Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

The Birth of the Souls (#ulink_aaa09714-50e6-5f32-8ba1-7bc2dcd4a684)

As Percy became East Knoyle’s squire, he abandoned national politics for local. To an extent, his hand was forced. Gladstone’s 1884 Franchise Act extended household suffrage to the countryside, adding 1.7 million voters to the electorate.

Of far more radical effect was the associated 1885 Redistribution Act, which in Robin Hood fashion took seats from over-represented rural constituencies to give to the under-represented towns. Manchester’s representatives were doubled from three to six, Wiltshire’s reduced from fifteen to six. Percy’s West Cumberland seat was one of over seventy abolished.

H. M. Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, whose members included William Morris and Eleanor Marx, daughter of the revolutionary thinker Karl, did not think it went far enough. It showed its socialist colours by renaming itself the Social Democratic Federation and organizing a series of unruly street meetings of the unemployed demanding ‘work or bread’.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Percy thought it the beginning of the end of aristocratic rule. Paradoxically he was saved, in his mind, by Gladstone himself.

In June 1885, Gladstone resigned, discredited by General Gordon’s martyrdom and finally brought down after being defeated on an amendment to the Budget. Lord Salisbury formed a caretaker government. An election was held over three weeks in late November and early December. Almost on the day the election ended, Herbert Gladstone ‘flew the Hawarden Kite’, leaking to the press the spectacular news that his father, deep in thought over the summer, had converted to Home Rule and was prepared to take office to implement it. The election results showed how meaningful this was. Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, now formally committed to Home Rule, held the balance of power.

That Liberalism should be allied to Home Rule was not inevitable in the shadowy boxing and coxing that took place over Christmas and in the early new year. Herbert Gladstone’s bombshell, partly a ham-fisted attempt to drum up support for Home Rule across the fractured Liberal party, alienated significant Whig and Radical tranches of the party. Gladstone appears to have wanted the Conservatives to put the measure forward themselves. But it became clear that Salisbury’s conception of empire demanded unity, not the pluralistic view Gladstone proposed.

In January 1886, Parliament reconvened under Salisbury’s minority government. Gladstone moved an amendment to the Address (that is, to the Queen’s Speech). Supported by the Irish, he brought the government down, and himself to power for a third time.

The news was greeted with gloom at Clouds. ‘What do you think of the Govt being out?!!!! Worst fears realized, says Papa,’ Mary told Hugo.

The next day, still enraged, she wrote Hugo an impassioned letter sitting in bed after breakfast: ‘the irish [sic] party can turn any Government out or in, me thinks! … besides which its [sic] infamous that the old scoundrel should have had the joy of getting in again … I’m sure he is singing in his tub lustily of mornings & Mrs. G must be much elated & foreign politics will go to the devil again …’

Mary adhered to the Salisburian view and thought Home Rule must lead to imperial disintegration. But neither Mary nor Percy had fully read the runes of the vote. Twenty Whigs, led by Lord Hartington, had voted with the Conservatives, against the amendment. The Liberal party’s disintegration had begun.

A week later, Mary, now some six months pregnant, visited London to buy furniture for the Elchos’ new house in Chelsea, 62 Cadogan Square.

The Elchos had left North Audley Street after a little more than a year for another rented house in Hans Place in Chelsea of which they proved no more fond.7

Mary’s political fervour had been superseded by thoughts of interior design, as she plotted how to achieve Morris-inspired style on the Elchos’ comparatively limited budget. She was staying with her parents-in-law in Mayfair, and had left Ego with her parents at Clouds; after a series of visits to friends throughout January, she felt as though she had barely seen her son for weeks, and she told her mother she felt ‘quite shy’ of seeing him again.

It was an exceptionally cold winter. The freezing temperatures amplified distress caused by prolonged economic depression. In early February serious riots broke out – literally on Mary’s doorstep – after sparks flew when socialist marchers, up to 10,000 of them, were provoked by servants of the gentlemen’s clubs along Pall Mall. Windows throughout the length of Clubland were smashed, shops on Piccadilly looted, ‘nobs’ pulled from their carriages and stripped of their valuables. For several days London looked like ‘a city under siege’. As a thick black fog blanketed the city, wild rumours spread of a further march of 50,000 unemployed.

Mary was strangely oblivious; ‘there was a demonstration of the unemployed today & they broke all the windows in St. James’s’,

she told her mother in an offhand postscript to a letter about beds. Thereafter, her letters resumed their exclusivity of subject: furniture. ‘I think about nothing else.’

This was not quite true. A week after the riots, around St Valentine’s Day, Mary went privately to visit Arthur Balfour at 4 Carlton Gardens, which had been at the heart of the affray. Twenty years later, she wrote to him preparing to recreate the incident: ‘I must settle to pay my first visit to yr house … and be received by you alone and step over the threshold and I shall remember a certain day exactly 20 yrs ago. f-rst k-ss.’

Shortly afterwards, Mary wrote to Hugo from St James’s Place in a particularly affectionate manner. ‘Me feels xceeding [sic] full of tremendous love for Wash,’ she told him.

It would set a pattern.

At Easter, Mary and Hugo went to Stanway. They had not been alone in the country ‘for a “minit” hardly since we married’, said Mary, explaining to her mother why they would not spend the holiday with the Wyndhams at Clouds.

Their days at ‘Stangewange’ were a success. ‘You can’t imagine how delicious it is here & we’re having the nicest Time, I think since we married,’ Mary told Laura Lyttelton. Laura immediately passed the news to Arthur verbatim, adding, with masterful tact: ‘Knowing you a little I think [this] will please you … I am v. happy about this … and you must be too, dear old friend.’

Was wily Laura double-bluffing: did she really know what had taken place at Carlton Gardens just a few weeks before? Possibly – for Margot Tennant, to whom Laura was close as a twin, allowed to Wilfrid Blunt, years later, that Arthur might once have kissed Mary, although she adamantly denied the possibility of anything more.

A few weeks later, in London, Laura gave birth to a healthy boy. At Stanway, Mary, now entertaining a party including the Brodricks and Godfrey Webb, rejoiced. But Laura’s apparent good health began to fade. On 24 April 1886, with an ashen Alfred and Margot by her bedside, she died, her last words: ‘I think God has forgotten me.’ She was twenty-three. Tommy Ribblesdale telegraphed Stanway with the news: ‘all over between 9 & 10 this morning’. ‘She was not able to struggle through after all, poor thing,’ Mary wrote in her diary that night as thunderstorms raged outside and light flooded through the oriel window into the hall. ‘It makes one utterly miserable.’

When Laura had written to Arthur, she had added a postscript. She had a premonition that she might not survive childbirth and wanted to say goodbye – just in case. ‘Probably I shan’t – die I mean but if I do don’t say “She might have been etc …” cause I can’t be,’ she told him.

In fact, Margot’s statement that ‘Laura made & left a deeper impression on the world in her short life than anyone I have ever known’ was, for once, without embellishment.

The number of grandees who flocked to Laura in her final days was astonishing for a young woman who had only recently broken into Society – Spencer Lyttelton cattily commented on the Bart’s ill-concealed pleasure – notwithstanding his grave anxiety – ‘at being surrounded by so many Lords and Honourables and receiving such an amazing quantity of inquiries’.

Burne-Jones created a memorial, choosing a peacock to symbolize the brief splendour of her life. Laura’s death left Mary bereft. She wrote bleakly to her mother:

We had so counted on living … our lives together … at least I feel how much I had counted on it … & bringing up our babies & helping one another … all the future was mixed up with her; for she twined into everyone’s joys & sorrows … it seems beastly being allowed to live when other people … the best & most needed people are not.

In her will Laura left Mary a Chippendale cradle, and a crescent necklace that was a wedding present from Arthur to Laura. ‘She must wear it because 2 of her dear friends are in it, as it were,’ Laura directed. It was presumably a public benediction intended to scour out any remaining hint of scandal.

In fact, Laura’s death – or perhaps her final letter to Arthur – temporarily drove a wedge between the two. The day after Laura’s funeral Arthur visited Mary at the Elchos’ new house. Alone in the half-finished drawing room he attacked her for being ‘hard’ and failing to give him the ‘comfort’ he sought. He did not explain what that ‘comfort’ was. Probably Balfour, unmoored by Laura’s death, did not know himself. Mary, as so often in moments of extreme emotional turmoil, was tongue-tied. After Arthur had left, she spent a sleepless night poring over her feelings. The next day she wrote to apologize for her inability to lessen the ‘awful blank’ left by Laura’s death. ‘If you could really know my thoughts “hard” would be the very very last word you could apply … I would do anything for you … you must forgive me.’

In mourning, Laura’s friends and family withdrew from Society for the remainder of the Season. The Gang all later believed their particular closeness had been fostered by this intense period in the sombre late spring of 1886. In the summer, Margot and the Ribblesdales joined the Elchos quietly at Felixstowe, and later visited Stanway with George Curzon, Evan Charteris and Arthur.

Mary’s engagements throughout the autumn were predominantly with the Gang. In October, the Elchos were at the Tennants’ Glen with Arthur, the Ribblesdales, Godfrey Webb and George Curzon. In November, they entertained at Stanway those same people, minus Webb, but plus Violet Manners, wife of John Manners, the future Duke of Rutland, Lucy Graham Smith (another Tennant sister), Doll Liddell and Earl and Countess de Grey. Ten days later they were at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, home of Lord and Lady Brownlow, with the Brownlows’ nephew and heir Harry Cust, the Brodricks, the Pembrokes and Arthur. In December, they were at Clouds, with George Wyndham, the Ribblesdales, Arthur, the Pembrokes and Margot; in January, at Wilton with Sir Jack and Lady Horner (the latter, Frances Graham, was Mary’s childhood friend) and Harry Cust.

Returning to Society’s ‘dreary ocean’, the Gang had found how much they preferred their company to that of anyone else.

Society frowned upon cliquishness. It was considered somehow improper. More unusual in the autumn of 1886 was that a group containing Liberals and Conservatives was meeting at all. Gladstone’s determination to press on with Home Rule had torn his party, and Society, apart. In June, his Home Rule Bill was defeated by the Conservatives, allied with ninety erstwhile Liberals, an uneasy combination of Radicals led by Joseph Chamberlain, the charismatic, opportunistic ex-Mayor of Birmingham, and Lord Hartington’s Whig grandees. The defectors became known, in Lord Randolph Churchill’s phrase, as Liberal Unionists, the allied forces as Unionists. As Wilde had Lady Bracknell explain, Liberal Unionists now ‘count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate.’

The schism over Home Rule paved the way for almost twenty years of Conservative hegemony. The Whig defection rendered the Unionists almost impeccably the party of the aristocracy, with an unassailable majority in the Lords. It allowed the Radical element of the Liberal party (those that remained) formerly at the fringes, tempered by the Whigs, to move to the mainstream.

It was to give grist to the Lords’ argument that their role was to prevent ‘hasty and foolish’ legislation by a hotheaded Commons. In the short term, it split Society. At Grosvenor Square, home of the devoutly Liberal Tennants, Margot was sent from the table in disgrace for declaring at dinner that she thought Gladstone had erred in his judgement (the unrepentant Margot was unruffled: when the Bart came to bring her back to the table, he found his youngest daughter swinging her legs on the billiard table enjoying one of his cigars).

By the autumn Unionists and Liberals no longer met.

Only the Gang refused ‘to sacrifice private friendship to public politics’.

In Margot’s grand recollections, ‘at our house … and those of the Souls, everyone met. Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Asquith, Morley, Chamberlain, Balfour, Rosebery, Salisbury, Hartington, Harcourt and, I might add, jockeys, actors, the Prince of Wales and every ambassador in London’. Margot thought it ‘made London the centre of the most interesting society in the world and gave men of different tempers and opposite beliefs an opportunity of discussing them without heat and without reporters’.

In later years the Souls looked back proudly on their influence as a cross-party group containing some of the country’s brightest political hopes. They were buoyantly confident of the abilities of their men: Margot recounted an afternoon spent by Souls women discussing which of George Curzon, George Wyndham or Harry Cust would become Prime Minister.

Politics was the warp and weft of the Souls’ daily lives. But they were more than that: a ‘fascinating, aristocratic, intellectual coterie’,

a group with a ‘special charm’.

‘I think they sent us all back to reading more than we otherwise would have done, and this was an excellent thing for us,’ said Daisy, Countess of Warwick, one of the Prince of Wales’s Marlborough House Set.

Others mocked them for being self-absorbed, cliquey and pretentious. Those who did not spend all their time on the hunting field found them intellectually insubstantial. ‘They read the Bible & they read the Morte d’Arthur in the same spirit,’ said Wilfrid Blunt.

In November 1886, Mary sat for a chalk and crayon portrait by Edward Poynter. Hugo, for unknown reasons, had resisted the idea, and Mary found the sittings a ‘nuisance’.

In the portrait, Mary, wistfully pensive, leans back on a chaise, gazing into the distance. She is surrounded by aestheticism’s accoutrements: a japonaiserie screen; blue and white ceramic vases. Her hair is fashionably shirred; her waist, in her plain mustard-yellow gown, tiny (the envy of her friends, she said proudly). One hand loosely holds a sketchbook, another book lies unopened before her. She looks deep in thought: a beauty with greater things on her mind. The features of a child are still there in her face, but her languid ease suggests someone increasingly comfortable with her place in the world.

Poynter captured many elements of a typical Souls woman in this portrait. He reflected her style of clothing – Souls women did not, by and large, indulge in feathers and furs but dressed ‘with a kind of aesthetic smartness all their own’, said Lady Tweedsmuir, wife of the author John Buchan.

Arthur was quite alarmed when Mary proposed having a gown made by Worth, the grand Parisian couturier of the day, commenting that he did not expect to recognize her in such finery.

Poynter also alluded to her intellectual, artistic bent (as a corollary, the tables of Souls hostesses were comparatively frugal by the standards of their time and class. Conversation, rather than rich food, sustained their guests,