Porchey met her at what is now LaGuardia Airport. She looked a million dollars as she got off the plane. They headed for the St Regis hotel and Tanis apologised for behaving in a beastly manner, in between eating an excellent lunch. ‘I shall always love you,’ she told him. ‘I shall never love anyone as much as I have loved you. It’s hopeless, though; I’m just not cut out for being chatelaine at Highclere.’
Porchey remained glum and could only pick at his food.
‘I’m not going to say a word to anyone, especially the press,’ she assured him, before adding, ‘My father and brother will be livid with rage with me because they like you tremendously.’
That night Porchey boarded the Europa, bound for England. A swarm of newspaper reporters and photographers awaited him on board, insisting that he give them an interview. The ship’s purser took him into his office, where Porchey explained that he would have nothing to do with them, since he and Mrs Montagu had agreed not to talk to the press. The purser pulled out the evening papers. There was Tanis, looking lovely in a new frock, holding court at the St Regis. ‘Earl jilted at last moment. Said to have savage temper’ ran the headline. Porchey could hardly read the words. He sat down, heavily.
Porchey decided that he would after all grant an interview and sent some champagne to the pressmen, asking them to come to his cabin in an hour. They found him in the deluxe bridal suite, a picture of dejection. In front of an audience and with a stiff drink to hand, he began to feel fractionally better. ‘I shall just have to enjoy shooting, as much as possible,’ he remarked. ‘I’m going to shoot a lot of pheasants. How would you feel in my position, though?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Pretty tough on a chap, having to go off alone on his honeymoon.’
The Daily Sketch’s headline the following day was: ‘Pa Found Tut’s Tomb, Earl Can’t Find Bride’. Utterly crushed, Porchey spent most of the crossing in his suite. Fortunately he’d bumped into an old friend, who kept him in sight and told him emphatically, ‘Porchey, it’s the luckiest escape. Besides, never run after a woman or a bus: there’ll be another one coming along behind.’
It was difficult to be quite so stoical. Porchey had sacrificed his marriage for Tanis, and had then spent the best part of a year pining for her. Now she had jilted him at the altar and the whole world was enjoying the story.
The Europa docked at Southampton on 12 November. Porchey was met by hordes of press, and his mother. He had telephoned her before he boarded the ship to let her know what had happened before she read about it. Typically of Almina, she didn’t let the fact that she had never believed in Tanis, or Porchey’s love, prevent her from rising to the challenge in a crisis. She swept down to the docks and, in a show of solidarity, scooped up her son and drove him back to Highclere. There is a press photo that shows her looking her very best ‘grand old lady’ self. Porchey is trying his hardest to bear all the attention; Almina seems simply to rise above it.
The next few weeks were a constant stream of humiliation for Porchey. He did indeed shoot pheasants every weekend and fill the castle with his closest friends to support him, but the story seemed to have a life of its own and his distress was considerable. Tanis wrote to him to say she wished she could have been more loyal to him but had to be loyal to herself. She wanted to write scripts in Hollywood, not live at Highclere, and had only weakened in the face of his persistence. She promised to return the money and presents he had given her, and only wished she could ‘also return the very great affection and devotion you have unfortunately wasted on me.’
While Lord Carnarvon’s marriage was definitely off, another one was looking increasingly likely. At the end of October, as Porchey sailed across the Atlantic on his doomed mission to marry Tanis, Mrs Simpson filed for divorce and the American press reported that her marriage to King Edward VIII was imminent. Alan Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, wrote to him to inform him that ‘the silence in the British press on the subject of Your Majesty’s friendship with Mrs Simpson is not going to be maintained … Judging by the letters from British subjects living in foreign countries where the press has been outspoken, the effect will be calamitous.’
On 16 November, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was summoned to Buckingham Palace where the King told him that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson as soon as she was free to do so. Baldwin replied that such a marriage would not be acceptable to the people of Britain and her dominions. The King responded that if forced to choose, he would choose to abdicate the throne in order to be able to marry.
Various middle-ground options were considered by the King, the government and his advisers over the next few days, but nothing could be made to stick. Edward summoned several ministers to discuss the matter with him, including Duff Cooper, who was Minister for War at the time. Duff Cooper simply asked him to try to think about how his life would be if he pressed ahead with his resolution, and what he would do. The King was unmoved.
The royal family were appalled at the constitutional crisis that threatened the British monarchy, and Edward’s refusal to do what they considered to be his duty. Appeals were made to numerous friends to intervene, to try to persuade him that he must choose the throne and give up Mrs Simpson. This was the helping hand that Prince George had requested of Porchey months ago, should the need arise.
On 23 November, the Duke of Kent was down at Highclere for the second shooting weekend in a row. Both men were in need of pleasurable distractions. Porchey might have been miserable, but he recognised that his problems were small in comparison with the crisis engulfing the royal family, and indeed the country.
The following week, Prince George telephoned Porchey to ask if he could come up to town as soon as possible. They wanted to leave no stone unturned in the effort to ‘dissuade David’. A plan was hatched. The Duke of Kent asked Porchey to contrive to meet his brother in the hammam on Jermyn Street in Mayfair, a Victorian Turkish Baths complex. Porchey would need to be there by 7.00 a.m. so that it seemed less of a put-up job, and could then have a quiet word.
Come the appointed day, Porchey was in situ as planned and making his way through the various steam rooms. Half an hour later the King arrived. With a grin he said, ‘Morning, Porchey. Now, let me guess. George has put you up to this.’
Porchey decided it was better to own up immediately and then get straight to the point. ‘Are you quite resolute, Your Majesty? Quite sure this is not an infatuation?’
‘Of course I’m sure. That’s what that bloody fool Baldwin asked me, too. No, no, Porchey, it’s her brain. I can’t tell you what a wonderful woman she is.’
Porchey reiterated his belief that the country would never accept a twice-divorced woman as queen and then, seeing that there was nothing more to be said, took his leave. He was very downcast at the thought of the certain crisis to come.
On 10 December 1936, Edward VIII of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Emperor of India, signed the papers to renounce his right, and that of his descendants, to the throne. His three brothers were with him in the drawing room at Fort Belvedere, to witness his signature. The following day, as the abdication was legally ratified by the British Parliament and that of the dominions, Prince Edward, as he now was, made a broadcast to the nation from Windsor Castle. His speech had been polished by Winston Churchill; he stressed that he did not feel he could do his job well without the support of the woman he loved. On the next day he left for Austria, to spend his life with Wallis Simpson.
Viewed from the great distance of eighty years, the fallout from the crisis was not as grave as the royal family and Stanley Baldwin had feared. Baldwin was commended for having successfully resolved the situation; Prince Albert (Bertie), who became King George VI, was widely believed to be far more suited to the job than his elder brother, and Edward was allowed to head off and pursue what Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King called that ‘jazz of life’ of which he had always been so fond.
But the fact that the resolution was a success, and th
at public attitudes to many of the moral and legal arguments that underpinned the case are now very different, does not alter the fact that at the time it was deeply traumatic. Many members of the establishment never forgave Edward for putting his own personal happiness above the wishes and needs of his nation. Many of them never forgave Wallis for being Wallis. Prince George maintained a cordial but distant correspondence. Porchey played golf with HRH the Duke of Windsor, as Edward became, and dined with the Duke and Duchess from time to time, but he and Wallis never got on and gradually the friendship was allowed to decline.
The King’s opponents were certainly wrong about one thing. The relationship was no mere infatuation. Edward married Wallis on 3 June 1937 in France and the marriage lasted until his death in 1972.
Thanks to the rumbling aftershocks of the abdication crisis, the British press largely forgot that they had been so excited about the Earl of Carnarvon’s jilting only two months previously. Porchey must have been inordinately grateful for their distraction when he read in the New York Post on 16 January 1937 that the Guinness heiress, the Hon. Mrs Tanis Montagu, and vice-president of MGM studios, Howard Dietz, had eloped by plane from Newark to Juarez, Mexico.
The bridegroom had been divorced for three days and insisted that there was nothing at all impetuous about the marriage. Mrs Dietz had perhaps started to appreciate the value of circumspection. She confined her comments to, ‘I am very happy.’ The couple thought they would settle in Greenwich Village, New York.
12
Recovery
In January 1937 Catherine, Countess of Carnarvon, wrote to the Duchess of Kent, wife of her old friend, to congratulate her on the birth of her second child, a daughter. The infant Princess Alexandra had been born on Christmas Day 1936 at her parents’ house, 3 Belgrave Square. Princess Marina replied, saying that she hoped to be able to show her the baby soon and wishing her ‘dear Catherine every blessing for 1937’.
The Duke and Duchess of Kent had been excellent friends to Catherine since her separation from Porchey. She had until recently been living nearby, just the other side of Hyde Park, at Hertford Street, and Princess Marina had invited her to tea and to dine when they were having one of their quieter evenings. She and Prince George could see that Catherine was starting to feel better, but deduced that she was still in no mood for the Kents’ typically boisterous evening parties, and probably would not enjoy seeing Porchey’s old friends, who were such a fixture of their social circle.
The Kents, along with Catherine’s numerous other friends and supporters, had reason to believe that she had turned a corner and was now really making an independent life for herself. At the end of 1936 she had bought a house on Wilton Crescent, a street of elegant late-Regency town houses just off Belgrave Square, in the heart of fashionable Belgravia. The Duke and Duchess of Kent were now even nearer neighbours, so it seems likely that she did indeed meet Princess Alexandra early in 1937.
Wilton Crescent was a new beginning. Catherine’s excitement about it (and her longing for the divorce to reach its conclusion) is palpable in a letter she wrote to her aunt Edith, in New York, in the October of 1936. ‘All this very sad affair of mine will be over on 2 November when I hope the divorce will be made absolute. I took [cousin] Mary over my new house yesterday and she thought it was lovely. So now I am very busy trying to get it all done up and settled for Xmas!’
Aside from being a beautiful house, 11 Wilton Crescent was the first significant asset that Catherine had ever owned herself. She bought it with part of the generous divorce settlement that her ex-husband made over to her, and it was hers and hers alone. Unlike Highclere, it truly was her home and no one could ask her to leave it.
There is something poignant about reading the inventory of furniture that was transported there by the removal company Messrs Camp, Hopson and Co., from Hertford Street on 11 November 1936. One realises how little Catherine had to call her own, despite the sixteen years she had spent as Lady Carnarvon. A double bed, a wardrobe, a settee and two easy chairs. A dressing mirror and some gramophone records, a silver teapot, sundry photographs. Her collection of dresses. The portrait of Catherine on the front cover of this book was painted by Simon Elwes in 1929, which now hangs again at Highclere in what was once her sitting room. The list of possessions, typed in fading purple ink, does not fill a single sheet of paper.
It was not that Catherine was left badly off. Porchey agreed to an income of £3,000 a year, for life and irrespective of any subsequent marriage. The Highclere Estate was charged as security, which meant that the settlement was cast-iron guaranteed. (An incidental, but fundamentally key consequence for Catherine’s son, was that this would later provide a check on his father’s sales of the remaining parts of the Highclere Estate. Because of the terms of the divorce, there would be something left for Henry to inherit.) The income was in addition to the money Porchey had provided for her to purchase the house, and his payment of most of their children’s expenses (though Catherine, fair-minded, insisted that she contribute, too). By the time the final stage of settlement was concluded, as it was in April 1937, Catherine was a wealthy woman. She was able to buy beautiful new things of her own choosing with which to furnish her house. She might have decided to hang her self-portrait, which is a lovely likeness that captures her luminous prettiness and calm expression. Though perhaps she chose not to: having it displayed would mean being reminded that Porchey had not wished to keep it.
Catherine had left her childhood homes at the age of ten after her father’s death, and then lived on the generosity of her mother’s cousins, in their space. Highclere had been a happy home for years, but it was always her husband’s family seat and her presence there was dependent on Porchey’s say-so. As Almina had discovered before her, countesses come and go from Highclere, always having to make room for the next generation, or the next wife. Compared to the vulnerability of all these former homes, Wilton Crescent was a place of safety.
It would be her children’s home, too, of course. Penelope was with her most of the time, except when she was visiting her father. Henry would return for the school holidays. Gar was frequently there, lending support. Jac and Eileen and their two children lived just a few doors away, at number 47, which was one reason that Catherine had decided on the house in the first place. Philippa was still far off in Scotland, wrestling with her own marital problems but, in other respects, it was like a return to the Wendells’ old London days. They were still a close family who enjoyed each other’s company as much as they relied on one another.
And of course, Catherine was still an attractive young woman with a love of dancing and music and conversation. She must at some point have realised that in some ways, she had never been this powerful before in her life. She had autonomy, money, and the sympathy of all who had wished her well during the past awful few years. She had battled her depression and her drinking problem, and the worst upset of her life was now behind her. She was free to do what she pleased. That was a challenging prospect in some ways for a woman unused to such liberty, but also an exciting one.
While 1937 began well for Catherine, for Porchey it was far more painful. Early in January he collapsed at Highclere and Almina swept down to collect him and take him back to Alfred House to nurse him better. Smith the butler was also ill and had to take some time off work; he had weak lungs and the damp winter was troubling him. It isn’t clear what Porchey was suffering from—it might well have been at least partly physical – but judging from Almina’s solicitude and the timing it seems likely that he was mostly at the end of his tether. His nerves were strung out after the separation and divorce from Catherine, worry over the impact on his children and then the whole ghastly Tanis affair that had culminated in his heartbreak and humiliation.
Porchey spent three weeks at his mother’s nursing home, where he rested and ate well and where he could talk things through with Almina. Perhaps it was her idea that he take a holiday, somewhere warm away from the cold London winter. After all
, her husband had been advised by his doctors to winter in Egypt, and though Almina had her misgivings about the place initially, she grew to love it.
Porchey spent a week or so in Egypt before travelling on to Kenya. He knew people out there, in particular Lord Delamere. The Delameres were the principal family in British Kenya. Tom Delamere’s father had been so formative in building up the agricultural economy of colonial East Africa, encouraging the British upper classes to settle there and assuming unofficial social and political leadership when they did, that he was nicknamed the Rhodes of Kenya. By 1937 there were approximately 25,000 white settlers in the lush highlands of central Kenya and their presence had established the country as a holiday destination for wealthy safari-goers.
At the end of January, Porchey set off for Nairobi with a group of friends. He knew Myrtle and Flash Kellet from the racing set; Patty Hoyt was an attractive American friend of theirs whom he had met the previous year and taken a liking to, and with whom he had embarked on a love affair after his relationship with Tanis foundered. He was accompanied, as always on his travels, by his valet, George.
Nairobi in 1937 had a tiny central district of grand administrative buildings, built in a hurry by the British, a rapidly developing commercial sector and a railway line running out towards Uganda in one direction and Mombasa on the Indian Ocean in the other. Outside of the city were the country clubs of the white elite, complete with golf courses and airstrips for easy access to their vast farms. Porchey’s party spent a night at the Norfolk hotel in central Nairobi and were then driven out to catch a flight that would transport them, complete with guns, cameras, tents and guides, to go on safari.
Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey Page 15