Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  To Curzon’s chagrin, Edward VII did not attend, sending as his representative his brother the Duke of Connaught. But Society flocked to the social event of the year – even Pamela. ‘I thought she would not bring herself to leave the children,’ said Percy mildly, but she and Eddy were on board a ship nicknamed the ‘Roll Britannia’ that carried them out to India.20 A mortified Mary was not among them. At the eleventh hour Cincie had fallen ill and Hugo went to India alone. Mary was so disappointed she refused even ‘so much as to look at a newspaper – I was much too angry at not being there’.21

  Each day of the Durbar was crammed with entertainments: games of polo, military reviews, bands, exhibitions of local handicrafts, dinners, balls and firework displays. Pamela enjoyed the ‘comédie humaine’ and the house-party atmosphere among the luxurious tents of the elite, where the Duke of Hesse was nicknamed ‘The Tower of Babel’ (presumably for his facility for languages or his volubility). On the final day over a million people lined the tented city’s streets to watch the concluding procession: one which ‘… I suppose’, said Curzon to Arthur with typical modesty, ‘the papers will describe as the most wonderful procession of the century’.22 Surprisingly clear black and white footage survives: a parade of elephants, each more gorgeously arrayed than the last, topped by maharajahs glittering with gold and jewels, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught and finally Lord and Lady Curzon. That night the sky was lit up by fireworks, as the Indian and European elite rubbed shoulders at the grand Coronation Ball. Mary Curzon was looking lovely, Pamela told Mary, ‘but very colourless and worn’. Pamela wondered too whether Hugo had ‘altogether enjoyed his stay in India?’ He had seemed rather ‘homeless & wandering sometimes … I was awfully pleased when he came once or twice & sat in my tent.’23

  Mary did not know. Hugo had been characteristically uncommunicative. After Cincie had recovered, Mary had taken her children to Madeira, to escape England’s foul weather. From there, she berated her husband for ‘the howling desert of loneliness & ignorance of all yr plans in which I have been living’.24 Yet only in curiously oblique terms could she try to persuade him to refrain from behaviour still more hurtful. A tiny ‘hinge’ at the bottom of her letter reads: ‘I hope you have got a little offering for each child – it makes nurse cruel to Yvo if you have nothing for Mary she, nurse, cries all night about it. It’s cruel & does such injustice to yrself.’25 Only by invoking Yvo could Mary hope to make Hugo be kind to Mary Charteris. It is a small clue that, despite Mary’s predictions, Hugo did not treat Blunt’s daughter as he did his other children.

  The Durbar was not an unmitigated success for the Viceroy. Some six months before, Curzon had had a run-in with the 9th Royal Lancers, denying the whole of the notoriously exclusive regiment leave for six months when it refused to reveal which of its members had clubbed an Indian cook to death. Racially provoked murders were far from uncommon in colonial India: during the previous two decades eighty-seven Indian batmen, menials or cooks had been killed by British troops. The British public did not share Curzon’s concerns. The Lancers became a cause célèbre in the papers; Edward VII protested on their behalf. In a calculated snub the Duke of Connaught chose the Lancers as his escort at the Durbar. As the 9th passed by, the watching elite rose to their feet with deafening cheers. ‘As I sat alone and unmoved on my horse … I felt a certain gloomy pride in having dared to do right,’ Curzon recalled in his memoirs.26

  Pamela arrived back in England, relieved beyond measure, to a house decorated in celebration by her children. She hated life on ship: ‘the smallness of one’s cabin, the constant noises, the loathsome smells … I think I was a tree in a former existence. This is my first incarnation I am sure & certainly my timbers cd never have been planted in a ship,’ she grumbled to Mary.27 Like all who had been in India, she agreed that they had never seen such an outrageous spectacle, nor ever heard of such an unpopular Viceroy. ‘Whether this is because his reforms are too good or his manners too bad seems doubtful,’ said Balfour.28 But he too was tiring of a Viceroy who treated anything less than absolute acquiescence to his proposals as a personal affront.

  That month, the Liberals moved a vote of censure against the War Secretary St John Brodrick over his conduct of the war recently concluded. ‘Never wish for anything overmuch,’ Balfour remarked drily to Mary, thinking back to three years before, when Hilda Brodrick had spent sleepless nights praying for her husband’s promotion.29 Brodrick was saved only by George Wyndham’s Land Purchase Bill making its way through the Commons. The Irish Nationalists knew that if the vote against Brodrick succeeded, the Bill would fall with the Government. So they refused to vote with the Liberals against Brodrick. Brodrick remained in his post, but his reputation was beyond salvage. Wyndham’s Land Act was passed. It instigated a workable land-purchase scheme that allowed tenants to buy the land they farmed from their landlords – unquestionably George’s finest legacy, and one of the high legislative points of an otherwise unexceptional ministry.

  Less than a decade before, the Souls had promised so much. Yet, in power, Arthur Balfour already seemed out of date. His detached, intellectual approach did not suit a country anxious about imperial decadence; he was not able – or willing – to control the fire-and-brimstone elements of his Cabinet, chiefly Joe Chamberlain, his Colonial Secretary. Arthur, capable always of seeing all sides of an argument, was unwilling to come down off the fence. This was conclusively demonstrated by his approach to tariff reform, a policy proposed by Chamberlain in 1903 that bedevilled the Unionists for the next decade. Tariff reform, or ‘Imperial Preference’, was Chamberlain’s answer to imperial crisis: imposing a system of protective tariffs on trade from outside the Empire to forge imperial ties and provide the funds for much-needed root-and-branch social reform. The United States had grown great on protectionism. But the British believed they had grown great on free trade. Tariff reform provoked an emotional response – in particular among Liberal Unionist Whigs like the Duke of Devonshire and the Chancellor, Charles Ritchie – that no amount of intellectualizing could alter.

  Balfour would never express himself openly for or against the policy. Possibly this was wise, for only in that way could he hope to hold together two mutually repelling forces: Chamberlain’s reformers and the free-trade Whigs. His own musings on the subject, Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade, published in pamphlet form in September 1903, advocated cautious protectionism; he sent them to Mary before publication, and she showed them privately to Hugo and to Percy, who both favoured the policy. Mary thought the Notes would appeal to protectionists – the question was whether they could persuade ‘youngish and intelligent people’, not so wedded to ancient ‘moral imperatives’, to consider abandoning such a fundamental tenet as free trade.30 Politics was changing in many ways: Mary told Balfour that, if he did publish, ‘you ought certainly to tell the important Press, they will surely review it’. Hugo, of a more old-fashioned cast of mind, believed all policy should be expounded by speech, in Parliament. He was appalled by the idea of employing the press in a publicity exercise: ‘thinks sending these notes to the Press, a shocking idea! Odd, incorrect, altogether wrong. I thought I’d tell you that,’ added Mary.31

  Matters reached a head in September. In the late summer of 1903, Balfour and Chamberlain had privately agreed that, if the Cabinet would not accept Imperial Preference, Chamberlain would resign and campaign outside the Cabinet to test the waters of public opinion, and his son (and proxy) Austen would become Chancellor. By skilful manoeuvring, Balfour used the bluff of Chamberlain’s resignation to rid himself of the most burdensome free-traders of his Cabinet, the Chancellor Ritchie and Lord Balfour of Burleigh. Momentarily, Balfour even seemed to have achieved his intended aim of keeping the Whig figurehead of the Duke of Devonshire in his Cabinet, but, bullied by his free-trade companions, the unhappy Duke resigned in October.

  Balfour and Mary squeezed in a hurried meeting in London in the middle of the negotiations, before Mary left for Ireland to visit Ge
orge. Arthur told Mary of all the latest developments – still secret to everyone else: his interview with Edward VII about Cabinet changes; St John Brodrick’s impending demotion to Indian Chief Secretary; Ritchie’s departure. He gave Mary permission to tell Hugo ‘various items of the dramatic situation’, which Mary duly did: ‘he was much thrilled and very grateful for being told …’, she reported back.32 At Phoenix Park, Mary once again had the upper hand. Placing a marker for the future, George confided in her his hopes for the Chancellorship – ‘the heart’s desire of his life’ – although Mary told him that Austen Chamberlain was lined up for it. She had yet not told George about Brodrick, and ‘told him (for fun) without my saying anything to tell me his views. He hopes that St. John will stay at the War Office … I do wonder who will take his place? … It would be an amusing experiment to put in Arnold Forster but perhaps too much of an experiment.’ Whether at Mary’s suggestion or otherwise, Hugh Arnold-Forster, erstwhile Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, was Arthur’s choice as War Secretary, a significant promotion. He immediately rose to the task by setting up the Esher Committee that considered War Office reforms.

  Notwithstanding Arthur’s manoeuvrings, by the summer of 1904 it was obvious ‘to anyone with Parliamentary experience that with the Conservative party torn with dissension and tottering to its fall, the coming Session would be its last’, said George’s private secretary Murray Hornibrook.33 The more immediate crisis was to be George’s. His Land Act had been a triumph. His intellect had risen to the challenge of the job. His nerves, fed by his mania for work, had not. He began to drink and smoke ever more heavily, slept little and forgot to eat.

  ‘I am undergoing a phase of nausea at politics, nostalgia for poetry,’ he told Pamela, declaring, as he did to Wilfrid Blunt, that he was sick of office. His mental state in these months was described, with admirable honesty, by Guy Wyndham in George’s Life and Letters:

  Between the engrossing demands of other political problems, the toil of constant effort towards keeping the shattered and mutinous party together, and the sickness at politics which continued during the summer months … he was losing his grasp over the machine … a machine so erratic in its working that it needed daily and almost hourly vigilance … He had always been over-engined for his hull; and he allowed himself to be distracted by a multiplicity of interests … Artificial stimulants and bursts of physical exercise only ran up the overdraft. He was, in the vivid phrase of a friend, ‘whirling rather than walking through his days’; and he could not stop.34

  George was more or less in the throes of a nervous breakdown, one so profound that even Sibell could not help but notice it.

  As soon as the summer session of 1904 ended, George and Sibell went to the Continent for an ‘extended holiday’ of six weeks. His secretaries were told not to contact him nor to forward any papers which could await his return. In George’s absence MacDonnell drafted, on Dublin Castle writing paper, a devolution scheme that was published by Lord Dunraven’s Irish Reform Association on 26 September 1904. It proposed an Irish Financial Council to govern purely Irish expenditure (albeit headed by the Chief Secretary and Lord Lieutenant) and the creation of a new statutory body to legislate on Irish business with which a Westminster Parliament ‘was unable or unsuited to deal’.35 In the words of John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, it was ‘simply a declaration for Home Rule’.36

  The result was political uproar. Ulster was enraged. The Unionist press, in the words of Murray Hornibrook, ‘went for it’. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the radical nationalist Michael Davitt considered it a ‘wooden-horse stratagem’ that attempted by half-hearted reform to subvert and demoralize the nationalist cause.37 George wrote a letter to The Times the next day, claiming to be dumbfounded. He was ignorant of MacDonnell’s scheme, and rejected it outright on behalf of the Government.38

  ‘They don’t call it Home Rule, but the path is the same’: Gladstone’s ghost looks on approvingly as George Wyndham examines MacDonnell’s Devolution Scheme.

  There are two letters from MacDonnell that suggest that George had been told of the scheme, even if he had not listened – one found in a box of letters after his resignation, the other, trapped between the pages of a Congested Districts Report that George had taken with him to the Continent. The latter made specific reference to the manifesto, in which manifesto MacDonnell hoped George ‘recognized the trace of conversations we have had’.39 This incriminating letter suggests that, contrary to his claims in The Times, George knew and possibly even approved of the scheme. Seeking to explain it away, Guy Wyndham could only proffer the weak explanation that his brother had not read beyond the first few sentences.40

  George’s true position is more difficult to tell. A decade later, Mary commented to Wilfrid Blunt that ‘It is curious how each person wants to prove George to be the thing they love themselves or to twist him into their narrow horizon if they like pink! They say he is pink that he was a nationalist, that he was an R.C. this that & the other …’41 In 1911, George would inveigh against constitutional reform of the House of Lords and the removal of its absolute veto, claiming inter alia that it would pave the way for Home Rule. Yet this lay in his more extremist future. What brought him down when Parliament reconvened in February 1905, and an amendment to the King’s Address was moved concerning his own conduct, was that he could not be pinned down at all on what he had meant, what he had known, what he supported and what he believed.

  Five years before, George had made his name in response to an amendment to the monarch’s Address on opening Parliament. Now, he ‘had to fight with his back to the wall under a hail of furious charges and envenomed insinuations, knowing that even on the benches alongside of him and behind him there was an atmosphere of sullen suspicion’.42 He was accused of concealing ‘ugly facts’, of using MacDonnell as a scapegoat or a Trojan horse. ‘Cannot the right hon. Gentleman give a plain answer to a plain question?’ he was asked. George’s family did not pretend that his conduct during those weeks in the Commons when he was under attack was anything other than a shambles. They had simply to wait for the horror to end. At the end of January, a leader in The Times declared that ‘the Chief Secretary, owing it is understood to enfeebled health, has seen little or nothing of the country for the administration of which he remains responsible’.43 Of all the attacks, this, for the ‘Patriot’ George, was one of the most bitter blows.

  On 20 February 1905 he made his final speech as Irish Secretary in the Commons. He was shambolic, rambling and confused. On 6 March, Balfour announced to the Commons ‘with the deepest regret’ that he had accepted the minister’s resignation, on grounds not of ill health – ‘though I frankly admit that I do not believe that he would be at present able to support all the labours and all the anxieties of a great administrative office’ – but because George ‘is of the opinion that the controversy which has recently taken place both within and outside these walls has greatly impaired, if not wholly destroyed, the value of the work which he could do in the office which he has so long held’. Balfour refused to pronounce on ‘the merits of that controversy’,44 or on the merits of George’s decision. He made his support for him as plain as he could, while adhering to instructions given by George the night before ‘not … from a colleague but from one of your closest friends. I beg of you not to praise me to-morrow. It will do you harm. Perhaps that argument will not weigh with you. So let me add, it will do me harm.’45

  It was the norm for a minister to announce his resignation in person. George was too ill for that. By the time Arthur addressed the Commons, George was at Clouds, knocked out on sedatives. Pamela came over from Stockton, bringing Bim and David to lighten the atmosphere in the house, and was appalled by the heavy, bowed figure she found masquerading in her brother’s body. ‘I never saw such a strong vigorous life so brought to a standstill,’ she reported to Mary, likening it to seeing a horse fresh from hunting pulled to a halt, heaving, wi
th sweating flanks ‘only the horse was George’. Pamela spent several days there. Madeline Wyndham was on ‘iron hooks’ of anxiety, Percy silent. It was clear to Pamela that Percy was using every ounce of his self-control not to break out in recriminations against his son and the world for having disappointed him so. Sibell was ‘all she could be’, Pamela told Mary, but they both knew that that was little more than the provider of a soft hand to clasp another’s while she prayed.

  Pamela treated George gently, taking him for long walks and talking over the old times. They played games of ‘do you remember’ from their childhood, reminiscing over ‘old trivial happenings’ at Wilbury and Isel. Every detail George remembered was greeted with silent relief by Madeline Wyndham that his crash had not permanently damaged his mind. Pamela and George spoke of Percy’s unselfishness and ‘self-control’; of poetry. Prompted by George, Pamela recited to him lines by heart. ‘And there were only two long spells when he walked on as if he forgot things around him,’ Pamela told Mary. At dinner the family feigned normality, maintaining chatter as George sat silently. His scattered interjections – ‘Now go on, Pam, tell me some more stories’ – were greeted with relief, ‘and once’, said Pamela, ‘he had a real good laugh & said now that is excellent, in his tremendous emphatic manner, you know, and then, with a great sigh “I’ve not been amused for so long, just go on”’.

  ‘Never should the outside world know, willingly, from me that he had been knocked out of step, even for a day or two, by all this,’ declared Pamela, urging Mary to keep this letter private. Externally calm, Pamela was burning internally with ‘spleen and rancour’, a white-hot rage at those who had brought down this beloved Icarus who had flown too close to the sun.46 And perhaps it was the Wyndham-religion that prompted Mary’s oddly pragmatic analysis of the matter in her letter to Arthur, sweeping under the carpet the destruction, public and private, of her brother. ‘George has profited by experience before … if he takes this right it may be a lesson to him … its [sic] very serious its breaking him so … but I think he will rebound all right,’ she said, anticipating that George’s ‘nervous disposition’ would act as a ‘safety valve’.47