Socialism’s creed of political rights and economic equality for all was inherently inimical to Mary’s world. Yet for the aristocratic dowagers who, gorgon-like, lined the ballroom walls as chaperones to the young who danced before them, the more present threat came from capitalism: plutocratic fortunes from industry and finance trying to force entry into the hallowed drawing rooms of the landed elite. Throughout the 1880s the cry went up from within Society that the ruling class were losing their exclusivity, that young women were being presented at court whom nobody (by which it was meant nobody of ‘birth’) had ever seen. The percentage of women from the titled and landed classes presented at court fell from 90 per cent in 1841 to 68 per cent in 1871, to under 50 per cent in 1891.11 Meanwhile the number of presentations was steadily increasing. In 1880, the year of Mary’s debut, a fourth drawing room was added to the social calendar, in 1895 a fifth. ‘Society, in the old sense of the term, may be said, I think, to have come to an end in the “eighties” of the last century,’ said Lady Dorothy Nevill in 1910.12 The anxiety this caused was immense. ‘Let any person who knows London society look through the lists of debutantes and ladies attending drawing rooms and I wager that not half the names will be known to him or her,’ thundered one dowager in 1891, inveighing against the advent of ‘social scum and nouveaux riches’.13
These dowagers’ underlying fear was that those forcing entry to their drawing rooms would use their seductive financial power to gain access to their children’s beds. The Season was a marriage market for the children of the elite. Within that market, matches were ‘facilitated’ by careful parents, rather than expressly arranged.14 The convention was that a young couple should be in love – but with a socially and financially suitable mate. Consequently, access to that market needed to be strictly regulated, in order to prevent young aristocrats accidentally making the wrong choice, and pure bloodlines being corrupted by plutocratic wealth.
In fact, the English elite’s permeability has always been one of the key reasons for its continued survival. Its education system – Eton and Oxbridge – could with time turn the son of ‘social scum’ into a gentleman apparently indistinguishable from one whose bloodline goes back centuries. Yet it required thick skin. Mary’s friends Laura and Margot Tennant, the daughters of the Scottish industrialist Sir Charles Tennant, great-granddaughters of a crofter,15 found that even after securing presentation at court, most doors were still closed to them, and, at the balls which they did attend, no men would dance with them. For Margot, social entrée came only when she managed to engage the Prince of Wales in conversation in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. ‘I felt my spirits rise, as, walking slowly across the crowded lawn in grilling sunshine, I observed everyone making way for us with lifted hats and low curtsies,’ she recalled.16 Even after the Tennant girls’ entry into Society their father was always known, to their aristocratic friends, in barely concealed mockery, as ‘the Bart’ – a reference to the baronetcy of which he was so obviously proud and the new money that had secured it.
For the aristocratic if bohemian Mary, who had access everywhere, what feathers she ruffled were of her own making. Writing her own memoir in later life, she remembered an incident with a young Oxford undergraduate, George Curzon:
As we were dancing we received the full impact of handsome Lady Bective’s train, formed of masses and masses and layers and layers of black tulle wired and strapped, about as heavy and powerful as a whale’s tail. It caught us broadside with immense force and we were swept off our feet and [hurled] to the ground and fell at my mother’s feet, our heads almost under the small hard gold chair on which she was patiently sitting as chaperone.17
In old age, validated by decades of social success, Mary could look back on such youthful exuberance with pride. For her contemporaneous feelings we must turn elsewhere. Not to her diary: the journal that Mary kept religiously from the age of sixteen until her death was an object of record, not of confidence, and her entries generally masterpieces of pragmatism. That for 8 October 1884, by no means untypical, reads: ‘Put on orange frock, went down to tea, sat in draught, rested, black’.18 It is far better to look to her sketches. On scraps of paper she drew top-hatted men about town carrying silver canes; strolling ladies in bustles and magnificent hats by day, drooping elegantly over their fans in ballgowns by night. She drew herself in balldress, shivering with cold in the early hours of the morning; bundled up against the chill spring in an umbrella and a muff; and on horseback, elegant in her riding habit, brandishing her riding crop under dripping trees in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row. On the back of an embossed thick card inviting ‘The Hon Percy & Mrs Wyndham & Miss Wyndham’ to one of Buckingham Palace’s two Court Balls each season is a caricature of herself entitled ‘Miss Parrot at the Ball’; she teased her little sisters with sketches depicting ‘Pretty Mary and her plain sisters’.19
These sketches show the curious eye of an eager young woman getting to grips with the rules of a new, sophisticated world. Around this time Mary visited Dr Lorenzo Niles Fowler, a fashionable American phrenologist, in his Piccadilly offices. Phrenology, the art of analysing character by skull shape, is now discredited, not least for its unsavoury associations with eugenics. In the 1880s, it was Society’s latest craze. Dr Fowler must have been perceptive, since his report is curiously accurate. It describes an unselfconscious young woman, young for her years, and happy to let others – particularly her mother – take the lead; combative, but quick to forgive; loyal; and easily interested in other people. Interestingly, Dr Fowler also identified a normally well-hidden element of Mary’s personality. ‘You are remarkable for your ambition in one form or another,’ he said, commenting on her desire ‘to appear well in society, to attract attention, & to be admired’. This was undoubtedly true, and something Mary herself would always disavow.20 She visited Dr Fowler at least twice more, taking her future husband with her too. Even given her love of novelty – Mary was always enthusiastic about the latest craze – it suggests she found some merit in his analysis.
In Thatched with Gold, Mabell Airlie expressed the conventional expectation of a debutante: to marry as soon as possible, preferably in her first Season. Too long a delay, and ‘there remained nothing but India as a last resort before the spectre of the Old Maid became a reality’.21 A debutante’s social success was certainly measured out by proposals. Mary, who declared later that ‘Many wanted me to wife!’,22 received more than a few. Nonetheless, her parents did not encourage her to marry straight away. They thought eighteen far too young to take on the responsibility of a husband and household, and were anyway reluctant to lose her to a husband so soon. Still, Mary did not become engaged until her fourth Season, in 1883. The delay was longer than Madeline Wyndham – responsible for guiding her daughter towards a suitable match, determined to prove her family’s worth by securing a splendid one – could have hoped for.
In the autumn of 1880 Balfour invited Mary and her parents to Strathconan, his Highland hunting lodge. The visit was not a success. Mary was tongue-tied with awkwardness: in her own words, ‘a shy Miss Mog … feeling very stiff & studying Green’s history & strumming Bach most conscientiously listening with silent awe to the flashing repartee, the witticisms & above all the startling aplomb of “grown-up conversation”’.23 It may have been this muteness that gave rise to the story that some of Mary’s circle had initially thought her a little backward.24
In