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

by Natalie Livingstone

  In 1906, Nancy and Waldorf spent their first Christmas at Cliveden as a married couple, and began discussing alterations to the house. ‘I was horrified at the size of it,’ Nancy wrote. ‘It is magnificent and beautiful but it did not look to me like a place anyone could turn into a home.’3 A month later, 120 workmen began transforming Cliveden according to Nancy’s instructions. In the space of two months, most of the appurtenances of William Waldorf’s solitary and fantastical existence – the mosaics, the urns, the dark historic furnishings – were removed in favour of more modern decor. Lighter, brighter colours arrived in the form of chintz curtains, furniture throws and large bowls of mixed flowers, an import from Nancy’s Virginian childhood. Nancy placed a voluptuous red sofa in the hall, to soften the impact of her father-in-law’s austere 16th-century stone fireplace. In her autobiography, Nancy neatly explained the shift in style between William Waldorf’s Cliveden and her own take on the house. ‘I set about making a good many changes. The key-note of the place when I took over, was splendid gloom,’ she wrote. ‘Tapestries and ancient leather furniture filled most of the rooms. The place looked better when I had put in books and chintz curtains and covers, and flowers.’4 Harriet Sutherland, whose wallpaper, throws and chintzes Queen Victoria had praised for being ‘so light and cheerful’, would have undoubtedly approved of Nancy’s taste in interior design. However, the Minton tiles laid by the duchess in tribute to her family’s Staffordshire loyalties were unfairly grouped with the rest of William’s gloomy styling, and torn up.

  Nancy and Waldorf moved into the house before the works had been fully completed, sleeping on the third floor and eating either in the schoolroom or library. ‘The Hall is much improved in fact the whole house is,’ Nancy wrote to Phyllis in April 1907. ‘I think it will be so lovely some day – my room is a dream but an unfinished one.’5 Her bedroom, which she painted yellow, was the brightest room in the house and had a long balcony. Nancy did not erase every aspect of her father-in-law’s house. She retained Waldo’s bombastic ‘Fountain of Love’ and the balustrade – though whether because she liked them or simply because they were too enormous to move is unclear. The octagonal temple, which William had turned into a chapel, was remodelled for the same purpose, rather than being turned back to its previous use as a tea room. However, a large proportion of the other antiquities were dispensed with, the Roman relics removed from the grounds and William’s skating pond redesigned as a modish oriental water garden. The Astors certainly changed enough that they were grateful for a May 1907 letter from William in which he expressed his desire ‘not to see what you have done and to content myself with my modest and humble arrangements as I remember them’.6 When William did eventually visit Cliveden from Hever Castle, in the grounds of which he had constructed an elaborate ‘Tudor village’, it caused Nancy such anxiety that she ran upstairs and took to her bed. Her panic proved unnecessary – whatever William really thought of the transformation, he had enough grace to complement Nancy’s taste, describing her bedroom as ‘beautiful’ and the hallway and drawing room as ‘much more liveable’.7

  Although she felt deep affection for Waldorf, Nancy still struggled with physical intimacy; she resented having to share a bed with her new husband and supposedly developed a habit of biting into an apple to distract her from the distasteful business of sex. She was also quick-tempered and prone to giving verbal lashings, a liability she readily acknowledged. ‘My greatest battle is with my tongue,’ she said. ‘It’s far too sharp and inaccurate.’8 To make matters worse, she was constantly in poor health – typical diary entries in the first year of her marriage read ‘bed all day’, or ‘dog tired’ – and she was pining dreadfully for her ‘soul companion’ Phyllis.9 ‘Not another thing I have to say except my eternal longing for you … if you were here all would be well. I love you more every day,’ she signed off one letter. In another intense declaration of love, she wrote: ‘You stand alone in my affections. I can only say that I love you like mother, father, child, husband all in one and every night I thank God for giving me such a perfectly understanding sister.’10 Nancy was unequivocal about the order in which her affections were ranked – it was Phyllis, her son Bobbie and then Waldorf. ‘I think if anything happened to you, Bobbie or my family I should feel inclined to jump off the house top,’11 she wrote, somewhat melodramatically. Her revulsion for sex notwithstanding, Nancy became pregnant in early 1907, and on 13 August she gave birth to the couple’s first child, a son christened William Waldorf Jr. Yet Nancy was not filled with maternal love: when Bill was just five days old, she wrote to Phyllis comparing him unfavourably to nine-year-old Bobbie. ‘He’s not so nice as Bobbie was,’ she said bluntly. It was a sentiment that she would retain throughout her life: ‘We can never love any children like one’s first borns, can we?’12

  Nancy’s love for Bobbie brought problems of its own. After leaving him at boarding school for the first time, she retreated to a hotel in St Leonard’s-on-Sea and wrote a distraught letter to Phyllis. ‘I have wept my eyes nearly out and must now pour out my sorrow to you… there were two other new boys and when I left the lone figure of my darling in the school room, you cant conceive of the over-whelming feeling of loneliness that came over me.’13 For Bobbie himself, the difficulty of separation from his mother was compounded by having to leave Cliveden, and he struggled to stay afloat academically and socially in his first months at school.

  Around the time of Bobbie’s departure, Nancy was sitting for the painter John Singer Sargent. Sargent, who was a cousin of her first husband Robert Shaw, met Nancy in 1907 and was interested in her as a subject partly, he said, because of her resemblance to Ophelia, by which he presumably meant the art-historical Ophelia, the Ophelia of Millais, though Nancy took the comparison rather more straightforwardly: ‘in other words, “bats’”, she wrote.14 Though he was an American, Sargent had become the most celebrated society portraitist in Edwardian England. Since the death of Queen Victoria, whose snobbery towards America was succinctly captured in her reaction to the Astor purchase of Cliveden, British haughtiness towards Americans had relented slightly. Edward VII was far more comfortable in transatlantic company, and his court gave Americans opportunities for social and professional status that had hitherto been far harder to attain. In 1910, after being exhibited at the Royal Academy, Sargent’s portrait of Nancy was hung in the hall at Cliveden, where it joined a selection of pictures – including some by Gainsborough and Reynolds – collected by Waldorf’s father. The work remains a focal point of the hall today.

  King Edward was sufficiently comfortable with the house’s new owners that, in 1908, he asked to visit. The visit was brokered by Lady ‘Ettie’ Desborough, chatelaine of the neighbouring Taplow Court, which in the 18th century had been owned by the Orkneys. At Taplow Court, Desborough presided over an intellectual and literary clique known as ‘the Souls’. Also among the Souls were Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon – both of whom would later play significant roles in the social life of Cliveden. Though it would be a few years before Nancy began to host political soirées in a way that would set her up as a rival to Ettie, the pair had other reasons to be wary of each other. Nancy had recently learned not only that Lord Revelstoke was infatuated with Ettie, but also that his infatuation had overlapped with their own brief and unsuccessful courtship. The visit of Edward VII – with his mistress, Mrs Keppel, in tow – was one of the earliest occasions on which the Taplow Court group attended Cliveden en masse, and if Ettie did not make any mistakes it would be necessary to invent some. ‘Lady Desborough telephoned Waldorf that the king wished to come over so he came followed by 16 courtiers for tea and stopped for two hours and went over the house and garden and seemed v pleased with it all,’ Nancy wrote to Phyllis after the event. ‘I don’t think the Desboroughs enjoyed the visit but behaved “nicely” – though I think it slightly strong to bring 16 people. It made us 40 for tea.’15 Forty guests was a negligible number compared to many of the parties hosted by the Astors around th
is time. Nancy thought nothing of throwing night balls of major proportions, sometimes for a thousand people, at 4 St James’s Square, her London residence.

  The most well-known and enduring social fixture inaugurated by Nancy around this time was the annual Ascot party hosted at Cliveden. Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, had also made use of the house’s proximity to Ascot by throwing grand parties in the early summer to coincide with the races. For the Astors the event had an even greater importance because of Waldorf’s personal obsession with horses: in 1900 he bought his first thoroughbred mare, Conjure, for £100, and over the following decade invested more and more seriously in his stable, until 1911 when he spent 4,500 guineas on Maid of the Mist, a thousand of which he was able to recover immediately by selling on the horse’s unborn foal.16 His undergraduate hobby had become a serious business. Conjure, Maid of the Mist and Popinjay were the foundation of the Cliveden stud, whose successes would attain eminence for Waldorf in the racing world. In 1907, 26 people were invited to the first of Nancy’s Cliveden Ascot parties. After this initial success, the number of guests increased dramatically, to the point where the parties received specific mention in the resignation letters of household staff who found themselves overworked.17

  On her arrival at Cliveden, Nancy had been struck by the sheer number of household staff, and the diversity of their roles. ‘At Market Harborough I had had one butler, single-handed – a dreadful cook and a faint-hearted housemaid. Here at Cliveden I found the household consisted of: 1 Butler, 1 Groom, 3 footmen, 1 Valet, 4 in the kitchen, including a Chef, 2 in the Stillroom, 1 Housekeeper, 5 Housemaids, 1 Odd-man, 1 House Carpenter, 1 Electrician,’ she recorded in her memoir. ‘It took me some time to grasp what the duties of all these people were. The odd-man especially was a new one on me. As far as I could make out, his main work was running round after the others and picking up what they had dropped.’18 Nancy would soon find that this 20-plus army of staff was barely sufficient to keep the house running.

  To some extent, Nancy and Waldorf’s remodelling of the house had modernised its infrastructure – for instance by introducing telephone lines and electricity. But for the most part, the machinery of the house was no different in the 1910s from how it had been in Harriet’s or even Anna Maria’s time. There was no central heating, and the plumbing was so rudimentary that most guests chose to be doused by their valets in front of their bedroom fire, rather than queue in the corridor for the use of one of the bathrooms. In the absence of central heating, fires had to be made to keep the house habitable, and, in the absence of lifts, coals had to be carried upstairs in scuttles. All of the 100 tons of coal that were burnt each year had to be pushed to the house in carts along a light railway that ran from the coal store under the west wing to the main basement, and then lugged up to the rooms by hand. The coal store, railway and subterranean storage formed a ‘working underground’ that sat alongside the ‘leisure underground’ of Buckingham’s sounding room.

  The Cliveden payroll shows the Astors to have gone through several butlers in quick succession as they attempted to find someone personable who could cope with the demands of the role. First, there was T. Southwood, who was paid £120 per annum. He lasted from October 1906 to June 1907, when he was dismissed under the note ‘Honest, but bad manager’. They had also been employing an ‘H. Bartly’ on £130 per annum, but dismissed him in March on the grounds that he was ‘capable’, but had ‘too big an idea of his position’ – perhaps it was the extra £10. The most persistent source of butler trouble, however, was also the most time-honoured. In January 1908 Arthur Webb was dismissed under the payroll note ‘Drink’, and on 21 June 1909 his replacement, a W. Dennison, was ‘dismissed for drinking’. Dennison was succeeded by Mr William Parr, who had been kept on at Cliveden from William Waldorf’s time. In Parr the Astors found – for the time being, at least – a less bibulous butler. He stayed in his position until the early 1920s.19

  As his superiors fell prey to their vices, Mr Edwin Lee, the last of five children from a Shropshire farming family, rose through the ranks of what Nancy referred to as the ‘sort of aristocracy among the servants’.20 Lee’s most important promotion would come in 1920, when the long-serving Mr Parr was sacked by Nancy. As well as succumbing to the drinks cabinet, Parr had became frustrated with the excessive demands of his role, and his rows with ‘her ladyship’ were constant. After dismissing Parr, Nancy ‘didn’t actually offer me [Lee] the job so much as tell me I was going to do it’.21 Lee would go on to become one of the finest butlers in the world, later providing the model for Stevens, the repressed and precise Englishman who serves the wealthy American Mr Farraday in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day.

  As if the management of domestic staff was not enough to occupy her time, Nancy’s new house soon became a sort of HQ for controlling the movements, spending habits and romantic liaisons of her sisters, two of whom visited Cliveden in 1908. First came Nancy’s eldest sister Lizzie, en route to Paris. Before the Langhorne fortunes were transformed by Chillie’s railroad investments, Lizzie had made an impecunious marriage to the Virginian Moncure Perkins. She was the only one of the Langhorne daughters to remain in Virginia, and became resentful of her sisters’ glittering lifestyles. By the time of Lizzie’s visit to Cliveden, Moncure was drinking himself to death in Richmond. He had given her $300 dollars for the trip to Europe, to which Nancy added $200 as a birthday present. Soon the money had run out and Lizzie was forced to ask Nancy for more funds. By the end of her European folly, Lizzie had spent close to $45,000 on furs, jewellery and clothes, much to the annoyance of Nancy and her father.22

  Attempts to prevent Nora from repeating Lizzie’s marital errors would only lead to further discord within the Langhorne sorority. For two years now, Nancy had been trying to persuade Chillie that he should send Nora to England, where Nancy would find her an appropriate husband. Then, at the age of 19, Nora fell passionately in love with Baldwin Myers, a Virginian with no breeding and no prospects. After all the trouble she had recently gone through with Lizzie, Nancy refused to sanction her younger sister marrying another Moncure Perkins in the making. In October 1908, she insisted that Nora come to England. Nora did, writing home to her father with a mixture of sadness, masochism, and apprehension about what life would be like at Cliveden under the iron rule of her elder sister. Whatever she anticipated, Nora was not prepared for the tirade of criticism and the controlling regime to which Nancy subjected her. She wrote home describing Cliveden as ‘the lonesomest place in the world’.23

  At Christmas Phyllis was back at Cliveden, with Reggie, to join Nancy in exhorting Nora to marry an Englishman. For a while the most eligible candidate appeared to be Lord Elphinstone, whom Nancy had rejected in favour of Astor, but Nora could not take him seriously, least of all when he proposed to her among the potted plants in the conservatory at Cliveden. In the spring of 1909, there emerged a new favourite. Paul Phipps, a charming architect whose reputation as a dancer (the best in London) far outstripped his reputation in his chosen profession, had been attending Cliveden weekends throughout the winter, watching the Elphinstone debacle from afar. Now that Elphinstone was no longer a contender, the Langhorne conclave, Nora included, swung behind Phipps. Somehow the sisters’ letters and cables to their father failed to make the situation clear, and Chillie was furious when, in early March 1909, he discovered that he had given permission for his daughter to marry not a Scottish baron, but a dandyish professional who had a collection of bow ties and a slight rhotacism. In the end, Nora and Paul had to travel to Virginia and win Chillie over in person. He allowed himself to be won, but vented his frustration by passing on to Nora all the letters Nancy had sent him in the course of the marriage negotiations, replete with lines like ‘The tragedy is his!’24

  By 1909, Nancy and Waldorf’s parties had evolved into rather more serious and more political events than they had been two years previously. Nancy enjoyed her early experience of gilded London functions, and her 1907 lette
rs to Phyllis have a sort of youthful gossipiness to them: at one ‘very pretty and great fun’ ball, she encountered the queen – who ‘looked lovely’.25 However, it wasn’t long before Nancy wrote to her sister declaring that ‘I am getting too old for balls’ and announcing her preference for ‘political parties’. Increasingly, Nancy’s Cliveden weekends were noted for their conversation just as much as their glamour, although guests were waited on by liveried footmen, who still, on occasion, powdered their hair using flour and water. Nancy was fastidious about choosing the right guests. Many of the literary visitors came via William Waldorf’s Pall Mall Gazette – H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, and Kipling were all frequent guests who had their careers launched by the paper. The French writer Hilaire Belloc was another regular visitor – at least until he and Nancy fell out and broke off all communication. It has been suggested that the root of their quarrel was Belloc’s rabid anti-Semitism, though given Nancy’s own hostility towards Jews, this sounds improbable: when the Zionist pioneer Chaim Weizmann was invited to an Astor dinner party, Nancy introduced him as ‘the only decent Jew I have ever met’.26