The Viceroy's Daughters

by Anne de Courcy

  Curzon, like the rest of his circle, viewed his friends’ liaisons with sympathy, relished hearing the latest gossip about them, and pursued his own affairs wholeheartedly but discreetly. It was different, of course, for the lower classes. When Curzon found that one of the housemaids in his employ at Carlton House Terrace had allowed a footman to spend the night with her he sacked her without hesitation (“I put the wretched little slut out in the street at a moment’s notice”) and years later believed that Edith Thompson (of the famous Thompson–Bywaters murder case) should be hanged, not because he thought she was guilty of murder but because of her “flagrant and outrageous adultery.” This regard for the outward form while pursuing private inclination was an ethos which was later to color the thinking of his daughters.

  Curzon was a loving and thoughtful, if distant, father to his three children, interested in every detail of their clothes, education and health. “My darling Twinkums,” reads a note brought up to the nursery in February 1908. “I am so sorry my pretty is whooping worse. This afternoon as I was lying with the window slightly open, I just caught a sound of it in the distance, like the cry of a far away owl. Love to all the kittens. Your loving Daddy.”

  Whenever he was away, letters scribbled on small black-bordered sheets of paper arrived for all of them in turn. Frequently—as, later, with his second wife, Grace—they contained an admonition to write to him more often. “Darling Cim, What is Mrs. Simkin doing? I get long and beautiful and well written letters from Irene but where is little Cim? Silent as a mouse. Not even the sound of a nibble.” Only Mary, viewed as a perfect, saintlike figure in death, had written to him as copiously and frequently as even he could wish.

  Long letters came when he and the children’s aunt Blanche took a restorative sea voyage in the autumn of 1908 to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where his fame preceded him but the lack of occupation made his stay nearly intolerable.

  Auntie Blanche and I have been here for over five days and are already rather tired of it. The roads are abominable and driving upon them almost a torture. The surroundings of the town are bare and brown and barren—all thrown up by some ancient volcano—and there is nothing to do.

  The Spanish authorities have found me out and write splendid articles about me in the local newspapers. The Governor and the Mayor called upon me in tight trousers and top hats with gold canes in their hands and tonight they have organised a special performance at the theatre in my honour. When I go out young Spanish boys pursue me with postcards on which they request me to write my autograph.

  It was not surprising that the girls grew up with the idea of their father as a majestic being of immense importance and all-seeing knowledge.

  When Mary Curzon died, the main presence in the children’s lives was their devoted Nanny Sibley, who from then on gave up her life to her three charges, refusing to return to the fiancé she had left in India. As the girls grew older, they spent most of their time in the gray-carpeted schoolroom with a succession of governesses.

  One of the first of these had taught Lady Cynthia Charteris (now Lady Cynthia Asquith). “Can you,” asked Curzon of Cynthia, “recommend this daughter of Austria, your sometime preceptress, as a suitable person to be entrusted with the upbringing of three high-minded orphans?” Lady Cynthia could. In later years, however, she did not tell him about her former governess’s report of how Curzon would “enter the schoolroom in a procession of one at the beginning of the term, arrange all the books and pictures, and draw up the timetable of lessons.”

  His interest in his children’s education did not stop at organizing their timetable. Luncheon would be treated as an impromptu lesson or, more often, an examination. Day after day events in the history of the nation would be described in Gibbonian prose, in the Derbyshire accent with its short a’s which their father retained all his life (“the grass on that path needs cutting”). Then came the questioning, dreaded most perhaps by Irene, the eldest, who frequently felt so nervous she could hardly swallow her food.

  It was often disguised as a game. “I see a battlefield,” Curzon would intone. “I see a man in armor, on a large, heavy horse, richly caparisoned . . .” The children would be asked in turn which incident their father had been describing and where it fitted into the pattern of history. When they could not answer, he would turn to the quaking governess, who was usually equally at sea. The only response that any of them could give was: “We have not got as far as that,” to which Curzon would reply that they never seemed to move beyond William the Conqueror. It was the same with geography, Bible studies or other subjects in which he thought they should be educated. Interestingly, the one subject of which he never spoke and in which he felt women should never “meddle” was the one that later attracted all three girls: politics.

  Out of doors, their hair in pigtails and dressed in navy-blue serge sailor suits, the children would help their father in an activity characteristic both of his energy and of his attention to detail. When Curzon had first arrived at Hackwood he had told the astonished head gardener, who had kept the gardens there for many years, that he did not know how to keep lawns free of plantains and that he, Lord Curzon, would show him the correct way.

  Accordingly, preceded by a footman carrying a small rush mat on which Curzon could rest his right knee and a narrow pronged spike for the removal of the enemy, the former viceroy and his daughters would emerge onto the Hackwood lawns. There he would vigorously attack the hated weed while the girls stood around him, each holding a little wicker basket in which to put the debris of roots and leaves. Anyone who spotted a plantain their father had not seen was given sixpence; a thistle rated one shilling. Indoors, Curzon showed the same dedication to removing grubby fingermarks from doors and walls, leading his children around bedrooms and drawing rooms with handfuls of bread crumbs to remove any stains they found.

  His eldest daughter, Irene, was already enthralled by the sport that would dominate her life for the next twenty-five years. Horses and hunting had become her passion. The hunts local to Hackwood were the Tyne and the Garth, and in her first season at the age of twelve, out with the Tyne on November 14, 1908, riding first Dandy and then Topsy, she was awarded the fox’s brush (tail). She went home ecstatic.

  At the end of the season there was an even greater triumph, this time with the Garth, who met seven miles from Hackwood at Long Sutton House. Hounds found a fox in nearby gorse and ran for two hours covering seven miles of country; Irene—again riding first Dandy then Topsy—was this time given the ultimate accolade, the mask (head).

  Later, her sisters came out hunting with her. Irene’s hunting journal, laboriously filled with handwriting that had not yet become atrocious, records that on October 29, 1910, during her third season, “Cim got the mask and Baba the brush.” As it was a cub-hunting day it was, no doubt, an easy way of maintaining cordial relations with a local grandee: halfway through the season, on January 21, 1911, there was a lawn meet at Hackwood (followed by a six-mile point), both of which Irene must have adored.

  Cimmie preferred the activities at her boarding school, The Links, in Eastbourne, where the thirty-seven pupils wore a uniform of white blouses and striped ties, played cricket, tennis and lacrosse, roller-skated, swam in the summer and skated in the winter. It was run by Miss Jane Potts, governess to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice, and it aimed to produce happy, healthy, well-brought-up young women who could embroider and play the piano—exactly fitting the Curzonian feminine ideal of accomplishment rather than education. Cimmie loved it.

  4

  Elinor Glyn

  Curzon was not one of those fathers who felt that his children must have a stepmother. To him, the wife he had loved so much was a paragon of all the virtues; he mourned Mary deeply and sincerely and he encouraged his children to think of their dead mother in the same way. “Darling Cim, I have been looking out the photos of darling Mummie for you and Irene and I will have some beautiful ones framed and sent to you before long,” said
one note sent from his study in Carlton House Terrace to the nursery upstairs.

  Upper-class Edwardian children seldom saw much of their parents and Curzon’s own upbringing, given over to the mercy of a sadistic governess, had been particularly brutal in that respect. The Curzon daughters viewed their father as someone loving but distant, an Olympian figure whose letters expressed the affection he was too busy to show by companionship. When they were living in the same house he would usually see them in the mornings; if not, they would frequently receive a note.

  He was not a man to do without women for long, not only because of his powerful libido but because he loved female company. “A dinner party without a woman present is nothing more than a meeting of masticating and chunnering males,” he once wrote. They had to be beautiful and, if possible, red-haired (all the locks of hair he kept were of some shade of red). Two attachments, in particular, were to have a lasting effect on his children’s lives.

  He had first met Elinor Glyn at a weekend house party in early 1908. At forty-three, she was extraordinarily youthful looking and an acknowledged beauty. With her white skin, green eyes fringed with thick black lashes and red hair (“No really nice woman would have coloring like that,” she once said of herself), she was everything that Curzon admired physically in a woman, from the “snowy amplitudes” revealed in her décolleté dresses to the color of her hair. This was so long and thick that when she first married her husband, Clayton Glyn, he had hired the Brighton Baths for two days so that she could swim up and down naked, her hair streaming out behind her. Alas, it was his sole romantic gesture—and Elinor lived for romance. Years later she was to write in her autobiography: “On looking back at my life, I see that the dominant interest, in fact the fundamental impulse behind every action, has been the desire for romance.”

  Thwarted of it in her relationship with her husband, a placid, good-natured man whose absorbing interest was food—one of his nieces remarked that rather than go to bed with his wife he would sit up all night with a pear in order to eat it at the exact moment of perfect ripeness—Elinor turned instead to clothes. Into them she poured all her love of beauty, her search for perfection, her thwarted romanticism.

  She had the perfect excuse—“helping Lucy.” Her sister Lucy, married to the baronet Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, was the fashionable society dressmaker “Lucile” and, as Elinor pointed out to her husband, if Lucy’s dresses were seen to advantage on Elinor, more customers would follow.

  It was an era when clothes had never been more lavish or important. For the smart woman, several changes of costume a day were essential: tweed walking dresses for the morning; chiffon and lace dresses surmounted by enormous picture hats for Ascot; cotton or linen dresses to go on the river; white muslin with silk sashes for tea on the lawn and tea gowns for an afternoon in the boudoir; fur-trimmed velvet coats to which bunches of Parma violets were pinned for winter; handmade peach or pink crepe de chine underwear trimmed with coffee-colored Brussels lace.

  Men’s clothes were equally elaborate: black morning coats with beautifully fitting dark blue or black overalls strapped down over polished black boots with blunt silver spurs for Rotten Row; tweed knickerbocker suits for shooting, often with the Tyrolean-style hats made popular by the king; frock coats for the House of Commons; white tie and tails for dinner parties.

  Elinor was always superbly dressed, frequently in her favorite shades of purple, mauve or lilac that set off her dramatic coloring. On every possible pretext she acquired new outfits—later, some of her family were to say that she ruined Clayton by her extravagance. This sense of a passion barely restrained—albeit for what the men of those days called “feminine fripperies”—flashed from her green eyes and informed her manner. She was completely faithful to her husband, but around her hung an aura of sensuality and sexual suggestiveness. She had just written the novel Three Weeks, which had scandalized Edwardian society with its tale of the erotic passion between a beautiful and mysterious older woman and a young man, its highlight the seduction by the “Lady” of her younger lover, Paul, on a tiger skin.

  Elinor found it difficult to understand the furor caused by Three Weeks. All her life, she believed not only that sensual passion could be the pathway to the highest appreciation of the beautiful and the good, and could awaken both idealism and nobility in the young, but also that it was the mysterious, necessary fertile soil from which sprang intellectual development and creative thought. For Elinor, love—real love—between a man and a woman meant the complete and rapturous union of body, mind and spirit, the noblest state to which humankind could aspire with, naturally, faithfulness to the object of such a supreme passion as the inevitable corollary. It was an attitude that found little echo in the society around her.

  When Curzon met the famous Mrs. Glyn, he was immediately intrigued and attracted. The fact that his friend Alfred, Lord Milner, was supposedly madly in love with her only added a competitive edge to his feelings. His chance for an opening move soon came.

  Owing to her husband’s financial losses, the Glyns were largely dependent on Elinor’s earnings. Elinor decided to cash in on the notoriety of Three Weeks and dramatize it for a charity matinee on July 23, 1908, in the hope that this would prompt a professional manager to stage it commercially. As no actress could be found to play the part of the heroine, Elinor took this herself. Curzon was one of the large invited audience. There, lying in voluptuous abandon on a tiger skin in the center of the Adelphi stage, her red hair tumbling over flimsy draperies, was the author and incarnation of the most famous love story of the decade, seemingly offering herself to the beholder. The effect on Curzon was immediate.

  He rushed back to Carlton House Terrace, where he unpacked from a trunk one of the five tiger skins he had brought back from India. It was a particularly fine one, shot in Gwalior by Curzon himself. Within days, the Lord Chamberlain had refused permission for Three Weeks to be shown in public, a ban that only enhanced the exotic reputation of the book—and its author. Curzon dispatched his present to Elinor (Alfred Milner, he was put out to learn a few days later, had had exactly the same idea).

  Nothing could have been more effective. Elinor had felt a particular affinity with this jungle beast ever since an early admirer had murmured “Belle tigresse!” in her ear. It was a message loaded with erotic symbolism; it came, too, from a man she already admired. Curzon’s aristocratic mien, dignity and cool, patrician good looks represented to her the highest type of Englishman—the hero of her books come to life (all her life she was to call him “Milor”).

  She wrote to thank him, mentioning the admiration she felt for his work as viceroy, a tribute that was balm to a man still chewing over the soreness of his rejection by an ungrateful government. He wrote back suggesting that they meet; to his delight, he found that she was cultivated, intelligent and well read as well as beautiful. The long, clandestine pursuit of her began over chance meetings, secret lunches and dinners.

  Curzon’s second important female friendship was open and sunny. In 1906 Waldorf Astor, son of an immensely wealthy American businessman, the widowed William Waldorf Astor, had fallen in love with Nancy Shaw, born Nancy Langhorne, from a well-known Virginian family. Nancy—like Waldorf, born on May 19, 1879—had been briefly and unhappily married to Robert Gould Shaw, by whom her first son, Bobbie, was born in 1898. When she realized that Shaw was a hopeless alcoholic she left him, only agreeing to a divorce when his parents begged her to do so in order that he could marry his pregnant mistress. In 1906 she married the twenty-seven-year-old Waldorf, and his father, now the first Lord Astor, gave the young couple Cliveden, his palatial house on the Thames.

  Almost at once, Nancy began to entertain on a grand scale. There were two or three balls for up to five hundred guests given every season, frequent dinners for fifty or sixty people and hardly a weekend without a house party for twenty or thirty. Cliveden was run like a small principality, with its own home farm, its outdoor servants—from forty to fifty gardeners and a
dozen stablemen at any one time—living in cottages with their families, its own football and cricket teams, its own tennis courts and golf courses. One hundred tons of coal a year were burned in the bedroom fires alone; the French chef had five kitchen maids; a legion of housemaids serviced the house; the lawns were mowed by horses with leather boots over their shoes and when a car passed through the park gates the lodgekeeper telephoned the house on a special hand-wound telephone.

  Nancy’s great charm as a hostess was her American freshness, vitality and relaxed approach. In contrast to the organized formality pertaining in most other great houses, she never appeared before luncheon and guests were free to do exactly what they wanted, from bathing or tennis to walking and talking. She was pretty, witty, warm and funny; she came from the same great country as Curzon’s beloved Mary; and he fell under her spell immediately.

  “My dear Nancy, I know you are all you describe (and a lot more besides),” he wrote to her in September 1909. “Virtue and frailty—can there be a more irresistible combination? Why can’t a man be fond of a woman without wanting to be her lover? Why can’t a woman be fond of a man without being bound to crawl into bed with him? Therefore I am always bound to you by ties of love and abandoned decorum. It is so good to find a woman who is witty and tender and withal domestic.” He loved Cliveden, too, its Palladian elegance, its spaciousness, the Italian stonework installed in the garden by Lord Astor.

  Nancy loved her Waldorf, so Curzon had to be content with a romantic friendship. Her relationship with the Curzon daughters was semi-maternal, often shot through with the same squabbles and furious accusations that bedevil family relationships, but the bond was similarly deep, loving and enduring. Cliveden was a house where children were welcome—a special table for them at tea with the grown-ups was set with bread and butter and a plain cake instead of the pastry cook’s confections.