The Viceroy's Daughters

by Anne de Courcy

  Then came other welcome news. The Prince of Wales had fought long and hard to take Fruity with him on his forthcoming tour of British Africa and South America in March 1925 but had not been able to persuade his father to allow this. What Fruity had not realized was that the prince was also doing his best to see that his friend was not left stranded. “I got this [an extract from a letter from the king] by a letter from the P. sent to me early this morning,” Fruity told Baba. “Oh dear, I felt so ashamed of myself this morning having doubted him.” The prince had written: “I hope this will make you less sunk. Look in and wake me before you go to Liverpool, no matter how early. EP.”

  The extract from the king’s letter of January 18 read: “I am glad to hear that you hope now that you have a billet for Metcalfe in England under the W[ar] O[ffice] when you start in March for S.A. I shall of course be ready to help him to get it when you let me know what you wish me to do.”

  From Fruity’s point of view, Curzon was not such a terrifying obstacle as he would once have been. As 1925 opened, his health and morale were in steep decline. When the first Labour government gained office in January 1924 he had, of course, lost the foreign secretaryship, but when, ten months later, Labour was overturned by a huge Conservative majority, he confidently expected his old job back. When the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had told him that he was not to return to the Foreign Office it was an appalling disappointment. Although he did not wish to take up a lesser appointment he was chivied by Grace into accepting the figurehead positions of lord president of the Council, leader of the House of Lords and chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defense. “As you know,” he wrote to her on November 8, 1924, three days after the fateful Baldwin interview, “I would not have swallowed what I have done or consented to take office again were it not that you so strongly wished me to do so, and that I am always urged to do the big thing though with equal regularity it is always forgotten as soon as done.”

  He felt miserable, frustrated (“a new Government formed and I with no boxes coming in and nothing to do”), disillusioned and lonely. He had perforce accepted that he was to have no heir; two out of his three children were estranged and the third appeared to be in love with a nobody. His country did not seem to want his knowledge and experience, yet lack of departmental responsibility did not mean that he saw more of Gracie—indeed, she may have pressed him to accept the lesser governmental posts against his wishes to keep him as much as possible out of her way.

  To console himself, he went to stay with one of his oldest women friends, Consuelo, the former duchess of Marlborough, now Madame Jacques Balsan, at the Balsans’ house on the French Riviera. “They have 350 acres, bought from nearly 80 persons, a huge property running right down to the sea. The upper part is terraces, the lower is a pinewood. It is wonderful what they have done and with what taste,” he wrote to Gracie, who had also been invited but had found reasons not to come.

  Even with the Balsans, he felt the need to work and spent much of his time in his room writing his book on India (“I hope I am not being an inordinate bore. I kept to my room most of the morning and again later and do not think that I interfere with their domestic life”). It was also a way of keeping disappointment at bay. Both the Balsans found him much changed, Consuelo telling her next visitor, Winston Churchill, that although he was a charming guest, full of anecdotes and wit, he was “sad and humble. The Fairy Queen [Grace] flouts him and laughs at him and now he is no longer the All Highest.”

  Gradually Curzon emerged from his shell, remarking approvingly that Jacques Balsan (whom he had not met before) was much better than he expected. “They are an extraordinarily well suited couple, he is very intelligent and well informed, she is, as always, very sympathetic and sunny and sweet.” Grace, he hoped, would arrive soon; she had promised to come for the last three days of his visit—but yet again there was a cancellation. He went back to London in February, shedding tears when he left the Balsans and telling Consuelo that he had not had such a happy holiday since he was a young man.

  On March 5, while dressing for dinner at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was due to speak to the university’s Conservative Association, he suffered a severe hemorrhage from the bladder. The following morning before breakfast Grace arrived to bring him home to Carlton House Terrace.

  It was quickly apparent that he was gravely ill. It is possible that he had had some inkling he might not live much longer: during the holiday with Consuelo he had told her that he constantly thought of Mary and had suddenly remarked, “I know that Mary will be the first to greet me in heaven” (“I hope that she will have got a comfortable and noble Mansion ready for him and precedence all arranged with the Authorities,” Churchill wrote to his wife when he heard this).

  At Carlton House Terrace, Curzon lay in bed discussing and amending his will and compiling a long handwritten memorandum of forty-four clauses, detailing everything from the whereabouts of his papers to a defensive note about his expenditure of Leiter money. “Should the plea ever be put forward that the pictures [in his various houses] were purchased with the funds that would ultimately fall to my daughters, the reply is that I bought nearly the whole from funds belonging to me personally which I saved up for the purpose; and that if I had bought them with Leiter money, I had a perfect right to do so under the orders of the Court out of the allowance made to me personally by the Court.” The final result, together with a codicil, he signed on March 8 with his butler and nurse as witnesses.

  He was operated on on the same day. Afterward he lay in Grace’s big comfortable bed in her big comfortable bedroom, attended by Sir Thomas Horder, the king’s doctor. There was no disguising the seriousness of his condition and Grace and Baba spent most of their time with him.

  When Irene, who had been in bed with flu and a temperature of 102 two days earlier, heard that he was desperately ill, she drove up from Melton Mowbray. At the door of Carlton House Terrace she was turned away by a footman. She was so shattered by this final rebuff that she went straight to the Carlton Hotel, where she retired to bed for two days. In her autobiography, Grace gave as her reason for refusing Irene entry to the house that the arrival of a daughter so deeply estranged would lead Curzon to believe he was dying (that her own presence was so rare that ten days of constant attention might not give him the same idea seems not to have entered Grace’s head).

  Baba, with no mother and separated from both her sisters, miserable at seeing her father suffer and at the thought that she might soon be orphaned, was under intense strain. Apart from Grace, the only person she could really talk to, albeit by letter only, was Fruity, who kept in daily touch by note. Although she did not tell her father of this, Curzon had become aware of their growing closeness, for during these last days he told Grace: “I think Baba may marry Major Metcalfe.”

  Fruity’s steady, constant sympathy and understanding must have reassured Baba that here was a man who would always protect and care for her. “I just can’t go to bed without letting you know how well I understand what you’ve been through today, my poor sweetheart,” runs one typical letter. “The uncertainty, the gloom, the shock of seeing your father worn out, fighting for his life—it has been just terrible. My dear one, I feel for you deeply.”

  A week after the operation Curzon developed congestion of the right lung. As he fought painfully for breath it was obvious to the doctors and those around him that the end could not be far off. As he got worse, he asked to see the woman he had once loved so deeply, Elinor Glyn. The message (recounted later by Baba to Cimmie and from her to Elinor Glyn’s daughter Juliet) was never passed on; Gracie’s jealousy endured until the end. On March 18 he wrote a last letter—this final missive from the vast pile of his lifetime’s correspondence an almost illegible protestation of loyalty to the king, who was about to set off on a Mediterranean cruise.

  That day the doctors told Grace there was no hope and Sir Thomas advised her to tell her husband he was dying. “He is a very great man, and it wo
uld be wrong to deceive him any longer. He should be told the truth so that he may prepare his mind in his own way.” When Curzon asked Gracie what the doctors had said when she returned to his room she replied gently: “Darling, I’m afraid you are very bad.” Closing his eyes, he repeated the Lord’s Prayer. They were the last words he spoke. The next day, March 19, he lapsed into unconsciousness and the following morning, at 5:30 a.m., he died, with Grace, his brother Francis and Baba at his side. It was Baba’s twenty-first birthday.

  “Beloved Pansy,” reads a scrawled note from Fruity. “My poor child. I feel deeply for you, especially on such a day. What a birthday for you! My poor darling, every happiness should be yours on this day. But one thing, my love, there is, I feel sure, for each and all of us, only a certain amount of happiness that is to be our portion in this life and as now you are not being granted your natural share then it is yet to come to you and you will get it, I promise you.”

  Irene, who had inherited her father’s barony of Ravensdale, did not comment at all on his death. Instead, a note in her journal merely says: “Old Dandy sent to the Kennels, to my great grief.”

  The funeral service was at Westminster Abbey on March 25. Curzon’s coffin, made from a two-hundred-year-old oak from Kedleston, was covered with an antique red velvet pall embroidered with the Curzon arms in gold and studded with gold nails. His Order of the Garter, Star of India, Order of the Indian Empire and Victorian Order lay on purple cushions at the foot; the pallbearers were Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the lord chancellor, the speaker, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Lords Salisbury and Birkenhead, Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald.

  There was a second, family service at Kedleston the following day when Curzon’s coffin, like the coffins of past generations of Curzons, was placed in the white marble vault of the chapel he had restored, on a white marble shelf, beside the white marble effigy of himself that he had commissioned during his lifetime. Next to it was a space holding a postcard with the words “Reserved for the second Lady Curzon” in Curzon’s handwriting in the thick blue pencil he always used. Two carriages and a dining car were engaged for the family and friends who traveled up. “Scatters Wilson who has come partly because he is in love with Lady Curzon and partly because it is on the way to the Grand National, Fruity Metcalfe who has come because he is in love with Baba Curzon,” wrote the author and diplomat Harold Nicolson in his diary. “They talk racing all the way up.” After the interment, the party returned to the house, where Nicolson noted seeing Baba and Cimmie. “Very upset. Very sweet.” Irene was not present.

  Curzon’s will, thanks to the emendations and alterations he had made just before his death, was an extraordinarily badly drafted document. Nevertheless, it made one thing perfectly plain: Gracie was to inherit virtually everything. To her went the remaining twelve months of the lease of I Carlton House Terrace and those contents not destined for Kedleston; to her went Hackwood (which had another eighteen months of lease to run) and all its contents, from horses, carriages, cars and chandeliers to pictures, tapestries and furniture; to her went Montacute House and its contents; she also received a jointure of one thousand pounds a year from the Kedleston rents. His daughters and his stepchildren, as Curzon pointed out, were amply provided for by their respective Leiter and Duggan inheritances; nevertheless, to his Duggan stepchildren he left five hundred pounds each “as proof of my affection.” His beloved Marcella inherited in addition the villa Naldera at Broadstairs, together with all its contents. The two castles, Bodiam and Tattershall, went to the National Trust, together with generous bequests for their upkeep.

  To his own daughters he left only their mother’s clothes, carefully stored for almost twenty years. His will also allotted them those few pieces of their mother’s jewelry particularly specified by her in her own will when she first went out to India but, with the exception of Cim who had been given her mother’s pearls when she married, none of the three girls received any of these items. Nor, as their mother would surely have intended, did their father leave them any of the rest of her splendid collection, much of which had come from their grandfather (though some was acquired after the making of her will). All of it had been given or was left to Grace.

  At the time, Baba was barely concerned, her mind occupied far more by the trauma of her father’s death, her growing love for Fruity and, perhaps, a realization that she too, like her sisters, would now have to make her own way in the world. The idea of marriage—the only “career” open to the young women of her circle—seemed ever more alluring.

  Fruity’s pursuit of her had seemed to many of his friends bound to end in failure. Paradoxically, his own realization of this had much to do with his ultimate success. He behaved toward Baba with the strictest honor, never attempting to “push” her into anything and always making sure she understood how little he had to offer in worldly terms. But his looks, his charm, his deep loyalty and his popularity with their friends spoke for him. By the time he was living with the Mountbattens he had begun to hope.

  Fruity had gone to live with them after the prince left for South Africa on March 30. He could not have had more opulent lodgings. Brook House, their Park Lane palace, built in the 1850s by Thomas Wyatt, had been inherited by Edwina from her grandfather, the immensely rich Sir Edward Cassel. The hall, grand staircase and first-floor gallery were lined with white marble, there were twelve bathrooms, several elevators, a stream bubbling among mulberry trees in the garden and a dining room in a two-story pavilion. With the prince away, Mountbatten was Fruity’s closest friend, and Fruity had become as devoted to Edwina as he was to Mountbatten. Soon he and Baba, with the Mountbattens, made up a foursome who often lunched together in London, went to watch Mountbatten play polo, religiously saw every new revue from the Midnight Follies to the Co-Optimists or dined together before going to a play followed by dancing. At weekends they would often go and stay at the Mountbattens’ country house, Adsdean, in Sussex.

  Without Curzon’s overwhelming presence and with Grace’s active encouragement, the relationship between Fruity and Baba was thriving. On May 25, 1925, Edwina’s diary reads: “. . . later to the Embassy and the Kitkat Club, Fruity told me of his engagement to Baba.” The next day: “Shopped with Fruity and Baba and tried to find an engagement ring.” The announcement of the engagement, on May 26, sent a shock wave through much of society. Though they were each other’s equals in looks, style and chic, the viceroy’s daughter and the handsome cavalryman had little else in common. It was an era in which, despite the upheavals of the war, worldly considerations still counted, and the engagement of this slender, aristocratic heiress and intimate of princes to a poor Irishman of no particular background who was seventeen years her senior was, in the eyes of the stuffier members of society, a mésalliance. For others, Fruity’s charm and his closeness to the Prince of Wales, which gave him the entrée everywhere, made him the most glamorous single man around.

  But the answer was much simpler. Baba was deeply, passionately and physically in love for the first time in her life—so much so that she simply did not notice that Fruity had hardly read a book and that his good nature, gaiety and charm hid an intellectual void. Her own character and personality were still to a large extent unformed and she was bowled over by this attractive man who adored her.

  Fruity himself could not believe his luck. His nature was sweet, loyal—once he had given his devotion, nothing would shake it—simple and modest. “I don’t know why my Bobs married me,” he would say in his rich brogue. “I have no money and I’ve got no brain.”

  He sent a cable to the prince at once, who wrote from the royal train in South Africa on May 27: “My dear Baba, This is only a scrawl to make this mail to say how delighted I was to get Fruity’s cable last night to tell me you were both engaged—it’s the best news I’ve had in a long time and you know how much happiness I wish for both of you.”

  To Fruity he wrote somewhat less formally:

  So you’ve pulled it off at last. I was pl
eased to get your cable last night and you should get mine today. No news could cheer me more. I’m absolutely delighted for you ’cos you do deserve a bit of good luck if anyone does and that’s the best luck anyone could have—shabash [well done]; and you know how much happiness I wish for you both. . . . This tour is hell and v. little fun tho’ funny—few good lookers or amusing people. I’ll leave it to you both to get yourselves a naice wedding present. Must stop—write again soon.

  A week later, the prince wrote a long letter from Durban. Delight at his friend’s happiness was complicated by other, less easily articulated emotions. When the prince loved, he loved with abandon, and his friendship with Fruity, the closest he would ever have with another man, was the intimate and exclusive. Marriage would inevitably loosen this charmed bond.

  Thank you for your last wild letter. I guess I know the mood you wrote it in—rather like mine after two or three more cocktails. But I’m keeping the deadly booze well under this trip and the cigs too so that I really am d——d fit considering. No drinks before 6:00 and only two cigs before tea. It was a strain at first but it’s easy now and so well worth it. I played polo once last week and rain did in another game but I’ll play here and tell you all about it. I believe it’s going to be fun here and I’m glad I’m stopping two extra days ’cos I spotted some d——d good lookers at the races this afternoon and am going to some good parties . . . I’m glad you miss me sometimes and I miss you too, often. But you won’t miss me anymore though . . . Damn it Fruity, why in hell didn’t you pull it off before I left? It would have helped us both so much wouldn’t it? you from being so sunk and me from feeling such a shit.