Lady Constance Lytton

by Lyndsey Jenkins

  Her life until then had given no hint of the rebellion to come. She was often ill and always cripplingly shy. She was devoted to her mother, her siblings and their families. Her spare time was spent in clumsy but well-intentioned efforts to help the working women who lived around the family estate. She had little interest in politics and even less in voting.

  Today, it is all too easy to see the suffragette victory as inevitable, a natural and logical development in a society becoming ever more liberal and progressive. But when Constance Lytton joined the suffragettes in 1909, there was nothing inevitable about it. Since Emmeline Pankhurst had set up the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, the decades-old struggle for the vote had gained new force and momentum. But after six years of exhausting campaigning, the sense of optimism and vigour was draining away. There was no end in sight. The women were tired of signing petitions, marching on parades and even going to prison when none of it seemed to have any effect. The Liberal government, led by Herbert Asquith, had no interest in ‘votes for women’, and were grimly set on ignoring these women, however loud and aggressive they became.

  To break the deadlock, the suffragettes needed more effective weapons. Almost by chance, they hit upon a deadly solution: the hunger strike. The battle between the government and the suffragettes now entered a new and perilous phase, in which the women risked their lives every time they were arrested. Why on earth would Lady Constance Lytton join them?

  We think we know the suffragettes. We have mental images of them, smartly dressed Edwardian ladies chaining themselves to railings and setting fire to postboxes. We’ve absorbed them into our culture and our history. In a measure of how iconic the suffragettes have become, Danny Boyle brought them to life in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony – and there they were, alongside Shakespeare, the Industrial Revolution and the NHS, defining modern Britain.

  The trouble with this stereotype is that it obscures the real women who were involved: women who gave up their time, their energy and in some cases their lives for the idea that they were worth something and they should be counted. For daring to stand up for themselves, they were heckled and ridiculed. For daring to keep trying, in the face of government indifference, public condemnation and even police brutality, they were imprisoned. Even today, they are sometimes dismissed and belittled as well-off single women who had nothing else to do. There are even those – historians as well as contemporaries – who claim that their focus on women and gender was a distraction which took the focus off the ‘real’ problems facing the nation: class, inequality and poverty. But it’s not easy to change the world unless you first are allowed into it, and the suffragettes broke down the barriers that had kept women out for centuries. In doing so, they did not just win the vote: they also changed how women were seen by men, and how women saw themselves. The suffragettes helped women become a force to be reckoned with, politically, socially and culturally.

  When it comes to the suffragette movement, biography has a great deal to add to traditional history. It allows us to understand the complexity and the rich diversity of the suffragette movement that is hidden by the image of the Edwardian lady gone wild. Every suffragette was different and was drawn into the movement for different and very personal reasons. Some were steeped in the labour movement and became disillusioned with a socialism that didn’t recognise the specific problems women faced. Some saw it as a natural progression after women had taken their first tentative steps into higher education, medicine and other professions. Some believed it was the only way to address the grinding poverty of women in the slums and inner cities. Some wanted recognition that women were equal to men. Others believed that women were different from men and that this very difference meant their voices should be heard and their views acknowledged. Some even wanted suffrage simply because they couldn’t vote and their butler could.

  It’s by remembering and retelling their stories that we do these women justice. They made acts of extraordinary acts of bravery and heroism part of their everyday routine. But Constance Lytton’s story is exceptional, even by suffragette standards. No less a person than Emmeline Pankhurst claims that ‘Constance Lytton did one of the most heroic deeds to be recorded in the history of the movement’.4 She was loved and admired by the suffragettes, almost as much as the Pankhursts themselves. After she died in 1923 one of her suffragette sisters said, ‘If someone could write the story of that spiritual pilgrimage, showing the atmosphere of the home where it started, and the contemporary current of thought among women that led Con out of that shelter into Jane Warton’s cell, a great deal that cannot be understood now would be made clear.’ No one has yet done so.

  This is partly because Lady Constance Lytton is so different from the others. Her story is not a ‘typical’ story of a suffragette, and not only because there was no such thing as a ‘typical’ suffragette. It is also partly because Constance remained utterly loyal to Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, even as many of their followers deserted them. Though history is supposedly written by the victors, many historical accounts of the Pankhursts have been critical of their leadership, and their followers have suffered by extension. More recently, historians have been keen to shift the focus away from the Pankhursts, and they are right to do so. The vote wasn’t won by just two women, however determined they may have been. The emphasis has been on restoring working-class women to the picture, but important as that is, it has left even less room for the anomalous stories of the upper-class suffragettes. However, as the centennial anniversary of women winning the vote approaches, and we reflect on the suffragettes’ achievement and their legacy, it’s time that this exceptional woman and her extraordinary story became better known. Though these events took place a hundred years ago, they still have resonance and parallels today. Think, for example, of the misogynistic vitriol and hate directed at many women who dare to have a voice and express an opinion in public. The suffragettes would find that all too familiar. We’ve not come as far as we’d like to think.

  This is a conventional biography, in that it begins at the beginning and continues on to the end, but Constance is not a conventional subject. She packed all the action and incident of her public life (though not her inner, emotional life) into a few short years. It seemed only right to reflect that when writing her biography. That makes this book a more uneven shape than a traditional biography, as it canters through the first forty years of her life and then slows right down to explore those turbulent months in detail – but, after all, whose life is as neat and linear as a traditional biography would have us believe?

  Biographers are always faced with the conundrum of what to call their subjects. It’s a uniquely unbalanced relationship. We think we know them. We spend our waking hours poring over their letters and poking into their secrets. But of course we hardly know them at all. Biographers of women have an added consideration. Male subjects are almost always called by their surname, whereas women are usually called by their first name: an unconscious reflex, perhaps, demonstrating that men are approached with respect and women with familiarity. In this case, as many Lyttons will appear, it would be confusing as well as jarring to use the surname. The same is true of the Pankhursts, and in the end, I have chosen to use the first names of most of the people who appear in these pages.

  The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls her Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton, but no one else, at the time or subsequently, uses the prefix Bulwer. No one called her Constance either. She was Conny or Con to her siblings and Lady Con among the suffragettes. That seemed too familiar for me though it would be tedious to continuously refer to ‘Lady’ Constance. I have compromised in using Constance.

  Unlike many biographers, I have not struggled with a lack of material. But it is important to note that the material I have had has been carefully edited. Constance told her own version of her story in her autobiography, Prisons and Prisoners. Her early life is dispatched in just a few pages and her ‘real’ life does not begin until she
becomes a suffragette. She appears as an accidental heroine, hopelessly naive but enlightened and saved by the Pankhursts. Prisons and Prisoners is astonishingly religious in tone. It is a spiritual quest as much as an autobiography and reads almost as though it has been written to be declaimed from a pulpit. There is a powerful moment during one of Constance’s stays in prison when Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence recites one of Olive Schreiner’s stories and it gives the women new strength. Prisons and Prisoners is likewise written to give the suffragettes new strength at a moment, in 1914, when increasingly audacious and violent attacks on private property had alienated public opinion. It expresses the fierce longings of a woman forced to leave the battle but desperate to rejoin it.

  Constance’s family, led by her sister Betty Balfour, told another story when they printed her letters. They wanted to present a picture which fitted with the family image of ‘Con’ as dutiful daughter and sacrificial lamb: Francis of Assisi in female form. In these letters, we also see clearly the struggles of a family who loved Constance and did as much as they could to support her but couldn’t understand her. The letters aren’t entirely sanitised, and Betty sometimes makes surprisingly modern editorial choices for a book published in the 1920s: for example, in the published letters, Constance speaks frankly about her dislike of her famous grandfather; her depression; and even her impulse to kill herself. However, Betty also left out a great deal. There is no mention, for example, of the unhappy love affair that coloured a decade of Constance’s life. This family story of duty and sacrifice was reinforced in later Lytton writing, including in her sister Emily’s collection of letters and her brother Neville’s memoir. But this was by no means the whole picture. This biography therefore draws heavily on letters which were left out of the published collection and have not appeared in print before. The suffragettes, too, had their own version of Constance’s life.

  This was a society deeply riven by class, and when Constance reached across the divide they responded with genuine love and admiration. But many of them were also slightly dazzled by her privilege, and this comes across in the way they talk about her, their aristocratic martyr. Constance does appear in histories of the suffrage movement, but just briefly. The focus is usually on two key moments in her life: her decision to join the suffragettes and her decision to become ‘Jane Warton’. This book explores what it was in her personality, her circumstances and her history that influenced those decisions, and argues there was much more to Constance Lytton than Jane Warton.

  The two stories of Constance Lytton’s life are so contradictory that they almost seem to belong to two different people. But they are both correct, and both important to Constance’s own identity and sense of self. She was both utterly loyal to her family and totally committed to the suffragettes, and to emphasise one over the other is to do her a disservice. I have done my best to tell both stories at once and, wherever possible, I have let her speak for herself.

  NOTES

  1 For accounts of Constance Lytton’s first suffragette demonstration, see Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, pp. 36–52, and also Antonia Raeburn, The Militant Suffragettes (Michael Joseph, 1973), p. 90.

  2 For accounts of Jane Warton’s force-feeding, see Constance Lytton, speech at the Queen’s Hall on 31 January 1910, quoted in Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes, The Women’s Social and Political Union 1903–1918 (Associated University Presses, 1999) and Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, pp. 268–93.

  3 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 269.

  4 Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (Virago, 1979), p. 187.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DIPLOMAT’S DAUGHTER

  ‘They thought for themselves, they thought differently from others; they often thought even more differently from each other. There is no pattern about the Lytton family, except a consistent strain of unconventionality, almost non-conformity, even inconsistency. All the Lyttons were originals: they did not go in for carbon copies.’ 1

  By far and away the best-known of Constance’s ancestors is her paternal grandfather, the novelist and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The youngest of three sons, he lost his father when he was just four years old. He was the only son to stay at home with his mother Elizabeth through childhood and they were very close. But when Edward married Rosina Doyle Wheeler in 1827 against his mother’s wishes, he was cut off. He had already published a few volumes of poetry: now, out of necessity, he turned to writing in earnest. His 1828 novel Pelham was a great success, and marked the first step in a literary career which put him second only to his great friend Charles Dickens in the literary popularity stakes. He was a versatile and prolific writer of historical fiction and mysteries, and he had a strong interest in horror and the occult. His later work Vril: The Power of the Coming Race was an early science fiction classic and, incidentally, lends its name to Bovril. He coined any number of phrases which have passed into the vernacular: ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, ‘the great unwashed’, ‘the pursuit of the almighty dollar’ and, most famously, ‘it was a dark and stormy night.’

  Edward was also a notable statesman. He won St Ives as an independent radical in 1831 and Lincoln the following year, holding the seat until 1841. When he returned in the early 1850s, it was to represent the Tory Party, alongside another great friend, Benjamin Disraeli. His estrangement from Elizabeth did not last long and, after she died, she left him her family estate at Knebworth in Hertfordshire. To honour her, he added her family name, Lytton, to his father’s name of Bulwer.2

  But despite the fame and fortune of her grandfather, Constance’s female forebears were just as remarkable. Rosina’s mother, Anna Wheeler, was one of the first women in England to actively campaign for women’s rights. Born in Tipperary in the 1780s, she married Francis Massy Wheeler aged just fifteen, only to discover that he was an abusive alcoholic. Twelve years of such a marriage was as much as she could stand and she fled to the protection of an uncle in Guernsey with her two young daughters, Henrietta and Rosina. Four other children died. Already familiar with the radical ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, now she taught herself French and became an avid reader of French political thinkers. She moved to France, where she fell in with a group of utopians and socialists who called her ‘the Goddess of Reason’. Her children were left in Guernsey with an affable great-uncle until they were old enough to go to school in Kensington and pay her periodic visits in Caen.3

  When her husband finally died, Anna settled in London and became part of a set of social reformers which included Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham. This group, the Owenites, were very concerned with issues of gender and wanted to see the establishment of co-operative communities where class and sex would be irrelevant. The publication of James Mill’s ‘Essay on Government’ was vitally important in Anna’s intellectual development. Radical insofar as it called representative government ‘the grand discovery of modern times’, Mill’s tract nevertheless wrote off the idea of women voting, since their interests could more than adequately be represented by their husbands and fathers. Anna would not stand for this. In 1825, her close friend William Thompson published An Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other, Men, which critiqued the way society expected women to live without education, employment or property rights. It challenged the institution of marriage for keeping women as helpless dependents and compared the position of women to that of slaves. The logical conclusion, Thompson argued, was to grant women political rights as well as to abolish marriage in favour of communal family life and free love.4 Anna, a staunch socialist as well as a committed feminist, had become far more radical than her inspiration, Mary Wollstonecraft.5

  Though Anna did not write An Appeal herself, Thompson attributed many of the ideas in the book to her and considered it a work of joint scholarship. Anna began to campaign for her feminist ideals in public, speaking at what is now Conway Hall and publishing her own work under the pseudonym Vlasta. Sh
e was even a vocal advocate of contraception. It is no wonder that the stately Elizabeth Lytton balked at the idea of Anna’s daughter Rosina joining her aristocratic family.

  In fact, Elizabeth was soon proved right. Rosina and Edward had two children, Emily and Edward (known as Robert, to distinguish him from his father), but had serious disagreements over the best way to raise them. But this was not the main point of contention. Victorian society understood that male infidelity was only to be expected, and Bulwer-Lytton took full advantage of this. Wives should look the other way and not say a word. But Rosina had inherited her mother’s independence and would not tolerate such hypocrisy. In 1833, on a European trip when Edward was researching and writing The Last Days of Pompeii, she began a flirtation of her own. Edward was outraged, and became violent. On at least one occasion he threatened her with a knife. The last straw, according to Rosina, was when she arrived unexpectedly in London one night to look after Edward, who was supposedly ill, only to find him with two cups of tea and a young lady beating a hasty retreat.6 They separated soon after. Edward would only grant her a divorce if she acknowledged her own infidelity but kept his a secret. Rosina would not consent to this; so they were stuck with each other.

  Their relationship descended quickly into bitterness, hostility and very public recriminations. Despite the fact that his unfaithfulness had led to the collapse of their marriage, in the eyes of the law Edward was blameless. That meant, in theory at least, that he kept the children. But in practice he was not much interested in them. For the next few months, they lived with Rosina and a family friend, Miss Mary Greene, in Ireland, which Robert would remember as among the happiest months of his life. This was the last time Rosina and her children lived together. Edward realised the power of making the children a weapon in his battle against Rosina, and refused to let her see them. Afterwards, they lived with Mary Greene in Cheltenham while Rosina divided her time between London and Europe. Edward, meanwhile, went on to have at least three long-term mistresses, and seven children. One, Eleanor D’Ewes Thomson, was his housekeeper. Another had the intriguing name of Marion Wollstonecraft Godwin Lowndes; he used to dress her up as a valet in order to take her around Europe. Miss Lowndes also took in Miss Thomson’s children when she died.7 Like his friend Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton kept all these mistresses as secret as he could.