Looking back over the abortive courtship many years later, Mary blamed her shyness and Balfour’s cowardice. She could not audaciously flirt like the Tennant sisters. She, like Shakespeare’s Beatrice, had needed luring. But Balfour was too ‘busy and captious’ to do it. ‘Mama wanted you to marry me [but] you got some silly notion in your head because … circumstances accidentally kept us apart – you were the only man I wanted for my husband and it’s a great compliment to you! … but you wouldn’t give me a chance of showing you nicely and you never came to Wilbury and you were afraid, afraid, afraid!’ she teased him.26
Many biographers have examined in some detail why Balfour, at whom women flung themselves, never married. It has been suggested that the ‘Pretty Fanny’ of press caricatures was gay, even an hermaphrodite.27 His devoted niece Blanche Dugdale suggested that he was nursing a lifelong broken heart after the death from typhoid in 1875 of his close friend May Lyttelton.28 In fact, Mary’s analysis seems to hint at the most probable answer: Balfour was lazy, and emotion frightened him. He felt safest in a rational, logical world. ‘The Balfourian manner’ for which he became known ‘has its roots in an attitude of … convinced superiority which insists in the first place on complete detachment from the enthusiasms of the human race, and in the second place on keeping the vulgar world at arm’s length …’ wrote Begbie. In Begbie’s phrase, that world, which Balfour so charmed upon meeting, was never allowed to penetrate beyond his lodge gates.29 A decade into their acquaintance, Mary pressed Balfour to express some kind of affection in his letters to her. He recoiled. ‘Such things are impossible to me: and they would if said to me give such exquisite pain, that I could never bring myself to say them to others – even at their desire,’ he explained.30
In December 1880, Mary visited Wilton, home of the Earl and Countess of Pembroke. It was her first visit without her parents – she was chaperoned only by Eassy, her mother’s maid – and a suitably ‘safe’ first foray since Gertrude Pembroke and Madeline Wyndham had been close friends for many years. The house party included two men whom Mary knew only a little, but liked – Alfred Lyttelton (brother of May), ‘that nice youngest one’ of the large Lyttelton clan, and Hugo Charteris, eldest surviving son of Lord and Lady Elcho, heir to the earldom of Wemyss. The house party was rehearsing Christmas theatricals in a delightfully shambolic fashion. Mary was in her element. ‘We all turn our backs on the audience, we don’t speak up, we laugh, we hesitate and we gabble,’ she told her mother. ‘Hugo talks in a very funny voice.’31 Acerbic, witty Hugo, a talented amateur actor, was far more attractive to women than his average looks suggested (he was balding fast). He was also a complicated soul, with a morose streak and a gambling problem. His gambling was often to complicate relations with his father, whose own high-minded preoccupation – army reform – earned him the sobriquet ‘the Brigadier’.32 Two elder brothers had died in their early twenties (one an accident, the other a suspected suicide). Lady Elcho was a daunting figure even in the context of mid-Victorian evangelism, and never troubled to conceal from Hugo her feeling that the wrong sons had died.33 ‘Mums called Keems [Hugo] darling & patted him on the leg … neither of which has she done for years,’ Hugo noted with delight (referring to himself in the third person, something he often did in correspondence with his wife) when he was almost thirty years old.34
Madeline Wyndham had known the Elchos for many years, not intimately but well. In February 1881 she invited Hugo to Wilbury. If she thought to capitalize upon interest sparked in Mary at Wilton, she was mistaken. When Madeline tried to make her daughter commit to a date, Mary professed an utter lack of interest. ‘As to Hugoman, his is an indefinite arrangement. I suppose you will write to him before the time comes [although] we might have him Monday as Lily [Paulet, Hugo’s cousin] comes that day,’ she wrote laconically in a letter otherwise devoted to plans for rearranging balls so that her friend and neighbour Louisa Gully might attend.35 Recalling this period a few years later, Mary gloated over her inscrutability: ‘poor Mum … she really couldn’t fathom Migs,’ she said, describing herself proudly as ‘the little hunter (who always hunted on her own hook & followed her own trail)’.36 Madeline persisted nonetheless. Six months later, Hugo was posted to Constantinople as part of a short-lived stint in the Foreign Office. By this time, his acquaintance with Mary was well established. Mary wrote to him on the eve of his departure recounting her recent nineteenth-birthday celebrations at Wilbury, where she had, in accordance with family tradition, been crowned with a wreath of roses and spent the evening celebrating with songs and dancing. She had decided, she told him, that ‘the [cat]’ – and here she drew a little cartoon of a cat – ‘believes the [hog]’ – a drawing of a pig – ‘to be most sage, large-minded and kind’.37
Meritocracy had not reached the Foreign Office. It was believed that only those with breeding could properly and confidently uphold British prestige abroad. Lord Robert Cecil commented that all a junior attaché needed was fluent French and the ability ‘to dangle about at parties and balls’.38 Several months later, bored and lonely in Constantinople, Hugo received a letter from his brother Evan, updating him on London gossip, including a nugget concerning a putative rival, David Ogilvy, heir to the earldom of Airlie:
Apparently he [Ogilvy] came over here in the summer intending to stay for a year and a half but went back after two months as Miss Wyndham was too much for him. He never proposed to her but was afraid he would do so, so he retired. I suppose you keep up constant correspondence with her I daresay she has told you more about Ogilvy than I can …
On that mischievous note, Evan swore Hugo to secrecy.39
Mary most certainly had not gossiped. Hugo only discovered the truth of the matter several years later. ‘I think that Mumsie [Madeline Wyndham] proposing to Ogles for you & being refused is very funni [sic],’ Hugo told Mary gleefully upon discovering the real sequence of events in 1887.40 Mary, like her husband employing the third person, blusteringly denied all responsibility: ‘It had nothing to do with Migs, it was entirely the old huntress’s transaction … I didn’t care a hang about Ogles & knew he didn’t care a rap for me … Mumsie wanted Migs to be clear of Ogles (or engaged to him!!!) to “go in” for Wash [Hugo himself] with a clean nose!’41 It is quite possible that Ogles was the unnamed beau who allegedly abandoned his interest in Mary with the explanation that she was ‘A very nice filly, but she’s read too many books for me’.42
Hugo returned to England in the spring of 1882, bearing bangles ‘for Miss Mary’, and determined to start a new career in politics as a member of the Conservative Opposition.43 Mary was in Paris, flirting with Frenchmen and having ‘a high old time’. Madeline Wyndham ‘hunted’ her annoyed daughter back to Wilbury and dismissed her wheedling attempts to secure an invitation for a handsome ‘Musha de Deautand’ whom she had met in Hyères with the excuse that there was no room. ‘[T]here would be no harm done just a fortnight in the country … the house is elastic you could shove somebody somewhere,’ pleaded Mary, to no avail.44 Madeline Wyndham was decided. As Mary later recalled, her mother’s plan was that she was to ‘go in’ for Hugo and marriage ‘in the summer (together with reading & music!) that makes me laugh! Hunt the arts to keep one’s hand in!’45
That summer was one of the bloodiest politically for some time. In May, Parnell and his lieutenants William O’Brien and J. J. O’Kelly were released from several months’ imprisonment in Kilmainham Jail. They had been jailed for ‘treasonable practices’ after fomenting opposition to Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act, which gave Ireland the ‘3 Fs’ of fair rents, fixity of tenure and free sale of landholdings but which Parnell and his party considered did not go far enough. Their incarceration had thrown Ireland back into