In early summer, Harriet was staying in London at Stafford House. Although the residence now belonged to her son George, she still had rooms there. On 8 July she wrote to Gladstone asking him to accompany her to the British Institution in Pall Mall to see their annual exhibition of Old Masters, which included Sir Joshua Reynolds’ painting of her grandmother. The exhibition was a key event in the social calendar of the nobility, who dominated the membership, and the summer exhibition at the Institution was a highly visible event for a chancellor and a dowager duchess to attend together. Harriet’s desire for company did not blind her to the possibility of gossip: at the end of her letter, she wondered if the engagement would be ‘too public’.5 In her first year of widowhood, Harriet’s emotional state was fragile. This was her first London social season without George, and everywhere she went, she was reminded of previous visits with her husband. Likewise the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts reminded her that she had visited the exhibition with George ‘after I had told him I would be his wife – an old but so fresh a recollection’.6
In mid-July Harriet, cutting a far more corpulent figure than she had in her youth, travelled to Paris to get treatment for her cataract, which had worsened to the point where it made reading and writing difficult. No less than London, the city was haunted by memories of the early days of her marriage. ‘The Louvre is full of pleasant memories of having first seen & enjoyed it with my dearest Husband,’ she wrote on 20 July.7 Her intense neediness brought on by grief and ill-health was causing some strain on her relationship with Gladstone. After waiting more than a month for him to reply to a letter, Harriet sent another, testier note to her friend: ‘Is it unreasonable to think I should perhaps hear from you…’ the letter began.8
Harriet did not have long to dwell on her disappointment with Gladstone, because she was soon forced to set her own emotions aside in order to take care of her other great friend. In December 1861, Queen Victoria’s husband Albert contracted typhoid and, later that month, aged just 42, he died. Victoria recorded his last moments in her journal: ‘Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine and … all, all, was over,’ she wrote. ‘I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead and called out in bitter and agonising cry, “Oh! my dear Darling!”’9 Victoria’s despair was extreme. She shut herself away with her family, seeing her cabinet ministers as rarely as she could, and eschewing her duties as queen and the ceremonial functions of monarchy. Entirely self-conscious about her solitude, she referred to it in her journals as ‘my seclusion’. There was only one person she wished to see – Harriet.
Within days of Albert’s death, the queen called Harriet to her side. Harriet rushed to Windsor and found Victoria sitting alone in her room. The tormented queen embraced her, then looked deep into Harriet’s eyes, repeating the phrase ‘you loved him’, before leading her into the room in which Albert’s lifeless body lay. The queen knelt before the couch in quiet contemplation and ‘extended her arms’ to Albert, speaking ‘every word of endearment as if he had lived’. Muttering incoherently about the ‘beauty of the face’ which even death had not impaired, Victoria tenderly stroked Albert’s forehead. All the while, Harriet stood by her side in shocked silence. Finally, as if slipping into a grief-induced trance, Victoria raised her eyes to the heavens and left the room. Harriet spent the ensuing days comforting the distraught queen. At times Victoria felt she was ‘going mad with grief. She confessed to Harriet that she was utterly lost without her husband and felt unable to continue. Who, she asked, could she confess her ‘every thought… anxiety or worry to’ now that her husband had died? Victoria interspersed these outpourings of misery with graphic ‘almost hour by hour’ accounts of Albert’s illness. Harriet, now shouldering the burden of Victoria’s loss as well as her own, sought some solace in Gladstone, to whom she wrote of her ‘very harrowing’ experiences caring for the queen.10
In January, while still making regular trips to Windsor to look after the queen, Harriet was going through a particularly difficult period in her own grieving, for the month marked the first anniversary of George’s death. ‘I live in the thick blows of last year,’ she wrote to Gladstone in February.11 She was touched – and maybe, given the self-involved nature of the queen’s mourning thus far, surprised – to receive a letter from Victoria expressing sympathy on the anniversary. ‘I like to tell you of the Queen,’ she wrote to Gladstone. ‘Is it not most kind & considerate of her to recollect the Day of my bereavement.’ She quoted Victoria, who had written: ‘I have not forgotten what to day is – I think of you – of what you lost with my poor bleeding heart & again I can feel for you.’ Victoria also took the opportunity to express her own ongoing agony. Harriet informed Gladstone that ‘she tells me that she feels very weak & continues getting thinner & thinner’ and reported her saying ‘how terrible life is all is black & for ever here – he was the light, & the life of my existence – I have now only the reflection of it’.12
When Harriet returned to Cliveden in the spring of 1862, she could feel the fog of her grief lifting. She had endured a wretched first year of mourning, but was beginning to yearn for company and conversation and, once again, began to invite people to her country estate. Perhaps unconsciously, she was redefining herself as an independent widow, a role she inhabited with even greater ease than that of a society hostess. Unlike Augusta, Harriet was able to forge a rewarding, new life for herself after George, surrounding herself with a group of nurturing and intellectually stimulating friends.
At Harriet’s Cliveden weekends of the 1860s, members of the clergy, including Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and architects such as the Crystal Palace visionary Sir Joseph Paxton, dined with politicians, sculptors, artists and poets. Despite her relatively diminished financial resources, Harriet continued to entertain in style, keeping an average of 45 servants at her disposal on any given weekend. In May 1862, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate, paid Harriet a visit. Tennyson was averse to large gatherings, so on the occasions he visited Cliveden, Harriet tried to keep the guest list as short as possible. Predictably, this meant occasionally asking Gladstone to stay without Catherine. Gladstone and Tennyson had known each other when they were younger and had both been obsessed by the English poet Arthur Hallam, whose death at the age of 22 prompted Tennyson to write In Memoriam. Their weekends together at Cliveden were an opportunity to renew their old acquaintance. ‘Conversation with T[ennyson] & the Duchess,’ recorded Gladstone, one Monday evening after a weekend at Cliveden. ‘At 11 AM ended this most interesting visit: & I really feel I have got nearer to this great simple man.’13
On several visits during the spring, Tennyson read drafts of new works to Harriet, Gladstone and a few other select guests. During one weekend visit in May, he read from Pericles on the Friday and Guinevere (from the larger cycle Idylls of the King) on the Sunday.14 Harriet was struggling with her cataracts, and had recently been told by an eye doctor in Paris that she should stop trying to read so much, so the experience of the poet laureate reciting his works for her in his ‘growling voice’ was extremely gratifying. There were further writerly endeavours going on in the wings: during the evenings, as well as drafting speeches and reading biographies and works of political economy, Gladstone was working hard on his own trochaic translation of Homer’s Odyssey, or, as it appears in his diary entries, ‘the Trochaic Version’.15 As in the days of Elizabeth Villiers and Jonathan Swift, Cliveden had again become a hive of literary conversation.
Harriet’s enjoyable weekends at Cliveden were punctuated by regular trips to Windsor to care for the grief-stricken queen. Despite being emotionally drained by Victoria’s depression, Harriet remained attentive as ever towards her friend’s needs. ‘I am exhausted as I always am after seeing the Queen,’ she wrote to Gladstone in April, ‘but I am anxious to tell you that I thought her much better today. She showed me [Albert’s] rooms in great detail but calm. She took me again into the room of Death where in the bed
was a crop of white Camelia.’16 The following month, Harriet reported to Gladstone that Victoria was ‘still more depressed’.17
As the second anniversary of Albert’s death approached, Gladstone became increasingly frustrated by Victoria’s grief-induced paralysis; the queen was still neglecting her official duties. She remained at Windsor, swathed in her famous black shrouds, wedded to the past and uninterested in the future. As the projected cost of a planned memorial to Albert escalated, Gladstone wrote darkly about public discontent in tones reminiscent of Harriet’s fearful politics of the 1830s. ‘If the sense of exaggeration once even suggests itself,’ he wrote to Harriet regarding the queen’s grief, ‘it will grow: and when it gains ground it will have a chilling effect.’18 Then, during a conversation with Victoria at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, he made the fatal miscalculation of speaking his mind. ‘I told her that she would not give way… that duty would sustain her,’ he recorded in his diary. Appalled at the perceived upbraiding, Victoria ‘hustled’ Gladstone out of her presence.19
The handsome and charismatic Tory politician Benjamin Disraeli understood that the route to the queen’s favour was to appeal not to her sense of duty, but her vanity. He coaxed and caressed her ego, fawned over and flattered her, and delivered effusive speeches in Parliament that deified Albert’s legacy. There were shades of Lord Melbourne in the alluring, witty and sophisticated politician; undoubtedly he reminded the queen of her more carefree past and, within months, Disraeli became Victoria’s acknowledged favourite. Thus, in a neat twist of fate, during their respective widowhoods Victoria and Harriet fell in love with the two men who were to become the fiercest political rivals of their time. And yet it was not Gladstone or Disraeli, but another more exotic leader, who threatened to drive a wedge between Harriet and the queen.
Chapter 12
GARIBALDI-MANIA
‘HAVE YOU HEARD that Garibaldi is likely to be here soon?’ Harriet enthused to Gladstone in April 1864.1 Possessed by a quasi-religious zeal, she began organising a series of luncheons and dinners at Stafford House and at Cliveden, where Garibaldi could meet with senior English politicians and the stars of high society.
The exploits of the Italian nationalist General Giuseppe Garibaldi had a cult-like following in 1860s Britain. In his youth, Garibaldi had embraced republican nationalism and had dedicated his life to liberating Italy from the shackles of the tyrannical Bourbon monarchy – the same dynasty that had produced the ousted Charles X of France. Garibaldi had won international fame during the 1848–9 revolutions in Italy, where he had heroically organised a doomed insurrection against the French. In attracting some limited support from British aristocratic liberals, the insurrection was exceptional among the many that occurred during those years. He had then spent the early 1850s in exile before re-emerging in 1860 to head the ‘Expedition of the Thousand’, which sailed across the Mediterranean to bolster the revolution that had broken out in Sicily. His intervention led to the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy of the Two Sicilies, and the overthrow of papal power in central Italy, and presaged the creation of an Italian nation state. Following the success of the Expedition, Harriet wrote to Gladstone celebrating ‘the liberation of ten or twelve millions of Italians from oppressive misrule’.2
Italian nationalism had been a hobby horse of both Harriet and Gladstone for the last decade. In the summer of 1851, after a visit to Naples, Gladstone published two Letters to Lord Aberdeen, expressing his outrage at the politically repressive rule of the Bourbon monarch Ferdinand II. The Letters triggered an international uproar against the treatment of Italian prisoners, and in particular of Carlo Poerio, a poet and political activist whom Gladstone had visited in jail.3 Despite the Europe-wide mobilisation of liberal opinion against the inhumane conditions in which Poerio and his contemporaries were forced to reside, it was 1858 before Poerio was finally released from prison. On his release, he and other prisoners were loaded onto a ship bound across the Atlantic, but the vessel was forced to land in Cork after one of the crew led a rebellion against the captain. From Ireland, Poerio made his way to London, where he soon became a sought-after dinner guest in progressive circles. In a letter to Gladstone of 6 April 1859, Harriet wrote: ‘I would much like … to make the acquaintance I have so long desired – Poerio’s.’4
A few weeks later, having met Poerio once in London, she wrote to Gladstone from Cliveden, saying ‘I would much like to have Poerio for a day here.’5 By this time, Gladstone, who had initially approached the ‘Italian Question’ as a reformist rather than a nationalist, had become convinced of the more radical case for unification. Harriet had also arrived at a similar conclusion, but for different reasons: her enthusiasm for the Italian revolution and subsequently for Garibaldi arose from her religious, not ideological beliefs. A committed Anglican, Harriet saw the Italian cause as a symbolic defeat for ‘popery’, the spectre of Catholic threat that had antagonised British Protestants for centuries.
Though Garibaldi had collaborated with the Sardinian monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II in order to ensure the birth of an Italian nation in 1861, his career in Italy and previously in South America, as well as his skill in rallying popular support, meant that he was still seen as a figurehead of radical nationalism. Many of Harriet’s contemporaries feared, with good reason, that a Garibaldi-esque revolution in Britain would mean not only the end of the monarchy, but the end of the aristocracy too. Harriet’s ardour for the revolutionary republican seems incongruous, not only with her proximity to the queen, but also with her aristocratic inheritance and, most strikingly, with her own long-running fear of revolution and ‘mob rule’ at home. Repeatedly her inclination towards liberal politics strained against the identity and status she had inherited from her ancestry and parents-in-law. When she campaigned for abolition she was held to account for the oligarchic abuses of a previous generation of Sutherlands, and now, in the 1860s, some of the friendships she had forged as the daughter of ‘Grand Whiggery’ did not sit easily with her admiration for Garibaldi. Most at risk was her friendship with Victoria who, unsurprisingly, detested revolutionaries, Italian or otherwise.
In the spring of 1864 Garibaldi finally reached England. His visit was an ideal opportunity to court the British public and lobby the British government to support the young Italian nation.6 On his arrival he showed himself eager to reassure the nervous establishment when he issued a press release calling for calm: ‘Dear Friends, I do not want any political demonstrations. PS. – Above all, don’t incite riots.’7 But his supporters could not contain themselves and Garibaldi-mania swept Britain. A swarm of 500,000 journalists, fans, politicians and socialites, many of them provocatively wearing the Italian national colours, turned out to greet him.
On Tuesday 12 April, Garibaldi’s first full day in London, he attended a luncheon hosted by Harriet. The Earl and Countess Russell, the Earl and Countess of Clarendon, Viscountess Palmerston, the Earl and Countess of Shaftesbury, and Mr and Mrs Gladstone all congregated to pay their respects.8 The following evening, Harriet held a glittering reception for the general at Stafford House; she even provoked a frisson of scandal by inviting him into her ‘boudoir’ to smoke a cigar. This caused ‘great astonishment and amusement’, according to the Earl of Malmesbury, because Harriet’s boudoir, ‘which is fitted up most magnificently with hangings of velvet and everything that is most costly’, was ‘considered such a sacred spot that few favoured mortals have ever been admitted into its precincts; and to allow someone to smoke in it is most astonishing to all who know the Duchess’.9 In addition to all the events at Stafford House, Garibaldi also escorted Harriet to a banquet at the Fishmongers Hall, wearing a red shirt, the distinctive uniform of his nationalist troops; all the other guests were in full evening dress.
The Duchess of Sutherland’s assembly at Stafford House, in honour of Garibaldi. The exploits of the Italian nationalist General Guiseppe Garibaldi had a cult-like following in 1860s Britain. Excited about his visit to England in the spring of 18
64, Harriet organised a series of luncheons and dinners in his honour.
Harriet’s close friend William Gladstone.
It was even suggested that Harriet, now aged 58, ought to marry Garibaldi. In fact the general had a wife back in Italy, but this only gave rise to a further witticism that linked the Harriet–Giuseppe frisson to the legendary oratorical skills of William Gladstone. According to The Economist ‘it was objected that the General had a wife living. “Oh, that does not matter,” was the reply, “Gladstone is here, and we could easily get him to explain her away.’”10
On Friday 22 April, Garibaldi left Stafford House for Cliveden ‘in an open carriage, drawn by four beautiful greys’.11 Newspapers across the country carried exhaustive accounts of his stay. ‘Garibaldi, true to his island custom, was up at an early hour, strolling in the grounds of Cliveden’, the Leeds Mercury noted. Garibaldi’s morning constitutional was followed by a trip to ‘inspect the model farm at Windsor’, accompanied by Harriet and the Duchess of Argyll; for lunch the three returned to Cliveden, where yet another party – this time with 30 guests – was held in the general’s honour. Later that afternoon Garibaldi and a ‘party of gentlemen’ went out in boats on the Thames. According to the report, Garibaldi was ‘delighted with the surrounding scenery and especially with the picturesque appearance Cliveden presented from the river’.12 The view of the Thames from the back of the house was said to remind him of river prospects in South America, where he had cut his teeth as a revolutionary.
Harriet was utterly mesmerised. After Garibaldi’s departure from Cliveden, she wistfully wrote of the ‘void’ he had left. ‘Come back, dear General,’ she implored, ‘I think so often about your sad words on life! How I would like to bring it some consolation! Can you give me the friendship of your beautiful spirit?’ Like a love-struck teenager, she continued: ‘do you remember the day you took my finger and placed it on the deep scar of your wound. Dear General, how you have suffered in your noble life, and I worry so, and often, that I did not express all the sympathy that I felt and will always feel.’ Henceforth, Harriet kept a portrait of her idol at her bedside: ‘It is next to me and looks at me with great indulgence.’13 Harriet was one of a number of women who formed obsessive attachments to Garibaldi during his visit. Her daughter-in-law Anne wrote to him amorously that ‘I so wanted to kiss you when saying goodbye.’14 Mary Seeley, who with her husband entertained Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight, treasured a lock of his hair and one of his old cigar ends, and sent him a lump of Stilton cheese after he left.
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 30
