The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England

by Jenifer Roberts

  The relationship had its tentative beginnings when she spent a few months in the Hôtel Molé during the spring of 1861 when she was still in mourning. It became a love affair soon after she returned to Paris the following year.

  The Hôtel Molé was five minutes’ walk from the British Embassy, along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, past the Élysée Palace to the corner of the Avenue Matignon. It was easy for Edward to slip away from the embassy to spend time with the lonely widow who had retained her beauty: the fine bone structure of her face, her large, wide-apart grey eyes, her smooth skin. In a carte-de-visite photograph taken in 1864, she is wearing an off-the-shoulder gown, her dark hair is swept back into a chignon, and she looks much younger than her fifty-one years.

  During his visits to the Hôtel Molé, she told him about the bill of complaint drawn up by the trustees in England, how they tried to amend her husband’s will to reduce her income, how they refused to accept that Stephens had given her the Hôtel Molé in her own name. She was unable to handle any of this, she told him, using her power of weeping to emphasise her distress. She was in need of someone to help her – and at this early stage in their relationship, it seemed a simple matter for Edward to offer ‘to manage a good many of her affairs’.

  Edward Claremont was living beyond his means in Paris. His salary of £1,100 a year was insufficient for a senior attaché, particularly one with a wife and six children. Unlike most army officers and diplomats of the time, he had little or no private income. At the same time, it was necessary to put on a show of uniform and equipage to impress Louis-Napoleon and senior officers in the French army.

  His lodgings were unusually modest for a man of his standing: a narrow, three-storey terraced house in the Rue Lord Byron, a small street behind the Champs-Élysées. When asked to entertain senior officers in the French navy, he complained that ‘my dining room is so small that it will be difficult to have more than two at a time’.

  He had been protesting about his salary for several years. In December 1859, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Cowley, had written a private letter to Lord John Russell, the foreign secretary:

  Claremont has written me a very piteous letter with the desire that I should endeavour to obtain for him an increase of salary … I am afraid that he has little or nothing else … If he had been an unmarried man, his present allowances should have been more than ample. As it is, he must I apprehend be in great difficulties.1

  On 30 April 1862, about the time he began his love affair with Yolande, Edward also wrote to the foreign secretary:

  I find myself in such a difficult position here … I was not given anything as an outfit, and the expense of establishing myself here not only ran away with the little money I had put by … but got me into debt besides … [and] I am sorry to say that I have never been able to bring up my arrears. My debts have gone on increasing and are so pressing now as to cause me the greatest uneasiness and anxiety.

  The expenses of living in Paris are enormous for a man like myself with a large family and with but very small private means. I cannot accuse myself of any extravagance and I can safely say that my difficulties have arisen from the wish to carry on the duties entrusted to me in the most efficient manner. I have not been so foolish as to do anything for show, but to obtain information I have been obliged to mix a good deal in society and to a certain extent to return the civilities I received from French officers who have entertained me …with whom it is indispensable that I should keep up my relations …

  I feel that I can do more good in this country than anywhere else. Therefore I do not ask for any change. I do not either ask for any increase in salary as this might in some way interfere with the diplomatic service … but I throw myself on your Lordship’s favourable consideration in the hope that you will see fit to allow me a certain sum in lieu of the outfit which I did not receive, and which may enable me to get over my present difficulties.2

  Yolande returned to Roehampton two months after Edward wrote this letter. He crossed the Channel a few weeks later, accompanying Lord Cowley on a visit to the Foreign Office in London. He took the opportunity to stay with Yolande and, on 31 July, he wrote to Cowley on Grove House headed notepaper:

  I was sorry on all accounts to miss you yesterday but I should have liked to have shown you a letter from Lord Russell who says he is sorry to have kept me waiting so long for an answer; he was in hopes that he could have acceded to my wishes but on reflection he cannot increase my pay and allowances … His Lordship had not my letter either before him or present in his mind for, if you recollect, I did not ask for an increase of pay and allowances, but merely for a sum equivalent to what I should have received had I been given an outfit … Of course I am very anxious to bring this to a settlement and may be detained for a few days which I hope you will not mind.3

  Edward was more than happy to be detained for a few days in Grove House, and he and Yolande returned to Paris together in early August. Five weeks later, they were back in England, the newspapers reporting on 13 September that ‘Mrs Lyne Stephens and Colonel Claremont’ were among the ‘fashionable arrivals’ at the West Cliff Hotel in Folkestone. Yolande was about to take possession of Lynford Hall. She was nervous about moving into the new house alone, so Edward had agreed to accompany her.

  They travelled by train to Brandon, five miles from Lynford, where a carriage was waiting. After driving through the park and through the elaborate wrought-iron gates decorated with the Lyne Stephens coat of arms, the carriage came to a halt outside the front door where the servants were lined up to welcome her. The red-brick mansion was adorned with mullioned windows, stone balustrading, shaped gables, dormer windows, turrets, and leaded cupolas, ‘forming a very imposing and picturesque pile of the Tudor style of domestic architecture’.

  The house had been designed to Stephens’s specifications, for hosting shooting parties and grand dinners, for showing off his wealth and prestige. The huge reception rooms were neither comfortable nor congenial for a woman living alone. Yolande was hoping that Edward would stay with her for at least a week, but even her tears could not persuade him to stay longer than three days. He was needed at the embassy and his wife may have been fretting at his absence.

  He returned to Paris on 18 September, but was almost immediately recalled to Norfolk. On the 23rd, he took Lord Cowley into his confidence:

  Mrs Lyne Stephens, who has asked me to manage a good many of her affairs, wishes me very much if possible to go over to England for three or four days to talk over some important matters. It is an object to me not to disappoint her and my absence would not extend beyond the middle of next week … I would go right through London and not near anybody, nor would I tell anyone here except Atlee who might telegraph if I was wanted. Of course I would take it all on my own shoulder in case of an accident, and naturally not move if you disapprove in any way.4

  Cowley wrote a brief note of acquiescence and Edward left again on 26 September. Despite his protestations of an early return, he was away for almost two weeks. On 3 October, he wrote to Cowley from Lynford Hall:

  I meant to have gone back to Paris tomorrow but a business has just occurred at the new house which Mrs Lyne Stephens is building. The clerk of works who has been here for five years has had a fit and I have telegraphed to the architect to come over tomorrow as it is feared drinking and confusion in the accounts may be at the bottom of the whole thing. Mrs Lyne Stephens would feel so very much at a loss what to do that I venture to remain to investigate the circumstances and, Sunday then intervening, I shall not be able to be in Paris till Tuesday morning. I hope you will not think I have abused your indulgence. You know it is not often that I neglect my duty.5

  There is no evidence that the clerk of works had created such a mess; William Burn was too efficient an architect to allow this to happen. It was an excuse for Edward to remain longer in Lynford Hall, as Yolande had no doubt begged him to do. He wrote a note to Cowley as soon as he returned to Paris on 7 October: ‘
I am in great hopes you did not want me during my absence. I am very sorry it should have been so prolonged and I assure you it was very much against my will but I could not help it.’

  Two months later, he returned to Lynford to spend a few more days in her company. She had prepared an indenture to put the land for the mausoleum at Roehampton into trust and on 9 December, he signed the deed of conveyance as a trustee. Now he was legally, as well as emotionally, involved in her life.

  12

  THE FIRST MILITARY ATTACHÉ

  The expenses of living in Paris are enormous for a man like myself with a large family and with but very small private means.

  Colonel Edward Claremont, 30 April 1862

  Edward was not only finding it difficult to resist Yolande’s demands, he was also increasingly concerned about money. This was an old story: even as a boy, he had lived beyond his means. At the age of fourteen, General Stopford placed him in a boarding school in Paris and wrote affectionate letters to his ‘dear little scamp’ and ‘dearest rascal’ and advised him not to go to the Comédie-Française because of the people he might encounter there.

  ‘So you little rascal,’ his father wrote in March 1834, ‘you have spent all your money and want more – was there ever such a fellow … I have sent you an order for some to go on with … As you know I am always happy to contribute to your pleasures, though it deprives me of the shirt on my back.’

  ‘You are now flush in money again,’ he wrote in April, ‘and will not deserve I hope the name you give yourself, spendthrift.’ Seven days later, he gave his son some financial advice:

  As far as it can be done and without being niggardly, I should prefer your being a sparethrift to a spendthrift. The latter … spends his money on trifles and orders things from the caprice of the moment without being really in want of them, and that is the advantage of always paying ready money; you think a moment before you go in to buy or perhaps, which may sometimes be the case, you have not in pocket the wherewithal to pay and, after a moment’s reflection, you say what a goose I was very near being, to buy a waistcoat merely from caprice … I don’t say that this has ever happened to you, but it has to me in my younger days.

  When Edward was sixteen, his father brought him to England to join his boyhood friend, Frederick Leveson-Gower (son of Lord Granville, the British ambassador in Paris) at a school near Nottingham. As Leveson-Gower wrote in his memoirs: ‘I was fond of some of my companions, amongst whom was Edward Claremont, the best friend man ever had.’1

  His father also arranged for Edward’s naturalisation as a British citizen, which at the time could only be done by private act of parliament. The head of the Stopford family, Edward’s cousin, the Irish peer Lord Courtown, refused permission for an illegitimate son to take the Stopford surname, so instead he was given the invented name of Claremont. The ‘Act for Naturalising Edward Stopford Claremont’ passed through both houses of parliament in May 1836 and received royal assent in June.

  General Stopford died in September 1837. Five months later, Edward joined the army as a cornet. He was posted to Montreal in 1840, assigned to the newly formed Royal Canadian Rifle Regiment which had been raised to police the Canadian frontier and prevent British soldiers deserting across the border into the United States. Detachments of the regiment, wearing uniforms of ‘rifle-green’, manned a series of frontier posts spread along the Canadian border.

  Promoted to lieutenant in July 1841, Edward was appointed aide-de-camp to Colonel George Augustus Wetherall, commander of the garrisons in west Canada. Two years later, he accompanied Wetherall on leave to England where, in October 1843, he married the colonel’s daughter Frances. On their return to Montreal, he was promoted to captain and given the appointment of deputy assistant adjutant-general.

  When the regiment trimmed the number of its staff officers in March 1851, Edward was one of three who became surplus to requirements. He returned to England where he became available for other duties. In June 1852, he acted as aide-de-camp to ‘His Highness Said Pasha, Hereditary Prince of Egypt’ on a state visit to England; he accompanied the prince to a dinner at Buckingham Palace and a ‘grand reception’ given by Benjamin Disraeli.

  Five months later, after the death of the Duke of Wellington, he was employed as aide-de-camp to ‘the Russian, Prussian, Spanish and Portuguese officers who have arrived in England to be present at the Duke’s funeral’. This took place in St Paul’s Cathedral on 18 November and was attended by large numbers of senior military men from overseas. Edward made their arrangements and accompanied them to functions held in their honour, including a state dinner in Windsor Castle.

  Eight days after the funeral, the foreign officers made a visit to Woolwich Arsenal, accompanied by Lord Raglan, master-general of the ordnance, and Queen Victoria’s cousin the Duke of Cambridge. They arrived in a fleet of eight carriages, ‘all in their respective uniforms, the distinguished foreigners attended by Captain Claremont in a rifle-green uniform’. Having inspected the weaponry in the arsenal, they mounted on regimental horses to ride up to Woolwich Common for the displays. The Morning Post described the scene:

  Although the rain was falling in torrents, and a strong south-west gale blowing all the time, and the ground was in as bad a state as it could well be, His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge and the distinguished visitors remained on the bleak common and witnessed the troops of the Royal Horse Artillery go through the entire evolutions of a field-day, firing twenty-five rounds from each gun in the various positions they took up.

  The scene on the common today will not be readily forgotten. The constant heavy rain was drifted by the wind in great force, sufficient to pass it through any clothing in a short time, and the bright flashing and the booming of the guns made a good representation of a thunder-storm, with the difference that the wind was bitterly cold and piercing, and all who were out for five minutes were completely wet through. The royal and distinguished visitors entered the carriages in their wet uniforms and left for town at four p.m.

  In January 1853, Edward was appointed to ‘the senior department of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst’. Fourteen months later, England and France declared war on Russia, allied with Turkey in the conflict in the Crimea. Because of his fluency in the language, Edward was appointed assistant military commissioner at the headquarters of the French army. He sailed for Turkey in April 1854, accompanied by three horses, two servants and a luggage mule.

  Later that year, he was present at the battles of Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman, as well as several other engagements during the siege of Sevastopol. It is a tradition in the Claremont family that, during the Battle of Balaclava, he overheard General Bosquet utter the famous words when watching the Charge of the Light Brigade: ‘c’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’

  Promoted to the rank of major, Edward was twice mentioned in despatches. In October 1854, Lord Raglan, the British commander-in-chief, forwarded a letter from General Canrobert, the French commander-in-chief, acknowledging ‘the high esteem in which Major Claremont is held by the French army for his courage, the uprightness of his character, and the services which he has rendered’. In the second despatch, forwarded to the Foreign Office in February 1855 by the British ambassador in Paris, Edward was commended for his ‘constant bravery when deployed in the face of the enemy in the battles of Alma and Inkerman, and also in operations during the siege of Sevastopol during which he served with distinction during the most difficult missions and displayed a perfect understanding of all the details of war’. ‘This officer,’ wrote General Canrobert, ‘has gained great esteem in our army … both in a military capacity and as an intermediary in the cordial and perfect relations which exist between our two armies.’2

  Edward returned from the Crimea in June 1855. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur (fourth class), the Crimean medal with four clasps, and the Turkish Order of Medjidie (second class). Queen Victoria also made the specific request that he be awarded the CB (Companion of the Order
of the Bath).

  On 2 September, the foreign secretary recommended that he take the place of General Torrens, the British military commissioner in Paris who had died nine days earlier. Louis-Napoleon had requested that Edward be given the appointment, stating publicly that he wished no other British officer to be military commissioner at his court. The request was endorsed by Queen Victoria:

  The Queen writes … to enquire whether Major Claremont has gone to Paris. If not, she thinks he should do so with as little delay as possible, as it is very important to have some military man on the spot to be able to communicate freely with the French Government.3

  On the 11th, Edward wrote to the foreign secretary asking for funds to equip himself with an outfit:

  I suppose my appointment may be considered as partly of a diplomatic nature. I believe that what is called an outfit or sum of money to assist in defraying the expenses of a first establishment is sometimes granted to diplomatic agents, and I would beg your Lordship to have the kindness to consider whether such a boon could not be extended to me.

  I am not a rich man and shall have to buy a great number of things, I shall have to pay in advance for an apartment in Paris, all of which will make a great hole in my first quarter’s pay. Were there any army sources from which I could have procured them, I would not have called upon your Lordship, but the Regulations only apply to an officer taking the field. I am waiting for my final instructions … after which I am to report myself at the Foreign Office and start for my post, which I am ready to do at any moment.

  He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel on the 22nd. The following day, accompanied by Lord Cowley, he was officially introduced to Louis-Napoleon as the new British military commissioner in Paris. Five months later, when peace was declared in the Crimea, his wartime appointment as military commissioner came to an end. However, ‘as it was considered that I might still be of some service here, I was asked whether I would remain in Paris as Military Attaché … to which I immediately acceded’.