Early in April ‘55 they were back at 3 Rutland Gate, their London house, and spent an evening with the Carlyles, the guests including Mrs. Gaskell (“who looks a delightful woman”) and Erasmus Darwin, brother of Charles: “Mrs. Carlyle was sumptuous, in a black velvet and Roman scarf, and is so much, much to be liked; Carlyle has grown a beard, moustache, and whiskers, all in one grand, grizzled and grisly conglomeration, looks hideous, and is more tiresome and unreasonable in his Jeremiad, perhaps, a little, than ever.” Carlyle also called on them “and made us a long visit—he having the first chair, I the second, and Edward the study-table!” Another time they called on the Carlyles and found Jane sitting alone with a frightful cold in the head. When they entered she jumped to her feet, exclaiming: “Well, it’s quite fearful—I was at that moment thinking of ye, when the servant said Mr. and Mrs. Edward Twisleton—I was thinking if ye had grown treacherous, too, like the rest of the world—I thought about yer husband, and then I thought of yer clear black eyes, and I said ‘is it possible!’”
While Edward was with Thomas “in his hole at the top of the house,” Jane regaled Ellen with stories about London life which made Thackeray’s picture of it in Vanity Fair and his portrait of Becky Sharp appear as “mild under-statements of the truth.” Jane was excessively funny but she had a caustic tongue.
Ellen sat next to Dickens at one dinner party. The dishes were of the Spanish variety because Dickens was thinking of a sojourn in Spain and his host wanted to show him what the cooking was like. He was therefore obliged to taste every dish and every wine, and was jokingly called “the victim.” He had cut his hair and grown a mustache since his return from America and looked so different that Ellen scarcely recognized him, “but I did not think him agreeable or quite at his ease. He ran the conversation on America so much...as if I could not be expected to speak on any other subject—and in a flattering tone, which I felt to be very hollow, and wanted to say to him ‘Now I know what you wrote to Lord Jeffery about us, so wouldn’t it be better to let this alone?’”
In the open space behind the Horse Guards she witnessed the Queen distributing medals to soldiers wounded in the Crimea. All the military and political nobs were there, including Lord Palmerston and Gladstone, who were near enough to provoke a comment by Ellen: “I can’t say the gentlemen are as handsome as their portraits make them!” She attended a Drawing Room on the Queen’s birthday and the same evening “went to another full-dress crush at Lansdowne House.” They dined at the homes of fashionable folk and gave dinners to the same, attended the concerts at which society congregated, and did everything else that was done by other people in their social class. At one of her dinner parties a Crown Derby set was displayed on her table; and when she said that it was used every day in their Boston home, her guests were amazed: they probably thought that Americans ate out of troughs.
In the summer of 1855 they sailed for the States and spent some weeks with her relations and friends, one of whom described her as “very beautiful” and “dressed all in white.” She told another that the main consolation in being away from one’s own country was to have “captured a husband to whom you can give your whole heart and soul for ever.” She struck everyone as very lively and affectionate, and quite capable of criticizing her countrymen as well as Edward’s. An onlooker said of Edward: “He makes fun of his wife in such a delightful way and seems to adore her, and she does him.” They returned to England in October, taking her sister Elizabeth, her chief correspondent, with them.
In 1857 the failure of a big business house in Boston deprived her family of much property, the condition of her relations causing her great anxiety. Her health deteriorated and they went twice to Malvern for the water cure. They wintered in Rome and spent a summer in Switzerland. Most of her correspondence between 1855 and 1860 was later lost, so we cannot keep track of her movements, but writing from Ashgrove, Malvern, in February ‘60 she described her illness as being “like one bound hand and foot with pain.”
The outbreak of the American Civil War added to her sufferings, strong feelings being expressed on both sides of the question in England, but it comforted her that “Edward and I agree exactly about America.” They were against slavery and the secessionists. She still managed to accept invitations, one of them to Lord Lansdowne’s house, Bowood. Unfortunately Lansdowne had grown so deaf “that it is impossible to make him hear so that everyone in the room will not hear too, and when you have a party like this it is very formidable, and one is divided between dislike of letting him sit in silence and dislike of screaming before the others.” It was perhaps a pity that another man could not be compelled to sit in silence. After church one Sunday she was chatting quietly at home with Edward’s cousin Georgina Leigh, a great favorite of hers, when Carlyle suddenly arrived, stayed talking for an hour, “and shocked Georgy most dreadfully by his sceptical conversation. She grew quite white, and would hardly bow to him when he went—and threw herself at my feet with ‘I don’t know how you live, Ellen, and hear such things—I couldn’t bear it—I think it would kill me!’”
As the war went on she was greatly concerned over the strained relations between England and America, and reported in June ‘61 what Edward had heard from Sir George Lewis: that President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, was constantly insulting Lord Lyons, who “finds it impossible to keep upon terms with him, so constant and violent is his abusive language about England.” Ellen had no respect for Seward, with whom she had talked, thinking him selfish, cunning and unprincipled, and deeply regretted that he should have it in his power to harm America by precipitating a quarrel with England.
But by the following October she was hardly in a state to feel dismay over the political situation, and her husband wrote to one of her sisters: “Ellen has not had a good week—indeed yesterday she had a very sharp attack of pain, which began at 2 o’clock and continued 12 hours; and she did not get to sleep till 8 this morning. This is most distressing, indeed it is a dreadful affliction, though she bears pain well.”
In November ‘61 they were at St. Leonard’s-on-Sea, and Ellen could write to thank her favorite sister for having named her baby after Edward: “If your son may be as upright and tender and generous as my Edward, he will be a blessing and a crown to you, and no one knows that better than you! you darling...” Her health seemed to be improving that month, and Edward wrote to her sister: “Notwithstanding all her pain, I cannot but think that Ellen is better. Last night she read to me a chapter of Rob Roy without suffering from it—a feat that she could not have performed before she went to Langen-Schwalbach....I think she would be better if the news from America were less unsatisfactory.” Though temporarily comforted by the assurance of the doctor that “the pain is sometimes greater when the ailment is going away than when it is coming on,” it soon became clear to Edward that his wife could not recover. In her last letter she said that “Edward’s love and devotion seem only to grow with every claim I make on them.”
She suffered dreadfully and her sister Mrs. Parkman crossed the Atlantic to nurse her in March 1862. She died on May 18th that year and Jane Carlyle wrote in her journal: “Dear little Mrs. Twisleton, so young, and so beautiful and clever, so admired in society and adored at home, is a loss that everyone can appreciate. And the strong affection she testified for me, through her long terrible illness, has made her death a keener grief than I thought it would be.” Thomas Carlyle later added a characteristic note to this: “A very beautiful and clever little Boston lady, wife of Hon. Edward Twisleton and much about us for the six or seven years she lived here. I well remember her affecting funeral (old Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire) and my ride thither with Browning.”
Edward tried to assuage his sorrow by writing, but half of him went with his wife to the grave. Among other things he wrote a laborious work establishing the identity of Junius, but that may be because he had partly lost a sense of his own. To comfort him Ellen’s sister Mrs. Parkman remained in England with her
two children for nearly three years, and again stayed with him after an interval of seven years. But in September 1874 his period of loneliness came to an end, and his body was laid next to Ellen’s in the churchyard at Broughton.
CHAPTER 3—An Eventful Union
Jeanette Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill
In the same year that Edward Twisleton died, a marriage of a very different kind from his took place in Paris. It was not a love-match: it was an attraction-match: and its outcome was momentous, not only for Great Britain and America but for the rest of the civilized world.
Of the many Huguenot families that settled in America at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, one was named Jerome. Having imbibed some form of puritanism in their cradles, the Jeromes were rigidly Calvinistic in their attitude to life, until at last a member of the family reacted against his upbringing and went to the other extreme. His name was Leonard Jerome, and fairly early in life he began to hate his father’s God, an attitude he retained to the end, for when some of his relations persuaded him to read the Bible during his last illness, in the hope that such an exercise would dispose the Almighty in his favor, he waded through the book of Genesis and then tossed the volume aside with the words: “What horrible people!”{6}
After a severe upbringing Leonard started life as a lawyer and continued it as a newspaper owner in Rochester, his policy favoring free education, the freedom of the slaves and the abolition of brothels. He married Clara Hall, who had Indian blood in her veins, being one quarter Iroquois. Of their four daughters, the first, Clara, was fair; the second, Jeanette, was dark; the third died young; and the fourth need not detain us. The second daughter was usually known as Jenny, her father having greatly admired the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, who had recently driven the New York public to dithyrambs. Leonard made enough money and obtained sufficient influence to be appointed American consul at Trieste in 1852. But he returned home the following year in order to take part in the operations of Wall Street, which he described as “a jungle where men tear and claw.” In this jungle he quickly made a fortune, apparently with less tearing and clawing than his competitors, because a rival was heard to say complainingly: “That damned fellow has cashed in on honesty!” He bought railway stock, and in the panic that followed the press exposure of certain rotten companies, for which he supplied the facts, he made far more money than he lost, and thus cashed in on honesty. Like several of his fellow speculators, he made and lost fortunes with a rapidity that would have whitened the hair of those who were not in his class of business.
Unlike most gamblers he was not solely interested in money. He loved driving, yachting and singing. He had a small opera house at his grand new dwelling on Madison Square, New York, and here the young Adelina Patti rehearsed her operatic roles. In 1858 he took his family to Paris, where he discovered much about the breeding of horses in France. His sporting and speculating proclivities made him a legendary figure while still in middle life. At the first ball the Jeromes held at their Madison Square house one fountain spouted champagne, another Eau de Cologne. The social world was impressed. He purchased a quarter of the shares in The New York Times, and though this was only a side line, he took command of two Gatling guns at the Times office when the anti-war riots broke out in New York during July 1863. But five regiments arrived from the Army of the Potomac and he did not have to fire a shot.
For a while the city was at the mercy of the rioters and some 1,200 people were killed, Leonard Jerome subscribing a quarter of a million dollars to the fund for the sufferers. He was making a great deal of money at this time in association with Cornelius Vanderbilt, of whom we shall hear more. He spent something like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars on a steam yacht, which he disliked, sold, and contented himself thenceforth with sails. A craze started in England by the Duke of Beaufort was soon copied in New York, and Jerome was seen in all parts of the city driving a coach loaded with pretty women. His energy was limitless, like his marital infidelities. But he had the reputation of serving God as well as Mammon: he was in fact a good man who gambled. He had polished if flamboyant manners, was honest “as this world goes,” and generous to those who were down on their luck. Generally regarded as “a sport,” one of those characters whose name evoked a smile of pleasure or toleration, he was a cool speculator who took his gains and losses with apparent indifference, and spent money as fast as he made it. He knew the gangster as well as the financial world, sometimes indistinguishable, but ran a good deal straighter than most of his associates. He owned an enormous quantity of railway shares, railways booming as a result of the Civil War, and almost the whole of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line to California.
In 1865 he gave forty thousand dollars for a race horse named Kentucky, and in the hope of lifting horse racing to the level it had attained in England, he and a friend laid out a race course for New York City called Jerome Park and started a Jockey Club. The course was opened in September ‘66. His daughters loved driving with him to see the races. They were thoroughly spoilt by their father and their youth was passed in a whirl of driving, riding, skating, dancing and operagoing. Their mother thought Jenny should have been a boy: she put so much zest into skating and riding.
Mrs. Jerome knew all about her husband’s sexual lapses, and when she was introduced to a notable beauty and singer of that time, Mrs. Fanny Ronalds, who was friendly with her daughters and rather more than friendly with her husband, she said: “I don’t blame you; I know how irresistible he is.” Fanny’s husband had left her and she was the cause of much gossip. She gave a fancy-dress ball which was the talk of New York and people wondered how she had found the money for such a display. The problem was solved twenty years later when two of her chief admirers, Leonard Jerome and August Belmont, were lunching together:
“August, do you remember Fanny’s celebrated ball?”
“Indeed I ought to: I paid for it.”
“Why, how very strange! So did I.”
Following her New York and Parisian glories Fanny fell in love with Sir Arthur Sullivan and made a great reputation in London society by rendering his song “The Lost Chord.”
Jerome once described a gentleman as one “with a due regard for the feelings of others.” It was not a definition that the world of Wall Street would have understood; but within the limitations imposed on him by the crooks with whom he had to deal, he did his best to play the part. Unfortunately he could not pay due regard to the feelings of his wife, and when it became known that his latest flame had been seen driving behind two splendid white horses which everyone recognized as his, Mrs. Jerome thought that a change of scene would be advisable. Giving out that her health was poor, she decided to consult a French physician and left with her girls for Paris, where she instantly became well again. Shortly after their departure Leonard suffered a setback, buying the whole of a new issue of stock in the Pacific Mail, failing to sell it, and when the dividend was reduced losing a million dollars at a stroke.
He left for Paris, where the Second Empire was drawing to a close accompanied by the tunes of Offenbach, while gaslighting was being installed in the new boulevards of Haussmann. He found that his eldest daughter Clara would not look at any Protestant aristocrat whom her mother wished her to marry but was rather inclined to like an older man who was married already, a predilection shared by her sister Jenny, whose face was slapped at a party by the same man’s wife. Jenny played the piano very well and stated her intention to become a musician. All the girls were wild and excitable, “just as you used to be,” his wife informed him.
Everyone in their circle was fascinated by the Empress Eugénie and even Mrs. Jerome preferred her charm to the pedigrees of the ancient nobility. Having made a short stay, Leonard Jerome returned to his dwindling fortunes in New York, where a financial crisis was in progress, and did his best to find more money for his daughters, who were in constant need of new dresses when taking part in the social functions at the Tuileries and elsewh
ere. But he could no longer stand the racket in the stock market and went back to France. Bored with making and losing money, he became keener than ever on yachts and horses, and he left for England to see the yacht racing at Cowes, after which he returned to the States.
His wife and daughters were still in Paris in 1870, when the French passed through one of those temporary periods of frenzy which are largely due to the perpetual frustration of human beings. They wanted war with Germany and madly proclaimed their desire. The declaration of war caused hysterical scenes of jubilation in theatres and streets, where the populace yelled themselves hoarse with “À Berlin! À Berlin!” Jerome cabled his wife insisting on the family’s removal to London, but as she was under the impression that they would shortly be following the Court à Berlin, and as she had recently sprained her ankle, she refused to budge. However, it soon became apparent that the Germans were on their way à Paris and the Jeromes had to leave within an hour. Clara and Jenny dashed about collecting all their jewelry and plate, bundling it into sheets and tablecloths, and taking it off to the station. Their mother had to be carried and all of them got to the train in a state of exhaustion. Clara’s maid was then sent back to the house for the luggage containing their clothes; but the maid could not get the job done in time and remained marooned in the house throughout the siege of Paris. According to Jenny, they escaped from the capital by the last train to leave it, but as some thousands of people did the same, if the memoirs of the period are to be trusted, it must have been a very long train. They spent some harassing and miserable weeks at Deauville, with no hats and no changes of clothing. The war, they felt, was very inconvenient. At length they managed to get on a boat, whether the last to leave the coast we cannot say, and for a while stayed at the Norfolk Hotel, Brighton, before settling down at Brown’s Hotel, near Piccadilly, London. Their father crossed the Atlantic to be with them, and their rooms became a sort of meeting place for distinguished French émigrés.
The Marrying Americans Page 5