by Bolt, Rodney
Mary sent telegrams to Arthur, who after taking a First in Classics had become a master at Eton, to Fred at King’s, Cambridge, and to Hugh, who had just that month gone up to his father’s old college at the same university, Trinity. Maggie was at Addington. Her studies at Oxford – at a time when women were not permitted to hold degrees or sit the official examinations – had led to a First in the Women’s Honour School of Philosophy, with by far the highest mark of her year. ‘If only it had been Greats [the official examination],’ her tutor wrote. ‘No one will realise how brilliantly she has done.’ Mary also wrote to Ethel.
The boys came to Addington, but stayed in a nearby hotel for fear of infection. It was golden October weather, wrote Fred, ‘with frosts at night and windless days, and the chestnut leaves peeling off trees and falling in a heap of yellow below them, each leaf twirling in the air as it fell’. Nellie had been ‘the best of us’, Arthur lamented, ‘gay, adventurous, brave’. Each of the Benson siblings felt they had a special bond with her. It was Nellie (a talented actress) who had organized theatricals every Christmas, who was the driving force behind the magazine they had produced together, whose childlike spirit had kept alive all manner of quaint family usages and games. Only a few weeks previously, Fred and she had larked about, playing at being children with Beth. (The old nurse had her own rooms at Addington.) In many ways, Nellie had bound them all together. Her death marked ‘the closing of the old days of childhood for all of us’, felt Arthur; with her passing, ‘some unrecapturable moment was lost,’ wrote Fred. At the funeral, Maggie, who had always been more reticent than Nellie, and much in her shadow, looked pale but brave, ‘as if she had vowed to herself to fill so far as possible, Nellie’s place as daughter and sister’. A friend later remarked that it was as if Maggie passed from childhood to womanhood without any intervening phase of ‘young ladyhood’.
Shortly after the funeral, Mary wrote to Ethel Smyth: ‘All is well here; our three sons have been so infinitely beautiful and have grasped the further communion of death (which you speak of) so wonderfully. ‘It is expedient for you that I go away’ is a human truth, I verily believe. . . Only selfishness or dreariness or repining would really separate us. Maggie is wonderful. I could break my heart about her, but loving is better – and God knows, as he does. . . all.’ Ethel remained a friend of Mary’s (and of Arthur and Fred, in particular), though the intensity of their earlier intimacy was gone. Another woman had entirely engaged Mary’s heart, and as she had admitted to Ethel, she could not ‘form two relations worth having at once’. Just weeks after Nellie’s death, Lucy Tait came to live at Lambeth Palace.
Fifteen years younger than Mary, Lucy was the daughter of Edward’s predecessor, Archbishop Tait. Full-faced and statuesque, she was a determined young woman, with a firm set to her mouth and small, assessing eyes. Edward liked Lucy. He respected her commitment to charitable works, and admired her as a woman who ‘not only thinks how she may serve her friends but if there is one way more thorough than another does it’. It was Edward who had invited Lucy to live at the palace, in a seemingly well-meaning but heavy-handed attempt after Nellie’s death to provide a substitute daughter for Mary and an older sister for Maggie (who was nine years Lucy’s junior). ‘She will come live with us for our Nellie,’ he said. Perhaps Edward was also aware that in return for the support and devotion he desired of Mary, he would have to admit Lucy as her prop.
In the very hot summer of 1882, when Edward was paying such scrupulous attention to the ailing Archbishop Tait, he had once brought Lucy back with him from London for a visit to Lis Escop. Mary had taken to her immediately. Walks in the garden and long talks about God, fulfilment, and love consumed the ensuing days, with Mary worrying ‘am I boring her?’. On Edward’s next journey to London, Mary went along, too, noting in her diary when it was time to return home: ‘Leave Addington. BOTHER.’ Arthur, who accompanied them, noted that Miss Tait was ‘greatly attached to my mother’.
Moving back into Lambeth Palace – which, after all, had once been her home too – Lucy behaved as a full-fledged member of the family. She helped entertain guests, she went riding with Edward, and to religious gatherings with Maggie. She impressed Ethel Smyth at a prayer meeting led by a particularly saccharine woman – who wound up her address with a saintly: ‘Do you think dear friends, we shall smile in Heaven?. . . I. . . do!’ – by muttering ‘low and thunderously: “If people are going to smile like that in Heaven, I don’t think I want to go there.”’ She took Mary to hear Tom Mann (a leader of the great London dock strike of a few years previous, and soon to be Secretary of the new Independent Labour Party) lecture on ‘The Religious Basis of the Socialist Movement’. They were struck by his eloquence, and horrified Edward by returning home fired with (albeit fleeting) enthusiasm for Mann’s ideas. The summer following Nellie’s death the family holidayed together in Switzerland, and at the end of December 1891 Lucy joined Edward, Mary, Fred and Maggie on a trip to Algiers and Tunis.
The journey was undertaken very much at Mary’s urging. Edward had for years been working on a Life of the third-century theologian and martyr St Cyprian of Carthage, and she finally convinced him to take a pilgrimage to ‘the places where in thought he had so often dwelt’. A month in north Africa also deeply appealed to her own sense of adventure. On an earlier journey through the Holy Land with Edward, she had been exhilarated by the ‘colour and handsomeness of the people’, their brightness and variety of dress, and was entranced by the scenery: ‘The mountains of Moab blue and bright – [and] like a green enamel below [,] the valley of the Jordan – a dark treelined groove along it the Jordan itself – running into a pushed-out yellow line of mud into the white-blue of the Dead Sea.’ She had watched Arab children sitting on mats at their lessons, girls filling washpots at fountains, and mounting winding stairs with wrung-out washing on their heads; she had even visited a Bedouin camp and tasted camel’s milk, some ‘very sweet and good’ cheese churned with a stick, and coffee roasted before her eyes. Now she looked forward to similar exploits, and Lucy was equally intrepid.
The journey did not begin well, with Edward in pain from neuralgia at Marseilles, and suffering from one of the depressions that had been afflicting him with increasing severity since he became Archbishop. Fred read aloud everyone’s favourite part of In Memoriam, but unknown to the others, this only darkened Edward’s mood, as it reminded him both of his inability to express his love for his children and that this love was not reciprocated. To his diary he confided:
In Memoriam was inexpressibly dear to me for the best part of my life. . . There was nothing I so longed for in early life as to lead my children along those ways and kindred ways in other poets. It had been done, and yet they were quite unconscious of my having any keen, deep interest in it. . . I could not but be silent throughout. It was strange to be in, and not be in the least felt to be in, my children’s tender thinkings.
But soon Edward was propelling the party with the same furious energy he had shown on his honeymoon – travelling fifteen hours to see the ruins and basilica at the one-time Carthaginian outpost of Tébessa, and after just a day there, making a seventeen-hour journey back; or arriving at Sétif after dark, having travelled since four o’clock that morning and aiming to set off again at seven o’clock on the next, scorning those who did not accompany him to peer through the ramparts after dinner. Yet this time, Mary did not always permit herself to be bullied into exhaustion. Rather, she left Edward to his vigorous sightseeing and went off on her own adventures with Lucy – boiling eggs in hot springs, shopping for necklaces in the souks (with Lucy doing the bargaining), feasting on lamb and couscous beneath an aqueduct, even dropping in on an ‘Arab cottage’. Here they encountered a ‘handsome smiling man and a handsomely decked out woman [with] magnificent earrings and silver clasps in her breast’. The young couple did not speak French, so they all communicated in sign language and, amidst much hilarity, Lucy sang.
The trip was almost brought to an a
brupt and early end when news arrived of the death of the Prince of Wales’s eldest son, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, during an influenza pandemic. Edward was preparing his return to officiate at the funeral, when a telegram arrived from the Prince of Wales himself, saying that on no account was he to curtail his holiday. A letter followed, in which the Prince expressed his sorrow that Edward would now no longer officiate at the late Prince’s wedding; Albert Victor’s ‘Bride has become his Widow without ever having been his Wife’. (The charming ‘May’ of whom Queen Victoria had noted that she was very unfrivolous and had much sense, was also resourceful. The following year, she married the next in line of succession, Prince Albert Victor’s younger brother George, Duke of York.)
The party resumed its original schedule, as Edward went on to spend many hours among the ruins of Carthage, while Mary, Lucy, Maggie and Fred remained in Tunis, visiting the souks, befriending a young Frenchman who was going to London to stay in ‘Cheeseweek Park’ and learn English, and engrossing themselves in local street life – including a musician who was so delighted by the half-franc Mary dropped into his tambourine that ‘in gratitude he brought down – from heaven – two large nails into his nose’. One Sunday they encountered a snake charmer, a hideous man with matted hair who teased and irritated a large cobra in a bag until it reared, spreading its hood and flicking its tongue at him. ‘A curious contrast, I thought,’ wrote Mary, in the beige school exercise book in which she had improvised a travel diary, ‘to an Addington Sunday afternoon.’
FRED REMEMBERS SUNDAY AFTERNOONS AT ADDINGTON, IN OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS
There was early communion in the chapel. . . [then] morning service in the church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family walk during which my father read George Herbert to us; the walk was succeeded by a Bible reading with him, and then came tea. After tea was evening service in the church, and after Sunday supper, he read the Pilgrim’s Progress aloud until we had compline in the chapel. . . No shoal of relaxation emerged from the roaring devotional flood; if at meals the conversation became too secular, it was brought back into appropriate channels. . . No games of any sort or kind were played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf entailed no labour on the part of the servants. . . The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly to this prohibition on reasonable relaxation, became a day of pitiless fatigue. . . To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely devotional mind, this strenuous Sunday was a time of refreshment. . . What he did not allow for was that on other temperaments, that which so aptly fulfilled the desires of his own produced a totally different impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing boredom and unutterable fatigue.
On very hot Sundays at Addington, the customary leisurely afternoon walk might be replaced by a gathering under the enormous cedar in the grounds, at which each member of the family read in turn from ‘some saintly chronicle’, while the others surreptitiously dozed. One somnolent Sunday afternoon, with ‘the serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar positively gilding the tennis court’ and the croquet lawn ‘starving for crack of balls’, the spirit of ‘Satan, or at least Puck’ entered Fred, and he began to read at random from the Lives of the Saints – a few lines from a page already read, a paragraph about an entirely different saint a hundred pages later, a sentence or two from the introduction to the whole volume, a fragment from the life of St Catherine, another from the life of St Francis – all in the same reverential drone. Then he suddenly stopped. The silence roused his sister.
‘Oh, how interesting!’ she said. Her voice woke the Archbishop.
‘Wonderful!’ said he. “Is that all, Fred?’
‘Yes that’s all,’ said Fred.
Later, Fred discovered to his great delight – in a book given to him to read by his father – that for many centuries following patristic times, no idea of such a dull Sunday had ever entered a Christian head, that the Sabbath was (once a suitable act of worship was out of the way) a time of village sports, general hospitality and festa. Barely suppressing his giggles, he ran up to his mother’s room to tell her. Mary ‘steered a course so wonderful that not even then could I chart it,’ observed Fred. ‘Her sympathetic amusement I knew was all mine, but somehow she abandoned no whit of her loyalty to my father’s purpose in giving me the book.’ With a consummate stroke of what Nurse Beth referred to as her ‘tac’, and that godly goodness combined with devilish cunning that Ethel Smyth so admired, Mary deftly placed Fred’s plan to pronounce sentence on boring Sundays right out of the question. ‘How she did it I have no idea,’ Fred admitted, ‘but surely the very test of tact lies in the fact that you don’t know how it is done.’
As Mary’s children grew into clever and idiosyncratic young adults, even though they were less frequently at home, her skills of ‘tac’ in mediating between them and their father, without compromising her devotion to either, became ever more necessary. The young Bensons were growing more assertive, each carving a most individual space in the world. ‘That’s one comfort about all of you,’ the explorer Gertrude Bell (‘uglier than ever, all points and peaks and moustached’) said to Arthur once, ‘You are not the least like the children of Archbishops.’ Another friend told Mary that ‘her children might cause her pain and vexation, but she would never be dull.’
Initially, it was Arthur who was most likely to arouse her concern. Self-absorbed and introspective, Arthur appeared to have inherited his father’s tendency to dark depression. Just prior to Nellie’s death, having injured his knee, Arthur found that stopping regular exercise led to insomnia, and that soon ‘the curse was on me’. During the ‘horrible dreary time’ around her funeral he turned his focus upon himself, one night ‘being seized by faintness, and creeping up to my room convinced I was going to die’. Arthur found some comfort in writing poetry. His first volume was published in 1893, when he was thirty-one – he had already had a collection privately printed a year earlier, and had a novel and a couple of biographical works behind him.
In his diaries, Arthur indicates a possible trigger to his depressions, an event that occurred in 1882 while he was at Cambridge. He refers to it as ‘my great misfortune’, as ‘the greatest and most sudden blow that ever befell me – which influenced my life incomparably more than anything before or since’, and which he marked every year on the ninth of November as ‘my great anniversary’, which ‘made its mark like nothing else in my whole life’. On 9 November 1882, Arthur attended a Revivalist meeting at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. Strong winds of scepticism were blowing through Cambridge at the time. Arthur’s uncle, Henry Sidgwick, a university lecturer in moral philosophy, was an influential sceptic. Edward appears, with some success, to have discouraged contact between the two at Cambridge, but Arthur could not help but feel the influence of the agnostic atmosphere. He had gone to the meeting originally in a spirit of mockery, but appears to have been dealt a soul-shaking blow. Alongside this religious experience came an emotional crisis, the ruinous collapse of an intense romantic friendship with an unnamed man, that arguably left Arthur unable to be truly intimate with anyone ever again. In his diary he later observed of those months: ‘I have often thought I was nearly out of my mind – and have certainly never quite recovered it.’ Arthur plunged into self-hatred and depression, and even wrote to the august Roman Catholic Cardinal Newman for advice – but he could not approach his father. Whatever Arthur might have confided to Mary within the seclusion of her sitting room, with the family at large, especially in front of Papa, no such disturbing sentiments surfaced. At least, not in conversation.
FROM A. C. BENSON’S NOVEL THE HOUSE OF QUIET
The unnamed hero, ‘a distant cousin’, remembers ‘how strangely and secretly the crucial moment, the most agonising crisis of my life, drifted upon me’
The [Revivalist] meeting was held in a hall in a side street; we went smiling and talking, and took our places in a crowded room. . . [The preacher] had not spoken half-a-dozen words before I felt as though he and I were alone in the world.
. . Every word he said burnt into my soul. He seemed to probe the secrets of my innermost heart; to be analysing, as it were, before the Judge of the world, the arid and pitiful constituents of my most secret thought. . . his words fell on me like the stabs of a knife. . . Even as he spoke, pierced as I was to the heart by contrition and anguish, I knew that this was not for me. . .He invited all who would be Christ’s to wait and plead with him. . . but I went out into the night, like one dizzied with a sudden blow. . . I felt like a wounded creature, who must crawl into solitude. . . every nervous misery known to man beset me – intolerable depression, spectral remorse, nocturnal terrors. . . For some weeks this lasted, and I think I was nearly mad.
He writes for advice to ‘an eminent Roman Catholic, in whose sermons I had found some encouragement’, and receives an ‘irritated, and bewildered’ reply
[M]y only way was to submit myself to true direction, and he did not see that I had any intention of doing this; that it was obvious that I was being plagued by some sin which I had not ventured to open to him.
FROM A. C. BENSON’S FIRST NOVEL, MEMOIRS OF ARTHUR HAMILTON
Christopher Carr researches the life of his friend Arthur Hamilton, and concludes that a ‘baptism of fire’ that occurred at Cambridge was not the result of a Revivalist meeting, but of ‘some emotional failure, some moral wound’
The exact day was November 8, 1872. It is engraved in a small silver locket that hung on his watch chain, where he was accustomed to have important days of his life marked. . . He had formed, in his last year at school, a very devoted friendship with a younger boy; such friendships. . . when they are truly chivalrous and absolutely pure, are above all other loves, noble, refining, true; passion at white heat without taint, confidence of so intimate a kind as can not even exist between husband and wife. . . This friend, a weak but singularly attractive boy [came to Cambridge] and fell in with a thoroughly bad set there. . . my belief is that disclosures were made on November 8 which revealed to Arthur the state of the case. . . I can hardly picture to myself the agony, disgust, and rage. . . loyalty fighting with a sense of repulsion, pity struggling with honour, which must have convulsed him when he discovered that his friend was not yielding, but deliberately impure.
