The schism over Home Rule paved the way for almost twenty years of Conservative hegemony. The Whig defection rendered the Unionists almost impeccably the party of the aristocracy, with an unassailable majority in the Lords. It allowed the Radical element of the Liberal party (those that remained) formerly at the fringes, tempered by the Whigs, to move to the mainstream.27 It was to give grist to the Lords’ argument that their role was to prevent ‘hasty and foolish’ legislation by a hotheaded Commons. In the short term, it split Society. At Grosvenor Square, home of the devoutly Liberal Tennants, Margot was sent from the table in disgrace for declaring at dinner that she thought Gladstone had erred in his judgement (the unrepentant Margot was unruffled: when the Bart came to bring her back to the table, he found his youngest daughter swinging her legs on the billiard table enjoying one of his cigars).28 By the autumn Unionists and Liberals no longer met.
Only the Gang refused ‘to sacrifice private friendship to public politics’.29 In Margot’s grand recollections, ‘at our house … and those of the Souls, everyone met. Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Asquith, Morley, Chamberlain, Balfour, Rosebery, Salisbury, Hartington, Harcourt and, I might add, jockeys, actors, the Prince of Wales and every ambassador in London’. Margot thought it ‘made London the centre of the most interesting society in the world and gave men of different tempers and opposite beliefs an opportunity of discussing them without heat and without reporters’.30
In later years the Souls looked back proudly on their influence as a cross-party group containing some of the country’s brightest political hopes. They were buoyantly confident of the abilities of their men: Margot recounted an afternoon spent by Souls women discussing which of George Curzon, George Wyndham or Harry Cust would become Prime Minister.31 Politics was the warp and weft of the Souls’ daily lives. But they were more than that: a ‘fascinating, aristocratic, intellectual coterie’,32 a group with a ‘special charm’.33 ‘I think they sent us all back to reading more than we otherwise would have done, and this was an excellent thing for us,’ said Daisy, Countess of Warwick, one of the Prince of Wales’s Marlborough House Set.34 Others mocked them for being self-absorbed, cliquey and pretentious. Those who did not spend all their time on the hunting field found them intellectually insubstantial. ‘They read the Bible & they read the Morte d’Arthur in the same spirit,’ said Wilfrid Blunt.35
In November 1886, Mary sat for a chalk and crayon portrait by Edward Poynter. Hugo, for unknown reasons, had resisted the idea, and Mary found the sittings a ‘nuisance’.36 In the portrait, Mary, wistfully pensive, leans back on a chaise, gazing into the distance. She is surrounded by aestheticism’s accoutrements: a japonaiserie screen; blue and white ceramic vases. Her hair is fashionably shirred; her waist, in her plain mustard-yellow gown, tiny (the envy of her friends, she said proudly). One hand loosely holds a sketchbook, another book lies unopened before her. She looks deep in thought: a beauty with greater things on her mind. The features of a child are still there in her face, but her languid ease suggests someone increasingly comfortable with her place in the world.
Poynter captured many elements of a typical Souls woman in this portrait. He reflected her style of clothing – Souls women did not, by and large, indulge in feathers and furs but dressed ‘with a kind of aesthetic smartness all their own’, said Lady Tweedsmuir, wife of the author John Buchan.37 Arthur was quite alarmed when Mary proposed having a gown made by Worth, the grand Parisian couturier of the day, commenting that he did not expect to recognize her in such finery.38 Poynter also alluded to her intellectual, artistic bent (as a corollary, the tables of Souls hostesses were comparatively frugal by the standards of their time and class. Conversation, rather than rich food, sustained their guests,39 and Souls women were, in general, notably slim).
Yet Poynter, himself not renowned for his sense of humour,40 had failed to capture the essence of Mary, and the group to which she was integral. Her family thought the portrait far too solemn, capturing none of the ‘dancing gaiety’ of her eyes, or the swallow-like quickness of her movement.41 In the flesh all the Souls – charismatic, mostly young and unusually good-looking – seemed simply to be having fun. Daisy Warwick considered them ‘more pagan than soulful’.42 Lady Tweedsmuir described them as ‘a little suspect as not conforming to the rules of the social game’.43 They were impossibly flirtatious with one another, while publicly advocating chastity. They were irreverent, renaming the group’s elder statesmen, the Cowpers, Brownlows and Pembrokes, ‘the Aunts’. Balfour, their lodestar, was ‘the adored Gazelle’. They loved games: ‘Clumps’, requiring participants to guess by questions abstractions like ‘the last straw’, ‘the eleventh hour’ or even ‘the last ball Mr Balfour drove into the [golf] bunker before lunch’; ‘Styles’, parodying well-known authors in prose or verse; ‘Epigrams’, inventing new ones; ‘Character Sketches’, describing someone present in terms of something else, such as a vegetable, building or colour.44 Their patter was based on quick, inconsequential wit and a ready turn of phrase. Mary commented later of Harry Cust that ‘Before his fair neighbour had finished her soup she would find herself plunged into dissertations on eternity’, but normally this was accompanied by peals of laughter because, in the words of Lord Vansittart, Cust, a notable wit, was ‘as happy to stand on his head as on his dignity’.45
Society was fascinated by them, ridiculed them and envied them in equal measure. ‘There is a “set” in this hotel who hate & abuse our “set” they call us “the Souls” … & say we are always laughing & that we read Herodotus & those sorts of crimes,’ reported D. D. (Edith) Lyttelton, Alfred Lyttelton’s second wife, while on a trip to Cairo.46 This was inherent in the name bestowed upon them during the 1888 Season, although no one could recall exactly how it happened. In the spring, Mary attended a dinner party at Lord and Lady Brownlow’s house. The Gang engaged in their usual heated debate. ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls. I shall call you “the Souls”,’ said Lord Charles Beresford, an outsider, a courtier. Mary was sure that the quip – which no one thought very funny – was a well-rehearsed line, trundled out several times that season.47 But it stuck, with all its undertones of mockery. The Souls always professed to hate it, and further denied being a clique at all.
Those denials convinced no one. In London, they were constantly in and out of one another’s houses. Outsiders finding themselves in the country at a house party of Souls often made their excuses and left: ‘either … they were bored with us or … they saw that we were bored with them’, Arthur said to Mary of Field Marshal Wolseley and his family, who left Wilton fully two days earlier than planned.48 Conversely, at a house party held by the non-soul Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at his magnificent Buckinghamshire château Waddesdon Manor, it was Mary and Charty Ribblesdale who retreated, to Mary’s room, ‘exhausted’ by the talk of their (non-Souls) fellow guests. They were soon joined by Hugo and his sister Hilda Brodrick, whereupon the intention that Charty should read Shelley aloud was abandoned in favour of an afternoon of vivacious chat and much ‘chaffing’ of Hugo.49 Three weeks later, Mary, Daisy White, George Curzon and Hugo whiled away the train journey from London to the Pembrokes’ Wilton House in Wiltshire by learning poetry by heart; the following Sunday at the Cowpers’ Panshanger in Hertfordshire, a large number of the party, Mary included, decided to forgo church in favour of a morning in which ‘we sat out on the grass talking [about] … Dickens etc …’50 – for the Souls, notwithstanding their name, did not share the previous generation’s religious fervour.
Given such proximity it is unsurprising that the Souls developed their own ‘ganglanguage’, incomprehensible to the outsider: ‘dentist’, a private meeting; ‘floater’, an embarrassing situation; ‘stodge’, the company of women; ‘flash’ or ‘sparkle’, the company of men.51 The vocabulary is revealing, for a Souls gathering was quite different from the traditional, gender-stratified house party where men shot, women read, sewed and talked, and the two sexes united only briefly