Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Her children called the more eccentric of these her ‘Freaks and Funnies’. Stories that sound apocryphal were in fact true – for example, Mary’s telegraphing Hugo from Taplow with instructions to provide beds at Cadogan Square for three ‘spiritual’ disciples of a Persian sage invited to London by Sir Arthur and Lady Blomfield: ‘It’s just a sort of neighbourly thing that does help people … they’ll dash round to [the Blomfields’] flat before breakfast & return after dinner just to sleep …’ she told him.48 She found that her guests provided her with all the friction needed to spark a house party into life. Beatrice Webb divided the world into two sorts: the ‘A’s (‘Aristocrats, Anarchists and Artists’) and the ‘B’s (‘Bourgeois, Bureaucrats, and Benevolents’). Mary challenged her to define where she (Mary) stood. Beatrice characterized her as ‘the purveyor of the Bs to the As! A very rare thing requiring great sympathy and one [must] be able and willing to intellectually subordinate oneself, to be able to carry a hostile force to another’. Notwithstanding the barb therein, Mary was thrilled: ‘what she said is really what I mean …’.49 ‘Don’t you agree with me, Mr. Balfour, that the only excuse for a dinner party is that it should end in a committee?’ Mrs Webb challenged the Prime Minister across the dinner table at Stanway.50 In 1907 Mary triumphantly reported to Balfour that ‘le beau Norts’ – the staunchly Tory Robert Norton – ‘has fallen head and crop over and become a collectivist’, while Beatrice Webb had succumbed to two glasses of champagne on Saturday night and the following morning ‘actually gone to church…!’51

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, Stanway was a house where an ambitious young man could make his mark over the ‘general conversation’ that was rallied across the dinner table like a game of tennis. In Cynthia’s memory, Mary was the delighted spectator, turning her head from side to side with each parry. Yet all knew Mary was largely responsible for generating this conversation: her gift was to throw in ‘bones’ on which experts could seize and opine. ‘If for an instant [the conversation] flagged over an entrée or a plover’s egg she lifted it again and withdrew herself to listen. The result of course was that we all felt we were at our best and came away radiant with satisfaction,’ recalled C. R. Ashbee.52 Mary and Balfour were a well-practised double act. Cincie Charteris drew a picture of long afternoons spent in the ‘boudoir’, Mary’s personal sitting room: curtains drawn across the two great mullioned windows to keep out the icy cold and the fire lit, vigorous debate among some guests, while others nodded off gently in the corner, the reading aloud of treatises and poetry, chows underfoot and sleeping on cushions, books and pictures piled up around:

  Arthur Balfour, Walter Raleigh, George Wyndham, Harry Cust, Charles Whibley, H. G. Wells, Evan Charteris, Hugh Cecil, Maurice Baring, Lady Desborough … whose voices and laughter I can hear again; while now with tempered heat they earnestly discuss some burning question of that day; now, like verbal ballet-dancers, glide, twist and pirouette in airiest fancies; now rollick in fantastic exuberant nonsense. I remember how the hours flew, and how much I used to dread the dispersing sound of ‘that tocsin of the soul – the dinner bell’.53

  In 1905, the thirty-six-year-old Mananai fell pregnant for the seventh time. This pregnancy felt quite different to the others. ‘I have never felt so “unjumpy” I think before,’ she reported to her mother. In October, the Adeanes went to London, sending their five daughters to Clouds. The wet-nurse had been booked, Mananai’s bedroom newly painted and papered, and the expectant mother was upbeat and enthusiastic: ‘whenever “Twinkie-Twankie” (this one’s name!) chooses to appear … we shall all be prepared!’54 On 3 November, after seventeen years of marriage and, curiously, six years to the day after their first son (the ‘dear little Boy Baby’) had died, Madeline and Charlie became the jubilant parents to a healthy son, Robert. ‘This wonderful gift is a mighty relief and a load off our backs … The anxiety has weighed on us for many years and just in a moment it was gone!’ said Charlie.55

  The whole family was ‘wild with delight’.56 Mananai’s always affectionate letters reached new heights of effusion. ‘I couldn’t half thank you or at all thank you Angel for fresh proof in this Joy of the Worlds & Worlds or rather Heavens & Heavens of never failing LOVE you shower upon me & mine … Bless you,’57 she wrote to her mother, when Madeline Wyndham sent little Robert a present. Mananai greeted each new ounce with wonder: ‘this week [he] has put on 14 … & nice firm flesh! Isn’t it a mercy? …’ she exclaimed to Mary, as she completed her lying-in.58 Her great fortune made her ‘long … to give large pieces’ of happiness ‘to the many who have none or so little[.] the feeling of Thankfulness is overwhelming … Baby is a splendid little fellow & we are so grateful for him.’59

  Mary and George were godparents. As part of her duties, Mary warned her brother-in-law against indulging the child. Charlie acknowledged ‘The inclination … to spoil a Benvenuto’ but assured Mary of his ‘implicit confidence in Madeline’s sagacity … she is a very remarkable woman – I can say that to you – & her character is so strong that it must influence any children under her care’.60 In contrast to the quiet christenings of his sisters, Robert’s was celebrated with pomp, at Babraham. The estate’s labourers were given the day off. With characteristic diffidence the Adeanes had only let it be known that the service was not private. They were astonished and touched to find the church packed full. A large tea followed; plans were made for enhanced Christmas festivities in due course.61 With little Robert laughing and crowing in his cradle, everything for Mananai seemed more than perfect: ‘LOVE … seems to radiate around,’ she told her father.62

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Souls in Power

  Little over a week after the hollow peace of Vereeniging marked the end of a gruelling guerrilla war, another political titan departed the public arena. In early June 1902, the elderly Lord Salisbury finally relinquished his post as Prime Minister. Arthur Balfour made his way to Windsor for a secretive meeting with the King. Two days later, his name was put forward for approval at the Unionist party conference. It was a nominal gesture. No one was likely to oppose the man groomed for decades as Salisbury’s successor.

  As the news of Arthur’s succession became public Mary was at Wilton in perfect weather, hugging to herself news that she had known since he was summoned to Windsor. ‘My dear P.M. & F.L.T., L.P.S., & L.H.C.’, she wrote jubilantly to him, savouring the flock of titles that were now his: Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons.1 Her old friend and rival Daisy White had already begun quizzing her about when exactly she had known of Salisbury’s intention to resign; and when Daisy tried to show off her own inside knowledge by alluding to the still-secret resignations of various Cabinet ministers (part of the inevitable shuffle that accompanied the handover of power) ‘of course I took it as news’, said Mary magnanimously.2

  Mary had given birth to Bibs less than a fortnight before, but she had no intention of recuperating quietly. She was the confidante of the most powerful man in the country, and she revelled in her role. Balfour’s ascendancy marked Mary’s heyday. They were ‘the great days of Mary Elcho at Stanway’, in H. G. Wells’s words.3 To say that Mary came to power when Arthur did is no exaggeration. She had the ear of the Prime Minister, controlling access by guest list and seating plans. Her invitations soared accordingly: she was asked to great houses of influence she had not visited for years, and made the guest of honour at London dinners, where the most influential and ambitious men in the country hung on her every word. She reported such triumphs to Balfour: the compliments on ‘gown, figure, face, prettiness’ paid her by Lord Revelstoke, senior partner of Barings Bank – and an old admirer of Pamela’s – until she hardly knew where to look; a confidence from Sir John (‘Jackie’) Fisher ‘that he had finished the Army thing’ (Fisher was a member of the Esher Committee which had been set up in 1903 to recommend reforms in the organization of the War Office in the wake of the Boer War) while waxing large
on Balfour’s fine treatment of Britain’s naval force.4 Ten months later Jackie Fisher was First Sea Lord, implementing a radical restructuring and modernization of the navy, and hurling Britain into a naval race with Germany.

  ‘I appear to be having one of those odd and apparently causeless “booms” of appreciation which some people have at intervals, they go in cycles regardless of any change of circs [sic],’ Mary told Arthur in 1904, after a successful visit to Chatsworth, the home of the social and political grandees the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. On Hugo’s account the assembled company had been fulsome in their praise of Lady Elcho after her departure, talking ‘of how nice I was! Isn’t that odd? And absurd – I have to tell you!’ Disingenuous and delighted, Mary continued: ‘Of course I do think the discovery that I am a well-informed woman must greatly add to my assets – prestige! I really must try and live up to the part.’5 The following month, she visited Dresden, where sixteen-year-old Cincie, was being ‘finished’. On the promise of a meeting with the Kaiser, she hastened on to Berlin, with only the oldest of gowns and without a maid. The meeting turned into a two-hour tête-à-tête. ‘You’d have laughed to see us,’ she remarked to Balfour. ‘Me on sofa, as if we were a play, and Fursts, Grafs and Admirals in the next room gazing and muttering! The only people in the same room were Lady E[dward] C[avendish] and Chancellor Bülow and Sir Frank [Lascelles, the British Ambassador in Berlin], who came up every 20 minutes with cigarettes … [I] had quite a “succès fou”.’6 At a time when Anglo-German rivalry was increasing Mary, fearlessly, had ‘got’ the Kaiser ‘onto our army and his army and of course as his soul is in that subject we got beyond making conversation and had a very interesting evening’, discussing the recently published Esher Committee’s reports. The autocratic Kaiser, unsurprisingly, was fiercely opposed to the proposals which recommended ‘divided responsibility’ between an Army Council and the General Staff, and the abolition of the office of Commander-in-Chief.7

  Mary’s social confidence gave her new confidence with Arthur. She had been badly shaken by a visit paid to England by Mary Curzon in the summer of 1901 that was part convalescence from the harsh Indian climate, and part reconnaissance, gauging for Curzon the political climate at home. Arthur did not trouble to conceal his obvious attraction towards the Viceroy’s beautiful American wife. At a house party at Wilton, according to the Vicereine’s report to her husband, Mary took Mary Curzon to her room for a ‘dentist’, that was in fact a grilling as she tried to ascertain just how close Mary Curzon and Arthur were. She refused to accept her rival’s protestations that she was ‘only in the galère with [Arthur’s] other friends’ and that Mary Elcho was ‘the only one that matters with AJB in the least. “No” says she, “I know when he is interested and he loves being with you”.’

  An incident the following day did nothing to assuage Mary’s fears. On leaving Wilton it had been arranged that all three – Arthur, Mary and Mary Curzon – would lunch at Willis’s Rooms in London later that day. Mary Curzon and Arthur arrived at the appointed time, but Mary did not turn up. The two lunched alone; afterwards, expressing anxiety, Mary Curzon suggested that they go to Cadogan Square to find Mary. She wrote to her husband to describe what happened next:

  we asked for her, and the footman went off to fetch her, while we waited in the library. Suddenly Mary appeared, wild-haired in a filthy dressing gown, and for two seconds we all stood quite still. Then Arthur said, ‘Well, why didn’t you come?’ ‘Come where?’ said Mary. ‘To lunch’ said A. ‘You never asked me’, cried Mary and hurled herself on a sofa. Arthur said, ‘You must be mad.’ Then Mary said, ‘Don’t you think I would have come if I had thought you wanted me? Would I miss an hour when I could be with you? I have suffered agonies to think you didn’t want me, and you had promised to lunch alone with me.’

  The encounter ended badly. Mary Curzon made her excuses and left, but not before Balfour, in front of a near-hysterical Mary, made Mary Curzon promise to dine with him alone at the Commons that night.

  Was Mary Curzon exaggerating the anecdote to provide her husband with gossip? Perhaps – but the nugget of truth is there, and Balfour’s ‘stern and cold’ treatment of ‘his poor trembling wild Mary’ is easy to believe.8 Mary Curzon herself returned to India wary of Balfour. ‘When the sun shines and women smile, he is a picturesque, rare, enchanting creature … In times of stress he is, I think, harsh, and just a little selfish.’9

  Mary when confident was a very different creature from the distraught figure in the filthy dressing gown. As she flourished as a hostess, the sexual element to her relationship with Arthur appears to have become more pronounced. Their correspondence opened with the same lack of ceremony as always: Mary’s abruptly, with no heading, and signed off as ‘Melcho’; Arthur’s addressed as always to ‘My dear Lady Elcho’. But Mary’s letters were newly coquettish, and far more explicit, with coy references to ‘punitive expeditions’, and teases about long hours in bed in the morning, playing with a ‘beastly little “Beast” of yr [Arthur’s] own making’.10 ‘2 hrs is what I like: one for boring things and one for putting you in yr place … on yr knees at my feet,’ Mary told Arthur in 1904, after managing to snatch two hours on a Sunday afternoon alone in his room at a house party in Oxfordshire.11 Three years later on Valentine’s Day she sent him a sketch of ‘somewhat obscure objects … a birch rod … a brush and a tin bottle of squirting grease (smells of peppermint!)’,12 taking childish glee in the nursery-punishment element of their relationship that appealed to her love of secrets and private jokes.

  The ‘boring things’ were ‘talking business’ – the business of politics.13 When in public, Mary preferred to generate debate among others rather than hold forth on her views. In their private confabulations Balfour was one of the few to receive the benefit of Mary’s ‘moral, social and intellectual opinions’ that Margot Asquith claimed to be ‘more interested in … than [those of] most of my friends’ – high praise from the waspish Margot.14 Mary’s children teased her that Balfour piled her letters unopened into his desk drawers, but in fact he seems to have sought, and greatly valued, the benefit of her wisdom and instinct. As Arthur’s confidante, Mary operated in the manner of most political wives at the time: listener rather than adviser, a sounding board to be trusted implicitly where colleagues could not.15 Most political wives did not aspire to more, and Mary was no different. Her own political foray on to the parish council was short lived: depressed by a committee’s inability to get anything done, and feeling as though she were ‘skinned alive’, she abandoned her seat as soon as she could.16 Throughout Arthur’s forty-one months as Prime Minister, the two discussed posts, policy and crises. Mary’s advice on appointments focused on personality as much as policy: the alchemy that could make a successfully balanced Cabinet work was not far off that required to make a successful house party ‘sing’. ‘There must be some heaven-born Chancellor somewhere outside … Cromer or Dawkins, or Hugo!!’ she told Arthur, as he began devising his new Cabinet in 1902, a mischievous reference to Hugo’s unremitting gambling. She was more serious about her brother’s prospects: ‘I suppose you know you won’t have a happy or peaceful life – with me – until brother George is in the Cabinet!’17 Despite Balfour at first insisting that he could ‘see no chance of George having anything’, George, while retaining his position as Irish Secretary, ultimately, and no doubt thanks in part to Mary’s tenacity, was brought into the Cabinet.18

  Arthur peopled his Cabinet with Souls. Civil servants were astonished to hear the Cabinet addressing each other by their first names, as the old friends they were.19 But their golden age was beset by problems. The new century had brought a new dawn, and, as the fog of jingoism cleared, a number of developments allowed the electorate to see the Unionists in a clearer light. It was a party that did not seek to remedy the legal position resulting from the notorious Taff Vale judgment of 1901 (which, by allowing employers to sue trade unions for damages arising from strike action, had a chilling effect on th
e ability of the labouring classes to protest), a party that, having compared Uitlanders to helots, was willing to import cheap indentured labour from China to work on the Rand. The ‘Chinese Slavery’ scandal was a gift for the Liberal Opposition. St John Brodrick’s conduct as Minister for War during the Boer War began to be vilified and the Government’s justifications for war looked shabby.

  In January 1903, at George Curzon’s suggestion, a Coronation Durbar was held in India. A deserted plain outside Delhi was transformed into a tented city with its own post office, shops, telephone and telegraphic facilities, police force (with specially designed uniform), hospital, magistrates’ court, up-to-the-minute systems of sanitation, drainage and electric light, and a small light railway carrying spectators from Delhi to the site. It was another example of the Viceroy’s extraordinary energy, zeal and vision. He had devoted his rule to scouring out the corruption that mired India, hauling the sub-continent into the modern age by reforms, commissions and sheer determination. That, and his self-importance, more grandiose than ever, earned him many enemies. Wits dubbed the event the ‘Curzonization’.