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

by Jenifer Roberts

  Six weeks before her death, outraged by the introduction of the Finance Bill (1894) which introduced estate duty on the full value of all property, both real and personal, she signed a codicil to her English will revoking these bequests. Instead, the items would:

  fall into and form part of my residuary personal estate and shall not form part of the bequest of household effects, provided always that it shall be lawful for the trustees to postpone … the sale of the pictures, ornamental china and objects d’art … and to permit the same to be enjoyed and remain in the possession of the person entitled to the income of my residuary personal estate.

  The bequests to the gallery and museum included two paintings and a few items of furniture from her apartment in the Champs-Élysées. Although she failed to write a similar codicil to her French will, Horace Pym (her residuary beneficiary in France) chose to honour her original intention.

  This involved some bureaucratic difficulty. Yolande’s French executors required proof from the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum that, ‘according to English law, they are entitled to receive the legacies’. The proof required was two powers of attorney, prepared by the consul at the French Embassy, which had to be signed by all the trustees of the gallery and museum before they could be passed on to an attorney in Paris. It took time for the National Gallery to obtain the necessary signatures, giving rise to a letter of complaint from Horace Pym dated 9 January 1895:

  Owing to the delay in obtaining the authority of the trustees of the National Gallery to hand over the pictures left to them by the deceased lady, I have had to pay a French tax for 1895, amounting to 2,000 francs (£80) because these goods were remaining in the apartment in Paris on 1 January. I am also unable to accept a tenant for the apartment for the same cause, and am paying a rent of £800 per annum for the rooms. I think it well that you should know these facts, and also that I claim from the National Gallery the sum of £80 tax paid, as above stated. Pray accelerate the completion of the French authority with all despatch.3

  The gallery replied on 7 February, pointing out that it knew nothing about the tax and had no intention of reimbursing the £80. Pym left it to one of his clerks to write again the following day:

  This payment has been personally made by our Mr Pym and cannot be made a charge against the late Mrs Lyne Stephens’s estate. Looking to the great value of the gift you have received, we feel that it is very ungracious on your part to decline to recoup Mr Pym a payment he has made under such circumstances … Had you offered to meet Mr Pym by paying even half the sum he has disbursed, he would not have felt, as he now has reason to do, that he has been treated ungenerously.4

  At the same time as feeling annoyed at the delay in Paris, Pym was making arrangements to sell most of the Lyne Stephens Collection at auction in London. Yolande’s will included this clause:

  It shall be lawful for my trustees … at their discretion if the said tenant for life is an infant, to sell the said household effects … and in such case, the monies to arise from such sale shall … form part of my residuary personal estate.

  The tenant for life was six years old. Of the three trustees, Sir John Lubbock showed little interest in the administration, so it was Horace Pym and his brother-in-law Joseph Gurney Fox who used their discretion. Instead of restricting the sale to the most valuable items which had reverted to the estate by codicil, they decided to sell the ‘household effects’ as well: the entire contents of Lynford Hall and most of the furniture and paintings in Grove House. Inevitably, this would raise more for money for the trust which Pym was paid to administer.

  The auction took place at Christie’s in May 1895 and lasted for nine days. A whole day was devoted to pictures, including seventy old master paintings, five paintings of horses in Melton Mowbray, and one of a royal shooting party at Compiègne. Another day was allocated to the sale of silver items and jewellery. ‘Messrs Christie’s rooms,’ explained The Times on 8 May:

  are now filled with the old pictures, fine French furniture, and Sèvres and other porcelain, for the possession of which the late Mrs Lyne Stephens was celebrated in London and Paris for some forty years or more. She was Mademoiselle Duvernay, the famous dancer … the adoration of our fathers and grandfathers … She married Mr Lyne Stephens … both had excellent taste, were well advised, and were large buyers of fine things, so the announcement that the whole collection would be sold was received with unusual interest by amateurs all over the world.

  The sale included three Velasquez portraits: Philip IV of Spain, the Infanta Maria Teresa, and an unnamed infanta. There were paintings by Bellini, Boucher, Greuze, and Veronese; a Rubens-Brueghel collaboration; an Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun; two paintings by Watteau; three by Murillo; a painting by Albert Cuyp of the Prince of Orange on horseback; a Claude Lorrain; a portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud; and the full-length portrait of Cardinal Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne.

  The furniture was French, mostly Louis XIV and Louis XVI. Lots included a gilded sixteenth-century Italian sedan chair; marquetry tables; secretaires and chests of drawers; sofas and chairs; tapestries; carpets; and an armchair ‘reputed to have been the property of Cardinal Wolsey’.

  There was a large quantity of porcelain, including three Sèvres dinner services of eighty, forty-eight and fifty-three pieces, and the Montcalm Vase, ‘one of a pair presented to the Marquis of Montcalm, the defender of Quebec, by Louis XV’. There were clocks and barometers, and two ‘large chimerical dragons inlaid with enamel’ from the Summer Palace in Peking.

  Jewellery included several gifts from men of society during Yolande’s years on the stage: ‘a pair of long brilliant earrings … formerly the property of Marie Antoinette’; ‘a necklace formed from forty-one large graduated pearls’ which sold for £4,200. Among the objects of vertu was ‘an old French fan of ivory, finely pierced and inlaid … with a white silk mount painted with garden scenes … presented to Mademoiselle Pauline Duvernay by Count d’Orsay’.

  According to Horace Pym, the sale was ‘the great attraction of the season’, with ‘buyers from Paris, New York, Vienna, and Berlin eagerly competing with London for the best things’. Prices obtained were ‘very far in excess of those paid for the various objects, in many cases reaching four and five times their original cost’.5

  The proceeds of the sale, £141,000 (£17 million), were added to Yolande’s estate in trust for the now seven-year-old Stephen, increasing his total trust fund to £593,000 (£70 million). Kitty was angry that Pym had sold so much of the collection, stripping Grove House of many of its contents. ‘I am thinking,’ she wrote, ‘of what my kind and generous friend Mrs Lyne Stephens would have wished if she had not been tricked by a rascally lawyer.’

  Pym had written regularly to Harry about legal and financial matters, and was solicitous to Kitty, writing several times to enquire about her husband’s health. Kitty was unimpressed. ‘Mr Horace Pym benefited largely under Mrs Lyne Stephens’s will,’ she wrote in the notebook she used to record matters of business:

  Towards the end of her life, she added one codicil after another, leaving large sums to members of Mr Pym’s family, as well as the contents of her apartment in the Champs-Élysées which consisted of the choicest art treasures in pictures, china, furniture, etc., together with a sum of money invested in France. All of this French property had originally been left to my husband, but the legacy was revoked in a codicil … and left absolutely to Mr Horace Pym.

  In addition to this, the firm of Tathams and Pym, of which Mr Pym was then the sole representative, was appointed sole solicitors to the Trust. Under these circumstances, I was advised to appoint a lawyer to act for me … The result was that I obtained from the Court of Chancery a provisional allowance of £3000 a year for maintenance during Stephen’s minority. My actions in taking my affairs out of Mr Pym’s hands angered him considerably. His object appeared to be to persuade me that I was entirely in his power in everything.

  Kitty had given birth to a thi
rd daughter, Winefride, on 7 March 1894, less than ten weeks after her husband’s death. A few months later, she left Harry’s house in Chelsea and moved into Grove House with her children. Under Yolande’s influence, she had converted to Catholicism and, in April 1897, she married Raoul Bedingfeld, a Catholic from Norfolk whom she first met at the opening service of the church in Cambridge. Constance Smith dined with them in Grove House towards the end of the year:

  The house was much emptied of its beautiful contents … but some very fine tapestry still remained, and in the billiard room hung two portraits of Mrs Lyne Stephens. One was of her in her early bright days; very handsome, with curling hair, and gay hopeful expression. The other was by Carolus-Duran, painted of her in her old age, a very melancholy picture. Not a smile left on her face and with most pathetic large dark eyes.6

  Stephen reached his majority on 3 April 1909. He had already instructed a lawyer to draw up a disentailing deed, breaking the entail on the Grove House estate and ‘vesting the same in himself in fee simple’. The deed, which was signed on his twenty-first birthday, also broke the entailed trust on Yolande’s residuary estate.

  Kitty’s second husband died in 1910, after which she left Roehampton and returned to the house in Chelsea. The following year, Stephen let Grove House and thirty-three acres of land to Charles Fischer, an American merchant, with an option to purchase the freehold. The remaining acreage was let to the Roehampton Polo Club, with a similar option to purchase.

  As Grove House was emptied for letting, more items from the Lyne Stephens Collection were sold at auction. Among the old master paintings sold at Christie’s in June 1911 were two by Greuze, three by Guardi, and a view of Venice by Canaletto. The furniture and furnishings included several Gobelins tapestries, ‘a set of six Louis XIII walnut-wood chairs’, and several items of Sèvres porcelain and objets d’art. Stephen and Kitty retained six paintings to hang in the house in Chelsea: a Veronese; a Murillo; portraits of Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour; and a double portrait of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.

  Stephen volunteered for military service at the outbreak of the First World War, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. Instead, he joined the Army Service Corps and drove ambulances at the front. In January 1917, despite his need to wear glasses, he was transferred to the West Yorkshire regiment. He was, wrote the colonel of the eleventh battalion, ‘capable of carrying out the duties of a subaltern in the infantry without further training … he has constantly been under fire and has a considerable knowledge of general conditions and requirements of the infantry in the present campaign’.7

  Wounded during the third battle of Ypres in October 1917, he was repatriated to a hospital in England. ‘He was injured on right cheek by fragment of shell which was extracted and the wound drained,’ reported the medical board on 31 December. ‘It healed in November but there is still inability to open mouth properly on account of scar tissue … He can separate his teeth half an inch.’8

  In February 1918, while convalescing in England, Stephen married his cousin, Joan Northey. Two months later, he wrote to the War Office to request a ‘wound gratuity’, pointing out that the fragment of shell had caused ‘considerable and permanent facial disfigurement, in addition to which the shock has greatly affected my general health’. He re-joined his battalion in September, three months before the armistice, and was demobilised in March 1919.

  He took to alcohol after the war, perhaps to mask the chronic pain in his face. He set out on a world tour after demobilisation and was away for several months, sending postcards to his mother from Hawaii, Tunis, Java and New York. Joan divorced him in 1921, after which he became a playboy; he raced motor cars, gambled in casinos, had affairs with actresses, and mixed with what Kitty called ‘a racy crowd’. In 1922, he spent several months in Rhodesia.

  Kitty confided in her notebook that, although his income was £13,000 a year (£700,000), she was concerned about his extravagance: ‘He spends money at such a rate that I wonder how he will manage to live within this income! Not at the rate he is going! He seems to have no idea what he spends. His extravagance makes me uneasy on his account.’

  She had left London after the war and moved to the Villa Borghese in Torquay. Stephen rarely came to see her. He made a brief visit in October 1920, to inform her that he intended to reduce her allowance. He visited again in July 1922 before he sailed for Rhodesia. A few weeks later, she wrote a letter which she attached to her will for him to read after her death:

  I trust that your religion and the faithful practice of it will be your abiding consolation until the end of your life. May the remembrance of your early years, and Catholic surroundings, bring you back entirely to God. May he in his mercy grant my prayers. Perhaps even in this world, I shall have this supreme consolation.

  On 9 September 1823, a telegram was sent from Swanage in Dorset to the priest-in-charge of the Roman Catholic presbytery in Torquay: ‘Will you please bring news to Mrs Bedingfeld at Villa Borghese that her son was killed in a motor accident Saturday evening.’ The story was told in a local newspaper:

  A shocking motor fatality occurred on the Kingston to Swanage road on Saturday evening. A private car driven by Captain Lyne Stephens … after passing a char-a-banc about a mile from Langton Matravers, swerved across the road and crashed into a telegraph pole. Captain Lyne Stephens was killed instantly … He apparently applied the brakes suddenly to the motor, which was a powerful car of Spanish make, and was pitched through the windscreen, his head striking one of the lamps. Another car containing friends was following close behind, but suffered no damage.

  At the inquest, the coroner gave a verdict of ‘accidental death caused by negligent driving on part of deceased’. It was concluded that the two cars were racing.

  Kitty arranged for her son’s body to be brought to Roehampton and buried in a third grave outside the mausoleum, between the graves of his father and grandparents. There were no children from his brief marriage and only one beneficiary of his will: his sister Winefride who lived with him in Chelsea.

  His estate was valued at £205,000 (£11 million), a third of the amount he had received from Yolande at the age of six. Her fortune would soon be reduced even further: according to family tradition, Winefride lost her inheritance from her brother, partly because of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and partly because of a fraudulent lawyer.

  It was not just Yolande’s fortune that vanished. Her name disappeared too. Created in 1826 when Charles Lyne inherited the Stephens fortune from Portugal, the name of Lyne Stephens came to an end in 1923 as two cars raced each other down the country lanes of Dorset.

  24

  THE LONG WAIT ENDS

  This great outspread of benevolence, giving a joyous

  independence which may extend downwards

  through generations.

  Mary Chudleigh, 13 April 1860

  At the time of Yolande’s death in 1894, the Lyne Stephens estate was valued at £1,057,430, so each ninety-third share was worth £11,370 (£1.3 million). Forty-eight of the original beneficiaries were still alive – and they had grown tired of waiting. When the drama critic Lewis Clifton Lyne died in December 1889, the Western Mail published an obituary:

  One who knew Mr Lyne well tells me that he was a co-heir to about a million of money left years ago by a wealthy old lawyer named Lyne Stephens. Unfortunately for him, a life interest in this vast fortune was bequeathed to a French ballet dancer who, by prolonging her life to over ninety, has managed effectively to keep him out of his share.

  Two weeks after Yolande’s death, the Cornish Times announced that the Lyne Stephens fortune would now be distributed according to the will:

  To those whose memories carry them back some thirty or forty years, the announcement that the great fortune belonging to the late Mr Stephens Lyne Stephens is now to be dispersed among his heirs must revive many interesting recollections … How the colossal fortune was accumulated by Mr Lyne Stephens’s father when a merc
hant at Lisbon is an interesting story. Suffice it to say here that a number of representatives of the Lyne family of Cornwall will now benefit under the will.

  At last the Court of Chancery could begin the slow process of winding up the Lyne Stephens estate. The first action taken by the court was to authorise the sale of Lynford Hall. It was advertised in May 1895:

  A princely freehold domain of about 7720 acres, well known as one of the finest sporting estates in England … a noble mansion erected in the most substantial and costly manner, lavishly fitted and decorated in fine order throughout, suitable in every way for the accommodation of the family and guests of a wealthy owner.

  The mansion comprises some fifty bed and dressing rooms, lady’s boudoir, spacious saloon opening from the grand entrance hall, a fine oak staircase, a palatial suite of grand reception rooms, the most complete domestic offices, and very fine cellarage … surrounded by lovely pleasure grounds and a beautiful richly-timbered park intersected by a branch of the River Wissey, which flows through the estate, and includes a series of ornamental lakes, the resort of wild fowl in great numbers.1

  The property was marketed by Horace Pym’s legal firm, Tathams and Pym, and the auction was held on 23 July at the Mart, near the Bank of England.

  Meanwhile, a dispute had arisen over the garden ornaments. Did they belong to Stephens’s ninety-three beneficiaries or to Harry Claremont’s infant son? The matter was referred to the Court of Chancery which, over thirty years earlier, had sanctioned the use of money in the Lyne Stephens estate to fund the completion of the mansion, although Yolande herself had bought ‘a large number of marble and bronze statues and vases’ for the formal gardens. In late July, Mr Justice Stirling ruled that the ornaments belonged to Stephens’s estate, on the questionable grounds that Yolande had bought them to complete the gardens as designed by her husband.