Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  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.7 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.8 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.9

  Mary never really liked being by herself: ‘when I’m alone my spirits go down! Down!’ she said,10 and she found Gosford as depressing as always. ‘I am very low but that’s not strange!’ she told her mother.11 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.’12 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.13 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.14 At Gosford, Mary suffered a violent bilious attack. Madeline thought it was a direct response to her ‘grief’ at the news.15

  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.16 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’.17

  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’.18 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.19 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.20 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.21 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.22

  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.’23 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.24 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 entrée. Laura met Lady Wemyss – who lived not thirty miles from Glen at Gosford – only when she married Alfred.25 Alfred’s brother Spencer described the Tennants to his cousin Mary Gladstone as a family of ‘brilliant young ladies and vulgar parents’.26 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 déjeuners and dinners at the Lion d’Or. They went to the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and then, Mary added in strangely bathetic phrase, they ‘walked home afterwards’.27 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.28 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.29

  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 …!’30 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.’31 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.32 The gossips of the New Club, seeing Mary and Laura dining with Arthur alone, could cause havoc.33

  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.’34 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.35

  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 …’.36 ‘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’.37 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.38 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 …’.39 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 Hyères, 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.’40 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.’41 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.’42

  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.43 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

  Clouds

  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.1 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’.2

  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.3 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.4

  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.5 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.