Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

Mary had never properly met Hugo’s parents. They were introduced the next day at tea at their Mayfair house, 23 St James’s Street. Annie Wemyss took to Mary ‘immensely’, deeming her ‘so natural, so true, so good, & so free from affectation, fastness’. ‘[This] is such a good thing,’ wrote a mutual acquaintance to Percy, ‘for as we know, she [Annie Wemyss] does not take always spontaneously to people. I confess I felt rather nervous about it …’

Madeline Wyndham was delighted. ‘She will bring you all nearer together,’ she told Hugo, as though her daughter were a sort of familial Elastoplast.

Mary’s precipitation from the Wyndhams’ loving bosom into the Wemysses’ chilly embrace concerned many of the Wyndhams’ friends. ‘Condolences’ upon the loss of a daughter to marriage were conventional enough, as were the ‘icy congratulations’ that Mary received from Hugo’s desultory rivals.

But many of the letters of congratulations sent to Belgrave Square were somewhat equivocal, and could not conceal a certain bemusement at her choice.

Rediscovering them in middle age, Mary thought it obvious that most of her relations had thought Hugo was not quite good enough.

Mary did not particularly enjoy her engagement: ‘six weeks of racket’

consisting of all the things she most disliked: endless trips ‘drudging around the shops’ after her mother, and being prodded and poked by crowds of people ‘swarming about the house about bothering clothes’.

Hugo teased Mary about the new skills she was acquiring in preparation for life as a matron running a household: ‘I wonder what you are doing … learning how many apples go to a Pie, or what butter costs at ¾ a pound … or perhaps you have been philosophizing over the degeneracy of modern linen … & regretting the halcyon days of muslins.’

Both lovers expressed the sentiments expected of them. The day after their engagement, Mary told Hugo she had passed a sleepless night, contemplating the great change before her.

In the following days she professed herself ‘completely happy!’ with her ‘darling Hoggolindo … angel-Hoggie’. ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,’ she told ‘his Lordship Hogge the Good’, quoting her favourite lines from Romeo and Juliet. Hugo had become the very model of young Victorian manhood, swearing to ‘to pray, pray with your photo before me … to become more deserving of my happiness, to be drawn out of my stupid narrow self to something higher, better, nearer what you are’.

But, all too soon, Hugo was back to his old habits, and doubts had surfaced in Mary’s mind.

Barely a fortnight into her engagement, Mary had to intervene with the Wemysses on Hugo’s behalf. Hugo had found his gambling poison, the Stock Exchange, and on his first flutter lost £700, the equivalent of over £57,000 today. In what would become a wearily familiar exchange, Mary persuaded the Wemysses not to tie up Hugo’s inheritance in a trust, but she was worried about their future before they had even embarked on it.

Nor did Hugo appear to think his engagement required him to stop his constant flirting. ‘I don’t care how much “nonsense” you talk to everybody or anybody at the Fisheries tonight for I do feel that you love me truly as I do you from the bottom of my heart,’ Mary told Hugo in mid-July, but her stout avowals ring hollow.

Around this time – perhaps precipitated by the gambling incident – Mary tried to call off the engagement. Her formal, stilted letter to ‘Lord Elcho’ reads like that of a slightly less tactful Elizabeth Bennet who has accidently accepted Mr Collins. She was at home in Belgrave Square, dinner was ready downstairs and doubtless her father was growing increasingly impatient, but, she declared,

I must write this at once … speak straight out & tell you that I have hour by hour become more forcibly, painfully & unmistakeably [sic] convinced that when I accepted you a fortnight ago I did not rightly understand my own mind … [I am] perfectly certain [that] I do not love & respect you as I feel I should … I feel it my duty my positive & absolute duty to break off our proposed marriage.

As soon as Mary had forced those words out, her relief is palpable: her tone becomes free and easy and her pen dashes across the page in her usual untidy manner:

I hope you will not mind much! Tho’ yr pride may be shocked at first – I feel assured that you will so feel it to be all for the best for both of us & I trust you will think of me kindly as your true friend MW p.s. Please excuse my untidiness! I feel our marriage would lead to endless misery to both of us as it is. N.B. I am sure we shall always be very good friends. I know you will not take it to heart.

The engagement was not broken. By the next day, Mary was writing to Hugo as though they were reconciled, but her tone remains sober and the pet-names are nowhere to be seen. Whether it was an attempt to shock Hugo into good behaviour or whether it was cold feet (thirty years later George Wyndham reminded Mary how all the siblings had ‘palpitated’ over their marriages – although George and his wife would also prove incompatible),

it was far too late for that. The Wyndhams’ indulgence did not extend to engagements broken for no good reason. It would have caused a scandal unthinkable for Madeline Wyndham, and while Percy gave his children a degree of independence, he held them consequently responsible for their actions. ‘Her mother had pushed her [Mary] into marrying L[or]d Elcho – so one used to be told at least,’ said Maud Wyndham, daughter of the Leconfields, and Mary’s first cousin, sixty years later.

Arrangements proceeded as normal: the wedding presents arrived at Belgrave Square and, as customary, were displayed for inspection by family, friends and household (although some, such as Stanway, the Gloucestershire manor house given by Lord Wemyss to the newlyweds, were not capable of display). Mary began work on hundreds of thank-you letters: ‘I have thanked eight presents (long elaborate letters) & August is two hours old!’ she complained to Hugo.

Last-minute adjustments were made to Mananai’s and Pamela’s bridesmaid dresses and Mary’s trousseau was packed in tissue paper in preparation for her honeymoon. Early on the morning of their wedding day, 10 August 1883, ‘the dawn of the day which I hope through all our lives we shall look upon as a blessed anniversary’, Hugo wrote to Mary anticipating their meeting in St Peter’s Church in Eaton Square later that day: ‘Darling God give you strength to go through it all – & make me a good Hogs worthy of the little angel Mogs … Goodbye my darling soon to be mine only and really.’ He sketched for Mary a cartoon: a small round Mary (not entirely representative, it must be said, since Mary was tall and slender) with a tall thin bridegroom by her side shouting ‘hurrah!’

Several hours later, as reported by The Times, Mary, dressed in white and decked with orange blossom, walked down the aisle of St Peter’s, past relations, friends and royalty in the form of Princess Christian, towards ‘Lord Elcho M.P.’, and became his wife.

As the assembled masses waited in the cool church for Mary to make her entrance on Percy’s arm, it was Madeline Wyndham’s nerves that were most frayed. ‘It was an awful bit that in the Church before you came – it felt so long,’ Madeline told Mary later, heady with relief that all had gone as planned. ‘The organ played such a tune … I could have screamed to the man, to stop his twiddles … & then, like hot & cold or magic music, as you drew near he played louder & louder!’

Normally such a thing would have given Mary and her mother the giggles: this time it only gave Madeline a feeling of ‘teeth on edge’.

The service was followed by a short reception at Belgrave Square. At a quarter past four, the bride and groom departed: first for Easton Lodge in Essex, lent to them by Lord and Lady Brooke, and then to Gober, in the Scottish Highlands, where Hugo was to go stalking. The Wyndhams settled in for a quiet evening at Belgrave Square. Madeline and her sisters, Julia and Lucy Campbell, alternately laughed and cried over the events of the day. Then George and Guy Wyndham went to a play. The rest of the family dined with Fräulein. After dinner, as Mananai sat and pulled apart Mary’s bouquet in order to make nosegays for Mary’s friends as keepsakes, her mother was reminded of her eldest daughter: ‘sitting there with a melancholy face picking and pulling at all the lovely flowers!’

The comparison did not bode well given that all Mary’s bouquets and buttonholes had been to do with Hugo.

FOUR (#ulink_a8814ea3-4f05-5ff2-9aed-7c04bf6a3bec)

Honeymoon (#ulink_a8814ea3-4f05-5ff2-9aed-7c04bf6a3bec)

Three years later, when the sheen of marriage had long started to fade, Mary reproved Hugo for spending their honeymoon stalking. At the time, she had seemed happy enough to yomp across the moors after Hugo, and she revelled in a sense of recklessness as the Elchos drank champagne and played piquet by night. The Wyndham family was by now summering in Hyères, and Madeline Wyndham was missing her eldest daughter desperately (‘I cannot get reconciled to being without you,’ she told Mary some two years after her marriage),

but Mary’s letters to her family glowed with delight in her marital state. One evening, she told Guy conspiratorially, the Elchos had got so ‘drunk’ on champagne ‘to cheer our spirits’ after Hugo failed to bag a stag that Hugo fell over.

At this liminal honeymoon stage Mary had been freed from childhood’s bonds without yet assuming matronly cares.

The little cartoons the Elchos sent one another in their marriage’s early years, and coy references to ‘lonely little cots’ when they were apart, suggest that sexually the union was a success. Not for the Elchos the horror stories of the Ruskins, whose marriage was never consummated, or of the young scientist Marie Stopes, who only realized her abusive husband was impotent after six months of study in the British Library.

Madeline and her daughters were extremely frank with each other about all health matters, microscopically recounting any oddities in relation to ‘Lady Betsey’, their term for their menstrual cycle. Mary was enthusiastically descriptive about gynaecological matters. It seems likely that Madeline gave all her daughters some kind of warning about what a wedding night entailed. What Mary told her mother after the event must remain a mystery. Madeline Wyndham kept ‘letter books’ containing her children’s correspondence over the course of their lives. On pasting in Mary’s first letter to her following her wedding, Madeline redacted it, so that it tells us only that Mary had ‘a headache’, before the next three lines are scrubbed out vigorously with black pen.

Romance was in the air at Gober. As Mary and Hugo ate their dinner by firelight, backstage in the little hut Hugo’s valet Williams seduced Mary’s maid Faivre. Prophylactics, not uncommon in the city, were hardly readily available in the Highland wilds; perhaps Faivre was also one of many unversed women who did not know how babies were made. Faivre consequently found herself unmarried and pregnant – ‘ruined’, as Mary put it.

It was a highly unfortunate position for any young woman, an untenable one for a lady’s maid.

In most cases, Faivre would have found herself immediately dismissed without a reference. When the Elchos’ friend George Curzon found out that a housemaid in his employ had been seduced by a footman, he ‘put the little slut out into the street’ without a qualm. His contemporaries considered his attitude unremarkable.

Mary responded quite differently. With the help of Madeline and Percy she helped Faivre find lodging with a tolerant North London landlady; assisted her financially from her own pin money (Hugo’s valet had long since scarpered); and visited Faivre once the child, a little boy, was born in the spring of 1884.

Most of Mary’s friends thought her admirably liberal attitude towards staff overly indulgent. Servant troubles became a constant footnote to her daily life. Her anxiety never to hurt anyone’s feelings did not serve her well as an employer.

On 14 August 1883, a few days after the Elchos had arrived at Gober, Hugo wrote a private letter to Percy. The subject was Mary’s dowry. Hugo told Percy that he had proposed ‘with no idea what Mary was to have or whether she was to have any[thing] at all’, as unconvincing a statement as the rest of his letter was disingenuous.

Mary’s marriage settlement had been negotiated in the weeks between the engagement and the marriage by Percy on the one hand and Hugo’s solicitor, Mr Jamieson, on the other, as was the convention.

Mary received £15,000 (roughly £1.25 million today), the interest on which would produce an annual income of £500.

Hugo had thought that £100 or more of this £500 would be given to him for his own use. Now conversations with Mr Jamieson had made it clear that Percy intended the whole for Mary’s use as pin money.

Hugo’s frantic letter to Percy argued that Mary should not have an allowance disproportionate to the Elchos’ income, lest she learn bad spending habits. His reasoning, while in line with contemporary attitudes, was both patronizing and misleading. His concern was not that Mary’s spending habits should be curbed but that his own should be supported. Mary was innately frugal, and remained so all her life. She spent almost no money on clothes (far too little, her friends complained). Her eldest daughter never remembered her buying even a trinket or a bottle of scent for herself. She invariably travelled third class. Hugo, who travelled in first, and liked expensive cigars, was not otherwise extravagant in his living habits, but his gambling habit on the London Stock Exchange was improvident. ‘As far as his children could make out all he wanted money for was to have plenty of it to lose!’ wrote his eldest daughter Cynthia.

Hugo’s haste to have this issue determined while on honeymoon suggests he was in yet another financial scrape. From his sheepish tone, even he realized that his behaviour was grasping. Percy agreed that Mary should have only £350–400 a year as pin money, with the remainder going to the Elchos’ common expenses.

From the occasional sly comment over the years it is clear that Percy knew full well why Hugo was so keen to reduce Mary’s pin money. Mary knew nothing of this until stumbling across this letter years later. ‘Typical’, she scrawled across it in irritation, that on their honeymoon Hugo should have written to her father ‘not on love but Money!’, adding, correctly, that Hugo’s master was ‘Mammon’.

From Gober the Elchos travelled to Gosford, the Wemysses’ family seat just outside Edinburgh. For a century, the family had lived on another property on the estate. Now Lord Wemyss was adding two vast wings on to an Adams-built centre completed, but never lived in, a century before.

During the course of the works, Mary persuaded the builders to let her go up in the crane used for the building. She drew a picture for her mother to illustrate it: a tiny figure swinging high over a bare landscape.

Mary hated Gosford on sight. A chill east wind whipped around the property, which looked out to the glassy grey Firth of Forth. Seagulls wheeled overhead in a ‘complaining chorus’.

In later life she described the rebuilt house as ‘like a large & gilded, dead & empty Cage’.

Her daughter Cynthia echoed her: ‘a great block of stone that seems to me very still-born. It has no living atmosphere.’