by Roy Jenkins
“I guess rather than feel in interviews with different men that I have been so much talked of by the papers for the Cabinet, and so much has been said of my having been consulted last year a great deal—that there is intense personal jealousy of me on the part of Fawcett, Courtney, Cowen and others. It takes the form of an assumption which is very irritating, that I never say what I mean—unless it happens to be that which party interest requires. I think I can only control it by keeping a little in the background this session.”17
From 1876 onwards it was not only Dilke’s political life which had gone well; he had also enjoyed himself in a more relaxed way and in a wider social circle than ever before. For a time the Waldegrave establishments became almost the centre of his life.
“I began this year (1876) to stay a great deal at Lady Waldegrave’s,” he wrote, “both at Dudbrook in Essex and at Strawberry Hill; and ultimately I had a room at Strawberry Hill to which I went backwards and forwards as I chose. The house was extremely pleasant, and so was Fortescue,[9] and he passionately adored his wife, and was afterwards completely broken down and almost killed by her death. Fortescue was my friend. I never much liked An- in spite of her good nature, but she was an excellent hostess and the house was perfectly pleasant, and in a degree in which no other house of our time has been. The other house which was always named as ‘the rival establishment,’ Holland House, I also knew. Some of the same people went there—Abraham Hayward, commonly called the ‘Viper,’ and Charles Villiers, for example. But Lady Holland was disagreeable and bitter, and far from a good hostess, whereas Lady Waldegrave always made everybody feel at home. Those of whom I saw the most this year, in addition to the Strawberry Hill people (who were Harcourt, James, Ayrton, Villiers, Hayward, Dr. Smith the editor of the Quarterly, Henry Reeve the editor of the Edinburgh, the Comte de Paris and the Duc d’Aumale) were Lord Houghton and Mrs. Duncan Stewart.”*18
Despite his frequent visits to Strawberry Hill, Dilke always retained an element of reserve towards the charms of life at Horace Walpole’s gothic mansion, as towards those of Frances Waldegrave herself. He listed first amongst its attractions his ability, when staying there, to walk down the road, take a train from Twickenham station to London, and escape from the chatter from morning until dinner-time. He was also a little cynical about the royal princes, mainly French and exiled, who frequently visited the place. He met there the Prince Imperial, usually remembered, perhaps on account of his early death, as a most sympathetic and agreeable youth, and wrote later of having “described him in my diary as having the manners and appearance of a tobacconist. Why tobacconist I do not know, although I remember his appearance, which was vulgar and his manners which were common, but at this distance of time I should be inclined to alter tobacconist into hairdresser.” Lest it should be thought that he attached too much importance to manners and appearance, Dilke hastened to add that “his (the Prince Imperial’s) father, who had not been brought up as a gentleman, was a gentleman in manners, although in character he was vile.”19
The Orleanist princes pleased Dilke little better than the Bonapartes. After dining with the Duc de Chartres, again at Strawberry Hill, he wrote that he was “no better and no worse than the other princes of his house, all dull men, not excepting the Duc d’Aumale, who had, however, the reputation of being brilliant, and who . . . was interesting from his great memory of great men. They all grew deaf as they grew old . . .”20 he added. Dilke was always a little patronising about those of royal blood. In 1879 there were two Crown Princes (those of Sweden and Baden) in London to whom he was introduced and of whom he noted: “Like all Kings and Princes, except the King of Greece, and in later days the Emperor William II, they seemed to me heavy men, bored by having to pretend to be thoughtful persons, and I found that difficulty in distinguishing them one from the other, which has always oppressed me in dealing with royal personages.”21
Dilke’s acquaintances during this period were by no means all heavy, anxious to be considered thoughtful, and difficult to distinguish from one another. Swinburne and Manning, for instance, were each in their different ways sui generis. The poet was brought into Dilke’s life by Lord Houghton, and for a time became a frequent visitor to Sloane Street. “A wreck of glasses attests the presence of Swinburne,” Dilke wrote of one visit in 1876. “He compared himself to Dante; repeatedly named himself with Shelley and Dante to the exclusion of all other poets; assured me that he was a great man only because he had been properly flogged at Eton . . . and finally informed me that two glasses of green Chartreuse were a perfect antidote to one of yellow, or two of yellow to one of green.”22 Some time after this visitation Swinburne wrote and sent to Dilke the following snatch of political verse:
For the Greek will not fight, which is far from right
And the Russian has all to gain
Which I deeply regret should so happen—but yet
’Tis true, tho’ it gives me pain
And methinks it were vulgar to cheat a poor Bulgar
With offers of help in vain.”23
Dilke was greatly shocked by the quality of the poetry; but perhaps Swinburne did not take the Eastern Question as seriously as he himself did.
Dilke’s acquaintance with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster had begun at the time of the death of Lady Dilke, when Manning had written a letter of sympathy. It did not ripen until 1878, however, when they met again at one of those frequent dinner parties which Manning thought it proper to attend, but at which he also thought it proper to touch neither food nor drink. After this occasion he asked Dilke to come and discuss Irish primary education with him, and by the following year a friendship had sprung up. The Cardinal’s visits to 76, Sloane Street became almost as frequent as those of Dilke to Archbishop’s House.
“I was amused by finding how much he cared for general gossip and even scandal,” Dilke noted. “He insisted on talking to me about Sarah Bernhardt, and Gambetta, and the Prince of Wales, and all sorts and conditions of people. He told me that if he was not Cardinal Archbishop he would stand for Westminster in the Radical interest. But, Radical though he be on social questions, he is a ferocious Jingo.”24
Another more specifically political acquaintanceship of this period was with Parnell, who had entered Parliament in 1875 and was rapidly forcing himself into a position of leadership. Dilke and Chamberlain joined in inviting him to dinner, with a view both to securing his support against the Zulu war and to hammering out some sort of joint programme on Ireland, but “were able to make little of him.” Dilke found him more useful as a consulting barber than as a political collaborator. “One of the grave questions upon which I consulted Parnell in the course of February (1878),” he wrote, “was suggested by my brother, who had objected to my becoming bald. Parnell had been going bald and had shaved his head with much success for his hair had grown again. . . .”25 But Dilke did not in the event follow his example; perhaps he was frightened by the information, also imparted by Parnell, that in some cases the hair never grew again at all. Another of Dilke’s memories of the Irish leader came from a Select Committee on House of Commons procedure, of which they were both members and before which Mr. Speaker Brand was examined as a witness. Parnell conducted a long cross-examination of the Speaker.
“Both of them were in a way able men,” Dilke noted, “but both were extraordinarily slow of intellect—that is, slow in appreciating a point or catching a new idea—and Mr. Brand. . . and Parnell used to face one another in inarticulate despair in the attempt to understand each the other’s meaning. There were a good many fairly stupid men on the Committee, but there was not a single member of it who did not understand what Parnell meant by a question more quickly than could the Speaker, and not a man who could not understand what the Speaker meant by a reply more quickly than Parnell.”26
Most of Dilke’s dinner table acquaintances were more conversationally rewarding than Parnell, but not sufficiently so to induce a high view of English talk.
“In
the best English political and literary society there is no conversation,” he noted rather extremely. “Mr. Gladstone will talk with much charm about matters he does not understand, or books that he is not really competent to criticise; but his conversation has no merit to those who are acquainted with the subjects on which he speaks. Men like Lord Rosslyn, Lord Houghton, Lord Granville (before his deafness) had a pleasant wit and some cultivation, as had Bromley Davenport, Beresford Hope, and others, as well as Arthur Balfour, but none of these men were or are at a high level; and where you get the high level in England, as with Hastings, Duke of Bedford (the one who killed himself), Grant Duff, and some among their friends, you fall into priggism.”27
It was much the same, Dilke was convinced, in Paris and St. Petersburg and probably in Berlin and Vienna too. Only in Rome, he rather surprisingly concluded, were things better. There you had “conversation not priggish or academic, and yet consistently maintained at a high level.” Dilke knew little Italian, and had passed hardly any time in Rome; but Mrs. Pattison had just spent a winter there.
Dilke went on to note two houses in which Gladstone talked particularly well: “In those two houses he was supreme; but if Coleridge or the Viper (Abraham Hayward) or Browning were present, who talked better than he did, and would not give way to him, he was less good.”28 A little later Dilke was struck by one of Gladstone’s social peculiarities. The Duke of Cambridge, on arriving at a dinner party, gave Gladstone his left hand, saying that his right was too painful through gout. “Mr. Gladstone,” Dilke wrote, “threw his arms up to the sky, as though he had just heard of the reception of Lord Beaconsfield in heaven, or of some other similar terrible news. His habit of play-acting in this fashion, in the interest of a supposed politeness, is a very odd one, giving a great air of unreality to everything he does; but of course it is a habit of long years.”29 Nevertheless Dilke’s judgment of Gladstone became increasingly favourable during these years. He thought that, in contrast with Bright, who was seldom in earnest, Gladstone had real moral force, mainly because he always believed passionately in whatever he was speaking about at any particular moment. In 1879, characterically mixing his praise with a sharp job of criticism, he wrote to Mrs. Pattison: “Gladstone is still a great power, and but for his Scotch toadyism to the aristocracy, which is a bad drawback, I could admire him with little reserve.”30
Dilke’s own dinner parties were frequent, with a great variety of guests, although after 1876 they were exclusively male. During that year—the first since the death of his wife in which he had entertained on any scale—he had tried holding parties with ladies, but with only a grandmother to help him found the plan “so uncomfortable that I dropped it.” At one stage it looked as though Dilke’s sister-in-law might move into 76, Sloane Street with her husband and act as hostess, but eventually this came to nothing. Ashton Dilke, soon to be elected member of Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, had married Maye Smith in the spring of 1876. She was the eldest of six daughters of Thomas Eustace Smith, a prosperous but extravagant North of England shipbuilder, who was himself Liberal member for Tyne-mouth. Charles Dilke, who already knew the family and who was destined never to forget them, did not approve of the alliance.
“In April there occurred the marriage of my brother,” he rather mysteriously wrote, “which was a cause of considerable distress to me as he had been very good to me, and, on the other hand, there were circumstances (not connected with his wife or with himself) which made me unable to approve his marriage. As, however, he immediately quarrelled with these others, I contemplated for some months the possibility of asking him and his wife to come and live with me.”31
The only hint at the circumstances in the Dilke papers for these years is in a letter which he wrote to Mrs. Pattison at the beginning of 1880. He was relating a conversation with Mrs. Grant Duff, and reported her as having said to him: “. . . and that set Ellen (Mrs. Eustace) Smith chattering, and you know—you know by your own case—what Ellen Smith’s chatter is.”32
Despite the absence of women from his parties, Dilke was far from moving in an exclusively male society. From Mrs. Langtry to Miss Rhoda Broughton he met almost everyone. Of the former he wrote in 1877: “Persons had begun to rave at the beauty of Mrs. Langtry, whom I had known as an ugly child in Jersey and whom I had met in 1876 at Lord Houghton’s before she had become a beauty and before anyone had noticed her”; and of the latter—“a very ignorant, very honest, good-hearted sort of woman, with loud, abrupt country-family sort of manners.” A closer friendship was with Miss Alice de Rothschild, a daughter of Baron Lionel de Rothschild and a first cousin of Lady Rosebery. Dilke described her as “a clever and agreeable lady of whom I saw a great deal for several years” until they both began to be disturbed by a spate of congratulations on their approaching marriage. This, Dilke recorded, brought their acquaintance gradually to an end, to his great regret.
A few years later, in 1879, Dilke was writing to Mrs. Pattison, who was certainly herself an exception to his statement, that “the only woman with whom I am now on terms which can be called ‘intimate’ is our Lady Venetia.”* But this did not prevent his sending to Mrs. Pattison a whole series of very sharp comments upon others. Sometimes these comments were merely engagingly disrespectful, as when after meeting the Roseberys at dinner, he recorded the presence of “fat Hannah and her lord.” At other times he was more severe and built up an impression of himself as a rather censorious individual. After a Sunday with old Lady Russell (the widow of the Prime Minister) at Pembroke Lodge, which in 1879 replaced Strawberry Hill for him as a week-end rendezvous, he wrote of the presence of Miss Laffan,12 to whom he “did not quite take.” “She is great fun,” he added, “but she looks immodest. . . .” Later in that year he entered into a long discussion, again in a letter to Mrs. Pattison, of the morals of a Mrs. Ronalds. He drew a distinction between her and the Duchess of Manchester, whom “I believe for many years to have been faithful to L(or)d H(artingto)n and he to her,” and ended by announcing firmly that Mrs. Ronalds ought to be cleared of the charges levelled against her “or else not received.” Again in the next year he wrote: “At the State dinner last night Corti (Italian ambassador to the Porte), who is here for a few days . . . was the most interesting guest. But he is one of those clever, ugly, cynical men, who tho’ interested in politics are more interested in the chatter of any and every woman, and so he rushes off to be chattered to.”33 The picture of Dilke trying vainly to get some detailed conversation about the intricacies of Near Eastern politics is a vivid one.
Another subject on which Dilke wrote to Mrs. Pattison, was his personal financial position. He was always rather neurotic about this, not out of meanness, but because of an ill-defined fear that some misfortune, perhaps political, perhaps personal, might befall him, which would make the possession of a liquid reserve highly desirable. He therefore began to hoard gold—and continued the practice for several years—depositing his reserves partly in England and partly in France. “I have saved very greatly on clothes and underclothes, and a little as yet on everything this year,” he wrote in April, 1879. “I do not use nearly all I put down for ‘self’ (which includes luncheons and dinners at the House)—but at present I am hoarding it in cash to have a reserve.”34
Apart from his neurosis there was little need for Dilke to economise. By the end of the ’seventies, in contrast with the position when his first wife had been alive, he was living within his income, even though this had fallen substantially. In 1880, for instance, he saved £1,650, quite apart from his “hoarding.” But he was not living in a particularly modest way. He kept nine servants at 76, Sloane Street, including a coachman who was paid £70 a year and a stable lad who received £58. The butler’s rate was £60 plus 3s. a week for beer money, and the footman’s £28 plus 2s. 6d. for beer. The cook was paid £40 a year, the upper housemaid £24, and the under housemaid and the kitchenmaid each received £14. The ninth servant was a nurse for the child who was given, no wages as such, but who,
in addition to her board, was clothed and given a small amount of pocket-money by Mrs. Chatfield.
A sample of how Dilke’s other expenses ran is provided by the following schedule of payments for April, 1880:
The total, at £640, is somewhat larger than the monthly average for the year, but this is to be explained by a number of quarterly or half-yearly payments having fallen due.
Dilke’s French visit was one of a regular series at this time. In the late summer of 1876 he had rented for four months La Sainte Campagne, a small Provençal property near Toulon. It was a small, grey-walled, eighteenth-century manor of a type more common amidst the poplars of the lie de France than in the harsher landscape of die Midi. The situation was magnificent. The house stood high on the cliffs of Cap Brun, and its terrace commanded one of the best views on the whole coast. In the following year he bought the property, and for some time made a habit of spending several weeks there both at Christmas and Easter. One of his neighbours was Émile Ollivier, who fascinated Dilke because of his knowledge of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War; but for the most part Dilke’s visits to Provence were periods of respite both from politics and from his normal social activities. He travelled alone, he rarely had guests in the house, and he lived a quiet and almost solitary life.13 But on his way to and from the South of France he usually spent a few days in Paris, staying at first in the Grand Hôtel, as he had done at the time of the Commune and after his wife’s death, but later at the St., James et d’Albany in the Rue St. Honoré; and during these halts he plunged into a life as animated as that of La Sainte Campagne was quiet. Gambetta remained his closest French political friend, but there were many others as well.