Lady Edward – ‘La Belle Pamela’ – was officially the adopted daughter of Madame de Genlis, educationalist disciple of Rousseau. In all probability, Pamela was de Genlis’ biological child, by her lover Philippe duc d’Orléans. Orléans was Louis XVI’s cousin. He voted for the King’s execution during the French Revolution, then was guillotined himself when his royal blood rendered him counter-revolutionary. Mary’s was an exotic heritage, romantic, royal, with a hint of disreputableness. Like all her siblings, she was proud of it.
Mary was born at the cusp of a new age, as a myriad of developments – some welcome, others not – forced Britain and her class to reassess their identities. She was born within five years of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the famous Huxley–Wilberforce debate on evolution, which her father Percy had attended;10 the 1857 Indian Rebellion which led to control over the sub-continent being passed from the British East India Company to the British Crown; and Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s discovery of the Nile’s source. When Mary was born, the working classes (and all women) were still unenfranchised – only one in five men could vote. Neither William Gladstone nor Disraeli, those giants of the late Victorian political arena, had yet formed their own ministries. Upper-class women could not appear in public without a chaperone. During her childhood, Joseph Bazalgette built the Victoria and Albert Embankments to cover the new sewage system that meant the Thames was no longer the city’s chamberpot. The telephone and the first traffic light (short-lived, it was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868, only to explode in 1869, gravely wounding the policeman operating it) were inventions of her early youth. Mary, who as a child had fossils shown and explained to her by her father, was born into a world ebullient in its capacity for exploration and invention but, in post-Darwinian terms, questing and unsure. The British were becoming, as Charles Dilke’s bestselling Greater Britain said, a ‘race girdling the earth’,11 but within their own country the patrician male’s stranglehold on power was being loosened. Mary, hopeful, endlessly curious, surrounded by novelty and change, was a child of that age.
Above all, Mary was the child of a love match – on one side, at least. It had been a coup de foudre for shy, crotchety Percy when as 1860 dawned he met Madeline Campbell in Ireland. Madeline was beautiful, dark and voluptuous, but she was more than that. Her earthy physicality exuded life, and enhanced it in others. ‘People in her presence feel like trees or birds at their best, singing or flourishing according to their own natures with an easy exuberance … she has a peculiar gift for making this world glorious to all who meet her in it,’ said her son George.12
Percy and Madeline were engaged in London in July, and married in Ireland in October. During a brief interim period of separation, as Madeline returned to Ireland, Percy gave voice to his infatuation in sheaves of letters, still breathtaking in their intensity, that daily swooped across the Irish Sea. ‘[D]ear Glory of my Life sweet darling, dear Cobra, dear gull with the changing eyes, most precious, rare rich Madeline sweet Madge of the soft cheeks’,13 said Percy, pouring forth his love, longing and dreams for the future. With barely concealed lust he begged Madeline to describe her bedroom so he could imagine her preparing her ‘dear body’ for bed, and recalled, with attempted lasciviousness charming in its naivety, their brief moments of physical contact – a kiss stolen on a balcony at a ball; a moment knocked against each other in a bumpy carriage ride. ‘[I]f these letters don’t make you know how I love you, let there be no more pens, ink and paper in the world.’14
No corresponding letters from Madeline survive. Brief fragments of reported speech suggest she was more world-weary than her besotted swain. ‘Oh Percy, Percy, I don’t think you know very much about me, but that’s no matter,’ she told him. Some of her descendants think that there may have been a failed love affair in her past; if so, she successfully, and characteristically, erased all trace of it.15 Her reserve only strengthened Percy’s attraction.
Madeline was well-born, if of colourful ancestry, but she had no money to speak of. Her widowed mother had brought up twelve children on an army pension. Madeline would receive just £50 a year on her mother’s death.16 The infatuated Percy persuaded his forbidding father – who succumbed immediately to Madeline’s charm on meeting her – to give his blessing to the match, and to dower his bride. A month before the Wyndhams married, £35,727 16s 5d in government bonds (equivalent to around £2.75 million today) was transferred from Lord Leconfield’s Bank of England account to the trustees of Percy and Madeline’s marriage settlement.17 The trust was to provide for Madeline and any younger children of her marriage. From the capital’s interest Madeline would receive annually a personal allowance, known as pin money, of around £300. A provision stipulated that if the marriage proved childless, the money would devolve back to the Leconfields. Otherwise there was no indication that Madeline had not brought this money herself to the marriage.18 A baronet’s genteelly impoverished seventh daughter had been transformed, in effect, into an heiress of the first water.
The provision was never exercised. Percy and Madeline had five adored children over the course of a decade – the three girls, and the boys George and Guy. ‘Ever since your birth has my Heart & Soul loved you & laughed with you & wept with you … sang to you to sleep – & anguished with you in all your sorrows …’ wrote Madeline Wyndham to her youngest, Pamela.19 She might have made the comment to any of her children, all of whom Percy deemed ‘confidential’, his highest form of praise.20 Madeline Wyndham had been raised in a Rousseauesque environment of loving simplicity. The Campbell girls had no governess – doubtless partly for financial reasons – and were encouraged to educate themselves, reading whatever they chose, and making off into the fields around Woodview, their rambling house in Stillorgan, then a small village outside Dublin, to explore the natural world. Percy, raised in frigid splendour by evangelical parents who banned everything from novels to waltzing, was entranced upon first visiting Woodview. He vowed that his children would be raised in a similarly warm, loving and natural milieu. And so, despite an aristocratic lifestyle, the loving intensity of life among the Wyndhams was almost bourgeois.21
Mary, like all her siblings, was born into privilege’s heartland. The family’s life was played out against a backdrop of staff – butler, housekeeper, footmen, housemaids, cook, kitchen maids, stable boys, gardeners and the ‘odd-man’ who lit the house’s lamps each evening as dusk fell. Only the absence of this – mostly silent – audience would have been remarkable. Madeline Wyndham never travelled anywhere without her lady’s maid Easton (known as ‘Eassy’), nor Percy without his Irish valet Thompson (‘Tommy’). Their children’s retinue included their nanny – the magnificently named Horsenail – nursemaid Emma Drake and, when a little older, governesses and tutors.
Society – of which the Wyndhams were impeccably a part – was a close-knit, interconnected group of ‘the upper 10,000’, four hundred or so families constituting Britain’s ruling class. To outsiders it was an impenetrable, corporate mass with ‘a common freemasonry of blood, a common education, common pursuits, common ideas, a common dialect, a common religion, and – what more than anything else binds men together – a common prestige … growled at occasionally, but on the whole conceded, and even, it must be owned, secretly liked by the country at large’, said the Radical Bernard Cracroft in 1867.22 During the mid-Victorian years, when the Queen and Prince Albert set the model of domestic rectitude, evangelism had a firm grip on the upper classes. Yet by the 1860s Darwinism had loosened that hold; and a Prince of Wales who liked a good time had come of age. Bertie’s fast-living, hard-gambling Marlborough House Set became known for its sybaritic tendencies. Meanwhile, Percy and Madeline were part of a set considered markedly bohemian since, in the words of the novelist and designer Alice Comyns Carr, they ‘took a certain