THE DECISION OF Diana and Bryan to marry provoked immediate opposition. Diana’s parents said with reason that at just eighteen she was far too young to know her own mind and that she must wait a year before an engagement could even be contemplated. ‘You must have one more season in London,’ said Sydney, ‘so that you can at least meet more people.’ This argument carried no weight with Diana, who had inherited her father’s characteristic of unswerving adherence to a decision once taken; anyway, she believed that she had already met quite enough young men to make a considered choice.
Sydney’s sensible reluctance to allow Diana’s engagement on the grounds of her extreme youth was reinforced by her own upbringing and the tenets of her father’s generation, namely that sisters should marry in order of age. There would be plenty of time for Diana to find a husband, she felt, when Nancy and Pam were settled. Pam, it was true, was engaged but though Nancy, as nearly always, was in love, the object of her affections, Hamish St Clair Erskine, was entirely unsuitable. He was charming, good-looking, hopelessly irresponsible, several years younger than Nancy and a homosexual – Nancy, innocent if not ignorant, fondly believed that the love of a good woman would ‘cure’ him. Meanwhile, they tore round London to every party, giggling in corners. (‘Hamish was funny yesterday. I do wish you’d been there to wink at, he had 5 glasses of brandy & crème de menthe (on top of sherry etc) & then began to analyse himself . . . I do worship that child.’)
There was also the question of the immense wealth of the Guinness family, to Sydney a disadvantage; she felt her daughter was far too young to become the possessor of such a fortune. When the season was over Bryan could, of course, come and stay at Swinbrook from time to time; meanwhile Diana would be sent on a round of country-house visits in the cause of meeting other young men – and she was not, on any account, to consider herself engaged.
But even the Redesdales could hardly refuse to let their daughter stay with Bryan at his parents’ home. She would be properly chaperoned, in a house of the utmost respectability – Lady Evelyn, though eccentric, was far from ‘fast’. Reluctantly, Sydney accepted Lady Evelyn’s letter of invitation and, in mid-August, Diana was allowed to travel to Bailiffscourt in Nanny’s charge. Here she and Bryan walked on Lady Evelyn’s lawn of wild thyme, sat on the beach and went for family picnics on the Downs. Colonel Guinness was not there; following his usual custom during the parliamentary recess, he was away on his yacht.
Bryan’s family loved Diana. ‘She’s enough to turn anyone’s head,’ said his little sister Grania; and Lady Evelyn, unworldly, anxious only for her son’s happiness and now reassured as to Diana’s general niceness, began to take a more favourable view of an early marriage.
Not so Diana’s parents. Soon after she returned from Sussex, she was briskly despatched to stay in Scotland with the Malcolms of Poltalloch, whose third son, Angus, was in love with her. Lady Malcolm, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Lillie Langtry, was a grande dame who lived in state on the 480,000-acre Malcolm estate. In the huge sandstone manor house on the Mull of Kintyre, banners hung round the azalea-scented hall and bagpipes skirled round the table at dinner. Lady Malcolm, presiding bejewelled and tea-gowned over a silver teatray, thought that Diana, well bred, well mannered, beautiful and seemingly biddable, would make an excellent wife for her good-looking son and encouraged them to wander on the hills in the long Scottish evenings. Diana faithfully reported these manoeuvrings to Bryan in Vienna, where he had gone with Robert Byron to distract himself while she was away.
‘I am green with envy, but not jealousy, I promise you, of Angus,’ he wrote back. ‘I get really furious when I think of the Clan Malcolm pursuing you, winding smiles around you, stunning you with bagpipe music and then trying to mother and marry you. I suppose one can’t blame them for liking you but how dare Lady M be so forward as to propose to you all helpless and alone under her roof.’
But neither Angus’s protestations, his mother’s blandishments nor the beauty of the Argyllshire hills had any effect on Diana. Pleasantly, firmly and inexorably, she turned Angus down.
Bryan’s promised visit to Swinbrook took place on the weekend of 6 September. In heaven at the thought of seeing Diana again, quaking at the prospect of meeting her formidable parents, facing Nancy’s teasing and being subjected to the critical gaze of five other Mitfords, he was in a turmoil of emotion. Fortunately his visit was brief, though long enough for his considerable charm to be felt by Diana’s younger sisters, so fascinated by the romantic drama in their midst that they trailed him and Diana constantly (‘Do you think we will ever be able to see each other alone? or will the seminary follow in a crocodile wherever we go?’ he wrote afterwards). But her parents remained adamant.
How to circumvent or erode this rock of opposition was a constant subject of discussion. For Diana was now just as determined to marry Bryan as soon as possible as Bryan was to marry her. Among their wilder schemes was talk of an elopement to Gretna Green. But this crumbled when, after writing to a parson reputed to be sympathetic to lovers who took this road, all they got in return was a lecture on self-discipline. ‘Like shouting halt at the Falls of Niagara,’ said Bryan in disgust. More realistically, they concentrated on the process known in the Mitford family as ‘slowly wearing away’. Logic, pity, the natural affection of parents for their child, all must be pressed into service. ‘When you feel most unhappy you must make a point of showing yourself to your Father and then you may convince him of how serious we are,’ wrote Bryan the day after he left. ‘It depresses me more than I can say to think of waiting any time at all. The thought of it makes me feel absolutely ill.’
The next day saw the first sign of hope. Bryan went for a walk with his mother, during which she declared that she was now unequivocally on the side of an early marriage. ‘I can see no point in your waiting, as you are both absolutely sure of your feelings,’ said Lady Evelyn. ‘When people are in doubt, they ought to wait for ages. But there is certainly no doubt about you.’ She promised to do what she could to influence her husband. As a first step, Diana was asked to stay at Heath House. Here she met Colonel Guinness, now returned from his oceanic wanderings, ate delicious food free from all Mosaic taboos and, for aesthetic sustenance, was introduced by Bryan to his passion for the theatre: every night, after an early dinner, they saw a play.
Randolph Churchill had not taken lying down the decision of his beloved to marry another. His sister Diana, who had seen Bryan and Diana together at the Eton and Harrow match, had reported to him that Bryan seemed (as Randolph put it) ‘much catched’ by Diana; by September he knew of their secret engagement. Still hampered by his schoolboy status, immured in Eton for the autumn half, furious and frantic at the thought of Diana disappearing from his horizon before he had a chance to grow up and court her properly, he attempted to part them by every means he could think of.
He bombarded each of them with letters explaining why the other was unsuitable, arguing ferociously that the marriage would be an appalling mistake (‘You’ll hate each other in no time!’). He did his best to put Bryan off Diana by explaining what he, Randolph, who had known her for many years, could see so clearly: she was not the right person for Bryan. In case this was not enough, she had been flirting with other men. Diana, he told an astonished Bryan, and anyone else who would listen, was not nearly nice enough or of good enough moral character. To Diana he explained – presciently, as it turned out – that Bryan was not strong enough for her. She would do far better to wait for him, Randyov, to grow up.
Bryan’s generosity of nature allowed him to forgive and forget almost immediately. As for Diana, aware of Randolph’s feelings but regarding them as a schoolboy crush rather than a first passionate love, she was too fond of him to do more than scold severely.
Randolph’s attempt to part the lovers may have been typically bold, resourceful and ill-judged; it was also perceptive. Equally characteristic was the note of injured self-justification:
You know I never told Bryan anything about you which anyone could possibly resent. The most I ever said was that though you were basically of a good disposition, you have no fundamental moral sense. In other words, though you rarely do wrong, you do not actually see anything wrong in sin. With all of which you will, I am sure, agree. However, all this was merely a polite way of telling him what I have already told you: that I do not think he is a character capable of retaining your affection . . . However, as you said in your letter, let’s forget all about it. I have had two charming letters from Bryan. In fact, the only person who seems annoyed over what I have done is Diana C, who keeps on making the most bloody remarks.
If Bryan had taken any note at all of Randolph’s remarks about Diana’s ‘flightiness’, he might have thought that the enquiry she now made was strange in someone who professed herself so deeply in love. She asked him if he would mind if she went out with other men after they were married. ‘I had never before thought about your going out, alone, with other men,’ he told her. ‘But though I know you could perfectly well be trusted to, I shall never allow you to, because you might think I didn’t love you so much if I did. I am afraid we shall be terribly exacting towards each other, just because we love each other so frantically much.’
This conviction had begun to impress his most valuable ally. By mid-October Colonel Guinness, too, had come round. He had become very fond of Diana whom he considered an eminently desirable daughter-in-law, he realised that his son’s mind was irrevocably made up, and he could see no logical point in waiting. He offered to write to Lord Redesdale to say so, though he pointed out that there was nothing he could do if Lord Redesdale still countered that Diana was too young. Bryan, however, felt that any approach had best come from himself (‘your Father might like it better’), so wrote to Lord Redesdale asking if he could talk to him about Diana if he was at any time in London.
David Redesdale’s reply was characteristic: ‘I never come to London if I can avoid it and as I can avoid it at the moment I am not likely to be there for some time. I understand you are likely to be at Swinbrook within the next fortnight and, if what you want to say will keep till then, well and good.’ This delaying tactic threw Diana and Bryan into some confusion. Should they put all their arguments for an early marriage in a letter? Or should Bryan visit Swinbrook and face David’s terrifying presence? Eventually, they agreed that a face-to-face discussion had more chance of success. ‘It is much more satisfactory to see him, though much more alarming,’ said Bryan.
By now Sydney’s opposition had more or less crumbled and so David finally agreed to see Bryan, inviting him to lunch at his club, the Marlborough, on 25 October. (‘This is the most alarming thing I have ever had to do in my whole life,’ wrote Bryan to Diana a quarter of an hour before setting off by bus down Piccadilly from 10 Grosvenor Place. ‘The thought of the Marlborough Club alone would justify whole weeks of terror.’)
Rumours that they were engaged were already rife among their friends, putting further pressure on David, who detested the idea that his daughters could be the subject of gossip. ‘I went to the dance at Londonderry House last night,’ wrote Bryan. ‘It was very embarrassing because everyone thought each of my partners must be you. Lady Cunard (!) rushed up to Anne Cavendish (!) who was dancing with me and told her she hoped she’d be happy . . .’ Pam’s engagement to Oliver Watney had just been broken off (‘postponed because of illness’, said the announcement in the papers); speculation about Diana was not to be borne.
At the club, David led Bryan into the billiard room to ensure privacy and there, after a brief discussion, agreed in principle to an Easter wedding.
At the beginning of November Bryan went to stay with his uncle Lord Iveagh at Elveden, in Suffolk, for a grand house party; Elveden was a famous shoot and the party had been arranged for George V, who was a first-class shot. Though he was only a junior member of the Guinness clan, Bryan’s shyness at being even momentarily the focus of royal attention overwhelmed him, manifesting itself in one of his familiar headaches. ‘My head is still bursting,’ he wrote on 5 November, the day after the King and Queen arrived:
The Queen was enormously tall and just exactly like her picture, but the King was very much smaller than I had thought, and much younger looking. He said to me that he hadn’t seen me since I was so high, so I muttered, ‘Yes, sir’. This is so far my total conversation with him. The Queen will keep walking around the house, looking at the furniture and so one doesn’t know when she won’t come across one.
But all such terrors soon vanished into insignificance. By the end of Bryan’s visit, which lasted for ten days, he and Diana were officially engaged and Diana too had been invited to stay at Elveden.
A dejected letter came from Angus Malcolm:
In spite of the lashing gales that block every step, it is very pleasant. Everything seems to remind me of you when you were here. You seem to have left a trail of pleasantness, not only on roads, hills and woods but among everybody here . . . Oh dear, oh dear, why does everybody when I begin to get fond of them, get engaged to somebody else six months later?
On 28 November the final bastion fell. Diana’s father agreed in a telephone conversation with Bryan’s father that Diana would be allowed to marry sooner rather than later. ‘Don’t tell the young people,’ David said to Colonel Guinness, ‘but between you and me I don’t think the end of January or the beginning of February would be altogether impossible.’ Bryan, sitting with his mother on the sofa listening to the fateful words ‘in terrific trepidation’, rushed upstairs on the pretext of an early bed to write to Diana at ten-thirty with the news. ‘I think your Father is the most kind and considerate and delightful man with far more imagination than any of us, and he hides it under a bushel of ferocity.’ He was so glad, he concluded that they would not have to choose between dying (‘which is what waiting till April would have meant’) and eloping.
He had dismissed from his mind entirely one disquieting episode. Once, caught off guard in the garden at Hampstead, Diana had answered his fervent declaration that their love would last for ever by murmuring, ‘Well, for a long time, anyway.’ It was, in his own words later, a violent shock. ‘I hoped it was a tease.’ The Mitfords, as he told himself, were very fond of teases.