A few weeks later, Profumo sued the French and Italian magazines Paris Match and Tempo Illustrato for libel, and won minor damages. But on 5 April, Keeler confirmed her brief affair with Profumo to the police. Stephen Ward, meanwhile, fearing that he would be dragged down in the debacle, admitted to Macmillan’s private secretary that Profumo was lying.6 This information was leaked to Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, who was determined to use the affair as evidence that the Conservative administration had compromised national security. On 9 April, Wilson wrote to Macmillan advising him of rumours that Ward was somehow mixed up with MI5, and on 27 May he went to see Macmillan personally, to tell him that Ward was a ‘tool of Russian Communism’ and that the whole Profumo–Keeler incident might constitute a serious risk to national security.7 On 4 June, after a meeting with the chief whip, Profumo resigned as both a minister and an MP, but by this point, resignation was not enough to end the matter. Four days later, Stephen Ward was arrested on the pretext of living off immoral earnings from Keeler and Rice-Davies, and was detained in Brixton prison.8
The Beaverbrook press focused especially – and vindictively – on Cliveden, and other newspapers followed the lead of the Express group. In the summer, as press coverage burgeoned, any number of exotic variations were offered on the initial swimming-pool meeting. News of the World journalists paid Keeler for an account in which Astor and Profumo chased her naked round the pool. Other exaggerated reports had Bronwen Astor arriving at the pool in a tiara, and Ward turning on the floodlights to reveal Keeler as she emerged topless from the water. Many of the lurid details of the affair appear to have been inspired by offers of generous payment in return for stories. On 25 March, Keeler had been paid £2,000 for an interview with the Daily Express; in the summer, once the story had really blown up, the News of the World paid £24,000 for the ‘Confessions of Christine’, which came replete with absurd details, such as the claim that Ward once led her through Marylebone on a dog lead.9
Coverage of the scandal did not fall along the neat party-political lines that might have been expected. While there was some predictable partisan reportage – most notably from the Mirror group, who used the scandal as a weapon in their ongoing crusade against the corrupt Conservative establishment – the paper most hostile to the Conservative government was the right-of-centre Sunday Telegraph. Meanwhile, David Astor’s left-leaning Observer adopted a tone of restrained criticism, acknowledging that Profumo had been wrong to lie about his relationship with Keeler, but also pointing out that ‘were it not for the conventional assumption that a politician’s sexual morality is relevant to his public role, it is probable that Mr Profumo would not have felt it necessary to deny so explicitly that he had had an affair with Miss Keeler’.10 The paper also editorialised that it would be foolish for Labour, who had already ‘gained a large electoral advantage by the revelation of these scandals’, to ‘dress up the desire to exploit a political advantage as a concern for national security’.11 David Astor was particularly keen to defend Cliveden from the lurid role it had been assigned by the popular press. In reply to the stories of tiaras, naked poolside chases, and lascivious floodlighting, he offered an image of the Cliveden pool as an altogether more salubrious and familial place. Among the guests previously hosted by Bill at Cliveden was the Observer photographer Jane Bown. She later recalled David’s attempts to save his childhood home from infamy: ‘He asked me if I had any pictures of my children in the swimming pool. He wanted it to look innocent, to show it in a good light.’ When the Cliveden pool appeared in the Observer it came with Jane Bown’s children splashing around in it.12
The costly and largely dubious confessions that dominated coverage in the Daily Express and the News of the World were predictably absent from The Times’s coverage, though not simply out of family loyalty. John Jacob Astor had for some time been involved in a high-minded and reactionary movement against the voyeurism and lewdness of much press coverage, and was a founding member of the General Council of the Press, which met quarterly and issued reports that were openly critical of populist editorial policies, deploring, for instance, ‘the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers’. The paper’s one major intervention in the scandal was a baldly sermonising editorial of 11 June, titled: ‘It Is a Moral Issue’. William Haley began the piece by crediting Harold Wilson with being a ‘shrewd politician’ for stressing that Labour’s concern was ‘with security, not morals’; then he went on the offensive, arguing that ‘morals have been discounted for too long’ and that ‘eleven years of Conservative rule have brought the nation psychologically and spiritually to a low ebb’. While he acknowledged that the Washington Post’s assessment of ‘a picture of widespread decadence’ emerging ‘beneath the glitter of a wide section of stiff lipped society’ may have been a caricature, he reminded readers that ‘the essence of caricature is to exaggerate real traits’. In John Jacob Astor’s view, the sensationalist coverage of other newspapers was just as much part of this ‘low moral ebb’ as the scandal itself.
The Profumo Affair became symbolic of the incompetence, moral laxity and security breaches that many said had plagued the Macmillan administration. On 21 June, in response to Harold Wilson’s claim that ‘there is clear evidence of a sordid underground network, the extent of which cannot be measured’, Macmillan asked Lord Denning to prepare a report on the ‘security aspects’ of the Profumo case.13 Denning examined various rumours one by one and interviewed the hostesses of various bacchanalian Belgravia parties to which Keeler claimed Ward had taken her; the report concluded that Keeler had indeed attended ‘perverted sex orgies’, but was sceptical about the extent to which security had been compromised. The findings came too late for the Profumo Affair’s ultimate victim, Stephen Ward.
The trial of Stephen Ward for living on the earnings of prostitution opened on 22 July. Although the charges were flimsy, the police were determined to uncover evidence, interviewing almost 140 people, and questioning Keeler alone on 38 separate occasions.14 The proceedings were held at the Old Bailey, where crowds gathered to watch the witnesses arrive, and hundreds queued for the public gallery. They were regaled by stories of orgies, whippings and sexual perversion. Many of the testimonies were later discredited. On 30 July, after the first day of the judge’s summing-up, Ward took an overdose of sleeping pills. He left a note: ‘It is really more than I can stand – the horror, day after day at the court and in the streets… I am sorry to disappoint the vultures.’ The next morning Ward was taken to hospital in a coma. At the Old Bailey, the trial continued, with the jury finding him guilty on two of five counts. He died several days later without regaining consciousness. In October 1963 Macmillan resigned, and a year later his party was defeated by Labour in the general election. The Conservatives would stay out of power for the rest of the decade.
The fact that Profumo and Keeler met at Cliveden, and that Stephen Ward lived in Spring Cottage and was one of Bill’s friends, meant that Bill himself was inevitably dragged into the coverage. In March 1963, as the scandal was beginning to unfold, Macmillan wrote in his diary of a second Cliveden Set: ‘The old “Cliveden Set” was disastrous politically. The new “Cliveden Set” is said to be equally disastrous morally.’15 Bill was interviewed by the police, and asked to provide a list of women he had slept with and whether he had paid them for sex. At the Old Bailey, Mandy Rice-Davies claimed to have had an affair with Bill, and responded to his denial with the line: ‘He would, wouldn’t he’ – a phrase that would by the end of the next decade enter into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Detectives soon discovered that Astor had once given Keeler a cheque to rent a flat in Barons Court, and erroneously extrapolated that he was profiting from some sort of sex enterprise. He was further shaken when police officers arrived at Cliveden to search for evidence of a brothel at Spring Cottage.16 Although the charges were dropped, Bill was devastated by the inquisition. The reaction of his friends only worsened his plight: at Royal Ascot in June 1963, he was reduced to a
social pariah, shunned and ostracised by the same people who, just two years previously, had rhapsodised over his lavish hospitality. A few weeks later, as Ward lay in a coma following his overdose, reporters were sent to Cliveden. John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, came armed with a message purportedly from Ward, which stated: ‘Bill could have spoken up for me. His silence crucified me.’17 Gordon speculated that, given the scandal, the National Trust might wish to reconsider its connection with Cliveden, and ‘return the estate to Lord Astor bringing the shadow of future death duties back upon his family’ as a form of ‘popular retribution’.18 In the wake of the Profumo Affair, Bill’s health problems became chronic and in March 1966, at the age of 58, in no small part due to the stress of the scandal, he succumbed to a heart attack.
The enthusiasm with which the public consumed the sensational reporting of the poolside encounter was closely bound up with idea of Cliveden in the collective consciousness – with what people believed could and did happen there. Despite the donation of the house to the National Trust, it continued to be associated – as it had sometimes been in previous decades, and centuries – with secrecy, conspiracy and opulence. This conception of Cliveden dates back to its very beginning and Alexander Pope’s depiction of the house as ‘The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love’, a ‘proud alcove’ in which Anna Maria and Buckingham could indulge their passion. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the word ‘alcove’ was used to describe not neutral or functional recesses, but places of intimacy: nooks in pleasure gardens, and, in houses, areas screened off for sleeping. Cliveden itself was, to Pope, a concupiscent nook that allowed and perhaps even encouraged ‘love’ and ‘wantonness’. That Pope was wrong about Buckingham and Anna Maria using Cliveden in this way, or indeed about them ever being at Cliveden together, only goes to show what a romantic impression the house left on him. Having seen the house and read about the affair, he could not help thinking that one provided the setting for the other. The same idea of Cliveden expressed in his couplet – the notion of a luxurious estate that fosters conspiracy and misbehaviour – persisted through the centuries.
In some ways, the resilient myth of the ‘proud alcove’ arose self-consciously: in his memoirs, Ronald Gower expressed irritation at how many people, when they learnt where he grew up, quoted Pope’s line at him. The more interesting part of its recurrence, however, was unintentional: the fanciful News of the World coverage of Keeler and Profumo’s poolside introduction was not a homage to Pope – it was just an expression of people’s genuine suspicions and fantasies about the way in which the wealthy and privileged disported themselves in remote ‘alcoves’ of luxury. The same suspicion had attended Frederick and Augusta’s Cliveden-based ‘counter-court’ of the mid-18th century, and had stoked allegations of a ‘Cliveden Set’ in the 1930s. All of these episodes existed within bigger political and cultural shifts that made the house particularly eligible for criticism. Pope, a poet steeped in the classical tradition and a Whig writing on the far side of the Glorious Revolution, looked back on Restoration politics as a tawdry and unenlightened business, and by describing Cliveden as ‘proud’ cast it as the site of Buckingham’s hubris – his nemesis being the ‘worst inn’s worst room’ in which he died. Likewise, it was a certain political climate – as well as one big personal grudge – that attracted so much attention to Cliveden during the Profumo Affair. Six years of radical post-war Labour administration had been succeeded by eleven years of Conservative government. There was growing resentment against the vestiges of the aristocratic and interwar elites, and some suspicion that the Conservative establishment was incubating a new generation of corrupt and privileged administrators. In both the 18th and 20th centuries, Cliveden was not only a place where politics was conducted, but was also a pawn in bigger political struggles, a symbol of certain highly politicised forms of power and class and ideology.
When the Profumo Affair hit the headlines in 1963, Nancy was elderly and infirm, her mental faculties in steady decline. The family decided it would be best if she did not find out, and a series of complicated procedures were performed every day to ensure that she stayed ignorant: her butler at Eaton Square, Charles Dean, cut out all references to Profumo and Cliveden from the morning newspapers and arranged for friends to call at one o’clock and six o’clock every day, so she would be occupied when the news came on the radio.19 One morning, when Nancy was staying with David Astor at Sutton Courtenay, she woke up early and got to the papers before Dean had managed to censor them. She asked to be driven to Cliveden straight away, but over the course of the journey forgot her reason for going, and never mentioned the affair again.20
Nancy had wanted to grow old like her own mother Nanaire, prized and doted on by her children. But she had never achieved the ‘saintliness’ she admired in her mother, and in her old age, her relationships with her children remained fractious. Even her relationship with Bobbie faltered. For most of his adulthood, Bobbie had idolised Nancy, but late in her life he realised that her love was tinged with narcissism. Nevertheless, Bobbie retained a special affection for Cliveden. He wrote to Nancy just before she left for a trip in the late 1950s: ‘Just went over to Eton and I had such nostalgia for Cliveden as we have always known it, I thought I would die – the Hall, your boudoir with the sweet smells, I just broke down and wept. I can’t believe it has gone. I just could not go up to Cliveden… I hope you will never be as unhappy as I am. I really don’t know how I stand my existence. It is one unending hell. I will be pleased when you get back.’21 Bobbie was sinking beneath the weight of a grave and hopeless depression. In 1964 he made his first serious suicide attempt, with pills and whisky, but was found early enough and revived at St Stephen’s Hospital. Meanwhile, Nancy’s feud with David continued, and he increasingly dealt with his mother’s prejudices by avoiding her. Bob Brand, who had always been remarkably tolerant of Nancy’s occasional cruelty, also began to tire of it. One day at Sandwich, Nancy pushed Bob too far with one of her caustic tirades about his materialism and cupidity, a favourite subject of hers after he took a job with Lazards in the 1910s. Refusing to hear another word, Bob threw down his napkin and retired to his room in disgust. It was the last time they met: in August 1963, while staying with family in East Sussex, Bob Brand died.
In spring 1964 Nancy went to stay with Wissie and her husband at Grimsthorpe Castle, their home in Lincolnshire. After her arrival, she had a stroke. Bobbie had recovered enough to come to visit her, along with her other children, nieces and nephews. Like Waldorf, she enjoyed a sort of ‘Indian summer’ in the last days of her life. David remembered her being ‘happy, light and charming… It was a complete transformation, and it was delightful’.22 Several decades previously, during her early years in Britain, she had written to Phyllis from Ross-shire expressing her longing to be back in Virginia: ‘I wander around the wood humming “I’m going back to dixie” and that’s as far as I get! It’s a sort of… longing for Mirador – mother and father [and] all of “you all chillun”.’23 Now, according to David, she really did imagine herself to be back in the Virginia of her youth. She died in the early hours of 2 May 1964; she was 84. Nancy was buried next to Waldorf in the Octagon Temple at Cliveden. Six years later Bobbie ended his life with characteristic gentility, ringing David with the message: ‘I’m terribly grateful and I’m just ringing to say goodbye.’ When David begged him to see sense, Bobbie replied, ‘You wouldn’t be so unkind would you, to make me stay on?’24
Bill was the last person to run the house as a private residence. The Astors had presided over a period in Cliveden’s history which appeared to be a heyday at the time, but in retrospect had actually been a dying glow. Previous generations of the house’s residents had been fearful about its decline: Ronald Gower was horrified by the thought of Cliveden being run as a hotel, and the Duke of Westminster was widely thought to have ‘redeemed’ it from such a ‘fate’ when he bought the house from the Sutherlands. In the late 19th century, but even more so in the mid-20th,
such attitudes misunderstood what the house was about. Though it was served by traditional domestic staff, Cliveden was not – and perhaps had never been – an exclusive family home. As Harold Macmillan replied when told the house was to become a hotel: ‘My dear boy, it always has been.’25
NOTES
ARCHIVE ABBREVIATIONS
BL
British Library, London
BoL
Bodleian Library, Oxford
BR
Buckinghamshire Records Office, Aylesbury
DCO
Duchy of Cornwall Office Archives, London
DR
Devon Record Office, Exeter
HMC
Historical Manuscripts Commission
NLS
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
NLW
National Library of Wales (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru), Aberystwyth
NMM
National Maritime Museum Archive, Greenwich, London
NoR
Northumberland Record Office, Berwick-upon-Tweed
NR
Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton
PWD
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 43
