1939

by Angela Lambert

  Meanwhile, two years later, Lady Sarah Lennox surprised everyone by marrying a man of her own choice. His name was Charles Bunbury and he turned out to have been a mistake, though Sarah made the best of it for as long as she could. She was bored to tears in the country: ‘My devil of a horse is as lame as a dog, and Mr B. has been coursing, hunting and doing every pleasant thing upon earth, and poor me sat fretting and fuming at home with Lady Rosse; in short I am patient Grizel to the last degree.’12 Finally, after six glum years, she fell in love with another man, had his child, and was ostracized by society for the next eleven years. The gossips claimed that George III always nurtured tender feelings for her.

  London life rolled merrily on without her, and in 1769 the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy was held for the first time. It instantly became – and has remained – a must for fashionable society. Founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who became its first President, the Royal Academy showed the work of painters like Romney, Lawrence and Reynolds himself.

  The social vacuum left by George III and Queen Charlotte was eagerly filled by the great Whig hostesses, who provided political intrigue and intellectual brilliance, and the royal dukes, who provided scandal and debauchery. Walpole disapproved: ‘The court independent of politics makes a strange figure. The recluse life led at Richmond, which is carried to such an excess of privacy and economy that the Queen’s friseur waits on them at dinner and four pounds of beef only are allowed for their soups, disgusts all sorts of people.’13 Yet the Court remained essential for one thing. Before a young girl could mingle in Society as a recognized adult, she had to be presented to the King and Queen. After that, if she were attractive both physically and financially, she would find mercenary suitors drawn to her like vampires to new blood. An observant matchmaker wrote off to a military friend in the country:

  Miss Child comes out this winter…, the moment she is fired off, she will be pursued by all the brawny tribe of fortune hunters, so that for her sake and yours I most sincerely wish (provided you like her) that you took the earliest occasion of showing her that sort of attention which she could not but remark. No time to be lost, and I think you should, even now, get away from quarters and take your measures for throwing yourself in her way. Such a prize as that of an amiable girl, with a fortune suited to your rank, is worth any exertion.14

  Poor Miss Child. Not a thought was given to the girl’s happiness. She might have been one victim among thousands: though she, in fact, took charge of her own future by eloping with the tenth Earl of Westmorland. But the majority had less spirit and therefore no choice. Dr Gregory in his book A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, published in 1774, warned them realistically: ‘Without an unusual share of natural sensibility and very peculiar good fortune, a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying for love.’

  The earliest recorded use of the verb ‘to come out’ in its modern sense occurs at this time, 1782, in Fanny Burney’s novel, Cecilia: ‘She has seen nothing at all of the world, for she has never been presented yet, so is not come out, you know; but she’s to come out next year.’ Fanny Burney was Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte for five years, but despite her loyalty and affection for the royal family, the tedium of Court eventually became quite unbearable and she asked to be relieved of the privilege. In addition there was the increasing problem of the King’s erratic and disconcerting behaviour. Whether he was mad, as his contemporaries believed, or suffered from porphyria, as recent medical research has deduced, made little difference. He was obscene and deluded by turns.

  The beau monde of London suffered none of this. George III’s reign coincided with an era when the art of the political hostess reached its peak: stimulated, no doubt, by the absence of any inspiration at Court. Great Whig hostesses like Lady Melbourne and the Duchess of Devonshire more than made up for it. Then there was Holland House, where the twice-married Lady Holland (who was never received on that account by the more rigid; the loss was theirs, not hers) entertained the most interesting men of her time. The operative word is ‘men’. Young women came out into Society only long enough to find a husband, after which they retired into domesticity and gentle accomplishments like sketching and singing and playing a little upon the pianoforte. Only great ladies of exceptional wealth, intellect and manipulative charm had the chance to do any more in life than be their husband’s wife and their children’s mother. In the latter role, their skills as matchmakers were crucial ; small wonder that the aristocracy was so fascinated by the making of marriages. It offered women a rare opportunity to wield power and exert some influence over the lives of those around them. A marriage for love was a rarity but not an impossibility, provided it were also convenient and suitable for both families ; but most daughters had little chance of doing anything other than submit to their parents’ wishes.

  There were, of course, exceptions – there are always exceptions. At the turn of the century there were three such. They were all related, all remarkable: the Duchess of Devonshire; her sister, the Countess of Bessborough; and her daughter, Lady Caroline Ponsonby. Between them these three kicked over most of Society’s traces.

  Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire lived in a ménage à trois with her husband and her best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster, who became the Duke’s mistress. Between them they bore him a number of children, known collectively as the ‘Children of the Mist’. Legitimate and illegitimate were treated alike – with one significant exception. Lady Elizabeth’s son, who was ill-advisedly born before the Duchess had produced an heir, was left with a foster-mother and brought up in France. Nothing could be allowed to threaten the sacred English bloodline.

  The Duchess’s sister was Lady Bessborough, another great hostess who often shared in the brilliance of Devonshire House and who in her fifties – when most of her contemporaries were regarded as old women – was still being ‘courted, followed, flattered and made love to’. Young William Lamb was one of her admirers, despite being half her age or less; at least until her daughter, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, was launched into London Society. She had had a crush on good-looking, black-eyed William ever since she was a hoydenish fourteen-year-old. By the time she reached seventeen she was diaphanously thin (could she have been an early anorexic? All the symptoms are there), highly strung, brilliant, moody and tiresome by turns, a towering egoist – and irresistible. And she still loved William. He, however, was but the younger son of a not very rich peer, and only his brother’s timely death enabled him – now the future Lord Melbourne – to propose marriage to her. She accepted, and became Lady Caroline Lamb. They had three happy years before everything went wrong.

  If such strictures ruled the life of a young woman brought up in the least conventional of families, how they must have limited the freedom and the choices of ordinary young women. Daughters were the chattels of their parents, disposable assets to their fathers, prudish misses to their suitors. Byron has a scathing verse describing the products of such a regime:

  ’Tis true, your budding Miss is very charming,

  But shy and awkward at first coming out,

  So much alarmed, that she is quite alarming,

  All Giggle, Blush ; half Pertness and half Pout ;

  And glancing at Mamma, for fear there’s harm in

  What you, she, it, or they, may be about,

  The nursery still leaps out in all they utter –

  Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.

  (Beppo, Stanza 39)

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Season was taking on a recognizable shape. A girl was launched from schoolroom into ballroom or drawing-room at an early age, somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, her emergence into Society being marked by her first presentation at Court. There would be no formal dance to mark her appearance on the social scene; that came a good hundred years later. Putting her hair up signalled her new marriageable status. Henceforth she might accompany her mother or an older, married sister when paying form
al calls. Typically, these emergent girls, debutantes in the true sense of beginners, new arrivals upon the social stage, were over-protected, mildly accomplished, wildly romantic, but ultimately passive. How could they be otherwise ? Their sole purpose in life was to be married. Spinster-hood meant failure. A mother’s ambition was to see her daughters safely married off to men slightly (better still, greatly) their social superiors, and their sons to girls who were at least their social equals, but with more money. Love was not an essential component.

  Social life already had a number of features in common with the Season of 1939: Ascot, Private View day at the Royal Academy, Founder’s Day at Eton, and some others, like the parade along Rotten Row and the spectators it attracted, or the popularity of Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, which have vanished altogether. Despite the attractions of Bath and other fashionable country towns, which had their own assembly rooms where people could congregate for balls, cards and concerts and to display the latest in fashions and fiancés, London remained the magnet. It was only in London that the Season took place, and at the end of summer everyone dispersed for the sporting pursuits of autumn and the deep family entrenchment of winter. That tidal rhythm, sweeping everyone of consequence into the metropolis for the summer and out of it again for the rest of the year, had not changed for centuries: it was based on the seasons rather than the Season, and on the fact that wealth was derived from land and land had to be cultivated. But the Court as the glittering centre of Society had apparently become obsolete.

  In 1837 the long reign of the Hanoverians ended and Queen Victoria came to the throne aged just eighteen. For the next half-century her dominance was such that the whole country reflected her age and stage in life. When she was an unmarried girl, Society was romantic and excitable, volatile and unpredictable. The young Queen alternated between dashing young men and responsible older ones, like her handsome Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, for whom she felt a more than daughterly devotion, while he in turn was touched by her eagerness and dependence. Yet she was acutely conscious of the formalities of Court life, and insistent that they be observed down to the smallest detail.

  At a levée in the first summer of her reign her hand was kissed three thousand times, but this did not prevent her from calling it ‘the pleasantest summer I ever passed in my life’, and she left London – ‘the greatest metroplis in the world’ – reluctantly at the end of the Season.15 Then she realized that she took the Court with her; that if she wanted to be gay at Windsor, to dance and go riding and play cards, no one could stop her.

  The next Season took place in her Coronation year, and opened with her first State ball in May, followed by two more State balls, two levées and a drawing-room. The young Queen was taking her role as the leader of Society as seriously as she took all the others – not that her responsibilities prevented her from being delightfully irresponsible: ‘a lovely Ball, so gay, so nice – I felt so happy and merry; I had not danced for so long.’16 But by the following year the novelty of reigning and the freedom from restrictions imposed by her mother were already beginning to pall. In April she told Lord Melbourne that she did not enjoy pleasures so much. ‘Oh! you will, when they begin,’ he said, meaning when the Season opened in May.17 The truth was, though she could not bring herself to admit it, that the Queen needed to be married: for all sorts of reasons. In May she gave a ball for a royal guest, the Tsarevitch Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia, and for the next two weeks entertained him with a theatre, two concerts, a reception and another ball. She was just twenty ; ready to fall in love ; falling in love, even: ‘the Grand Duke is so very strong that in running round [in the mazurka] you must follow quickly, and after that you are whisked round like in a Valse, which is very pleasant. … I got to bed by a quarter to three but could not sleep till five.’18 Yet her views on marriage were surprisingly modern: ‘I couldn’t understand the wish of getting married amounting to marrying anyone,’ she wrote ungrammatically;19 and when those around her praised Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha just before his visit, she wrote anxiously, ‘I might like him as a friend and as a cousin and as a brother, but not more. …’20 Queen Victoria at twenty was determined to marry for love: and that included sexual attraction.

  She did. She fell in love with Albert on sight, thought him beautiful, clever and good, and five days after he had arrived with his brother for a visit to Windsor, she proposed and was accepted. In February 1840 they were married: and the Court left mazurkas behind and settled down to family life and a nursery full of royal infants.

  Queen Victoria’s courtship and marriage are interesting for the light they shed on the restrictions that circumscribed young female behaviour throughout the nineteenth century. Victoria might be Queen, but she had to obey the same conventions of maidenly decorum that hemmed in her subjects. Occasionally her own spirited common sense broke through: as when she overruled the absurd idea that it would be improper for Albert to spend the night before their marriage under the same roof as his bride … even though that roof covered Windsor Castle. True, she fell in love with Albert: but he was still the carefully selected consort whose visit to England had been preceded by months of scheming by her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, and half a host of female matchmakers. She might be Queen of England; but the youngest son of a minor peer had more emotional licence than she did.

  Once she was married she had to trim her preferences to those of her husband. Victoria loved London; Albert preferred Windsor and the country ; so they spent increasing time away from London. Victoria loved music and dancing and Albert deplored all frivolity, and especially late nights; so they gave fewer balls and were in bed by midnight. His stern sense of duty began to mould hers ; his high-mindedness got the better of her high spirits.

  As the century and the Queen moved towards their middle years, Society, like a Victorian family processing publicly to church, also took on an air of whaleboned self-esteem. This ponderousness was reflected in Court manners. No man might sit in the Queen’s presence except at dinner, nor any maid of honour in front of Prince Albert. No one spoke until spoken to. Bowing, curtseying, walking backwards and hand-kissing all became rigidly formalized, and so did the precise Court dress permitted in the royal presence. Spontaneity was impossible, with the inevitable consequence. The Court became dull again. Lord Macaulay complained in 1851 that at dinner ‘a military band covered the talk with a series of sonorous tunes’ ; Lord Ashley was glad of it, ‘for the band filled up long pauses in the conversation’. ‘Cant and Puritanism are in the ascendant,’ wrote Charles Gre ville in his diary in 1856.21

  Queen Victoria’s domestic life may have been untroubled by jealousy and subterfuge, but Society had its usual share of scandalous liaisons. The Duchess of Manchester and Lord Hartington carried on an affair for years. Lady Arundel lived with an artist, Basil Hodges, and told her friend Mrs Panton that her legal husband ‘thought he had bought me body and soul with his silly old wedding ring…. Basil is always afraid that I shall kick over the traces again and make off with someone else and he is always my lover and never the stern, unbending husband.’22 Lady Jersey and Lord Abingdon were publicly accepted as lovers ; so were Lady Ailesbury and Lord Wilton, Lady Lincoln and Lord Walpole. But the important thing to remember is that none of these erring couples erred so far as to produce a rival heir. Nor, indeed, would they have been admitted in some of the more high-minded households, let alone at Court. Queen Victoria understood sexual passion, but only within marriage. In 1857 she bore her ninth child, Princess Beatrice, and might well have borne more had not Prince Albert died in 1861, plunging the Queen, the Court and the country into deepest mourning – from which the Queen, at least, never fully emerged.

  Away from the Court and away from the scandals, the Season continued to follow its necessary pattern, becoming more like that of 1939 as the century progressed. Debutantes – the word was in common currency by 1837* – were presented to the Queen at an afternoon drawing-room, after their mothers had been carefully v
etted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Any hint of scandal, let alone a divorce, precluded both mother and daughter from appearing at Court. Divorce at this time was still highly unusual (between 1876 and 1880 there were just 460 divorces) and a divorced woman lost not only her property but access to her children as well, no matter who was the guilty party in the case.

  Each new debutante embarked, with her first Season, on a voyage into the unknown. She was launched into the great river of Society and, although surrounded by a flotilla of relatives, chaperones and other nervous cygnets like herself, she had to make her own way safely past the rocks of scandal and seduction on the one side and dullness and neglect on the other. If she were too bold, that would be unfavourably remarked upon; if too timid, she would be dismissed as colourless. And yet within a year or two she was expected to find safe harbour as the fiancée of a young man whom decorum prevented her from getting to know properly until after they were engaged. By then it was often too late. The stately Leviathan of trousseau, wedding list, invited guests and marriage date would have been set in motion, and was almost impossible to reverse. Many a girl must have walked up the aisle knowing already that she was making a mistake.