Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  After each sexual encounter, Mary assured Wilfrid that it was the last, threatening with relish to become the model of ‘professional cousinly’ rectitude, ‘quiet and undisturbing’. ‘I shall have on a quaker or salvation Army bonnet … or a nun’s veil … or rather my soul will be draped in suchlike garments … I shall be as dull as anything,’ she announced after her nighttime visit in 1906.45 Perhaps one of the strangest twists of this tale was that by this point Dorothy Carleton was living with Wilfrid, ostensibly acting as his nurse but actually having an affair with him. When Wilfrid recovered, he ‘adopted’ Dorothy so that she could continue to live with him, as she did, until his death in 1922. It caused the final breach between Wilfrid and Anne, and occasioned much bitterness from Judith Blunt and Dorothy’s brother Guy. The Wyndhams accepted it without a bat of the eyelid, and continued to be as close to Dorothy as they had ever been.46

  The real distress for Mary came when she revealed to Arthur the truth of her child’s paternity, and genuinely did have to destroy an ideal. A cryptic letter from her in the spring of 1896 speaks of an unhappy afternoon spent at Arthur’s house at 4 Carlton Gardens. ‘I hated having to distress you,’ she says.47 Mary was already five months pregnant with Yvo, the Elchos’ true ‘reconciliation baby’ born in 1896, who was the apple of Hugo’s eye, so the revelation cannot have been her pregnancy. But she did not lose Arthur. In fact, it reminded him – as it had Hugo – that Mary could be desirable to other men. And as one thinks of pregnant Mary, elegant in her black dress and pearls, dismounting at Brighton to be met by her cousin, with her hold on her husband, her ‘friend’, her children and her social life intact, it is very hard to resist giving her a silent, heartfelt cheer.

  EIGHTEEN

  Glen

  The Souls thought the marriage of the youngest Wyndham to the eldest Tennant would provide a new nexus of power. ‘I am so glad they have got anyone so delicious as Pamela to take over Glen!’ Frances Horner enthused to D. D. Lyttelton.1 It did not take Pamela long to rectify these misapprehensions nor much time before a civil war had developed between her and her redoubtable sisters-in-law.

  After a brief honeymoon, Eddy and Pamela made their way to Glen, where the entire Tennant clan had decamped for the summer. Wilfrid Blunt, on seeing Pamela briefly in London just before, thought her looking ‘very slight, and rather pale, and perfectly lovely’, and also happy: ‘not rapturously … but perhaps sufficiently’.2 Pamela assured her family that she was indeed happy, and thankful, she declared to George, for the decision she had made in Florence.3

  But Pamela’s tone was muted, and there are clues which indicate that her honeymoon, such as it was, had been a shock to her. In 1918, Marie Stopes’s bestselling Married Love confronted its fascin-ated readers with the necessity of the female orgasm, attributing many of the neuroses of modern women to unsatisfying marital relations. Pamela, when she was nearly fifty, told Marie Stopes that ‘meeting with your book has given me a sense of fellow-feeling & comfort’. She referred to a conversation in which ‘I have never spoken to anyone as I did to you’.4 It is hard to escape the conclusion: sexually, Pamela and Eddy were a mismatch.

  For both Pamela’s sisters, the novel delight of sex had eased their transition into married life. Pamela was precipitated into a new world without that comfort. Glen compounded her loneliness. A mock-baronial monstrosity, windswept and cold, the house was ‘so different to what I have always lived among’, she complained to George, shrinking into herself and longing for the light and air of Clouds – ‘it is as if Morris were not – nor had been’.5 Meanwhile the fundamental differences between the Tennant and the Wyndham ways of life were daily becoming more apparent.

  ‘I find Sir Charles very difficult to get on with,’ said Pamela, ‘a curious grown-up child – with whims & tantrums’ and a line in selective deafness that drove her to distraction. She found the Bart overbearing, dictatorial and ridiculously sentimental: ‘Eddy says he can’t read Prayers without wobbling,’ she told George exasperatedly, and at dinner, she explained, ‘the conversation trails like a winged bird, lower and lower till it gradually settles down among stocks and shares, or the indifferent among the poems of Burns.’ ‘It’s true … there is an awful leg to the table corner which takes all my thoughts; – it’s the kind of leg to the table you can’t forget, but still I think it’s his fault rather’.6

  Pamela had been dominant in her own social circle. By marriage to Eddy she was ‘grafted’ on to the Souls, ‘a world of friends already so formed & complete’ a good decade older than her.7 She had no inclination to assume a junior role, and was constantly enervated by her sisters-in-law’s reminders of how much better they knew ‘dear Eddy’ than she; and, in Margot’s case, how, until her own marriage to Asquith in 1894, she had been Glen’s chatelaine in all but name. Mary advised Pamela to remember that the Tennants were akin to the vultures in the Bible verse: wherever there was death and destruction, there they would be, teasing out pain and worrying away at weak spots.8

  The Tennant women were caustic, unsentimental and matter-of-fact. Their frank approach pierced Pamela’s pretensions; their claims on Eddy provoked uncontrollable jealousy in her. She professed horror when, rhapsodizing about the Scottish hills on a carriage ride with Charty, she saw that her companion, head down, was knitting furiously, heedless of the beauty all around. She deplored their habit of facing conflicts head on. In retaliation, she became ever more vague and ethereal. ‘The more I see of them,’ she wrote to Mary of her sisters-in-law two years into her marriage, ‘the more I realize what very remarkable women they are [and] I don’t mean it in a wholly complimentary sense … they have so many qualities that equip them almost unfairly for the fray of Life compared to most other women.’9

  Pamela seized upon the opportunity provided by her first pregnancy to escape. Eddy had promised to take a house in Wiltshire, and paid over the odds to secure the rental of Stockton House, just a few miles from Clouds. While waiting for it to be made ready, Pamela retreated to her childhood home. Barely six months after her marriage, she was back at Clouds, embroidering hats with Wommy and knitting the intricate patterns at which she excelled for the baby due in July 1896. She wrote Eddy long letters about the minutiae of her days, her quick pen sketching out a scene in its quintessence: the obsequious waiter who had served her and Wommy with tea at Mere; the children round the maypole at Clouds; Charlie Adeane lecturing the assembled company at Clouds with his views on matters ranging from educational reform to poultry breeding.10

  Eddy visited Pamela when he could in between conducting family business in London and shooting and fishing at Glen. He diligently corresponded with her when he could not. Adoring and fearful of his beautiful wife, Eddy canvassed opinions among his sisters and sisters-in-law as to the best possible nursemaids and governesses; trailed around Glen’s nurseries with Pamela’s latest letter in hand checking that everything from skirting-board length to the new Morris wallpaper accorded with her instructions. He dealt with all Stockton’s furnishing and staffing – by convention, Pamela’s domain – even down to buying the glasses, linen and crockery for the servants’ hall, sourcing and interviewing staff.11 Notoriously parsimonious, Eddy had long been casting a critical eye over the extravagance of the Bart’s practices at Glen, but, to Margot’s rage, he encouraged his wife to buy whatever took her fancy for the new house. He gave each of Pamela’s points his full attention, whether considering ‘Wommy’s [newly trimmed] Hat’ (‘sounds fascinating’)12 or the news that Pamela had dreamt on three successive occasions of flowers (‘it is curious’).13 He scoured Glen from top to toe for a book of Scottish songs she was missing; he was enraptured when she wrote to him of a drawing she had done, and was ‘longing’ to have it framed and hung up.14 He was thrilled when she told him that she was beginning to read about politics in the newspapers.15 And as Pamela’s complaints about her first pregnancy steadily increased – a litany of aches and pains, neuralgia, indigestion, excessive ‘wriggling’ from th
e baby and haunting dreams – Eddy provided all the sympathy for which Pamela could have hoped. By the end he was swearing never to leave her again.16

  ‘He is A.1.,’ said Madeline Wyndham delightedly, likening Eddy’s stoicism to the way that they had tested the chandeliers in Clouds’ hall, hanging on them many hundredweight more than they would ever bear: ‘I feel [that he] is like a Chain tested to bear so much weight that the small weight of every day life must hang light on it.’17 Her remark was provoked by an incident in which Pamela, departing from Clouds with the mountains of luggage that accompanied her class’s perambulations, had failed to see that boxes meant for London were marked accordingly. Half their things had disappeared, presumably Stockton-bound. Mary concurred with her mother’s views: Eddy was ‘a very kind good unostentatiously upright & useful man … so wonderfully sweet & gentle & nice’.18

  At Stockton Eddy and Pamela replaced footmen with housemaids (Margot thought it an affectation). Pamela declared herself Eddy’s ‘loving Wyf [sic]’, and him her ‘dearest husband’, but her descendants believe that by the late 1890s she was already involved in several affairs – one with the ambitious young architect Detmar Blow, a romantic figure with dark curls and dashing manner; another with Ivor Guest, heir to a steel fortune.19 Nor, true to her words in Florence, did Pamela forget Harry Cust. They continued to see one another, although, as a scribbled note from Harry to Pamela at the turn of the century attests, they preferred such visits to be made when her husband and children were not around.20

  Pamela’s main focus was her children. Clarissa Madeline Genevieve Adelaide, known as Clare, was born on 13 July 1896, Edward Wyndham Tennant, or ‘Bim’, on 1 July 1897, ‘Kit’, Christopher Grey Tennant, on 14 June 1899, David on 22 May 1902 and Stephen on 21 April 1906. Pamela was enchanted by them – more accurately by her boys. She quickly earned a reputation as a devoted mother. But motherhood did not dispel her lurking unhappiness. All the Wyndham children found it hard to leave the cradle of their family. ‘I feel I have … transplanted very badly and am always lean & hungry for want of the soil I am accustomed to – everywhere except at home, I feel like a mangy fir tree with a bald top,’ Mary remarked to her mother, on leaving Clouds after a visit, some three years after her own marriage.21 Yet in those early years of her own marriage Pamela wept inconsolably every time she left Clouds.22 In later years, she recalled vividly a visit by Wilfrid Blunt to Stockton. ‘I was still so unhappy, and so strangely situated in my new life that I remember answering you almost in a dream when you said how you hoped everything was well with me.’23

  In her enforced summers at Glen Pamela locked herself away in the library with a pile of books, emerging only to play with her children. At dinners, she sat aloof and silent. Charty taxed her with this. Pamela recounted their conversation to Mary, triumphantly scornful of Charty’s ‘pathetic’ attempts to appeal to her vanity: ‘she said she wished I would take more trouble to make people like me! and … know how clever I could be … “perhaps … you may meet a man at dinner & never see him again – and he may never know what a wonderful memory you have! How you can say pages by heart, how quick you are at understanding & what a lot of funny little stories & things you know”’. Pamela added, ‘I said I did not think anyone could recite at dinner & that if one was going to get to know a person I could not shell out all I had before fish.’24

  With Pamela’s most recent tearful departure from Clouds fresh in her mind, a worried Madeline Wyndham advised her daughter to ‘get [Philip] Webb or [Detmar] Blow to build you your large Family Cottage for your own that you may live in it & love it & the Babes also’.25 George came up with another plan. He was fast earning a reputation as one of the most promising young backbenchers of Salisbury’s ministry. His trenchant support of ‘Uitlander’ rights in one of the Boer republics, Paul Kruger’s Transvaal – the Uitlanders were the disenfranchised foreigners exploiting the Transvaal’s gold rush – had earned him the nickname of ‘the Member for South Africa’. George was part of a new breed of imperialists seeking a more aggressive foreign and colonial policy. Their figurehead was Joe Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who compared the position of Uitlanders to helots, and had secretly colluded in the botched coup of 1895 that attempted to overthrow Kruger’s Government, the Jameson Raid. In 1897, Chamberlain pushed the appointment of Sir Alfred Milner as High Commissioner overseeing Britain’s Southern African republics. Behind a judicious façade, Milner was a fanatical imperialist, determined to render British supremacy in South Africa complete.

  The imperialist faction was buoyed by the glorious spectacle of the Queen’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee. Almost half a million imperial troops and a panoply of native royalties processed through a London garlanded in bunting, past billboards advertising the very best imperial products, to pledge allegiance to their Empress at a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral. Gladstone dismissed it as ‘the spirit of Jingoism under the name of Imperialism’, while Salisbury privately deprecated its vulgarity, but the public was intoxicated by this visual reminder of the sheer reach of Britain’s power. Gloomy political naysayers began almost immediately to look for the nadir that must follow this imperial zenith, referencing Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.26

  Polymath George had been dabbling in journalism for a number of years, earning his reputation with a promising introduction to North’s Plutarch and translations of Ronsard’s poems. In the winter of 1897/8 he was in the process of launching Outlook, a periodical intended to combine in a weekly paper his favourite interests, politics and literature, with a strongly imperialist slant.

  George thought Pamela would be the perfect contributor. Shortly after her engagement, Percy had teased her and Mananai with a newspaper cutting, claiming that they, with their Liberal husbands, were nonetheless ‘Tory by birth & conviction’.27 Furthermore, both Charlie and Eddy fell to the far right of their party’s spectrum, Liberal Imperialists, or ‘Liberal Imps’, who privately harboured doubts about Home Rule and were reluctant to advocate disestablishment. One might call them Liberal by birth rather than by conviction. Pamela’s early attempts to educate herself politically had quickly failed for lack of interest, but instinctively such views as she had corresponded with George’s: romantic, nostalgic and imperialist. George thought her writing skill might even be better than his. ‘How I wish you would write something, anything!’ he told her early in the new year of 1898. Urged on by her brother and her family, Pamela began.

  For the first time in her life when faced with a blank sheet of paper, she baulked. Since childhood she had shown an interest in letter-writing unmatched by her sisters: crossing words out and replacing them with others more apposite, dwelling on form as well as substance. But now her mind, she admitted to George, felt like the five fingers of the hand, all spread out in different directions. She agonized that she couldn’t possibly know enough to start; or that she had more to say than she could ever put down. ‘My dear when you have seen more, felt more and thought more than others, you have always too much to say,’ replied George. Whatever she wrote was sure to be interesting, ‘the point is to make it intelligible’.28 Words were something to be wrestled with, stripped down to sinews and bones: ‘a faculty for writing is a pearl of contentment’, George proclaimed, writing lyrically of days in his own turret writing room at Saighton, with its whitewashed, book-lined walls, oak writing desk and two armchairs in cosy conversation before the fire.29

  Once Pamela took ‘the plunge!’ she scarcely looked back.30 Sheaves of letters whisked between brother and sister as they discussed everything from subject matter to Pamela’s proposed pen-name. Pamela agonized over editing; George discursed on the art of prose-writing and the importance of style, counselling brevity as he lectured at length. Pamela’s Glen days were now full as she scribbled and crossed out, read, read more, and rewrote. At George’s suggestion she began with a series of sketches, ‘painting in words’ the world around her. He suggested that she look at an essay by a young
Irish writer in the periodical Nineteenth Century. William Butler Yeats was doing ‘for Irish Faery lore just what you could do for Wiltshire … invent new names for your people and places and then reproduce their words exactly … giving the sensation which they aroused in you’.31

  Pamela’s resulting essays were serialized in Outlook under the pen-name of ‘Clarissa’. While comparisons with Yeats were fallacious, her keen ear for dialect and her ability to skewer an apposite and unexpected turn of phrase gave them a certain charm. ‘I love your imagination,’ said George; ‘sometimes I think of it as a horse turned out to grass: so happy and irresponsible and quaint.’32

  For the same reasons that Pamela’s writing so appealed to Outlook’s readership, it has not stood the test of time. Pamela depicted a sun-lit, semi-feudal world in which peasants tugged their forelocks and uttered naive wisdom; children were tow-headed and rosy-cheeked, the aristocracy wise, benevolent and handsome. As imperial propaganda, it was magnificent. It was not a realistic portrait of the nation. When Heinemann published ‘Clarissa’s’ essays as Village Notes under Pamela’s own name in 1900 braver critics hinted as much. It was marketed as studies of life in ‘a typical country village’, illustrated by fourteen photogravure illustrations that ‘Mrs. Tennant … an amateur photographer’ had taken herself. ‘The modern cottager is a very wide-awake person, who reads penny novelettes and likes her clothes made “in the fashion”,’ pointed out the World. The Glasgow Herald took exception to Pamela’s rendition of the Scottish dialect (‘“Parn” is not the Scotch for pan, nor “coof” for cough’). But by and large the reviews were soft and deferential. They praised Pamela’s fresh and sympathetic approach, and the restraint and sparseness of her style. It was ‘eminently soothing’, said the Pall Mall Gazette (still under Harry Cust’s editorship), just the kind of thing to read in a hammock; she had written it con amore, reported the Globe, in a typically breathless phrase.33 Pamela was not so foolish as to take these condescensions as compliments. ‘The harshest blow was “pretty booklet”,’ she commented wryly to Mary.34