Those Wild Wyndhams (40 page)

In the autumn of 1907 Mary took Ego and Cincie to Italy, hoping that with Beb ‘out of sight, out of mind’ Cincie’s infatuation would cease. The trip was exhilarating. ‘One … gets to know one’s children more in 20 days in these circs than in many months at home,’ Mary told Arthur, although ‘… I feel rather as if my brain were lined with frescoes upon frescoes … and my mind is a jumble of Tuscan, Romanesque Gothic style!’
¹⁴
On Mary’s return she went to Birmingham to listen to Arthur address the annual conference of the National Union of Conservative Associations on party unity over tariff reform. She had not heard Arthur speak publicly for some time and thought it ‘
excellent
’: touching his ‘top level qua “platform speech”’, but she knew that ‘human nature is alas! silly and small’, and that people would continue to think that Arthur, by not taking a firm position on the issue, was Chamberlain’s puppet, trying to lay the ground for the party’s adoption of the policy in due course.
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Party unity was to be found only through opposition. Shortly after his defeat in 1906, Balfour announced that the Unionists would ‘continue to control the destinies of this great empire’ whether in or out of office.
¹⁶
Reviving his uncle’s referendum theory, he explained in a speech at Manchester a few months later that the purpose of the House of Lords was ‘not to obstruct and still less to run counter to the will of the community as a whole, but to prevent hasty and foolish legislation’.
¹⁷

Campbell-Bannerman’s ministry promised ‘New Liberalism’, a scheme of social reform by which the state took unprecedented responsibility for the welfare of its people. But friction between the Imperialist and Radical wings of the Cabinet meant that the reforms put forward between 1906 and 1908 were prosaic, focusing on reversing Unionist legislation on issues on which the fractured Liberals could still cohere, principally licensing measures and education (the Liberals were united on the need for stricter liquor licensing and in their opposition to Tory attempts to provide state funding of church schools). Still Balfour’s Lords filibustered every measure of any significance: killing them outright, or wrecking them with amendments so that the measures were ‘stripped and wounded and left half dead’ as Lloyd George, now President of the Board of Trade, said bitterly of the mangled 1906 Education Bill.
¹⁸
In 1906, Percy had gloomily asked, ‘We are now just where we were in 1885 on the brink of Democracy, when Gladstone saved us for 20 years by jumping into Home Rule. What will save us now?’
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The answer, it seemed, was the House of Lords.

The Lords’ highhanded behaviour provoked Campbell-Bannerman to put constitutional reform proposals before the Commons in March 1908: a suspensory veto for the House of Lords (so that the peers could delay but not veto legislation); and the reduction of parliamentary terms from seven years to five. The Unionists howled that the Upper House was the watchdog of the people. Lloyd George gave one of his memorable ripostes: ‘A mastiff? It is the right hon. Gentleman’s [Balfour’s] poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to.’
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The Commons voted in favour of the reform, but within a month Campbell-Bannerman had resigned. He died in April 1908, still in residence at 10 Downing Street, from where he had been too frail to be moved.

Asquith was finally in power, although he had to cross the Channel incognito by night-train and ferry to kiss hands when Edward VII refused to cut short his holiday with his mistress Mrs Keppel in Biarritz, the French resort on the Atlantic coast popular for its bracing air, golf courses and casino. To date Asquith remains the only Prime Minister to kiss hands on foreign soil. His father’s advancement did not improve Bob’s prospects so far as Hugo and Lord Wemyss were concerned. Lord Wemyss fulminated against Asquith’s final Budget as Chancellor which introduced the ‘socialistic’ measure of pensions for the elderly but was passed since, as a fiscal measure, the Budget was by convention inviolable by the Lords’ veto.
²¹
Otherwise, Balfour’s Lords continued poodle-like, in 1908 alone rejecting or mutilating bills for licensing, education and town planning, and two Scottish measures concerning smallholders and land values.

Mary was still encouraging Cincie to meet ‘fresh people’. In the spring of 1908, Cincie brought an Oxford undergraduate named Ridley to Stanway. They were the only guests not well into middle age, but the evening demonstrated that the Souls had lost none of their old zest. At around midnight on Sunday, after a long dinner and much talk, the party was seized by ‘a frenzy of song, dance and improvisation’. Arthur Paget – ‘the Stanway Minstrel’ and Pamela’s youthful suitor, now a close friend of both Mary and Pamela (Pamela was godmother to his daughter, Pamela Paget) – seized his guitar; the carpet was rolled back; George Wyndham spouted Virgil while somersaulting across the floor; the ‘Professor’ – Sir Walter Raleigh – crowned by a wreath of roses, did the cake-walk with Cincie. The party spilled out into the garden to serenade Arthur Balfour (who had gone to bed some three or four hours before) at his window.
²²
‘Mary – I must tell you – asked me to come “and see her quiet home life”: I have never heard, and rarely made, more noise before … A. Paget is a “Pied Piper of Hamelin” … and we were rats who danced in time to his music,’ George told Percy as he made his way back to London.
²³

In the spring of 1909, Wilsford village was ‘rocked & shaken’ by the revelation that its new Canadian curate, ‘so excellent it seemed in every way’, was a bigamist with a ‘very bad past’. With the curate in a state of ‘breakdown’ and his wife in ‘misery’, Pamela took in their ‘poor little boy … to get him out of the poor mother’s way … He is lying looking at picture books on the rug now,’ she told Charlie Tennant.
²⁴
Meanwhile, Mary and Cynthia were setting sail on the
Empress of Britain
for the curate’s native land, Mary equipped with a new grey-squirrel fur coat bought in London on sale for £30 to insulate herself against the cold.
²⁵
Ego, now serving as a diplomatic attaché in Washington DC, was to join them as guests of Canada’s Governor General, Earl Grey (a distant cousin of Edward Grey), and his wife. Ostensibly, Mary was making the most of an opportunity to visit old friends. Privately, she made no bones about the real reason for the trip: ‘for Cynthia: general indefinable hope that change may be beneficial physically, mentally, spiritually’,
²⁶
she told Arthur; or, as she put it more candidly to Hugo, to keep their daughter out of ‘the arms of Beb!’
²⁷
Uncharacteristically, they travelled in some style, securing a double-berthed suite with a private bath and parlour, at a cost of £50. An extra £14 allowed first-class servant accommodation for Mary’s maid. ‘[I]f we are ill the whole time and never sit in our parlour I shall die of disappointment at the money wasted, unless I die of sickness,’ said Mary.
²⁸

Mary found Canada exhilarating, admiring its pioneer spirit, relishing the wild open spaces that reminded her of Cumberland, and enjoying the fact that post, routed via New York, took several weeks to arrive. She could breakfast in peace without Squidge or Nanny appearing with tales of domestic disasters. Now that she was in her late forties, the freshness of Mary’s youth was long behind her, but she had not yet earned the respect and dignity of ‘
extreme
old age’.
²⁹
Yet local self-made eminences fell over themselves to praise her at Government House dinners (everyone, she told Hugo mockingly, appeared to be a baronet and she had never heard of any of them). The attention was invigorating and inspiring. With characteristic enthusiasm, she began devising unrealistic plans for the future: she wished she could send her sons to the Macdonald College, a new and innovative agricultural college;
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she wanted to return in the summer and explore the Rockies; perhaps even to invest in land. ‘[I]f I were a man I’d settle there [in British Columbia] & buy a fruit farm – in fact if I’d any capital, I’d buy a small valley right away –
I wish you would
,’
³¹
she told Hugo, adding, in a dangerous tactic that appealed to his worst nature, ‘the difference between what you have &
pay
& what you
get
is positively El-Doradoish’.
³²

The travellers planned to pass through New York on their way back to London. Mary was already looking forward to a dinner planned with William Astor, the property magnate and newspaper proprietor. But barely a fortnight into the trip she received a telegram. Percy had fallen badly in the early hours of the previous morning and suffered a ‘seizure’. A doctor and nurses were treating him at Clouds, Pamela and George were making their way there now. There was talk of ‘brain leakage’: it is most likely that Percy had suffered a stroke.
³³

Just days before, Percy had written a long and chatty letter to his eldest daughter. The Wyndhams had paid an enjoyable visit to Petworth, but were now both plagued by colds; an unexpectedly large snowfall had offered temporary employment to London poor as street sweepers; George Wyndham had given a Commons speech on tariff reform that people were saying was the best thing he had done in recent years. The
Evening Standard
reported that Balfour was giving the issue of protectionism serious consideration, and Percy thought that even Lloyd George and Winston Churchill seemed to be recognizing its benefits. However, Percy was not feeling at his best. ‘I am coming to a theory as to the way in which man & woman grow old,’ he told his daughter, illustrating with a sketch:

Percy never really recovered from this first stroke, which was partly attributed to his splenetic anger over the direction of the country. Henceforth he was perpetually in the care of two nurses. His doctor banned him from any further public speaking on politics.

His resolve was immediately tested. On 29 April 1909, in a rambling four-hour speech Lloyd George, now Chancellor, introduced his first Budget: a ‘war budget’ to ‘wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’.
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It introduced direct taxation on spirits, estates and higher incomes (a ‘supertax’ of sixpence in the pound on incomes over £5,000 a year) and land taxes including a tax on the ‘unearned increment’ on the value of land enhanced by the effort of the community. The landed classes saw it as a war on themselves. ‘This is not a Budget, but a revolution; a social and political revolution of the first magnitude’ and ‘obviously intended as one’, declared Lord Rosebery both from the cross-benches and in
The Times
.
³⁵

In the months that followed, Lloyd George did not trouble to conceal his contempt for the parasitical leisured classes. But his Budget seems primarily to have been expedient. The pensions scheme had a £16 million shortfall; new social reforms required funding; local government was in financial crisis; naval expenditure was running out of control. If the Government could redistribute wealth at the same time as generating revenue, so be it. But Unionists thought it was dressing up a social measure in fiscal clothing: in Balfour’s view, as one biographer has put it, this was ‘unwise and dishonest’
³⁶
and constitutionally dangerous. Mary thought the Government had disgraced itself by allowing its policy to be dictated by ‘party enmity’ while disregarding the country’s wishes.
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Both her Liberal brothers-in-law were seriously concerned by their Government’s proposal.

Rosebery circulated around the Liberal League’s executive a letter testing the waters to see who might wish ‘to join a crusade against the Governments [sic] proposals if they knew that Lord Rosebery would lead the movement, and accept full official responsibility’. Eddy Tennant showed the letter to Edward Grey, and wrote privately to the League’s Secretary discussing its implications. He did not go so far as to suggest that he might be among their number, but his sympathy for Rosebery’s position is clear enough.
³⁸
In an address delivered two days later at the National Liberal Club Edward Grey defended the Budget inasmuch as he suggested that it was not quite the revolution Rosebery had claimed – but he did not directly endorse it.
³⁹

All knew that if the Lords rejected the Budget, a constitutional crisis would ensue. Balfour’s observation that the conventional prohibition of a veto related to an
alteration
of fiscal measures, not to outright rejection, was too subtle a distinction for most. The summer and autumn of 1909 were dominated by the issue.
The undoubted star of the hustings was Lloyd George, addressing crowds of thousands. At Limehouse in East London in July he addressed his audience on landlords: ‘a gentleman … who does not earn his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks that receive for him … He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending … His sole function, his chief pride, is the stately consumption of wealth produced by others.’ At Newcastle’s Palace Theatre in October he turned his guns on the dukes. ‘“A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as a couple of Dreadnoughts,” he said in the tone of one who is proposing a complimentary toast; “and they are just as great a terror and last longer,” he added when the 4,000 had done laughing.’
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