Blunt was preoccupied with another devastating blow to nationalism dealt by Gladstone’s ministry in Egypt. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, in order to shore up the corrupt Khedive’s unstable rule in the face of revolt by Colonel Ahmed Orabi, popularly known as the Arabi Pasha. The need to protect the interests of the ‘bondholders’, as those numerous Britons with investments in Egypt were now called, outweighed any nice concerns for Midlothian principles of national self-government. So firmly did the British believe that Suez must be protected that just nineteen members of the House of Commons voted against the occupation. Percy Wyndham was the only Tory to do so, vigorously opposed to what he believed to be Britain’s illegal and oppressive behaviour.48 He later made one of his increasingly rare Commons speeches on Blunt’s behalf, for Blunt’s fierce advocacy of the Arabi’s cause – even to the extent of paying for his legal defence when the Arabi was court-martialled (the trial was abandoned, and the Arabi exiled instead) – earned Blunt exile himself. In July 1884, trying to go back to Egypt, Blunt was detained at Alexandria by British officials who, under instructions from Sir Edward Malet, the Consul General, forbade the troublemaker entry.49
Access to a parliamentary seat was still easy for a young aristocrat. In January 1883, Hugo’s grandfather died, and his father, now the tenth Earl of Wemyss, was elevated to the Lords. At a by-election in February, Hugo, having inherited his father’s courtesy title, stepped neatly into the Suffolk seat his father had held since 1847. Seamlessly, a Lord Elcho once more sat for Haddington. At Wilbury Mary, Mananai and Pamela decorated Mary’s dog Crack with yellow ribbons to celebrate – the colour of the Primrose League. The League, named after the favourite flower of Disraeli (who died in 1881), promoted working- and middle-class Toryism – the latter becoming known as Villa Toryism – largely through jamborees and summer fêtes, enticing the electorate with the promise of aristocratic proximity. It was the work of Lord Randolph Churchill, the preacher of ‘Tory Democracy’, an ill-defined creed that involved transferring power from the party’s leadership to the National Union – the constituencies – but was really part of his own bid for power. Privately, he described it as ‘chiefly opportunism’.50
Throughout that year Hugo sent Mary bouquets which she unpicked and made into buttonholes for him to wear; they played lawn tennis, went to the theatre, had tea and walked in the park: all under Madeline Wyndham’s encouraging eye. Finally on a July night in 1883, with ‘buttonhole no. 171’ in his lapel, Hugo proposed and Mary said yes.51 The next day, Hugo went to Belgrave Square to seek formally the Wyndhams’ blessing. Percy gave it to him ‘from my heart of hearts … Mary is a great treasure, and as I believe you know it I am very glad you have made her love you.’52
Mary had never properly met Hugo’s parents. They were introduced the next day at tea at their Mayfair house, 23 St James’s Street. Annie Wemyss took to Mary ‘immensely’, deeming her ‘so natural, so true, so good, & so free from affectation, fastness’. ‘[This] is such a good thing,’ wrote a mutual acquaintance to Percy, ‘for as we know, she [Annie Wemyss] does not take always spontaneously to people. I confess I felt rather nervous about it …’53 Madeline Wyndham was delighted. ‘She will bring you all nearer together,’ she told Hugo, as though her daughter were a sort of familial Elastoplast.54
Mary’s precipitation from the Wyndhams’ loving bosom into the Wemysses’ chilly embrace concerned many of the Wyndhams’ friends. ‘Condolences’ upon the loss of a daughter to marriage were conventional enough, as were the ‘icy congratulations’ that Mary received from Hugo’s desultory rivals.55 But many of the letters of congratulations sent to Belgrave Square were somewhat equivocal, and could not conceal a certain bemusement at her choice.56 Rediscovering them in middle age, Mary thought it obvious that most of her relations had thought Hugo was not quite good enough.57
Mary did not particularly enjoy her engagement: ‘six weeks of racket’58 consisting of all the things she most disliked: endless trips ‘drudging around the shops’ after her mother, and being prodded and poked by crowds of people ‘swarming about the house about bothering clothes’.59 Hugo teased Mary about the new skills she was acquiring in preparation for life as a matron running a household: ‘I wonder what you are doing … learning how many apples go to a Pie, or what butter costs at ¾ a pound … or perhaps you have been philosophizing over the degeneracy of modern linen … & regretting the halcyon days of muslins.’60
Both lovers expressed the sentiments expected of them. The day after their engagement, Mary told Hugo she had passed a sleepless night, contemplating the great change before her.61 In the following days she professed herself ‘completely happy!’ with her ‘darling Hoggolindo … angel-Hoggie’. ‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,’ she told ‘his Lordship Hogge the Good’, quoting her favourite lines from Romeo and Juliet. Hugo had become the very model of young Victorian manhood, swearing to ‘to pray, pray with your photo before me … to become more deserving of my happiness, to be drawn out of my stupid narrow self to something higher, better, nearer what you are’.62 But, all too soon, Hugo was back to his old habits, and doubts had surfaced in Mary’s mind.
Barely a fortnight into her engagement, Mary had to intervene with the Wemysses on Hugo’s behalf. Hugo had found his gambling poison, the Stock Exchange, and on his first flutter lost £700, the equivalent of over £57,000 today. In what would become a wearily familiar exchange, Mary persuaded the Wemysses not to tie up Hugo’s inheritance in a trust, but she was worried about their future before they had even embarked on it.63 Nor did Hugo appear to think his engagement required him to stop his constant flirting. ‘I don’t care how much “nonsense” you talk to everybody or anybody at the Fisheries tonight for I do feel that you love me truly as I do you from the bottom of my heart,’ Mary told Hugo in mid-July, but her stout avowals ring hollow.64
Around this time – perhaps precipitated by the gambling incident – Mary tried to call off the engagement. Her formal, stilted letter to ‘Lord Elcho’ reads like that of a slightly less tactful Elizabeth Bennet who has accidently accepted Mr Collins. She was at home in Belgrave Square, dinner was ready downstairs and doubtless her father was growing increasingly impatient, but, she declared,
I must write this at once … speak straight out & tell you that I have hour by hour become more forcibly, painfully & unmistakeably [sic] convinced that when I accepted you a fortnight ago I did not rightly understand my own mind … [I am] perfectly certain [that] I do not love & respect you as I feel I should … I feel it my duty my positive & absolute duty to break off our proposed marriage.
As soon as Mary had forced those words out, her relief is palpable: her tone becomes free and easy and her pen dashes across the page in her usual untidy manner:
I hope you will not mind much! Tho’ yr pride may be shocked at first – I feel assured that you will so feel it to be all for the best for both of us & I trust you will think of me kindly as your true friend MW p.s. Please excuse my untidiness! I feel our marriage would lead to endless misery to both of us as it is. N.B. I am sure we shall always be very good friends. I know you will not take it to heart.65
The engagement was not broken. By the next day, Mary was writing to Hugo as though they were reconciled, but her tone remains sober and the pet-names are nowhere to be seen. Whether it was an attempt to shock Hugo into good behaviour or whether it was cold feet (thirty years later George