Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  THREE

  ‘The Little Hunter’

  At 3 o’clock on an early-summer afternoon in 1880 Madeline Wyndham presented Mary at the Royal Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace.1 This was Mary’s ‘passport to Society’:2 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.3 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.’4 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.5 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.6 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.7

  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.8 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.9

  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.10

  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 1891.11 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 1910.12 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’.13

  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.14 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,15 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 entrée 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.16 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.17

  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’.18 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’.19

  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.20 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’.21 A debutante’s social success was certainly measured out by proposals. Mary, who declared later that ‘Many wanted me to wife!’,22 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”’.23 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.24

  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.25 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.26

  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.27 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.28 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.29 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.30

  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.’31 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’.32 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.33 ‘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.34

  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.35 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)’.36 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’.37