In May 1883, the bishop wrote to her in Paris explaining that the diocese had borrowed money to buy four plots of land bordering Marriott Street in Northampton and that the architect ‘is now engaged on the working drawings’. After their return to England, she and Edward visited Riddell on 18 July to see the site of the new house. ‘As I am very awkward travelling by myself,’ she had written a few days earlier, ‘I hope you will not mind General Claremont accompanying me.’ On 21 July, she wrote again:
I have been thinking a great deal about our conversation … and I cannot bear the idea of your having incurred a debt for the purchase of the ground on which your house is to be built. Therefore I feel that I must enclose a cheque which I think will make you free on that score, leaving still £5000 for the building. This will, I suppose, enable you to sign the contract and to begin the work as soon as possible. Before I close this note, I wish to tell you how much I enjoyed my visit to you, and also how much more interested I am now that I have seen everything.9
The Bishop’s House – Yolande’s petite maison – was completed in 1884, a large, imposing residence set in four acres of grounds. She paid for the land, the building costs, and the furniture and furnishings, including the oriental carpets. She also presented the house with a religious painting by the seventeenth-century artist Pierre Mignard, the frame inscribed with the words ‘Presented by Mrs Lyne Stephens, October 7th 1884’ – the date of the consecration of her chapel in Lynford.
She and Edward visited Northampton again on 12 March 1885, this time to inspect the finished building. ‘We talked about your house all the way back,’ Edward wrote to Riddell from Gloucester Street two days later, ‘and we both agreed that it is perfect inside and out. The appearance is dignified and original, and the internal arrangements so well planned.’10
At the same time as paying for the Bishop’s House, Yolande had funded further buildings at the orphanage in Shefford, including the new church of St Francis which was also completed in 1884. A panel in one of the stained-glass windows portrays her on her knees, wearing a black dress with a white shawl over her head and shoulders, holding a replica of the church in her hands.
Edward accompanied her to the opening service during the first week of July, followed by a luncheon in the town. ‘It was a very great pleasure to be in Shefford last week,’ she wrote to Riddell on the 14th. ‘I only wish I should live long enough to assist at many such ceremonies. The General was much alarmed when you mentioned his name and relieved when he found he had not to make a speech!’11
She made many other gifts to the diocese. In 1882, she gave £2,500 to the Episcopal Income Fund; three years later, she contributed £4,000 (£500,000) towards the cost of building the church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Wellingborough; but her crowning gift was the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, one of the largest Catholic churches in the country.
In the past, the hierarchy had dissuaded Catholics from studying at university. Before 1856, those Catholics who did attend were prevented from taking their degrees because of the religious test required. Numbers had increased only slightly since then because students still had to obtain their bishop’s approval, and most bishops – stressing ‘the dangers to the faith of an atmosphere of liberalism and scepticism’ – continued to oppose the entry of Catholics to university except with special permission.
By the time Arthur Riddell was appointed to the diocese, several bishops had begun to change their minds and it became clear that the small church of St Andrew, which had served Catholics in the town for forty years, was too small for the expected increase in Catholic students. The clergy decided to build ‘a new and imposing church … more worthy of the old faith of Cambridge’. With a donation from the Duke of Norfolk, a plot of land was purchased on a corner of the major crossroads in the city, the intersection of Lensfield Road and Hills Road known as Hyde Park Corner.
In 1883, Canon Christopher Scott was appointed to St Andrew’s with instructions to raise money for the new church. Having worked as vicar-general of the diocese, he already knew Yolande. He had blessed the chapel in Lynford in November 1879 and had visited her several times since then. He was a man of great charm and, when he visited Lynford during the winter of 1883/84, Yolande listened intently as he told her of the land at Hyde Park Corner and the church he hoped to build there.
Cardinal John Henry Newman also visited Lynford that winter and lent his support to the cause. He wrote to Scott on Yolande’s headed notepaper, a letter marked ‘for publication’:
Cambridge, as being the seat of a great university, has a hold on the hearts and minds of Catholics in all parts of England. This is why I feel a special satisfaction in learning from you that … you are receiving subscriptions with a view of building there a new Church on a new site, an undertaking which, though local in its purpose, is not local in the interest which attaches to it, nor in the call which it makes on our co-operation. I pray God to bless so important a work.12
Scott and Newman sowed the seed in Yolande’s mind. She nurtured the idea for several months and by 14 July, as she wrote to Arthur Riddell after attending the opening service in Shefford, ‘I am rather under a promise to Dr Scott about helping him at Cambridge’.
A month later, on 15 August 1884, she and Edward made the journey from Roehampton. It was the Feast of the Assumption and she had brought a bouquet of flowers from the gardens at Grove House. She asked Scott to lay the bouquet on the altar of St Andrew’s, then asked him – with no trace of irony – ‘Will you allow poor me to build your church?’ As he would write ten years later:
What hopes should we have had of utilising the site unless we had looked to her who had already done so much, but who crowned her many deeds of munificence by erecting the church? … There had been no need of repeated requests, of urgent appeals to persuade to it; the work was as spontaneous as it was lavish in its generosity.13
Yolande intended this to be her church, funded entirely by her own money and built and furnished entirely to her own taste. As she wrote to Riddell on 30 August: ‘What I have most at heart is Cambridge, and for this … I must be allowed to indulge my own taste and fancy, for I think it would not do building a church there which could not be worthy of the surroundings.’14
She would pay for the entire cost of the church and the rectory. She would pay for the furnishings and furniture in both buildings, as well as ceremonial accoutrements in the church and vestments for the clergy. She agreed to just one exception: she would allow Baron von Hügel, a prominent Catholic in the town, to donate a medieval processional cross, although it was she who would pay to have it restored and studded with precious stones.
Yolande and Scott agreed that the church should be dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption, in honour of the Feast Day when she made her offer. Scott also wished to commemorate the English Catholic martyrs who died for their faith between the Reformation of 1535 and the reign of Charles II, many of whom had been educated at Cambridge.
He employed the Catholic architects Dunn and Hansom of Newcastle to design the church in Gothic Revival style. Builders were appointed, and ecclesiastical artists and craftsmen selected to produce the carvings, sculptures, and stained-glass windows. The land at Hyde Park Corner was cleared and, in the summer of 1885, foundations were laid for the church.
At the same time, work began on the rectory which was completed two years later, a large red-brick building with an open quadrangle, reminiscent of a university college. Work now began on the church and, on the afternoon of 30 June 1887, Yolande was guest of honour when Arthur Riddell laid the foundation stone. She and Edward had taken the train from London that morning after he performed his last duty at Queen Victoria’s jubilee. The town was decorated in celebration of the jubilee and ‘at no spot in the borough were the decorations more chaste and artistic than on the gateway to the new Roman Catholic church … where a bust of Her Majesty crowned the edifice of flags, evergreens and Chinese lanterns’.
The bishop entered the site of the church in a long procession, ‘preceded by candle-bearers and followed by the greater part of the chapter and clergy’ of the diocese. A platform with a large wooden cross had been erected where the altar would stand, ‘the foot of which was adorned with choice roses and behind which were plants’. He blessed the stone and sprinkled it with holy water before giving a brief address from the platform. He concluded with a tribute to Yolande: ‘Almighty God moved the heart of a lady who came forward to bear the whole of the expenses of this beautiful church, which will vie with many of the churches of the good olden days.’15
While Catholics in Cambridge delighted in their new church, Protestants in the town were enraged by the size of the building. The interior measured 156 feet long by 71 feet wide. The nave would be 50 feet high and the spire – at over 213 feet – would be the highest landmark in the whole of Cambridgeshire, visible for miles in all directions. As one of Scott’s friends, Edward Conybeare, later recalled:
Though a generation or more had passed since Catholic Emancipation, the penal laws … were still remembered and some non-Catholics considered that a religion so recently … outlawed ought to avoid making itself conspicuous. Yet the new church was the most outstanding landmark in the whole town. Hostility was thus aroused; shoals of letters, of bigotry now almost unthinkable, were sent to the local Press, and the great poplar tree which then stood at Hyde Park Corner was white with ultra-Protestant posters and leaflets.16
Low-church evangelicals were particularly incensed. ‘Dolls’ eyes for idols,’ they chanted, aware that this ‘eyedollatrous’ building was funded from a fortune made in a glass factory. The church became known as the ‘eye-doll house’, giving rise to rumours – still prevalent today – that Stephens had made his money by the invention of moveable eyes for dolls. E. M. Forster included the legend in his novel The Longest Journey, published in 1907:
They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic Church, whose florid bulk was already receding into twilight. It is the first big building that the incoming visitor sees. ‘Oh, here come the colleges!’ cries the Protestant parent, and then learns that it was built by a Papist who made a fortune out of moveable eyes for dolls. ‘Built out of dolls’ eyes to contain idols’ – that at all events, is the legend and the joke. It watches over the apostate city, taller by many a yard than anything within, and asserting, however wildly, that here is eternity, stability, and bubbles unbreakable upon a windless sea.17
During the winter of 1887/88, Yolande and Edward made the occasional journey by train from Brandon to Cambridge to see the walls of the church rise from the ground. In November, Arthur Riddell travelled to Rome where he took the opportunity of having a word with Pope Leo XIII about Yolande’s activities in the diocese. He wrote to her from Rome on 30 December, a letter to which Yolande replied on 19 February: ‘Thank you for … the gratifying intelligence that the Holy Father granted a special blessing to the Lady qui vous bâtit une grande église. It is very good of you to have thought of me.’18
Three months later, she received a letter from the Vatican, dated 30 April and signed by Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Propagation of the Faith. The pope had asked Simeoni to congratulate her on ‘the zeal with which she has promoted the advancement of the Holy Faith, as well as her generous donations towards the building of churches’. He was sending her a rosary of agate beads mounted in silver, together with the ‘Apostolic Blessing’.
In July, Christopher Scott found himself in a quandary. He was ready to sign a contract for further work to the church when news arrived that ‘Mrs Lyne Stephens was lying seriously ill at Paris, and it was believed in danger of death’. Had Yolande made arrangements for completion of the church in her will? Scott thought not. The solicitor for the diocese offered to travel to Paris but was informed that Yolande ‘was not permitted to see anybody’. As a result, Scott had ‘several sleepless weeks in which he was haunted by visions of an uncompleted church which would be known for all time as Scott’s Folly and which it would be almost impossible to get anyone to finish because of its great cost.’19
According to Scott, Yolande recovered from her illness and, after returning to England, ‘one of the first acts of her convalescence was to come to Cambridge’. At their first meeting in the autumn of 1888, she unclasped ‘a magnificent pearl necklace worth many thousands of pounds’ from around her neck and placed it in his hands. As he wrote a few years later:
Her great gift to Cambridge was not merely an easy one out of superfluous wealth, but it involved some personal sacrifice. Friends of late had missed the sight of costly jewels, which for years had formed a part of her personal adornment. What had become of a necklace of rarest pearls now no longer worn? They had been sacrificed for the erection of this very church.20
Work on the exterior was complete by the spring of 1889 and, on 6 May, Scott climbed the scaffolding to lay the capstone on the spire. The weathervane was fixed the following day. On the 8th, ‘the tower was illuminated by coloured lights and a display of fireworks took place from the top of the scaffolding. This produced a very beautiful effect and was seen for miles.’
Although the interior of the church remained ‘quite devoid of ornament’, the stonework was finished. Above the rose window of the north transept were inscribed these words: ‘Pray for the good estate of Yolande Marie Louise Lyne Stephens, Foundress of this church.’
19
PENAL SERVITUDE
Madame never varies. She turns everything round and makes
a row out of nothing.
Harry Claremont, 24 April 1889
Yolande was seventy-five years old. The generosity she bestowed on the diocese of Northampton, the charm she displayed to Arthur Riddell and Christopher Scott, were rarely reflected in her private behaviour. Over the years, she had become spoilt, imperious and irritable. She insisted that Edward be with her at all times and the unfortunate Fanny sometimes took refuge in the house in Gloucester Street, particularly when Yolande and her husband were in France. As Harry wrote to his mother-in-law after the birth of his third child, a boy, on 3 April 1888: ‘The Heir is fit and round with a lot of dark hair like his father … Madame and the General went off yesterday to Paris.’
A few weeks after their arrival in the Champs-Élysées, Yolande sat for the eminent society portraitist Émile-Auguste Carolus-Duran. Sitting with her head slightly tilted to the left, she watched the flamboyantly dressed painter at work on the canvas, his dark curls streaked with grey, his wrists festooned with gold chains and bracelets. She wore a black silk dress, a black velvet head-dress, and the string of pearls that she would donate to the church in Cambridge a few months later. Her iron-grey hair is combed forward into a fringe; her large, wide-apart eyes gaze directly into the eyes of the viewer.
A demanding woman, accustomed to having her own way, she was no doubt a difficult sitter but Carolus-Duran was expert at gazing into the soul of his subjects. Seating her against a deep red background, he captured the contrasts in her personality and the portrait has an almost hypnotic power. The art dealer who restored the painting a few years ago described its impact:
I was struck by … the subject’s face, particularly her expression. At a glance, one might think she is gently smiling, but a longer look reveals something else – and it is hard to be quite sure what. Her expression seems to segue between gentle warmth, near contempt and tragic regret. Which of these very different takes is most persistent is perhaps dependant on my own mood, but that it is capable of this transition gives the painting enormous, almost haunting vitality – as though there is something of her still here.1
At the same time as sitting for Carolus-Duran, Yolande wrote a will disposing of her assets in France. She left legacies to five people in Paris, including ‘my friend Madame Frédéric Reiset’ and Josephine Trochoux, her housekeeper in Paris. She left 20,000 francs to the priest of her parish, Saint Philippe du Roule, ‘to make distributions among
the poor of his parish as he shall think fit’, and 20,000 francs to the Home for Incurable Children in the Hospital of Saint Jean de Dieu in Vaugirard. Finally, she bequeathed her residuary estate in France – her financial assets and the contents of her apartment in the Champs-Élysées – to Harry Claremont.
A few weeks later, according to Christopher Scott, she was close to death and not permitted to see anyone from Cambridge. There is no evidence for this illness, and perhaps it was not Yolande who was in poor health. Edward had been unwell in Lynford during the previous winter and this had delayed their return to Roehampton, as well as their onward journey to Paris. As Yolande explained to Arthur Riddell on 19 February:
I have had this winter a great deal of sickness in the house and now I am stopped by the state of the weather. It would be so bad travelling in these snow storms and it would hardly be safe for General Claremont who … has not been at all well the whole winter. When I do start, I hope you will not mind my taking mon petit chaplain as he is really in want of some rest and a little change.2
By March, Edward was ‘improving by slow degrees’ and he was well enough to leave for Paris on 3 April. If he did fall ill again in July, Yolande would have been too distraught to deal with anything, even matters concerned with the church in Cambridge.
Back in Lynford in September, she and Edward spent a second winter making the occasional visit to Cambridge to see the church under construction. Still encased in scaffolding, the exterior was now almost complete and builders were at work on the roof and the spire. ‘Altogether,’ wrote the Cambridge Chronicle, ‘the building is one possessed of considerable beauty. The interior being lofty and the character of the stone-groined roof exceptional, the view from the west end is very striking.’3
The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England Page 18