Those Wild Wyndhams (43 page)

The Ditchers resembled nothing so much as over-excited schoolboys, grandstanding in the face of irrefutable facts. ‘The country is in revolt,’ George told Wilfrid. ‘They are ready for actual armed resistance, or rather, they would like that,’ Wilfrid told his diary, with certain disbelief.
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Later George sent to Arthur, via Mary, a letter explaining his conduct. ‘[Y]ou felt I believe it was … very involved & obscure … you couldn’t really fathom his meaning,’ Mary reminded Arthur. Having read it, she believed that ‘that letter places him apart from many others of the die hard who behaved quite differently!’ – but she never explained to Arthur or anyone else why.
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The presence within the Ditchers’ ranks of serious political figures – Austen Chamberlain and F. E. Smith to name just two – indicates serious dissatisfaction within the party ranks not just with their leaders’ position, but with their failure to lead, and a belief, however faint, that the guarantee must be a bluff.

The final reckoning began at half-past four on the afternoon of 9 August, when the Lords convened to discuss the Commons’ amendments made to the Parliament Bill. It was the final round of pass the parcel. If the Lords considered themselves ‘Content’ with those amendments, the Bill would pass. If ‘Not Content’, it was time for the guarantee – the precise terms of which were still unclear – to be put into action. After almost eight hours, the debate was adjourned just after midnight.

As it reconvened the next morning, 10 August, Balfour was making his way in baking heat to Paris, on the first leg of his journey to Bad Gastein. That the final act of a two-year saga was even now playing out at Westminster could not convince him to alter train fares booked some time back. He had washed his hands of the affair which, he told Mary, was more ‘odious’ to him ‘from the personal point of view’ than any other episode in his public life.
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Asquith was also out of London, having gone to Wallingford to recover from a bout of laryngitis. But Asquith’s party was not mutinous, and he had made contingency plans for an emergency Cabinet meeting the following day in the event that it was required.
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When the session recommenced in the Lords that morning, the atmosphere on the Opposition benches was electric, on the Government benches calm. The real fight, everyone knew, was not between the Government and the Opposition, but between Hedgers (many with buttonholes of white heather) and Ditchers (sporting red roses). On the Government side, Lord Morley sat quietly, glancing frequently at a small piece of paper that he kept in the pocket of his frock-coat. The debate recommenced. Lord Midleton began, taunting the Government that the proceedings were a sham. The call was taken up by Rosebery and Lansdowne for a clear statement by the Government about the nature of the guarantee.

At that point, Lord Morley stood up and read from the paper that he held in his hand: ‘If the Bill should be defeated tonight His Majesty could assent – I say this on my full responsibility as the spokesman of the Government – to the creation of Peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different Parties in Opposition by which the Parliament Bill might again be exposed a second time to defeat.’

Morley had barely finished speaking when a cheer rose up from the Government side. From the Opposition, Hedgers and Ditchers alike, there was dead silence. By request, Morley read the statement out one more time. It was the clearest possible answer to dispel any delusions the Diehards might have cherished. If they voted against the Bill, their number would be swamped until the Upper Chamber was so pliable as to vote through anything the Government might desire. In case anyone had not quite understood the implications of his words, Morley added helpfully, ‘every vote given to-night against my Motion not to insist on what is called Lord Lansdowne’s Amendment is a vote given in favour of a large and prompt creation of peers’.
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Outside, heat shimmered above warped railway lines; tarmac melted on the roads. It was the hottest day recorded in seventy years. In the East End, the dockers were on strike. Inside the neo-gothic splendour of the Upper Chamber, Rosebery attacked the Government for taking advantage of a ‘young and inexperienced’ King; others denounced the Bill as sheer ‘revolution’.
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But they knew they faced a choice of evils. As Lord Selborne put it, ‘shall we perish in the dark, slain by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our own enemies …?’
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At twenty to eleven at night, the division was called. As peers thronged the lobbies, a desperate Willoughby de Broke hid the top hat and coat of one duke to keep him in the Lords to vote. The duke bolted, preferring to commit the cardinal sin of appearing in public hatless and in shirtsleeves rather than make an impossible choice.
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In any event, one duke would not have made a victory. The final vote was as follows: Contents, 131; Not Contents, 114. The Government had won by seventeen votes, thanks to the support of thirty-seven Unionist peers and thirteen prelates, or, as George Wyndham termed them, ‘the Bishops and the Rats’ – men, including George Curzon, who were henceforth hissed upon entering the Carlton Club by the hysterical Diehards.

From the Ritz in Paris, Balfour wrote to Mary: ‘You must not ask me to tell anything about the last ten days. I am trying to forget it all.’ Mary replied immediately and sympathetically from St Moritz: ‘I feel I do not understand [the situation] and I suppose never shall! This letter is only to remind you of what perhaps you know … that my heart goes out to you … I longed and longed to be able to come and comfort you – not by talking over the situation but by quite other means – a good smacking would brace you up I think!’
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Arthur’s leadership would not survive the crisis. Succumbing to Leo Maxse’s campaign in the
National Review
that ‘Balfour Must Go’ – staccatoed to ‘B.M.G.’ – he resigned in November. The night before the announcement, he visited Mary, one of very few to have known his plans from the first,
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at Cadogan Square. Tired, sad, finding it difficult to speak, Mary stood on the steps of no. 62 to watch the motor ‘turn away with you buried inside, not looking!, and I had a serrement de Coeur as the car drove away for the last time – with you as Leader – after so long’.
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That August, both kept silent about George, who himself wrote to Sibell, incoherent from tiredness and emotion, mourning the death of his age:

Many things that I loved are shattered and some friendships gone … Now we are finished with the cosmopolitan press – and the American duchesses and the Saturday to Mondays at Taplow – and all the degrading shams. When the King wants loyal men, he will find us ready to die for him. He may want us. For the House of Lords today – tho’ they did not know it – voted for Revolution.
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As news of the vote reached India, F. W. Bain wrote to Pamela: ‘I suppose that you and your “mountain-top” have been full of politics, rejoicing over the downfall of the Peers.’
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In fact at the time of the Liberal triumph Pamela was face down on her bed in her darkened room, pillows sodden with tears, crumpled-up handkerchiefs strewn across the counterpane, succumbing to the grip of ‘the Glen mood’, a mixture of ‘neuralgia’, self-pity, depression and self-loathing that besieged her each year for several days on arrival at Glen, a place where even the weather seemed bent on victimizing her with ‘hard metallic sunshine’ and ‘whipping wind’.
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‘When I am in my Hinterland,’ Pamela explained to Charlie Tennant, ‘the chief feeling of it is a longing to be of use … not to spend so much money on the trivial things, and to do some tangible good. If you knew what a World there is in one, of a need to give … Money doesn’t express it, I’m giving that away with both hands … & always will, so long as I have it, but that kind of giving doesn’t express my need.’
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Charlie was one of several confidants to whom she revealed at length her darkest feelings of worthlessness and despair. She drew for them comical pictures of herself, tear-stained, in her darkened room; recounted her imagined dialogues with God defending the insatiable need for affection and praise that He had bestowed on her; bemoaned her selfishness and vanity; complained how Eddy did not afford her ‘the smallest little sayings of praise’; and vowed to make the best of her life through the futures of her children: ‘if only I may make a good success of that, I shouldn’t mind about my own rubbishy life. But sometimes the fear of failing, or the responsibility of it all floods over me, & I feel as if I were out on an open Sea – in the dinghi [sic] – …with a hair-pin for a paddle,’ she said, writing to another, unnamed recipient.
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Pamela had a magpie’s knack for the picturesque image or phrase. Her ‘hair-pin’ line seems to have been inspired by a Sanskrit translation sent to her by Bain from ‘the great Hindoo Poet’ Kalidasa earlier that year: ‘I am desirous of crossing the impassable ocean, in my infatuation, in a tiny boat’ (‘You can remember the words when I am in India,’ Bain said).
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Pamela tweaked it in her letter to Charlie Tennant (‘sometimes it seems to me as if I were on a great Sea, alone in a little boat; & all my love of poetry & books & great ideas, avail nothing. I only feel utterly useless, & of no value anywhere …’)
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and to better effect here. The brilliant transposition is an indication of her flashes of real talent as a writer, but so easily did she lay her soul bare to numerous correspondents that her letters, ostensibly so anguished, become almost glib. It is hard not to agree with Elizabeth Asquith, sharp-tongued daughter of Margot, that Pamela gave her ‘essence … cheaply’.
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In March 1911, Eddy had been raised to the peerage as Baron Glenconner and appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. He was now the sovereign’s personal representative to the Scottish Kirk’s governing body.
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Edward Grey began to address him, affectionately, as ‘Your Grace’. The Glenconners’ official residence in Scotland was Holyrood, but Eddy’s post required them to spend ever more time at Glen. In print, Pamela described Glen as a ‘paradise’ for children: with parties and lawn tennis, acting, charades and camping parties at Loch Eddy.
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She invited her Adeane nieces to parties of young people that she took to Peebles Ball,
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insisting on giving Mananai ‘money presents’ (kept secret from Charlie) for their ballgowns.
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Privately, she never ceased to hate it.

Eddy’s appointment reflected the considerable financial support provided by the Tennants to the Asquiths as well as the Liberal party, although he never sent Margot a cheque without an accompanying homily and protestations that he too needed to ‘be careful’. Margot gave this short shrift – ‘I wish I felt he & Pamela wd ever be in debt!’ she scrawled on one such letter of 1910.
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‘Highly characteristic of my brother on the subject of money’, she wrote on another envelope from Eddy. ‘They both owe Henry
everything
.’
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For over a decade, Margot had been devising ways to exploit her brother’s finances and his wife’s social appeal to the party’s end. From the start, she tried to use the aristocratic Pamela to make the party ‘more socially attractive’. ‘I shall have a “day”,’ she told Eddy in 1900, ‘& with Pamela’s beauty … I’ll show our party what we can do,’ planning also to recruit Mananai to the cause. At the time, Margot bemoaned the failure of the Liberal leadership, except the Asquiths, ‘ever [to] do anything of this sort Ly Harcourt & Ly C.B. do nothing at all …’.
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The construction of the gallery at Queen Anne’s Gate in 1910 facilitated the hosting Margot wanted Pamela to take on. She still complained that the Tennants entertained far too little.
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Pamela thought they entertained far too much.
‘[T]he world of Books … is more to me than any other,’ she told Sidney Cockerell, drawing a little crown above the capitalized word to emphasize her point.
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In 1912, her compendium,
The White Wallet
, was published, the title a reference to her vellum commonplace folder. She included her poem ‘Fantasia – of a London House Closed’, in which she wanders through the shut-up great houses of London, lamenting time spent in ‘tedious revelry’, haunted by ghosts of ‘murdered Summers’ that:

speak of Mays, strangled in Rotten Row,

Of massacred Julys, whose glowing heads

Hung on the lances of red-cloth Bazaars – (‘Society Bazaars’ that kill the soul …)
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Pamela refused to let the demands of her official engagements impinge upon time spent devoted to the things she thought most worthwhile – ‘her children, her village friends, poetry, the cultivation of her own considerable literary gift, and that life-long enthralling interest … her love for, and study of, wild birds’.
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It resulted in a certain ruthlessness where everyone else was concerned. On occasion Mary became distressed by how little the sisters saw of each other. She wrote to Pamela expressing this sentiment. ‘It is quite all right about you and me. I find I am able to love
operatively
(the italics are mine) from a distance,’ Pamela replied. Mary’s children thought it ‘wonderfully typical’ of their aunt, and urged their mother to ‘love operatively from a distance’ whenever she proposed inviting disliked guests to Stanway.
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