Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

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.