8

Hearts and Souls

THE HOSTILITY GEORGE CURZON often aroused in public life puzzled many who only knew him socially. Since leaving Oxford he had been one of the most sought-after men both in London and in country-house society. He was welcomed for his sense of fun, for what one friend called ‘the Rabelaisian humour and the inventive spirit which he displayed’,1 and for the quality of his talk. ‘Through all his conversation,’ recalled Lady Warwick, ‘like sunlight dappling a wooded stream, gleamed the constant flash of his wit, and the ripple of laughter that seemed the more wonderful to me because I knew of his constant pain.’2 The most frequent and appreciative beneficiaries of this wit were members of that élite and enigmatic group known as the ‘Souls’.

Judging that its members spent an exorbitant amount of time discussing their souls, Lord Charles Beresford is supposed to have given the group its name in the late 1880s. Among each other, however, they usually referred to themselves as ‘the gang’. Its membership consisted largely of friends of Laura Lyttelton who, disconsolate at her death and unwilling for a time to resume an elaborate social life, preferred each other’s company. Laura herself, with her charm, her fantasies and her rather fey sensibility, would have been a typical Soul. Her sister Margot, although more intellectual, self-centred and unconventional than most of the other women in the group, was one of its leading members. So were Mary Elcho and Ettie Grenfell, who entertained the Souls at their respective country houses, Stanway and Taplow. Beauty, wit, flirtatiousness and an emphasis on sentiment – qualities required of the group’s women – were matched by similar characteristics in the men. Several of them were politicians, but they were also writers and wits and were usually good-looking. Within the circle there was much speculation as to which of the young Tory Souls – Curzon, Wyndham or Harry Cust – would have the most successful career.3

The Souls’ notoriety owed much to Curzon who, unable to entertain at home, gave two large dinners for them at the Bachelors’ Club, introducing each of his guests with a verse of what he himself called ‘doggerel appalling’. These functions, which took place in 1889 and 1890, caused some resentment in the rest of London society and gave the impression that the group was more cohesive and homogeneous than it was. What really bound the Souls, apart from friendship, was what they liked and disliked doing at weekend parties in the country. Saturday was not spent racing, gambling and drinking oneself under the table. Cards were shunned in favour of literary and acting games. If shooting sometimes took place, it was not a more integral part of life than tennis or long walks, and it was a good deal less important than the incessant talking.

‘No history of our time’, Balfour told Margot Asquith, ‘will be complete unless the influence of the Souls upon society is dispassionately and accurately recorded,’ a remark which may have been taken more seriously than its author intended.4 Balfour suggested it was under the influence of the Souls that leading politicians from opposing parties began to meet each other. Yet the fact that Balfour could drink Asquith’s champagne before attacking him in the House of Commons owed as much to the temperaments of the two men as it did to their connection through Margot. The bias of the Souls was heavily Tory – apart from those mentioned they included Balfour himself and Brodrick – and even Alfred Lyttelton, who was a nephew of Gladstone, entered the House of Commons as a Liberal Unionist and later joined Balfour’s Cabinet. As a group the Souls were no doubt rather frivolous and self-regarding, exposed, as one journalist put it, to ‘the insidious dry rot of mutual admiration’.5 But they were more attractive than the Prince of Wales’s Marlborough House Set and, through their civilized and mildly unconventional activities, set a better example of upper-class behaviour. Keynes’s description of his Bloomsbury circle – ‘water spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and as reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents beneath’6 – is perhaps more appropriate for its precursors among the Souls.

The society columns of the press regarded Balfour, who was considerably older than the others, as the chief luminary of the group and Curzon as the number two. Lady Paget, however, identified Curzon as the ‘Captain of the Souls’ and Frances Horner as the ‘High Priestess’. At first sight Curzon seems an improbable member. The traveller in the Persian deserts hibernating in Norwood to produce long, scholarly volumes does not fit easily with the image of charades in the drawing-room at Stanway. The fact that he was so completely at home at Stanway illustrates the range of his personality and the way he could lead different, almost unconnected lives. As one Soul put it rather cryptically, those of his ‘emotions which are not consistent with the harmless associations of the Souls he reserves for situations in which no Soul is involved’.7

Curzon’s conversation was regarded by ‘the gang’ as the most brilliant and also as the most reckless: one member remarked that there was a ‘diablerie’ about his dialogue which sometimes went too far and led to rebukes from the others.8 But despite this trait, he was much in demand as an adviser and confidant. Margot Tennant, whose mind was made up on almost every other issue, could not decide whom to marry and eventually turned to Curzon for advice. Several years earlier she had been engaged to a man so unsuitable that her mother had exclaimed, ‘You might as well marry your groom!’9 Persuaded to break off the relationship, she was still unmarried in 1893 when, at the age of 29, she had two suitors, H.H. Asquith, the Liberal Home Secretary whose first wife had died in 1891, and the much younger Evan Charteris, a brother-in-law of Mary Elcho. Although she was not in love with either of them, she thought she ought to marry one and asked Curzon which he recommended. For someone as emotional and impulsive as Curzon, his advice was surprisingly judicious. While Charteris would give her youth, looks and physical charm, he told her, the combination would last a maximum of ten years, while Asquith would bring ‘devotion, strength, influence, a great position – things that last and grow’. Take the older man, he said, and ‘though you will miss the fugitive you will gain the permanent’.10 Margot accepted the advice and married Asquith, to the despair of his Liberal colleagues who were soon complaining that he neglected his department in order to stay in smart houses and learn how to ride.11

Social life for the Souls naturally extended outside their circle, especially for the men who had their club lives and various male functions to attend. Political dinners, like that given in 1893 for all Balliol men in Parliament (forty-nine of them in the House of Commons alone), were almost as agreeable to Curzon as the badinage of an evening at Taplow. He liked clubs too, and was much pleased to be the youngest member elected to Grillion’s, a dining club whose small and very select membership included Gladstone, Morley and Chamberlain. His other clubs included White’s, the Athenaeum and, in an eccentric and hedonistic league of its own, the Crabbet Club.

The Crabbet was founded by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the traveller, poet and campaigner for Irish and Egyptian nationalism. Although he modelled himself on Byron (whose granddaughter he married) he was, like his cousin George Wyndham, a man whose talents were too diffuse for him to achieve a great deal in any field, and the principal triumphs of his life were philanderous. While he despised the Souls as a group, he liked them enough as individuals to attempt, with varying degrees of success, the seduction of their women, and to invite some of their men to the annual weekend of the Crabbet Club at his Sussex home. The club’s purpose, as defined by Wyndham, was ‘to play lawn tennis, the piano, the fool and other instruments of gaiety’, but the chief event of the weekend was the yearly poetry competition.12

Although he was nearly twenty years younger than Blunt and disagreed with most of his political views, Curzon was an enthusiastic member of the Crabbet Club. He liked his host but regarded him as an ‘incorrigible charlatan’ and once, after encountering him in Egypt, wrote in his diary: ‘My dear Wilfrid, your poetry is delightful and your morals, though deplorable, enchanting. But why are you a traitor to your country?’13 Curzon was elected to the club in 1891 at the same time as Oscar Wilde, and his ‘diablerie’ immediately got the better of him. Appointed to the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ to oppose Wilde’s candidature, Curzon embarked on a clever, amusing and unkind speech about sodomy and the treatment of the subject in The Picture of Dorian Gray. ‘Poor Oscar’, noted Blunt, ‘sat helplessly smiling, a fat mass, in his chair,’ but pulled himself together to make a witty reply. To the mingled amusement and embarrassment of the other members, the duel continued long into the night, brilliant and ferocious, recalled Blunt, who doubted ‘if anything better was ever heard, even from Disraeli in his best days’.14 Several years later, when Wilde was in exile and Curzon was Viceroy, the playwright described his antagonist’s speech as the height of bad taste and claimed that everyone had roared with laughter at his own. But at the end, he said, Curzon had been charming and apologetic, and the talking had continued until dawn. Then the younger men, including Curzon and Wyndham, had gone for a swim in the lake and afterwards, in Wilde’s words, they had begun ‘playing lawn tennis, just as they were, stark naked, the future rulers of England’. Blunt’s daughter remembered Wilde also playing tennis, ‘a great wobbly blancmange trying to serve underhand’.15 He never went to Crabbet again.

Curzon, however, returned the following year and again in 1893, when Blunt recorded that he was ‘as usual, the most brilliant, he never flags for an instant either in speech or repartee’.16 His verses at the meetings, which even Wilde praised as sharp and well-tuned, were better than his usual efforts, and in 1893 he won the Crabbet ‘laureate’s’ award for a poem in praise of ‘sin’. For its final stanzas he wrote:

And so when some historian

Of the period Victorian

Shall crown the greatest exploit of this wonder-working age,

His eye shall light on Crabbet

And, if truth shall be his habit

The name of every one of us will shine upon that page.

To us will be the glory,

That shall never fade in story,

Of reviving the old axiom that all the world’s akin,

That the true link of union

Which holds men in communion

Is frank and systematic and premeditated Sin!17

The most interesting feature of Curzon’s Crabbet verses is their self-mockery, the jibes about his appearance and ‘superior person’ image which conflict with traditional perceptions of their author. In one poem, long predating Max Beerbohm’s description of him as ‘Britannia’s butler’, he confessed:

My looks are of that useful type – I say it with elation –

That qualify me well for almost any situation –

I’ve sometimes been mistaken for a parson, and at others

Have recognised in butlers and in waiters long lost brothers.

With Balfour as a non-runner, George Curzon had some claim to be the most eligible bachelor in England. A few weeks before dying in 1893, Jowett asked him when he was going to exchange ‘All Souls for one body’.18 As at that stage Curzon had only just made up his mind, he decided to keep the date and the choice a secret. He was then 34, still a faithful observer of the convention that unmarried girls from his own class could not be subjected to more than flirtation and that physical relationships must be restricted to married friends or girls from other backgrounds. His habit of flirtatious chaffing is well illustrated by his behaviour on a visit to Stanway in January 1889 when the chief entertainment was a fancy-dress concert. The object of his attentions was 24-year-old Edith (known as Didi) Balfour, who afterwards on paper tried to reproduce Curzon’s ‘swelling eighteenth century manner and phraseology’. He had heard of her, he said, ‘as a great addition to our circle, clever, brilliant; a good talker, and I had imagined to myself a woman of a certain age, without any other charms but those of intellect. What do I find? A buxom creature, charming …’ He continued in this vein for the rest of his visit and one morning, finding themselves alone in the breakfast room, shut the door and kissed her fervently. Didi was bewildered but not displeased, she recalled, even though she was not physically attracted to him.19

Curzon’s recollections were rather different. Afterwards he wrote her a series of letters about his ‘memory of her voice, particularly in that song upon the moonlit steps’, her talk, her eyes and above all her lips. He called her the ‘most original and subversive of girls’ because she wanted ‘her mind and imagination taken captive as well as her heart!’ After Didi had expressed remorse about letting herself be kissed, Curzon told her not to be ashamed or nervous about the memory. ‘Seals cannot be put upon the door of lips or of anything else that have been voluntarily opened.’ Declaring himself the last person, however, ‘to misinterpret or exaggerate or hug’ to himself ‘conceited illusions’, he realized he was not going to win her, and they soon reached the stage of uncomplicated friendship.20 Didi became Alfred Lyttelton’s second wife in 1892, and the couple invited Curzon to be the godfather of their second son, who died in infancy. Their eldest boy, the future Lord Chandos, recalled many years later that Curzon treated him ‘like a nephew, almost like a son’, and hoped he would marry one of his daughters.21

Outside the ranks of the Souls, Curzon found a more passionate response from the American Mary Leiter, who will be discussed later on, and the American-born Pearl Craigie, who wrote novels under the pseudonym John Oliver Hobbes. Married at the age of 19, Pearl Craigie had soon separated from a husband who infected her with venereal disease, an experience which persuaded her to take a vow of chastity and to join the Catholic Church. Yet in about 1892, almost immediately after she had committed herself to her new life, she conceived a great passion for Curzon, admitting years later to her confessor that she had loved him ‘to an extraordinary and fatal degree’ and had placed her soul at his disposal. This passion greatly upset another suitor, the novelist George Moore, who became extremely jealous of Curzon and, after obtaining some of his letters to Pearl after her early death, apparently planned to publish them.22 As with Curzon’s other affairs, all evidence of the relationship in his possession was destroyed, and her letters which survive among his papers were written later, after she had become a friend of his wife. Her own evidence, while no doubt sincere, is unreliable and sometimes contradictory; her love for Curzon, combined with her religious fervour and her revulsion for her husband, had clearly left her in a tormented and near hysterical frame of mind. In her letters to her confessor, a Father Brown, she at times gave the impression that Curzon had proposed to her and had been turned down, and at others that she would have accepted him had he asked her. In 1900 she told the priest she had made a great sacrifice when she rejected him, but three years later admitted she ‘would have married [him] beyond question’, and in 1904 confessed she had been ‘madly devoted’ and ‘would have sacrificed everything’ for him. Later still she claimed to have refused persistent invitations to become his mistress after his marriage.23

The period of Mrs Craigie’s real distress was in 1895, when, as she later revealed, she ‘went through agonies over the Curzon story [which] weakened my heart and prostrated me again and again’. The date she referred to strongly suggests that he never in fact proposed to her. Deeply upset by the announcement of his engagement in the spring of that year, she later claimed that the event had equally depressed him, that he had become ill as a result and had told her he wished he was dead. As Curzon had by then been secretly engaged for two years, it is an implausible story, and no evidence from his friends or anyone else supports it. Moreover, the fact of the secret engagement, which Pearl Craigie was unaware of, seems to dispose of the theory that he proposed to her during this period. Her other claim, that Curzon tried to seduce her and that she, though tempted, refused to surrender, sounds more plausible. So does his alleged complaint that she was unresponsive and like an ‘iceberg’.24

Until his unpremeditated engagement in March 1893, Curzon appears to have had no strong marital ambitions since his failure to secure Sibell Grosvenor seven years earlier. It had taken him a long time to recover from losing her to George Wyndham. As late as 1891, when Wyndham was already bored with her and Sibell was engaged in an inconclusive flirtation with Wilfrid Blunt, Curzon told her he would always regard her ‘as my nearest dearest truest friend. I loved you earliest and I have loved you longest; and the joy and treasure you have been to me, although we have never been married, has been as great as most wives can give their husbands.’25 It was a love he did not hide even from his future wife. In a letter describing various friends and relations just before their marriage, he admitted that Sibell Grosvenor was ‘the sweetest woman (bar one!)’ that he had ever known.26

A more difficult letter he had to compose in the same period was a reply to a lecture from Brodrick about his treatment of women.

I will say nothing about the past save this, that (with one exception – due to special causes of which you heard something from me the other day) I believe I have never caused any woman sorrow or bitterness or regret, and also that I have never left any woman morally worse than I found her. To some maybe I have even done good. And those who may have heard hints or caught glimpses of this or that surrender, do not know but should not therefore ignore that there may have been (and in far greater number) acts of self-denial and renunciation.27

This justification must have been broadly true because otherwise Curzon would not have dared send it to such a forthright critic who was aware of many of the circumstances. But Brodrick had become less of a confidant in recent years, and the defensive plea probably does not cover the cases he knew nothing about. It may have been true, as Pearl Craigie believed, that Curzon was ‘always kind to all women – young, or middle-aged, or old’, that he, ‘alone among libertines’, always spoke well of his mistresses, and that he had that ‘rare gift: il sait aimer’.28 But one woman whom he certainly caused both bitterness and sorrow was an anonymous mistress living in London’s Westbourne Terrace. As usual the details have been obscured by Curzon’s order that all evidence should be burnt, and the affair has only come to light because George Wyndham failed to destroy the letters in his possession.

Wyndham was a natural intermediary whose charm and negotiating skills were successfully used to overcome frictions within the Souls and employed, with less success, by his cousin Lord Alfred Douglas in an attempt to prevent the trial of Oscar Wilde.29 In the course of 1891 Wyndham acted as Curzon’s intermediary with the woman from Westbourne Terrace. Evidently refusing to accept that their affair had ended, she began to blackmail Curzon, set a detective to watch his movements, and tried to send telegrams denouncing him to the Cabinet, which were stopped. In November Wyndham went on a long and exasperating mission on Curzon’s behalf, and by the end of the month a final meeting between the former lovers in front of witnesses seems to have ended the matter. At the interview, according to Curzon, the woman produced her normal display of tears, hysterics and play-acting but accepted that there would be no more meetings and promised to go to St Moritz with a nurse. He then told her he would not breathe a word of forgiveness until by leaving the country she had made some reparation for the injury she had tried to inflict on him. Presumably realizing that she now had nothing left to lose, the distraught woman ended the meeting by telling him that on the night of one of his departures from England she had picked up a man off the street and gone to bed with him. Her taunt provoked the desired reaction. ‘Tingling with black anger and shame’ and nearly beside himself ‘with horror and loathing’, Curzon worked himself into a state of hypocritical hysteria and said he never wanted to set eyes on her again. ‘Treachery, betrayal, anger, abuse, revenge – all I have forgiven but coarse and vulgar sin never – no, not till I die.’30

It was not the only escapade of its kind. ‘Curzon was madly reckless with women,’ recalled Pearl Craigie, whose evidence seems more reliable when she was not personally involved. He had had a dozen mistresses, she said, not casual acquaintances such as ‘actresses or street-nymphs’ but women of whom he was ‘exceedingly fond’. On one occasion, however, his recklessness landed him in an adventure in which he was ‘cornered by a terror with six children and a past’; the affair ended in ‘much woe and shattered nerves and a considerable pension to the aggrieved female’.31 Considering the damage which divorce or sexual impropriety could inflict on a political career, Curzon’s foolhardiness is surprising. Before him loomed the fate of Parnell and the example of Sir Charles Dilke, who had seemed Gladstone’s probable successor until a murky divorce case precluded his future participation in government. He knew that W.T. Stead, the puritanical editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, would crucify him in print if his activities became known.fn1 And there were limits to tolerance even among the Souls, where marital infidelity might be forgiven but bad behaviour was not. Harry Cust, a notorious philanderer, was called a cur for his treatment of a girl he had seduced and was later forced to marry. And Curzon himself had been censorious of Cust’s conduct towards a previous lover, agreeing with Brodrick that if the miscreant continued ‘to play the blackguard with her’, he could not retain their friendship.32

Affairs among the Souls were unlikely to land the lovers in the divorce courts. Mary Elcho could give birth to a daughter of Blunt’s and Violet Granby to a daughter of Cust’s without Lord Elcho or Lord Granby threatening legal action. Curzon could seduce Charty Ribblesdale or pay elaborate if unrewarded court to Ettie Grenfell without unduly annoying their husbands. But straying outside that circle, even while remaining within the same social class, could be hazardous. Only months after settling the Westbourne Terrace problem, Curzon found himself in another potentially disastrous situation. On discovering a batch of compromising letters, a nephew of Lord Middleton called Machell decided to instigate divorce proceedings against his wife and to name Curzon as co-respondent. The lovers’ reaction is unrecorded, but they were doubtless relieved when Machell’s own solicitors persuaded him to abandon the action on the grounds that he himself might be thought to have condoned the affair and that in any case he would not be coming into court with entirely ‘clean hands’. In 1920, twenty-eight years later, the firm discovered it still possessed thirty of Curzon’s letters to Mrs Machell and invited their author to pay £100 for the privilege of watching them being burnt. Curzon, who was then Foreign Secretary, claimed he had paid for their destruction many years earlier and refused to do so again. The letters were burnt without payment.33

Most of the episodes related in these last pages occurred during Curzon’s long and idiosyncratic courtship of Mary Leiter, an attractive and musical American girl of much charm and beauty. Tall and graceful, her large grey eyes set in an oval face framed by fine auburn hair, Mary invariably drew attention with her ‘presence’. To one Englishman, in India, she was ‘a vision of loveliness’ that made him realize why ‘the Greeks had besieged Troy for so many years’.34 Her father was Levi Zeigler Leiter, a Chicago millionaire and philanthropist widely but wrongly assumed to be of either Jewish or Dutch Calvinist origin; he was in fact descended from a Swiss Mennonite who had emigrated to Pennsylvania early in the eighteenth century and whose family had later founded the village of Leitersburg in Maryland.35 Her mother, Mary Teresa Carver, was a warm-hearted but somewhat foolish woman, ‘a dear, kind soul’, noted an American friend, notorious for ‘using the wrong word at the wrong time or place’.36 Socially ambitious, in 1881 she persuaded her husband to move their young family of four children from Chicago to Washington, a city where he had few friends and little to do. Although the Leiters rented an enormous and very expensive house in Dupont Circle, the couple enjoyed little social success until Mary, their eldest daughter, ‘came out’ and established herself as the débutante of the year in 1888. Her ability to further her mother’s ambitions must have been very gratifying; even before her eighteenth birthday Mary had become one of the closest friends of President Cleveland’s young wife.37

Cultural as well as social reasons took the Leiters so often to Europe that Mary later feared they would become ‘a family of wandering and Europeanised Americans’. In London as in Washington it was Mary, at the age of 20, who achieved the social entrée. Arriving in England with her mother and sister Nancy in the summer of 1890, she was reduced to reading about the London season in the newspapers until a letter of introduction led to luncheon at the Admiralty followed rapidly by invitations to numerous smart functions including the Duchess of Westminster’s ball at which she danced the opening quadrille with the Prince of Wales. George Curzon was much struck by her appearance that evening, but they did not meet properly until a few days later when they were guests together at a country-house party. He found her very attractive and later confessed that only with great difficulty had he restrained himself from kissing her in the rose garden. Mary fell in love almost on sight and was thrilled by a little amulet he gave her. On her return to London she had a pearl set from her necklace which she sent to him as emblematic of the tear she shed on leaving him. Curzon thanked her for the ‘blessed keepsake’, promised to wear it frequently in his tie, and called her ‘the dearest girl’ – not one of his most exclusive designations – that he had met for a long time.38

At the beginning of August the Leiter party renounced England and various invitations to Scotland in favour of a Continental tour. Bored and unhappy, Mary sent Curzon a small Bavarian Madonna and looked forward to seeing him on their return to London. But by then the temptations of the rose garden had largely evaporated, and he told her he was looking for a quiet spot near London to write his book and enjoy the isolation which such work required. He would be engaged upon the task for the rest of the year, he added discouragingly, a labour that would take him ‘every minute of every hour of every day’. By early October he had shut himself up in Norwood with his Persian manuscript and refused to be distracted. While Mary was bewailing the fact that she would have to spend three days in London without seeing him, he was describing by post the ‘furious exhilaration’ he experienced living and working by himself. On the day before the Leiters sailed for America, he finally dragged himself to central London to say goodbye. Mary sang for him, and they spent a ‘sad and happy’ evening together, but the next day she departed ‘at the zero of despair’ and at the end of her voyage the sight of the Statue of Liberty for once filled her with sadness rather than delight. Soon after her return she received a photograph of Curzon wrapped in three of his speeches which she read imagining herself as a loyal constituent ‘in the front row of enthusiastic listeners’. A photograph sent the other way produced a disappointing response, its recipient condemning it as a caricature and criticizing the hairstyle for spoiling ‘one of a woman’s fairest gifts, the outline of the head’. He also found fault with the sitter’s expression. It made her seem stern, contemplative and severe, whereas a woman ought to look tender, yielding and gentle.39

Curzon was more forthcoming when she returned to England with her mother the following spring. He gave a dinner on their arrival and saw her frequently in London during the parliamentary session. In the middle of May Mary went to Paris, where his friend, the Princesse de Wagram, planned to marry her off to a French nobleman, but she returned to England before an introduction could be made; like Curzon, she found the French rather foppish and insincere. The rest of the season was spent at social events in London or at the country houses of various Souls who liked her enough to tolerate the chaperoning of her embarrassing mother. Curzon was attentive and charming, she noted, and on her twenty-first birthday he gave her an enamelled silver box from Canton accompanied by a pompous note congratulating her on having achieved ‘complete and sensible womanhood’. She was even allowed to visit him at Norwood, where he rowed her around the Crystal Palace lake while Mrs Leiter sat on the bank. But his amiability never indicated passion, and he sometimes appeared indifferent. When her father came over in late July and made them stay in a Brighton hotel, far from the attractions of the Souls, Mary mentioned Curzon’s coldness and indicated the nature of her feelings for him. At Christmas the following year in Rome she crawled up the Scala Santa on her knees and prayed that he would marry her.40

The problem was that Curzon’s gallantry could be directed at several women at the same time. While Mary was rejecting French, Italian, British and American suitors, she remained only one of a group of women at whom he deployed his charm. In the early years of their friendship he enjoyed similar relationships with Ettie Grenfell and Pearl Craigie, he had a mistress in Westbourne Terrace and he was having, or had recently concluded, an affair with Mrs Machell. During Mary’s visits to London he showed her the sort of affection he had once felt for Laura Tennant and Didi Balfour, but it was far less than the passion he had given Sibell Grosvenor. There was no question of his being in love with her. She intruded little into his bachelor’s existence either at Norwood or at Westminster. He wrote to her from time to time but, unless they happened to be in central London simultaneously, he made little effort to see her. In August 1892 he went to America and stayed a night in Washington without attempting to make contact or even find out if she was there.

Curzon’s indifference would not have been comprehensible to those who observed his later love for his wife and assumed it must have been preceded by an ardent courtship. Yet he probably thought less about Mary in the months before their engagement than of several other women. When he left England in August 1892 for his second round-the-world trip, his dreams were of Ettie Grenfell, whose ‘little clinging hand’ he had held under a table and upon whose ‘willowy form’ he had briefly pounced on his last evening.41 In America her place was taken by Amélie Rives, whose family he had stayed with in Virginia. ‘Upon me Amy shone with the undivided insistence of her starlike eyes. Oh God!’ he exclaimed to his diary, ‘the nights on the still lawn under the soft sky with my sweetheart!’42 Whether the thought of Amy kept him going till he reached Japan is uncertain, but there it was clearly supplanted by the charms of Ethel Kirkwood, whose presence remained vivid over the return leg. While he was steaming through the Suez Canal in February 1893, he learnt that Mary, whom he had not seen for eighteen months, was in Cairo, and he therefore wrote a friendly but far from passionate letter regretting he could not get off the ship to meet her. The tone of this missive was not surprising because on the same day he wrote to Spring Rice telling him he ‘still thrilled’ at the thought of ‘the Kirkina’.43 What is extraordinary is that a few days later he proposed to Mary in a Paris hotel.

Mary and her mother had sailed to France immediately after Curzon and, on finding him in the French capital, invited him to dine at the Hôtel Vendôme. Many years later he described what ensued:

I had entered the hotel without the slightest anticipation that this would be the issue. After dinner, when we were alone, this beautiful, sweet and faithful woman told me her story. How she had waited for nearly three years since the time when we first met, rejecting countless suitors and always waiting for me. I told her that, while I felt from the beginning that we were destined for each other, I had not dared to speak, and had even run the risk of losing her because there was certain work in my scheme of Asiatic travel which I had resolved to do, and which I could not ask any married woman to allow her husband to carry out. Some of it, notably the journey to the Pamirs and Afghanistan, still remained undone: and even now when we became secretly engaged, it was on the understanding that I should be at liberty to complete my task before we took the final step. This did not happen for 2 years, during which we remained engaged to each other, unknown to a single human being … Was there not something wonderful in this long trial, in the uncomplaining and faithful devotion of this darling girl? I think it was the foundation of the great happiness that she gave me … Could there be a greater glory than to be the one and only love of such a woman? Eleven years of married life left us both unchanged.44

On the anniversary of that evening Mary recalled the ‘after dinner talk which began so timidly and ended so lovingly’, her fiancé ‘slipping away in a half-startled way’ at midnight, beseeching her to keep the engagement a secret.45 But if Curzon’s description of the event is accurate, his explanation of the background and his feeling of ‘destiny’ should be accorded due scepticism. He wanted the world to consider their romance as a fairy tale and so he burnt evidence which threatened this interpretation. But although he could destroy love letters from others, he could not invent ones to Mary he had not written or infuse those he had with a passion he had not possessed. His marriage turned out to be a good one and, although he still dreamed of other women, only Pearl Craigie’s evidence suggests he went beyond dreaming. But his courtship was far from romantic. His letters to Mary, infrequent and unpassionate, his occasional coldness, his attachments to others, above all his failure to see her very often, all ridicule that claim to a common destiny. He did not propose, as he wished people later to believe, because he was in love. Nor did he propose, as people have often assumed, because he wanted Mary’s money; had that been his objective, he could have secured a hefty marriage settlement in the autumn of 1890 instead of waiting and risking its loss later. The only credible explanation is that put forward by Mary’s own biographer – that he acted out of impulse.46 An emotional man, weary after a long and exhausting journey in the East, he arrived in Paris and after a good dinner learnt that this beautiful young woman had been waiting for him, uncomplainingly, for nearly three years. Prompted by long-standing affection, by sudden emotion, perhaps also by a sense of guilt, he proposed and was accepted. His offer was unpremeditated, made spontaneously in the magic of a moment, and from it years afterwards he conjured a romantic aura over a pre-marital relationship which on his part had been decidedly unromantic.

Curzon’s behaviour during his engagement shows him at his most unsympathetic. The conditions he imposed at the Vendôme dinner were difficult enough: their wedding would not take place for two years, their engagement must remain a secret, and he should be allowed to make an extremely perilous journey to an unknown part of Asia in the meantime. The following day he added a fourth – that he would not write too often ‘for fear of exciting suspicions’ – while a fifth – that they would scarcely meet during the next two years – was made implicit. The situation suited Curzon very well. ‘I am spared all the anxiety of what is called courtship,’ he told Mary complacently, ‘and I have merely when the hour strikes to enter into possession of my own.’ He also spared himself the trouble of writing love letters; his correspondence during the engagement resembles that between a guardian and his ward. Asking her if she hated the idea of a critical husband, he conceded it might be ‘rather maddening’ before launching himself prematurely into the role. He wrote to her about her complexion, about eating enough, about practising different ways of doing her hair in a coil or knot: he did not want it ‘brushed up from the ears, but waving along longitudinally in deep rich undulations’. He also gave advice about music, a subject Mary knew very much more about than her fiancé. ‘Learn some sweet simple songs for me,’ she was instructed, ‘things that touch and move and tell of quiet love and pathos and peace’. She should not, however, concentrate entirely on singing. There was ‘much sweet solace in the pianoforte’, she was reminded, for a woman’s fingers were ‘given her as ministering angels to heart as well as head’. Still more intolerably, she was told to polish up her spelling and given examples of her mistakes. Spring Rice’s nickname, for instance, should have been spelt Springy not Springie, for ‘the latter [was] a termination suitable only to small women and pug dogs’. When she declared that several of the words he had corrected were spelt differently in America, back came the insufferable reply: ‘You must learn how to think and spell as an Englishwoman, my child.’ After eighteen months of this, she was driven to suggest that he might tell her that he loved her, for it was ‘a good long time since you have thought something loving of your devoted Mary’.47

Curzon occasionally recognized that the advice and education should not be entirely unilateral. After their marriage he hoped Mary would teach him French and German because if he ever became Foreign Secretary he would need to be more fluent ‘in order to score off those ambassadors’. He was also capable of feeling mild remorse for his behaviour and hoped she would not think him a unique ‘phenomenon of preconnubial selfishness’. But he did not appreciate Mary’s feelings of unhappiness and insecurity. During their long engagement they met only twice, for two days in London (which he promised to cram with ‘a century of emotion’) and for a few hours in France (where he was able to ‘pardon the French for being able at least to make beautiful dresses for beautiful women’). Mary was forced to spend over seven hundred days alone with her secret, badgered by other suitors and anxious about George’s safety. He could write of his tranquillity and of his serene trust in the future quite unaware that these feelings could not be shared by his fiancée.48

Mary acquiesced in his journey to the Pamirs but she did not pretend to like it. Her letters of this time, natural, loving and sincere, reveal anxiety and sometimes desperation. Her hair would be white, she told him, and the long practice of patience would have crushed her spirit by the time he came back – if he came back. In response to a letter referring to the possibility of him dying on his travels, Mary declared that if that happened she would devote the rest of her life to charity and never marry. She would renounce her inheritance except for a fraction for her work and, as a final gesture to George, whatever sum was needed to pay off various debts of the Kedleston estate. Curzon acknowledged the nobility and generosity of this offer but assured her that neither he nor his father could possibly accept it. He also told her that in the event of his death he wanted her to marry someone else because otherwise she would always resent him for ruining not only her youth but the rest of her life as well. In a subsequent letter he calmed her fears that he would abandon her for more travels soon after their marriage. It would not be fair on her, he proclaimed, for a ‘disconsolate and dejected bride’ was in a worse position than ‘a forlorn fiancée’.49

Mary’s anxiety was increased by the gloomy predictions of Curzon’s friends. Spring Rice told her that the dangers of his journey were almost insurmountable, while a Tory colleague remarked that he had one chance in ten of getting safely out of Kabul. From London Mary wrote in desperation to India, imploring him not to travel from the Pamirs to Afghanistan. She had learnt that the Emir was ill and might die, and feared his successor would be a ‘monstrous fellow with a death and destruction policy to all foreigners’. To pay him a congratulatory visit on his succession, she asserted, would be mad, ‘inhuman’, and ‘a kind of out and out desertion’ of herself. Only when she heard that he had returned safely could she admit that the ordeal had been of any personal benefit. Tests and patience improved a woman, she was now able to conclude, adding that they would be happier together for the experience. From his ship off Aden, Curzon conceded that she had been ‘a Niobe of patience without the tears’, and wrote a long letter about the wedding arrangements.50 His last great journey, the boldest and most hazardous of all, had been successfully completed without injury and probably without infidelity to Mary. Ettie Grenfell had received a letter from Kabul in which he had sighed for a kiss on a blood-red sofa in front of a fire, but he does not seem to have gone further than that.51 There had been no Amy Rives or Ethel Kirkwood on this trip. Even the Baroness de Malortie, whom he met in Cairo on his way home, offered no temptations this time. The ‘darling’ and ‘goddess’ of his Egyptian sojourn twelve years before now bulged ‘with thickened neck and fattened limb, crowned by the artificial glory of saffron-dyed hair. Oh Lilia!’ he expostulated to his diary. ‘How any more can I kiss you?’52

Curzon was curiously anxious about breaking the news of the engagement to his father and went to the interview armed with various apologetic defences and explanations. In the event they were not needed. ‘So long as you love her and she loves you,’ Lord Scarsdale said, ‘that is all. You are not likely at your age to make a mistake. She is old enough to know her mind.’53 Another problem which worried him was how they could explain the logistics of their engagement. He did not want anyone – except Mary’s parents, who had been told the previous summer – to know of the two-year wait for fear that ‘it might not be understood’. Yet it was difficult to explain how he had managed to propose either from Asia when she was in Europe or after his return when she was in America. ‘It was clever of you’, wrote the invalid Lord Pembroke, ‘and extremely characteristic to get engaged to Miss Leiter at Washington from the top of the Pamirs – you must tell me how it was done.’ Close to death from tuberculosis at the age of 49, he added with admirable nonchalance, ‘The way I go on trying to die without doing it is intolerable and a bore to everyone. I apologise.’54

Among the many letters of congratulation, Curzon particularly treasured that of the Emir of Afghanistan, to whom he had sent a photograph of Mary. Abdur Rahman congratulated his ‘very wise friend’ on his choice, told him he could see from the picture that she would be faithful, wise and honest, and added, ‘If she should at any time thrash you I am certain you will have done something to deserve it.’55 Less welcome was some advice from Brodrick, who, like others of his friends, was worried by Curzon’s growing indifference to religion. Love and mutual admiration were important, he told him, but a successful marriage required the help of religion to sustain it.56 To Brodrick’s further admonition to be faithful to Mary, Curzon replied spiritedly that he had always been very loyal to those he had loved and that he would be even more loyal to the girl who had consented to link her fate with his. ‘I do not enter upon matrimony except with the idea and intention of being faithful to its highest and deepest as well as to its external and superficial obligations.’57

The weeks between Curzon’s return from Afghanistan at the end of January 1895 and his departure for the wedding in America in early April were a more than usually hectic time for him. His brother Assheton nearly died of pleuro-pneumonia in February, and his own back gave way in March, forcing him to spend over a week in bed. Yet he insisted on playing an active part in Parliament, asking questions about Siam and making speeches about MPs’ pay and the right of peers to remain in the House of Commons; he also became embroiled in the issue of Chitral, whose ruler had been murdered on New Year’s Day. Yet even Curzon could not fulfil all his commitments on time and he was forced to take work with him on his voyage to New York. He had agreed with the publisher Macmillan to write an introduction to a new edition of James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, a satire on the Persian people which he admired for its ‘good-humoured flagellation of Persian peccadilloes’ and its masterly portrait of ‘the salient and unchanging characteristics of a singularly unchanging Oriental people’. Apologizing to Macmillan with a white lie, he blamed his failure to meet the deadline on his impending marriage, a contingency he could not have contemplated when he accepted the offer.58 Three days before the wedding, he sent the piece from Washington.

Curzon was not the sort of man to allow the preparations for his wedding to be monopolized by his bride and her family. Mary was not even permitted to choose her wedding dress without a lecture about the way it should hang from the waist. The most important and time-consuming issue, however, was financial. Mary’s wealth did not seem to Curzon a good reason for renouncing his claim to the much more limited Scarsdale funds. He even intimated to his father, on whom he wasted little tact or charm in business matters, that a generous settlement from him would stimulate still greater generosity from Levi Leiter. Asking for a covenant of £1,000 per year, he also suggested that Scarsdale might wish to avoid death duties by settling the Kedleston estate on him or a future son with £10,000 income for its upkeep. He pointed out that, had he been marrying a penniless English girl, his father would have been compelled to pay her a jointure if his son predeceased him as well as provide for the children. Lord Scarsdale’s good fortune in escaping this dual obligation was advanced as an argument in favour of treating his heir more liberally.

While father and son were thus negotiating, Mr Leiter behaved with what Curzon recognized as ‘really princely generosity’. Mary and her descendants were offered immediately the annual income from $700,000 (£140,000) worth of bonds which totalled $33,500 (£6,700), while on her father’s death her marriage settlement would receive a further sum of at least $1 million. In the event of Mary predeceasing him, her husband was to be allowed for his lifetime whatever portion of the £6,700 that he and Lord Scarsdale desired. Astonished at such munificence, Curzon suggested to his father that ‘it would be only gentlemanly as well as wise not to appear to be too grasping’ and that they should therefore ask for only £4,000 of the income. Nevertheless, the Indenture eventually stated that he could have the entire income if Mary died childless and retain one-third for himself if they had children. This liberality did not, understandably, produce an improved offer from the other side. Lord Scarsdale agreed to pay his son an annuity of £1,000 but he did not make over Kedleston or commit himself to do so after his death. He did state, however, that it was his intention to leave the estate to his eldest son.59

Curzon’s closing letters to his fiancée were dominated by the curious behaviour of one of his closest friends. Cecil Spring Rice and Lord Lamington were almost the last unmarried friends of Curzon’s generation, and were thus both candidates for the role of ‘best man’. When he heard of the engagement in Washington, Spring Rice turned ‘summersaults of joy’, told Curzon it was the best news he had heard for a long time, and promised as a wedding present a cabinet he had bought on their trip in the Far East; he also expressed his relief that Mary had not been ‘lost’ to an American. But soon afterwards he told her that Curzon’s family and friends would disapprove of the match and followed this up by observing that her fiancé had been very fond of a Miss Morton whom ‘everyone’ had assumed he would marry. Mary began by feeling ‘rather blue’ about these revelations but soon became deeply upset, telling Curzon that Springy’s one pleasure consisted in giving her pain.60

From the other side of the Atlantic her fiancé tried to calm her down, claiming that the Miss Morton story was ‘simply grotesque’ because he had only met her twice and had paid her not the slightest attention. Springy’s disloyalty was merely ‘jealous trash’, a consequence of his love for Mary, and should be ignored. Some years earlier Spring Rice had indeed proposed to Mary and had been rejected. He had then gone to Japan and during their travels had advised Curzon himself to marry her. As his companion seemed unwilling to make a commitment, Spring Rice thought that he might still have a chance when he was again posted to Washington in 1894. Although Mary was by then secretly engaged, Springy refused to give up hope until he knew for certain that she loved someone else. On eventually learning of the engagement and realizing there must have been some understanding of which he was kept ignorant, he reacted with understandable emotion, alternately jealous and delighted by the news. Curzon, who claimed not to understand jealousy himself, recommended leniency to her old admirer. But Mary needed constant reassurance that the rumours were not true, and in his last letter before the wedding Curzon was still imploring her not to believe Springy’s nonsense. He was in fact remarkably lenient towards his old friend and did not remonstrate about his behaviour. Recognizing, however, that Spring Rice had disqualified himself as a potential best man, he relegated him to the role of usher.61

Accompanied by Lamington and his brother Frank, Curzon arrived in New York on 17 April, reached Washington the next day and quickly sat down with lawyers to draw up the legal settlements. On the 23rd the wedding took place at the fashionable Episcopalian church of St John’s, Mary wearing a dress from Worth and a diamond coronet from Kedleston. George at her side was suffering from acute backache but managed to disguise it from the guests. The ceremony was followed by a reception and a banquet in the Leiter mansion, after which the couple left for a short honeymoon in a country house in Virginia. Prodigious numbers of wedding presents had been accumulating in both Washington and England. A dozen of Curzon’s closest friends had clubbed together to buy an immense silver-gilt centre-piece, suitable for grand dinners in future mansions. More personal and no doubt more poignant gifts were a case of Japanese silver spoons from Ethel Kirkwood and a morocco-bound copy of Rossetti’s poems from Sibell Grosvenor. But Mary was now his ‘Blessed Damozel’ and remained so for the rest of her life. A verse from that poem is engraved on her tomb at Kedleston.