Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Leconfield’s death provoked the Wyndhams’ move to Isel from Cockermouth Castle, which now belonged to Henry; and his will made them rich. Percy and Madeline now commissioned Leighton and his architect George Aitchison to decorate Belgrave Square’s entrance hall. The Cymbalists was a magnificent mural painted above the central staircase – five life-sized, classical figures in a dance against a gold background. Above that was Aitchison’s delicate frieze of flowers, foliage and wild birds in pinks, greens, greys and powder blue. Even the most unobservant visitor could see this was an artistic house.

  Shortly after Leconfield’s death, Percy visited his sister Blanche and her husband Lord Mayo in India, where Mayo was Viceroy. (Mayo had previously served as Ireland’s Chief Secretary for almost a decade, and it was Blanche who had introduced Percy to Madeline, when Percy visited them in Ireland.)48 While Percy was abroad, Lady Campbell, in her seventies, was suddenly taken ill. Madeline Wyndham hastened to Ireland with newborn Mananai, Guy and Horsenail, leaving Mary and George, with their governess Mademoiselle Grivel, at Mrs Stanley’s boarding house in Keswick, Cumberland. ‘… I am so sorry that dear Granny is so ill for it must make you so unhappy. George and I will try to be very good indeed so as to make you happy,’ Mary wrote to her mother.49 Lady Campbell died shortly afterwards, and Madeline made her way back to her elder children: ‘so glad I shall be to see you my little darling … you were so good to me when I was so knocked down by hearing such sad news’.50 Almost precisely upon Madeline and Percy’s reuniting, Madeline fell pregnant. Pamela Genevieve Adelaide was born in January 1871, at Belgrave Square like all her siblings.

  The little girls were born into the age of Gladstone. In 1867, Disraeli had pushed Lord Derby’s Tory ministry into ‘the leap in the dark’: the Reform Act that gave the vote to all male householders in the towns, as well as male lodgers who paid rent of £10 a year or more for unfurnished accommodation, almost doubling the electorate. In the boroughs, the hitherto unenfranchised working classes were now in the majority. The debate over the Act was fought with passion on both sides: for most, democracy was a demoniacal prospect signifying mob rule. A series of unruly popular protests organized by the Radical-led Reform League, with hordes brandishing red flags and wearing the cap of liberty marching on Trafalgar Square, did little to dispel these fears. In a notorious incident of July 1866 – just a stone’s throw from Belgrave Square – a mob of 200,000 tore down Hyde Park’s railings when the Government tried to close it to public meetings, overwhelming the police ‘like flies before the waiter’s napkin’.51 Contemporary theorists were concerned that vox populi would become vox diaboli. In The English Constitution Walter Bagehot expressed his fear that ‘both our political parties will bid for the support of the working man … I can conceive of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision and compete for the office of executing it.’52

  The equally bleak predictions by Lord Cranborne, later Marquess of Salisbury – who resigned in protest from Derby’s ministry upon the passing of the Act – seemed confirmed when the electorate returned Gladstone in the 1868 elections, at the head of the first truly Liberal ministry, a disparate band of Radicals of the industrial north, Whig grandees, some still speaking in their eighteenth-century ancestors’ curious drawl, and Dissenters, the non-conformists who wanted to loosen the hold of the established Church. Gladstone immediately announced his God-given mission to ‘pacify Ireland’ (provoked, in part, by the Fenian bombing of Clerkenwell Prison the previous year that had killed twelve civilians and injured forty more)53 and set about disestablishing the Irish Church, while dealing several blows to the hegemony of the British landed classes by introducing competitive exams for the civil service, abolishing army commissions and removing the religious ‘Test’ required for fellows of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities to enable non-Anglicans to hold those posts.

  Percy, like his father before him, was a Tory of the oldest sort, who believed that his class’s God-given duty to govern through wise paternalistic rule not just the tenantry on their estates but the country as a whole was under attack. For Percy, like most Tories, authority was ‘like a sombre fortress, holding down an unpredictable population that might, at any moment, lay siege to it’.54

  In 1867, Percy had commissioned Watts to paint Madeline’s portrait. The portrait took three years to complete, partly because painter and sitter, kindred artistic souls, enjoyed their conversations so much they were reluctant for them to end.55 In a nod to classical portraiture the statuesque Madeline, in her early thirties, gazes down at the viewer from a balustraded terrace. A mass of laurel, signifying nobility and glory, flourishes behind her; in the foreground a vase of magnolias denotes magnificence. Her gown is loose and splashed with sunflowers, proclaiming her allegiance to the world of the Pre-Raphaelites; the gaze from hooded eyes under swooping dark brows direct and forthright. The portrait, hung in Belgrave Square’s drawing room, made its first public appearance – to quite a splash – some seven years later, on the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, a private venture of the Wyndhams’ friends Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay on London’s New Bond Street. It caught the eye of Henry James, recently arrived in England, reviewing the exhibition for the Galaxy. He told his readers of his companion’s comment: ‘It is what they call a “sumptuous” picture … That is, the lady looks as if she had thirty thousand a year.’ ‘It is true that she does,’ said James, praising nonetheless ‘the very handsome person whom the painter has depicted … dressed in a fashion which will never be wearisome; a simple yet splendid robe, in the taste of no particular period – of all periods’.56

  James had seen that the aristocrat effortlessly superseded the artist. And, although it was kept well hidden beneath her friendships with artists, her undoubted talent and her air of vague, bohemian warmth, Madeline Wyndham was acutely aware of social gradations. ‘You and Papa are rather stupid about knowing who people are!!’ she told Mary, half jokingly, half in frustration as she discussed the ‘belongings’ of fellow guests at a house party – by which she meant their connections and titles.57 She assiduously cultivated the boring Princess Christian as a friend. ‘She is a humbug,’ declared the middle-class Philip Burne-Jones (son of Edward and Georgiana), finding that Madeline’s warmth towards him as a family friend cooled rapidly when he made plain his hope that he could court Mary, with whom he had been in love since childhood.58

  It has been said that Madeline, with her artful eye, the creator of Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house into which the Wyndhams moved in 1885, is the model for Mrs Gereth in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, the story of a jewel-like house created out of the ‘perfect accord and beautiful life together’ of the Gereths: ‘twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a long sunny harvest of taste and curiosity’. Mrs Gereth is an unscrupulous obsessive who tries to manipulate her son into marrying a worthy chatelaine, then sets the house aflame rather than see it pass into the wrong hands. If Madeline Wyndham is the model, there is no clearer indication of the steel within her soul.59

  Extravagantly generous – she kept open table at Belgrave Square, with sometimes forty people unexpectedly sitting down to lunch60 – Madeline never spoke of the sudden change in her fortunes brought about by marriage, only fondly recollecting an Irish childhood in a ‘nest of lovely sisters’ visiting relations in pony and trap.61 Her ambitions for her family were tied up with her anxiety to prove that Percy’s gamble in marrying her had exalted his clan. When her daughters married, she was terrified that one might bear a child with some ‘defect’.62 It is clear that she feared what might be latent in her blood.

  In the early 1870s, Madeline had an affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a handsome poet and Percy’s cousin and close friend who had spent part of his childhood living in a cottage on the Petworth estate. Blunt and his wife Lady Anne spent much of their time travelling in Africa and the Middle East, a
nd bought an Egyptian estate just outside Cairo named Sheykh Obeyd, after the Bedouin saint Obeyd buried in the grounds.63 They spoke vernacular Arabic, and Blunt, a self-professed iconoclast, adopted Bedouin dress even in England.64 At Crabbet Park, Blunt’s Sussex estate, they founded a successful stud breeding Arab horses. The annual sale and garden party was a fixture of the Season: ‘everybody who was anybody in London went in those days to Crabbet for the sale of the Arabs [sic],’ wrote the journalist Katharine Tynan, recalling Janey Morris, Oscar Wilde and Jane Cobden, radical daughter of the reformer Richard Cobden, wandering through the beautiful grounds.65

  The intrepid Arabists: Wilfrid Blunt and Lady Anne Blunt in the late 1870s.

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century Blunt was notorious in political circles as an anti-imperialist troublemaker. Socially he was regarded with equal suspicion as a lothario, capable of seducing any man’s wife. Yet this inveterate womanizer’s diaries, in which he recorded every conquest (albeit sometimes a little embroidered), show him as nothing so much as a perplexed cork buffeted on the waves of strong women’s personalities. With each affair, Blunt made grand plans for a lifelong passion. Almost invariably, his paramours called it off, returning to their husbands enlivened by their brief dalliance.

  Madeline and Wilfrid had known each other for many years when they tipped from friendship into ‘passionate fulfilment’, in Blunt’s words. He had always found Madeline seductive – ‘a tall strong woman, such as are the fashion now; no porcelain figure like the beauties of the last century, nor yet the dull classic marble our fathers loved’66 – and their affair seems in large part provoked by intense mutual physical attraction. Blunt dressed it up as a meeting of two artistic minds. Their piecemeal dalliances – romantic visits to Watts’s studio in London and trysts among Hyères’ olive groves – provided ‘something apart’ from Madeline’s sometimes ‘overpowering’ domestic life.

  Blunt maintained that the affair did not affect Madeline’s love for her husband and children: ‘what she gave to me was not a plunder robbed from any other. Her tenderness was no mere weakness of the heart, but its strength rather, proving its wealth …’.67 Wilfrid rarely saw things clearly, and this was no exception. Among his papers is a photograph of Madeline with Pamela upon her lap. Madeline is in mourning, presumably for her brother-in-law Lord Mayo, the Viceroy, who was assassinated while visiting a penal colony in the Andaman Islands in 1872. She wears an elaborate dark hat that shades her hooded eyes. Her features have been refined with age. She appears leaner and finer than Watts’s voluptuous beauty of three years before, and almost sad. Tousle-haired Pamela sits on her lap, eyes skyward as though she is trying to glimpse her mother’s face even as Madeline grasps her daughter firmly around her stout waist. On the back of this photograph is a note in Madeline’s handwriting: fragmentary, it appears to have been written in a hurry. Wilfrid must not come to look for her until later. ‘I think [Percy] is not happy at finding me not alone he has not said it but I think it … my heart fails me … you have chosen the lowest oh it makes me so sad – I don’t know why my heart is not up to it I have no courage …’68

  In 1873 the Wyndhams rented Château Saint-Pierre, a neo-gothic pile near to Emily and Charley Ellis in Hyères. They settled their children there with nurse, governess and tutor, and left for several months’ travel across France and Italy, sightseeing and buying art. This was the Wyndhams’ longest absence – by far – from their children throughout their childhood. Undoubtedly the trip was intended as a second honeymoon to reunite them. The following year, Percy took the lease of Wilbury Park in Newton Toney, some 10 miles from Salisbury on the Wiltshire Downs. In later life, Madeline wrote her daughters impassioned warnings (scored with underlining and written in her trademark purple ink) about the dangers of drifting from their husbands. It seems she was speaking from personal experience. Wilbury, which provided easy access to London by train from Amesbury, allowing Madeline to maintain her life among the city’s aristocratic art crowd, and offered excellent hunting and shooting and reasonable trout-fishing for Percy, was to arrest that drift.69

  The affair finally ended only in 1875. Madeline asked Wilfrid to return to friendship. ‘What is this prate of friendship?’ wrote Wilfrid furiously in a sonnet, ‘To Juliet’. In his diary, sore-pawed, he attacked Madeline as ‘a pottery goddess … I do not think her beautiful, or wise, or good. Her beauty is a little too refined, her wisdom too fantastic, her goodness too selfish …’70 Trying to forget his fantasies of a life together with her, he dusted himself off and attempted to dismiss the affair: ‘it was all pleasure, of a high sensual kind, heroic in its tenderness and with no afterthought of pain. Its departure caused no unbearable sorrow. Even when it had ended finally as passion I did not grieve for her because I knew she did not grieve for me …’71

  A veil was drawn over the incident. Percy never spoke of it. But between Madeline and Wilfrid there remained some friction. Despite Wilfrid’s surmises, Madeline does not seem to have escaped entirely unscarred. Many years later she advised Pamela that the power ‘not to fret over spilt milk is a great faculty it almost amounts to wisdom’. Years of ‘experience & hard toil’ had taught her to let go of the regret ‘that kills’.72 Madeline did not say what that regret was. One can hazard a guess.

  TWO

  Wilbury

  In the late 1870s, with relations once again on an even keel, the Blunts visited the Wyndhams at Wilbury. As Wilfrid left, he kissed Mary on the cheek: ‘in a cousinly way’.1 Mary blushed. Afterwards, Madeline scolded her with unusual and uncharacteristic vehemence. The incident, notable enough for Mary to remember it twenty years later, suggests that the adolescent knew something of the affair just past. It is also a rare chink in the Wyndham armour, a moment when one of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’2 – in his words – lets slip something suggesting their family life was not so perpetually sunlit as they maintained.

  Percy and Madeline’s devotion to their children, and their disregard for convention, generated intense familial closeness. George spoke of ‘the Wyndham-religion’;3 Mary’s daughter Cynthia explained that ‘Family love was almost a religion with the Wyndhams.’4 A legendary anecdote – familiar to almost all their contemporaries – concerned Percy impatiently shushing his collected dinner guests, hissing, ‘Hush. Hush! George is going to speak!’ as his schoolboy son prepared to give the table his views.5 Ettie Desborough, close friends with Mary and George, described the clan as being bred up with the pride of Plantagenets.6 Their loyalty was fearsome. They would never listen to criticism of their own, far less give it.

  At the time of Wilfrid’s visit to Wilbury, Mary was in her mid-teens, awkward, lanky, childish for her age. She was devoted to her dog Crack, a thirteenth-birthday present, and her pet rat Snowy.7 She adored the caricatures of Dickens and the romances of Sir Walter Scott. She had inherited her mother’s artistic talent, and spent hours making elaborate cards and teasing cartoon sketches for her younger sisters, to whom she was known by a host of nicknames, ‘Black Witch’, ‘Sister Rat’ and ‘Migs’ (or ‘Mogs’) being just a few. She was a devotee of ‘Spression’ – a sort of pidgin English mixed with baby talk that she spoke with her closest friend, Margaret Burne-Jones, given somatic form by cartoons drawn by Edward Burne-Jones for the girls, endearingly shapeless animals that have been described as part pig, part dog, part wombat.8

  An insight into Mary’s character comes from one of her most vivid childhood memories, probably from the summer of 1875, which she spent at Deal Castle – a place she thought ‘must be haunted by my girl spirit I was there so much’9 – while recovering from whooping cough. She remembered sitting by the moat and, in a ‘moment of cruel curiosity’, feeding a live bluebottle fly to a ‘huge spider [with] shining eyes’. As Mary recalled, she was immediately ‘seized with remorse and probably killed both in righteous wrath’.10 Mary had a delight for the gruesome (demonstrated by a zestful account to her mother of a bilious attack aged eighteen: ‘I brought u
p basins of the thickest, gluest [sic] phlegm, slime, burning excruciating yellow acid with little streaks of browny reddy stuff in it, sometimes great gollops of brown fluid … Lastly Tuesday morning, came green bile’),11 a curious mind and an adventurous spirit. She had a tendency to act first and think later: more accurately an inclination to ‘choose to prefer the gratification of the present … to slide & glide because it was pleasant or amusing & exciting & to face & bear the consequences when they came’.12 In adulthood, Wilfrid thought Mary sphinx-like in her inscrutability, speaking of her ‘unfathomable reserve … her secrets are close shut, impenetrably guarded, with a little laugh of unconcern baffling the curious’.13 Wilfrid was all too frequently baffled by women, but Pamela described her sister in similar terms, speaking of a ‘deep nature’ that only Mary’s closest friends truly knew.14

  As Mary entered adolescence, her life became notably more domesticated. At almost exactly the time that the Wyndhams moved to Wilbury, George was sent to prep school – the Grange in Hertfordshire – to prepare him for Eton in due course. Guy, uncontrollable without his brother, followed George after just one term. From roaming across Cumberland’s hills with a pair of ragamuffin playmates, Mary found herself in a tamer Wiltshire landscape in the company of her governess Fräulein Schneider and sisters of just three and five.

  A contemporary of the Wyndham children described ‘an air of Bohemian quasi-culture’ within the family.15 Artistic rather than intellectual, the Wyndhams never contemplated either that Mary would attend school or that she would find her métier otherwise than in marriage. ‘A woman’s only hope of self-expression in those days was through marriage,’ explained Mabell Airlie, a contemporary of Mary’s, in her memoir Thatched with Gold.16 The strides forward in women’s education – the establishment of academic girls’ schools, under the remarkable Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss; women’s admission as undergraduates, London University being the first to open its doors in 1878 – primarily benefited middle-class daughters. Upper-class girls were educated by governesses – for the most part deliberately not too well, lest it scare off suitors. Some girls were lucky to be taught by a governess with exceptional capacities. Mary’s daughter Cincie benefited in her early years from the highly gifted Miss Jourdain, one of Oxford’s first female undergraduates. Bertha Schneider, or ‘Bun’, as she was called by the children, lacked the intellectual talents of ‘Miss J’. Originally from Saxony, Bun had been poached from the Belgrave Square family who forbade their children from playing with the Wyndhams, joining the family when she was twenty-eight. A photograph of her some years later shows her to have a pleasant, somewhat clumsy-featured face, pince-nez spectacles and fashionably frizzled hair.