The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home
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1855
Charles Barry is fired by the Sutherlands
1857
The Sutherlands employ George Devey and Henry Clutton to design several new structures for the grounds of the estate
1861
George, 2nd Duke of Sutherland, dies
1861–65
American Civil War
1864
Garibaldi visits Cliveden
1866
Queen Victoria stays at Cliveden for ten days
1867
Second Reform Act
1868
HARRIET dies
Cliveden is bought by Hugh Grosvenor, later the Duke of Westminster
1879
NANCY LANGHORNE born
1893
William Waldorf Astor buys Cliveden
1895
National Trust established
1897
NANCY marries Bob Shaw
1903
NANCY divorces Bob Shaw
1906
NANCY marries Waldorf Astor; Waldorf and NANCY given Cliveden as a wedding present; NANCY redesigns the garden and the interior
1914–18
First World War; hospital built at Cliveden
1918
Representation of the People Act extends the vote to women aged 30 and over
1919
NANCY becomes the first female MP to take her seat
1937
The Week runs the Cliveden Set story
1939–45
Second World War; new hospital built at Cliveden
1942
Waldorf approaches the National Trust about the donation of Cliveden
1945
NANCY resigns from Parliament
1952
Waldorf dies; NANCY gives Cliveden to their son Bill
1961
Jack Profumo meets Christine Keeler at Cliveden beside the newly built swimming pool
1963
‘Profumo Affair’ becomes a public scandal
1964
NANCY dies and is buried next to Waldorf at Cliveden
1966
Bill Astor dies of a heart attack. The Astors vacate Cliveden
1969–83
Stanford University leases Cliveden from the National Trust for use as an overseas campus
1970
Bobbie Shaw commits suicide
1985
Lease acquired by the Von Essen hotel group
2012
Lease acquired by Ian Livingstone of London and Regional Properties to run as a hotel
At the head of the driveway to the house stands the ‘Fountain of Love’, a vast marble cockleshell surrounded by cavorting nymphs and cherubs, created by the Anglo-American sculptor Waldo Story.
INTRODUCTION
ON THE SULTRY night of 8 July 1961, the 19-year-old showgirl Christine Keeler was in the swimming pool at Cliveden when she heard voices approaching from the terrace. She had been larking about with her friend Stephen Ward (who rented a cottage at the foot of the estate), a law student called Noel Howard-Jones, and a pretty young hitch-hiker whom the three of them had picked up on the drive down from London. Usually Ward asked permission to use the pool from the estate’s owner Bill Astor, but tonight Bill was occupied by a more sober dinner party in the main house. The pool was tucked away in a walled garden on the west side of the property, so the group thought nothing of going for an impromptu swim without giving Astor prior warning. The party grew raucous, and at some point Keeler shed her swimsuit in a bet.
Up at the main house, the company at dinner included Field Marshal Ayub Khan, president of Pakistan, John Profumo, secretary of state for war, and his film-star wife Valerie. The hosts were Bill Astor, who had inherited the house from his parents Waldorf and Nancy, and Bill’s wife Bronwen. After dinner, the hosts decided to take advantage of the balmy night and suggested a stroll down to the swimming pool to show off a newly installed bronze statue of their son riding a dolphin. What the guests actually saw, as they rounded the corner into the walled garden, was the lithe form of Christine Keeler, lifting herself from the pool and dashing across the patio, her feet making damp prints on the terracotta tiles. Profumo wasted no time in asking Bill for an introduction.
Late that night Keeler returned to London to pick up a couple more of Ward’s girlfriends, and the next morning they were all driven back to Cliveden by the Russian naval attaché and intelligence officer Yevgeny Ivanov. The group spent a lazy Sunday by Bill Astor’s pool, where Ivanov challenged Profumo to a swimming race. Just before Keeler left that evening, Profumo, who according to Ivanov had been ‘flirting outrageously’ with the young girl, asked for her contact details.1 Ivanov drove Christine back to Ward’s flat where, the Soviet attaché would later claim, they slept together. Two days later, Profumo tracked Keeler down and arranged to meet her while his wife Valerie was visiting his Warwickshire constituency. It marked the beginning of a tepid, half-hearted liaison, which Keeler – who once cooked them sausages before they had sex in front of the television – described as ‘a very, very well-mannered screw of convenience’.2
The weekend at Cliveden was the first act in a drama that would bring down a government and change the course of British history. The apparent ménage à trois between the minister of war, a Soviet spy and a good-time girl made Cliveden synonymous with scandal in the collective consciousness of an entire generation.
But the outraged headlines and lurid scoops of the Profumo Affair – as it came to be known – were nothing new. During its dawn in the 1660s as much as its twilight in the 1960s, Cliveden was an emblem of elite misbehaviour and intrigue. Indeed the 350-year history of the house began when a powerful politician decided to build a secluded mansion in which to enjoy his affair with an ambitious courtesan not much older than Keeler. The courtesan was Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury, and the politician George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, a childhood friend of Charles II and one of the wealthiest men in England. When Buckingham bought Cliveden in the 1660s, it comprised two modest hunting lodges set within 400 acres of land. Over the following decade, he transformed it, landscaping the gardens and constructing a magnificent house as a monument to his scandalous affair with the countess.
The estate sits just 5 miles upriver from Windsor Castle and fewer than 30 from the Palace of Westminster in London, a privileged location that would be crucial to the lives of its residents. Its outlines have changed little since the 17th century, and, then as now, Cliveden is one of England’s most breathtaking landmarks. To the south-west, the grounds overlook the Thames from the tall chalk cliffs that give the site its name – over the centuries it has also been spelt Cliefden, Clifden, and Cliffden. Further north, the cliffs, which are densely planted with oak, beech, ash and chestnut, dip into a hollow, and the gardens trail like skirts down to the water. At the top of these gardens, at the end of a long parterre, and raised to an even more imperious height by an arcaded terrace, stands the house itself, an elaborate Italianate mansion, flanked by two wings and approached by road from the north, down a long gravel drive.
In April 2012 Cliveden became central to my life when my husband acquired the property. When it came into our possession it was no longer a private residence – Cliveden had been reincarnated as a university and a hospital, and latterly run as a hotel. But amid its faded charms there were clues everywhere to the past lives of the estate, most noticeably in the portraits of the house’s former mistresses.
In the great hall hangs a portrait of Anna Maria, the original inspiration for the house, a courtesan much maligned in her own time and misunderstood by subsequent generations. Carved into the staircase is Elizabeth, Countess of Orkney, a formidable intellect, power-broker and long-time lover to Britain’s conqueror of 1688, William III. Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the queen that Britain was promised and then denied in the middle of the 18th century, is immortalised in a painting over the grand staircase, while the fourth mistress, Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, a glittering soci
ety hostess and the closest confidante of Queen Victoria, presides over the dining room. Finally, hanging beside the fireplace in the great hall is John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Nancy Astor – Cliveden’s last great mistress, Britain’s first female Member of Parliament, and one of the most controversial and colourful women in British political history.
The struggles and sacrifices of these women, their juggling of outer image and inner life, are familiar and universal. Their privileges, however, were extraordinary. It is from their elite viewpoint that this book narrates the tumultuous events of the last three centuries: Restoration and Glorious Revolution, aristocratic rise and fall, two world wars and the Cold War. Along the way there are tales of fanaticism and fashion, of censorship, disease, slavery and the unlikely correlation between gardening and warfare.
As well as being a story about women and power, this book is also the biography of a house. Conceived by Stuart aristocracy, Cliveden later served as a counter-court during the power struggles of the Hanoverian dynasty, and in the 19th century became a crucible for a new brand of liberal politics, while continuing to offer a safe haven for royalty. With the decline of aristocratic wealth, it was one of the first houses to be bought up by American money, and in the later 20th and 21st centuries, it has become part of a new commercial order in which my husband and I – Jewish and self-made – play our part. Throughout the narrative Cliveden itself remains central – the constant character and a defining presence in the lives of all these women. For more than three centuries, the house provided opportunity and authority to women; in return, successive mistresses shaped the house, transforming both its architectural appearance and its social role.
While these women’s biographies reflect the gender politics of their times, their story is not a simple one of progress towards emancipation and equality. Nancy, in the 20th century, was more financially reliant on her husband than Elizabeth Villiers was in the 17th. In the early 19th century Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, watched from the balcony of the Lords as an act passed into law that would formally prevent women from participating in parliamentary elections – a privilege that had been enjoyed by women burgesses in the Tudor period. The life of each mistress is a dance of progress and reaction, of old and new. In this way, the biographies are not dissimilar from the house itself, where past and present are woven together: where 20th-century wiring runs underground along 16th-century tunnels, service bells from the 19th century hang from the wall above Wi-Fi boxes, and a swimming pool from the 1950s sits within a garden landscaped in the 1700s.
On the opposite side of the house to the pool, between the main block and the east wing, lies an unusual monument from the early 20th century that commemorates an event from the late 17th. Carved into the grass, inlaid in brickwork, is a rapier with an elegant handle, the sort a gentleman would have used in a duel. Alongside it lies a date: 1668.
It is a monument to the day on which a duel was fought between two of the most powerful people in the land, the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Shrewsbury. They were fighting for one woman – Anna Maria – Shrewsbury’s wife and Buckingham’s lover. The duel was to the death. Buckingham killed Shrewsbury and claimed Anna Maria as his prize. She became the first mistress of this great house, and it is to her that I turn to begin my story.
PART I
ANNA MARIA
1642–1702
Chapter 1
THE DUEL
BARN ELMS, 16 JANUARY 1668
IN THE THIN light of a January morning, the Duke of Buckingham galloped towards Barn Elms, the appointed site for the duel he had so long awaited. In springtime and summer, revellers flocked to Barn Elms with their bottles, baskets and chairs, recorded the diarist Samuel Pepys, ‘to sup under the trees, by the waterside’, but in winter the ground next to the Thames was frozen and deserted. Nevertheless, there was still activity on the river.1 Nearby Putney was famous for its fishery and was also the point at which travellers going west from London disembarked from the ferry and continued by coach.2 The harried cries of watermen and the shouts of fishermen returning from dawn trips filled the air as Buckingham neared his destination.
The grounds of the old manor of Barn Elms lay on a curve in the river just west of Putney. The land was divided into narrow agricultural plots – some open, others fenced off by walls or hedgerows. Pepys recorded that the duel took place in a ‘close’, meaning a yard next to a building or an enclosed field – somewhere screened off from passers-by.3
But as his horse’s hoofs thundered along the icy riverbank, Buckingham’s thoughts lay on a more distant turf. Anna Maria, the woman who had provoked the duel, was 270 miles away, in self-imposed exile in a convent in France. Nine years before, in 1659, Anna Maria Brudenell had married Francis Talbot, 11th Earl of Shrewsbury, but the union had been an unhappy one. He was 36, a wealthy but sedate landowner; she was a pleasure-loving 16-year-old already conscious of her seductive charms. Anna Maria kept a series of lovers but Shrewsbury turned a blind eye, making himself a laughing stock at court. During a trip to York in 1666, she began a new affair, this time with the flamboyant courtier George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and the following summer sexual rivalry between him and another of her paramours, the hot-headed rake Henry Killigrew, exploded in a violent scuffle.4 This very public fracas made it abundantly clear that Anna Maria had been serially unfaithful, and Shrewsbury’s failure to challenge either man to a duel was seen as a dereliction of his role as a noble husband. Anna Maria fled to France in shame.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, whose appetite for pleasure was, according to the poet Samuel Butler, ‘diseased and crazy’.
Amid reports that Buckingham was actually hiding Anna Maria in England, Shrewsbury at last summoned the courage to defend his marriage and his name. He challenged Buckingham to a duel and the duke eagerly accepted. Anna Maria exerted an extraordinary hold over a great number of men but she quite simply possessed the duke. ‘Love is like Moses’ serpent,’ he lamented in his commonplace book, ‘it devours all the rest.’5
Pepys reported that King Charles II had tried to dissuade Buckingham from fighting the duel but the message was never received.6 Even if it had been delivered, Buckingham would probably have taken little heed of the king’s wishes. Charles II was more like his brother than his monarch. Buckingham’s father, also George Villiers, had been made a duke by Charles I and, when Villiers senior was assassinated in 1628, the king took the Buckingham children into his household. Young George became a close friend of the future king and many of Charles’s happiest childhood memories involved Buckingham. The pair spent their student days at Cambridge University and their names appear side by side in the records of matriculation at Trinity College.7 Buckingham felt little obligation to defer to the king, while Charles tended to turn a blind eye to Buckingham’s reckless conduct.
Unknown to Shrewsbury, Buckingham had another reason to be riding to Barn Elms that January day in 1668. Shortly after the start of his affair with Anna Maria, Buckingham had viewed a magnificent estate next to the Thames. The site, then owned by the Manfield family, was within easy boating distance of London and included two hunting lodges set in 160 acres of arable land and woods. The estate was known as Cliveden, or Cliffden, after the chalk cliffs that rose above the river. From the lodges the ground dropped sharply towards the Thames, and on the far side of the river flooded water meadows and open land spread out for miles beyond. There had once been a well-stocked deer park on the site and Buckingham knew he could restore the estate to its former glory. He intended to replace the lodge with a large house that would boast the best views in the kingdom.
Buckingham bought Cliveden with the pleasures of the flesh at the forefront of his mind. This, he fantasised, would be his grand love nest with Anna Maria, a place for them to freely indulge in their affair – hunting by day, dancing by night. It was Buckingham’s obsession with Anna Maria and his dream of a gilded life with her at Cliveden that led him to accept Shrewsbury’s
challenge.
Buckingham’s fight with Shrewsbury was not to be an impulsive brawl of the sort seen every night across London’s streets and taverns, but a carefully calibrated episode of violence. Although there had been medieval precedents for settling disputes through combat, the duel of honour was essentially a Renaissance invention, imported from Italy. Duelling formalised conflicts between aristocrats, replacing cycles of revenge, usually romantic in nature, with a single, rule-bound encounter. Its outcome served to resolve and annul any other grievances. The duel was part of a new court culture, which placed heavy emphasis on civility and courtesy; when these principles were ignored, duelling provided a means of redress. In the 1660s, after the monarchy was restored, duels became more common and attracted significant public interest and press comment, even if the participants lacked any kind of celebrity status.8 Charles II did issue an anti-duelling proclamation in 1660: ‘It is become too frequent,’ this stated, ‘especially with Persons of quality, under a vain pretence of Honour, to take upon them to be the Revengers of their private quarrels, by Duel and single Combat.’9 In reality, however, Charles I had no moral objection to the culture of romantic fighting, and in the absence of effective legislation from Parliament, duels were judged on a case-by-case basis.
A duel was conventionally initiated with a challenge from the aggrieved party, whose complaint could be anything from the monumental to the trivial. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that men fought duels ‘for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue in their Kindred, their Friend, their Nation, their Profession or their Name’.10 Even if a challenge were accepted, the duel itself could be avoided, either by one of the parties backing down or by a third party intervening. When a fight did take place, the duellists were each required to select two men as ‘seconds’. In earlier times the seconds had merely an auxiliary role, carrying weapons and arbitrating, but by the 1660s it had become fashionable for them to engage at the same time as the main combatants – turning the duel into a ritualised piece of gang violence. Nominally, the aim was to prove one’s honour by exposing oneself to danger, not to kill the opponent, but inevitably some duels ended in serious injury or death.