Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Six weeks later on a Monday afternoon in late July, Mananai and Charlie were married, as Mary had been, at St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square. The nineteen-year-old bride, reported Modern Society, wore a white satin dress embroidered with silver, ruched with crêpe lisse on to which was pinned orange blossom, as was traditional. A diamond-encrusted sun (an Adeane family heirloom) pinned her tulle veil to her hair. Mary’s toddler sons Ego and Guy were pageboys in blue satin and rather alarming-sounding ‘fanciful hats and feathers’; the bridesmaids, among them Pamela and Dorothy Carleton, wore white crêpe dresses and bolero jackets, white tulle hats, pink stockings and heart-shaped enamel brooches with a double heart picked out in pearls and diamonds – a gift from the triumphant, not entirely indigent bridegroom.6

  The newlyweds spent the first part of their honeymoon at Panshanger. It poured with rain every day, but, holed up reading aloud to each other in Lady Cowper’s boudoir, Madeline and Charlie were ‘much too happy to care for the elements’. ‘Tout va bien,’ Charlie assured his ‘beloved M.M.’ in a letter marked ‘private’, so not to be read out at the breakfast table or handed around to family members as such letters often were. ‘Madeline is quite well … & perfectly comfortable.’7 Charlie’s coded message was scarcely needed. Madeline Adeane’s ecstatic letters expressed delight at every aspect of ‘this delicious new life’. ‘I … wonder if you felt and thought the same as I do,’ she asked Mary, longing for a ‘confidential chat’.8 She could hardly wait to show her family ‘how truly, and blissfully happy I am – letters are very nice but not quite satisfactory. I don’t think that I shall have to tell you because I think that when you see us you will see how happy we are,’ she enthused to her mother.9 ‘She is so beloved your & my Madeline,’ Charlie told his mother-in-law, ‘& so good. No words of mine can express my love & adoration for her – she is a perfect woman – & that article which is rare is certainly the most wonderful & most beautiful of all God’s works – much love to you my dearest – to whom she owes her existence, to whom I owe my love.’10

  The Adeanes snatched a brief visit to Stanway where the Wyndhams were staying with Mary. As a married woman, Madeline Adeane could now chaperone her sister, and so she and Pamela experienced the novelty of walking alone outside for the first time in their lives. The Adeanes then headed for Victoria Station and the boat train that would carry them (Madeline Adeane dressed in her new ‘most comfortable’ travelling clothes: a grey suit with hat and veil to match), Charlie’s valet, Madeline’s lady’s maid Alice and a vast amount of luggage to the Continent.11

  ‘Fancy me in Paris!’ said Mananai the next day as she lay on her bed in the Hôtel Meurice, gazing out of the window at the Tuileries baking in the August heat, revelling in the sounds of bells ringing, horses’ hooves clattering and whips cracking outside. ‘Charlie knows Paris very well,’ she informed her mother, recounting drives up the Champs-Elysées and through the Bois de Boulogne; an ‘excellent’ band in the Jardins d’Acclimation; and visits to the Invalides and the Louvre. Shortly afterwards, defeated by the heat, they retreated to Chantilly to stay with ‘dear Baronne de St Didier’, one of Lady Elizabeth’s large network of friends eager to fête the newlyweds. Everything was a source of wonderment to Mananai from the tremendous amount that French grandees seemed to eat and drink to the turquoise-studded gold butterfly that awaited her on her dressing table at Chantilly: so clever, it could be either a brooch or a hairpin.

  ‘Fancy me in Switzerland!!!’ exclaimed an incredulous Mananai two weeks later, snatching a moment before ‘déjeuner’ to write to George from the Hôtel National on Lake Geneva, while Charlie peered out of the window, examining through opera glasses the boats on the lake. They had attended a breakfast ‘for 16!!!’ held by the Baronesse de Rothschild (‘quite the ugliest lady I think I have ever seen but most kind’), at which guests entered as if to dinner, in pairs, and were quite outnumbered by footmen.12 From Switzerland they headed onwards to Italy. ‘Florence is the most perfect Paradise of the sightseer,’ George advised Mananai: ‘you have everything packed in the space of Belgrave Square, and can walk in and out of scores of historical Treasure-houses of Beauty with all the ease of a turn in the East garden and round by the green river at Clouds …’13 The Adeanes read diligently in anticipation. ‘We have just read The Makers of Florence, Charlie is now finishing The Makers of Venice & I am going to begin Lives of Italian Painters by Jameson,’ Mananai reported to George.14 They kept a joint diary, and Mananai filled a ‘birthday book’ (that is, an autograph album) with the signatures of all the people they met along the way.

  Travel worn, weary and still blissfully happy the Adeanes returned to England in September. They went directly to Clouds, where they were crowned with wreaths made by Fräulein and slept in a bed decorated by Madeline Wyndham with handmade angel wings. From there they went to Babraham to open the house, shut up since the death of Charlie’s father nineteen years before. Charlie’s old nurse accompanied them. She was so overwhelmed by the occasion that she broke down and wept when they arrived.15

  Babraham Hall near Cambridge was a rambling red-brick Victorian-Jacobean mishmash possessing, thanks to Charlie’s profligate father, a disproportionately large ballroom and a somewhat incongruous Italianate colonnade. Mananai was undaunted. An exploratory drive around the estate revealed ‘belts of trees and banks of firs’ that she thought somewhat reminiscent of the Wiltshire Downs. She took out a subscription to her mother’s favourite periodical the Garden and began devising plans for wild flower beds like those of Clouds – perhaps even a small golf course like the one that Percy had recently built.16 Cautious Charlie may have cavilled at the cost of the latter, but he gave his new wife free rein inside the house. She painted the upstairs rooms white and papered the downstairs reception rooms with Morris patterns. She poked about in the attics hoping to find treasures as Mary had done (there were sadly few), covered bulky, old-fashioned cabinets with curtains and swathed tables in lengths of silk sent to her by Madeline Wyndham for that purpose. ‘All I do is a feeble imitation of you,’ she told her mother cheerfully.17

  Mananai threw herself with relish into the life of a county squire’s wife. She made friends with the local gentry, visited the poor of the estate and the nearby villages, entertained the tenant farmers and their families to tea. ‘Our life is that of an ordinary English house,’ Charlie said, by which he meant ordinary for the landed gentry, since most English households did not portion their time between ‘1 day’s partridge shooting to 2 days’ croquet (new) tennis – walking, talking, reading’.18 Perhaps the only hint of the bohemian roots of young Mrs Adeane was the pet fawn that followed her, like a puppy, everywhere she went.19

  TEN

  Conflagration

  Madeline Adeane’s precipitate departure from schoolroom to matronhood grieved Pamela intensely. She bickered with Fräulein and snapped at Dorothy,1 itching to enter the adult world. The Wyndhams had a tradition of taking each daughter to Ireland for their first ‘grown-up’ visit.2 In September 1888 it was Pamela’s turn. She was bewitched by this first visit to the country of her ancestors: ‘it is like an enchanted land’, she rhapsodized to Mary from Killarney, looking out from her bedroom window on to lush green fields, a lake ‘twinkling and sparkling in the sunlight like beautiful Lohengrin’s armour’ and shadowy mountains in the distance, shifting colour from smoky grey to ‘hearts ease purple’.3 She and her parents visited George and Sibell, the de Vescis at Abbey Leix and, briefly, the Vice Regal Lodge. ‘It is great fun visiting and it … doesn’t feel like me; I feel very “grown-up” going down to dinner in long reach-elbow gloves,’ she told Mary, drawing for her sister ‘word pictures’ of her fellow guests.4

  Pamela returned to a Clouds echoing with Mananai’s absence, counting down the months until her own debut. The sisters were briefly reunited when the Adeanes spent Christmas at Clouds. But by the new year the party was just Percy, Madeline Wyndham, Pamela, Dorothy Carleton, Fräulein, Mary, now pregnant for a f
ourth time, and her three children. George and Sibell were in Ireland, Guy in India with his regiment, Hugo off shooting. Mary was planning to leave for Stanway the following day. The Charteris trunks stood packed and ready. That night, Mary sat up score-keeping for her mother and Fräulein in an animated game of piquet, going to bed rather later than planned.5

  When the clanging of a bell woke her from a deep sleep Mary presumed it to be the bell that rang around the house at 8 o’clock every morning to rouse its inhabitants for breakfast. She ‘got out of bed, put on dressing gown, picked up a few things almost leisurely’, when her bedroom door was flung open by Bertha Devon, now head housemaid, with five-year-old Ego in her arms crying, ‘Oh Miss Mary, you must leave the house the house is on fire.’ Mary rushed on to the landing, ‘saw the ruddy glare & heard the low sharp snapping’. At that moment, Percy dashed past. He told her that Guy and Cincie had been carried to safety by their nursemaid Mrs Fry. ‘I was wild to see the children at once & rushed down to find them.’6

  The passages down which she raced were already filling with dense, scorching smoke. Once safely outside in the freezing January night she found most of her family, a night-gown-clad Madeline Wyndham desperately bruised from hoisting the Baldovinetto off the hall’s wall and toppling off the chair on which she stood under its weight (the bruises were so deep that they did not fade for weeks),7 but only one of her children: a small scared Ego in his red dressing gown still being held in Bertha Devon’s arms. ‘Mama and I were in despair,’ said Mary, ‘helpless distracted anguish … we could see Guy & Cynthia nowhere & … the roaring crackling flames & the showering sparks & smoke spreading everywhere made one wild with fear …’

  ‘Don’t Mamma, don’t,’ screamed Pamela as Madeline Wyndham and Mary tried to force their way back into the burning building. ‘Where’s Fraulein, has anyone awakened Fraulein?’ Percy shouted above the din, having forgotten in his panic that he had awakened her himself. ‘Then’, said Mary, ‘through the panic and the terror came the cry of “they’re here, they’re safe”’: Fräulein and Mrs Fry carrying Cincie and Guy. In the time it had taken to wrap the small children in blankets to protect them, the smoke had made the passage down which Bertha carrying Ego had fled impassable. Only Clouds’ warren of entrances, exits and passageways had allowed them to find another route.

  The horse-drawn fire engines sent from Mere, Wilton and Salisbury were horribly delayed by the perilous conditions. Wilton’s horses fell down three times on the icy roads in the 18 miles between the two houses, and were ultimately too injured to continue, requiring fresh horses to be borrowed from nearby farms. Villagers, who had rushed up the hill in wagons from East Knoyle and Milton, helped the house carpenters form a human chain that saved most of the Wyndhams’ treasures from the ground floor: books were piled high in dog baskets on the lawn; paintings, furniture and even the huge Morris carpet from the drawing room were saved. Someone (presumably a plucky housemaid) flung out of the window the contents of Mary’s trunks (not the trunks themselves, Mary hastened to add), which were caught by Mary and Fräulein standing underneath. The firemen reached Clouds too late to do more than contain the fire and save the offices from becoming part of the conflagration.8 As the great chandelier in the hall crashed down in a shower of glass and sparks they aimed their hoses at the flames now dancing from the roof of Clouds, but ‘the flames seemed rather to like the water’, and fuelled by the draught provided by the hall roared more fiercely still. It was so bitterly cold that the captain of Wilton’s fire brigade froze solid to the side of his ladder. The villagers retreated to their wagonettes, munching on egg sandwiches and ‘hugely enjoying themselves’, said Mary, likening them, without rancour, to the crowd at the races in William Powell Frith’s Derby Day.

  On the slippery terrace, with the trees laced with hoar frost silhouetted behind them, the family stood ‘& … watched the dear house burn’.9 Unknown hands covered them in a scarecrow assortment of warmer garb: over Mary’s orange dressing gown she sported several shawls and an ulster, and on her head a bowler hat. ‘Oh, my Bible, and oh, my canaries!’ cried Pamela, wringing her hands beside her. Madeline Wyndham, standing a little apart with a rapt look on her face, was silent. She wore ‘a rough homespun coat’ over her nightgown, remembered one neighbour, ‘and the lace frills escaped beneath the tweed sleeves and fell over her hands which were flung out in an unconscious gesture of wonder at the sight. She was entranced by its beauty and terror.’10

  The cause of the fire, it was later discovered, was a lighted candle left by a sleepy housemaid in a linen cupboard. A moment of carelessness – born, doubtless, of exhaustion – resulted in a conflagration that gutted the house, leaving only its shell standing. It took three days for the smouldering ashes to cool enough for it to be safe to approach the ruins; the cellar was still hot for a week after the fire. Burne-Jones’s cartoon of the Ascension was lost, many items on the first floor and everything on the second floor. ‘All the childrens [sic] lovely wardrobe toys silver cups birds etc & all the nurses clothes & money gone,’ mourned Mary. The contents of her trunks served to dress all the females in the household. ‘Mrs Fry looks very nice in my red lawn tennis jersey & skirt,’ she told Frances Balfour.

  Two weeks later, back at Stanway, Mary was hosting Doll Liddell, Gladys de Grey, Emmie and Eddy Bourke, the Pembrokes, Harry and Daisy White, George Curzon, Alan Charteris and D. D. Balfour. D.D., who later married Alfred Lyttelton, was no relation to Arthur Balfour. A London businessman’s daughter, she was drawn into the Souls by merit of her brilliant talk and engaging intellect. Curzon, meeting her for the first time, was drawn by her considerable personal charms and tried to grope her when they were momentarily alone in the dining room at breakfast.11 The Whites, the only non-British Souls, were Americans who had been in England since 1884 by reason of diplomat Harry White’s position as First Secretary to the US Legation. Daisy White, a close friend of Edith Wharton’s since childhood, was well admired, pretty, ambitious, and a key player among the rivalrous female Souls.12 That evening, the party dressed as Cavaliers and Puritans, and sat on the stairs, moonlight streaming over them as D.D. and Emmie sang. ‘Most of us looked quite picturesque and we all felt very sentimental. I wish you had been there and then it might have been perfect for me; or as perfect as anything can be,’ Mary told Arthur.13

  In fact, and unusually for Mary, she had counted the days until the party ended.14 The fire had left her ‘physically abattu … as if everything had been wiped out of my brain with a clean sponge or burnt away’.15 Each morning was devoted to writing ‘Fire letters’, replying to the scores of condolences she received – many asking if it was true that Clouds really had been razed to the ground. ‘I’ve done 25 today & yest & spent whole mornings in bed, writing and blotting self & sheets,’ she recounted to Arthur some two weeks after the fire itself.16

  In the fire’s aftermath, the family ‘knew nothing except how much we all loved each other & how close together we were drawn’.17 ‘[H]ow tightly we are bound … how we all stand and fall together,’ George Wyndham said to his mother.18 Volatile Pamela was ‘very brave and behaved splendidly’ despite the loss of everything she owned, but she had nightmares about the fire for years.19 To doubtless intense relief Madeline Wyndham’s nerves held up under the strain: perhaps the destruction of her jewel-like house confirmed her belief that the forces of light and darkness walked hand in hand. At least, she often said, death had never entered into the house.20 Yet the utter destruction of Clouds – what Georgie Burne-Jones called ‘that beautiful monument of loving and successful labour’21 – was, said Betty Balfour, a ‘heart-breaking event’.22 Philip Burne-Jones cited the calamity to Gerald Balfour as philosophical proof of the existence of evil.23 The most romantic of the Wyndhams’ children echoed this view. ‘Who the gods love die young,’ said Pamela, describing Clouds as ‘too ideal to live’.24 From Ireland, George vowed to ‘begin at once defeating evil Fortune and making it lovely again’.25 Both he and Pamela regar
ded the fire, the first calamity they had faced, as an indication that the world must have been corrupted. Their self-conscious bravery is a reminder of how distinct Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ of rich and poor remained: it displayed the arrogance of the Wyndhams’ ‘Plantagenet’ strain. Of all the Wyndhams’ children only Mary put the loss in perspective, not railing against fate, only pitying her parents. ‘I’ve aches and aches for them and I have not suffered half enough it’s too hard; all their love and labour lost, when one did so want them to enjoy the well-earned fruits of all their pains,’ she wrote to Arthur.26

  The conflagration in Poynton destroys, for ever, the work of a lifetime. The Wyndhams defied this. Webb’s estimate for rebuilding was £26,741 17s. To Percy’s relief, the insurers of the house and its contents paid in full, £28,345 12s from the Sun Insurance Company and £27,000 from the Royal Insurance Company, enabling him to rebuild Clouds identically – except with fire-proof flooring, additional tin-lined water pipes to avoid further troublesome plumbing and a new boot cupboard for Percy in his dressing room – and to refurnish it, replacing treasures lost in the fire. Percy calculated that he was only £3,000 out of pocket.27 The Wyndhams moved into the offices for the duration of the rebuilding, operating a reduced staff and having only close friends to stay. ‘It is a good thing that our architect was a socialist because we find ourselves just as comfortable in the servants’ quarters as we were in our own,’ commented Madeline Wyndham cheerfully.28 They re-entered the ‘Beautiful Phoenix’, as they termed it, two and a half years later on 29 August 1891.29