A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Ernest, too, was happy. ‘A more perfect jewel of a girl I never saw,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘The devotion that all who know her, young, old, men & women show towards her really is quite touching. They think nobody is like her and nothing is too good for her. She is so bright, clever, sweet and unselfish that living with her is like living in perpetual sunshine. Everybody tries to spoil her & yet she is not in the least spoilt. I find I am the object of universal envy …’

  They went up to Yorkshire so that Luie could meet Ernest’s family and see the place where they would live. Set on a plateau, Kirkstall Grange was a large Georgian house built in 1752 by the architect Walter Wade as an appendage to the derelict twelfth-century Abbey. Originally called New Grange, it had been acquired in the early 1830s by the Beckett family who changed its name, made major alterations to the building, and improved the farmland and private park belonging to the estate (later known as Beckett’s Park). This is where Ernest and Luie were to spend part of their married life, while in London they bought an expensive property just off Piccadilly, at 17 Stratton Street. ‘My precious old boy,’ his mother wrote after they had left Yorkshire, ‘God ever bless you and your dear bride and give you all possible happiness this world can give darling, remembering it’s only the preparation for afar happier one. You have always been such a very dear, affectionate child that I am sure you will be an equally good husband.’ Ernest seemed even more pleased on Luie’s behalf than his own. ‘It was such a pleasure to her & to me to think that you do care for her a little,’ he replied. ‘She is so anxious that you should all love her, and she is so worthy of your love.’ In September they went to Paris to buy Luie’s trousseau – and this time she was not bored by the fittings. ‘Only a fortnight to-day before I am to be tied up,’ Ernest wrote ominously from Paris that autumn. ‘It is a serious thought, but I don’t flinch.’

  The marriage took place on 4 October 1883 at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, in London. The ceremony was performed by the Archbishop of York ‘in the presence of a large and fashionable assembly’. They came from Italy, France, America and Yorkshire, and included the newly knighted Sir Arthur Sullivan, the beautiful Lady Sackville and, as one of the chief witnesses, William Wetmore Story. Luie’s family had taken over the whole of the Pulteney Hotel in Albemarle Street where a breakfast for eighty guests was laid and an array of glittering wedding presents exhibited for inspection: clocks and candelabra, several silver flower vases, numerous china dessert services, a gilt-mounted dressing case alongside an assortment of fruit knives, fans and vegetable dishes and thermometers, table lamps, hairbrushes, inkstands …

  Like Lily Hamersley (who married the eighth Duke of Marlborough), Grace Duggan (who married Lord Curzon), Consuelo Vanderbilt (who married the ninth Duke of Marlborough) and the ambitious Jeanette Jerome who married Ernest’s friend Lord Randolph Churchill, Lucy Tracy Lee followed those ‘Pilgrim Daughters’ who left the United States for the Old World during the early nineteenth century and were to replenish the British aristocracy through their alliances. This permeation of British high society by American heiresses reached its peak in the late years of the century and became recognised as a significant component in the history of Anglo-American relations.

  For their honeymoon Ernest and Luie went to Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight before settling into Kirkstall Grange where, almost exactly nine months later, on 10 July 1884, Luie gave birth to their first child, a daughter, whom they named Lucy Katherine but who liked to be called Lucille. There was a slight atmosphere of disappointment in the family that this first child was not a son and a suspicion, in later years, that she (who needed ‘a firm hand’) was not quite so favoured as Luie’s second daughter, ‘my little pet’ Helen Muriel, born in 1886.

  The importance of having a son was emphasised by changes in the family name – changes, inexplicable to foreigners and indeed to most British people, that seemed to emanate from a comic opera world. Ernest’s great-grandfather had assumed the surname and arms of the Denison family out of respect for his wife (or rather the expectations of his wife – she was a celebrated Denison family heiress). But their son relinquished the name Denison after his father’s death, leaving the rest of the family in some confusion as to what they should call themselves. Ernest’s father somewhat hedged his bets by inserting a hyphen and becoming William Beckett-Denison and finally, by royal warrant, assuming the single surname Beckett, the surname of his ancestors. The position was further complicated by Ernest’s uncle (his father’s elder brother) who, being raised to the peerage and created a baron at the beginning of 1886, chose the forbidding Dickensian name of Grimthorpe. Ernest then followed his father’s example, expunging Denison and replacing it with Beckett. So the family at Kirkstall Grange was now the Honourable Ernest Beckett, his wife Lucy Tracy Beckett and their two daughters, Lucille and Muriel (both Denisons at birth but soon growing into Becketts). Since the first Lord Grimthorpe had no children, the baronage would pass to his younger brother William Beckett and then to William’s eldest son Ernest – hence the importance of producing a male heir.

  This requirement was made more dramatically urgent in 1890. On Sunday 23 November that year, Ernest’s father William Beckett instructed his butler at the family home in London, 138 Piccadilly, to put his luggage in a cab and have it sent to Oxford Street, indicating that he intended to spend the night there. He then set off himself in the opposite direction from his luggage telling no one where he was going. Some said that he was looking forward to seeing a granddaughter in Dorset; others that he was determined to inspect Lord Lonsborough’s new house at Brockenhurst; and there were those who believed that he was visiting Lord Wimborne to discuss financial matters. But he saw none of these people. Alone and luggageless, he took an early afternoon train from London and arrived at Wimborne a little before three o’clock. Enquiring of a porter what time the next train for Bournemouth left, he was told there was one in five minutes and another in an hour and five minutes. It was a sunny if rather boisterous day and he decided to take the later train so that, it was claimed, he could look at the ‘interesting old Minster’ in Wimborne. A little later he reached the central square of the town and, a witness reported, ‘he was standing still as if undecided which way to take’. On his arm was folded a mackintosh and in his hand he carried an umbrella. ‘He did not appear to be under the influence of drink,’ the witness volunteered.

  Then, as if suddenly making up his mind, he hurried off across a field to Oxley Farm and, after some unaccounted-for time there, walked rapidly along Canford Park Drive towards the station. The railway track ran through Canford Park along a high embankment. Near an ornamental bridge stood a signal box with steps leading up to the line which the signalman used to reach the station quickly. It was by now almost time for the four o’clock train to arrive and William Beckett, climbing up the signalman’s steps, began walking hurriedly back along the line. With the high wind in his face and because of his deafness, he did not hear the train approaching behind him. As it drew level his hat flew off, he raised his hands to his head and the umbrella and mackintosh, like a mast and sail, filled with the rush of air, flung him violently under the second carriage. His body rolled beneath the wheels, he was dragged along the bridge for some sixty yards and, in the words of The Times, ‘cut to pieces’. The train driver had noticed nothing, but the signalman alerted two railwaymen who found portions of his mutilated body strewn along the line. No one recognised who he was, but a policeman noticed the name ‘W. Beckett Esq. MP’ on the collar of an undercoat. In his dress coat pocket they found an envelope with a lady’s name and address (not disclosed in the newspapers) written on it, together with a one-hundred-pound note. There was also a ring, a timepiece, a five-pound note having a recent stamp of the Bachelors Club on it – and, some way off, the umbrella. William Beckett was aged sixty-four.

  Ernest was enjoying what the Yorkshire Post called ‘a well-earned holiday’ in Algiers and could not get back for the inquest. The jury was taken
up on to the ornamental bridge and, encountering a fierce gust of wind, almost perished themselves. They returned the obvious verdict of accidental death. But behind the fatal accident lay a mystery. Why was William Beckett there? A rumour wafted round the community that he had been visiting his mistress – the envelope with a lady’s name and the terrific bank note (worth £8,000 today) seemed to lend colour to this story. Later there was an attempt to extort money from the Beckett family, which Ernest successfully resisted.

  William Beckett’s fragmented body was gathered together, taken to the Railway Hotel and put by the undertaker into a shell, which was carried by train to the Beckett family residence in Piccadilly and then conveyed to Yorkshire. The funeral took place on 6 December at a remote little stone church at Alcaster, a mile and a half away from Nun Appleton Hall. No invitations had been sent out except to close members of the family, but no restrictions were imposed on people wishing to attend. The terrible nature of his death had caught the public imagination and the railway companies arranged for special trains to take sympathisers from other parts of the country to this remote destination. At Bolton Percy station over a hundred carriages waited to drive them to the burial ground. This thin black line of carriages, a cavalcade stretching over half a mile, moved slowly between fields of thick snow while from the opposite direction a family cortège with the hearse carrying William Beckett’s remains set off from Nun Appleton. Men and women of all ranks and opinions assembled for the simple service: bankers and railwaymen, politicians, churchmen, country gentlemen, friends and servants. Heads bared, they formed an aisle down which the coffin was carried in silence to the church. The nineteen-year-old Eve Fairfax was also there with her mother. Ernest had arrived back via Paris and was accompanied by his wife Luie. But his elderly uncle, the first Lord Grimthorpe, sent apologies for not risking the bleak weather to attend his brother’s funeral.

  Ernest Beckett was now the heir presumptive to the Grimthorpe title; but Luie had recently suffered a miscarriage while she was visiting her mother in Rome. ‘The Dr says I am doing perfectly well and should be on my sofa in a few days – I don’t suppose anyone has had an easier fausse couche but it is tiring,’ she wrote to Ernest. She reassured him that this did not mean she could not bear him another child: a boy. ‘There will be no weakness or liability … Don’t let anyone worry you into thinking so.’ Being apart from him and feeling vulnerable, she declares: ‘I have loved you so my darling these last few days and feel no woman ever had such a sweet, dear husband as mine.’ Her one regret is that he does not write to her as much as she would like. ‘I am quite sure you would not have failed to write when you knew I was ill – I have been so cross with the postman, & servants all day, for every knock at the door I hoped was a letter from you.’

  On her recovery, Ernest arranged for Luie to be painted by the Royal Academician, Edward Hughes. It is a studio portrait staged against a backdrop of trees, showing Muriel charmingly perched over her shoulder and Lucille, standing next to her mother, carrying some flowers. A sympathetic and celebratory picture: Luie in her décolleté evening dress is seen as having regained her figure. She looks young and happy.

  Her letters to ‘my beloved darling’ suggest that these first six or seven years of married life were untroubled. In the autumn of 1884 they travelled to America, staying for the most part in New York. ‘People have been so exceedingly kind and hospitable’, Ernest wrote, ‘that now I shall be almost as sorry to leave as Luie. Every night during this last week a dinner is given in our honour … All the best people in New York have called upon us.’ In a letter to his mother, Ernest suggests they were being lavishly entertained ‘as a bait to make us stay. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that Luie receives more attention than any woman in New York. We have opera boxes sent us nearly every night … And the papers are continually saying nice things about us. Luie seems to thrive on all the love & admiration that is showered upon her … and I feel a different man altogether. I think all this agreeable society does me good. As it is such a contrast to the life I have led for so many years.’

  But though ‘in every way this visit has been a pleasure & success’, Ernest added, ‘I feel as if we ought to be home again before the year’s end.’ There is an indication that Luie would have preferred living in America. But Ernest missed the Yorkshire hunting and the shooting. And there were other considerations. What he admired most in America was the ostentatious display of wealth. There is a revealing passage in one of his letters in which he describes a visit to the spectacular house of William Henry Vanderbilt, ‘the richest man in the world’, he writes with schoolboy enthusiasm. ‘It is known positively that he has £50 millions.’ Ernest is dazzled by the marble entrance hall with its mosaic pavement and also by the many opulent rooms – one hung round with red velvet and gold into which precious stones have been worked, another lined with mother-of-pearl and bearing Japanese curtains, and a third of carved wood with its ceiling painted on canvas ‘by one of the best French painters who charges £1,000 for a single picture’. But most wonderful of all was the picture gallery ‘with the best collection of modern pictures in the world, a perfect enchantment. One small picture cost £1,200. Mr Vanderbilt has excellent taste in pictures and he has always the pick of the market.’ Ernest seems interested in the price of everything and the identity of nothing. He was drawn to wealth but he also needed power. He met many powerful and wealthy people in America, but he met them at one remove as Luie’s husband. His own best chance of advancement lay in England.

  At the age of seventeen Luie had dreamed of being ‘thrown with people who will be historical’, and when Ernest was elected the Conservative Member of Parliament for Whitby in November 1885, her dream appeared to be coming true. Whitby was traditionally radical, but Charles Stewart Parnell, the influential Irish Member of Parliament, had called on all Irishmen in England to vote Conservative, and although the Liberals won the General Election, Ernest was returned with a majority of 340 votes. Standing on the slopes and looking out to sea, with the crowds gathered below on the sands at Whitby, he resembled a classical orator in a natural amphitheatre. In his election address he had called on voters to ‘reject the Feeble and Futile policy of the late [Liberal] Government through five years of failure and disgrace’, condemned the ‘waste of men and money in unjust and unnecessary wars’, defended the Established Church as ‘a strong bulwark against infidelity’ and appealed for the maintenance of the Imperial Parliament’s jurisdiction over Ireland.

  In the summer of 1886 Gladstone, who had formed a third Liberal ministry, introduced a Home Rule Bill for Ireland, which was defeated on its second reading and, Parliament being dissolved, a new General Election was called. This time the Liberal Party was split in two by the Irish question, and the Conservatives won. Lord Salisbury became Premier and Ernest quadrupled his majority at Whitby. ‘I regard myself as your representative and not as your delegate,’ he told the electors. ‘Fishermen, sailors, miners and working men of every sort and condition have joined with landowners and professional men to make up my big majority. And why? Because from the bottom of their honest English hearts they believed their country was in danger [and were] determined to maintain the union between England and Ireland. I have received my orders and shall stand by my guns.’

  He liked making political speeches – and his audiences enjoyed them too. He flattered them nobly and made them feel important. If necessary, he discovered, he could speak with ease and fluency for over an hour, enriching his rhetoric with fine-sounding biblical quotations, interspersing it with clever topical jokes and producing a swell of reverberating invective. On the Irish Home Rule Bill he declared: ‘It sweats difficulties at every paragraph, every provision breeds a dilemma, every clause ends in a cul de sac, danger lurks in every line, mischief abounds in every sentence, and an air of evil hangs over it all.’ He castigated Gladstone as a man ‘who had been tinkering at Ireland for twenty years, and under his treatment the last state of Ireland
was worse than the first. And this was the man who had got the amazing effrontery to come forward and ask to be allowed to have a free hand to boggle at the job he had so much mismanaged before.’

  For the first year Ernest enjoyed his time as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. It reminded him of his happy debating days at Eton and Cambridge. But soon he began to grow impatient with the limitations of the party system. He wanted more than laughter and applause. He looked round for someone with whom to align himself. He had been polite to Lord Salisbury but his praise was always lukewarm and he calculated that, his health being poor, Salisbury had little political future. There was only one man whose verbal swordplay excited him and that was the maverick figure of Lord Randolph Churchill (son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough and father of Winston Churchill). In the early 1880s Randolph Churchill had formed a small group called the Fourth Party which attacked everything the Liberals proposed and, sidestepping the guidance of the party whips, set out to force reforms on the Conservatives. Ernest quickly joined this small band of ambitious malcontents. Churchill’s brilliant speeches were making him the most popular politician in the country and the Conservative success in the 1886 election was largely credited to him. ‘He carries the Conservative party and its fortunes,’ Ernest declared. ‘No man has done so much to mould it into its present shape. In all its words and works it bears the impress of his hand. It is popular mainly because he won popularity for it.’ Few people doubted that Randolph Churchill would one day be Prime Minister. Nevertheless he was considered a dangerous figure within the party. He was, however, given high office in Salisbury’s new administration until, at the end of 1886, in the face of Cabinet opposition to his budget, he suddenly astonished everyone by resigning both as Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer.