68. Blunt Papers, K6115.
69. Dakers, Clouds, p. 45; Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.24.
70. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, diaries, quoted in Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion, p. 102.
71. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, ‘Alms to Oblivion’, Part V, Chapter III, Blunt Papers, FM 311-1975.
72. Madeline Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 1 June 1896, Glenconner Papers, NRS GD510/1/30.
Chapter 2: Wilbury
1. Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion, pp. 157, 310.
2. Percy Wyndham to Mary Elcho, 22 November 1900, Stanway Papers.
3. George Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 23 December 1896, Glenconner Papers, NRS GD510/1/32.
4. Cynthia Asquith, Remember and Be Glad (James Barrie, 1952), p. 192.
5. Wemyss, Family Record, p. 20.
6. Richard Davenport-Hines, Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), p. 83.
7. Mary Elcho to Guy Wyndham, 11 May 1877, Stanway Papers. For Mary’s recollection of herself at this time see Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 16 August 1895 (Letters, pp. 138–9).
8. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, p. 308.
9. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.21.
10. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 16 August 1895 (Letters, pp. 138–9).
11. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 14 October 1880, Stanway Papers.
12. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 3 June 1885, Stanway Papers.
13. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, diary entry, 9 January 1895, quoted in Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion, p. 310.
14. Asquith, Haply I May Remember, p. 135.
15. Alfred Lyttelton to Mary Gladstone, 31 December 1886, quoted in Nancy Waters Ellenberger, ‘The Souls: High Society and Politics in Late Victorian England’, PhD thesis, University of Oregon, 1982, pp. 62–3.
16. Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Thatched with Gold: The Memoirs of Mabell, Countess of Airlie, ed. and arranged by Jennifer Ellis (Hutchinson, 1962), p. 40.
17. George Wyndham to Madeline Wyndham, 15 October 1874, Petworth Papers.
18. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 4 September 1883, Stanway Papers.
19. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 19 November 1876, Petworth Papers.
20. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 7 December 1889, Stanway Papers.
21. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.26.
22. Ibid., 1.24.
23. Dakers, Clouds, p. 45; Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.24.
24. Philip Burne-Jones to Mary Elcho quoted in Dakers, Clouds, p. 176.
25. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.21.
26. Walter Crane in Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, quoted in Mary Greensted (ed.), An Anthology of the Arts and Crafts Movement: Writings by Ashbee, Lethaby, Gimson and their Contemporaries (Aldershot, Lund Humphries, 2005), p. 18.
27. See, for example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s résumé of Beerbohm Tree at http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/8593.
28. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.27–8.
29. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 6 October 1880, Stanway Papers.
30. Dakers, Clouds, p. 42.
31. Ibid., p. 47.
32. Ibid., p. 48. The equivalent in RPI is £7,719,000; in ESV £64,500,00; and in EPV £122,700,000.
33. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.31.
34. Dakers, Clouds, p. 44.
35. Ibid., p. 48.
36. Mary Elcho, diary entry, 16 September 1878, quoted in Dakers, Clouds, p. 114.
37. Quoted in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Strange Death of Tory England (Penguin Books, 2005), p. 31.
38. Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (Abacus, 1995), p. 196.
39. Ibid., p. 198.
40. Ibid., pp. 196–7.
41. Ibid., pp. 196–9.
42. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.11.
43. Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.32.
44. Ellenberger, ‘Constructing George Wyndham’, pp. 487, 496.
45. Dakers, Clouds, pp. 67–8.
46. Ibid., p. 64.
47. Mary Elcho to Guy Wyndham, 11 May 1877, Stanway Papers.
48. Mary Elcho, diary entry, 30 June 1878, Stanway Papers.
49. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 15 July 1898, Stanway Papers.
50. Madeline Adeane to Madeline Wyndham, 26 July 1878, Petworth Papers.
51. Pamela Tennant to Madeline Wyndham, 11 December 1878, Petworth Papers.
52. Pamela Tennant to Percy Wyndham, 13 November 1878, Petworth Papers.
53. The Times, 10 May 1887.
54. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, p. 281.
55. The Times, 1 May 1877.
56. The Times, 10 May 1887.
57. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, p. 281.
58. For a fuller account of the Aesthetic movement and its impact upon society, see Charlotte Gere, Artistic Circles: Design & Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement (V&A Publishing, 2010), and Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (eds), The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 (V&A Publishing, 2011).
59. Mary Elcho, diary entry, quoted in Dakers, Clouds, p. 57.
60. Mary Gladstone, quoted in R. J. Q. Adams, Balfour: The Last Grandee (John Murray, 2008), p. 29.
61. Harold Begbie (as ‘A Gentleman with a Duster’), Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections (Mills & Boon, 1920), pp. 76–9.
62. Laura Tennant to Lady Frances Balfour, 9 October [1885], Whittingehame Papers, NRS GD433/2/477.
63. See Arthur James Balfour, Chapters of Autobiography, ed. Blanche Dugdale (Cassell, 1930), p. 234. Chapters of Autobiography has seventeen chapters. The first sixteen concern Balfour’s political youth. The final words of this section recollect his meeting Mary, Madeline and George Wyndham at Sir Frederic Leighton’s studio. The seventeenth chapter, tacked on somewhat incongruously, covers Balfour’s first trip to the United States in 1917, and his subsequent diplomatic work there.
Chapter 3: ‘The Little Hunter’
1. Mary Elcho, diary entry, 12 May 1880, Stanway Papers.
2. Davidoff, The Best Circles, p. 25.
3. Dakers, Clouds, p. 59.
4. Quoted in Max Egremont, The Cousins: The Friendship, Opinions and Activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham (Collins, 1977), p. 33.
5. See, in particular, David Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition” circa 1820–1977’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992).
6. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 165–6.
7. Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 320, 362, 367.
8. Quoted in A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (Hutchinson, 2002), p. 449.
9. The Times, 14 March 1911.
10. White, London in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 373–4.
11. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (rev. edn, Penguin Books, 2005), p. 347.
12. Quoted in Ellenberger, ‘The Souls: High Society and Politics’, p. 72.
13. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, p. 346.
14. Davidoff, The Best Circles, p. 49.
15. Ibid., p. 25.
16. Margot Asquith, More Memories (Cassell, 1933), pp. 219–22.
17. Mary Elcho, ‘The Souls’, unpublished memoir, quoted in Ellenberger, ‘The Souls: High Society and Politics’, p. 45.
18. Mary Elcho, diary entry, 8 October 1884, Stanway Papers.
19. Mary Elcho, sketches, n.d., Stanway Papers.
20. Phrenological Reports, n.d. [c.1880 and 1883], Stanway Papers.
21. Airlie, Thatched with Gold, p. 40.
22. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 14 February 1905 (Letters, p. 218).
23
. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 3 October 1883, Stanway Papers.
24. Ridley and Percy, Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho, p. 13.
25. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 14 February 1905 (Letters, p. 218).
26. Ibid.
27. The claim was famously made by Lord Beaverbrook: see Ruddock F. Mackay, Balfour: Intellectual Statesman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 8; Davenport-Hines, Ettie, p. 54.
28. Balfour was close friends with May (a niece of Gladstone, and cousin of Mary Gladstone), who died in 1875, and he mourned her all his life. He was a keen spiritualist (later in life, he became President of the Society for Psychical Research, a body founded in 1882 to use scientific analysis to ‘prove’ the existence of a spirit world), and he tried several times to contact May through a medium. R.J.Q. Adams has said there is no evidence that Balfour and May, who by all accounts had a tomboy charm not dissimilar to Mary’s in her youth, were secretly engaged – or, whatever Blanche said, that Balfour asked for a ring to be put in her coffin (see Adams, The Last Grandee, pp. 29–31). However, certainly contemporaries believed the story to be true: see Maud Wyndham to Ettie Desborough, n.d. (1944), Desborough Papers, HALS DE/Rv/C2806 f.2, recalling at length the affair: ‘He [Balfour] put what I believe had been his mother’s engag[ement] ring into May’s coffin, saying “she wd [sic] have been my wife” … it’s impossible to make out all the “ins & outs” of the whole situation …’
29. Begbie, Mirrors of Downing Street, pp. 76–9.
30. Arthur Balfour to Mary Elcho, January 1894 (Letters, pp. 98–9).
31. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 7 December 1880, Stanway Papers.
32. Lord Elcho invented an Elcho boot, bayonet and military shovel and was a founder of the Volunteer Rifle Force, a forerunner of the Territorial Army, established in the late 1850s in response to invasion scares in the wake of the Crimean War (Wemyss, Family Record, p. 11).
33. Ibid., p. 10.
34. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, 12 October 1887, Stanway Papers.
35. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 23 February 1881, Stanway Papers.
36. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d. (Summer 1887), Stanway Papers.
37. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 3 August 1881, Stanway Papers.
38. Quoted in James, Aristocrats, p. 307.
39. Evan Charteris to Hugo Elcho, 1 October [1881], Stanway Papers.
40. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, 31 August 1887, Stanway Papers.
41. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d. [summer 1887], Stanway Papers.
42. Quoted in Simon Blow, Broken Blood: The Rise and Fall of the Tennant Family (Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 42; Abdy and Gere, The Souls, p. 11.
43. Hugo Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 1 November 1881, Stanway Papers.
44. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 1 April 1882, Stanway Papers.
45. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d. [summer 1887], Stanway Papers.
46. Adams, The Last Grandee, p. 55.
47. Quoted in Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion, p. 180.
48. Ibid., p. 190.
49. The Times, 27 November 1882.
50. Quoted in Hugh Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain, 1832–1918 (Harlow, Longman, 2001), p. 122.
51. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 28 June 1883, Stanway Papers.
52. Percy Wyndham to Hugo Elcho, 2 July 1883, Stanway Papers.
53. Unknown correspondent to Percy Wyndham, 11 July 1883, Stanway Papers.
54. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, n.d. [July 1883], Stanway Papers.
55. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 6 December 1913 (Letters, p. 307).
56. See, for example, the letters of Godfrey Webb to Percy Wyndham, and Constance Mure to Percy Wyndham, both n.d. [July 1883], Stanway Papers.
57. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 6 December 1913 (Letters, p. 307).
58. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 11 August 1883, Stanway Papers.
59. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d. [July 1883], Stanway Papers.
60. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, n.d. [July 1883], Stanway Papers.
61. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 2 July 1883, Stanway Papers.
62. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, 1 July 1883, Stanway Papers.
63. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 18 July 1883, Stanway Papers.
64. Ibid.
65. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d. [c.17 July 1883], Stanway Papers.
66. George Wyndham to Mary Elcho, 15 February 1913, quoted in Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 2.737–8.
67. Maud Wyndham to Ettie Desborough, 3 March 1944, Desborough Papers, HALS DE/rv c2806 f.3.
68. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 31 July 1883 [sic], Stanway Papers
69. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, 9 August 1883, Stanway Papers.
70. The Times, 10 August 1883.
71. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, 10 August 1883, Stanway Papers.
72. Ibid.
Chapter 4: Honeymoon
1. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, n.d. (c.August 1885), Stanway Papers.
2. Mary Elcho to Guy Wyndham, n.d. [1883], Stanway Papers.
3. Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain (Macmillan, 2009), pp. 74–5.
4. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 11 August 1883, Stanway Papers.
5. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d. [c.1903], Stanway Papers.
6. Lambert, Unquiet Souls, p. 143.
7. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, n.d., Stanway Papers; Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 7 September 1884, Stanway Papers.
8. Hugo Elcho to Percy Wyndham, 14 August 1883, Stanway Papers.
9. Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics 1860–1914 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 59–64.
10. The equivalent in ESV is £9,881,000 and in EPV £17,600,00.
11. Asquith, Haply I May Remember, p. 21.
12. Percy Wyndham to Mary Elcho, 13 and 18 May 1888, Stanway Papers.
13. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 6 December 1913 (Letters, p. 308).
14. Daker, Clouds, pp. 136–7.
15. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 27 September 1888, Stanway Papers.
16. Wemyss, Family Record, p. 16.
17. Mary Elcho to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 11 August 1915, Blunt Papers, FM 758-1975.
18. Cynthia Asquith, diary entry, 1 August 1918, quoted in Cynthia Asquith, Diaries, 1915–1918, ed. E. M. Horsley (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), p. 464.
19. Dakers, Clouds, pp. 136–7.
20. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 16 October 1883, Stanway Papers.
21. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 17 October 1883, Stanway Papers.
22. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 19 April 1884, Stanway Papers. Until mid-March 1884, Mary’s letters from London are written on writing paper headed 44 Belgrave Square. After that, they are headed 12 North Audley Street (see, for example, Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 10 and 27 March 1884, Stanway Papers).
23. Laura Lyttelton to Arthur Balfour, n.d. (c.1885), Whittingehame Papers, NRS GD433/2/477/4.
24. Abdy and Gere, The Souls, p. 150.
25. Hugo Elcho to Mary Elcho, 31 August 1887, Stanway Papers.
26. Mary Elcho to Hugo Elcho, 28 January 1886, Stanway Papers.
27. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 10 March 1884, Stanway Papers.
28. Madeline Adeane to Madeline Wyndham, c.1902, Adeane Papers.
29. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 1 August 1884, Stanway Papers.
30. Wemyss, Family Record, p. 35.
31. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 5 September 1884, Stanway Papers; Wemyss, Family Record, p. 7.
32. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, September 1884, Stanway Papers.
33. Ibid.
34. Quoted in Kenneth Young, Arthur James Balfour: The Happy Life of the Politician, Prime Minister, Statesman and Philosopher, 1848–1930 (G. Bell, 1963), pp. 81–2.
35. Mary Elcho to Percy Wyndham, 30 November 1884, Stanway Papers.
36. Mary Elcho, diary entry, 23 November 1884, Stanway Papers.
37. Ellenberger, ‘The Souls: High Society and Poli
tics’, p. 53.
38. Ibid., p. 50.
Chapter 5: The Gang
1. The dates suggest that Ego was a ‘new thread’, and that Mary fell pregnant almost immediately after she miscarried in the spring of 1884.
2. Pamela Tennant to Mary Elcho, n.d. [c.January 1905], Stanway Papers.
3. For a full account see Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979), pp. 491–513.
4. The Times, 24 December 1884.
5. The Times, 31 December 1884.
6. Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion, p. 212.
7. Mary Elcho, diary entries, December 1884, Stanway Papers.
8. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 30 July 1889, Stanway Papers.
9. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, February 1885, Stanway Papers.
10. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 15 March 1899 (Letters, pp. 60–1).
11. Mary Elcho to Madeline Wyndham, 13 February 1885, Stanway Papers.
12. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, February 1885, Stanway Papers.
13. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, February 1885, Stanway Papers.
14. Percy Wyndham to George Wyndham, 19 February 1885, quoted in Mackail and Wyndham, Life and Letters, 1.29.
15. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, February 1885, Stanway Papers.
16. Madeline Adeane to Mary Elcho, 18 February 1885, Stanway Papers.
17. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, February 1885, Stanway Papers.
18. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, March 1885, Stanway Papers.
19. Pamela Tennant to Mary Elcho, 6 March 1885, Stanway Papers.
20. Madeline Wyndham to Mary Elcho, March 1885, Stanway Papers.
21. Margot Asquith, An Autobiography, 2 vols (Thornton Butterworth, 1920–2), 1.60.
22. Mary Elcho to Percy Wyndham, 12 April 1885, Stanway Papers.
23. Mary Elcho, ‘The Souls’, unpublished memoir, cited in Ellenberger, ‘The Souls: High Society and Politics’, pp. 49–50.
24. Quoted in Blow, Broken Blood, p. 88.
25. Ellenberger, ‘The Souls: High Society and Politics’, p. 53.
26. Quoted in ibid., p. 51.
27. Mary Elcho to Percy Wyndham, 12 April 1884, Stanway Papers.
28. Mary Elcho to Arthur Balfour, 26 May 1905 (Letters, p. 223).
29. Ibid.
Those Wild Wyndhams Page 41