Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  ‘I think there must be no heartache like that of losing a child,’ said Pamela as she watched over Mary, lying ‘very still’ in her quiet darkened room.17 ‘I am sure she is brave & wonderful,’ wrote Mananai impotently to her mother as the news reached the Adeanes at Babraham; ‘kiss her from me.’18 Colin was buried on a sunny bank under a laburnum tree in the East Knoyle churchyard. By convention Mary did not attend to see the small white coffin decked with flowers go into the earth. A notice in the Evening Times alerted the world. Letters of condolence flooded in, offering varying degrees of comfort. Almost all spoke of how close Mary had been to her son, how much she had loved him, how happy his life had been.

  Around 14 per cent of infants born in England and Wales between 1860 and 1900 never reached their first birthday. Disease was the most common cause of death, and scarlet fever, gastro-enteritis, dysentery, measles, smallpox and tuberculosis among the most prevalent diseases. Upper-class children had a better rate of survival: approximately 8 per cent of infants died in their first year, and 5 per cent between the ages of one and five. The old assumption that parents of this era were somehow immune to infant death has been discredited. Parents cared deeply, particularly when, like Mary, they had no strong religious faith to console them.19

  Outwardly and for the sake of her children she put on a ‘resolute, almost jaunty brightness’. Cincie, who tiptoed out of the nursery to find her mother sitting on the stairs ‘weeping as if her heart must break’, knew differently.20 Mary was plagued by the fear that Colin had died in pain, alone, thinking his mother had abandoned him. She asked Arthur whether life could be checked without great suffering. Arthur employed all his philosophical detachment to help her, but his reductionist argument – ‘It was right that you should be absent … it would have been most wrong because most useless that you should be present’ – can have helped little. But he had a stronger argument: it was ‘not the last farewell, the last look, the last word that ever matters’, but the life preceding it, ‘the endless trifles of which everything really important consists’. Between Mary and Colin ‘there never was anything in your relations … which now you need desire to be unsaid or undone. How rarely can a mother say this of any child?’21

  Mary and her children, accompanied by a nurse and Cincie’s governess Miss Jourdain, did not leave Clouds until March: Guy Charteris had developed complications from the fever and was too ill to be moved until then. They were to convalesce in Hyères, joining Madeline and Percy who had developed the habit of wintering there. Hugo was to make sporadic visits from London.

  The departure was bleak. Guy was sewn up in an eiderdown to protect him from the cold; Cincie wept all the way. Mary had been set on cramming her entire family into one sleeping car, and only with great difficulty was dissuaded from sleeping top-to-toe in a bunk with Cincie, an instinct that seems driven by vulnerability rather than frugality. A party of friends and relatives saw them on to the boat train in London; another met them at Hyères where they settled into a tiny doll’s-house of a place called the Villa Marguerite.

  Anyone who has grieved will be drearily familiar with the path that Mary trod that ‘long and un-ending’ spring, as the exaltation of grief gives way to the dull realization that what seems an experiment in loss is actually a new reality. Without a strong faith – throughout her life, her letters spoke little of God – or her mother’s spiritualist beliefs, Mary found little to console her. ‘I do not feel as if he were near! … but then I should hate & could not bear to feel that he was hanging about, missing the spring and wanting to live,’ she said to her mother. Not knowing what to think, she had only unanswerable questions and a deep sense of guilt. Watching her children grow stronger and play among the same olive groves she had run through as a child, she felt some relief, but ‘Spring intensifies everything.’ She was ‘horrid’, she told her mother, and nothing could help her.22

  Mary and her children left Hyères in mid-May and went straight to Felixstowe. In deep mourning, Mary eschewed the Season entirely, only stopping briefly in London to see Madeline Adeane, who had given birth to a third girl, called Madeline after herself. She then left to summer in Sweden where a Dr Widegren had promised to restore her to health. With a distracted mother, the Charteris children ran wild and unruly. They did not return to Stanway until October 1893, almost a year since they had first left it.23 Colin’s death drove his parents still further apart. Hugo’s absence is notable in the records of this period. Reading Mary’s bald account of her son’s death in Family Record it is hard not to escape the conclusion that she blamed Hugo for her absence from Colin at his death – even, perhaps, for his death. That, even as Mary mourned, in Hermione Leinster’s nurseries was a six-month-old son, a child that was undoubtedly Hugo’s, cannot have failed to intensify Mary’s deep-seated grief and rage.24

  In mid-August Arthur attended a Saturday-to-Monday at Ashridge. Harry Cust, the Brownlows’ heir, Violet Granby and their mutual young cousin Nina Welby were among the party. A drawing of Nina by Violet shows a dark, slim, pretty girl with a distinctly doleful air. Nina was utterly in Violet’s thrall, and well known to be besotted with Harry. Arthur described to Mary an uneventful weekend. He had unsuccessfully tried to evade the clutches of Adelaide Brownlow and been ‘carried off’ by her for a long walk before dinner: ‘she nearly makes me cry with boredom’. He had written a little more of Foundations of Belief, which he had begun in 1892 (it was his second book following on from A Defence of Philosophic Doubt published in 1879),25 played some lawn tennis and had a nice talk on art with a young female guest. ‘H.C. seemed to me rather to neglect his harem – those who were there – but was pleasant enough to the outside world.’26

  Shortly afterwards, Harry went to Clouds. His behaviour seemed promising. ‘He does not flirt in the coarse way he did but is deferential & attentive & vy. pleasant to evry [sic] one. He & George have endless arguments on Poetry,’ Madeline Wyndham told Mary.27 Percy thought Pamela looked prettier, happier and more hopeful every day, though he maintained some misgivings. ‘I hope it may all turn out well,’ he told Mary. ‘I wish I had better grounds for thinking it would.’28 It seems likely that at this point Harry and Pamela became secretly engaged. George Wyndham subsequently told Wilfrid Blunt that only the thought that Lucy Graham Smith might ‘make trouble in the matter’ had prevented an announcement before Lucy had been duly mollified.29

  As Harry left Clouds, the state of affairs was ‘like an extremely delicate weather glass’, said Pamela.30 She knew the dangers of marriage to Harry, but it offered the chance to do more than ‘just live and be passive’. ‘I feel I could without any hesitation jump into a chasm for someone … or cut off a finger – or anything real,’ she told Mary. Her letters were filled with rhetorical flourishes: she was a lone warrior going out to meet an army; a sailor refusing to turn back at the sight of stormy seas. She discussed the conflict between her ‘hill self’ – the self of thoughts, ideas and inspiration, found in church and at Bayreuth – and her ‘earth self’ – ‘the one who talks, sleeps and comes down to breakfast’31 – in a convoluted discourse that would have done justice to George pirouetting in the House of Commons. She explained to Mary:

  One thing I have learnt in my life & I am glad I have learnt it so young, is that to look for peace & happiness in perfect entirety is a wild goose chase in this world … in the end the chances of happiness are more equally balanced than one thinks, what may seem ‘wreckage’ viewed in one way – may not be more ‘wreckage’ than lives outwardly perfectly matched.32

  It was doubtful logic.

  In September, Madeline Wyndham took to her bed. Her guests were told she was suffering from rheumatism and a bad cold. It is likely that her nerves were succumbing under the strain. Pamela and Mananai, who was visiting, were left to hold the fort. Pamela took pleasure in the ill-concealed surprise of their eminent guests – mostly male Souls – at finding her and Mananai hosting with not one of the Souls hostesses, like Mary, Ettie or Margot, in
attendance. She took equal pleasure in defeating their attempts to make her change her mind about Harry. On a sunset walk Richard Haldane, a Scottish Liberal Imperialist barrister who was gradually being drawn within the Souls’ ambit (and whom Walburga, Lady Paget, a fellow guest that week, thought conversed ‘in epigrams and aphorisms’),33 told Pamela that Harry was a man she could better help as friend than as wife, and that he ‘should not regret it’ if she ‘postponed a decision’. The following week Asquith, now Home Secretary, and courting Margot Tennant, talked urgently of silk purses and sows’ ears. Later that day it was Arthur’s turn. From Sweden Mary had begged him to make Pamela see sense, but Arthur was ‘on a pedestal of perfection as always’ and could not bring himself to come down off his plinth to talk about Cust, ‘so we reached home again having discussed civilization!’34 said Pamela mischievously, particularly delighted to have outwitted Arthur, whose understated intelligence always made her own pretensions seem florid, and whose loyalty to Mary made her feel scorned. Pamela liked having primacy in people’s affections.

  For almost a decade, the Souls had prided themselves upon their moral precepts, on behaving in a more high-minded fashion than the Marlborough House Set, who were perpetually plagued by scandal. They were the intellectual, spiritual, thoughtful face of the aristocracy, with men and women in the group existing on an equal plane. This was blown out of the water by what ensued. Unbeknown to everyone except the participants, Harry and Nina Welby had been conducting an affair for the previous year, aided and abetted by Violet, who pushed forward Nina, her acolyte, as her candidate for Harry’s wife, knowing that that way she could maintain her hold over her lover. At Ashridge, as a ‘leave-taking’ Harry and Nina spent ‘some nights together … with the result that she had become or thought herself with child’, wrote a fascinated Wilfrid Blunt in his diary some months later, agog at the scandal that threatened to undo the Souls.35

  In the aftermath of the affair, the Souls shunned Violet, the Machiavellian Circe who had sacrificed the virginal Nina to her own sexual ends. Such outrage over premarital sex was to a degree dissimulation. It happened among the elite. It is suggested that Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill had used Lady Randolph’s unwed pregnancy to secure their families’ approval of their match.36 Even among the Souls, Margot Tennant used Wilfrid Blunt to relieve her of her virginity – if his diary can be believed.37 But it was not common, and a scandal like this was unthinkable. In September, Nina wrote to Harry to tell him that she was pregnant. Harry either did not reply, or replied ‘with great brutality’.38 In desperation, Nina sought Violet’s help. Violet, in Nina’s words, took ‘the matter out of my hands’ and bruited the affair about the Souls, imploring the Brownlows, Balfour, Asquith, Curzon to help save Harry from ‘worldly disgrace’ and make him marry Nina.

  The resultant chaos is reflected in the tangle of papers in the Whittingehame archives, with the instruction ‘Mr Balfour says burn eventually’ scribbled across the front. By unspoken agreement, Arthur, as ‘High Priest’ of the Souls, was to resolve the crisis. His inclination to destroy this evidence is unsurprising. ‘I am coming to you on a matter of life and death’ reads an undated scrap of paper from Nina; ‘Oh! I feel more fiendish than anyone can ever have felt before’ reads a letter from Violet. A letter from Lady Welby-Gregory, imploring Arthur to use his influence to make Harry marry her daughter is followed by outraged missives from Adelaide Brownlow deploring her nephew’s behaviour; and telegrams from George Wyndham and George Curzon, Balfour’s lieutenants, ‘tearing about the country on one sad errand after another’ trying to settle the matter and keep it hidden from the outside world.39

  The matter was so heavily hushed up at the time that even those within the Souls were not sure of exactly what was happening. To this day, accounts differ.40 ‘Believe nothing that you hear,’ George told Ettie Grenfell. ‘No one whom you will meet knows the whole truth & those who know a part spend their time in perverting it.’41 ‘I am so anxious so anxious,’ said Pamela, bombarding Sibell with questions and God with her prayers.42 By this time, George had broken the news of Nina’s pregnancy to his family, and Madeline Wyndham, collapsing along with the whole house of cards, had been hustled off to Bournemouth in an invalid’s carriage (that is, a railway carriage fitted out with a brass bed and sprung mattress so that she could lie flat all the way).43

  There was only one way this matter could be resolved. Harry must marry Nina, although Balfour had to threaten Cust with social ostracism and political exile before he complied.44 On 3 October 1893 Harry stood once again before Pamela by the hearthstone in Clouds’ hall. With George lurking quietly in the background he revealed to Pamela the full extent of events and his impending forced marriage. ‘Whatever I did, sad, mad and bad I always said to myself, “I have got Pamela, like a star in a cupboard to come back to,’ said Harry.45 Pamela did not castigate Harry then, or ever. She had already cast him as a Christlike figure and reserved her anger for the world that had sacrificed him on the altar of conventional morality. Harry described Pamela as ‘a little heroine thro’out & a little saint as well’.46 He immortalized their mutual sacrifice in the poem ‘Non Nobis’, which presented Pamela as that saint and himself as a flawed mortal purged by suffering.

  It was inevitable, perhaps, that the Wyndhams should send Pamela abroad to escape the scandal. The Adeanes had been planning a trip to India. Percy paid for them to take Pamela with them: no expense spared. A passage was booked on the Ganges in November47 (fortunately not on the same ship as Lucy Graham Smith, who was also dispatched to India by her family to recover from Cust). In the intervening weeks, Pamela was sent to Saighton Grange, one of the Westminsters’ houses in Cheshire, where George and Sibell lived, to stay with them.

  Many years later Osbert Sitwell commented to Pamela on her apparently unlimited reserves of social grace. In response Pamela showed him her scarred palms: to maintain composure when enraged she clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails cut into the skin.48 She remembered this time as a blur of pain and suffering: shaking and sobbing in Saighton’s chapel while clasped in Sibell’s arms. But in front of the other guests she tried to maintain her composure. She sang old sea ballads and read Blunt some of her poetry. He thought her ‘delightful, with wit and sense and feeling’; her poetry ‘really excellent, original and good, far beyond what is usual with young ladies’, and was so taken with his young cousin that he was moved to compose one of his acrostics, a favoured seductive tool, using her name – Pamela Genevieve Adelaide Wyndham – to praise her to the skies,49 as a woman capable of inspiring a knight to valorous battle, ‘empires [to] bend and break’ and ‘kingdoms [to] crumble down’.50

  Such was Society’s understanding of a common code that when, on his return to Crabbet a few days later Wilfrid read the bald announcement in The Times ‘that Harry Cust has been “recently married” to Miss Welby’,51 and that the newlyweds had departed England for the Continent52 – without the customary engagement announcement – he immediately knew something was up. As George Curzon made his way to the Carlton Club in Pall Mall, he was ‘inundated with enquiries’ from intrigued acquaintances who had also seen the suspicious notice. London was pricking up its ears for a scandal. The Souls closed ranks. ‘Since H.C. has, though tardily done the right thing I am sure you will agree that we should now try to save both of them from the consequences of this foolish delay,’ Curzon proposed in a note dashed off to Arthur as soon as he was safely inside. He suggested they cobble together a story that ‘will impose upon none of the innermost circle: but if industriously circulated may shut the mouths of the public’.53 The approved version, neatly typed and sent inter alia to the Tennants at the Souls stronghold of the Glen and to the intractable Brownlows, explains a long attachment, familial opposition on both sides (due to Harry’s ‘entanglements with married women’: a positively safe vice now in light of recent events), a decision to marry ‘at all hazards nonetheless’. The story contained enough truth to be almost plausible,
although as Nina’s elder brother Charles said ruefully, ‘it’s a thin veil at best’.54

  ‘Flirtation practice’ had brought the Souls to the edge of public scandal and they recoiled. ‘To a good many pretty tough and experienced men and women of the world this has been a positively startling revelation of the things that can happen amongst people presumably refined and well-meaning,’ said Lord Pembroke.55 Eight months later, Wilfrid Blunt lunched with Margaret Talbot, not herself a Soul, to find she had given up all vanity, in part ‘thanks to the hideous scandals connected with Harry Cust, they have frightened her, as they have many others’.56 Violet was shunned. Harry’s own status within the group never quite recovered. By the spring of 1894 he was out of politics, his editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette his sole occupation, and to the next generation a tired, somewhat seedy figure with only the faint glow of someone of whom greatness had once been predicted. The Cust affair showed how determinedly the Souls, despite steps towards gender parity, were of their time. Violet was deemed the ultimately culpable sorceress; Harry, albeit deceitful, the mortal man unable to control his impulses. When it became apparent shortly after the marriage that Nina was no longer pregnant – the inescapable conclusion being that Nina, forced by Harry, had had an abortion57 – D. D. Lyttelton thought that Nina should die of shame. ‘I don’t want her to, though I generally feel it to be the only solution,’ she added charitably.58

  FOURTEEN

  India

  Several weeks later, on a grey November’s day, Pamela stared out of the window of the boat-train taking her from Victoria Station to Southhampton, sick with misery. The most prosaic details of ordinary life that flashed past – ‘even the milk-cans & the papers at the station’ – were ‘each a separate little agony’ reminding her of a world that she was leaving behind.1