The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  In January 1916, Waldorf was informed that the title Baron Astor of Hever had been conferred on his father William. It was an honour William Astor had been pursuing for years: during the Boer War he had funded an artillery regiment, and in the following decade he had donated vast sums to the Conservative party and then the Conservative–Unionist government. His contributions to the war effort – including $125,000 to the Prince of Wales’s war fund and $200,000 to the Red Cross – amounted to around £10 million in today’s money.38 Like many wealthy Americans of the late 19th century, William saw in the British aristocracy an opportunity to varnish his wealth with the patina of age and respectability. He had previously attempted the same thing genealogically, commissioning a family tree that traced his blood line back to the crusader Count Pedro D’Astorga of Castille, who was killed in AD 1000 by the Saracen King of Morocco.39

  Unfortunately for William Astor, his son and daughter-in-law were not so prone to lavish historical fantasies. While Harriet and George Sutherland had been elated by the family’s ennoblement, Nancy and Waldorf were crestfallen. A barony, Waldorf feared, would sound the death knell for his political career. On his father’s demise, he would automatically inherit the title, and consequently be forced to relinquish his seat as Member of Parliament for Plymouth. Peers were ineligible for election to the Commons and were, by law, unable to disclaim their title. Not only was Waldorf averse to leaving the Commons, he resented the idea of joining the Lords: the Parliament Act of 1911 had emasculated the upper house by effectively abolishing its right to reject legislation. If William Astor viewed the aristocracy in the nostalgic glow of a bygone age, his son saw it in the harsh light of the age to come: he could tell that the old landed constitution was disintegrating, and that power was shifting from the Lords to the Commons. William could not understand his son’s objections, and retaliated by changing his will: much of the Astor wealth would now skip a generation and go directly to his grandsons. The ensuing enmity between father and son lasted a lifetime. Nancy expressed equal distaste at the elevation, although as fate would conspire, Waldor’s enforced resignation as MP would later present her with the greatest opportunity of her life.

  Despite his disappointment about his father’s elevation to the peerage, Waldorf continued to pursue a political career. In December 1916 the first wartime governing coalition collapsed; Asquith resigned as prime minister and Lloyd George took his place. Waldorf, a long-time supporter of the new premier, was appointed Lloyd George’s private secretary. His post necessitated spending more time in Westminster, leaving Nancy to represent him at meetings in his Plymouth constituency. In May 1917, the new president of the Board of Education, H. A. L. Fisher, came on an official visit to Plymouth. Nancy was tasked with introducing him to an audience. Standing on the podium she declared, ‘I am very keen about education because I suffer from a lack of it, and if you want an ignorant woman to take the chair at an educational meeting, you could not have found a better if you had searched Europe.’40 This talent for comic, candid and effective oratory would serve her well in her own political career over the following years.

  On 11 November 1918, the epic and brutal conflict that was the First World War ended. Nancy insisted on creating a cemetery within the grounds for those servicemen who had died at the Cliveden hospital. She chose a peaceful spot in a sunken garden on the west side of the house; 42 inscribed stones marked the graves of her fallen soldiers. Presiding over the cemetery was a bronze statue of a woman, her arms outstretched, her face bearing more than a passing resemblance to Nancy’s. In fact, Nancy had commissioned the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal to execute a symbolic figure representing Canada to stand in the cemetery. He had agreed, on the condition she sit for him as the head. As the finishing touches to the memorial were completed, the hospital at Cliveden was being demolished. Nancy wrote wistfully to a former patient, Jimmy Boyden: ‘The hospital is being pulled down and it is exactly like seeing your home go.’41

  Chapter 2

  THE THRILL OF THE CHASE

  NANCY HAD GROWN up in the shadow of her beautiful sister Irene, six years her senior, and known as ‘Queen Bee’ in the Langhorne household. Irene was an instant sensation when in 1890 she entered the southern ‘marriage market’. She was invited as guest of honour to events across the country, from the cotillions and masked balls at White Sulphur Springs, the most fashionable spa resort in the south, to the Patriarchs’ Ball in New York, which was hosted by Mrs Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, the high-priestess of fashionable society. She is ‘tall and fair’, the New York Times wrote of Irene. ‘Her carriage is queenly and her complexion perfect.’1 A succession of suitors from the north made the pilgrimage to Mirador, hoping to ensnare Irene. Nancy, competitive by nature, kept tabs on all her sister’s proposals. By 1894, when Irene met Charles Dana Gibson at a dinner in New York, the count had reached 62. Gibson was a talented graphic artist employed by Life magazine. He had made his name by sketching the Gibson Girl – a strong, sexy and athletic young woman who represented a new model of female beauty. Life rewarded Gibson by paying him $100,000 for his invention – the highest annual contract on record. The day after their first encounter, Irene visited Charles at his studio. They fell in love and were married in Richmond the following November. Henceforth, Irene and the Gibson Girl became inextricably entwined in the public mind. Nancy, who was bridesmaid at the wedding, pretty in a French taffeta gown and long white gloves, was now the next Langhorne in line to be married.

  The business of courtship was more of a chore than a pleasure for Irene’s prudish younger sister. Uncomfortable with flirting, she tended to befriend or even compete with her beaux, rather than beguile them. Unlike Phyllis, who felt comfortable with the rituals of seduction, Nancy showed a profound disdain, bordering on physical revulsion, for gestures of romantic love. Letters or poems from admirers rendered her ‘nauseous’.2 Nancy’s diffidence made her, in her mother’s opinion, too unpredictable to take part in her debutante season. Instead, Nancy was dispatched to Miss Brown’s Academy for Young Ladies, a finishing school in New York. It was an experience she despised, and when Nanaire and Chillie came to visit her, she pleaded to be released. They acquiesced and by the summer of 1895 Nancy was back at Mirador, running and riding, thrilled to have turned her back on ‘that ghastly finishing school’.3

  When she returned to New York the following spring to visit Irene and Dana, she came not as one of Miss Brown’s young ladies, but as a self-styled Virginian, ‘petite, freshly turned out, sparkling with life’, – though to the newspapers she was still ‘the Gibson Girls’ younger sister’.4 That summer, Nancy was introduced to Robert Gould Shaw. The son of a distinguished Boston family, extremely rich, and a spectacular polo player, Shaw was a thrilling prospect. As soon as he saw her, he knew he would marry her: Nancy was 17, Robert in his mid-twenties. Although Nancy had not been officially launched onto the marriage market, rumours of an impending engagement began to swirl. Delighted to be the centre of attention, Nancy persuaded herself that she was in love with Bob. ‘I suppose I was flattered and pleased to have made this spectacular conquest,’ she later confessed. ‘It was pleasant to be the centre of the picture all of a sudden. But in my heart I was never sure.’5 At one point, she called off the engagement to the idle, indulged Shaw, but ultimately she yielded to enormous pressure from both families.

  The wedding took place in October 1897, with a reception at Mirador that was memorable only for its ‘gloom’. Nancy had spent the previous night lying awake ‘praying the church would burn down’.6 After the ceremony, the couple travelled to the Homestead Hotel, Hot Springs, in the Appalachian mountains. Although the details of their honeymoon remain opaque, Nancy, now aged 18, appears to have been deeply shocked by her first experience of physical intimacy. After three torturous nights, during which she resorted to sleeping on her stomach to avoid contact with her new husband, she begged to return to Mirador. Whether Nancy’s distaste for sex was the result of an unpleas
ant initiation on her honeymoon, or something more deeply ingrained in her psyche, we will never know, but the nights at the Homestead Hotel must have played a role. Later, she would pronounce sex to be a base and shameful pursuit, and quip that her children were conceived ‘without pleasure’.7

  Chillie persuaded Nancy to go back to Boston, but it was clear that the marriage was doomed. Bob Shaw resumed an old affair and started drinking heavily again, a habit he had briefly curtailed in order to persuade Nancy to go through with the union. Nancy ran away from the Shaw home several times, yet surprisingly, three months after the marriage, she was pregnant. She later claimed that she had no recollection of the conception, besides waking up one night to find Bob in the bedroom clutching a chloroform-filled sponge. When she finally left Shaw, her rationale was that she simply could not ‘risk having any more children by him’.8 The baby, a son christened Bobbie, was born in 1898. Nancy refused the advice of her family and friends to get a divorce, and instead signed a deed of separation in 1901, which prevented her from marrying again. Aged 22, ‘unwanted, unsought, and part widowed for life’, she returned to Mirador with Bobbie.9 Shaw, however, seemed to misunderstand the meaning of a separation, and married his mistress, Mary Converse, opening himself up to charges of bigamy, a crime punishable by imprisonment.10 The Shaw family begged Nancy to agree to a divorce. After much bargaining, she consented on the grounds of adultery. The marriage was officially dissolved in a Charlottesville courtroom in 1903.

  Nancy may have gained her freedom from marriage, but she felt trapped and listless at Mirador. The death of her beloved mother Nanaire in October 1903 plunged her into grief and depression. ‘The light went out of my life,’ she later recalled. ‘I was ill for months, in a wretched, nameless fashion… The anguish of it never seemed to grow any less.’11 Despite her fiercely independent streak, it was a loss from which Nancy never truly recovered. Chillie was concerned about his daughter’s emotional state and suggested a change of scene. He could see that it was unhealthy for someone so young to remain at home, absorbed in misery. Nancy’s future, he insisted, was not hopeless. At the end of 1904, at her father’s instigation, Nancy left for England, accompanied by Phyllis and their children.

  ‘I had always loved England,’ Nancy wrote. ‘It always gave me a peculiar feeling of having come home, rather than visiting a strange land.’12 Her feelings towards the old world had a touch of William Astor about them, but they also had a progenitor closer to home: Chillie’s own research had speculatively traced the Langhorne line back to Wales and the West Country. Nancy and Phyllis rented a small house in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, with the intention of partaking in their first English hunting season. This was an audacious move for two American outsiders; fox hunting was a serious sport governed by a set of rigorous rules and conventions, which immediately separated the experienced riders from the amateurs. Although Phyllis was soon summoned home by her husband, Nancy was more than up for the challenge. In her autobiography, she recounted a number of tales from her hunting trip. ‘I hired the biggest horse I had ever ridden. It must have been 16 hands,’ she recalled. On her first day out, her horse stumbled on a branch, throwing Nancy into a ditch. A man came galloping up. ‘Can you mount from the ground?’ he asked. ‘If not I will get down and help you.’ Nancy looked up at him in bemusement and retorted, ‘Do you think I would be such an ass as to come out hunting if I could not mount from the ground!’ Another anecdote involves her interactions with English women, one of whom, Edith Cunard, wife of the industrialist Sir Gordon Cunard, asked whether she had come over to England to take her husband. ‘If you knew the trouble I had in getting rid of mine,’ Nancy told her, ‘you would know I don’t want yours.’ Edith was suitably amused and the two became firm friends.13

  The stratified world of fox hunting was intrigued by this straight-talking, teetotal, God-fearing Virginian divorcee. ‘I often wonder now what they really thought of me in those days,’ Nancy mused in her autobiography. ‘I had a sharp tongue, and I was quick off the trigger. Things just popped out…! Many people were afraid of me, but I don’t think I made any enemies, except amongst those I could do very well without.’14 Nancy’s quick wit and crisp beauty made her a much sought-after guest at dinner parties and soon she was juggling a handful of suitors. In the late 17th century, a cold caught during a fox hunt had ended the life of Cliveden’s creator, the Duke of Buckingham; over 200 years later, a reputation made while fox hunting would launch a new life for the house’s last mistress.

  It was during her heady first season in England that Nancy fell deeply in love. The object of her affection was John Baring, Lord Revelstoke, chairman of the merchant bank Baring Brothers and 16 years her senior. Since 1891, he had been having an on-off affair with Ettie Grenfell, later Lady Desborough, and Nancy’s future neighbour at Cliveden. Nancy was drawn to Revelstoke, both physically and emotionally. Revelstoke, although attracted to Nancy, was in no rush to commit. Nancy had grown up in the quintessentially southern courting culture, which dictated that beaux should propose immediately, and thus interpreted Revelstoke’s delay in suggesting marriage as a sign of reticence or, worse, rejection. Humiliated, she immediately went on the offensive and lost her temper, accusing him of snobbery, selfishness and coldness. The romance inevitably broke down. ‘I have been & am still going through tortures – you can’t realise it – I never did before – All is off between John & me,’ she lamented to Phyllis. ‘There are many reasons – which I can’t write I can only explain – but I have decided its best never to see him again… I can’t eat sleep or think & weep as I am spoken to! A nice state of affairs.’15 Heartbroken, Nancy resolved to return to Virginia. As she was departing on a train to Liverpool, another suitor, Sidney Herbert, the 16th Baron Elphinstone, jumped aboard and asked her to marry him.

  Nancy did not stay in Virginia for long, and when she returned to England in December 1905 with her father, Elphinstone assumed she would be his wife. He planned to meet her at the Liverpool dock, but he arrived to find that he had a rival: Nancy had met Waldorf Astor on the boat. Waldorf was modest, distinguished, faultlessly polite, quietly clever, and also, coincidentally, the same age to the day. He had heard all about the gregarious Langhorne girl, and arranged to travel on the same steamship so he could meet her. At first, Nancy, who was suffering from seasickness, declined Waldorf’s invitation to dine with him. Unperturbed, he spent the subsequent days charming Chillie and making his intentions to marry his daughter abundantly clear.

  Nancy now had two extremely viable marriage options and she agonised over her choice between Astor and Elphinstone. ‘I sit and think here by the hour but I can’t decide… one has one thing I like best & the other has another,’ she wrote to Phyllis. ‘As soon as I have selected the unfortunate young man I will wire you!… Waldorf sends flowers fruits vegetables potted food and everything imaginable and Ld E the same!’16 A strong clue as to the ‘thing’ of Waldorf’s that Nancy ‘liked best’ came later in the letter, when she informed Phyllis that her Astor admirer was in line to become the ‘fourth richest man in the world’. She later wrote, ‘The gig’s up and I am engaged to Waldorf – & better still I am v v happy & I know you will love him.’17 The marriage took place on 3 May 1906 at All Souls’ Church, Langham Place, under a blanket of secrecy. They were both 27 years old. ‘The Astor diamonds are wonderful,’ Nancy wrote to her father. Unusually for Nancy, this was an understatement: the 55-carat, pear-shaped Sancy diamond given to her as her wedding present had previously belonged to James II and Louis XIV. Nancy and Waldorf spent their honeymoon in Cortina, in the Swiss Tyrol, then crossed the Atlantic to visit the Langhorne family, before starting their new life back in England.

  Chapter 3

  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  THE HISTORICAL OBSESSIONS of Waldorf’s father had not stopped at fanciful genealogies and a veneration of the British aristocracy. Cliveden itself had become a canvas for his fantasies. A vast 16th-century fireplace from a French cast
le was the centrepiece of the grand reception hall, while wild tamarind wood panelling from South Africa had been installed in the library. Perhaps most impressive was the Louis Quinze rococo panelling from the Château d’Asnières, the hunting lodge near Paris once occupied by Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV.1 In a nod to Cliveden’s past, William Astor and his Gothic Revival designer John Loughborough Pearson had built an imposing staircase featuring carved statues of some of the most important figures in the story of the house – Anna Maria, the Duke of Buckingham and Elizabeth Villiers. William had also sourced surviving 18th- and 19th-century architectural drawings, garden designs, engravings and manuscripts relating to Cliveden and bound them together in a large album for posterity.2 For the garden, he had procured the balustrade of the Villa Borghese in Rome, along with an assortment of sarcophagi, which he had set within the yew hedges. A pagoda that had stood in the Paris Exhibition of 1867 had been reassembled in the grounds, and, as an additional flourish, a skating pond built around it. At the head of the driveway to the house was the ‘Fountain of Love’, a vast marble cockleshell surrounded by cavorting nymphs and cherubs, created by the Anglo-American sculptor Waldo Story.