I am surprised to start this letter as I have not written any letters since I have been here. It is such a long time since I picked up my pen that I am almost incapable of writing. I know you are easy to please and you will be happy that the first letter I have written for an infinite time is for you. In the past, I used to write without difficulty. Now slowness makes it hard for me and yet it feels as if I am speaking to you. This gives me pleasure. I wish to tell you that I have become so immobile that I prefer not to go out. I am happy to embrace you because I love you. My hand wants to repeat this – I embrace you because I love you. When are you coming to see me?
A few days later, Christopher Scott came to Lynford to tell Yolande that prayers would be read for her soul on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, the tenth anniversary of her offer to pay for the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs. That morning, while the promised prayers were intoned in Cambridge, Yolande tripped and fell in her bedroom, hitting her head on the parquet floor. Her lady’s maid heard her cry out. She rushed in and lifted her on to a sofa. Then, ‘all of a sudden’, Yolande fainted and remained unconscious for several hours.
An urgent message was sent to Harry who had returned to London a few weeks earlier. When he arrived in Lynford the following day, Michael Dwane was shocked by the change in his appearance. Gaunt and skeletally thin, Harry was weak, tired and fatigued, and frequently overcome by spasms of coughing. ‘I got here all safe,’ he wrote to Kitty that evening, ‘not too tired and did not cough at all really … Madame is better, not all there but she knew me and is most affectionate. Kissed me over and over again and wouldn’t release my hand. I stayed till she dozed off.’
The doctor talked of ‘suffusion of blood on the brain’, probably a stroke or a haemorrhage. ‘Marie never leaves her,’ Harry continued, ‘and is very devoted, in fact too much so.’ The distraught lady’s maid was waking Yolande up every few minutes to thrust a crucifix in her face, ‘giving her no peace and not letting her sleep. Madame has received the last sacraments and seems to know she is dying and is quiet and resigned and grateful for the attention.’
The last rites had been performed by Christopher Scott who was summoned from Cambridge on the morning of the 16th. When the ritual was over, he rose from his knees and stood at the bedroom window:
From her room, I looked abroad upon the view without, the spacious gardens on the terrace, with their winding well-kept walks, flowers of every hue, the marble statues, the flowing waters beyond, the long stretches of stately trees shutting in the princely mansion from the world outside; the summer sun … shining upon the whole in all its glory, the soothing notes of a solitary dove the only sound which broke the stillness … a scene of peace and entrancing beauty … I have said the only sound was the song of a solitary bird, but there was another, the laboured breathing of her to whom all that fair scene belonged, now lonely indeed, separated from friends, now to complete the sacrifice, and herself to quit all.2
Yolande rallied during the night of the 18th. ‘Madame is decidedly better,’ Harry wrote the following day:
Her pulse is stronger and she is taking nourishment, chicken broth, calf’s foot jelly with brandy in it, and champagne. All this naturally, besides two injections of six ounces of beef tea. It is really marvellous how she has rallied. She kicked up a row last night at being changed – quite like old times – and astonished the nurses by her strength. She talked to me for some time.
Horace Pym came twice to Lynford as Yolande lay dying: on 17 August and again on the 21st. In his memoirs, he would recall ‘her affectionate gratitude to all who watched and tended her, her bright recognition when faces she loved came near, her quick response to all that was said and done … beautiful and touching to see, and very sweet to remember’. A few hours after Pym left on the morning of the 22nd, Harry wrote a more brutal description of the deathbed scene:
She lies all day in a sort of stupor you can’t call sleep. She is never dry and the sheets are changed every hour. Last night the smell was so awful that both the nurse and Marie were nearly sick. The doctor said this was decay of the internal organs and he recognised the smell … Madame told me I was not to leave her and made me stay with her a long time till I said that the doctor would pitch into me for staying too long. I told her I couldn’t keep you away any longer and that you would be here on Saturday. She smiled and said ‘I am very glad. You are all very good to me.’
Kitty joined her husband on 23 August, so there are no more letters. Harry kept his promise and remained with Yolande until she died on 2 September 1894. For the next three days, her body lay in state in the chapel in Lynford. On the 6th, she was taken to Brandon station and then by train to Cambridge, where she was received by Christopher Scott at the main door of the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs.
The coffin of ‘handsome polished oak’ was carried into the church and laid before the altar. The church was arrayed in mourning, the altar steps covered in purple cloth, the pulpit and communion rails draped in black. In the evening, Scott conducted a short service and the choir of the Brompton Oratory, who had travelled from London for the occasion as they had done for the opening service four years earlier, sang a funeral dirge. Four nuns of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth kept watch during the night.
The following morning, a Requiem Mass was conducted by Christopher Scott and Arthur Riddell in the presence of a large congregation. Scott preached the eulogy, taking his text from Hebrews 6: ‘God is not unjust that He should forget your work, and the love that you have shown in His name’:
The departed benefactress, whose remains now lie before the altar, has claims upon us why she should be remembered. We have towards her a debt of gratitude for deeds, on account of which she will not, we trust, be forgotten by God into whose presence she has been called … Greatly indeed was she indebted to God; richly had she been endowed with gifts of every kind; of natural character, of special intelligence, of winning attractiveness, which compelled homage from all who came under the charm of her influence; with the result of widespread renown and unbounded wealth – the possession of which, blessings as they might be, only too easily obtain from us an idolatrous devotion which excludes God from our hearts …
Therefore it was that the blessing of God came in another form – by the discipline of suffering and trial. There was the trial of loneliness. Soon bereft, as she was, of the husband, of whose affection we may judge by the way in which he laid all he possessed at her feet; French and Catholic, living amongst those who were not of her faith or nation, though enjoying their devoted friendship; deprived of the surroundings of Catholic sympathy, she was thrown entirely upon herself in all that which is of the deepest concern. With advancing years, deprived by death even of intimate friends, she was lonely in a sense throughout her life.
These were her crosses, destined doubtless as a corrective to the fascination of wealth, and which led her to become, in addition to her contributions to general charities, the great benefactress of our large and poverty-stricken diocese.3
After the service, the coffin was taken to Grove House in Roehampton where Yolande lay in state for the rest of the day and night. The coffin was surrounded by floral tributes, from members of the Claremont and Pym families, the clergy of churches she had funded, and Lady Wallace, the French parfumerie assistant who had married Richard Wallace, a wreath from one Frenchwoman to another, both of them risen from poor backgrounds to marry Englishmen of great wealth.
Nuns knelt in prayer by the coffin and continued their vigil through the night. At noon on 8 September, a small number of people gathered in the house to attend the interment in the mausoleum. The mourners included the Claremont children and their spouses; Horace Pym and his wife; Arthur Riddell and Christopher Scott; the Catholic Bishop of Southwark; the chaplain of the Convent of the Sacred Heart; Michael Dwane and Marie Marque; and Yolande’s friend from Méry, Edgar de Ségur-Lamoignon.
Constance Smith came to watch the proceedings and was invited
into the house by the lady’s maid:
The drawing room was filled with flowers and there were nuns kneeling by the little coffin – such a very little coffin – which lay in front of the temporary altar where two Bishops were presiding. Then the procession formed and headed by the Bishops the tiny coffin was carried across the garden to the mausoleum she had built for her husband’s body.
The chief mourner was General Claremont’s youngest son, but he seemed too feeble to be able to follow the funeral, and sank into a chair as it left the house. There were the Claremont daughters as mourners, but I saw no sign of grief, nor any tears except in the eyes of the little French lady’s maid who had invited us into the house, recognising us as neighbours.4
The procession crossed the terrace and passed through the rose garden to the mausoleum. Yolande might have preferred to have joined Edward in his grave outside the building, continuing the ménage-à-trois for all time, but the bearers continued up the steps and into the gloom of the interior. The sarcophagus had been opened and, as the clergy spoke the words of committal, Yolande’s small coffin was lowered into the tomb alongside the large one which held the remains of her husband.
Two days later, Harry received a letter, in almost indecipherable handwriting, from his father’s friend General Trochu. Calling himself ‘an octogenarian relic and an invalid’, Trochu explained that he had sent a letter to Yolande every year on the anniversary of Edward’s death, to commemorate the passing of a man ‘who held so great a place in my life’. This was the first year that she had not replied. He sent his condolences to Harry and also to Michael Dwane, ‘who showed such extraordinary devotion to her soul’.
In his advent address on 28 November, Arthur Riddell paid tribute to the woman who had given so much to his diocese:
We commend to your prayers the soul of one who has recently passed away … Her innumerable works of religion and charity during her life, and especially in recent years, force us to acknowledge our indebtedness to her … Gratefully remembering these gifts we ask our beloved clergy to remember her at Holy Mass and we ask them and you all often to pray for her soul. Her name has been inscribed in our Liber Vitae among the great benefactors whether living or dead, and for these we constantly offer up Mass and prayers that God may bless their good estate in life and after death receive them to their reward.5
Obituaries in the newspapers also referred to Yolande’s charitable works and her building of churches. Only a very few mentioned her years on the stage. ‘To 99 per cent of the present generation,’ explained the Pall Mall Gazette:
the names of Duvernay and Lyne Stephens convey nothing whatsoever; yet the lady who bore these successively and who passed away last week at a very ripe old age was, more than sixty years ago, the subject of much comment and the object of much admiration with our grandfathers, who crowded old Drury Lane to see her.6
An elderly journalist in Cambridge recalled her Cachucha:
I wonder if there are many people who know that this venerable and untiringly charitable lady was, prior to her marriage to Mr Stephens Lyne Stephens, famous throughout the civilised world as the enchanting operatic dancer, Yolande Marie Louise Duvernay. This wondrous ballerina made her first appearance in Drury Lane in 1833, but it was in a pas seul – the Spanish dance of the Cachucha – that I especially remember her. I can see her now, in my mind’s eye, in her modest pink skirt with black lace flounces … and hear the merry clatter of her castanets.7
23
THE PRECIOUS BOY
He spends money at such a rate that I wonder how he will manage to live … He seems to have no idea what he spends. His extravagance makes me uneasy on his account.
Kitty Bedingfeld, c. 1922
Two weeks later, a Catholic newspaper published a mean-spirited tribute to the woman who had given so much to the Church: ‘The operatic boards are not the exact spot to spend an apprenticeship to the great aims of existence, but when one is naturally good and desirous of obeying the commands of the Church, one can work out salvation anyway.’1
The Pall Mall Gazette was more prosaic, referring to Yolande as ‘the wealthiest lady in England’. On 3 January 1895, 12,000 miles away in the remote Chatham Islands, Edward Chudleigh made a note in his diary: ‘Mail arrived with account of Mrs Lyne Stephens’s death leaving nearly two millions of money.’
Her financial assets were valued at £647,759, her Roehampton estate at £57,210, and her assets in France at £49,274, giving her a personal fortune of £754,243 (£89.5 million). She had also had sole use of her husband’s estate which was valued at an additional £1,057,430 (£125 million), providing a total of £1.8 million (£214.5 million).
There was a rumour that Yolande was even richer than Queen Victoria. This was probably untrue – but it may have been close. Wills of British monarchs are not in the public domain, but some estimates put Victoria’s wealth at about £2 million when she died in 1901. This compares with Yolande’s £1.8 million, a difference of just 10 per cent.
In her English will written in March 1887 and ten codicils signed between September 1890 and June 1894, Yolande disposed of her assets in England. She left an immediate legacy of £30,000 to Harry Claremont; £20,000 each to his three sisters; and (in a codicil in 1893) £5,000 to Teddy in addition to his annuity of £200 a year. She bequeathed £1,000 to the long-suffering Michael Dwane; £500 to William Marshall, her doctor in Roehampton who made several professional visits to Lynford; £500 each to her housekeeper and coachman; and a year’s wages to all her servants: twenty-two indoor servants and 129 outdoor servants, most of whom worked on the Lynford estate.
Her bequests to charity totalled £29,000, including £5,000 each to the Bishops of Northampton and Southwark, to be used for charitable purposes, and £2,000 to the orphanage in Shefford. In a codicil signed in May 1892, she left £5,000 to Christopher Scott and Arthur Riddell to invest on behalf of the church in Cambridge, ‘for upholding and keeping in repair the fabric’.
She gave a legacy of £2,500 to each of her three executors, Sir John Lubbock, Horace Pym and Joseph Gurney Fox. Pym also received her financial assets in France, the contents of her apartment in the Champs-Élysées, and the legacies of £40,000 for himself and his family. The wording of the will confirmed that ‘Horace Pym shall by himself or his firm act as Solicitor in the trusts and execution of this my will’.
Yolande’s relationship with Sir John Lubbock, who had been a trustee of Stephens’s estate for thirty-four years, had not been a happy one, so she was flattered when he brought his five-year-old son Harold to see her in the spring of 1893. When Pym next came to Roehampton, she dictated a codicil: ‘To Harold Lubbock, son of Sir John Lubbock, as a mark of gratitude for all his father and grandfather have done for me, the sum of £5,000.’
Finally, she left her property in Roehampton and her entire residuary estate in England to Harry Claremont, a fortune worth £452,000 (£54 million) after payment of legacies and death duties. He inherited this in trust, to be passed on ‘in male tail’ down the generations. Her ‘household effects’, including most of her celebrated art collection, were included in the trust, to be ‘held and enjoyed by the person entitled to the Roehampton estate’. She made this request:
I direct that my Roehampton estate is not to be sold or disposed of by my trustees for any purpose whatever, and I declare that [this] limitation … is made with the earnest hope and strong desire that the estate will not be sold by any tenant for life thereof or any person becoming entitled thereto … and I desire that any person who shall become entitled to the Roehampton estate … shall take and use the surname and arms of Lyne Stephens … in lieu of his or her own surname.
Yolande’s will was proved by Harry and Horace Pym on 5 October. Four days later, Harry signed a new will which appointed Kitty and Pym as his executors and divided his personal assets between his three daughters. In mid-October, after signing the papers to change his name by deed poll to Lyne Stephens, he and his family travelled to the Royal Hotel in
Monte Carlo where it was hoped that the warmer sea air might benefit his lungs. He died there on 30 December 1894, having outlived Yolande by less than four months.
Kitty brought his body home to England, crossing the Channel four and a half years after Edward’s body had made the same journey. After a funeral service in Roehampton, Harry was buried on 10 January in a second grave outside the mausoleum, a few yards from the grave of his parents. Constance Smith watched the cortège as it made its way from the church:
I was walking in Roehampton Lane when I saw a funeral procession moving along the lane towards the entrance lodge of Grove House. I enquired whose funeral it was, and was told that it was the funeral of Mrs Lyne Stephens’s heir, Mr Claremont, and I remembered how feeble and ill he looked when chief mourner at the ceremony in September.2
Harry’s will, signed only four months earlier, was proved in the sum of £44,000 (£5 million). His inheritance from Yolande was in trust and not included in his estate, although the probate value did include her immediate legacy of £30,000.
Thirty years of looking after Yolande’s affairs had availed Edward Claremont very little, apart from a luxurious lifestyle and the shooting he enjoyed so much on the Lynford estate. Harry, too, gained little from his years of attendance, his ‘penal servitude’ as ‘the precious boy who is heir to so much’. He had neglected his wife and children to be with her in Lynford, Paris and Monte Carlo. He knew that he was dying, that his six-year-old son Stephen would inherit her fortune, although he would not have use of it until he reached the age of twenty-one. In the meantime, the boy was made a ward of the Court of Chancery, his fortune administered by Yolande’s trustees.
In her English and French wills, Yolande had bequeathed forty-eight of her most valuable paintings to the National Gallery and her best pieces of china, furniture and objets d’art to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). Most of these items were in Lynford Hall and Grove House, and the bequests were made on condition that they ‘shall be known, described and marked as the Lyne Stephens Collection and deposited … in some suitable position for their proper exhibition to the public’.
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