Mad World (21 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
Later, after
Brideshead
, when some critics accused him of glamorising Catholicism and converting out of a ‘love of money’ and a preference for ‘the company of the European upper classes’, he denied the charge: ‘I can assure you it had no influence on my conversion. In England, Catholicism is predominantly a religion of the poor. There is a handful of Catholic aristocratic families, but I knew none of them in 1930 when I was received into the Church.’ Many of his closest friends were Catholics, some of them converts (Harold Acton, Alastair Graham, Christopher Hollis, Frank Pakenham, Douglas Woodruff). Others, such as Tom Driberg and John Betjeman, were devout Anglo-Catholics. Perhaps more significantly, the women with whom he fell in love were all devout Catholics: Olivia Plunket Greene, Teresa Jungman and later his second wife, Laura. The influence of Gwen Plunket Greene was undoubtedly very strong – more so than that of her daughter. Olivia, who had recently converted, had the typical zeal of a convert. For her, it was all an affair of the emotions. For Gwen, by contrast, ‘the call came unadorned by any joy or emotion, only a hard and naked will to follow God’. Evelyn understood this response.
It was not something undertaken lightly. He saw that he was making a sacrifice of home, marriage and children. As a divorced man he would be unable to marry again. His reasoning was simple: the world was ‘unintelligible and unendurable without God’. He was twenty-six. He later said to Alec: ‘The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.’ To Father D’Arcy he wrote: ‘As I said when we first met, I realise that the Roman Catholic Church is the only genuine form of Christianity.’ It was perhaps that simple. The Catholic Church was the ‘True Church’ and that was all there was to it.
Evelyn had embraced the Scarlet Woman.
O child of Uranus, wanderer down all times,
Darkling, from farthest ages of the Earth the same,
Strange tender figure, full of grace and pity,
Yet outcast and misunderstood of men.
(Edward Carpenter,
Towards Democracy
, 1902)
One afternoon in July 1930, Evelyn Waugh took tea with Victor Cazalet, the MP for Chippenham, on the terrace of the House of Commons. On the way he bumped into his old Oxford friend, Lord Elmley, and Oliver Baldwin, the homosexual son of the former Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. That evening Evelyn noted in his diary: ‘Oliver Baldwin grown fatter and Elmley a little thinner.’
Elmley was following his father into politics. His life since Oxford had followed a typical trajectory for a man of his class. He had done a stint in the Army (second lieutenant in the 100th Worcester and Oxford Yeomanry Field Brigade, then transferred to the Royal Tank Corps, where he stayed for the next four years). After that, he went on a world tour.
His brother’s life was rather different. Since Oxford, Hugh had drifted aimlessly. Having been forced to abandon his banking job in Paris, he was often to be seen hanging around in the Packard limousine showroom in
Piccadilly, driving around in the vast cars whenever the fancy took him. Every now and then his name crops up in the Court Circular or the gossip columns, accompanying one or other of his sisters to a society reception, a wedding or a dance. He sometimes provided dutiful help to his father, entertaining dignitaries to luncheon in Belgrave Square. He was happier at the Madresfield Agricultural Show and the annual Hunt Ball in Worcester.
In 1929 he decided that he wanted to work with horses, so he became an amateur jockey. His chances of success were slim, given that he was six feet two inches tall. In July 1930, he was on the card to ride a horse called Alan Malone in the Amateur’s Cup at Salisbury. But he was not among the finishers: he must have either scratched or fallen. His next scheme was to train racehorses.
A couple of weeks after Evelyn bumped into Elmley, the newspapers noted that Lord Beauchamp was departing on a world tour. At the end of July 1930 he left London for Australia. He had taken up the position of Chancellor of the University of London and as ambassador on its behalf he intended to visit various universities in Canada and the United States on the way back. In early September he wrote to tell his daughter Coote that he had just crossed the equator: ‘I hope for news of Madresfield and especially of mummy, though I fear it might take her a little time to settle down.’ The wording suggests that there had been some trouble before Lord Beauchamp left Madresfield. Was the countess ill, or worried about her husband’s safety? It is not clear what he meant by her needing time to ‘settle down’. What Lord Beauchamp did not know was that a plot for his downfall was underway.
Beauchamp planned to return to England at the end of January 1931, in time for the opening of Parliament. He travelled home on the
Europa
, stopping off at San Francisco, Washington and New York. In New York he met Evelyn’s elder brother, Alec, at a party given by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mother. Alec Waugh told him that he was acquainted with Elmley and that he knew Hugh well. ‘A dear, dear boy,’ said Beauchamp; ‘If only he would write to me more often.’ The comment would take on an extra poignancy in the light of the events of the coming year. Alec Waugh recalled that ‘the great man was very gracious and urbane, embellishing his role of guest of honour’. ‘Had he any knowledge,’ Alec wondered, ‘of the trouble that awaited him back in England?’
Lord Beauchamp was said to have ‘exquisite taste in footmen’. When interviewing male staff he would pass his hands over their buttocks, making a similar hissing noise to that made by stable lads when rubbing their horses down. If the young man was handsome and pleasant, Beauchamp would remark: ‘He’ll do well. Very nice indeed!’ The fingers of the footmen of Madresfield were said to be glittering with diamonds. One could hear the clunk of the jewellery as they served dinner.
The diplomat and diarist Harold Nicolson recalled a dinner at Madresfield when he was asked by an astonished fellow guest, ‘Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the Butler, ‘‘Je t’adore’’?’ ‘Nonsense,’ Nicolson replied, ‘He said ‘‘Shut the door’’.’ But Nicolson, bisexual husband of Vita Sackville-West, knew that the other guest had indeed heard correctly. The Madresfield butler, Bradford, was an exceptionally handsome man. According to Lady Sibell, even her prudish mother thought he was delicious: ‘Not birth-control – self-control,’ she would say in front of him, to the bemusement of her children.
Not all Lord Beauchamp’s servants were homosexual, though many were. One day a heterosexual servant, finding the door to the Belgrave Square drawing room locked, peeped through the keyhole to find the earl and his doctor sexually engaged on the sofa.
At a certain exalted level of society, Lord Beauchamp’s homosexuality had been an open secret for years. His ‘persistent weakness for footmen’ was familiar to many of his friends. Indeed, his proclivities were reasonably well known even to his political opponents. But it was not thought gentlemanly to make them a subject for public attack. Beauchamp felt confident that he could continue his double life without being exposed by his colleagues or the press.
Even his children knew of their father’s secret double life, advising their male friends to lock their bedroom doors at night when they came to stay at Madresfield. If a particularly handsome young man was staying, Beauchamp would try the guest-room door. On finding it unavailing, he would complain at breakfast the next morning: ‘He’s very nice that friend of yours, but he’s damned uncivil.’
At Walmer Castle, where he was frequently without his wife, he held parties for Kentish lads, fishermen and prominent London homosexuals. It was there that he indulged in unseemly behaviour with figures such as the flamboyant actor Ernest Thesiger, subsequently co-star with Boris Karloff
and Elsa Lanchester in
The Bride of Frankenstein
. When Lady Christabel Aberconway was invited to the Beauchamps’ London residence for tea, she was amazed to find herself being introduced to Thesiger, who was naked from the waist up and adorned with ropes of pearls. He had just been cast in a film called
The Vagabond Queen
. At Madresfield, Lady Christabel also met a beautiful young man who described himself as a tennis coach. She could not help noticing that he had no idea how to hold a racquet.
Lord Beauchamp took an intellectual as well as a practical interest in homosexuality. He was an admirer of Edward Carpenter, the poet, homosexual activist, vegetarian and socialist reformer. He read Carpenter’s epic poem
Towards Democracy
, which boldly linked homosexuality to political freedom in a style much influenced by the energies of Walt Whitman. He also treasured Carpenter’s
Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship
, a celebration of ‘Greek love’ published in 1902 that became an underground hit in homosexual circles.
It was Carpenter’s long-term partnership with a working-class, uneducated odd-job man called George Merrill that led him to believe that same-sex couples had the power to subvert class boundaries and that homosexuals could be in the vanguard of radical social change. A visit to Edward Carpenter inspired E. M. Forster to write his one openly gay novel,
Maurice
. The template for the affair between middle-class Maurice and Alec the gamekeeper was the relationship between Carpenter and Merrill. Like Carpenter, Beauchamp was drawn towards young men of a lower social class. His lovers were invariably tall, handsome grooms or manservants.
He was comfortable in the company of homosexuals and gave patronage to men who shared his own orientation. He commissioned the Arts and Crafts designer C. R. Ashbee (also a friend and admirer of Carpenter) to redesign Madresfield. The artist William Ranken, who painted portraits of the family for Elmley’s coming of age, was also homosexual.
Ashbee was lanky and intense, with eyeglass, moustache and wispy beard. Known to be solitary and foppish, he was extremely close to his mother (his father was infamous for possessing Victorian England’s most extensive collection of erotic, and especially flagellant, literature). Like Lord Beauchamp, Ashbee continued to have homosexual affairs after he married. Being a bohemian type as opposed to an eminence in society, he could be quite open about his preferences, insisting to his wife upon
his need for ‘comrade friends’: ‘My men and boy friends [have] been the one guiding principle of my life … You are the first and only woman to whom I have felt I could offer the same loyal reverence of affection that I have hitherto given to my men friends. Will not the inference be obvious to you? There are many comrade friends, there can only be one comrade wife.’ Lord Beauchamp would have wished but never dared to write thus to his pious wife.
He would not, then, have felt alone in his leanings, but his downfall came as a result of his increasingly indiscreet conduct. As the years went on he found it more and more difficult to hide his orientation. This was extremely risky for a senior politician in an age when homosexuality was a criminal offence.
By 1927 the high-society figure Lord Lee of Fareham was ‘painfully cognizant of Beauchamp’s unsavoury moral reputation’. He protested when the earl presented the prizes at a school speech day. The novelist Hugh Walpole told Virginia Woolf of a visit to ‘the Baths at the Elephant and Castle [where he] saw Lord Carisbrooke naked: saw Lord Beauchamp in the act with a boy’. Sooner or later, this sort of thing was going to become public.
The final straw was Beauchamp’s behaviour during his 1930 tour in Australia. He was accompanied by a rising figure in the Liberal Party, Robert Bernays, a former President of the Oxford Union, now in his late twenties and with one unsuccessful parliamentary bid behind him. Bernays was employed as Beauchamp’s secretary. Travelling with them there was – not unusually – a young valet. George Roberts, a handsome nineteen-year-old plucked from the Madresfield estate, was His Lordship’s ‘joy-boy’.
Beauchamp was well received on his return to Sydney, so many years after relinquishing the governorship, but eyebrows were raised when it became clear that young George Roberts was living with him as his lover rather than his servant. There was to be a visit to Canberra, in advance of which the hosts requested Bernays to let it be known to the earl that Roberts would not be welcome. Bernays reported this news in a letter back to his own lover in London, Harold Nicolson. Soon the story was doing the rounds in London society. Boom may have thought that being abroad he could get away with behaviour of a kind that would have been impossible at home, but he could not stop the spread of gossip.
If there were to be a scandal, the countess would suffer and the person who took it upon himself to protect her was her brother, Hugh Richard
Arthur Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in Europe (he supposedly earned a guinea a minute from his rents). Known as Benny or Bendor (after Bend Or, a racehorse of his grandfather’s that had won the Derby), he had long been waiting to act against his brother-in-law.
Bendor had many reasons to resent Lord Beauchamp, who had borne the sword of state at the coronation of King George. A duke ranks above an earl. But it was the Earl Beauchamp, not the Duke of Westminster, who had been elevated to the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Bendor was jealous. He sneered at Beauchamp’s pomposity. Why, the man was to be seen flaunting his blue Garter ribbon whenever he threw a servants’ ball. Bendor also believed that Beauchamp was behind an attack on him in a Church newspaper after his first divorce back at the time of the Great War. He was now on his third marriage. His two divorces had made him persona non grata at the court of King George and Queen Mary, where there was a rigid sense of propriety and deep disapproval of anything so public and vulgar as divorce.