The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Brussels, like Florence, sustained a large British colony, and for the same reason. It was cheap to live there, and titled European families were ten a penny. A man might fill his mantelpiece with crested invitations and cartes de visite. Perhaps the very best people were in Paris, but there was enough going on in Brussels to replicate that older, frowstier form of society that was to Morgan’s taste. So, interspersed with the names of son Dal’s fellow Etonians who came to stare and wonder, we find the Baron de Pfuel, Limmander de Nieuvehoven, and—Louisa’s finest social acquisition—the Baronne de Goethals. There was war in the air and everyone was talking about Constantinople. Some of the insouciant young Englishmen Georgina saw lounging about at balls and parties she would never see again. One of her beaux was William Scarlett, whose uncle was to command the Heavy Brigade at Sebastopol.

  Brussels was intended by her parents to be a kind of finishing school. They stayed a season, and Georgina sang before an audience for the first time at the British Embassy. The recital—which may not have been more than one song—was well received. For the first time in her life it was exciting to be a Thomas. Though she was by her own description “wild,” she was also “irresistible.” Her triumphs came entirely as a consequence of her own efforts—to her surprise people liked this turbulent and impulsive girl from Florence. Now that the family was out in the world a little more, her father’s peculiarities became more obvious. It was the first chance she had to compare him with other fathers, and she began to form the opinion expressed so forcibly in the years ahead:

  My father, who as a consequence of his proud and violent character had always been more or less mad at last became so, despite being gifted with rare and valuable qualities. His mother’s favourite, he had been spoiled as a child, and he reaped what all spoiled children reap. He inspired hate and terror in everybody. As for me, I never addressed a word to him in my life, and he only spoke to us to call us to table and to tell us we were damn fools. If my mother had only a little common sense or principle, she would not have endured such a hell, neither for herself nor for her children, and I blame her much more than my father for all that has happened.

  There is a characteristic element of exaggeration in this. At the time, darting about Brussels, discovering clothes, learning to waltz, and reaping compliments wherever she went, life had taken an unexpected twist. It was fun. Evidently, some young women made their effect by hiding shyly behind their mothers’ skirts. That was not Georgina’s way. She was bold, careless even. A lifelong habit of bathing in cold water had been set in Florence. Now, much farther north and in the depths of winter, she bounced from the bath pink and eager, hungry for breakfast and the chance to meet new people and shine in their company. Wherever she went she demonstrated a similar animal exuberance. She was happy.

  While retaining the lease on the house in the rue de Luxembourg, Morgan finally took his family back to England in 1854. Dal was at Eton, but the other children had never seen England and only Georgina had been born there. It was exciting to be home, but it was also daunting. The country was more interested in cholera and the imminence of war than the arrival of the Thomas family. Georgina’s flirtatious experiments followed her across the Channel: no sooner had they set foot in England than Morgan intercepted a love letter to his daughter from a mysterious G.V.—presumably by stealing it or reading it surreptitiously. His reaction was illuminating. He summoned the butler, Antonio, and had him take it to the bemused local police. Meanwhile, Gate House in Mayfield was prepared for the family as its permanent seat, and Georgina’s first scattered impressions of her native country were gathered while driving about Brighton and East Sussex to be introduced to the local gentry. She was not impressed. That vague sense of superiority so lavishly rekindled in Brussels was not to be squandered on mutton-eating squires and their sullen children.

  At first, England disappointed Georgina. Life at the Villa Capponi had been dull, but wonderful things had happened to her since. Though her father watched her like a hawk, she had already received two declarations of love and turned any number of heads. Neither of her sisters was of an age to be seen in a romantic light: she was the center of attention in whatever drawing room she found herself. She confirmed the earlier suspicion that she was far more forward and direct than her English contemporaries. In an age that placed so much importance on the niceties of address, how to behave with self-effacing quiet was something it was already too late for her to learn. Her father had been right about one thing: once you described yourself as of good family, the number of friends and acquaintances you might make in life was small indeed, at any rate in the Sussex hinterland. However, farming had never been so prosperous in living memory, and Morgan and his family had come back to a golden decade for corn prices. The best of the country gentlemen had “no enemies but time and gout,” as one admiring foreign observer put it. That did not necessarily make them entrancing company.

  If Sussex was dull, London was a different matter. Though Morgan might find as much to deprecate there as anything he had found in Florence, his opinion counted for nothing. The London he came home to had almost doubled in size from the one he had left. Its sophistication and complexity were quite beyond him. There was more “dash” to affairs than he remembered and a great deal more irreverence. Whole new classes had sprung up and with them manners that were beneath Morgan’s dignity to interest himself in. He was safe for as long as he stayed in the West End and kept himself away from anything approaching talent. The truth was that Morgan could not and never would find a niche in society. His time had passed.

  For Georgina London was a city bathed in dangerous adventure. Rotten Row, of which she had heard much as a child, had been recently widened to accommodate the Sunday carriage rides of the rich and titled. She duly made her baptismal appearance there, stared at in what she considered an insolent way by any number of young men on horseback. She found them all distressingly tall. It was no use attempting a conversational finesse by comparing the scene disfavorably to the Cascine Gardens—this was the real thing. The carriage row in Hyde Park was a showcase of the aristocracy. The Prince Consort rode out there. As the elegant carriages ambled their way back and forth along the mile-and-a-half route around the edge of Hyde Park, on fine days—just out of sight but not out of earshot—as many as twelve thousand bathers swam in the Serpentine. The scale of London and the juxtaposition of its classes were beyond anything she had ever seen. Like her father, she discovered much that she must learn. The greatest part of it was where and how to fit in. To be fashionable was to know far more—perhaps to discount far more—than the elementary education she had received in Florence.

  In 1855 Georgina went back to Brussels with her mother for Carnival, and on February 17 attended a ball at the Baronne de Goethals’. It was the scene of one of the great moments in her life. Among the company was a Portuguese baron named Pedro de Moncorvo. He was twenty-seven years old, the son of a former ambassador to the Court of St. James. Georgina was dressed in the costume of a Parisian grisette, and the evening passed in a delirium of romantic enchantment. Here, with all the force of a novel, was the perfect situation—a beautiful girl heated by the dance, pursued by a dark and handsome stranger. Writing fifty years later, Georgina claimed to have loved him with all her heart, and when she was sixty-six, she went all the way to Bemfica to visit his grave. Moncorvo was probably the first man to see her for what she was and not attempt to change her. They met no more than ten times, during which he alternately scolded and cajoled her. For the first but not the last time in her life she was, so to speak, living to the tune and lyrics of the best kind of song. Four days after her eighteenth birthday, her father intervened, and she was banished from Brussels and sent into exile at Boulogne.

  On June 18, wracked by love, playing the piano with tragic abandon, she opened the door of her lodgings to find Moncorvo on the doorstep. Unchaperoned, they walked on the cliffs overlooking the town.

  He asked me if I had deceived myself in al
lowing that perhaps I loved him. I answered “If I loved you, what would be the use?” “Forgive me,” he said. “If you loved me we could be married in that church” and he pointed to the church of Boulogne. I made no reply, his lips almost touched my cheek. I drew back gently. He did not kiss me. He departed that same afternoon—and I have never seen him since.

  It is a perfect vignette. As she grew older, she realized he may have loved her with a seriousness her youth and ignorance did not allow for on the day. For the rest of her life she wondered what might have happened if she had done as he asked and married him against the wishes of her parents. And though a year later he married a Portuguese comtessa, he continued to write her affectionate letters, enough for her to make that long sea journey when he died. What makes the story so poignant, in light of what was to come, is that the girl on the cliffs was still the girl from Florence, the wayward boy in the body of a woman, the original and untempered Georgina Thomas. She lost him out of inexperience.

  It is sad to see her later embroider the story, explaining that she could not marry him because of a devotion to a higher thing, her art. She was an eighteen-year-old girl who had for the first time in her life been faced with a real decision, touching real feelings. Moncorvo was asking a lot of her—he was very much older, he was poor, and he was Catholic. But the truth was that—too early in her life for her to understand and profit from the experience—a man was prepared to take her exactly as she was. In this brief and shimmering image of them on the cliffs, we are watching a man who has seen something of the world and a girl who has not. Moncorvo was not saying “take me back to England so that I can sponge off your father.” He was inviting her to come with him to Portugal.

  When he pointed with a sweep of his arm to “the church of Boulogne,” the gesture also took in the villa where Dickens and Wilkie Collins stayed with their families, and the place where Thackeray and his daughters had rested in the past. Perfectly visible was the massive embarkation camp from which the French Imperial Army had set sail to the Crimea. Even while they spoke, many of those who had marched down to the quays garlanded with flowers were being blown to pieces at the Malakhov Redoubt.

  Georgina knew nothing of such things. Moncorvo was the first to lay bare her ignorance of the real world. She may have had practical misgivings, and certainly the peculiar urgency and danger of his visit must have weighed with her. Watching the hazy sea, trying not to look into his eyes, she learned from Moncorvo that afternoon what love was, rather than what a well-arranged English marriage could confer. She chose the wrong option.

  Treherne

  1

  In the autumn of 1857 Morgan and his brothers changed their name to Treherne. The battle of Poitiers was now five hundred years old, and the family was able to show that the two surnames had been interchangeable down the years that followed Sir Hugh’s adventures in France. They were merely reclaiming what was theirs by right and reverting to a more profoundly ancestral form of address. From Morgan’s point of view, there was an element of the ruse de guerre in the alteration. Like his forebear, he had gone away one person and (he hoped) come home another. A change of name was a partial cancellation of all his earlier mistakes. While it might please his eldest brother to stand contemplating his Lletymawr estates as a Treherne, it did Morgan no harm, either, to lord it over his Sussex neighbors under the new title. In a way, it was as good as an elevation.

  There was more of a problem with how to identify the new Trehernes when they came up from the country to London. They were not rich, nor were they well connected. Families—brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts—usually made a simple enough matrix for the giving and receiving of hospitality, as did work or political allegiance. None of these helped describe the Sussex Trehernes. To go about at all in society meant they had to have some circle of acquaintance, and it is probable that the greater part of it was provided by Georgina. When carriages were summoned and Georgina parted regretfully from her hosts after what she hoped was an irresistible contribution to the evening, the question arose: who was she? Parsed, this meant, who were her parents? Mr. Treherne himself had no cronies, political or otherwise, and belonged to no clubs. He was estranged from his own family. His wife was a dumpy and unfashionable lady happier when she was in the country. If it was asked what this family wanted, what advantage it was trying to seek (a perfectly understandable inquiry), no easy answer was forthcoming. The change of name might indicate that Morgan wished to be considered Welsh, but he would have been bitterly disappointed to have given this impression.

  When Thackeray’s The Snobs of England was published ten years earlier, it made the whole country anxious. Some of those who read the work in serial form wrote in to ask whether they could be accounted snobs, and Thackeray cheerfully included the details of their lives in his next installment. How far did a man like the new Mr. Treherne come under the title? The word derives from Cambridge undergraduate slang in use during Morgan’s time at Trinity. In the narrow sense, the Welshman was indeed a “snob” as much as he was a “tassel”—his parentage bridged town and gown. Thackeray’s extension of the meaning to include anyone wishing to be something he was not was useful in principle but applied so indiscriminately by him that Morgan and many others might have wondered whether anyone at all in society could escape the term.

  One of the small miracles of literature is how Thackeray escaped the crude and gluey morass that was The Snobs of England to begin in the very next year his literary masterpiece, Vanity Fair. There he devoted a famous chapter to how to live well on nothing a year. The new tone is more realistic and generous: “The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on nothing a year, we use the word ‘nothing’ to signify something unknown—meaning, simply, that we don’t know how the gentleman in question defrays the expenses of his establishment.” This describes Morgan’s situation when seen about town in London or Brighton. His innate anxiety led him to claim more than he possessed, in wealth as well as rank, but he was not as fatuous as some of Thackeray’s more helpless victims. Nor was he in the slightest way ingratiating. He paid no man his loyalty. If the question turned on whether he was a gentleman at all, most Victorians would have concluded that he was. They might have gone on to say that he was not a very pleasant one, nor a very distinguished example of the breed. That was beside the point. Morgan’s desire was not so much to remake himself in a different image, but to consolidate what little rank he had. In that respect, he had gone away one person and come back as another.

  His daughter was the immediate beneficiary of the new surname and the first to give it luster. In October 1857 Miss Georgina Treherne was included in the cast list of a private musical extravaganza devised in honor of the Duchess of Cambridge, called endearingly Hearts and Tarts. The performance took place at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, the home of Lady Marion Alford, a widow in her forties who kept up a lively artistic and political salon. The Queen of Hearts was played by Princess Mary of Cambridge, whom Queen Victoria always found so wanting for her terrible size, her dirty ball gowns, and the racy company she kept. The Princess had been childhood friends with Constance Villiers, which explained her presence in the cast, as well as that of Lady Villiers’s father, Lord Clarendon, who acted as stage manager. His fellow minister, Lord Granville, played the Knave of Hearts and had as his father in the play the newly succeeded Duke of Manchester. In fact, only Georgina was without noble connection. Princess Mary, per-haps confused by the surname and the obscurity of her background, remembered her afterward as a handsome young lady from Cornwall.

  How had Georgina come to be in such august company? It pleased her in later years to describe herself as wracked by shyness, but of all her fantasies this rings least true. She was certainly very pretty—the Pre-Raphaelite Frederick Sandys considered her one of the most beautiful women in England (though in this and practically every other area, his was a very unreliable opinion)—but it was her voice that gave her the entrée.

  There was a very
long established tradition of musical entertainment in great houses. If you were well bred and could sing, you could do something very useful for your hostess and add to the charm of the occasion. It did not much matter if people talked through your rendition of some touching ballad—you were there to see and be seen. And it was a wonderful means of social introduction. At some of the grander functions, duchesses filled the first chairs, and the audience was ranged back in strict order of precedence. Invitations to these evenings—when they took place in the London high season—might exceed a hundred. The better houses had music rooms, but in other places the company crammed into drawing rooms and sat in bundles on the stairs. If there was not much glamour in it for the old, for the young it was exciting. For their mothers it was a battleground.

  Constance Villiers liked and remembered Georgina for her performance on this particular evening at Ashridge. Hidden in the playbill is the clue to how she may have come to take part. The prompt for Georgina’s performance in Hearts and Tarts was a wonderful old piece of Regency flotsam, Freddy Byng. It may have been his sponsorship that got Georgina into such august company. Poodle Byng (who was given his nickname by the Prince Regent because of the tight blond curls he wore as a young man) flits in and out of Victorian memoirs like an elderly and homeless bat. It was the Poodle who so scandalized the court in the first months of Victoria’s reign when she was still considered a green girl by playing cards and making eyes at her, until he was gently shown the door. The fifth son of Viscount Torrington, he was fond of very young women and is said to have married his mother’s chambermaid. He seems to have traveled light in Victorian society and been tolerated in the houses of the rich for his manners and gentle heart—because he knew everybody and was so very old. His only official duty anyone could remember had come in 1824 when he was given the job of escorting the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands about London as a representative of the Crown. He did the best he could to amuse these two monarchs but could not stop them from dying of influenza two months after they arrived. Acting with unusual decisiveness, he had them embalmed in brandy and shipped back to the South Pacific.