The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  On 9 March 1882, he met Max at 17 Upper Grosvenor Street and told him that Lionel and Pepita had never been married. ‘He seemed utterly astonished and was much overcome,’ recalled William Edward, ‘but did not doubt my word. I had never seen him before and have never seen him since.’ His only contact over the next few years was to make payments quarterly, at his brother’s request, to Max and then Henry in South Africa through his Bankers Messrs Cox & Co.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, in Washington, Lionel broached one evening with Victoria the fact that he and her mother had never been married – for the simple reason that Pepita already had a husband. He told her that he had loved Pepita, and would have been ‘only too happy to marry her’ if Oliva had died; the discussion in no way altered Victoria’s ‘personal feelings’ towards her mother, whom she had always looked upon ‘as a saint’.

  Other members of the extended Sackville family were also being made aware for the first time of the family secrets. In the summer of 1882, Max’s fourteen-year-old first cousin, William Edward’s son, Lionel, a future Lord Sackville and husband of Victoria, was staying with his mother in the spa town of Homburg, where she had gone to take the waters for the disease that would kill her the following year. She told him that his ‘uncle had lived for several years with a Spanish “actress” and had had children by her’, that ‘she had always heard that the mother was a very good woman’ and that it was his ‘grandmother, Lady De La Warr’s wish that the family should be kind to the children’. A couple of months later, Lionel met his young cousin, Lady Edeline Sackville, at Buckhurst, who told him that she was going to see ‘our cousins, Uncle Lionel’s children’ (Flora and Amalia had stayed on in England after Victoria had left for America). Lionel did not think, however, that Edeline would be aware the cousins were illegitimate, as she was younger than he was, and ‘would hardly have been told’.

  Max was stunned by the news that his father and mother had never been married. He had recently got back in touch with Béon after a long silence, for which he apologised profusely, blaming his ‘incurable laziness’. Béon had been like ‘a second father’ to him, wrote Max: ‘I know how you love us and what a good heart you have or I should be afraid to address myself to you after so many years.’ And it was to Béon that he confided his great unhappiness: ‘They have told me the secrets of our births, secrets I had not the slightest knowledge of which has nearly sent me mad. Oh, if Father had told me sooner. When one is of my age and about to commence life a thing like this is sufficient to make you despair concerning everything.’ He was particularly worried how these revelations would affect his engagement to Mary Norton. How could he ‘return to her and tell her the truth!’ The fear of losing her oppressed him even more than the English climate (‘one never sees the sun’), as he counted the hours until his return to Natal. He did not have a single regret nor a bitter thought, he claimed, for any worldly possessions he may have lost, ‘I who fancied myself the heir of my Father since childhood.’ He was now beginning to ask himself how he could have been so blind. ‘The blow has been the more rude as I was not prepared for it. Oh how could my father allow me to pass all these years in ignorance . . . What an injustice that the children must suffer for the faults of their parents.’

  Mary did not reject him on his return, however, and accepted him for what he was. ‘All the rest seems indifferent to me now, and how little importance do I attach to what I have lost, position and title in one day. I never valued all of this very much and now that all my wishes are fulfilled in spite of all, what do I care! I am very happy.’ Max was aware of the sacrifices Captain and Mrs Norton were making on his behalf and ‘although Mr Norton has been very kind and spoken to me with plenty of regard’, he did impose some conditions. For a start, he decided that his daughter needed time – a year’s engagement – to reflect on the changed circumstances: a year which Max was confident would pass quickly as he worked ‘like a negro’ on the farm he was about to purchase, and the house he would build on it, ‘all for her sake’.

  Captain Norton also wanted Max to get hold of his birth certificate, to establish exactly who he was, and to make this a further condition of his consent to the marriage. In July 1882, the Sackville family solicitor wrote to the Attorney General of Natal asking whether this was strictly necessary, since ‘there would be considerable trouble and expense in obtaining it from Spain’. In a second letter, he explained how Max’s father had proposed giving him £1,500, and his aunt had proposed settling on him a further £1,500, to purchase and stock a farm. Surely, the solicitor argued, a letter from his firm remitting the £1,500 and forwarding the settlement of a further £1,500 would be accepted ‘as sufficient evidence of identity without a certificate of Baptism from Spain’. In the light of all this, the Attorney General concluded that he did not believe a birth certificate was absolutely necessary.

  Despite these reassurances, Captain Norton was still demanding the production of Max’s birth or baptism certificate the following year. Lushington Phillips, an agent acting for the Sackville family, argued that even if such a certificate could now be obtained, ‘it would give you no further information as to his status [beyond the fact that he is the avowed son of Lionel Sackville-West] which would interest or affect you or yours beyond what you now know’. The request would be distressing to Lionel, and serve only ‘to raise the ghosts of a buried past and supply matter for gossip’. There was an implication that Captain Norton and Max were pursuing this line of inquiry purely out of curiosity. ‘I am sorry West has made the request; it cannot be complied with and has caused useless pain,’ Phillips concluded in a letter to the Sackville solicitor, ‘for I am pretty confident the want of a Baptismal Certificate or information on it will not delay the marriage a single day’. But was Max’s curiosity really so unreasonable? The twenty-five-year-old had only just learnt that he was illegitimate, and there were further revelations about his paternity to come.

  The taint of illegitimacy would torture Max for the rest of his life. Why, he asked, in all the various legal documents produced by the Sackville solicitors at the time of this settlement, was he called simple Max West rather than his ‘full name of Sackville West . . . Mr Norton and I noticed this difference and were puzzled. We could not help noticing it as it was so plainly marked. What is the object of this?’ The object was clear: to erase him from the family record.

  Max was staying with his future in-laws, the Nortons, on their farm, Greenwich, near Riet Vlei, as he scoured the country for a farm to purchase. It took time, and the frustration is apparent in his letters. In the autumn of 1882, he eventually bought a 2,500-acre farm called Dartington, on a tributary of the Mooi River, in Natal, for £1,200 from a Mr Studdy.

  British immigrants had started to settle the Mooi River in the 1850s (Mooi means ‘beautiful’ in Afrikaans, which is exactly what the area is). At first, these pioneers farmed sheep, shearing them once a year and transporting the wool by wagon to the local capital, Pietermaritzburg. It was a hard, hand-to-mouth existence, constantly under threat from stock diseases and from packs of wild dogs and warthogs that came down from the Drakensberg Mountains to roam the grasslands. In the 1880s, however, the railway was extended from Durban on the coast to Johannesburg in the interior, passing through the Mooi River district, and the face of farming was transformed. Farmers could now produce more than they needed, and use the railway to market the surplus farther afield. Towards the end of the century, progressive farmers began to import pedigree stock from Britain, and in particular Shorthorn cattle. Max was a founding member of the Mooi River Farmers’ Association, which was formed in 1893 to promote the market for sheep and cattle. As a result of all this, the Mooi River became, by the time of the Boer War, a prosperous stock-raising and horse-breeding area.

  The money for Dartington came from the £1,500 settled on Max by his father, but in order to stock it he needed the further £1,500 given to him by his aunt Mary. This sum was to come partly from the sale of a family-owned fa
rm, called Aberfeldy, in Griqualand – a fact that Max chose not to appreciate, preferring instant cash (which he believed he had originally been promised) rather than deferred money from the sale of Aberfeldy. On 4 October 1882, he wrote to Lushington Phillips about the problem: ‘Expecting to receive the full amount in money as stated, I laid my plans accordingly, and now everything is upset. Do not think I grumble, I am thankful that at last I can start and work, but if the thing could be managed, if Lady Derby would give me the £630 and keep the farm I should like it much better . . . Do try, dear Judge Phillips, to change this.’ He went on to beg another favour: could he pay a London saddler out of the balance of the £1,500 for a lady’s saddle and bridle he had ordered? ‘It is for Miss Norton and I would not disappoint her for anything.’

  Next, there was the problem of a sitting tenant, Mr Ford, on the Dartington farm, with about six months of his lease left to run. Max had not previously been aware of this, and was desperate to get on to the property. ‘How I shall manage I don’t know,’ he wrote to Phillips:

  for God’s sake let us have no more delay; let’s have everything settled once for all . . . I really despair sometimes at the time that is flying away. Five months gone now and I might have had my house built and all this time I have been doing nothing, living a wretched life at the Nortons expecting to hear every day that all was settled. There seems to be always something springing up in the way . . . The Nortons are as anxious as I am that I should go, how can I live so in their house in idleness when I expected to be off.

  At least, the saddle had been sent out from London to his wife. ‘It’s a great weight off my mind,’ wrote Max and he thanked Phillips for his help.

  In 1885, Henry was still at Stonyhurst, and his father was wondering what to do with him. ‘He is lazy . . . and the education at Stonyhurst is not practical, and he has not the qualities for business here,’ Lionel complained. He was rather put out that ‘those people there had the idea of making a priest of him’. And so it was decided, in 1886, that Henry should be sent to South Africa too. He stayed with his older brother at first, their father advising Max ‘to keep him well in hand’. Victoria, too, encouraged Max to look after Henry, pointing out that while she helped their father by taking care of his household ‘and managing everything’, Max should help by taking care of Henry. ‘Henry is not a bad child, he is still a mere child, I am sure – “et ne se rend compte de rien”. He is not careful of his clothes or of anything, as he does not understand yet the value of money. I am sorry for you dearest Max, that he wears out his shoes and clothes so quickly. I will try to reason with him and make him understand to be more economical.’ In letters to Max’s wife, Victoria asked Mary to put up with him in their home, even if he was sometimes ‘tiresome’, but then, as she observed, life was not always ‘couleur de rose’.

  Henry appreciated the fact that his older brother was ‘very kind’ to him: Max paid him pocket money to help him plant the orchard at Dartington, and taught him some of the rudiments of farming. Henry was happy at first, and wrote to his father that he could not think of ‘any other life but farming [that] would have suited [him] so well’. But the brothers soon quarrelled, with Henry claiming that Max had stolen his best cow. Henry had to leave Max’s farm, and was put under a Mr Nourse Varty at Stag Stones, on the Mooi River, to learn more about farming.

  Victoria was ‘very sorry’ about the quarrel, as she wrote to Max in December 1889: ‘Poor Papa has already so much worry and anxiety from many sources and he was in hopes his sons would give him satisfaction. Let us hope that at last, as you don’t live with Henry any longer, you will kindly remain good friends. It is so sad that you two should be almost like enemies. Do be kind to him, dear Max and forgive him once more, make up with him.’

  Mr Varty gave Henry a certain amount of responsibility, and in 1891, Lionel proposed to provide his younger son with a total of around £3,500 to purchase and stock three small farms, Farleigh, Hall Cross and Burgundy, with a total of just over two thousand acres. Henry was initially grateful – ‘greatly indebted’ – to his father for his kindness, ‘and in return I shall try to do my best to get on well to please you’. Henry kept his father closely informed about progress. ‘I have made a very good start . . . You cannot imagine how careful I have been with money,’ he wrote in April 1892, getting Farleigh in order, ploughing forty acres of land, planting five acres of wattle for shelter and firewood, fencing in paddocks with two and a half miles of wire, and supervising the six men who worked for him.

  Outside the family circle, the muddle over his children’s legitimacy persisted, with Lionel claiming that ‘when my daughters stayed in Washington, they passed as my legitimate children, but everybody knew they were illegitimate’. The girls went by the name of West, and Victoria’s official visiting cards were printed ‘West’ rather than Sackville West. These fine distinctions, with all that they meant for the sisters’ sense of self and status at the time, were to become particularly significant twenty years later.

  On the grounds of their illegitimacy, the girls were not, for example, presented at the Queen’s Drawing Room, on returning to London on leave, as would have been the daughters of other British ambassadors. (Victoria, in fact, was not to be received at Court until after her marriage.) Cecil Spring-Rice, when secretary at the legation, hoped that favourable reports of Victoria being well received in London by visiting Americans would filter back to Washington, as ‘it would do her and our poor Legation here a great deal of good’.

  Matters came to a head with Flora’s engagement. Flora became engaged to Gabriel Salanson, a third secretary at the French legation in Washington, at a ball in February 1888. Flora was at the time ‘the most English-looking of the three sisters, who are Parisian to the tips of their toes’, according to one newspaper report. ‘She is medium in stature, has an elegant figure, blue eyes, blonde hair, and the tiniest hands and feet to be seen upon a mortal. She carries herself like a young princess, dances like a fairy, is vivacious and witty, has a sweet disposition and a cordial manner, and is greatly admired and beloved in her circle here.’ Gabriel Salanson was ‘a Society favourite’, too, according to another newspaper report: ‘[he] is short and stout of figure and has a handsome, florid face. He comes of a good French family, is twenty-eight years old and is immensely rich.’ This last claim was not true, as would later become clear.

  Neither of them had consulted their families beforehand, and Gabriel was never to raise the subject of the engagement directly with his future father-in-law. It was Victoria who heard the news first – from Flora on the way back from the ball as they clattered through the streets in a brougham. ‘I remonstrated with her,’ Victoria recalled later, with a degree of social confidence that she can hardly have felt at the time, ‘on the ground that he would not make a suitable match – his social position not being as good as ours’. And it was Victoria who first told her father of the engagement. ‘I never cared about Salanson,’ Lionel claimed, ‘I took no active part with reference to the engagement or the marriage. I simply held aloof and let them manage their own affairs. I never even asked Salanson as to his means.’ Nor, amazingly, or so he later claimed, did he have anything to do with the financial settlement made on Flora’s marriage, which was left entirely to Béon and Gabriel.

  Gabriel’s superiors certainly approved of his marriage to the well-connected Flora. Lady Derby made ‘numerous’ enquiries about the young man, and found them quite satisfactory. Victoria, too, eventually came round to the idea, writing to Max, ‘I think they will be quite happy together. What a pity you can’t assist at the ceremony. Flora will be a pretty bride, her features are not very good, but her skin and her figure are lovely . . . I rather dread going to London, où on a toujours l’air de me regarder avec pitié, I feel it so’ – this yet another reference to her illegitimacy.

  ‘You know all about my father and mother?’ Victoria had asked Gabriel, in her sitting room at the British legation, the day after his engagement to Fl
ora. ‘Of course I do,’ he replied (although he was later to claim that he was unaware of the fact), ‘all Washington knows it, and it makes no difference to me.’ But whereas Gabriel knew that Flora was illegitimate, his recently bereaved father Louis, a former Counsellor General of Aisne in Picardy, did not (Gabriel’s mother had died while he was at sea, travelling to France to tell his parents of his engagement). Nor did his uncle Charles, a general and Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. Any suspicion of Flora’s illegitimacy needed, therefore, to be kept from Gabriel’s father, who was unwell at the time and who, it was thought, would never give his consent to the marriage if he knew the truth.

  In April, a couple of months before the wedding, Victoria and her two sisters, accompanied by Bonny, were seen off at the railway station in Washington by the legation staff. They were bound for France, to buy Flora’s trousseau and to prepare for the wedding. Lionel was due to join them in Paris just a few days before the ceremony, once all the arrangements had been made. Amalia was particularly worried by how much she would miss Flora after her marriage; as she confided to her Washington friend, Amy Heard, whose father was to become the American Minister to Korea, she found it much more fun being ‘chaperoned’ by the easy-going Flora than by her more censorious and bossy eldest sister. In any case, there was no hope of marriage for herself, ‘poor little Malia’, at the moment, as ‘all of those who have given me a bit of heart this winter are so poor’.

  There were lengthy discussions at the Hôtel de l’Empire, where the wedding party was staying, about how to keep the older Salansons in the dark. Béon proposed to get hold of Flora’s birth and baptism certificates, in which Lionel had attested years before that Flora was his ‘legitimate’ daughter. Knowing that the claim was fraudulent and had been made only to spare Pepita’s feelings, Victoria and her father, when he arrived in Paris, became increasingly nervous about ‘les papiers’ – as the certificates were always referred to by the conspirators. They attempted to distance themselves from the elaborate deception. Lionel, in particular, as the original perpetrator of the falsehood, was sure that ‘he and all of them would get into a bother over the business’, but was persuaded by Béon and Salanson to go along with the story. As Lionel later confessed, he colluded in Béon’s plan ‘in order to hoodwink M. Salanson Père and the other guests at the ceremony’. When pressed as to why he had signed the marriage register acknowledging Flora as his ‘legitimate daughter’, he simply reverted to the familiar excuse that ‘I did not read what I signed before I signed it’.