Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power. Claudia Renton

the Wyndham blood and breeding. Such haziness about childbirth matters was far from uncommon. Twenty years later Mananai recounted to Madeline the story of an unfortunate girl who was told that she was to give birth in July and found herself still pregnant in September.²⁸ In Mary’s case, ‘Betsey’ did not reappear. She began to feel sick and ‘squeamish’. She supposed that she was either still pregnant or pregnant again.

      That summer, Mary made her first visit to Stanway, the Gloucestershire house that was her wedding present from Lord Wemyss. Stanway, where the family still lives, is a magical place – a ramshackle sixteenth-century house of honey-coloured stone shouldering on to a churchyard hidden away along an alley of pleached trees. The air seems thicker and stiller there: part of the house was originally a monastery, and a sense of this seclusion remains. The Elchos arrived on 31 July 1884, met at the station by a coachman, pony-chaise and black horse all seemingly as ancient as each other. They emerged from the leafy lanes to find Stanway glowing in the evening sun, with the bells of the tiny church that stood next door pealing in celebration. ‘[A] sort of heavenly feeling comes over one and laps one about,’ Mary told her mother of this arrival, the moment that she fell in love with the house that would be her home for the rest of her life.²⁹ That evening the Elchos walked up to the Pyramid, a monument at the top of a gentle hill overlooking the house that was to become the site of many a tryst and midnight escapade. Half a century later Mary could still remember the sickeningly stuffy smell of the brand-new blankets and the next day’s breakfast of trout fried in oatmeal made by the housekeeper.³⁰

      When the Elchos arrived, the house had lain near-abandoned for half a century, kept barely habitable by a skeleton staff of ancient retainers for the rare occasions that the Wemysses used it as a shooting lodge on a foray south. Draughts whistled through cracks in the walls, cold flooded in through the latticed windowpanes. Armies of rats and cockroaches scuttled across bare floorboards, and as dusk fell bats swooped through shadowy rooms. Mary was undaunted by the state of the house and full of enthusiasm for transforming it. On pieces of rough paper she sketched out floorplans for her family, explaining the house’s peculiar layout. Stanway had almost no passages: most of the rooms led on from one another and it could only sleep sixteen at a pinch – remarkably small in the context of most houses the Wyndhams visited. Mary would continually struggle with this as a hostess.

      Mary’s first guests – Percy, Fräulein, Mananai and Pamela – arrived on 3 August to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. Fräulein had made ‘a cake with big raisins in it’, and Mary had bought crackers, eagerly anticipating ‘a feast & revel’ with her family. Madeline Wyndham, George and Guy arrived a few days later, and work began on transforming the house. As gooseberries gently ripened in the overgrown gardens, Madeline and her daughters picked their way through dusty attics hunting for treasures. They found Chippendale chairs which they brought down to replace the early Victorian plush-and-gilt furniture already in situ; and they patched together lengths of embroidered materials so that they could be hung as curtains in Mary’s sitting room at the end of the house that looked up to the Monument. Great pieces of furniture were trundled from room to room, old rugs laid out across floorboards.

      A month later, while staying at the Wemysses’ gloomy townhouse in Edinburgh, with the tick-tock of the eerie mechanical clock echoing through the rooms, Mary reported to Madeline Wyndham that ‘Earnest’ ‘is alive and kicking!’ Despite a riot of ailments (‘rheumatic pains in back & tummy … flatulence, ript livers’, insomnia and indigestion),³¹ she finally relaxed. Madeline was at Wilbury, where George was waxing and waning yellow from an attack of jaundice. She seized a moment to write to her daughter before dashing into the village to ‘beg borrow or steal’ a hollyhock so that Val Prinsep, seized by the urge, could paint it.³² She sent Mary strict instructions not to travel unless she felt up to it, for ‘sometimes indigestion gets such possession of one during the last months that one is only fit for home [where] … you can give yourself up to a tea gown & your sofa’.³³

      Mary did not listen. Already she carried everywhere her ‘nest egg’ – a wicker hand basket of unanswered letters, always full to overflowing, despite several hours spent each morning trying to reduce the Sisyphean pile. In December 1884, when she was almost to term, she hosted her first house party for ‘the Gang’ at Stanway, their number including Arthur Balfour, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb, St John and Hilda Brodrick and Laura Tennant. It was a roaring success. Laura Tennant wrote, ‘it’s such fun here … we quarrel about everything – we talk up to the top of our bent – we grow hyper-sentimental and blow blue bubbles into the stars & Hugo Ld Elcho comes down upon them with jeers & in pumps & a smoking suit. We play games & the piano – we none of us open a book or write a letter – we scribble & scrawl & invent words & reasonless rhymes.’³⁴ The guests ‘departed on the verge of tears!’, Mary told Percy with pride.³⁵ Her diary came alive. ‘Talk talk the whole time,’ she recorded, scribbling down in detail all the games they played.³⁶ Six months later the Elchos hosted another party. ‘Remember darling you are staying with very nice people. Please be careful and do not do anything to shock or annoy them,’ Charty Ribblesdale warned her younger sister, Margot Tennant. ‘At that moment’, Mary recalled, ‘Margot was walking on the church wall, pursuing Willie Grenfell with a large sponge – and astounding Hugo by her habit of talking in the passage or in her friends’ bedrooms till all hours of the night or morning.’³⁷ It was, in the collective memory, the first house party of the Souls.³⁸ Mary at Stanway, in her delight, had found her métier.

       FIVE

       The Gang

      A heavily pregnant Mary spent Christmas 1884 at Wilbury. She had planned to give birth in January, in London, but Hugo Richard Francis Charteris (later known as ‘Ego’ from his childish attempts to pronounce his name) appeared early, and was born at Wilbury on 28 December.¹ Thirteen-year-old Pamela was enthralled at having a ‘real live baby in the house’,² Madeline Wyndham almost sick with relief that the child was healthy. Hugo sat by Mary’s side in her old bedroom as she recovered, allowing her to dictate her letters and diary to him until she was strong enough to wield a pencil herself.

      Ego was born one day before Gladstone’s seventy-fifth birthday. The GOM’s ministry was still bedevilled by foreign policy problems. By 1884, the trouble-spot had shifted to the Sudan, where British troops had become caught up in an attempt to suppress a revolt against Egyptian rule. For almost a year, the small, fearsome General Gordon, whose piercing blue eyes burned with Christian zeal, had been besieged in Khartoum by a mysterious fanatic known as the Mahdi who had been conducting the rebellion since 1881. In fact, it was entirely Gordon’s fault he was besieged. He had been sent out to effect a British withdrawal from the Sudan,³ but on arrival he had announced his intention to ‘smash up the Mahdi’ and dug his heels in at Khartoum. Such was the danger of having an uncontrollable ‘man on the spot’, who by maverick actions could influence government policy. In the autumn of 1884, caving in to intolerable public pressure (and to an angry Queen at Windsor), Gladstone authorized relief troops to be dispatched to the Sudan. To his intense disappointment, George Wyndham, who had joined the Coldstream Guards on leaving Eton, narrowly missed out on the opportunity to form part of the rescue mission. Wilfrid Blunt, who was still keen to return to Egypt, also wanted to become involved. On Christmas Eve he addressed the Executive of the International Arbitration and Peace Association, proposing to lead a ‘friendly mission’ to intervene with the Mahdi on Gordon’s behalf.⁴ From his home at Hawarden, a weary Gladstone acknowledged the offer, and promised to discuss the matter with Earl Granville, the Liberal party’s Leader in the Lords.⁵ Blunt’s offer was quietly let drop.⁶

      Tucked up in bed at Wilbury, and just days into motherhood, Mary must have barely registered these matters. Her diary records