Though still vested with the reputation of a sickly child Diana was largely recovered from her long illness by the time her father succeeded as Duke of Rutland. Formal schooling would have been almost inconceivable for a ducal daughter but her parents viewed with some dismay the degree to which her education had been allowed to decline or flourish according to her own whim. What was described as ‘the putting-back plan’ was now set in action. It spelt the end, wrote Diana:
of my happy-go-lucky useless life. The new régime is schoolroom tea, stiff music-lessons from snobbish masters, days at the Berlitz and perhaps even solitary confinement at Belvoir, the which bijou maisonette is in my mind the ultima thule.
A few weeks later she reported that she was now ‘une petite fille modèle’, learning Italian and German at the Berlitz, Greek history and singing at Arlington Street.
The year was to widen her horizons in other ways. That summer she spent three weeks with the Trees at Brancaster in North Norfolk. In neighbouring houses a group of Oxford undergraduates were holding a reading party, eager for any diversion that would relieve them of the need to work. Among them were several who were to become Diana’s closest friends. In her memoirs she called the chapter that described this period ‘Brave New World’, and her delighted wonder when confronted by this group of young men could not better be summed up than in Miranda’s ecstatic cry: ‘Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.’
The generation that perished in the First World War has earned by so doing a peculiar lustre. Whether in fact it contained more than the usual share of genius or even talent can never be proved, but the little group of Eton and Balliol men at Brancaster was certainly brilliant enough to dazzle a susceptible fourteen-year-old. Among them Patrick Shaw-Stewart seemed most certain to succeed, if only because he wanted to so desperately. He was pallid, freckled, red-haired, with a face so long that when Marjorie Manners sketched him her pencil slipped further and further down the page until she grew ‘almost frightened’. His academic prowess was glittering – the Ireland, Craven and Hertford Scholarships followed by a First in Greats. This his contemporaries admired, but they were disquieted by his aggressive ambition. His brains and wit were irreproachable, his heart a less certain quantity. Though he had many loyal friends he also had enemies; Julian Grenfell wrote of him: ‘Animals always edged away from him, and the more intelligent they were the further they edged. I think there is something rather obscene about him, like the electric eel at the zoo.’ ‘Not quite long enough in the bottle,’ was Raymond Asquith’s astringent verdict. In one of those truth games in which that generation so delighted, Diana awarded him ten out of ten for intellect, eloquence, sympathy and humour, nine for cleanliness, eight for loyalty and manners, five for looks and none for sincerity. Shaw-Stewart awarded her eight and a half, his maximum, for assurance about the universe.
No one would have given Edward Horner ten out of ten for intellect. He was six foot four inches tall with muscles and shoulders to match, strikingly handsome and with a good-nature and bonhomie that shone from his face. Though probably the most generally loved of the group he could hardly hold his own in wit or wisdom; when he got a poor result in his Oxford finals Raymond Asquith comforted his sister with the reflection: ‘Of course it has been unfortunate for him that owing to his always living with these brilliant young men, and superficially resembling them in habits and catchwords and so forth, he has come to have an impossible standard applied to his own moderate and less disciplined wits.’ Only son of Sir John Horner of Mells, he was the despair of his parents for his drunkenness, gambling and sexual escapades. He lured Lady Cunard’s beautiful parlourmaid to an upstairs room and seduced her after a luncheon party; his elders felt this in poor taste, but the teenage Diana thought it ‘eighteenth-century and droit de seigneur and rather nice’.
Charles Lister was altogether more serious, viewing his friends with mingled affection and disapproval. He was the son of that Edwardian magnifico Lord Ribblesdale and looked the part, ‘his long white patrician face,’ in Laurence Jones’s words, ‘crowned with a tight-curling lack-lustre mat that would not be smoothed or parted’. Unique among his friends he possessed, indeed flaunted, a social conscience; felt that the working classes were miserably misused and argued vigorously in their interest. His socialism, though genuine, was far from revolutionary. To Alan Lascelles he was shortly to protest that he felt the grievances of Labour as strongly as ever but had lost faith in their favoured remedies. ‘If only they could get back to the old sober Trades Unionism and to collective bargaining. But a change of spirit in most of the Trades Unions is required before this is achieved. They are shockingly out of hand.’ Even this modest radicalism he bore lightly, his laugh being daemonic and easily provoked.
Finally Alan Parsons, son of a country vicar but an Etonian like the others, added a touch of glamour with his sombre Renaissance good looks. He lacked the ebullience of Homer, the intellectual distinction of Shaw-Stewart, the idealism of Lister, but had a solidity and good sense not always found among the others. A classical scholar of some merit, he cared more about music, painting, the theatre than did his friends and was more sensitive than they were to the doubts and fears of a fourteen-year-old girl thrust into such company. It was to him that Diana wrote shortly after she left for home: ‘Brancaster was heavenly, wasn’t it? I nearly cried when I left. Do for pity’s sake let’s all meet again soon. I hate making friends and then passing on, don’t you? When one makes friends, I think one ought to go on being friends hard and not let it drop.’ It was a precept she was to follow all her life.
The young men, for their part, were delighted by this pretty, precocious and impertinent child. She distracted them agreeably from their studies and breached their bachelor solidarity without posing any serious threat. Several of them already knew her elder sisters, now they added Diana to their innermost circle. Within the next year or two, long before she officially came out, she had accumulated a rich haul of love-letters. ‘You’re more beautiful every time I see you, and more wonderful and more delicious,’ wrote Patrick Shaw-Stewart. ‘Do love me a little because I love you so much.’ ‘I am glad I told you I loved you as Tristan loved Isolde,’ contributed Charles Lister. ‘Thank you, dear, for saying I’m among your first four or so; one must be thankful for small mercies. I am so happy at finding I can love anybody and that I do love you.’
It would be absurd to attach great significance to such effusions. This was an age of extravagant expression, passion poured forth by men and women whose emotions were often as tepid as their words were ardent. Lister and Shaw-Stewart were probably writing to half a dozen other girls in similar terms. Nor did Diana regard the letters as much more than trophies to be gloated over. Certainly nobody was seriously in love with anyone else. It was, however, still an impressive tally for so young a girl. Diana longed to hasten her advance into the world of maturity. ‘I wish I were there,’ she wrote wistfully to Patrick Shaw-Stewart at a house-party at Gosford. ‘I don’t mean by this that I have any desire to be “out”, but that if it had been within the range of possibilities that a dirty schoolroom lout might ever be invited anywhere, I should like to have been the one.’
In spite of her patent success she constantly questioned her ability to amuse or interest others, shunning tête-à-têtes in which her deficiencies would be uncovered. ‘If we could only form a group,’ she wrote in anguish, ‘so that I need not have the sole responsibility and fear of being discovered to be stupid and dull.’ After fifty years of intensive social life this uncertainty still ran rampant. ‘I can live happily with you,’ she once wrote to Lady Pamela Berry, ‘but an isolated meal gives me fears. I’ve confidence in myself in adventures, active and illicit conditions, forest glades or dark Arab alleys, the darkened cinema, but I have very little in my conversational powers.’ In part because of this lack of self-confidence she hungered for flattery, clamoured for compliments to be passed on by all who heard them. Edward Horner was congratulated on ‘a really good letter teeming with dew-drops which mean to me what wine does to you, and there never was dry common earth more grateful for a touch of moisture or so good at lapping it up’.
Gradually during these years Diana was evolving her own style. The Manners daughters were known to some as ‘The Hothouse’; an allusion to a greenhouse, explained Julian Grenfell, ‘they being renowned for their exotic affectations’. Diana gloried in the appellation, fancied herself as being mysterious, volatile, above all different. ‘Don’t search among metal elements or men for a metaphor to illustrate me,’ she advised Edward Horner; ‘just see and describe me as Diana whose curse it is to be incomparable to either the great, the base or the commonplace.’ She did not mean it as self-eulogy, she went on to assure him; but she did, of course. To be incomparable was her highest ambition. She sought it in her dress – Greek draperies and sandals, chiffon shirts cut like an Eastern djibbah, Rumanian peasant shirts. She sought it in her room at Belvoir, painted black with the bed upholstered in red damask and the walls hung with swags of everlasting flowers. The results veered between the arty-crafty and the exotic, striving for a sophistication she could not yet possess, but they showed imagination and a spirit of adventure, a genuine originality, which ensured that though she would make mistakes they would be her own and not in imitation of the current fashion. Her appearance gave her little satisfaction. ‘Christ, I am so fat!’ she complained. ‘If only I could even feel like Artemis I should reach the zenith of all happiness. Julian [Grenfell] once inspired me with the spirit of her. For the moment I was slim and sure-footed as the chamois. Now, alas, I’m like Diana of the moon; round, white, slow, lazy and generally like an unappetizing blancmange.’
Her new friends filled Diana with regrets for her inadequate education. Her youth was marked by sudden darts in search of self-improvement, often quickly checked but usually leaving some trace behind. Patrick Shaw-Stewart inspired her with enthusiasm for Homer, and Edward Marsh taught her the Greek alphabet. Next day she wrote him a letter in Greek characters – ‘an incredibly apt pupil. A marvellous brain in a ravishing exterior.’ For several weeks she persevered, amazed by her own industry: ‘No summer moon has set that has not left me crescent shaped over vales as deep as sea-fishing. I swear to you by this time next year I shall be in the surge and thunder of the Odyssey.’ But long before next year had come she had abandoned the hunt, convinced of her own inadequacy. Instead she continued to read and memorize great tracts of poetry, Shakespeare, Keats, Browning, Meredith. This last was a friend of the Duchess. Diana wrote to him and won his praise: ‘To judge by her letter she can express herself in a way to give a picture as good as the photograph. This is not usual, and would be condemned as eccentric by every spectacled spinster in the Kingdom. The letter is pronouncedly spontaneous. It exhibits the heart in the head of the writer … the young person should be encouraged to continue flouting the world.’
Little encouragement was needed. Though her unfailing capacity to find herself absurd saved her from any disastrous consequences, she was becoming decidedly swollen-headed. When playing some after-dinner game at Lord Curzon’s house she turned on the Prime Minister and chided him smartly, ‘Use your brain, Mr Balfour, use your brain!’ She was more dismayed than anyone else at her impertinence, but the episode still showed a self-confidence, almost arrogance, disconcerting in one so young. George Meredith sent her a copy of his poems inscribed with the strikingly banal couplet:
Lady Diana Manners: her book.
But if she my muse had been
Better verse she would have seen.
Proudly she passed on the compliment to Alan Parsons, ‘So I’m coming on in literary circles.’
*
In 1910 Diana, aged seventeen and three quarters, formally came out. Soon she was presented at court and began to attend her first balls in the great houses of London. She had for years dressed and behaved as if she were into if not past the debutante stage, had won frequent mention in the social columns and even been awarded a column to herself in the New York American on the eve of her presentation – ‘she is admired more by artists than by ordinary young men’. It was the extraordinary young men whom Diana was seeking and to her delight she found that they were to be met even in the sedater London houses. The first ball that she attended, in fact shortly before she came out, was given by Lady Manners – a Hampshire family only tenuously connected with the Rutland Manners. At supper she sat next to Maurice Baring, who entertained her by throwing rolls in the air and stabbing them with a sharp knife with his eyes shut. Then he put matches to his scant hair and let it frizzle. Next day he bombarded her with telegrams: ‘I loved you long ago in Thessaly’, ‘O, toi, mon clair soleil’. Diana was enchanted, startled and a little alarmed. It was not at all what she had expected.
Society is now one polish’d horde
Formed of two mighty tribes – the Bores and Bored.
Diana was determined she did not belong to the former tribe and resolved to avoid the second if she could. She had some obstacles to overcome. It was assumed that the unmarried girl was ignorant of the facts of life and most other things as well. One need not believe in the Edwardian hostess who, wanting to show a young girl the library, threw open the doors to discover a couple making love in front of the fire and murmured warmly: ‘Mending the carpet, so kind,’ but most debutantes of the period would have accepted the explanation without demur. It was the preoccupation of the older woman to keep her junior in this ignorance and to make sure that she was never exposed to any situation which might compromise her virtue. Things had been relaxed somewhat since before the Boer War, at which time no girl of gentle birth could walk down St James’s Street, even with an escort, in case the clubmen leered offensively at her from the windows of White’s or Brooks’s, but the rules of chaperonage were still strict. Diana had always to be seen home from a party by a married woman, could enter no hotel except the Ritz. Even in 1914 she was bemoaning to Duff Cooper that ‘it seems to be a brazen law that you and I may never crack our eggs, masticate our marrows, coax down our caviare, without the two-edged sword of a married couple between us. It seems over-hard but insurmountable.’
Diana did not defy the system but she pushed against it to the limits of discretion. Youth has always derided the shibboleths of society, and Diana and her friends were no more rebellious than any other generation. On all significant issues, indeed, they were anxious to conform. Nevertheless they felt themselves delightfully wicked. Diana strove to outdo them all. It was she who went to a grand reception at the Duke of Westminster’s wearing her Coronation medal, an eighteenth-century silver St Esprit and two medals for swimming won at the Bath Club. The Crown Prince of Germany goggled at this apparition, accosted her and later sent her a postcard of himself with Vergiss mich nicht written across the corner.
Her most celebrated exploit came at a charity ball in the Albert Hall. Lady Sheffield was organizing a procession of ‘dancing princesses’, masquerading as swans and all dressed in virginal white; they were to be matched by a dozen ‘dancing princes’, one of them A. A. Milne, who wore silver smocks with very tight tights and a golden wig. At a party the previous night Milne heard Diana asking everyone; ‘Have you heard the scandalous story that I’m going to the ball in black? Not a word of truth in it!’ It came as no surprise to him, therefore, when a black swan arrived at the Hall, very late and only slightly abashed. Lady Sheffield surveyed her stonily: ‘Well, you look very interesting, Diana, but you can’t be in the procession.’ Diana, who had looked forward to a sensational entry, was in the end allowed to remain with the others. It was felt on the whole that Lady Sheffield had behaved well and Diana gone too far. The Duchess told everyone that ‘poor little Diana’ had had to go in dull black so as not to outshine the others in the procession.
Such follies may seem innocent enough but Diana won a reputation among her generation for being daring to the point of outrage, exotic, almost corrupt. Raymond Asquith described her presence in a house-party at Lord Manners’s home, Avon Tyrrell, as being like ‘an orchid among cowslips, a black tulip in a garden of cucumbers, nightshade in the day nursery’. He was far too intelligent himself to believe such nonsense but she played up to her image whole-heartedly, rejoiced when it was accepted by others, almost at times concurred in it herself.
It was all part of the legend which was forming around her. It is always hard to define the quality which makes one person stand out among a multitude. Diana was recognized as a very considerable beauty. Winston Churchill and Eddie Marsh, standing together at London balls, played a game based on Marlowe’s line: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ How many ships would Miss X have launched? Or Lady Y? Only two faces earned the full thousand – Diana Manners and Clementine Hozier, Churchill’s future wife. Yet to have great beauty is one thing, to be acknowledged Queen of Beauty for a quarter of a century is something different. One could quote a hundred tributes to her ‘love-in-the-mist eyes, samite-wonderful complexion’, her ‘hair, pale gold and with the delicate texture of ancient Chinese silk’, without getting anywhere near the secret of her success. Perhaps nearest to it came Violet Trefusis with her account of Diana’s lighting up the room with her ‘flawless, awe-inspiring beauty. So must the angel have looked who turned Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. With a face like that she should, I thought, carry a sword or trumpet.’ And then there was Enid Bagnold who saw her for the first time at this period, coming down the stairs like a muslin swan. ‘Her blind, blue stare swept over me. I was shocked – in the sense of electricity. Born to the city I wanted to storm, the Queen of Jericho swept past me.’
Awe-inspiring, shocking, like an avenging angel, there was nothing cosy or seductive about Diana’s beauty. The ‘blind, blue stare’ owed more to bad eyesight than a challenging disposition, but it was intimidating to those who did not know her. Yet within the classical and chilly carapace there burnt a light that could transform a gathering by its brilliance. Even at the age of eighteen, she could not enter a room without being noticed or leave it without causing a sense of loss. Without this radiance her features would still have been remarkable but she could never have caused the impression that she did.
Not everyone conceded her beauty. Margot Asquith dismissed her brusquely as ‘what I most dislike in appearance – German-Greek’. Veronica Maclean, told as a child that she was about to see the most beautiful woman in the world, complained, ‘But mummy, she looks like a sheep!’ The same was felt by Rachel Ferguson, who admired Diana’s perfect heart-shaped face, ‘but the whole effect struck me as static and sheeplike’. One of the more unusual things about Diana was that she would have agreed with her critics rather than her admirers. She loved to be told that she was beautiful but never really understood what all the fuss was about. She would peer myopically into the glass, hoping that the blurred outline in front of her was indeed of transcendent splendour but suspecting that it was still the ‘unappetizing blancmange’ she had found there years before. Constantly she took action to put the matter right. ‘I’m preparing my seven bodily sins against your return –’ she wrote to an absent friend, ‘thinning by banting, oiling my hair, fading my skin. I hope it will all show.’ Always she doubted whether it would, always she assumed herself to be in the worst of looks. She would have liked Cecil Beaton’s reference to her ‘glorious goatish profile’ better than Lady Maclean’s sheepish analogy, but that was merely because she preferred to identify herself with the restless, intransigent goat rather than the docile sheep. From the point of view of looks she would not have quarrelled with either description.
The public did not take her at her own valuation. The beautiful, daring, delightfully wicked Lady Diana Manners was the role in which they cast her, and all she did was news. She was natural fodder for those society magazines that catered for people who might actually meet her or liked to think they might, but she was also taken up by the new popular press, aimed at those millions who would not otherwise have known of her existence. Whether Lady Diana did or did not attend a party, the colour and material of her dress, her bons mots about the band, were believed to be just the sort of information for which the working classes were craving. She enjoyed the réclame which today would be reserved for the athlete or the pop-star. By contemporary standards the gossip purveyed was always most innocuous, innuendo was kept to a discreet minimum. Nevertheless to the strait-laced such publicity seemed deplorable; Lady Diana might be very pretty, clever too it was said, but she was not quite the thing.
For Diana, not to be the thing was all she hoped for. She delighted in her publicity and did nothing to discourage it. Whether she actually courted it is another matter. She herself always denied it. Certainly she would not have altered her behaviour a whit if there had not been a journalist to record it. No one, however, who contrived to be so consistently in the right place at the right time doing the right thing to ensure the maximum of attention can be acquitted of working to achieve that end. Diana would never have warned a journalist that some exploit was in the offing, but she could feel reasonably confident that somebody else would do so and would feel rather disappointed if in the end the event went unrecorded. Many of the best things that happened to her came because of the publicity that surrounded her, and she was never so hypocritical as to pretend that it displeased her.
A by-product of this publicity was that all her life she was the recipient of letters which were either anonymous or which came from people totally unknown to her. Many of these were touchingly ingenuous; the work of elderly pensioners or illiterate teenagers whose days had been brightened by Diana’s doings. Others were from would-be lovers: some proposing marriage; others less honourable behaviour – one such from Jesus of Nazareth of Chorley Wood, Herts. A small but significant number were rich in malice, accusing her of unmentionable vices, which were then not merely mentioned but described in detail. Even seventy years later it is disturbing to read these products of envy and impotent hatred; Diana’s sang froid was formidable but she can hardly have failed to feel disquiet and to wonder from time to time whether dull obscurity might not be a happier lot.
*
In February 1911 Diana’s sister Letty married. She had never been happy at home and, though she was sad to leave Diana, it was in every other way a merciful escape. Her husband was Ego Charteris, son of the Earl of Wemyss. In her memoirs Diana wrote that ‘of all men Ego was the nearest to a knight of chivalry’, but at the time she was apt to mock at his thoughtful diffidence – ‘Gentle Ego, meek and mild,’ she called him. She wanted something a lot more exciting for herself.
Until this moment Diana had shared Letty’s bedroom; now she transferred to Marjorie and the two sisters grew still closer together. For some years Marjorie had been in love with Charlie Paget. Her mother disapproved – a ‘penniless charity-boy’ whom Marjorie cared for only because he was so patently unsuitable. Then Charlie Paget’s thirty-year-old cousin died and he unexpectedly became the enormously rich Marquess of Anglesey. All obstacles vanished but the Marquess now grew hesitant and vanished on his yacht with a married woman. In revenge, Marjorie took up with the glamorous Prince Felix Youssupoff. Alarmed, Lord Anglesey hurried back and proposed, Marjorie despatched her Russian prince, and the couple were married in August 1912. Prince Youssupoff returned home, where in due course he won fame as one of the assassins of Rasputin. ‘So Felix is a murderer,’ wrote Marjorie coolly. ‘Well, well, there it is. I have a feeling for the criminal classes and there it is and is and is. Dirty work all round, it sounds. Does one write and congratulate or condole?’
Diana’s family circle had disintegrated. About this time it was dealt another blow. At dinner one night Edward Horner remarked casually that he had seen her father earlier that day. Diana said that he couldn’t have, the Duke was at Belvoir. ‘Oh, no,’ said Edward, ‘I mean your real father, Harry Cust.’ Then, seeing her expression, he added in consternation, ‘Do you mean to say you didn’t know?’ Diana denied that this revelation disturbed her, she was interested rather than upset, did not even mention the matter to her mother and in no way changed her manner to Harry Cust. Although she was fond of the Duke she found her new father a far more romantic figure. Her standing as the daughter of a Duke – something of great importance to her – was in no way impaired by the fact that London society gossiped about her parentage. Yet her reaction can hardly have been as clearcut as that. The life of a child is based upon a complex of cherished certainties, of which the solidity of the parents’ union is one of the most important. Diana was no longer a child, but she still nurtured childish fears and doubts. However insouciant she may have seemed to others, however little concern she may in later years have convinced herself that she had experienced, it is hard to believe that at the time her confidence was not shaken, that she did not feel distressed and disconcerted. No one would have guessed it if she did, however. It is not possible to detect any change in her character or in her attitude towards her parents, and any psychiatrist seeking evidence of a traumatic wound would be hard put to find it.
*
By now Diana was gripped by an addiction to foreign travel which was to possess her all her life and provide some of her keenest pleasures. From the age of fifteen no peacetime year passed without her going abroad at least once, and usually several times. Her first expedition was with her mother and sisters to Florence. Whether, as Diana believes, because her father gave his wife only £100 to cover all expenses, or whether the Duchess’s delight in parsimony got the better of her, the party seemed perpetually undernourished and lodged sometimes in the grubbiest hotels, sometimes in luxurious but borrowed villas. Diana was not in the least discomfited; new sensations were all-important, comfort insignificant; ‘It’s character we want, not revolving doors,’ was her slogan through life. Anyway, though Belvoir might be grander, it was very little if at all more comfortable. The high spot of the trip was neither a church nor a gallery but
gala day when we left Milan for Certosa and had an audience of twenty or thirty undergraduates laughing, jeering, sympathizing at our outré lunch and ticket arguments. We were nothing if not prudish for a bit, but melted when eight of them sprang out at Certosa and followed us round the monastery, pressing lilies and wild flowers on us. Calamity at last knit us together, we missed a train back to Milan, so we all took a bank-holiday wagonette to Pavia, singing glees and Neapolitan songs all the way. They were too charming and we finally exchanged cards and sighed to think that we would never see them again.
Italy was followed next year by The Hague and Paris, then Italy again. In 1911 it was Normandy, an expedition for some reason ‘hidden by a web of lies from Father’. Diana enjoyed everything but begrudged the time she was separated from her swelling horde of admirers: ‘I shall love stone cathedrals with their hundred straight pillars – man’s excellent improvement on tree-trunks – but how much more would I appreciate it if Edward was there to understand, unexplained, the humours and beauty of things.’ Then in October 1912 came the first intoxicating visit to Venice, the foreign city that over the years was to mean more to her even than Paris. The Marchesa Casati dominated the scene. Diana first saw her ‘drifting down the Grand Canal under a parasol of peacock’s feathers’ and soon became a regular attender at Casati’s parties, which were exotic, extravagant, vulgar perhaps but never dull. Once the Piazza San Marco was taken over as the Casati’s ballroom, filled with guests dressed as characters from pictures by Longhi and Guardi. The hostess herself wore ‘the trousered Bakst-designed dress of an animal-tamer. On her shoulder was a macaw, on her arm an ape. She was followed closely by an attendant keeper leading a restive leopard, or puma it may have been.’ Unfortunately the public were also there in force and greeted the Casati’s party with jeers and abuse. A near-riot followed. Diana revelled in the scandal, and still more in the fact that, though she could hardly match the bizarre splendour of the Casati, her golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty won her an army of admirers among the Venetians. ‘Every night a three-hundred-man crowd followed us on the Piazza till finally I had a duel fought over me by two unknown swashbucklers,’ she proudly told Edward Horner. ‘But an Italian success for a fair-hair is a bloody poor one – though very intoxicating.’
Though she loved to be abroad she had her reservations about the natives. After a rapturous few days in Rome she wrote fiercely: ‘There’s nothing like Italy, but gosh, the people! They do run away with the macaroon. There’s not one passable one. All the men should be crushed beneath the heel.’ Next year it was Paris: ‘A thought from an Englishman is worth ten years’ devotion from these squalid, mis-shapen, Jewish, vulgar, loud-tongued, insult-asking Frenchmen.’ Never did she wholly escape from a generalized distrust of foreigners; before 1914, when her feelings were fortified by the arrogance of the master-race, they ran rampant. Her prejudices rarely survived long once she got to know strangers as individuals, but collectively she viewed them with distaste.
‘Jewish’ was one of the epithets she flung at the French. It is hard to know how seriously to take the anti-semitism of the English upper classes. Rothschilds, Cassels, Sassoons were fêted and flattered, honoured at court and accepted in the houses of the aristocracy, yet those same aristocrats abused them freely behind their backs and sometimes to their faces. ‘Filthy Jew’ was part of the common currency of schoolboy invective and the propensity of the English upper classes to behave like schoolboys has always been remarkable. Billy and Julian Grenfell, two of Diana’s closest friends, were particularly virulent. At Balliol Julian would watch for Philip Sassoon to come into the college and then, with a cry of ‘Pheeleep, Pheeleep, I see you!’ chase him from the quadrangle with an Australian stock-whip cracking within inches of his head. Even Duff Cooper, ardent champion of Zionism and enemy of every kind of persecution, a man who was in time to dedicate his book David to ‘The Jewish People’, snarled ‘These bloody Jews are all the same’ when not allowed to borrow Philip Sassoon’s Rolls-Royce one rainy night.
Many of the greatest pleasures in Diana’s life came to her through Jews whose affection she cherished and to whom she was utterly loyal. Many years later, when her son was describing the virtues of his latest friend, he was rash enough to qualify the catalogue with ‘… though he’s a Jew’. He can still remember the stinging box on the ears which his mother administered: ‘And what, pray, is there wrong with that?’ Yet she grew up with the instinctive anti-semitism of her class and race. When George V acceded she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart that ‘he represents to me all that I most heartily dislike … except that I thank God that he hates the Jews’. Philip Sassoon was notorious for snapping up secretaryships to important people. One Easter Day Diana sent him a telegram – ‘Christ has risen and will shortly be needing a secretary.’ Such jibes never meant much to her and she would live to be heartily ashamed of them. In youth, however, she was as intolerant as the majority of her friends. Acquaintances were condemned for their accents, their clothes, their stupidity, their hair-style. Jewishness was just another to be added to the catalogue of vices; venial, certainly, but a blemish all the same.
*
Violet, Duchess of Rutland, had less truck than most with such follies. She was as unconventional in her choice of friends as in everything else. Edward VII was so put out by her goings-on that he took the trouble to call at Arlington Street to remonstrate; a woman in her position ‘ought to drop cards and drive in a barouche round and round Hyde Park, and not go to supper-parties and draw and do amusing things’. He was settled in an imposing armchair which turned out to be worm-eaten, and collapsed halfway through his harangue, pitching the monarch to the floor. A few years later Queen Alexandra similarly ended up on the floor at Arlington Street when the leg of a sofa snapped beneath her.
In one thing, however, the Duchess was wholly conventional: the selection of husbands for her daughters. Here the most rigid tests of wealth and breeding were applied. Letty had married the heir to a rich earl; Marjorie a very rich marquess; Diana, the favourite, must do at least as well as either. The Duchess was said to keep a list of eligible suitors, putting a skull and crossbones against any that were inconsiderate enough to marry elsewhere. Foreigners had to be very grand to be included. The Crown Prince of Germany figured fleetingly. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was one of Diana’s first suitors. ‘I despised him as a shiny little black thing.’ Diana sat next to the widower ex-King Manuel at dinner. ‘I like kings or commoners,’ she told her sister, ‘far better than those chronic eligibles with coronets on their fingers and coronets on their toes.’
It was enough for a young man to be deemed eligible for Diana to distrust if not dislike him. Lord Rocksavage, rich and beautiful, was ‘an eligible eldest son after Mother’s own heart’. Most women considered him attractive but Diana found his conversation ‘unluckily reduced to three words, adaptable to any remark: “Oh”, “Really?” “Right-ho!”. Monotonous but a simplification of life.’ Some of the eligibles were later to be among her dearest friends, but at that time her mother’s approval was proof that they were undesirable: Lord Dudley was slothful and somnolent, ‘that bugger Bobbety Cranborne’ wholly unacceptable with his ‘loose gaping mouth and lean, mean shanks’ (‘bugger’, it should be stressed, being an epithet to which Diana was attached at the time and used with cavalier indifference to its usual meaning).
Most eligible of eligibles was the Prince of Wales. The future Edward VIII was three years younger than Diana, which meant that the war had started before his name began seriously to be linked with those of women, but it was still permissible to dream. The Duchess had no doubt that her daughter was eminently well qualified to be Queen and that this should be her ambition. For Diana the dream was nightmare; she thought the Prince a snivelling cub and viewed with horror the prospect of internment in the court. She was far from being republican, but in her set it was unfashionable to admit to any enthusiasm for the royal family. When Edward VII died, the bell at Belvoir tolled all day and the flag was at half-mast. Nixon, the butler, ‘gave his views eloquently the whole damned day, always the same: “I tell you what I think, Milady. I think it’s very serious, not so much for the royal circle, but for the country!” I longed to say it was a hundred times worse for Mrs Keppel than all put together.’ Her main concern was clothes: ‘Every soul in the nation has a trim black outfit with the exception of us three, who look the fulfilment of makeshift in black chiffon wound round in every direction to conceal parrot-colours.’ As it turned out, the Prince of Wales was equally unenthusiastic about the prospect of an alliance with the Manners family. Whether, if he had liked the idea, Diana would have been able to resist the pressure from society and the glamour of the throne, must be doubtful. When the Duke of Connaught said that she was the only woman who would keep the Prince on the throne she professed dismay, but the flattery was intoxicating.
Her first proposal came from smaller fry. Claud Russell was a grandson of the Duke of Bedford and adequately rich, but he did not rank high on the Duchess’s list. He had been in love with Diana since he first saw her at the age of fifteen, tobogganing in the snow with folded arms and eyes shut, ‘like a heroine of fairy tale going on a last enchanted voyage’. He waited till she was eighteen, then presented her with a diamond-and-ruby pendant and proposed. Diana accepted the pendant and refused the marriage; ‘He seemed a frightfully old man, almost like a cripple.’ She continued to keep him as a suitor, though. She always hated to let any man pass out of her life. When Edward Horner threatened desertion she wrote in dismay: ‘Do you imagine that I don’t want you, someone who will talk and listen to me and perhaps love me? Let me know, and I’ll settle whether to console myself with winter sports, or let green, slimy river-bubbles burst above me.’ And yet, though she wanted Edward Horner to love her, she was by no means sure that she wanted to love him in return. Love, she told Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘brings pain and sighs in its train and endless rue, whereas I would bring nothing but fun, gladness’. Flattery, courtship, flirtation, a mutual pursuit of pleasure, this was all very well, but anything more serious was a threat to be countered by hostility or indifference. ‘I love you desperately,’ wrote Shaw-Stewart, ‘but it’s no use saying so, as the statement is always a signal for an outburst of brutality.’ ‘Your remote look in that taxi‚’ complained Edward Horner, ‘seemed like an instrument of torture.’
Diana knew that in some way she was failing to give them what they wanted; not physically, which the social climate of the age would anyhow have precluded, but in any kind of whole-hearted commitment. She regretted it, was even slightly alarmed by it, but did not feel it within her to offer more. Patrick Shaw-Stewart wrote reproachfully after a weekend at The Woodhouse in which he felt she had neglected him. Diana replied in terms that showed contrition yet little hope of amendment:
What can I say, except that I was fairly unconscious of being anything different from my heartless ’umble self and that I’ve got one of those new marble hearts, and that I like you as well as (not an atom more than) anybody – and surely now you must realize that I’m not so good a woman, and please you mustn’t love me, because I’m only one of those Children of Illusion. It’s damned nice and unselfish of me to ask you this, so realize it.
It is to be doubted whether the recipient took much pleasure from this muted apology.
*
By 1912 or 1913 Diana’s circle had widened far beyond the original Brancaster group. Its inner nucleus, however, remained tight-knit and exclusive. ‘The Corrupt Coterie’, as it was called affectionately by its members and disparagingly by those not admitted to membership, consisted largely of the children of members of the Souls – Asquiths, Listers, Horners, Trees, Grenfells. But where the Souls prided themselves on their spirituality, the Coterie flattered itself that it was ‘unafraid of words, unshocked by drink, and unashamed of “decadence” and gambling – Unlike Other People, I’m afraid’. Its debaucheries were innocuous – at least until the war liberated London society to sin more spiritedly – but its pretensions to wickedness were many and vociferous.
The Asquiths were at the heart of the Coterie and immeasurably important to Diana. Katharine Asquith was Edward Horner’s sister – ‘a lovely, tall creature,’ Laurence Jones described her, ‘large-eyed, long-lashed, with a magnolia complexion’. She was far more intelligent than her brother, a perturbed spirit endlessly questing perfection and causing herself much tribulation in the search, capable when young of a reckless gaiety which at times seemed to border on hysteria. Her friends loved her but found her withdrawn, even mysterious. ‘All girls – like all men – long to know you well because you are so beautiful,’ said Blanche Stanley, ‘but are puzzled how to do it because you are so uncommon and remote.’
In 1907 Katharine Horner married Raymond Asquith, eldest son of the Chancellor of the Exchequer who the following year was to become Prime Minister. Raymond was a scholar of Winchester and Balliol, winner of the Ireland, Craven and Derby Scholarships, a First in Greats and a Fellowship at All Souls. With these towering academic achievements went indifference to worldly success; he had chosen the Bar as a career and would undoubtedly have excelled at it, perhaps too done well in politics, but he could not be bothered to fight hard, preferring to cultivate his friendships and his intellectual pleasures. John Buchan described him as a demi-god: ‘a scholar of the ripe Elizabethan type, a brilliant wit, an accomplished poet, a sound lawyer – these things were borne lightly, for his greatness was not in his attainments but in himself … Most noble in presence and with every grace of voice and manner, he moved among men like a being from another world, scornfully detached from the common struggle.’ Demi-gods are by definition inhuman; Raymond Asquith could appear so to his acquaintances but to his friends he was warm, sympathetic, an exhilaratingly good companion. Posterity may fairly doubt the qualities of many members of the lost generation but about him there can be little dispute.
He was fourteen years older than Diana, ten years older than Horner, Shaw-Stewart, Lister, the Grenfells, or others of the group. One cannot be sure why he chose to make so many of his closest friends in a younger generation; perhaps in part because he loved to lead, probably still more because he found this particular group more amusing. Certainly he achieved leadership. ‘He was the king,’ said Diana. ‘He was the one we liked best and he liked us better than his own people. He was wonderful.’ His influence on her was far greater than that of any other of her friends; she read books to please him, echoed his opinions, feared his criticism. She loved him with a fervour that only first love can inspire.
It is more difficult to be unequivocally enthusiastic about the Grenfells. Julian and Billy Grenfell were the two elder sons of Lady Desborough, a fashionable hostess whose wealth, ambition, toughness and hunger for applause ensured her pre-eminence in a crowded field. ‘Ettie is an ox, she will be made into Bovril when she dies,’ said Margot Asquith, Raymond’s step-mother. Lady Desborough craved the exclusive love of her sons and resented the affection they felt for Diana. Billy, the second son, was undeterred. ‘You get 100 out of 100 for companionship, beauty, wit, intelligence and intellect, 77 for athleticism and 7½ for lawn tennis,’ he wrote to Diana, and then again a few months later, ‘You have given me wonderful and amazing love; I dare not think how much.’ In fact, though Diana was fond of both the brothers, she felt no love for either. There was a brutal heartiness, an insensitivity about them which accorded ill with the decadence that was her favoured affectation; she did not actively disapprove of their anti-semitism, their crude consciousness of caste, their worship of the traditional manly qualities, but there was a stridency, a vulgarity about them that she deplored. Few of the people she loved were conspicuously full-blooded and she found a little of the Grenfell boys went a long way.
Denis Anson had some of the same attributes, though he did not elevate them to the level of a philosophy. A rich, sporting baronet, he could never resist a challenge and passed from one wild excess to another. Billy Grenfell recalled ‘a glorious dinner’ in his rooms, after which ‘fifty rabbits were lowered out of Trinity in wicker baskets – whereupon one hundred excited humans and one mangy bull-dog ran after them, and the Dons ran after us, and afterwards collected the defunct rabbits into large piles and buried them’. An unattractive scene; but Denny Anson was as likely to risk his own life as that of a rabbit, and his charm and genuine kindness redeemed what otherwise might have seemed boorish or even brutal.
Lord Vernon was another who was more loving than loved. George Vernon was short, stout, spoiled and very rich; endearingly hopeless and inducing in almost every woman a wish to mother him and put him right. He was extravagantly generous, and though it was not his readiness to foot the bills which won him a place in the Coterie, he was undoubtedly valued for his bank-balance as well as for his gentleness and sweetness. Edward Horner once accused Diana of being engaged to Vernon. Diana dismissed the charge as absurd, but it was not for want of soliciting that she was not. ‘If you could imagine a millionth fraction of the amount I worship you, you would be obliged to forgive me‚’ wrote Vernon. ‘Oh Dibbins, I implore you to say you’ll marry me. You sit in every chair and I see you in every step and I can think and imagine nothing else but you.’
Tommy Bouch also suffered from unrequited love. He was a rich fox-hunting squire, Master of the Belvoir and a man of greatness in that hunting world; but the Coterie saw nothing great in such a role and found him elderly and something of a bore. He adored Diana and wrote her countless poems, some of which were mediocre, most worse. Diana, who considered the typical Belvoir house-party to consist of ‘a collection of senile, decayed relations and a second-childhood aunt’, welcomed him as a county neighbour and a generous friend, but found he could be a trial in London, especially when his jealousy led him to call three or four times a day and bombard her with letters in the intervals.
And then there was Duff Cooper. His ancestry was interesting. His mother, Lady Agnes, was sister to the Duke of Fife. After two elopements and a divorce she found herself ostracized by polite society and sought solace in nursing. There she met and married Alfred Cooper, a surgeon of considerable ability who specialized in the more embarrassing complaints. His carriage was well known in Mayfair and the fact that ‘Cooper’s clap-trap’ had been seen outside a noble house was the subject of ribald speculation in the clubs. Mr Cooper would have enjoyed the ribaldry; he is supposed to have remarked that he and his wife between them had inspected the private parts of half the peers in London. In old age he grew eccentric, wore white kid gloves to shoot and refused to play bridge until the looking glasses had been draped in cloth so as to remove the chance of cheating.
Duff himself was far from eligible. A young man working for the Foreign Office examination and living on a small allowance from his mother would not anyway have seemed an enticing prospect to the Duchess of Rutland, but Duff had more against him than that. ‘Writing in my sixty-fourth year,’ he claimed in his autobiography, ‘I can truthfully say that since I reached the age of discretion I have consistently drunk more than most people would say was good for me.’ He might have said the same thing about eating. He was notoriously unsafe with women, viewing almost anyone between the age of sixteen and sixty as his rightful prey. His temper was ferocious; his indolence, except when something particularly interested him, was formidable. He was one of the least tolerant of men; when asked why he had been so rude to a fashionable designer he snarled: ‘I don’t like men who live, by choice, out of their own country. I don’t like interior decorators. I don’t like Germans. I don’t like buggers and I don’t like Christian Scientists.’
What to the Duchess seemed irresponsibility was to Diana deliciously dashing. Duff’s vices were balanced by a crop of virtues. He was courageous, loyal and generous to a fault. He was exceptionally funny and mocked himself with more vigour than he did anybody else. He wrote and talked with exquisite facility and did anything he set his hand to with competence always and usually with distinction. His love of life was fierce; his failings, indeed, arose generally from his determination to enjoy it to the full. He was perennially optimistic and there were few occasions when his presence did not enhance the pleasure of the participants.
For a long time Duff was no more than one of the many young men in Diana’s life. ‘Our letters cross as quick as knitting needles,’ wrote Duff in March 1913, but he was in love with at least two other women at the time and the correspondence was more for their mutual entertainment than to fuel the fires of passion. He wrote ruefully to report that he had been crossed in love. ‘Christ I have reason to believe is crazy about me so I shall probably marry the church … I think you are well out of it really. You did not know till now that my feet are ever so slightly web, also I am a somnambulist when crossed, also very decadent and theatrical, inclined to look fast.’ His relationships with women were for Duff an enthralling game; his friendships with other men lacked the savour of flirtation but seemed to him at that time immeasurably more important. He was almost as reluctant to commit himself as Diana, though in his case the reasons were less complex, being little more than a reluctance to sacrifice the delights of bachelor independence. With Diana, too, he feared rebuff, not only from her parents but from her. He was more sincere than was his wont when he wrote to her: ‘… as for loving you best in the world, I think that might happen all too easily. I am really rather frightened that it will, for I feel that you would be terrible then and have no pity.’
Usually his love-letters were romantic, ecstatic, delicately ironic; a little too well-honed to stem from the heart. After seeing her portrait painted by Sir John Lavery he erupted:
If I were a painter then you would be properly painted. Not once but a thousand times, in every dress you have ever honoured, in every setting you have ever shone in. And if I were a millionaire I would found a picture gallery in which only pictures of you might be exhibited. The gallery would be open only to the nobility and clergy, the entrance fee would be £1,000 and visitors would have to take off their shoes on entering. And if I were an architect I would design that gallery to look something like a church but more like a heathen temple. And the best of your pictures should hang above the high altar where the pale-faced high priest of Dianolatry would worship every hour. And if I were a musician I would make music so passionate that when it poured out of the temple organ it would reach the souls of your thousand idolaters and make them drunk like wine. And if I were a poet I would write psalms and prayers so beautiful and so unhappy that your picture, half intoxicated with the incense streaming up from the censers, would stretch out its hands in pity to the worshippers below. And if I were God I should let all those unfortunates die in the ecstasy of their devotion – all except one who should love for ever after in a palace of pearl and purple with you sitting on a throne of chrysoprase by his side. But unfortunately I am neither artist, millionaire, architect, poet, musician or even God, but only a rather sentimental, shy young man with ambitions beyond my energy and dreams beyond my income. So shall I send you a small box of chocolates, or would you rather have a postal order?
It was irresistible nonsense, but no less nonsensical for being irresistible. Diana relished it but did not take it seriously. The Duchess too would have appreciated it, indeed she appreciated Duff and most of her daughter’s other friends, enjoyed their attentions, only jibbed when it seemed possible that they might present themselves as putative sons-in-law. Some years later Diana summarized her mother’s opinion of the young men in her life at this period: ‘Edward, drunk and dangerous; Patrick, the same and hideous; Vernon, mad; Charles, just a gasp of horror; Alan, gesture of sickness; Claud, never heard him speak or met his eye; Raymond, missed my character.’ The description was a caricature; but the least suspicion that her daughter was becoming too fond of one of these ineligibles was enough to set the Duchess fuming. Diana’s friends recognized the obsession and delighted in feeding it. Raymond Asquith wrote to his sister: ‘I wish I might live to see the Duchess of Rutland’s face on the simultaneous announcement of engagement between Marjorie and Oc [Arthur Asquith] and Diana and Cis [Cyril Asquith] respectively. As I don’t belong to an Empire-building family, I take a certain pride in belonging to a mother-wrecking one.’ The Duchess had confidence in Diana’s prudence; yet as she surveyed the career of her headstrong daughter she must have asked herself from time to time whether her confidence might not prove misplaced.
*
The last years before the First World War were the most carefree of Diana’s life. The family – an extended family with a plethora of aunts and cousins – would spend Christmas and see in the New Year at Belvoir. ‘That ass Diana doesn’t like country or tree-tops or chapel practice or anything,’ complained Marjorie. ‘It is a waste, by Jove!’ Diana did indeed feel cut off in this remote fastness: at other times of the year a retinue of male admirers would usually follow her to Belvoir, but Christmas was sacred to the clan, with only the Trees thrown in as a sop to the children and the Duchess.
This was the season of the servants’ ball, ‘that most appalling of all orgies’. Whatever members of the family were at Belvoir had to attend for at least six dances. Nervous giggling outside the door was followed by dances with the butler, the chauffeur, the head groom. The waltz was an animated affair in which Diana’s partner, after four rounds of vigorous pat-a-cake with her knees and feet, inquired, ‘Shall we do a little gliding, milady?’ Someone presumably must have enjoyed the affair, but not the daughters of the house. ‘I adore children of the soil and what Viola calls peasants, and prize-fighters, and all plebeians practically, but I abhor genteel servants,’ wrote Diana splenetically. ‘They’re despicable for their trade alone. I’d sooner be a cod-fish than a bower.’
Diana’s affection for peasants and prize-fighters illustrated the romantic illusion of the British upper classes that they understood the workers and could establish a good relationship with them if only the middle classes would go away. She knew nothing of the problems of the proletariat, let alone of that still unborn concept ‘The Third World’. If poverty or misery was thrust under her nose she was as distressed as any other teenage girl, but it would not have occurred to her to seek them out; she would indeed actively have avoided them. Socialists were either like Charles Lister, well-intentioned but misguided idealists, or dangerous revolutionaries jealous of the good fortune of their superiors. Diana and most of her friends were unthinking conservatives. At Bakewell, not far from Rowsley, she canvassed for Lord Kerry, the Unionist candidate, against the moderately radical Mr Himners. She found the electorate divided ‘between fools and eloquent wise men’; enjoyed the former but was perpetually confounded by the latter.
‘Weel, I’ve always voted Cavendish and hope to till I die,’ said one old lady. Diana pointed out that Mr Victor Cavendish had been Duke of Devonshire for eighteen months and Lord Kerry was member in his place.
‘I don’t fancy Kerry. He’s a wee bloody mouse.’
‘Well, anyway, he’s preferable to Himmer, my pretty.’
‘Who’s Himmer?’
‘Why, his opponent!’
‘Do you mean Himners?’
‘Oh, blast you, of course I do!’
‘Then why did you say Himmer? I believe you’re a suffragette!’
The ‘wee bloody mouse Kerry’ won by over a thousand votes. Diana’s interest in politics was largely confined to the knockabout fun of elections. Certainly she was no suffragette and would have considered any such activity common and pointless. She had no wish to vote, being confident that she could get what she wanted from life without recourse to so arcane a method. No divine discontent stirred within her. When a clairvoyante predicted that she could accomplish whatever she wanted she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart: ‘Sometimes I long to be a man and hear the mad claps of an appreciative multitude, but alas the longing doesn’t last long. There is no joy so lazy and delicious as to find one is a woman who depends.’
When the family returned to London towards the middle of January it was to an endless sequence of concerts, operas, charity matinées, ballets and, above all, parties. London in the last years before the war was gripped by an almost frenetic gaiety, when, in Osbert Sitwell’s phrase, ‘the great, soft, headless amorphous mob of rich people of indeterminate origin produced by the business activities of the previous century was bent on pleasure’. The easiest way to obscure the difference between nouveaux riches and aristocrats was for the former to lure the latter to their houses with lavish entertainments. The presence of Lady Diana Manners was considered one of the ultimate accolades, proof to the hostess at least that she had made it to the inner circle.
These years saw the birth of ragtime. New night-clubs burgeoned every week in which negro bands moaned platitudes about the Mason-Dixon line or stirred the hearts of their listeners with the syncopated rhythm of ‘Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle?’ Even in the magnificent halls of Stafford or Bridgewater House the fox-trot and the tango disturbed the aristocratic calm, though the more traditional Baron Ochs’s plaintive waltz from Der Rosenkavalier above all haunted those last London summers. Diana was considered somewhat raffish by the staider hostesses. The Cecils, who lived only one house away in Arlington Street, rarely visited their neighbours. Lord and Lady Salisbury felt that, though the Duchess of Rutland had amusing people to the house, ‘foreign actresses and people like that’, it was not quite the sort of place to which you sent your children; so the young Cecils were left somewhat wistfully outside. Sylvia Henley escorted Diana to a ball. At 2.30 a.m. she decided it was time for bed, but could see no sign of her charge. Diana finally reappeared from a night-club at 4.15. Such an excess might seem modest today but was dashing indeed in the climate of 1912 and 1913.
The Edwardians adored dressing up. Diana’s first public appearance was aged fourteen as a Knight of the Round Table; since when, reported the Aberdeen Journal, ‘no fancy dress ball has been complete without her’. She was constantly being called on to make spectacular entries as the Queen of Sheba borne by sweating slaves or to play the central role in some tableau vivant depicting Titania surrounded by her fairies or ‘Venus and Child’ by an unknown Tuscan artist. She responded to such calls with alacrity, loving to be the centre of the picture and also finding in such extravagances a release from the constraints of everyday life. To dress up was a visual expression of her craving for new experience and her wish to be all things to all men. ‘Your game,’ wrote Duff Cooper perceptively, ‘is to play all games. Catherine of Russia one day, Mimi of Bohemia the next, David Copperfield’s child wife alternately with the Emperor Claudius’s only too grown-up one. Cleopatra sometimes, sometimes Desdemona, occasionally Juliet, still more occasionally Portia, but never, never Cordelia.’ Apotheosis of this fantasy world took place at Earl’s Court, where a replica of the courtyard at Warwick Castle provided the scene for a revival of the Eglinton Tournament. Lady Curzon was Queen of Beauty, but Diana stole the show in a black velvet Holbein dress designed by herself and wholly out of period, mounted on the horse that played Richard II’s Roan Barbary. By her side rode Prince Youssupoff on a snow-white Arab ‘foaming and flecking and pawing’.
Diana was as stage-struck as any of her family and would have relished a chance to play Titania in the theatre rather than simpering in a tableau vivant. Herbert Tree would allow her a walk-on part in some of his productions, mingling with the crowd and muttering ‘Yes, Antony, we’ll lend you our ears’ at appropriate moments. Sometimes too she believed that she might have been a concert pianist and practised the Liebestod assiduously in the ballroom at Arlington Street. She told Alan Parsons that she could play it faultlessly ‘with the technique of the platform player. The face of nature is changed when one feels Richter fathoms beneath one.’
Spiritualism was much in vogue in London society. Lady Wemyss told of a seance conducted by a Mrs Herbine, during which Harold Large addressed the gathering on the curious case of a man whose brain exuded a scent of sandalwood whenever he thought hard. Diana, seated on the floor, ‘rocked with ill-suppressed laughter at the grave absurdity with which HL told the tale’. Robust scepticism was Diana’s usual attitude; she visited palmists and clairvoyants for the fun of it, but with little expectation of enlightenment. When Letty, on the verge of her engagement to Ego Charteris, was assured with a plethora of convincing details that she was about to marry the man she loved, Diana assumed that the Duchess had done an efficient job of briefing the clairvoyant in advance. Yet her cynicism was not impregnable. When an aviator friend vanished in mid-Channel, she wrote to Marie Mathieu, a celebrated medium, to ask if he was really dead – hardly the behaviour of a sceptic. Her attitude, in fact, reflected the same eagerness to believe in something‚ yet reluctance to accept anything in particular, which marked her religious life. She inclined towards a vague and optimistic pantheism. When Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s mother died Diana wrote to him: ‘People here say, no one since the year dot has been as Godless as me, but it’s not true, is it? There is nobody in the world who had more trust in God, who is me and you, the stars, the dead, all. Of course it matters very little what one believes, so long as one believes in something. I, thank God! am brainless enough to believe absolutely.’
From March or April the season of weekend house-parties was under way. Every Friday evening or more usually Saturday morning the upper classes would pour out of London to congregate twenty, thirty or forty strong in the country houses within a railway-journey’s distance of the capital, to shoot, fish, hunt; play golf, tennis and after-dinner games, of which adultery was the most popular; or to conduct the business of the country in dignified seclusion. Belvoir was a great centre for such gatherings and Diana found herself reluctantly on duty, showing guests the terraced gardens or walking with them to the elegant eighteenth-century kennels some half a mile from the house. Some weekends were more imposing than others, as one in which: ‘the passages were lined with great men, ambassadors hung on banisters – glorious men who like Atlas carry empires on their very incapable-looking shoulders. Conceited schoolboys like F. E. Smith and others like Rosebery bristling with independence, Alfred Lyttelton brisk as a brush. One and all with great brows oppressive with their minds.’ To alleviate the mass of solemn statesmen was ‘a marvellous girl called Vita Sackville-West, rollingly rich, who writes French poetry with more ease than I lie on a sofa’.
When Diana’s presence was not needed at Belvoir, a score of other country houses were eager to receive her. There was Avon Tyrrell with Lord and Lady Manners; ‘Diana was looking radiant,’ reported Billy Grenfell, ‘and was exquisitely witty and full of joie de vivre’. She and Angie Manners dressed up as suffragettes and pelted the company with biscuit boxes thrown from the top of a gazebo. There was Stanway with Lord and Lady Wemyss, a beautiful house but short on comfort, ‘lukewarm water, blankets that are no prison to one’s wayward toes, and every horizontal object wears a coat of dust, like a chinchilla. It’s a wonder that the inmates look as clean as they do.’ Welbeck with the Duke and Duchess of Portland; Beaudesert with the Angleseys; Hatton with Alfred de Rothschild, his private detective, lawyer and doctor permanently on the premises; Blenheim; Hatfield; Sutton Courtenay; Hackwood with the Curzons; it is tempting to portray a group of bored and blasé fainéants endlessly touring the countryside in search of diversion, but in fact Diana and her friends enjoyed themselves hugely and were just as likely to spend an afternoon reading poetry aloud or acting scenes from Shakespeare as in the more traditional diversions of the English upper classes.
For a month or so of the summer the family migrated to Rowsley, where entertaining continued but guests were fewer and the style less formal. Billy Grenfell recorded a week in August when the downpour was continuous but ‘the wit and pleasant drawing and cheerful reading of our hostess, as well as the beauty of Haddon Hall in slashing rain, have made life a pleasaunce. Tennis, fencing and battledore fill up the intervals.’ In 1913 H. G. Wells’s game ‘Little Wars’, played with toy mechanical guns and tin soldiers, was all the rage. Diana, Ego Charteris, George Vernon, John Granby and the Austrian Alfy Clary spent all day on their stomachs in a courtyard at Rowsley, shifting the pieces from one place to another. War was still a game but premonitions that it might become something more serious were beginning to be felt. Diana was summoned to the German Embassy where the Ambassadress, a buxom lesbian, was embarrassingly eager to photograph her in the nude. In the interests of international goodwill Diana obliged, but even as she posed she wondered nervously what use might be made of her photograph in case of war.
Travel was now a regular feature of the programme. In the years before the war Diana went several times to Paris; to Rouen; to The Hague to stay with Violet Keppel – ‘all the brilliant doomed young men the war was to annihilate, George Vernon, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Raymond Asquith, Bim Tennant, flocked to Holland,’ wrote her hostess. ‘Diana Manners, dazzling, disconcerting, came with her mother’; to Florence; to Genoa to visit Viola Tree who was rehearsing for an opera; above all to Venice. It was Venice that provided the apotheosis of these festive years. Diana was staying with Lady Cunard in a party that included the Prime Minister and his wife Margot, Harry Cust and Ronald Storrs. Not far away George Vernon had taken a palazzo and filled it with Diana’s dearest friends: Raymond and Katharine Asquith; Billy Grenfell; Duff Cooper; Denny Anson; Charles Lister, now at the Embassy in Rome; Edward Horner. Hand in hand with the Prime Minister Diana marvelled at the sights of Venice and then in the evening the Coterie would fête and cosset him: ‘On his birthday we dressed him up as a Doge and hung the sala with Mantegna swags of fruit and green leaves and loaded him with presents, tenderness and admiration. I think he was ecstatically happy that day.’
But it was with her own friends that Diana was happiest. ‘There was dancing and extravagance and lashings of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses.’ Denny Anson tried to liven up the Piazza San Marco by throwing a series of epileptic fits, was towed off to jail by indignant police and had to be rescued next day by Charles Lister and the influence of the Embassy. There was amateur prize-fighting and a girls’ sparring match. Denny Anson and Duff raced each other across the canal: ‘I can see Duff now, jacket flung to me, miraculously climbing up one of the great posts that moor the gondolas at the entrance steps – posts quite fifteen feet high and in part slimy with sea-water.’ Duff won, and it was all for love of Diana, or so the men said, though any other object would probably have done as well.
The life of the young and rich in pre-1914 England was an easy one. The idle were in no way disapproved of; even those who worked followed a schedule that today seems hardly taxing. Their self-confidence, even complacency, was daunting. ‘I’ve been to Rowsley,’ recorded Viola Tree, ‘where I’ve had God’s own time. I swear that all of you are without doubt the “Superior People” of history. It is almost too exciting; you are all quite unlike ordinary people – you are like the heroines of Greece and the popular novels. England can never sink while we’ve got a king like good King E and while it is inhabited by a few such as us.’ Viewed from the lofty heights of late twentieth-century rectitude it is easy to condemn the ‘Superior People’ as frivolous and futile, fiddling while the fires were laid for Europe’s holocaust. Whether the modern moralist would have used his time and money any better is an open question, but even the sternest critic can hardly avoid compassion at the contrast between this carefree gaiety and the carnage that was to come. The Coterie left Venice intoxicated by the delightfulness of its existence and vowing to repeat the triumph annually. But ‘this was the Carne Vale of 1913. Only Duff and I ever did return.’
*
In July 1914 a presage of the catastrophe to come brought the first touch of tragedy into Diana’s adult life. Constantine Benckendorff and Edward Horner had arranged a party in a boat on the Thames. Several members of the Coterie were there: Claud Russell, Raymond and Katharine Asquith, Duff Cooper and his sister Sybil, Iris Tree and Denny Anson. The band was drawn from Thomas Beecham’s orchestra at Covent Garden and at 11.30 p.m. the party set sail from Westminster Pier. By 3 a.m. they were opposite Battersea Park on the return journey. Earlier there had been some talk of bathing and now Raymond Asquith offered Diana £10 if she could get Denny Anson to go in. What happened then is unclear, Claud Russell was sure Diana made no response but she herself thinks she may have said something like: ‘Oh, the whole idea was we should bathe and nobody’s done it.’ Whether or not he was egged on to jump, certainly nobody tried to stop Anson when he took off his coat, handed his watch to Diana and dived in. Within a few seconds he realized the force of the current and, as he was swept away, called out ‘Quickly, quickly!’ Benckendorff and one of the bandsmen followed to his rescue; Duff had his coat half off when Sybil and Diana seized his arms and held him back as he cursed and struggled to get free. Benckendorff, an exceptionally strong swimmer, was pulled back on board, totally exhausted, a few minutes later. Anson and the bandsman were drowned.
When the inquest was held a few days later the coroner was startled to find himself confronted by the fine flower of the London bar defending the interests of the various participants: F. E. Smith K.C., later Lord Chancellor; Ernest Pollock K.C., J.P., later Master of the Rolls; William Jowitt, another Lord Chancellor to be; and Hugh Fraser, a future Judge of the High Court. Raymond Asquith conveniently had another case on hand and was excused attendance; no mention was made of his role in encouraging Anson to dive. As a result of the intervention of the Duchess, Diana too was not called as a witness. The verdict was predictably ‘Death by misadventure’, with a few platitudes about the wildness of youth and no particular blame attached to anyone. The press had been having a field-day over the affair and some sort of demonstration was expected outside the court, but the imposing spectacle of Herbert Tree, with a beautiful daughter on either arm, soon stilled the murmurs.
Diana was given more attention by the press than any other protagonist. After Sir Denis Anson’s funeral the evening papers carried the placard ‘Diana’s Love’. ‘Nothing can exceed the blackguardism of the press,’ commented the Prime Minister, ‘but by misfortune or design some people are always in the limelight.’ London society was no kinder. It was said that she had been heard singing the morning after the tragedy; that she went to the Bath Club and gave an imitation of Anson drowning; that she visited the opera the following night and caused such indignation among the orchestra that they refused to continue with the performance until ‘that woman’ left the theatre. None of this was true, though the Covent Garden orchestra did feel that their colleague had been unfairly sacrificed and Thomas Beecham had to work hard to stop them passing on their indignation to the press. A more justified complaint was that Diana did not personally return Anson’s watch to his family but instead sent it round by Edward Homer. Perhaps correctly, she had felt that she would be unwelcome at the Ansons’ house, but her conduct fed the rumours of her chill indifference. Diana always shrank from painful confrontations, and left it to others to pass on bad news. Thus she earned a reputation for being unfeeling, when at the worst she was guilty of a kind of cowardice. The wreath she sent to Denis Anson’s funeral ‘With Diana’s love’ was the target of an anonymous letter which urged her, when next in Venice, to persuade some man to jump from the top of the Campanile to the roof of St Mark’s – making sure first there was a good crowd to admire the exploit and its instigator.
The pain caused her by this miserable folly cannot be doubted. Two years later she told Raymond Asquith: ‘I have an hour ago been thrown entirely off my balance by seeing Denny in the corner – not dripping slime or festering in a shroud, but he always looked at best like “a shrieking mandrake torn out of the earth” so it was as bad as if he had worn the symbols of my murder.’ In less dramatic form the tragedy haunted her all her life; when she wrote her memoirs fifty years later she was still asking herself whether she was to blame and what she could have done to stop it. Shortly after the incident Diana found herself abruptly dropped from the list for the Guards Ball, one of the events of the season which few of her group would expect to miss. No explanation was offered and none was asked for. Indignant, the Duchess organized a rival party at Arlington Street and brought considerable pressure on the faithful and not-so-faithful to attend. Duff was one of those who rallied and he was rumoured too to have knocked down a man whom he heard disparaging Diana in his club. Nothing would at that time have made the Duchess think of him as other than a drunkard and a spendthrift, inconceivable as a son-in-law and dangerous as a friend, but even she was touched by such evidence of loyalty.
The lesser tragedy was soon submerged by the greater. ‘Goodbye, my darling,’ wrote Duff late in June 1914. ‘I hope that everyone whom you like better than me will die very soon.’ It seemed an idle joke but it was not long to remain so. On 4 August 1914, less than a month after the disaster on the Thames, war broke out. Diana’s untroubled youth was over.