uperficially, all seemed well, especially during Sir George’s three years as a backbench MP. If he did not achieve very much in his chosen career, he enjoyed the amenities of the House of Commons, the ‘best club in London’. Behind the scenes, however, his marriage was going badly wrong, even if Edith exaggerates in saying that her mother found herself in ‘a kind of slave bondage to an equally unfortunate and pitiable young man’.1
George realised that he had made a disastrous choice. Years later, he wrote of how after they were married, he discovered that Lady Ida (as she became in 1887 when her father was created an earl) did not even know the multiplication tables, and possessed no idea of the value of money.
Her priorities became clothes, jewellery and champagne. When her husband cancelled her orders for cases of champagne, she turned to whisky, and was only saved from destroying herself by his watchful eye. She spent as uncontrollably as she drank. On at least eight occasions he gave her large sums, totalling over £20,000, with which to settle bills. In addition, he later calculated that during the first thirteen years of married life, to fend off writs he had to pay bills for lesser debts at least every three weeks.
For all Ida’s faults, her husband was touchingly proud of her beauty. Soon after their marriage, he decided to have her portrait done. Having thought briefly of commissioning Alma-Tadema, he chose Sir William Blake Richmond, who produced an unattractive picture typical of the eighties. Wearing a turquoise blue silk coat, Ida holds a zither, an instrument she had probably never seen; but the face is lovely, such a good likeness that her husband nearly had it cut out and framed. Dissatisfied, he contemplated having her painted by Jacques-Émile Blanche. Finally, he decided on a group portrait of the family by John Singer Sargent, a conversation piece to complement Copley’s study of the Sitwell children a century before. It was finished early in 1900.
The £1,500 fee, huge for those days, was in fact a bargain, since Sargent had not yet acquired his full popularity. He makes George strikingly handsome and Edith almost pretty, but does not quite do Ida justice. Some thought he gave the baronet a crooked nose and Edith a straight one, the reverse of real life, because he felt sorry for her.
In his autobiography Osbert belittles the picture, arguing that Sargent could not compete with Copley. He also ridicules his father for wearing riding breeches when he seldom rode.2 But a newly discovered letter shows it was the painter who insisted on these clothes, not his patron.3 The group is undoubtedly one of the finest of all Sargent’s works.
Early in April 1900, while viewing the portrait at Sargent’s studio, Lord Londesborough collapsed from a bout of flu. He then developed pneumonia, which killed him. (Osbert claimed imaginatively that it was the more exotic malady of psittacosis, caught from a parrot.) Writing to his agent and former tutor Peveril Turnbull, Sir George comments that his father-in-law had ‘had a remarkably kind and amiable manner and disposition’, and that Lady Ida was very upset. He adds that the new earl, her brother William, ‘will be what the family call badly off, that is to say he will only have £40,000 a year to begin with and death duties to pay out of that, but eventually there will be £60,000’.4
He adds that his wife will now have an income of £600 instead of £300 from the Londesborough estate. ‘She really ought to have had this on marriage for though it is possible to dress fashionably on £300, it is certainly not easy for girls who have been been brought up in this way.’ As he gave Lady Ida £500 a year, this should have made her self-sufficient, but she was already wildly extravagant. Nor had he reckoned with the dowager.
While not without charm when she deigned to use it, the widowed Lady Londesborough was a thoroughly selfish, ill-tempered woman whom Edith pictured in her prime as ‘living in luxury like a gilded and irascible wasp in a fine ripe nectarine’.5 Now she found, as Osbert put it, ‘horses and carriages and grooms and houses and gardens and jewels and plate, and indeed the whole luxurious decoration of life by which she had been so long surrounded snatched away at a single grab’.6 She turned to moneylenders, who very nearly ruined her. Worse still, instead of helping to control her daughter’s spending, she not only encouraged her but tried to use her as a source of income.
In 1905, while Ida was in hospital with appendicitis, the dowager countess made her sign a document demanding a separation from Sir George unless he paid Ida’s latest batch of debts and settled a large yearly allowance on her. She signed because her mother told her that her brother Londesborough would have to pay the debts if George refused. Ida then changed her mind.
Desperate for money, the dowager had hoped to use her daughter as a milch calf who would pay her own bills. George recalled bitterly that ‘Lady Londesborough’s actions nearly killed Lady Ida and prevented me from being able to exercise restraint over her expenditure.’7
It was not just extravagance that wrecked the marriage. Ida was incapable of sharing her husband’s interests in any way, or of giving him the slightest support. According to her daughter Edith, she lay in bed reading newspapers or trashy novels but could remember nothing of what she read. Otherwise, all she did was play bridge or watch the golfers in the park, or give large luncheon parties without warning her husband. She had constant tantrums, screaming and threatening to throw herself out of the window. And she possessed a wounding tongue.
One reason for her lassitude was chronic ill health. She was consumptive, and nearly died in 1904 after losing a lung. Her tuberculosis made her dangerously vulnerable to any sort of infection and, in the end, was indirectly responsible for her death. Sickness and lack of vitality affected her temperament, contributing to the irrational outbursts of anger. Edith later said that her rages were the only reality in her life. They were increasingly fuelled by heavy drinking.
George, whose own life was meticulously organised, was maddened by the chaos surrounding his wife and goaded by the constant rows; while Ida, gregarious and fascinated by new faces, found his detachment infuriating. While he counted every penny, she loved shopping sprees – even when an old lady, she said she never dared visit Paris for fear she might spend money like a drunken sailor. No more ill-matched couple can be imagined, but divorce would have meant social ostracism. Although Ida did not take lovers, some of his family suspected George of siring one or two red-haired bastards, but there is no evidence.
Something of what he had to put up with can be glimpsed from the story of the Learned Pig (‘able to foretell the future’) that Ida bought at a Conservative Party bazaar in Scarborough. Although its psychic powers deserted it on its arrival at Renishaw by train, she could not bear to have it killed, instead boarding it out secretly at various farms. When an enormous bill for housing and feeding – and grooming – the animal eventually reached her husband, he immediately ordered it to be destroyed. Any mention of the pig always enraged him.
Yet Lady Ida possessed a bewitching charm, enlivened by a wonderful sense of fun. If empty-headed, she inspired affection. When young, she was very gay and very generous, says Edith, adding that she had an appealing, childlike quality. Osbert, who adored his mother, writes that her delight in driving through summer woods at night had something of a child’s in it, as did her imitations of odd people – she was a gifted mimic – and her enjoyment of ridiculous situations. Children loved her because she treated them as friends, never laughing at anything they said. If a woman friend admired a bracelet or a dress, she immediately gave it to her, sometimes giving away several dresses after lunch. ‘Take it, darling.’
Occasionally, she could even be kind about her husband. Warning Osbert not to mention a secret luncheon for sixteen guests because his father made such a foolish fuss about bills, she added, ‘But whatever one may say about him, there’s no one else like him.’
She, too, had her pet eccentricities, such as a length of hangman’s rope twisted round her bedhead for good luck. It was in keeping with her strange, fey nature that she should be unafraid of Renishaw’s otherworldly denizens. When little Osbert went into her bedroom in the mornings and asked his mother if she had slept well, she would often answer, ‘Oh, fairly well, although the ghosts were about again’ – as if they were of no more account than owls or mice.8
In 1901 Sir George suffered a complete collapse in his health, almost certainly because of the tensions within his marriage. There may have been other factors, such as failing to regain the Scarborough seat, but Ida was the catalyst. All that we know about it comes from Osbert’s account (in The Scarlet Tree) of what he witnessed as a small boy, written four decades later and – as usual – designed to make his father look a fool.
Bewildered by his mysterious and frightening malady, Sir George decided he must give up politics. The doctors could not tell him what was wrong, as it was beyond the period’s medical science; each diagnosis disagreed with the next. Hoping a holiday might work a cure, he went to Germany, staying at Nuremberg and then Rothenburg, but he took the cause with him – Lady Ida. For a short time, however, he thought the change of scenery was doing him good.
In May 1901, according to Osbert, his father fell alarmingly ill with what was clearly a nervous breakdown; but in those days doctors scarcely knew the term, let alone what it implied. It prostrated him, and he could not deal with business matters. He became convinced he was a dying man – after all, his father had died at just the same age. Unable to sleep, he tried going to bed in a different house or hotel every night of the week.
Cure after cure was tried, often contradictory: wine or no wine, exercise or no exercise, etc. The illness dragged on for several years, with the patient (the ‘dear invalid’, as Louisa Lucy called him) showing no improvement. In the end, the local GP ousted the specialists and convincingly advised change. Sir George must travel.