Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

Lutyens likened it to a rendition of ‘God Save the King’ sung flat.

As a newlywed, Mary dreaded the time when Hugo would succeed to the Wemyss title, requiring her to relocate to the north.

Gosford was enough to induce homesickness in anyone. Just days after they arrived, Hugo went rabbit shooting, leaving his new wife alone in the bosom of his family. He had accepted the invitation before his engagement, and claimed he could not in good conscience cancel. It was an early indication of his ability to costume selfishness as honour. In Hugo’s absence, Mary attended Aberlady Church with the family, went for long solitary walks and wrote endless letters to her husband. Evan Charteris, on finding her at her writing desk once again, marvelled teasingly that she had anything further to say. Annie Wemyss visited her in her bedroom before dinner and in her own stiff way ‘thimpashized’ with her doleful daughter-in-law. Nonetheless Mary felt marooned in a strange place and wondered what she was doing there. ‘You must come back soon … the very first instant you can … it is too horrid – & … dreary & dismal … everything is rainy & black & miserable & Mogs feels very sad,’ she told Hugo.

Hugo’s sympathetic replies showed no sign that he intended to change his plans.

At dinner the Wemysses lectured Mary upon the dangers of separation in marriage. Annie Wemyss noted proudly that she and Lord Wemyss had barely spent a day apart. Already, the Elchos seemed to have exceeded their tally, and Mary’s solitude forced her into contemplation. ‘I think now that Hugo & I shall always love being together by ourselves better than anything else … [but] the habit of living together as one cannot be acquired in a minute any more than any other habit … the wedding day is but the beginning of the marriage not the “fait accompli”,’ she told her mother. She had taken as her mantra ‘I bide my time’. With that she could ‘remove Mountains!’

But Mary’s brave words rang hollow. She was beginning to realize that moulding Hugo into the husband she wanted might be even more difficult than she had anticipated.

A few weeks later the Elchos returned to London. Hugo had taken a small house near his parents at 12 North Audley Street, off Grosvenor Square. The Elchos stayed at Belgrave Square while waiting for works on the rented house to be completed.

Both their mothers warned Mary about the dangers of city life, full of distractions to drive an emotional wedge between a young husband and wife. Once installed in North Audley Street, the Elchos made a good fist at domesticity. Sometimes they dined alone. Over champagne, Hugo practised the speeches he intended to make the next day in the Commons, speeches they both hoped would gain the attention of the party leadership and raise him out of the backbenches in due course. On other evenings Hugo read poetry to Mary as they sat by the fire.

Yet far more frequently Mary’s diary recorded evenings spent in the company of others. In her journal the companions of her youth, cousins and Wiltshire neighbours, fall away. Instead she went with her sisters-in-law Evelyn de Vesci and Hilda Brodrick to watch the debates from the Ladies’ Gallery in the Commons, or spent evenings at the ‘New Club’ (the New University Club on St James’s Street) drinking champagne and ‘getting lively’ with Arthur Balfour, Hugo and Evan Charteris as they debated that day’s point of interest with dazzling lightness and speed. With Hugo, Laura Tennant and Alfred Lyttelton, Mary passed evenings at the bachelor lodgings of Godfrey Webb where the company reclined in armchairs, played the piano and indulged in ‘nice long talk’.

Webb was somewhat older, and had originally been a friend of Percy and Madeline’s. A clerk in the House of Lords, and celebrated wit and raconteur, ‘Webber’ was described by some of the group as their court jester.

That group, of which Arthur was the undisputed king, began to refer to itself as ‘the Gang’. In a few years its members would become ‘the Souls’.

Marriage had established the direction of Mary’s social circle. After a spat about flirtations in 1887, Hugo implied as much, telling Mary that ‘me almost wishes as a punishment – though not quite! That you were now playing the part of Lady Airlie [David Ogilvy had since become Earl of Airlie] – in some provincial garrison town – jealously guarded by Othello Ogles – no Migs – no Barkin [Arthur Balfour] – NO Tommie [Ribblesdale] – NO Stanywan [Stanway] – only Ernests [babies] – soldiers wives – & tea parties of 10th Hussar Sols – with Othello Ogles pouring out the tea.’

Hugo’s conjecture was remarkably accurate in describing the life of Ogilvy’s actual wife Mabell Airlie at that time. Yet a comment by Mary in those early days suggests that the frenetic socializing for which she became notorious was partly the result of her husband’s response to married life rather than her own. Two years into their marriage, Mary counted to Hugo the number of occasions that the Elchos had been ‘quite alone’ in the countryside, without the array of hangers-on required to keep him amused. It was just twice: the time in Gober, ‘when you were stalking all day & one week at Whitsuntide at Stanway when I felt very ill – & yet you pretend to believe we are a domestic couple …’.

In the spring of 1884, before the Elchos moved into North Audley Street, Mary had a miscarriage. She was put to bed at Belgrave Square and a doctor summoned. With fear of infections and haemorrhaging, miscarriage was considered more dangerous than childbirth, but Dr Cumberbatch said Mary’s condition gave him no cause for concern. ‘I suppose I have gone about it methodically in an easy going manner … I am as jolly as a sandgirl, or rather matron, or would be matron!’ Mary reassured her mother, who had stayed in London to be near Mary for as long as she could until the stream of telegrams from Percy, left with a houseful of guests at Wilbury, grew too irate to ignore. In a quiet room, cared for by a nurse, Mary rested on a chaise longue and knitted, whiling away the days until she was allowed back into the world. Hugo drifted in and out in between stints at the Commons. She was visited by friends – Lily Paulet and Emmie Bourke (a cousin of sorts whose husband Edward was the brother of Mary’s late uncle Lord Mayo) – and her sisters-in-law, who recounted their own experiences of childbearing and miscarriage. Eventually the shows of blood decreased. ‘Betsey … from [her] kind of light out of door attire is about to put on tippet and depart,’ Mary told her mother, and she was allowed to re-enter the world.

As Mary did so, she was unclear whether she was pregnant or not. Dr Cumberbatch, perplexed by the non-appearance of ‘a 3 months ovum’, confessed he could not tell what exactly had happened. Perhaps Mary had had a phantom pregnancy; perhaps she was still pregnant; perhaps the foetus would come away at Mary’s next monthly period. If her period did not appear, ‘I shan’t know whether I have picked up old threads or started afresh! It’s very funny,’ said Mary, resolutely bright-faced, affecting nonchalance.

Madeline Wyndham was terrified that Mary might produce a child with some kind of ‘omission’: a living judgement upon the Wyndham blood and breeding. Such haziness about childbirth matters was far from uncommon. Twenty years later Mananai recounted to Madeline the story of an unfortunate girl who was told that she was to give birth in July and found herself still pregnant in September.

In Mary’s case, ‘Betsey’ did not reappear. She began to feel sick and ‘squeamish’. She supposed that she was either still pregnant or pregnant again.

That summer, Mary made her first visit to Stanway, the Gloucestershire house that was her wedding present from Lord Wemyss. Stanway, where the family still lives, is a magical place – a ramshackle sixteenth-century house of honey-coloured stone shouldering on to a churchyard hidden away along an alley of pleached trees. The air seems thicker and stiller there: part of the house was originally a monastery, and a sense of this seclusion remains. The Elchos arrived on 31 July 1884, met at the station by a coachman, pony-chaise and black horse all seemingly as ancient as each other. They emerged from the leafy lanes to find Stanway glowing in the evening sun, with the bells of the tiny church that stood next door pealing in celebration. ‘[A] sort of heavenly feeling comes over one and laps one about,’ Mary told her mother of this arrival, the moment that she fell in love with the house that would be her home for the rest of her life.

That evening the Elchos walked up to the Pyramid, a monument at the top of a gentle hill overlooking the house that was to become the site of many a tryst and midnight escapade. Half a century later Mary could still remember the sickeningly stuffy smell of the brand-new blankets and the next day’s breakfast of trout fried in oatmeal made by the housekeeper.

When the Elchos arrived, the house had lain near-abandoned for half a century, kept barely habitable by a skeleton staff of ancient retainers for the rare occasions that the Wemysses used it as a shooting lodge on a foray south. Draughts whistled through cracks in the walls, cold flooded in through the latticed windowpanes. Armies of rats and cockroaches scuttled across bare floorboards, and as dusk fell bats swooped through shadowy rooms. Mary was undaunted by the state of the house and full of enthusiasm for transforming it. On pieces of rough paper she sketched out floorplans for her family, explaining the house’s peculiar layout. Stanway had almost no passages: most of the rooms led on from one another and it could only sleep sixteen at a pinch – remarkably small in the context of most houses the Wyndhams visited. Mary would continually struggle with this as a hostess.

Mary’s first guests – Percy, Fräulein, Mananai and Pamela – arrived on 3 August to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. Fräulein had made ‘a cake with big raisins in it’, and Mary had bought crackers, eagerly anticipating ‘a feast & revel’ with her family. Madeline Wyndham, George and Guy arrived a few days later, and work began on transforming the house. As gooseberries gently ripened in the overgrown gardens, Madeline and her daughters picked their way through dusty attics hunting for treasures. They found Chippendale chairs which they brought down to replace the early Victorian plush-and-gilt furniture already in situ; and they patched together lengths of embroidered materials so that they could be hung as curtains in Mary’s sitting room at the end of the house that looked up to the Monument. Great pieces of furniture were trundled from room to room, old rugs laid out across floorboards.

A month later, while staying at the Wemysses’ gloomy townhouse in Edinburgh, with the tick-tock of the eerie mechanical clock echoing through the rooms, Mary reported to Madeline Wyndham that ‘Earnest’ ‘is alive and kicking!’ Despite a riot of ailments (‘rheumatic pains in back & tummy … flatulence, ript livers’, insomnia and indigestion),

she finally relaxed. Madeline was at Wilbury, where George was waxing and waning yellow from an attack of jaundice. She seized a moment to write to her daughter before dashing into the village to ‘beg borrow or steal’ a hollyhock so that Val Prinsep, seized by the urge, could paint it.

She sent Mary strict instructions not to travel unless she felt up to it, for ‘sometimes indigestion gets such possession of one during the last months that one is only fit for home [where] … you can give yourself up to a tea gown & your sofa’.

Mary did not listen. Already she carried everywhere her ‘nest egg’ – a wicker hand basket of unanswered letters, always full to overflowing, despite several hours spent each morning trying to reduce the Sisyphean pile. In December 1884, when she was almost to term, she hosted her first house party for ‘the Gang’ at Stanway, their number including Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb, St John and Hilda Brodrick and Laura Tennant. It was a roaring success. Laura Tennant wrote, ‘it’s such fun here … we quarrel about everything – we talk up to the top of our bent – we grow hyper-sentimental and blow blue bubbles into the stars & Hugo Ld Elcho comes down upon them with jeers & in pumps & a smoking suit. We play games & the piano – we none of us open a book or write a letter – we scribble & scrawl & invent words & reasonless rhymes.’

The guests ‘departed on the verge of tears!’, Mary told Percy with pride.

Her diary came alive. ‘Talk talk the whole time,’ she recorded, scribbling down in detail all the games they played.

Six months later the Elchos hosted another party. ‘Remember darling you are staying with very nice people. Please be careful and do not do anything to shock or annoy them,’ Charty Ribblesdale warned her younger sister, Margot Tennant. ‘At that moment’, Mary recalled, ‘Margot was walking on the church wall, pursuing Willie Grenfell with a large sponge – and astounding Hugo by her habit of talking in the passage or in her friends’ bedrooms till all hours of the night or morning.’

It was, in the collective memory, the first house party of the Souls.

Mary at Stanway, in her delight, had found her métier.

FIVE (#ulink_ff2d3908-e3a5-5a58-819e-37e31a25b77c)

The Gang (#ulink_ff2d3908-e3a5-5a58-819e-37e31a25b77c)

A heavily pregnant Mary spent Christmas 1884 at Wilbury. She had planned to give birth in January, in London, but Hugo Richard Francis Charteris (later known as ‘Ego’ from his childish attempts to pronounce his name) appeared early, and was born at Wilbury on 28 December.

Thirteen-year-old Pamela was enthralled at having a ‘real live baby in the house’,

Madeline Wyndham almost sick with relief that the child was healthy. Hugo sat by Mary’s side in her old bedroom as she recovered, allowing her to dictate her letters and diary to him until she was strong enough to wield a pencil herself.

Ego was born one day before Gladstone’s seventy-fifth birthday. The GOM’s ministry was still bedevilled by foreign policy problems. By 1884, the trouble-spot had shifted to the Sudan, where British troops had become caught up in an attempt to suppress a revolt against Egyptian rule. For almost a year, the small, fearsome General Gordon, whose piercing blue eyes burned with Christian zeal, had been besieged in Khartoum by a mysterious fanatic known as the Mahdi who had been conducting the rebellion since 1881. In fact, it was entirely Gordon’s fault he was besieged. He had been sent out to effect a British withdrawal from the Sudan,

but on arrival he had announced his intention to ‘smash up the Mahdi’ and dug his heels in at Khartoum. Such was the danger of having an uncontrollable ‘man on the spot’, who by maverick actions could influence government policy. In the autumn of 1884, caving in to intolerable public pressure (and to an angry Queen at Windsor), Gladstone authorized relief troops to be dispatched to the Sudan. To his intense disappointment, George Wyndham, who had joined the Coldstream Guards on leaving Eton, narrowly missed out on the opportunity to form part of the rescue mission. Wilfrid Blunt, who was still keen to return to Egypt, also wanted to become involved. On Christmas Eve he addressed the Executive of the International Arbitration and Peace Association, proposing to lead a ‘friendly mission’ to intervene with the Mahdi on Gordon’s behalf.

From his home at Hawarden, a weary Gladstone acknowledged the offer, and promised to discuss the matter with Earl Granville, the Liberal party’s Leader in the Lords.

Blunt’s offer was quietly let drop.

Tucked up in bed at Wilbury, and just days into motherhood, Mary must have barely registered these matters. Her diary records only an uncharacteristic interest in food: ‘pheasant and baked apples for luncheon’, she noted.

By convention, new mothers spent a month ‘lying in’ after the birth. After a spell of bed-rest, and under nurse’s instructions, they gradually made ‘all the steps back into Life! Such as walking, [putting on] stays [corsets] & sitting on the Commode!’, as Mary explained.

After that, they were ‘churched’ with a religious blessing and re-entered society.

Mary was soon bored by lying in, and frustrated by her difficulty in breast-feeding Ego, a fractious infant. As quickly as she could, she threw herself back into the social whirl. Madeline Wyndham chided her daughter for ‘racketing around’ at the expense of her health and her child. ‘The rule is that one cannot possibly live in the same way for 2 or even 3 months after “The Crisis” as one did before.’ But Mary did not listen, and before long her health gave out. In February 1885, Madeline Wyndham and Annie Wemyss joined forces, compelling a ‘pale and wasting’ Mary to Gosford for ‘a nice quiet bit by the sea’ with nothing to amuse her except long walks and her child – ‘who is a most important personage’, Madeline reminded her.

Mary never really liked being by herself: ‘when I’m alone my spirits go down! Down!’ she said,

and she found Gosford as depressing as always. ‘I am very low but that’s not strange!’ she told her mother.

In fact she was miserable, bursting into tears every time she heard Ego cry. On the advice of her maternity nurse, Mrs Sayers, she began bottle-feeding him, such feeding newly in vogue, as legislation curbing the adulteration of foodstuffs made cow’s milk safer than before. Madeline Wyndham, fiercely opposed to the novel practice, immediately besieged her daughter with prophecies of doom: too much milk, she said, might ‘fly to ones head & make one vy odd for a time! Go to one’s leg & lay one up with what is called a milk leg.’

In her anxiety Madeline became vitriolic, and, though her anger was mostly reserved for the ‘wicked’ Mrs Sayers for proposing this course, Mary feared she was a bad mother and that her son was not developing as he should. Hugo had remained in London. What news he did deliver was dismal: Stanway’s housekeeper had dropped dead from diabetes. Mary’s initial shock and sympathy were swiftly replaced by exhaustion and alarm as she wondered how she would possibly find a suitable replacement.

The news in the wider world was just as poor. The relief troops arrived at Khartoum in January 1885 four days too late. The city had fallen. Gordon’s head was impaled upon a stick under a sky as blazing as his own eyes. The news was telegraphed back to London. In the press, the GOM of the Midlothian Campaign became the MOG: ‘Murderer of Gordon’. In February it was announced that a further dispatch of troops would effect the original evacuation plan. Among these troops were Hugo’s jubilant brother Alan and George Wyndham, ‘in the 7th Heaven of delight’ at the prospect of a good old rout. ‘It’s like a death in ones [sic] heart,’ said Madeline as she broke the news to Mary.

All her forebodings, poured out to Mary in letter after anguished letter, charged towards one impossible truth: George was departing to his death. Percy, who thought this intervention as wrong as all Britain’s actions in Egypt thus far, was scarcely more optimistic. In a letter written on the eve of George’s departure he assured him that he did not think ‘for a moment your most precious life is thrown away’ if his son should die in combat.

At Gosford, Mary suffered a violent bilious attack. Madeline thought it was a direct response to her ‘grief’ at the news.