Those Wild Wyndhams (36 page)

Mary’s social confidence gave her new confidence with Arthur. She had been badly shaken by a visit paid to England by Mary Curzon in the summer of 1901 that was part convalescence from the harsh Indian climate, and part reconnaissance, gauging for Curzon the political climate at home. Arthur did not trouble to conceal his obvious attraction towards the Viceroy’s beautiful American wife. At a house party at Wilton, according to the Vicereine’s report to her husband, Mary took Mary Curzon to her room for a ‘dentist’, that was in fact a grilling as she tried to ascertain just how close Mary Curzon and Arthur were. She refused to accept her rival’s protestations that she was ‘only in the galère with [Arthur’s] other friends’ and that Mary Elcho was ‘the only one that matters with AJB in the least. “No” says she, “I know when he is interested and he loves being with you”.’

An incident the following day did nothing to assuage Mary’s fears. On leaving Wilton it had been arranged that all three – Arthur, Mary and Mary Curzon – would lunch at Willis’s Rooms in London later that day. Mary Curzon and Arthur arrived at the appointed time, but Mary did not turn up. The two lunched alone; afterwards, expressing anxiety, Mary Curzon suggested that they go to Cadogan Square to find Mary. She wrote to her husband to describe what happened next:

we asked for her, and the footman went off to fetch her, while we waited in the library. Suddenly Mary appeared, wild-haired in a filthy dressing gown, and for two seconds we all stood quite still. Then Arthur said, ‘Well, why didn’t you come?’ ‘Come where?’ said Mary. ‘To lunch’ said A. ‘You never asked me’, cried Mary and hurled herself on a sofa. Arthur said, ‘You must be mad.’ Then Mary said, ‘Don’t you think I would have come if I had thought you wanted me? Would I miss an hour when I could be with you? I have suffered agonies to think you didn’t want me, and you had promised to lunch alone with me.’

The encounter ended badly. Mary Curzon made her excuses and left, but not before Balfour, in front of a near-hysterical Mary, made Mary Curzon promise to dine with him alone at the Commons that night.

Was Mary Curzon exaggerating the anecdote to provide her husband with gossip? Perhaps – but the nugget of truth is there, and Balfour’s ‘stern and cold’ treatment of ‘his poor trembling wild Mary’ is easy to believe.
⁸
Mary Curzon herself returned to India wary of Balfour. ‘When the sun shines and women smile, he is a picturesque, rare, enchanting creature … In times of stress he is, I think, harsh, and just a little selfish.’
⁹

Mary when confident was a very different creature from the distraught figure in the filthy dressing gown. As she flourished as a hostess, the sexual element to her relationship with Arthur appears to have become more pronounced. Their correspondence opened with the same lack of ceremony as always: Mary’s abruptly, with no heading, and signed off as ‘Melcho’; Arthur’s addressed as always to ‘My dear Lady Elcho’. But Mary’s letters were newly coquettish, and far more explicit, with coy references to ‘punitive expeditions’, and teases about long hours in bed in the morning, playing with a ‘beastly little “Beast” of yr [Arthur’s] own making’.
¹⁰
‘2 hrs is what I like: one for boring things and one for putting you in yr place … on yr knees at my feet,’ Mary told Arthur in 1904, after managing to snatch two hours on a Sunday afternoon alone in his room at a house party in Oxfordshire.
¹¹
Three years later on Valentine’s Day she sent him a sketch of ‘somewhat obscure objects … a birch rod … a brush and a tin bottle of squirting grease (smells of peppermint!)’,
¹²
taking childish glee in the nursery-punishment element of their relationship that appealed to her love of secrets and private jokes.

The ‘boring things’ were ‘talking business’ – the business of politics.
¹³
When in public, Mary preferred to generate debate among others rather than hold forth on her views. In their private confabulations Balfour was one of the few to receive the benefit of Mary’s ‘moral, social and intellectual opinions’ that Margot Asquith claimed to be ‘more interested in … than [those of] most of my friends’ – high praise from the waspish Margot.
¹⁴
Mary’s children teased her that Balfour piled her letters unopened into his desk drawers, but in fact he seems to have sought, and greatly valued, the benefit of her wisdom and instinct. As Arthur’s confidante, Mary operated in the manner of most political wives at the time: listener rather than adviser, a sounding board to be trusted implicitly where colleagues could not.
¹⁵
Most political wives did not aspire to more, and Mary was no different. Her own political foray on to the parish council was short lived: depressed by a committee’s inability to get anything done, and feeling as though she were ‘skinned alive’, she abandoned her seat as soon as she could.
¹⁶
Throughout Arthur’s forty-one months as Prime Minister, the two discussed posts, policy and crises. Mary’s advice on appointments focused on personality as much as policy: the alchemy that could make a successfully balanced Cabinet work was not far off that required to make a successful house party ‘sing’. ‘There must be some heaven-born Chancellor somewhere outside … Cromer or Dawkins, or
Hugo
!!’ she told Arthur, as he began devising his new Cabinet in 1902, a mischievous reference to Hugo’s unremitting gambling. She was more serious about her brother’s prospects: ‘I suppose you know you won’t have a happy or peaceful life – with me – until brother George is in the Cabinet!’
¹⁷
Despite Balfour at first insisting that he could ‘see
no
chance of George having anything’, George, while retaining his position as Irish Secretary, ultimately, and no doubt thanks in part to Mary’s tenacity, was brought into the Cabinet.
¹⁸

Arthur peopled his Cabinet with Souls. Civil servants were astonished to hear the Cabinet addressing each other by their first names, as the old friends they were.
¹⁹
But their golden age was beset by problems. The new century had brought a new dawn, and, as the fog of jingoism cleared, a number of developments allowed the electorate to see the Unionists in a clearer light. It was a party that did not seek to remedy the legal position resulting from the notorious Taff Vale judgment of 1901 (which, by allowing employers to sue trade unions for damages arising from strike action, had a chilling effect on the ability of the labouring classes to protest), a party that, having compared Uitlanders to helots, was willing to import cheap indentured labour from China to work on the Rand. The ‘Chinese Slavery’ scandal was a gift for the Liberal Opposition. St John Brodrick’s conduct as Minister for War during the Boer War began to be vilified and the Government’s justifications for war looked shabby.

In January 1903, at George Curzon’s suggestion, a Coronation Durbar was held in India. A deserted plain outside Delhi was transformed into a tented city with its own post office, shops, telephone and telegraphic facilities, police force (with specially designed uniform), hospital, magistrates’ court, up-to-the-minute systems of sanitation, drainage and electric light, and a small light railway carrying spectators from Delhi to the site. It was another example of the Viceroy’s extraordinary energy, zeal and vision. He had devoted his rule to scouring out the corruption that mired India, hauling the sub-continent into the modern age by reforms, commissions and sheer determination. That, and his self-importance, more grandiose than ever, earned him many enemies. Wits dubbed the event the ‘Curzonization’.

To Curzon’s chagrin, Edward VII did not attend, sending as his representative his brother the Duke of Connaught. But Society flocked to the social event of the year – even Pamela. ‘I thought she would not bring herself to leave the children,’ said Percy mildly, but she and Eddy were on board a ship nicknamed the ‘Roll Britannia’ that carried them out to India.
²⁰
A mortified Mary was not among them. At the eleventh hour Cincie had fallen ill and Hugo went to India alone. Mary was so disappointed she refused even ‘so much as to look at a newspaper – I was much too angry at not being there’.
²¹

Each day of the Durbar was crammed with entertainments: games of polo, military reviews, bands, exhibitions of local handicrafts, dinners, balls and firework displays. Pamela enjoyed the ‘comédie humaine’ and the house-party atmosphere among the luxurious tents of the elite, where the Duke of Hesse was nicknamed ‘The Tower of Babel’ (presumably for his facility for languages or his volubility). On the final day over a million people lined the tented city’s streets to watch the concluding procession: one which ‘… I suppose’, said Curzon to Arthur with typical modesty, ‘the papers will describe as the most wonderful procession of the century’.
²²
Surprisingly clear black and white footage survives: a parade of elephants, each more gorgeously arrayed than the last, topped by maharajahs glittering with gold and jewels, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught and finally Lord and Lady Curzon. That night the sky was lit up by fireworks, as the Indian and European elite rubbed shoulders at the grand Coronation Ball. Mary Curzon was looking lovely, Pamela told Mary, ‘but very colourless and worn’. Pamela wondered too whether Hugo had ‘altogether enjoyed his stay in India?’ He had seemed rather ‘homeless & wandering sometimes … I was awfully pleased when he came once or twice & sat in my tent.’
²³

Mary did not know. Hugo had been characteristically uncommunicative. After Cincie had recovered, Mary had taken her children to Madeira, to escape England’s foul weather. From there, she berated her husband for ‘the howling desert of loneliness & ignorance of all yr plans in which I have been living’.
²⁴
Yet only in curiously oblique terms could she try to persuade him to refrain from behaviour still more hurtful. A tiny ‘hinge’ at the bottom of her letter reads: ‘I hope you have got a little offering for each child – it makes nurse cruel to Yvo if you have nothing for Mary she, nurse, cries all night about it. It’s cruel & does such injustice to yrself.’
²⁵
Only by invoking Yvo could Mary hope to make Hugo be kind to Mary Charteris. It is a small clue that, despite Mary’s predictions, Hugo did not treat Blunt’s daughter as he did his other children.

The Durbar was not an unmitigated success for the Viceroy. Some six months before, Curzon had had a run-in with the 9th Royal Lancers, denying the whole of the notoriously exclusive regiment leave for six months when it refused to reveal which of its members had clubbed an Indian cook to death. Racially provoked murders were far from uncommon in colonial India: during the previous two decades eighty-seven Indian batmen, menials or cooks had been killed by British troops. The British public did not share Curzon’s concerns. The Lancers became a cause célèbre in the papers; Edward VII protested on their behalf. In a calculated snub the Duke of Connaught chose the Lancers as his escort at the Durbar. As the 9th passed by, the watching elite rose to their feet with deafening cheers. ‘As I sat alone and unmoved on my horse … I felt a certain gloomy pride in having dared to do right,’ Curzon recalled in his memoirs.
²⁶

Pamela arrived back in England, relieved beyond measure, to a house decorated in celebration by her children. She hated life on ship: ‘the smallness of one’s cabin, the constant noises, the loathsome smells … I think I was a tree in a former existence. This is my first incarnation I am sure & certainly my timbers cd never have been planted in a
ship
,’ she grumbled to Mary.
²⁷
Like all who had been in India, she agreed that they had never seen such an outrageous spectacle, nor ever heard of such an unpopular Viceroy. ‘Whether this is because his reforms are too good or his manners too bad seems doubtful,’ said Balfour.
²⁸
But he too was tiring of a Viceroy who treated anything less than absolute acquiescence to his proposals as a personal affront.

That month, the Liberals moved a vote of censure against the War Secretary St John Brodrick over his conduct of the war recently concluded. ‘
Never
wish for anything overmuch,’ Balfour remarked drily to Mary, thinking back to three years before, when Hilda Brodrick had spent sleepless nights praying for her husband’s promotion.
²⁹
Brodrick was saved only by George Wyndham’s Land Purchase Bill making its way through the Commons. The Irish Nationalists knew that if the vote against Brodrick succeeded, the Bill would fall with the Government. So they refused to vote with the Liberals against Brodrick. Brodrick remained in his post, but his reputation was beyond salvage. Wyndham’s Land Act was passed. It instigated a workable land-purchase scheme that allowed tenants to buy the land they farmed from their landlords – unquestionably George’s finest legacy, and one of the high legislative points of an otherwise unexceptional ministry.

Less than a decade before, the Souls had promised so much. Yet, in power, Arthur Balfour already seemed out of date. His detached, intellectual approach did not suit a country anxious about imperial decadence; he was not able – or willing – to control the fire-and-brimstone elements of his Cabinet, chiefly Joe Chamberlain, his Colonial Secretary. Arthur, capable always of seeing all sides of an argument, was unwilling to come down off the fence. This was conclusively demonstrated by his approach to tariff reform, a policy proposed by Chamberlain in 1903 that bedevilled the Unionists for the next decade. Tariff reform, or ‘Imperial Preference’, was Chamberlain’s answer to imperial crisis: imposing a system of protective tariffs on trade from outside the Empire to forge imperial ties and provide the funds for much-needed root-and-branch social reform. The United States had grown great on protectionism. But the British believed they had grown great on free trade. Tariff reform provoked an emotional response – in particular among Liberal Unionist Whigs like the Duke of Devonshire and the Chancellor, Charles Ritchie – that no amount of intellectualizing could alter.