The Viceroy's Daughters (8 page)

Even the lawyer hinted delicately that Curzon was trying to make his daughter pay too much. “I cannot help thinking that a mistake has been made. It is quite clear that Lady Irene cannot carry on the arrangement agreed unless she receives the first quarterly payment of £500 at once.”

It was perfectly true: she had had to buy a cottage for Fox, and though she started the season riding “old Dandy, game as ever at 23,” she needed new, fast horses for the great Leicestershire grass countries. With the ones she bought she acquitted herself so well that in December 1921 the master of the Quorn hunt club, Algernon Burnaby, wrote to her asking if she would do himself and his joint master, Mrs. Paget, “the honour of accepting the Quorn hunt button.”

Curzon put up resistance to every attempt to make him release the money that Irene needed for hay, oats and saddlery and to set up her stables. He had always complained of being short of money, chiding Grace for the amount she spent on flowers (“Stevens' minimum charge, even for a lunch, is £22”), complaining of a bill for linen of £100 and talking of the high cost of servants.

In April 1920 he wrote to his wife:

I lie awake at night worrying about money matters. I have nothing in the bank and don't know how to go on. On top of this, while Irene is sheltering beside you, comes a further demand from her lawyer for her super tax of last year, making altogether over £2,000 that I have been asked to pay over the past fortnight to her. Needless to say, I have not got it.

I must say, I feel rather hurt at her profiting by you in Paris while her lawyer continues to bombard me here and I don't think it ought to have been done. If she wants to have things on a legal basis, so be it. Let her exact her full legal claim and go. But she can't do that and at the same time claim your protection. I see that my daughters will be the end of me.

 

As usual, he saw things from his point of view only. The fact that he owned four main houses—Kedleston, 1 Carlton House Terrace, Hackwood and Montacute—as well as Bodiam and Tattershall Castles, which he was restoring and repairing, seemed to him wholly proper, and Irene's suggestions for economies that would benefit them both fell on deaf ears.

When you tell me you had to find £1,500 and you cannot continue to do so, ought we not to retrench in other ways, like others are forced to do? [Irene suggested in August 1920]. We never go near Broadstairs and is not our [his daughters'] share of these and other houses very remote? Montacute we never go inside, Baba occasionally lives at Carlton House Terrace and Hackwood is only lived in for about two months. I know it is a sore point but I benefit little by these shares and can scarcely feel the places are homes. If things are so bad—forgive me for saying all this—ought not both sides to pull in?

As for the £545 and the £2,000 which was given for my dressing, hair, travel and charity, you know that £1,150 has gone on horses. You ask what has become of the other two thirds of my income, £1,332 approx. About £400 has gone on charity, as with that income I feel one ought to help others. £300 has gone on maids, travelling, hunting, stabling and all the extras in life. I spent over £100 on car and garage which ought not to be. My dressing this year comes to £400 as things are frightfully dear. I can meet these demands by so planning out my remaining moneys coming in but I cannot if I do not refund myself what I am owed.

 

If Grace had been at home, she might have persuaded Curzon that his daughter's pleas were understandable. She frequently mediated between the girls and their father and, an inveterate spender herself, would have sympathized with Irene's requests.

But Grace was again away, this time taking a mud-bath cure at Langenschwalbach in the Rhineland, on the advice of the Queen of the Belgians, as it was supposed to promote fertility. The cycle of pregnancy and miscarriage had continued for five years; Grace was now in her mid-forties and this was a last great effort to conceive an Earl of Kedleston. Her response to her husband's complaints was to say that she did not presume to advise him—“I am full of confidence in my Boy”—and to ask him to find her a French maid who was a good hairdresser and a valet who “understood” hunting clothes for her son.

The cumulative effect of constant efforts to make her father disburse what was really hers had the effect that the lawyers had foreseen: Irene finally decided she had to take complete charge of her own money—and terminated the “allowance” arrangement.

By the beginning of 1921 Curzon's lawyers, Taylor and Humbert, had received a letter from Irene's solicitor explaining that Curzon still owed her nearly three thousand pounds. Though this was backed up with statements from the Leiter Trust, it drew forth a letter of rebuttal from Curzon, written with such emotion that it was almost indecipherable. In March, Irene's solicitor replied crisply that Irene was fully within her rights to end the agreement and that the words “repudiated” and “violated” were therefore unjustified.

The fact remains [continued the lawyer] that for the first half of the current financial year Lord Curzon has received either £5,990 or £5,400—let us say the latter—out of his daughter's income and out of it has paid her £1,000, leaving £4,000 clear in his hands.

Even after providing for the taxes on the £5,400, amounting in round figures on the rate of the whole year's income to £2,700, there would still be a clear credit left in his hands for the six months only of £1,700.

Lady Irene states therefore that upon every ground, whether legal, equitable or moral, she cannot believe that her father will not carry out his agreement and obligation and pay to her the sum necessary to pay the taxes from the money received and retained by him between April and October 1920, for which taxes the Inland Revenue look to her primarily.

In that connection she would like me to point out that for the year for which the arrangement existed, the total remittances which her father received are as follows, from the Leiter estate, a total of £11,698 17s 6d, out of which his Lordship says he gave back £589 16s 3d.

Thus the total received by Lord Curzon amounts as you will see to a very large sum indeed—much larger than was ever contemplated when Lady Irene made the arrangement in October 1919.

 

Irene hoped that there would be an opportunity for reconciliation when her father was created a marquess (an expensive honor at £630 2s in fees and stamp duties, payable to the Home Office) in the King's Birthday Honors on May 26, 1921. This elevation had first been mooted six months earlier when Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative opposition, told Curzon that Prime Minister David Lloyd George had proposed it as recognition of Curzon's four years as leader of the House of Lords, member of the war cabinet and then foreign secretary. Telegrams and letters poured in, from Indian maharajas, from Belgium, from friends, from the Foreign Office—and from Irene, who wrote almost as a timid stranger.

“A timely line of congratulation and pleasure at your great honour. I would like you to think that as your daughter I was delighted for your sake and that you deserved it for all the work you do for England.” She signed it simply “Irene.”

This did not diminish Curzon's hostility toward his eldest daughter. He now did his best to denude Irene of her share of the settlement income. He still had Cimmie's; on her majority she had received her Leiter Trust money and when she married she had left her share of the settlement income with her father because she did not want to deprive him too suddenly of what he had been used to.

In June a long letter from Curzon's lawyers went to the leading King's Counsel, Dighton Pollock. After setting out the position, it said: “Lord Curzon considers that Lady Irene has behaved badly to him and in the exercise of the power given in the Settlement he has directed that the income of the Trust Funds over which he has power of appointment shall be applied to Lady Cynthia and Lady Alexandra. The effect of this direction is to increase the incomes of Lady Cynthia and Lady Alexandra and, according to the arrangements made, incidentally that of Lord Curzon.”

Cimmie had no intention of benefiting at the expense of her sister. Instead, at the urging of her husband, she too asked for the share of the settlement income that was rightfully hers—Tom had bought a newspaper in his constituency, Harrow, to publicize his speeches on Ireland (he deplored the use of the Black and Tans) and it had failed, incurring debts.

On September 21, 1921, Curzon reported to Grace that he had received an extraordinarily offensive letter from Cimmie:

She described my attitude, heaven knows why, as mean, petty, unwarrantable, unaccountable and incomprehensible. My daughters seem to go mad when a question of money is concerned and Cim is heading straight towards the same result as Irene, which indeed I suppose she desires.

That any daughter of mine should have written in such a vein I should have deemed incredible were it not that I have previously had the same from Irene. Humbert tells me they are hard up. They paid £8,000 for their Guildford home taking it out of settlement. I do not think there is any force in her legal claim but am going to take the lawyers' advice, also whether I can make another redistribution to her detriment. I certainly would if I could.

 

Curzon was so anxious to do this that he requested his lawyers that same day to ask for Counsel's immediate opinion on whether he could redirect his elder daughters' share of the settlement income in favor of Baba—which would, of course, leave it in her father's hands.

Counsel's opinion was that he could not. Curzon's reaction was immediate, and icy. “My dear Irene,” he wrote on September 21, 1921. “I will deal just as you did over the unjust bargain. You will then see what you deserve and be able to devote whatever sums you please to your pleasures, your charities and your hunting. Above all, you will be free from any interference from your father.”

A week later he received a letter from Irene written straight from the heart:

I wish to God the faults on both sides had not inevitably come to this ending but I want to try and hold on to the hope that now the cause of all our unhappiness has been removed the better things and the links we have between us may be able to appear and the love which I know at the bottom is there may cover up all the hurts and pains that have gone before.

I loathe quarrels and rows and their horrid consequences and my actions may seem to you those of one who does not care and that I have none of the feelings of what home and my father are and ought
to be. Deep down no one realises them more than me and I desperately want peace and friendship to reign between us in the future. May we forget all the things that have been said and my prayer is that out of this action of mine good may come and you will not feel that it is the severance of two people who can never get on together. No one wants that less than your Irene.

 

There was no reply. For a young woman of twenty-five to realize that she would never see her father again was a devastating psychological blow, especially in an era when single young women living on their own were virtually unknown. Irene was effectively orphaned, at an age when most of her contemporaries were either married or still had the secure emotional background of home.

Cim
was
to
receive
the
same
treatment.
“The
thing
is
certain,”
wrote
Curzon
to
Grace
in
October
1921.
“The
excellent
Tom
Mosley
has
been
to
see
Humbert
and
in
the
same
breath
talks
about
the
value
he
and
Cim
attach
to
paternal
and
filial
relations.
They
mean
to
take
the
whole
money
and
I
think
the
best
thing
to
do
is
to
say
Take
it.
I
cannot
stand
the
perpetual
torrent
of
threats
and
abuse
and
insinuation.

“But I am going to write an account of my adumbration of what they call their money since their mother died and of what they have done to me. And there I will leave it.” Curzon, given to setting every aspect of his life down on paper, now wrote a note justifying his conduct, which he put among his papers, sending a copy to Cim. It is dated November 1, 1921.

When Irene took away the whole of her fortune I made no concealment of the fact that I intended to take advantage of a change in the Marriage Settlement which permitted of my altering the distribution of a portion of the income. This clause had been in the settlement the day before I married in 1895 on the intercession of my first wife in order to provide for the exact situation that has now arisen. Viz, the contingency of one or more of my future children of the marriage acting in the event of her death in a manner that would injuriously affect the position of the interests of their father.