The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  On a windy afternoon in April 1858, Victoria visited Cliveden for the first time in three years to inspect the finishing touches that had been added to the mansion. Harriet’s penchant for French phrases is echoed in the queen’s diary entry for the day. Victoria admired the ‘objects d’art, china and glass’ and pronounced the house a ‘bijou of taste’. Harriet’s ‘boudoir had been transformed (at a cost of £900, the equivalent of £54,000 today) into an ‘enchanting’ haven with hand-painted plasterwork of flowers, foliage and trellises.3

  The reception rooms had also been finished to the most exacting standards. Central to the great hall with its floor of Minton tiles stood a life-size bronze of Joan of Arc by Princesse Marie-Christine d’Orléans, third daughter of the French king and a celebrated artist and sculptor. Harriet had a special devotion to the French martyr, whom she considered the embodiment of ‘all that is good and beautiful’.4 The statue can still be seen in the gardens of Cliveden. The ceiling of the staircase (all that remains of Harriet’s interior design today) was painted with her children depicted as the Four Seasons. In the sitting room overlooking the garden her children were depicted again, this time as cupids, and two pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds portrayed her grandfather Lord Carlisle and her grandmother Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. A copy of Titian’s Assumption was on display in the dining room, while a portrait of the Duke of Buckingham hung on the wall overlooking the staircase. The library opened into a magnificent drawing room decorated, Versailles-like, with a row of mirrors, which reflected the view of the Thames to stunning effect.5 In the gardens, Harriet had planted a succession of ‘stately flower beds’, which included an arrangement of 4,000 geraniums known as the ‘scarlet ribbon’. The scent of the flowers hung seductively in the spring air – a smell Victoria would always associate with Cliveden. To conclude the royal visit, Harriet once again accompanied Victoria on a long walk ‘above the river’, passing along ‘the most splendid yew trees, 400 years old’.6

  Among the finishing touches put to the outside of the house during this period was a frieze, inscribed in Latin along the entablature, and painted gold. The frieze was made up of four panels, starting on the north side of the house and ending on the west:

  Constructed upon foundations laid long before by George Villiers Duke of Buckingham in Charles the Second’s reign.

  Completed in the year of Our Lord 1851 when Victoria had been Queen by God’s grace for fourteen years.

  Restored by George Duke of Sutherland and Harriet his wife on the site where two houses had previously been burnt down.

  Built by the skill, devotion and design of the architect Charles Barry in 1851.7

  The Latin words for the frieze were contributed by Harriet’s friend, William Gladstone. The pair had known each other for some time but it was in September 1853 when Gladstone was staying at Dunrobin that their acquaintanceship evolved into something significant. During the stay, he was struck down by erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection which induces fevers, shaking and vomiting, and Harriet read to him ‘full of the utmost kindness and simplicity’ during his unexpected month-long confinement.8 The period of proximity and care was the beginning of an affectionate bond that would sustain Harriet for the rest of her life.

  Gladstone was a brilliant yet troubled man grappling with many irreconcilable traits. The son of a Liverpool merchant who had transformed a modest family inheritance into a great fortune, he had been educated at Eton and then Oxford, and took a seat in Parliament at the age of 23 as the Tory MP for Newark. An evangelical Christian and deeply contemplative man, Gladstone was brought up to believe in the redemptive power of perpetual self-examination, which at its most intense resulted in a periodic fascination with sexual temptation. Gladstone’s twin preoccupations of sex and religion propelled him, in the mid-1840s, to embark on a mission of ‘rescue work’ with prostitutes. This involved walking the streets of London at night to reclaim women from a life of vice. Although his work fell firmly within the bounds of Christian charity, it raised eyebrows in political circles as well as provoking a personal crisis of conscience within Gladstone himself. He regularly confessed in his diary to committing ‘adultery of the heart’, ‘enjoying thinking of evil without the intention of action’, and being ‘out at all hours’ to put himself ‘in the way of contact with exciting causes’ and ‘the path of danger’.9 The path induced in him ‘uneasy’ thoughts, which led to excruciating bouts of guilt and shame. In his diaries a curious black mark often appears after encounters with prostitutes or evenings with illicit books: this mark was his symbol for a small whip known as a scourge. Gladstone appears to have gone through periods in which he whipped himself as punishment for sinful thoughts.

  Among the salacious books that periodically tempted Gladstone were several volumes of the Fabliaux et contes des poètes français du XI-XV siècles [Fables and tales of the French poets of the 11th–15th centuries], which he first came across in May 1848. Of his first session with the Fabliaux, Gladstone wrote: ‘I began to read it, and found in some parts of it impure passages, concealed beneath the veil of a quite foreign idiom: so I drank the poison, sinfully, because understanding was thus hidden by a cloud – I have stained my memory and my soul.’10 He set down a black mark against the day. A few months later, he punished himself after stumbling across ‘two vile poems’ by the Earl of Rochester (the Duke of Buckingham’s friend), and in February 1849 he succumbed once again to the temptations of the Fabliaux.11 Such was Harriet’s soothing influence on Gladstone that during his years of intense friendship with her, the ominous black mark ceased to appear in his diary entries. It is just one striking expression of the significance of their relationship.

  Following his time with the duchess at Dunrobin, Gladstone became a regular guest at Cliveden. In July 1854 he visited the house and ‘sculled on the river, the first time in many years’; he made at least two weekend visits in 1857, and several more during the summer of 1859.12 He went for trips in the carriage and in boats on the Thames, and during a visit in August, ‘read Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson’.13 Throughout their friendship, the pair maintained a regular and lively correspondence. The letters Harriet wrote to Gladstone are bound together in six volumes in the British Library and amount to 2,000 folios of correspondence. It was a mutually beneficial relationship; while Gladstone gave Harriet the confidence to take an active interest in politics, the duchess’s wealth and social connections gave him status and credibility to pursue his political agenda.

  The British party-political landscape in the 1850s was undergoing seismic change. The two-party system of the Tories – who had traditionally represented the cause of the High Church and landed wealth, and had been resistant to social and political change – and the Whigs – who had typically been more receptive of reformist and commercial causes – had begun to fracture during the 1840s. In 1846, old allegiances were shattered by Robert Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws. These were tariffs on foreign cereal imports that had existed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when they were introduced in order to protect British cereal manufacturers from foreign competition. Critics of the laws claimed that they artificially inflated food prices and stymied economic growth; opponents of the laws included manufacturers and merchants, as well as workers who were suffering from the high cost of bread at a time when factory owners were cutting wages.

  Commercial middle-class opposition to the laws reached its apotheosis in William Cobden and John Bright’s Anti-Corn Law League, which was established in 1838 to agitate peacefully for reform. Many in the Tory party were fierce supporters of the laws, and feared that repeal would undermine the status of landlords economically and politically, thus endangering Britain’s traditional ‘territorial constitution’.14 Peel’s conversion to free trade made him a traitor in the eyes of many Tories, and the Corn Law vote caused a split from which the party would never recover. The economically liberal Peelites had a lot more in common with free trade Whigs and Radicals – themselves an
offshoot of the Whig party – than they had with the traditional ‘territorial constitutional’ rump of their own party. An alliance of Peelites, Whigs and Radicals was attempted under the Peelite prime minister Lord Aberdeen in the early 1850s, but it was only in 1859 that a lasting alliance would be formed.

  On 6 June 1859, in the surroundings of Willis’s Rooms, where the Westminster meeting on the subject of the Great Exhibition had taken place almost ten years previously, the new Liberal Party was formally established with the assent of 274 Peelite, Whig and Radical MPs.15 The alliance would allow Lord Palmerston, who had begun his political career as a Tory but now favoured the new Liberal politics, to form an effective ministry, and on 12 June, the queen asked him to become prime minister. Though he would not be prime minister for another decade, Gladstone’s work as chancellor in Lord Palmerston’s government set the tone for the new liberal economics that came to dominate the latter half of the 19th century. His budget of 1860 included a tariff-reducing treaty with France, and a controversial plan to abolish the duty on paper, which was known as a ‘tax on knowledge’ because of the way it inflated the price of newspapers.

  During his stint as chancellor under Palmerston, Gladstone saw the Sutherlands frequently. While he often saw the duke and duchess together, it was with the latter that he had a more natural bond. During the summer of 1861, he spent five separate ‘weekends’ at Cliveden. In the mid-19th century, the term ‘weekend’ did not exist, and in many lines of work, politics included, Saturday was treated as a workday. Practice varied between different prime ministers, but Palmerston used Saturday as a cabinet day, with business running from one o’clock in the afternoon to around half past four. Gladstone consequently invented his own ‘weekends’ around this schedule, heading straight to Cliveden after Saturday cabinet meetings. In the Restoration era, travel from the capital to the estate involved much time and planning; by the 1860s, the short train journey did not take significantly longer than it does today. Cliveden could be accessed from London within an hour. The expansion of the railways allowed Gladstone and Harriet to pioneer that quintessentially English phenomenon: the country-house weekend.

  As well as serving the house, the Great Western Railway transformed the Thames Valley landscape in which Cliveden stood. The new topography of the river at Maidenhead was given a particular significance by J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain, Steam and Speed, which was first exhibited in 1846. The work depicts a passenger train thundering over Maidenhead bridge and, in the bottom corner, a fleeing hare. Behind the hare and the approaching train, the scene is half-formed; even the foreground scene looks at risk of being submerged in the turbid landscape. Turner’s image captured the conflict between old and new, and expressed both excitement and doubt at the way in which a settled past was being devoured by technology and speed. This must have struck a chord with Harriet, who had expressed similar trepidation about steam travel as early as 1830. The river, which in Georgian Britain had so often been a site of pomp and pageantry, was now being carved up by new and unprecedented thoroughfares.

  Gladstone did not merely view Cliveden as a leisure retreat, but also as a base from which to conduct and reflect on his political affairs. Throughout 1860 and 1861, these affairs were fraught. The embryonic Liberal Party had not yet established a clear identity. Lord Palmerston was less economically liberal than Gladstone, and less concerned about economic retrenchment (the administration had inherited a public debt of nearly five million pounds from the previous government). The prime minister’s expenditure on costly projects such as fortifying the south coast horrified Gladstone, who believed that in a time of peace nothing but dire necessity should induce a government to borrow. The two also disagreed over foreign policy, Gladstone being an opponent (for both economic and ethical reasons) of Palmerston’s strident interventionism. On several occasions during 1861, these tensions brought Gladstone to the brink of resignation. During a weekend at Cliveden in June that year, he wrote: ‘My resignation all but settled.’16 But despite several such claims, he remained chancellor until 1866.

  At the end of 1860, Harriet wrote ecstatically to Gladstone about the election of Abraham Lincoln, a well-known abolitionist, as president of the United States. The election, she believed, with rather naive optimism, was an unmitigated victory for her cause and one of several events that had made 1860 ‘a year of grace’.17 The path to abolition would, in fact, prove to be a long and bloody one.

  In the bitterly cold January of 1861, George suffered an attack of paralysis. ‘I wish you to hear from me first that my dear Duke has been … ill this morning,’ she informed Gladstone on 8 January.18 Later that month, as the gravity of the duke’s condition became clear, Harriet wrote to Victoria, resigning her position as Mistress of the Robes, but the queen refused to accept, displaying her own great need of her friend and, perhaps, stubborn optimism that George might still recover. In February, the duke’s condition deteriorated further. ‘The poor dear Duke of Sutherland is I am afraid dying,’ Victoria recorded in her journal. ‘He will be such a loss.’19

  By the end of the month, Harriet’s husband of nearly 40 years was dead. At Cliveden, George’s study – perhaps the only room to truly reflect his simple but refined tastes – stood empty. Harriet was haunted by her loss. ‘Even then I felt as if I could not see Him Die, or if I did that I should lose my mind – & yet I have witnessed I have heard the last breath,’ she wrote to Gladstone in her misery. ‘I am often composed. I have cried enough. I have slept. In my last letter I feel as I had seemed satisfied – alas you know that this is not so… The Bible has no allusion to this Parting… I wish there had been – There is much to soothe.’20 A few months later, she reflected on her bitter-sweet memories of George at Cliveden. ‘I have rested in the place at Cliveden where our children were married – & grand-children baptised,’ she wrote to Gladstone. ‘What a hold [a] Place has upon one.’21

  George’s death had serious financial as well as emotional ramifications for Harriet. The Sutherland estate passed immediately to Harriet’s eldest son. Unlike Augusta, however, who was entirely at the mercy of her male patrons, George had made ample provision for his much-loved wife. The house had been conveyed to Harriet in 1849 partly in the expectation that George, 20 years her senior, would die before she did. There was, however, the problem of ongoing works on the house, the largest of which was the construction of the water tower, still incomplete when the duke died in 1861. Thankfully Harriet’s son, George, who was now the 3rd Duke of Sutherland, arranged ‘to gratify his mother by executing the work for her, as would have been the case had his father lived’.22 The new duke’s concern for his mother is a touching demonstration of the strong bonds that existed between the Sutherland family. The water tower was finished later the same year, having cost £3,000 in total. An elaborate structure with an ornate blue clock-face, it became a monument to the 2nd Duke, with his name and dates inscribed on the pediments.

  The queen, who during George’s illness had so resisted Harriet’s attempts to resign, now felt obliged to accept the grieving Harriet’s decision. In April, ‘full of Grace and Sorrow’, she released her from her duties as Mistress of the Robes. This time, Harriet would not return to the role. In her place, Victoria appointed the Duchess of Wellington, as she reported in her diary on 6 May: ‘Saw the dear Dss of Wellington, who is now my Mistress of the Robes, the poor dear Dss of Sutherland having resigned.’23 But the Duchess of Wellington would never occupy such a position of influence and intimacy with the queen as Harriet had done. Later that year, when Victoria suffered her own life-changing bereavement, it was Harriet she relied on for support – this time in no official capacity, but simply as her best friend.

  ‘Cliefden, the Residence of the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, visited by the Queen.’ Victoria visited the house on numerous occasions, and pronounced it a ‘bijou of taste’.

  Chapter 11

  AN INDEPENDENT WIDOW

  IN THE MONTHS following George’s death, Harri
et became increasingly dependent on Gladstone for emotional support. Gladstone too sought comfort in Harriet’s friendship. On 16 April 1861, Harriet wrote to Gladstone suggesting he visit her alone at Cliveden; it was the first time they had seen each other since the duke’s death. ‘Would you come for a visit & would Mrs Gladstone let it be the first time alone,’ she appealed. ‘It must be sad & solemn.’1 Gladstone followed her wishes: the guest book for Tuesday 23 April records only Harriet and Gladstone as having been in residence at the house.2 Harriet was alert to the possibility that Gladstone’s wife Catherine would feel marginalised, or even betrayed by the closeness of their friendship. At the start of May, she invited Gladstone and Catherine to visit for a weekend, and on two further occasions (in May, and then in June) suggested that the couple visit for a meal, or to spend the night. The invitation she extended to both of the Gladstones in early May is especially attentive to Catherine – she mentions wanting to see them both, and in a postscript emphasises: ‘Pray tell Mrs Gladstone that I shall much like to see her.’3

  After civil war broke out in America in mid-April, Harriet had a particularly prolonged correspondence with Gladstone on the subject of the war and slavery. Harriet viewed the war in providential terms, as both the inevitable consequence of slavery, and a God-given opportunity to end it forever. She believed that the vicissitudes of war were worth enduring, if they stamped out a greater evil. ‘The curse of war will sweep away a curse quicker still,’ she wrote with almost religious fervour.4 Gladstone, on the other hand, saw the war as a conflict over the constitutional rights of the southern states to secede from the Union, and considered slavery to be an unrelated matter. At the time, there was much truth in his view, for while Abraham Lincoln was an opponent of slavery, he had promised not to interfere with the southern system of slave-holding; indeed, until 1862, officers in the Unionist army were still obliged to return runaway slaves to the belligerent South.