Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

Dedication

For Beatrice Hollond,a diamond amongst friends

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Principal Women

Introduction

Prologue

1. Getting There

2. The Posting

3. Partners

4. Private Life

5. Embassy Life

6. Ambassadresses

7. Public Life

8. Social Life

9. Hardships

10. Children

11. Dangers

12. Rebel Wives

13. Contemporary Wives

Plates

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

About the Author

Author’s Note

Notes

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

A List of the Principal Women in the Book and the Primary Places Where They Served

Introduction

‘English ambassadresses are usually on the dotty side, and leaving their embassies nearly drives them completely off their rockers.’ These words, from Nancy Mitford’s classic vignette of embassy life Don’t Tell Alfred, were like a mantra of my youth. As children, my brothers and I used to chant them to my mother, in those days a British ambassadress herself, in her vaguer moments. Not because she was dotty (well, only occasionally) but because we knew, beyond doubt, that all other ambassadresses were.

From an early age, we were used to the tales of former ambassadresses – mad, bad and dangerous to know, they came to form part of our family culture. In New Zealand, my father’s first posting as a young first secretary, there was the delightfully distraite Lady Cumming Bruce. She was far more interested in her painting than in her diplomatic social engagements, which often slipped her mind completely; according to legend, she could regularly be spotted crawling through the residence shrubberies, so as not to be spotted arriving late for her own parties. ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy,’ my mother wrote to my grandparents just a few months after her arrival in Wellington, ‘Lady Cumming Bruce is very vague and difficult to pin down – says she’ll do something and then doesn’t. When Helen* went onto their boat to greet them on arrival she suggested to Lady CB that she should perhaps put her hat on before meeting the press. Lady CB opened her hat box inside which instead of a hat, was a child’s chamber pot.’

During the twenty-eight years that my mother spent as a diplomat’s wife, she wrote letters home. Today, at my parents’ house in Wiltshire, in amongst the paper rubbings from the temples at Angkor Wat, the Persian prayer mats and the bowls of shells from the beaches of Connemara – the legacy of a lifetime’s wanderings – there is a carved wooden chest which contains several thousand of them. Once a week with almost religious regularity – sometimes more frequently – these letters were written at first to my grandparents and my aunt, but then later also to myself and my two brothers when we were sent home to boarding school in England. During the last ten years of her travelling life it was not unusual for her to write half a dozen letters a week, recording all the vicissitudes of diplomatic life.

In these days of instant communications, of faxes and e-mails and mobile telephones, it is hard to describe the extraordinarily intense pleasure of what used, in old fashioned parlance, to be called ‘a correspondence’. As a bitterly homesick ten-year-old at boarding school for the first time, I found in my mother’s letters an almost totemic significance. The main stairs of my school house wound down through the middle of the building around a central well; in the hall below was a wooden chest on which the post was always laid out. For some reason only the housemistress and the matron were permitted to use these stairs (the rest of us were confined to the more workaday stone stairs at the back of the house), so the trick was to crane over the banisters and try to spot your letters. From two storeys up it was impossible to read your name but, to a practised eye, the form of a certain handwriting, the shape of a certain envelope, its colour or its thickness, were all clues.

Occasionally my mother would use the official embassy writing paper – thick sheaves of a creamy sky-blue colour, lavishly embossed with the royal crest – but it wasn’t really her style. For most of my school days she used the same big pads of plain white airmail paper, slightly crinkly to the touch, bordered in red and blue, which she bought in industrial quantities from an English stationer’s. Often I would carry her letters around with me in my pocket, unopened, for a whole morning, until I could escape somewhere private in which to savour them. Their fatness, their pleasing weight, their peculiar texture against my fingertips had an almost magical power to soothe. These letters carried news of my family, of course, but perhaps more importantly they described another world, and another way of life. They described another part of myself, in fact, which was as strange to my English friends as the land of the Jabberwock or the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

I kept these letters, and many years later they were to be the inspiration for this book. Although I have quoted them here only occasionally, what they have given me is a strong sense not only of the value of the experiences they describe, but also of their fragility. One of my main aims in writing this book is to preserve them, and others like them, lest, like Lady Winchilsea’s, their stories should drift into oblivion.

The lives of the women described in this book represent a lacuna in history. While the experiences of their menfolk were recorded and preserved for posterity even as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,* what these women saw or felt or did is unknown. Because, with a few rare exceptions, they were not involved in affairs of state, they were quite simply not considered important enough. Because they were women, their experience had no value, and even their presence often went unrecorded. To quote the well-worn feminist joke, the history of diplomacy is very much a ‘his-story’.

Of all the women whose experiences I have drawn upon in this book, Lady Winchilsea, who in 1661 made the long and perilous journey to Constantinople at her husband’s side, is the earliest. I am in no doubt that there were others before her, for the custom of sending resident ambassadors abroad, initiated by the Italians during the Renaissance, had begun to spread through the rest of Europe by the beginning of the sixteenth century,† but any records for them are almost impossible to find.

Even when we do have a fleeting glimpse of them (as in the case of the Countess of Winchilsea) their stories are tantalizingly elusive. Did Lady Winchilsea, like one of her more famous successors, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ever visit a harem or one of the imperial city’s glorious marble-domed hammams? Did she, like Mary Elgin nearly a century and a half later, go disguised in man’s clothing to watch her husband present his credentials to the Grand Seignior? What of the everyday practicalities of her life? What were the conditions she had to endure aboard ship? Did she have children whom she was forced to leave behind? Perhaps, like her contemporary Ann Fanshawe, she fell pregnant and gave birth thousands of miles from home. If so, did her child survive?

Although we will never know what Lady Winchilsea thought and felt when she arrived in Constantinople in 1661, remarkably, many accounts of the lives and experiences of diplomatic women have survived. Until well into the first half of this century many of them wrote letters home; these letters are often the sole record we have of them. A handful are already well-known names – Mary Wortley Montagu, Vita Sackville-West, Isabel Burton. The vast majority are not. Who was Mrs Vigor, gossiping from St Petersburg in the 1730s about the scandals and intrigues of the imperial court? Or Miss Tully, incarcerated for over a year in the consulate in plague- and famine-torn Tripoli on the eve of the French Revolution? We know almost no personal details about them (not even their Christian names). Nor do we know who their correspondents were, only that their letters were precious enough to someone, as my mother’s were to me, to have been safely kept. A great number of the sources I have used – collections of letters, private journals, or memoirs largely based on them – were never intended for public consumption at all: only a hundred or so copies were sometimes published through private subscription for family and friends. Why did they write these letters? No doubt they longed for news from home; but perhaps they also felt compelled to describe the circumstances of their lives abroad – so exhilarating, so strange, so inexplicable – to their family and friends. In Moscow in 1826 Anne Disbrowe enjoys the festivities which took place at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I; in Peking, some fifty years later, at the heart of the Forbidden City itself, Mary Fraser takes tea with the legendary Chinese Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi; while at the turn of this century, during her seventeen long years in Chinese Turkistan, Catherine Macartney witnesses not one, but two full eclipses of the sun.

Others have more perilous tales to tell, of famines, plagues, tempests, earthquakes, wars, kidnappings, assassination attempts, and of the illnesses and deaths of their children. Even today – perhaps especially today – the world remains a hostile place for many diplomats. Their families, my own included, have often felt that the real substance of their lives is greatly, and at times almost wilfully, misunderstood. As one wife recently wrote in the BDSA (British Diplomatic Spouses Association) Magazine: ‘All Britons KNOW that diplomatic life is one long whirl of gaiety (they have seen the films and read the books)…’ Although this may be true for a few, most of the women represented here have very different stories to tell. ‘I shall never forget the utter despair into which the sight of my new home plunged me,’ wrote Jane Ewart-Biggs of her arrival as a young wife at her first posting in Algiers. From the outside their house – the central block of the old British hospital – seemed solid enough, but the interior was in a state of total disrepair, the paint flaking from the walls and doors hanging on single hinges. In the entrance hall a huge hole gaped through the ceiling ‘through which pipes and wires hung like intestines’. By the time her husband Christopher came home she was in tears. He, by contrast, was buoyed up by the fascinating day he had spent learning all about his new job. ‘It was then that I realised that the major problems arising from our nomadic life were going to affect me rather than him,’ Jane wrote, ‘and that the same circumstances creating political interest for him would make my life especially difficult.’1

Whatever the external circumstances, for the most part these are personal stories told from within. Their sphere is essentially domestic. Whether they are writing from Persia or St Petersburg, these women (mostly wives, but some daughters and sisters, too) describe the concerns of any ordinary Englishwoman: children, dogs, gardens, houses, servants, clothes, food. Politics, except on the occasions when they came into direct conflict with their lives, are only incidentally discussed. What they engage with instead is daily life. For the contemporary reader the women’s subjectivity has a peculiar veritas which is frequently absent from their husbands’ more distanced and perhaps more scholarly approach. What they do, brilliantly, is to describe what life was really like. It is this, more than anything else, which is their particular genius.

Who, today, would want to read Colonel Sheil’s ponderous ethnographic dissertation on Persia in the mid-nineteenth century?* The memoir of his wife Mary, however, contained in the same volume, while politically almost entirely uninformative, has a freshness and drama which remains undimmed by time. Mary vividly describes her agonizing 1,000-mile journey with three small children and an invalid husband through the Caucasus Mountains from Tehran to Trebizond on the Black Sea (from whence they were able to sail to England). She recorded with simple stoicism how they waded up to their knees through the freezing snow, eating only dry crusts and sleeping in stables: ‘I learned on this journey that neither children nor invalids know how much fatigue and privation they can endure until they are under compulsion.’2

In writing Daughters of Britannia I have drawn on the experiences of more than 100 diplomatic women. Their lives span nearly 350 years of history, and encompass almost every imaginable geographical and cultural variation, from the glittering social whirl enjoyed by Countess Granville in Paris after the Napoleonic Wars, to the privations suffered at the turn of this century by that redoubtable Scotswoman, Catherine Macartney, who in her seventeen years in Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan, saw only three other European women.

Many of these women lived unique lives. Some saw sights which no other English person, man or woman, had ever seen. And yet, despite their vast differences – in character and taste as much as circumstances – a bond of shared experience unites them; a diplomatic ‘culture’ which was both official and intensely personal. Even though they are separated by nearly 200 years, when the anguished Countess of Elgin writes about her longing for news from home, it could be my own mother writing.

Dearest Mother,

Do not expect this to be an agreeable letter. I am too much disappointed in never hearing from home; the 17th July is the last from you, almost six months!… I can’t imagine why you took it into your heads that we were going home; for I am sure I wrote constantly to tell you that we were at Constantinople, and why you would not believe me I know not. If you knew what I felt when the posts arrive and no letters for me, I am sure you would pity me. I shall write to nobody but you, for I feel I am too cross.3

In the Elgins’ day the journey from England to Constantinople was not only long and arduous, it was also hazardous. Messengers were frequently attacked and robbed, and every single precious letter either destroyed or lost. Amazingly, even in the late twentieth century the non-arrival of the bag has been the cause of as much disappointment and pain. Here is my mother to my brother on 23 May 1978: ‘Darling Matthew, Boo hoo! The bag has let us down, and there is gnashing of teeth here, and blood is boiling.’ And to myself, on the same day: ‘Darling Katie, The bloody bag has let us down yet again and we have no letters from any of you. We are so mad we could spit …’

What qualities were needed in a diplomat’s wife? In Mary Elgin’s day nobody would have thought it necessary to enumerate them. Of course, plenty was written on the qualities required in a man. In the sixteenth century, when the idea of sending a resident ambassador abroad was still fairly new, these were frequently listed in treaties and manuals. A man (in Sir Henry Wotton’s famously ambiguous phrase) ‘sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’ was required to have an almost impossibly long list of attributes. He should be not only tall, handsome, well-born and blessed with ‘a sweet voice’ and ‘a well-sounding name’,4 but also well read in literature, in civil and canon law and all branches of secular knowledge, in mathematics, music geometry and astronomy. He should be able to converse elegantly in the Latin tongue and be a good orator. He should also be of fine and upstanding morals: loyal, brave, temperate, prudent and honest.

An important ambassador’s entourage could include secretaries and ‘intelligencers’, a chaplain, musicians, liverymen, a surgeon, trumpeters, gentlemen of the horse, ‘gentlemen of quality who attended for their own pleasure’, young nephews ‘wanting that polish that comes from a foreign land’, even dancing and fencing masters. But never a wife.

The ideal diplomatic wife was more difficult to describe: ‘Just as the right sort can make all the difference to her husband’s position,’ wrote Marie-Noele Kelly rather forbiddingly in her memoirs, ‘so one who is inefficient, disagreeable, disloyal, or even merely stupid, can be a millstone around his neck.’5 Although there have been some magnificent millstones – Lady Townley’s infamous ‘indiscretions’ forced her husband to retire from the service – there is no doubt that all the staunchest qualities deemed necessary in men were required in their wives, too. Circumstances have often demanded of them unimaginable courage and reserves of fortitude.

This book is the story of how such women survived. It is the story of many lives lived valiantly far away from family and friends; and of the uniquely demanding diplomatic culture which sustained (and sometimes failed to sustain) these women as they struggled, often in very difficult conditions, to represent their country abroad. Although their role, in the eyes of ‘his-story’, lay very much behind the scenes, I believe that this is precisely why their testimony is so valuable: it was in coping with quite ordinary things, with the daily round of life, that their resilience and resourcefulness found its greatest expression.

My only regret is for the lives which, even after more than two years’ searching, have continued to elude me. So it is only in my imagination that I can describe for you what it must have been like for Lady Winchilsea as she sailed into Constantinople, that city of marvels, by her husband’s side that afternoon. Perhaps she, like the ambassador, was dressed in her court robes, still fusty and foul-smelling from their long confinement in a damp sea-trunk. Dolphins were still a common sight in the Bosphorus in those days, and I like to think of her watching them riding the bow-waves in front of the ship as it came into the harbour at last, the fabled city rising before them, its domes and minarets shining in the pink and gold light.

* Helen Pickard, the wife of the deputy high commissioner.

* Manuscript copies of these documents, often written in the form of relazione (‘A narrative of …’), were considered so valuable that they often commanded large sums, even in their own time.

† Previously, the role of an ambassador was usually to complete a short-term mission – to declare war or negotiate a treaty. England’s first permanent ambassador, John Shirwood, became resident in Rome in 1479. In 1505 John Stile was sent to Spain by Henry VII, where he became the first resident ambassador to a secular court. By the mid-seventeenth century the idea of permanent missions abroad was no longer a novelty in England, but neither was it a universal practice. During the Restoration (1660–68) the crown sent diplomatic missions to thirty countries, but permanent embassies to only five (France, Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces and the Hanse towns of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck). Turkey and Russia were in a special category: ambassadors were sent there in the name of the monarch, but were in fact paid servants of the Turkey Company or British merchants settled in Moscow.