Those Wild Wyndhams (31 page)

Just a few weeks before, George had been passed over as Curzon’s replacement as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in favour of Mary’s brother-in-law, St John Brodrick (the thirty-nine-year-old Curzon had been spectacularly promoted to Viceroy). Madeline Wyndham had gone into a furious decline, wildly speculating about conspiracies to keep her family down (indeed, Salisbury had opposed George’s promotion on both occasions, disliking George’s exuberance, verve and florid romanticism).
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Now George was being given Brodrick’s old post. It did not sour the family’s delight.

George’s promotion signified the strengthening of the jingoist faction of Salisbury’s ministry. That September, Sir Herbert Kitchener’s troops in the Sudan had finally avenged General Gordon’s death, defeating the Mahdi at the battle of Omdurman, The Wyndhams and East Knoyle’s parishioners had been among the first to hear the news. The Wyndhams were hosting a party that included the general Lord Roberts and Brodrick, at the time still in his old post. On Sunday morning, as the party made their way to church, Brodrick received a telegram. He handed it to the rector to read out. As the news of victory at Omdurman boomed forth from the pulpit, as if by magic the guns of the camps on Salisbury Plain echoed out their confirmation of the news.
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The triumph at Omdurman raised Anglo-French tensions to boiling point. Within George’s first few weeks of office, the Fashoda incident in which both countries laid claim to the strategically key Southern Sudanese town brought them to the brink of war, although they both climbed down. ‘George is in high spirits … he and the ultra-Jingo section of the party are all for war,’ Wilfrid Blunt commented in his diary.
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Charlie Adeane’s sister Marie (now married to the civil servant Bernard Mallet) thought that George had forced the Government’s hand over Fashoda: she had heard from a source at court that ‘he is almost the best hated man in the House of Commons …’.
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George’s sisters were meanwhile most anxious that their portrait grouping should not appear contrived. Mary’s suggestions for a ‘reposeful’ setting with all three studying a book or staged as ‘if the
Evening Post
had just come & one was reading a letter to the others’ were resoundingly rejected. Their discussions grew more tense. Pamela announced her intention to dress in blue and Mananai was wearing pink chiffon. Mary, who had her own plans to wear ‘cream or white, with perhaps some fur’, was concerned. ‘Don’t you think Pink white & blue will look rather like a Neapolitan ice?’ she asked her mother, appealing for her help to steer the obdurate Pamela from her choice.
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Few managed ever to change Pamela’s mind, and neither Madeline Wyndham nor Mary appears to have given it a serious try. Mary abandoned her plan to wear a dress she already owned and ordered a new white chiffon gown to match Mananai’s pink: ‘same sort of
shape
will look well I think’.
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The sisters and their parents had a preliminary dinner with Sargent at Belgrave Square in February 1899. Even arranging a date which they could all attend proved almost impossible. Mary had spent the first weeks of the new year in an Edinburgh nursing home, recovering from an operation to correct a prolapsed uterus, the result, it is to be presumed, of her two recent pregnancies in quick succession. She reported the details of her ‘curating’ to her mother in minute detail: morphia suppositories, chloroform-induced bilious attacks and ‘a pessary (
round
) … which I am told is a
perfect fit
!’
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Mary took her ‘Spring-Cleaning’ and
‘Furnishing
’ in good humour. She revelled in the peace and quiet of the nursing home, free from the demands of servants and friends. A bored Hugo was being unexpectedly uxorious and visiting her daily, and she had managed to persuade the nurses to allow her to keep Cymru by her side. The chow inherited from Hermione had become Mary’s most beloved pet. Mary delighted in the way Cymru, whom the denizens of Kissingen had once mistaken for a wolf, guarded her and frightened visitors, doctors and fellow patients; only recently, she informed her mother, he had nearly floored ‘an invalid lady bobbing round the corner from the bath room in the red dressing gown & curl papers’.
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Nonetheless, four weeks of bed-rest had left her ‘thin and pinched’, and she looked, she told her mother, ‘exactly like Miss Havisham!’
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The final composition was suggested by Sargent after that dinner – a brilliant choice that reveals their characters and nervous energy more clearly. None of the sisters seems to have felt there was anything pointed in Sargent choosing a pose of indolence. Once his initial sketching had outlined the group, each sister sat separately as the artist began work in earnest.

The experience of sitting to awkward, gruff Sargent was not reflective of Madeline Wyndham’s enjoyable time with Watts. Additionally, London in February was inhospitable. On several occasions the sittings had to be curtailed when ‘smelly thick yellow fog’ made it too dark to work.
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No number of fires seemed capable of truly warming Belgrave Square’s vast drawing room. Pamela, pregnant with Kit, caught influenza and refused to leave her house; Mary, in the throes of ‘Betsey’ and fearing that her face was still insufficiently plump to be painted, directed all her energies to getting Pamela to Belgrave Square without swallowing a mouthful of fog (her favoured method involved a Shetland rug covering head and face). Mananai diligently made the lengthy journey from Babraham for each sitting without tardiness or absence and finally succumbed to the ‘demoniacal Influenza’ while at Belgrave Square.
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The doctor ordered a period of total bed-rest for several weeks, forbidding her to travel back to Babraham. ‘Sargeant [sic] must be fairly puzzled at the intricate health problems presented to him,’ said Mary.
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At Easter, while the rest of the Wyndhams went to Clouds, Mananai was still tucked up in bed at Belgrave Square. She was in good spirits, snug in her room, a fire blazing in the grate, an amenable ‘little nurse’ on hand, reading her mother’s copies of Ruskin on the Pre-Raphaelites and delighting in Madeline Wyndham’s annotations to the text: ‘
What
wonderful people and
dear
B.J.’s name just mentioned with promise of
great
fame & the start of
Morris & Co
! I long to ask you
all
about it for you know it all – how
curious
Miss Siddal was.’
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Charlie Adeane was less content. His four daughters were well cared for in Babraham’s nursery, but he was unaccustomed to being without his wife, and was worried about her health. ‘It seems that when once you have fallen a victim a victim you remain …’ he told his mother-in-law sternly. He had begged Mananai to stay at home, ‘to no avail … her sense of duty with regard to that blessed picture overcame all caution’, and he expressed the hope that no further sittings were planned until the whole family decamped to London for the Season in May: ‘it is almost too much of a nuisance & I do not appreciate a solitary life at this time of year’. Charlie insisted that he, not his parents-in-law, would pay for the nurse currently tending Mananai, and declared his intention at Babraham ‘to lay on hot water pipes all over the house cost what it may!’
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‘It was a very unfortunate time of year to choose for a picture to be painted. But I suppose these painters are tyrants. This one is a real drill-sergeant,’ Charlie added in a postscript, employing a rather good but almost certainly unintentional pun.
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The picture was the final straw for Charlie, tired of playing second fiddle to his wife’s family. For months Mananai, who fell pregnant again that summer, had been fretting over the welfare of Minnie Wyndham and her children while Guy was away. The political temperature was rising. A conference between Milner and Kruger at Bloemfontein in June 1899 over Uitlander rights ended in deadlock. ‘It is our country you want!’ Kruger told Milner with tears in his eyes. In August, Guy Wyndham received a longed-for promotion: Deputy Assistant Adjutant General under Sir George White, the commander of the British forces in Natal. ‘I suppose it is a great honour but I do trust there won’t be war,’ said Mananai.
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From the War Office, George assured his family that there would not. Mananai began to relax. She was past her first trimester, she felt preternaturally well and active. The baby was kicking strongly and, as she told her mother, ‘I always like it so much when they begin to be lively it is quite company! & a little “individual” is’nt [sic] it.’
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Neither George nor the War Office thought Kruger’s and Milner’s elaborate schemes of bluff and double-bluff would come to a head. But the daily reports grew darker. On 4 October George wrote to his mother to tell her that ‘between you me and the gatepost we mobilize on Monday’.
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A week later Kruger delivered an ultimatum to Milner. The British were to withdraw their troops from the border of the Transvaal and send back all the troops currently on their way out to South Africa or face war. Such a concession was unthinkable for the British. The ultimatum expired at 3 p.m. GMT on Wednesday 11 October. ‘Well it has come,’ said George.
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Britain was at war.

Salisbury’s Government greeted the news with a kind of relief, for Kruger’s aggression saved them from having to justify war to the public. In fact, the British public greeted the news with a great outpouring of truculent jingoism. Still drunk on the glory of the Diamond Jubilee, most people thought that it would be mere days – weeks at most – before Britain put a handful of backward Boer farmers firmly in their place. Bunting was strung up in Trafalgar Square; Kipling and Swinburne composed verses for the occasion published in
The Times
.
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Theatres hastily revised their programmes, putting on suitably imperialist productions: Wilfrid Blunt reluctantly accompanied George to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of
King John
at Her Majesty’s Theatre – full of ‘jingo tags and no popery talk’, said George.
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Blunt was hoping the fracas would prove the Empire’s downfall, but he did not really think that it would. The cream of the British army was at that very moment being shipped out to Africa. And George heartily denied rumours that the War Office was ill prepared. ‘Don’t pay the slightest attention to alarmist rumours, we are well enough ahead with our work,’ he assured his mother.
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It soon became painfully apparent that this was not true. Poor communications and inadequate preparations paved the way for a series of disasters on the veldt hollered out by paperboys on every street corner at home. On 31 October 1899, when the war was almost three weeks old, Mananai was at Babraham. ‘We are all very well here,’ she reported to her mother, enjoying the crisp late-autumn day, ‘only almost sick with anxiety [about Guy Wyndham] … still the days are going by and each day brings the end of the War nearer.’
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But the evening’s headlines reported the disastrous battle of Ladysmith: 12,000 British casualties and Sir George White’s forces driven back to the besieged town by a torrent of Boers who now blockaded them in. Among those soldiers was Sir George White’s Deputy Assistant Adjutant General.

Mananai slept fitfully that night with battle images storming around her head. At 3 o’clock in the morning she woke up ‘to find quite a “
show
” of … “Betsy” … a bad threathening [sic] of a “miscarriage” I who had
never
had any symptom of such thing before’, she told her mother. Charlie roused the coachman and head housemaid and sent for the doctor. For twenty-four hours Mananai lay ‘like a log’, clinging on to the hope promised by each passing hour. ‘The little thing is
splendidly
lively,’ she assured her mother from her bed. ‘[Doctor] Wherry and Nurse consider me
out of the wood
& so do I now … Don’t you worry about this Darling, I feel quite sure we have warded it off.’
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This collective optimism proved sadly unfounded. At 9 o’clock on the evening of 2 November 1899 Mananai gave birth to a twenty-four-week-old child. ‘The premature baby was unfortunately a boy & lived 12 hours this has been a great aggravation of the blow … Madeline however is going on well and with her fund of sound sense is well & that is the only thing we care about you & I!’ Charlie wrote to Madeline Wyndham, who on receipt of the letter left Clouds immediately for Babraham.
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Mananai’s family were devastated by the tragedy, which they all believed had been brought upon her by reading of the horrific news of Ladysmith. Mary worried over might-have-beens: wishing that an incubator had been handy; dwelling on the peculiar fact that the child had managed to live so long, yet no longer. Madeline Wyndham tried to console herself with the fact that the child ‘might not have been realy [sic]
sufficiently developed
to be perfect or
strong
and might only have been a weakling’. On receiving her mother’s long, sad account of the scene at Babraham, of Charlie’s ‘
gentleness
&
brightness
’, of Mananai’s ‘
quietness
&
wonderful
resignation’, Pamela was simply distraught.
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‘You must not grieve for Madeline,’ Madeline Wyndham told her youngest daughter sternly, ‘as those who have no hope & make
yourself
ill & thereby make
her
& all of us more unhappy & give us
more to bear
than we have already! Your duty now is to … write Madeline a cheerful letter for
outside things do interest her
& they take her mind off the sorrow …’
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Madeline Wyndham took comfort in the fact that, like herself, both Mary and Pamela had had ‘2 boys running … so let us
hope & pray for that for her
… don’t think of anything emotional but pray pray pray because sometimes … dwelling on the horrors of the war … does
overmaster
one [and] makes one feel as if one must
die
of it & it would be
dreadful
if we all died of fright & Guy were to escape & come home & find us dead …’.
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