In June 1895 he was appointed undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office. The following month there was a general election; Curzon, his campaign for reelection funded by his father-in-law and aided by the charm and beauty of his young wife, increased his majority.
Within a few months the young couple had decided they could not afford Carlton House Terrace and instead leased No. 4 Carlton Gardens from a fellow Soul, Arthur Balfour, renting a Georgian house in Reigate, the Priory, while Balfour’s house was being made ready for them. Mary was not allowed to choose so much as a single curtain; Curzon, although working sixteen-hour days, took the entire decoration out of her hands, despite the fact that she would have enjoyed it—and that her father was paying. In many ways, it was the template for their marriage.
For the next few years Mary was miserable, alone in a foreign country, with little to do and a husband hardly ever there. Because his work prevented him from escorting her, the ordinary social round passed her by. During the London season of 1896 they went out to dinner only twice, and it was the same during the Jubilee year that followed. Only Mary’s baby, Mary Irene, born on January 20, 1896, lightened her wretchedness. She pronounced the child’s name Ireen, in the American fashion; Curzon, a classicist, gritted his teeth every time he heard this but loyally said nothing.
A fortnight before her second child, Cynthia Blanche (always known as Cimmie), was born on August 28, 1898, it was announced that Curzon was to succeed Lord Elgin as viceroy of India. For a man as young as thirty-eight, who had held no senior government position before, it was an extraordinary post to be offered. It was given to him in part because he had asked for it—Curzon believed, with reason, that he could fill it better than anyone else—but chiefly because he was quite clearly the best available candidate. He had visited India four times, his knowledge of its culture, problems and history was immense, he had written about it at length, and he was on terms of friendship with many of its potentates, as well as the emir who ruled its powerful neighbor, Afghanistan.
His triumph was crowned by the award of the peerage considered fitting for the greatness of the office; he was now Baron Curzon of Kedleston (in the peerage of Ireland). But although as viceroy of India he would be one of the most powerful rulers in the world, holding the destinies of millions in his hand, financially he would be worse off rather than better. Maintaining the huge staffs considered essential at Viceregal Lodge in Calcutta and the viceroy’s summer palace at the hill station of Simla mopped up the twenty-five-thousand-pound annual viceregal salary; in addition, the Curzons were expected to buy all plate, wine, carriages and horses from the outgoing viceroy, as well as paying their own fares and freight to India.
As vicereine, Mary had to be dressed as befitted a queen in a country where status was indicated by sumptuous clothing and jewels. Her trousseau from Paris cost over one thousand pounds* (the average weekly wage of an agricultural laborer then was ninety pence). Levi Leiter gave her a parure of diamonds, including a tiara, and three thousand pounds to the couple jointly. It was at this moment that Curzon, perhaps feeling that once touched by destiny nothing could harm him, decided to buy a twenty-five-year lease on the house at No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. It cost him twenty-five thousand pounds and a further one thousand five hundred pounds was needed to put it in decent repair, which he did not hesitate to borrow from the bank (guaranteed by his long-suffering father-in-law).
On December 10, 1898, Mary, Irene, Cimmie, aged three and a half months, and their nanny (engaged, needless to say, by Curzon) left Plymouth on the three-week voyage for India. Curzon joined them at Marseilles. His departure was known to his coterie of friends as “the passing of a Soul.”
2
Viceroy and Vicereine
On the way to India Mary Curzon made her will. Datelined “The Indian Ocean, 29 December 1898,” it is a pathetically brief document, seemingly written largely to safeguard her jewelry.
I devise and bequeath my four rows of white pearls my large tiara made by Boucheron my second diamond tiara made by the Goldsmiths Co my diamond necklace made by Watherston and all my old laces to my husband George Nathaniel Lord Curzon of Kedleston to be held by him upon trust during his life for my son if I have one or for the eldest surviving of my sons if I have more than one. And upon my husband’s death to be similarly held upon trust by my son or eldest son whichever it be as heirlooms inalienable from the Kedleston title. Failing my son I bequeath the above mentioned articles to my husband upon trust during his life for my daughters to be distributed by him among them either during his life or upon his death at his discretion.
She wished the same for her diamond star tiara and diamond brooch.
Moving on to the rest of her jewelry—notably a ring, clasp and brooch of rubies and diamonds, brooches, crescent and belt of turquoise and a sapphire-and-diamond bracelet—she left these to Curzon, to keep or dispose of as gifts as he thought fit, as well as her plate and personal belongings. To her father went a book and a picture by Millet; to her mother, her sables, silver fox, chinchilla and other furs. This will would later add to the conflict between Curzon and his daughters.
In India, as in England, the two little girls led a life with a strict nursery routine. Outside the home, their parents moved through the formalities expected of them. Levees, dances, a Drawing Room, a garden party, official dinners for 120 every Thursday and innumerable smaller dinner and luncheon parties were crammed into the three months spent in Calcutta. Bejeweled princes walked along marble floors past motionless rows of uniformed viceregal guards to where the viceroy, seated on a dais in the throne room, awaited them. If the visitor were of sufficiently high rank Curzon would descend the steps to meet him.
Simla, in the hills north of Delhi, was a different matter altogether. The wives and children of army officers and administrators in the Indian civil service came here to escape the stifling, enervating heat of the plains while their husbands sweltered below, escaping for short breaks to join them, and life was freer and less formal. Young officers flirted with grass widows during early-morning rides, picnics and dances; gossip was rife and the atmosphere frivolous.
The nearest Curzon came to relaxation was at another viceregal refuge, Naldera, a camp seventeen miles from Simla where he could eat and work out of doors. The stream of orders, reports, diplomatic messages and reforms that flowed unceasingly from his pen were varied by letters to friends in England and a copious correspondence with his agent on the need to find a tenant prepared to pay the highest possible rent for No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. Eventually they settled on Joseph Hodges Choate, U.S. Ambassador to London, who offered two thousand pounds a year.
India, with its superabundance of eligible single men, was a paradise for young unmarried women. When Mary’s sisters came to stay with the Curzons in 1899 the youngest, Daisy, became engaged to one of the viceroy’s aides-de-camp, Lord Suffolk’s eldest son (whom she married in 1904).
Mary took her two young children back to England for a visit of six months in 1901, during which time she and Curzon wrote to each other almost every day. He also wrote to his daughters, loving little notes with exactly the sort of news they would like. “My sweet Simmy, Daddy is going to write you a line while he is sitting out under the trees at Naldera,” he wrote on June 10, 1901. “It is so hot that he has got no coat on. Little Fluffy is lying at my feet stretched out on her side pretending to be asleep. She never leaves me and has quite recovered her looks now that she is back in Simla. I am all alone now in the morning when I get up. No itty girls to come in and see me and help me to shave. Isn’t it sad? Kisses to Irene and Simmy from loving Daddy.” The letters continued in a stream, from Viceregal Lodge, Simla, and the heat of Government House in Calcutta (“When I came back here little Danny recognized me at once and he came trotting to me and never leaves my side at luncheon and dinner.”)
In England Mary was feted, dining with the king and queen—of whom she became a close friend—and enchanting men like the future prime
minister, Arthur Balfour, who described her as “intoxicating.”
She was back in India for the Coronation Durbar (to proclaim Edward VII King-Emperor) held in India’s capital, Delhi, in 1902. The viceregal couple entered the city on an elephant, sitting in a silver howdah beneath the golden umbrella of state. The assemblage awaiting them displayed possibly the greatest collection of jewels ever to be seen in one place: each of the Indian princes was adorned with the most spectacular of his gems from the collections of centuries, while the English had been advised that protocol demanded their most splendid, opulent pieces. The only unplanned moment in the magnificence of the proceedings occurred when a fox terrier belonging to one of the bandsmen in a Highland regiment trotted across the great horseshoe-shaped arena, mounted the dais, leaped into the empty throne awaiting Curzon and began barking.
Parades, march-pasts and polo culminated in the State Ball, where Mary outshone everyone in the famous Peacock Dress—cloth of gold embroidered with tiny peacock feathers, each eye an emerald, the skirt trimmed with white roses and the bodice with lace. She glittered with diamonds, pearls and precious stones: a huge necklace of diamonds around her throat, others of diamonds and pearls and a crownlike tiara, a pearl tipping each of its high diamond points. As she walked through the hall, Curzon beside her in white satin knee breeches, the gasps were almost audible.
It was at Naldera, in the summer of 1903, that Mary conceived her third child. She returned to England early in January 1904 for the birth; the Curzons’ third daughter was born on March 20, 1904. She was christened Alexandra Naldera, after her godmother, Queen Alexandra, and the place of which Mary had such idyllic memories. Neither of the Curzons regarded their family as complete, however; both were anxious for an heir.
Very shortly, Mary was pregnant again. Curzon, who had come back to England in May, began to look for a country house, which had to be reasonably easy to reach from London and grand enough to suit his tastes. One day he was taken to lunch at Hackwood, near Basingstoke, a beautiful eighteenth-century house set in a finely timbered deer park of seven hundred acres. Lord Wilton, to whom it had been leased by its owner, Lord Bolton, was anxious to reassign the lease. With his usual thoroughness, Curzon, who had been immediately attracted by the place, set himself the task of finding out as much as he could about it.
In August their hopes for an heir were dashed when Mary suffered a miscarriage, followed by complications. In those pre-antibiotic days, any infection was dangerous, and by September her life was despaired of. She rallied, succumbed, and rallied again, Curzon distraught at her bedside and her daughters brought in to say goodbye to her. Finally, after her life had been five times given up for lost, she recovered and by the end of October 1904 was considered out of danger, though very weak.
A month later Curzon tore himself away from his family to return to India. Although no previous viceroy had served a second term, he had requested an extension in order to see through the reforms he had inaugurated and, having gained cabinet agreement, felt he could not renege on this. He missed Mary bitterly (“I have not dared go into your room for fear I should burst out crying”), as she did him.
In February 1905 Mary, her three daughters, two nannies, and a live cow in the hold to give fresh milk for eleven-month-old Alexandra left for India. They went straight to the health-giving air of Simla—where almost at once Mary narrowly escaped death from an earthquake—and, at last, settled down for what they hoped would be a uninterrupted spell of family life at Naldera. It was here that Alexandra was given the name that would stay with her all her life: Baba, the Indian word for baby or little one.
They were there less than a year. Curzon may have been India’s greatest viceroy, but his imperious attitude had made him enemies. The chief of these was Lord Kitchener, whom Curzon himself had proposed as commander in chief of the Indian army. Although, ironically, Kitchener was one of Mary’s greatest admirers, it was almost inevitable that two men of such dominating character would fall out. In the ensuing battle of wills Kitchener, politically more manipulative than Curzon and soon with the cabinet on his side, became the victor. On August 14, 1905, Curzon resigned. “Today you will see Curzon’s resignation in the papers and Minto’s appointment,” wrote Lord Esher to a friend. “What a confusion, a new viceroy on the eve of the Prince of Wales’s visit.
“Of course it is bound to take the gilt off that, as Curzon would have done the whole thing magnificently. Perhaps, in one sense, from the P. of Wales’s point of view, it has this advantage, that he would have played ALMOST second fiddle to Curzon.”
When the Curzons left Simla in October, their carriage was dragged through the streets by the townspeople and they were given a triumphant send-off. By contrast, Curzon arrived home in December 1905 to a cool, shabby welcome. There was no earldom (given to every previous viceroy) and his friend Arthur Balfour, now prime minister, refused to support his candidacy in the various parliamentary constituencies which invited him to stand.
Bitterly wounded, puzzled and humiliated, he retired with Mary and their daughters to the South of France, returning to I Carlton House Terrace the following March. Here, once more, he took over the management of the house, even inspecting all the servants every morning to check that their uniforms were in perfect condition and their fingernails clean. This time, Mary did not mind so much. She had never really recovered her health after her illness eighteen months earlier and it was now steadily deteriorating, so much so that in June 1906 she wrote to her brother: “I fear I shall never be well again.”
Less than a month later she put her final letter on Curzon’s pillow. “What causes me such acute agony is that I should be a burden to you whom I worship, just when I would give my very soul to be a help.” Ten days later, on July 18, 1906, she died of a heart attack, with Curzon’s arm around her. She was only thirty-six.
3
The Schoolroom at Hackwood
Devastated by the death of his wife and the miserable, ignominious end to his viceroyalty, Curzon virtually retired from public life, devoting most of his intellectual energy to the chancellorship of Oxford University, to which he had been nominated in 1907, and to the rectorship of Glasgow University, to which he was elected in 1908. More importantly for his daughters, he installed himself in the house that was to become their home. For, ignoring his father’s adverse reports on its size and expense, he had finally leased Hackwood.
Palatial enough to suit even Curzon, who had acquired its lease for a premium of eight thousand pounds (the original asking price was fourteen thousand pounds), its rent of three thousand fifty pounds a year included the wages of keepers for the excellent shoot. There were nine lodges and cottages, vineries, greenhouses, a cricket ground, kitchen garden, coach house and infirmary. The entrance hall was fifty-two feet long, with tapestry panels; there was a ballroom, a large library, an oak-paneled saloon of forty-five by thirty-three feet and a morning room almost as big, a dining room sixty feet long, bedrooms galore, with a large nursery suite in the east wing above the billiard room and the smoking room, servants’ bedrooms, a steward’s room, a housekeeper’s room, furnace rooms, dairies, sculleries, bakehouses, cellars, larders, a lamp room, a plate room and a boot room.
Curzon immediately set about improving those aspects of the house which he considered needed remodeling. A large mound outside interfered with his view; he had it lowered, necessitating the removal of almost fifteen thousand cubic feet of earth before it was level. The drains, which gave trouble, were cleaned—Curzon devoted many letters to the question of sludge in the filters—and the lake was dredged. A ratcatcher was called in, the breakfast room and library painted, two bell-pushes, with ivory labels marked “Maid” and “Valet,” fitted in all the family and guest bedrooms. Four radiators were fitted in the icy ballroom, and in an organ hall covered with Persian carpets he installed an Aeolian organ on which he would play with childlike gusto and enjoyment.
The house was furnished with the utmost grandeur. Curzon�
�s tastes ran to the imperial—gilded furniture, crimson velvet hangings, gold tassels and huge chandeliers. There were crimson silk damask curtains with cords and tassels, a carved gilt threefold Louis XIV screen and panels of crimson velvet with appliqué borders in the saloon. Even the billiard table had a cover of crimson velvet with a design in gold and silver thread. Tapestry curtains set off the more exotic fruits of his travels—ivories, Persian rugs, ebony chairs and tiger skins.
Almost at once he began hosting some of the great house parties for which the Edwardians are known. His most famous ones were at Whitsuntide, in late May or early June, with firework displays in the park, charades, games, croquet, tennis, walking, talking and the clandestine love affairs that were a feature of Edwardian high society.
For this was a world of rigid etiquette but flexible morals, where anything was permissible if there was no public scandal. Thus certain conventions took on the force of iron rules. Letters, for instance, always had to be left out to be stamped and posted by servants: if a woman posted her own it suggested a secret correspondent. Every well-brought-up girl was taught from childhood to close the door of her bedroom as she left it—open doors could be thought to signal availability—and forbidden to look into the windows of gentlemen’s clubs, as this could also be interpreted as invitation (although the same young women were expected to use every art, including the sidelong glance, to allure those same gentlemen when seated next to them at dinner). Going on the stage was disreputable, yet the private equivalent—charades, tableaux and amateur dramatics—was popular in the grandest and most respectable houses.
Provided one observed these outward forms, romantic possibilities were ever present. The formality between the sexes was such that friendships, always ostensibly platonic, between men and married women were a recognized social relationship. Many were truly platonic—Lady Desborough, for instance, had a host of male friends with whom she corresponded, many of whom wrote to her for years without ever using her Christian name. Others were covers for love affairs under the accepted convention that they were nothing more than friendships.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 2
