Victoria left the convent in July 1881 with nothing but a certificate enabling her to seek employment as a governess. She later showed the certificate to Vita, describing how at that time in her life there seemed no other path open to her. ‘I must say,’ Vita wrote in Pepita, ‘that I smile to think how she would have turned any employer’s house upside-down within a week. Anyone less adapted to the position of a governess I can scarcely imagine.’ The girls spent the summer holidays in lodgings in Eastbourne, where Henry, who had been escorted back from Paris by Mr Mulhall, joined them. It was then off to new lodgings with another governess, Miss Hillier, in Denbigh Street, Pimlico.
Victoria did not tell her sisters the shocking truth about their illegitimacy, but passed the news on to Henry, before he was taken by his father in October 1881 to board at Stonyhurst, the Jesuit college in Lancashire. She thought it better that Henry should learn of his illegitimacy from her, rather than from the other boys at school. But she told him to keep it a secret, ‘as it was a dreadful thing. He seemed to be astonished but probably did not realise what it meant.’ His schoolfellows inevitably did find out, and made his life a misery as a result. Despite Aunt Mary’s efforts to change the family name that Lionel’s children went by, Lionel had enrolled Henry at Stonyhurst as his son, and in the name of Sackville West – in a vain attempt to spare him any unpleasantness.
‘There was something awesome, too, in the great stone-flagged corridors, the huge rooms, rude desks etc., and the stray glimpses of the inhabitants . . . Nothing since has ever approached that sense of despairing desolation and abandonment. He felt that there was no friend here for him, not a soul to whom he could turn, or who would not laugh, or at least smile, at his sorrows.’ This is how the author Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald described his first term at Stonyhurst in the late 1840s. But the first impressions for Henry, who spoke very little English on arrival, who was used to the company of women, and who felt lost in his translation to the cold, damp slopes of Longridge Fell, must have been even more miserable.
Henry attended Stonyhurst for five years, and he did not distinguish himself, moving slowly and anonymously up the school through the years, or ‘schools’, named after the components of a classical education: Elements, Figures, Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax . . . The intellectual subtlety and sophistication of the Jesuit education (at a time when academic standards under Father John Gerard were improving) were wasted on poor Henry. It was a communal life, the day starting with prayers and Mass in chapel, followed by an hour’s study at 7 a.m., breakfast at 8 a.m., and ending at 7.30 p.m. with dinner at refectory tables in the dining hall, beneath the stags’ heads and portraits of distinguished former pupils on the walls. Everything was on the grand scale: a Renaissance-style mansion, with marble floors, great oak staircases, fine plasterwork ceilings and a study place with 200 seats. While Henry was there, a vast new 560-foot south front was being built, with dormitories covering an area of 2,000 square yards on the upper floor. These developments expressed the driving vision of Stonyhurst’s creators, but Henry himself was left behind by education on such a grand, almost industrial, scale.
While the girls were in Denbigh Street, plans were made and permission sought for Victoria to join her father, who had in 1881 been appointed British Minister to the United States in Washington, as his hostess and the mistress of his house. Aunt Mary was warm-hearted as well as meddlesome. She had noticed that her illegitimate niece, however insecure and ill-educated, had a certain style, and persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, that it would be a good idea to send Victoria to Washington. Queen Victoria gave her consent, on condition that Washington’s notoriously snobbish and exclusive society agreed. A committee, consisting of Mrs Garfield, the wife of the American President (who was assassinated that year), Mrs James Blaine, the wife of the Secretary of State, Mrs Bancroft Davis, the wife of the Assistant Secretary of State, and Mrs Donald Cameron, the wife of a leading Republican senator from Pennsylvania, was formed – and approved the proposal.
Many years later, when the question arose of whether Victoria and her sisters were generally considered legitimate during their years in America, Maria Stockton Cheston (née Howell), the daughter of a US admiral who had come to live in Washington, recalled ‘a discussion amongst the leading ladies of Washington Society’. They had debated ‘whether she [Victoria] should be received in Society . . . on the ground of her illegitimacy’ and ‘decided that she should be received – it was absolutely accepted in Society in Washington that she was illegitimate . . . The same opinion was held all the time she was there without exception.’
As in so many aspects of his life, Lionel later claimed to have been completely ignorant of all these machinations: ‘When I was at Washington, Victoria came to me first and then my other daughters joined me. I did not make any application personally for leave for my daughters to be allowed to come out to me – I believe Lady Derby made the application, I have no personal knowledge on the subject, I say it from what I have heard. I do not know that any consent was obtained from any authority at Washington for my daughters to join me.’ Lionel also continued to be economical with the truth about his daughters’ illegitimacy. It is hardly surprising that, as a result of such connivances, all of the children would be so confused about their names and identities for the rest of their lives.
See Notes on Chapter 2
3
Continental Drift
In December 1881, Victoria set sail for the United States on the Cunard Line’s RMS Bothnia. She was accompanied by John Sturgis, an American acquaintance of her aunt Mary, and his daughter. Mr Sturgis thanked Lady Derby ‘for giving my daughter so sweet a sister & myself a companion so charming . . . I quite envy her father the possession of a child at once so docile & of so good a disposition. You must not consider my expression extravagant but must remember that 12 days’ intimate association on board ship is equal to an equal number of years of acquaintance on land.’
Victoria joined her father in Washington, moving into the British legation, a recently built, red-brick mansion in the seventeenth-century-French style, on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and North Street, about fifteen minutes’ walk north-west of the White House. A porte cochère at the front of the mansion carried the royal court of arms, and from there a flight of stone steps led up to the front door and a hall dominated by a portrait of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes, hanging at the head of the grand staircase.
The surrounding area preserved a surprisingly rural air for a national capital. The novelist Henry James captured Washington’s appeal at this moment when the United States was poised to usurp Great Britain’s industrial leadership of the world: ‘It is very queer and yet extremely pleasant: informal, familiar, heterogeneous, good-natured, essentially social and conversational, enormously big and yet extremely provincial, indefinably ridiculous and yet eminently agreeable. It is the only place in America where there is no business, where an air of leisure hangs over the enormous streets, where everyone walks slowly and doesn’t look keen and preoccupied. The sky is blue, the sun is warm, the women are charming, and at dinners the talk is always general.’ At one of these dinners, Henry James was particularly taken with Victoria, the Minister’s ‘most attractive little ingénue of a daughter, the bâtarde of a Spanish ballerina’.
Victoria’s role was to act as social hostess for the British Minister and to manage his household – a role requiring some skill, since her father’s disposition did not incline to the sociable, and his means, as a younger son, were limited. Mrs Blaine, the wife of the recently replaced Secretary of State, particularly noted the rather derelict air of the legation before Victoria’s arrival and the poor quality of the food.
Victoria was a little lonely at first – ‘I so much regret that my little sisters are not here with me,’ she wrote to Béon – but despite her shyness and her broken English, she was soon managing the legation ‘with a knowledge that is not to be believed’, as her father reported. She gener
ally made a very favourable impression. Mrs Blaine, whom she visited the day after her arrival in Washington, found her charming. Mrs Henry Adams, the Society hostess, thought Minister West’s ‘convent-fledged daughter’ elegant and loved her ‘charming foreign accent’. ‘It’s a curious position for a girl of eighteen to be put at the head of a big establishment like the British legation,’ Mrs Adams wrote to her father. ‘She is delighted with her first week here. As I can’t endure English misses, it’s a great relief to have this pretty girl after Lady Thornton [the previous Minister’s wife] with her neuralgia and sharp tongue . . . a funny little church mouse in contrast with the sharp-clawed grimalkin who preceded her.’ She was certainly an asset to her father, ‘the quiet, sad-eyed British plenipotentiary’. He, on the other hand, ‘does not improve on further acquaintance; is very dull – no conversation – and it seems to me a nullity’.
Lionel’s professional style, as one of his colleagues in London later recalled, was as laconic as his personal style. When Minister West sent a letter from Washington reporting on the impact of the Irish Question on relations between Britain and the United States, it arrived ‘looking very pregnant in a big envelope’. All it contained was an extract from a newspaper on the subject. His boss at the Foreign Office simply lifted his eyebrows, and held out the document at arm’s length, observing, ironically: ‘This is a satisfactory elucidation of this important question and shows conclusively the advantage of a well-informed diplomatic agent.’ Lionel’s former colleague went on to describe the diplomatic agent in question, Minister West, as:
a curious person. His conversation is just like his correspondence – when it exists at all. At first sight you would think he was about as bad a man as you could have here. But I can’t think he is at all a bad man. The Americans thoroughly understand him and tell him all sorts of things they don’t to anyone else. They have a common taste for whiskey, poker and business, and a common hatred for female society. He never humbugs anyone, and never makes any bones over what he wants, and he always gets it. To our Government unfortunately he is so hopelessly reserved that unless he is directly asked for anything he never gives anything at all.
By contrast, Victoria took to her role instinctively: she was a natural hostess, organising dinners, dances and paper-chases, and participating in the established Washington social rituals of afternoon calls and ladies’ lunches. As she did so, she grew from a shy, inexperienced convent girl into a popular and confident young woman and, in the process, as her friend Mrs Elizabeth Cameron later observed, she raised ‘the whole status of the Legation’.
Victoria was beautiful at this stage of her life. To her mother she owed her Mediterranean looks, her dancer’s figure and tiny waist, the lustrous dark hair that hung to her hips, long eyelashes, and olive skin so fine (and unlined into old age) that she would never in her life wear make-up. Arched eyebrows framed her expressive dark blue eyes, and particularly in profile – with her classic nose and her long neck – she exuded a delicate grace. She was to become a spectacular social success. The press was enthusiastic – the scrapbook she kept of her cuttings extolled the ‘sweet and winning charm of her manners’. ‘She is not yet nineteen years old,’ raved one correspondent, and yet she combined ‘the dignity of a woman with the unconscious sprightliness of a child. Her style of beauty is more Castilian than Anglo-Saxon.’
No wonder, then, that she attracted so many suitors. In the ‘Book of Reminiscences’ she wrote in 1922, she listed those who had proposed to her, including, so she claimed, the President himself, the widower Chester Arthur. ‘It was the second proposal I had at Washington,’ she wrote, ‘I burst out laughing in his face and said: “Mr. President, you have a son older than me and you are as old as my father.”’ Throughout her life, Victoria was attracted to rich and powerful men older than herself. But her conquests also included two young men on her father’s staff: Charles Hardinge, a future head of the Foreign Office, and Cecil Spring-Rice, who joined the legation as Hardinge left it, and was himself to become Ambassador to the United States during the First World War. Her favourite, though, was probably Baron Carl Bildt, the chargé d’affaires at the Swedish legation. Every year, for the next half century, Victoria was to mark in her diary the anniversary of the day, 8 May, that ‘Buggy’ Bildt, who used to drive her out in his buggy ‘with great dash and speed and chic along the flowering avenues of Washington’, first proposed.
Victoria declined all of her suitors. She was still unmarried after six years in Washington and although she was regularly described by columnists as ‘the reigning belle’, and ‘the most beautiful woman in diplomatic circles’, she was no longer ‘a bud’. This was partly, as she explained in a letter to her brother Max in South Africa, because ‘I am so happy with Papa and help him in so many ways that I prefer to stay with him and take care of him’, and partly because ‘I can’t make up my mind to marry any man because I can’t trust any man enough. They are all so spoiled by Society and club life.’ There was another reason, however. Victoria was always ambivalent about sex. And when Bonny, the French lady-companion she had brought to Washington, explained the ‘facts of life’ to her, she went right off the idea of marriage, and turned Buggy down without giving any reason. ‘Ce pauvre Buggy!’ she later told Vita.
Victoria was joined in Washington in December 1883 by Flora, seventeen, and Amalia, fifteen – a development which, as Mrs Elizabeth Cameron recalled years later, ‘Washington thought . . . rather too much’ on account of their illegitimacy. The junior sisters were at first too young to enter Society, attending the legation ball of January 1884, in ‘simple dresses of white nun’s veiling and lace and corsage bouquets of apple blossoms’, according to the New York Times, and sitting in the drawing room on either side of a governess. But in January 1885, Victoria organised a magnificent coming-out ball for Flora (with Scottish dancing), and a couple of years later Amalia came out at another big ball. From then on, the Misses West were publicly inseparable and fully received in Washington society. Amalia was sometimes described as the clever one, Victoria as the beauty, and Flora as shy and reticent. According to one American newspaper, ‘Miss West [Victoria], who has scores of admirers in New York City, has been a most painstaking mother to her younger sisters.’ As her father became more and more dependent on Victoria, the sisters were subtly nudged into the shade from which they never really emerged.
In the summer of 1886, the Misses West were escorted by Bonny on a short visit to England – they tended to travel to Europe in the summer as life was cheaper there, returning to Washington in the autumn. It was the first time that Victoria had seen her younger brother, Henry, since he had been packed off to Stonyhurst in 1881. He was now going out to South Africa to join Max, and she took him to the stores in London to buy his outfits. Henry confided to her that he was very glad to be going away because ‘the boys at Stonyhurst had found out about his birth and he could not stand it’. Victoria suggested that, from now on, ‘he drop the name of Sackville in order not to identify himself and have unpleasant questions asked’.
During her years in Washington, Victoria worried not just about her illegitimacy, but also about money: the cost of running, and entertaining at, the legation, and the future of the family finances in general. The market-trader spirit that was later to inspire her interior decorating shop, Speall’s, was already in evidence, as she tried to persuade Béon to send her tapestries for her to sell on at a profit to American buyers. ‘It is quite natural,’ she wrote in November 1887, ‘that I like to make a little money, because if Papa was to die we would be very poor.’ The same month she wrote to her brother Max, bemoaning the fact that their father had been taken in and fleeced by their former butler, Wills, and that as a result ‘we have got to get square now . . . When Papa has to retire in ten years, his pension being only 13 hundred pounds a year, he will not be able to give us any allowance, we shall have barely enough to dress on and to live . . . If he were to die, what should we do? It makes me shiver to t
hink of it. Let us hope, dear brother, that he may live long; he is so good and kind.’ She also hoped, as she wrote to Max in January 1888, that their uncle Mortimer, the current Lord Sackville, would live a long time too (in fact, he was to die later that year). She did not like the idea of the Sackville title and Knole bypassing Max, as they inevitably would on account of his illegitimacy, and wished to defer that moment for as long as possible – in any case, ‘the money would not benefit us much, as it is all employed to keep the house in good order, so it is much better that Papa should never be Lord Sackville, don’t you think so?’
Max had learnt of his illegitimacy in the most brutal fashion in 1882. After six years in South Africa, Max had written to his father saying that he wished to get married to Mary Norton, the daughter of the farmer who had taken him in during his illness, and he was hoping to find out what his father could do for him ‘in the way of settlements’, as he imagined himself to be his heir. Max came to London to press for an answer, and was delighted to see his ‘little sisters’, Flora and Amalia, again, and to visit Henry, who had just broken his collarbone, at Stonyhurst. Lionel’s younger brother, my great-grandfather William Edward, was deputed, ‘much against [his] inclination’, at Lady Derby’s request, to tell Max the truth. Mrs Mulhall had already been asked, but refused to carry out the task.
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