Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Since 1886, Unionists had dominated the Lords. They now presented themselves as a bulwark against demotic liberalism, protecting the nation from a Liberal party apparently moving ever further leftwards. Lord Salisbury’s ‘referendum theory’, in a nutshell, stated that if a government elected by the people put forward controversial legislation, the people ought to be given a chance to decide specifically on that legislation. The Lords were exercising their veto on behalf of the country. At heart, they claimed that they knew better the vacillating public’s wishes than their directly elected representatives. It was an intellectually hollow argument, and constitutionally dangerous – but it appeared to be vindicated when the Unionists triumphed at the polls in 1895.

  Gladstone’s successor was Constance Leconfield’s brother Lord Rosebery, his former Foreign Secretary. The choice was not Gladstone’s: the Queen, who could not bring herself to thank in person the ‘most disagreeable’ of all her ministers,3 further breached convention by deciding on his successor without seeking Gladstone’s advice. She deliberately overlooked Gladstone’s Chancellor, Sir William Harcourt, who, despite being of landed birth, had introduced in his most recent Budget the devastating salvo against the landed classes of death duties of 8 per cent on all estates worth over £1 million. Lord Rosebery, a blue-blooded imperialist, was as close to a Tory as the Liberals could offer.

  The choice was a bad one. Rosebery, acutely shy, prone to deep depression since being widowed in 1890, was not up to the increasingly difficult task of leading a government from the House of Lords. In the Commons, Harcourt, thwarted and overlooked, was as unsupportive as possible,4 and his devoted son Lewis (known, not always entirely fondly, as ‘Loulou’, and renowned for his capacity for manipulative intrigue),5 who acted as his father’s private secretary, spread rumours already doing the rounds that Rosebery was having a homosexual affair with his own secretary. The secretary was the ‘excellent, amiable’ and ‘instantly loveable’ Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig (‘Drummy’), eldest son of Sibyl Queensberry, and the Wyndhams’ cousin.6 Whether or not the rumours were true (and Drummy’s extraordinary elevation to the peerage after just one year of service as Baron Kelhead of Dumfries, and his appointment as lord in waiting to the Queen, did little to dispel them), Drummy’s father had believed them enough to pursue Rosebery to Bad Homburg in August 1893, threatening to thrash him to the bone. Only the intervention of several other spa-goers, including the Prince of Wales, the Chief Commissioner of Police and the Society lawyer Sir George Lewis, drove Queensberry out of town.7

  When Drummy began to court Pamela on her return to England in 1894, the Wyndhams did not put a stop to it, but they were uneasy. Their reserve was in marked contrast to the enthusiasm of Drummy’s immediate family, in particular his doting grandfather, Alfred Montgomery. From later elliptical references to concerns about the ‘opinion of the world’, it is clear that Pamela had heard the rumours too, and that she knew her family were unenthusiastic about the match.8 At the end of the summer, Pamela told Drummy she could not marry him, being unable to love him as she had Harry Cust, ‘simply & honestly – & without knowing why’.9 A few weeks later, Drummy became engaged to someone else.

  Throughout the summer and autumn of 1894, Pamela’s misery had been growing. The anniversary of the break with Harry loomed. The past year, she said, ‘makes one afraid of living. The waking every morning – the needle of pain coming through sleep.’10 She was suffocated by her feelings, unable to ‘make Mamma the receptacle’ but terrified of ‘getting shramped [sic] up instead of opening out’. She scribbled out her ‘bursting feelings’ to Sibell in lengthy letters,11 but felt keenly that she should keep them from her immediate family. In October, she and her parents visited Mary at Gosford. Pamela let slip some of her misery to her sister, and, despite a sympathetic response, was immediately mortified at ‘even letting you [Mary] think I had anything but the easiest surroundings … [or that] I’m always like that’. As soon as she left, she wrote to Mary to apologize, blaming ‘Betsey’ for making her overemotional: ‘there is nothing about me that isn’t really to make life easier & happier for me … I was a coward to let you say there was! It is entirely in my own hands – and is my own fault if I’m unhappy, or ill.’12

  But by then Pamela had been provided with an opportunity to express her feelings. The Wyndhams’ stay at Gosford had been cut short by devastating news. Drummy, attending a shooting party in Somerset given by his fiancée’s family, had been found dead in a hedge, his collar and head ‘very much sprinkled’ with blood from a gunshot wound through the mouth.13 The coroner, hearing evidence of Drummy telling a beater that he was going back to look for a partridge he had winged, and of the single strangely deadened shot that rang out moments later, made a finding of accidental death: another sad example of a loaded gun going off as its owner climbed a stile. The fact that Drummy’s body had been found nowhere near a stile and that the post-mortem suggested that his mouth had been wide open when the shot was fired was carefully overlooked.14

  The Wyndhams immediately returned south, meeting Drummy’s shattered family in London, before taking them to Clouds. ‘Cousin Sib’ seemed shrunken inside her mourning garb, Bosie was thoughtful and gentle. During their brief stay in London, Pamela accompanied Wommy to a dreadful interview with Alfred Montgomery, who seemed more interested in talking to Pamela than to his own granddaughter. She described it to Mary: ‘He kept saying “he was so fond of you – he loved you so – how fond he was of you – let me look at you – ah my dear” – & then breaking down – and all the time I felt like swords inside me the “one-moment-too-lateness” of Life.’15 Now, at Clouds, Wommy seemed simply dazed, ‘but I am afraid she [Wommy] feels it terribly at night when she is alone’, Pamela told Mary, kept awake by the sound of sobbing echoing down the corridors.16

  Pamela plunged into a frenzy of self-recrimination, castigating herself as ‘blind and afraid’, unworthy of Drummy’s love. It is clear she knew that Drummy had killed himself, suspected that it was related to the rumours about Drummy and Lord Rosebery, and thought she could have saved him by marrying him. She crucified herself accordingly, enduring the limpet-like affections of Wommy who, having always hero-worshipped her cousin, now refused to leave her side, insisting on sharing her bed and watching her as she slept. Bosie did not stay long at Clouds before disappearing to be comforted by Oscar Wilde.

  Pamela plummeted from a rhapsody of grief into a deep depression. Plans had been made for the Wyndhams, Sibyl Queensberry and Wommy to travel abroad in the new year, escaping scandal once again with a flight to the Continent. In the meantime Pamela was sent to Babraham to recuperate, although with limited opportunities to do so, since Wommy came too. A worried Mananai plotted ways to restore her younger sister to health and spirits. Still hopeful for Baker-Carr,17 she wrote to her mother proposing to effect a meeting between the two when Baker-Carr returned on leave. Madeline Wyndham’s reply does not survive, but it is evident from Mananai’s reluctantly parroting response that her mother poured cold water on the plan: ‘I quite agree if she [Pamela] is not very much in love not to help her marry a man not rich enough for the comfort of Life … let her wait now that she can … & help her to meet [a] nice man with money enough.’18 Pamela barely noticed, consumed by the feeling that she had let down her family and herself. ‘Ever since I was grown-up I wanted to be worthy of all the rest of you. Of Mamma, & you, & all,’ she told Mary. With Harry gone, Drummy dead, scandal in the air and her mother on tenterhooks, Pamela felt only that she had failed. ‘I don’t mind the mills of God grinding small if only they wouldn’t grind so slowly: – I think I have had an eternity in the last 3 years.’19

  SIXTEEN

  Egypt

  In 1894 a new play was put upon the London stage. The Case of Rebellious Susan by Henry Arthur Jones considered the plight of Lady Susan, who wanted revenge on her philandering husband. Lady Susan leaves her husband and travels to Cairo where she has a brief romance and falls in love. But, mindful
of convention and of her place in Society, she returns to England and her cheating husband and they are reconciled. In a final display of rebellion she refuses to reveal the details of the affair to him unless he will do the same regarding his.1

  At the insistence of the actor-manager Sir Charles Wyndham (no relation to the Wyndhams) and his leading lady Mary Moore, the version that made it on to the stage at Wyndham’s Theatre on Charing Cross Road was deliberately ambiguous about whether Lady Susan had actually been unfaithful. Chastity was ‘that one indispensable quality in respect for womanhood’, Sir Charles told Jones, asking how he could expect ‘married men to bring their wives to a theatre to learn the lesson that their wives can descend to such nastiness, as giving themselves up for one evening of adulterous pleasure and then return safely to their husband’s arms, provided they are clever enough, low enough and dishonest enough to avoid being found out’? Reluctantly Jones agreed, but his published preface to the play maintained what he believed to be the moral of the piece: ‘That as women cannot retaliate openly, they may retaliate secretly – and lie!’2

  The revised play, a roaring success, was part of a wave of productions considering ‘the marriage question’, which began in 1889 with the first English performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, but is better exemplified by Wilde’s smash hits in the early 1890s. In An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance the pure unyielding wife is pitted against the ‘fallen woman’, while an ostensibly upright husband has a dark past. Love, secrecy, scandal and convention all play off against one another. The overwhelming impression is that in Society the truth is something to be dispensed carefully and in very small doses.

  In 1892, Wilde had suggested Mary take a walk-on part in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Mary asked Wilfrid Blunt’s advice, but he dismissed the idea out of hand.3 By 1894, Mary was fair placed to play the wronged wife in any of those dramas. That summer, the Elchos’ marriage had reached a critical point. Hermione Leinster, suffering from incurable tuberculosis, had gone to France to live out her final months in a more temperate climate.4 She packed off her sons to relations and left with her mother and sister for the south of France. Over the course of the summer the Elchos came to an agreement. Hugo would go to Hermione until the end came. When it did, Hugo and Mary would reconcile and have another child to seal their marriage. In the intervening period Hugo’s sister Evelyn de Vesci was to act as go-between for the Elchos. It seems that even the long-suffering Mary baulked at maintaining anything more than cursory contact with her husband during this time.

  In August 1894 Wilfrid Blunt and Bosie Douglas made a pilgrimage to Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, stopping at Stanway en route. They arrived unannounced to find the Adeanes, George Wyndham, Arthur Balfour and Mary playing cricket while a band of brightly dressed Neapolitan musicians serenaded them from the sidelines. Hugo was in the Engadine in Switzerland on a cure, Mary about to depart for her own spa treatment at Ems. The following days were filled with Stanway’s standard amusements: croquet in the rain, a golfing trip to Cleve Hill, evening games of battledore (an early form of badminton) played across a string rigged up in the hall. Normally Hugo’s absence gave Mary a chance to spend time with Arthur without challenge. But this time, while Arthur played golf, Mary was not on the links but sitting with Wilfrid in an inn garden nearby while he read poetry to her.

  In the years since Blunt had first discovered his fascination for Mary a friendly, cousinly relationship had sprung up. In 1887, he had been allowed back into Egypt, and his small family were now accustomed to spend half their year at Sheykh Obeyd. Over a decade after the British occupation had started, Egypt was the fashionable holiday location of choice for upper-class Englishmen and women. Large elegant hotels sprang up in Cairo and Alexandria catering for linen-clad panama-hatted tourists eager to visit the Pyramids and cruise down the Nile. ‘Someday I must take my children there!’ Mary had told Blunt on receipt of his latest tales of desert life in 1893.5 Blunt insisted to himself that he had built El Kheysheh, the little pink guest house in Sheykh Obeyd’s grounds, expressly with Mary in mind.6

  On Blunt’s last night at Stanway he found himself momentarily alone with Mary and ‘by a sudden inspiration kissed her’. ‘She turned pale, said nothing, and went away to Arthur,’ Blunt told his diary, but the seed had been planted.7 The next morning Blunt and Bosie left to continue their journey. Mary got up early to say goodbye and went for a short walk with Blunt in the churchyard that lay adjacent to the house. In the churchyard, in the rain, Mary agreed to go to Sheykh Obeyd that winter.8 A few weeks later, lest Mary should waver, Wilfrid sent the keen horsewoman one of his finest Arab horses from the Crabbet stud – ‘the most delicious hack I have ever been on – it’s like riding a swallow’, said Mary blissfully.9

  In October 1894, Hugo left for France and Hermione. Mary was quite alone at Gosford. The news of Drummy’s death had just broken, and her family had hastened back to Clouds. The Wemysses were spending October in the spa town of Maldon, oblivious to any developments in the south of France since, fearing their reaction, Hugo had decided not to tell his parents anything at all.

  When, through a helpful busybody, Annie Wemyss discovered the whereabouts of her son she was, she told Mary in the reproachful letter that followed, too upset for several days even to put pen to paper. Having found her tongue she did not spare her daughter-in-law: ‘I do not lose sight of your goodness … you must have reached heights of charity and self-effacement of which I should have been incapable of even dreaming.’ But the fact that Mary had given her ‘sanction’ to Hugo was in Annie Wemyss’s mind the most terrible thing of all.10 ‘Many seemingly crooked things get straight,’ Mary said evasively. She did not reveal the pact’s full details, knowing that it would send her mother-in-law into an even greater frenzy of righteous indignation.11

  Mary’s own family were incapable of bringing up the subject. Pamela made glancing allusions to Mary’s ‘trials’, but there were no more encouragements from Madeline Wyndham to ‘cleave together’. Matters between the Elchos had now reached such a pass that the Wyndhams could only remain silent, and hope that in time things would improve.

  Hugo’s departure was the provocation for Mary’s own trip to Egypt and the bargaining tool that enabled her to go. Ignoring the warnings of her friends, she booked her passage on the Bengal at exactly the time that Hugo left. In late December, in the middle of the worst winter that anyone could remember Mary, ten-year-old Ego, eight-year-old Guy and seven-year-old Cincie, Cincie’s governess Miss Jourdain and Mary’s latest maid crossed to Cairo in terrible seas (Mary, teased Arthur, seemed always to attract the stormiest of crossings). They arrived at Sheykh Obeyd, dusty and footsore, in the freezing early hours of 5 January 1895.12 Mary woke later that morning to sparkling blue skies and ‘paradise’. She embraced everything about her new surroundings, the Bedouin clothes that Wilfrid had left out for her, the heat, the silence and flickering shade in the garden as the leaves of the gemeyseh tree rustled in the wind and sunlight sharpened off the white stone dome of Sheykh Obeyd’s tomb. The children were terribly happy ‘grubbing in a little Bedouin tent a few yards from this house’, she reported to Evelyn in the first of many anodyne letters;13 their party had made a trip into the desert, with Mary, Wilfrid and Anne Blunt on Arab horses and the children and Miss J on donkeys. Photographs of this excursion show Mary still in a western riding coat and top boots, white blanket draped over her head to protect her from the dust, a green and white umbrella in her hand. Behind her a black-clad Miss J looks hot and uneasy on her donkey; the children are so small one can scarcely make out their faces.

  All Mary’s friends had warned her before she left that Wilfrid would try to seduce her. They reiterated these warnings in every letter they sent. She kept her letters home cheerful and bland, proffering sanitized tales of picnics of dates and fresh camel milk in Bedouin tents. ‘The little bits we get of real Eastern life are very interesting,’ she told Evelyn
in a letter headed ‘Desert, Cairo’. ‘We might be living in the time of Joseph (this is just about where Potiphar’s garden might have been).’ Staying with the Blunts was delightful: ‘so much nicer than being in an hotel’.14 The true story of what happened lies in Wilfrid’s own account, and in Mary’s later correspondence with him: for of all her diaries that remain, the volume for 1895 is missing. The inference that it was destroyed, possibly by a diligent descendant, is inescapable.

  Four days after Mary arrived she appeared at the main house alone, dressed in Bedouin clothes and asking Wilfrid to show her Sheykh Obeyd’s tomb. When they were by the tomb Wilfrid kissed her once again and in the flickering shade of the gemeyseh tree the cousins sat and talked. Mary confessed her childhood crush on Blunt, and on gentle pressing revealed something of her relationship with Arthur on which others had speculated for so long. ‘To him she is pledged far more than to Hugo,’ Wilfrid duly noted in his diary. ‘She loves and honours and respects him, and he is constant to her, and she has always been constant to him, and she is bound to him by a thousand promises never to give herself to another. On this understanding he has been content that their love should be within certain limits – a little more than friendship a little less than love.’15