What Consuelo did not know as she recuperated from this taxing journey, was that the stay in Calcutta would mark a turning-point in her life. While Consuelo, Harold, and the Vanderbilts’ friends remained on board the Valiant, Alva and William K. were invited to stay by the Viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, at Government House in Calcutta. Sometimes described as ‘the most neglected statesman in modern British history’ Lord Lansdowne (or Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne), had already had a distinguished career as Governor-General of Canada and would go on to become Secretary of State for War, Foreign Secretary, leader of the Conservative and Unionist peers, and a member of Asquith’s wartime cabinet. At the time of the Vanderbilts’ visit to Calcutta, however, his sojourn in India as Viceroy was almost at an end, and, worn out by his tour of duty, he was longing to go home. Nonetheless, Lord and Lady Lansdowne extended generous hospitality to the Vanderbilts with the result that just when Alva was feeling most vulnerable to a life of ‘sunlight by proxy’ she witnessed the life of the Vicereine, Lady Lansdowne, when the British Raj was at its zenith.
‘We might as well be monarchs,’30 wrote Mary Curzon when she arrived as Vicereine herself three years later. Even aristocrats such as Lord Lansdowne, accustomed to palatial space and waited on since birth, found Government House in Calcutta somewhat grandiose. ‘Words cannot describe the hugeness of this place or the utter absence of anything like homely comfort … [The bedroom with its] colossal bed large enough for half a dozen couples … the ceiling which is so far up that one can scarcely see it,’31 he wrote to his mother. Historian David Cannadine suggests that the grandeur was a deliberate political ploy: ‘The British now saw themselves as the legitimate successors of the Mughal emperors, and came to believe that their regime should project a suitably “oriental” and “imperial” image. So they set out to construct a new ritual idiom for the government of India, partly based on the appropriation of what they believed were traditional Mughal court ceremonials, and partly invented and developed by themselves, through which they could express their own authority … The ceremonial surrounding the Viceroy, both in Calcutta and at Simla, and as he travelled round India, became increasingly splendid, ornate, elaborate and magnificent – far grander than the state in which British monarchs themselves lived at home.’32
The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned … in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’.33 What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes. ‘The numerous house guests and outside friends assembled in an antechamber, and at a given moment the double doors were thrown open and the Viceroy and Lady Lansdowne were announced’. Even at lunchtime. Calcutta House had a throne room and on state occasions the Vicereine took her place on a throne on the dais beside her husband, receiving Indian princes in magnificent ceremony. Alva was even more impressed by the extent to which the British Vicereine made an important contribution in her own right, undertaking charity work in Calcutta and running much of the social life at Government House.
The Vanderbilts’ visit coincided with plans for the handover of power to Lord Elgin and tributes were already flowing in to the departing Viceroy and Vicereine. Lord Lansdowne had been a popular viceroy and the view was frequently expressed that his tour of duty had enjoyed ‘an almost unique popularity, to which the social gifts of Lady Lansdowne had largely contributed’.34 Alva would also have been aware of the splendid formalities planned for the Lansdownes’ departure, ceremonies which would acknowledge the contribution of them both, just as the ceremonies to welcome the Curzons in 1898 acknowledged Mary Curzon’s American birth. There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future.
‘My mother, whose habit it was to impose her views rather than to invite discussion, had already, on occasion, revealed the hopes she nourished for my brilliant future, and her admiration for the British way of life was as apparent as was her desire to place me in an aristocratic setting. These intentions, I am sure, crystallised during her visit at Government House,’35 wrote Consuelo later. Worse, conversations between Alva and Lady Lansdowne revealed that there was a most interesting way of moving this vision forward. Maud Lansdowne had a nephew of the right age, with an interest in politics. He was already a duke – the young Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo thought later that it was during her parents’ stay in Calcutta that ‘the possibility of my marriage to him may have been discussed’. Even if the idea was not discussed explicitly, however, ‘it is certain that it was then [my mother’s] ambitions took definite shape; for she confessed to me years later that she had decided to marry me either to Marlborough or to Lord Lansdowne’s heir’.36
It was possibly in a spirit of mutual inspection that Consuelo was invited to spend a day with the Lansdownes’ younger daughter, Lady Beatrix, for Lady Lansdowne was fond of her nephew and knew that he had inherited a troubling financial burden in Blenheim Palace. The impression made by Miss Vanderbilt on the Lansdownes is not recorded but the serious-minded Consuelo was astounded (to the point of sounding quite priggish) by the ignorance and ‘homespun education’ of Lady Beatrix. On 19 January 1894 the captain of the Valiant recorded that ‘the Viceroy & party from Government House were entertained on board’.37 The Valiant left its moorings in Calcutta on the same day and headed back to Europe. It mattered not that when she played with her friends in Paris, Consuelo never liked being queen: Alva had decided what she wanted for her only daughter.
It was later claimed by the press that the Valiant cruise broke up in India after a final blazing row between the Vanderbilts; but according to both Alva and the ship’s log, it continued as planned, sailing first to Ceylon, where the entry read: ‘left a fireman behind at Colombo so we are one short’.38 Apart from the fireman, the party remained intact, winding its way back to the Mediterranean by way of Alexandria, where the yacht was detained by rough seas. Near Rhodes, in another strangely symbolic incident, the Valiant lost its way – the captain took a local pilot on board who turned out to be incompetent. There is no doubt that relations between the Vanderbilts were strained to the limit and these setbacks can have done little to help matters. A visit to Delphi in Greece briefly acted as balm to Consuelo’s troubled soul, but the break came by the time the yacht reached Nice. As the Valiant docked, Consuelo was told that her parents’ marriage was definitely over.
Consuelo’s initial feeling was one of relief ‘that the sinister gloom of their relationship would no longer encompass me’.39 It was only later that she realised how little she would now see of her father and the extent to which Alva would come to dominate her life. In the short term nothing changed. After their yacht moored at Nice on 24 February 1894, Alva took Consuelo to Paris, as she had so often done before.