Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  Mary was now a young woman of thirty-two. She had known her husband nearly all her life. ‘I first saw him when I was five,’ Mary once wrote to a friend, ‘and I never had a time of conscious existence when he wasn’t my larger self – The self of myself.’ Was love for Ellen Hall a betrayal of Edward? He certainly seemed to think so. ‘Ah! my husband’s pain,’ Mary declared, ‘what he bore, and how lovingly, how quickly – our talk.’ If only, like the Greeks, she could find a different word for each of these loves, words that could somehow keep them separate and explain them.

  Edward and Mary found a modus vivendi. Mary had, after all, been schooled her entire life in the virtues of duty, in at least trying to quash her inclination to rebel. Edward loved her, and her behaviour caused him anguish. It appears that Ellen Hall was asked to leave. She did visit again in the summer, but then, Mary writes, ‘I saw. . . Friendship has its duties like marriage.’ Mary was at her husband’s side for the final Speech Day at Wellington College, and his emotional leave-taking. She would take her place as wife of the Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral. And (though whether by design or not is unclear) there would be no more children. Edward went alone with the two elder boys, Beth and baby Hugh to Lincoln to prepare the Chancery for Mary’s arrival. Mary took the girls and Fred, her favourite, to her mother’s house at Rugby.

  SKETCH IN A LETTER FROM MARY BENSON TO ELLEN HALL

  SKETCH IN A LETTER FROM MARY BENSON TO ELLEN HALL

  Yet Ellen Hall was not the last of Mary’s loves. In Lincoln, Mary would meet a woman who would change her life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A POSTCARD FROM EDWARD BENSON TO HIS WIFE

  Sep. 1873

  All going well. Boys very industrious and happy. The Precentory a grand refuge. Arrangements are very complete at the Chancery; there is a man to make dust, and a man to burn paint off doors, and a man to make a noise with a hammer, and a man to throw soot at the books, and a man to dig for tobacco pipes in the garden, and a man to splash the paper with paint, and a man to scrape paint off with a knife, and a boy not to fetch or carry, and rods and rings not to fit, and carpets not to fit also, and women to wet floors, and several men to charge. So we shall not be ready for you till Friday, if then. And yet you see what efforts! — and I fell down yesterday and scratched a shilling’s worth of skin off my elbow, and to-day made a two-shilling hole in my trouser knee. Baby is splendid and so dirty and so happy. When Beth says she is surprised and asks if he is not he says ‘No’ in a highly concerned manner, and emphatically repeats ‘No.’ My best love to Nellie and Maggie and thanks for their letters which were very nice, and to old Fred and Grannie.

  Beth seems to like everything.

  The Chancery stood in a Close touching the hem of Lincoln’s exultantly Gothic cathedral, and was almost as venerable as the church itself. Corbelled arches traversed its ancient flagstone floors; winding stairways led to criss-crossing corridors; light filtered in through mullioned stained glass. Pentacles and holy emblems to ward off evil spirits had been scratched into the stonework by medieval masons; there were Cromwellian bullets embedded in the front door. Haphazardly, over the centuries, a cavernous vestibule, wood-panelled chambers, a subterranean dining hall, curious anterooms and mysterious, poky cabinets had grown together. Ghosts seemed to mutter and rattle from the water pipes, to sidle with the draughts through rows of empty attic rooms; there were dusk-scented cellars, abandoned outbuildings, and a kitchen fit for a castle.

  For Mary, Edward brightened up a sitting room, a pleasant half-panelled room with clear windows overlooking the Close, with sprigged wallpaper, white paint and an orange carpet. He threw two bedrooms together to make a study for himself, and assigned the ancient chapel, with its fifteenth-century oak screen, to serve as a schoolroom for the children. Martin and Arthur were considered old enough to have their own sitting room, but were soon to be off to school at Winchester and Eton respectively.

  Mary came down from Rugby with Fred and the girls, and the household was further swelled by Rector the blue-eyed tomcat, Watch the border collie, and the parrot that had been bought when Arthur was a baby. Familiar furniture from Wellington took up residence in new surroundings – the grand dining-room sideboard, Mary’s sofa, the comfortable ottoman. Along to the Chancery came the keepsakes, the display pieces and well-worn favourites – the dog-eared music for ‘Willie We Have Missed You’, the epergne with the Arab and camel, the volumes of Sir Walter Scott and Tennyson, even the giant blancmange of a beaded, crimson velvet pincushion that had been placed on a dressing table for the Queen’s visit. Just off the drawing room, a narrow chamber with windows depicting Our Lord, the Virgin Mother and St John was fitted up as an oratory for family prayers. An outlay of £5 provided a miniature harmonium with pathetically bleating tremolo, and Mary coaxed hymn tunes from it twice daily. Above the oratory, at the top of a flight of stone stairs, Fred and the girls were given an empty room to do with as they liked. They immediately dubbed it The Museum, stocking it with pretty pebbles and fossils, old bits of glass and pottery, the broken tobacco pipes dug up in the garden, sheep’s wool rescued by Maggie from a hedge, an addled swan’s egg (soon ejected), a case of their grandfather’s butterflies. Here, they would occasionally invite Mama to tea, to which she came, properly and formally attired in her hat.

  For the children, the Lincoln Chancery proved an even more exciting place for growing up than Wellington College had been. The large garden came with a Roman sarcophagus and a turreted wall with battlements, once part of the old city fortifications. Inspired by the new fashion for lawn tennis, Edward laid out a somewhat oddly shaped court marked by tape pinned down with hairpins, and the family played with flat wooden bats made (in accordance with Edward’s characteristic thriftiness) by the cathedral carpenter – line judgements were made easy by an explosion of hairpins. The house itself, with its dark corners and quaint angles, unaccountable spaces and deep, empty cupboards, seemed specifically designed for the delight of children, for terrifying episodes of hide-and-seek and dreadful games of ambush. The children staged boisterous ‘sieges’, defending the top of a winding stone staircase against each other with some violence. Nellie usually took the lead, was quite up to giving Fred a bloody nose, and could terrify the others by playing dead. Maggie – tall, slim and secretive – and Fred (who became besotted with a chorister in the cathedral, and prayed to be allowed to join the choir), were the quieter ones, most often to be found in The Museum. The others had their more sedate moments too. Arthur, childish for his age, played alone with lead soldiers in the attic, long after he was at Eton. Martin – serious, still with a stammer, precocious beyond his fourteen years and pushed academically by his father – read complicated books and argued abstract questions with both Edward and Mary. Together, the children began the Saturday Magazine, a family venture, written by hand. All of them contributed, though Maggie’s stories, piling catastrophe upon catastrophe, were thought a little below family par – and, of course, baby Hugh was not yet up to it. An ugly little thing pampered by all, especially Beth, baby Hugh was growing up spoilt and petulant. Yet his elder siblings made a most favourable impact on the Close – the boys clever, energetic and full of promise, the girls ‘not a whit behind their brothers in intellect and power’.

  NELLIE AND MAGGIE AT LINCOLN IN 1876

  Mary ‘blew like a spring wind through the calm autumnal Close’. She started a musical society, causing a stir by departing from the usual popular songs and glees into Bach Chorales, singing in a rolling alto as she conducted with a paperknife. Even more shocking, for a clergyman’s wife, was her open advocacy of the works of George Eliot, who not only lived in sin with a man and was a dangerous sceptic and free-thinker, but whose Adam Bede touched on infanticide and illegitimacy. She even read such novels to her children. Infuriatingly, Mrs Benson could – albeit most calmly and sweetly – effortlessly argue the objections of canons’ wives in knots. She was equally adroit when one of her promising, energetic children publicl
y demanded to know the difference between a bull and an ox, responding without hesitation that the bull was the father and the ox the uncle.

  On nights when Edward was not lecturing or giving a bible class, and if Mary was at home and not putting the music club through its paces, the family sat together reading in the drawing room, or played Floral Lotto and card games. Mary often read to the children in her sitting room before they went to bed, though these days it was from Dickens or The Mill on the Floss rather than Ivanhoe or fairy romances. While she did so, she liked having Fred stand beside her, stroking her hair. Life was quieter than it had been at Wellington, with fewer dinner parties and just a sprinkling of visitors. For the first time, in the children’s eyes, their father was no longer the absolute ruler of all he surveyed, the crucial pivot around which the world they observed through the nursery window revolved – though within their family circle he inspired no less trepidation, and still, despite his gestures of affection, even a little fear. Yet to his friend Canon Crowfoot, Edward spoke of his children with love, reverence and ‘with awe and trembling, lest his own strong will and that stubborn temper, with which his own life was one perpetual struggle, should do some wrong to them. . . He felt they were his, yet not his, but only lent.’

  FROM E. F. BENSON’S OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS

  [My Father] had no idea how blighting his displeasure was to small children, and for fear of incurring it we went delicately like Agag, attending so strictly to our behaviour that all spontaneity withered. Nothing would have pleased him more, had we taken him into our confidence, but we feared his disapproval more than we were drawn to intimacy with him. . . he brought too heavy guns to bear on positions so lightly fortified as children’s hearts, and for fear of the bombardment we did not dare to make a sortie and go to him. . . with him we were careful to be decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed hands and neat hair and low voices, because thus we minimized the risks of his society. . . We sat on the edge of our chairs, and were glad to be gone.

  Edward’s tasks as Chancellor were not onerous. All that was legally required of him was to reside in Lincoln for three months of the year, preach once each Sunday and by tradition hold a few lectures in the Chapter House. He had been asked in addition to start a new theological college. The Scholae Cancelarii opened in January 1874 with two students. Yet before Mary arrived with Fred and the girls, Edward was clawed at by depression, dragged into a deep, tearful despondency as he pondered the immensity of the changes he had made in their lives. He was convinced that he was unequal to making a success of the new venture, worried his wife was too ill to play the role he required of her. His drive and vigour soon resurfaced, and Edward threw himself into his work with energy. The Scholae Cancelarii grew rapidly, he founded a temperance society, gave university extension lectures, set up a night school and held weekly bible classes for working men. Unused to having to be answerable to anyone, he clashed with his superior the Dean, who tried to curb his wilder enthusiasms. In response, Edward turned his magnetism and melting, bright-eyed charm to raising independent funds for his schemes, sweeping away such hesitations as those of the elderly ladies who said as they handed over their donations: ‘We give this to you, Mr Chancellor, to show our regard for you, but for our parts, Patty and I prefer an ignorant poor.’

  Mary, when she arrived in Lincoln, was still beset by periods of melancholy, too, at times prostrated by afflictions that meant long periods away from home to recuperate. Riseholme and the Wordsworths were close at hand, but the ladies of the Close were no match for her Wellington friends, and the life that stretched before her seemed flat and arid. To make matters worse, her heart and mind were dangerously unsettled by ‘a time of urgent doubt and mental turmoil’. The certainties of God and Church and Faith had turned fluid and undependable beneath her. Perhaps her brother Henry’s scepticism had affected her. She had always been enquiring, even speculative, and had been stimulated by books which Edward found heretical. Certainly her unhappiness, and the quavering of her independent spirit against Edward’s rock solidity of character and purpose, had moved her to a crisis. She had in the past been glib in her prayers, a little lackadaisical about church, but the comforts of the old orthodoxy had been there, practised mechanically but supporting of the spirit, accepted without question. Now she was flailing, doubting even that. She had not been swept up by Edward’s ardent churchmanship and unswerving belief. Mary looked on God as a Father; for Edward, He was an omnipotent King. As a consequence Edward travelled in His cause on a road of firm granite, and now that she was stumbling along her own uneven path, Mary had no appeal to her husband for help.

  THE CASE OF ANNIE BESANT

  Annie Besant, née Wood, was born in 1847. Her father died when she was five, and she was raised by a friend of her mother’s. At the age of 19 she married the Reverend Frank Besant and had two children by the time she was 23. Annie’s independence of spirit brought her into fierce conflict with her clergyman husband. Annie did not concede, and as discord grew she began to question God’s goodness. The faith that had hitherto guided her life started to crumble. In 1871, Annie suffered a nervous collapse and ‘lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and unceasing head-pain, unable to bear light. . . indifferent to everything’. When she recovered, she refused to take Holy Communion, and her husband ejected her from the family home. A legal separation ensued, and in 1874 Annie joined the Secular Society. Her later campaigns for birth control, and her publication of a work on this subject dubbed by The Times ‘an indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy and obscene book’, rendered her husband’s humiliation complete.

  Intertwined with Mary’s spiritual crisis was the issue of the love she felt for women like Ellen Hall, which caused Edward deep heartache and served to widen the gulf between them. Yet it was such a passion that ensured that Mary’s commitment to her marriage would remain; a woman who brought Mary firm answers, shoring her up against collapse.

  Mrs Mylne was the wife of a student at the theological college, a zealous man who had taken orders late in life. She was middleaged, motherly, forthright, yet quietly dignified, with a beautiful smile and unaffected charm. Mary called her ‘Tan’– when she writes the name it appears sometimes as τ, the Greek letter T, a Christian symbol for the crucifix and for life. Tan called Mary ‘Ben’. When she met Tan, in 1875, Mary was in the throes of a Schwärmerei, of ‘stirrings of the old love – Alice Swan – the old ungoverned desire’. Their meeting was not one of Mary’s instant ‘My God, what a woman!’ moments, but gradually Mary was drawn to Mrs Mylne, began ‘to play with my human love for her and hers for me – felt it coming – felt how different places were when she was there. . . so went May and June – and now I loved her indeed – and she was getting hold, only humanly as yet.’ Tan came with the family for a holiday in Torquay. Mary and Edward were ‘terribly apart’, in a seeming constant quarrel, saying hard and unloving things to each other. The situation with her husband was the worst Mary could remember, and she had all but given up on God, was ‘quite prayerless’.

  Tan was a fervent Evangelical. In early 1876, she and her husband were deeply involved in a Mission in Lincoln which Mary attended. Tan and Mary went on long country walks outside Lincoln, sat talking for hours in Mary’s sitting room at the Chancery. Tan now had firm hold of Mary, and squeezed any doubt or scepticism from her mind. In the midst of their talks, Mary heard a voice murmur ‘Fiat voluntas Tua’ – Thy will be done – and happiness welled and brimmed within her. Mary turned to God. Unlike Mary’s earlier loves, Tan was an older woman. She became Mary’s ‘blessed Mother’, her ‘Mother in Christ’. This new-found love for God was inextricably bound up with her love for a woman; it was almost the same thing, as if love for God was a development of this earthly love. Mary felt that she would not have known, truly, about divine love – about any true love at all – were it not for the love of a woman. God, Mary wrote in her diary (with her characteristic touch for metaphor), had brought her Tan, had given her ‘first h
uman knowledge and human love, and I drank eagerly of both founts – then thou leadest me through human love, and human knowledge, just to the Fountain of both, Thyself – where I lie and drink forever.’

  Tan took control of Mary’s tottering life. She demanded to know all about Mary’s earlier loves. She wanted details. Confessions. She brought Mary to admit that she had never loved, truly loved, Edward. She bombarded Mary with disturbing questions:

  ‘Why are you so weak?’

  ‘Why do you fail?’

  ‘Doesn’t weakness become guilt?’

  She made Mary sit and write it all down – daily for three weeks around her thirty-fifth birthday in March 1876 – in a retrospective diary that viewed every part of her life from a new perspective, ‘a spirit photograph, whatever its ugliness’. Tan confirmed Mary’s sense of sin. The girl who had numbered her Schwärmereien with delight, though with occasional twinges of guilt, now wrote of them in terms of ‘stain’ and ‘soil’ – words she used again and again, and underlined. Mary wrote her retrospect on the right-hand page of her diary. On the left, she addressed musings to God, wrote out short prayers, pleas to the Lord to burn away her sin, to ‘burn truth in, burn this out’, to ‘burn all that must burn’; an entreaty ‘to possess and purify my heart, that this subtle, inward, but indeed alas! real fall may be impossible ever again’. Yet still the rebellion remained. Tan knew how to deal with it.