marie Stopes, to whom Pamela became patron; and the iconoclast poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, lover both of Mary and her mother before her. Their lives would be irrevocably devastated by the horrors of the First World War.In their first ever biography, Claudia Renton, drawing on a rich archive of letters, charts these women’s intimate stories in their own voices, from romantic beginnings through the passions and disappointments of womanhood to the tragedy that brought a definitive end to their era, against the backdrop of the political and social events that shaped their age. Those Wild Wyndhams is an unforgettable historical biography that captures the high drama of this grand family against the political and social events that shaped their age. Dedication (#ulink_e94439ab-1da6-54d1-9e2f-61f774c8dae1) For Mama. Always. Epigraph (#ulink_2932c562-62f2-54e7-90f6-2c9d2917ccc3) ‘La Chanson de Marie-des-Anges’ Y avait un’fois un pauv’gas, Et lon la laire, Et lon lan la, Y avait un’fois un pauv’gas, Qu’aimait cell’qui n’l’aimait pas. Elle lui dit: Apport’moi d’main Et lon la laire, Et lon lan la, Elle lui dit: Apport’moi d’main L’c?ur de ta m?r’ pour mon chien. Va chez sa m?re et la tu Et lon la laire, Et lon lan la, Va chez sa m?re et la tue, Lui prit l’c?ur et s’en courut. Comme il courait, il tomba, Et lon la laire, Et lon lan la, Comme il courait, il tomba, Et par terre l’c?ur roula. Et pendant que l’c?ur roulait, Et lon la laire, Et lon lan la, Et pendant que l’c?ur roulait, Entendit l’c?ur qui parlait. Et l’c?ur lui dit en pleurant, Et lon la laire, Et lon lan la, Et l’c?ur lui dit en pleurant: T’es-tu fait mal mon enfant? Jean Richepin (1848–1926) ‘Do you know Richepin’s poem about a Mother’s Heart? It means something like this:- “there was a poor wretch who loved a woman who would not love him. She asked him for his Mother’s heart, so he killed his Mother to cut out her heart and hurried off with it to his love. He ran so fast that he tripped and fell, and the heart rolled away. As it rolled it began to speak and asked “Darling child, have you hurt yourself?”’ George Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 11 March 1912 Contents Cover (#u92fac752-4e29-5933-96ab-350d581322cf) Title Page (#u32d4d11a-7dcb-59db-8569-2ea1f13903d4) Dedication (#ub0f9d869-39d4-54b6-b5f6-335615b7780e) Epigraph (#ubaf6b94d-e0df-5c1b-ab58-aaaccc6e56b5) Family Tree (#u34406507-a1a2-58b3-a323-b9d622abb0fd) Prologue (#u353ba36c-72ab-5bac-a5fd-0e536442ad6e) 1. ‘Worse than 100 boys’ (#u40239673-8dc2-5239-9d0b-7910e5effa83) 2. Wilbury (#u40cd861c-83c3-55a1-a351-db8ef194f96d) 3. ‘The Little Hunter’ (#uc70df969-c6dc-5582-abae-1e6dc93d2a29) 4. Honeymoon (#ubed01ffe-12c7-56bf-8de4-799f21480ca1) 5. The Gang (#u5313104a-1bf6-568c-b56b-bb0fd68b6f3f) 6. Clouds (#u77de2b42-e85b-55fa-9b35-7e570cc3d298) 7. The Birth of the Souls (#u18d96b72-2c89-51d5-a4aa-972150100ab5) 8. The Summer of 1887 (#u7f2889db-ead1-5ea7-afa5-24736ee6b3db) 9. Mananai (#litres_trial_promo) 10. Conflagration (#litres_trial_promo) 11. The Season of 1889 (#litres_trial_promo) 12. The Mad and their Keepers (#litres_trial_promo) 13. Crisis (#litres_trial_promo) 14. India (#litres_trial_promo) 15. Rumour (#litres_trial_promo) 16. Egypt (#litres_trial_promo) 17. The Florentine Drama (#litres_trial_promo) 18. Glen (#litres_trial_promo) 19. The Portrait, War and Death (#litres_trial_promo) 20. Plucking Triumph from Disaster (#litres_trial_promo) 21. The 1900 Election (#litres_trial_promo) 22. Growing Families (#litres_trial_promo) 23. The Souls in Power (#litres_trial_promo) 24. Pamela at Wilsford (#litres_trial_promo) 25. Mr Balfour’s Poodle (#litres_trial_promo) 26. 1910 (#litres_trial_promo) 27. Revolution? (#litres_trial_promo) 28. 1911–1914 (#litres_trial_promo) 29. MCMXIV (#litres_trial_promo) 30. The Front (#litres_trial_promo) 31. The Remainder (#litres_trial_promo) 32. The Grey Dawn (#litres_trial_promo) 33. The End (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Prologue (#ulink_ec251a36-21db-5211-b4c6-1e4d94bbf25a) On a cool February night in 1900, Pamela Tennant, wife of the industrialist Eddy Tennant, was dining at the London townhouse of her brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady Ribblesdale. The Season had not quite started, but there was already a smattering of balls. By early summer that smattering would become a deluge, as seemingly every house in Mayfair echoed to the strains of bands and England’s elite waltzed round and round camellia-filled ballrooms in what would prove to be the last year of Victoria’s reign. Thus far, London seemed to have escaped the disgusting yellow smog that had blanketed the city for months the year before, and added to the misery of the swathes affected by a bad strain of influenza that year. Pamela was not really looking forward to the Season that was to come: or to any Season, for that matter. In the five years since she had married, her refusal to play ball socially had provoked several spats with her sister-in-law. Charty Ribblesdale, one of the audacious Tennant sisters who had launched themselves on to London Society twenty years before, could not understand why Pamela should wilfully clam up when faced with new people. Pamela’s refusal to play by any rules but her own mystified Charty and her sisters Margot and Lucy. They thought it alien to the ethos of the Souls: their fascinating, chattering set who affected insouciant, swan-like ease, no matter how frantically their legs paddled beneath the serene surface. The delightfully haphazard Mary Elcho, Pamela’s eldest sister, was a leading light of the Souls. Pamela, beautiful, brilliant, a master of the pointed phrase, had it in her to joust with the best of them. But she chose not to. Instead, she professed disdain for ‘those murdered Summers’ of the Season, and openly expressed her preference for Wiltshire, where she caravanned across the Downs in the company of her children. It was a very peculiar attitude. The burly American placed next to Pamela also seemed ill at ease among Society’s hubbub. John Singer Sargent, whose Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose had dazzled the Royal Academy over a decade before, was establishing himself as a society portraitist par excellence, but he had little time for his sitters’ chatter. He preferred quiet times in the Gloucestershire village of Broadway with his sisters and nieces – incidentally not far from where Mary Elcho lived at Stanway. ‘He was very nice & simple, & … very shy & not the least like an American,’ Mary’s friend Frances Horner reported to the artist Edward Burne-Jones after meeting Sargent (for Sargent, although an American by parentage, had been born and raised on the Continent), ‘& he wasn’t very like an artist either! … he hated discussing all his great friends … & talking about his pictures.’ Perhaps Charty took a certain pleasure in seating Pamela next to Sargent that evening. A taste of her own medicine – and Charty could justify the placement because Sargent was currently working on a portrait of Pamela and her sisters. It had been commissioned by their father, Percy Wyndham, who, with his wife Madeline, had built Clouds in Wiltshire, a house little over a decade old and already famous as a ‘palace of weekending’. Pamela, Mary and sweet-natured Madeline Adeane (who so unluckily after a whole brood of girls had finally succeeded in giving birth to a boy only for the premature infant to die the same day) had been sitting to Sargent ever since then. There was plenty to talk about. No mention was made of the Boer War’s disastrous progress, or Pamela’s elder brother George, Under-Secretary in the War Office, whose triumphant speech in the House of Commons a few weeks before had singlehandedly seemed to redeem the Government’s conduct of the war. All Sargent’s talk was of the portrait. The first sittings had taken place over a year before, in the drawing room of the Wyndhams’ London house, 44 Belgrave Square. Yet just recently, Pamela, in the thick of preparations for one of the tableaux of which she was so fond, received a letter from Percy suggesting that Sargent’s portrait might still not be finished in time for this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. What with the uncertain light at this time of year, and the fact that the Wyndhams would not be in London until after Easter, ‘perhaps this is better’, he concluded. To Pamela’s mind, this was not better. At this rate, she replied ominously, there was the danger that ‘we shall all be old and haggard before the public sees it’. Pamela in the flesh made the shortcomings of Pamela in oils all too clear. Sargent told Pamela in his deep, curiously accentless voice (the legacy of his Continental upbringing) that he ‘felt sure’ that Mr Wyndham ‘would not mean it to be as it is’. ‘He is very anxious for some more sittings from me and enquired my plans most pertinaciously,’ Pamela told Percy the next day. Her very presence had seemed to prove an inspiration: ‘“and now I see you oh it must be worked on” – squirming & writhing in his evening suit – “no finish – no finish” – he got quite excited’. As agreed, Pamela made her way to Sargent’s studio on Tite Street in Chelsea at half-past two the following Saturday. Three or four days was all that Sargent, a phenomenally fast worker, required before she could thankfully flee London once again. ‘He has not repainted the face … He worked on little corners of it and has much improved it I think,’ Pamela said. He had remodelled her nose, taken ‘a little of the colour out of my cheeks, this improves it’, and transformed her hair from ‘all fluffy and rather trivial looking before’ to swept back, which ‘has strengthened it, and made it more like my head really’. There was one loss. The front of Pamela’s dress, an eye-catching blue, had, Sargent said decisively, to go. It was, she explained to her parents, ‘disturbing to the scheme … And much as I regret my pretty blue front I quite see it was rather preclusive of other things in the picture as a whole. For instance both sisters seem to gain by its removal – one’s eye is not checked & held by it … My face also seems to gain significance by its removal.’ Mary, who had always been suspicious of Pamela’s colour choice, must have been relieved: ‘blue can be so ugly don’t you think?’ she had complained to their mother when Pamela had first announced her sartorial intentions. Uncharacteristically, Madeline was causing trouble. At the Ribblesdales’, Sargent had been adamant that ‘Mrs Adeane in particular’ needed to be changed, requiring a further week of sittings. The year before, Charlie Adeane’s patience with ‘that blessed picture’ had worn thin when Madeline had caught influenza while sitting for it. Now, with Madeline still recovering from her infant son’s death, Charlie Adeane, as protective as he was devoted, might prove the spanner in the works. ‘I hope you will use your influence if Charlie is against it,’ Pamela implored her father; ‘it seems a pity if it is so near it shouldn’t be managed.’ Madeline Wyndham, who could never refuse anything to her ‘Benjamina’, as she called her youngest daughter, replied, ‘I think it would amuse her – & I should trust it was warmer in Sargent’s Studio than it is in [the] large drawing room at 44 this time of year without hot water or hot air which I am sure Sargent’s studio has … you ought write to Madeline & beg her to go up for a week she can be snug as a bug in my bedroom and she & Charlie can be there.’ In art, as in life, Mary was proving difficult to pin down. Marooned among the rugs, tapestries and antiques that formed the paraphernalia of an artist’s studio, as Sargent, muttering unintelligibly under his breath, charged to and from the easel (placed, as always, next to his sitters so that when he stood back he might view portrait and person in the same light), Pamela had to exercise all her diplomatic skill when asked what she thought of Sargent’s depiction of Mary. ‘I could say honestly I liked it,’ she told her parents, ‘but I did not think it “contemplative” enough in expression for her.’ And ‘no sooner than I had said the word “contemplative” than he caught at it. “Dreamy – I must make it a little more dreamy!”’ All it needed, apparently, was a touch to Mary’s hooded eyelids, which Pamela agreed were ‘a most characteristic feature of her face’; but ‘of course he will not do it till she sits to him’, she concluded, with not a little exasperation. Astonishingly Mary – nicknamed ‘Napoleon’ by her friends for her tendency to make monumental plans that rarely came to pass, and who seemed, in the view of her dear friend Arthur Balfour, ‘to combine into one disastrous whole all that there is of fatiguing in the occupations of mother, a woman of fashion, and a sick nurse’ – got herself to London, and to Tite Street, in time for the painting to be completed so that it could be displayed at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition that year. The Wyndham Sisters, to the gratification of all (and doubtless Pamela in particular) was heralded as Sargent’s masterpiece. For The Times, it was simply ‘the greatest picture which has appeared for many years on the walls of the Royal Academy’. Bertie, the elderly Prince of Wales, who had honed his eye for beauty over many years, dubbed the portrait ‘The Three Graces’. It was, crowed the Saturday Review, ‘one of those truces in the fight where beauty has unquestionably slipped in’. Though we now think of Sargent as the Annie Leibovitz of his day – intently flattering at all costs – at that time people did not see it in quite the same way. ‘In all the history of painting’, commented the critic D. S. MacColl in the Saturday Review in 1898, ‘hostile observation has never been pushed so far as by Mr. Sargent. I do not mean stupid deforming spite, humorous caricature, or diabolic possession … rather a cold accusing eye bent on the world.’ MacColl likened Sargent to ‘the prosecuting lawyer or denouncing critics’. His work made the viewer ‘first repelled by its contempt, then fascinated by its life’. ‘I chronicle,’ declared Sargent, ‘I do not judge.’ The dazzling results seduced the aristocracy, but they commissioned him with trepidation. ‘It is positively dangerous to sit to Sargent,’ declared one apprehensive society matron; ‘it’s taking your face in your hands.’ One oft-repeated criticism, that Sargent did no more than replicate his sitters’ glamour, is perhaps a misunderstanding of the emptiness that his brush was so often revealing. To defeat any accusation that The Wyndham Sisters is simply a pretty picture, one needs only to look at the sisters’ hands. Pamela’s fingers imperiously flick outwards as she lounges back on the sofa, in the most obviously central position as always, unblinkingly staring the viewer down; Mary’s thin hands worry at each other as she perches on the edge of the sofa and gazes ‘dreamily’ off into the distance showing all her ‘delicate intellectual beauty’. Then there is Madeline, who uses her left hand to support herself against the sofa, while her right hand, quelled by sorrow, lies in her lap, patiently facing upwards, cupped to receive the blessings that fate, in recent months, had so conspicuously denied her. Underneath the serenity is the wildness of the Wyndhams, the foreign strain from their mother’s French-Irish blood, that people would remark on time and time again. Before the sittings began, before the composition had been decided upon, Madeline and Percy Wyndham had arranged a dinner at Belgrave Square for Sargent to meet his sitters properly. Watching the family at home, Sargent had caught on immediately. Rather than paint these women in his studio, as was the norm, he set them in the drawing room of their parents’ house. As one’s eye becomes accustomed to the cool gloom behind the seated figures swathed in layers of white organza, taffeta, tulle, one can make out in the background the portrait of their mother that hung in that room: George Frederic Watts’s portrait of Madeline Wyndham, resplendent in a sunflower-splashed gown, that had caused such a stir at the Grosvenor Gallery a quarter of a century before. Through the darkness, behind Mary, Madeline and Pamela, gleams Madeline Wyndham. So in art, as in life. Sargent had not missed a thing. ONE (#ulink_6f019c18-8152-546a-a613-5748e0744f06) ‘Worse Than 100 Boys’ (#ulink_6f019c18-8152-546a-a613-5748e0744f06) The eldest daughter of the portrait, Mary Constance Wyndham, was born to Percy and Madeline in London, in summer’s dog days, on 3 August 1862. Percy, called ‘the Hon’ble P’ by his friends, was the favoured younger son of the vastly wealthy Lord Leconfield of Petworth House in Sussex. The Conservative Member for West Cumberland, he had a kind heart and the family traits of an uncontrollable temper and an inability to dissemble. It was true of him, as was said of his father, that he had ‘no power of disguising his feelings, if he liked one person more than another it was simply written on his Countenance’. Percy’s Irish wife Madeline was different. Known in infancy as ‘the Sunny Baby’, she was renowned for her expansive warmth. ‘She is an Angel … She has the master-key of life – love – which unlocks everything for her and makes one feel her immortal,’ said Georgiana Burne-Jones, who, like her husband Edward, was among Madeline’s closest friends. Yet in courtship Percy had spoken much of Madeline’s reserve – ‘you sweet mystery’, he called her, one of very few to recognize that her personality seemed to be shut up in different boxes, to some of which only she held the key. Percy and Madeline were both twenty-seven years old. In two years of marriage, they had established a pattern of dividing their time between Petworth, Cockermouth Castle – a family property in Percy’s constituency given to them by his father for their use – and fashionable Belgrave Square, at no. 44. Madeline’s mother, Pamela, Lady Campbell, came over from Ireland for the birth, and during Madeline’s labour sat anxiously with Percy in a little room off her daughter’s bedroom. The labour was relatively short – barely four and a half hours – but it was difficult. Lady Campbell had threatened to call her own daughter ‘Rhinocera’ when she was born because of her incredible size. Mary, at birth, weighed an eye-watering 11 pounds. ‘[T]he size and hardness of the baby’s head (for which I am afraid I am to blame)’, Percy told his sister Fanny with apologetic pride, had required the use of forceps to bring the child into the world. ‘Of course we should have liked a boy but I am very grateful to God that matters have gone so well,’ Percy concluded. Percy and Madeline’s daughter held within her person the blood of Ireland and England – a physical embodiment of the vexed union between the kingdoms. Mary grew up on tales of her maternal great-grandfather, Lord Edward FitzGerald, hero and martyr of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Her own London childhood was punctuated by acts of violence by the newly formed republican Fenian Brotherhood. In 1844 Parliament had debated, at length, the motion ‘Ireland is occupied, not governed’. An ambitious young Benjamin Disraeli drew for the Commons a picture of ‘a starving population, an absentee aristocracy … an alien church, and … the weakest executive in the world’. While the novelist Disraeli may have been exercising a little artistic licence – certainly by 1873 only 20 per cent of Ireland’s aristocracy were technically absentee – fundamentally his depiction was, and remained, true. Mary and her siblings were brought up to mourn the fate of ‘darling Ireland’. With a Catholic strain passed down from Lord Edward’s French wife, they sympathized with the Catholic masses. Mary described herself and her younger brother George in childhood as ‘the Fenians of the family’. Lady Edward – ‘La Belle Pamela’ – was officially the adopted daughter of Madame de Genlis, educationalist disciple of Rousseau. In all probability, Pamela was de Genlis’ biological child, by her lover Philippe duc d’Orl?ans. Orl?ans was Louis XVI’s cousin. He voted for the King’s execution during the French Revolution, then was guillotined himself when his royal blood rendered him counter-revolutionary. Mary’s was an exotic heritage, romantic, royal, with a hint of disreputableness. Like all her siblings, she was proud of it. Mary was born at the cusp of a new age, as a myriad of developments – some welcome, others not – forced Britain and her class to reassess their identities. She was born within five years of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the famous Huxley–Wilberforce debate on evolution, which her father Percy had attended; the 1857 Indian Rebellion which led to control over the sub-continent being passed from the British East India Company to the British Crown; and Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s discovery of the Nile’s source. When Mary was born, the working classes (and all women) were still unenfranchised – only one in five men could vote. Neither William Gladstone nor Disraeli, those giants of the late Victorian political arena, had yet formed their own ministries. Upper-class women could not appear in public without a chaperone. During her childhood, Joseph Bazalgette built the Victoria and Albert Embankments to cover the new sewage system that meant the Thames was no longer the city’s chamberpot. The telephone and the first traffic light (short-lived, it was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868, only to explode in 1869, gravely wounding the policeman operating it) were inventions of her early youth. Mary, who as a child had fossils shown and explained to her by her father, was born into a world ebullient in its capacity for exploration and invention but, in post-Darwinian terms, questing and unsure. The British were becoming, as Charles Dilke’s bestselling Greater Britain said, a ‘race girdling the earth’, but within their own country the patrician male’s stranglehold on power was being loosened. Mary, hopeful, endlessly curious, surrounded by novelty and change, was a child of that age. Above all, Mary was the child of a love match – on one side, at least. It had been a coup de foudre for shy, crotchety Percy when as 1860 dawned he met Madeline Campbell in Ireland. Madeline was beautiful, dark and voluptuous, but she was more than that. Her earthy physicality exuded life, and enhanced it in others. ‘People in her presence feel like trees or birds at their best, singing or flourishing according to their own natures with an easy exuberance … she has a peculiar gift for making this world glorious to all who meet her in it,’ said her son George. Percy and Madeline were engaged in London in July, and married in Ireland in October. During a brief interim period of separation, as Madeline returned to Ireland, Percy gave voice to his infatuation in sheaves of letters, still breathtaking in their intensity, that daily swooped across the Irish Sea. ‘[D]ear Glory of my Life sweet darling, dear Cobra, dear gull with the changing eyes, most precious, rare rich Madeline sweet Madge of the soft cheeks’, said Percy, pouring forth his love, longing and dreams for the future. With barely concealed lust he begged Madeline to describe her bedroom so he could imagine her preparing her ‘dear body’ for bed, and recalled, with attempted lasciviousness charming in its naivety, their brief moments of physical contact – a kiss stolen on a balcony at a ball; a moment knocked against each other in a bumpy carriage ride. ‘[I]f these letters don’t make you know how I love you, let there be no more pens, ink and paper in the world.’ No corresponding letters from Madeline survive. Brief fragments of reported speech suggest she was more world-weary than her besotted swain. ‘Oh Percy, Percy, I don’t think you know very much about me, but that’s no matter,’ she told him. Some of her descendants think that there may have been a failed love affair in her past; if so, she successfully, and characteristically, erased all trace of it. Her reserve only strengthened Percy’s attraction. Madeline was well-born, if of colourful ancestry, but she had no money to speak of. Her widowed mother had brought up twelve children on an army pension. Madeline would receive just ?50 a year on her mother’s death. The infatuated Percy persuaded his forbidding father – who succumbed immediately to Madeline’s charm on meeting her – to give his blessing to the match, and to dower his bride. A month before the Wyndhams married, ?35,727 16s 5d in government bonds (equivalent to around ?2.75 million today) was transferred from Lord Leconfield’s Bank of England account to the trustees of Percy and Madeline’s marriage settlement. The trust was to provide for Madeline and any younger children of her marriage. From the capital’s interest Madeline would receive annually a personal allowance, known as pin money, of around ?300. A provision stipulated that if the marriage proved childless, the money would devolve back to the Leconfields. Otherwise there was no indication that Madeline had not brought this money herself to the marriage. A baronet’s genteelly impoverished seventh daughter had been transformed, in effect, into an heiress of the first water. The provision was never exercised. Percy and Madeline had five adored children over the course of a decade – the three girls, and the boys George and Guy. ‘Ever since your birth has my Heart & Soul loved you & laughed with you & wept with you … sang to you to sleep – & anguished with you in all your sorrows …’ wrote Madeline Wyndham to her youngest, Pamela. She might have made the comment to any of her children, all of whom Percy deemed ‘confidential’, his highest form of praise. Madeline Wyndham had been raised in a Rousseauesque environment of loving simplicity. The Campbell girls had no governess – doubtless partly for financial reasons – and were encouraged to educate themselves, reading whatever they chose, and making off into the fields around Woodview, their rambling house in Stillorgan, then a small village outside Dublin, to explore the natural world. Percy, raised in frigid splendour by evangelical parents who banned everything from novels to waltzing, was entranced upon first visiting Woodview. He vowed that his children would be raised in a similarly warm, loving and natural milieu. And so, despite an aristocratic lifestyle, the loving intensity of life among the Wyndhams was almost bourgeois. Mary, like all her siblings, was born into privilege’s heartland. The family’s life was played out against a backdrop of staff – butler, housekeeper, footmen, housemaids, cook, kitchen maids, stable boys, gardeners and the ‘odd-man’ who lit the house’s lamps each evening as dusk fell. Only the absence of this – mostly silent – audience would have been remarkable. Madeline Wyndham never travelled anywhere without her lady’s maid Easton (known as ‘Eassy’), nor Percy without his Irish valet Thompson (‘Tommy’). Their children’s retinue included their nanny – the magnificently named Horsenail – nursemaid Emma Drake and, when a little older, governesses and tutors. Society – of which the Wyndhams were impeccably a part – was a close-knit, interconnected group of ‘the upper 10,000’, four hundred or so families constituting Britain’s ruling class. To outsiders it was an impenetrable, corporate mass with ‘a common freemasonry of blood, a common education, common pursuits, common ideas, a common dialect, a common religion, and – what more than anything else binds men together – a common prestige … growled at occasionally, but on the whole conceded, and even, it must be owned, secretly liked by the country at large’, said the Radical Bernard Cracroft in 1867. During the mid-Victorian years, when the Queen and Prince Albert set the model of domestic rectitude, evangelism had a firm grip on the upper classes. Yet by the 1860s Darwinism had loosened that hold; and a Prince of Wales who liked a good time had come of age. Bertie’s fast-living, hard-gambling Marlborough House Set became known for its sybaritic tendencies. Meanwhile, Percy and Madeline were part of a set considered markedly bohemian since, in the words of the novelist and designer Alice Comyns Carr, they ‘took a certain pride in being the first members of Society to bring the people of their own set into friendly contact with the distinguished folk of art and literature’. Madeline and her female friends – aristocrats all – dressed in flowing gowns, tied their hair back simply and draped themselves in scarves and bangles. Madeline herself was reputedly the first woman in England to smoke, with a habit of three Turkish cigarettes a day, one after each meal. Her friend Georgie Sumner dyed her hair red to resemble more closely ‘stunners’ like Lizzie Siddal, the Pre-Raphaelite muse. They read the bibles of Pre-Raphaelitism, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Tennyson’s poem of the same title, and, in the setting of their own family seats – Scottish castles and English stately homes – posed in medieval dress for Julia Margaret Cameron’s camera. They frequented Little Holland House, home of Cameron’s sister, Sara Prinsep, where G. F. Watts was literally the artist in residence (he moved in during a period of illness, and never left); and Leighton House, the creation of Frederic Leighton, later President of the Royal Academy. They considered Burne-Jones, as yet unrecognized in the wider world, to be a genius. Madeline was a talented amateur artist, particularly in the decorative arts, with a near-perfect eye. In 1872 she helped to found the School of Art Needlework with her friend Princess Christian, a daughter of the Queen. In later life, she studied enamelling under that craft’s master, Alexander Fisher. All the artists Madeline knew thought she had a true artist’s soul. Beauty could cause her ‘thoughts that fill my heart to bursting’, she told Watts. For the Pre-Raphaelites and their heirs, beauty’s pursuit was not indulgence but necessity. Their dreamy art, born out of the Industrial Revolution, was intended to counteract, even arrest, the modern world’s ugliness. For Burne-Jones’s great friend and business partner William Morris, whose Oxford Street store, Morris & Co., was the favoured emporium of the English aesthetic classes, this philosophy led him to political activism and ardent socialism. Burne-Jones was content to improve society by feeding its soul through its eyes. The provision of art to cultivate and inspire the masses was now part of civic responsibility, reflected in the large public art galleries constructed in urban centres of the industrial north. Mary’s early childhood in Cumberland was like a Pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life. The Wyndhams lived at Cockermouth Castle, a strange, half-ruined property on the River Cocker’s banks, until 1869. Afterwards they rented Isel Hall, an Elizabethan manor a few miles away. Madeline Wyndham took her children out among the heather to draw and paint, and read aloud to them Arthurian tales. At night she sang berceuses, French lullabies learnt from her own mother, and left them to sleep, soothed by the sound of the Cocker’s rushing waters and owls hooting in the dark. She had miniature suits of armour made for George and Guy. The children played at knights and damsels with Mary dressed in her mother’s long flowing skirts. A portrait of eight-year-old Mary in Cumberland by the Wyndhams’ friend Val Prinsep, in the flat, chalky style characteristic of their artistic circle, shows a tall, round-eyed beautiful child. In wide straw hat and loose mustard-yellow dress, she gazes directly at the viewer, bundling in her skirts armfuls of flowers. One of Mary’s earliest adventures in childhood was scrambling after her father through thick heather up Skiddaw, the mountain dominating the Cumbrian skyline, with a trail of dogs in search of grouse; then sleeping overnight in a little lodge perched on the mountainside. In adulthood, Mary wrote lyrically of ‘the club & stag, the moss, the oak & beech fern, bog myrtle, & grass of Parnassus – Skiddaw in his splendid majesty – covered with “purple patches” (of heather) with deep greens & russet reds & swept by the shadows of the clouds – my heart leaps up – when I behold – Skiddaw – against the sky …’. Mary considered herself a lifelong ‘pagan’, fearlessly finding freedom in wildness. She attributed these qualities to her Cumberland childhood. She mourned ‘beloved Isel’ when the Wyndhams finally gave it up in 1876. Ever after, Cumberland was a lost Arcadia to her. When George was born in August 1863, Lady Campbell told Percy he ‘deserved a boy for having so graciously received the girl last year!’ In 1865 the Wyndhams had another boy, Guy. With two brothers so close to her in age, Mary was practically a boy herself. She learnt to ride on a donkey given to the children by Madeline when they were toddlers, was taught to hunt and hawk by her father’s valet Tommy, and was keeping up with the hounds at just nine years old, even if, on that first occasion, she told her mother ruefully, ‘I did not see the fox.’ She kept pet rooks which she fed on live snails, and begged her mother for permission to be taken down a Cumberland coal mine by her brothers’ tutor. Some summers, the Wyndhams visited Madeline’s favourite sister, Emily Ellis, at her home in Hy?res, the French town at the westernmost point of the C?te d’Azur, which was becoming increasingly popular with the British. There Mary scrambled willingly along the narrow tunnels of the Grotte des F?es into a cavern of stalagmites and stalactites. While the other members of her party sat and ate oranges, she caught ‘a dear dear little soft downy long eared bat’ which, she informed her mother, in her father’s absence she had installed in his dressing room: ‘all day he sleeps hung up to the ceiling by his two hind legs’. High spirited to the point of being uncontrollable, the children exhausted a stream of governesses. At Deal Castle in Kent, home of the Wyndhams’ friend Admiral Clanwilliam, Captain of the Cinque Ports, marine sergeants were deputed to drill the children on the ramparts to tire them out. Their arrival in Belgrave Square’s communal garden, clad in fishermen’s jerseys, whooping and hollering on being released from their lessons, prompted celebration among their peers and anxiety among their playmates’ parents. At least one couple instructed their governess not to let her charges play with ‘those wild Wyndham children’. In Mary’s stout babyhood Percy nicknamed her ‘Chang’ after a popular sensation, an 8-foot-tall Chinese who entertained visitors – for a fee – at Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall. Mary grew into a ‘strapping lass’. ‘How well and strong I was, never tired,’ she said in later life, now thin and enervated, recalling wistfully her days as a rambunctious, lanky ringleader, strongest and most daring of the three siblings. ‘I was worse than 100 boys.’ The fairytale had a darker side. Madeline Wyndham concealed beneath her calm, loving exterior a mind seething with dread. She had a paranoid strain capable of rendering her literally insensible from anxiety. A childhood of loss – her father’s death when she was twelve, a beloved elder brother’s five years after that – during the years of the ‘Great Hunger’, the famine that, by death and emigration, diminished Ireland’s population by up to a quarter, had a formative effect upon her. She was intensely spiritual, mystical and religious. Her deep foreboding of fate compounded rather than diminished that faith: ‘the memory of death gave to the passing hours their supreme value for her’, said her friend Edith Olivier. Olivier had looked through Madeline’s vellum-bound commonplace books to find them crammed with dark thoughts. ‘All strange and terrible things are welcome, but comforts we despise,’ reads one entry. ‘God to her is, I think, pre-eminently the “King of Glory”,’ said Madeline’s son George in later years, but in Madeline’s mind glory came as much from darkness as from light. When, during the Wyndhams’ courtship, Madeline had confessed to bleak moods, Percy simply denied them. He did not think she was permanently in ‘low spirits’, he said, advising against articulating such thoughts lest ‘the hearer should think them stronger than they are and permanently there when in reality they are not’. For Percy, anxieties that seemed all consuming at the time dissipated within ‘half an hour’, a day at most, like clouds puffed across the sky. In fact, Madeline’s volatile moods and her sporadic nervous collapses suggest that a strain of manic depression ran through the family – what George called the ‘special neurotic phenomena of his family’. The impact on her children was intense. She invested in them all her apocalyptic hopes, determined they should succeed and prove her family’s merit, convinced the world conspired to bring them down. It is telling that, despite her undoubted love for her mother, Mary described Percy as ‘one of the people – if not the one that I loved best in the world – who was unfailingly tender & who loved me more than anyone did and without whose sympathy I have never imagined life’. The Wyndhams’ tribe naturally split between Mary, George and Guy, the trio born in the early 1860s, and the ‘little girls’, Madeline (known as ‘Mananai’, from what was obviously a childish attempt to pronounce her name) born in 1869 and Pamela in 1871. As a consequence of Lord Leconfield’s death in 1869 their early childhoods were also markedly different. Leconfield, intensely disliking his heir Henry, left everything that was not tied up in an entail to Percy. He created a trust for Percy and his heirs of a Sussex estate (shortly afterwards sold to Henry for ?48,725 8s 10d), land in Yorkshire, Cumberland and Ireland, ?15,000 worth of life insurance and ?16,000 worth of shares in turnpike roads and gas companies, and made provision for the trustees to raise a further ?20,000 from other Sussex land. Percy received outright the family’s South Australian estates (bought by Percy’s maverick grandfather, the third Earl of Egremont, Turner’s patron and three-times owner of the Derby winner, for his estranged wife); most of the household effects from East Lodge, a Brighton family property, including thirty oil paintings and all the plate; the plate from Grove, another family property; and the first choice of five carriage horses. Leconfield’s will was a calculated, devastating snub to Henry. For a while, the Wyndhams continued to visit Henry and his wife Constance at Petworth, but soon enough the brothers had a spectacular row over the port after dinner. The resulting estrangement between the families lasted for almost a decade, despite all the attempts of their wives, still close friends, to heal it. Leconfield’s death provoked the Wyndhams’ move to Isel from Cockermouth Castle, which now belonged to Henry; and his will made them rich. Percy and Madeline now commissioned Leighton and his architect George Aitchison to decorate Belgrave Square’s entrance hall. The Cymbalists was a magnificent mural painted above the central staircase – five life-sized, classical figures in a dance against a gold background. Above that was Aitchison’s delicate frieze of flowers, foliage and wild birds in pinks, greens, greys and powder blue. Even the most unobservant visitor could see this was an artistic house. Shortly after Leconfield’s death, Percy visited his sister Blanche and her husband Lord Mayo in India, where Mayo was Viceroy. (Mayo had previously served as Ireland’s Chief Secretary for almost a decade, and it was Blanche who had introduced Percy to Madeline, when Percy visited them in Ireland.) While Percy was abroad, Lady Campbell, in her seventies, was suddenly taken ill. Madeline Wyndham hastened to Ireland with newborn Mananai, Guy and Horsenail, leaving Mary and George, with their governess Mademoiselle Grivel, at Mrs Stanley’s boarding house in Keswick, Cumberland. ‘… I am so sorry that dear Granny is so ill for it must make you so unhappy. George and I will try to be very good indeed so as to make you happy,’ Mary wrote to her mother. Lady Campbell died shortly afterwards, and Madeline made her way back to her elder children: ‘so glad I shall be to see you my little darling … you were so good to me when I was so knocked down by hearing such sad news’. Almost precisely upon Madeline and Percy’s reuniting, Madeline fell pregnant. Pamela Genevieve Adelaide was born in January 1871, at Belgrave Square like all her siblings. The little girls were born into the age of Gladstone. In 1867, Disraeli had pushed Lord Derby’s Tory ministry into ‘the leap in the dark’: the Reform Act that gave the vote to all male householders in the towns, as well as male lodgers who paid rent of ?10 a year or more for unfurnished accommodation, almost doubling the electorate. In the boroughs, the hitherto unenfranchised working classes were now in the majority. The debate over the Act was fought with passion on both sides: for most, democracy was a demoniacal prospect signifying mob rule. A series of unruly popular protests organized by the Radical-led Reform League, with hordes brandishing red flags and wearing the cap of liberty marching on Trafalgar Square, did little to dispel these fears. In a notorious incident of July 1866 – just a stone’s throw from Belgrave Square – a mob of 200,000 tore down Hyde Park’s railings when the Government tried to close it to public meetings, overwhelming the police ‘like flies before the waiter’s napkin’. Contemporary theorists were concerned that vox populi would become vox diaboli. In The English Constitution Walter Bagehot expressed his fear that ‘both our political parties will bid for the support of the working man … I can conceive of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision and compete for the office of executing it.’ The equally bleak predictions by Lord Cranborne, later Marquess of Salisbury – who resigned in protest from Derby’s ministry upon the passing of the Act – seemed confirmed when the electorate returned Gladstone in the 1868 elections, at the head of the first truly Liberal ministry, a disparate band of Radicals of the industrial north, Whig grandees, some still speaking in their eighteenth-century ancestors’ curious drawl, and Dissenters, the non-conformists who wanted to loosen the hold of the established Church. Gladstone immediately announced his God-given mission to ‘pacify Ireland’ (provoked, in part, by the Fenian bombing of Clerkenwell Prison the previous year that had killed twelve civilians and injured forty more) and set about disestablishing the Irish Church, while dealing several blows to the hegemony of the British landed classes by introducing competitive exams for the civil service, abolishing army commissions and removing the religious ‘Test’ required for fellows of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities to enable non-Anglicans to hold those posts. Percy, like his father before him, was a Tory of the oldest sort, who believed that his class’s God-given duty to govern through wise paternalistic rule not just the tenantry on their estates but the country as a whole was under attack. For Percy, like most Tories, authority was ‘like a sombre fortress, holding down an unpredictable population that might, at any moment, lay siege to it’. In 1867, Percy had commissioned Watts to paint Madeline’s portrait. The portrait took three years to complete, partly because painter and sitter, kindred artistic souls, enjoyed their conversations so much they were reluctant for them to end. In a nod to classical portraiture the statuesque Madeline, in her early thirties, gazes down at the viewer from a balustraded terrace. A mass of laurel, signifying nobility and glory, flourishes behind her; in the foreground a vase of magnolias denotes magnificence. Her gown is loose and splashed with sunflowers, proclaiming her allegiance to the world of the Pre-Raphaelites; the gaze from hooded eyes under swooping dark brows direct and forthright. The portrait, hung in Belgrave Square’s drawing room, made its first public appearance – to quite a splash – some seven years later, on the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, a private venture of the Wyndhams’ friends Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay on London’s New Bond Street. It caught the eye of Henry James, recently arrived in England, reviewing the exhibition for the Galaxy. He told his readers of his companion’s comment: ‘It is what they call a “sumptuous” picture … That is, the lady looks as if she had thirty thousand a year.’ ‘It is true that she does,’ said James, praising nonetheless ‘the very handsome person whom the painter has depicted … dressed in a fashion which will never be wearisome; a simple yet splendid robe, in the taste of no particular period – of all periods’. James had seen that the aristocrat effortlessly superseded the artist. And, although it was kept well hidden beneath her friendships with artists, her undoubted talent and her air of vague, bohemian warmth, Madeline Wyndham was acutely aware of social gradations. ‘You and Papa are rather stupid about knowing who people are!!’ she told Mary, half jokingly, half in frustration as she discussed the ‘belongings’ of fellow guests at a house party – by which she meant their connections and titles. She assiduously cultivated the boring Princess Christian as a friend. ‘She is a humbug,’ declared the middle-class Philip Burne-Jones (son of Edward and Georgiana), finding that Madeline’s warmth towards him as a family friend cooled rapidly when he made plain his hope that he could court Mary, with whom he had been in love since childhood. It has been said that Madeline, with her artful eye, the creator of Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house into which the Wyndhams moved in 1885, is the model for Mrs Gereth in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, the story of a jewel-like house created out of the ‘perfect accord and beautiful life together’ of the Gereths: ‘twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a long sunny harvest of taste and curiosity’. Mrs Gereth is an unscrupulous obsessive who tries to manipulate her son into marrying a worthy chatelaine, then sets the house aflame rather than see it pass into the wrong hands. If Madeline Wyndham is the model, there is no clearer indication of the steel within her soul. Extravagantly generous – she kept open table at Belgrave Square, with sometimes forty people unexpectedly sitting down to lunch – Madeline never spoke of the sudden change in her fortunes brought about by marriage, only fondly recollecting an Irish childhood in a ‘nest of lovely sisters’ visiting relations in pony and trap. Her ambitions for her family were tied up with her anxiety to prove that Percy’s gamble in marrying her had exalted his clan. When her daughters married, she was terrified that one might bear a child with some ‘defect’. It is clear that she feared what might be latent in her blood. In the early 1870s, Madeline had an affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a handsome poet and Percy’s cousin and close friend who had spent part of his childhood living in a cottage on the Petworth estate. Blunt and his wife Lady Anne spent much of their time travelling in Africa and the Middle East, and bought an Egyptian estate just outside Cairo named Sheykh Obeyd, after the Bedouin saint Obeyd buried in the grounds. They spoke vernacular Arabic, and Blunt, a self-professed iconoclast, adopted Bedouin dress even in England. At Crabbet Park, Blunt’s Sussex estate, they founded a successful stud breeding Arab horses. The annual sale and garden party was a fixture of the Season: ‘everybody who was anybody in London went in those days to Crabbet for the sale of the Arabs [sic],’ wrote the journalist Katharine Tynan, recalling Janey Morris, Oscar Wilde and Jane Cobden, radical daughter of the reformer Richard Cobden, wandering through the beautiful grounds. The intrepid Arabists: Wilfrid Blunt and Lady Anne Blunt in the late 1870s. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Blunt was notorious in political circles as an anti-imperialist troublemaker. Socially he was regarded with equal suspicion as a lothario, capable of seducing any man’s wife. Yet this inveterate womanizer’s diaries, in which he recorded every conquest (albeit sometimes a little embroidered), show him as nothing so much as a perplexed cork buffeted on the waves of strong women’s personalities. With each affair, Blunt made grand plans for a lifelong passion. Almost invariably, his paramours called it off, returning to their husbands enlivened by their brief dalliance. Madeline and Wilfrid had known each other for many years when they tipped from friendship into ‘passionate fulfilment’, in Blunt’s words. He had always found Madeline seductive – ‘a tall strong woman, such as are the fashion now; no porcelain figure like the beauties of the last century, nor yet the dull classic marble our fathers loved’ – and their affair seems in large part provoked by intense mutual physical attraction. Blunt dressed it up as a meeting of two artistic minds. Their piecemeal dalliances – romantic visits to Watts’s studio in London and trysts among Hy?res’ olive groves – provided ‘something apart’ from Madeline’s sometimes ‘overpowering’ domestic life. Blunt maintained that the affair did not affect Madeline’s love for her husband and children: ‘what she gave to me was not a plunder robbed from any other. Her tenderness was no mere weakness of the heart, but its strength rather, proving its wealth …’. Wilfrid rarely saw things clearly, and this was no exception. Among his papers is a photograph of Madeline with Pamela upon her lap. Madeline is in mourning, presumably for her brother-in-law Lord Mayo, the Viceroy, who was assassinated while visiting a penal colony in the Andaman Islands in 1872. She wears an elaborate dark hat that shades her hooded eyes. Her features have been refined with age. She appears leaner and finer than Watts’s voluptuous beauty of three years before, and almost sad. Tousle-haired Pamela sits on her lap, eyes skyward as though she is trying to glimpse her mother’s face even as Madeline grasps her daughter firmly around her stout waist. On the back of this photograph is a note in Madeline’s handwriting: fragmentary, it appears to have been written in a hurry. Wilfrid must not come to look for her until later. ‘I think [Percy] is not happy at finding me not alone he has not said it but I think it … my heart fails me … you have chosen the lowest oh it makes me so sad – I don’t know why my heart is not up to it I have no courage …’ In 1873 the Wyndhams rented Ch?teau Saint-Pierre, a neo-gothic pile near to Emily and Charley Ellis in Hy?res. They settled their children there with nurse, governess and tutor, and left for several months’ travel across France and Italy, sightseeing and buying art. This was the Wyndhams’ longest absence – by far – from their children throughout their childhood. Undoubtedly the trip was intended as a second honeymoon to reunite them. The following year, Percy took the lease of Wilbury Park in Newton Toney, some 10 miles from Salisbury on the Wiltshire Downs. In later life, Madeline wrote her daughters impassioned warnings (scored with underlining and written in her trademark purple ink) about the dangers of drifting from their husbands. It seems she was speaking from personal experience. Wilbury, which provided easy access to London by train from Amesbury, allowing Madeline to maintain her life among the city’s aristocratic art crowd, and offered excellent hunting and shooting and reasonable trout-fishing for Percy, was to arrest that drift. The affair finally ended only in 1875. Madeline asked Wilfrid to return to friendship. ‘What is this prate of friendship?’ wrote Wilfrid furiously in a sonnet, ‘To Juliet’. In his diary, sore-pawed, he attacked Madeline as ‘a pottery goddess … I do not think her beautiful, or wise, or good. Her beauty is a little too refined, her wisdom too fantastic, her goodness too selfish …’ Trying to forget his fantasies of a life together with her, he dusted himself off and attempted to dismiss the affair: ‘it was all pleasure, of a high sensual kind, heroic in its tenderness and with no afterthought of pain. Its departure caused no unbearable sorrow. Even when it had ended finally as passion I did not grieve for her because I knew she did not grieve for me …’ A veil was drawn over the incident. Percy never spoke of it. But between Madeline and Wilfrid there remained some friction. Despite Wilfrid’s surmises, Madeline does not seem to have escaped entirely unscarred. Many years later she advised Pamela that the power ‘not to fret over spilt milk is a great faculty it almost amounts to wisdom’. Years of ‘experience & hard toil’ had taught her to let go of the regret ‘that kills’. Madeline did not say what that regret was. One can hazard a guess. TWO (#ulink_d48295ee-963a-54b9-a6e0-bd6f7ed9c783) Wilbury (#ulink_d48295ee-963a-54b9-a6e0-bd6f7ed9c783) In the late 1870s, with relations once again on an even keel, the Blunts visited the Wyndhams at Wilbury. As Wilfrid left, he kissed Mary on the cheek: ‘in a cousinly way’. Mary blushed. Afterwards, Madeline scolded her with unusual and uncharacteristic vehemence. The incident, notable enough for Mary to remember it twenty years later, suggests that the adolescent knew something of the affair just past. It is also a rare chink in the Wyndham armour, a moment when one of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’ – in his words – lets slip something suggesting their family life was not so perpetually sunlit as they maintained. Percy and Madeline’s devotion to their children, and their disregard for convention, generated intense familial closeness. George spoke of ‘the Wyndham-religion’; Mary’s daughter Cynthia explained that ‘Family love was almost a religion with the Wyndhams.’ A legendary anecdote – familiar to almost all their contemporaries – concerned Percy impatiently shushing his collected dinner guests, hissing, ‘Hush. Hush! George is going to speak!’ as his schoolboy son prepared to give the table his views. Ettie Desborough, close friends with Mary and George, described the clan as being bred up with the pride of Plantagenets. Their loyalty was fearsome. They would never listen to criticism of their own, far less give it. At the time of Wilfrid’s visit to Wilbury, Mary was in her mid-teens, awkward, lanky, childish for her age. She was devoted to her dog Crack, a thirteenth-birthday present, and her pet rat Snowy. She adored the caricatures of Dickens and the romances of Sir Walter Scott. She had inherited her mother’s artistic talent, and spent hours making elaborate cards and teasing cartoon sketches for her younger sisters, to whom she was known by a host of nicknames, ‘Black Witch’, ‘Sister Rat’ and ‘Migs’ (or ‘Mogs’) being just a few. She was a devotee of ‘Spression’ – a sort of pidgin English mixed with baby talk that she spoke with her closest friend, Margaret Burne-Jones, given somatic form by cartoons drawn by Edward Burne-Jones for the girls, endearingly shapeless animals that have been described as part pig, part dog, part wombat. An insight into Mary’s character comes from one of her most vivid childhood memories, probably from the summer of 1875, which she spent at Deal Castle – a place she thought ‘must be haunted by my girl spirit I was there so much’ – while recovering from whooping cough. She remembered sitting by the moat and, in a ‘moment of cruel curiosity’, feeding a live bluebottle fly to a ‘huge spider [with] shining eyes’. As Mary recalled, she was immediately ‘seized with remorse and probably killed both in righteous wrath’. Mary had a delight for the gruesome (demonstrated by a zestful account to her mother of a bilious attack aged eighteen: ‘I brought up basins of the thickest, gluest [sic] phlegm, slime, burning excruciating yellow acid with little streaks of browny reddy stuff in it, sometimes great gollops of brown fluid … Lastly Tuesday morning, came green bile’), a curious mind and an adventurous spirit. She had a tendency to act first and think later: more accurately an inclination to ‘choose to prefer the gratification of the present … to slide & glide because it was pleasant or amusing & exciting & to face & bear the consequences when they came’. In adulthood, Wilfrid thought Mary sphinx-like in her inscrutability, speaking of her ‘unfathomable reserve … her secrets are close shut, impenetrably guarded, with a little laugh of unconcern baffling the curious’. Wilfrid was all too frequently baffled by women, but Pamela described her sister in similar terms, speaking of a ‘deep nature’ that only Mary’s closest friends truly knew. As Mary entered adolescence, her life became notably more domesticated. At almost exactly the time that the Wyndhams moved to Wilbury, George was sent to prep school – the Grange in Hertfordshire – to prepare him for Eton in due course. Guy, uncontrollable without his brother, followed George after just one term. From roaming across Cumberland’s hills with a pair of ragamuffin playmates, Mary found herself in a tamer Wiltshire landscape in the company of her governess Fr?ulein Schneider and sisters of just three and five. A contemporary of the Wyndham children described ‘an air of Bohemian quasi-culture’ within the family. Artistic rather than intellectual, the Wyndhams never contemplated either that Mary would attend school or that she would find her m?tier otherwise than in marriage. ‘A woman’s only hope of self-expression in those days was through marriage,’ explained Mabell Airlie, a contemporary of Mary’s, in her memoir Thatched with Gold. The strides forward in women’s education – the establishment of academic girls’ schools, under the remarkable Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss; women’s admission as undergraduates, London University being the first to open its doors in 1878 – primarily benefited middle-class daughters. Upper-class girls were educated by governesses – for the most part deliberately not too well, lest it scare off suitors. Some girls were lucky to be taught by a governess with exceptional capacities. Mary’s daughter Cincie benefited in her early years from the highly gifted Miss Jourdain, one of Oxford’s first female undergraduates. Bertha Schneider, or ‘Bun’, as she was called by the children, lacked the intellectual talents of ‘Miss J’. Originally from Saxony, Bun had been poached from the Belgrave Square family who forbade their children from playing with the Wyndhams, joining the family when she was twenty-eight. A photograph of her some years later shows her to have a pleasant, somewhat clumsy-featured face, pince-nez spectacles and fashionably frizzled hair. At sixteen Mary’s day consisted of breakfast at 8 a.m., lessons from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., ‘d?jeuner’, some time outside – collecting ferns, blackberry picking, long walks or games of the new sport of lawn tennis – lessons from 4 until 6, dinner at 7, and reading aloud with Fr?ulein until bed. This was supplemented, during ‘term times’ (dictated by the boys’ holidays), by fortnightly music lessons from a Mr Farmer in London, and art classes at the Kensington School of Art. Each autumn Bun took Mary and the little girls to a Felixstowe boarding house for ‘sea air’ where they rode donkeys, ate potted shrimps, paddled in the sea and read aloud, endlessly, to one another. By the time they left Eton in their late teens, George and Guy had a tolerable grounding in the basics of Latin, Greek, astronomy, history and public speaking. After the same number of years of education by Fr?ulein, Mary was relatively well read so long as the literature was popular; spoke good French and German (with a ripe vocabulary in the latter); could play the piano; and could draw proficiently, having taken exams in the subject at the Kensington School of Art (‘I forget what it was now,’ she said vaguely, when pressed by her mother on the subject of her exam. ‘It had some sort of foliage’). Mary would spend much of her adult life educating herself, wading gamely through heavy tomes on esoteric subjects. In effect, she was an autodidact. Her education was rigour-free, her brain almost totally untrained. Twenty years after she married and left home, Mary read over her adolescent diaries, thinking fondly of the ‘happy life … that we all spent at Wilbury’, laughing at copies of ‘the house Annals’ produced by the children, remembering their pet names for the family’s twenty horses and the old blind donkey brought from Cockermouth, and recalling games of sardines and nights of ghost stories, hunting and hawking in the winter, summer cricket matches and a host of friends and neighbours near by. In the memory of the children Wilbury was merely ‘a large plain comfortable house’. To modern eyes it is undoubtedly grand, with a large columned portico and octagonal bays flanking the main section of the building. It was set in some 140 acres of land, with amusements in its grounds including an octagonal summerhouse and a grotto. Philip Burne-Jones remembered Wilbury as a kind of heaven, ‘with the sun pouring down upon the lawn … and all the magic of youth & impossible hopes in the air’. The Wyndham children had been stage-struck since first creeping into a performance of Hamlet while visiting the Crystal Palace, once home of the 1851 Great Exhibition – one of those ‘huge trophies of the world’s trade’ in which the Victorians delighted – and now rehoused in Sydenham. No school holiday was complete without a trip to see the famous partnership of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum Theatre. Audiences had a voracious appetite for novelty. By the early 1880s, at Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Haymarket Theatre live rabbits hopped across the stage during A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the storm-scenes in The Tempest were so realistically staged that audience members complained of seasickness. The amateur productions at Wilbury were almost as ambitious. Madeline Wyndham constructed elaborate sets and costumes, but refused to take any role with more lines than could be pinned to the back of her fan. Servants, groundsmen and stray visitors were corralled into the hall as an audience. Mary and Philip took the leads; Pamela and Mananai were pages and fairies. Bun gamely took on whatever role was assigned to her – excelling herself, in collective memory, with an enthusiastic Caliban so lovelorn that Tommy the valet thought the character was a woman, and married to Prospero. In London Mary and Madeline Wyndham frequently visited the Burne-Jones family at The Grange, their house in Fulham. Mary loved these visits where Burne-Jones amused the children by playing wheelbarrows in the garden with Georgiana, holding her ankles while she walked on her hands, and told them fireside stories of his youth with William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal in Red Lion Square. On occasion, Mary stayed overnight, sharing a bed with Margaret Burne-Jones, waking up in the morning to breakfast in bed and chat ‘yards of nonsense’ in ‘Spression’. Percy’s intention when renting Wilbury had always been to look for a suitable estate of his own. In 1876, the Wyndhams found the enchantingly named Clouds, a parcel of 4,000 acres of land at East Knoyle, a village a little south of Salisbury. Particulars supplied by the agents, Messrs Driver, set out the more important neighbours, and the exact distance of their seats: Longleat, Wardour Castle, Fonthill House. Percy sold Much Cowarne, the similarly sized Herefordshire estate he had inherited at the age of twenty-one, and bought Clouds for just over ?100,000. He immediately commissioned Philip Webb, the visionary architect of William Morris’s Red House, to design and build what was intended ‘to be the house of the family for generations to come’. Percy was reinvesting in land at a time when it was ceasing to be the backbone of elite wealth. In the mid-1870s, the agricultural economy foundered as Britain, committed to free trade since Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, struggled to compete with cheap grain imports from the American prairies and with refrigerated and canned goods from the Antipodes. Arable farming was particularly badly affected. Average wheat prices fell from 55 shillings to 28 shillings a quarter between 1870 and 1890. ‘Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one a position, and prevents one from keeping it up,’ declared Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, written in 1895. Percy’s fortune was buoyant thanks to stocks and his Australian estates. He could afford to exchange Much Cowarne (which had only a ‘shooting box’, and which he used purely for income – he never even seems to have visited) for the slightly less profitable Clouds. He played with Home Farm, carved out of the Clouds estate for his own management, like a small boy with an entrancing toy. ‘He has made ?184.10s by the sale of all his sheep and ?146.15s by sale of wool and now has 190 lambs. His corn is in, 11 ricks of wheat, 5 of barley, 6 of oats,’ Mary told her diary in 1878. As Percy retreated ever more rapidly to Tory squirearchy, his parliamentary career was stalling. In 1874, after six years in the wilderness, the Conservatives returned to power under Disraeli. ‘We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer,’ mourned Gladstone, attributing defeat to the licensing bills pushed by the non-conformist temperance supporters of his party. Disraeli, half genius, half charlatan, had already put in a bid to make Conservatives the party of popular imperialism in a speech delivered at Crystal Palace in 1872. Now he embarked upon an ‘unwholesome political cocktail’ of a foreign policy, its ‘main ingredients … amoral opportunism, military adventures, and a disregard for the rights of others’. The only guiding principle seemed to be that no action was too morally bankrupt so long as the imperial lodestone, India, was safe. In 1875, Disraeli (with the financial help of Lord Rothschild) bought the controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company from the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt, for it was a deeply embedded British belief that the Raj could be maintained only so long as the Canal was secure, in that it allowed passage to India without a long and dangerous journey round the Cape of Good Hope. In 1877, conjuror Disraeli turned a delighted Victoria from Queen into Empress, an act denounced by Gladstone as ‘theatrical folly and bombast’. And as graphic details of the Bulgarian Atrocities committed by the Ottoman Turks when crushing rebellion in the Balkans consumed the international press, Disraeli stood by the corrupt Ottoman regime, as a bulwark against Russian expansion that might threaten the Raj. Yet Russia then invaded the Balkans, Britain sent warships to the Dardanelles and mobilized Indian troops to Malta, and its music halls rang to the popular refrain ‘We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo if we do, / We’ve got the ships; we’ve got the men; we’ve got the money too!’ The Conservatives were the party of patriotism, monarchy and empire; ‘jingoism’ was in the ascendant. Percy was staunchly pro-Turk and anti-Russian in this instance, harking back to the position Britain had held in the Crimean War, in which he would have fought but for his being invalided home from Bulgaria when he contracted pleurisy en route. However, he did not by any means slavishly follow the party line. As Guy Wyndham later wrote, Percy ‘held his own principles and opinions unswervingly; and they were not always those of his party’ – in particular, advocating a system of protectionist tariffs when all the politicians and economists of the nation were devoted to Peelite free trade. Such independent-minded action by MPs was fast dying out. The party machine was growing. The National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, founded in 1867, and the National Liberal Foundation of 1877 registered voters, managed elections and chose candidates willing to toe the party line in order to deal with the challenges of the vastly increased franchise, whose votes, thanks to the secret ballot’s introduction in 1872, could no longer be controlled with such ease by employer or squire, nor, after 1883’s Corrupt Practices Act, influenced by bribery. It was the era of the extraordinary coincidence, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s catchy lines, ‘That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’ Yet it has been suggested that Percy’s failure to advance was also due to his ungovernable temper, which was all too familiar to his children. It is a mark of Percy’s and Webb’s instinctive affinity that the two difficult men never fell out during the long process of designing and building Clouds, beyond one protracted dispute over the buff colour of the glazed bricks used in the stables. It took until 1881 to agree drawings and find an acceptable tender from builders. Work was not finished until 1885. The ascetic Webb asked just ?4,000 for his decade of labour. Through him, Percy became involved with the work of Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Known fondly as ‘the anti-scrape society’, it tried to prevent thoughtless modern restoration, and Percy began a campaign to save East Knoyle’s church.Webb became a familiar figure at Wilbury. When Mary’s pet rat Snowy died, Webb provided an epitaph for the gravestone. In the early summer of 1878, Madeline Wyndham took Mary, still not quite sixteen, to Cologne to be ‘finished’. Mary retained fond memories of her time there, spent cramming in as many operas as possible and visiting cultural attractions like the Goethe House and the Jewish Quarter. Their return to Wilbury several weeks later was welcomed. ‘I am so glad glad glad glad glad that you are coming home …’ wrote Mananai. Pamela, who swore that she could not sleep when her mother was away, maintained her usual signing off: ‘I love you and I’ve got you and I won’t let you GO.’ A few months of Wagner was not enough to rub off the rough edges acquired over a lifetime of boisterousness: ‘Mary has upset the milk over her forock [sic],’ Pamela informed her parents a few weeks after Mary’s return, ‘but not the same one she tore yesterday.’ That autumn, Mary sat entranced at the dinner table as Percy and Webb discussed the latest cause c?l?bre: James McNeill Whistler’s libel case against Ruskin, in which the Wyndhams had more than a passing involvement. The case had arisen out of the Grosvenor Gallery’s opening the year before. The Gallery – which, as advertised in The Times,was open daily to the public for a shilling – was effectively an artistic call to arms by Percy and Madeline’s circle, championing the avant-garde and challenging the nearby Royal Academy’s turgid stranglehold over taste. For too long the Wyndhams’ circle had seen the artists they admired being overlooked, in particular Burne-Jones, who had not exhibited publicly since a spat with the prestigious Watercolour Society almost a decade before, when he refused to cover up the genitalia of a very naked Demopho?n in his work Phyllis and Demopho?n. The Lindsays spared no expense on their sumptuous enterprise, which was all silk damask, marble columns, velvet sofas and potted palms in sky-lit galleries, and looked like a very expensive private house. Many of the opening exhibition’s pictures came from their friends’ collections. The Wyndhams, who in some seventeen years of marriage had established themselves as discerning patrons with an excellent eye, loaned two: Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge, a Whistler that Percy had bought some two years before on a whim when passing Piccadilly’s Dudley Gallery, and the magnificent Watts of Madeline. In May 1877, the Wyndhams went to the Gallery’s opening night, attending both Lady Lindsay’s ‘magnificent banquet’ for the inner circle, including the Prince of Wales and three of his siblings, and the larger reception, to which critics and lesser personages were invited, in the galleries upstairs. That opening made Burne-Jones famous: his eight works had star position in the hundred-foot-long West Gallery, occupying an entire end wall. Oscar Wilde, still an Oxford undergraduate – albeit rusticated – caused a sensation in a velvet coat embroidered to look like a cello. Soon Wilde was famous himself as the columnist informing the readership of The Woman’s World how to adopt the aesthetic way of life, and giving American lecture tours in velvet breeches with a green carnation in his buttonhole. Inspired by the Gallery, the public adopted the fashions, interior decoration and art that Madeline and her friends had cultivated for over a decade. They flocked to Liberty’s department store on Regent Street for murky silks and sludgy velvets. Madeline’s School of Art Needlework (‘Royal’ since securing Queen Victoria’s patronage in 1875), which had long been producing Burne-Jones designs, moved to larger premises to accommodate demand. Sunflowers, peacocks and blue and white china, the motifs of aestheticism, appeared everywhere. Gerald du Maurier in Punch and Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience joyfully let loose on the pretensions of the ‘greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery’ and its devotees. On that opening night, however, the great critic Ruskin was mostly struck by Whistler’s effrontery in exhibiting work with so little apparent finish. ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,’ he wrote in Fors Clavigera. Whistler sued for libel, claiming inter alia that since Ruskin’s review he had not been able to achieve a price comparable to that which Percy paid for his Nocturne. Mary, like the art world, was agog: ‘so funny’, she wrote in her diary, ‘the jury going to Westminster Palace Hotel to examine the pictures, and hearing Mr. Burne-Jones, Whistler, W. M. Rossetti and all of them in the witness box’. Six months later, Madeline Wyndham took Mary and George, home for the holidays, to Leighton House for one of Leighton’s famed chamber-music afternoons that introduced rising musical stars – Hall?, Piatti, Joachim – to Society. Among the guests was Arthur Balfour, in his early thirties, Conservative Member for Hertford. Balfour, the man who once said ‘Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all,’ was already renowned for his languidness. Despite six years in the Commons, he was not to make his political name until the next ministry, as a member of the maverick quartet known as the Fourth Party, led by Lord Randolph Churchill, who devoted their time in opposition to harassing the Liberal Government and their own ineffectual Leader in the Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote. However, Balfour was already a prime target for ambitious Society matrons seeking to marry off their daughters. He was impeccably connected through his mother, and the favourite nephew of Lord Salisbury, the gloomy refusenik of the Reform Act who was now a serious contender to take over from the elderly Disraeli when the latter retired. From his dead father Balfour had inherited a nabob fortune – the term used to describe those whose riches came from working for the East India Company in the Indian sub-continent – and the prosperous Whittingehame estate. Balfour was not one who thought politics should govern life. He maintained a keen interest in philosophy – the best known of his works, Foundations of Belief, was published in 1895 – and held musical concerts at his own house, 4 Carlton Gardens, for which he had recently commissioned Burne-Jones to create a series of murals. Above all, the tall, dark-haired, humorous Balfour was charming: ‘He has but to smile and men and women fall prone at his feet,’ said his close friend Mary Gladstone, who had been besotted with him for years and whose father William considered him a prot?g?, despite their opposing political stances. Fifty years later, the Liberal MP Howard Begbie commented caustically on Balfour’s undimmed charm: ‘I have seen many [people] retire from shaking his hand with a flush of pride on their faces as though Royalty had stooped to inquire after the measles of their youngest child.’ Some years later, when Mary Wyndham was newly married, a friend would comment worriedly on her attitude towards Arthur: ‘he fascinates her – her attitude is that of looking up in wonder … Thinks him good …’ Mary and George’s shared fascination with Balfour began the day they met him. Their lives would ever after be entwined with his. And an elderly Balfour, attempting an autobiography, would put down his pen at precisely the moment he met the seventeen-year-old Mary Wyndham among the chattering crowds at Leighton House. THREE (#ulink_0362402f-3cf4-5833-aa2e-5dad1c532925) ‘The Little Hunter’ (#ulink_0362402f-3cf4-5833-aa2e-5dad1c532925) At 3 o’clock on an early-summer afternoon in 1880 Madeline Wyndham presented Mary at the Royal Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace. This was Mary’s ‘passport to Society’: her formal entry to her parents’ world. Each spring, aristocratic households decamped, children, staff and all, to London for the Season. One year at Wilbury, Mary counted thirty-six boxes of luggage stacked up in the hall. Ostensibly, the Drawing Rooms, at which presentations took place, were the most important element of the Season. In reality, Society thought them the most tedious part. Ornate carriages with bewigged coachmen and liveried footmen sat nose to tail on the Mall for hours waiting to gain entry to the Palace, traffic sometimes snaking back through St James’s Park. Their occupants, stifling in their elaborate dress, were considered fair game for the crowds that thronged the Mall to watch and pass bawdy, affectionate comment. After her husband’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria had retreated into self-imposed purdah. One of her many children deputized for her as the Royal Presence to whom debutantes curtsied low before rising, waiting for their train to be draped over their arm, and then backing out of the room. Half a century on, a host of elderly memorialists dwelling long on the fragrant pot-pourri of a bygone age recalled their relief at having executed the complicated manoeuvre – which required several weeks’ worth of dedicated lessons – without falling or tripping over. Doubtless Mary felt the same. The pageant along the Mall was a glorious affirmation of the social order, proving Henry James’s observation that ‘Nowhere so much as in England was it fortunate to be fortunate.’ Yet, as so often, the interplay between pageantry and power was more subtle. Over the course of a century, the traditions surrounding Britain’s monarchy had become more elaborate as the reality of its sovereign power decreased. The same might be true in relation to its aristocracy. After six years of Disraeli, Gladstone stormed back to power in 1880 on the back of his Midlothian Campaign. Ostensibly the campaign was for a constituency. In reality, it was a national platform for Gladstone to inveigh against the moral iniquities of ‘Beaconsfieldism’ – for in raising Victoria to the rank of empress Disraeli had secured himself a peerage as Earl of Beaconsfield in token of his monarch’s grateful thanks. The campaign, orchestrated by Constance Leconfield’s brother Lord Rosebery, was a whistle-stop railway tour of the north. The meetings were more like religious revivals. As Gladstone, followed by a pack of press, lamented Britain’s failure to act as the watchdog of weaker nations, people fainted in the crush of thousands and were handed out over the heads of those around them. Reports of his latest address rattled across the wires to Fleet Street, telegraphed across the nation in the next day’s press. It irrevocably altered the landscape of campaigning. Gladstone’s enemies deplored his demagogic approach. But the man now popularly known as the ‘GOM’ – the ‘Grand Old Man’ – was the nation’s moral compass, and his party triumphant. Queen Victoria, despite trying first to persuade the Whig Lord Hartington to form a government, was reluctantly forced to accept the inevitable and invite a man she characterized as a ‘half-madman … mischief maker and firebrand’ to be Prime Minister for a second time. The Whigs still restrained the Radical element, but the Liberal party nonetheless seemed to be lurching to the left. For the Tories the very fact that radicalism had a political voice provoked anxiety, and the parliamentary runes augured ill when Parliament, on reconvening, was consumed by the Bradlaugh Affair, in which Northampton’s atheist Liberal representative asked to ‘affirm’ his allegiance to the Crown instead of taking the religious oath demanded of all MPs. Lord Randolph Churchill, leader of the Fourth Party, spat vitriol against Bradlaugh as a ‘seditious blasphemer’, bent on destroying the union of Church and State. Throughout the controversy of several years – Bradlaugh was not to take his seat until 1886 – Percy stood against his party in supporting Bradlaugh, citing his belief in liberty of conscience. Gladstone’s mission to pacify Ireland had only inflamed tensions, by promising reforms that did not go far enough. Ireland was gripped by a violent Land War waged by the peasantry against their absentee landlords, and masterminded by the shadowy Land League. Its head, the half-American Protestant landowner Charles Stewart Parnell, was also leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party that now dominated Irish politics, demanding land reform and Home Rule, a measure – as yet unspecified – of self-governance for John Bull’s Other Island. In Britain, working-class discontent was growing as real wages, which had risen steadily throughout the 1870s, began to slump. Arable farming was year on year in greater distress. Britain was on the verge of a violent, nationwide economic depression. Calls for electoral reform were growing in volume. In 1883 Lord Salisbury, Eeyore-like in his perpetual gloom, published Disintegration, an essay predicting the breakdown of the social and political order as a result of mass enfranchisement. And socialism was now taking its first tottering steps into the political consciousness of the intelligentsia and the English working class. Socialism’s creed of political rights and economic equality for all was inherently inimical to Mary’s world. Yet for the aristocratic dowagers who, gorgon-like, lined the ballroom walls as chaperones to the young who danced before them, the more present threat came from capitalism: plutocratic fortunes from industry and finance trying to force entry into the hallowed drawing rooms of the landed elite. Throughout the 1880s the cry went up from within Society that the ruling class were losing their exclusivity, that young women were being presented at court whom nobody (by which it was meant nobody of ‘birth’) had ever seen. The percentage of women from the titled and landed classes presented at court fell from 90 per cent in 1841 to 68 per cent in 1871, to under 50 per cent in 1891. Meanwhile the number of presentations was steadily increasing. In 1880, the year of Mary’s debut, a fourth drawing room was added to the social calendar, in 1895 a fifth. ‘Society, in the old sense of the term, may be said, I think, to have come to an end in the “eighties” of the last century,’ said Lady Dorothy Nevill in 1910. The anxiety this caused was immense. ‘Let any person who knows London society look through the lists of debutantes and ladies attending drawing rooms and I wager that not half the names will be known to him or her,’ thundered one dowager in 1891, inveighing against the advent of ‘social scum and nouveaux riches’. These dowagers’ underlying fear was that those forcing entry to their drawing rooms would use their seductive financial power to gain access to their children’s beds. The Season was a marriage market for the children of the elite. Within that market, matches were ‘facilitated’ by careful parents, rather than expressly arranged. The convention was that a young couple should be in love – but with a socially and financially suitable mate. Consequently, access to that market needed to be strictly regulated, in order to prevent young aristocrats accidentally making the wrong choice, and pure bloodlines being corrupted by plutocratic wealth. In fact, the English elite’s permeability has always been one of the key reasons for its continued survival. Its education system – Eton and Oxbridge – could with time turn the son of ‘social scum’ into a gentleman apparently indistinguishable from one whose bloodline goes back centuries. Yet it required thick skin. Mary’s friends Laura and Margot Tennant, the daughters of the Scottish industrialist Sir Charles Tennant, great-granddaughters of a crofter, found that even after securing presentation at court, most doors were still closed to them, and, at the balls which they did attend, no men would dance with them. For Margot, social entr?e came only when she managed to engage the Prince of Wales in conversation in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. ‘I felt my spirits rise, as, walking slowly across the crowded lawn in grilling sunshine, I observed everyone making way for us with lifted hats and low curtsies,’ she recalled. Even after the Tennant girls’ entry into Society their father was always known, to their aristocratic friends, in barely concealed mockery, as ‘the Bart’ – a reference to the baronetcy of which he was so obviously proud and the new money that had secured it. For the aristocratic if bohemian Mary, who had access everywhere, what feathers she ruffled were of her own making. Writing her own memoir in later life, she remembered an incident with a young Oxford undergraduate, George Curzon: As we were dancing we received the full impact of handsome Lady Bective’s train, formed of masses and masses and layers and layers of black tulle wired and strapped, about as heavy and powerful as a whale’s tail. It caught us broadside with immense force and we were swept off our feet and [hurled] to the ground and fell at my mother’s feet, our heads almost under the small hard gold chair on which she was patiently sitting as chaperone. In old age, validated by decades of social success, Mary could look back on such youthful exuberance with pride. For her contemporaneous feelings we must turn elsewhere. Not to her diary: the journal that Mary kept religiously from the age of sixteen until her death was an object of record, not of confidence, and her entries generally masterpieces of pragmatism. That for 8 October 1884, by no means untypical, reads: ‘Put on orange frock, went down to tea, sat in draught, rested, black’. It is far better to look to her sketches. On scraps of paper she drew top-hatted men about town carrying silver canes; strolling ladies in bustles and magnificent hats by day, drooping elegantly over their fans in ballgowns by night. She drew herself in balldress, shivering with cold in the early hours of the morning; bundled up against the chill spring in an umbrella and a muff; and on horseback, elegant in her riding habit, brandishing her riding crop under dripping trees in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row. On the back of an embossed thick card inviting ‘The Hon Percy & Mrs Wyndham & Miss Wyndham’ to one of Buckingham Palace’s two Court Balls each season is a caricature of herself entitled ‘Miss Parrot at the Ball’; she teased her little sisters with sketches depicting ‘Pretty Mary and her plain sisters’. These sketches show the curious eye of an eager young woman getting to grips with the rules of a new, sophisticated world. Around this time Mary visited Dr Lorenzo Niles Fowler, a fashionable American phrenologist, in his Piccadilly offices. Phrenology, the art of analysing character by skull shape, is now discredited, not least for its unsavoury associations with eugenics. In the 1880s, it was Society’s latest craze. Dr Fowler must have been perceptive, since his report is curiously accurate. It describes an unselfconscious young woman, young for her years, and happy to let others – particularly her mother – take the lead; combative, but quick to forgive; loyal; and easily interested in other people. Interestingly, Dr Fowler also identified a normally well-hidden element of Mary’s personality. ‘You are remarkable for your ambition in one form or another,’ he said, commenting on her desire ‘to appear well in society, to attract attention, & to be admired’. This was undoubtedly true, and something Mary herself would always disavow. She visited Dr Fowler at least twice more, taking her future husband with her too. Even given her love of novelty – Mary was always enthusiastic about the latest craze – it suggests she found some merit in his analysis. In Thatched with Gold, Mabell Airlie expressed the conventional expectation of a debutante: to marry as soon as possible, preferably in her first Season. Too long a delay, and ‘there remained nothing but India as a last resort before the spectre of the Old Maid became a reality’. A debutante’s social success was certainly measured out by proposals. Mary, who declared later that ‘Many wanted me to wife!’, received more than a few. Nonetheless, her parents did not encourage her to marry straight away. They thought eighteen far too young to take on the responsibility of a husband and household, and were anyway reluctant to lose her to a husband so soon. Still, Mary did not become engaged until her fourth Season, in 1883. The delay was longer than Madeline Wyndham – responsible for guiding her daughter towards a suitable match, determined to prove her family’s worth by securing a splendid one – could have hoped for. In the autumn of 1880 Balfour invited Mary and her parents to Strathconan, his Highland hunting lodge. The visit was not a success. Mary was tongue-tied with awkwardness: in her own words, ‘a shy Miss Mog … feeling very stiff & studying Green’s history & strumming Bach most conscientiously listening with silent awe to the flashing repartee, the witticisms & above all the startling aplomb of “grown-up conversation”’. It may have been this muteness that gave rise to the story that some of Mary’s circle had initially thought her a little backward. In London, Madeline and Mary invited Balfour to the Lyceum to see Ellen Terry in Much Ado About Nothing. Forever after the play would fill Mary with ‘a peculiar kind of sadness’. Twenty years on she remembered the evening with startling clarity: ‘We sat in a box and when the audience tittered at the wrong part you said savagely “I would gladly wring their necks” and I remember the sense of vague dissatisfaction when it was all over – the evening – one of my little efforts,’ she recalled to Balfour. Balfour subsequently declined Madeline Wyndham’s invitations to visit the family at Wilbury. By the end of Mary’s second season it was clear that the affair had come to nothing. Looking back over the abortive courtship many years later, Mary blamed her shyness and Balfour’s cowardice. She could not audaciously flirt like the Tennant sisters. She, like Shakespeare’s Beatrice, had needed luring. But Balfour was too ‘busy and captious’ to do it. ‘Mama wanted you to marry me [but] you got some silly notion in your head because … circumstances accidentally kept us apart – you were the only man I wanted for my husband and it’s a great compliment to you! … but you wouldn’t give me a chance of showing you nicely and you never came to Wilbury and you were afraid, afraid, afraid!’ she teased him. Many biographers have examined in some detail why Balfour, at whom women flung themselves, never married. It has been suggested that the ‘Pretty Fanny’ of press caricatures was gay, even an hermaphrodite. His devoted niece Blanche Dugdale suggested that he was nursing a lifelong broken heart after the death from typhoid in 1875 of his close friend May Lyttelton. In fact, Mary’s analysis seems to hint at the most probable answer: Balfour was lazy, and emotion frightened him. He felt safest in a rational, logical world. ‘The Balfourian manner’ for which he became known ‘has its roots in an attitude of … convinced superiority which insists in the first place on complete detachment from the enthusiasms of the human race, and in the second place on keeping the vulgar world at arm’s length …’ wrote Begbie. In Begbie’s phrase, that world, which Balfour so charmed upon meeting, was never allowed to penetrate beyond his lodge gates. A decade into their acquaintance, Mary pressed Balfour to express some kind of affection in his letters to her. He recoiled. ‘Such things are impossible to me: and they would if said to me give such exquisite pain, that I could never bring myself to say them to others – even at their desire,’ he explained. In December 1880, Mary visited Wilton, home of the Earl and Countess of Pembroke. It was her first visit without her parents – she was chaperoned only by Eassy, her mother’s maid – and a suitably ‘safe’ first foray since Gertrude Pembroke and Madeline Wyndham had been close friends for many years. The house party included two men whom Mary knew only a little, but liked – Alfred Lyttelton (brother of May), ‘that nice youngest one’ of the large Lyttelton clan, and Hugo Charteris, eldest surviving son of Lord and Lady Elcho, heir to the earldom of Wemyss. The house party was rehearsing Christmas theatricals in a delightfully shambolic fashion. Mary was in her element. ‘We all turn our backs on the audience, we don’t speak up, we laugh, we hesitate and we gabble,’ she told her mother. ‘Hugo talks in a very funny voice.’ Acerbic, witty Hugo, a talented amateur actor, was far more attractive to women than his average looks suggested (he was balding fast). He was also a complicated soul, with a morose streak and a gambling problem. His gambling was often to complicate relations with his father, whose own high-minded preoccupation – army reform – earned him the sobriquet ‘the Brigadier’. Two elder brothers had died in their early twenties (one an accident, the other a suspected suicide). Lady Elcho was a daunting figure even in the context of mid-Victorian evangelism, and never troubled to conceal from Hugo her feeling that the wrong sons had died. ‘Mums called Keems [Hugo] darling & patted him on the leg … neither of which has she done for years,’ Hugo noted with delight (referring to himself in the third person, something he often did in correspondence with his wife) when he was almost thirty years old. Madeline Wyndham had known the Elchos for many years, not intimately but well. In February 1881 she invited Hugo to Wilbury. If she thought to capitalize upon interest sparked in Mary at Wilton, she was mistaken. When Madeline tried to make her daughter commit to a date, Mary professed an utter lack of interest. ‘As to Hugoman, his is an indefinite arrangement. I suppose you will write to him before the time comes [although] we might have him Monday as Lily [Paulet, Hugo’s cousin] comes that day,’ she wrote laconically in a letter otherwise devoted to plans for rearranging balls so that her friend and neighbour Louisa Gully might attend. Recalling this period a few years later, Mary gloated over her inscrutability: ‘poor Mum … she really couldn’t fathom Migs,’ she said, describing herself proudly as ‘the little hunter (who always hunted on her own hook & followed her own trail)’. Madeline persisted nonetheless. Six months later, Hugo was posted to Constantinople as part of a short-lived stint in the Foreign Office. By this time, his acquaintance with Mary was well established. Mary wrote to him on the eve of his departure recounting her recent nineteenth-birthday celebrations at Wilbury, where she had, in accordance with family tradition, been crowned with a wreath of roses and spent the evening celebrating with songs and dancing. She had decided, she told him, that ‘the [cat]’ – and here she drew a little cartoon of a cat – ‘believes the [hog]’ – a drawing of a pig – ‘to be most sage, large-minded and kind’. Meritocracy had not reached the Foreign Office. It was believed that only those with breeding could properly and confidently uphold British prestige abroad. Lord Robert Cecil commented that all a junior attach? needed was fluent French and the ability ‘to dangle about at parties and balls’. Several months later, bored and lonely in Constantinople, Hugo received a letter from his brother Evan, updating him on London gossip, including a nugget concerning a putative rival, David Ogilvy, heir to the earldom of Airlie: Apparently he [Ogilvy] came over here in the summer intending to stay for a year and a half but went back after two months as Miss Wyndham was too much for him. He never proposed to her but was afraid he would do so, so he retired. I suppose you keep up constant correspondence with her I daresay she has told you more about Ogilvy than I can … On that mischievous note, Evan swore Hugo to secrecy. Mary most certainly had not gossiped. Hugo only discovered the truth of the matter several years later. ‘I think that Mumsie [Madeline Wyndham] proposing to Ogles for you & being refused is very funni [sic],’ Hugo told Mary gleefully upon discovering the real sequence of events in 1887. Mary, like her husband employing the third person, blusteringly denied all responsibility: ‘It had nothing to do with Migs, it was entirely the old huntress’s transaction … I didn’t care a hang about Ogles & knew he didn’t care a rap for me … Mumsie wanted Migs to be clear of Ogles (or engaged to him!!!) to “go in” for Wash [Hugo himself] with a clean nose!’ It is quite possible that Ogles was the unnamed beau who allegedly abandoned his interest in Mary with the explanation that she was ‘A very nice filly, but she’s read too many books for me’. Hugo returned to England in the spring of 1882, bearing bangles ‘for Miss Mary’, and determined to start a new career in politics as a member of the Conservative Opposition. Mary was in Paris, flirting with Frenchmen and having ‘a high old time’. Madeline Wyndham ‘hunted’ her annoyed daughter back to Wilbury and dismissed her wheedling attempts to secure an invitation for a handsome ‘Musha de Deautand’ whom she had met in Hy?res with the excuse that there was no room. ‘[T]here would be no harm done just a fortnight in the country … the house is elastic you could shove somebody somewhere,’ pleaded Mary, to no avail. Madeline Wyndham was decided. As Mary later recalled, her mother’s plan was that she was to ‘go in’ for Hugo and marriage ‘in the summer (together with reading & music!) that makes me laugh! Hunt the arts to keep one’s hand in!’ That summer was one of the bloodiest politically for some time. In May, Parnell and his lieutenants William O’Brien and J. J. O’Kelly were released from several months’ imprisonment in Kilmainham Jail. They had been jailed for ‘treasonable practices’ after fomenting opposition to Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act, which gave Ireland the ‘3 Fs’ of fair rents, fixity of tenure and free sale of landholdings but which Parnell and his party considered did not go far enough. Their incarceration had thrown Ireland back into full-blown chaos: a national rent strike by day, while the mysterious ‘Captain Moonlight’ terrorized landlords by night. The ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ released Parnell in return for his bringing his influence to bear to end the rent strike. Many thought it negotiating with terrorists, including W. E. Forster, who in fury resigned as Irish Chief Secretary. His replacement, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under-Secretary Thomas Burke had barely set foot on Irish soil when they were murdered in Dublin’s Phoenix Park by a gang calling itself the Invincibles. In London, men poured, hatless, out of their clubs to disseminate the appalling news. Quite unjustly, Parnell and his fellow Irish parliamentarian John Dillon were blamed; arriving at the House of Commons the following day, Wilfrid Blunt was told that they were the ‘conspirators’. Stoutly, Blunt refused to give credence to the rumours: ‘they looked very much like gentlemen among the cads of the lobby’. Blunt was preoccupied with another devastating blow to nationalism dealt by Gladstone’s ministry in Egypt. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, in order to shore up the corrupt Khedive’s unstable rule in the face of revolt by Colonel Ahmed Orabi, popularly known as the Arabi Pasha. The need to protect the interests of the ‘bondholders’, as those numerous Britons with investments in Egypt were now called, outweighed any nice concerns for Midlothian principles of national self-government. So firmly did the British believe that Suez must be protected that just nineteen members of the House of Commons voted against the occupation. Percy Wyndham was the only Tory to do so, vigorously opposed to what he believed to be Britain’s illegal and oppressive behaviour. He later made one of his increasingly rare Commons speeches on Blunt’s behalf, for Blunt’s fierce advocacy of the Arabi’s cause – even to the extent of paying for his legal defence when the Arabi was court-martialled (the trial was abandoned, and the Arabi exiled instead) – earned Blunt exile himself. In July 1884, trying to go back to Egypt, Blunt was detained at Alexandria by British officials who, under instructions from Sir Edward Malet, the Consul General, forbade the troublemaker entry. Access to a parliamentary seat was still easy for a young aristocrat. In January 1883, Hugo’s grandfather died, and his father, now the tenth Earl of Wemyss, was elevated to the Lords. At a by-election in February, Hugo, having inherited his father’s courtesy title, stepped neatly into the Suffolk seat his father had held since 1847. Seamlessly, a Lord Elcho once more sat for Haddington. At Wilbury Mary, Mananai and Pamela decorated Mary’s dog Crack with yellow ribbons to celebrate – the colour of the Primrose League. The League, named after the favourite flower of Disraeli (who died in 1881), promoted working- and middle-class Toryism – the latter becoming known as Villa Toryism – largely through jamborees and summer f?tes, enticing the electorate with the promise of aristocratic proximity. It was the work of Lord Randolph Churchill, the preacher of ‘Tory Democracy’, an ill-defined creed that involved transferring power from the party’s leadership to the National Union – the constituencies – but was really part of his own bid for power. Privately, he described it as ‘chiefly opportunism’. Throughout that year Hugo sent Mary bouquets which she unpicked and made into buttonholes for him to wear; they played lawn tennis, went to the theatre, had tea and walked in the park: all under Madeline Wyndham’s encouraging eye. Finally on a July night in 1883, with ‘buttonhole no. 171’ in his lapel, Hugo proposed and Mary said yes. The next day, Hugo went to Belgrave Square to seek formally the Wyndhams’ blessing. Percy gave it to him ‘from my heart of hearts … Mary is a great treasure, and as I believe you know it I am very glad you have made her love you.’ Mary had never properly met Hugo’s parents. They were introduced the next day at tea at their Mayfair house, 23 St James’s Street. Annie Wemyss took to Mary ‘immensely’, deeming her ‘so natural, so true, so good, & so free from affectation, fastness’. ‘[This] is such a good thing,’ wrote a mutual acquaintance to Percy, ‘for as we know, she [Annie Wemyss] does not take always spontaneously to people. I confess I felt rather nervous about it …’ Madeline Wyndham was delighted. ‘She will bring you all nearer together,’ she told Hugo, as though her daughter were a sort of familial Elastoplast. Mary’s precipitation from the Wyndhams’ loving bosom into the Wemysses’ chilly embrace concerned many of the Wyndhams’ friends. ‘Condolences’ upon the loss of a daughter to marriage were conventional enough, as were the ‘icy congratulations’ that Mary received from Hugo’s desultory rivals. But many of the letters of congratulations sent to Belgrave Square were somewhat equivocal, and could not conceal a certain bemusement at her choice. Rediscovering them in middle age, Mary thought it obvious that most of her relations had thought Hugo was not quite good enough. Mary did not particularly enjoy her engagement: ‘six weeks of racket’ consisting of all the things she most disliked: endless trips ‘drudging around the shops’ after her mother, and being prodded and poked by crowds of people ‘swarming about the house about bothering clothes’. Hugo teased Mary about the new skills she was acquiring in preparation for life as a matron running a household: ‘I wonder what you are doing … learning how many apples go to a Pie, or what butter costs at ? a pound … or perhaps you have been philosophizing over the degeneracy of modern linen … & regretting the halcyon days of muslins.’ Both lovers expressed the sentiments expected of them. The day after their engagement, Mary told Hugo she had passed a sleepless night, contemplating the great change before her. In the following days she professed herself ‘completely happy!’ with her ‘darling Hoggolindo … angel-Hoggie’. ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,’ she told ‘his Lordship Hogge the Good’, quoting her favourite lines from Romeo and Juliet. Hugo had become the very model of young Victorian manhood, swearing to ‘to pray, pray with your photo before me … to become more deserving of my happiness, to be drawn out of my stupid narrow self to something higher, better, nearer what you are’. But, all too soon, Hugo was back to his old habits, and doubts had surfaced in Mary’s mind. Barely a fortnight into her engagement, Mary had to intervene with the Wemysses on Hugo’s behalf. Hugo had found his gambling poison, the Stock Exchange, and on his first flutter lost ?700, the equivalent of over ?57,000 today. In what would become a wearily familiar exchange, Mary persuaded the Wemysses not to tie up Hugo’s inheritance in a trust, but she was worried about their future before they had even embarked on it. Nor did Hugo appear to think his engagement required him to stop his constant flirting. ‘I don’t care how much “nonsense” you talk to everybody or anybody at the Fisheries tonight for I do feel that you love me truly as I do you from the bottom of my heart,’ Mary told Hugo in mid-July, but her stout avowals ring hollow. Around this time – perhaps precipitated by the gambling incident – Mary tried to call off the engagement. Her formal, stilted letter to ‘Lord Elcho’ reads like that of a slightly less tactful Elizabeth Bennet who has accidently accepted Mr Collins. She was at home in Belgrave Square, dinner was ready downstairs and doubtless her father was growing increasingly impatient, but, she declared, I must write this at once … speak straight out & tell you that I have hour by hour become more forcibly, painfully & unmistakeably [sic] convinced that when I accepted you a fortnight ago I did not rightly understand my own mind … [I am] perfectly certain [that] I do not love & respect you as I feel I should … I feel it my duty my positive & absolute duty to break off our proposed marriage. As soon as Mary had forced those words out, her relief is palpable: her tone becomes free and easy and her pen dashes across the page in her usual untidy manner: I hope you will not mind much! Tho’ yr pride may be shocked at first – I feel assured that you will so feel it to be all for the best for both of us & I trust you will think of me kindly as your true friend MW p.s. Please excuse my untidiness! I feel our marriage would lead to endless misery to both of us as it is. N.B. I am sure we shall always be very good friends. I know you will not take it to heart. The engagement was not broken. By the next day, Mary was writing to Hugo as though they were reconciled, but her tone remains sober and the pet-names are nowhere to be seen. Whether it was an attempt to shock Hugo into good behaviour or whether it was cold feet (thirty years later George Wyndham reminded Mary how all the siblings had ‘palpitated’ over their marriages – although George and his wife would also prove incompatible), it was far too late for that. The Wyndhams’ indulgence did not extend to engagements broken for no good reason. It would have caused a scandal unthinkable for Madeline Wyndham, and while Percy gave his children a degree of independence, he held them consequently responsible for their actions. ‘Her mother had pushed her [Mary] into marrying L[or]d Elcho – so one used to be told at least,’ said Maud Wyndham, daughter of the Leconfields, and Mary’s first cousin, sixty years later. Arrangements proceeded as normal: the wedding presents arrived at Belgrave Square and, as customary, were displayed for inspection by family, friends and household (although some, such as Stanway, the Gloucestershire manor house given by Lord Wemyss to the newlyweds, were not capable of display). Mary began work on hundreds of thank-you letters: ‘I have thanked eight presents (long elaborate letters) & August is two hours old!’ she complained to Hugo. Last-minute adjustments were made to Mananai’s and Pamela’s bridesmaid dresses and Mary’s trousseau was packed in tissue paper in preparation for her honeymoon. Early on the morning of their wedding day, 10 August 1883, ‘the dawn of the day which I hope through all our lives we shall look upon as a blessed anniversary’, Hugo wrote to Mary anticipating their meeting in St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square later that day: ‘Darling God give you strength to go through it all – & make me a good Hogs worthy of the little angel Mogs … Goodbye my darling soon to be mine only and really.’ He sketched for Mary a cartoon: a small round Mary (not entirely representative, it must be said, since Mary was tall and slender) with a tall thin bridegroom by her side shouting ‘hurrah!’ Several hours later, as reported by The Times, Mary, dressed in white and decked with orange blossom, walked down the aisle of St Peter’s, past relations, friends and royalty in the form of Princess Christian, towards ‘Lord Elcho M.P.’, and became his wife. As the assembled masses waited in the cool church for Mary to make her entrance on Percy’s arm, it was Madeline Wyndham’s nerves that were most frayed. ‘It was an awful bit that in the Church before you came – it felt so long,’ Madeline told Mary later, heady with relief that all had gone as planned. ‘The organ played such a tune … I could have screamed to the man, to stop his twiddles … & then, like hot & cold or magic music, as you drew near he played louder & louder!’ Normally such a thing would have given Mary and her mother the giggles: this time it only gave Madeline a feeling of ‘teeth on edge’. The service was followed by a short reception at Belgrave Square. At a quarter past four, the bride and groom departed: first for Easton Lodge in Essex, lent to them by Lord and Lady Brooke, and then to Gober, in the Scottish Highlands, where Hugo was to go stalking. The Wyndhams settled in for a quiet evening at Belgrave Square. Madeline and her sisters, Julia and Lucy Campbell, alternately laughed and cried over the events of the day. Then George and Guy Wyndham went to a play. The rest of the family dined with Fr?ulein. After dinner, as Mananai sat and pulled apart Mary’s bouquet in order to make nosegays for Mary’s friends as keepsakes, her mother was reminded of her eldest daughter: ‘sitting there with a melancholy face picking and pulling at all the lovely flowers!’ The comparison did not bode well given that all Mary’s bouquets and buttonholes had been to do with Hugo. FOUR (#ulink_a8814ea3-4f05-5ff2-9aed-7c04bf6a3bec) Honeymoon (#ulink_a8814ea3-4f05-5ff2-9aed-7c04bf6a3bec) Three years later, when the sheen of marriage had long started to fade, Mary reproved Hugo for spending their honeymoon stalking. At the time, she had seemed happy enough to yomp across the moors after Hugo, and she revelled in a sense of recklessness as the Elchos drank champagne and played piquet by night. The Wyndham family was by now summering in Hy?res, and Madeline Wyndham was missing her eldest daughter desperately (‘I cannot get reconciled to being without you,’ she told Mary some two years after her marriage), but Mary’s letters to her family glowed with delight in her marital state. One evening, she told Guy conspiratorially, the Elchos had got so ‘drunk’ on champagne ‘to cheer our spirits’ after Hugo failed to bag a stag that Hugo fell over. At this liminal honeymoon stage Mary had been freed from childhood’s bonds without yet assuming matronly cares. The little cartoons the Elchos sent one another in their marriage’s early years, and coy references to ‘lonely little cots’ when they were apart, suggest that sexually the union was a success. Not for the Elchos the horror stories of the Ruskins, whose marriage was never consummated, or of the young scientist Marie Stopes, who only realized her abusive husband was impotent after six months of study in the British Library. Madeline and her daughters were extremely frank with each other about all health matters, microscopically recounting any oddities in relation to ‘Lady Betsey’, their term for their menstrual cycle. Mary was enthusiastically descriptive about gynaecological matters. It seems likely that Madeline gave all her daughters some kind of warning about what a wedding night entailed. What Mary told her mother after the event must remain a mystery. Madeline Wyndham kept ‘letter books’ containing her children’s correspondence over the course of their lives. On pasting in Mary’s first letter to her following her wedding, Madeline redacted it, so that it tells us only that Mary had ‘a headache’, before the next three lines are scrubbed out vigorously with black pen. Romance was in the air at Gober. As Mary and Hugo ate their dinner by firelight, backstage in the little hut Hugo’s valet Williams seduced Mary’s maid Faivre. Prophylactics, not uncommon in the city, were hardly readily available in the Highland wilds; perhaps Faivre was also one of many unversed women who did not know how babies were made. Faivre consequently found herself unmarried and pregnant – ‘ruined’, as Mary put it. It was a highly unfortunate position for any young woman, an untenable one for a lady’s maid. In most cases, Faivre would have found herself immediately dismissed without a reference. When the Elchos’ friend George Curzon found out that a housemaid in his employ had been seduced by a footman, he ‘put the little slut out into the street’ without a qualm. His contemporaries considered his attitude unremarkable. Mary responded quite differently. With the help of Madeline and Percy she helped Faivre find lodging with a tolerant North London landlady; assisted her financially from her own pin money (Hugo’s valet had long since scarpered); and visited Faivre once the child, a little boy, was born in the spring of 1884. Most of Mary’s friends thought her admirably liberal attitude towards staff overly indulgent. Servant troubles became a constant footnote to her daily life. Her anxiety never to hurt anyone’s feelings did not serve her well as an employer. On 14 August 1883, a few days after the Elchos had arrived at Gober, Hugo wrote a private letter to Percy. The subject was Mary’s dowry. Hugo told Percy that he had proposed ‘with no idea what Mary was to have or whether she was to have any[thing] at all’, as unconvincing a statement as the rest of his letter was disingenuous. Mary’s marriage settlement had been negotiated in the weeks between the engagement and the marriage by Percy on the one hand and Hugo’s solicitor, Mr Jamieson, on the other, as was the convention. Mary received ?15,000 (roughly ?1.25 million today), the interest on which would produce an annual income of ?500. Hugo had thought that ?100 or more of this ?500 would be given to him for his own use. Now conversations with Mr Jamieson had made it clear that Percy intended the whole for Mary’s use as pin money. Hugo’s frantic letter to Percy argued that Mary should not have an allowance disproportionate to the Elchos’ income, lest she learn bad spending habits. His reasoning, while in line with contemporary attitudes, was both patronizing and misleading. His concern was not that Mary’s spending habits should be curbed but that his own should be supported. Mary was innately frugal, and remained so all her life. She spent almost no money on clothes (far too little, her friends complained). Her eldest daughter never remembered her buying even a trinket or a bottle of scent for herself. She invariably travelled third class. Hugo, who travelled in first, and liked expensive cigars, was not otherwise extravagant in his living habits, but his gambling habit on the London Stock Exchange was improvident. ‘As far as his children could make out all he wanted money for was to have plenty of it to lose!’ wrote his eldest daughter Cynthia. Hugo’s haste to have this issue determined while on honeymoon suggests he was in yet another financial scrape. From his sheepish tone, even he realized that his behaviour was grasping. Percy agreed that Mary should have only ?350–400 a year as pin money, with the remainder going to the Elchos’ common expenses. From the occasional sly comment over the years it is clear that Percy knew full well why Hugo was so keen to reduce Mary’s pin money. Mary knew nothing of this until stumbling across this letter years later. ‘Typical’, she scrawled across it in irritation, that on their honeymoon Hugo should have written to her father ‘not on love but Money!’, adding, correctly, that Hugo’s master was ‘Mammon’. From Gober the Elchos travelled to Gosford, the Wemysses’ family seat just outside Edinburgh. For a century, the family had lived on another property on the estate. Now Lord Wemyss was adding two vast wings on to an Adams-built centre completed, but never lived in, a century before. During the course of the works, Mary persuaded the builders to let her go up in the crane used for the building. She drew a picture for her mother to illustrate it: a tiny figure swinging high over a bare landscape. Mary hated Gosford on sight. A chill east wind whipped around the property, which looked out to the glassy grey Firth of Forth. Seagulls wheeled overhead in a ‘complaining chorus’. In later life she described the rebuilt house as ‘like a large & gilded, dead & empty Cage’. Her daughter Cynthia echoed her: ‘a great block of stone that seems to me very still-born. It has no living atmosphere.’ Lutyens likened it to a rendition of ‘God Save the King’ sung flat. As a newlywed, Mary dreaded the time when Hugo would succeed to the Wemyss title, requiring her to relocate to the north. Gosford was enough to induce homesickness in anyone. Just days after they arrived, Hugo went rabbit shooting, leaving his new wife alone in the bosom of his family. He had accepted the invitation before his engagement, and claimed he could not in good conscience cancel. It was an early indication of his ability to costume selfishness as honour. In Hugo’s absence, Mary attended Aberlady Church with the family, went for long solitary walks and wrote endless letters to her husband. Evan Charteris, on finding her at her writing desk once again, marvelled teasingly that she had anything further to say. Annie Wemyss visited her in her bedroom before dinner and in her own stiff way ‘thimpashized’ with her doleful daughter-in-law. Nonetheless Mary felt marooned in a strange place and wondered what she was doing there. ‘You must come back soon … the very first instant you can … it is too horrid – & … dreary & dismal … everything is rainy & black & miserable & Mogs feels very sad,’ she told Hugo. Hugo’s sympathetic replies showed no sign that he intended to change his plans. At dinner the Wemysses lectured Mary upon the dangers of separation in marriage. Annie Wemyss noted proudly that she and Lord Wemyss had barely spent a day apart. Already, the Elchos seemed to have exceeded their tally, and Mary’s solitude forced her into contemplation. ‘I think now that Hugo & I shall always love being together by ourselves better than anything else … [but] the habit of living together as one cannot be acquired in a minute any more than any other habit … the wedding day is but the beginning of the marriage not the “fait accompli”,’ she told her mother. She had taken as her mantra ‘I bide my time’. With that she could ‘remove Mountains!’ But Mary’s brave words rang hollow. She was beginning to realize that moulding Hugo into the husband she wanted might be even more difficult than she had anticipated. A few weeks later the Elchos returned to London. Hugo had taken a small house near his parents at 12 North Audley Street, off Grosvenor Square. The Elchos stayed at Belgrave Square while waiting for works on the rented house to be completed. Both their mothers warned Mary about the dangers of city life, full of distractions to drive an emotional wedge between a young husband and wife. Once installed in North Audley Street, the Elchos made a good fist at domesticity. Sometimes they dined alone. Over champagne, Hugo practised the speeches he intended to make the next day in the Commons, speeches they both hoped would gain the attention of the party leadership and raise him out of the backbenches in due course. On other evenings Hugo read poetry to Mary as they sat by the fire. Yet far more frequently Mary’s diary recorded evenings spent in the company of others. In her journal the companions of her youth, cousins and Wiltshire neighbours, fall away. Instead she went with her sisters-in-law Evelyn de Vesci and Hilda Brodrick to watch the debates from the Ladies’ Gallery in the Commons, or spent evenings at the ‘New Club’ (the New University Club on St James’s Street) drinking champagne and ‘getting lively’ with Arthur Balfour, Hugo and Evan Charteris as they debated that day’s point of interest with dazzling lightness and speed. With Hugo, Laura Tennant and Alfred Lyttelton, Mary passed evenings at the bachelor lodgings of Godfrey Webb where the company reclined in armchairs, played the piano and indulged in ‘nice long talk’. Webb was somewhat older, and had originally been a friend of Percy and Madeline’s. A clerk in the House of Lords, and celebrated wit and raconteur, ‘Webber’ was described by some of the group as their court jester. That group, of which Arthur was the undisputed king, began to refer to itself as ‘the Gang’. In a few years its members would become ‘the Souls’. Marriage had established the direction of Mary’s social circle. After a spat about flirtations in 1887, Hugo implied as much, telling Mary that ‘me almost wishes as a punishment – though not quite! That you were now playing the part of Lady Airlie [David Ogilvy had since become Earl of Airlie] – in some provincial garrison town – jealously guarded by Othello Ogles – no Migs – no Barkin [Arthur Balfour] – NO Tommie [Ribblesdale] – NO Stanywan [Stanway] – only Ernests [babies] – soldiers wives – & tea parties of 10th Hussar Sols – with Othello Ogles pouring out the tea.’ Hugo’s conjecture was remarkably accurate in describing the life of Ogilvy’s actual wife Mabell Airlie at that time. Yet a comment by Mary in those early days suggests that the frenetic socializing for which she became notorious was partly the result of her husband’s response to married life rather than her own. Two years into their marriage, Mary counted to Hugo the number of occasions that the Elchos had been ‘quite alone’ in the countryside, without the array of hangers-on required to keep him amused. It was just twice: the time in Gober, ‘when you were stalking all day & one week at Whitsuntide at Stanway when I felt very ill – & yet you pretend to believe we are a domestic couple …’. In the spring of 1884, before the Elchos moved into North Audley Street, Mary had a miscarriage. She was put to bed at Belgrave Square and a doctor summoned. With fear of infections and haemorrhaging, miscarriage was considered more dangerous than childbirth, but Dr Cumberbatch said Mary’s condition gave him no cause for concern. ‘I suppose I have gone about it methodically in an easy going manner … I am as jolly as a sandgirl, or rather matron, or would be matron!’ Mary reassured her mother, who had stayed in London to be near Mary for as long as she could until the stream of telegrams from Percy, left with a houseful of guests at Wilbury, grew too irate to ignore. In a quiet room, cared for by a nurse, Mary rested on a chaise longue and knitted, whiling away the days until she was allowed back into the world. Hugo drifted in and out in between stints at the Commons. She was visited by friends – Lily Paulet and Emmie Bourke (a cousin of sorts whose husband Edward was the brother of Mary’s late uncle Lord Mayo) – and her sisters-in-law, who recounted their own experiences of childbearing and miscarriage. Eventually the shows of blood decreased. ‘Betsey … from [her] kind of light out of door attire is about to put on tippet and depart,’ Mary told her mother, and she was allowed to re-enter the world. As Mary did so, she was unclear whether she was pregnant or not. Dr Cumberbatch, perplexed by the non-appearance of ‘a 3 months ovum’, confessed he could not tell what exactly had happened. Perhaps Mary had had a phantom pregnancy; perhaps she was still pregnant; perhaps the foetus would come away at Mary’s next monthly period. If her period did not appear, ‘I shan’t know whether I have picked up old threads or started afresh! It’s very funny,’ said Mary, resolutely bright-faced, affecting nonchalance. Madeline Wyndham was terrified that Mary might produce a child with some kind of ‘omission’: a living judgement upon the Wyndham blood and breeding. Such haziness about childbirth matters was far from uncommon. Twenty years later Mananai recounted to Madeline the story of an unfortunate girl who was told that she was to give birth in July and found herself still pregnant in September. In Mary’s case, ‘Betsey’ did not reappear. She began to feel sick and ‘squeamish’. She supposed that she was either still pregnant or pregnant again. That summer, Mary made her first visit to Stanway, the Gloucestershire house that was her wedding present from Lord Wemyss. Stanway, where the family still lives, is a magical place – a ramshackle sixteenth-century house of honey-coloured stone shouldering on to a churchyard hidden away along an alley of pleached trees. The air seems thicker and stiller there: part of the house was originally a monastery, and a sense of this seclusion remains. The Elchos arrived on 31 July 1884, met at the station by a coachman, pony-chaise and black horse all seemingly as ancient as each other. They emerged from the leafy lanes to find Stanway glowing in the evening sun, with the bells of the tiny church that stood next door pealing in celebration. ‘[A] sort of heavenly feeling comes over one and laps one about,’ Mary told her mother of this arrival, the moment that she fell in love with the house that would be her home for the rest of her life. That evening the Elchos walked up to the Pyramid, a monument at the top of a gentle hill overlooking the house that was to become the site of many a tryst and midnight escapade. Half a century later Mary could still remember the sickeningly stuffy smell of the brand-new blankets and the next day’s breakfast of trout fried in oatmeal made by the housekeeper. When the Elchos arrived, the house had lain near-abandoned for half a century, kept barely habitable by a skeleton staff of ancient retainers for the rare occasions that the Wemysses used it as a shooting lodge on a foray south. Draughts whistled through cracks in the walls, cold flooded in through the latticed windowpanes. Armies of rats and cockroaches scuttled across bare floorboards, and as dusk fell bats swooped through shadowy rooms. Mary was undaunted by the state of the house and full of enthusiasm for transforming it. On pieces of rough paper she sketched out floorplans for her family, explaining the house’s peculiar layout. Stanway had almost no passages: most of the rooms led on from one another and it could only sleep sixteen at a pinch – remarkably small in the context of most houses the Wyndhams visited. Mary would continually struggle with this as a hostess. Mary’s first guests – Percy, Fr?ulein, Mananai and Pamela – arrived on 3 August to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. Fr?ulein had made ‘a cake with big raisins in it’, and Mary had bought crackers, eagerly anticipating ‘a feast & revel’ with her family. Madeline Wyndham, George and Guy arrived a few days later, and work began on transforming the house. As gooseberries gently ripened in the overgrown gardens, Madeline and her daughters picked their way through dusty attics hunting for treasures. They found Chippendale chairs which they brought down to replace the early Victorian plush-and-gilt furniture already in situ; and they patched together lengths of embroidered materials so that they could be hung as curtains in Mary’s sitting room at the end of the house that looked up to the Monument. Great pieces of furniture were trundled from room to room, old rugs laid out across floorboards. A month later, while staying at the Wemysses’ gloomy townhouse in Edinburgh, with the tick-tock of the eerie mechanical clock echoing through the rooms, Mary reported to Madeline Wyndham that ‘Earnest’ ‘is alive and kicking!’ Despite a riot of ailments (‘rheumatic pains in back & tummy … flatulence, ript livers’, insomnia and indigestion), she finally relaxed. Madeline was at Wilbury, where George was waxing and waning yellow from an attack of jaundice. She seized a moment to write to her daughter before dashing into the village to ‘beg borrow or steal’ a hollyhock so that Val Prinsep, seized by the urge, could paint it. She sent Mary strict instructions not to travel unless she felt up to it, for ‘sometimes indigestion gets such possession of one during the last months that one is only fit for home [where] … you can give yourself up to a tea gown & your sofa’. Mary did not listen. Already she carried everywhere her ‘nest egg’ – a wicker hand basket of unanswered letters, always full to overflowing, despite several hours spent each morning trying to reduce the Sisyphean pile. In December 1884, when she was almost to term, she hosted her first house party for ‘the Gang’ at Stanway, their number including Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb, St John and Hilda Brodrick and Laura Tennant. It was a roaring success. Laura Tennant wrote, ‘it’s such fun here … we quarrel about everything – we talk up to the top of our bent – we grow hyper-sentimental and blow blue bubbles into the stars & Hugo Ld Elcho comes down upon them with jeers & in pumps & a smoking suit. We play games & the piano – we none of us open a book or write a letter – we scribble & scrawl & invent words & reasonless rhymes.’ The guests ‘departed on the verge of tears!’, Mary told Percy with pride. Her diary came alive. ‘Talk talk the whole time,’ she recorded, scribbling down in detail all the games they played. Six months later the Elchos hosted another party. ‘Remember darling you are staying with very nice people. Please be careful and do not do anything to shock or annoy them,’ Charty Ribblesdale warned her younger sister, Margot Tennant. ‘At that moment’, Mary recalled, ‘Margot was walking on the church wall, pursuing Willie Grenfell with a large sponge – and astounding Hugo by her habit of talking in the passage or in her friends’ bedrooms till all hours of the night or morning.’ It was, in the collective memory, the first house party of the Souls. Mary at Stanway, in her delight, had found her m?tier. FIVE (#ulink_ff2d3908-e3a5-5a58-819e-37e31a25b77c) The Gang (#ulink_ff2d3908-e3a5-5a58-819e-37e31a25b77c) A heavily pregnant Mary spent Christmas 1884 at Wilbury. She had planned to give birth in January, in London, but Hugo Richard Francis Charteris (later known as ‘Ego’ from his childish attempts to pronounce his name) appeared early, and was born at Wilbury on 28 December. Thirteen-year-old Pamela was enthralled at having a ‘real live baby in the house’, Madeline Wyndham almost sick with relief that the child was healthy. Hugo sat by Mary’s side in her old bedroom as she recovered, allowing her to dictate her letters and diary to him until she was strong enough to wield a pencil herself. Ego was born one day before Gladstone’s seventy-fifth birthday. The GOM’s ministry was still bedevilled by foreign policy problems. By 1884, the trouble-spot had shifted to the Sudan, where British troops had become caught up in an attempt to suppress a revolt against Egyptian rule. For almost a year, the small, fearsome General Gordon, whose piercing blue eyes burned with Christian zeal, had been besieged in Khartoum by a mysterious fanatic known as the Mahdi who had been conducting the rebellion since 1881. In fact, it was entirely Gordon’s fault he was besieged. He had been sent out to effect a British withdrawal from the Sudan, but on arrival he had announced his intention to ‘smash up the Mahdi’ and dug his heels in at Khartoum. Such was the danger of having an uncontrollable ‘man on the spot’, who by maverick actions could influence government policy. In the autumn of 1884, caving in to intolerable public pressure (and to an angry Queen at Windsor), Gladstone authorized relief troops to be dispatched to the Sudan. To his intense disappointment, George Wyndham, who had joined the Coldstream Guards on leaving Eton, narrowly missed out on the opportunity to form part of the rescue mission. Wilfrid Blunt, who was still keen to return to Egypt, also wanted to become involved. On Christmas Eve he addressed the Executive of the International Arbitration and Peace Association, proposing to lead a ‘friendly mission’ to intervene with the Mahdi on Gordon’s behalf. From his home at Hawarden, a weary Gladstone acknowledged the offer, and promised to discuss the matter with Earl Granville, the Liberal party’s Leader in the Lords. Blunt’s offer was quietly let drop. Tucked up in bed at Wilbury, and just days into motherhood, Mary must have barely registered these matters. Her diary records only an uncharacteristic interest in food: ‘pheasant and baked apples for luncheon’, she noted. By convention, new mothers spent a month ‘lying in’ after the birth. After a spell of bed-rest, and under nurse’s instructions, they gradually made ‘all the steps back into Life! Such as walking, [putting on] stays [corsets] & sitting on the Commode!’, as Mary explained. After that, they were ‘churched’ with a religious blessing and re-entered society. Mary was soon bored by lying in, and frustrated by her difficulty in breast-feeding Ego, a fractious infant. As quickly as she could, she threw herself back into the social whirl. Madeline Wyndham chided her daughter for ‘racketing around’ at the expense of her health and her child. ‘The rule is that one cannot possibly live in the same way for 2 or even 3 months after “The Crisis” as one did before.’ But Mary did not listen, and before long her health gave out. In February 1885, Madeline Wyndham and Annie Wemyss joined forces, compelling a ‘pale and wasting’ Mary to Gosford for ‘a nice quiet bit by the sea’ with nothing to amuse her except long walks and her child – ‘who is a most important personage’, Madeline reminded her. Mary never really liked being by herself: ‘when I’m alone my spirits go down! Down!’ she said, and she found Gosford as depressing as always. ‘I am very low but that’s not strange!’ she told her mother. In fact she was miserable, bursting into tears every time she heard Ego cry. On the advice of her maternity nurse, Mrs Sayers, she began bottle-feeding him, such feeding newly in vogue, as legislation curbing the adulteration of foodstuffs made cow’s milk safer than before. Madeline Wyndham, fiercely opposed to the novel practice, immediately besieged her daughter with prophecies of doom: too much milk, she said, might ‘fly to ones head & make one vy odd for a time! Go to one’s leg & lay one up with what is called a milk leg.’ In her anxiety Madeline became vitriolic, and, though her anger was mostly reserved for the ‘wicked’ Mrs Sayers for proposing this course, Mary feared she was a bad mother and that her son was not developing as he should. Hugo had remained in London. What news he did deliver was dismal: Stanway’s housekeeper had dropped dead from diabetes. Mary’s initial shock and sympathy were swiftly replaced by exhaustion and alarm as she wondered how she would possibly find a suitable replacement. The news in the wider world was just as poor. The relief troops arrived at Khartoum in January 1885 four days too late. The city had fallen. Gordon’s head was impaled upon a stick under a sky as blazing as his own eyes. The news was telegraphed back to London. In the press, the GOM of the Midlothian Campaign became the MOG: ‘Murderer of Gordon’. In February it was announced that a further dispatch of troops would effect the original evacuation plan. Among these troops were Hugo’s jubilant brother Alan and George Wyndham, ‘in the 7th Heaven of delight’ at the prospect of a good old rout. ‘It’s like a death in ones [sic] heart,’ said Madeline as she broke the news to Mary. All her forebodings, poured out to Mary in letter after anguished letter, charged towards one impossible truth: George was departing to his death. Percy, who thought this intervention as wrong as all Britain’s actions in Egypt thus far, was scarcely more optimistic. In a letter written on the eve of George’s departure he assured him that he did not think ‘for a moment your most precious life is thrown away’ if his son should die in combat. At Gosford, Mary suffered a violent bilious attack. Madeline thought it was a direct response to her ‘grief’ at the news. As the troops prepared to leave, the Wemysses travelled south, and the Wyndhams congregated first at Wilbury and then in London. Only Mary was absent, forbidden by both families from making the long journey while she was still frail. She remained with Mrs Sayers and Ego, reliant upon her family’s letters for updates. They were not encouraging. ‘Tonight is the awful night when we say goodbye I never felt such a horrible feeling as it is – Poor darling Rat [Madeline Wyndham] looks so unhappy but she bares [sic] it wonderfully,’ Mananai told Mary on the eve of George’s departure after a day spent watching the inspection of the troops at Wellington Barracks. The next day they were at the Barracks again, among the cheering crowds waving off the troops in the glittering sunshine of an early-spring day, determined – said Madeline – to show George ‘no signs … of our sorrow but rejoice in his joy’. Madeline left London for Gosford. The visit was intended to raise her own spirits as much as her daughter’s, but seems rather to have made them confidantes in each other’s misery. She then returned to Wilbury ‘with a distracted mind & a sad heart & eyes that have gone blind with much crying these last weeks’. The house was in a state of upheaval. Final preparations were being made for the move to Clouds, which was to take place while the Wyndhams were in London for the Season. ‘The packing that is going on here is terrific. 3 immense waggons came here the other day and were loaded I don’t know how high & then trudged off at six o’clock in the morning,’ Pamela reported to Mary. On finding that her pet white sparrows had been left unfed and allowed to die in the chaos, Madeline saw another augury of George’s fate. It was not long before her mind would find another avenue along which to race. In April 1885 the Gang rejoiced at the engagement of Alfred Lyttelton to Laura Tennant, two of the most beloved of their group. All who knew Laura praised her to the point of hyperbole. She was possessed of ‘an extra dose of life, which caused a kind of electricity to flash about her … lighting up all with whom she came into contact’, said Adolphus (‘Doll’) Liddell, one of the many men in love with her. Laura was intensely spiritual, very flirtatious and extremely frank. Mary considered her to be her closest friend. The two concocted grand plans for a literary salon. Shortly after the engagement the Elchos jaunted to Paris with Arthur Balfour, Godfrey Webb and Alfred Lyttelton to visit Laura, who was with Margot and Lady Tennant shopping for her trousseau. ‘We form a fine representative party of Englishmen a married couple, an engaged couple, “doux garcons” as Webber wd call it in his fine English accent … & Margot does well for a sporting “mees”,’ Mary told Percy. In old age Mary recalled the irrepressible Tennant sisters’ debut in London as causing ‘a stir indeed – one may almost call it a Revolution … theirs was a plunge, a splash as of a bright pebble being thrown from an immense height into a quiet pool … Many were startled and most were delighted.’ The Tennant girls, unchaperoned by their mother, were ‘of totally unconventional manners with no code of behaviour except their own good hearts’, as the wife of Arthur’s brother Eustace, Lady Frances Balfour, put it. At Glen House, the family home in the Scottish Borders, they entertained male guests in their nightgowns in their bedroom, arguing late into the night over philosophy, spirituality, politics and psychology. The room was known as the ‘Doo-Cot’ (Dovecot) in ironic reference to their heated debates. In London – and in qualification of Mary’s recollection – it took them some time to achieve entr?e. Laura met Lady Wemyss – who lived not thirty miles from Glen at Gosford – only when she married Alfred. Alfred’s brother Spencer described the Tennants to his cousin Mary Gladstone as a family of ‘brilliant young ladies and vulgar parents’. Mary Elcho, of somewhat unconventional behaviour herself, was captivated from the first. Mary recounted this week in Paris to her parents in exhaustive, delighted detail. She told them about afternoons dozing on the sofa while Laura played the piano in their little shared sitting room; about their proficiency at lawn tennis that had roused the natives to applause; about their conversation, ‘as animated as the most spirited of Frogs’. Mary complained to Percy about the stolid Lady Tennant: ‘someone always has to lag & try to talk to her & she talks not at all! Except in the most commonplace manner.’ She told them about drives in the Bois de Boulogne, delicious d?jeuners and dinners at the Lion d’Or. They went to the Th??tre du Palais-Royal and then, Mary added in strangely bathetic phrase, they ‘walked home afterwards’. She did not tell her parents that the person with whom she had walked arm in arm, deep in conversation, on the winding route home was not Hugo but Arthur. On their return to London Arthur dined with the Elchos. Mary was wearing a low-cut gown which startled her guest into an unexpected compliment. ‘You have a jolly throat,’ he told her, such an effusive comment for the reserved Arthur that Mary openly blushed. One of the Gang’s defining characteristics, stemming directly from the nightgowned Tennant girls entertaining in the Doo-Cot, was their belief that men and women could be intellectual equals, and capable of intimate friendship on the mental plane. They chided scurrilous-minded outsiders, unaccustomed to seeing one man’s wife deep in conversation with another woman’s husband, for suspecting more earthly inclinations. Among themselves they conceded a little more. Mary described herself to Hugo as a ‘little flirt …!’ but all maintained that this flirtation was innocent. Throughout the early years of their marriage, the Elchos conducted a double romance with the Ribblesdales. The two couples holidayed together in Felixstowe and the New Forest, splitting off into contented pairs: Hugo and Charty, Mary and Tommy. It was convenient, diverting and fundamentally harmless. As Mary explained, ‘Migs in practice (flirtation practice) dwells on the ambiguity of implications the possibility of a backdoor or loophole that Tommy considers the word to contain. Migs thinks it doesn’t matter what she says in her letters to men conks [admirers], provided she only implies it … for if brought to book she can say that they have misunderstood her – and nice men conks never take one to task.’ In essence, it was courtly love, updated: men pursued, women teased, both remained beyond reproach. Yet Mary and Arthur’s relationship was different. ‘She reverences him,’ said Laura. Worryingly for Laura, upon broaching the issue with Arthur it seemed that he was not ‘as indifferent heart-wards to her as I at first thought – he said several things about it that gave me qualms’. Mary and Arthur’s obvious mutual attraction was not beclouded by the bavardage of ‘flirtation practice’. Within the context of Society this was dangerous: ‘the eyesight of the world … is vastly farsighted & sees things in embryo’, Laura warned Mary. The gossips of the New Club, seeing Mary and Laura dining with Arthur alone, could cause havoc. Laura was not the only person warning Mary that summer. Shortly after the Elchos had returned from Paris, Madeline Wyndham visited Stanway and had several lengthy private talks with Mary, undoubtedly about Arthur. Afterwards, Mary wrote to thank her: ‘I can’t say what it was having you here & what it is to have you at all. You are the best influence in my life & stronger than myself … as noble healthy & cleansing as a gust of … mountain air removing cobwebs from one[’s] moral mirror.’ But, despite these protestations, her behaviour did not alter at all. Mary had boasted that her mother, in the years before her marriage, had never quite been able to ‘fathom’ her. Now, it seemed no one could. Laura, analysing the situation, could only conclude that Mary, in the grip of fascination, neither knew herself nor could help herself, and that moreover infatuation blended with ambition: for ‘her affection for Hugo is strangely mixed up with her affection for the man she knows can, will & does help Hugo more than anyone else does’. For Laura, Mary was a woman buffeted by her emotions, and only Laura’s firm hand might prevent Mary from sleepwalking into disaster. ‘I never allow for a minute when I am with Mary that she is in love with A … were I to say “you are in love” she would believe me and poking the fire is productive of flame; & at present the conflagration is chiefly smoke,’ she told Frances Balfour, further placing the onus upon Arthur, as one capable of controlling his feelings, to put a stop to things. A letter written by Mary to her mother that summer suggests otherwise. Madeline Wyndham’s anxiety had been exacerbated, rather than eased, by her visit to Stanway. Shortly after leaving Mary, and while visiting her friend Georgie Sumner, she sent Mary a frantic letter. She did not directly mention the subject. Instead over numerous pages of increasingly illegible scrawl she dwelt long on the cautionary tale of Georgie, estranged from her husband, suffering ‘deadly remorse’, feeling she had ‘sinned against God & Man … and would die … sooner than act again as she did …’. ‘I thought perhaps you might send me a wopper,’ Mary replied, treating her mother to a lengthy, strangely abstract discourse on the nature of wrongdoing. It is a tortuous read, but in short it divides the world into two classes: wrongdoers too stupid or wicked to know they did wrong; and those who knew, but did it anyway, preferring to face the consequences at a later date. Mary classed herself in the latter camp. The only remedy she saw was to ‘pray … to set one’s heart & to keep it fixed in the right direction & day by day the effort will become less … the backsliding & driftings less frequent – to be able to make one’s will want to do the right thing’. Taken out of the abstract it is a startling admission. Mary’s heart was not fixed in the right direction. She wanted to be with Arthur. The following year, the Elchos and Arthur went on a walking tour of North Berwick. Printed backwards in tiny letters in Mary’s sketchbook from the trip are the words: ‘How I wish I could, but you know that would be impossible.’ It has been suggested that the ‘impossible’ thing was divorce, although it might have been sex, or even something more innocent. It is startling to think that Mary could ever truly have contemplated divorce – which would have made her a social pariah, would have given Hugo custody of her children and would have destroyed Arthur’s political career. More likely, Mary simply chose not to think of the consequences at all. As Laura later said, it was a case in which ‘they hurt other people because they liked themselves too much …’. But, for whatever reason, Mary faltered. After Madeline had failed to acknowledge her daughter’s easily decipherable code in the summer of 1885, Mary no longer attempted to confide in her. In fact, she seems almost to have stopped communicating at all. Desperate and panicked, Madeline Wyndham increased the barrage, while still maintaining that nothing was wrong. In frenzied underlinings from Hy?res, as Mary’s birthday approached, she exhorted the Elchos to ‘Cling on to doing things together … come nearer to each other … you must both work together … don’t get separated in your lives.’ On the Elchos’ wedding anniversary, invoking the memory of the ‘good Dear good single-minded Child’ Mary had been two years before, she demanded that ‘Hugo … keep you from all pitch … I know he first loved you for all that & Married You to have a Wife different from all the world. I’m sick of some of the Wives I see … I love you. I believe in you. I worship you.’ Mary broke her silence with cheerful obfuscation and a generous approach to the truth. ‘Hugo read … the birthday exhortation & wondered whether you thought I didn’t care for him any more!’ she said, ‘but I told him yr words were as warnings not as remedies … I don’t think two people could easily be more united than we are & will always strive to be … I would rather kill myself than make you miserable & disappointed in me.’ Mary fell pregnant shortly afterwards (her second son, Guy Lawrence, was born on 23 May 1886). Yet the fact of her pregnancy was not enough to calm a ‘wretched’ Annie Wemyss, who had also heard the rumours, and that autumn recruited Laura to keep Mary and Arthur apart. Laura enlisted Frances Balfour. The two conspired to prevent Arthur from going to Stanway in December, for the house party which was fast becoming an annual tradition, ditching it themselves in order to keep him away: ‘v [sic] good of us I think!’ said Laura, who used her own six-months’ pregnancy as an excuse. In the early months of the new year Laura trailed Mary like a shadow: almost every engagement with Arthur set down by Mary in her diary, whether visiting Sir John Millais’ new gallery or drinking hot chocolate at Charbonnel et Walker in the West End, notes Laura gently, inexorably interposing herself between the two, trying with all her might to reduce their relationship to innocent friendship. SIX (#ulink_9f1efebf-0dec-5c60-8522-7bce98e83a2a) Clouds (#ulink_9f1efebf-0dec-5c60-8522-7bce98e83a2a) As soon as the Stanway party ended, Mary left to join her family for their first Christmas at Clouds. The Wyndhams had finally moved in in September 1885. Throughout the autumn her excited younger sisters had bombarded her with letters giving her every detail of their ‘scrumtious [sic]’ new domain. If Mary was disappointed by Arthur’s previous absence, she showed no signs of this to her family. She arrived at Clouds, loaded down with ‘millions of packages’, Ego, his nurse Wilkes (known as ‘Wilkie’), her poodle Stella and a cageful of canaries, and was rushed around the house by her sisters demanding to know if it was exactly as she had imagined. All Mary could manage was ‘delightful’. The house was enormous. Built of green sandstone with a red-brick top floor, it looked like a storybook house that, like Alice, had found a cake saying ‘eat me’ and mushroomed to a hundred times its normal size. ‘I … keep discovering new rooms inside and windows outside,’ marvelled Georgie Burne-Jones on her first visit in November. Half a century later, an estate agent’s particulars listed five principal reception rooms, a billiard room, thirteen principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, a nursery suite of two bedrooms, twelve other bedrooms, a separate wing of domestic offices including thirteen staff bedrooms, stabling for twenty-three horses, garaging for four cars (presumably carved out of the stabling facilities) and a model laundry. The nerve centre of the house was a spacious sky-lit central hall, two storeys high. Opening off it at ground-floor level were Percy’s suite of rooms – bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, study – and the reception rooms – billiard room, waiting room, smoking room, dining room, adjacent dining service room, and the long south-facing drawing room and music room, connected by double doors, where floor-to-ceiling French windows revealed a wide grass terrace melding gently into the misty Downs beyond. Magnolia trees clustered up against those walls, with a border of roses, myrtles and rosemary beneath. Spiralling stone staircases in the hall’s corners led up to a vaulted, cloistered gallery overlooking the hall, off which were the family’s bedrooms; and up again to the nurseries and housemaids’ rooms on the top floor. The lower ground floor was the masculine domestic sphere. There the under-butler slept, guarding the gun room, wine cellars and butler’s pantry where the family silver and other valuables were locked in the plate closet. There too were the butler’s sitting room, odd-man’s room, lamp room, gun room and brushing room, dedicated entirely to brushing dirt off woollen clothes. The servants’ offices, where the majority of Clouds’ thirty-odd indoor staff slept, were connected to the main house on the ground floor through the dining service room and on the lower ground floor by a web of subterranean passages. The offices were a long, low wing designed by Philip Webb to look like a series of cottages, with un-cottage-like proportions. The beamed servants’ hall was nearly 40 feet long; the housekeeper Mrs Vine’s bedroom and sitting room two-thirds as large. The housekeeper’s ground-floor rooms led directly to the china closet, the table linen room, the still room, store rooms, larder, game larder and bakehouse: all her responsibility and domain. Forbes the butler slept on the first floor, next to the footmen’s rooms, where he could keep an eye on them. Footmen, chosen specifically for their height, good looks and turn of calf, were apt to be troublesome. Further rooms for visiting valets were beyond. At the far end of the offices was the gardener’s cottage of Harry Brown, who had come with the Wyndhams from Wilbury; beyond that stood the stables with their controversial bricks. The vast kitchen was modelled on a medieval abbot’s kitchen at Glastonbury. Huge joints of meat roasted on a spit over the fire kept turning by a hot-air engine. The dripping, caught in a vat beneath, was sold to East Knoyle’s villagers for a penny per portion. Next door the scullery maids scrubbed stacks of dishes and dirty pans. In a separate laundry building containing washing house, ironing room and drying room, four local girls washed and rinsed muslins, linens, cottons and woollens three days a week, mangling, starching and ironing for another two. A house like Clouds might go through on average 1,000 napkins a week; soap and soda were delivered annually by the ton and half-ton. The imaginative gardens, designed for t?te-?-t?tes, were a collaboration between Madeline Wyndham and Harry Brown. Madeline’s bedroom on the main house’s east side overlooked a series of gardens, walled on one side by the offices (which were covered in vines and fig trees). The gardens were ‘a succession of lovely surprises’, said Harry Brown, with rose gardens, yew hedges clipped to resemble peacocks’ tails, a chalk-walled spring garden blooming annually with tulips, narcissus and cyclamens, and a pergola garden. The garden to the house’s north-west, with its winding ‘river walk’ (so-called by the family), was wilder. Cedar trees towered in the distance. The walk itself was planted with bluebells, primroses, Japanese iris, azaleas, bamboos, magnolias and rhododendrons. When the Wyndhams moved in, the house was not quite complete. The hall’s chandeliers had yet to arrive; the drawing room’s intricate plasterwork was not finished until 1886. The plumbing was so full of glitches that Percy complained it required the assistance of the house carpenter and an engineer for ‘a common warm bath’. The house had to be unpacked, and decorated. ‘Lately the floors have been strewn with scraps of carpet and we have stood with our heads on one side …,’ said a perplexed Mananai. When finished, the house had a distinctive scent of cedar wood, beeswax and magnolias and was decorated with near-monastic simplicity. Percy’s bedroom was papered in Morris print. Otherwise all the ground-floor rooms were painted white, their woodwork unpolished oak. Against the hall’s stone walls hung two large tapestries: ‘Greenery’ commissioned from Morris & Co., and a Flemish hunting scene. Over the vast fireplace was a large painting, believed to be by the Italian Renaissance painter Alesso Baldovinetti, of The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with the Infant St John the Baptist and Angels in a Forest, bought by Percy at auction. A Morris carpet, pale pink, green, blue and white, covered the floor. The hall had little furniture: a Broadwood piano, four black-lacquer cabinets, and chairs upholstered in Morris’s ‘Honeysuckle’ design. The light-flooded drawing room, filled with comfortable sofas and chairs, was piled high with periodicals and books rebound by Madeline Wyndham in her favoured vellum. There was no library, books were everywhere in the house, with a trolley for trundling them about. At the drawing room’s far end stood Madeline’s ‘scrattle table’ – at which she sketched, and wrote, hands constantly moving even as ‘her mind was free, moving among her guests’. The furniture was eighteenth-century Hepplewhite or Chippendale. On the walls – finally displayed to perfection – was the Wyndhams’ collection of many years: works by the Pre-Raphaelites; the Etruscan School; and Old Italian Masters. Over the main staircase hung Burne-Jones’s cartoon of the Ascension, depicting in glowing raw umber and gilt ‘the figure of Christ blessing those on Earth from above surrounded by the Arch-Angels’. This might well have been the house depicted by Henry James in The Spoils of Poynton: ‘the record of a life … written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists … all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out of old windows – it was England that was the wide embrace.’ In every room cushioned baskets awaited Madeline’s pampered fleet of fox terriers; more than thirty peacocks and peahens strutted through the gardens. The South Terrace beyond the drawing room rang to the ‘wild satanic laughter’ of a pair of African jackasses; fifty to sixty doves, which were fed in the Walnut Tree Court, flew freely about the rooms. Three times a day, Madeline scattered birdfeed outside to attract wild birds. A packing box used originally for Mananai’s possessions was turned into a squirrel house, still bearing the faded legend ‘Miss Wyndham’s bedroom’. The house teemed with life. The Wyndhams’ arrival at Clouds coincided with George’s return from the Sudan with tales of some ‘hot’ engagements and a souvenir in the form of a 3-foot-long Crusader sword liberated from a Sudanese prisoner of war. Madeline was ‘simply brimming over with thankfulness’ at entering the house with her family safe and well. From the very first Christmas the family showed themselves diligent and generous squires. Madeline provided each of East Knoyle’s 190 or so schoolchildren with a new, warm jumper. Semley station’s employees were invited to toast and ale on Boxing Day. On New Year’s Eve the family threw a staff ball with dancing from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.; an orchestra was bussed in from Salisbury, chairs laid out along the passages for sitting out and rooms provisioned with card tables for those who preferred gin rummy to waltzing. A music show was held in which footmen and kitchen maids displayed their talents. George reinforced his hero status by rescuing a village child who had fallen through the bathing pond’s ice – although, due to ongoing plumbing problems, he could not have a hot bath afterwards. ‘There is something refreshing in the idea of patrician and plebean [sic] after their common danger being relegated to the humble copper kettle of daily use but that is not what I am paying for,’ wrote Percy to his architect Philip Webb, unable to resist a good-natured dig. Percy, like all his family, was delighted with their new house. Clouds was the embodiment of their exceptionalism. And though the Wyndhams’ friend Godfrey Webb thought, privately, the house ‘the largest and ugliest in England’, for the most part the Wyndhams were flooded in praise. ‘Influential people (or donkeys as you would call them) are putting it about that this is the house of the age. I believe they are right,’ Percy wrote to his architect, as he surveyed his new domain. The villagers of East Knoyle and Milton greeted the rising up of a great house in their midst with feudal-like enthusiasm. They twice turned out to cheer the family’s arrival, East Knoyle’s church bells pealing in celebration, when Percy, Guy, Mananai, Pamela and Fr?ulein arrived on the afternoon of 23 September 1885, and when George and Madeline, delayed by George’s regimental inspection, followed the next day. The handsome, eccentric family was a source of fascination: village children whispered that drawling, impeccably dressed Percy had his valet wash the coins jingling in his pocket, so bleached clean did he seem (in fact, such a practice was quite common and the rumour probably accurate). By contrast Madeline ‘never seemed like an ordinary rich person … she … was the easiest and most sympathetic person to talk to that I have ever met,’ remembered Violet Milford, one of the daughters of the Canon of East Knoyle church. The house and the village existed in symbiosis. The Wyndhams had brought some staff with them from Wilbury – Tommy the valet, Eassy and tall, tranquil Bertha Devon, a housemaid who joined the family in Cumberland and spent her entire service life in their employ. Others were recruited from the locality. When a bad spate of influenza struck East Knoyle, Madeline Wyndham took Mananai and Pamela with her to visit the sick ‘nearly everyday’, and shortly afterwards employed a London-trained nurse permanently to attend the parish’s sick. Each day lunch’s leftovers were delivered by the little girls and Fr?ulein to the cottages of the poor – piled up, as was customary, in one pungent mess. The village’s children remembered Punch & Judy shows in the hall at Christmas; charity bazaars where the female Wyndhams manned the stalls; vast feasts held to celebrate the marriages of each of the Wyndham children where all the toys in the nurseries were turned out on to the lawns – a very heaven. Clouds was to become famous as a ‘palace of weekending’, in the phrase of William Lethaby, the architectural historian and propagandist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and for the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose writings disseminated the works of his friends Philip Webb and William Morris to the next generation. The press would focus on the fact that, from the late 1880s, Clouds was where Arthur Balfour spent each Easter, passing his days playing golf on the private links built by Percy, and engaging in brilliant ‘general conversation’ at dinner, of which he was always the star. Mary recalled those Easters in later years: when she met the golfers for lunch in a ‘small furze hut’ on the links, and as the party drank Ch?teau-Yquem provided by Percy, discussions between Balfour, Percy, the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge and George Wyndham, among others, ranged across politics, philosophy, literature and science, while ‘the gorse shed its fragrance and the larks sang’. Clouds, a place where politicians of all complexions, primarily Souls, convened, was a house of esoteric delights, overseen by a consummate hostess. Madeline Wyndham was impervious to obstacles when the opportunity of delighting people arose. On a September day in 1883, Mananai and Pamela’s lessons had been interrupted by the sight, from the schoolroom window, of an elephant trundling a yellow cart down the drive. Madeline Wyndham, taking a morning constitutional on the Downs, had encountered a travelling menagerie and persuaded it to divert its course so as to amuse her daughters. ‘We fed the “oily phant” with buns and bread and he … drank some beer, his ears were enormous just like umbrellas,’ Mananai reported excitedly to Mary. At Clouds, Madeline Wyndham’s munificence was given full force.Regular guests arrived to find hand-bound copies of their favourite books at their bedside (a favourite family anecdote concerned a tiny bound copy of the Lord’s Prayer, which contained a slip bearing ‘the Author’s Compliments’). In the evenings, Madeline plied them with blankets while listening to recitals in the hall. Masseuses were on hand to give ‘Swedish rubbing’; in front of a blackboard, Lodge (later President of Birmingham University), who played a key role in the development of wireless telegraphy, gave lectures on ‘electrons’ and ‘cyclones’; gymnastics classes were conducted in the garden; and invariably in a darkened room somewhere in the house a spiritualist was conducting a bout of table-turning for the Wyndhams’ guests. Madeline had been a convert to spiritualism since inviting her first medium to Wilbury in 1884, and at Clouds the Wyndhams hosted the most prominent theorists of the day – Edward Maitland, Gerald Massey, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Lord and Lady Mount Temple. Walburga, Lady Paget, an eccentric vegetarian, thought Clouds perfection in all its entertainments, except for the adders that slithered through the Downs preventing her from walking barefoot through the morning dew. In microcosm, Clouds reflected ‘the oncoming of a great new tide of human life over the Western World’, in the words of the sage Edward Carpenter – a post-Darwinian, post-Industrial Revolution experimentalism, seeking to find meaning in and improve the new age. The spiritualist craze exemplifies the way, in this age, optimism and anxiety combined. Balfour, Ruskin, Tennyson, Watts, Leighton, Oliver Lodge, Sigmund Freud, Gladstone and William James, psychologist brother of Henry, were all members of the Society for Psychical Research (the SPR), founded by a group of Cambridge scientists in 1882 ‘for the purpose of inquiring into a mass of obscure phenomena which lie at present on the outskirts of our organized knowledge’. Their number included two of Balfour’s brothers-in-law: John, Lord Rayleigh, husband of Evelyn Balfour; and Henry Sidgwick, husband of Eleanor Balfour. In an age of extraordinary exploration, it seemed quite possible that science might be able to communicate with a world beyond the earthly plane. One of the SPR’s founders, Frederic Myers, was a reluctant atheist and spoke for many when admitting that his spiritualism was driven by the desire to ‘re-enter … by the scullery … the heavenly mansion out of which I had been kicked through the front door’. Madeline Wyndham, who designed beautiful prie-dieus for her children, and illustrated biblical tracts to hang above their beds, had no difficulty in reconciling her powerful religious faith with a belief in a ‘sproits and spiris [sic]’. Pamela, who adopted her mother’s creed more enthusiastically than her siblings, in later life explained her teachings: ‘I learned that death is an incident in life … that communication with those we call the dead, under certain conditions is possible … never was I led for a moment to think that [spiritualism] should stand in the place of religion … Spiritualism supports rather than conflicts with [the] narratives of the life of Christ.’ Percy was more sceptical. But he was certainly a little superstitious. In the spring of 1885, as builders were putting the finishing touches to Clouds, a tall woman dressed in black appeared, asking to see the house. She was shown inside – such requests were not uncommon. She stood in the dusty hall, the walls rearing up around her. ‘This house will be burnt down and in less than three years,’ she announced, before disappearing as mysteriously as she had arrived. When later that year Percy arranged with Webb for the insurance of the house and its outbuildings, he expressed particular concern about the provision for loss by fire. Clouds’ magical luxury depended on a silent army of staff. Its occupants woke to fires crackling in the grate, laid soundlessly by a housemaid who had risen long before dawn and had then scurried downstairs to clear away the previous evening’s detritus: wine-stained glasses, full ashtrays in the smoking room; pieces of paper from a game, torn up and carelessly thrown aside. While the family and guests breakfasted, staff flung open windows to air bedrooms, whipped off still-warm sheets to remake beds perfectly and emptied chamberpots. Then they dusted, swept, polished and mended linen before preparing the bedrooms again for their occupants to dress for dinner (men attended by their valets, women by their ladies’ maids); and again while the house dined, they were drawing curtains, lighting candles, turning down beds. Rarely did they throw their exhausted bodies on to their own mattresses before eleven or twelve at night. Sarah, ‘the pretty 2nd housemaid’ at Clouds, was probably glad to leave service when she married Pearson the coachman and set up in his rooms above the coachhouse. She was fortunate in being able to live with her husband. Married footmen, valets or butlers lived separately from their wives, setting them up in a nearby cottage, and visiting them on their days off. The wife of William Icke, Clouds’ butler from 1892,was housekeeper to two spinster ladies in East Knoyle. Her loyalty was rewarded when they left her their house in their will. Housekeepers and cooks, who bore the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’, could actually be married – the Wyndham children’s nanny of Cumberland days, Horsenail, had in fact married Forbes, graduating to housekeeper in the days before Mrs Vine. Otherwise, a female servant who married would immediately leave her employ. In 1891 there were over one and a half million domestic servants in the United Kingdom – almost 16 per cent of the workforce. Service was an honourable profession with loyalty and affection on both sides. Eassy and Bertha Devon both stayed with the Wyndhams until retirement, the former then moving to a cottage in East Knoyle. Nonetheless, in 1898 the average length of stay by a servant in a household was less than eighteen months. The turnover at Clouds, from the names on the ten-yearly censuses, was not notably different. The reasons were numerous: marriage; a promotion elsewhere; or abandonment of domestic service entirely. Periodicals like the Lady complained of young men and women with ‘ideas above their station’, thinking themselves too good for service. As the century wore on, many did, rejecting the snobbish hierarchy of the servants’ hall for the greater freedom and excitement available in other jobs. All Madeline’s daughters bemoaned the impossibility of finding good staff. In 1884, domestic calm was rocked by a young woman’s distress: ‘poor Lucy the housemaid in London I’m afraid she has gone mad – she went for a holiday & came back quite off her head’. The situation, relayed by Mrs Vine to Madeline, and thence to her daughters, was grave, if comical. Lucy, whose head Madeline thought had been ‘turned’ by the marriage of her fellow housemaid Mary Brown, veered between lucidity and moments of ‘wild’ behaviour. Following a composed conversation with Dr Gibbons, the doctor summoned to examine her, Lucy ‘came down and said to Bertha “if I take any one I think I’ll take Dr Gibbons!”’ While amused by Mrs Vine’s decorous alarm, Madeline nonetheless took the matter seriously. She reported to Mary: it is quite too awfully sad … she is full of delusions thinks people are coming to take her away & that something dreadful will happen because Mary Brown had to sign some cheques for her that they will f[i]nd out she could not wright [sic] and a lot more I told her that she must not let her self give way … but … she is so miserable she would break her heart Bertha & Charlotte had to sit up with her & hold her down in bed. Don’t talk about this with anyone but is it not horrid? History does not relate what happened to Lucy. She does not appear in the 1891 census either for Clouds or for Belgrave Square. Presumably she was dispatched back to her family: it is likely that Madeline took care to make sure someone would look after her. Reportage of such untoward incidents was part of the traffic of communication between Madeline and her daughters: their own children picked up snippets and came to Clouds wide-eyed, alert to a servant to whom such gossip had lent an air of celebrity. Lizzie Beaver, the still-room maid (in charge of cakes, jam and preserves, so a good person for hungry children to befriend), nearly died when, returning from the village to Clouds early in the morning of 31 December 1886, she got lost in snow and fog, and was only found at midday on New Year’s Day, frozen half to death. Howard ‘the married stable-man’ slipped over when carrying a heavy sack and injured his back badly enough to be confined to lying ‘quite still’ for a lengthy period of time. The daughter of Wareham the under-coachman suffered from paralysed legs, ‘the awful result, it was thought, of sitting on a cold stone when she was very hot’. Eassy raised the alarm in 1888 with fears about her own heart, although Dr Collins pronounced her as suffering only from ‘nervous shock’ – most likely a panic attack, for reasons unknown. In 1892, Enfield, who had replaced Forbes as butler in 1888, was struck by a sudden ‘chill’ and ‘rheumatic pains’ one Friday night that left him ‘unable to wait at dinner’, followed swiftly by ‘inflammation of the brain … he died in convulsions at 2.30 o’clock’. Enfield’s wife, who had gone to London ‘to be confined’, was left to give birth to a fatherless child. In her youth Madeline Wyndham had compiled a photograph album of ‘all the dear Servants at Petworth’, with handwritten commentary beneath, explaining who each subject was. Yet she, like most, thought nothing of loaning her daughters a spare footman when they had large house parties ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’, said an ex-butler, Eric Horne, scornfully in a bestselling memoir published in 1923. Percy rewarded his favourite, William Mallett, the clerk of works responsible for all maintenance on the house and estate, with a house that was two cottages knocked into one. It allowed Mallett – who had worked his way up from house carpenter – a comparatively palatial four bedrooms for his family of eleven. But Percy’s attitude towards his staff was aristocratic, to say the least. Hyde, Clouds’ head keeper, lost a finger when Percy swung round carelessly and pulled the trigger of his gun. That might have been sheer absent-mindedness. The occasion on which Percy shot a beater called Fletcher in the foot for picking up the wrong pheasant most certainly was not. SEVEN (#ulink_aaa09714-50e6-5f32-8ba1-7bc2dcd4a684) The Birth of the Souls (#ulink_aaa09714-50e6-5f32-8ba1-7bc2dcd4a684) As Percy became East Knoyle’s squire, he abandoned national politics for local. To an extent, his hand was forced. Gladstone’s 1884 Franchise Act extended household suffrage to the countryside, adding 1.7 million voters to the electorate. Of far more radical effect was the associated 1885 Redistribution Act, which in Robin Hood fashion took seats from over-represented rural constituencies to give to the under-represented towns. Manchester’s representatives were doubled from three to six, Wiltshire’s reduced from fifteen to six. Percy’s West Cumberland seat was one of over seventy abolished. H. M. Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, whose members included William Morris and Eleanor Marx, daughter of the revolutionary thinker Karl, did not think it went far enough. It showed its socialist colours by renaming itself the Social Democratic Federation and organizing a series of unruly street meetings of the unemployed demanding ‘work or bread’. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Percy thought it the beginning of the end of aristocratic rule. Paradoxically he was saved, in his mind, by Gladstone himself. In June 1885, Gladstone resigned, discredited by General Gordon’s martyrdom and finally brought down after being defeated on an amendment to the Budget. Lord Salisbury formed a caretaker government. An election was held over three weeks in late November and early December. Almost on the day the election ended, Herbert Gladstone ‘flew the Hawarden Kite’, leaking to the press the spectacular news that his father, deep in thought over the summer, had converted to Home Rule and was prepared to take office to implement it. The election results showed how meaningful this was. Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, now formally committed to Home Rule, held the balance of power. That Liberalism should be allied to Home Rule was not inevitable in the shadowy boxing and coxing that took place over Christmas and in the early new year. Herbert Gladstone’s bombshell, partly a ham-fisted attempt to drum up support for Home Rule across the fractured Liberal party, alienated significant Whig and Radical tranches of the party. Gladstone appears to have wanted the Conservatives to put the measure forward themselves. But it became clear that Salisbury’s conception of empire demanded unity, not the pluralistic view Gladstone proposed. In January 1886, Parliament reconvened under Salisbury’s minority government. Gladstone moved an amendment to the Address (that is, to the Queen’s Speech). Supported by the Irish, he brought the government down, and himself to power for a third time. The news was greeted with gloom at Clouds. ‘What do you think of the Govt being out?!!!! Worst fears realized, says Papa,’ Mary told Hugo. The next day, still enraged, she wrote Hugo an impassioned letter sitting in bed after breakfast: ‘the irish [sic] party can turn any Government out or in, me thinks! … besides which its [sic] infamous that the old scoundrel should have had the joy of getting in again … I’m sure he is singing in his tub lustily of mornings & Mrs. G must be much elated & foreign politics will go to the devil again …’ Mary adhered to the Salisburian view and thought Home Rule must lead to imperial disintegration. But neither Mary nor Percy had fully read the runes of the vote. Twenty Whigs, led by Lord Hartington, had voted with the Conservatives, against the amendment. The Liberal party’s disintegration had begun. A week later, Mary, now some six months pregnant, visited London to buy furniture for the Elchos’ new house in Chelsea, 62 Cadogan Square. The Elchos had left North Audley Street after a little more than a year for another rented house in Hans Place in Chelsea of which they proved no more fond.7 Mary’s political fervour had been superseded by thoughts of interior design, as she plotted how to achieve Morris-inspired style on the Elchos’ comparatively limited budget. She was staying with her parents-in-law in Mayfair, and had left Ego with her parents at Clouds; after a series of visits to friends throughout January, she felt as though she had barely seen her son for weeks, and she told her mother she felt ‘quite shy’ of seeing him again. It was an exceptionally cold winter. The freezing temperatures amplified distress caused by prolonged economic depression. In early February serious riots broke out – literally on Mary’s doorstep – after sparks flew when socialist marchers, up to 10,000 of them, were provoked by servants of the gentlemen’s clubs along Pall Mall. Windows throughout the length of Clubland were smashed, shops on Piccadilly looted, ‘nobs’ pulled from their carriages and stripped of their valuables. For several days London looked like ‘a city under siege’. As a thick black fog blanketed the city, wild rumours spread of a further march of 50,000 unemployed. Mary was strangely oblivious; ‘there was a demonstration of the unemployed today & they broke all the windows in St. James’s’, she told her mother in an offhand postscript to a letter about beds. Thereafter, her letters resumed their exclusivity of subject: furniture. ‘I think about nothing else.’ This was not quite true. A week after the riots, around St Valentine’s Day, Mary went privately to visit Arthur Balfour at 4 Carlton Gardens, which had been at the heart of the affray. Twenty years later, she wrote to him preparing to recreate the incident: ‘I must settle to pay my first visit to yr house … and be received by you alone and step over the threshold and I shall remember a certain day exactly 20 yrs ago. f-rst k-ss.’ Shortly afterwards, Mary wrote to Hugo from St James’s Place in a particularly affectionate manner. ‘Me feels xceeding [sic] full of tremendous love for Wash,’ she told him. It would set a pattern. At Easter, Mary and Hugo went to Stanway. They had not been alone in the country ‘for a “minit” hardly since we married’, said Mary, explaining to her mother why they would not spend the holiday with the Wyndhams at Clouds. Their days at ‘Stangewange’ were a success. ‘You can’t imagine how delicious it is here & we’re having the nicest Time, I think since we married,’ Mary told Laura Lyttelton. Laura immediately passed the news to Arthur verbatim, adding, with masterful tact: ‘Knowing you a little I think [this] will please you … I am v. happy about this … and you must be too, dear old friend.’ Was wily Laura double-bluffing: did she really know what had taken place at Carlton Gardens just a few weeks before? Possibly – for Margot Tennant, to whom Laura was close as a twin, allowed to Wilfrid Blunt, years later, that Arthur might once have kissed Mary, although she adamantly denied the possibility of anything more. A few weeks later, in London, Laura gave birth to a healthy boy. At Stanway, Mary, now entertaining a party including the Brodricks and Godfrey Webb, rejoiced. But Laura’s apparent good health began to fade. On 24 April 1886, with an ashen Alfred and Margot by her bedside, she died, her last words: ‘I think God has forgotten me.’ She was twenty-three. Tommy Ribblesdale telegraphed Stanway with the news: ‘all over between 9 & 10 this morning’. ‘She was not able to struggle through after all, poor thing,’ Mary wrote in her diary that night as thunderstorms raged outside and light flooded through the oriel window into the hall. ‘It makes one utterly miserable.’ When Laura had written to Arthur, she had added a postscript. She had a premonition that she might not survive childbirth and wanted to say goodbye – just in case. ‘Probably I shan’t – die I mean but if I do don’t say “She might have been etc …” cause I can’t be,’ she told him. In fact, Margot’s statement that ‘Laura made & left a deeper impression on the world in her short life than anyone I have ever known’ was, for once, without embellishment. The number of grandees who flocked to Laura in her final days was astonishing for a young woman who had only recently broken into Society – Spencer Lyttelton cattily commented on the Bart’s ill-concealed pleasure – notwithstanding his grave anxiety – ‘at being surrounded by so many Lords and Honourables and receiving such an amazing quantity of inquiries’. Burne-Jones created a memorial, choosing a peacock to symbolize the brief splendour of her life. Laura’s death left Mary bereft. She wrote bleakly to her mother: We had so counted on living … our lives together … at least I feel how much I had counted on it … & bringing up our babies & helping one another … all the future was mixed up with her; for she twined into everyone’s joys & sorrows … it seems beastly being allowed to live when other people … the best & most needed people are not. In her will Laura left Mary a Chippendale cradle, and a crescent necklace that was a wedding present from Arthur to Laura. ‘She must wear it because 2 of her dear friends are in it, as it were,’ Laura directed. It was presumably a public benediction intended to scour out any remaining hint of scandal. In fact, Laura’s death – or perhaps her final letter to Arthur – temporarily drove a wedge between the two. The day after Laura’s funeral Arthur visited Mary at the Elchos’ new house. Alone in the half-finished drawing room he attacked her for being ‘hard’ and failing to give him the ‘comfort’ he sought. He did not explain what that ‘comfort’ was. Probably Balfour, unmoored by Laura’s death, did not know himself. Mary, as so often in moments of extreme emotional turmoil, was tongue-tied. After Arthur had left, she spent a sleepless night poring over her feelings. The next day she wrote to apologize for her inability to lessen the ‘awful blank’ left by Laura’s death. ‘If you could really know my thoughts “hard” would be the very very last word you could apply … I would do anything for you … you must forgive me.’ In mourning, Laura’s friends and family withdrew from Society for the remainder of the Season. The Gang all later believed their particular closeness had been fostered by this intense period in the sombre late spring of 1886. In the summer, Margot and the Ribblesdales joined the Elchos quietly at Felixstowe, and later visited Stanway with George Curzon, Evan Charteris and Arthur. Mary’s engagements throughout the autumn were predominantly with the Gang. In October, the Elchos were at the Tennants’ Glen with Arthur, the Ribblesdales, Godfrey Webb and George Curzon. In November, they entertained at Stanway those same people, minus Webb, but plus Violet Manners, wife of John Manners, the future Duke of Rutland, Lucy Graham Smith (another Tennant sister), Doll Liddell and Earl and Countess de Grey. Ten days later they were at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, home of Lord and Lady Brownlow, with the Brownlows’ nephew and heir Harry Cust, the Brodricks, the Pembrokes and Arthur. In December, they were at Clouds, with George Wyndham, the Ribblesdales, Arthur, the Pembrokes and Margot; in January, at Wilton with Sir Jack and Lady Horner (the latter, Frances Graham, was Mary’s childhood friend) and Harry Cust. Returning to Society’s ‘dreary ocean’, the Gang had found how much they preferred their company to that of anyone else. Society frowned upon cliquishness. It was considered somehow improper. More unusual in the autumn of 1886 was that a group containing Liberals and Conservatives was meeting at all. Gladstone’s determination to press on with Home Rule had torn his party, and Society, apart. In June, his Home Rule Bill was defeated by the Conservatives, allied with ninety erstwhile Liberals, an uneasy combination of Radicals led by Joseph Chamberlain, the charismatic, opportunistic ex-Mayor of Birmingham, and Lord Hartington’s Whig grandees. The defectors became known, in Lord Randolph Churchill’s phrase, as Liberal Unionists, the allied forces as Unionists. As Wilde had Lady Bracknell explain, Liberal Unionists now ‘count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate.’ The schism over Home Rule paved the way for almost twenty years of Conservative hegemony. The Whig defection rendered the Unionists almost impeccably the party of the aristocracy, with an unassailable majority in the Lords. It allowed the Radical element of the Liberal party (those that remained) formerly at the fringes, tempered by the Whigs, to move to the mainstream. It was to give grist to the Lords’ argument that their role was to prevent ‘hasty and foolish’ legislation by a hotheaded Commons. In the short term, it split Society. At Grosvenor Square, home of the devoutly Liberal Tennants, Margot was sent from the table in disgrace for declaring at dinner that she thought Gladstone had erred in his judgement (the unrepentant Margot was unruffled: when the Bart came to bring her back to the table, he found his youngest daughter swinging her legs on the billiard table enjoying one of his cigars). By the autumn Unionists and Liberals no longer met. Only the Gang refused ‘to sacrifice private friendship to public politics’. In Margot’s grand recollections, ‘at our house … and those of the Souls, everyone met. Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Asquith, Morley, Chamberlain, Balfour, Rosebery, Salisbury, Hartington, Harcourt and, I might add, jockeys, actors, the Prince of Wales and every ambassador in London’. Margot thought it ‘made London the centre of the most interesting society in the world and gave men of different tempers and opposite beliefs an opportunity of discussing them without heat and without reporters’. In later years the Souls looked back proudly on their influence as a cross-party group containing some of the country’s brightest political hopes. They were buoyantly confident of the abilities of their men: Margot recounted an afternoon spent by Souls women discussing which of George Curzon, George Wyndham or Harry Cust would become Prime Minister. Politics was the warp and weft of the Souls’ daily lives. But they were more than that: a ‘fascinating, aristocratic, intellectual coterie’, a group with a ‘special charm’. ‘I think they sent us all back to reading more than we otherwise would have done, and this was an excellent thing for us,’ said Daisy, Countess of Warwick, one of the Prince of Wales’s Marlborough House Set. Others mocked them for being self-absorbed, cliquey and pretentious. Those who did not spend all their time on the hunting field found them intellectually insubstantial. ‘They read the Bible & they read the Morte d’Arthur in the same spirit,’ said Wilfrid Blunt. In November 1886, Mary sat for a chalk and crayon portrait by Edward Poynter. Hugo, for unknown reasons, had resisted the idea, and Mary found the sittings a ‘nuisance’. In the portrait, Mary, wistfully pensive, leans back on a chaise, gazing into the distance. She is surrounded by aestheticism’s accoutrements: a japonaiserie screen; blue and white ceramic vases. Her hair is fashionably shirred; her waist, in her plain mustard-yellow gown, tiny (the envy of her friends, she said proudly). One hand loosely holds a sketchbook, another book lies unopened before her. She looks deep in thought: a beauty with greater things on her mind. The features of a child are still there in her face, but her languid ease suggests someone increasingly comfortable with her place in the world. Poynter captured many elements of a typical Souls woman in this portrait. He reflected her style of clothing – Souls women did not, by and large, indulge in feathers and furs but dressed ‘with a kind of aesthetic smartness all their own’, said Lady Tweedsmuir, wife of the author John Buchan. Arthur was quite alarmed when Mary proposed having a gown made by Worth, the grand Parisian couturier of the day, commenting that he did not expect to recognize her in such finery. Poynter also alluded to her intellectual, artistic bent (as a corollary, the tables of Souls hostesses were comparatively frugal by the standards of their time and class. Conversation, rather than rich food, sustained their guests, and Souls women were, in general, notably slim). Yet Poynter, himself not renowned for his sense of humour, had failed to capture the essence of Mary, and the group to which she was integral. Her family thought the portrait far too solemn, capturing none of the ‘dancing gaiety’ of her eyes, or the swallow-like quickness of her movement. In the flesh all the Souls – charismatic, mostly young and unusually good-looking – seemed simply to be having fun. Daisy Warwick considered them ‘more pagan than soulful’. Lady Tweedsmuir described them as ‘a little suspect as not conforming to the rules of the social game’. They were impossibly flirtatious with one another, while publicly advocating chastity. They were irreverent, renaming the group’s elder statesmen, the Cowpers, Brownlows and Pembrokes, ‘the Aunts’. Balfour, their lodestar, was ‘the adored Gazelle’. They loved games: ‘Clumps’, requiring participants to guess by questions abstractions like ‘the last straw’, ‘the eleventh hour’ or even ‘the last ball Mr Balfour drove into the [golf] bunker before lunch’; ‘Styles’, parodying well-known authors in prose or verse; ‘Epigrams’, inventing new ones; ‘Character Sketches’, describing someone present in terms of something else, such as a vegetable, building or colour. Their patter was based on quick, inconsequential wit and a ready turn of phrase. Mary commented later of Harry Cust that ‘Before his fair neighbour had finished her soup she would find herself plunged into dissertations on eternity’, but normally this was accompanied by peals of laughter because, in the words of Lord Vansittart, Cust, a notable wit, was ‘as happy to stand on his head as on his dignity’. Society was fascinated by them, ridiculed them and envied them in equal measure. ‘There is a “set” in this hotel who hate & abuse our “set” they call us “the Souls” … & say we are always laughing & that we read Herodotus & those sorts of crimes,’ reported D. D. (Edith) Lyttelton, Alfred Lyttelton’s second wife, while on a trip to Cairo. This was inherent in the name bestowed upon them during the 1888 Season, although no one could recall exactly how it happened. In the spring, Mary attended a dinner party at Lord and Lady Brownlow’s house. The Gang engaged in their usual heated debate. ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls. I shall call you “the Souls”,’ said Lord Charles Beresford, an outsider, a courtier. Mary was sure that the quip – which no one thought very funny – was a well-rehearsed line, trundled out several times that season. But it stuck, with all its undertones of mockery. The Souls always professed to hate it, and further denied being a clique at all. Those denials convinced no one. In London, they were constantly in and out of one another’s houses. Outsiders finding themselves in the country at a house party of Souls often made their excuses and left: ‘either … they were bored with us or … they saw that we were bored with them’, Arthur said to Mary of Field Marshal Wolseley and his family, who left Wilton fully two days earlier than planned. Conversely, at a house party held by the non-soul Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at his magnificent Buckinghamshire ch?teau Waddesdon Manor, it was Mary and Charty Ribblesdale who retreated, to Mary’s room, ‘exhausted’ by the talk of their (non-Souls) fellow guests. They were soon joined by Hugo and his sister Hilda Brodrick, whereupon the intention that Charty should read Shelley aloud was abandoned in favour of an afternoon of vivacious chat and much ‘chaffing’ of Hugo. Three weeks later, Mary, Daisy White, George Curzon and Hugo whiled away the train journey from London to the Pembrokes’ Wilton House in Wiltshire by learning poetry by heart; the following Sunday at the Cowpers’ Panshanger in Hertfordshire, a large number of the party, Mary included, decided to forgo church in favour of a morning in which ‘we sat out on the grass talking [about] … Dickens etc …’ – for the Souls, notwithstanding their name, did not share the previous generation’s religious fervour. Given such proximity it is unsurprising that the Souls developed their own ‘ganglanguage’, incomprehensible to the outsider: ‘dentist’, a private meeting; ‘floater’, an embarrassing situation; ‘stodge’, the company of women; ‘flash’ or ‘sparkle’, the company of men. The vocabulary is revealing, for a Souls gathering was quite different from the traditional, gender-stratified house party where men shot, women read, sewed and talked, and the two sexes united only briefly to eat: at damp outdoor lunches where the women joined the ‘guns’; in the drawing room at tea-time; and in the dining room at dinner, after which the women once more left the men, now to their port, smoking and billiards. The young niece of Lord Wenlock, whose wife Constance was a Soul, was startled when, attending a house party at the Wenlocks’ Escrick Park in Yorkshire that mixed Souls and their more conventional counterparts, she found that certain men including ‘Harry Cust, Evan Charteris, Doll Liddell … seemed to prefer the society of ladies and stayed at home on stormy or doubtful days, reading aloud to my aunt and her friends while they painted or modelled – or sometimes just talking, whimsically, wittily (as I know now, if I didn’t then) all day long’. Women were the driving force behind the Souls, yet still they measured their social success by their impact upon the men of the group. If a rising political star (his own talents daily on show in the Commons to the press and strangers in the galleries above) talked to them for hours, it was a reflection of their own intellectual capacity, as well as their physical charm, for of course this talk was always amusing and flirtatious as well. When writing of themselves in old age even the Souls struggled to recapture their evanescent charm, which was of the bon mot; behaviour that startled, but amused; a delightful but fundamentally unthreatening disregard for convention. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Henry Asquith, and a child of the next generation, thought the Souls had a ‘liberating and civilising’ impact on Society, and she appreciated that ‘much of our fun and freedom was a direct heritage from them’. The Souls’ benign rebellion pushed the boundaries. It did not breach them. The best illustration comes from one who was not a Soul. Intellectual, acerbic Lady Frances Balfour thought the Souls morally wanting, and far too frivolous. Her daughter Blanche Dugdale recorded her fury on returning from church at Whittingehame (Arthur’s East Lothian home) to find nine-year-old Blanche playing backgammon for half-crown stakes with Hugo. Frances had visited Mells, Somerset home of the Horners. She described the scene at dinner to her sister-in-law Lady Betty, the wife of Gerald Balfour, another of Arthur’s brothers: Lady Ribblesdale talking of a Peacock said it was a voluptuous bird, at which old Mrs Graham [Frances Horner’s mother] took exception and said ‘that word beginning with a “V” ought not to be mentioned’ I stood up for it and said it was what we all would be if we knew how, on which the old lady nearly fainted, and Lady Ribblesdale screamed with laughing, and asked the dear old soul if she would like to be if she knew how, and then there was a rapid proposal that a class should be formed and a Professor found (Lady Ribblesdale proposing Swinburne) to teach us the way wherein to walk. Wild nonsense but so refreshing I felt inclined to walk all round the room on my head. Notwithstanding her fundamental disapproval, Frances recognized the group’s merit: ‘There is no doubt that with a hostess who understands how to manage them and with a real personality there is something very interesting in the “gang” … All these people have lived together through some of the great experiences and feelings of life, they know each other to the very core, and the absolute freedom and ease are delightful …’ At heart, this was a group of very good friends, competing fiercely in romance, politics, friendship. Only the Souls would read out ‘Collinses’, the effusive letters of thanks sent after each house party, from guests recently departed to ‘roars of mirth & groans of contempt’ from those remaining, as Mary, Ettie, Harry Cust and Harry White did one November day at Stanway in 1890. ‘We acted like traitors that afternoon!’ said Mary to Ettie, with a ‘crushing sense’ that her own letter was even at that moment being read out ‘as a sample of idiocy!’ Tiny, fascinating Ettie Fane, the Cowpers’ niece, drawn into the circle after her marriage to Willie Grenfell in 1887, was one of Mary’s and Arthur’s closest friends. ‘I feel really that you & I (& Laura [Lyttelton] who left so swiftly so long ago) stand very much for the souls [sic] – for we were really – the soul! & centre in a way of the elusive set,’ Mary wrote to Ettie in old age. Privately, to Arthur, Mary called Ettie ‘Delilah’, crowing when Ettie, the least intellectually able (or interested) of the group, failed to grasp some point of debate. Margot once challenged Balfour with not minding if Mary, Ettie and she all died. ‘I should mind if you all died on the same day’ was Balfour’s laconic response. At twenty-three, George Wyndham, who had moved into the Gang’s orbit through Mary, scored a palpable hit when he secured the hand of the widowed, exceptionally beautiful Sibell, Countess Grosvenor, over a reported eighty rivals, including George Curzon. Sibell was nearly a decade older than George, a mother of three, and renowned for her indiscriminate warmth and sweetness. When she clasped someone’s hand in her own soft one, said the Anglo-Irish hostess Elizabeth Fingall, it was never quite clear whether she knew whose hand it was. Sibell had been charmed by George’s exuberant volubility and intense romanticism – the poet ‘riding to hounds across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland’, as T. S. Eliot described him – and his dark, ‘French’ looks: those of a troubadour according to Elizabeth Fingall, who added that George lived ‘every minute of his life at high pitch’. In maturity, George earned the tired sobriquet of ‘the handsomest man in England’. But it was possibly Madeline Wyndham’s old friendship with Sibell’s father-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, that made the Duke finally, reluctantly, agree to Sibell’s marrying the bumptious young man. He stipulated that Sibell maintain her title after marriage. It was unthinkable that the mother of his heir, Bend’Or, should be plain Mrs George Wyndham. George’s unmistakably oedipal choice was regarded with misgivings by many who knew him. Alfred Lyttelton expressed concern about the effect on a ‘smart youth … very keen about his profession and about intellectual things … from a family where there is throughout an air of Bohemian quasi-culture’ of being ‘plunged into deadalike decorous ducal circles coldly hostile to him and all that produced his unstupid but ill-ballasted personality’. George survived – but Sibell was no match intellectually for him. Soon enough he took up with Gay, Lady Plymouth, and conducted a contented lifelong affair. EIGHT (#ulink_cd9d1d82-922a-5a3f-81cc-422b7ec7bb01) The Summer of 1887 (#ulink_cd9d1d82-922a-5a3f-81cc-422b7ec7bb01) In January 1887, while staying at Clouds, Mary realized to her horror that she was pregnant again. She chided ‘Naughty Wash’ for ‘pinting [sic] too soon after Betsey at Panshanger’, breaking the news in a carrot-and-stick manner: ‘if ou comes veggy early! Migs will receive ou in cot & no more precautions needed, for Migs is quite certainly in the family way,’ she told him. Hugo had been expected back several days before. Mary suspected, with good reason, that he had been delayed by another woman’s charms. She used the promise of sex to entice him back. Mary was furious about being pregnant. Her younger son Guy was barely six months old. Mananai was due to be presented that spring. Mary had been looking forward to showing her younger sister the ropes in her first Season. Pregnancy required her to scale down her social activities. It made her feel fat, dull, unable to compete socially among her friends. The mid-Victorian days of ten or twelve children were past. Souls women, appreciating their figures, their health and their consuming social lives, did not have many children. There were ways of achieving this. Carefully coded advertisements in women’s periodicals recommended purges of pennyroyal and compounds of aloe and iron that would restore an ailing young lady to her former good ‘health’. It seems that at least some of Mary’s friends employed these, but Mary decided that she ‘daren’t send for Zach’s stuff its too naughty’, and resigned herself to the inevitable: ‘Me looks forward to it [the pregnancy] with disgust & loathing … my season with Mad knocked on the head. Migs propose Pints dispose,’ she mourned. Mary was still in her first trimester when she attended George and Sibell’s quiet marriage in the private chapel of the Westminsters’ Cheshire house, Eaton Hall. The service was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Only immediate family on both sides attended. In what must have been a significant blow to George’s ego, The Times reported that the Countess Grosvenor had married Guy Wyndham of 16th (Queen’s) Lancers, with George acting as best man. The Wyndhams celebrated the occasion more lavishly on their return to Clouds with a vast tea for Milton’s and East Knoyle’s inhabitants, with a band playing from the terrace, a cricket match for the adults and a bag of sweets and a bun for each child. When George and Sibell made their first visit as newlyweds, the villagers followed the still fairly widespread tradition of intercepting their carriage and replacing their horses with eighty men who pulled them up the driveway to Clouds themselves. While on honeymoon in the Italian Lakes, George received a telegram from Arthur Balfour. In March 1887, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Ireland’s Chief Secretary, had resigned, citing cataracts that had left him nearly blind. The grounds for resignation evoked those of Sir George Trevelyan, Cavendish’s successor, whose hair turned completely white within twelve months of taking the job, and who resigned a year after that, pleading to be released from a post that was, in his words, ‘not a human life at all’. In a shock appointment, Salisbury now chose his favourite nephew to fill the vacancy. Balfour’s appointment provoked incomprehension at Westminster and jubilation in Dublin: ‘We have killed Cavendish, blinded Beach and smashed up Trevelyan. What shall we do with this weakling?’ taunted the Irish crowds. So startling was Robert Salisbury’s decision that it has prompted the suggestion (probably incorrect) that it gave rise to the popular phrase that suggests when ‘Bob’s your uncle’ anything is possible. Now Arthur asked George to join him as his private secretary. Citing the Wyndham tradition of public service, George cut short his honeymoon and hotfooted it back to ‘throw my lot in the political boat’. George’s new post was a triumph for the Wyndhams, establishing, in the Souls’ fiercely competitive world, how close the family was to the ‘adored Gazelle’. But both offices were dangerous. Cavendish’s and Burke’s murders were still fresh in people’s minds. Arthur, the tenth Chief Secretary in as many years, pointed out with typical detachment that Ireland was a place where people tended to lose their reputations, their lives or possibly both. Shortly before Arthur’s departure, Mary visited him at Carlton Gardens. It was a Wednesday afternoon, fast becoming their ritual meeting time when in London, for on Wednesdays the House rose early. Perhaps it was the urgency lent by anxiety that provoked what Mary described as a ‘small very private and personal incident (gear changing!)’ in the same downstairs sitting room where they had first kissed a year before. Mary gave no further clues to what the incident might have been, beyond teasing Arthur that it would not appear in his memoirs. Some years later, Mary explained to Wilfrid Blunt the exact nature of sexual relations among the Souls. ‘Nearly all the group were married women with husbands whom they loved & by whom they had children, but each had her friend who was a friend only.’ Those friends’ relationship was ‘a little more than friendship, a little less than love’. So far as Wilfrid could understand, this meant everything but ‘the conjugal act’; or, from the male perspective, ‘Every woman shall have her man, but no man shall have his woman.’ Later correspondence indicates that Mary and Arthur developed a sexual relationship involving role-play and mild sado-masochism (Arthur’s fondness for vigorous spankings lends disappointing force to the accusations frequently levelled at public-school-educated Englishmen). Quite possibly this ‘incident’ was the first time that Mary – then almost three months’ pregnant – and Arthur engaged in such activities. Arthur left a few days later, leaving with Frances Balfour a pouch to be opened only in the event of his death. ‘Accidents have occurred to a Chief Secretary for Ireland and (although I think it improbable) they may occur again. If the worst (as people euphemistically say!) should happen,’ said Balfour, Frances was to cut open the pouch with her penknife and ‘read the scrawl inside. It relates to a matter with which only you can deal.’ Arthur did not need to elaborate on these instructions, or on his request that in such an event Frances check through his papers for any incriminating correspondence (Arthur’s preparations for his departure included burning a multitude of letters, many, presumably, from Mary). Fifty years later, an elderly Frances and Mary sat down together to open the pouch. ‘My dear Frances,’ wrote Balfour: I write this in a great hurry, but as you will only have to read it in the event of my death you will forgive my handwriting. I think you and all whom I love will be sorry that I am not any longer with you. But you will be able to talk it freely over with each other and all whom such an event may concern. There is however one who will not be in this position. I want you to give her as from yourself this little brooch which you will find herewith: and to tell her that, at the end, if I was able to think at all, I thought of her. If I was the means of introducing any unhappiness into her life I hope God will forgive me. I know she will. The year 1887 marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The Queen was reluctantly persuaded out of purdah for a Season glittering with magnificent balls, processions and banquets. Mary spent it more quietly in intellectual self-improvement. She was a keen attendee of weekly ethics classes organized by her sister-in-law Hilda Brodrick, who hired a Girton graduate as tutor. The day chosen was Wednesday, so male Souls could join. The small group that gathered each week included Mary, Betty Balfour, Charty Ribblesdale, Lady Pembroke and Ettie Grenfell. The sessions, on themes including ‘Conscience self love etc’ and ‘Kant’, were a qualified success. ‘Miss Anderson gave us a lecture which as none of us (except Betty) knew anything about the subject or had read anything was rather above our heads,’ Mary told her diary, noting that week’s essay: ‘Is it necessary for ethical reasoning, to assume or establish an ultimate end to rational action?’ Attendance diminished as the Season wore on. Mary was just one of three participants at the final class in early July, although their numbers had been boosted when Willie Grenfell and Tommy Ribblesdale joined after the House rose. The triumphant ethicists went out for a ‘farewell ethical luncheon’ that continued into the early hours of the morning: ‘we argued about the word implied & implicit till 1 o’clock & then couldn’t sleep from excitement’, Mary recorded. A brief respite followed, as Mary, Hugo, the Ribblesdales and their eldest son Thomas went for a few days to Lyndhurst in the New Forest, staying in the Crown Hotel. The weather was baking, and the Forest even more lovely than Mary had expected. ‘We have been out all today laying [sic] on our backs looking up at the trees [while] Charty read aloud,’ Mary told her mother. Later in the day Hugo, Tommy and little Tommy raced around, hot, flustered and excited, trying to catch butterflies in nets. That night both couples dined with Sir William Harcourt, who had served in Gladstone’s most recent Cabinet as Chancellor, and Harcourt’s wife Elizabeth, and then took a moonlit drive back to their hotel. The trip was a ‘great success’ for the two flirtatious couples. Shortly afterwards, Mary went to Clouds. Hugo quickly absented himself, busying himself in London for the Season’s final weeks. Madeline Wyndham proposed that Mary should stay at Clouds for the rest of the summer rather than return to Stanway. With some misgivings, Mary broached the idea with Percy. After ‘incubating’ the issue for a few days, Percy expressed himself in favour. ‘Pupsie is like Migs & likes to make up his mind & face a thing slowly but then definitely for ever! (not like weathercock Wash),’ Mary told Hugo. To her amusement, Percy had seized on the plan as a means of protection ‘against Mumsie’s indiscriminating hospitality’: using Mary to keep ‘away people he don’t like!’ ‘I hope the poor mad sister won’t be forbidden as being bad for Migs i.e. disagreeable for Pup,’ added Mary. The ‘poor mad sister’ was Madeline’s sister Mary Carleton. Widowed early, with two small children, Dorothy and Guy, and little money, she was one of Madeline’s many lame ducks. Percy found her intensely annoying. Throughout the summer Mary had misgivings about Hugo. She knew his inclination for flirting with other women – ‘pairing off with a conk & having long t?te-?-t?te & purely (or impurely) personal conversations’ – and feared he was neglecting his Commons’ duties. ‘You see too much of Violet [Manners] & [I] am getting uneasy,’ she told him in early August, for Violet, the most artistic of all the Souls women, did not subscribe to the group’s morality in the way Mary’s other friends did. A few weeks later, under pretext of recounting a heated lunchtime debate with Hilda Brodrick and Betty Balfour on J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, Mary wrote Hugo a lengthy letter about ‘systematic selfishness’ and the necessity of quelling one’s hedonistic will. The subtext was not hard to see. Mary’s magpie-like, irreverent approach to Mill, twisting his theories to serve her own ends, reflected a frequently criticized trait of the Souls: their alleged want of intellectual depth. When Margot Tennant devised a plan for a Souls’ journal entitled ‘To-morrow: a Women’s journal for men’ (the proposed contents of the first issue included ‘Persons and Politics’ by Margot; the ‘Rise and Fall of Professional Beauties’by Lady de Grey; ‘Foreign and Colonial Gossip’ by Harry Cust; a short story by Oscar Wilde; a book review by John Addington Symonds and ‘Letters to Men’ by George Wyndham), the press pounced on the idea, the News of the World revealing with glee that Webber’s suggested title had been ‘Petticoats’. Sir William Harcourt gently mocked the plan: ‘Ah, it is their bodies that I like; and now that they are going to show us their souls all naked in print I shall not care for them.’ In fact, the journal never came to pass. By late August, Mary, Hilda and Betty had finished Mill and were planning two days of Butler’s sermons and dissertations before taking the ‘plunge into Sorley’s Ethics of Naturalism, which I hope & trust to have finished before practical Physics in the shape of giving birth to an infant puts a temporary stop to my Ethics – I shall study Physiology first and as intelligence dawns, & the babe looks & smiles at the light, I shall study Psychology combined with jurisprudence & so I shall get back to Ethics again,’ Mary said. The other goings-on of the house impinged little upon her. ‘Mr. Adeane’s here (Marie’s brother) rather a muff I think,’ she told Hugo. Charles Adeane, whose sister Marie was a maid of honour to the Queen, was a twenty-three-year-old Cambridgeshire landowner. He had been courting Mananai since her debut that spring. Of all the sisters, Mananai came closest to replicating their mother’s ‘sweetness and social charm’, without the underlying steel. Few were likely to exclaim, as Mananai did, how ‘lovely’ February was as a month, and mean it. Her solemn interest in clothes and titles prompted Percy to nickname her ‘Madeline the Mondaine’. As a child she had had a tendency to ‘twitch! & wink! Terribly’, and despite being older by two years, her development had always noticeably lagged behind the precocious Pamela’s. Like Guy Wyndham, she was a lesser star in the family constellation, but she was passionately supportive of her siblings, championing their achievements and mourning their defeats with utter sincerity, and beloved by them for it. Mananai found the Souls’ intellectual jousting daunting. Harry Cust earned her lasting affection by confessing to her that he was just as bashful as she: a lie, but a comforting one. She felt far more at ease with Charlie Adeane, good-hearted, rather ponderous, apt to pontificate about the problems besetting agriculture, and from a more stolid family of courtiers (although not entirely without spark: Charlie’s jovial uncle Alick, a groom in waiting, had provoked one of the Queen’s most famous comments when he recounted a risqu? joke at a state dinner. ‘We are not amused,’ she replied). Portrait of Miss Madeline Wyndham,aged sixteen: Mananai on the brink of adulthood, by Edward Burne-Jones. None of the Wyndhams was particularly impressed by Charlie. Mary and Pamela found the ‘longueurs’ in his conversation a little trying. With glee Mary told Hugo that the hapless suitor had tried sounding out Fr?ulein in confidence about his prospects – a confidence not kept. After leaving Clouds, Charlie tried to send Mananai a bracelet as a gift. Madeline Wyndham refused to allow her daughter to accept it. In a friendly but reserved letter, she explained that the Wyndhams thought Mananai too young to marry and did not approve of the five-year age gap between the lovers. Her response was without a shadow of the affection shown to Hugo when he was courting Mary – and he also was five years older than his intended bride. Displaying the tolerant good humour that he almost always managed to employ with the Wyndhams, Charlie agreed to make no declaration to Mananai just yet. He asked whether he might send the bracelet to Madeline Wyndham, who could then give it to her daughter; ‘may I say, with my love? … Certainly being in love is not cheerful,’ he added, assuring Madeline that he had read over her letter ‘about fifty times’. Madeline Wyndham’s excuses were a pretext. As Souls, it did not matter that Charlie was a Liberal. What mattered was that Charlie’s income, from the Cambridgeshire estate he had inherited upon his alcoholic father’s death, was just ?3,000 to ?4,000 a year. He could not hope for any more. Given the parlous state of eastern England’s arable estates, he might end up receiving markedly less. As Percy commented, Charlie and any wife of his would not be ‘poor’ but they would not be ‘at all rich’ either. Madeline Wyndham thought her charming daughter could do better. The last weekend of August found the Wyndhams at Clouds with Sibyl Queensberry and her two youngest children, Arthur and Edith Douglas, known respectively as ‘Bosie’ and ‘Wommy’ (the nicknames themselves abbreviations of ‘Boysie’ and ‘Little Woman’), and with Wilfrid Blunt and his teenage daughter Judith. Sibyl and her children frequently visited Clouds, all the more since Sibyl’s acrimonious divorce from the abusive Marquess of Queensberry that year. On Saturday, Arthur Balfour, George Wyndham and Henry James were due to arrive. In the months since his arrival in Ireland Balfour had shown the Irish – and Westminster – that they had underestimated him. The Unionist policy was to kill Home Rule with kindness, but conciliation went hand in hand with coercion. Balfour made good on his promise to ‘be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law’. Anyone inciting tenants in the rent strike, known as the Plan of Campaign, was immediately imprisoned. Prisoners’ complaints about the putrid conditions in their cells were met with short shrift: the connection between diseased lungs and Irish patriotism was interesting, said Balfour drily. By late August, the political world was alight with the news that the Government was putting the Irish MP John Dillon on trial for his part in the Plan of Campaign. George, erstwhile ‘Fenian’, proud descendant of the Patriot Lord Edward, was now an instrument of one of the most brutally effective periods of repression since the British had crushed the 1798 Rebellion. Yet the Wyndhams managed to reconcile the two. George wanted to save ‘darling Ireland’, as Mary called it, and to gain ‘high office’. Quelling agitators could, just about, be interpreted as helping the country reclaim calm. And the Wyndhams were ambitious. They ignored any contradiction, including Madeline Wyndham who while visiting George in Ireland trawled through antique shops, collecting commemorative buttons of the heroes of ’98 to distribute to her children and grandchildren, and requested all family members making the trip to do the same. Wilfrid Blunt was resolutely of the opposing view. Ireland was his latest anti-imperialist hobby horse. In 1886, he had visited Ireland and subsequently published in the Pall Mall Gazette, which was under the editorship of the sensationalist journalist W. T. Stead, a devastating expos? of the barbarity of the evictions he found there. He now intended to return to Ireland in October to join the fray. He was keenly looking forward to confronting Balfour at Clouds, but by the time Balfour arrived Blunt was already on the back foot, because he had decided that he was in love with Mary: ‘the cleverest best & most beautiful woman in the world with just that touch of human sympathy which brings her to the level of our sins’, he wrote in his diary. The family’s reverence for Balfour cast Blunt into a deep gloom. ‘Balfour is here under particularly favourable [circumstances] as he is in love with Mary Elcho, to whom he makes himself of course charming, but, possibly for the same reason, I do not like him much … He has a grand passion for Mary – that is quite clear – and it is equally clear that she has a tendresse for him,’ said Wilfrid as he watched the two, heads bent in conversation, drift off on long walks. ‘But what their exact relations may be I cannot determine. Perhaps it is better not to be too wise, and as all the house accepts the position as the most natural in the world, there let us leave it.’ It nonetheless made Blunt bad-tempered. No one – except Mary – escaped criticism in his diary. James, ‘always a little behindhand’ in conversation, was disappointing – ‘For a man who writes so lightly and well it is amazing how dull-witted he is.’ Judith was unacceptably mute at dinner while Pamela and Bosie played boisterous rhyming games. Blunt’s pen was most acidic about Balfour: ‘As a young man he must have been charming and still has some of the ways of a tame cat.’ On the tennis court, a red-faced and ferocious Blunt, partnering George Wyndham, triumphed over a nonchalant Arthur and Guy Wyndham. That night at dinner, Balfour admitted, to Blunt’s astonishment, that Home Rule was inevitable: that his party’s coercion was merely stalling. ‘When it comes I shall not be sorry,’ Arthur told the assembled party. ‘Only let us have separation as well as Home Rule; England cannot afford to go on with Irishmen in her Parliament. She must govern herself too.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/claudia-renton/those-wild-wyndhams-three-sisters-at-the-heart-of-power/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.