The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  It is tempting to speculate about Yolande’s feelings as she wrote this letter. No one in England ever knew that she had given birth to two children in Paris, that she may also have experienced the ‘great happiness and joy at being a mother’ – if only for a short time.

  Meanwhile, events were unfolding which would soon bring her closer to Harry. In the summer of 1881, his brother Teddy, perhaps inspired by the amateur dramatics in Lynford Hall, had acquired the lease and management of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Yolande lent him £2,500 towards the cost and the theatre reopened under the management of ‘Mr Edward Clare’ on 24 September.

  Ten months after reopening, the theatre had to close again when the Metropolitan Board of Works insisted on ‘extensive alterations … for the prevention of the spread of fire’. Teddy employed an architect to design a new proscenium wall and an entrance porch, and the theatre reopened again, ‘prettily redecorated’, on 14 November 1882.

  This three-and-a-half-month interruption was expensive, not only because of the cost of the work but also because of lost revenue. Teddy borrowed more money from Yolande and, without Edward’s knowledge, also borrowed from several of his father’s friends, including Richard Wallace and the Duke of Cambridge. In March 1883, he premiered a new play by Arthur Wing Pinero. This was followed by two further productions, but Teddy was now deeply in debt.

  The last performance under his management took place on 30 June, after which he escaped his creditors by moving north to Settle in Yorkshire where, under the different pseudonym of Edward Clarke and with more borrowed money, he bought a printing and stationery business. This was not a success either and in June 1884, after incurring further debts, he fled again, this time back to London. He failed to attend meetings of his creditors in Yorkshire, using the excuse that he was too ill to travel, and when he was declared bankrupt in Bradford in August 1884, the official receiver suggested that a warrant be put out for his arrest.

  Edward was appalled by his son’s behaviour. His conduct, he wrote, ‘has been so bad, the claims against him so numerous, that the only thing for me to do is to steadily refuse to have anything to do with him’. Teddy wrote humble and ingratiating letters to his father, ending one with a postscript which makes clear the order of priority in the family: ‘Love to Madame and my mother.’ He also wrote to Harry, complaining about being ‘utterly broken in heart and spirit. Will nothing soften my father towards me … I don’t want money now, but I do want a little sympathy, a little encouragement.’

  In September 1885, when the High Court of Justice confirmed Teddy’s bankruptcy with liabilities amounting to almost £16,000 (£1.8 million), he wrote again to his father:

  The other person besides yourself whose forgiveness I crave is a person who has always been a true friend to me. I mean Mrs Lyne Stephens. I am writing to her now and it has cost me many, many a bitter pang to think of my base ingratitude. I was mad, I believe, and that is all I can say.

  Edward’s reply was curt: ‘I hope sincerely that you are, as you say, an altered man and that you will prove it.’

  Edward and Yolande were so disappointed in Teddy, ‘so bitter and unforgiving’, that they would not give him the £10 he needed to buy his dog back from the receivers. In their wills, drafted by Horace Pym and signed in early 1887, he was removed from any significant interest in their estates. He was named as a residuary beneficiary of Edward’s will but he was not appointed a trustee, nor was he given an interest in the house in Gloucester Street. Yolande left legacies of £20,000 each to Edward’s other five children, but Teddy was merely given an annuity of £200 a year, which would cease if ‘he shall have done or suffered something whereby the whole or some part of the annuity … would become payable to or vested in some other person’.

  It was Harry, who had continued to flatter Yolande and spend time with her in Lynford and Paris, who gained the most from Teddy’s bankruptcy. He now became her favourite among the Claremont children. When his second daughter was born in Lynford Hall in January 1885, Yolande stood as godmother when the child was baptised in the Anglican church at West Tofts and given the name Marie Louise. In her will signed two years later, she left her personal fortune to Edward and, after his death, to his youngest son Harry – ‘the precious boy who is heir to so much’.

  In July 1885, the newspapers reported that ‘a residence has been purchased in Norfolk for Prince Albert Victor. If the news be true, the Prince will have a charming sporting estate … and Lynford Hall will lose a charitable lady in Mrs Lyne Stephens’. Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, was second in line to the throne and the news was reported in British colonies throughout the world. It reached the Chatham Islands, a remote archipelago in the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles from New Zealand, where a beneficiary of the Lyne Stephens estate, Edward Chudleigh, ran a sheep station. On 7 September, he made a note in his diary:

  Saw a paragraph in the Home News that Prince Albert Victor was going to purchase my good cousin’s house and grounds of Lynford Hall Norfolk. She told me she would not sell it when I was at home. At that time the Prince of Wales and Lord Dudley had both offered for it. £800,000 I understood was refused.1

  The prince did make an offer for Lynford but Yolande turned it down, mainly because of Edward’s love of shooting. During the winter months, he managed the estate, supervised the ground staff, and dealt with disputes with neighbouring farmers who continued to complain about their land being overrun by hares bred for sport. Several of these disputes came before the magistrates at the Mundford Petty Sessions.

  When the ménage-à-trois was in Roehampton, Edward attended court functions at Buckingham and St James’s Palaces in his role as groom of the privy chamber to Queen Victoria. In June 1887, the queen celebrated her golden jubilee. It was fifty years since she succeeded her uncle William IV on 20 June 1837, seven weeks after writing in her diary that Yolande had danced the Cachucha during a performance of Don Giovanni looking ‘wretchedly thin and pale’.

  The jubilee celebrations lasted for thirteen days, from the 16th to the 29th, with Edward in attendance at several functions. At the service of thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey on the morning of 21 June, he was instructed ‘to show Her Majesty’s Guests and Suite to their places in the Choir’. The dress code was specific: ‘Full Dress Coat and Trousers will be worn by the Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Household in Waiting. The Day will be observed as a Collar Day.’

  Edward stayed in Gloucester Street during the two weeks of the jubilee. One day, he dressed himself in the uniform he had worn as military attaché in Paris and walked to a nearby photographic studio in Hyde Park Corner. He was portrayed leaning against a plinth, his plumed helmet by his side, his white gloves in his hands. He wore the Légion d’Honneur below the top button of his scarlet tunic. His other medals were displayed on his chest: Companion of the Order of the Bath, Crimean Medal with four clasps, Turkish Order of Medjidie, and the Italian Campaign medal awarded after the battles of Magenta and Solferino.

  He had lost weight during the last sixteen years and the scarlet tunic hangs a little loosely about him. He also has a melancholy look, perhaps remembering past triumphs when he was friends with the emperor of France and with marshals and generals in the French army. His unique position as military attaché to a country where he was born and spoke the language and had served with its army in battle had given him a high reputation in both England and France. All this he had lost because he could not say ‘no’ to Yolande Lyne Stephens.

  18

  THE EYE-DOLL HOUSE

  What I have most at heart is Cambridge, and for this … I must be allowed to indulge my own taste and fancy.

  Yolande Lyne Stephens, 30 August 1884

  By the time of the golden jubilee, Yolande had succeeded in putting much of her scandalous reputation behind her. In its place, she had acquired a reputation as a philanthropist.

  The neighbours in Roehampton may have ignored her presence among them, but she was po
pular with her tenants on the Lynford estate who knew nothing about her early life. She would drive around the villages to visit them in their homes and gave presents at Christmas to every man, woman and child – inviting the children into the hall to collect their presents from under a Christmas tree. Older residents on the estate remembered her in the 1920s as ‘a real Lady Bountiful’.1

  ‘Always be kind to your family’, Stephens had told her – and with no family of her own, she continued his generosity to members of the extended Lyne family, not only in England but also in the colonies. One example was Edward Chudleigh in the Chatham Islands, to whom she gave £10,000 (£1 million) to enable him to buy and stock 7,500 acres of land with sheep. On a visit to Auckland in 1877, he received two telegrams from his lawyer in Christchurch:

  20 June: Have authority to inform you ten thousand Lyne Stephens absolutely yours. English mail just in.

  21 June: Mrs Lyne Stephens gives you money outright. Instruct us to make gift complete.

  ‘The great state of doubt and anxiety I have been in for the last two months,’ Chudleigh wrote in his diary, ‘makes this sudden success and good fortune a fact worth recording.’2

  Yolande’s first major gift to charity was in January 1866 when Sir John Lubbock handed £20,000 (£2 million) to the chairman of the Middlesex Hospital, ostensibly ‘from an anonymous donor’. Five years later, on 2 February 1871, she gave the smaller – but still significant – sum of £500 (£54,000) to the Lord Mayor’s Fund to provide food for the people of Paris. This ‘munificent donation’ was second in size only to that of the Bank of England, which contributed £1,000.

  In 1882, she paid for an ornate fountain with drinking troughs to be installed in the village of Roehampton, using water supplied from a spring on Putney Heath. Her inspiration was Sir Richard Wallace, who was awarded a baronetcy for his efforts to help British residents during the Siege of Paris. Water supplies in the city had been damaged during the siege and the Commune, so Wallace paid for more than a hundred drinking fountains to be installed in the streets – fountains known today as Les Wallaces.

  A single fountain was enough for Yolande and it cost her £3,000 (£322,000). She employed the Catholic architect J. C. Radford, and gave him precise instructions. According to Radford, the final design was ‘the result of much enquiry and inspection throughout London and some of the big towns in the provinces and in France and Italy’.

  The concept of the bronze sculpture, two cherubs riding a dolphin, came from a tomb in Italy; it was made in Paris by Henry Dasson and cast there under Radford’s supervision. The grey and red granite was sourced from quarries near Aberdeen; ‘the unusual size of the drinking troughs for horses made the granite work very expensive as a great many blocks had to be quarried before suitable ones could be obtained’.3

  Water for the village had previously been pumped or drawn from wells, so the supply of fresh drinking water was welcomed by the people of Roehampton. An engraved address was prepared by the vicar and churchwardens offering Yolande ‘our best thanks for the generous kindness … of building in our village such a useful and ornamental structure. It is not the beautiful fountain alone which calls for the expression of our thanks but also the thoughtful consideration for the health and comfort of your neighbours.’

  The fountain in Roehampton, the gifts to the Middlesex Hospital and the Lord Mayor’s Fund, together with small contributions to charities such as the Fund for Ladies in Distress through Non-Payment of Rent in Ireland, were Yolande’s only donations of a secular nature. The rest of her giving was to religious institutions, mainly in the Catholic diocese of Northampton which included the county of Norfolk. The woman who had faked a sudden desire to become a nun at the age of nineteen became increasingly devout as she grew older, a religiosity which had its roots in her friendship with an English nun.

  During her early years in Roehampton, while Stephens attended Sunday service in the Anglican chapel near the gates of Grove House, Yolande had to travel further afield to attend Mass. In July 1850, nuns from the Sacred Heart, a French teaching order, acquired an adjoining estate with plans to use the house as a convent and boarding school for girls. Yolande made contact with the mother superior, Stephens gave £500 towards the construction of a chapel, and when the building was completed Yolande attended Mass at the convent, sitting in a side chapel for lay members of the congregation.

  Twenty years later, Mabel Digby arrived in Roehampton to take over the duties of mother superior. The daughter of an heiress, she had converted to Catholicism at the age of eighteen, entered the order of the Sacred Heart four years later, and spent fourteen years in a teaching convent in France. As mother superior during the Franco-Prussian war, she had converted her school building into a hospital for wounded soldiers.

  Yolande was in Grove House when Mother Digby arrived at the convent in August 1872. She called on the new mother superior and was delighted to learn that they could converse together in French. She was also struck by the nun’s demeanour. ‘When I first saw her calm sweet countenance,’ wrote one of the novices, ‘the impression lasted me for forty years.’4

  Yolande made many visits to Mother Digby when she was staying in Roehampton, private visits of which the other nuns were unaware. At first the nuns lived in cramped accommodation in the old servants’ quarters, so Yolande paid for a new building with greater space and comfort. She made many other gifts to the convent, money which was always handed over by Sir John Lubbock. As one of the nuns explained, ‘a veil of mystery, almost of romance, hung over the benefactress when nobody ever saw her’.

  She had a longer journey to make when she was staying in Lynford Hall: the nearest Catholic church was ten miles away in Thetford. ‘The bustle and excitement of the arrival at the church door of the great lady and her attendants’ was a regular Sunday event in the town. It was one of her guests, the Catholic Lord Lovat, who came up with the idea of a private chapel on the estate. ‘Why don’t you build a chapel here at Lynford,’ he asked her in December 1875, ‘and save yourself the trouble of taking your staff and guests to Thetford?’

  Yolande selected a site close to the Home Farm and employed the Catholic architect Henry Clutton to design the chapel. She rehoused the farm tenants and converted the farmhouse for use as a presbytery. With permission from the Court of Chancery, she bought four acres of land from the Lyne Stephens estate. As she had done with the mausoleum in Roehampton, she placed the land in trust and appointed Edward Claremont as a trustee. Building work began in the spring of 1877 and the chapel was completed eighteen months later at a cost of £10,000 (£1 million). Built of stone and local flint, it was given the grand name of Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen.

  The unorthodox ownership of the land led to legal difficulties with the diocese and, in 1882, Yolande agreed that the land, chapel and presbytery should be transferred into the hands of the diocesan trustees. At the same time, she endowed the chapel with £5,000 (£550,000) to enable it to remain in use for perpetuity. A resident priest had already been appointed: Father Michael Dwane had arrived in the presbytery in September 1881 to act as Yolande’s personal chaplain.

  It was a great occasion in Lynford when the chapel was consecrated on 7 October 1884 by Arthur Riddell, Bishop of Northampton, accompanied by six canons and eight priests, all of whom were entertained for three days in Lynford Hall. A crowd of local people came to watch the proceedings and one man was convinced that the service had been conducted by the pope. ‘Nay, nay,’ he said firmly when informed that the splendidly dressed prelate was only a bishop. ‘It was the Pope of Rome. I saw him with my own eyes.’5

  Arthur Riddell had been appointed Bishop of Northampton in April 1880. This was the largest Catholic diocese in the country (consisting of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdon, Norfolk, Northampton, and Suffolk) but contained the fewest Catholics so it was always short of funds. ‘Excelled by no one in the intensity of his religious beliefs’, Riddell wasted no time in developing the
diocese. He founded religious institutions and built churches ‘in places where before the zealous Catholic had not easy means of joining in the elaborate ritual of his worship’.6

  Yolande was already active in the diocese when Riddell was appointed to Northampton. She had built the chapel in Lynford and paid for a new building at the St Francis Home for Boys, a Catholic orphanage in Shefford in Bedfordshire. The new bishop inspired her and, for almost a decade after his appointment, his zeal to build churches in a diocese starved of funds was matched by her zeal to pay for them.

  Riddell visited Yolande in Lynford at least once during his first year of office. ‘My dear Lord Bishop,’ she wrote to him on 6 January 1881:

  I am soon leaving Lynford and it would have been very agreeable if you could have given me the pleasure to come again, but I am afraid your time is so … taken up and my departure may be before the end of the month, so that in mentioning this wish of mine, I am not at all hopeful you could grant it. In that case, I would, when I come back to these parts, beg you to appoint your own time.7

  The bishop’s next visit was on 24 August, when Yolande made a special journey to Lynford Hall to meet him. ‘Monseigneur,’ she said to him in French as they sat in one of the grand reception rooms, ‘je voudrais vous bâtir une petite maison’ – ‘I should like to build you a little house’. Fifteen months later, in early December 1882, Riddell wrote a letter about his ideas for the location and size of the property. Yolande replied from Lynford Hall on the 20th:

  I have been so extremely busy of late, with a house full of people and with my usual Christmas gifts and the tree to a great number of children, that it has been quite impossible for me to answer your letter … You know so much better than I can myself the requirements for a Bishop’s House, that I should hardly like to interfere with any plan which may meet with your approval, nor certainly to constrain it, as I think it would be a pity building the house and not doing it well.8