A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  In his biography of Lord Randolph Churchill, his son Winston Churchill describes Ernest as an intimate friend of his father who ‘stood by him, worked with him and rendered many political services in the years that followed his resignation’ – services, he adds, ‘which were not extravagantly beloved’ in the high places of his party.

  Luie, who took a careful interest in her husband’s political career, seems to have had some doubts about Randolph Churchill. ‘You are the only person I am sure who can get together a Randolphian party,’ she wrote to Ernest early in 1889, ‘but you must be sure he will lead you to Austerlitz & not to Moscow – or that at all events intends to!!’ But then, thinking perhaps this was too inconsiderate, she added: ‘He is an Englishman & gentleman therefore it will be safe to trust his word.’ Yet she was pleased with Ernest for distrusting Gladstone’s word, and also told him she was ‘very glad you had a fine dig at Ld Salisbury’. She welcomed, too, the distance he kept from Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, who was attempting to act as mediator between Randolph Churchill and Lord Salisbury. There was something she did not like about the self-aggrandisement of these top dogs in party-political life. ‘The Balfourian worship is as odious to me as Gladstone worship,’ she wrote to Ernest, ‘and I only hope there will never be Randolph worship. It turns men into automatons and takes away their reasoning powers …’ Perhaps she feared that Ernest himself might be drawn too far into this mechanistic political life.

  Ernest’s reasoning powers told him that Randolph Churchill’s star would indeed rise again. He was a natural successor to Disraeli and nothing could stop him. ‘Raised by his genius far above the common herd, he has that penetrating insight which is the imperial prerogative of genius to possess,’ Ernest declared in one of his speeches, ‘and his eye like that of the eagle hovering in the heavens, discerns things clearly which are hidden from the view of ordinary mortals.’ Why then did his party distrust him? Ernest’s answer was clear: ‘When the Tory party gives birth to a genius they always stare and blink and rub their eyes and fidget about uneasily and ask each other anxiously what manner of man is this? “Is he a spirit of health or a goblin damned? Brings he airs from heaven or blasts from hell?” They begin foolishly by suspecting and trying to suppress him, and not being able to do that, they end wisely by trusting implicitly to his guidance. So will it be with Randolph Churchill.’

  Ernest saw in Randolph Churchill a version of himself, a superior version to which he aspired. Churchill was said to have been ‘too proud to care for any but the first place’ and he believed that you should never resign until you were indispensable. But in becoming indispensable to the Conservative Party, he had also become what Salisbury called a boil on its neck. He was admired but not liked by his colleagues. They were disturbed by his cleverness, his individuality and the way he came out with opinions that were entirely his own. These were all qualities that appealed to Ernest, who invited him to speak at Whitby and to stay at Kirkstall Grange. Churchill had the extravagance and charm of someone who has been much spoilt as a child. He could be petulant, rude and capricious when thwarted in what he wanted. What he wanted was power over men and the love of women.

  And so did Ernest.

  It was strange, with such important work to occupy him in banking and politics, how often Ernest disappeared abroad. During another of his visits to Rome in the late 1880s he was taken by William Wetmore Story’s son, Waldo Story, to a ball where he met Josephine Cornelia Brink, a voluptuous, nineteen-year-old girl from South Africa whom everyone called José. She was one of the five children of a prominent legislator who, dying at the age of fifty-five, had left his family near Cape Town in financial difficulties. His widow, ‘the golden-haired Mrs Brink’, found José the most spirited and unruly of her children. When Lady Robinson, an Irish aristocrat and wife of the Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Hercules Robinson, offered to bring her up at the official Cape residence, Mrs Brink readily consented. The Robinsons treated her like their own daughter and introduced her at dinner parties and country-house weekends to smart society. Tall, fair, with great vivacity and ‘a gorgeous figure’, she was an immediate success, receiving impetuous offers of marriage and, on travelling to England with Lady Robinson, being presented at Court to Queen Victoria. ‘You will have much joy and much flattery as well as much temptation in your life,’ Lady Robinson advised her. ‘Snatch at every ray because they may never return again.’

  José seemed determined to follow this advice – even after her mother joined her in London. It was when she was visiting Rome as the guest of Lord and Lady Dufferin, the British Ambassador and his wife, that she met Ernest. José’s picture appeared in many newspapers and magazines, and Waldo Story used one of these photographs to help him create a marble statue of her entitled Victory. Seeing her at Story’s studio, Ernest entreated her to write to him after they were both back in London. She did so. He replied inviting her to lunch at the Savoy Hotel and enquiring whether she might come without the formality of her mother’s consent. She had no intention of doing otherwise and met him in a private suite there. ‘So much in love were we with each other that it seemed quite natural when he took me into the bedroom adjoining his suite and with love and fondness I let him unclothe me,’ she wrote. This was the beginning of her first serious love affair. ‘I want to teach you what love means,’ she remembered Ernest telling her.

  To assist with this tuition, Ernest took a small flat in St James’s Street, between Piccadilly and Pall Mall, where they continued meeting. He let her know he was married – though she must already have been aware of this. But he does not appear to have told her that, by the late summer of 1890, Luie was again pregnant. He said she was ill and that if she died he would marry José – that at any rate was what she recalled. And probably it explains her decision not to accompany her mother back to South Africa to prepare for one of her other daughters’ marriage there. José was no longer under the protection of the Robinson family and her own family threatened to stop her allowance if she did not return immediately. However, she had recently inherited a legacy of six hundred pounds and this may have emboldened her. But how long would this money last her in London? Where would she live and what would be her future? She had found a wonderful little house called Leinster Lodge in Bayswater, overlooking Kensington Gardens – should she risk taking a long lease on it? She put these questions to Ernest who, according to a short Life of her by Daphne Saul, ‘made himself responsible for the down payment, which she declared she could not afford, and also for the rent of £150 a year’.

  In an early unpublished autobiography, José writes of her time at Leinster Lodge as being extraordinarily happy. The house, its garden and stables, were encircled by a high brick wall. Her bedroom was situated on the ground floor with the drawing room, reached by a Jacobean staircase, above it. A conservatory opened on to the back garden, and the kitchen and servants’ rooms lay somewhat obscurely in a ‘wonderfully ventilated’ floor below stairs. José was looked after by a cook, a parlour maid, a housemaid and a lady’s maid, while the horses and brougham were under the care of her coachman. She rode most mornings in Rotten Row, but her social life as Ernest’s mistress was restricted. No longer could she be invited regularly to ‘At Homes’ and for country weekends. When she saw people it was usually at small dinner parties she and Ernest gave at Leinster Lodge.

  On Sunday 3 May 1891, in the family home at 138 Piccadilly, Luie gave birth to a son, Ralph William Ernest Beckett. Six days later she died. She had suffered from a bronchial attack the previous month, gone into premature labour a week before the birth and caught influenza, which developed into pneumonia after her son was born. Losing a lot of blood, she fainted and lay unconscious for two days before dying on the Saturday afternoon. She was twenty-six years old.

  Her death was, in the words of one Yorkshire newspaper, ‘of a peculiarly pathetic and painful nature’. When Ernest was in London, Luie had often stayed at Kirkstall Grange and it was in Leeds, and also rou
nd Whitby where she stood on election platforms with her husband, that she was best known and most missed. People knew she was ill but had felt confident that her natural vitality would pull her through. What they called ‘her sunny disposition and gentleness’ had made her a popular figure in the county, and her charitable work was everything that could be desired from the wife of a prominent politician. Her funeral in the churchyard of St John the Baptist at Adel on Friday 23 May was attended by her two young daughters, her mother, members of Ernest’s family and also the Fairfaxes. But what gave the procession its unexpected poignancy were the number of children, almost outnumbering the adults – children from St Chad’s Home for Waifs and Strays and the Mill Street Mission in Leeds, charities she supported – as well as what the newspapers called ‘the poorer classes of the people’ in whose welfare she had been so active.1

  2

  Ernest Goes Abroad

  ‘It is doubtful whether he will be seen in the House of Commons again this Session,’ the Yorkshire Herald wrote of Ernest. Following his father’s death, he had been made a senior partner in the family bank in Leeds. The welfare of his three children was partly handed over to Luie’s family in Rome. Then there was José in London.

  He could not marry her, he explained, until a decent interval had passed following his wife’s death. He then set off for South America. But José was still waiting when he returned the following year. Their liaison was by now known to Ernest’s family, which was strongly opposed to it – particularly his two banker brothers, Gervase and Rupert Beckett. José and Ernest began quarrelling and eventually agreed to break off their relationship. Determined to start a new phase in her life, José persuaded a mutual friend to introduce her to the famous actor-manager Beerbohm Tree. Much impressed by her face and figure, he engaged her to play a small part in Oscar Wilde’s new play, A Woman of No Importance, when it went on tour in 1893.

  It seems unlikely that José was very popular with the other actors. She refused to travel with them in third class railway carriages, sending her lady’s maid to keep them company while she occupied a first class compartment. She also put up at superior hotels (with her maid who, being more popular, was given a walk-on part in the production). Once, when Tree’s wife Maud Holt fell ill, José took her role – that of the cynical libertine Mrs Allonby. She played it well because ‘it was the part of a coquette’. Some of Mrs Allonby’s lines suited her perfectly: ‘It’s such a strain keeping men up to the mark. They are always trying to escape from us.’

  One weekend that summer, when the company reached Eastbourne, José went up to London for a dinner party given by her brother-in-law who had recently arrived in England and was staying at the Langham Hotel. There she met John Joseph Lace, a rich, handsome man in his early thirties, with a fine moustache and brilliant solitaire diamond ring glittering on the little finger of his left hand. It had been presented to him, he told her, by Cecil Rhodes. José replied bluntly that she disliked seeing men with rings on their hands – at which he took it off and moved it on to the third finger of her left hand. Was he joking or serious? José believed she was still in love with Ernest and told this new admirer about him. But this had the opposite effect to what she expected. There seemed no resisting his passion for her. He was so flattering – it was exactly what she needed after Ernest’s unsettling treatment. Before the weekend was over he had proposed to her and she had come near to accepting him. The following weekend, on 12 August, they were married at a London register office in Hanover Square with José’s maid as witness. They celebrated afterwards with a splendid lunch at the Savoy.

  But though they were married they had not consummated their marriage, José having made it a condition that they should not do so until they had gone through a church ceremony. This, at any rate, was what she later told Ernest. It was a curious arrangement and seemed to indicate a profound uncertainty as to what she wanted, and what she thought the consequences of this marriage would be. Had she started a brilliant new chapter in her life or ruined an unfinished one? The change in her circumstances was bewildering, almost frightening. Might Ernest have come back to her – might he even now come back to her? She and Joseph spent that weekend together at Leinster Lodge, then travelled to Eastbourne where they persuaded a reluctant Beerbohm Tree to reduce her twelve-month contract to six months.

  Early that autumn Joseph was obliged to hurry back to South Africa on urgent financial business. When A Woman of No Importance returned to the Haymarket Theatre in London for a second run, Ernest came to see it – kept coming to see it and seeing José after the performances. He told her that now his wife had been dead for over two years he could at last marry her. Perhaps she read more into what he was saying than she should have done. Or perhaps he was tempted to say more than he really meant. She was the perfect mistress – and it seems unlikely he really wanted to marry her. But he always gave in to his moods and his moods were always changing. He was not insincere: he was consistent yet never constant. ‘And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.’

  A proposal was what José had longed for and now dreaded. What should she do? Ernest Beckett was the man she loved. She could not let him go. What she did was to prevaricate, telling him that in his absence she had become engaged to marry John Joseph Lace. Ernest was shocked. He insisted she break off the engagement, insisted so strongly and with such perseverance that she had to confess she was married to John Joseph Lace. Ernest was appalled, incredulous. How could she have done this to him? But when she swore that their marriage was unconsummated, he told her it had to be annulled – and she cabled her husband asking him to release her.

  It was as difficult escaping from men as it was keeping them up to the mark. Instead of agreeing to her request, John Joseph Lace took the next boat to Southampton where he was met by José’s mother and one of her daughters imploring him not to see his wife who certainly did not want to see him. The three of them travelled by train up to London and by the end of the journey he had persuaded the two women that José really must see him. And so she did see him and he convinced her that it would only be fair to experiment with a trial marriage for three months at Leinster Lodge (which was still being paid for by Ernest) before making a final decision. It quickly became evident, however, that there was no future in the marriage. Before returning to South Africa, Joseph agreed to sue for divorce (not mentioning Ernest’s name) on the grounds of José’s desertion. He was, in José’s words, ‘a man in a million’.

  José and Ernest were now free to live together – but not to marry since her divorce was not made final until 23 November 1894. In May that year José became pregnant and on 25 February 1895 she gave birth to a son at Leinster Lodge. On the marriage certificate ‘Joseph Dale-Lace’ appears as the name of the father (the Dale being his mother’s surname which he had attached to his father’s name). Her name is given as ‘José Dale-Lace’ and her maiden name recorded as ‘Lange-Brink’ (Lange being her mother’s surname which she had spelt backwards for her acting name, ‘Valdane Egnal’, in Beerbohm Tree’s company). The names she chose for her son were Lancelot Ernest Cecil: the first was a tribute to her ex-husband’s Arthurian behaviour; the importance of being Ernest was to signify the actual father of her child; and the third was a family name. But whatever names she played with on the certificate, her baby, born three months after the final divorce decree came through, was illegitimate.

  Ernest rented a house for them on the Thames and, in the words of Daphne Saul, ‘settled a sum of money on her and agreed to pay for the boy’s upbringing and education’. But still he had not married her.

  One reason for this must have been the entry of Alice Keppel into Ernest’s life. They met in the winter of 1892 – 3. Her name and that of her husband George Keppel first appear in the guest book at Kirkstall Grange in 1893. Alice also began visiting him alone at 138 Piccadilly, into which Ernest had moved after the death of his father on the railway line. According to Raymond Lamont-Brown, author of Edward VII’s Last Loves
, Ernest ‘showered her with presents of money and gowns, all of which were a godsend to the Keppels’ strained budget’. By the late summer they were lovers, by the end of the year Alice was pregnant and in the early summer of 1894 she gave birth to a daughter. She was called Violet, the name of Ernest’s favourite sister, ‘dearest Vi’, who had died in 1883.

  Alice was running the risk of social ostracism but, with the help of a complaisant husband, she managed everything with perfect discretion. The Keppels went on visiting Kirkstall Grange until 1898 (but not in 1895 while the Prince of Wales was staying there for the Doncaster races and Leeds Music Festival). Alice’s affaire with Ernest was like a rehearsal for her role as royal mistress, which began in 1898.

  Violet never mentions having met Ernest, her presumed father. If everyone is to be believed, she was his fourth child, her illegitimate half-brother Lancelot being born some eight months later. Ernest was now in a predicament. If he had not married José before Lancelot’s birth, why should he marry her now? She had had a good innings, a good run for Ernest’s money: it was unreasonable of her to expect anything more. Besides, how could he give up Alice who was so wonderfully discreet and refreshing? With her the awkward matter of marriage never arose and besides he had known her less than half the time he had known José. It was seven years since he and José first met in Rome and, now that she had given up her South African husband for him, she seemed to have become less of a necessity to Ernest. In any event, he refused to marry her and in 1896 she returned with their son to South Africa. The following year she married John Joseph Lace once more – this time in a church at Cape Town. In the early twentieth century, while travelling in Europe, José and Joseph met Edward VII and a rumour spread through South Africa that José had been the King’s mistress and Lancelot was their son. She found herself curiously unable to deny it. When the Royal Academician, Hal Hurst, painted Lancelot’s portrait, José asked him to add in the background of the picture a shadowy image of the King – and this ghostly silhouette kept the story alive.