A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only]

Even this early, her bumps dictated events in an unfortunate way. Among the party lounging and sketching, going out onto the lake in boats and exclaiming about the wonders of nature was a familiar family legend, the source of many an outrageous story. He was the fiery and voluble vicar of Llanelli, a man called Ebenezer Morris, whose living had been presented to him by Georgina’s grandfather. The Reverend Mr Morris was sixty-three and decidedly eccentric. His preaching was considered so entertaining that on one occasion the gallery of the church threatened to collapse from the press of people gathered to hear him. He was also a man of colossal and unforgiving temper, perfectly able to knock down a parishioner for some imagined insult. In his battles with neighbouring clergy, he composed scathingly brutal and quite scandalous letters and pamphlets. In Llanelli he was a notorious and much discussed figure.

As well as flirting with the young men who ran after her and deriding the enthusiasm her uncle held for romantic scenery, Georgina romanced the Reverend Mr Morris, whom she dubbed Canonicus. She was successful enough to have him embrace her a little too freely and kiss her without the innocence usually employed towards a child. Emboldened, he wrote her a love letter. One can think of half a dozen reasons why he might instantly regret what he had done. This was the first test of her capacity to behave more like a young lady than a hoyden. Could the situation be defused by tact and commonsense? Was this the kind of letter that anyone else would have torn in a hundred pieces or hidden in the trunk of a tree? Was it an occasion for the young to moralise the old and bring the reckless philanderer to the error of his ways, as happened in fiction?

She chose differently. She gave the letter to her mother. Louisa gave it to her husband. For all Morris’s long friendship with the family (which included being a lifelong drinking crony of his patron, Rees Goring Thomas) Morgan did not hesitate. The poor man was confronted with the evidence, humiliated, and shown the door. Georgina had done the right thing and learned a useful lesson: she might not be the cleverest girl in the world but she was certainly able to stir up passion in the opposite sex. Moreover, she had found a new way to make her father angry. Shortly after the incident, the Thomas family left Schloss Hard, still postponing London and heading towards Brussels.

In the winter of 1853 they took a house in the Rue de Luxembourg. Morgan bought a carriage with a form of armorial bearing painted on the doors. ‘We went about in our carriage, and all our ancient admirers, on foot, stared at us as if we were risen from the grave,’ Georgina commented. Her father had managed to secure a letter of introduction to the Ambassador: he was positioning himself for the campaign that lay ahead. If he had gone abroad like a loser, he intended to come back with a different story to tell.

Brussels, like Florence, sustained a large British colony, and for the same reason. It was cheap to live there and titled European families were ten a penny. A man might fill his mantelpiece with crested invitations and cartes de visite. Perhaps the very best people were in Paris, but there was enough going on in Brussels to replicate that older, frowstier form of society that was to Morgan’s taste. So, interspersed with the names of Dal’s fellow Etonians who came to stare and wonder, we find the Baron de Pfuel, Limmander de Nieuvehoven and – Louisa’s finest social acquisition – the Baronne de Goethals. There was war in the air and everyone was talking about Constantinople. Some of the insouciant young Englishmen Georgina saw lounging about at balls and parties she would never see again. One of her beaux was William Scarlett, whose uncle was to command the Heavy Brigade at Sebastopol.

Brussels was intended by her parents to be a kind of finishing school. They stayed a season and Georgina sang before an audience for the first time at the British Embassy. The recital – which may not have been more than one song – was well received. For the first time in her life it was exciting to be a Thomas. Though she was by her own description ‘wild’, she was also also ‘irresistible’. Her triumphs came entirely as a consequence of her own efforts – to her surprise people liked this turbulent and impulsive girl from Florence. Now that the family was out in the world a little more, her father’s peculiarities became more obvious. It was the first chance she had to compare him with other fathers and she began to form the opinion expressed so forcibly in the years ahead.

My father, who as a consequence of his proud and violent character had always been more or less mad at last became so, despite being gifted with rare and valuable qualities. His mother’s favourite, he had been spoiled as a child, and he reaped what all spoiled children reap. He inspired hate and terror in everybody. As for me, I never addressed a word to him in my life, and he only spoke to us to call us to table and to tell us we were damn fools. If my mother had only a little common sense or principle, she would not have endured such a hell, neither for herself nor for her children, and I blame her much more than my father for all that has happened.

There is a characteristic element of exaggeration in this. At the time, darting about Brussels, discovering clothes, learning to waltz and reaping compliments wherever she went, life had taken an unexpected twist. It was fun. Evidently, some young women made their effect by hiding shyly behind their mothers’ skirts. That was not Georgina’s way. She was bold, careless even. A lifelong habit of bathing in cold water had been set in Florence. Now, much further north and in the depths of winter, she bounced from the bath pink and eager, hungry for breakfast and the chance to meet new people and shine in their company. Wherever she went she demonstrated a similar animal exuberance. She was happy.

While retaining the lease on the house in the Rue de Luxembourg, Morgan finally took his family back to England in 1854. Dal was at Eton, but the other children had never seen England and only Georgina had been born there. It was exciting to be home, but it was also daunting. The country was more interested in cholera and the imminence of war than the arrival of the Thomas family. Georgina’s flirtatious experiments followed her across the Channel – no sooner had they set foot in England than Morgan intercepted a love letter to his daughter from a mysterious G. V. – presumably by stealing it or reading it surreptitiously. His reaction was illuminating. He summoned the butler Antonio and had him take it round to the bemused local police. Meanwhile, Gate House in Mayfield was prepared for the family as its permanent seat and Georgina’s first scattered impressions of her native country were gathered driving about Brighton and East Sussex to be introduced to the local gentry. She was not impressed. That vague sense of superiority so lavishly rekindled in Brussels was not to be squandered on mutton-eating squires and their sullen children.

At first, England disappointed Georgina. Life at the Villa Capponi had been dull, but wonderful things had happened to her since. Though her father watched her like a hawk, she had already received two declarations of love and turned any number of heads. Neither of her sisters was of an age to be seen in a romantic light: she was the centre of attention in whatever drawing-room she found herself. She confirmed the earlier suspicion that she was far more forward and direct than her English contemporaries. In an age that placed so much importance on the niceties of address, how to behave with self-effacing quiet was something it was already too late for her to learn. Her father had been right about one thing; once you described yourself as of good family, the number of friends and acquaintances you might make in life was small indeed, at any rate in the Sussex hinterland. However, farming had never been so prosperous in living memory and Morgan and his family had come back to a golden decade for corn prices. The best of the country gentlemen had ‘no enemies but time and gout’ as one admiring foreign observer put it. That did not necessarily make them entrancing company.

If Sussex was dull, London was a different matter. Though Morgan might find as much to deprecate there as anything he had found in Florence, his opinion counted for nothing. The London he came home to had almost doubled in size compared with the one he had left. Its sophistication and complexity was quite beyond him. There was more ‘dash’ to affairs than he remembered and a great deal more irreverence. Whole new classes had sprung up and with them manners which were beneath Morgan’s dignity to interest himself in. He was safe for as long as he stayed in the West End and kept himself away from anything approaching talent. The truth was that Morgan could not and never would find a niche in society. His time had passed.

For Georgina, London was a city bathed in dangerous adventure. Rotten Row, of which she had heard much as a child, had been recently widened to accommodate the Sunday carriage rides of the rich and titled. She duly made her baptismal appearance there, stared at in what she considered an insolent way by any number of young men on horseback. She found them all distressingly tall. It was no use attempting a conversational finesse by comparing the scene disfavourably with the Cascine Gardens – this was the real thing. The carriage row in Hyde Park was a showcase of the aristocracy. The Prince Consort rode out there. As the elegant carriages ambled their way back and forth along the mile-and-a-half route round the edge of Hyde Park, on fine days – just out of sight but not out of earshot – as many as 12,000 bathers swam in the Serpentine. The scale of London and the juxtaposition of its classes was beyond anything she had ever seen. Like her father, she discovered much that she must learn. The greatest part of it was where and how to fit in. To be fashionable was to know far more – perhaps to discount far more – than the elementary education she had received in Florence.

In 1855, Georgina went back to Brussels with her mother for Carnival, and on 17 February attended a ball at la Baronne de Goethal’s. It was the scene of one of the great moments in her life. Among the company was a Portuguese Baron called Pedro de Moncorvo. He was twenty-seven years old, the son of a former Ambassador to the Court of St James. Georgina was dressed in the costume of a Parisian grisette and the evening passed in a delirium of romantic enchantment. Here, with all the force of a novel, was the perfect situation – a beautiful girl heated by the dance, pursued by a dark and handsome stranger. Writing fifty years later Georgina claimed to have loved him with all her heart and when she was sixty-six she went all the way to Bemfica to visit his grave. Moncorvo was probably the first man to see her for what she was and not attempt to change her. They met no more than ten times, during which he alternately scolded and cajoled her. For the first but not the last time in her life she was, so to speak, living to the tune and lyrics of the best kind of song. Four days after her eighteenth birthday, her father intervened and she was banished from Brussels and sent into exile at Boulogne.

On 18 June, racked by love, playing the piano with tragic abandon, she opened the door of her lodgings to find Moncorvo on the doorstep. Unchaperoned, they walked on the cliffs overlooking the town.

He asked me if I had deceived myself in allowing that perhaps I loved him. I answered, ‘If I loved you, what would be the use?’ ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘If you loved me we could be married in that church,’ and he pointed to the church of Boulogne. I made no reply, his lips almost touched my cheek. I drew back gently. He did not kiss me. He departed that same afternoon – and I have never seen him since.

It is a perfect vignette. As she grew older, she realised he may have loved her with a seriousness her youth and ignorance did not allow for on the day. For the rest of her life she wondered what might have happened if she had done as he asked and married him against the wishes of her parents. And though a year later he married a Portuguese comtessa, he continued to write her affectionate letters, enough for her to make that long sea journey when he died. What makes the story so poignant, in light of what was to come, is that the girl on the cliffs was still the girl from Florence, the wayward boy in the body of a woman, the original and untempered Georgina Thomas. She lost him out of inexperience.

It is sad to see her later embroider the story, explaining that she could not marry him because of a devotion to a higher thing, her art. She was an eighteen-year-old girl who had for the first time in her life been faced with a real decision, touching real feelings. Moncorvo was asking a lot of her – he was very much older, he was poor and he was Catholic. But the truth was that – too early in her life for her to understand and profit from the experience – a man was prepared to take her exactly as she was. In this brief and shimmering image of them on the cliffs, we are watching a man who has seen something of the world and a girl who has not. Moncorvo was not saying, ‘Take me back to England so that I can sponge off your father.’ He was inviting her to come with him to Portugal.

When he pointed with a sweep of his arm to ‘the church at Boulogne’, the gesture also took in the villa where Dickens and Wilkie Collins stayed with their families, and the place where Thackeray and his daughters had rested in the past. Perfectly visible was the massive embarkation camp from which the French Imperial Army had set sail to the Crimea. Even while they spoke, many of those who had marched down to the quays garlanded with flowers were being blown to pieces at the Malakov Redoubt.

Georgina knew nothing of such things. Moncorvo was the first to lay bare her ignorance of the real world. She may have had practical misgivings and certainly the peculiar urgency and danger of his visit must have weighed with her. Watching the hazy sea, trying not to look into his eyes, she learned from Moncorvo that afternoon what love was, rather than what a well-arranged English marriage could confer. She chose the wrong option.

4 TREHERNE (#ulink_5974f2cd-45a1-55dc-87c2-7335bc65c2f5)

In the autumn of 1857, Morgan and his brothers changed their name to Treherne. The battle of Poitiers was now 500 years old and the family was able to show that the two surnames had been interchangeable down the years that followed Sir Hugh’s adventures in France. They were merely reclaiming what was theirs by right and reverting to a more profoundly ancestral form of address. From Morgan’s point of view, there was an element of the ruse de guerre in the alteration. Like his forebear he had gone away one person and (he hoped) come home another. A change of name was a partial cancellation of all his earlier mistakes. While it might please his eldest brother to stand contemplating his Lletymawr estates as a Treherne, it did Morgan no harm either to lord it over his Sussex neighbours under the new title. In a way, it was as good as an elevation.

There was more of a problem how to identify the new Trehernes when they came up from the country to London. They were not rich, nor were they well connected. Families – brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts – usually made a simple enough matrix for the giving and receiving of hospitality, as did work, or political allegiance. None of these helped describe the Sussex Trehernes. To go about at all in society meant they had to have some circle of acquaintance and it is probable that the greater part of it was provided by Georgina. When carriages were summoned and Georgina parted regretfully from her hosts after what she hoped was an irresistible contribution to the evening, the question arose: who was she? Parsed, this meant who were her parents? Mr Treherne himself had no cronies, political or otherwise, and belonged to no clubs. He was estranged from his own family. His wife was a dumpy and unfashionable lady happier when she was in the country. If it was asked what this family wanted, what advantage it was trying to seek (a perfectly understandable enquiry) no easy answer was forthcoming. The change of name might indicate that Morgan wished to be considered Welsh but he would have been bitterly disappointed to have given this impression.

When Thackeray’s The Snobs of England was published ten years earlier it made the whole country anxious. Some of those who read the work in serial form wrote in to ask whether they could be accounted snobs and Thackeray cheerfully included the details of their lives in his next instalment. How far did a man like the new Mr Treherne come under the title? The word derives from Cambridge undergraduate slang in use during Morgan’s time at Trinity. In the narrow sense, the Welshman was indeed a ‘snob’ as much as he was a ‘tassell’ – his parentage bridged town and gown. Thackeray’s extension of the meaning to include anyone wishing to be something he was not was useful in principle but applied so indiscriminately by him that Morgan and many others might have wondered whether anyone at all in society could escape the term. One of the small miracles of literature is how Thackeray escaped the crude and gluey morass that was The Snobs of England to begin in the very next year his literary masterpiece, Vanity Fair. There he devoted a famous chapter to how to live well on nothing a year. The new tone is more realistic and generous: ‘The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on nothing a year, we use the word “nothing” to signify something unknown – meaning, simply, that we don’t know how the gentleman in question defrays the expenses of his establishment.’

This describes Morgan’s situation when seen about town in London or Brighton. His innate anxiety led him to claim more than he possessed, in wealth as well as rank, but he was not as fatuous as some of Thackeray’s more helpless victims. Nor was he in the slightest way ingratiating. He paid no man his loyalty. If the question turned on whether he was a gentleman at all, most Victorians would have concluded that he was. They might have gone on to say that he was not a very pleasant one, nor a very distinguished example of the breed. That was beside the point. Morgan’s desire was not so much to remake himself in a different image, but to consolidate what little rank he had. In that respect, he had gone away one person and come back as another.

His daughter was the immediate beneficiary of the new surname and the first to give it lustre. In October of 1857, Miss Georgina Treherne was included in the cast list of a private musical extravaganza devised in honour of the Duchess of Cambridge, called endearingly Hearts and Tarts. The performance took place at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, the home of Lady Marion Alford, a widow in her forties who kept up a lively artistic and political salon. The Queen of Hearts was played by Princess Mary of Cambridge, whom Queen Victoria always found so wanting for her terrible size, her dirty ball gowns and the racy company she kept. The Princess had been childhood friends with Constance Villiers, which explained her presence in the cast, as well as that of Lady Villiers’s father, Lord Clarendon, who acted as stage manager. His fellow Minister, Lord Granville, played the Knave of Hearts and had as his father in the play the newly succeeded Duke of Manchester. In fact, only Georgina was without noble connection. Princess Mary, perhaps confused by the surname and the obscurity of her background, remembered her afterwards as a handsome young lady from Cornwall.

How had Georgina come to be in such august company? It pleased her in later years to describe herself as racked by shyness but of all her fantasies this rings least true. She was certainly very pretty – the Pre-Raphaelite Frederick Sandys considered her one of the most beautiful women in England (though in this and practically every other area, his was a very unreliable opinion). It was her voice that gave her the entrée. There was a very long-established tradition of musical entertainment in great houses. If you were well-bred and could sing, you could do something very useful for your hostess and add to the charm of the occasion. It did not much matter if people talked through your rendition of some touching ballad – you were there to see and be seen. And it was a wonderful means of social introduction. At some of the grander functions, duchesses filled the first chairs and the audience were ranged back in strict order of precedence. Invitations to these evenings – when they took place in the London high season – might exceed a hundred. The better houses had music rooms, but in other places the company crammed into drawing-rooms and sat in bundles on the stairs. If there was not much glamour in it for the old, for the young it was exciting. For their mothers, it was a battleground.

Constance Villiers liked and remembered Georgina for her performance on this particular evening at Ashridge. Hidden in the playbill is the clue to how she may have come to take part. The prompt for Georgina’s performance in Hearts and Tarts was a wonderful old piece of Regency flotsam, Freddy Byng. It may have been his sponsorship that got Georgina into such august company. Poodle Byng (who was given his nickname by the Prince Regent because of the tight blond curls he wore as a young man) flits in and out of Victorian memoirs like an elderly and homeless bat. It was the Poodle who so scandalised the Court in the first months of Victoria’s reign when she was still considered a green girl by playing cards and making eyes at her, until he was gently shown the door. The fifth son of Viscount Torrington, he was fond of very young women and is said to have married his mother’s chambermaid. He seems to have travelled light in Victorian society and been tolerated in the houses of the rich for his manners and gentle heart – because he knew everybody and was so very old. His only official duty anyone could remember had come in 1824 when he was given the job of escorting the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands about London as a representative of the Crown. He did the best he could to amuse these two monarchs but could not stop them dying of influenza two months after they arrived. Acting with unusual decisiveness, he had them embalmed in brandy and shipped back to the South Pacific.

Byng seems to have been genuinely besotted by Georgina. Three years on, Thackeray, who knew the Poodle rather better than he knew Georgina, surprised her buying a wedding ring in Cockspur Street. Later in the afternoon, he ran across the decrepit old man and broke his heart by saying, ‘Poodle, you have lost your singing bird. Miss Treherne has married some other fellow.’ Poodle Byng found her when she first came out and introduced her to those of his many friends who spent part of their time and wealth on private concerts and recitals. If he was amorous, he was also kindly: after blandishments from Georgina, he helped get her parents presented at court in 1858. Even Morgan could see the use of a sponsor like that, however old and decrepit he might be.

Georgina at twenty possessed an enchanting and very idiosyncratic soprano voice (her diction was considered exceptionally clear and distinct) and what she lacked in manners and sophistication she made up for by being seen everywhere. If she was coquettish – and this could certainly be levelled against her – then it was all very artless and inconsequential. Suspicious mothers and society hostesses alike were quickly reassured that this was no Becky Sharp, no girl on the make. She was if anything naïve to a fault. Her dearest friends were the people she met last night. They were replaced without embarrassment by those to whom she was presently talking. So, for example, early on she spoke of Lord Lansdowne as a dear friend and ally. The fourth Marquis was an Under Secretary of State for foreign affairs and a political scalp worth having. Whether he could separate Georgina from any of half a hundred young women he might have met under similarly brief circumstances was quite another matter. Georgina was beginning to exhibit her father’s ability to improve the facts. She had only to be in a noble house once to affect a lifelong intimacy with its owners. The most casual kind word addressed to her was an affirmation of undying love. She was odd like this and had a number of other social faults, including a garrulity that sometimes led her into indiscretion. She was not a girl to keep a secret.

Poodle Byng soon found her an appropriate milieu in which to shine. This was at Little Holland House, the former dower house of Lady Holland. After her death it had been purchased by Mr and Mrs Thoby Prinsep. Prinsep was an amiable and elderly retired official of the India Office and his wife Sara one of the famously beautiful, famously eccentric Pattle sisters. Georgina was specially delighted to discover there someone she could claim to know from the Florence years. The last time she had seen him was in the Casa Feroni, when she was six. The principal adornment of Little Holland House was her father’s most reviled artist, George Frederick Watts.

Watts was now forty-one years old. He was the centrepiece of all Mrs Prinsep’s bustling social energies, a position he had more or less proposed for himself. ‘He came for three days; he stayed thirty years,’ his patroness observed dryly. The salon he helped her create included many of the Pre-Raphaelites, and figures such as Tennyson and Thackeray, Dickens and Caryle, but it was really given over to Watts’ enigmatic genius. George du Maurier left a description of Sara and her sisters – ‘Elgin marbles with dark eyes’ as Ruskin once called them – handing out tea to their guests with almost eastern obeisance:

Watts, who is a grand fellow, is their painter in ordinary: the best part of the house has been turned into his studio and he lives there and is worshipped till his manliness hath almost departed, I should fancy … After the departure of the visitors we dined; without dress coats – anyhow, and it was jolly enough – Watts in red coat and slippers. After dinner, up in the music room Watts stretched himself at full length on the sofa, which none of the women take when he is there. People formed a circle, and I being in good voice sang to them the whole evening, the cream of Schubert and Gordigiani – c’était très drôle, the worship I got …

This was a different kind of ambiance altogether from Ashridge and du Maurier’s breezy insouciance captures it exactly. The house itself was as good as in the country, removed by trees and meadows from the harsher, more unforgiving light that shone on soirées in Grosvenor Square or Belgravia. It was a low and sprawling building, the interiors decorated by Watts’s frescoes. Some rooms boasted wonderful blue ceilings and others were hung with Indian rugs and cloths. Behind a door covered in red baize lay the hallowed centre of the house, the source of its energies, Watts’s studio. For Georgina it was a perfect stage, non-political, gossipy and faintly loose. There was enough oddity already existing at Little Holland House for her to feel at home. Sara Prinsep swept about the rooms in her own version of Indian dress, coaxing and wheedling Watts and permitting in her other guests what seemed to stricter hostesses a dangerous bohemianism. Her husband’s library was kept out of the way and there were no books on display in the main rooms, forcing visitors and habitués into torrents of conversation and persiflage.

As to Watts, nobody could quite make him out. He had an almost perfect mixture of worldly vanity and ethereal otherness. Tall and thin, very good-looking in youth, now with a hint of pain and suffering peering out from behind biblically long and straggling whiskers, the time he spent in Florence – and in particular the gift for portraiture he discovered there – had set him on the road to fame. If there was a question mark against his sexual appetites – or lack of them – and if men found him ridiculous, he was all the same a society portraitist of the highest rank. This was a label he hated, for Watts had it in mind to paint the large allegorical works with which he had started out, and which the fame of the Florence portraits had eclipsed. As soon as Georgina met him she made up to him unmercifully and was given the reward – the accolade – of a sitting.

Watts had the reputation of making his subjects look younger and more beautiful than they were in life. In his Florence portrait of Augusta, Lady Holland, she looks out directly at the viewer under a slightly tilted head, her huge eyes shaded by the Italian straw hat she wears. Her lips are smiling and there are dimples in her cheeks: she wears the expression of someone sharing a pleasant secret with the artist, and so with us. It is the portrait of a clever, sensuous woman, well aware of the effect she is creating. Watts finished this painting in 1843. Fourteen years on, the portrait of Georgina makes a striking contrast. Shown in three-quarter profile, she wears a similarly wide-brimmed hat and her hand lightly supports her chin and cheek. She has highly arched and plucked eyebrows and looks out a little past the painter with unsmiling eyes. Although she is only twenty, her face is full and the neck plump. Augusta smiles out at the world with sardonic humour; Georgina’s expression is faintly suspicious. It is an unfinished woman that Watts has represented and not an entirely likeable one. He wrote at the time of the portrait:

I must tell you, Bambina mia, that I miss you very much and the studio is very silent. The Bambina’s vivacity was pleasant enough to the dull Signor, who was affected by the exhilarating contagion; now, coming from Lincoln’s Inn weary and listless, I miss the vivacious little Bambina, and though Little H. H. is always charming and I am always made much of and spoiled, especially when I am tired, I miss the effervescent stimulant that was sparkling and overflowing all about the house, yet I was always in a fidget about the wild little girl, and very often not a little unhappy.

There is the accent of a spinster aunt about this. What put him in a fidget and made him unhappy? Was it anything more than having his peace and routine disturbed? Or something deeper? In the next sentence he adds, enigmatically, ‘I depend upon her to be prudent and wise, not less merry I hope, God forbid she ever should be.’

The portrait, of which she was enormously proud, has nothing in it at all merry or skittish. At first blush he might have been writing about someone else altogether. Watts liked very young girls, as he was to prove in a disastrous marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, and he was also fond of moralising. But the artist in him was painfully honest. He had seen a gaucheness in Georgina that he put into words in another, later letter:

I want you to be very wise in the choice of a husband, for everything will depend on the person or persons with whom you may live. If you are fortunate in this respect, you will be as you ought to be, an ornament and a delight to society; if the contrary, I dread more than I can say for the poor little Bambina. I do not think you could be happy as the wife of a poor man …

In one way it is pretty obvious conventional advice. But Watts was writing to the girl who thought of herself as destined for a £10,000-a-year man, a story she must have told him. Fey though he was, however foolish he might act with the young, he was still the piano tuner’s son. His remarks seem to distinguish between a life spent in society and not. That was something he knew all about, but a thing too unpleasant for her to contemplate.

And was there anyone truly rich, eligible and well-connected among the people who flocked to Little Holland House, drank its tea and admired its painter in ordinary? Not Watts himself, nor any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Of the writers Mrs Prinsep cultivated, all were rich men, but their property was intellectual. Thackeray might gaze in amazement at a cheque for £2000 from his American tour and Dickens was by no means a poor man, yet theirs was a different kind of wealth. Carlyle had once explained this in a letter to Jane Welsh, the intelligent and ambitious girl he was trying to persuade to marry him – and it was a sentiment likely to have found favour at Little Holland House:

Kings and Potentates are a gaudy folk that flaunt about with plumes & ribbons to decorate them, and catch the coarse admiration of the many headed monster for a brief season – and then sink into forgetfulness … but the Miltons, the de Staëls – these are the very salt of the earth; they derive their ‘patents of Nobility’ direct from Almighty God; and live in the bosoms of all true men to all ages.

One of the occasional members of the coterie Georgina had now joined and who did belong to that rather less exalted nobility of plumes and ribbons was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Charlotte Schreiber had strong Welsh connections. Her first husband was Josiah John Guest of the Dowlais Ironworks, the MP for Merthyr Tydfil for twenty years until his death. Guest practically owned the town and employed most of the people in it. His wife was a daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsay and a Welsh scholar – she translated the Mabinogion into English when she was still in her twenties. After her husband’s death in 1852, she ran the iron and coal companies he left her under her own name. She had recently – and in some eyes shockingly – remarried Charles Schreiber of Trinity College, Cambridge, tutor to her eldest son. In Dorset the family kept up Canford Manor in all its magnificence, though (as the ever-vigilant Morgan discovered) under the terms of a trust, the house and Lady Charlotte’s personal share in the fortune were forfeited by reason of this second marriage.

It was at about this time, when the eldest son Ivor came into his majority and Canford became his, that Georgina first met the Schreibers. In the winter of 1856, Lady Charlotte and nine of her ten children crowded into a house at Marine Parade, Brighton, while a search was made for suitable and more permanent accommodation in London. Not until April of the following year did they find Exeter House in Roehampton, standing in sixteen acres. During their stay in Brighton they became acquainted with the Trehernes, in the general sense of being present at the same ball or party and included on the same subscription lists for concerts. The fourth son of the family was a boy called Merthyr. He was a year younger than Georgina, a restless and under-achieving student at Trinity College, Cambridge (where his brother had taken a first). Very comfortingly and after only a few meetings, he declared himself infatuated with her. When the family moved to Exeter House, Georgina was soon invited there by Lady Charlotte. She also saw her from time to time at Little Holland House, where Merthyr’s mother was wont to engage Tennyson in conversations about the Arthurian legends. She had no knowledge of the depths of her son’s feeling for the pretty and amiable Miss Treherne. For the time being, Georgina said nothing to enlighten her.

If coming out in society and making a mark in it was part of Morgan’s plan for his daughter, Georgina had already done a great deal to satisfy his ambition. Her voice had carried her into drawing-rooms that he would have difficulty in entering on his own merits. He had taken a house in Stratford Place, a small gated cul-de-sac off Oxford Street, from which to direct both her affairs and his own. In the country he was a magistrate and a ruthless persecutor of trespassers and poachers. On his own land he set spring-guns without the slightest qualm. He had by no means given up hope of a seat in the House of Commons. He was friendless and his relations with his brothers were as strained as ever but by his own lights the new Mr Treherne was making progress in the world. He was very deliberately old-fashioned and there were as a consequence huge gaps in what he knew about the age in which he lived. Style and the surface of things had always meant nothing to him. He was a reactionary and proud of it. In certain circles – say among military men – there was no harm in that. On brief acquaintance and with the addition of only a little humour, his position could even seem endearing. He polished a way of expressing himself that he was to use to the electors of Coventry in a famous speech:

I have a thorough and hearty detestation of the Whigs … I have a parrot at home that cries Damn the Whigs! and although I should be very sorry to use such language myself – even if I do express myself strongly sometimes – I cannot say that my feelings towards the Whigs are more friendly than those of my parrot.

Georgina was troublesome to him but no more than she had ever been. Although by now she was of an age where he might have expected her to be settled and not emptying his purse running about London as a young lady of fashion, there were some encouraging developments. It was never Morgan’s practice to give a compliment, yet Georgina’s impetuous charm had at least secured the interest of an eminently worthy family like the Schreibers and she had the friendship (or so she claimed) of Lady Constance Villiers, daughter of the Foreign Secretary. From such connections who knew what might follow?

And then the roof fell in.

In January of 1858, Lady Sudeley gave a ball in Brighton to which Louisa and her daughters were invited. The occasion was a happy one. Lord Sudeley, whose family owned large estates in the town, had just succeeded to the title. It was the first entertainment of the New Year and the 250 guests who assembled in the Pavilion Rooms had another lively topic of conversation, in addition to Lord Sudeley’s good fortune. A few days earlier, amid scenes of incredible pomp and attended by thirteen crowned heads of Europe, the Queen’s eldest daughter had married Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia. She was seventeen years old. That very Saturday, there had been an immense press of people at a congratulatory Drawing Room, at which the young Princess stood by her mother to receive her guests. Victoria was amazed and delighted at the cordiality shown to the Royal Family on what was for her a watershed experience. (The Princess Royal left England the following Tuesday in a blizzard of snow, attended by immense crowds. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen had parted from her daughter in floods of tears and this mood was communicated to the entire household who sobbed and wailed as at a funeral. Lady Desart, a Lady-in-Waiting, said later it was the first time in her memory that Victoria completely lost control of herself.)

There was much to discuss, then. Louisa might borrow a little from the glamour of the Royal Wedding by having boys at Eton, for the school had telegraphed the happy couple on the day of the wedding and asked permission to drag the honeymooners’ carriage through the streets of Windsor, which they accomplished most gallantly and inexpertly. And of course, since the subject of marriage in general was more than usually on everyone’s lips, did the company know that Georgina, etc., etc? Nothing had been fixed, no formal announcements had been made, but Merthyr Guest was such a prepossessing young man and seemed so enamoured of Miss Treherne, etc., etc. Of course he was very young and had first his career at Trinity to contemplate, but he was a dear, kind boy. People who knew the Schreibers rather better than Louisa herself might have been startled at this piece of wishful thinking. A really shrewd observer might have looked behind the understandable note of triumph and discovered an ancient doubt: the development of the plot was only as good as the steadiness of its principal character, which was to say Georgina. Was she going to do something stupid at this critical moment?