Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  That same summer, Curzon forced an uncomfortable confrontation between himself and Wilde at the meeting of the Crabbet Club, an all-male club that met annually at Wilfrid Blunt’s Sussex estate. The Crabbet’s stated purpose was ‘to discourage serious views of life’. Its annual meeting consisted of a poetry competition and a night of Bacchanalian excess. Its membership, recruited by Wilfrid and George Wyndham in collaboration, was primarily male Souls. By convention each new member was subjected to ‘jibes’ – a grilling on his life and work.6 The two new members that summer were Curzon and Wilde. Curzon demanded that he be the one to grill Wilde.

  As recorded by Blunt in his diary, Curzon was ruthless: attacking Wilde for his treatment of sodomy in Dorian Gray and suggesting that Wilde engaged in such practices himself. The fleshy Wilde at first smiled helplessly, but eventually gave ‘an amusing and excellent speech’. The debate continued until dawn when some of the Club, including Curzon and George Wyndham, went to swim in the river, followed by a game of lawn tennis – ‘just as they were, stark naked, the future rulers of England’, said Wilde.7 Shortly afterwards, Wilde met the Wyndhams’ cousin Bosie Douglas, and their destructive mutual infatuation began. Bosie later joined the Crabbet, but Wilde never attended another meeting – an indication, probably, of his distaste for it.

  The following year, the poetry competition’s theme was ‘Marriage’. Harry Cust’s offering brimmed with ironic self-knowledge:

  Various vigorous virgins may have panted

  Wailing widows wilted in the dust

  To no female has the great God granted

  Grace sufficient to be Mrs. Cust

  Harry Cust, by his lover, Violet Manners.

  Contemporary paeans to Harry’s heavenly blond appearance must be measured against the adolescent Judith Blunt’s cool estimation: ‘fat podgy and coarse, his hair and eyes too light for his red complexion’.8 Indisputably, ‘Cust bulged with sex.’9 His quicksilver charm could, and did – quite literally – lay all before him. His ‘harem’10 included his long-term mistress, Violet Granby (as Violet Manners had become when her husband succeeded as Marquess), and Lucy Graham Smith. Harry did not adhere to the Souls’ morality. He conceived sexual improvidence as an aristocratic right; moral restraint was mealy-mouthed and middle class. ‘What if all had been forbidden but the apple? Imagine polygamy advanced by God and man, and at this moment all the upper classes would have been dwelling in the joys of illicit constancy and despising the cowardly unenterprising middle classes who were forced to content themselves with profligacy,’ he mused to Mary in 1887.11 Violet had little truck with Souls morality either. By 1892, she was pregnant with Harry’s child.

  By the summer of 1892, Pamela was the only one of the Wyndhams’ children yet to be settled. In May, Guy had married Edwina Brooke (nicknamed ‘Minnie’), a widow with two children who was five years older than he. Both Madeline Wyndham’s sons had sought out maternal figures, but this marriage was to prove very happy. Shortly afterwards Harry Cust joined the Wyndhams for a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at Covent Garden, part of a sell-out season of German opera conducted by Richard Mahler. In retrospect, the choice was ominous. Tannhäuser skated on the edge of respectability, examining the choice between sacred and profane love. Wilde used it in Dorian Gray to reflect the darkness of his hero’s own soul.

  Seven years before, Laura Tennant had pitied women, who were expected to fight with ‘unarmed breast … as strongly as the cap and pied man’, and warned Mary about the capacity of the world ‘to see things in embryo’.12 As Mary sat in the Wyndhams’ box and saw Harry’s exaggerated flirting with Pamela, leaning low over her to point out some detail in the programme, whispering in her ear, she was filled with foreboding. Harry was a close friend, but he was a dangerous proposition. His behaviour had the capacity to damage Pamela’s reputation severely. Yet it was possible that Harry was serious. To test if it was so, Mary invited him to Stanway when Pamela was there. By unspoken rule, if he accepted, it would mean that he planned to court her in earnest. Harry turned down the invitation. Mary and Madeline Wyndham decided to nip things in the bud before any further harm was done. They forbade both parties from seeing each other. A month passed in this way, causing Pamela intense anxiety as she scanned crowded ballrooms for his tall blond figure, playing out in her mind what would happen if he ‘accidentally’ appeared.

  Harry’s eventual appearance was every bit as dramatic as Pamela might have hoped. On 15 August 1892, a fortnight before Violet Granby gave birth to his daughter, Harry pitched up unannounced in Belgrave Square’s drawing room before a startled Madeline and a delighted Pamela. The incident, as recounted by Pamela to Mary, had aspects of a drawing-room farce. Barely had Harry managed to explain that he had turned down the Stanway invitation because ‘He does not want to make love to me (only less crudely expressed by him!)’13 than the butler Icke precipitated into the drawing room a young ‘Mr. Allhuisen’ who was intending, most likely, to pay court to Pamela. Harry was hustled off into the front drawing room by Madeline Wyndham, Pamela left to sit and drink tea with the hapless ‘Mr. A’ while trying to eavesdrop on the muffled conversation behind the double doors.

  Behind those doors, Madeline Wyndham laid down the law in somewhat unsatisfactory fashion. She told Harry he could see Pamela only if he promised to stop his ‘coarse flirting’. If and when he was willing to seek her hand in earnest, then he could. Harry promised. Pamela was delighted, although she protested that Harry had never been flirting. ‘His manner which has grown upon him misleads people … he says “How do you do” as if it was “you are the Soul of my Life” but he is unaware of this, I really believe like people who clear their throats continually,’ she explained to Mary.14

  Osbert Sitwell, meeting Pamela in middle age, recognized the discordance between her image and her reality. ‘She was – though she in no way realized it – far from being a rather remote, reasonable woman, under which guise she saw herself, presented herself, and was accepted, but, to the contrary … violently and enchantingly prejudiced in a thousand directions.’ Her sitting room was filled with photographs ‘of the most astonishing rakes and rips’ whom Pamela would ‘unflaggingly, and with the greatest display of ingenuity defend’ or, where defence was impossible, ‘ignore’.15 Pamela declared that she would not be ‘deceived by outside views!!!’,16 but she was more than capable of deceiving herself by her own tortuous logic.

  Pamela maintained to Mary that the best way for her to get over Harry was ‘by knowing him not by not seeing him’, since separation only allowed her to gild him in her imagination. ‘If I in any way let my friendship with him spoil my life it would be voluntary foolishness on my part …’ she added.17 Mary worried that Pamela was motivated merely by pique. When she found out that Pamela – who as Madeline Wyndham’s ‘Benjamina’, a biblical allusion to Jacob’s beloved youngest son, could twist her mother around her little finger – had persuaded Madeline to invite Harry to Clouds she was horrified. She immediately wrote to Madeline warning against this course of action. It was too late.

  Harry joined the tail end of a house party to find Pamela distracted by the company of a young man called Arthur Paget.18 It was idyllic late-summer weather. The party had spent a ‘delicious’ week making excursions to Stonehenge, and taking long walks across the Downs. Pamela confessed to Mary privately that she thought more ‘highly of [Paget than] any man before … delightfully clever, original & nice – good & kind & honest (what a funny lot of adjectives strung together!)’.19 Harry sulked, moped and glowered until finally (as no doubt he designed) Pamela confronted him on the Sunday afternoon in the empty hall, whereupon he told her ‘all that he meant not to say (so he says) but I think, it was all that he did not expect to feel’.

  Pamela wrote the conversation out in full for Mary. The exchange is worthy of a cheap melodrama, with Harry the moustache-twirling villain. Harry declared his love, explained (without explaining why) that he was not free, and asked Pamela – supp
osing that, in two years or so, he could make himself free – whether she would agree to be his wife. To Pamela’s surprise, as she stood incredulously by the fireplace with hands like ice, she found herself saying that she was not sure:

  ‘In the Summer I was afraid I let you think more than I was prepared actually to do – I think that I have changed.’

  And he put his head against the mantelpiece, & looked very miserable, & said: ‘Perhaps you are right’

  ‘But I cannot believe it – it seems so odd if you could, would you ask me to be your wife?’

  ‘I would’

  ‘And if in this next year I was to marry somebody would you mind?’

  ‘I would mind awfully’

  & then we were quiet for a long time.

  Harry then broke out into a rage of self-recrimination, berating himself for having broken his word to Madeline Wyndham, blaming his intolerable, uncontrollable jealousy, his feeling that to lose Pamela would be to miss ‘a most perfect good’:

  & again & again, I kept saying ‘I do not think you mean it – are you serious – do you really love me or do you think you do?’

  ‘I love you, & you only, & you always’

  Mary, would even the most self-blinded flirt say that? Surely he would have kept to the suggested vaguenesses that he has hitherto spoken in – not compromised himself unless he meant it?

  Harry’s final words were a masterpiece of manipulation: ‘I want to try & get as right as I can – and in the mean time no words of mine are to tie you in the very least – think of nothing I have said – when you are tired of me … you are to throw me away like a sucked orange, & marry the best man you can – though I shall be furious if you do – but that will be nothing to you.’20

  On hearing of this ‘episode’, Mary was furious: ‘just like him I feel inclined to say & think he has shown great want of self-control his great vice. Why not now if he really means it?’ she asked her baffled mother.21 Mary’s fingers were crossed for the ‘nice-sounding’ Arthur Paget, but she knew the ‘horribly clever’ Harry and her own sister too well for that. Mary was right. By Christmas Arthur Paget and another young suitor had been dispatched, the Wyndhams’ friends were beginning to gossip that the unorthodox parenting methods practised at Clouds were coming home to roost, and Percy was concerned enough to write to Mary about the matter at what was, for him, some length.

  As a rule Percy concerned himself little with his children’s marriages. His personal experience made him sympathetic to the pull of ‘magnetisme, attraction’. He thought parents pushing their children into loveless, wealthy marriages were simply ‘wrong’. But he believed that relying upon mere attraction was far worse and he baulked at the ‘apparently insane’ justification of ‘love conquers all’ woven by his youngest daughter and Harry Cust.22 When he tried to enumerate the risks of marrying a man like Cust, he had to put his pen down, overwhelmed by the multitude that presented themselves. Eventually, he adopted a light-hearted tone, dividing the world into two camps: the ‘mad’ and the sane, who were their ‘keepers’. ‘Myself, Mamma and Pamela are undoubtedly mad, Mananai I am sure is a keeper.’ Mary seemed to veer between the two. Percy was clear where Harry stood. ‘N.B. He, Cust, is sane,’ he wrote in a tiny postscript that revealed the root of his misgivings: for, spiderlike, Cust seemed to be playing with Pamela, trapped like a fly in his web.23

  THIRTEEN

  Crisis

  As Christmas approached, the atmosphere at Clouds was tense. Percy’s doubts about Cust were growing, as were his fears for his wife’s state of mind. His irascibility was enhanced by the presence of all four of Mary’s children in the nurseries. Mary, considered by her contemporaries to be a devoted mother, was frequently absent from her children for extended periods of time: she spent almost six months of both 1890 and 1891, whether at a house-party, on a cure, ill, or in London, apart from them.1During such absences, Mary frequently left her children at Clouds. It saved the Elchos the expense of running Stanway in their absence; and Mary disliked taking her children to Gosford, believing the journey too long. Cynthia Charteris visited Gosford for the first time that she could remember when she was six years old.1

  Three and a half years of no physical relations had shown what a binding force sex had been for the Elchos. They bickered like children. In January 1891, Mary sent Evelyn de Vesci a long apology for their recent confused departure from Abbey Leix. The morning they were due to leave, Hugo refused: ‘said he had a boil on his nose & sat on his bed & would not dress’. Mary stormed off to the railway station, servants and luggage in tow before her rage quelled. She returned and played the ‘ma[r]tyr’. Eventually they took the later train that Hugo had wanted. In the process, Mary accidentally made off with John de Vesci’s latest copy of the periodical Nineteenth Century. She told Evelyn that she had left it with the railway porter. ‘I hope he will get [it].’3 Evelyn was wearily familiar with contretemps like these.

  Mary’s letters to Hugo, which had once mixed admonitions with caresses in ‘Spression’, were now primarily couched in plain English: asking her husband where he was, when he was coming back, and why he did not reply. Any compliment seemed more an attempt to provoke him into good behaviour than a response to it. Hugo’s incessant infidelity was so poorly concealed that at one point Ettie Grenfell (herself the recipient of his attentions) intervened to urge him, at the very least, to exercise a little discretion.4 At the turn of the decade Hugo began a relationship with the renowned beauty Hermione, Duchess of Leinster, a distant kinswoman by marriage of Mary’s.5 By the early 1890s he was more frequently at Carton, Hermione’s house in Ireland, than at Stanway. If, as he sat at dinner underneath Lord and Lady Edward FitzGerald’s portraits, joking with Hermione’s friends, he felt any pangs of guilt he did not show it.6 Mary reproached him for his inconsiderate behaviour, challenged him on his gambling, asked him questions about children and arrangements: in short, engaged him in the minutiae of married life. Hermione told Hugo that his love for her was ‘the one happiness of her unhappy life’. In her eyes, the errant son and disappointing husband was the perfect lover.7

  Mary was widely regarded as a saint for putting up with Hugo, and her perceived forbearance regarding Arthur Balfour was considered, even by the most morally exacting of her contemporaries, to be ‘wonderful’. In 1891, Arthur had returned from Ireland to take up the post of Leader of the House of Commons, and First Lord of the Treasury. The 1892 election delivered Gladstone to power for a fourth time, and put Arthur in opposition. The greater free time this afforded him meant that he and Mary were ever more in proximity. Yet, remarked Ettie Grenfell, ‘I cannot make it out – ‘she [Mary] seems never to see him [Arthur] alone, positively to avoid it.’ Ettie put this down to Mary’s ‘prudence … I do admire her courage intensely.’8 ‘Lady Elcho is an angel: of all the women I know, an angel,’ said Lady Lyttelton, wife of the soldier Sir Neville.9

  Privately there remained, in Mary’s phrase, an ‘unstable equilibrium!’10 As she drily pointed out to Arthur, on the increasingly rare occasions when Hugo was with only his family ‘he has more time for observation’. On a summer’s evening in 1890 when all three were visiting the Adeanes at Babraham. Hugo materialized in Mary’s room before dinner and tormented her with questions. Had Arthur ever openly expressed his fondness for her? What exactly had he said? Such questions ‘screw up my entrails! And make me feel quite quivering,’ Mary told Arthur the next day, apologizing for her silence all evening. ‘[C]hilld to the bone’ and feeling ‘particularly helpless and nervous’, she had been unable to talk to him normally. Sitting after dinner in the Italian Colonnade, she had only been able to hope, impotently, that Arthur would ask her to watch the moon rise on the other side of the house, allowing her to escape Hugo’s sardonic gaze. Arthur didn’t.11 Mary was anguished. She perpetually feared that Arthur would abandon her for a younger, prettier woman who could offer him more by way of sex than she.12 Arthur, capable of cattishness, did not always dispel those fears. In a
particularly low blow he even once eulogized Hermione and her artistic skill.13 ‘No woman, wife or mother is ever quite her own master,’ said Mary.14 Hugo’s and Arthur’s behaviour often forcibly reminded her of that.

  By the time Mary arrived at Clouds on 21 December 1892, she had not seen her children for over a month. Her primary concern was for Ego, still overly nervy after a bout of scarlet fever he had contracted in the autumn, but she put it down to Christmas excitement. A shoot planned for 28 December had kept the Adeanes and their girls at Babraham; George and Sibell were at Eaton in Cheshire with the Westminsters; Guy and Minnie were in India. It being a high day and holiday, Hugo was present too.

  On Christmas morning the children’s stockings were crammed with toys. As the family walked to East Knoyle church, three-year-old Colin delighted every passer-by with a prattling ‘Merry Christmas’. Just a few hours later he was struck by scarlet fever; Hugo and the other children fell sick the next day. Five-year-old Cynthia remembered ‘a timeless blur of bewildered suffering. Burning heat, raging thirst, tossing and turning in sheets that seemed on fire’.15 In a journal that recorded her children’s infancies and early youths, Mary recalled that she had been ordered by the doctor not to go to her children in case she caught the fever herself. But she had already had scarlet fever in her late teens, and would have been immune. In fact, as Mary recorded to George in a letter just a few days later, Mary had stayed by Colin’s side until Hugo ‘begged me to go with tears in his eyes’ for ‘the others’ [children’s] sake’. Half an hour after Mary left him, Colin died. Heartbreakingly, Mary was told that Colin had been conscious and had asked for her.16