An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (3 page)

In 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister, he chose Macmillan as Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Ministry of Supply. About a month after this humdrum appointment, Headlam sat beside Macmillan at the long table where members dine together at the Beefsteak Club. ‘He is very much the Minister nowadays, but says that he has arrived too late to rise very high,’ Headlam noted. ‘I can see no reason (except his own personality) for his not getting on – even to the top of the tree – but he is his own worst enemy: he is too self-centred, too obviously cleverer than the rest of us.’ Shortly after this Beefsteak evening, Macmillan was motoring in a car with his private secretary, John Wyndham. After desultory conversation, Macmillan fell into brooding silence. Then suddenly, with intense emphasis, but as if talking to himself, he exclaimed: ‘I
know
I can do it.’
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These glimpses of Macmillan at forty-six – delighted to have reached office, but equivocal about his prospects – are telling. He felt his aptitude for power, but sensed he must disguise his clever ambition. His confidences to Headlam, his exclamation before his most trusted aide Wyndham, prefigure him briefing journalists in 1956 that his political career was over as he poised himself to take supreme control.

At the end of 1942 Churchill offered the post of ‘Minister Resident at Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers’ to Macmillan, his second-best candidate, whom he had recently described as ‘unstable’. Macmillan accepted without a moment’s havering. It proved to be a hard job, unrewarding in outward prestige, but he won praise from those who knew of his behind-the-scenes adroitness. With both the American and Free French representatives he was direct in his approach but insinuating in his ideas. During the closing phase of the war, Macmillan headed the Allied Control Commission in Italy, becoming, said Wyndham, ‘Britain’s Viceroy of the Mediterranean by stealth’.
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By the war’s close Macmillan had been married for a quarter of a century. He had met Lady Dorothy Cavendish when he was serving as aide-de-camp to her father, the Duke of Devonshire, who was then Governor-General of Canada. They married – she aged nineteen, he twenty-six – at St Margaret’s, Westminster in 1920. The bride’s side of the church was filled with hereditary grandees: Devonshires, Salisburys, Lansdownes; the groom’s with Macmillan authors, including Thomas Hardy, who signed as one of the witnesses. The young couple took a London house, at 14 Chester Square, on Pimlico’s frontier with Belgravia. After 1926 they also shared Birch Grove, a large house newly built in Sussex under the directions of his mother. The marriage deteriorated after 1926, as Dorothy Macmillan chafed under her mother-in-law’s meddling intimidation.

One of the Tory Democrats to whom Macmillan was closest in the 1920s was Robert Boothby, a dashing young MP with an unruly mop of black hair and bombastic style of speechifying. Dorothy Macmillan was attracted to him when they met during a shooting and golfing holiday in Scotland in 1928: during a second holiday after Macmillan’s defeat in the general election of 1929, she squeezed Boothby’s hands meaningfully while they were on the moors. Their affair was consummated during a house party with her Lansdowne cousins at Bowood. Photographs of the pair, taken at Gleneagles, show her as clear-skinned and strong-limbed, with prominent eyebrows and chin, a saucy grin, and the air of an undergraduate. Of the two lovers, Dorothy Macmillan had the dominant temperament.

Boothby was intelligent, but wayward in his habits and ductile in his feelings. ‘A fighter with delicate nerves,’ Harold Nicolson called him in 1936. Boothby had a look of manly vigour, with a boisterous style, and a reputation as a
coureur des femmes
. Nevertheless, he enjoyed being chased by men during his trips to Weimar Germany, and supposedly enjoyed frottage with fit, ordinary-looking, emotionally straightforward youths. Homosexuality, however, drove public men to suicide or exile in the 1920s, and stalled careers; indeed it was a preoccupation of policemen and blackmailers until partially decriminalised in 1967. ‘I detected the danger and sheered away from it,’ Boothby later wrote.
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Dorothy and Harold Macmillan had one son and three daughters. She fostered the untruth that their youngest daughter Sarah, born in 1930, had been fathered by Boothby, in the hope of provoking her husband to agree to a divorce. Macmillan did not yield to this wish. A solicitor whom he consulted warned that divorce would be an obstacle to receiving ministerial office, and might make Cabinet rank impossible. It might even require him to resign his parliamentary seat (as happened in 1944 when Henry Hunloke MP was in the process of divorce from Dorothy’s sister Anne, and seemed likely for a time in 1949 when James Stuart MP, married to another sister, was cited in a divorce). There would have been outcry at Birch Grove, too. His brother Arthur had been ostracised by their mother for marrying a divorcee in 1931, despite consulting the Bishop of London before proceeding with the ceremony.

Until the divorce reforms of 1969, it was necessary for one of the married partners to be judged ‘guilty’ of adultery or marital cruelty before a divorce could be granted. It was considered deplorable, except in flagrant scandals, for a man to attack his wife’s reputation by naming her as the guilty party. Instead, even if the wife had an established lover, the husband was expected to provide evidence of guilt, by such ruses as hiring a woman to accompany him to a Brighton hotel, signing the guestbook ostentatiously, sitting up all night with her playing cards, but having sworn evidence from hotel staff or private detectives that they had spent the night together. Macmillan, who had been neither adulterous nor cruel to his wife, refused to collude in fabricating evidence of marital guilt: still less was he willing to sue her for divorce, and cite Boothby as co-respondent. ‘In the break-up of a marriage,’ Anthony Powell wrote of the 1930s, ‘the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame’.
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Sympathy, then, lay with Dorothy Macmillan.

She was too proud and ardent to bother with discretion as an adulteress; her bracing earthiness left no room for subtlety. Her telephone calls to Boothby were made in earshot of her husband and children; she left Boothby’s love letters visible about the Birch Grove and Chester Square houses. As he wrote to a parliamentary colleague in 1933, she was ‘the most formidable thing in the world – a possessive, single-track woman. She wants me, completely, and she wants my children, and she wants practically nothing else. At every crucial moment she acts instinctively and overwhelmingly.’ Over forty years later, in 1977, Boothby gave a similar recapitulation. ‘What Dorothy wanted and needed was emotion, on the scale of Isolde. This Harold could not give her, and I did. She was, on the whole, the most selfish and most possessive woman I have ever known.’ When he got engaged to an American heiress, she pursued him from Chatsworth, via Paris, to Lisbon. ‘We loved each other,’ he said, ‘and there is really nothing you can do about it, except die.’
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Commentators have suggested that Macmillan’s distress at his wife’s lifelong infidelity (her affair with Boothby lasted until her death in 1966) made him chary of speaking to Profumo directly in 1963, or of confronting the implausibility of the minister’s disavowals of an affair with Keeler. This is doubtful, for Downing Street power relaxed Macmillan’s inhibitions. ‘The PM,’ wrote his niece, the young Duchess of Devonshire, in 1958, ‘has become much more human all of a sudden and talks about things like Adultery quite nicely.’ His prime ministerial diaries show his pleasure in playing the part of a man-of-the-world who knew about kept women, betrayal and divorce. In 1958, after reading the memoirs of the nineteenth-century courtesan Harriette Wilson, he mused that Doris Delavigne, Beaverbrook’s Streatham-born mistress (and quondam wife of Beaverbrook’s columnist Lord Castlerosse), who took a fatal overdose of barbiturates after being insulted in 1942 in a corridor of the Dorchester hotel by the Duke of Marlborough, was one of the last of the demimondaines. ‘This type really depends on the institution of marriage being strict & divorce impossible or rare,’ he wrote. ‘Now people marry for a year or two & then pass to the next period of what is really licensed concubinage. Since the so-called “upper classes” are as corrupt as they can be, these ladies, like Harriette Wilson, are cut out by “real ladies” – the daughters of our friends. I think the old way was really best.’
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It is, however, true that the Profumo Affair snared a specific, secret susceptibility of Macmillan’s. The ‘foursome’, as Harold Wilson slyly called Ward, Profumo, Keeler and the Russian attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, whose convergence was imagined to raise security issues, had met at the Astor house, Cliveden.
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Thirty years earlier Nancy Astor had made decisive interventions during the Macmillan marital crisis: a visit by Boothby to Cliveden had proved critical to its resolution. Like many people who had been done a good turn, Macmillan did not forgive the Astors for helping him at his nadir. He associated them with memories that he preferred to repress.

Boothby triggered the crisis in September 1932. He told his lover that he could not continue their ‘unendurable’ half-life together: ‘Just an interminable series of agonising “goodbyes” with nothing to go back to. Living always for the next time. Work to hell. Nerves to hell.’ Dorothy Macmillan was aghast at Boothby’s ultimatum: marriage or a clean break. ‘Why did you ever wake me?’ she cried at him. ‘I never want to see any of my family again. And, without you, life for me is going to be nothing but one big hurt.’ She knew that Boothby’s political career would be ruined if he eloped with another MP’s wife, and that they would have little money to live on. She asked her husband for a divorce, confident that he would agree to collude in providing evidence, and was devastated when in January 1933 he gave an adamant refusal. In desperation she sought sympathy and counsel from Nancy Astor, who gave her the use of a house at Sandwich in Kent as refuge for calm reflection. Lady Astor invited Boothby to Cliveden: there were confabulations in St James’s Square with the deserted husband, who also sought his mother-in-law’s help. ‘Poor Harold had another awful time with me last night, & he talked till 3 in the morning, and is still entirely hard about everything and everybody,’ the Duchess of Devonshire wrote to Nancy Astor on 24 January.
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Macmillan was exciting himself into a suicidal rage. Around 31 January 1933 he scrawled an agonised pencilled note from 14 Chester Square to his trusted intermediary in his marital negotiations. It is the most emotionally naked document of his that survives, and the fact that it was sent to an Astor may explain his inhibitions, and unforgiving attitude to Bill Astor, when thirty years later a scarring scandal was foisted on Cliveden. ‘Dearest Nancy,’ he wrote. ‘Sorry to bother you. But make it clear to her that I will
never
divorce her’ – even if she publicly absconded with Boothby. ‘If she does that, I will kill myself. I won’t & can’t face the children. This is real – not stuff.’ Having promised suicide if Dorothy deserted him, he proposed the best way forward. ‘If I could feel she was
trying
to achieve the same ultimate objective as I am, I will do everything to make her life happy. But I must feel that we are working together, as it were. And she must be considerate to my nerves.’ If she would try to restore ‘normality,’ he promised, ‘I’ll devote anything that [is] left of my life for that – for the children & for her – whom I love more than I can say. Tell her that I am still grateful for the 8 happiest years that mortal man ever had. Nothing can take that away from me.’
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A few hours later he sent Nancy Astor a second message: ‘You are our angel – and you are really fighting for a soul, as well as for lots of innocent people – e.g. four lovely children.’ On 1 February he saw Boothby, and received a letter from Dorothy accepting a compromise. ‘It only remains, therefore, for us to help her to build a new life & to heal the wounds,’ he told Nancy Astor in a third letter. ‘I realise that I can do nothing – except negatively, by leaving her alone.’ There was no bridling of his gratitude to Lady Astor for her handling of Boothby. ‘Dear, dear Nancy – I know how much I owe to you. When I saw him on Tuesday after he had been at Cliveden, he was in a different mood (I sensed a great change) to any that I had seen at previous interviews. It seemed to me that some of the crust of cynicism had been broken & all the rot with which he had protected himself was rather shattered. Your influence I trace there.’ Macmillan believed that their prayers, too, had helped. The continuing strains in the situation were clear in a later confidence of Evie Devonshire’s to Lady Astor. Dorothy’s temper was stabilised, the duchess wrote, but ‘whether she will ever get over her dislike of H is another matter, but she is less hard and angry’.
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Macmillan’s marital traumas raised a muffled commotion in Society. It was humiliating that parliamentary colleagues knew he was Boothby’s cuckold. He donned a mask of indifference, but was instilled with the vengeful ambition and steely endurance that brought him to the premiership in 1957. He described himself to his biographer Alistair Horne as ‘this strange, very buttoned-up person’. Strolling in the Birch Grove grounds with Horne, he proffered a hint about himself: ‘I think gardens should be divided, so you can’t see everything at once.’ Pamela Wyndham, wife of his closest confidant as Prime Minister, said he was protean in his shape-shifting: ‘one moment you had a salmon in your hand, the next it was a horse’. Significantly, one of his favourite novels was Dumas’s
Count of Monte Cristo
, with its hero who returns from the dead in various disguises to wreak revenge on those who had betrayed and humiliated him. An air of cynical mastery was what he aspired to.
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