Those Wild Wyndhams
Page 40
Walking through the house, Pamela felt like Kay in The Snow Queen, a fairytale she had read with her sisters long ago, in which dreams and vapours passed the boy that only he could see.39 She relived the sight of Madeline Wyndham, making her way across the hall, arms piled high with shawls for music listeners, of Percy in his flapping slipper-heels slip-slopping his way across. She heard the sound of herself on her guitar. She saw themselves as children impatiently tapping the weather glass, longing for snow and ice to go tobogganing; saw the great teas where thirty or more sat and waited for toast, always cold and curling after the servants’ trek down miles of corridor. She saw Mary and Madeline Wyndham, desperately trying to battle up the narrow stone staircase through gathering smoke, thinking the children still above on that January night that Clouds was ablaze; she saw too in the empty, rebuilt hall herself and Harry Cust standing on the hearthstone in that final interview at the end of the summer – the end of their affair. Clouds’ atmosphere, like the scent of the wild flowers that once filled it, was still strong.
‘Just as there are long strands of Time, here, on the Earth Plane which we live through & then fold up & lay away, so I believe, in the next phase of Consciousness, there are long sweeps of Earth Life, to be lived over again, to be more fully realized perhaps,’ Pamela told Mary. The only difference she thought likely was that ‘sad facts’ might be hidden from ‘dead eyes’. ‘And so’, Pamela concluded, ‘it might be that Mamma may quite well be happily unconscious of any disturbing or chilling factors in the present history of Clouds, and be – possibly – safely and joyously tucked away again into a nest of lovely sisters, and visiting Mrs Curragh with Lord Odo Fitzgerald [sic] … or shining in an equipage of old Lord Carlisle’s, with outriders, driving through the gates of Dublin Castle …’40 – on her way to meet, perhaps, for the first time, the young, uncertain Percy Wyndham, and let the whole story unfurl once more.
Picture Section
‘A tall strong woman’: Madeline Wyndham, in her early thirties,
by G. F. Watts.
‘The Hon. P’: Percy Wyndham as a young man, by Frederic Leighton.
Playing at romance: Guy, Mary and George Wyndham at Cockermouth Castle, 1867.
Madeline Wyndham with the toddler Pamela on her lap at Hyères, 1873. On the reverse Madeline has scribbled a clandestine note to Wilfrid Blunt.
The adoring father: Percy Wyndham with George.
Mary, as a wide-eyed eight-year-old in Cumberland, by Valentine Prinsep.
Mary in her early twenties, by Sir Edward Poynter. Mary found the sittings a ‘bore’. Her children thought Poynter failed to capture her vitality.
A young Wilfrid Blunt, smouldering into the camera.
‘Pretty Fanny’: Arthur James Balfour in less obviously seductive mode.
George Wyndham, hard at work, and already showing the signs of age.
A rhapsody in white: the Adeanes at Babraham in 1897. From left, Mananai, Madeline, Sibell, Pamela and Charlie.
The next generation at Clouds. From left, Mananai’s daughters Madeline and Lettice Adeane prepare to sally forth with Pearson the coachman. Madeline Wyndham, holding one of her beloved dachshunds, looks on from the steps.
The men in their lives, as seen by the cartoonists of Vanity Fair.
Clockwise from top left: Harry Cust, Percy Wyndham, Hugo Elcho and Eddy Tennant.
Mary and Balfour in old age, with one of Mary’s beloved chows.
Pamela in her fifties, communing with the birds.
List of Illustrations
Integrated
1. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt © imagebroker/Alamy
2. Madeline Wyndham, by Edward Burne-Jones © Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, London, www.leicestergalleries.com
3. Mrs E. Tennant, afterwards Lady Glenconner, by Violet, Duchess of Rutland (pencil on paper, 1895) © Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library
4. Mr Henry Cust, by Violet, Duchess of Rutland (pencil on paper, c.1890s) © Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library
5. Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, by Harry Furniss (pen and ink, 1880s–1990s) © National Portrait Gallery, London
6. ‘They don’t call it Home Rule, but the path is the same’, after Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (line block postcard, c.1903) © National Portrait Gallery, London
8 Edward Wyndham Tennant, by John Singer Sargent © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy
Picture section
1. Madeline Wyndham, by G. F. Watts © Private Collection
2. Percy Wyndham, by Frederic Leighton © Stanway House
3. Guy, Mary and George Wyndham © Stanway House
4. Madeline Wyndham with Pamela Wyndham © Stanway House
5. Percy Wyndham with George Wyndham © Private Collection
6. Mary Wyndham, by Valentine Princep © Stanway House
7. Mary Wyndham, by Edward Poynter © Stanway House
8. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt © British Library
9. Arthur James Balfour, by London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company (albumen cabinet card, 1870s–1900s) © National Portrait Gallery
10. George Wyndham, by Frank T. Foulsham, published by Underwood & Underwood (albumen stereoscopic card, 1900)
11. Mananai, Madeline, Sibell, Pamela and Charlie Adeane © Private Collection
12. Madeline Wyndham and Madeline and Lettice Adeane © Private Collection
13. (top left) Henry John Cockayne-Cust, by Sir Leslie Ward (‘Spy’), 15 February 1894, Vanity Fair cartoon (colour litho), in Private Collection © Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library; (top right) The Hon. Percy Scawen Wyndham, by Sir Leslie Ward (‘Spy’), 30 October 1880, Vanity Fair cartoon (colour litho), in Private Collection © Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library; (bottom right) Lord Elcho, by Sir Leslie Ward (‘Spy’), 26 March 1892, Vanity Fair cartoon (colour litho), in Private Collection © Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library; (bottom left) Sir Edward Tennant, 2 November 1910, Vanity Fair cartoon (colour litho), in Private Collection © Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library
14. Arthur Balfour and Mary Charteris, by Lady Ottoline Morrell (vintage snapshot print, 1925) © National Portrait Gallery, London
15. Pamela Grey, by unknown photographer (sepia-toned vintage bromide print on card mount, mid-1920s) © National Portrait Gallery, London
Notes
A note on the references:
The correspondence between Mary Elcho and Arthur Balfour lies principally in the Stanway archives, at Stanway House in Gloucestershire, and the Whittingehame archives. Professor Jane Ridley and Clayre Percy have edited a wonderful collection of this correspondence in Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho 1887–1917 (Hamish Hamilton, 1992). For the reader’s ease, where the letter I have referred to also appears in this published collection, I have referenced it according to the page at which it may be found in the Letters.
A note on the values:
Where I provide calculations of money values in today’s terms, I provide three values for the sum. For income or wealth: the simple RPI calculation (RPI), the economic status value, which may be described as the ‘prestige value’ of that income or wealth (ESV), and the economic power value, which measures the amount of income or wealth relative to the total output of the economy (EPV). Both these latter calculations are based on GDP, and help to give a better idea of relative wealth within contemporary society. For commodity values I give the real price; the labour value, which is measured by using the relative wage for a worker to buy that commodity; and the income value, which measures the relative average income that would be used to buy the commodity. All calculations are from www.measuringworth.com.
Epigram
1 J. W. Mackail and Guy Wyndham, Life and Letters of George Wyndham, 2 vols (Hutchinson, 1925), 2.723.
Prologue
1. Pamela
Glenconner, ‘Fantasia – of a London House Closed’, in Pamela Glenconner, The White Wallet (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), pp. 211–12.
2. Frances, Lady Horner to Edward Burne-Jones, quoted in Caroline Dakers, Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993), p. 163.
3. The phrase is that of William Lethaby, the architectural historian, and friend and biographer of Philip Webb, cited in Dakers, Clouds, p. 83.
4. Percy Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 7 February 1900, Glenconner Papers, NRS GD510/1/26.
5. Pamela Tennant to Percy Wyndham, quoted in Dakers, Clouds, pp. 164–5.
6. Pamela Tennant to Percy Wyndham, quoted in ibid., p. 164.
7. Ibid.
8. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 18 January 1899, Stanway Papers.
9. Ibid.
10. Madeline Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 16 February 1900, Glenconner Papers, NRS GD510/1/26.
11. William Howe Downes, John S. Sargent: His Life and Work (Thornton Butterworth, 1926), p. 17.
12. James Lomax and Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian Age: An Exhibition Organized Jointly by the Leeds Art Galleries, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Detroit Institute of Arts (Leeds, Leeds Art Galleries, 1979), p. 53.
13. Pamela Tennant to Percy Wyndham, quoted in Dakers, Clouds, pp. 164–5.
14. Arthur Balfour to Mary Elcho, 22 September 1900, quoted in Jane Ridley and Clayre Percy (eds), The Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho 1885–1917 (Hamish Hamilton, 1992), p. 176.
15. Quoted in Downes, John S. Sargent, pp. 188–9.
16. Quoted in ibid., p. 50.
17. Quoted in ibid., pp. 109–10.
18. Quoted in Lomax and Ormond, John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian Age, p. 55.
Chapter 1: ‘Worse than 100 Boys’
1. Constance Leconfield to Madeline Wyndham, 15 March 1909, Petworth Papers.
2. Emily Eden, Miss Eden’s Letters, ed. Violet Dickinson (Macmillan, 1919), pp. 250–1 n. 423.
3. Quoted in Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 324.
4. Percy Wyndham to Madeline Wyndham, 31 July 1860, Petworth Papers.
5. Percy Wyndham to Fanny Montgomery, 3 August 1862, cited in Dakers, Clouds, p. 20.
6. Quoted in D. G. Boyce, The Irish Question and British Politics 1868–1996 (2nd edn, Macmillan, 1996), p. 1.
7. Lawrence James, Aristocrats: Power, Grace and Decadence – Britain’s Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present (Little, Brown, 2009), p. 314.
8. Katharine Tynan Hinkson, The Years of the Shadow (Constable, 1919), p. 256.
9. Ibid., p. 257.
10. Max Egremont, The Cousins (Collins, 1977), p. 21.
11. John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 26 n.1.
12. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.153.
13. Percy Wyndham to Madeline Wyndham, 1 August 1860, Petworth Papers.
14. Percy Wyndham to Madeline Wyndham, 5 August 1860, Petworth Papers.
15. Conversation with Mrs James Adeane, c.2008.
16. Lady Campbell to Lord Leconfield, 12 July 1860, quoted in Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.17.
17. See the correspondence between Henry Brydon, the lawyer responsible for the transaction, Percy Wyndham and Lord Leconfield in September and October 1860, Petworth Papers. The money, £35,727 16s 5d in consols, was transferred from Lord Leconfield’s account at the Bank of England on 19 September 1860. Lord Leconfield was charged £1 1s 6d for the transaction. On 10 October, it was transferred to the trustees of the marriage settlement – Percy’s elder brother Henry, and Adolphus Liddell, a lifelong friend of Percy and Madeline’s, and in time a close friend of their children. The equivalent in today’s money is £2,754,000 in RPI, £30,250,000 in ESV and £66,340,000 in EPV. The settlement was signed by Percy and Madeline either the day before or the morning of their marriage.
18. ‘Heads of Settlement by the Honourable Percy Scawen Wyndham on his marriage with Miss Campbell of Woodview, Stillorgan near Dublin, daughter of the late Sir Guy Campbell, Bart., of £35,000 consols’, Petworth Papers. When Percy’s brother Henry married Constance Primrose, granddaughter of the Earl of Rosebery, some seven years later, Lord Leconfield provided the same amount for her. However, Constance matched this with the dowry she brought to the marriage herself.
19. Madeline Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 14 January 1898, Glenconner Papers, NRS GD510/1/32 f. 24r.
20. Mary, Countess of Wemyss, A Family Record (Plaistow, Curwen Press, 1932), pp. 19–20.
21. Nancy Waters Ellenberger, ‘Constructing George Wyndham: Narratives of Aristocracy in Fin-de-Siècle England’, Journal of British Studies 39:4 (October 2000): 487–517, 496.
22. Bernard Cracroft, ‘The Analysis of the House of Commons, or Indirect Representation’, in Essays on Reform, quoted in Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1500–1880 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 422.
23. Quoted in Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (Croom Helm, 1974), p. 64.
24. Ridley and Percy (eds), Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho, p. 11.
25. G. F. Watts to Madeline Wyndham, quoted in Mary S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life, 2 vols (Macmillan, 1912), 1.239–41.
26. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.20–1.
27. Dakers, Clouds, p. 35.
28. Mary Elcho to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 16 August 1921, Blunt Papers, FM 225-1976.
29. Ibid.
30. Lady Campbell to Percy Wyndham, quoted in Dakers, Clouds, p. 20.
31. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 7 December 1899, Stanway Papers.
32. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 17 February 1871, Petworth Papers.
33. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 8 October 1874, Petworth Papers.
34. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, n.d. [1874], Petworth Papers.
35. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.21.
36. Ibid., 1.19.
37. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 16 August 1895 (Letters, pp. 138–9).
38. Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 (Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1994), p. 357.
39. Edith Olivier, Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (Faber & Faber, 1940), p. 92.
40. Ibid., p. 93.
41. George Wyndham to Edward Clifford, September 1895, quoted in Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.287.
42. Percy Wyndham to Madeline Wyndham, 12 August 1860, Petworth Papers.
43. Ellenberger, ‘Constructing George Wyndham’, p. 497.
44. Mary Elcho to Margot Asquith, 3 May 1911, Bodleian, Asquith Papers, MS. Eng. d. 3283.
45. As she grew older, the Wyndhams’ second daughter more frequently used ‘Madeline’. In order, however, to distinguish between mother and daughter, I refer throughout to Madeline (daughter) as Mananai, except where I use her married name, Madeline Adeane. Doubtless Mananai would have understood, as even she was capable of being caught out on occasion by the family’s faithful adherence to a mere handful of names: ‘[T]here were two Madelines in the house, two Pamelas, two Percys … three Guys … so it was rather confusing’ Mananai commented of a visit by Campbell cousins to Wilbury in 1883 (Madeline Adeane to Mary Elcho, 16 September 1883, Stanway Papers).
46. Dakers, Clouds, p. 36.
47. Ibid.
48. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.16.
49. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, n.d. [November, 1869], Petworth Papers.
50. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, 25 October [1869], Stanway Papers.
51. Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century (Vintage, 2008), pp. 371–2.
52. Quoted in David Marquand, Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (Orion, 2008), p. 33.
53. White, Lond
on in the Nineteenth Century, p. 137.
54. Marquand, Britain since 1918, p. 53.
55. See G. F. Watts to Madeline Wyndham in Watts, George Frederic Watts, 1.239–41, 325–6.
56. Quoted in Dakers, Clouds, p. 57.
57. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, c.September 1884, Stanway Papers.
58. Philip Burne-Jones to Lady Frances Balfour, 15 October 1889, Whittingehame Papers, NRS GD433/2/301 f. 72.
59. For the suggestion that this is so, see Dakers, Clouds, p. 129; and Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), pp. 90–1.
60. Cynthia Asquith, Haply I May Remember (James Barrie, 1950), p. 138.
61. See Pamela Tennant’s recollection in her letter to Mary Elcho, 13 March 1928, Stanway Papers.
62. See Madeline Wyndham’s response to Mary Elcho’s miscarriage in 1884 and Madeline Adeane’s stillborn child in 1899.
63. Elizabeth Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), p. 172.
64. Frederic Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, 2 vols (Macmillan, 1911), 2.166, 173.
65. Katherine Tynan Hinkson, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (John Murray, 1913), pp. 302–3.
66. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, diaries, quoted in Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion, p. 102.
67. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, ‘Alms to Oblivion’, Part V, Chapter III, Blunt Papers, FM 311-1975.