Those Wild Wyndhams (39 page)

George – a frequent and honoured guest at Wilsford – was fast becoming a figurehead of the naval lobby, coining the belligerent demand in respect of dreadnoughts at the Wigan by-election in 1908: ‘We want eight and we won’t wait!’
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His support for tariff reform, once tentative, was now ardent, even as Balfour refused to move beyond his cautious position. George had ostensibly recovered from his crisis of 1904, but something had cut loose. He returned to the backbenches in 1906 ‘an incorrigible Tory!’, glad to have ‘shed our Financiers and Brewers’, eager to fight for ‘The Church’, ‘the Realm’ and ‘the Empire of the English’,
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allying with Marie’s writer brother Hilaire Belloc over a mutual hatred of the ‘corrupting influences’ of ‘Levantine finance’ and the plutocracy, and displaying an overt anti-Semitism hitherto no more pronounced than that casually expressed by the rest of his class. Balfour laughed off George’s new stridency, comparing him to his Tory ancestor Sir William Wyndham, who had refused to kowtow to Walpole’s Whig hegemony. Wilfrid Blunt found his cousin’s alteration of political character repugnant.
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Pamela thought nothing of it. In her eyes George was a poet, and a poet he remained.

Margot Asquith – a less welcome family member – made her first visit to Wilsford in July 1906. She had to admit that the house was ‘perfectly lovely’, although she took pleasure in pointing out the impracticality of the thatch on the nursery wing; while it was ‘charming from the outside … I cd hardly sleep for thinking of the heat of Clare’s bedroom over the kitchen,’ she noted in her diary.
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Relations between the sisters-in-law remained strained. In 1903, Pamela had scored a palpable hit with an allegorical short story, ‘in which Margot figures as a princess in a glass house, herself as a beetle beloved by God, and my father [Asquith] as a Muscovy duck …’, Margot’s stepson Raymond wrote in his diary, anticipating with interest a visit by the Tennants to the Asquiths at The Wharf, their house in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.
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Yet the two couples were tied closer than ever since the Bart’s death, which left Eddy in the peculiar position of holding the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s pursestrings. Margot’s marriage settlement had provided that she would receive £3,000 per annum while her father was alive, £1,000 per annum after his death.
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The loss of income hit the Asquiths hard, particularly as Asquith’s political duties became more pressing, and Margot’s bridge habit became more expensive. In 1919, Eddy estimated that he had given Margot, by way of loans and extensions, around £25,000 in excess of her allowance (well over three-quarters of a million pounds in today’s money) since the Bart had died.
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Margot took the opportunity of her visit to draw a character sketch of Pamela in her diary: ‘remarkably clever & very beautiful. Charming with other people’s children & a wonderful mother herself but she lacks nature & humanness … she has not felt anything very deeply yet, she has always controlled her own destiny … She is not a citizen of the world … she lives in an adoring, uncritical milieu …’ She thought that Pamela, ‘self-scanned and self-secure’, would get ‘more heart when her own has been squeezed’.
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Pamela often defended herself against accusations of remoteness, claiming that it was simply shyness. But her frostiness towards Margot stemmed from dislike, as Margot well knew.

Margot’s sketch had much truth to it. Pamela surrounded herself with acolytes, whether family or minor literary figures, and her papers are crammed with their missives: breathless pages from Wommy declaring undying devotion; paeans from F. W. Bain, bestselling author of
The Digit of the Moon
, addressing her as ‘Shri’ the beautiful, sensuous princess heroine of one of his tales;
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a declaration from Sidney Cockerell that to him and Bain Pamela was ‘a Great Golden apple out of reach on the topmost bough’.
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One of the more intriguing is a folded scrap of almost translucent paper covered in tiny pencilled handwriting. It was written by an admirer in the gods at Covent Garden’s Opera House watching Pamela in a box below. The author tracks her every move: her anxious study-ing of the programme; fiddling with her glove and bracelet; her asides to the man beside her; the expressions fleeting across her face as the violinist played on. Pamela looked tired and lost in thought, thought her correspondent, who presumably having tightly folded up this love letter pressed it into her gloved palm as they met briefly in the buzzing, brightly lit foyer before going their separate ways. The signature on it is almost illegible, but appears to read ‘Sholto’ – possibly Sholto Johnstone Douglas, a Queensberry cousin to whom Pamela was close.
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To all these people, Pamela played the great lady, bestowing upon them the gift of her company. Most of them rhapsodized in turn about Wilsford’s perfect simplicity. Pamela instructed her staff to give food and alms to vagrants so that in their underworld Wilsford would earn a reputation as a ‘safe house’. She welcomed into the house Bim’s troop of ‘village boys’, sending off to Hamleys for quantities of cardboard armour and toy pistols for their games. She took her children on overnight excursions across the Downs in a colourful Gypsy caravan, burning sausages and pigeons that her children had shot over a campfire and singing them to sleep with folk ballads on her guitar. She entertained parties of youths, sending them off, with the caravan carrying their bedding, to sleep at Stonehenge overnight.
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She had a pet bullfinch, Chuffy, who sat on her dressing table whistling a tune she had taught him, and who tried to drink her diamond earrings, thinking them ‘water-drops’.
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The flipside is the many contemporary anecdotes that show Pamela in the worst possible light. Marie Belloc Lowndes recounted in her memoirs a dinner party at Queen Anne’s Gate at which Eddy remarked to the assembled company in ‘quiet measured tones’ that he could not conceive what jealousy might feel like. Pamela, perceiving the comment as a slur upon herself, fled into the garden, pacing up and down and sobbing in full view while her uncomfortable guests continued eating inside.
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Marie’s daughter Susan recounted as a child at Wilsford catching sight through an open doorway of Pamela lying on the floor, literally biting the carpet in fury.
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In family legend, as recorded in memoirs written by her descendants, she has become little more than a narcissistic horror, spoilt, demanding, vain and destructive
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– a woman who, if she felt she was receiving insufficient attention, would rise from the table and implacably face the wall;
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who asked Eddy to remove the motto ‘Charles Tennant & Co., Chemical Manufacturers’ emblazoned on the brick of Tennant’s Stalk, the family’s Glasgow chemical factory, disliking this public reminder of the family’s trade roots;
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and who so frightened her husband that he never charged her directly with her extravagance, but asked the company secretary to drop a gentle hint about her overspending.
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Charlie Tennant, who became one of Pamela’s protégés, was the recipient of the best of her nature. Her letters to him are honest, thoughtful and humorous. She fretted about his happiness while working for the family company (she feared he was ‘the square peg in a round hole, in Glasgow!’),
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and made efforts to matchmake him with ‘pretty girls’, inviting him to attend the Peebles Ball with her goddaughter ‘Pammy’ Adeane,
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told him of the time that someone had asked her the date of Easter that year and she, lost in thought, had answered, ‘Oh, about the 18th or 19th of
Wilsford
I believe!’
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As with all her closest friends, it was a rare letter from Pamela that did not contain some discussion of her current reading, from Mrs Humphry Ward (‘[she] has a suburban way of describing life that doesn’t hold one’) to Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
, which Edward Grey had read aloud at Fallodon (she found getting her mind around Gibbon’s complex sentences like trying to span the girth of an enormous tree: ‘you feel you can’t quite get round it, or if you do, it is only
just
done’).
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On a summer’s morning at Stanway, in July 1907, Mary was bearded in her bedroom by a furious Hugo. Once again he charged her with excessive socializing, this time on behalf of their children, and expressed the hope ‘that the result of our dinners etc. will not be a double marriage, Violet [Manners]–Ego, Cynthia–Beb [Asquith]’, adding ‘that Cynthia spends all her nights with Beb at balls, and that V. and B. both look very second rate and that he’s going to tell Cynthia and Ego so – this is the really worrying thing’, Mary reported to Arthur.
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The Duchess of Rutland (as Violet Granby had become) had a trio of daughters, known as ‘the Hothouse’ for the highly strung fascination they exerted over men, and the second of the three, Violet ‘Letty’ Manners, married Ego in 1911. Cincie and Beb, Asquith’s taciturn second son by his first marriage, were already secretly engaged.

The children of the Souls, all well known to one another, were approaching maturity. They gave themselves the name of ‘the Coterie’ – later renaming themselves ‘the Corrupt Coterie’ in an indication of defiance. Mary’s children were all, by their birth, part of the Coterie, although some with more ambiguous attitude than others. Mary’s three eldest were young adults. The twenty-two-year-old Ego, recently graduated from Oxford, was ‘rather a darling’,
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quietly humorous and diffident,
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and still politically naive enough to have been devastated at Arthur Balfour’s apparent betrayal by his Manchester constituents in the elections of 1906. Mary wished he could spend more time talking to Arthur: ‘I should like him trained to be a good Unionist Conservative.’
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Guy had suffered from his position as second son, and from the poor health he had endured since childhood.
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At Oxford he racked up large debts and barely scraped a third.
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Mary worried that whenever he was in a position of tension or stress he might ‘crack up’ under the strain.
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Cincie had an alien beauty, with wide-set eyes, and a razor-sharp intelligence left entirely unhoned by her education. Mary, with much agonizing, had dispatched the intellectual Miss Jourdain in 1896. She feared that Miss J’s intense High Anglicanism was making Cincie overly religious,
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and was unnerved by the governess’s own emotional attachment to Mary herself. She replaced her with Fräulein Moskowitz, a ‘dear, bird-witted little Viennese’, known as ‘Squidge’ for her resemblance to a squirrel.
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The expectation for Cincie was that she would ‘marry a country house’, but while in Dresden, aged sixteen, she had met Beb Asquith, and in the two years since had appeared totally uninterested in any other man.
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Cynthia’s determination to be with the silent Beb – inexplicable to everyone except herself – placed Mary in a quandary. She found chaperoning a challenge – ‘even if one is at the balls oneself … one cannot see what is going on’, she said – and felt ‘low and rather helpless’ in trying to determine what to do, ‘over the most difficult part of life – how much to meddle? … Our system is confused and illogical. I dare say general results work out the same! whatever systems!!’ she lamented to Arthur.
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Lord Wemyss – who, as head of the family, would determine what marriage settlement Cynthia would receive – was fiercely opposed to Beb because he was a Liberal. Mary’s concern, which seems also to have been Hugo’s, was that Beb lacked the qualities needed to make a success of himself. Mary’s duty as a mother was to see her daughter well provided for by marriage financially, as well as emotionally. Finding that balance was the alchemy.

Mary’s visits to Gosford were normally spent trying to avoid lectures from her octogenarian father-in-law on the subject either of her children or of Arthur’s leadership of the Unionist party, both of which Lord Wemyss felt were being seriously mishandled. Mary found the former particularly enervating given the conduct of Wemyss’s own son. Neither Hugo’s gambling nor his infidelities had improved. A recent visit to Chatsworth when Mary, Hugo and his latest mistress, twenty-five-year-old Peggy, Countess of Crewe (a daughter of Lord Rosebery), were all present, had been a disaster. For some time, Mary’s response to Hugo’s affairs had been to offer quasi-maternal advice as to how her husband and his mistresses might bring out the best in each other. ‘You exaggerate each other’s peculiarities,’ she said, encouraging Hugo to ‘steady’ the spoilt, witty, headstrong Peggy. Her attempts at Chatsworth to befriend Peggy had horrified Hugo. He responded by freezing her out. ‘I ask you a perfectly harmless question – you jump as if you were shot, I come near yr room & you look at me as if I were a poisonous snake,’ wrote Mary afterwards in reproof. ‘I had really far rather that you spent the whole of every night with P. & behaved in a decent friendly way to me all day … but you are so aloof, so strange, so suspicious, so on wires – that you really make me inclined to … tell you that I think you an ass! … why should being pro her make you anti me?’
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By contrast, ‘My children are
not
immaculate,’ Mary told Arthur, ‘but they have some conscientious feelings, they are warm-hearted, friendly, and essentially domestic. They love being at home, they do not remember always but they would be grieved at distressing one and would shut a door to please one and do tiresome things occasionally because they feel them to be right and they
want
to please one …’
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