The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Instead, they married secretly at Aldershot on Saturday, April 21, 1860.

  5

  It was snowing in London that day. There was war in the air, as well as snow. All the docks and installations had been fortified, and the previous month the Queen had received 2,500 Volunteer officers in review. Millais, Rossetti, and even Watts joined the Artists’ Rifles, riding about Wimbledon Common on horses they could hardly manage. Most amazing of all, the decrepit and tottering Poodle Byng enlisted in the Queen’s Westminsters and was present on parade, just as he had been for George III in the levy of volunteers fifty-seven years earlier. It was a strange time for the happy couple to be rattling toward Dover and the Continent, but a letter from Lord Clarendon to the Duchess of Manchester may hint at the suddenness of the marriage: “Don’t you remember Miss Treherne, who sang so well at Ashridge & the Poodle was so in love with? She has just eloped with Mr. Welldon a respectable man of 3000 a year but who her father did not think fine enough for her. My sister knows her very well & had a letter from her to say how impossible it wd: have been for her to have acted otherwise.”

  The £3,000 a year did not exist, of course. What was the reason for her being unable to act otherwise? Whether she was pregnant going across to Dieppe we do not know (though she was very soon after). Although Harry was married in uniform and attended by his fellow officers, he sold his commission the same day. At Paris Georgina wrote to her brother Dal, asking him to intercede with her father. But it was no use. Morgan cut her off without a penny, and she never saw him again.

  Harry had won his prize after all. The circumstances were less than ideal. He had met her parents only once, at the Sudeley Ball. He knew her only through the days and nights they had stolen together. She knew nothing at all of his family and astounded him by supposing Manchester to be a town in Yorkshire. As the coach headed south and Georgina practiced her French and Italian on the natives, their destination was—where else?—Florence. Less than two years after being presented at court, a week after shaming her parents, she was talking with a wildness and lack of realism he must already have grown used to, of going on the stage. No matter that the Mediterranean sun began to shine on them and leaving aside the question of whether or not she was already pregnant, they were effectively ruined. The only way back from a fiasco like this was through love. Or genius.

  Weldon

  1

  The new Mrs. Weldon returned to Florence with an adult’s view of what had been her childhood landscape. Harry was dismayed to find recent history being vigorously rewritten by his bride. The little girl who once bristled with virtue had become a confident gossip and name-dropper. She could assure people that Watts, who as a young man had painted Napoleon’s niece when she was newly married, had also painted her, to the acclaim of all London. She had met Thackeray, amused herself with Millais. Lord Clarendon and all the Villierses were special friends and Princess Mary such a lump. Tennyson was a rather earnest man with a complexion much ruined by tobacco. On the threat of war and revolution, of the political mood in England—on any matter whatsoever to do with politics—she was on less sure ground. Human society was for her always a matter of style and not content. It was hats and gardens, wallpapers, sheet music. She seemed not to understand that the world was being run by someone, or that there were wheels within wheels.

  Georgina was, or would like to have been thought, “a fashionable.” A fashionable woman was described by the width of her crinoline, the depth of her neckline, the exact amount of false hair added to her coiffure. Only a fashionable would know what jewelry to select for a given occasion or how well or badly to play at cards. But the term extended beyond clothes and appearance and crossed the line between the sexes. Books, plays, towns, streets within those towns, drawing rooms, furniture, the naming of children and dogs, the livery of servants—the list continued. It was easy to see what would not do. For example, until the Crimea veterans started to come home, beards were thought very de trop among men, and only certain kinds of mustache would pass. But after the investiture Victoria gave her Crimean soldier heroes in Green Park, beards might be allowed. In the same way, Wellington had detested his officers wearing uniforms in public, but now (for a while at least) it was thought rather a good thing.

  Fashionables might be treated satirically by their lessers, but the codes they established were very powerful. Georgina understood this world and all its nuances, without quite realizing that it interlocked with the world of real events. Though she came back to Florence a fashionable, it caused her no reflection that Italian unification was just about to knock a nail into the coffin of the English colony she wished to impress. In Florence itself the Grand Duke had abdicated, and the British Embassy, scene of so much revelry and intrigue in her childhood, had been withdrawn. Florence’s revolution had been peaceful, yet for the old Waterloo veterans still tottering the streets there was the unmistakable scent of gunpowder in the air. Garibaldi was in Naples. An era was ending.

  Harry’s enjoyment of the honeymoon was tempered by some unpleasant surprises. For such a careless name-dropper, his wife was extremely exact in matters of household budgeting. The cost of a night in a coaching inn, the loose change left over from a wise—or careless—choice of wines: in such things she showed a decided taste for petty detail. He had married a list maker. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come. She made lists, she argued indignantly over bills, handled servants with superb contempt. It was a side of her he had not reckoned with. It was true she had a hundred ideas and inspirations and an absolute passion for improving the bones of a story. But the grand lady she liked to be in the daily concourse of carriages at the Cascine Gardens and the musical genius she felt to be her true destiny came down in bed to a rather erratic woman who tried to amuse him by imitating the sound of birds and animals. In the mornings, staying at this or that hotel, she would sing for him, at alarming volume, breaking off only to scold a maid or question the reckoning of last night’s supper. The Florence of galleries and palaces left them both unmoved. They were at their best in cafés and restaurants or as the guests of some gullible family, hoping for news of England.

  Harry could play the part of a languid consort: it was the sort of thing he did well, and he was a clubbable, even on occasion a twinkly, personality. But he was much more realistic in temperament. Walking in the city and its gardens, listening to her chatter, it was better not to think too deeply of the comparison between Florence and whatever a little town in Anglesey had to offer. When they came home again to England—or as he had constantly to remind her, Wales—they would pay the full price for their folly.

  For a few weeks, all was well. They went to Capri, where they met the minor Pre-Raphaelite John Brett, who sketched her portrait. Such flattering attentions were no more than the embers of the romantic fires she had lit so briefly among the Little Holland House set. Her flirting days, the gamble she made of her youth and beauty for such high stakes, all this was at an end. Marriage did not extinguish her beauty, but to marry meant to settle down. In the case of the new Weldons, without money and influence, it meant to disappear. Their host Brett was an instance of how obscurely the obscure might live. To be praised by Ruskin for a particular painting was a fine thing, but it was not the passport to wealth and riches. In a year or so, with the whole Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood shipwrecked (to some extent on the rock of marriage), Brett left Capri and took himself off to Putney, where he built himself a most amazing house and took up astronomical observation and was largely forgotten. Here on Capri, talking and lounging, life seemed so wonderful, so fabulous. Whether or not she had married Harry for love, she was clearly mad about him now. He was her Proomps, her Darling Boy, her Dear Old Man.

  Brett was a few years older than them both and unmarried. He had been born into a soldier family and could recognize in Harry a lazy lustfulness, a sort of garrison town gift for making himself attractive to women. The husband, he observed, had little intelligent conversation and was perfectly ignorant of a
rt and culture. His wife was beautiful but also distressingly empty-headed. The pencil sketch Brett did of Georgina shows her sleeping, a plump arm extended above her head, her chin full. Around her neck is a choker of coral. There is not a line on her face. The whole drawing suggests ripeness and indolence, a Mediterranean abandon. This is Georgina at the magic hour, the shutters open to a blissful silence as the sea begins to take up the tint of the sky. But the idyll could not last. Harry finally dinned it into her that they could not stay where they were. The sun, the sea, all the romance of Italy, had been no more than a cruel backdrop to what seemed like a hopeless future. For the second and last time in her life she climbed into a diligence and quit the Mediterranean.

  Back in England, and on the road to her mother-in-law’s cottage in Beaumaris, she miscarried of a boy.

  2

  The miscarriage was a shattering blow. In her memoirs almost the only good word she has to say about Harry in any of his guises is that he sat by her bed for weeks nursing her through illness and despair. The location was unpromising. On the road into Beaumaris there lay a short row of cottages, one of which was occupied by Harry’s mother, a redoubtable and, according to Georgina, coarse-grained widow who came originally from Eccleshall in Lancashire. The newly marrieds moved in as neighbors. They, who had so recently sat where Nero sat, now found themselves in four rooms and an outside privy, with no money, no prospects, and no friends. Watts’s portrait, which hung on the wall alongside Harry’s boyhood collection of stuffed birds, was a ghastly reminder of what had been.

  Georgina lost the baby to what turned out to be an incurable gynecological defect. The enormity of this news—taken with the desolation of all her other prospects—might have brought a lesser woman to her knees. (It is the one subject on which she stayed silent in later life.) There were investigations done by doctors in London, cures attempted in the Rhine spas. The physicians she consulted saw a plump and comely young woman of twenty-three with a very ready presence, not at all the textbook wraith or hollow-eyed neurasthenic. Georgina was an otherwise healthy patient with unbounded energy and apparently unending reserves of courage and fortitude. They could not help her. It is quite clear that she desired children. Whatever had gone wrong with her own childhood she wanted to redress with children of her own. She persisted with the doctors long past the stage of a second or even a fourth opinion. In this, at least, the willfulness she had shown before her marriage came suddenly into focus. Being barren was something she simply could not allow to happen; and when it was proved beyond a doubt that she was, what was most valuable to her—her power over events—was taken away. Love in a cottage was all very well, but without the long perspective offered by children, where would her life with Harry lead?

  Some of her new neighbors took pity on her. The kindly Lady Bulkely called, which she had never done for the elder Mrs. Weldon. All the same, the scale of her Beaumaris life was more like shipwreck than anything else. She responded with a new and unfamiliar determination to make the very best of things. She gardened furiously in a handkerchief plot overlooking the sea, kept a dog, made light of her circumstances, and absolutely insisted on her rank. She engaged two Welsh girls as maids at £8 a year and started the long climb back.

  Without children, without the possibility of reconciliation to her own family, her single resource was not so much her talent, of which she had little that had been properly educated, but her energy. In the Beaumaris years it was this that made her famous. She astonished everyone who met her. Harry’s indolence, which had looked so well in uniform, soon enough seemed to her a mysterious force, a sort of disease even. She loved him dearly but found him completely without ambition. After a while he had himself elected to the Beaumaris Artillery Volunteers, where he found undemanding duties and congenial drinking companions among his fellow officers. Georgina organized a choir drawn from the ranks, augmented by child altos and with herself as principal soprano, and gave charity concerts. Harry thought her mad. His own plans were rudimentary in the extreme. He was waiting for his grandmother to die.

  3

  Georgina had been told several times just before her marriage that she should put her singing voice to advantage and turn professional. The advice came originally from Frederick Clay, an amateur composer who held a clerk’s post in the Treasury. Clay was a year or so younger than she and not much better trained as a musician, but he was a considerable melodist and an ambitious young man. He had been charmed by her and remained her friend through thick and thin. “The Sands of Dee,” a Clay ballad which for forty years every young woman in England offered when music was called for, was dedicated to her. It may have been that he knew enough about her to make this idea of singing professionally a subtly practical suggestion, as a way out of the disgrace she had brought down on herself at Little Holland House. It was a delicate matter to broach, for young ladies of good family did not take this route very often. Lords might marry opera singers, but their daughters hardly clamored to go on the stage. Fredling, as she called him, may have been trying to help, but it was not completely welcome advice. His own hold on the musical scene came from two little operettas he had written. He was much better known as James Clay’s son and the man who first introduced Gilbert to Sullivan.

  The composer and conductor Julius Benedict gave Georgina the same encouragement to turn professional. This was a much more weighty endorsement of her talents. Benedict had the unmistakable air of the maestro about him (he had been a pupil of Weber’s and was surely the only man Georgina ever met who had shaken hands with Beethoven). It was Benedict who brought Jenny Lind to England to sing in oratorio and he who shepherded the singer on her triumphant tour of America. His admiration for Georgina’s voice seems to have been unqualified. Benedict understood very well that the Upper Ten Thousand knew little about music they did not make for themselves. They went to the Italian Opera as a form of social snobbery. Otherwise, they were taught by poor devils who came to the house as servants or by their mothers. Their accomplishments were consequently very modest.

  Benedict—and there were increasing numbers of others like him—saw that musical patronage was passing from the aristocracy to the middle classes. The Royal Academy of Music was a striking example. It was founded in 1822 and given its charter in 1830, but its fortunes had until recently been mixed. The original patron was Lord Westmorland, a soldier and diplomat, and an amateur composer and fiddle player. The committee that formed around him was entirely aristocratic. It took as its principal duty the management of a modest fund and a property off Hanover Square. The question of music education hardly came into it. The institution lurched from one disaster to another. When Westmorland died in 1859, the Board of Professors tried for ten years to increase their role from being merely advisory to the directors, to a share in the running of affairs. The committee’s response was simple and direct. If the profession of music led to unseemly wrangles of this kind with titled gentlemen, they would rather have nothing to do with it. They voted to resign the Royal Charter. The professors took legal opinion, and it was only by their energies that the Royal Academy of Music was saved.

  Georgina’s own interest in music was purely amateur. As her experience of Little Holland House had shown, it was much easier to meet a poet or a painter on more or less equal terms than it was to discover a composer, especially an English composer. The division that existed in the Royal Academy of Music ran right through society. The gifted amateur from her own rank in society and the professional music maker hardly ever mixed. There is a telling anecdote in Fenimore Cooper’s account of his visit to England, as early as 1828: “Respectable artists such as would be gladly received in our orchestras walk the streets and play the music of Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Meyerbeer, Weber, &tc., beneath your windows,” he reported. The poverty they dwelled in astonished him quite as much as the quality of their playing. He even found a man who pushed a grand piano about on a cart and gave recitals “quite equal to what one finds in society.” In forty yea
rs much had changed, but the underlying point of the story remained the same. Music professionals were doubtless very worthy, but they were not exactly cherishable.

  Benedict was one of the men who changed all this. At the time he first met Georgina he was conductor of the Italian Opera. If he thought she could turn professional, it was advice not to be dismissed lightly. In the long winter of 1860 she must have thought about this many times. If she had truly compromised her social position by a runaway marriage—as it must have seemed with the wind whistling through the cottage door and snow blanking out the view of Baron Hill, behind whose walls Lady Bulkely gave court to the even more illustrious Pagets—maybe a professional career as a singer was the only way out. Harry had no opinion one way or the other. He knew none of the people she knew and had no particular wish to make their acquaintance. Georgina could, if she wished, ride bareback in a circus. It was all the same to him.

  She did not in the end respond to Benedict. Every life has opportunities that are not taken up—in this case fatefully. Benedict was a pleasant old man, but he was after all merely a German. To do what he proposed was to admit defeat, not only to people who had known her in London but, more important, to her parents and brothers and sisters. The composer could not know how important it was for her to be counted among the elite. Fame of the kind given to Malibran or Jenny Lind was not what she was after. She had already touched the hem of what she wanted—to be in the same company as the Duchess of Cambridge or Lord Clarendon and his adorable daughter. To be irresistible in a room filled with duchesses, simply because she was beautiful and in some small way dangerous to know—that was her real stage.