Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Revolution?

  On Monday 13 March 1911, Percy died in his bedroom at Clouds. He had been declining for days. His wife and four of his five children were with him, only Guy, summoned by telegram back from St Petersburg where he was military attaché, did not arrive in time. Percy’s children agreed that their father was ‘absolutely himself to the very end … his mind clear as crystal’.1 He was ‘ready for either alternative. He did not surrender weakly but neither did he struggle to live,’ said George.2 His friends were saddened, but not surprised. His frailty had been apparent at his last social appearance, Ego Charteris’s wedding to Letty Manners the month before.

  Percy, whose religious faith had wavered ever since he had read Darwin as a young man, appeared to have had some sort of deathbed enlightenment. ‘“God” revealed himself to Percy & gave him such a vision OF LOVE & HAPPINESS & glory that I can never forget it,’ Madeline Wyndham told Wilfrid Blunt.3 Her ardent polyglot faith gave her comfort. ‘[T]he feeling that He has left us, never makes me unhappy, not half as unhappy as seeing Him suffering & miserable Here – that was wretchedness,’ she told Mary, some six months later from Clouds as she passed her first birthday for fifty years without her husband on ‘a Heavenly day almost too Hot with a Peacock with head turned up to heaven piercing the air with his Cries’.4

  Percy’s body was cremated at Woking. His ashes, in an oak casket made from trees grown on the estate, were buried after a funeral held at East Knoyle church on Saturday 18 March,5 and marked by a green sandstone cross.6 Percy’s obituaries mourned the passing of a man who was the last of an age: the independent-minded aristocrat dutifully undertaking the responsibility of paternalistic rule.7 Pamela immediately placed an order with the milliners Maison St Louis in Halkin Street for a black straw quatre corn with chiffon veil, a coarse black straw and feather toque with veil, a widow’s hat with crêpe veil, two chiffon hats, a black tagel picture hat with grey feather mount, a mercury in black straw-lined velvet with velvet trimming, and a grey straw with velvet lining and grey wing – £26 16s 6d in total.8

  Percy’s estate was valued at £241,162 gross.9 He left Madeline Wyndham a lifetime interest in 44 Belgrave Square, his household effects and her jewellery, all to revert to George on her death. She received absolutely a lump sum of £1,000 and an annuity of £3,100 and his horses, carriages, personal effects and ‘consumable stores’. Guy received £5,000 and a further annuity of £850 during his mother’s lifetime. Percy’s daughters received nothing – nor did Dorothy Carleton (on whom he had intended to settle £300) – for all, so he wrote in his will, were sufficiently provided for by settlement. The governess Bun received £100, so did Percy’s agent Edward Miles. Various other members of staff received small bequests. Everything else went to George.10 Increasingly, Madeline Wyndham divided her time between Clouds, Stanway, Babraham and Wilsford, a shawl-clad, mob-capped expansive figure, beloved of her grandchildren, known to them as ‘Gan-Gan’.

  George turned his substantial energy towards making his own mark upon Clouds. He arranged for electricity to be installed, and commissioned Detmar Blow to turn the old nursery into a large library for himself. The now redundant lamp room was made into a chapel for Sibell, panelled in old Italian dark wood with a red-brick floor and an arching whitewashed ceiling overhead.11 George assumed with relish, and a certain humility, the role of squire for which he had been preparing all his life: ‘All the work I have to do here only increases – if that were possible – my deep respect for his [Percy’s] definite character and my admiration of his justice and generosity,’ he wrote to a friend.12 For the present, his full energies were focused on securing the future of his class.

  For almost two decades the Souls had managed to separate politics from friendship. In 1900, Arthur had written to Mary recounting a heated ‘passage of arms’ with Asquith in the Commons over Irish landlords which took place directly after Arthur had dined with the Asquiths: ‘Asquith was the challenger, but I felt a mild awkwardness replying to a man in the strength of his own champagne!’13 Now the situation was forcing underhand behaviour. In January 1911, Arthur dined with Lord Knollys and fell into the trap of giving him his views on the constitutional position and the creation of peers, not knowing either of the secret guarantee or that the dinner was approved by Asquith, to whom Knollys was reporting back. At the same time, Margot, who almost certainly had some idea of the guarantee, was leading Mary astray. Visiting her at Gosford, she came to her room for a talk after tea. While claiming to know no real details, she urged magnanimity from the Unionists with regard to the Parliament Bill about to be put before the Commons. As Mary wrote to Arthur:

  She was practically making a great appeal to ‘trust Henry’ … I said but supposing we are disposed to trust Henry and accept the veto bill as the best way out, trusting to amendments and Henry’s conscience or moderation, how can we tell that Henry would not be pushed much further than he wanted to go … She said Henry’s not a bit afraid of his own party. She is horrified at the idea of having to create peers.14

  The Parliament Bill had its first reading in the Commons on 22 February. During three readings over three months, 900 amendments were tabled – almost all from the Opposition – only the most minor of which succeeded. All knew that the real action was to come in the Lords, where a tribe of backwoods peers, who had never hitherto troubled the Upper House with their presence, were mustering under the leadership of Lord Willoughby de Broke, given encouragement by more senior figures, including George Wyndham, Curzon and Lord Lansdowne, the Leader in the Lords. It was shaping up to be a sweltering summer. George V’s coronation, held on 22 June, was one of the few cool, cloudy days of the Season. Whenever he could, Balfour adopted flannels and straw hats;15 after work, Edward Grey and Winston Churchill splashed about in the marbled swimming baths at the Automobile Club on Pall Mall.16 At a fancy-dress ball at Claridge’s given by Lord Winterton and the rising Unionist star F. E. Smith on 24 May, to general merriment Waldorf Astor, son of William Astor and a Unionist MP, appeared clad in a peer’s robes of state and a tinsel coronet on which was balanced a placard: ‘499’ read one side; ‘still one more vacancy’ read the other. Both Asquith and Balfour were present.17

  It was no laughing matter when the Lords massacred the Parliament Bill with amendments in July, and the news of the King’s secret guarantee was finally leaked. It was a ‘shocking scandal’, Arthur said to Mary. ‘I expect an anxious, but not a laborious week …’18 In fact, he was furious at Asquith’s and Knollys’s underhand behaviour in securing and concealing the guarantee. For more rational Unionists, the guarantee’s existence made it impossible to continue to obstruct the Bill, since a House flooded with Liberal peers would destroy any remaining Unionist power in the Lords. Yet when on 21 July Balfour called his Shadow Cabinet to Carlton Gardens to vote on what course the peers should take, there was no agreement: ‘indeed most violent differences’, he told Mary.19 Standing against the ‘Hedgers’, like Arthur, who recommended capitulation, were ‘Ditchers’, like George, in a phrase of his own coining, determined ‘to die in the last ditch’ defending the Lords.20

  For the first time in their long friendship, Arthur and George were on opposing sides, although that is to misrepresent their relative positions somewhat. George was zealous, and Arthur expressed almost no position at all. Privately Arthur thought resistance would only ‘advertise … the fact that we are the victims of a revolution. Their policy may be a wise one, but there is nothing heroic about it.’21 Publicly, he said only that he would stand and fall by Lord Lansdowne.22 Lansdowne, the most reluctant of ‘Hedgers’, only advocated but did not demand from his peers the capitulation that privately he too found ‘unpalatable’.23 Passivity had settled like a blanket over the party leadership. The Ditchers were in full revolt.

  The Commons was scheduled to address the Lords’ wrecking amendments on 24 July. It was confounded by the ‘Cecil Scene’, as Asquith, rising to speak, was drowned out by a
full half-hour of cat-calls, jeers and howls of ‘Traitor’, ‘Who killed the King’, ‘Let Redmond speak’ (an allusion to the fact that the Lords was considered the last bastion against Home Rule) and, more obliquely, ‘American Dollars’. Eventually, without uttering a word, Asquith sat down. When Balfour rose, the Chamber fell embarrassingly silent. Nothing comparable to this had been seen since MPs brawled on the floor of the Commons over Home Rule in 1893, but that had been born out of momentary passion. This was a plot organized by Balfour’s Cecil relations: ‘as usual the leading lunatics are my own kith and kin,’ he admitted to Mary wearily.24

  By tacit agreement, neither Mary nor Arthur mentioned George’s part in events. The next day, Wilfrid Blunt stopped in at Belgrave Square to find George, F. E. Smith and George’s stepson Bend’Or Westminster ebullient at the Cecil Scene’s success and planning their next line of attack. ‘Here you see the conspirators,’ cried George as his cousin poked his head round the door. ‘They are all in the highest possible spirits at the commotion they have caused and consider they have forced Balfour’s hand,’ Wilfrid recorded in his diary; ‘… they are going to give a banquet to old Halsbury … as the saviour of the Constitution.’25

  The ‘Halsbury Banquet’ – in honour of the eighty-seven-year-old Lord Halsbury, the Diehards’ designated figurehead – took place at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand two days later. Tickets were advertised by a circular issued from the Carlton Club and signed by George, Edward Carson, Austen Chamberlain and F. E. Smith.26 Spirits among the 600-strong crowd ran dangerously high. ‘They [the Government] have been playing, and they are playing a game of gigantic bluff …’ declared Austen Chamberlain. It is hard not to see George’s hand in the hastily devised plan at the evening’s end for the banqueters to draw Halsbury in triumph from the Strand to his house in Ennismore Gardens. Halsbury’s family stymied the plan, fearing the octogenarian might expire from the excitement.27

  The Ditchers resembled nothing so much as over-excited schoolboys, grandstanding in the face of irrefutable facts. ‘The country is in revolt,’ George told Wilfrid. ‘They are ready for actual armed resistance, or rather, they would like that,’ Wilfrid told his diary, with certain disbelief.28 Later George sent to Arthur, via Mary, a letter explaining his conduct. ‘[Y]ou felt I believe it was … very involved & obscure … you couldn’t really fathom his meaning,’ Mary reminded Arthur. Having read it, she believed that ‘that letter places him apart from many others of the die hard who behaved quite differently!’ – but she never explained to Arthur or anyone else why.29 The presence within the Ditchers’ ranks of serious political figures – Austen Chamberlain and F. E. Smith to name just two – indicates serious dissatisfaction within the party ranks not just with their leaders’ position, but with their failure to lead, and a belief, however faint, that the guarantee must be a bluff.

  The final reckoning began at half-past four on the afternoon of 9 August, when the Lords convened to discuss the Commons’ amendments made to the Parliament Bill. It was the final round of pass the parcel. If the Lords considered themselves ‘Content’ with those amendments, the Bill would pass. If ‘Not Content’, it was time for the guarantee – the precise terms of which were still unclear – to be put into action. After almost eight hours, the debate was adjourned just after midnight.

  As it reconvened the next morning, 10 August, Balfour was making his way in baking heat to Paris, on the first leg of his journey to Bad Gastein. That the final act of a two-year saga was even now playing out at Westminster could not convince him to alter train fares booked some time back. He had washed his hands of the affair which, he told Mary, was more ‘odious’ to him ‘from the personal point of view’ than any other episode in his public life.30 Asquith was also out of London, having gone to Wallingford to recover from a bout of laryngitis. But Asquith’s party was not mutinous, and he had made contingency plans for an emergency Cabinet meeting the following day in the event that it was required.31

  When the session recommenced in the Lords that morning, the atmosphere on the Opposition benches was electric, on the Government benches calm. The real fight, everyone knew, was not between the Government and the Opposition, but between Hedgers (many with buttonholes of white heather) and Ditchers (sporting red roses). On the Government side, Lord Morley sat quietly, glancing frequently at a small piece of paper that he kept in the pocket of his frock-coat. The debate recommenced. Lord Midleton began, taunting the Government that the proceedings were a sham. The call was taken up by Rosebery and Lansdowne for a clear statement by the Government about the nature of the guarantee.

  At that point, Lord Morley stood up and read from the paper that he held in his hand: ‘If the Bill should be defeated tonight His Majesty could assent – I say this on my full responsibility as the spokesman of the Government – to the creation of Peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different Parties in Opposition by which the Parliament Bill might again be exposed a second time to defeat.’

  Morley had barely finished speaking when a cheer rose up from the Government side. From the Opposition, Hedgers and Ditchers alike, there was dead silence. By request, Morley read the statement out one more time. It was the clearest possible answer to dispel any delusions the Diehards might have cherished. If they voted against the Bill, their number would be swamped until the Upper Chamber was so pliable as to vote through anything the Government might desire. In case anyone had not quite understood the implications of his words, Morley added helpfully, ‘every vote given to-night against my Motion not to insist on what is called Lord Lansdowne’s Amendment is a vote given in favour of a large and prompt creation of peers’.32

  Outside, heat shimmered above warped railway lines; tarmac melted on the roads. It was the hottest day recorded in seventy years. In the East End, the dockers were on strike. Inside the neo-gothic splendour of the Upper Chamber, Rosebery attacked the Government for taking advantage of a ‘young and inexperienced’ King; others denounced the Bill as sheer ‘revolution’.33 But they knew they faced a choice of evils. As Lord Selborne put it, ‘shall we perish in the dark, slain by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our own enemies …?’34 At twenty to eleven at night, the division was called. As peers thronged the lobbies, a desperate Willoughby de Broke hid the top hat and coat of one duke to keep him in the Lords to vote. The duke bolted, preferring to commit the cardinal sin of appearing in public hatless and in shirtsleeves rather than make an impossible choice.35 In any event, one duke would not have made a victory. The final vote was as follows: Contents, 131; Not Contents, 114. The Government had won by seventeen votes, thanks to the support of thirty-seven Unionist peers and thirteen prelates, or, as George Wyndham termed them, ‘the Bishops and the Rats’ – men, including George Curzon, who were henceforth hissed upon entering the Carlton Club by the hysterical Diehards.

  From the Ritz in Paris, Balfour wrote to Mary: ‘You must not ask me to tell anything about the last ten days. I am trying to forget it all.’ Mary replied immediately and sympathetically from St Moritz: ‘I feel I do not understand [the situation] and I suppose never shall! This letter is only to remind you of what perhaps you know … that my heart goes out to you … I longed and longed to be able to come and comfort you – not by talking over the situation but by quite other means – a good smacking would brace you up I think!’36 Arthur’s leadership would not survive the crisis. Succumbing to Leo Maxse’s campaign in the National Review that ‘Balfour Must Go’ – staccatoed to ‘B.M.G.’ – he resigned in November. The night before the announcement, he visited Mary, one of very few to have known his plans from the first,37 at Cadogan Square. Tired, sad, finding it difficult to speak, Mary stood on the steps of no. 62 to watch the motor ‘turn away with you buried inside, not looking!, and I had a serrement de Coeur as the car drove away for the last time – with you as Leader – after so long’.38

  That August, both kept silent about George, who himself wrote to Sibell, incoherent from tirednes
s and emotion, mourning the death of his age:

  Many things that I loved are shattered and some friendships gone … Now we are finished with the cosmopolitan press – and the American duchesses and the Saturday to Mondays at Taplow – and all the degrading shams. When the King wants loyal men, he will find us ready to die for him. He may want us. For the House of Lords today – tho’ they did not know it – voted for Revolution.39

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  1911–1914

  As news of the vote reached India, F. W. Bain wrote to Pamela: ‘I suppose that you and your “mountain-top” have been full of politics, rejoicing over the downfall of the Peers.’1 In fact at the time of the Liberal triumph Pamela was face down on her bed in her darkened room, pillows sodden with tears, crumpled-up handkerchiefs strewn across the counterpane, succumbing to the grip of ‘the Glen mood’, a mixture of ‘neuralgia’, self-pity, depression and self-loathing that besieged her each year for several days on arrival at Glen, a place where even the weather seemed bent on victimizing her with ‘hard metallic sunshine’ and ‘whipping wind’.2