After making the proper kind of dynastic marriage, providing their aristocratic husbands with heirs, and transferring their children’s care to nannies, well-born women would find themselves at leisure. They were often bored, and played the game as enthusiastically as their husbands. Society colluded to keep everything discreet, even when prominent ladies gave birth to ‘late’ children who looked nothing like their husbands. The only threat to this happy arrangement, the thing to be avoided at all costs, was the public scandal of the divorce courts. Then the gloves came off, and the losers—usually women—were reviled in the press and excluded from society.
As an illustration of this code of conduct, there could be no better example than the Parnell affair. Everyone who knew Parnell and Mrs O’Shea, from the Prime Minister himself to the chambermaids who served them, treated Mrs O’Shea as Parnell’s lawful wife, and no one seemed to trouble themselves about the morality of the situation. But the fateful intervention of Captain O’Shea removed Parnell’s private life from the realm of the Marlborough House set rules, and cast it firmly into the public arena, where such things could not be accommodated. Thus Gladstone, who had been perfectly happy to acknowledge the affair in private, could not risk supporting Parnell through a public scandal. This may seem like utter hypocrisy—it seemed so to Mrs O’Shea at the time—but it was a reflection of the fact that the middle and working classes expected their national leaders to keep out of such scandals.
This was the world in which Lloyd George found himself when he entered Parliament, and this was the context to his own behaviour during the years that followed. The Parnell affair had lessons to impart in terms of both his marriage and his career, and he learned them well. Within his marriage, he was able to keep transient flirtations and affairs separate from the love and commitment he offered Maggie. While expecting total fidelity from his wife, he indulged in relationships with other women and was never faithful to any of them, making full use of the prevailing silence of the press in such matters. This was a million miles away from the attitudes in Criccieth, but then, Lloyd George was far away from Criccieth. Such was the impact of the Parnell affair on Lloyd George that he would give Frances Stevenson a biography of Parnell when he asked her to be his mistress. The warning was implicit: there would be no divorce in his case. There would be no scandal. His career came first.
However clear in his mind Lloyd George was on this point, the story of the gallant Irish politician who sacrificed his career for love sent a very different message to others of his acquaintance. One of them was Catherine Edwards, the wife of a respectable doctor in Cemmaes, Merioneth, who by fancying herself as the Welsh Kitty O’Shea caused the first major scandal of Lloyd George’s parliamentary career.
By the summer of 1896, Maggie’s life had settled into its uneven split between Criccieth and London, and since Lloyd George had maintained his majority in the general election of 1895, she could be confident that her life as an MP’s wife was likely to continue. She was thirty, and her brood now numbered four chicks, with Dick aged seven, Mair six, Olwen four, and the youngest, Gwilym, eighteen months. She was pregnant for the fifth time, and as usual she intended to stay in Criccieth until the birth. She and Lloyd George were still spending long times apart. He was making a name for himself as a backbencher and leader within the Welsh Parliamentary Group, and had taken several long holidays with political friends, while she stayed behind in Criccieth, which seemed to suit them both.
Money was still a problem. In his struggle to keep the family financially afloat, Lloyd George was apt to be tempted into unwise business dealings, and in 1893 the prospect of a quick return on a goldmine in far-distant Patagonia had been too attractive to resist. The consequences were disastrous, and in an attempt to turn the situation around he decided to take a trip to Argentina during the 1896 parliamentary recess, leaving on 21 August and returning on 27 October. He also needed a holiday, for his mother had died on 19 June. She was sixty-eight, and had been an invalid for many years. Lloyd George returned to Criccieth for a small, private funeral, and was so upset that Richard Lloyd sent him back to London so that politics could distract him from his grief. Maggie was too unwell to attend Betsy’s funeral, and during his trip—or possibly just before his departure—she lost the baby. While she was recovering from this setback, unbeknownst to her a child was being born to a cousin of hers, Catherine Edwards. This child was going to cast a shadow over her life for the next three years.
Catherine Edwards, or ‘Kitty’ as she was (ironically) known, was a ‘pretty, pert, amiable young woman’28 who lived with her daughter and her husband, the local doctor, near the village of Mathafarn. In August 1896 her husband realised that she was pregnant, which was a surprise to him since the couple were estranged and had occupied separate bedrooms since 1894. What happened next came within a whisker of destroying Lloyd George’s political career.
Kitty later claimed that on 10 August her husband used physical violence to induce her to sign a statement written in his hand. It read:
I, Catherine Edwards, do solemnly confess that I have on 4th of February, 1896, committed adultery with Lloyd George MP, and that the said Lloyd George is the father of the child, and that I have on a previous occasion committed adultery with the above Lloyd George.29
Dr Edwards denied using violence against his wife, but he did throw her out of the house, and just over a week later she gave birth to a child at a temperance hotel called The Tower in Penygroes, near Caernarvon. At the time it was claimed that the baby was born near its full term, but the date of the confessed adultery, together with Dr Edwards’ ignorance of his wife’s condition until August, lend credence to a later doctor’s report that the child was born substantially premature, weak and sickly at just over four pounds. The child did not survive to adulthood.
Naturally, within a small community, news like this could not be kept quiet, and Lloyd George’s political enemies made sure that the gossip persisted. While Lloyd George was abroad the rumours reached the ears of his brother William. To his credit, William never entertained the notion that his brother could be guilty as charged, but he recognised the gravity of the situation, recording gloomily in his diary: ‘The event that has overshadowed everything else in my little world during the last two days is the charge which is being made against D in connection with Mrs Dr Edwards…I hope to God that neither Uncle nor Maggie will hear anything of this slander until D returns when, of course, he will be in a position to deal with the “affair” effectively.’30
William knew that the scandal would end Lloyd George’s career if he was not able to defend himself adequately, a fear that was reinforced the next day when he received a letter from R.O. Roberts, Lloyd George’s election agent, containing the sombre message: ‘The story is in everybody’s mouth here, and naturally enough, people are shocked whether it be true or not. If true, then D’s days are numbered; if untrue then it is a most devilish trick to blacken a man in his absence.’31
William immediately set about discovering the facts in order to mount a defence, taking care that Maggie heard nothing of the matter. He wrote a letter to Lloyd George with the bare bones of the accusation and sent it to Southampton to await his return. Having consulted Uncle Lloyd’s diary, which faithfully recorded Lloyd George’s whereabouts every day, he satisfied himself that his brother was innocent, and proceeded to do everything he could to keep a lid on the story. However, he did not know the date of the alleged adultery. He must have counted back nine months from the birth