Those Wild Wyndhams (23 page)

For almost a decade, the Souls had prided themselves upon their moral precepts, on behaving in a more high-minded fashion than the Marlborough House Set, who were perpetually plagued by scandal. They were the intellectual, spiritual, thoughtful face of the aristocracy, with men and women in the group existing on an equal plane. This was blown out of the water by what ensued. Unbeknown to everyone except the participants, Harry and Nina Welby had been conducting an affair for the previous year, aided and abetted by Violet, who pushed forward Nina, her acolyte, as her candidate for Harry’s wife, knowing that that way she could maintain her hold over her lover. At Ashridge, as a ‘leave-taking’ Harry and Nina spent ‘some nights together … with the result that she had become or thought herself with child’, wrote a fascinated Wilfrid Blunt in his diary some months later, agog at the scandal that threatened to undo the Souls.
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In the aftermath of the affair, the Souls shunned Violet, the Machiavellian Circe who had sacrificed the virginal Nina to her own sexual ends. Such outrage over premarital sex was to a degree dissimulation. It happened among the elite. It is suggested that Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill had used Lady Randolph’s unwed pregnancy to secure their families’ approval of their match.
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Even among the Souls, Margot Tennant used Wilfrid Blunt to relieve her of her virginity – if his diary can be believed.
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But it was not common, and a scandal like this was unthinkable. In September, Nina wrote to Harry to tell him that she was pregnant. Harry either did not reply, or replied ‘with great brutality’.
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In desperation, Nina sought Violet’s help. Violet, in Nina’s words, took ‘the matter out of my hands’ and bruited the affair about the Souls, imploring the Brownlows, Balfour, Asquith, Curzon to help save Harry from ‘worldly disgrace’ and make him marry Nina.

The resultant chaos is reflected in the tangle of papers in the Whittingehame archives, with the instruction ‘Mr Balfour says burn eventually’ scribbled across the front. By unspoken agreement, Arthur, as ‘High Priest’ of the Souls, was to resolve the crisis. His inclination to destroy this evidence is unsurprising. ‘I am coming to you on a matter of life and death’ reads an undated scrap of paper from Nina; ‘Oh! I feel more fiendish than anyone can ever have felt before’ reads a letter from Violet. A letter from Lady Welby-Gregory, imploring Arthur to use his influence to make Harry marry her daughter is followed by outraged missives from Adelaide Brownlow deploring her nephew’s behaviour; and telegrams from George Wyndham and George Curzon, Balfour’s lieutenants, ‘tearing about the country on one sad errand after another’ trying to settle the matter and keep it hidden from the outside world.
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The matter was so heavily hushed up at the time that even those within the Souls were not sure of exactly what was happening. To this day, accounts differ.
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‘Believe nothing that you hear,’ George told Ettie Grenfell. ‘No one whom you will meet knows the whole truth & those who know a part spend their time in perverting it.’
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‘I am so anxious so anxious,’ said Pamela, bombarding Sibell with questions and God with her prayers.
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By this time, George had broken the news of Nina’s pregnancy to his family, and Madeline Wyndham, collapsing along with the whole house of cards, had been hustled off to Bournemouth in an invalid’s carriage (that is, a railway carriage fitted out with a brass bed and sprung mattress so that she could lie flat all the way).
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There was only one way this matter could be resolved. Harry must marry Nina, although Balfour had to threaten Cust with social ostracism and political exile before he complied.
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On 3 October 1893 Harry stood once again before Pamela by the hearthstone in Clouds’ hall. With George lurking quietly in the background he revealed to Pamela the full extent of events and his impending forced marriage. ‘Whatever I did, sad, mad and bad I always said to myself, “I have got Pamela,
like a star in a cupboard
to come back to,’ said Harry.
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Pamela did not castigate Harry then, or ever. She had already cast him as a Christlike figure and reserved her anger for the world that had sacrificed him on the altar of conventional morality. Harry described Pamela as ‘a little heroine thro’out & a little saint as well’.
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He immortalized their mutual sacrifice in the poem ‘Non Nobis’, which presented Pamela as that saint and himself as a flawed mortal purged by suffering.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that the Wyndhams should send Pamela abroad to escape the scandal. The Adeanes had been planning a trip to India. Percy paid for them to take Pamela with them: no expense spared. A passage was booked on the
Ganges
in November
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(fortunately not on the same ship as Lucy Graham Smith, who was also dispatched to India by her family to recover from Cust). In the intervening weeks, Pamela was sent to Saighton Grange, one of the Westminsters’ houses in Cheshire, where George and Sibell lived, to stay with them.

Many years later Osbert Sitwell commented to Pamela on her apparently unlimited reserves of social grace. In response Pamela showed him her scarred palms: to maintain composure when enraged she clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails cut into the skin.
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She remembered this time as a blur of pain and suffering: shaking and sobbing in Saighton’s chapel while clasped in Sibell’s arms. But in front of the other guests she tried to maintain her composure. She sang old sea ballads and read Blunt some of her poetry. He thought her ‘delightful, with wit and sense and feeling’; her poetry ‘really excellent, original and good, far beyond what is usual with young ladies’, and was so taken with his young cousin that he was moved to compose one of his acrostics, a favoured seductive tool, using her name – Pamela Genevieve Adelaide Wyndham – to praise her to the skies,
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as a woman capable of inspiring a knight to valorous battle, ‘empires [to] bend and break’ and ‘kingdoms [to] crumble down’.
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Such was Society’s understanding of a common code that when, on his return to Crabbet a few days later Wilfrid read the bald announcement in
The Times
‘that Harry Cust has been “recently married” to Miss Welby’,
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and that the newlyweds had departed England for the Continent
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– without the customary engagement announcement – he immediately knew something was up. As George Curzon made his way to the Carlton Club in Pall Mall, he was ‘inundated with enquiries’ from intrigued acquaintances who had also seen the suspicious notice. London was pricking up its ears for a scandal. The Souls closed ranks. ‘Since H.C. has, though tardily done the right thing I am sure you will agree that we should now try to save both of them from the consequences of this foolish delay,’ Curzon proposed in a note dashed off to Arthur as soon as he was safely inside. He suggested they cobble together a story that ‘will impose upon none of the innermost circle: but if industriously circulated may shut the mouths of the public’.
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The approved version, neatly typed and sent
inter alia
to the Tennants at the Souls stronghold of the Glen and to the intractable Brownlows, explains a long attachment, familial opposition on both sides (due to Harry’s ‘entanglements with married women’: a positively safe vice now in light of recent events), a decision to marry ‘at all hazards nonetheless’. The story contained enough truth to be almost plausible, although as Nina’s elder brother Charles said ruefully, ‘it’s a thin veil at best’.
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‘Flirtation practice’ had brought the Souls to the edge of public scandal and they recoiled. ‘To a good many pretty tough and experienced men and women of the world this has been a positively startling revelation of the things that can happen amongst people presumably refined and well-meaning,’ said Lord Pembroke.
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Eight months later, Wilfrid Blunt lunched with Margaret Talbot, not herself a Soul, to find she had given up all vanity, in part ‘thanks to the hideous scandals connected with Harry Cust, they have frightened her, as they have many others’.
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Violet was shunned. Harry’s own status within the group never quite recovered. By the spring of 1894 he was out of politics, his editorship of the
Pall Mall Gazette
his sole occupation, and to the next generation a tired, somewhat seedy figure with only the faint glow of someone of whom greatness had once been predicted. The Cust affair showed how determinedly the Souls, despite steps towards gender parity, were of their time. Violet was deemed the ultimately culpable sorceress; Harry, albeit deceitful, the mortal man unable to control his impulses. When it became apparent shortly after the marriage that Nina was no longer pregnant – the inescapable conclusion being that Nina, forced by Harry, had had an abortion
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– D. D. Lyttelton thought that Nina should die of shame. ‘I don’t want her to, though I generally feel it to be the only solution,’ she added charitably.
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Several weeks later, on a grey November’s day, Pamela stared out of the window of the boat-train taking her from Victoria Station to Southhampton, sick with misery. The most prosaic details of ordinary life that flashed past – ‘even the milk-cans & the papers at the station’ – were ‘each a separate little agony’ reminding her of a world that she was leaving behind.
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The weeks between Harry’s marriage and Pamela’s departure for India had not been easy for any of the Wyndhams. Madeline Wyndham remained in the throes of a breakdown at Bournemouth, under the care of a nurse until early December. Percy stayed at his wife’s side. Pamela was kept at Saighton, out of Percy’s way. Their relations, already at breaking point, deteriorated still further when Percy found out in late October that a stream of letters and keepsakes were still passing between Harry at Fontainebleau and Pamela at Saighton. ‘
How long is the writing to continue
,’ he demanded of Mary as he realized Sibell’s limitations as a chaperone: ‘In my judgment the things [sic] seems
very far from over
with the chains, rings and copies of Browning poems! … I feel that they are all so sunk in fatuity that no words can save them.’
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Enraged by his daughter’s ‘freaks’ and tears, furious about the affair that had caused his wife’s breakdown, Percy was astonished that Pamela did not have the sense to realize that ‘Letters from [Harry] after his marriage that would have been harmless under ordinary circumstances cease … to be so after what has passed between them.’
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Percy decided to ban all communication between Pamela and Harry henceforth, but the edict – delivered at Mary’s suggestion more softly by herself – did not end matters completely. The lovers continued to communicate through Sibell. ‘Except by English law I am not one bit married, save to Pamela only,’ Harry told Sibell in a rather belated conversion to chastity, while also declaring Pamela ‘the one pure perfect love of my life’. Pamela received each message with joy. She seems to have thought of Nina not at all.
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As Pamela prepared to depart for India she saw nothing but pain ahead ‘for the next 10 years’.
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Her gloom did not lift once on board the
Ganges
. Minna, Pamela’s and Mananai’s shared maid, began unpacking their travel trunks. Mananai and Charlie set off to explore the ship and peruse the Captain’s list of their fellow travellers. Pamela sat in her cabin ‘very mis[erable] very alone’, clutching a bundle of Harry’s letters and a prayer book that he had sent her, waiting for the clock’s hands to reach midnight, the hour appointed for the
Ganges
to steam out. ‘It hardly seems real,’ she wrote in the first of many lengthy letters to her confessor Sibell. Desperate for the smallest details about Harry, Pamela implored Sibell to write the moment she saw him with ‘long minute descriptions: colour of clothes etc or even if his dog was with him’.
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The passage, and passengers, to India were familiar to an imperial nation. Ships carrying brave soldiers (returning from leave to garrison the Jewel in the Crown) and ‘the Fishing Fleet’ (unfortunate young ladies who had failed to secure a husband in England now trying their luck abroad) passed Gibraltar, made their way through the Suez Canal and across the Gulf of Aden to Bombay. Pamela was surprised to find how accurate the caricatures were: ‘the people on the steamer are beyond
words
– typical – & more like the young ladies in “shirts” & skirts in the
D[aily] Graphic
than I ever expected’, she told Sibell.
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Mananai was more optimistic about the calibre of passengers. ‘There are very many nice people on board, especially men,’ she told her mother, scrolling off a list of names as proof. She was particularly taken by one Lieutenant Baker-Carr of the Rifle Brigade, a ‘delightful & very good looking man’ who reminded her of her brother Guy. Robert Baker-Carr was a seasoned veteran of India, about to take up a post as the Viceroy Lord Elgin’s aide-de-camp. To Mananai’s delight, he was the son of an acquaintance of Madeline Wyndham from her Irish youth. ‘I am trying to describe the people to amuse Papa,’ said Mananai, but she was doing her best to sell the dashing infantry officer to her parents, and to Pamela as well.
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