Dedication

For Mama.

Always.

Epigraph

‘La Chanson de Marie-des-Anges’

Y avait un’fois un pauv’gas,

Et lon la laire,

Et lon lan la,

Y avait un’fois un pauv’gas,

Qu’aimait cell’qui n’l’aimait pas.

Elle lui dit: Apport’moi d’main

Et lon la laire,

Et lon lan la,

Elle lui dit: Apport’moi d’main

L’cœur de ta mèr’ pour mon chien.

Va chez sa mère et la tu

Et lon la laire,

Et lon lan la,

Va chez sa mère et la tue,

Lui prit l’cœur et s’en courut.

Comme il courait, il tomba,

Et lon la laire,

Et lon lan la,

Comme il courait, il tomba,

Et par terre l’cœur roula.

Et pendant que l’cœur roulait,

Et lon la laire,

Et lon lan la,

Et pendant que l’cœur roulait,

Entendit l’cœur qui parlait.

Et l’cœur lui dit en pleurant,

Et lon la laire,

Et lon lan la,

Et l’cœur lui dit en pleurant:

T’es-tu fait mal mon enfant?

Jean Richepin (1848–1926)

‘Do you know Richepin’s poem about a Mother’s Heart? It means something like this:- “there was a poor wretch who loved a woman who would not love him. She asked him for his Mother’s heart, so he killed his Mother to cut out her heart and hurried off with it to his love. He ran so fast that he tripped and fell, and the heart rolled away. As it rolled it began to speak and asked “Darling child, have you hurt yourself?”’

George Wyndham to Pamela Tennant, 11 March 1912

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Tree

Prologue

1. ‘Worse than 100 boys’

2. Wilbury

3. ‘The Little Hunter’

4. Honeymoon

5. The Gang

6. Clouds

7. The Birth of the Souls

8. The Summer of 1887

9. Mananai

10. Conflagration

11. The Season of 1889

12. The Mad and their Keepers

13. Crisis

14. India

15. Rumour

16. Egypt

17. The Florentine Drama

18. Glen

19. The Portrait, War and Death

20. Plucking Triumph from Disaster

21. The 1900 Election

22. Growing Families

23. The Souls in Power

24. Pamela at Wilsford

25. Mr Balfour’s Poodle

26. 1910

27. Revolution?

28. 1911–1914

29. MCMXIV

30. The Front

31. The Remainder

32. The Grey Dawn

33. The End

Picture Section

List of Illustrations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

On a cool February night in 1900, Pamela Tennant, wife of the industrialist Eddy Tennant, was dining at the London townhouse of her brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady Ribblesdale. The Season had not quite started, but there was already a smattering of balls. By early summer that smattering would become a deluge, as seemingly every house in Mayfair echoed to the strains of bands and England’s elite waltzed round and round camellia-filled ballrooms in what would prove to be the last year of Victoria’s reign. Thus far, London seemed to have escaped the disgusting yellow smog that had blanketed the city for months the year before, and added to the misery of the swathes affected by a bad strain of influenza that year.

Pamela was not really looking forward to the Season that was to come: or to any Season, for that matter. In the five years since she had married, her refusal to play ball socially had provoked several spats with her sister-in-law. Charty Ribblesdale, one of the audacious Tennant sisters who had launched themselves on to London Society twenty years before, could not understand why Pamela should wilfully clam up when faced with new people. Pamela’s refusal to play by any rules but her own mystified Charty and her sisters Margot and Lucy. They thought it alien to the ethos of the Souls: their fascinating, chattering set who affected insouciant, swan-like ease, no matter how frantically their legs paddled beneath the serene surface.

The delightfully haphazard Mary Elcho, Pamela’s eldest sister, was a leading light of the Souls. Pamela, beautiful, brilliant, a master of the pointed phrase, had it in her to joust with the best of them. But she chose not to. Instead, she professed disdain for ‘those murdered Summers’ of the Season, and openly expressed her preference for Wiltshire, where she caravanned across the Downs in the company of her children.¹ It was a very peculiar attitude.

The burly American placed next to Pamela also seemed ill at ease among Society’s hubbub. John Singer Sargent, whose Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose had dazzled the Royal Academy over a decade before, was establishing himself as a society portraitist par excellence, but he had little time for his sitters’ chatter. He preferred quiet times in the Gloucestershire village of Broadway with his sisters and nieces – incidentally not far from where Mary Elcho lived at Stanway. ‘He was very nice & simple, & … very shy & not the least like an American,’ Mary’s friend Frances Horner reported to the artist Edward Burne-Jones after meeting Sargent (for Sargent, although an American by parentage, had been born and raised on the Continent), ‘& he wasn’t very like an artist either! … he hated discussing all his great friends … & talking about his pictures.’²

Perhaps Charty took a certain pleasure in seating Pamela next to Sargent that evening. A taste of her own medicine – and Charty could justify the placement because Sargent was currently working on a portrait of Pamela and her sisters. It had been commissioned by their father, Percy Wyndham, who, with his wife Madeline, had built Clouds in Wiltshire, a house little over a decade old and already famous as a ‘palace of weekending’.³ Pamela, Mary and sweet-natured Madeline Adeane (who so unluckily after a whole brood of girls had finally succeeded in giving birth to a boy only for the premature infant to die the same day) had been sitting to Sargent ever since then.

There was plenty to talk about. No mention was made of the Boer War’s disastrous progress, or Pamela’s elder brother George, Under-Secretary in the War Office, whose triumphant speech in the House of Commons a few weeks before had singlehandedly seemed to redeem the Government’s conduct of the war. All Sargent’s talk was of the portrait. The first sittings had taken place over a year before, in the drawing room of the Wyndhams’ London house, 44 Belgrave Square. Yet just recently, Pamela, in the thick of preparations for one of the tableaux of which she was so fond, received a letter from Percy suggesting that Sargent’s portrait might still not be finished in time for this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. What with the uncertain light at this time of year, and the fact that the Wyndhams would not be in London until after Easter, ‘perhaps this is better’, he concluded.⁴ To Pamela’s mind, this was not better. At this rate, she replied ominously, there was the danger that ‘we shall all be old and haggard before the public sees it’.⁵

Pamela in the flesh made the shortcomings of Pamela in oils all too clear. Sargent told Pamela in his deep, curiously accentless voice (the legacy of his Continental upbringing) that he ‘felt sure’ that Mr Wyndham ‘would not mean it to be as it is’. ‘He is very anxious for some more sittings from me and enquired my plans most pertinaciously,’ Pamela told Percy the next day. Her very presence had seemed to prove an inspiration: ‘“and now I see you oh it must be worked on” – squirming & writhing in his evening suit – “no finish – no finish” – he got quite excited’.⁶

As agreed, Pamela made her way to Sargent’s studio on Tite Street in Chelsea at half-past two the following Saturday. Three or four days was all that Sargent, a phenomenally fast worker, required before she could thankfully flee London once again. ‘He has not repainted the face … He worked on little corners of it and has much improved it I think,’ Pamela said. He had remodelled her nose, taken ‘a little of the colour out of my cheeks, this improves it’, and transformed her hair from ‘all fluffy and rather trivial looking before’ to swept back, which ‘has strengthened it, and made it more like my head really’.

There was one loss. The front of Pamela’s dress, an eye-catching blue, had, Sargent said decisively, to go. It was, she explained to her parents, ‘disturbing to the scheme … And much as I regret my pretty blue front I quite see it was rather preclusive of other things in the picture as a whole. For instance both sisters seem to gain by its removal – one’s eye is not checked & held by it … My face also seems to gain significance by its removal.’⁷ Mary, who had always been suspicious of Pamela’s colour choice, must have been relieved: ‘blue can be so ugly don’t you think?’ she had complained to their mother when Pamela had first announced her sartorial intentions.⁸

Uncharacteristically, Madeline was causing trouble. At the Ribblesdales’, Sargent had been adamant that ‘Mrs Adeane in particular’ needed to be changed, requiring a further week of sittings. The year before, Charlie Adeane’s patience with ‘that blessed picture’ had worn thin when Madeline had caught influenza while sitting for it. Now, with Madeline still recovering from her infant son’s death, Charlie Adeane, as protective as he was devoted, might prove the spanner in the works. ‘I hope you will use your influence if Charlie is against it,’ Pamela implored her father; ‘it seems a pity if it is so near it shouldn’t be managed.’⁹ Madeline Wyndham, who could never refuse anything to her ‘Benjamina’, as she called her youngest daughter, replied, ‘I think it would amuse her – & I should trust it was warmer in Sargent’s Studio than it is in [the] large drawing room at 44 this time of year without hot water or hot air which I am sure Sargent’s studio has … you ought write to Madeline & beg her to go up for a week she can be snug as a bug in my bedroom and she & Charlie can be there.’¹⁰

In art, as in life, Mary was proving difficult to pin down. Marooned among the rugs, tapestries and antiques that formed the paraphernalia of an artist’s studio,¹¹ as Sargent, muttering unintelligibly under his breath, charged to and from the easel (placed, as always, next to his sitters so that when he stood back he might view portrait and person in the same light),¹² Pamela had to exercise all her diplomatic skill when asked what she thought of Sargent’s depiction of Mary. ‘I could say honestly I liked it,’ she told her parents, ‘but I did not think it “contemplative” enough in expression for her.’ And ‘no sooner than I had said the word “contemplative” than he caught at it. “Dreamy – I must make it a little more dreamy!”’ All it needed, apparently, was a touch to Mary’s hooded eyelids, which Pamela agreed were ‘a most characteristic feature of her face’; but ‘of course he will not do it till she sits to him’, she concluded, with not a little exasperation.¹³

Astonishingly Mary – nicknamed ‘Napoleon’ by her friends for her tendency to make monumental plans that rarely came to pass, and who seemed, in the view of her dear friend Arthur Balfour, ‘to combine into one disastrous whole all that there is of fatiguing in the occupations of mother, a woman of fashion, and a sick nurse’¹⁴ – got herself to London, and to Tite Street, in time for the painting to be completed so that it could be displayed at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition that year.

The Wyndham Sisters, to the gratification of all (and doubtless Pamela in particular) was heralded as Sargent’s masterpiece. For The Times, it was simply ‘the greatest picture which has appeared for many years on the walls of the Royal Academy’. Bertie, the elderly Prince of Wales, who had honed his eye for beauty over many years, dubbed the portrait ‘The Three Graces’.

It was, crowed the Saturday Review, ‘one of those truces in the fight where beauty has unquestionably slipped in’.¹⁵ Though we now think of Sargent as the Annie Leibovitz of his day – intently flattering at all costs – at that time people did not see it in quite the same way. ‘In all the history of painting’, commented the critic D. S. MacColl in the Saturday Review in 1898, ‘hostile observation has never been pushed so far as by Mr. Sargent. I do not mean stupid deforming spite, humorous caricature, or diabolic possession … rather a cold accusing eye bent on the world.’ MacColl likened Sargent to ‘the prosecuting lawyer or denouncing critics’. His work made the viewer ‘first repelled by its contempt, then fascinated by its life’.¹⁶ ‘I chronicle,’ declared Sargent, ‘I do not judge.’¹⁷ The dazzling results seduced the aristocracy, but they commissioned him with trepidation. ‘It is positively dangerous to sit to Sargent,’ declared one apprehensive society matron; ‘it’s taking your face in your hands.’¹⁸

One oft-repeated criticism, that Sargent did no more than replicate his sitters’ glamour, is perhaps a misunderstanding of the emptiness that his brush was so often revealing. To defeat any accusation that The Wyndham Sisters is simply a pretty picture, one needs only to look at the sisters’ hands. Pamela’s fingers imperiously flick outwards as she lounges back on the sofa, in the most obviously central position as always, unblinkingly staring the viewer down; Mary’s thin hands worry at each other as she perches on the edge of the sofa and gazes ‘dreamily’ off into the distance showing all her ‘delicate intellectual beauty’. Then there is Madeline, who uses her left hand to support herself against the sofa, while her right hand, quelled by sorrow, lies in her lap, patiently facing upwards, cupped to receive the blessings that fate, in recent months, had so conspicuously denied her. Underneath the serenity is the wildness of the Wyndhams, the foreign strain from their mother’s French-Irish blood, that people would remark on time and time again.

Before the sittings began, before the composition had been decided upon, Madeline and Percy Wyndham had arranged a dinner at Belgrave Square for Sargent to meet his sitters properly. Watching the family at home, Sargent had caught on immediately. Rather than paint these women in his studio, as was the norm, he set them in the drawing room of their parents’ house. As one’s eye becomes accustomed to the cool gloom behind the seated figures swathed in layers of white organza, taffeta, tulle, one can make out in the background the portrait of their mother that hung in that room: George Frederic Watts’s portrait of Madeline Wyndham, resplendent in a sunflower-splashed gown, that had caused such a stir at the Grosvenor Gallery a quarter of a century before. Through the darkness, behind Mary, Madeline and Pamela, gleams Madeline Wyndham. So in art, as in life. Sargent had not missed a thing.

ONE
‘Worse Than 100 Boys’

The eldest daughter of the portrait, Mary Constance Wyndham, was born to Percy and Madeline in London, in summer’s dog days, on 3 August 1862. Percy, called ‘the Hon’ble P’ by his friends, was the favoured younger son of the vastly wealthy Lord Leconfield of Petworth House in Sussex. The Conservative Member for West Cumberland, he had a kind heart and the family traits of an uncontrollable temper and an inability to dissemble. It was true of him, as was said of his father, that he had ‘no power of disguising his feelings, if he liked one person more than another it was simply written on his Countenance’.¹

Percy’s Irish wife Madeline was different. Known in infancy as ‘the Sunny Baby’,² she was renowned for her expansive warmth. ‘She is an Angel … She has the master-key of life – love – which unlocks everything for her and makes one feel her immortal,’ said Georgiana Burne-Jones, who, like her husband Edward, was among Madeline’s closest friends.³ Yet in courtship Percy had spoken much of Madeline’s reserve – ‘you sweet mystery’, he called her,⁴ one of very few to recognize that her personality seemed to be shut up in different boxes, to some of which only she held the key.

Percy and Madeline were both twenty-seven years old. In two years of marriage, they had established a pattern of dividing their time between Petworth, Cockermouth Castle – a family property in Percy’s constituency given to them by his father for their use – and fashionable Belgrave Square, at no. 44. Madeline’s mother, Pamela, Lady Campbell, came over from Ireland for the birth, and during Madeline’s labour sat anxiously with Percy in a little room off her daughter’s bedroom. The labour was relatively short – barely four and a half hours – but it was difficult. Lady Campbell had threatened to call her own daughter ‘Rhinocera’ when she was born because of her incredible size. Mary, at birth, weighed an eye-watering 11 pounds. ‘[T]he size and hardness of the baby’s head (for which I am afraid I am to blame)’, Percy told his sister Fanny with apologetic pride, had required the use of forceps to bring the child into the world. ‘Of course we should have liked a boy but I am very grateful to God that matters have gone so well,’ Percy concluded.⁵

Percy and Madeline’s daughter held within her person the blood of Ireland and England – a physical embodiment of the vexed union between the kingdoms. Mary grew up on tales of her maternal great-grandfather, Lord Edward FitzGerald, hero and martyr of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Her own London childhood was punctuated by acts of violence by the newly formed republican Fenian Brotherhood. In 1844 Parliament had debated, at length, the motion ‘Ireland is occupied, not governed’. An ambitious young Benjamin Disraeli drew for the Commons a picture of ‘a starving population, an absentee aristocracy … an alien church, and … the weakest executive in the world’.⁶ While the novelist Disraeli may have been exercising a little artistic licence – certainly by 1873 only 20 per cent of Ireland’s aristocracy were technically absentee⁷ – fundamentally his depiction was, and remained, true. Mary and her siblings were brought up to mourn the fate of ‘darling Ireland’.⁸ With a Catholic strain passed down from Lord Edward’s French wife, they sympathized with the Catholic masses. Mary described herself and her younger brother George in childhood as ‘the Fenians of the family’.⁹

Lady Edward – ‘La Belle Pamela’ – was officially the adopted daughter of Madame de Genlis, educationalist disciple of Rousseau. In all probability, Pamela was de Genlis’ biological child, by her lover Philippe duc d’Orléans. Orléans was Louis XVI’s cousin. He voted for the King’s execution during the French Revolution, then was guillotined himself when his royal blood rendered him counter-revolutionary. Mary’s was an exotic heritage, romantic, royal, with a hint of disreputableness. Like all her siblings, she was proud of it.

Mary was born at the cusp of a new age, as a myriad of developments – some welcome, others not – forced Britain and her class to reassess their identities. She was born within five years of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the famous Huxley–Wilberforce debate on evolution, which her father Percy had attended;¹⁰ the 1857 Indian Rebellion which led to control over the sub-continent being passed from the British East India Company to the British Crown; and Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s discovery of the Nile’s source. When Mary was born, the working classes (and all women) were still unenfranchised – only one in five men could vote. Neither William Gladstone nor Disraeli, those giants of the late Victorian political arena, had yet formed their own ministries. Upper-class women could not appear in public without a chaperone. During her childhood, Joseph Bazalgette built the Victoria and Albert Embankments to cover the new sewage system that meant the Thames was no longer the city’s chamberpot. The telephone and the first traffic light (short-lived, it was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868, only to explode in 1869, gravely wounding the policeman operating it) were inventions of her early youth. Mary, who as a child had fossils shown and explained to her by her father, was born into a world ebullient in its capacity for exploration and invention but, in post-Darwinian terms, questing and unsure. The British were becoming, as Charles Dilke’s bestselling Greater Britain said, a ‘race girdling the earth’,¹¹ but within their own country the patrician male’s stranglehold on power was being loosened. Mary, hopeful, endlessly curious, surrounded by novelty and change, was a child of that age.

Above all, Mary was the child of a love match – on one side, at least. It had been a coup de foudre for shy, crotchety Percy when as 1860 dawned he met Madeline Campbell in Ireland. Madeline was beautiful, dark and voluptuous, but she was more than that. Her earthy physicality exuded life, and enhanced it in others. ‘People in her presence feel like trees or birds at their best, singing or flourishing according to their own natures with an easy exuberance … she has a peculiar gift for making this world glorious to all who meet her in it,’ said her son George.¹²

Percy and Madeline were engaged in London in July, and married in Ireland in October. During a brief interim period of separation, as Madeline returned to Ireland, Percy gave voice to his infatuation in sheaves of letters, still breathtaking in their intensity, that daily swooped across the Irish Sea. ‘[D]ear Glory of my Life sweet darling, dear Cobra, dear gull with the changing eyes, most precious, rare rich Madeline sweet Madge of the soft cheeks’,¹³ said Percy, pouring forth his love, longing and dreams for the future. With barely concealed lust he begged Madeline to describe her bedroom so he could imagine her preparing her ‘dear body’ for bed, and recalled, with attempted lasciviousness charming in its naivety, their brief moments of physical contact – a kiss stolen on a balcony at a ball; a moment knocked against each other in a bumpy carriage ride. ‘[I]f these letters don’t make you know how I love you, let there be no more pens, ink and paper in the world.’¹⁴

No corresponding letters from Madeline survive. Brief fragments of reported speech suggest she was more world-weary than her besotted swain. ‘Oh Percy, Percy, I don’t think you know very much about me, but that’s no matter,’ she told him. Some of her descendants think that there may have been a failed love affair in her past; if so, she successfully, and characteristically, erased all trace of it.¹⁵ Her reserve only strengthened Percy’s attraction.

Madeline was well-born, if of colourful ancestry, but she had no money to speak of. Her widowed mother had brought up twelve children on an army pension. Madeline would receive just £50 a year on her mother’s death.¹⁶ The infatuated Percy persuaded his forbidding father – who succumbed immediately to Madeline’s charm on meeting her – to give his blessing to the match, and to dower his bride. A month before the Wyndhams married, £35,727 16s 5d in government bonds (equivalent to around £2.75 million today) was transferred from Lord Leconfield’s Bank of England account to the trustees of Percy and Madeline’s marriage settlement.¹⁷ The trust was to provide for Madeline and any younger children of her marriage. From the capital’s interest Madeline would receive annually a personal allowance, known as pin money, of around £300. A provision stipulated that if the marriage proved childless, the money would devolve back to the Leconfields. Otherwise there was no indication that Madeline had not brought this money herself to the marriage.¹⁸ A baronet’s genteelly impoverished seventh daughter had been transformed, in effect, into an heiress of the first water.

The provision was never exercised. Percy and Madeline had five adored children over the course of a decade – the three girls, and the boys George and Guy. ‘Ever since your birth has my Heart & Soul loved you & laughed with you & wept with you … sang to you to sleep – & anguished with you in all your sorrows …’ wrote Madeline Wyndham to her youngest, Pamela.¹⁹ She might have made the comment to any of her children, all of whom Percy deemed ‘confidential’, his highest form of praise.²⁰ Madeline Wyndham had been raised in a Rousseauesque environment of loving simplicity. The Campbell girls had no governess – doubtless partly for financial reasons – and were encouraged to educate themselves, reading whatever they chose, and making off into the fields around Woodview, their rambling house in Stillorgan, then a small village outside Dublin, to explore the natural world. Percy, raised in frigid splendour by evangelical parents who banned everything from novels to waltzing, was entranced upon first visiting Woodview. He vowed that his children would be raised in a similarly warm, loving and natural milieu. And so, despite an aristocratic lifestyle, the loving intensity of life among the Wyndhams was almost bourgeois.²¹

Mary, like all her siblings, was born into privilege’s heartland. The family’s life was played out against a backdrop of staff – butler, housekeeper, footmen, housemaids, cook, kitchen maids, stable boys, gardeners and the ‘odd-man’ who lit the house’s lamps each evening as dusk fell. Only the absence of this – mostly silent – audience would have been remarkable. Madeline Wyndham never travelled anywhere without her lady’s maid Easton (known as ‘Eassy’), nor Percy without his Irish valet Thompson (‘Tommy’). Their children’s retinue included their nanny – the magnificently named Horsenail – nursemaid Emma Drake and, when a little older, governesses and tutors.

Society – of which the Wyndhams were impeccably a part – was a close-knit, interconnected group of ‘the upper 10,000’, four hundred or so families constituting Britain’s ruling class. To outsiders it was an impenetrable, corporate mass with ‘a common freemasonry of blood, a common education, common pursuits, common ideas, a common dialect, a common religion, and – what more than anything else binds men together – a common prestige … growled at occasionally, but on the whole conceded, and even, it must be owned, secretly liked by the country at large’, said the Radical Bernard Cracroft in 1867.²² During the mid-Victorian years, when the Queen and Prince Albert set the model of domestic rectitude, evangelism had a firm grip on the upper classes. Yet by the 1860s Darwinism had loosened that hold; and a Prince of Wales who liked a good time had come of age. Bertie’s fast-living, hard-gambling Marlborough House Set became known for its sybaritic tendencies. Meanwhile, Percy and Madeline were part of a set considered markedly bohemian since, in the words of the novelist and designer Alice Comyns Carr, they ‘took a certain pride in being the first members of Society to bring the people of their own set into friendly contact with the distinguished folk of art and literature’.²³

Madeline and her female friends – aristocrats all – dressed in flowing gowns, tied their hair back simply and draped themselves in scarves and bangles. Madeline herself was reputedly the first woman in England to smoke, with a habit of three Turkish cigarettes a day, one after each meal.²⁴ Her friend Georgie Sumner dyed her hair red to resemble more closely ‘stunners’ like Lizzie Siddal, the Pre-Raphaelite muse. They read the bibles of Pre-Raphaelitism, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Tennyson’s poem of the same title, and, in the setting of their own family seats – Scottish castles and English stately homes – posed in medieval dress for Julia Margaret Cameron’s camera. They frequented Little Holland House, home of Cameron’s sister, Sara Prinsep, where G. F. Watts was literally the artist in residence (he moved in during a period of illness, and never left); and Leighton House, the creation of Frederic Leighton, later President of the Royal Academy. They considered Burne-Jones, as yet unrecognized in the wider world, to be a genius. Madeline was a talented amateur artist, particularly in the decorative arts, with a near-perfect eye. In 1872 she helped to found the School of Art Needlework with her friend Princess Christian, a daughter of the Queen. In later life, she studied enamelling under that craft’s master, Alexander Fisher. All the artists Madeline knew thought she had a true artist’s soul. Beauty could cause her ‘thoughts that fill my heart to bursting’, she told Watts.²⁵

For the Pre-Raphaelites and their heirs, beauty’s pursuit was not indulgence but necessity. Their dreamy art, born out of the Industrial Revolution, was intended to counteract, even arrest, the modern world’s ugliness. For Burne-Jones’s great friend and business partner William Morris, whose Oxford Street store, Morris & Co., was the favoured emporium of the English aesthetic classes, this philosophy led him to political activism and ardent socialism. Burne-Jones was content to improve society by feeding its soul through its eyes. The provision of art to cultivate and inspire the masses was now part of civic responsibility, reflected in the large public art galleries constructed in urban centres of the industrial north.

Mary’s early childhood in Cumberland was like a Pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life. The Wyndhams lived at Cockermouth Castle, a strange, half-ruined property on the River Cocker’s banks, until 1869. Afterwards they rented Isel Hall, an Elizabethan manor a few miles away. Madeline Wyndham took her children out among the heather to draw and paint, and read aloud to them Arthurian tales. At night she sang berceuses, French lullabies learnt from her own mother, and left them to sleep, soothed by the sound of the Cocker’s rushing waters and owls hooting in the dark. She had miniature suits of armour made for George and Guy. The children played at knights and damsels with Mary dressed in her mother’s long flowing skirts.²⁶ A portrait of eight-year-old Mary in Cumberland by the Wyndhams’ friend Val Prinsep, in the flat, chalky style characteristic of their artistic circle, shows a tall, round-eyed beautiful child. In wide straw hat and loose mustard-yellow dress, she gazes directly at the viewer, bundling in her skirts armfuls of flowers.²⁷

One of Mary’s earliest adventures in childhood was scrambling after her father through thick heather up Skiddaw, the mountain dominating the Cumbrian skyline, with a trail of dogs in search of grouse; then sleeping overnight in a little lodge perched on the mountainside.²⁸ In adulthood, Mary wrote lyrically of ‘the club & stag, the moss, the oak & beech fern, bog myrtle, & grass of Parnassus – Skiddaw in his splendid majesty – covered with “purple patches” (of heather) with deep greens & russet reds & swept by the shadows of the clouds – my heart leaps up – when I behold – Skiddaw – against the sky …’.²⁹ Mary considered herself a lifelong ‘pagan’, fearlessly finding freedom in wildness. She attributed these qualities to her Cumberland childhood. She mourned ‘beloved Isel’ when the Wyndhams finally gave it up in 1876. Ever after, Cumberland was a lost Arcadia to her.

When George was born in August 1863, Lady Campbell told Percy he ‘deserved a boy for having so graciously received the girl last year!’³⁰ In 1865 the Wyndhams had another boy, Guy. With two brothers so close to her in age, Mary was practically a boy herself. She learnt to ride on a donkey given to the children by Madeline when they were toddlers,³¹ was taught to hunt and hawk by her father’s valet Tommy, and was keeping up with the hounds at just nine years old, even if, on that first occasion, she told her mother ruefully, ‘I did not see the fox.’³² She kept pet rooks which she fed on live snails, and begged her mother for permission to be taken down a Cumberland coal mine by her brothers’ tutor.³³ Some summers, the Wyndhams visited Madeline’s favourite sister, Emily Ellis, at her home in Hyères, the French town at the westernmost point of the Côte d’Azur, which was becoming increasingly popular with the British. There Mary scrambled willingly along the narrow tunnels of the Grotte des Fées into a cavern of stalagmites and stalactites. While the other members of her party sat and ate oranges, she caught ‘a dear dear little soft downy long eared bat’ which, she informed her mother, in her father’s absence she had installed in his dressing room: ‘all day he sleeps hung up to the ceiling by his two hind legs’.³⁴

High spirited to the point of being uncontrollable, the children exhausted a stream of governesses. At Deal Castle in Kent, home of the Wyndhams’ friend Admiral Clanwilliam, Captain of the Cinque Ports, marine sergeants were deputed to drill the children on the ramparts to tire them out.³⁵ Their arrival in Belgrave Square’s communal garden, clad in fishermen’s jerseys, whooping and hollering on being released from their lessons, prompted celebration among their peers and anxiety among their playmates’ parents. At least one couple instructed their governess not to let her charges play with ‘those wild Wyndham children’.³⁶ In Mary’s stout babyhood Percy nicknamed her ‘Chang’ after a popular sensation, an 8-foot-tall Chinese who entertained visitors – for a fee – at Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall. Mary grew into a ‘strapping lass’. ‘How well and strong I was, never tired,’ she said in later life, now thin and enervated, recalling wistfully her days as a rambunctious, lanky ringleader, strongest and most daring of the three siblings. ‘I was worse than 100 boys.’³⁷

The fairytale had a darker side. Madeline Wyndham concealed beneath her calm, loving exterior a mind seething with dread. She had a paranoid strain capable of rendering her literally insensible from anxiety. A childhood of loss – her father’s death when she was twelve, a beloved elder brother’s five years after that – during the years of the ‘Great Hunger’, the famine that, by death and emigration, diminished Ireland’s population by up to a quarter,³⁸ had a formative effect upon her. She was intensely spiritual, mystical and religious. Her deep foreboding of fate compounded rather than diminished that faith: ‘the memory of death gave to the passing hours their supreme value for her’, said her friend Edith Olivier.³⁹ Olivier had looked through Madeline’s vellum-bound commonplace books to find them crammed with dark thoughts. ‘All strange and terrible things are welcome, but comforts we despise,’ reads one entry.⁴⁰ ‘God to her is, I think, pre-eminently the “King of Glory”,’ said Madeline’s son George in later years,⁴¹ but in Madeline’s mind glory came as much from darkness as from light.

When, during the Wyndhams’ courtship, Madeline had confessed to bleak moods, Percy simply denied them. He did not think she was permanently in ‘low spirits’, he said, advising against articulating such thoughts lest ‘the hearer should think them stronger than they are and permanently there when in reality they are not’. For Percy, anxieties that seemed all consuming at the time dissipated within ‘half an hour’, a day at most, like clouds puffed across the sky.⁴² In fact, Madeline’s volatile moods and her sporadic nervous collapses suggest that a strain of manic depression ran through the family – what George called the ‘special neurotic phenomena of his family’.⁴³ The impact on her children was intense. She invested in them all her apocalyptic hopes, determined they should succeed and prove her family’s merit, convinced the world conspired to bring them down. It is telling that, despite her undoubted love for her mother, Mary described Percy as ‘one of the people – if not the one that I loved best in the world – who was unfailingly tender & who loved me more than anyone did and without whose sympathy I have never imagined life’.⁴⁴

The Wyndhams’ tribe naturally split between Mary, George and Guy, the trio born in the early 1860s, and the ‘little girls’, Madeline (known as ‘Mananai’, from what was obviously a childish attempt to pronounce her name) born in 1869 and Pamela in 1871.⁴⁵ As a consequence of Lord Leconfield’s death in 1869 their early childhoods were also markedly different.

Leconfield, intensely disliking his heir Henry, left everything that was not tied up in an entail to Percy. He created a trust for Percy and his heirs of a Sussex estate (shortly afterwards sold to Henry for £48,725 8s 10d),⁴⁶ land in Yorkshire, Cumberland and Ireland, £15,000 worth of life insurance and £16,000 worth of shares in turnpike roads and gas companies, and made provision for the trustees to raise a further £20,000 from other Sussex land. Percy received outright the family’s South Australian estates (bought by Percy’s maverick grandfather, the third Earl of Egremont, Turner’s patron and three-times owner of the Derby winner, for his estranged wife); most of the household effects from East Lodge, a Brighton family property, including thirty oil paintings and all the plate; the plate from Grove, another family property; and the first choice of five carriage horses. Leconfield’s will was a calculated, devastating snub to Henry. For a while, the Wyndhams continued to visit Henry and his wife Constance at Petworth, but soon enough the brothers had a spectacular row over the port after dinner. The resulting estrangement between the families lasted for almost a decade,⁴⁷ despite all the attempts of their wives, still close friends, to heal it.

Leconfield’s death provoked the Wyndhams’ move to Isel from Cockermouth Castle, which now belonged to Henry; and his will made them rich. Percy and Madeline now commissioned Leighton and his architect George Aitchison to decorate Belgrave Square’s entrance hall. The Cymbalists was a magnificent mural painted above the central staircase – five life-sized, classical figures in a dance against a gold background. Above that was Aitchison’s delicate frieze of flowers, foliage and wild birds in pinks, greens, greys and powder blue. Even the most unobservant visitor could see this was an artistic house.

Shortly after Leconfield’s death, Percy visited his sister Blanche and her husband Lord Mayo in India, where Mayo was Viceroy. (Mayo had previously served as Ireland’s Chief Secretary for almost a decade, and it was Blanche who had introduced Percy to Madeline, when Percy visited them in Ireland.)⁴⁸ While Percy was abroad, Lady Campbell, in her seventies, was suddenly taken ill. Madeline Wyndham hastened to Ireland with newborn Mananai, Guy and Horsenail, leaving Mary and George, with their governess Mademoiselle Grivel, at Mrs Stanley’s boarding house in Keswick, Cumberland. ‘… I am so sorry that dear Granny is so ill for it must make you so unhappy. George and I will try to be very good indeed so as to make you happy,’ Mary wrote to her mother.⁴⁹ Lady Campbell died shortly afterwards, and Madeline made her way back to her elder children: ‘so glad I shall be to see you my little darling … you were so good to me when I was so knocked down by hearing such sad news’.⁵⁰ Almost precisely upon Madeline and Percy’s reuniting, Madeline fell pregnant. Pamela Genevieve Adelaide was born in January 1871, at Belgrave Square like all her siblings.

The little girls were born into the age of Gladstone. In 1867, Disraeli had pushed Lord Derby’s Tory ministry into ‘the leap in the dark’: the Reform Act that gave the vote to all male householders in the towns, as well as male lodgers who paid rent of £10 a year or more for unfurnished accommodation, almost doubling the electorate. In the boroughs, the hitherto unenfranchised working classes were now in the majority. The debate over the Act was fought with passion on both sides: for most, democracy was a demoniacal prospect signifying mob rule. A series of unruly popular protests organized by the Radical-led Reform League, with hordes brandishing red flags and wearing the cap of liberty marching on Trafalgar Square, did little to dispel these fears. In a notorious incident of July 1866 – just a stone’s throw from Belgrave Square – a mob of 200,000 tore down Hyde Park’s railings when the Government tried to close it to public meetings, overwhelming the police ‘like flies before the waiter’s napkin’.⁵¹ Contemporary theorists were concerned that vox populi would become vox diaboli. In The English Constitution Walter Bagehot expressed his fear that ‘both our political parties will bid for the support of the working man … I can conceive of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision and compete for the office of executing it.’⁵²

The equally bleak predictions by Lord Cranborne, later Marquess of Salisbury – who resigned in protest from Derby’s ministry upon the passing of the Act – seemed confirmed when the electorate returned Gladstone in the 1868 elections, at the head of the first truly Liberal ministry, a disparate band of Radicals of the industrial north, Whig grandees, some still speaking in their eighteenth-century ancestors’ curious drawl, and Dissenters, the non-conformists who wanted to loosen the hold of the established Church. Gladstone immediately announced his God-given mission to ‘pacify Ireland’ (provoked, in part, by the Fenian bombing of Clerkenwell Prison the previous year that had killed twelve civilians and injured forty more)⁵³ and set about disestablishing the Irish Church, while dealing several blows to the hegemony of the British landed classes by introducing competitive exams for the civil service, abolishing army commissions and removing the religious ‘Test’ required for fellows of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities to enable non-Anglicans to hold those posts.

Percy, like his father before him, was a Tory of the oldest sort, who believed that his class’s God-given duty to govern through wise paternalistic rule not just the tenantry on their estates but the country as a whole was under attack. For Percy, like most Tories, authority was ‘like a sombre fortress, holding down an unpredictable population that might, at any moment, lay siege to it’.⁵⁴

In 1867, Percy had commissioned Watts to paint Madeline’s portrait. The portrait took three years to complete, partly because painter and sitter, kindred artistic souls, enjoyed their conversations so much they were reluctant for them to end.⁵⁵ In a nod to classical portraiture the statuesque Madeline, in her early thirties, gazes down at the viewer from a balustraded terrace. A mass of laurel, signifying nobility and glory, flourishes behind her; in the foreground a vase of magnolias denotes magnificence. Her gown is loose and splashed with sunflowers, proclaiming her allegiance to the world of the Pre-Raphaelites; the gaze from hooded eyes under swooping dark brows direct and forthright. The portrait, hung in Belgrave Square’s drawing room, made its first public appearance – to quite a splash – some seven years later, on the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, a private venture of the Wyndhams’ friends Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay on London’s New Bond Street. It caught the eye of Henry James, recently arrived in England, reviewing the exhibition for the Galaxy. He told his readers of his companion’s comment: ‘It is what they call a “sumptuous” picture … That is, the lady looks as if she had thirty thousand a year.’ ‘It is true that she does,’ said James, praising nonetheless ‘the very handsome person whom the painter has depicted … dressed in a fashion which will never be wearisome; a simple yet splendid robe, in the taste of no particular period – of all periods’.⁵⁶

James had seen that the aristocrat effortlessly superseded the artist. And, although it was kept well hidden beneath her friendships with artists, her undoubted talent and her air of vague, bohemian warmth, Madeline Wyndham was acutely aware of social gradations. ‘You and Papa are rather stupid about knowing who people are!!’ she told Mary, half jokingly, half in frustration as she discussed the ‘belongings’ of fellow guests at a house party – by which she meant their connections and titles.⁵⁷ She assiduously cultivated the boring Princess Christian as a friend. ‘She is a humbug,’ declared the middle-class Philip Burne-Jones (son of Edward and Georgiana), finding that Madeline’s warmth towards him as a family friend cooled rapidly when he made plain his hope that he could court Mary, with whom he had been in love since childhood.⁵⁸

It has been said that Madeline, with her artful eye, the creator of Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house into which the Wyndhams moved in 1885, is the model for Mrs Gereth in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, the story of a jewel-like house created out of the ‘perfect accord and beautiful life together’ of the Gereths: ‘twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a long sunny harvest of taste and curiosity’. Mrs Gereth is an unscrupulous obsessive who tries to manipulate her son into marrying a worthy chatelaine, then sets the house aflame rather than see it pass into the wrong hands. If Madeline Wyndham is the model, there is no clearer indication of the steel within her soul.⁵⁹

Extravagantly generous – she kept open table at Belgrave Square, with sometimes forty people unexpectedly sitting down to lunch60 – Madeline never spoke of the sudden change in her fortunes brought about by marriage, only fondly recollecting an Irish childhood in a ‘nest of lovely sisters’ visiting relations in pony and trap.⁶¹ Her ambitions for her family were tied up with her anxiety to prove that Percy’s gamble in marrying her had exalted his clan. When her daughters married, she was terrified that one might bear a child with some ‘defect’.⁶² It is clear that she feared what might be latent in her blood.

In the early 1870s, Madeline had an affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a handsome poet and Percy’s cousin and close friend who had spent part of his childhood living in a cottage on the Petworth estate. Blunt and his wife Lady Anne spent much of their time travelling in Africa and the Middle East, and bought an Egyptian estate just outside Cairo named Sheykh Obeyd, after the Bedouin saint Obeyd buried in the grounds.⁶³ They spoke vernacular Arabic, and Blunt, a self-professed iconoclast, adopted Bedouin dress even in England.⁶⁴ At Crabbet Park, Blunt’s Sussex estate, they founded a successful stud breeding Arab horses. The annual sale and garden party was a fixture of the Season: ‘everybody who was anybody in London went in those days to Crabbet for the sale of the Arabs [sic],’ wrote the journalist Katharine Tynan, recalling Janey Morris, Oscar Wilde and Jane Cobden, radical daughter of the reformer Richard Cobden, wandering through the beautiful grounds.⁶⁵

The intrepid Arabists: Wilfrid Blunt and Lady Anne Blunt in the late 1870s.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century Blunt was notorious in political circles as an anti-imperialist troublemaker. Socially he was regarded with equal suspicion as a lothario, capable of seducing any man’s wife. Yet this inveterate womanizer’s diaries, in which he recorded every conquest (albeit sometimes a little embroidered), show him as nothing so much as a perplexed cork buffeted on the waves of strong women’s personalities. With each affair, Blunt made grand plans for a lifelong passion. Almost invariably, his paramours called it off, returning to their husbands enlivened by their brief dalliance.

Madeline and Wilfrid had known each other for many years when they tipped from friendship into ‘passionate fulfilment’, in Blunt’s words. He had always found Madeline seductive – ‘a tall strong woman, such as are the fashion now; no porcelain figure like the beauties of the last century, nor yet the dull classic marble our fathers loved’⁶⁶ – and their affair seems in large part provoked by intense mutual physical attraction. Blunt dressed it up as a meeting of two artistic minds. Their piecemeal dalliances – romantic visits to Watts’s studio in London and trysts among Hyères’ olive groves – provided ‘something apart’ from Madeline’s sometimes ‘overpowering’ domestic life.

Blunt maintained that the affair did not affect Madeline’s love for her husband and children: ‘what she gave to me was not a plunder robbed from any other. Her tenderness was no mere weakness of the heart, but its strength rather, proving its wealth …’.⁶⁷ Wilfrid rarely saw things clearly, and this was no exception. Among his papers is a photograph of Madeline with Pamela upon her lap. Madeline is in mourning, presumably for her brother-in-law Lord Mayo, the Viceroy, who was assassinated while visiting a penal colony in the Andaman Islands in 1872. She wears an elaborate dark hat that shades her hooded eyes. Her features have been refined with age. She appears leaner and finer than Watts’s voluptuous beauty of three years before, and almost sad. Tousle-haired Pamela sits on her lap, eyes skyward as though she is trying to glimpse her mother’s face even as Madeline grasps her daughter firmly around her stout waist. On the back of this photograph is a note in Madeline’s handwriting: fragmentary, it appears to have been written in a hurry. Wilfrid must not come to look for her until later. ‘I think [Percy] is not happy at finding me not alone he has not said it but I think it … my heart fails me … you have chosen the lowest oh it makes me so sad – I don’t know why my heart is not up to it I have no courage …’⁶⁸

In 1873 the Wyndhams rented Château Saint-Pierre, a neo-gothic pile near to Emily and Charley Ellis in Hyères. They settled their children there with nurse, governess and tutor, and left for several months’ travel across France and Italy, sightseeing and buying art. This was the Wyndhams’ longest absence – by far – from their children throughout their childhood. Undoubtedly the trip was intended as a second honeymoon to reunite them. The following year, Percy took the lease of Wilbury Park in Newton Toney, some 10 miles from Salisbury on the Wiltshire Downs. In later life, Madeline wrote her daughters impassioned warnings (scored with underlining and written in her trademark purple ink) about the dangers of drifting from their husbands. It seems she was speaking from personal experience. Wilbury, which provided easy access to London by train from Amesbury, allowing Madeline to maintain her life among the city’s aristocratic art crowd, and offered excellent hunting and shooting and reasonable trout-fishing for Percy, was to arrest that drift.⁶⁹

The affair finally ended only in 1875. Madeline asked Wilfrid to return to friendship. ‘What is this prate of friendship?’ wrote Wilfrid furiously in a sonnet, ‘To Juliet’. In his diary, sore-pawed, he attacked Madeline as ‘a pottery goddess … I do not think her beautiful, or wise, or good. Her beauty is a little too refined, her wisdom too fantastic, her goodness too selfish …’⁷⁰ Trying to forget his fantasies of a life together with her, he dusted himself off and attempted to dismiss the affair: ‘it was all pleasure, of a high sensual kind, heroic in its tenderness and with no afterthought of pain. Its departure caused no unbearable sorrow. Even when it had ended finally as passion I did not grieve for her because I knew she did not grieve for me …’⁷¹

A veil was drawn over the incident. Percy never spoke of it. But between Madeline and Wilfrid there remained some friction. Despite Wilfrid’s surmises, Madeline does not seem to have escaped entirely unscarred. Many years later she advised Pamela that the power ‘not to fret over spilt milk is a great faculty it almost amounts to wisdom’. Years of ‘experience & hard toil’ had taught her to let go of the regret ‘that kills’.⁷² Madeline did not say what that regret was. One can hazard a guess.

TWO
Wilbury

In the late 1870s, with relations once again on an even keel, the Blunts visited the Wyndhams at Wilbury. As Wilfrid left, he kissed Mary on the cheek: ‘in a cousinly way’.¹ Mary blushed. Afterwards, Madeline scolded her with unusual and uncharacteristic vehemence. The incident, notable enough for Mary to remember it twenty years later, suggests that the adolescent knew something of the affair just past. It is also a rare chink in the Wyndham armour, a moment when one of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’² – in his words – lets slip something suggesting their family life was not so perpetually sunlit as they maintained.

Percy and Madeline’s devotion to their children, and their disregard for convention, generated intense familial closeness. George spoke of ‘the Wyndham-religion’;³ Mary’s daughter Cynthia explained that ‘Family love was almost a religion with the Wyndhams.’⁴ A legendary anecdote – familiar to almost all their contemporaries – concerned Percy impatiently shushing his collected dinner guests, hissing, ‘Hush. Hush! George is going to speak!’ as his schoolboy son prepared to give the table his views.⁵ Ettie Desborough, close friends with Mary and George, described the clan as being bred up with the pride of Plantagenets.⁶ Their loyalty was fearsome. They would never listen to criticism of their own, far less give it.

At the time of Wilfrid’s visit to Wilbury, Mary was in her mid-teens, awkward, lanky, childish for her age. She was devoted to her dog Crack, a thirteenth-birthday present, and her pet rat Snowy.⁷ She adored the caricatures of Dickens and the romances of Sir Walter Scott. She had inherited her mother’s artistic talent, and spent hours making elaborate cards and teasing cartoon sketches for her younger sisters, to whom she was known by a host of nicknames, ‘Black Witch’, ‘Sister Rat’ and ‘Migs’ (or ‘Mogs’) being just a few. She was a devotee of ‘Spression’ – a sort of pidgin English mixed with baby talk that she spoke with her closest friend, Margaret Burne-Jones, given somatic form by cartoons drawn by Edward Burne-Jones for the girls, endearingly shapeless animals that have been described as part pig, part dog, part wombat.⁸

An insight into Mary’s character comes from one of her most vivid childhood memories, probably from the summer of 1875, which she spent at Deal Castle – a place she thought ‘must be haunted by my girl spirit I was there so much’⁹ – while recovering from whooping cough. She remembered sitting by the moat and, in a ‘moment of cruel curiosity’, feeding a live bluebottle fly to a ‘huge spider [with] shining eyes’. As Mary recalled, she was immediately ‘seized with remorse and probably killed both in righteous wrath’.¹⁰ Mary had a delight for the gruesome (demonstrated by a zestful account to her mother of a bilious attack aged eighteen: ‘I brought up basins of the thickest, gluest [sic] phlegm, slime, burning excruciating yellow acid with little streaks of browny reddy stuff in it, sometimes great gollops of brown fluid … Lastly Tuesday morning, came green bile’),¹¹ a curious mind and an adventurous spirit. She had a tendency to act first and think later: more accurately an inclination to ‘choose to prefer the gratification of the present … to slide & glide because it was pleasant or amusing & exciting & to face & bear the consequences when they came’.¹² In adulthood, Wilfrid thought Mary sphinx-like in her inscrutability, speaking of her ‘unfathomable reserve … her secrets are close shut, impenetrably guarded, with a little laugh of unconcern baffling the curious’.¹³ Wilfrid was all too frequently baffled by women, but Pamela described her sister in similar terms, speaking of a ‘deep nature’ that only Mary’s closest friends truly knew.¹⁴

As Mary entered adolescence, her life became notably more domesticated. At almost exactly the time that the Wyndhams moved to Wilbury, George was sent to prep school – the Grange in Hertfordshire – to prepare him for Eton in due course. Guy, uncontrollable without his brother, followed George after just one term. From roaming across Cumberland’s hills with a pair of ragamuffin playmates, Mary found herself in a tamer Wiltshire landscape in the company of her governess Fräulein Schneider and sisters of just three and five.

A contemporary of the Wyndham children described ‘an air of Bohemian quasi-culture’ within the family.¹⁵ Artistic rather than intellectual, the Wyndhams never contemplated either that Mary would attend school or that she would find her métier otherwise than in marriage. ‘A woman’s only hope of self-expression in those days was through marriage,’ explained Mabell Airlie, a contemporary of Mary’s, in her memoir Thatched with Gold.¹⁶ The strides forward in women’s education – the establishment of academic girls’ schools, under the remarkable Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss; women’s admission as undergraduates, London University being the first to open its doors in 1878 – primarily benefited middle-class daughters. Upper-class girls were educated by governesses – for the most part deliberately not too well, lest it scare off suitors. Some girls were lucky to be taught by a governess with exceptional capacities. Mary’s daughter Cincie benefited in her early years from the highly gifted Miss Jourdain, one of Oxford’s first female undergraduates. Bertha Schneider, or ‘Bun’, as she was called by the children, lacked the intellectual talents of ‘Miss J’. Originally from Saxony, Bun had been poached from the Belgrave Square family who forbade their children from playing with the Wyndhams, joining the family when she was twenty-eight. A photograph of her some years later shows her to have a pleasant, somewhat clumsy-featured face, pince-nez spectacles and fashionably frizzled hair.

At sixteen Mary’s day consisted of breakfast at 8 a.m., lessons from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., ‘déjeuner’, some time outside – collecting ferns, blackberry picking, long walks or games of the new sport of lawn tennis – lessons from 4 until 6, dinner at 7, and reading aloud with Fräulein until bed. This was supplemented, during ‘term times’ (dictated by the boys’ holidays), by fortnightly music lessons from a Mr Farmer in London, and art classes at the Kensington School of Art. Each autumn Bun took Mary and the little girls to a Felixstowe boarding house for ‘sea air’ where they rode donkeys, ate potted shrimps, paddled in the sea and read aloud, endlessly, to one another. By the time they left Eton in their late teens, George and Guy had a tolerable grounding in the basics of Latin, Greek, astronomy, history and public speaking.¹⁷ After the same number of years of education by Fräulein, Mary was relatively well read so long as the literature was popular; spoke good French and German (with a ripe vocabulary in the latter);¹⁸ could play the piano; and could draw proficiently, having taken exams in the subject at the Kensington School of Art (‘I forget what it was now,’ she said vaguely, when pressed by her mother on the subject of her exam. ‘It had some sort of foliage’).¹⁹ Mary would spend much of her adult life educating herself, wading gamely through heavy tomes on esoteric subjects. In effect, she was an autodidact. Her education was rigour-free, her brain almost totally untrained.

Twenty years after she married and left home, Mary read over her adolescent diaries, thinking fondly of the ‘happy life … that we all spent at Wilbury’, laughing at copies of ‘the house Annals’ produced by the children, remembering their pet names for the family’s twenty horses and the old blind donkey brought from Cockermouth,²⁰ and recalling games of sardines and nights of ghost stories, hunting and hawking in the winter, summer cricket matches and a host of friends and neighbours near by.²¹ In the memory of the children Wilbury was merely ‘a large plain comfortable house’.²² To modern eyes it is undoubtedly grand, with a large columned portico and octagonal bays flanking the main section of the building. It was set in some 140 acres of land, with amusements in its grounds including an octagonal summerhouse and a grotto.²³ Philip Burne-Jones remembered Wilbury as a kind of heaven, ‘with the sun pouring down upon the lawn … and all the magic of youth & impossible hopes in the air’.²⁴

The Wyndham children had been stage-struck since first creeping into a performance of Hamlet while visiting the Crystal Palace,²⁵ once home of the 1851 Great Exhibition – one of those ‘huge trophies of the world’s trade’²⁶ in which the Victorians delighted – and now rehoused in Sydenham. No school holiday was complete without a trip to see the famous partnership of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum Theatre. Audiences had a voracious appetite for novelty. By the early 1880s, at Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Haymarket Theatre live rabbits hopped across the stage during A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the storm-scenes in The Tempest were so realistically staged that audience members complained of seasickness.²⁷ The amateur productions at Wilbury were almost as ambitious. Madeline Wyndham constructed elaborate sets and costumes, but refused to take any role with more lines than could be pinned to the back of her fan. Servants, groundsmen and stray visitors were corralled into the hall as an audience. Mary and Philip took the leads; Pamela and Mananai were pages and fairies. Bun gamely took on whatever role was assigned to her – excelling herself, in collective memory, with an enthusiastic Caliban so lovelorn that Tommy the valet thought the character was a woman, and married to Prospero.²⁸

In London Mary and Madeline Wyndham frequently visited the Burne-Jones family at The Grange, their house in Fulham. Mary loved these visits where Burne-Jones amused the children by playing wheelbarrows in the garden with Georgiana, holding her ankles while she walked on her hands, and told them fireside stories of his youth with William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal in Red Lion Square.²⁹ On occasion, Mary stayed overnight, sharing a bed with Margaret Burne-Jones, waking up in the morning to breakfast in bed and chat ‘yards of nonsense’ in ‘Spression’.³⁰

Percy’s intention when renting Wilbury had always been to look for a suitable estate of his own. In 1876, the Wyndhams found the enchantingly named Clouds, a parcel of 4,000 acres of land at East Knoyle, a village a little south of Salisbury. Particulars supplied by the agents, Messrs Driver, set out the more important neighbours, and the exact distance of their seats: Longleat, Wardour Castle, Fonthill House.³¹ Percy sold Much Cowarne, the similarly sized Herefordshire estate he had inherited at the age of twenty-one, and bought Clouds for just over £100,000.³² He immediately commissioned Philip Webb, the visionary architect of William Morris’s Red House, to design and build what was intended ‘to be the house of the family for generations to come’.³³

Percy was reinvesting in land at a time when it was ceasing to be the backbone of elite wealth. In the mid-1870s, the agricultural economy foundered as Britain, committed to free trade since Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, struggled to compete with cheap grain imports from the American prairies and with refrigerated and canned goods from the Antipodes. Arable farming was particularly badly affected. Average wheat prices fell from 55 shillings to 28 shillings a quarter between 1870 and 1890. ‘Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one a position, and prevents one from keeping it up,’ declared Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, written in 1895. Percy’s fortune was buoyant thanks to stocks and his Australian estates. He could afford to exchange Much Cowarne (which had only a ‘shooting box’, and which he used purely for income – he never even seems to have visited)³⁴ for the slightly less profitable Clouds.³⁵ He played with Home Farm, carved out of the Clouds estate for his own management, like a small boy with an entrancing toy. ‘He has made £184.10s by the sale of all his sheep and £146.15s by sale of wool and now has 190 lambs. His corn is in, 11 ricks of wheat, 5 of barley, 6 of oats,’ Mary told her diary in 1878.³⁶

As Percy retreated ever more rapidly to Tory squirearchy, his parliamentary career was stalling. In 1874, after six years in the wilderness, the Conservatives returned to power under Disraeli. ‘We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer,’ mourned Gladstone, attributing defeat to the licensing bills pushed by the non-conformist temperance supporters of his party.³⁷ Disraeli, half genius, half charlatan, had already put in a bid to make Conservatives the party of popular imperialism in a speech delivered at Crystal Palace in 1872.³⁸ Now he embarked upon an ‘unwholesome political cocktail’ of a foreign policy, its ‘main ingredients … amoral opportunism, military adventures, and a disregard for the rights of others’.³⁹ The only guiding principle seemed to be that no action was too morally bankrupt so long as the imperial lodestone, India, was safe.

In 1875, Disraeli (with the financial help of Lord Rothschild) bought the controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company from the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt,⁴⁰ for it was a deeply embedded British belief that the Raj could be maintained only so long as the Canal was secure, in that it allowed passage to India without a long and dangerous journey round the Cape of Good Hope. In 1877, conjuror Disraeli turned a delighted Victoria from Queen into Empress, an act denounced by Gladstone as ‘theatrical folly and bombast’. And as graphic details of the Bulgarian Atrocities committed by the Ottoman Turks when crushing rebellion in the Balkans consumed the international press, Disraeli stood by the corrupt Ottoman regime, as a bulwark against Russian expansion that might threaten the Raj. Yet Russia then invaded the Balkans, Britain sent warships to the Dardanelles and mobilized Indian troops to Malta, and its music halls rang to the popular refrain ‘We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo if we do, / We’ve got the ships; we’ve got the men; we’ve got the money too!’ The Conservatives were the party of patriotism, monarchy and empire; ‘jingoism’ was in the ascendant.⁴¹

Percy was staunchly pro-Turk and anti-Russian in this instance, harking back to the position Britain had held in the Crimean War, in which he would have fought but for his being invalided home from Bulgaria when he contracted pleurisy en route.⁴² However, he did not by any means slavishly follow the party line. As Guy Wyndham later wrote, Percy ‘held his own principles and opinions unswervingly; and they were not always those of his party’ – in particular, advocating a system of protectionist tariffs when all the politicians and economists of the nation were devoted to Peelite free trade.⁴³ Such independent-minded action by MPs was fast dying out. The party machine was growing. The National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, founded in 1867, and the National Liberal Foundation of 1877 registered voters, managed elections and chose candidates willing to toe the party line in order to deal with the challenges of the vastly increased franchise, whose votes, thanks to the secret ballot’s introduction in 1872, could no longer be controlled with such ease by employer or squire, nor, after 1883’s Corrupt Practices Act, influenced by bribery. It was the era of the extraordinary coincidence, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s catchy lines, ‘That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’ Yet it has been suggested that Percy’s failure to advance was also due to his ungovernable temper, which was all too familiar to his children.⁴⁴

It is a mark of Percy’s and Webb’s instinctive affinity that the two difficult men never fell out during the long process of designing and building Clouds, beyond one protracted dispute over the buff colour of the glazed bricks used in the stables.⁴⁵ It took until 1881 to agree drawings and find an acceptable tender from builders. Work was not finished until 1885. The ascetic Webb asked just £4,000 for his decade of labour.⁴⁶ Through him, Percy became involved with the work of Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Known fondly as ‘the anti-scrape society’, it tried to prevent thoughtless modern restoration, and Percy began a campaign to save East Knoyle’s church. Webb became a familiar figure at Wilbury. When Mary’s pet rat Snowy died, Webb provided an epitaph for the gravestone.⁴⁷

In the early summer of 1878, Madeline Wyndham took Mary, still not quite sixteen, to Cologne to be ‘finished’.⁴⁸ Mary retained fond memories of her time there, spent cramming in as many operas as possible and visiting cultural attractions like the Goethe House and the Jewish Quarter.⁴⁹ Their return to Wilbury several weeks later was welcomed. ‘I am so glad glad glad glad glad that you are coming home …’ wrote Mananai.⁵⁰ Pamela, who swore that she could not sleep when her mother was away, maintained her usual signing off: ‘I love you and I’ve got you and I won’t let you GO.’⁵¹ A few months of Wagner was not enough to rub off the rough edges acquired over a lifetime of boisterousness: ‘Mary has upset the milk over her forock [sic],’ Pamela informed her parents a few weeks after Mary’s return, ‘but not the same one she tore yesterday.’⁵²

That autumn, Mary sat entranced at the dinner table as Percy and Webb discussed the latest cause célèbre: James McNeill Whistler’s libel case against Ruskin, in which the Wyndhams had more than a passing involvement. The case had arisen out of the Grosvenor Gallery’s opening the year before. The Gallery – which, as advertised in The Times, was open daily to the public for a shilling – was effectively an artistic call to arms by Percy and Madeline’s circle,⁵³ championing the avant-garde and challenging the nearby Royal Academy’s turgid stranglehold over taste. For too long the Wyndhams’ circle had seen the artists they admired being overlooked, in particular Burne-Jones, who had not exhibited publicly since a spat with the prestigious Watercolour Society almost a decade before, when he refused to cover up the genitalia of a very naked Demophoön in his work Phyllis and Demophoön.⁵⁴

The Lindsays spared no expense on their sumptuous enterprise, which was all silk damask, marble columns, velvet sofas and potted palms in sky-lit galleries, and looked like a very expensive private house.⁵⁵ Many of the opening exhibition’s pictures came from their friends’ collections. The Wyndhams, who in some seventeen years of marriage had established themselves as discerning patrons with an excellent eye, loaned two: Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge, a Whistler that Percy had bought some two years before on a whim when passing Piccadilly’s Dudley Gallery, and the magnificent Watts of Madeline. In May 1877, the Wyndhams went to the Gallery’s opening night, attending both Lady Lindsay’s ‘magnificent banquet’⁵⁶ for the inner circle, including the Prince of Wales and three of his siblings, and the larger reception, to which critics and lesser personages were invited, in the galleries upstairs.

That opening made Burne-Jones famous: his eight works had star position in the hundred-foot-long West Gallery, occupying an entire end wall.⁵⁷ Oscar Wilde, still an Oxford undergraduate – albeit rusticated – caused a sensation in a velvet coat embroidered to look like a cello. Soon Wilde was famous himself as the columnist informing the readership of The Woman’s World how to adopt the aesthetic way of life, and giving American lecture tours in velvet breeches with a green carnation in his buttonhole.⁵⁸ Inspired by the Gallery, the public adopted the fashions, interior decoration and art that Madeline and her friends had cultivated for over a decade. They flocked to Liberty’s department store on Regent Street for murky silks and sludgy velvets. Madeline’s School of Art Needlework (‘Royal’ since securing Queen Victoria’s patronage in 1875), which had long been producing Burne-Jones designs, moved to larger premises to accommodate demand. Sunflowers, peacocks and blue and white china, the motifs of aestheticism, appeared everywhere. Gerald du Maurier in Punch and Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience joyfully let loose on the pretensions of the ‘greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery’ and its devotees.

On that opening night, however, the great critic Ruskin was mostly struck by Whistler’s effrontery in exhibiting work with so little apparent finish. ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,’ he wrote in Fors Clavigera. Whistler sued for libel, claiming inter alia that since Ruskin’s review he had not been able to achieve a price comparable to that which Percy paid for his Nocturne. Mary, like the art world, was agog: ‘so funny’, she wrote in her diary, ‘the jury going to Westminster Palace Hotel to examine the pictures, and hearing Mr. Burne-Jones, Whistler, W. M. Rossetti and all of them in the witness box’.⁵⁹

Six months later, Madeline Wyndham took Mary and George, home for the holidays, to Leighton House for one of Leighton’s famed chamber-music afternoons that introduced rising musical stars – Hallé, Piatti, Joachim – to Society. Among the guests was Arthur Balfour, in his early thirties, Conservative Member for Hertford.

Balfour, the man who once said ‘Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all,’ was already renowned for his languidness. Despite six years in the Commons, he was not to make his political name until the next ministry, as a member of the maverick quartet known as the Fourth Party, led by Lord Randolph Churchill, who devoted their time in opposition to harassing the Liberal Government and their own ineffectual Leader in the Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote.

However, Balfour was already a prime target for ambitious Society matrons seeking to marry off their daughters. He was impeccably connected through his mother, and the favourite nephew of Lord Salisbury, the gloomy refusenik of the Reform Act who was now a serious contender to take over from the elderly Disraeli when the latter retired. From his dead father Balfour had inherited a nabob fortune – the term used to describe those whose riches came from working for the East India Company in the Indian sub-continent – and the prosperous Whittingehame estate. Balfour was not one who thought politics should govern life. He maintained a keen interest in philosophy – the best known of his works, Foundations of Belief, was published in 1895 – and held musical concerts at his own house, 4 Carlton Gardens, for which he had recently commissioned Burne-Jones to create a series of murals.

Above all, the tall, dark-haired, humorous Balfour was charming: ‘He has but to smile and men and women fall prone at his feet,’ said his close friend Mary Gladstone, who had been besotted with him for years⁶⁰ and whose father William considered him a protégé, despite their opposing political stances. Fifty years later, the Liberal MP Howard Begbie commented caustically on Balfour’s undimmed charm: ‘I have seen many [people] retire from shaking his hand with a flush of pride on their faces as though Royalty had stooped to inquire after the measles of their youngest child.’⁶¹ Some years later, when Mary Wyndham was newly married, a friend would comment worriedly on her attitude towards Arthur: ‘he fascinates her – her attitude is that of looking up in wonder … Thinks him good …’⁶² Mary and George’s shared fascination with Balfour began the day they met him. Their lives would ever after be entwined with his. And an elderly Balfour, attempting an autobiography, would put down his pen at precisely the moment he met the seventeen-year-old Mary Wyndham among the chattering crowds at Leighton House.⁶³

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