Those Wild Wyndhams (25 page)

The travellers docked at a misty Southampton in April, with Pamela’s guitar intact, and a parrot that Mananai had brought back home for a pet. In the summer that followed, Pamela’s family spoke with relief of her buoyant spirit; how pretty and well she was looking; and enthused about her hordes of admirers, and innumerable engagements. ‘How much
better
she is again,’ said Mananai, hoping that finally her sister’s fortunes would improve.
³³

The travellers returned to a political landscape irrevocably altered by Gladstone’s retirement from politics little over a month before their return. Few had thought that the octogenarian’s fourth ministry, which began in 1892, would be anything but short-lived, although the young Welsh Radical David Lloyd George was one of many in the Commons who marvelled at how, in moments, the shrunken figure huddled on the front bench could become ‘an erect athletic gladiator, fit for the contest of any arena’.
¹
But Gladstone was broken when his second Home Rule Bill, after battling its way through the Commons – in a sense literally, for a fistfight broke out on the benches between Unionists and Home Rulers at its final reading – was rejected by the House of Lords. In an incandescent final speech in the Commons, Gladstone asked his fellow Members how long ‘a deliberative assembly, elected by the votes of more than six million people’, could continue to be defied by the inherited wealth and privilege of the Lords.
²
As he left the House for the final time that evening, making his way to Windsor to offer the Queen his resignation, he was applauded to the rafters by MPs, all aware, even then, that an era was at an end.

Since 1886, Unionists had dominated the Lords. They now presented themselves as a bulwark against demotic liberalism, protecting the nation from a Liberal party apparently moving ever further leftwards. Lord Salisbury’s ‘referendum theory’, in a nutshell, stated that if a government elected by the people put forward controversial legislation, the people ought to be given a chance to decide specifically on that legislation. The Lords were exercising their veto on behalf of the country. At heart, they claimed that they knew better the vacillating public’s wishes than their directly elected representatives. It was an intellectually hollow argument, and constitutionally dangerous – but it appeared to be vindicated when the Unionists triumphed at the polls in 1895.

Gladstone’s successor was Constance Leconfield’s brother Lord Rosebery, his former Foreign Secretary. The choice was not Gladstone’s: the Queen, who could not bring herself to thank in person the ‘most disagreeable’ of all her ministers,
³
further breached convention by deciding on his successor without seeking Gladstone’s advice. She deliberately overlooked Gladstone’s Chancellor, Sir William Harcourt, who, despite being of landed birth, had introduced in his most recent Budget the devastating salvo against the landed classes of death duties of 8 per cent on all estates worth over £1 million. Lord Rosebery, a blue-blooded imperialist, was as close to a Tory as the Liberals could offer.

The choice was a bad one. Rosebery, acutely shy, prone to deep depression since being widowed in 1890, was not up to the increasingly difficult task of leading a government from the House of Lords. In the Commons, Harcourt, thwarted and overlooked, was as unsupportive as possible,
⁴
and his devoted son Lewis (known, not always entirely fondly, as ‘Loulou’, and renowned for his capacity for manipulative intrigue),
⁵
who acted as his father’s private secretary, spread rumours already doing the rounds that Rosebery was having a homosexual affair with his own secretary. The secretary was the ‘excellent, amiable’ and ‘instantly loveable’ Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig (‘Drummy’), eldest son of Sibyl Queensberry, and the Wyndhams’ cousin.
⁶
Whether or not the rumours were true (and Drummy’s extraordinary elevation to the peerage after just one year of service as Baron Kelhead of Dumfries, and his appointment as lord in waiting to the Queen, did little to dispel them), Drummy’s father had believed them enough to pursue Rosebery to Bad Homburg in August 1893, threatening to thrash him to the bone. Only the intervention of several other spa-goers, including the Prince of Wales, the Chief Commissioner of Police and the Society lawyer Sir George Lewis, drove Queensberry out of town.
⁷

When Drummy began to court Pamela on her return to England in 1894, the Wyndhams did not put a stop to it, but they were uneasy. Their reserve was in marked contrast to the enthusiasm of Drummy’s immediate family, in particular his doting grandfather, Alfred Montgomery. From later elliptical references to concerns about the ‘opinion of the world’, it is clear that Pamela had heard the rumours too, and that she knew her family were unenthusiastic about the match.
⁸
At the end of the summer, Pamela told Drummy she could not marry him, being unable to love him as she had Harry Cust, ‘simply & honestly – & without knowing why’.
⁹
A few weeks later, Drummy became engaged to someone else.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1894, Pamela’s misery had been growing. The anniversary of the break with Harry loomed. The past year, she said, ‘makes one afraid of living. The waking every morning – the needle of pain coming through sleep.’
¹⁰
She was suffocated by her feelings, unable to ‘make Mamma the receptacle’ but terrified of ‘getting shramped [sic] up instead of opening out’. She scribbled out her ‘bursting feelings’ to Sibell in lengthy letters,
¹¹
but felt keenly that she should keep them from her immediate family.
In October, she and her parents visited Mary at Gosford. Pamela let slip some of her misery to her sister, and, despite a sympathetic response, was immediately mortified at ‘even letting you [Mary] think I had anything but the easiest surroundings … [or that] I’m always like that’. As soon as she left, she wrote to Mary to apologize, blaming ‘Betsey’ for making her overemotional: ‘there is nothing about me that isn’t really to make life easier & happier for me … I was a coward to let you say there was! It is entirely in my own hands – and is my own fault if I’m unhappy, or ill.’
¹²

But by then Pamela had been provided with an opportunity to express her feelings. The Wyndhams’ stay at Gosford had been cut short by devastating news. Drummy, attending a shooting party in Somerset given by his fiancée’s family, had been found dead in a hedge, his collar and head ‘very much sprinkled’ with blood from a gunshot wound through the mouth.
¹³
The coroner, hearing evidence of Drummy telling a beater that he was going back to look for a partridge he had winged, and of the single strangely deadened shot that rang out moments later, made a finding of accidental death: another sad example of a loaded gun going off as its owner climbed a stile. The fact that Drummy’s body had been found nowhere near a stile and that the post-mortem suggested that his mouth had been wide open when the shot was fired was carefully overlooked.
¹⁴

The Wyndhams immediately returned south, meeting Drummy’s shattered family in London, before taking them to Clouds. ‘Cousin Sib’ seemed shrunken inside her mourning garb, Bosie was thoughtful and gentle. During their brief stay in London, Pamela accompanied Wommy to a dreadful interview with Alfred Montgomery, who seemed more interested in talking to Pamela than to his own granddaughter. She described it to Mary: ‘He kept saying “he was so fond of you – he loved you so – how fond he was of you – let me look at you – ah my dear” – & then breaking down – and all the time I felt like
swords
inside me the “one-moment-too-lateness” of Life.’
¹⁵
Now, at Clouds, Wommy seemed simply dazed, ‘but I am afraid she [Wommy] feels it terribly at night when she is alone’, Pamela told Mary, kept awake by the sound of sobbing echoing down the corridors.
¹⁶

Pamela plunged into a frenzy of self-recrimination, castigating herself as ‘blind and afraid’, unworthy of Drummy’s love. It is clear she knew that Drummy had killed himself, suspected that it was related to the rumours about Drummy and Lord Rosebery, and thought she could have saved him by marrying him. She crucified herself accordingly, enduring the limpet-like affections of Wommy who, having always hero-worshipped her cousin, now refused to leave her side, insisting on sharing her bed and watching her as she slept. Bosie did not stay long at Clouds before disappearing to be comforted by Oscar Wilde.

Pamela plummeted from a rhapsody of grief into a deep depression. Plans had been made for the Wyndhams, Sibyl Queensberry and Wommy to travel abroad in the new year, escaping scandal once again with a flight to the Continent. In the meantime Pamela was sent to Babraham to recuperate, although with limited opportunities to do so, since Wommy came too. A worried Mananai plotted ways to restore her younger sister to health and spirits. Still hopeful for Baker-Carr,
¹⁷
she wrote to her mother proposing to effect a meeting between the two when Baker-Carr returned on leave. Madeline Wyndham’s reply does not survive, but it is evident from Mananai’s reluctantly parroting response that her mother poured cold water on the plan: ‘I
quite
agree if she [Pamela] is not
very
much in love not to
help
her marry a man not rich enough for the comfort of Life … let her
wait
now that she can … & help her to meet [a] nice man with money enough.’
¹⁸
Pamela barely noticed, consumed by the feeling that she had let down her family and herself. ‘Ever since I was grown-up I wanted to be worthy of all the rest of you. Of Mamma, & you, & all,’ she told Mary. With Harry gone, Drummy dead, scandal in the air and her mother on tenterhooks, Pamela felt only that she had failed. ‘I don’t mind the mills of God grinding small if only they wouldn’t grind
so
slowly: – I think I have had an
eternity
in the last 3 years.’
¹⁹

In 1894 a new play was put upon the London stage.
The Case of Rebellious Susan
by Henry Arthur Jones considered the plight of Lady Susan, who wanted revenge on her philandering husband. Lady Susan leaves her husband and travels to Cairo where she has a brief romance and falls in love. But, mindful of convention and of her place in Society, she returns to England and her cheating husband and they are reconciled. In a final display of rebellion she refuses to reveal the details of the affair to him unless he will do the same regarding his.
¹

At the insistence of the actor-manager Sir Charles Wyndham (no relation to the Wyndhams) and his leading lady Mary Moore, the version that made it on to the stage at Wyndham’s Theatre on Charing Cross Road was deliberately ambiguous about whether Lady Susan had actually been unfaithful. Chastity was ‘that one indispensable quality in respect for womanhood’, Sir Charles told Jones, asking how he could expect ‘married men to bring their wives to a theatre to learn the lesson that their wives can descend to such nastiness, as giving themselves up for one evening of adulterous pleasure and then return safely to their husband’s arms, provided they are clever enough, low enough and dishonest enough to avoid being found out’? Reluctantly Jones agreed, but his published preface to the play maintained what he believed to be the moral of the piece: ‘That as women cannot retaliate openly, they may retaliate secretly – and
lie
!’
²

The revised play, a roaring success, was part of a wave of productions considering ‘the marriage question’, which began in 1889 with the first English performance of Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
, but is better exemplified by Wilde’s smash hits in the early 1890s. In
An Ideal Husband
,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
and
A Woman of No Importance
the pure unyielding wife is pitted against the ‘fallen woman’, while an ostensibly upright husband has a dark past. Love, secrecy, scandal and convention all play off against one another. The overwhelming impression is that in Society the truth is something to be dispensed carefully and in very small doses.