A brief respite followed, as Mary, Hugo, the Ribblesdales and their eldest son Thomas went for a few days to Lyndhurst in the New Forest, staying in the Crown Hotel. The weather was baking, and the Forest even more lovely than Mary had expected. ‘We have been out all today laying [sic] on our backs looking up at the trees [while] Charty read aloud,’ Mary told her mother. Later in the day Hugo, Tommy and little Tommy raced around, hot, flustered and excited, trying to catch butterflies in nets. That night both couples dined with Sir William Harcourt, who had served in Gladstone’s most recent Cabinet as Chancellor, and Harcourt’s wife Elizabeth, and then took a moonlit drive back to their hotel. The trip was a ‘great success’ for the two flirtatious couples.20
Shortly afterwards, Mary went to Clouds. Hugo quickly absented himself, busying himself in London for the Season’s final weeks. Madeline Wyndham proposed that Mary should stay at Clouds for the rest of the summer rather than return to Stanway. With some misgivings, Mary broached the idea with Percy. After ‘incubating’ the issue for a few days, Percy expressed himself in favour. ‘Pupsie is like Migs & likes to make up his mind & face a thing slowly but then definitely for ever! (not like weathercock Wash),’ Mary told Hugo. To her amusement, Percy had seized on the plan as a means of protection ‘against Mumsie’s indiscriminating hospitality’: using Mary to keep ‘away people he don’t like!’ ‘I hope the poor mad sister won’t be forbidden as being bad for Migs i.e. disagreeable for Pup,’ added Mary.21 The ‘poor mad sister’ was Madeline’s sister Mary Carleton. Widowed early, with two small children, Dorothy and Guy, and little money, she was one of Madeline’s many lame ducks. Percy found her intensely annoying.
Throughout the summer Mary had misgivings about Hugo. She knew his inclination for flirting with other women – ‘pairing off with a conk & having long tête-à-tête & purely (or impurely) personal conversations’22 – and feared he was neglecting his Commons’ duties. ‘You see too much of Violet [Manners] & [I] am getting uneasy,’ she told him in early August,23 for Violet, the most artistic of all the Souls women, did not subscribe to the group’s morality in the way Mary’s other friends did. A few weeks later, under pretext of recounting a heated lunchtime debate with Hilda Brodrick and Betty Balfour on J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, Mary wrote Hugo a lengthy letter about ‘systematic selfishness’ and the necessity of quelling one’s hedonistic will.24 The subtext was not hard to see.
Mary’s magpie-like, irreverent approach to Mill, twisting his theories to serve her own ends, reflected a frequently criticized trait of the Souls: their alleged want of intellectual depth. When Margot Tennant devised a plan for a Souls’ journal entitled ‘To-morrow: a Women’s journal for men’ (the proposed contents of the first issue included ‘Persons and Politics’ by Margot; the ‘Rise and Fall of Professional Beauties’ by Lady de Grey; ‘Foreign and Colonial Gossip’ by Harry Cust; a short story by Oscar Wilde; a book review by John Addington Symonds and ‘Letters to Men’ by George Wyndham),25 the press pounced on the idea, the News of the World revealing with glee that Webber’s suggested title had been ‘Petticoats’.26 Sir William Harcourt gently mocked the plan: ‘Ah, it is their bodies that I like; and now that they are going to show us their souls all naked in print I shall not care for them.’27 In fact, the journal never came to pass.
By late August, Mary, Hilda and Betty had finished Mill and were planning two days of Butler’s sermons and dissertations before taking the ‘plunge into Sorley’s Ethics of Naturalism, which I hope & trust to have finished before practical Physics in the shape of giving birth to an infant puts a temporary stop to my Ethics – I shall study Physiology first and as intelligence dawns, & the babe looks & smiles at the light, I shall study Psychology combined with jurisprudence & so I shall get back to Ethics again,’ Mary said.28 The other goings-on of the house impinged little upon her. ‘Mr. Adeane’s here (Marie’s brother) rather a muff I think,’ she told Hugo.29
Charles Adeane, whose sister Marie was a maid of honour to the Queen,30 was a twenty-three-year-old Cambridgeshire landowner. He had been courting Mananai since her debut that spring. Of all the sisters, Mananai came closest to replicating their mother’s ‘sweetness and social charm’, without the underlying steel.31 Few were likely to exclaim, as Mananai did, how ‘lovely’ February was as a month, and mean it.32 Her solemn interest in clothes and titles prompted Percy to nickname her ‘Madeline the Mondaine’.33 As a child she had had a tendency to ‘twitch! & wink! Terribly’,34 and despite being older by two years, her development had always noticeably lagged behind the precocious Pamela’s. Like Guy Wyndham, she was a lesser star in the family constellation, but she was passionately supportive of her siblings, championing their achievements and mourning their defeats with utter sincerity, and beloved by them for it.
Mananai found the Souls’ intellectual jousting daunting. Harry Cust earned her lasting affection by confessing to her that he was just as bashful as she: a lie, but a comforting one.35 She felt far more at ease with Charlie Adeane, good-hearted, rather ponderous, apt to pontificate about the problems besetting agriculture, and from a more stolid family of courtiers (although not entirely without spark: Charlie’s jovial uncle Alick, a groom in waiting, had provoked one of the Queen’s most famous comments when he recounted a risqué joke at a state dinner. ‘We are not amused,’36 she replied).
Portrait of Miss Madeline Wyndham, aged sixteen: Mananai on the brink of adulthood, by Edward Burne-Jones.
None of the Wyndhams was particularly impressed by Charlie. Mary and Pamela found the ‘longueurs’ in his conversation a little trying.37 With glee Mary told Hugo that the hapless suitor had tried sounding out Fräulein in confidence about his prospects – a confidence not kept.38 After leaving Clouds, Charlie tried to send Mananai a bracelet as a gift. Madeline Wyndham refused to allow her daughter to accept it. In a friendly but reserved letter, she explained that the Wyndhams thought Mananai too young to marry and did not approve of the five-year age gap between the lovers. Her response was without a shadow of the affection shown to Hugo when he was courting Mary – and he also was five years older than his intended bride.39 Displaying the tolerant good humour that he almost always managed to employ with the Wyndhams, Charlie agreed to make no declaration to Mananai just yet. He asked whether he might send the bracelet to Madeline Wyndham, who could then give it to her daughter; ‘may I say, with my love? … Certainly being in love is not cheerful,’ he added, assuring Madeline that he had read over her letter ‘about fifty times’.40
Madeline Wyndham’s excuses were a pretext. As Souls, it did not matter that Charlie was a Liberal. What mattered was that Charlie’s income, from the Cambridgeshire estate he had inherited upon his alcoholic father’s death, was just £3,000 to £4,000 a year. He could not hope for any more. Given the parlous state of eastern England’s arable estates, he might end up receiving markedly less. As Percy commented, Charlie and any wife of his would not be ‘poor’ but they would not be ‘at all rich’ either.41 Madeline Wyndham thought her charming daughter could do better.
The last weekend of August found the Wyndhams at Clouds with Sibyl Queensberry and her two youngest children, Arthur and Edith Douglas, known respectively as ‘Bosie’ and ‘Wommy’ (the nicknames themselves abbreviations of ‘Boysie’ and ‘Little Woman’), and with Wilfrid Blunt and his teenage daughter Judith. Sibyl and her children frequently visited Clouds, all the more since Sibyl’s acrimonious divorce from the abusive Marquess of Queensberry that year. On Saturday, Arthur Balfour, George Wyndham and Henry James were due to arrive.
In the months since his arrival in Ireland Balfour had shown the Irish – and Westminster – that they had underestimated him. The Unionist policy was to kill Home Rule with kindness, but conciliation went hand in hand with coercion. Balfour made good on his promise to ‘be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law’.42 Anyone inciting tenants in the rent strike, known as the Plan of Campaign, was immediately imprisoned. Prisoners’ complaints about th
e putrid conditions in their cells were met with short shrift: the connection between diseased lungs and Irish patriotism was interesting, said Balfour drily.43 By late August, the political world was alight with the news that the Government was putting the Irish MP John Dillon on trial for his part in the Plan of Campaign.
George, erstwhile ‘Fenian’, proud descendant of the Patriot Lord Edward, was now an instrument of one of the most brutally effective periods of repression since the British had crushed the 1798 Rebellion. Yet the Wyndhams managed to reconcile the two. George wanted to save ‘darling Ireland’, as Mary called it,44 and to gain ‘high office’. Quelling agitators could, just about, be interpreted as helping the country reclaim calm. And the Wyndhams were ambitious. They ignored any contradiction, including Madeline Wyndham who while visiting George in Ireland trawled through antique shops, collecting commemorative buttons of the heroes of ’98 to distribute to her children and grandchildren, and requested all family members making the trip to do the same.45 Wilfrid Blunt was resolutely of the opposing view. Ireland was his latest anti-imperialist hobby horse. In 1886, he had visited Ireland and subsequently published in the Pall Mall Gazette, which was under the editorship of the sensationalist journalist W. T. Stead, a devastating exposé of the barbarity of the evictions he found there.46 He now intended to return to Ireland in October to join the fray. He was keenly looking forward to confronting Balfour at Clouds, but by the time Balfour arrived Blunt was already on the back foot, because he had decided that he was in love with Mary: ‘the cleverest best & most beautiful woman in the world with just that touch of human sympathy which brings her to the level of our sins’, he wrote in his diary.47
The family’s reverence for Balfour cast Blunt into a deep gloom. ‘Balfour is here under particularly favourable [circumstances] as he is in love with Mary Elcho, to whom he makes himself of course charming, but, possibly for the same reason, I do not like him much … He has a grand passion for Mary – that is quite clear – and it is equally clear that she has a tendresse for him,’ said Wilfrid as he watched the two, heads bent in conversation, drift off on long walks. ‘But what their exact relations may be I cannot determine. Perhaps it is better not to be too wise, and as all the house accepts the position as the most natural in the world, there let us leave it.’48
It nonetheless made Blunt bad-tempered. No one – except Mary – escaped criticism in his diary. James, ‘always a little behindhand’ in conversation, was disappointing – ‘For a man who writes so lightly and well it is amazing how dull-witted he is.’49 Judith was unacceptably mute at dinner while Pamela and Bosie played boisterous rhyming games. Blunt’s pen was most acidic about Balfour: ‘As a young man he must have been charming and still has some of the ways of a tame cat.’50
On the tennis court, a red-faced and ferocious Blunt, partnering George Wyndham, triumphed over a nonchalant Arthur and Guy Wyndham. That night at dinner, Balfour admitted, to Blunt’s astonishment, that Home Rule was inevitable: that his party’s coercion was merely stalling. ‘When it comes I shall not be sorry,’ Arthur told the assembled party. ‘Only let us have separation as well as Home Rule; England cannot afford to go on with Irishmen in her Parliament. She must govern herself too.’51
The next day Arthur and George left Clouds for Ireland. Mary, always feeling a little guilty after spending time with Arthur, wrote a particularly affectionate letter to Hugo, professing herself to have been ‘mad with low spirits’ in his absence. ‘[Y]ou are such a deeer [sic] companion to Migs,’ she added, looking forward to a honeymoon planned by the Elchos after the birth of the child ‘as a caged bird to freedom’.52 Two weeks later Blunt mounted the hustings at a public meeting. ‘Men of Galway,’ he declared, and was promptly pulled down by English troops and arrested. ‘We are trying to put yr cousin in gaol. I have not heard whether we have succeeded,’ Balfour wrote to Mary as Blunt awaited trial, imagining that Blunt would be ‘horribly disappointed’ if he were set free.53 On 27 September, at Clouds, Mary gave birth to her third child, a girl named Cynthia (‘Cincie’) after the goddess of the moon, in tribute to Clouds. A month later, Mary Carleton died and Clouds received two new inhabitants, her orphaned children, Dorothy and Guy, who came to live with the Wyndhams as their wards.54 Madeline Wyndham went into mourning for her sister, leaving Percy to chaperone Mananai on the round of country-house visits that autumn. Percy was ‘splendid’, Mananai loyally reported, but he had no experience in the art of marrying off a daughter and no inclination to develop the requisite skills now.55
All that autumn, Home Rulers massed in Trafalgar Square, their numbers swelled by socialist agitators and members of the unemployed. In Ireland, police shot down rioters at Mitchelstown, and Balfour stood by them. In London, in November, a non-violent protest organized by the Metropolitan Radical Federation demanding the release of William O’Brien – imprisoned again for his part in the Plan of Campaign – turned into ‘Bloody Sunday’, when police set upon the marchers, whose numbers included William Morris, Annie Besant and George Bernard Shaw. In the resultant fighting, which spilled along the Strand, Parliament Street and all the way to Shaftesbury Avenue, two policemen were stabbed to death, a young clerk called Alfred Linnell killed and a further 200 injured. It was to prove the last great outing of the London crowd.56 In the Commons Irish MPs compared Balfour to Heliogabalus, a Roman emperor who revived himself by bathing in children’s blood.57 At Christmas, Arthur wrote to Mary in red ink: ‘Greetings from Bl[oo]dy B[a]lf[ou]r, I write to you in the hue appropriate to my sanguinary character,’ using the name by which he was now most commonly known in Ireland and to the world at large.58 Six months later, when buying a copy of Funny Folk to while away a train journey from Stanway to Clouds, Pamela was diverted by a cartoon she found therein depicting Balfour as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in reference to R. L. Stevenson’s recent smash-hit novel. Better still, Pamela told Mary, ‘the “ill-starred advisors were you & Mamma!!!”’59
The Wyndhams had, very publicly, made it clear where their allegiances lay. In January 1888, Blunt was sentenced to two months’ hard labour in Kilmainham Jail. He secured maximum publicity, first refusing to swap his greatcoat for the standard prison-issue one that barely covered his knees; and then bringing a case against Balfour for assault.60 The more liberal minded of the Wyndhams’ friends – the Morrises and the Burne-Joneses – staunchly supported Blunt. Janey Morris thought it a ‘splendid commotion’.61 The Wyndhams believed, as George said, that ‘Wilfrid is … temporarily out of his senses.’62 They left him to his latest hobby horse. On the very day that Wilfrid was returned to his cell after his failed appeal, Percy, Madeline Wyndham and Mary arrived at the Chief Secretary’s Lodge to hold ‘high revel’, in Wilfrid’s own phrase. He passed a sleepless night in his cell composing anagrams of his rival’s name on a slate. The Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour of Whittingehame became ‘How! Am I not Arthur B. a huge thief, the brutal gaoler of Irishmen?’63
NINE
Mananai
That spring, the Wyndhams broke with their fast-establishing tradition of Easters at Clouds. On Good Friday, Pamela wrote to Mary from Madeline Wyndham’s darkened bedroom at Belgrave Square. Their mother had been given ‘a fresh brain tonic’ by Dr Cumberbatch and ‘is going on capitally’. She was ‘quite quiet’, and either Pamela, Mananai or Percy was constantly at her bedside. ‘Darling Mary it is such a relief that she is better isn’t it?’1
From the tone of Pamela’s letter it is clear that this was not the first such episode, although it may have been more serious than most. Certainly it was closely concealed. Visiting the Poynters around this time, Percy was horrified when Agnes Poynter said something to suggest that ‘she knew how Mamma had been unwell. I hope it was my fancy but I fear not,’ Percy reported to Mary, questioning her closely as to whether she had ‘by any chance’ told Georgie Burne-Jones (Agnes’s sister) ‘that Mamma was muddled, or had a temporary loss of consciousness, or in short anything of that kind?’2 Whatever reply Mary sent is m
issing from the letterbooks Madeline Wyndham compiled when in better health.
The catalyst, most likely, was the combined pressure of Mary Carleton’s death, the responsibility of her new charges and no doubt Charlie Adeane’s inexorable progress – for he and Mananai became engaged in May. ‘Thank goodness there has been no “scratching up of dirt”! but everything has been as “serene as oil!”,’ Mananai exclaimed to Mary.3 The Wyndhams invited Charlie’s mother, Lady Elizabeth, and her second husband Michael Biddulph, a Liberal Unionist banker, to a slightly stolid engagement dinner at Belgrave Square which wanted, Percy said, for ‘our two brightest stars’ – Mary and George – to liven it up.4 A recovered Madeline Wyndham swallowed her misgivings and embraced Charlie with the warmth that she had Hugo. Charlie began addressing her as ‘M.M.’, short for ‘Mother Madeline’, and soon proved an infinitely better son-in-law in every way. ‘I like what I know of Charlie, I like him very much, the more I see of him the more I like him,’ Percy told Mary stoutly.5
Those Wild Wyndhams Page 12
