Impossible Life of Mary Benson, The

by Bolt, Rodney

  CHARLES DICKENS, ON A LONDON NOVEMBER AFTERNOON, FROM BLEAK HOUSE

  Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of [the] shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

  Edward was not unfamiliar with life in Lambeth Palace. He had been assiduously attentive to the dying Archbishop Tait, visiting him so frequently in his final months that the Primate assigned Edward his own rooms at the palace, in the fifteenth-century Lollards’ Tower. One of the old Archbishop’s last confidences to his domestic chaplain, the Revd Randall Davidson, was that although the rather too elderly Harold Browne, Bishop of Winchester, was ‘a man of peace’, the Archbishop had no doubt that the energetic and most heedful Bishop of Truro would ‘come forward and do a great work’ as head of the Church. The chaplain observed the strong personal link that was being ‘forged or strengthened’ by ‘the visits and the ministry’ of the Bishop of Truro to His Grace in his dying days. Others noted Truro’s youth and energy, at a time when a strong and vigorous hand was needed at the prow, and the upper echelons of the Church were riven by politicking. The Archbishop of York did not envy ‘the man who will be seated in the Chair of Augustine in these times. The winds blow keen round it, and the rains fall heavily just now,’ and he thought that ‘Truro would perhaps, all things considered, prove best for the Church.’ Even Arthur, up at Cambridge, had heard rumours that his father was in the running to succeed Archbishop Tait. So the letter from Mr Gladstone that had arrived at Lis Escop just before Christmas had perhaps not taken Edward too much by surprise.

  Whatever his greater strategy for the future of the Church might have been, Edward fell upon the redecoration of Lambeth Palace with the ease and alacrity of a man who had long thought about what he might one day change, and with the flair for interior design he had shown in all the previous homes he and Mary had shared. In the early 1830s, Edward Blore, the architect who took over from John Nash to complete Buckingham Palace, had built a new residential wing at Lambeth. It was an imposing pile of Bath stone in the Gothic Revival style Edward so admired, but inside it did indeed have something of the forbidding atmosphere of a ‘huge cold Barrack’. All the rooms ran off a broad central corridor, like a series of offices, offering little privacy. They were charmless, scantily furnished, and though large, there were not enough of them comfortably to accommodate all the functionaries and guests that came with Edward’s new role. Despite its magnificence, Lambeth Palace felt curiously cramped, and while seeming impossibly crowded and busy, it was at the same time cavernous and daunting.

  During their first weeks at Lambeth, before invitations for dinners and luncheons began to be sent out, with Nellie and Arthur away at university and Fred and Hugh at school, a shrunken family took its place for meals at a table dwarfed by the high vaulted timber roof of the Guard Room – in medieval and Tudor times the Archbishop’s audience chamber, turned by Blore into a dining room. Off it ran a gallery – desolate and draughty, lined with dusty, ignored portraits – leading to the old prison (and Edward’s former chambers) in the Lollards’ Tower. Mary’s comfy ottoman, the wheezy harmonium, the beds, books and card games, the bronzed dessert dishes from the working-men’s bible class, the butterfly collections, mahogany cabinets, sumptuous sideboard – much that had made the journey from Wellington to Lincoln and then down to Cornwall – came up to London from Lis Escop, to be sucked almost without trace into Lambeth Palace.

  Edward’s changes were swift and radical. He had connecting doors knocked through between the rooms of the Blore wing, so that he could walk from bedroom to dressing room to library and sitting room, without having to engage with the constant human traffic in the single corridor. He rooted about in cupboards and garrets, hauling back into the open sofas and chests, chairs and fine tables, many of some antiquity and value, that had drifted into obscurity over the centuries. He personally superintended the re-hanging of pictures, dusting off old paintings in the gallery, and discovering a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole in the process. In one of the towers he came across a bundle of rusty pikes and had them cleaned and displayed in a fan shape in the entrance hall. Joining in the fray, Arthur uncovered – in a box containing bones of old saints – the shell of the pet tortoise that had famously outlived Archbishop Laud (who was beheaded during the Civil War), and had been inadvertently killed at the age of 120, when a gardener dug it up from hibernation. The shell was put on display in the corridor, in a glass case with a curtained recess for the relics.

  At first, overwhelmed by the domestic chaos and facing frightening new territory as wife of the Archbishop, Mary hankered for her darling Chat. ‘Oh my sweetheart, come soon and help me to laugh at these things that oppress my soul,’ she wrote. She had been catapulted from the cosy charms of Cornwall, with its tight circle of family, Chat, and a handful of friends, not only to London, but into the very heart of the Establishment and Society. Yet gradually a change came over Mary Benson. The shy child-bride who had so quailed at her husband’s wrath and crumpled under the demands and complexities of running the household at Wellington; the young woman prostrated by serial childbirth, bored and marginalized in Lincoln; the devoted mother, happier but isolated in rural Cornwall – all these dropped from her like dried husks. Mary took root in her new position, and suddenly blossomed.

  Quietly, Mary had been changing the rules. The transformation had begun with the disruption caused by Ellen Hall on Mary’s return from Wiesbaden, after which there had been no more children; it had gained force from Tan, and the fervent and very personal religion Mary had fashioned under her direction; it then gathered impetus in Cornwall, as her children grew older and as Chat helped confirm her conviction that ‘Love is God’. Mary was still dutifully and devotedly committed to her husband’s well-being, yet she had found a way of surviving within these confines. She was no longer scared of Edward.

  As the Archbishop’s wife, Mary began to exercise this new confidence. The childlike sunniness; the ‘volatility’ that had never been quite suppressed; the verve and effervescence her children so adored in her; the warmth and empathy that drew admiring young women to her in hotel parlours and country-house sitting rooms, her conversational dexterity as a hostess – qualities previously revealed to just a few – were now on display to a wide and influential world. The wide and influential world relished them, and Mary revelled in the esteem.

  Already white-haired at forty-one, and growing rather stout, the new Archbishop’s wife did not present a particularly commanding figure, and indeed confessed to Fred that she felt ‘shy and inadequate’ at her first great social functions. She told Arthur that at one party she had tried to keep her nervousness at bay by thinking of Eternity, ‘and how frail a prop Eternity seemed to be’. But her wit and irresistible charm won people over, and soon she ‘revelled in the multitude of her engagements’ and ‘delighted in the froth and bustle and movement’ of life both at Lambeth Palace and at the Archbishop’s country seat of Addington, near Croydon. Her hapless management of the Lodge at Wellington well behind her, Mary took to the control of two great houses with, in Fred’s words, ‘a natural and effortless instinct’. Surprising perhaps even herself, she ‘took the reins and cracked her whip, and the whole equipage bowled swift and smooth along the road’. Banquets were magicked effortlessly into existence a
nd ran without hiccough; surprise guests were accommodated without fuss or flutter. Mary’s neat little victoria would appear with perfect punctuality (‘and woe be to the carriage-cleaner if the japanned panels failed to reflect with the unwavering quality of glass’) to take her off on a visit, or with young Hugh to the Zoo. Her whip hand could be strong. During an influenza epidemic, when Mary and Maggie had been confined in a room together, ‘flecked by depression’ and fed on chicken and champagne, Mary emerged to find a fellow-suffering house guest without a fire and drinking medicine from a bottle, because his glass had been taken away. She went on a fierce ‘ramp round the household’ that soon had the servants back in shape.

  As her engagements multiplied, Mary took delight in the delicacies of timing and arrangement, in what she called ‘fittings in’. ‘Life is roaring on,’ she wrote to Maggie, who had gone up to Oxford just a few months after the family moved into Lambeth Palace. ‘Dinner of 30 Sat. 55 Junior Clergy yesterday. 40 Bps tonight.’ On another occasion: ‘My mind is in a whirl with arrangements for parties – one on Saturday, a large one Tuesday, Evg. Party on Thursday, guests all week beginning Saty, and a Very August one on the 23rd.’ Yet life was not always so grand. ‘Such military blokes came to dinner,’ she confided once to Maggie. ‘Quite as old as Rural Deans, and I do think duller.’ Sometimes, hospitality required immense effort. ‘Our party of which I told you went through heavy seas on Tuesday,’ Mary confessed about one group of guests. ‘It was all such collar work, breakfast talk, slow walking talk, clump driving talk, tea talk, dinner talk – we positively came to shouting proverbs in the evening.’

  Mary ‘nobly filled and fitted the new sphere’, Fred thought, but she remained firmly grounded. After a dinner spent engrossed in the talk of the hour with political notables, followed by a party at the Foreign Office, she might be up before seven the next morning, dressed in her oldest clothes to take a stroll through Covent Garden Market, or down Lambeth Walk, then back home to entertain the family over breakfast with sharp-eyed observations of some ‘comic side-show of the streets’. She showed a girlish excitement at meeting certain of the dignitaries she now encountered, but she remained wholly unworldly.

  Arthur thought his mother ‘so indifferent to the grandeurs and pomps of life that she was neither disconcerted by them nor disdainful of them’. ‘Yes,’ a worldly and somewhat sour old peeress once remarked, ‘poor thing, you see she has no precedence.’ Nor did she. For although the Archbishop of Canterbury himself ranks immediately below Princes of the Blood Royal, and above non-royal dukes and the Lord Chancellor, as the highest commoner in the land, his wife has no precedence or title at all. The old peeress would have been perplexed to learn that Mary simply did not care, and had too finely developed a sense of ‘the infinite comicalities of life’ to take such attitudes seriously. Nor was she particularly interested in what Arthur called the ‘ecclesiastical machine’ – though she did involve herself in some women’s charities and committees, and in time gave theological lectures for women. What appealed to Mary about her new sphere was what had always appealed to her – human intimacy and interaction – yet now with a scope she had previously never imagined possible.

  ‘It was the human being beneath that she was in search of,’ wrote Arthur, ‘and that was all she cared about.’ From the pinkest, most tongue-tied curate to the starchiest of aristocrats, Mary could set people at ease, soften social edges, coax out conversation. She was herself a sparkling conversationalist, ‘really brilliant’ marvelled Arthur. Alas, Mary’s flow of talk was ‘so fanciful, humorous, suggestive, incisive, and her power of transition so great’ that Arthur – like everyone else who knew her and admired her wit and deadly repartee, and to the great loss of posterity – could only throw up his hands and admit that it was utterly impossible to reproduce the quality of her conversation in print.

  To Fred, it was Mary, not Edward, who seemed most elevated by their new position in the world. Mary’s offspring, like their mother, had scant interest in the ‘ecclesiastical machine’. ‘Stupendous though my father had become,’ declared Fred, ‘we knew but little of his work and of its national significance, and it was my mother who to us, far more than he, was exalted into the zenith.’ But Mary also happily took the opportunity to puncture any grandeur. It became a ritual after magnificent dinner parties for any of the children then at home to join her ‘in a wild war-dance all over the drawing-room in a sort of general jubilation’. (They were thus discovered by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, on an occasion when he unexpectedly returned to the palace after having taken his leave.) The young Bensons were then in their late teens or early twenties. Something about them remained rooted in their tight, self-encapsulated childhood. The same was true of their mother. ‘I did not grow up,’ she had written in her diary, looking back on her girlhood betrothal and early marriage. Her letters to the children were strewn with exclamation marks, girlish squeals, breathless capitals, and would burst with such effusions as ‘Lor!’, ‘Oh Lorks!’, ‘Isn’t it Orfle’ (a phrase picked up by her green parrot, Joey) and ‘O how goluptious!’ Yet, in her public role, their mother was the pivot of all that glittered at Lambeth Palace, and infinitely more adept in social situations than their father.

  Edward could tell a good story (even if all the accents he employed, from Cornish to American, sounded the same); he had a loud, inspiriting laugh and a dramatic energy in conversation, but he was not inclined to listen, and all too easily went on at length, explaining in minute detail what to his audience was already lucidly clear. He was affable when surrounded by an atmosphere of deference, but was prickly and silent with equals; if opposed, he could be vehement and severe. Arguments with Edward engendered heat rather than light. Mary, on the other hand, had always enjoyed a good argument. She relished the ‘intoxication’ of frank, friendly discussion, she wrote to a friend. ‘Disagreement comes in as a nice little savour. . . Yes, intoxication is the best word.’ She had most enjoyed the company of those masters at Wellington College who had taken pleasure in conversational cut and thrust, though she had usually remained the reticent, silent headmaster’s wife. Now, not only did she join in but became skilled at steering the discussion, and at a level that enthralled her. Though not particularly engaged in politics herself, she delighted in talk about great issues with the people who were making the decisions.

  Back in 1881, Mary had written to Chat from Lis Escop with news of a surprise visit:

  Fancy, my Beloved, having GLADSTONE’S DAUGHTER in the house! The whole atmosphere is full of it and it is Lovely!

  Now she entertained the Grand Old Man (as he was just beginning to be called) himself. It was a full year after Edward’s appointment before Mary first met the Prime Minister; she wrote immediately to Fred at Marlborough:

  This morning I am a Proud Woman – with the feel still on my fingers of the more than august arm which they pressed going down to dinner last night at Ely House. WHO do you think? Need I say GLADSTONE of course. I was more tired and stupid than usual, still there he was in the flesh and there he talked.

  Mary liked the Prime Minister’s voice ‘immensely’, and thought his eyes ‘wonderful – so clear and soft, and steady’, but found his accent curious, and the man ‘so very strong in his expressions and so little polished in his manner’ that ‘I think if I did look upon him as Chat does, as the villain who is ruining this country, I should feel immensely borne out by his manner – but then you see I don’t.’ On that occasion they talked of St Peter’s in Rome, of art and architecture, about everything but politics, as that was territory Mary ‘felt too ignorant to touch on and he didn’t begin’.

  Later encounters made good the omission. The High Tory Archbishop of Canterbury and the Liberal Prime Minister were distant from each other on the political spectrum, especially as regards such issues of the day as the disestablishment of the Welsh Church and Gladstone’s consuming political passion, the question of Irish Home Rule. Yet Edward admired the premier’s strong sense
of religious conviction, and the men developed a robust respect for each other, their cordial relationship outlasting Gladstone’s time in office. Gladstone had a great appreciation of Mary’s wit, Fred noticed, of her ability to ‘strike a spark out of the most humdrum of happenings’. The man who had reputedly read over 20,000 books by the time he died would engage in deep conversations with the Archbishop’s wife, on one occasion detaining her at table long after it was time for the ladies to withdraw, discussing a recent Life of George Eliot, and declaiming: ‘It is not a Life at all. It is a Reticence, in three volumes.’ Fred was told that once at Hawarden Castle, Gladstone’s home in north Wales, in a discussion as to who was the cleverest woman in England, Mrs Benson’s name was raised. ‘No, you’re wrong,’ exclaimed the Grand Old Man in impressive voice, reinforcing his opinion with pointed forefinger, ‘she’s the cleverest woman in Europe.’

  Mary ‘took an infinity of rapturous trouble’ over her dinners. These were usually populated by clerics, though half a dozen times a season the Bensons hosted grand secular affairs where around thirty guests from the worlds of literature and science, art and politics would be magnificently assembled. There were luncheons, seldom en famille but more intimate than the dinners, as well as garden parties in the summer – where irreverent behaviour by guests laughing and talking in the chapel, as if it were a public lounge, once drove Mary to complaint, and the Archbishop to suggest that they raise two large boards under the East window, reading: ‘Keep thy Foot’ and ‘Hold thy Tongue’. On one occasion, in 1888, when Mary and Edward were called away, Maggie and Nellie had to officiate. Maggie wrote to Hugh (then on a scholarship at Eton): ‘We had a Queen at our last garden-party we had, and as Mar and Par were both ordered down to Windsor to dine with the other Queen (of England I mean) – we are so sought after by the Royal Family – Nellie and I had to entertain the first Queen, who was from Hawaii. She had an interpreter, who told her Wiclif [sic] was the first Archbishop – and stopped her by a nod when she wanted to put a sponge cake in her tea.’