Those Wild Wyndhams (8 page)

Madeline Wyndham had known the Elchos for many years, not intimately but well. In February 1881 she invited Hugo to Wilbury. If she thought to capitalize upon interest sparked in Mary at Wilton, she was mistaken. When Madeline tried to make her daughter commit to a date, Mary professed an utter lack of interest. ‘As to Hugoman, his is an indefinite arrangement. I suppose you will write to him before the time comes [although] we might have him Monday as Lily [Paulet, Hugo’s cousin] comes that day,’ she wrote laconically in a letter otherwise devoted to plans for rearranging balls so that her friend and neighbour Louisa Gully might attend.
³⁵
Recalling this period a few years later, Mary gloated over her inscrutability: ‘poor Mum … she really couldn’t fathom Migs,’ she said, describing herself proudly as ‘the little hunter (who always hunted on her own hook & followed her own trail)’.
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Madeline persisted nonetheless. Six months later, Hugo was posted to Constantinople as part of a short-lived stint in the Foreign Office. By this time, his acquaintance with Mary was well established. Mary wrote to him on the eve of his departure recounting her recent nineteenth-birthday celebrations at Wilbury, where she had, in accordance with family tradition, been crowned with a wreath of roses and spent the evening celebrating with songs and dancing. She had decided, she told him, that ‘the [cat]’ – and here she drew a little cartoon of a cat – ‘believes the [hog]’ – a drawing of a pig – ‘to be most sage, large-minded and kind’.
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Meritocracy had not reached the Foreign Office. It was believed that only those with breeding could properly and confidently uphold British prestige abroad. Lord Robert Cecil commented that all a junior attaché needed was fluent French and the ability ‘to dangle about at parties and balls’.
³⁸
Several months later, bored and lonely in Constantinople, Hugo received a letter from his brother Evan, updating him on London gossip, including a nugget concerning a putative rival, David Ogilvy, heir to the earldom of Airlie:

Apparently he [Ogilvy] came over here in the summer intending to stay for a year and a half but went back after two months as Miss
Wyndham
was too much for him. He never proposed to her but was afraid he would do so, so he retired. I suppose you keep up constant correspondence with her I daresay she has told you more about Ogilvy than I can …

On that mischievous note, Evan swore Hugo to secrecy.
³⁹

Mary most certainly had not gossiped. Hugo only discovered the truth of the matter several years later. ‘I think that Mumsie [Madeline Wyndham] proposing to Ogles for you & being refused is very funni [sic],’ Hugo told Mary gleefully upon discovering the real sequence of events in 1887.
⁴⁰
Mary, like her husband employing the third person, blusteringly denied all responsibility: ‘It had nothing
to do with Migs
, it was entirely the old huntress’s transaction … I didn’t care a
hang
about Ogles & knew he didn’t care a rap for me … Mumsie wanted Migs to be
clear
of Ogles (or engaged to him!!!) to “go in” for Wash [Hugo himself] with a clean nose!’
⁴¹
It is quite possible that Ogles was the unnamed beau who allegedly abandoned his interest in Mary with the explanation that she was ‘A very nice filly, but she’s read too many books for me’.
⁴²

Hugo returned to England in the spring of 1882, bearing bangles ‘for Miss Mary’, and determined to start a new career in politics as a member of the Conservative Opposition.
⁴³
Mary was in Paris, flirting with Frenchmen and having ‘a high old time’. Madeline Wyndham ‘hunted’ her annoyed daughter back to Wilbury and dismissed her wheedling attempts to secure an invitation for a handsome ‘Musha de Deautand’ whom she had met in Hyères with the excuse that there was no room. ‘[T]here would be no harm done just a fortnight in the
country
… the house is elastic you could shove somebody somewhere,’ pleaded Mary, to no avail.
⁴⁴
Madeline Wyndham was decided. As Mary later recalled, her mother’s plan was that she was to ‘go in’ for Hugo and marriage ‘in the summer (together with reading & music!) that makes me laugh! Hunt the arts to keep one’s hand in!’
⁴⁵

That summer was one of the bloodiest politically for some time. In May, Parnell and his lieutenants William O’Brien and J. J. O’Kelly were released from several months’ imprisonment in Kilmainham Jail. They had been jailed for ‘treasonable practices’ after fomenting opposition to Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act, which gave Ireland the ‘3 Fs’ of fair rents, fixity of tenure and free sale of landholdings but which Parnell and his party considered did not go far enough. Their incarceration had thrown Ireland back into full-blown chaos: a national rent strike by day, while the mysterious ‘Captain Moonlight’ terrorized landlords by night. The ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ released Parnell in return for his bringing his influence to bear to end the rent strike. Many thought it negotiating with terrorists, including W. E. Forster, who in fury resigned as Irish Chief Secretary. His replacement, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under-Secretary Thomas Burke had barely set foot on Irish soil when they were murdered in Dublin’s Phoenix Park by a gang calling itself the Invincibles. In London, men poured, hatless, out of their clubs to disseminate the appalling news.
⁴⁶
Quite unjustly, Parnell and his fellow Irish parliamentarian John Dillon were blamed; arriving at the House of Commons the following day, Wilfrid Blunt was told that they were the ‘conspirators’. Stoutly, Blunt refused to give credence to the rumours: ‘they looked very much like gentlemen among the cads of the lobby’.
⁴⁷

Blunt was preoccupied with another devastating blow to nationalism dealt by Gladstone’s ministry in Egypt. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, in order to shore up the corrupt Khedive’s unstable rule in the face of revolt by Colonel Ahmed Orabi, popularly known as the Arabi Pasha. The need to protect the interests of the ‘bondholders’, as those numerous Britons with investments in Egypt were now called, outweighed any nice concerns for Midlothian principles of national self-government. So firmly did the British believe that Suez must be protected that just nineteen members of the House of Commons voted against the occupation. Percy Wyndham was the only Tory to do so, vigorously opposed to what he believed to be Britain’s illegal and oppressive behaviour.
⁴⁸
He later made one of his increasingly rare Commons speeches on Blunt’s behalf, for Blunt’s fierce advocacy of the Arabi’s cause – even to the extent of paying for his legal defence when the Arabi was court-martialled (the trial was abandoned, and the Arabi exiled instead) – earned Blunt exile himself. In July 1884, trying to go back to Egypt, Blunt was detained at Alexandria by British officials who, under instructions from Sir Edward Malet, the Consul General, forbade the troublemaker entry.
⁴⁹

Access to a parliamentary seat was still easy for a young aristocrat. In January 1883, Hugo’s grandfather died, and his father, now the tenth Earl of Wemyss, was elevated to the Lords. At a by-election in February, Hugo, having inherited his father’s courtesy title, stepped neatly into the Suffolk seat his father had held since 1847. Seamlessly, a Lord Elcho once more sat for Haddington. At Wilbury Mary, Mananai and Pamela decorated Mary’s dog Crack with yellow ribbons to celebrate – the colour of the Primrose League. The League, named after the favourite flower of Disraeli (who died in 1881), promoted working- and middle-class Toryism – the latter becoming known as Villa Toryism – largely through jamborees and summer fêtes, enticing the electorate with the promise of aristocratic proximity. It was the work of Lord Randolph Churchill, the preacher of ‘Tory Democracy’, an ill-defined creed that involved transferring power from the party’s leadership to the National Union – the constituencies – but was really part of his own bid for power. Privately, he described it as ‘chiefly opportunism’.
⁵⁰

Throughout that year Hugo sent Mary bouquets which she unpicked and made into buttonholes for him to wear; they played lawn tennis, went to the theatre, had tea and walked in the park: all under Madeline Wyndham’s encouraging eye. Finally on a July night in 1883, with ‘buttonhole no. 171’ in his lapel, Hugo proposed and Mary said yes.
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The next day, Hugo went to Belgrave Square to seek formally the Wyndhams’ blessing. Percy gave it to him ‘from my heart of hearts … Mary is a
great
treasure, and as I believe you know it I am very glad you have made her love you.’
⁵²

Mary had never properly met Hugo’s parents. They were introduced the next day at tea at their Mayfair house, 23 St James’s Street. Annie Wemyss took to Mary ‘immensely’, deeming her ‘so natural, so true, so good, & so free from affectation, fastness’. ‘[This] is such a good thing,’ wrote a mutual acquaintance to Percy, ‘for as we know, she [Annie Wemyss] does not take always spontaneously to people. I confess I felt rather nervous about it …’
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Madeline Wyndham was delighted. ‘She will bring you all nearer together,’ she told Hugo, as though her daughter were a sort of familial Elastoplast.
⁵⁴

Mary’s precipitation from the Wyndhams’ loving bosom into the Wemysses’ chilly embrace concerned many of the Wyndhams’ friends. ‘Condolences’ upon the loss of a daughter to marriage were conventional enough, as were the ‘icy congratulations’ that Mary received from Hugo’s desultory rivals.
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But many of the letters of congratulations sent to Belgrave Square were somewhat equivocal, and could not conceal a certain bemusement at her choice.
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Rediscovering them in middle age, Mary thought it obvious that most of her relations had thought Hugo was not quite good enough.
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Mary did not particularly enjoy her engagement: ‘six weeks of racket’
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consisting of all the things she most disliked: endless trips ‘drudging around the shops’ after her mother, and being prodded and poked by crowds of people ‘swarming about the house about bothering clothes’.
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Hugo teased Mary about the new skills she was acquiring in preparation for life as a matron running a household: ‘I wonder what you are doing … learning how many apples go to a Pie, or what butter costs at ¾ a pound … or perhaps you have been philosophizing over the degeneracy of modern linen … & regretting the halcyon days of muslins.’
⁶⁰

Both lovers expressed the sentiments expected of them. The day after their engagement, Mary told Hugo she had passed a sleepless night, contemplating the great change before her.
⁶¹
In the following days she professed herself ‘
completely
happy!’ with her ‘darling Hoggolindo … angel-Hoggie’. ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,’ she told ‘his Lordship Hogge the Good’, quoting her favourite lines from
Romeo and Juliet
. Hugo had become the very model of young Victorian manhood, swearing to ‘to pray, pray with your photo before me … to become more deserving of my happiness, to be drawn out of my stupid narrow self to something higher, better, nearer what you are’.
⁶²
But, all too soon, Hugo was back to his old habits, and doubts had surfaced in Mary’s mind.

Barely a fortnight into her engagement, Mary had to intervene with the Wemysses on Hugo’s behalf. Hugo had found his gambling poison, the Stock Exchange, and on his first flutter lost £700, the equivalent of over £57,000 today. In what would become a wearily familiar exchange, Mary persuaded the Wemysses not to tie up Hugo’s inheritance in a trust, but she was worried about their future before they had even embarked on it.
⁶³
Nor did Hugo appear to think his engagement required him to stop his constant flirting. ‘I don’t care how much “nonsense” you talk to everybody or
any
body at the Fisheries tonight for I do feel that you love me truly as I do you from the bottom of my heart,’ Mary told Hugo in mid-July, but her stout avowals ring hollow.
⁶⁴

Around this time – perhaps precipitated by the gambling incident – Mary tried to call off the engagement. Her formal, stilted letter to ‘Lord Elcho’ reads like that of a slightly less tactful Elizabeth Bennet who has accidently accepted Mr Collins. She was at home in Belgrave Square, dinner was ready downstairs and doubtless her father was growing increasingly impatient, but, she declared,

I must write this at once … speak straight out & tell you that I have hour by hour become more forcibly, painfully & unmistakeably [sic] convinced that when I accepted you a fortnight ago I did
not
rightly understand my own mind … [I am] perfectly certain [that] I do
not
love & respect you as I feel I should … I feel it my duty my positive & absolute duty to break off our proposed marriage.

As soon as Mary had forced those words out, her relief is palpable: her tone becomes free and easy and her pen dashes across the page in her usual untidy manner:

I hope you will not mind much! Tho’ yr pride may be shocked at first – I feel assured that you will so feel it to be all for the best for both of us & I trust you will think of me
kindly
as your
true
friend MW p.s. Please excuse my untidiness! I feel our marriage would lead to endless misery to both of us as it is. N.B. I am sure we shall always be very good friends. I know you will not take it to heart.
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The engagement was not broken. By the next day, Mary was writing to Hugo as though they were reconciled, but her tone remains sober and the pet-names are nowhere to be seen. Whether it was an attempt to shock Hugo into good behaviour or whether it was cold feet (thirty years later George Wyndham reminded Mary how all the siblings had ‘palpitated’ over their marriages – although George and his wife would also prove incompatible),
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it was far too late for that. The Wyndhams’ indulgence did not extend to engagements broken for no good reason. It would have caused a scandal unthinkable for Madeline Wyndham, and while Percy gave his children a degree of independence, he held them consequently responsible for their actions. ‘Her mother had pushed her [Mary] into marrying L[or]d Elcho – so one used to be told at least,’ said Maud Wyndham, daughter of the Leconfields, and Mary’s first cousin, sixty years later.
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