In 1902, when she was asked to open a bazaar in aid of West Ham Hospital (later Queen Mary’s Hospital) in London’s East End, Consuelo decided to put a cautious toe in philanthropic waters herself. She was so intrigued by its work that she proposed herself as patroness, lending her financial support, name, social network and even Blenheim in the years that followed (she eventually became president of the hospital in 1916). Thereafter there is clear evidence that her philanthropic activity increased as her marriage become more miserable and in 1904 an American journalist, Kate Masterson, reported to Town Topics: ‘The Duchess is very busy these days; she is always presiding at things. The latest to her credit is the Industrial Exhibition at the St James-the-Less Building, Sewardstone Road. But she looks awfully well, despite her English clothes.’ The Duke meanwhile, was in a ‘perpetual grouch just as he had been in New York, but it goes with the sturdy British atmosphere, and must be the right thing.’54
In the spring of 1904, Gladys Deacon suddenly faced tragedy. In April, not long after the family moved to Rome, her favourite sister Audrey developed the heart condition endocarditis. It was clear she would not have long to live. By May she was given morphine to help her rest, and Gladys came to sit with her before she died.
Gladys was devastated by Audrey’s death, writing to Consuelo that: ‘the pain in me has burned away all but what is the nucleus of immortality in us … If this living be of importance, why should she have been withdrawn?’55 At the end of June, after visiting Audrey’s grave in Florence with her mother, and an evening with Bernard Berenson that left him feeling profoundly uneasy, she joined the Marlboroughs in Paris. A couple of weeks later, when the Marlboroughs were back in London, they both wrote to her in Italy, from the same house, on the same day, apparently unaware that the other was making contact. Consuelo’s letter was filled with love and affection, asserting that: ‘I love you & feel for you and you want love and sympathy now. Women can give to each other what no man can give us – for their love is interested … [while ours is] in opposition to self interest. Surely then it must be real and stronger than self. Gladys dear I want you too, I long for your clever and deep thoughts for all that makes you so attractive and dear.’56
The Duke’s letter, however, was one of real pain, suggesting that the encounter with the grief-stricken Gladys had moved him profoundly, and awakened all his old feelings for her. It implied that there had been intimacy in the past, but that she had now rejected (by letter) any suggestion that he should come to visit her in Italy. ‘You are perfectly right to express yourself with frankness to me. I am glad that you have done so, for it is silly to live under a false impression,’ he wrote. He expressed great concern at rumours from the ‘social houses’ that she was very ill, saying that ‘everything that concerns you is of the same acute importance to me as if I was living near you’, and emphasising that it was this concern that prompted him to ‘trespass on her privacy’. He had only done so in ‘tender recollection of much kindness that you have shown me in times gone by’. He had ‘experienced such difficulty in resigning myself to the position of one who no longer may claim to be included in the inner circle of your instincts, thoughts and emotions’.
The Duke begged her not to place him on the same level as some of her other admirers saying: ‘I shall always retain the deepest and truest gratitude to you for kindness which I believe no man has ever received at a woman’s hands.’ He would travel to Italy alone in any case. ‘I will not attempt however to come to see you, the most I truly intend to do is the hope that passing through Florence I may see your mother to ascertain from her the extent of your illness. I shall then wander on to the Italian lakes which I have always wished to visit, and I will come home early in October. The solitude amidst the beautiful surroundings will do me good … I love Italy and I love the sunshine and under certain circumstances I love solitude – so I daresay I shall enjoy myself … I do not feel inclined in this letter to write to you about the silly things of the world in London. I hate the life here so it is distasteful even to write about it.’
Sunny then declared that he had spent a day at Blenheim rereading her letters: ‘The task was both a sad and pleasant one and I treasure these documents as a remembrance of some of the happiest and brightest days of my life and in recollection of one who possessed a heart kinder and more sensitive than any I have known.’57 Later in the day, like lovers the world over, the Duke panicked about the letter he had written earlier in the day and sent another: ‘I have many misgivings that the letter I sent to you this afternoon may be construed by you as unfeeling and unkind,’ he wrote, consumed with insecurity. He asked her to make allowances for his distressed frame of mind since he was ‘dead with fatigue’ and ‘exhausted with 12 months stay in this city of filth and heat … My temper and wellbeing are disturbed and I am prone to expressions of irritation.’ But at its end he could not prevent another howl of pain: the anxiety caused by their long separation was almost too much to bear, and sometimes he wished they ‘had never met’.58
The Duke appears to have kept his word and stayed away from Gladys, who was being pursued by other, more available suitors. One was Roffredo Caetani, Principe di Bassiano and son of the Duke of Sermoneta; another was the Duke of Camastra. In October 1905, Consuelo made a further visit to the US, this time for an operation on her throat which it was hoped might alleviate her deafness. Town Topics reported that Alva was beside herself with delight, and showed her daughter off to all and sundry, driving her ‘up and down Fifth Avenue past the clubs, and round and round the Waldorf Astoria’.59 For the first time a Marlborough divorce was openly discussed in the American press, though Town Topics dismissed such talk as ‘the same story that was in circulation in London and Paris last season, and it caused the same flutter’. A year later, the same gossip columns maintained that during 1905, Consuelo had a ‘violent quarrel with the dashing young Anglo-American, Miss Gladys Deacon, whom she openly accused of flirting with the Duke’.60
It was in this atmosphere that the Duke commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint the family portrait that hangs in the red drawing-room at Blenheim, intending it to be a companion piece to the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds of the 4th Duke and his family which hangs opposite. Sargent was somewhat taken aback to find that in Reynolds’s painting there were eight people and three dogs, and questioned whether he could achieve what the 9th Duke desired. ‘When, however, he realised that there was no choice he began to study a composition that would place us advantageously in architectural surroundings.’ Consuelo wrote. ‘We were therefore depicted standing in the hall with columns on either side and over our heads the Blenheim Standard, as the French Royal Standard captured at Blenheim had become known. I was placed on a step higher than Marlborough so that the difference in our height – for I was taller than he – should be accounted for. He naturally wore Garter robes.’61
For Consuelo, Sargent chose a black dress whose wide sleeves were lined with deep rose satin, modelled on the one worn by Mrs Killigrew in a portrait by Van Dyck on the north wall of the red drawing-room at Blenheim. Blandford wore a costume of white and gold and Sargent put Ivor in blue velvet, playing with a Blenheim spaniel at Consuelo’s side. Sargent, whom Consuelo came to like very much as she took her sons for sittings at his studio in Tite Street, told Sir Edgar Vincent that he planned to emphasise the Spanish Infanta in her appearance, and for this reason he refused to let Consuelo wear her famous pearls, much to the horror of one of her sisters-in-law, ‘who remarked that I should not appear in public without them’.62
In spite of all its pointers to a magnificent family history – the Blenheim Standard, the Duke’s Order of the Garter – the painting conveys a deep sense of unease. There is no suggestion here of the relaxed informality of, for example, Sargent’s paintings of the plutocratic Wertheimer family. The painting is dominated by Consuelo. The sense of movement in her draperies, and the dash of colour in her sleeve give her life and energy, though her face is sad. Blandford, the
‘link in the chain’, looks graver and more inert, held in place by Consuelo as if he could burst into mischief at any moment. Oblivious to the rest of the group, Ivor plays at Consuelo’s side. There is great tension between the dynamism of the rest of his family and the seated figure of the Duke, positioned as a counterweight to his wife, sons and dogs. A wide space between the faces of the Duke and Consuelo underlines the Duke’s lonely position. He seems disconnected from the family group, inscrutable behind an expression of melancholy amid emblems of a glorious Marlborough past.
There would be one more portrait of Consuelo before the end of 1906, by Boldini whom she met through Paul Helleu. She agreed to sit for him ‘provided his behaviour remained exemplary’, since his reputation with women was poor. He restrained himself to sighing ‘Ah, la Divina, la Divina!’ – he said this to a number of his female clients – and the portrait he produced was one of his best, showing Consuelo at her most vibrant. Towards the end, it gave Boldini problems. ‘He had difficulty in getting my left arm on which my weight rests in proper position, and at one time I resembled a Hindu goddess, with no less than three arms protruding at different angles.’63 The Marlboroughs decided to buy it. They had it enlarged to include Ivor and it was hung in the dining room of Sunderland House. In almost every other respect, 1906 was a difficult year, starting and ending badly.
The year began with a general election that resulted in a landslide victory for the Liberal Party, putting an end to the Duke’s career in government. At first glance, the reason for the Liberal Party’s success appeared to have been its celebrated programme of social reform which represented an early attempt to grapple with the problems of industrialisation suffered by those whom Churchill described as ‘the left-out millions’. However, the Liberal programme of social reform only evolved after the party took power, driven forward by Lloyd George from 1908. In 1906, Liberal success had as much to do with the unpopular policies and problems of the Conservative Party whose standing was severely damaged by the failures and cruelties of the Boer War, and associated revelations about the poor physical condition of young British soldiers. The need to reinforce the bonds of Empire after the divisive effect of the Boer War prompted Conservative politician Joseph Chamberlain to argue for tariff reform – a preferential system of duties for goods from the Empire. This split the Conservative Party down the middle and co-incidentally caused Winston Churchill to join the Liberals who supported free trade.
The Conservatives suffered a further blow when Lord Salisbury resigned in July 1902. He was replaced by his nephew and the Marlboroughs’ friend, Arthur Balfour, who may have been, in Consuelo’s words ‘gifted with a breadth of comprehension I have never seen equalled’, but whom historians blame for a series of misjudgements which gave the impression that the aristocratic Conservatives were becoming detached from the problems of their middle- and working-class supporters. These included the pro-Anglican church school Education Act of 1902 which deeply alienated the Nonconformist vote and induced the uncommitted to defect to the Liberals; a solution to divisions over tariff reform widely perceived to be inimical to working-class interests; support for the right of mine owners in the Transvaal to import low paid Chinese workers (proposed by the Duke in the House of Lords) which alienated working-class supporters; and its refusal to reverse a judgement in the Taff Vale case of 1901 which had severely restricted the ability of workers to strike. Conservative difficulties were adroitly exploited by the Liberals who forged an electoral pact with the emerging socialist Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1903 to avoid splitting the progressive vote.
The return of the Liberals to power with a huge majority marked a change in atmosphere and attitude in Edwardian politics. Even if the Liberal programme of social reform only evolved after 1906, it marked the end of an era for the Conservatives (though they would successfully reinvent themselves) and the beginning of the end of aristocratic government. As early as 1892–5, the Liberal Chancellor William Harcourt had made a distinction between ‘unproductive’ and ‘productive’ wealth, introducing death duties on large incomes in an early signal that the Liberals were now prepared to impose taxation on the rich, particularly the landed rich – a principle that would be extended to pay for social welfare reform in Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. After the Liberal victory, there were far fewer aristocrats in Parliament to argue their case. In 1906, the number of MPs from landed backgrounds fell to below one-fifth of the total. Leading members of the squirearchy such as Henry Chaplin lost their seats (after thirty-seven years in his case). ‘Even Balfour, normally detached and unflappable, admitted that “the election of 1906 inaugurates a new era”,’ writes David Cannadine. Sir Henry Lucy went further as he contemplated a House where almost half the members were sitting for the first time, noting that ‘its tone and character were “revolutionary”’.64
Apart from one brief sighting by Daisy, Princess of Pless on 21 January 1906 when they joined a house party at Eaton, the Marlboroughs seem to have spent the first part of 1906 doing their best to avoid each other. This may well have had something to do with Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart – Viscount Castlereagh and eldest son of the Marquess of Londonderry – a cousin of the Duke’s and Unionist MP for Maidstone. Although he had married Edith ‘Edie’ Chaplin seven years earlier and they had two young children, he already had a reputation as a philanderer. He was many things that Sunny was not: tall, extremely good-looking, sensitive and sympathetic. Consuelo was beautiful, lonely, miserable and sorely in need of rescue. As Anita Leslie points out in Edwardians in Love, it was not always possible to observe the rule that extra-marital affairs should be discreet and restrained. With so many marriages arranged within a small aristocratic circle for reasons other than romantic love, it sometimes happened that an adulterous couple lost their heads, fell in love and threw caution to the winds. This seems to have been what happened: Consuelo and Lord Castlereagh either went off to Paris together, or were proposing to go when their plans were discovered.
Though rumour had it that the Duke wired Consuelo and told her not to return, Castlereagh’s mother, the formidable Lady Londonderry, was determined to save her son from a scandal that would ruin his political career just as it started, and destroy his marriage to Edie into the bargain. It was said that she even involved the King and Queen who applied pressure of their own – this would have had little effect on Consuelo who already found royal circles dull and irritating – but it might, if it is true, have had some effect on Lord Castlereagh. The offence was, of course, that they took so little trouble to disguise their relationship. Such pressure was applied that the affair ended in the early summer and they both agreed to put a stop to it.
Consuelo continued to like Theresa Londonderry, in spite of her role in putting an end to the relationship with her son, and even came to appreciate her ‘shrewd worldly wisdom’ which ‘proved a wholesome antidote to any sentimental tendencies on my part’.65 Charley’s wife, Edie, on the other hand, was made thoroughly miserable by the affair, one of the few of her husband’s dalliances which she believed was a genuine threat to their marriage. ‘I did experience a real deep shock in the early summer and it showed me with a clearness and abruptness how foundations which one imagines to be firmly built on rocks seem as nothing when a great wave – of what shall I say? – feeling anything you like, comes along,’66 she wrote to him afterwards. She took an uncharacteristically long time to forgive him, even though he was deeply penitent after it was over and wrote begging for forgiveness. In the end she did, writing that it was wrong to blame other people and that she believed that they would both have to change. ‘After this happened, I set out to alter the old conditions of things to the new. It is not in my nature to do otherwise. God alone knows what I expected in the summer when I felt that everything was slipping and sliding away from me.’67
The Castlereaghs were reconciled on a trip to Spain for the wedding of Prince Alfonso XIII to Princess Ena on 31 May 1906. The atmosphere be
tween the Marlboroughs in the same month, on the other hand, was reported to be dreadful. It cannot have helped that Lord Castlereagh was elected to a parliamentary committee on South African and Colonial affairs while the Duke’s political career languished. Writer Pearl Craigie wrote from Blenheim where she was part of a large party that included Winston Churchill that: ‘I could not lead the life of these houses. I’d sooner die in an attic with an ideal. There is no affection in the atmosphere: the poor Duke looks ill and heartbroken.’68 Sightings of the Marlboroughs that summer suggest that they remained anything but reconciled. Whenever Daisy, Princess of Pless saw Consuelo, she was alone. In July the Duke was away taking another health cure while Consuelo went with Daisy to the opera accompanied by Mr A. E. W. Mason, a Liberal MP and author of The Four Feathers, and the young good-looking Duke of Alba. The Duke was still away when they both joined at a house party at the Desboroughs at Taplow Court.
The break finally came in the middle of October 1906, when the Marlboroughs were both back at Blenheim. It was later said by the American press that it had come during a dinner at Blenheim when Consuelo had mentioned – in front of guests – that she was intending to go to Paris to buy her winter wardrobe, whereupon the Duke lost his temper, and shouted that she should go to Paris and stay there. If the story of this outburst is true, it may have been caused by a certain sensitivity about Paris as a destination; he may have suspected she was planning to see Lord Castlereagh again. The Duke later wrote to Churchill that he had asked Consuelo to leave on the grounds that he refused to be ‘complicit’ in her affairs any longer, though the impression was given in the American press that Consuelo departed because she could not stand another insult from her husband.
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 30