Lady Constance Lytton

by Lyndsey Jenkins

  Like Robert before him, Victor returned from India a disappointed man – or rather, as he told Betty, feeling ‘like a suffragette as the gates of Holloway open to let her out’.64 Victor had gone to India full of optimism and hope about the prospects for Home Rule and became thoroughly disillusioned. When he returned home, he felt rather sidelined by the Foreign Office and his career faltered. It was not until the 1930s that he was once again given real responsibility, and this time his work had global repercussions. He was asked by the League of Nations to investigate the war in Manchuria between Japan and China. His report accurately concluded that Japan was to blame. Japan withdrew from the League, which helped hasten its demise.

  Edith Lytton lived until 1936, a widow for forty-five years, in a world that was unrecognisable from that of her childhood. It was a delightful surprise to find buried in an archive a touching correspondence with Jessie and Annie Kenney, apparently begun after Constance had died. Much as Constance loved her mother, she always saw Edith as an immovable obstacle to her suffragette career. But these letters reveal Edith’s open mind and caring heart. Edith wrote as an intimate friend, and as equals, to Annie and Jessie; Dowager Countess to former mill girls. She gave Annie advice about getting her book to Queen Mary. ‘My dear daughter Con friend [sic] and my own also I hope,’ she says once; even more remarkably, she once signs herself ‘Red Grannie Lytton’.65 Edith’s obituary in The Times called her ‘a great lady of the old school’, praised her ‘courage, dignity, unswerving rectitude and loving kindness’ and said she was ‘a rare instance of increasing breadth of outlook as she grew older’.66 That, of course, was not necessarily out of choice. But she loved her children, and accepted them and their causes, however much they baffled her. She was ninety-five when she died.

  Emily remained unconventional and unapologetic. She followed Theosophy until Krishnamurti left the movement; then she followed him. She was often in India at the same time as Victor, though she disagreed with him on many Indian issues. Her autobiographies are astounding in their candour; her letters are staggering in number. Both are invaluable sources for historians in a variety of fields. Emily died in 1964, on the cusp of an age of freedom she would have been far more suited to. Betty remained interested in the occult, the afterlife and the spirit world. Just before the Second World War broke out, she ‘contacted’ Constance at a séance, through a medium. In the Balfour papers at the Scottish Archives, among the reams of official government business, there is a transcription of this event. ‘I see … a woman who passed to this life some time ago. She looks as if in some way in life she was a lonely person. She shows me Prison clothes. But she does not say what crime she committed … She says “Prison gave me my freedom.”’ The ‘spirit’ of Constance told Betty not to be afraid, and that she was not coming to the spirit world yet.67 Betty died in 1942.

  Neville and Judith were divorced in 1923. He remarried, lived in France and had another daughter. This second life seems to have been much more stable and content than his relationship with Judith. He was a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts and exhibited regularly. They had to escape France during the Second World War, but returned to England afterwards, where he died in 1951. Victor’s sons, Anthony and John, both predeceased him, Anthony in a plane crash and John in the Second World War. Neville inherited Victor’s earldom when he died in 1947, which then passed to Neville’s son. Knebworth, though, was inherited by Victor’s eldest daughter, Hermione Cobbold. Hermione’s son, David, with his wife Chrissie, were responsible for introducing the rock concerts that have made Knebworth famous in recent years, while also keeping it solvent. Their son Henry is the present occupant. Like generations of Lyttons before him, he is both extremely literary and very interested in family history. A screenwriter by profession, he is working on a biography of Emily, Robert Lytton’s sister. His wife, Martha, oversees the running of the extensive estate: it is a model for other similar estates in Britain. The interior of the house honours all their extraordinary forebears. Constance’s achievements are celebrated alongside those of her father and grandfather.

  After Edith died, Davinia lived at Homewood until Victor died and Hermione inherited it with the rest of the estate, whereupon it was let to a series of diplomatic families. In the early 1970s it was brought by the Pollock-Hill family, who still live there. In recent years, they have restored most of the inside of the house to Lutyens’s original plans, aside from the addition of much-needed bathrooms. Constance would recognise her Homewood in the house which stands today, with her bedroom just next door to Edith’s.

  Constance’s nieces took full advantage of the freedom that had been won by their aunt and her contemporaries. They went on to live interesting lives with distinguished careers, making their mark in fields which would not have been open to them a generation before. Eve Balfour was one of the first women to study agriculture at university, was a pioneer of organic farming and co-founded the Soil Association. Ruth Balfour studied medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became a doctor. Elisabeth Lutyens became a composer of significant note, championed by William Walton. Mary Lutyens became a scholar. In an eclectic career, she collected and edited the philosophy of Krishamurti, was the first to put forward the theory of John Millais’s notorious wedding night, and took on the mantle of family biographer. She was also a novelist and agony aunt. None of the women went into politics, though Davinia married a prominent MP. Constance would surely have been pleased at the opportunities these women had and the choices they were able to make.

  In 1928, Parliament voted to give women the vote on the same terms as men. Fred Pethick-Lawrence, a Labour MP since 1923, said he had never cast a vote for anything that had given him greater pleasure. During the debate, he referred to Constance in the same breath as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill and suggested that ‘with a heroism that has rarely been equalled, [she] placed herself in the humblest position in order that she might suffer and share the lot of many of her humble sisters’.68 Nancy Astor, the first woman MP, also paid tribute to Constance, ‘very frail and delicate, who fought so long and so hard’. The elderly Millicent Fawcett was in Parliament to witness the debate and the fulfilment of all her hopes. Mrs Pankhurst had died just a few weeks earlier.

  After Constance was cremated, her white urn was placed in the small family mausoleum in the grounds of Knebworth. Victor and his daughters are in St Mary’s Church, a few moments away. Her father was already there: her mother was also placed there after her death and the two lay side by side, opposite the door. To the right is Robert’s sister Emily Lytton, the aunt she never knew, and to the left is the unbearably small coffin of her brother, Henry. At some point in the 1950s, the mausoleum was broken into and Emily’s coffin stripped of its lead. To stop this happening again, the mausoleum was bricked up. Towards the end of her life, Lady Hermione Cobbold, Victor’s daughter, decided to invest in restoring the mausoleum. The bricks were torn down and the door broken in. At that point, it was discovered that during the previous breakin, Constance’s urn had been knocked over and some of her ashes spilled. She was restored as best as she could be, and now rests next to her brother, adjacent to her father, under a domed roof open to the sky. Outside, next to the formal tribute to her parents, there is a large inscription commemorating her life and her achievements. A group of women have begun to lay flowers here each International Women’s Day. Her epitaph concludes with an extract from a poem by Maurice Baring.

  Constance Georgina Lytton

  Born February 12 1869

  Died May 21 1923

  Endowed with

  A celestial sense of humour

  Boundless sympathy

  And rare musical talent

  She devoted the later years

  Of her life to the political

  Enfranchisement of women

  And sacrificed her health

  And talents in helping to

  Bring victory

  To this cause

  You were
a summer’s day all warmth and tune

  Your soul a harbour dark beneath the moon

  And flashing with soft lights of sympathy

  The tree that had been planted in the Bath garden to honour Constance’s achievements lasted into the 1950s. In 1951, Mary Blathwayt sent Annie Kenney a cutting from the tree, along with samples of her own tree, Christabel’s and Elsie Howey’s. It was as well she did, because the following year a huge overnight gale uprooted and destroyed Constance’s tree. Mary told Annie, ‘Lady Constance Lytton’s tree was a splendid one, and would have been all right, if it had not come up by the roots.’69

  NOTES

  1 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to Mrs Solomon, 23 October 1929, Women’s Library 9/20/081.

  2 Constance Lytton to Annie Kenney, 5 February 1921, KP/AK/2/LyttonC/17.

  3 Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 254.

  4 Constance Lytton to Jessie Kenney, 17 October 1919, KP/JK/3.

  5 Constance Lytton to Adela Smith, 3 September 1919, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 255.

  6 Constance Lytton to Olive Schreiner, 5 November 1919, written on the back of Olive Schreiner to Betty Molteno, November 1919, BC16/Box7/Fold2/Aug–Dec1919/22, UCT Manuscripts & Archives, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription.

  7 Ethel was an admirer of Edith as well as Constance. In one of her many volumes of autobiography, she commented on the letters collection by saying: ‘From these pages emerges a beautiful picture of a parent, confronted in her old age by a new spiritual force fantastically alien to her own epoch and breeding; facing this ordeal as only a loving mother and great lady could … a wave of sympathy and admiration in the direction of the heroine’s mother.’ Ethel Smyth, A Final Burning of Boats (Longmans, 1928), p. 164. It is surprising that more suffragettes do not appear in the Homewood visitors’ book.

  8 Olive Schreiner to Joan Hodgson née Wickham, 29 August 1919, Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription, HRC/OliveSchreinerLetters/OS-JOANHodgson/8, line 31.

  9 Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, undated, quoted in Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner, p. 303.

  10 Constance Lytton in Time and Tide, 31 December 1920, p. 712.

  11 See Betty Balfour’s foreword to Constance’s projected cookery book, Knebworth Archive, 40438.

  12 June Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (Tempus, 2007), p. 156.

  13 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 25 February 1921, British Library, Add MSS 58688/45 and Emily Lutyens to Marie Stopes, 21 March 1921, British Library, Add MSS 58688/78.

  14 June Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, p. 194.

  15 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 23 April 1921, British Library, Add MSS 58688/136 and Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 4 July 1921, British Library, Add MSS 58689/152.

  16 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 14 February 1921, British Library, Add MSS 58693/64.

  17 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 15 October 1921, 58690/62 and Christmas 1921, Add MSS 58691/1.

  18 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 26 July 1921, British Library, Add MSS 58689/187; 15 October 1921, 58690/62 and 27 September 1921, 58690/28.

  19 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 10 October 1922, Add MSS 56891/82 and Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 5 March 1923, Add 58693/109.

  20 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 5 March 1923, Add 58693/109.

  21 W. David Wills, Homer Lane: A Biography (George Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 153.

  22 W. David Wills, Homer Lane, p. 23.

  23 See W. David Wills, Homer Lane, pp. 161–72.

  24 W. David Wills, Homer Lane, p. 186.

  25 Victor Lytton in E. T. Bazeley, Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth (George Allen & Unwin, 1928), p. 20.

  26 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 6 April 1922, Knebworth Archive, 40503.

  27 Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 27 May 1922, Knebworth Archive, 40485.

  28 W. David Wills, Homer Lane, p. 203.

  29 W. David Wills, Homer Lane, p. 207.

  30 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 12 July 1922, Knebworth Archive, 49514.

  31 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 26 July 1922, Knebworth Archive, 49514.

  32 Marie Mulvey-Roberts: ‘Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom? The Public and Private Prisons of Constance Lytton’, June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, Votes for Women (Routledge, 2000), p. 173.

  33 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 26 July 1922, Knebworth Archive, 40516.

  34 Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 6 January 1923, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/369/6.

  35 Edith Lytton to Betty Balfour, 5 December 1922, Knebworth Archive, 40432a and Betty Balfour to Edith Lytton, 6 December 1922, Knebworth Archive, 40432 (copy sent to Victor Lytton).

  36 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 30 September 1922.

  37 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 279.

  38 Betty Balfour’s draft foreword to the cookbook, Knebworth Archive, 40438 and Constance Lytton to Jessie Kenney, Knebworth Archive, 24 April 1923, JP/JK/3.

  39 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, 13 January 1923, Add MSS 58693 10.

  40 Victor Lytton to Edith Lytton, 15 February 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40173 and Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, Knebworth Archive, 21 December 1922, 40534.

  41 Constance Lytton to Marie Stopes, undated but sent from Tavistock Square, Add MS 58694.

  42 Constance Lytton to Victor Lytton, 4 April 1923, quoted in Michelle Myall, Flame and Burnt Offering, p. 71.

  43 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 14 August 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40437.

  44 Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner, p. 302. They give two possible locations for this address, but because Constance’s death certificate gives her place of death as Paddington, I believe that it was Olive’s home at 9 Porchester Place.

  45 Constance Lytton to Jessie Kenney, 24 April 1923, KP/JK/3. This is, I think, Constance’s last extant letter.

  46 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 14 August 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40437; Victor Lytton to Edith Lytton, 23 May 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40186 and Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 23 July 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40434.

  47 Neville Lytton, The English Country Gentleman, p. 281. He wasn’t actually there.

  48 The Times, 28 May 1923, p. 15.

  49 Quoted in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 265.

  50 Frances Balfour to Betty Balfour, May 1923, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/369/68–72.

  51 John Ponsonby to Victor Lytton, 25 May 1923, Knebworth Archive, 51120/A.

  52 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 23 July 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40434.

  53 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 14 August 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40437.

  54 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 23 July 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40434.

  55 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 18 September 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40442.

  56 Probate record, 12 November 1936.

  57 University of East Anglia Archive, KP/AK/5.

  58 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 3 July 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40434.

  59 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to Mrs Solomon, 13 June 1923, 9/20/07, LSE Library Collections.

  60 There is frustratingly scant information to be found about Rachel. She does not have an entry in Elizabeth Crawford’s magisterial account of the movement. Some Google search results describe her as one of the most prominent suffragettes. This is not true. There are, however, several surveillance photographs of her in existence, which show how dangerous she was considered to be.

  61 Betty Balfour to Victor Lytton, 18 July 1923, Knebworth Archive, 40436.

  62 Betty Balfour to Annie Kenney, KP/AL/2/BalfourB/2.

  63 Pamela Lytton to Betty Balfour, 20 May 1925, Knebworth Archive, 40422.

  64 Victor Lytton to Betty Balfour, 24 March 1924, Knebworth Archive, 40404.

  65 Edith Lytton to Annie Kenney, 4 Ap
ril 1925 KP/AK/2/LyttonE/1 and 24 April 1925 KP/AK/2/LyttonE/2, advice on Queen Mary, 22 September 1924, KP/AK/2/LyttonE/11. The Kenney sisters’ own mother had died in 1905, just before Annie met Christabel.

  66 The Times, 19 September 1936, consulted in the Knebworth Archive.

  67 Record of seance with Gerald Balfour and Betty Balfour, 9 June 1939, GD433/2/386, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland

  68 Fred Pethick-Lawrence, in the second reading of the Representation of the People Bill, HC Deb 29 March 1928, Vol. 215, cc. 1359–481, accessed 1 June 2013. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1928/mar/29/

  representation-of-the-people-equal#S5CV0215P0_19280329_HOC_318.

  69 Mary Blathwayt to Annie Kenney, 25 February 1951, KP/AK/2/Blathwayt/4 and Mary Blathwayt to Annie Kenney, 19 November 1952, KP/AK/2/Blathwayt/5. The arboretum itself was destroyed in the 1960s and the only original tree left standing belongs to Rose Lamartine Yates. In 2012, staff from Bath Spa University arranged for new trees to be planted.

  AFTERWORD

  ‘My job in going to prison was a very small thing tho’ like our other women, I gave my all. Jane Warton did good, was of use, for a very little time.’1

  ‘Women died to get you the vote!’ is often remarked sternly in response to political apathy around election times. It is now over a hundred years since Emily Wilding Davison died under the King’s horse on Derby Day. Her spectacular death is burned into the public consciousness for ever. But those who die quietly, away from the spotlight, are easily forgotten. The story of the suffragettes, as the suffragette historian Sandra Stanley Holton writes,