Curzon was aware that his relationship with his children was deteriorating. Writing to Gracie from Kedleston in August 1919, he described how even Baba had lost her sweet and affectionate ways and become silent and moody. “I get very little consolation from their society. They have become so used to a purely selfish existence that they make no effort to please. Sandra is absolutely silent and I have to make conversation the whole time, while Cim is in her rather arrogant, defiant mood. I suppose they regard themselves as doing me a great favour by coming here at all but I own I shall be rather relieved when they go.” It did not seem to occur to him to wonder why they seemed to have changed so.
Cimmie was in truth nervous as to how her father might react to hearing that the young man who had been pursuing her so vigorously was slowly winning her. For Curzon had spent so little time with his daughters—and even less since he had married Grace—that they had come to regard him as a stranger. Nor did they make allowance for the debilitating effect of his constant pain—but then, they did not see their father after he had returned from a Cabinet meeting at 2 a.m., reduced to sobs of anguish as he pored over the week’s butcher’s bill.
For Irene and Cimmie, the usual gulf between the generations was exacerbated by the effect of the war. Girls who had constantly read of the deaths of the young men they knew, who had worked in some capacity to help the war effort and who were in any case full of the exuberance of youth, could not force themselves back into the rigid mold of the disciplined Edwardian young. They also resented their lack of privacy over friendships: though they might not see their father for days, no one could call them up without his being aware of it and often intercepting the call. Curzon always answered the telephone himself in his London house; even when in bed, he managed this by means of a receiver fitted with an extending arm.
With the much younger Baba, his relationship was still distant but serenely uncomplicated. He wrote to her often, sometimes a few lines twisted into a tiny package (“Darling Baba, you are a sweet girlie and I love you very much”), sometimes longer letters: “Darling Sandra, Although I did not get to bed until three this morning I am writing this in bed before dawn as I awoke very early—about four hours sleep. Too little! I have been wondering how my little girl is getting on . . .” But he seldom saw her.
All the sisters suffered from the lack of an older female confidante. Their mother had died when they were so young that any memory of the real person had been overlaid by an idealized image of her. They had become extremely fond of Elinor Glyn and then she had suddenly and dramatically vanished from their lives—although they did their best to keep in touch by writing to her frequently in Paris—and they undoubtedly realized that their father was responsible for ejecting this loved figure from their lives. They liked the kindhearted Grace, but she had begun to absent herself with increasing frequency, taking long holidays in Paris and refusing to go to Kedleston, which she complained had not enough lavatories and no telephone. Both Irene and, in particular, Cimmie were very fond of Nancy Astor, but love—or rather, Love—was undoubtedly Elinor’s subject. And Cimmie’s feelings were confused about her new suitor.
Cimmie stayed with Elinor in Paris during the Peace Conference of 1919 where, the only woman in the Salle des Glaces, Elinor was reporting on the Treaty of Versailles for the Hearst newspapers. After an official dinner at Versailles to which Cimmie, who had lost her luggage, had to wear a sapphire-blue satin tea gown of Elinor’s, they sat up late talking and gazing at the stars through the windows of Elinor’s apartment. “God is up there watching us, and I know he will always bring me through,” Cimmie told Elinor confidently.
She had resisted Tom Mosley’s advances for some time. Though she found him fascinating as a friend, she was frightened both of the intensity of his feelings and of his experience with women (one of her earlier boyfriends had written: “There is a reason for knowing your Tom very thoroughly, and this is best discussed with a married woman”). Finally, after he had persuaded her to come to Leicestershire and hunt with him, she fell in love with him; it is likely that there, on his home territory, he succeeded in seducing her.
“I fear that side of me is very vital and strong,” he wrote to her after what he described as “tonight’s few moments,” continuing, “but I do love you with all the strength of the other side, which is the only side that matters and which I have never given to any other woman.” Poor Cimmie could not know what agonies “that side” would soon cause her.
Theoretically, there was no reason for Curzon to refuse his consent to the marriage and, in any case, Cimmie at twenty-one did not need her father’s approval. But she was aware that he wished his daughters to make grand matches and she longed for him to like the man she loved. Her apprehensions were justified. Curzon was quite prepared to send Mosley away if he did not think him suitable. He was always on his guard against fortune hunters and he was also anxious for his daughters to be as happy in marriage as he had been with their mother. On March 22, 1920, he wrote to Gracie: “Lady Salisbury has given me a good account of young Mosley. He is coming to see me this evening and I am making independent enquiries. I do hope he is all right. I shall soon find out, I hope, if he is really in love with Cim and what are his ideas and prospects. Don’t send your congrats to Cim until you hear from me whether I find him all right.”
Mosley passed. The following day, Curzon wrote again to Gracie:
The young man Mosley came to see me yesterday evening. Very young, tall, slim, dark, rather big nose, little black mustache and rather a Jewish appearance. I put to him the whole case about a young man at 23 taking a young girl of 21 for life, and all that it meant. Was he sure of himself? of her? of both of them? were they prepared to join for the big things for a lifetime? She was strong, independent, original. Could he promise her fidelity? devotion? could they take the rough as well as the smooth?
It turns out he is quite independent, etc, and has practically severed himself from his father, who is a spendthrift and a ne’er do well. The estate is in the hands of trustees who will give him £8–10,000 a year straightaway and he will ultimately have a clear £20,000 per annum. He did not even know that Cim was an heiress.
Yesterday I had a satisfactory report about him from Edward Talbot, our whip in the House of Commons, and today Bob Cecil, for whom the young man has worked, came and told me he regarded him as a keen, able and promising warrior, with a good future before him. So I have done what I could and have no alternative but to give my consent.
Everyone was delighted by the engagement. Irene and Baba, already magnetized by Tom’s dark good looks and aura of sexual power, felt a deep, vicarious involvement in his love affair with their sister. For the twenty-four-year-old Irene, this marriage represented something almost magical. “My thoughts will fly to you both tonight with all the prayers and wonder and sacredness that surround that little wedding ring,” she wrote on the evening of their marriage.
Baba, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, was affected still more. As her sister’s future husband, Tom Mosley became the first man in her own generation to be on an intimate footing with her. This close relationship, charged with his powerfully masculine presence, was both intoxicating and overwhelming. Her hypnotized fascination was so noticeable that one day Grace remarked: “I believe Baba is even more in love with Tom than Cimmie is.”
Nancy Astor, devoted to Cim, and impressed as well as grateful to Tom for his work on her behalf, wrote, “I do love Tom too. You will be just the kind of wife he needs and wants. I feel he must have a great soul, or he would never have asked you to share it.” And from Elinor Glyn came the dramatic comment: “You two will rule the world.” Curzon himself was pleased that his daughter was marrying a rising politician of whom his close friends spoke well and who was, into the bargain, rich and landed.
The original plan of a wedding in Westminster Abbey was abandoned, as Cimmie wanted only a small number of guests. She would have liked Kedleston but it was too far away. Eventually the Chapel Royal in St. James’s was settled on and here they were married on May 11, 1920. Cimmie, noted several newspapers, defied superstition: first by marrying in May, and then because her Molyneux white silk crepe dress had a long train embroidered with lilies in silver and pearls (a symbol of tears) and with leaves of pale green (symbolizing jealousy).
Curzon, as always, did everything en prince. There were lilies everywhere, seven bridesmaids in green chiffon dresses with petal skirts, King George, Queen Mary and the king and queen of the Belgians in the front pew and Princess Alice and Lord Athlone behind (the last four had stayed at Hackwood beforehand). Afterward there was a glittering reception at I Carlton House Terrace, where Gracie’s boudoir, awash with carnations and lilies, was reserved for the royal party and twelve selected guests.
Curzon showered his daughter with presents: a long rope of pearls, a chinchilla cape, a fur coat, an emerald-and-diamond ring. The Mosleys’ first home was at Guildford, after a honeymoon at Hackwood and then in the Italian coastal village of Portofino, en route to which they had to pass through Paris. Here they saw Elinor Glyn, who emphasized to Cimmie the importance of loyalty, telling her: “You will be Tom’s chief of staff always.” Curzon predicted a desperate struggle between Cimmie and Irene over their joint lady’s maid, Andrée, which he thought—correctly—that Cimmie would win.
Though Cimmie’s marriage had brought a rush of family love and affection, this united domestic front soon splintered. Grace gave vent to one of her hormone-enhanced spasms of jealousy, causing Curzon to write to her bitterly at the beginning of August 1920 about her “great wickedness” to him:
It springs in this case from a suspicion for which there is not the slightest foundation. I go down to Lympne for a Saturday afternoon conference. Only on my arrival do I find the remnants of a country house party which apparently you regard with jealousy . . . what you mean I have no idea. All I realize is that, as usual, my one poor little holiday is sacrificed and I find you on the other hand having one of your monthly quarrels with me out of nothing. Surely after three and a half years of married life you might be a bit more trustful, a little less jealous and a little more kind.
The Curzons were soon reconciled; their mutual desire for an heir would alone see to that, and a few weeks later when Grace wired him with “good news” their letters were as loving as ever. He responded delightedly when she told him what her gynecologist had said. “His report about womb and chance of child-bearing is very encouraging and you must feel much happier, as I do. My precious girl, it is most splendid news.”
In April 1921 he wrote to her of his eldest daughter in terms that suggest an undesirable hanger-on rather than a child. “It is very good of you to allow Irene to come to you [in Paris]. I hope that she will not be a nuisance and that you will not allow her to sponge. Her suggestion of coming was rather a crafty one in her own interest. I trust you to be firm as regards my position. It is now regularised by her initiative and wish and I do not desire to alter it.”
For the disagreement between Irene and her father had rumbled on. Although she had threatened to remove all her money from his hands, she had agreed to continue with the old arrangement, whereby he paid her an allowance, for a further year.
It was seldom that Irene came home. During the hunting season she lived near Oakham, Rutland, where she had taken the Albert Street stableyard, which had a small house attached, on a three-year lease. With her went her groom, William Fox. Setting herself up in this new life cost more than Curzon seemed prepared to allow her and she was forced to write to him frequently for more money. A typical letter (in March 1920) makes clear how grudgingly Curzon dealt with his eldest daughter. “Daddy, I don’t quite understand about this motor bill. I thought that when you offered to lend me the Fiat you were setting it up ready for me. I never for one moment thought you expected me to repair it before using it. I had to pay £60 for six weeks for a hired car while waiting for it so that if I have to pay for it it will total about £200 and for that I might have bought a tiny car and had it for good.”
Even the lawyer hinted delicately that Curzon was trying to make his daughter pay too much. “I cannot help thinking that a mistake has been made. It is quite clear that Lady Irene cannot carry on the arrangement agreed unless she receives the first quarterly payment of £500 at once.”
It was perfectly true: she had had to buy a cottage for Fox, and though she started the season riding “old Dandy, game as ever at 23,” she needed new, fast horses for the great Leicestershire grass countries. With the ones she bought she acquitted herself so well that in December 1921 the master of the Quorn hunt club, Algernon Burnaby, wrote to her asking if she would do himself and his joint master, Mrs. Paget, “the honour of accepting the Quorn hunt button.”
Curzon put up resistance to every attempt to make him release the money that Irene needed for hay, oats and saddlery and to set up her stables. He had always complained of being short of money, chiding Grace for the amount she spent on flowers (“Stevens’ minimum charge, even for a lunch, is £22”), complaining of a bill for linen of £100 and talking of the high cost of servants.
In April 1920 he wrote to his wife:
I lie awake at night worrying about money matters. I have nothing in the bank and don’t know how to go on. On top of this, while Irene is sheltering beside you, comes a further demand from her lawyer for her super tax of last year, making altogether over £2,000 that I have been asked to pay over the past fortnight to her. Needless to say, I have not got it.
I must say, I feel rather hurt at her profiting by you in Paris while her lawyer continues to bombard me here and I don’t think it ought to have been done. If she wants to have things on a legal basis, so be it. Let her exact her full legal claim and go. But she can’t do that and at the same time claim your protection. I see that my daughters will be the end of me.
As usual, he saw things from his point of view only. The fact that he owned four main houses—Kedleston, 1 Carlton House Terrace, Hackwood and Montacute—as well as Bodiam and Tattershall Castles, which he was restoring and repairing, seemed to him wholly proper, and Irene’s suggestions for economies that would benefit them both fell on deaf ears.
When you tell me you had to find £1,500 and you cannot continue to do so, ought we not to retrench in other ways, like others are forced to do? [Irene suggested in August 1920]. We never go near Broadstairs and is not our [his daughters’] share of these and other houses very remote? Montacute we never go inside, Baba occasionally lives at Carlton House Terrace and Hackwood is only lived in for about two months. I know it is a sore point but I benefit little by these shares and can scarcely feel the places are homes. If things are so bad—forgive me for saying all this—ought not both sides to pull in?
As for the £545 and the £2,000 which was given for my dressing, hair, travel and charity, you know that £1,150 has gone on horses. You ask what has become of the other two thirds of my income, £1,332 approx. About £400 has gone on charity, as with that income I feel one ought to help others. £300 has gone on maids, travelling, hunting, stabling and all the extras in life. I spent over £100 on car and garage which ought not to be. My dressing this year comes to £400 as things are frightfully dear. I can meet these demands by so planning out my remaining moneys coming in but I cannot if I do not refund myself what I am owed.
If Grace had been at home, she might have persuaded Curzon that his daughter’s pleas were understandable. She frequently mediated between the girls and their father and, an inveterate spender herself, would have sympathized with Irene’s requests.
But Grace was again away, this time taking a mud-bath cure at Langenschwalbach in the Rhineland, on the advice of the Queen of the Belgians, as it was supposed to promote fertility. The cycle of pregnancy and miscarriage had continued for five years; Grace was now in her mid-forties and this was a last great effort to conceive an Earl of Kedleston. Her response to her husband’s complaints was to say that she did not presume to advise him—“I am full of confidence in my Boy”—and to ask him to find her a French maid who was a good hairdresser and a valet who “understood” hunting clothes for her son.
The cumulative effect of constant efforts to make her father disburse what was really hers had the effect that the lawyers had foreseen: Irene finally decided she had to take complete charge of her own money—and terminated the “allowance” arrangement.
By the beginning of 1921 Curzon’s lawyers, Taylor and Humbert, had received a letter from Irene’s solicitor explaining that Curzon still owed her nearly three thousand pounds. Though this was backed up with statements from the Leiter Trust, it drew forth a letter of rebuttal from Curzon, written with such emotion that it was almost indecipherable. In March, Irene’s solicitor replied crisply that Irene was fully within her rights to end the agreement and that the words “repudiated” and “violated” were therefore unjustified.
The fact remains [continued the lawyer] that for the first half of the current financial year Lord Curzon has received either £5,990 or £5,400—let us say the latter—out of his daughter’s income and out of it has paid her £1,000, leaving £4,000 clear in his hands.
Even after providing for the taxes on the £5,400, amounting in round figures on the rate of the whole year’s income to £2,700, there would still be a clear credit left in his hands for the six months only of £1,700.
Lady Irene states therefore that upon every ground, whether legal, equitable or moral, she cannot believe that her father will not carry out his agreement and obligation and pay to her the sum necessary to pay the taxes from the money received and retained by him between April and October 1920, for which taxes the Inland Revenue look to her primarily.
In that connection she would like me to point out that for the year for which the arrangement existed, the total remittances which her father received are as follows, from the Leiter estate, a total of £11,698 17s 6d, out of which his Lordship says he gave back £589 16s 3d.
Thus the total received by Lord Curzon amounts as you will see to a very large sum indeed—much larger than was ever contemplated when Lady Irene made the arrangement in October 1919.
Irene hoped that there would be an opportunity for reconciliation when her father was created a marquess (an expensive honor at £630 2s in fees and stamp duties, payable to the Home Office) in the King’s Birthday Honors on May 26, 1921. This elevation had first been mooted six months earlier when Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative opposition, told Curzon that Prime Minister David Lloyd George had proposed it as recognition of Curzon’s four years as leader of the House of Lords, member of the war cabinet and then foreign secretary. Telegrams and letters poured in, from Indian maharajas, from Belgium, from friends, from the Foreign Office—and from Irene, who wrote almost as a timid stranger.
“A timely line of congratulation and pleasure at your great honour. I would like you to think that as your daughter I was delighted for your sake and that you deserved it for all the work you do for England.” She signed it simply “Irene.”
This did not diminish Curzon’s hostility toward his eldest daughter. He now did his best to denude Irene of her share of the settlement income. He still had Cimmie’s; on her majority she had received her Leiter Trust money and when she married she had left her share of the settlement income with her father because she did not want to deprive him too suddenly of what he had been used to.
In June a long letter from Curzon’s lawyers went to the leading King’s Counsel, Dighton Pollock. After setting out the position, it said: “Lord Curzon considers that Lady Irene has behaved badly to him and in the exercise of the power given in the Settlement he has directed that the income of the Trust Funds over which he has power of appointment shall be applied to Lady Cynthia and Lady Alexandra. The effect of this direction is to increase the incomes of Lady Cynthia and Lady Alexandra and, according to the arrangements made, incidentally that of Lord Curzon.”
Cimmie had no intention of benefiting at the expense of her sister. Instead, at the urging of her husband, she too asked for the share of the settlement income that was rightfully hers—Tom had bought a newspaper in his constituency, Harrow, to publicize his speeches on Ireland (he deplored the use of the Black and Tans) and it had failed, incurring debts.
On September 21, 1921, Curzon reported to Grace that he had received an extraordinarily offensive letter from Cimmie:
She described my attitude, heaven knows why, as mean, petty, unwarrantable, unaccountable and incomprehensible. My daughters seem to go mad when a question of money is concerned and Cim is heading straight towards the same result as Irene, which indeed I suppose she desires.
That any daughter of mine should have written in such a vein I should have deemed incredible were it not that I have previously had the same from Irene. Humbert tells me they are hard up. They paid £8,000 for their Guildford home taking it out of settlement. I do not think there is any force in her legal claim but am going to take the lawyers’ advice, also whether I can make another redistribution to her detriment. I certainly would if I could.
Curzon was so anxious to do this that he requested his lawyers that same day to ask for Counsel’s immediate opinion on whether he could redirect his elder daughters’ share of the settlement income in favor of Baba—which would, of course, leave it in her father’s hands.
Counsel’s opinion was that he could not. Curzon’s reaction was immediate, and icy. “My dear Irene,” he wrote on September 21, 1921. “I will deal just as you did over the unjust bargain. You will then see what you deserve and be able to devote whatever sums you please to your pleasures, your charities and your hunting. Above all, you will be free from any interference from your father.”
A week later he received a letter from Irene written straight from the heart:
I wish to God the faults on both sides had not inevitably come to this ending but I want to try and hold on to the hope that now the cause of all our unhappiness has been removed the better things and the links we have between us may be able to appear and the love which I know at the bottom is there may cover up all the hurts and pains that have gone before.
I loathe quarrels and rows and their horrid consequences and my actions may seem to you those of one who does not care and that I have none of the feelings of what home and my father are and ought to be. Deep down no one realises them more than me and I desperately want peace and friendship to reign between us in the future. May we forget all the things that have been said and my prayer is that out of this action of mine good may come and you will not feel that it is the severance of two people who can never get on together. No one wants that less than your Irene.
There was no reply. For a young woman of twenty-five to realize that she would never see her father again was a devastating psychological blow, especially in an era when single young women living on their own were virtually unknown. Irene was effectively orphaned, at an age when most of her contemporaries were either married or still had the secure emotional background of home.
Cim was to receive the same treatment. “The thing is certain,” wrote Curzon to Grace in October 1921. “The excellent Tom Mosley has been to see Humbert and in the same breath talks about the value he and Cim attach to paternal and filial relations. They mean to take the whole money and I think the best thing to do is to say Take it. I cannot stand the perpetual torrent of threats and abuse and insinuation.
“But I am going to write an account of my adumbration of what they call their money since their mother died and of what they have done to me. And there I will leave it.” Curzon, given to setting every aspect of his life down on paper, now wrote a note justifying his conduct, which he put among his papers, sending a copy to Cim. It is dated November 1, 1921.
When Irene took away the whole of her fortune I made no concealment of the fact that I intended to take advantage of a change in the Marriage Settlement which permitted of my altering the distribution of a portion of the income. This clause had been in the settlement the day before I married in 1895 on the intercession of my first wife in order to provide for the exact situation that has now arisen. Viz, the contingency of one or more of my future children of the marriage acting in the event of her death in a manner that would injuriously affect the position of the interests of their father.
When Cynthia married, I consulted my lawyer as to the propriety of asking her to leave a portion of the entire fortune now hers to assist her father, already embarrassed by the sudden withdrawal of the entire income of his eldest daughter. We made these arrangements with Cynthia and her lawyer that she should leave with me that portion of her income which had accrued from the Marriage Settlement, which was expected to amount to about £3,000 a year.
She even hinted at legal proceedings to be instituted by her sister or herself while protesting at any suspension of the affectionate relations that ought to reign between father and daughter. At the same time, although declaring her intention to carry out the obligations which she had accepted upon marriage, she indicated that circumstances might compel her to modify or terminate it, as in the present situation.
I am unwilling to continue any controversy on the matter. I would not willingly be again addressed in the language which Cynthia employed to me in her last letter and which I cannot forget. She must do as she pleases. A father does not with pleasure in any circumstance accept “an allowance”—the phrase she habitually employs—from his daughter, but he would sooner not accept it at all than know it is found grudgingly and with obvious regret.
It was the end of his relationship with his two eldest daughters.