To all these people, Pamela played the great lady, bestowing upon them the gift of her company. Most of them rhapsodized in turn about Wilsford’s perfect simplicity. Pamela instructed her staff to give food and alms to vagrants so that in their underworld Wilsford would earn a reputation as a ‘safe house’. She welcomed into the house Bim’s troop of ‘village boys’, sending off to Hamleys for quantities of cardboard armour and toy pistols for their games. She took her children on overnight excursions across the Downs in a colourful Gypsy caravan, burning sausages and pigeons that her children had shot over a campfire and singing them to sleep with folk ballads on her guitar. She entertained parties of youths, sending them off, with the caravan carrying their bedding, to sleep at Stonehenge overnight.32 She had a pet bullfinch, Chuffy, who sat on her dressing table whistling a tune she had taught him, and who tried to drink her diamond earrings, thinking them ‘water-drops’.31
The flipside is the many contemporary anecdotes that show Pamela in the worst possible light. Marie Belloc Lowndes recounted in her memoirs a dinner party at Queen Anne’s Gate at which Eddy remarked to the assembled company in ‘quiet measured tones’ that he could not conceive what jealousy might feel like. Pamela, perceiving the comment as a slur upon herself, fled into the garden, pacing up and down and sobbing in full view while her uncomfortable guests continued eating inside.34 Marie’s daughter Susan recounted as a child at Wilsford catching sight through an open doorway of Pamela lying on the floor, literally biting the carpet in fury.35 In family legend, as recorded in memoirs written by her descendants, she has become little more than a narcissistic horror, spoilt, demanding, vain and destructive36 – a woman who, if she felt she was receiving insufficient attention, would rise from the table and implacably face the wall;37 who asked Eddy to remove the motto ‘Charles Tennant & Co., Chemical Manufacturers’ emblazoned on the brick of Tennant’s Stalk, the family’s Glasgow chemical factory, disliking this public reminder of the family’s trade roots;38 and who so frightened her husband that he never charged her directly with her extravagance, but asked the company secretary to drop a gentle hint about her overspending.39
Charlie Tennant, who became one of Pamela’s protégés, was the recipient of the best of her nature. Her letters to him are honest, thoughtful and humorous. She fretted about his happiness while working for the family company (she feared he was ‘the square peg in a round hole, in Glasgow!’),40 and made efforts to matchmake him with ‘pretty girls’, inviting him to attend the Peebles Ball with her goddaughter ‘Pammy’ Adeane,41 told him of the time that someone had asked her the date of Easter that year and she, lost in thought, had answered, ‘Oh, about the 18th or 19th of Wilsford I believe!’42 As with all her closest friends, it was a rare letter from Pamela that did not contain some discussion of her current reading, from Mrs Humphry Ward (‘[she] has a suburban way of describing life that doesn’t hold one’) to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which Edward Grey had read aloud at Fallodon (she found getting her mind around Gibbon’s complex sentences like trying to span the girth of an enormous tree: ‘you feel you can’t quite get round it, or if you do, it is only just done’).43
TWENTY-FIVE
Mr Balfour’s Poodle
On a summer’s morning at Stanway, in July 1907, Mary was bearded in her bedroom by a furious Hugo. Once again he charged her with excessive socializing, this time on behalf of their children, and expressed the hope ‘that the result of our dinners etc. will not be a double marriage, Violet [Manners]–Ego, Cynthia–Beb [Asquith]’, adding ‘that Cynthia spends all her nights with Beb at balls, and that V. and B. both look very second rate and that he’s going to tell Cynthia and Ego so – this is the really worrying thing’, Mary reported to Arthur.1 The Duchess of Rutland (as Violet Granby had become) had a trio of daughters, known as ‘the Hothouse’ for the highly strung fascination they exerted over men, and the second of the three, Violet ‘Letty’ Manners, married Ego in 1911. Cincie and Beb, Asquith’s taciturn second son by his first marriage, were already secretly engaged.
The children of the Souls, all well known to one another, were approaching maturity. They gave themselves the name of ‘the Coterie’ – later renaming themselves ‘the Corrupt Coterie’ in an indication of defiance. Mary’s children were all, by their birth, part of the Coterie, although some with more ambiguous attitude than others. Mary’s three eldest were young adults. The twenty-two-year-old Ego, recently graduated from Oxford, was ‘rather a darling’,2 quietly humorous and diffident,3 and still politically naive enough to have been devastated at Arthur Balfour’s apparent betrayal by his Manchester constituents in the elections of 1906. Mary wished he could spend more time talking to Arthur: ‘I should like him trained to be a good Unionist Conservative.’4 Guy had suffered from his position as second son, and from the poor health he had endured since childhood.5 At Oxford he racked up large debts and barely scraped a third.6 Mary worried that whenever he was in a position of tension or stress he might ‘crack up’ under the strain.7
Cincie had an alien beauty, with wide-set eyes, and a razor-sharp intelligence left entirely unhoned by her education. Mary, with much agonizing, had dispatched the intellectual Miss Jourdain in 1896. She feared that Miss J’s intense High Anglicanism was making Cincie overly religious,8 and was unnerved by the governess’s own emotional attachment to Mary herself. She replaced her with Fräulein Moskowitz, a ‘dear, bird-witted little Viennese’, known as ‘Squidge’ for her resemblance to a squirrel.9 The expectation for Cincie was that she would ‘marry a country house’, but while in Dresden, aged sixteen, she had met Beb Asquith, and in the two years since had appeared totally uninterested in any other man.10
Cynthia’s determination to be with the silent Beb – inexplicable to everyone except herself – placed Mary in a quandary. She found chaperoning a challenge – ‘even if one is at the balls oneself … one cannot see what is going on’, she said – and felt ‘low and rather helpless’ in trying to determine what to do, ‘over the most difficult part of life – how much to meddle? … Our system is confused and illogical. I dare say general results work out the same! whatever systems!!’ she lamented to Arthur.11 Lord Wemyss – who, as head of the family, would determine what marriage settlement Cynthia would receive – was fiercely opposed to Beb because he was a Liberal. Mary’s concern, which seems also to have been Hugo’s, was that Beb lacked the qualities needed to make a success of himself. Mary’s duty as a mother was to see her daughter well provided for by marriage financially, as well as emotionally. Finding that balance was the alchemy.
Mary’s visits to Gosford were normally spent trying to avoid lectures from her octogenarian father-in-law on the subject either of her children or of Arthur’s leadership of the Unionist party, both of which Lord Wemyss felt were being seriously mishandled. Mary found the former particularly enervating given the conduct of Wemyss’s own son. Neither Hugo’s gambling nor his infidelities had improved. A recent visit to Chatsworth when Mary, Hugo and his latest mistress, twenty-five-year-old Peggy, Countess of Crewe (a daughter of Lord Rosebery), were all present, had been a disaster. For some time, Mary’s response to Hugo’s affairs had been to offer quasi-maternal advice as to how her husband and his mistresses might bring out the best in each other. ‘You exaggerate each other’s peculiarities,’ she said, encouraging Hugo to ‘steady’ the spoilt, witty, headstrong Peggy. Her attempts at Chatsworth to befriend Peggy had horrified Hugo. He responded by freezing her out. ‘I ask you a perfectly harmless question – you jump as if you were shot, I come near yr room & you look at me as if I were a poisonous snake,’ wrote Mary afterwards in reproof. ‘I had really far rather that you spent the whole of every night with P. & behaved in a decent friendly way to me all day … but you are so aloof, so strange, so suspicious, so on wires – that you really make me inclined to … tell you that I think you an ass! … why should being pro her make you anti me?’12 By contrast, ‘My children are not immaculate,’ Mary told Arthur, ‘but they have some c
onscientious feelings, they are warm-hearted, friendly, and essentially domestic. They love being at home, they do not remember always but they would be grieved at distressing one and would shut a door to please one and do tiresome things occasionally because they feel them to be right and they want to please one …’13
In the autumn of 1907 Mary took Ego and Cincie to Italy, hoping that with Beb ‘out of sight, out of mind’ Cincie’s infatuation would cease. The trip was exhilarating. ‘One … gets to know one’s children more in 20 days in these circs than in many months at home,’ Mary told Arthur, although ‘… I feel rather as if my brain were lined with frescoes upon frescoes … and my mind is a jumble of Tuscan, Romanesque Gothic style!’14 On Mary’s return she went to Birmingham to listen to Arthur address the annual conference of the National Union of Conservative Associations on party unity over tariff reform. She had not heard Arthur speak publicly for some time and thought it ‘excellent’: touching his ‘top level qua “platform speech”’, but she knew that ‘human nature is alas! silly and small’, and that people would continue to think that Arthur, by not taking a firm position on the issue, was Chamberlain’s puppet, trying to lay the ground for the party’s adoption of the policy in due course.15
Party unity was to be found only through opposition. Shortly after his defeat in 1906, Balfour announced that the Unionists would ‘continue to control the destinies of this great empire’ whether in or out of office.16 Reviving his uncle’s referendum theory, he explained in a speech at Manchester a few months later that the purpose of the House of Lords was ‘not to obstruct and still less to run counter to the will of the community as a whole, but to prevent hasty and foolish legislation’.17
Campbell-Bannerman’s ministry promised ‘New Liberalism’, a scheme of social reform by which the state took unprecedented responsibility for the welfare of its people. But friction between the Imperialist and Radical wings of the Cabinet meant that the reforms put forward between 1906 and 1908 were prosaic, focusing on reversing Unionist legislation on issues on which the fractured Liberals could still cohere, principally licensing measures and education (the Liberals were united on the need for stricter liquor licensing and in their opposition to Tory attempts to provide state funding of church schools). Still Balfour’s Lords filibustered every measure of any significance: killing them outright, or wrecking them with amendments so that the measures were ‘stripped and wounded and left half dead’ as Lloyd George, now President of the Board of Trade, said bitterly of the mangled 1906 Education Bill.18 In 1906, Percy had gloomily asked, ‘We are now just where we were in 1885 on the brink of Democracy, when Gladstone saved us for 20 years by jumping into Home Rule. What will save us now?’19 The answer, it seemed, was the House of Lords.
The Lords’ highhanded behaviour provoked Campbell-Bannerman to put constitutional reform proposals before the Commons in March 1908: a suspensory veto for the House of Lords (so that the peers could delay but not veto legislation); and the reduction of parliamentary terms from seven years to five. The Unionists howled that the Upper House was the watchdog of the people. Lloyd George gave one of his memorable ripostes: ‘A mastiff? It is the right hon. Gentleman’s [Balfour’s] poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to.’20 The Commons voted in favour of the reform, but within a month Campbell-Bannerman had resigned. He died in April 1908, still in residence at 10 Downing Street, from where he had been too frail to be moved.
Asquith was finally in power, although he had to cross the Channel incognito by night-train and ferry to kiss hands when Edward VII refused to cut short his holiday with his mistress Mrs Keppel in Biarritz, the French resort on the Atlantic coast popular for its bracing air, golf courses and casino. To date Asquith remains the only Prime Minister to kiss hands on foreign soil. His father’s advancement did not improve Bob’s prospects so far as Hugo and Lord Wemyss were concerned. Lord Wemyss fulminated against Asquith’s final Budget as Chancellor which introduced the ‘socialistic’ measure of pensions for the elderly but was passed since, as a fiscal measure, the Budget was by convention inviolable by the Lords’ veto.21 Otherwise, Balfour’s Lords continued poodle-like, in 1908 alone rejecting or mutilating bills for licensing, education and town planning, and two Scottish measures concerning smallholders and land values.
Mary was still encouraging Cincie to meet ‘fresh people’. In the spring of 1908, Cincie brought an Oxford undergraduate named Ridley to Stanway. They were the only guests not well into middle age, but the evening demonstrated that the Souls had lost none of their old zest. At around midnight on Sunday, after a long dinner and much talk, the party was seized by ‘a frenzy of song, dance and improvisation’. Arthur Paget – ‘the Stanway Minstrel’ and Pamela’s youthful suitor, now a close friend of both Mary and Pamela (Pamela was godmother to his daughter, Pamela Paget) – seized his guitar; the carpet was rolled back; George Wyndham spouted Virgil while somersaulting across the floor; the ‘Professor’ – Sir Walter Raleigh – crowned by a wreath of roses, did the cake-walk with Cincie. The party spilled out into the garden to serenade Arthur Balfour (who had gone to bed some three or four hours before) at his window.22 ‘Mary – I must tell you – asked me to come “and see her quiet home life”: I have never heard, and rarely made, more noise before … A. Paget is a “Pied Piper of Hamelin” … and we were rats who danced in time to his music,’ George told Percy as he made his way back to London.23
In the spring of 1909, Wilsford village was ‘rocked & shaken’ by the revelation that its new Canadian curate, ‘so excellent it seemed in every way’, was a bigamist with a ‘very bad past’. With the curate in a state of ‘breakdown’ and his wife in ‘misery’, Pamela took in their ‘poor little boy … to get him out of the poor mother’s way … He is lying looking at picture books on the rug now,’ she told Charlie Tennant.24 Meanwhile, Mary and Cynthia were setting sail on the Empress of Britain for the curate’s native land, Mary equipped with a new grey-squirrel fur coat bought in London on sale for £30 to insulate herself against the cold.25 Ego, now serving as a diplomatic attaché in Washington DC, was to join them as guests of Canada’s Governor General, Earl Grey (a distant cousin of Edward Grey), and his wife. Ostensibly, Mary was making the most of an opportunity to visit old friends. Privately, she made no bones about the real reason for the trip: ‘for Cynthia: general indefinable hope that change may be beneficial physically, mentally, spiritually’,26 she told Arthur; or, as she put it more candidly to Hugo, to keep their daughter out of ‘the arms of Beb!’27 Uncharacteristically, they travelled in some style, securing a double-berthed suite with a private bath and parlour, at a cost of £50. An extra £14 allowed first-class servant accommodation for Mary’s maid. ‘[I]f we are ill the whole time and never sit in our parlour I shall die of disappointment at the money wasted, unless I die of sickness,’ said Mary.28
Mary found Canada exhilarating, admiring its pioneer spirit, relishing the wild open spaces that reminded her of Cumberland, and enjoying the fact that post, routed via New York, took several weeks to arrive. She could breakfast in peace without Squidge or Nanny appearing with tales of domestic disasters. Now that she was in her late forties, the freshness of Mary’s youth was long behind her, but she had not yet earned the respect and dignity of ‘extreme old age’.29 Yet local self-made eminences fell over themselves to praise her at Government House dinners (everyone, she told Hugo mockingly, appeared to be a baronet and she had never heard of any of them). The attention was invigorating and inspiring. With characteristic enthusiasm, she began devising unrealistic plans for the future: she wished she could send her sons to the Macdonald College, a new and innovative agricultural college;30 she wanted to return in the summer and explore the Rockies; perhaps even to invest in land. ‘[I]f I were a man I’d settle there [in British Columbia] & buy a fruit farm – in fact if I’d any capital, I’d buy a small valley right away – I wish you would,’31 she told Hugo, adding, in a dangerous tactic that appeale
d to his worst nature, ‘the difference between what you have & pay & what you get is positively El-Doradoish’.32
The travellers planned to pass through New York on their way back to London. Mary was already looking forward to a dinner planned with William Astor, the property magnate and newspaper proprietor. But barely a fortnight into the trip she received a telegram. Percy had fallen badly in the early hours of the previous morning and suffered a ‘seizure’. A doctor and nurses were treating him at Clouds, Pamela and George were making their way there now. There was talk of ‘brain leakage’: it is most likely that Percy had suffered a stroke.33
Just days before, Percy had written a long and chatty letter to his eldest daughter. The Wyndhams had paid an enjoyable visit to Petworth, but were now both plagued by colds; an unexpectedly large snowfall had offered temporary employment to London poor as street sweepers; George Wyndham had given a Commons speech on tariff reform that people were saying was the best thing he had done in recent years. The Evening Standard reported that Balfour was giving the issue of protectionism serious consideration, and Percy thought that even Lloyd George and Winston Churchill seemed to be recognizing its benefits. However, Percy was not feeling at his best. ‘I am coming to a theory as to the way in which man & woman grow old,’ he told his daughter, illustrating with a sketch:
Those Wild Wyndhams Page 28
