Perhaps it was through Benedict’s good offices that she received an offer to join an amateur choir giving concerts to the British volunteers who had gone to support the North in the American Civil War. This was more appropriate to her idea of herself. She went very willingly and after her duties in Canada (where she was, she says, feted as “the Napoleon of Song”) made a visit to Washington, flirted her way into the British Legation, and did what she did best, which was to entrance older men.
The head of legation was Lord Lyons, a bachelor diplomat in his forties who had been in Florence at the end of Georgina’s stay there. William Russell, the Times correspondent made famous by his reporting of the Crimea, was also a guest. The whole of the North was baying for his blood after dispatches he sent from the Battle of Bull Run, seeming to suggest Yankee cowardice. At the same time, his reports were so vehemently antislavery they upset the South and contradicted the generally favorable line his own editor took with the Confederates. As a consequence Russell was more or less in hiding, both from his public and from his employer. Georgina’s visit occurred at an electric moment. There was talk of war between America and Britain for insults received and slights offered. Lyons was to say later that had there existed an Atlantic telegraph cable at that time, war would have been inevitable. Though Georgina knew nothing of it, there were contingency plans already laid to evacuate him and his staff to Canada.
The Washington episode throws light on her incurable naïveté. To have wangled her way to the center of an international crisis as well as a civil war took some doing. It was soon clear that most of what was being talked about in the Federal capital went straight over her head. She was not there to learn, but to be seen and swooned over. Russell met the challenge. He got up a parlor game in which those in the legation formed a secret society, the members of which were named Bully—Bully Warre, Bully Anderson, and so on—with himself as the Bold Buccaneer. Georgina was inducted as Sister Sal. The young men of the legation staff took a shine to Harry and his rather brash but flirtatious wife. One of the Bullys—Frederick Warre—became a lifelong friend of Harry’s. As for Georgina, she was loud and reckless. Her opinions of Anglesey society were quite scandalous, and though she pressed on Lord Lyons her claims to know Florence well, he was not impressed. Nor did William Russell entirely recognize her descriptions of literary London. What could not be denied was her colossal and childlike enthusiasm. Like life lived as a child, every day was a completely new beginning, and what had gone wrong the day before was sunk without trace. She could be spiteful and vindictive, but these were moments that passed as quickly as clouds.
4
Once back in Anglesey, things came to a head with Harry’s mother, who could be forgiven a certain bewilderment at the way things had turned out for her boy. In 1863 old Mrs. Weldon had taken enough and announced her intention of removing to Chester. War immediately broke out between the two women on the most trivial of issues. They were glad to be rid of one another, but the problem was that of forward delivery of the mail. Harry’s mother instructed the post office to send on all mail addressed to Mrs. Weldon. Georgina at once struck back. She let it be known that in Anglesey society, she was that person. The other Mrs. Weldon, who had lived in the neighboring cottage a great many years, quite understandably objected. She might not be Lady Muck, but she did have rights over her own surname.
The Beaumaris postmaster failed to arbitrate, and Georgina revealed the first signs of a litigious nature. Letters were exchanged between the two Mrs. Weldons, who lived only a few yards apart. Solicitors were threatened on both sides, and Georgina composed a magisterial letter to the Postmaster General. That was a characteristic Georgina flourish—go to the top, brook no contradiction. (There had in fact been an earlier example of her passion for litigation. At Holyhead a woman passenger on her way to Ireland stumbled down the steps of a railway carriage and injured her foot. Georgina, a bystander, darted forward and impressed upon the poor woman the need to sue the company. The lady was uncertain; Georgina insisted. Her husband was drawn into the discussion. Unfortunately for him, he thought he was talking to someone with a close knowledge of the law. The passengers accordingly sued, lost the case, and were ruined.)
Harry’s mother was a fearsome enemy while she lived, but death seemed to mellow her. In 1876 a medium by the name of Towns raised the shade of Hannah Weldon at a séance. He described for the company “a very fat woman, not at all pretty. She squints. She has a large hooked nose and wears her hair combed flat with two large buns at either side. I can’t see much of her mouth or neck, for one side of her face is completely swathed in cotton wool and she wears a red flannel cloth around her head.”
“It is my mother-in-law!!! The description is exact!” Georgina exclaimed.
Once on the Other Side, Hannah proved to be an unexpectedly loyal voice. (Georgina received a spirit letter from her eight years after her death, which read baldly, “Continue to do harm to Harry Weldon.”) In the immediate here and now she was not quite so accommodating. Until Georgina arrived to plague her life she had lived in comfortable retirement with Mrs. Rawson, her sister. These two knew their place, and living in a little cottage was no bar to their comfort. They were respectable people, the sort to be invited to a ball or party only when the guest list was very long indeed, but perfectly happy to be nonentities. It did the elder Mrs. Weldon’s nerves no good at all to hear the younger Mrs. Weldon dismiss the Pagets as “very humbuggy” while the rest of Anglesey society was impressed beyond measure at the condescension shown them by such great people. There is a London journal entry for 1862 that gives the tone of Georgina’s reckless appraisals:
Harry went to lunch with Mother and I went off to Effie Hopetoun. It was so nice and they were all so kind and gave me quantities of monograms. I saw all Effie’s diamonds and things. Miss C the old reptile came. We went off to Lady Theresa Lewis at 4. I amused myself very much as I did not stick in the concert room, so I talked to Alice Gurney and her husband who seems a darling little pretty man. Lady Ailesbury, Lady Alwyne Compton, Mr. Vivian and Clay and all the musical celebrities there. Lady Agneta Yorke sang all out of tune and the Inflammatus was not suited to Miss Browne’s voice. Sir John Harington most haffable and admiring. I sang well, I am thankful to say. So it was jolly and Benedict was fulsome.
The company might seem exalted, but she was soon able to join it on more equal terms. In 1864 Grandmother Weldon died, the old lady who six years earlier Harry had blithely asserted had only weeks to live. Grandma Weldon left him £4,000 and some scraps of land around Chesterfield. In 1867, quite incredibly, this land—which Harry seldom visited and Georgina had never even seen—proved to have coal under it. It was wonderful, almost unbelievable news. Harry Weldon was now the £10,000-a-year man of Morgan Treherne’s dreams. He had got there by a strange route and was hardly the titled proprietor Morgan had set his heart on. (A £10,000-a-year man living in a four-room cottage with an outside washhouse was a difficult idea for anyone to encompass.) But the plain fact was that Georgina was now best placed of all the children.
Unfortunately, there was no longer any communication between her and her family. None of her brothers and sisters offered to heal the breach between her and Morgan, nor did her mother dare to write. In Morgan’s household there was only one side to any question. Though he had lost his daughter, there was a turn to his fortunes that offset that. In 1863 Ellice, who had for so long barred Morgan’s way to a parliamentary seat, died in his sleep in Scotland. For the last time the Rattler put himself forward to the Coventry voters. As the result of the by-election was announced, a sweep stood on top of the highest chimney of the City Hotel and yelled ironically to the crowds below, “All’s up! Morgan’s in!”
He had achieved his goal in life almost too late to savor it. He was assiduous in his duties and enormously pleased to add to his parliamentary seat the deputy lieutenancy of Surrey, but his mind was faltering. In 1866 Georgina wrote to him:
My dear Papa,
Morgan made no reply, merely remarking to his eldest son that “a person had written” to him. It wasn’t perhaps the best of letters in its phrasing (he was to be “forgiven” for her unhappy childhood), but it took a man of very great rectitude—or cruelty—not to respond. A year later, just after making a will that specifically excluded Georgina (“I wish to mark my strong disapprobation of her conduct in marrying her present husband William Henry Weldon without my knowledge and against my consent”), he succumbed to the insanity that had been circling him all his adult life. He died in the asylum at Carshalton and was buried in a tomb he had provided for himself in the parish church of St. Dunstan’s, Mayfield. It is not clear that Georgina was invited to attend the funeral.
5
All family deaths herald a new beginning. However, the hoped-for reconciliation between Georgina and her mother never took place. Sussex was as forbidden to her as ever, and the frost between the members of the family never melted. Losing the baby and finding herself barren had been a cruel blow to Georgina which she dealt with entirely on her own. Now that Morgan was gone, she hoped she might be accepted back into the fold. Louisa in her old-fashioned and artless way simply crowned Dal the new head of the family, and he kept his sister firmly at arm’s length. While Flo and Apsley might feel sorry for her, she had the bitter and lifelong enmity of Emily to contend with. Flo married first. Her husband was an officer of the Life Guards who scandalized a garden party by remarking to a young woman serving at a tea stall, “My wife is ill. When she is dead and buried I shall marry you.” Flo died a few months later. Emily married a man named Bill Williams who was land agent to the Duke of Newcastle. He was painfully dull. Apsley married a hapless girl named Mamie.
Though she sang for her supper in many of the great houses and lived among people her mother could only ever dream of meeting, Georgina was growing increasingly disillusioned. After a charity concert organized by Mrs. Gladstone she wrote: “I was furious and so was dear Harry to see that horrid old crow and humbug Jenny Lind put herself down for five solos and me for one.” She adds, “Jenny Lind the image of a shrunken crab apple! She sings through a veil and it might be in any language but her style is good and altogether if she was nice her singing would be nice. Deacon accompanied lovelily and I sang The Keeper so as to draw tears from most eyes. J.L. looked as though a toad had croaked and took not the slightest notice.”
This is overreaching. The Swedish Nightingale was then in her early forties and one of the richest artists of any kind in the world. Julius Benedict had secured her £20,000 for a single tour of America, and from her stupendous life earnings the singer had endowed an entire hospital in Liverpool and the wing of another in London. She was in fact the consummate professional. Georgina was just one of any number of pretty young society sopranos that fell in her way—and not so young any longer either. Jenny Lind lived in state and was the friend of kings and princes. Georgina, when she was not in London, famously received visitors to her cottage in Beaumaris in her apron, her pug Dan Tucker yapping at her feet. Over the teacups she would confide her most cherished and almost her only artistic opinion. She had taken to explaining that superiority was its own form of exile:
I have already given some idea of the select society in which I ruled and reigned and of which I was the “Peri,” the “Queen of Song,” the “Semiramis,” the “Corinna,” the “Nightingale,” the “Muse” etc, and all those other pretty flattering names which are accorded to the worst amateur, as well as to the greatest artist. I was acquainted with all the richest and noblest among those who were in the habit of throwing their money out of the window, and as my runaway marriage, beneath me and sans façons, had not been the signal for a shower of wedding presents, I thought that my friends would have seized this opportunity of repairing their want of generosity, in order to give me proofs of their appreciation, their admiration and their gratitude. How often, with eyes suffused with tears, with smothered sighs had I not been accosted with—“Ah, Mrs. Weldon, what ought we not to do for you who lavish so bountifully your divine gifts on your fellow creatures? What have you not a right to demand of us?”
The labored facetiousness of this is quite awful. Was it the job of the richest and noblest to repair a bad marriage? And did it really help her case to describe the hospitality they offered as being akin to throwing money out of the window? It was ridiculous bravado of her to write, “Mrs. Gladstone sent me an impudent invite. So I sent word that I should come if I had nothing better to do.” The fact was she had run after such opportunities ever since losing the baby in 1860, and if it was all now beginning to pall, that was hardly the fault of her hosts. When she was only thirty-two, she wrote, “The sun has quite gone down on my beautiful past.” It was probably the most poignant sentence she ever wrote. She had tried to make the whole world love her without being able to see how impossible an ambition that was.
Some of her despair was with Harry. Though he continued escorting her wherever she went in high society with his customary and impertubable good humor, he was not the man she had married. There was a reason. Harry was unfaithful and had been since 1863. The details were woundingly prosaic. Shortly after his mother moved to Chester, he went to see her on a filial visit. There he met Mrs. Annie Lowe, a dressmaker and widow of a Fusiliers’ officer. They commenced a relationship, and in time she gave him a son, Frank. Had they known of it in the Beaumaris Artillery Volunteers, his friends might have shrugged and smiled. This was very much the scrape he might get himself into, even so soon after the tumult of marriage to Georgina. It was worth a drunken cheer to learn that Harry had a clandestine child by this other woman, after all the fuss and bother with Georgina’s doctors. There was clearly nothing wrong with his shot and shell. However, if they reasoned that their support was needed to help get him out of a tight corner, they were wrong. Harry had found the woman in his life.
Georgina remained in complete ignorance of the liaison for fourteen years. Though Harry kept Annie Lowe a secret, there was no doubt left in his wife that the love she so craved was not in any case going to come from him: not in the form she most desired it. Harry tolerated her and even indulged her. But he could not be changed into Moncorvo—he could not be altered a whit from the easy-natured spendthrift he was. Georgina’s whole existence depended upon being thought irresistible. That had been the story of how she and Harry met, after all, and giving up all for love was one way of glossing their hasty and imprudent marriage. The strangest thing of all was that he did better than she in most social situations, partly because it mattered so little to him. Freddie Warre was back in London, and the two men renewed their Washington friendship. It did not include Georgina—Warre did not like her and once described her to her face as “Georgina Graspall.” It was a candid as well as a brutal assessment. She was importunate. Women of rank did not put themselves about in quite the brash way Georgina did. If they wanted to be in the world, they cultivated politics or the arts. They triumphed over men in the world of men. For all her running after social fame, this was a skill of which Georgina knew nothing. Meanwhile, Harry was elected to the Garrick Club, where he amused himself with Freddie Warre and other cronies in that pleasant and undemanding manner that made him such a popular figure.
Georgina was beginning to disappoint people. She began to realize that she made enemies much faster than Harry made friends. Even her most loyal supporters—and they were very few—saw in her a woman who was somehow detached from the realities of life. The thing she lacked most was a clear view of what was possible. All her energies flew off with
centripetal force, bringing her back nothing but harm. There were scandals—none of them very great and some of them farcical. An example was when Harry asked her to make herself “agreeable” to Sir William Thompson, a distinguished surgeon and devoted amateur of the arts, in particular music. The elderly and susceptible Sir William was soon besotted, only to find that he was not being loved for himself but instead being asked to invest in a granite quarry in some part of Wales of which he had never heard. In general, society began to tire of her foolishness, her grand opinions of herself. It is at this time of her life that she began to end her account to friends of how she rejected the fabled Moncorvo with the remark “and this is why and how I became a great musician.” It was a desperate piece of wishful thinking.
Her bachelor friend Clay liked her, but even he must have winced when she claimed to know all the singing teachers in London, all of whom worshiped her genius. She had gone to Canada as a member of a choir, yet by her account of the tour a listener might be forgiven for thinking it was to give solo performances. Certainly, she had sung for the Gladstones, for Palmerston, Lord Lansdowne, and many others. But being asked a service of them—to provide part of an evening’s musical entertainment to a company that might exceed a hundred—was confused by her as an invitation to deep and lasting friendship, even intimacy. She seemed not to realize how others saw her talent, or the frame in which it existed. In the Mémoires she writes of another social acquaintance, this time with a quite reckless abandon:
In 1868 the composer Arthur Sullivan (who died quite recently and was buried in St. Paul’s, his tomb covered in palms and laurels) pestered me as he pestered all women with his disgusting familiarities. I was even obliged, laughingly, to get my husband to tell him to leave me alone. He was a tiny little fellow, quite dark, with enormous hands on very long arms and nigger feet. In our circle one called him Jackie—he was a comical little thing who made everyone laugh. As a musician he was a very facile plagiarist, a real parrot: when he imitated Handel, Fred Clay, Mendelsohn [sic] or Gounod, he was very good, but when he tried to be original his music was nothing. For myself, I never patronised his efforts and although he tried to cling to me like a monkey, I told him squarely what I’ve just now written. My husband eventually told him “Jackie, don’t bother my wife or I shall be forced to horsewhip you.”
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 10
