The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Byng seems to have been genuinely besotted by Georgina. Three years on, Thackeray, who knew the Poodle rather better than he knew Georgina, surprised her by buying a wedding ring in Cockspur Street. Later in the afternoon he ran across the decrepit old man and broke his heart by saying, “Poodle, you have lost your singing bird. Miss Treherne has married some other fellow.” Poodle Byng found her when she first came out and introduced her to those of his many friends who spent part of their time and wealth on private concerts and recitals. If he was amorous, he was also kindly: after irresistible blandishments from Georgina, he helped get her parents presented at court in 1858. Even Morgan could see the use of a sponsor like that, however old and decrepit he might be.

  2

  Georgina at twenty possessed an enchanting and very idiosyncratic soprano voice (her diction was considered exceptionally clear and distinct), and what she lacked in manners and sophistication she made up for by being seen everywhere. If she was coquettish—and this could certainly be leveled against her—then it was all very artless and inconsequential. Suspicious mothers and society hostesses alike were quickly reassured that this was no Becky Sharp, no girl on the make. She was if anything naive to a fault. Her dearest friends were the people she met last night. They were replaced without embarrassment by those to whom she was presently talking. So, for example, early on she spoke of Lord Lansdowne as a dear friend and ally. The fourth Marquis was an undersecretary of state for foreign affairs and a political scalp worth having. Whether he could separate Georgina from any of half a hundred young women he might have met under similarly brief circumstances was quite another matter.

  Georgina was beginning to exhibit her father’s ability to improve the facts. She had only to be in a noble house once to affect a lifelong intimacy with its owners. The most casual kind word addressed to her was an affirmation of undying love. She was odd like this and had a number of other social faults, including a garrulity that sometimes led her into indiscretion. She was not a girl to keep a secret.

  Poodle Byng soon found her an appropriate milieu in which to shine. This was at Little Holland House, the former dower house of Lady Holland. After her death it had been purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Thoby Prinsep. Prinsep was an amiable and elderly retired official of the India Office and his wife, Sara, one of the famously beautiful, famously eccentric Pattle sisters. Georgina was especially delighted to discover there someone she could claim to know from the Florence years. The last time she had seen him was in the Casa Feroni, when she was six. The principal adornment of Little Holland House was her father’s most reviled artist, George Frederick Watts.

  Watts was now forty-one years old. He was the centerpiece of all Mrs. Prinsep’s bustling social energies, a position he had more or less proposed for himself. “He came for three days; he stayed thirty years,” his patroness observed dryly. The salon he helped her create included many of the Pre-Raphaelites, and figures such as Tennyson and Thackeray, Dickens and Carlyle, but it was really given over to Watts’s enigmatic genius. George Du Maurier left a description of Sara and her sisters—“Elgin marbles with dark eyes,” as Ruskin once called them—handing out tea to their guests with almost Eastern obeisance:

  Watts, who is a grand fellow, is their painter in ordinary: the best part of the house has been turned into his studio and he lives there and is worshipped till his manliness hath almost departed, I should fancy . . . After the departure of the visitors we dined; without dress coats—anyhow, and it was jolly enough—Watts in red coat and slippers. After dinner, up in the music room Watts stretched himself at full length on the sofa, which none of the women take when he is there. People formed [a] circle, and I being in good voice sang to them the whole evening, the cream of Schubert and Gordigiani—c’était très drôle, the worship I got . . .

  This was a different kind of ambience altogether from Ashridge, and Du Maurier’s breezy insouciance captures it exactly. The house itself was as good as in the country, removed by trees and meadows from the harsher, more unforgiving light that shone on soirees in Grosvenor Square or Belgravia. It was a low and sprawling building, the interiors decorated by Watts’s frescoes. Some rooms boasted wonderful blue ceilings, and others were hung with Indian rugs and cloths. Behind a door covered in red baize lay the hallowed center of the house, the source of its energies, Watts’s studio. For Georgina it was a perfect stage, nonpolitical, gossipy, and faintly loose. There was enough oddity already existing at Little Holland House for her to feel at home. Sara Prinsep swept about the rooms in her own version of Indian dress, coaxing and wheedling Watts and permitting in her other guests what seemed to stricter hostesses a dangerous bohemianism. Her husband’s library was kept out of the way, and there were no books on display in the main rooms, forcing visitors and habitués into torrents of conversation and persiflage.

  As to Watts, nobody could quite make him out. He had an almost perfect mixture of worldly vanity and ethereal otherness. Tall and thin, very good-looking in youth, now with a hint of pain and suffering peeping out from behind biblically long and straggling whiskers, the time he spent in Florence—and in particular the gift for portraiture he discovered there—had set him on the road to fame. If there was a question mark against his sexual appetites or lack of them and if men found him ridiculous, he was all the same a society portraitist of the highest rank. This was a label he hated, for Watts had it in mind to paint the large allegorical works with which he had started out, and which the fame of the Florence portraits had eclipsed. As soon as Georgina met him she made up to him unmercifully and had the reward—the accolade—of a sitting.

  Watts had the reputation of making his subjects look younger and more beautiful than they were in life. In his Florence portrait of Augusta, Lady Holland, she looks out directly at the viewer under a slightly tilted head, her huge eyes shaded by the Italian straw hat she wears. Her lips are smiling and there are dimples in her cheeks: she wears the expression of someone sharing a pleasant secret with the artist, and so with us. It is the portrait of a clever, sensuous woman, well aware of the effect she is making. Watts finished this painting in 1843. Fourteen years on, the portrait of Georgina makes a striking contrast. Shown in three-quarter profile, she wears a similarly wide-brimmed hat, and her hand lightly supports her chin and cheek. She has highly arched and plucked eyebrows and looks out a little past the painter with unsmiling eyes. Although she is only twenty, her face is full and the neck plump. Augusta smiles out at the world with sardonic humor; Georgina’s expression is faintly suspicious. It is an unfinished woman that Watts has represented and not an entirely likable one. He wrote at the time of the portrait:

  I must tell you, Bambina mia, that I miss you very much and the studio is very silent. The Bambina’s vivacity was pleasant enough to the dull Signor, who was affected by the exhilarating contagion; now, coming from Lincoln’s Inn weary and listless, I miss the vivacious little Bambina, and though Little H.H. is always charming and I am always made much of and spoiled, especially when I am tired, I miss the effervescent stimulant that was sparkling and overflowing all about the house, yet I was always in a fidget about the wild little girl, and very often not a little unhappy.

  There is the accent of a spinster aunt about this. What put him in a fidget and made him unhappy? Was it anything more than having his peace and routine disturbed? Something deeper? In the next sentence he adds, enigmatically, “I depend upon her to be prudent and wise, not less merry I hope, God forbid she ever should be.”

  The portrait, of which Georgina was enormously proud, has nothing in it at all merry or skittish. At first blush Watts might have been writing about someone else altogether. He liked very young girls, as he was to prove in a disastrous marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, and he was also fond of moralizing. But the artist in him was painfully honest. He had seen a gaucheness in Georgina that he put into words in another, later letter: “I want you to be very wise in the choice of a husband, for everything will depend on the person or pers
ons with whom you may live. If you are fortunate in this respect, you will be as you ought to be, an ornament and a delight to society; if the contrary, I dread more than I can say for the poor little bambina. I do not think you could be happy as the wife of a poor man . . .”

  In one way it is pretty obvious conventional advice. But Watts was writing to the girl who thought of herself as destined for a £10,000-a-year man, a story she must have told him. Fey though he was, however foolish he might act with the young, he was all the same still the piano tuner’s son. His remarks seem to distinguish between a life spent in society and not. That was something he knew all about, but a thing too unpleasant for her to contemplate.

  And was there anyone truly rich, eligible, and well connected among the people who flocked to Little Holland House, drank its tea, and admired its painter in ordinary? Not Watts himself, nor any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Of the writers Mrs. Prinsep cultivated all were rich men, but their property was intellectual. Thackeray might gaze in amazement at a cheque for £2,000 from his American tour, and Dickens was by no means a poor man, yet theirs was a different kind of wealth. Thomas Carlyle had once explained this in a letter to Jane Welsh, the intelligent and ambitious girl he was trying to persuade to marry him—and it was a sentiment likely to have found favor at Little Holland House: “Kings and Potentates are a gaudy folk that flaunt about with plumes & ribbons to decorate them, and catch the coarse admiration of the many headed monster for a brief season—and then sink into forgetfulness . . . but the Miltons, the de Staels—these are the very salt of the earth; they derive their ‘patents of Nobility’ direct from Almighty God; and live in the bosoms of all true men to all ages.”

  One of the occasional members of the coterie Georgina had now joined and who did belong to that rather less exalted nobility of plumes and ribbons was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Charlotte Schreiber had strong Welsh connections. Her first husband was Josiah John Guest of the Dowlais Ironworks, the M.P. for Merthyr Tydfil for twenty years until his death. Guest practically owned the town and employed most people in it. His wife was a daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsay and a Welsh scholar—she translated the Mabinogion into English when she was still in her twenties. After her husband’s death in 1852, she ran the iron and coal companies he left her under her own name. She had recently—and in some eyes shockingly—married Charles Schreiber of Trinity College, Cambridge, tutor to her eldest son. In Dorset the family kept up Canford Manor in all its magnificence, though (as the ever-vigilant Morgan discovered) under the terms of a trust the house and Lady Charlotte’s personal share in the fortune was forfeited by reason of this second marriage.

  It was at about this time, when the eldest son, Ivor, came into his majority and Canford became his, that Georgina first met the Schreibers. In the winter of 1856 Lady Charlotte and nine of her ten children crowded into a house at Marine Parade, Brighton, while a search was made for suitable and more permanent accommodation in London. Not until April of the following year did they find Exeter House in Roehampton, standing in sixteen acres. During their stay in Brighton they became acquainted with the Trehernes, in the general sense of being present at the same ball or party and included on the same subscription lists for concerts. The fourth son of the family was Merthyr Guest. He was a year younger than Georgina, a restless and underachieving student at Trinity College, Cambridge (where his brother had taken a first). Very comfortingly and after only a few meetings he declared himself infatuated with her. When the family moved to Exeter House, Georgina was soon invited there by Lady Charlotte. She also saw her from time to time at Little Holland House, where Merthyr’s mother was wont to engage Tennyson in conversations about the Arthurian legends. She had no knowledge of the depths of her son’s feeling for the pretty and amiable Miss Treherne. For the time being, Georgina said nothing to enlighten her.

  3

  If coming out in society and making a mark in it were part of Morgan’s plan for his daughter, Georgina had already done a great deal to satisfy his ambition. Her voice had carried her into drawing rooms that he would have difficulty in entering on his own merits. He had taken a house in Stratford Place, a small gated cul-de-sac off Oxford Street from which to direct both her affairs and his own. In the country he was a magistrate and a ruthless persecutor of trespassers and poachers. On his own land he set spring guns without the slightest qualm. He had by no means given up hope of a seat in the House of Commons. He was friendless and his relations with his brothers were as strained as ever, but by his own lights the new Mr. Treherne was making progress in the world. He was very deliberately old-fashioned, and there were as a consequence huge gaps in what he knew about the age in which he lived. Style and the surface of things had always meant nothing to him. He was a reactionary and proud of it. In certain circles—say among military men—there was no harm in that. On brief acquaintance and with the addition of only a little humor his position could even seem endearing. He polished a way of expressing himself that he was to use to the electors of Coventry in a famous speech: “I have a thorough and heart detestation of the Whigs . . . I have a parrot at home that cries Damn the Whigs! and although I should be very sorry to use such language myself—even if I do express myself strongly sometimes—I cannot say that my feelings towards the Whigs are more friendly than those of my parrot.”

  Georgina was troublesome to him but no more than she had ever been. Although by now she was of an age where he might have expected her to be settled and not emptying his purse running about London as a young lady of fashion, there were some encouraging developments. It was never Morgan’s practice to give a compliment, yet Georgina’s impetuous charm had at least secured the interest of an eminently worthy family like the Schreibers and she had the friendship (or so she claimed) of Lady Constance Villiers, daughter of the Foreign Secretary. From such connections who knew what might follow?

  And then the roof fell in.

  In January 1858 Lady Sudeley gave a ball in Brighton to which Louisa and her daughters were invited. The occasion was a happy one. Lord Sudeley, whose family owned large estates in the town, had just succeeded to the title. It was the first entertainment of the new year, and the 250 guests who assembled in the Pavilion Rooms had another lively topic of conversation, in addition to Lord Sudeley’s good fortune. A few days earlier, amid scenes of incredible pomp and attended by thirteen crowned heads of Europe, the Queen’s eldest daughter had married Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia. She was seventeen years old. That very Saturday, there had been an immense press of people at a congratulatory Drawing Room, at which the young Princess stood by her mother to receive her guests. Victoria was amazed and delighted at the cordiality shown to the Royal Family in what was for her a watershed experience. (The Princess Royal left England the following Tuesday in a blizzard of snow, attended by immense crowds. At Buckingham Palace the Queen had parted from her daughter in floods of tears, and this mood was communicated to the entire household, who sobbed and wailed as at a funeral. Lady Desart, a lady-in-waiting, said later it was the first time in her memory that Victoria completely lost control of herself.)

  There was much to discuss, then. Louisa might borrow a little from the glamour of the royal wedding by having boys at Eton, for the school had telegraphed the happy couple on the day of the wedding and asked permission to drag the honeymooners’ carriage through the streets of Windsor, which they accomplished most gallantly and inexpertly. And of course, since the subject of marriage in general was more than usually on everyone’s lips, did the company know that Georgina, etc., etc.? Nothing had been fixed, no formal announcements had been made, but Merthyr Guest was such a prepossessing young man and seemed so enamored of Miss Treherne, etc., etc. Of course he was very young and had first his career at Trinity to contemplate, but he was a dear kind boy. People who knew the Schreibers rather better than Louisa did might have been startled at this piece of wishful thinking. A really shrewd observer might have looked behind the understandable note of triumph and discove
red an ancient doubt: the development of the plot was only so good as the steadiness of the principal character in it, which was to say Georgina. Was she going to do something stupid at this critical moment?

  She was. The officers of the 18th Hussars, who were in barracks at Preston Park, had been invited to the Sudeley Ball. The 18th was hardly a very fashionable regiment: it had only recently been reconstituted, and of the officers there was not a title among them. It was true that General Scarlett, the hero of Balaclava, had himself served as a cornet with the old 18th; one of the present cornets had the honor to have been born under a gun at Waterloo. But the regiment was originally raised in Yorkshire and re-formed there; and though it had taken part in the festivities surrounding the royal wedding, it was too new to have fought in the Crimea or to have had any part in the putting down of the infamous Mutiny in India.

  Among those of the regiment who accepted for Lady Sudeley was a young lieutenant named Harry Weldon. While he cut a fine figure in patrol uniform and was reputed to ride well, his experience of soldiering was practically nil. Like many of his troopers, he came from Yorkshire. He had the languid manners appropriate to a junior officer and was good-looking in a stock sort of way, but he was shockingly provincial, for whom the past glittering month or so—of Brighton and London—had been bewitching. His expression was frank and open, and he was altogether the sort of boy you might entrust at a ball to fetch an ice or search for a shawl, but one whose name you asked only to forget. He was twenty years old and in the present company, a spear-carrier, an extra. If Morgan Treherne, M.P., had searched the Army List for a week, he could not have come up with a less appealing candidate for Georgina’s attentions.