On that opening night, however, the great critic Ruskin was mostly struck by Whistler’s effrontery in exhibiting work with so little apparent finish. ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,’ he wrote in Fors Clavigera. Whistler sued for libel, claiming inter alia that since Ruskin’s review he had not been able to achieve a price comparable to that which Percy paid for his Nocturne. Mary, like the art world, was agog: ‘so funny’, she wrote in her diary, ‘the jury going to Westminster Palace Hotel to examine the pictures, and hearing Mr. Burne-Jones, Whistler, W. M. Rossetti and all of them in the witness box’.59
Six months later, Madeline Wyndham took Mary and George, home for the holidays, to Leighton House for one of Leighton’s famed chamber-music afternoons that introduced rising musical stars – Hallé, Piatti, Joachim – to Society. Among the guests was Arthur Balfour, in his early thirties, Conservative Member for Hertford.
Balfour, the man who once said ‘Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all,’ was already renowned for his languidness. Despite six years in the Commons, he was not to make his political name until the next ministry, as a member of the maverick quartet known as the Fourth Party, led by Lord Randolph Churchill, who devoted their time in opposition to harassing the Liberal Government and their own ineffectual Leader in the Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote.
However, Balfour was already a prime target for ambitious Society matrons seeking to marry off their daughters. He was impeccably connected through his mother, and the favourite nephew of Lord Salisbury, the gloomy refusenik of the Reform Act who was now a serious contender to take over from the elderly Disraeli when the latter retired. From his dead father Balfour had inherited a nabob fortune – the term used to describe those whose riches came from working for the East India Company in the Indian sub-continent – and the prosperous Whittingehame estate. Balfour was not one who thought politics should govern life. He maintained a keen interest in philosophy – the best known of his works, Foundations of Belief, was published in 1895 – and held musical concerts at his own house, 4 Carlton Gardens, for which he had recently commissioned Burne-Jones to create a series of murals.
Above all, the tall, dark-haired, humorous Balfour was charming: ‘He has but to smile and men and women fall prone at his feet,’ said his close friend Mary Gladstone, who had been besotted with him for years60 and whose father William considered him a protégé, despite their opposing political stances. Fifty years later, the Liberal MP Howard Begbie commented caustically on Balfour’s undimmed charm: ‘I have seen many [people] retire from shaking his hand with a flush of pride on their faces as though Royalty had stooped to inquire after the measles of their youngest child.’61 Some years later, when Mary Wyndham was newly married, a friend would comment worriedly on her attitude towards Arthur: ‘he fascinates her – her attitude is that of looking up in wonder … Thinks him good …’62 Mary and George’s shared fascination with Balfour began the day they met him. Their lives would ever after be entwined with his. And an elderly Balfour, attempting an autobiography, would put down his pen at precisely the moment he met the seventeen-year-old Mary Wyndham among the chattering crowds at Leighton House.63
At 3 o’clock on an early-summer afternoon in 1880 Madeline Wyndham presented Mary at the Royal Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace.1 This was Mary’s ‘passport to Society’:2 her formal entry to her parents’ world. Each spring, aristocratic households decamped, children, staff and all, to London for the Season. One year at Wilbury, Mary counted thirty-six boxes of luggage stacked up in the hall.3 Ostensibly, the Drawing Rooms, at which presentations took place, were the most important element of the Season. In reality, Society thought them the most tedious part. Ornate carriages with bewigged coachmen and liveried footmen sat nose to tail on the Mall for hours waiting to gain entry to the Palace, traffic sometimes snaking back through St James’s Park. Their occupants, stifling in their elaborate dress, were considered fair game for the crowds that thronged the Mall to watch and pass bawdy, affectionate comment.
After her husband’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria had retreated into self-imposed purdah. One of her many children deputized for her as the Royal Presence to whom debutantes curtsied low before rising, waiting for their train to be draped over their arm, and then backing out of the room. Half a century on, a host of elderly memorialists dwelling long on the fragrant pot-pourri of a bygone age recalled their relief at having executed the complicated manoeuvre – which required several weeks’ worth of dedicated lessons – without falling or tripping over. Doubtless Mary felt the same. The pageant along the Mall was a glorious affirmation of the social order, proving Henry James’s observation that ‘Nowhere so much as in England was it fortunate to be fortunate.’4 Yet, as so often, the interplay between pageantry and power was more subtle. Over the course of a century, the traditions surrounding Britain’s monarchy had become more elaborate as the reality of its sovereign power decreased.5 The same might be true in relation to its aristocracy.
After six years of Disraeli, Gladstone stormed back to power in 1880 on the back of his Midlothian Campaign. Ostensibly the campaign was for a constituency. In reality, it was a national platform for Gladstone to inveigh against the moral iniquities of ‘Beaconsfieldism’ – for in raising Victoria to the rank of empress Disraeli had secured himself a peerage as Earl of Beaconsfield in token of his monarch’s grateful thanks. The campaign, orchestrated by Constance Leconfield’s brother Lord Rosebery, was a whistle-stop railway tour of the north. The meetings were more like religious revivals. As Gladstone, followed by a pack of press, lamented Britain’s failure to act as the watchdog of weaker nations, people fainted in the crush of thousands and were handed out over the heads of those around them. Reports of his latest address rattled across the wires to Fleet Street, telegraphed across the nation in the next day’s press.6 It irrevocably altered the landscape of campaigning. Gladstone’s enemies deplored his demagogic approach. But the man now popularly known as the ‘GOM’ – the ‘Grand Old Man’ – was the nation’s moral compass, and his party triumphant. Queen Victoria, despite trying first to persuade the Whig Lord Hartington to form a government, was reluctantly forced to accept the inevitable and invite a man she characterized as a ‘half-madman … mischief maker and firebrand’ to be Prime Minister for a second time.7
The Whigs still restrained the Radical element, but the Liberal party nonetheless seemed to be lurching to the left. For the Tories the very fact that radicalism had a political voice provoked anxiety, and the parliamentary runes augured ill when Parliament, on reconvening, was consumed by the Bradlaugh Affair, in which Northampton’s atheist Liberal representative asked to ‘affirm’ his allegiance to the Crown instead of taking the religious oath demanded of all MPs. Lord Randolph Churchill, leader of the Fourth Party, spat vitriol against Bradlaugh as a ‘seditious blasphemer’, bent on destroying the union of Church and State.8 Throughout the controversy of several years – Bradlaugh was not to take his seat until 1886 – Percy stood against his party in supporting Bradlaugh, citing his belief in liberty of conscience.9
Gladstone’s