by Paula Byrne
By 1927 the high-society figure Lord Lee of Fareham was ‘painfully cognizant of Beauchamp’s unsavoury moral reputation’. He protested when the earl presented the prizes at a school speech day. The novelist Hugh Walpole told Virginia Woolf of a visit to ‘the Baths at the Elephant and Castle [where he] saw Lord Carisbrooke naked: saw Lord Beauchamp in the act with a boy’. Sooner or later, this sort of thing was going to become public.
The final straw was Beauchamp’s behaviour during his 1930 tour in Australia. He was accompanied by a rising figure in the Liberal Party, Robert Bernays, a former President of the Oxford Union, now in his late twenties and with one unsuccessful parliamentary bid behind him. Bernays was employed as Beauchamp’s secretary. Travelling with them there was – not unusually – a young valet. George Roberts, a handsome nineteen-year-old plucked from the Madresfield estate, was His Lordship’s ‘joy-boy’.
Beauchamp was well received on his return to Sydney, so many years after relinquishing the governorship, but eyebrows were raised when it became clear that young George Roberts was living with him as his lover rather than his servant. There was to be a visit to Canberra, in advance of which the hosts requested Bernays to let it be known to the earl that Roberts would not be welcome. Bernays reported this news in a letter back to his own lover in London, Harold Nicolson. Soon the story was doing the rounds in London society. Boom may have thought that being abroad he could get away with behaviour of a kind that would have been impossible at home, but he could not stop the spread of gossip.
If there were to be a scandal, the countess would suffer and the person who took it upon himself to protect her was her brother, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in Europe (he supposedly earned a guinea a minute from his rents). Known as Benny or Bendor (after Bend Or, a racehorse of his grandfather’s that had won the Derby), he had long been waiting to act against his brother-in-law.
Bendor had many reasons to resent Lord Beauchamp, who had borne the sword of state at the coronation of King George. A duke ranks above an earl. But it was the Earl Beauchamp, not the Duke of Westminster, who had been elevated to the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Bendor was jealous. He sneered at Beauchamp’s pomposity. Why, the man was to be seen flaunting his blue Garter ribbon whenever he threw a servants’ ball. Bendor also believed that Beauchamp was behind an attack on him in a Church newspaper after his first divorce back at the time of the Great War. He was now on his third marriage. His two divorces had made him persona non grata at the court of King George and Queen Mary, where there was a rigid sense of propriety and deep disapproval of anything so public and vulgar as divorce.
The success of Beauchamp’s marriage was a thorn in Bendor’s side. Perhaps most significantly, given the importance of inheritance to an aristocrat, he was also profoundly jealous of his having produced three sons. It seemed grotesquely unfair that his brother-in-law should have three sons, a loyal wife, a string of homosexual lovers, a glittering career and great standing in politics, while he himself had got through three wives without producing a surviving male heir. The duke’s only son had died at the age of four back in the Edwardian era. There were reports that the duke had contributed to the little boy’s demise by forcing him to ride to hounds. The child had complained to his father of severe abdominal pain, but the duke had insisted that he should join the hunt. He was suffering from appendicitis. Following an emergency operation, he died of peritonitis. The boy, Edward George Hugh, first cousin to the Lygon children, had been born in the same year as Hugh. The duke never recovered from the loss. There may be an echo of the story in Evelyn’s homage to Madresfield Court, A Handful of Dust, when the beloved only son is killed in a hunting accident.
As an ardent right-wing Tory, Bendor saw incidental political advantage in a campaign to destroy Beauchamp. Since the earl was the Liberal Party’s leader in the House of Lords, his demise would be a great embarrassment to his colleagues, a further nail in the coffin of the party that had been a shadow of its former self since the split between Asquith and Lloyd George. Indeed, Beauchamp was doing his best and most important political work in these years, attempting to reunite the fractured party. A glimpse of his efforts behind the scenes is seen in a letter that he wrote to the wife of a fellow Liberal, Walter Runciman, after she had scuppered efforts to patch over differences with her husband:
I came to see you at your request. I was advised not to come by those who know you. In your home to which you had invited me, you entertained me to an hour and a half of studied insolence such as I have never experienced in a varied life. You took advantage of the fact that you were a lady to whom I must speak with respect in her own house. I hope I may never have such an experience again. I am afraid we must disagree as much on the principles of hospitality as we do on our ideas of what Liberalism means.
Lord Beauchamp’s capacity to speak his mind in this way meant that he was well prepared for the battle to come, which was to be both personal and political.
Bendor was also homophobic – as were most men of his era and class. But he was in no position to take the moral high ground, given his own habit of seducing underage girls. On one occasion, he had to pay a wronged family £20,000 as hush money. He was a known womaniser, famous for his pursuit of, and love affair with, the fashion designer Coco Chanel. He therefore had to proceed carefully.
Westminster employed private detectives to spy on his brother-in-law. Witness statements were compiled. When he had accrued enough incriminating evidence, he arranged a meeting with King George V. This had to be held at a private location, since as a divorced man the duke was ostracised from court. At the meeting Bendor told the King that he had conferred the highest honour of Knight of the Garter on a licentious homosexual. The rumoured response of the King, often repeated when the story circulated in aristocratic circles, may or may not be apocryphal: ‘Why, I thought people like that always shot themselves.’ Another version had the King saying that he was under the impression that people only did such things abroad.
The King asked his legal adviser, Lord Buckmaster, sometime Solicitor General and Lord Chancellor, to undertake further investigations into Beauchamp’s conduct. Personal statements were taken from servants at Walmer Castle, Madresfield and Halkyn House. The evidence, Bendor reported, was indisputable and overwhelming. It was kept in the Grosvenor family archive in a box marked ‘The Beauchamp Papers’ until the 1960s, when the contents were destroyed.
The King decided that a scandal of this nature should not taint the court, where Beauchamp had once been Lord Steward of the Household. It should at all costs be kept out of the public eye. According to the Lygon family version of events, this was not what the duke wanted. He demanded a public trial and went so far as to insist that his nieces and nephews testify against their father. They stoutly refused. This, in their eyes, was the most heinous sin: that they could be requested to betray their own father. Instead they blamed their mother. The duke was incensed by their attitude. Only Elmley took the side of his mother. As far as the other Lygon children were concerned, the hounding of their beloved father was entirely Bendor’s doing. The Lygon girls always maintained that it was not their father’s proclivities but their uncle’s malice that ruined everything. They never changed their minds about this and they never forgave their uncle.
Whenever there is a family dispute, the opposing parties have different histories of the events. The Grosvenor account of the affair has one crucial difference from the Lygon. It is not denied that Bendor bore a grudge against Beauchamp. Nor that he was the major player in the story. The fact that the Beauchamp Papers were held in the family offices in Davies Street shows that he was the man who took it upon himself to gather the evidence. And the fact that the fifth Duke of Westminster ordered a senior employee to burn those papers suggests that the family were long embarrassed by the extreme lengths to which Bendor was prepared to go in his determination to bring Beauchamp down.
The point in disp
ute is whether it was really Bendor who initiated the chain of events that led to the collapse of Beauchamp’s marriage and career, or someone else. Bendor was fingered not only by the Lygon family, but also by everyone in the limited high-society circle who knew about these events. However, one detail in the story seems odd. Given that Bendor had had no dealings with the royal family in the decade since his first divorce, why did he involve the King and the King’s Counsel, Buckmaster? It would have been perfectly possible for him to orchestrate his brother-in-law’s downfall through a combination of innuendo, divorce proceedings and the threat of prosecution for illegal homosexual acts without the high-risk strategy of involving the royal family. And for that matter, given Bendor’s marginalisation from the royal court, how easy would it have been for him to gain the ear of King George?
These questions evaporate if we believe the Grosvenor account, reconstructed by their authorised family historian, Robin Rhoderick-Jones, from the testimony of the employee who destroyed the papers. According to this version, it was not Bendor who sought a meeting with the King, but the King who got in touch with Bendor. Discreetly, indirectly, of course, using Buckmaster as intermediary.
So why did King George V, that aged embodiment of tradition and moral rectitude, sully himself by becoming involved in such a sordid affair? According to the Westminster family history, it was because two of his sons, Prince Henry and Prince George, were friends of Beauchamp and occasional visitors to Madresfield. If the stories of the earl and his footmen reached the press, in however veiled a form, the consequences could be catastrophic. One imagines the King’s advisers having nightmares about newspaper headlines along the lines of: ‘Royal Princes in Immoral Country House Parties’.
But the connection between the Lygons and one of the royal princes was much closer than this account supposes. Prince Henry was a stolid military type, who later became Governor-General of Australia. No taint of scandal attached to his name. But his younger brother Georgie was a very different character.
Born in 1902, Prince George was educated at a preparatory school in Broadstairs where, unusually for a member of the royal family, he proved himself a very bright pupil. His father sent him into the Navy, which he loathed, but he escaped by doing well in exams at the Royal Naval College. He then persuaded his father to allow a change of career: he entered the civil service, working as a health and safety officer for the Home Office Factory Inspectorate. Like his eldest brother, David, the future Edward VIII, he took an interest in the plight of the working classes in a time of sharply rising unemployment.
But he also shared with his brother a love of serious party-going and a voracious sexual appetite. They would go to all-night jazz clubs and kick their top hats through the streets in the small hours of the morning. Georgie drove fast cars and loved fast women; he flew, sailed, played the piano and was cultured. Tall, handsome and dark-haired, he could have any woman he wanted. One of his lovers was the American cabaret artist Florence Mills who danced in the show called Blackbirds that was enjoyed by Evelyn Waugh. Another princely paramour from across the pond was a girl called Kiki Whitney Preston, who was a member of the Kenyan expatriate ‘Happy Valley’ set. Known as ‘the girl with the silver syringe’, she introduced His Royal Highness to cocaine and morphine.
Prince George, known to his friends as Babe, was bisexual. In 1923 he began a nineteen-year affair with Noël Coward, whose play The Vortex offered the most explicit portrayal of homosexuality and drug addiction yet seen on the London stage. The threat of scandal was ever present. On one occasion, the royal household had to pay a substantial sum of blackmail money to a Parisian boy to whom Babe had written compromising letters.
On 22 May 1928, Lady Mary ‘Maimie’ Lygon, eighteen years old, had her coming-out ball at Halkyn House. Princess Ingrid of Sweden was there: Maimie was being lined up for a position as her lady-in-waiting. The next day the King and Queen held court at Buckingham Palace. Top of the list of those in attendance was Prince George. Top of the list of the debutantes to be presented was Maimie. She wore pearls and a gown of white silk tulle over silver lamé, embroidered with bright silver thread motifs on the bodice and a long floating tulle skirt. Her train was of silver lace and tulle flounces. The design was by Norman Hartnell.
Maimie had grown into the great beauty of the family. She was the deb that everyone wanted at their party. Prince George had recently broken up with another debutante, Poppy Baring, with whom he’d had a full-blown affair. There had been talk of marriage until Poppy let it be known that she ‘couldn’t bear the royal family’. The relationship was terminated. Now it was Maimie who caught the prince’s roving eye.
A year later, her portrait by William Ranken, who had painted all the Lygons, was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer show. The piece was singled out on account of her beauty as much as Ranken’s art. Though painted in the studio, it shows her standing by an urn in a landscape intended to evoke the grounds of Madresfield. She is a willowy blonde, wearing her coming-out dress and a shoulder scarf flecked with gold. It may be assumed that Ranken chose it for his contribution to the annual Academy exhibition because Maimie had suddenly become a prominent, talked-about young beauty in high society.
In early June 1930, not long after the opening of the exhibition, there was perfect weather for Ladies’ Day at Ascot. Maimie was an honoured guest in the Royal Stand. Prince George strolled around the paddock looking very relaxed among his friends. The affair between them began around this time. Six months later, they were seen dancing together at a charity masked ball. Baby Jungman, with whom Evelyn Waugh had fallen in love, was also there.
On the surface, Maimie was an ideal candidate to become a royal bride. Prince George was nearly thirty, with an alarming array of extra-curricular activities to his name. Marriage would settle him down. She was the beautiful daughter of an earl from an ancient line, a Knight of the Garter with an impeccable record of service to both the royal household and the state. Her mother was the sister to a duke. The family had hopes that an engagement might have been on the way.
Society rumours about Lord Beauchamp’s flaunting of his homosexuality in Australia therefore came at the very worst possible moment. If Prince George were to propose, there would suddenly be the prospect of the royal family allying itself to the household of a man who buggered his footmen. The lethal combination of a possible match and the prince’s own bisexual tendency was too high a risk to countenance. Something had to be done.
The Duke of Westminster’s hatred of his brother-in-law being well known, the obvious course of action was for him to undertake the dirty work on behalf of the King. Buckmaster was therefore dispatched to Bendor and they worked together to gather sufficient evidence to force Beauchamp to do the honourable thing, which would mean allowing his wife to leave him quietly. He would have to resign all posts and slip out of the country. In private exile on the continent – or back in Australia – he could do what he liked with his valets and his ‘joy-boys’. And there would be no question of the relationship between Babe and Maimie progressing beyond a fling. Ironically, she would eventually become a princess, but of a very different kind from those of the House of Windsor.
Given how high the stakes were, it is not surprising that everything was kept from the public. The Beauchamp story never got into the newspapers. Lady Sibell, who always placed herself at the centre of things, liked to claim credit for this. She was having an affair with Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express. The reality is that the most powerful forces in the land had a vested interest in keeping everything private. After all, if it came to a criminal prosecution Lord Beauchamp could have exercised his ancient right to a trial by all his peers in the House of Lords – and Prince George might have been dragged in as a witness. Nor was it only the King who was involved: the leader of the Conservative Party and sometime Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was a Worcestershire neighbour and close personal friend of Lord Beauchamp’s. Since his son, Oliver, also a politician, was als
o homosexual – this was accepted by his family, but not known to the public – the last thing Baldwin wanted was a public scandal turning on the sexuality of a prominent political figure.
The royal archives are silent on the affair. We may never know whether it was King George V or the Duke of Westminster himself who fired the starting pistol. Whichever of them it was, Bendor set about his task with great relish and ruthless dispatch.
His first task was to get his sister out of the marriage. He prepared a house for her, Saighton Grange, on his estates in Cheshire. He then arranged for Buckmaster and two other very senior barristers to inform the Countess Beauchamp of her husband’s double life. The story went that the news was delivered with such brutality that she suffered a nervous collapse. It was said that she had no idea what ‘homosexuality’ meant: ‘Benny tells me it’s because he’s a bugler,’ was her alleged response. The duke had to resort to drawing diagrams in order to make the position completely clear. There is, however, no evidence for these more colourful claims: they are part of the froth of anger and innuendo that was provoked at the time and sustained for decades to follow.
Countess Beauchamp’s account is to be found in a letter that she wrote to her children after the event:
Enquiries were made, tho’ not by me, or with my knowledge, and most terrible things were discovered. These were laid before 3 of the greatest and wisest barristers – they considered most anxiously, the situation, not once or twice, but many times. I myself saw them twice; and they advised the thing was so dreadful, that the best and kindest way, was to give daddy the opportunity to leave England, and sign a document, undertaking to remain abroad, and thus avoid any legal step being taken either by me, or the authorities.
