9

Number Two at the FO

LORD ROSEBERY’S GOVERNMENT hobbled on until June 1895 when, to the relief of its leading members, it more or less voluntarily expired. On the 21st of that month the War Secretary, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was censured by the Conservatives, at the instigation of Brodrick, for his alleged failure to supply the army with sufficient cordite. Although he was a rather idle man, Campbell-Bannerman was an able as well as a popular minister, and Brodrick’s allegation seems to have been largely spurious. But it was a Friday night, the Liberal Whips were unprepared and, before they could rally their followers, the Government had been defeated by seven votes. Had he wished, Rosebery could have reversed the vote and continued in power, but he was too thin-skinned to carry on with his cantankerous and demoralized Cabinet, and on the following day he resigned. Dismayed though she was by the Tories’ treatment of Campbell-Bannerman, the Queen was relieved to be rid of the Liberals. Without pressing Rosebery for a dissolution of Parliament, she accepted his resignation and invited Lord Salisbury to form a government.

The Conservative leader realized it was time to transform his alliance with the Liberal Unionists into a coalition government. Admiration for Joseph Chamberlain among Tory MPs was still qualified by distrust, but it was widely felt that he should now be tamed by responsibility inside a cabinet. The ambivalent Conservative attitude towards the leader of the Radical Unionists was typified by George Curzon, who admired him as an orator while deploring him as a demagogue.1 Two of Chamberlain’s biographers have suggested that Curzon was the anonymous author of an unpleasant article in the New Review which called for an end to the situation whereby the Member for Birmingham enjoyed influence without drudgery or responsibility. Chamberlain, it had argued, should be made a minister as soon as the Conservatives were next in power, for nobody was ‘capable of better and more useful work so long as he is driven and is not on any account allowed to drive’.2 Whether or not Curzon wrote the article – there is no evidence for it among his papers or in the letters of his friends – Salisbury agreed with its argument if not with its tone. A day after receiving the Queen’s invitation to form a government, he and Balfour met the leaders of their Liberal allies, Chamberlain and the Duke of Devonshire (formerly Lord Hartington). Reserving the leadership of the Commons for Balfour, Salisbury gave Devonshire a choice between the Foreign Office and the Lord Presidency (a post which included the chairmanship of a defence committee to co-ordinate the armed forces) while Chamberlain was offered the Exchequer, the Home Office or any other post he cared for. Considering Salisbury’s prestige in foreign affairs, the Duke made the logical decision to become Lord President, but Chamberlain, whose favourite issues hitherto had been Ireland and social reform, surprised everyone by eschewing the domestic departments in favour of the Colonial Office. Upon this nucleus Salisbury built a strong Government with Goschen at the Admiralty, Hicks Beach at the Exchequer and the Marquess of Lansdowne at the War Office.

Although several of Curzon’s friends thought he should have had a seat in the Cabinet, there was no obvious position for him. The only post for which he was really qualified was the India Office, which went to Lord George Hamilton, the former Under-Secretary in Disraeli’s Government. Many years later, Winston Churchill argued that Curzon’s failure to enter the Cabinet in 1895 indicated that the House of Commons considered him a lightweight: a first-rate parliamentarian, he argued, would have managed to establish a claim to Cabinet rank during the three years in opposition since his spell as a junior minister.3 If Churchill was comparing Curzon’s rate of advancement with his own, he was being unfair because each had plotted a very different parliamentary course. Unlike his critic, Curzon had decided to make a political name outside the Commons by becoming his country’s leading authority on Asiatic affairs. His books and journeys were an admirable preparation for much of his later work, but they did not make him an indispensable candidate for the Cabinet at the age of 36. In addition, the demands of coalition politics forced Lord Salisbury to restrict the number of Tory Cabinet ministers to fourteen.

While Curzon himself had hopes of a place, he expected to be appointed Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, a job he welcomed if it meant serving under Lansdowne but not if Devonshire became his chief.4 In the event Salisbury kept the Foreign Office for himself, somewhat disingenuously telling Curzon he had done so against his will and wished the Duke had taken it instead.5 Invited to act as his Under-Secretary in the Commons, Curzon replied with an acceptance of the job and a request for a privy councillorship, explaining that the honour would offset his constituents’ disappointment that he had not achieved promotion to the Cabinet. Salisbury had anticipated the request and, barely a week after Rosebery’s resignation, Curzon became the youngest man in living memory to be ‘sworn of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council’. Rennell Rodd wrote from Cairo to congratulate him on his new post, suggesting it was the right job for him at that juncture and would prepare the way for control of the Foreign Office in the future. Congratulations were also offered by Churchill, then a subaltern at Aldershot, who went to a party at Devonshire House and found the new ministers dressed in their official blue and gold uniforms. Looking ‘very splendid and prosperous’, Curzon received his congratulations ‘with much affability’ and told the young cavalryman he hoped to have a share in making foreign policy instead of merely defending and explaining it in the House of Commons. A good deal more impressed by this parliamentary ‘lightweight’ than he recalled forty years later, Churchill studied Curzon and the ministerial uniforms and ‘felt free to give rein to jealousy’.6

Salisbury had made it clear that Parliament must be dissolved as soon as the House of Commons had voted the new Government an interim financial supply. The election campaign thus began in July, the Liberal leaders traversing the country to deliver conflicting messages while Salisbury kept his party united with a moderate programme that included a few concessions to Chamberlain on social reform. The disarray in the Liberal Party, stemming from personal antagonisms as well as ideological differences, virtually assured its defeat. But the scale of Salisbury’s victory took almost everyone by surprise. The Conservatives alone won 340 seats which, allied to 71 Liberal Unionists, gave them an enormous majority over 177 Liberals and 82 Irish nationalists.

To the electors of Southport, Curzon offered his usual blend of hostility to Home Rule, ambiguous endorsement of temperance, and sympathy for social reform, in particular for ‘some provision for the old age of the thrifty and deserving poor’. In other respects 1895 was different from previous campaigns. Levi Leiter had removed any financial anxiety by giving him £1,000 for the election and later offering to increase his gift to whatever his son-in-law required. Mary was also there to help canvass and was such a success with the electors, always smiling and graceful, that her husband assumed she must be very happy. In fact she was miserable. Southport was ‘a 4th-rate Brighton’, she told her father, and its inhabitants were ‘an idle, ignorant, impossible lot of ruffians’, quite unworthy of George. Desperately homesick for America and her family, she could find nothing attractive about the place and regretted that victory would oblige her to visit it each year.7

Success at the polls was not made any less likely by the Liberals’ choice of candidate. Until the beginning of 1895 Herbert Naylor-Leyland had been a Conservative MP and so great an admirer of Curzon that he had not only invited him to speak in his constituency but had also plagiarized his speeches. A sudden conversion to Home Rule had then induced him to change parties, an action for which Rosebery awarded him a baronetcy, and he was now challenging his erstwhile hero in a seat in which his uncle was a prominent Tory. It may not have been a particularly happy campaign for Sir Herbert – each morning he looked out of the window to see the word ‘Rat’ freshly painted on the wall opposite – but he did well to restrict Curzon’s majority to 764.8 Three years later, after his opponent had resigned to take up the viceroyalty, Naylor-Leyland captured the seat for the Liberals. Following his early death in 1899, Southport was held briefly by Curzon’s first opponent there, Dr (later Sir) G.A. Pilkington, before returning to the Conservatives in the ‘Khaki Election’ of 1900.

The new Under-Secretary recognized that the closing years of the nineteenth century were a critical period for British foreign policy. He understood how rapidly international relations were changing and knew there was room neither for complacency about his country’s position nor for delusions about a world happy to bask in a sunny Pax Britannica. Soon after the election he warned at Derby that the lull in foreign affairs was over. ‘The world is unquiet. Uneasy symptoms are abroad. We hear the moaning of sick nations on their couches, and we listen to and witness the struggles of dying men.’9 While Turkey and Persia slithered into apparently irreversible decadence, Russia continued her expansion into Asia while a new predator in Berlin, only a generation old, had appeared upon the scene. As Britain’s industrial supremacy was now under challenge from both Germany and the United States, he saw that her international position could be maintained only by a combination of naval strength and astute diplomacy.

The presence of Salisbury at the Foreign Office and Chamberlain at the Colonial Office indicated that international affairs would not be neglected by the new Government. The venerable Prime Minister, who in appearance resembled both the cricketer W.G. Grace and ‘one of Michelangelo’s versions of God’,10 knew as much about diplomacy as any man in Britain. He had already been Foreign Secretary three times and Secretary of State for India twice. With experience and wisdom he combined patience, realism, a knowledge of the requisites of imperial power and an understanding of what could be achieved by diplomacy. He also appreciated the interaction of policies in distant continents. When one of his daughters wondered why he had reacted so mildly to a piece of Russian aggression in China, he replied that in six months’ time he would be on the verge of war with France in Africa and could not afford to antagonize Russia beforehand.11 While he was prepared to use force if necessary, he saw the futility of a small island, which refused to accept conscription, threatening to fight simultaneous wars in different parts of the globe. It was more sensible to concentrate on a few strategic points, such as the Upper Nile and the Indian frontier, and stay flexible on the rest. Above all it was important not to gloat over victories, because the concealment of diplomatic triumphs made it easier to repeat them. It was necessary, Curzon was told before one parliamentary appearance, to avoid ‘all observations at all wounding to France’ – unwelcome advice for someone who thought the best way of handling the French was to say frankly what he thought of them. On another occasion the Prime Minister observed that gratuitous hostility to Russia, with no object but the expression of indignation and patriotic temper, could only be counter-productive.12 Diplomacy was a persuasive not a triumphalist profession. To be successful, it had to persuade the Cabinet, then the foreign powers and in the last resort the British people.

Salisbury was not a secret diplomatist but he was, as his Under-Secretary soon discovered, a secretive operator. He generally communicated with his deputy through minutes, Curzon sending a lengthy query about policy and receiving in reply a pithy couple of sentences in red ink. When asked whether the Court should go into mourning for the Empress Dowager of Japan, the Prime Minister replied, ‘Better not make a new precedent. If there are several wives, are we to mourn for all?’13 On more important issues Curzon often found it impossible to discover either from Salisbury or from the Foreign Office what the Government’s policy was. In March 1896 he asked his chief if he might be allowed to see the private telegrams and despatches between the FO and its representatives abroad: it would be easier to defend the Government in the House of Commons, he pointed out, if he knew what was going on. Salisbury’s acquiescence did not satisfy his deputy’s thirst for information, and a few weeks later Curzon asked if he might be present when the Prime Minister received deputations. Although other parliamentary under-secretaries invariably attended deputations in their departments, he never even learnt of their existence until they had already left the Foreign Office. He would have liked, for instance, to have been present at a deputation about Indo-Chinese railways, a subject which particularly interested him, but the first he heard of it was from a report of one of Salisbury’s speeches in The Times.14

Curzon’s problems were sometimes simply the result of timing and communication. As he later told Lord George Hamilton, the Foreign Secretary and his deputy should have met every day to discuss policy before the Under-Secretary had to explain it in the House of Commons. But in his case this was impossible because Lord Salisbury spent the morning working in his house in Arlington Street and did not reach the Foreign Office until half-past three, at which hour Curzon was already answering questions on the Government front bench.15 But the Under-Secretary’s troubles often stemmed from the Cabinet’s unwillingness to discuss an issue or from its inability to make up its mind. When dealing with a complicated matter in West Africa, Curzon felt miserable at the prospect of defending a policy ‘without the slightest idea what the Cabinet really think or by what steps they arrive at their mysterious conclusions’.16 For someone who always knew his own mind, indecisiveness was inevitably frustrating. It also placed him in an awkward position for, by remaining the Government’s spokesman, he laid himself open to accusations that he defended from loyalty policies of which he disapproved from conviction.17

In spite of these problems, Curzon was an undoubted success as Under-Secretary. Efficient and self-assured, he had to make statements or answer questions from the front bench on subjects as diverse as the Uganda railway line, trawling in the Moray Firth, and the abolition of slavery in Zanzibar, a territory recently acquired from Germany in exchange for the island of Heligoland. Members from both sides of the House tried to trip him up, but he was invariably reliable: almost his only recorded mistake occurred when he turned over two pages of notes together and left out a passage on Madagascar. If he felt he had been badly misrepresented, he sometimes followed up a debate with furious letters and demands for an apology.18 More often he treated his opponents with a disdain in which he taunted them with ignorance while refusing to supply them with information. The ‘succinct discreetness’ of his parliamentary replies prompted the Conservative MP T. Gibson Bowles to quip that ‘just as words were given to conceal our thoughts, so under-secretaries were given to conceal’ foreign affairs.19 If, noted a parliamentary sketch-writer, the questioner pointed out that his query had not been answered, Curzon assumed a look of pained surprise and then repeated his reply with a slight variation of words but without satisfying the supplicant with more information.20 Occasionally he employed blandness in place of dissimulation. When Bowles, a persistent tormentor, enquired whether the military operations in the Sudan were being carried out under a British or a Turkish flag, he replied that he did not know because he hadn’t been there.21

The growth in Curzon’s reputation during his period as Under-Secretary can be measured by the reaction to his major parliamentary speeches. Opponents might still deplore the tone and the partisanship, but they increasingly admitted that Curzon had become one of the most formidable debaters on the Treasury bench. His speech on Crete in May 1897, declared the Irish nationalist T.P. O’Connor, was one of the strongest and most masterful defences of a policy he had ever heard. ‘Deliberate, certain of his facts, strong in his opinions, with a fine voice, even, well controlled, but resonant with passion, scorn, and self-will,’ Curzon had dominated the debate and rattled his opponents.22 Scoffing at MPs who protested with their ‘mouths full of denunciation and [their] brains empty of suggestion’, he had provoked another Irish member to accuse him of being ‘very superior’; but his opponents were incapable of contesting his interpretation of the Christian-Muslim antagonism on the island.

By the following year commentators were even agreeing that Curzon’s chief flaw – the arrogance of manner, that ‘superior person’ tone that had marred his earlier speeches – was much less evident.23 In a debate on the Indian frontier in February, Labouchere admitted he had made by far the best speech, overshadowing both Balfour and Asquith, while the Liberal Unionist peer Lord Grey found himself wholly converted to Curzon’s viewpoint.24 It was not surprising that a politician who had travelled all over the ground should overwhelm opponents who had only vague notions about the nature of the frontier and its inhabitants. Nonetheless, Curzon’s parliamentary successes now marked him out as the Tories’ most likely champion in the coming years against Asquith and Edward Grey. As one supporter observed, there was no one else on their side who could match him: Curzon and Grey, he believed, were destined to be the Pitt and Fox of the future.25

The Under-Secretary found Lord Salisbury a good chief to serve under, admiring his wisdom at the same time that he regretted his intrinsic distaste for strong measures. Yet by temperament and viewpoint they were ill-suited to work together, and in a moment of exasperation Curzon later referred to him as ‘that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive deadweight at the top’.26 Lansdowne observed that the Prime Minister might ‘intimidate his [foreign] visitors and curtail their stay by waggling his foot at them’,27 but he refused to employ intimidating tactics against foreign governments. When the French annexed Madagascar after promising not to, Salisbury shrugged his shoulders and told Curzon the action would merely be carried to France’s debit in her account with Britain. He reacted similarly to their behaviour at Tunis, which was not as bad as in Madagascar and ‘well within the French code of honour as habitually practised’.28 Curzon was exasperated by this attitude. On the Prime Minister’s advice he told the House of Commons that the ‘Concert of Europe’ was a beneficent organization which occasionally did some good, but he did not believe that in practice European co-operation benefited his country. A better approach, he thought, would be to accept the individual hostility of all the great powers and use diplomacy to prevent them from uniting against Britain. There was no point relying on American sympathy, which was limited to the upper classes, or German friendship, which was confined to the Kaiser, just as it was futile to try to come to terms with Russia or France in Asia, because neither country was prepared to surrender her territorial ambitions. After he had left the Foreign Office, he repeatedly compared Salisbury’s diplomacy to throwing bones to different dogs to keep them quiet. All that happened, however, was that the dogs, particularly France and Russia, devoured the bones and snarled for more. Britain had not gained anything from allowing the French into Djibouti and Madagascar or from surrendering her treaty rights to them at Tunis without exacting a similar concession with regard to Egypt. Nor had Germany become any friendlier after receiving Heligoland or installing herself at Dar-es-Salaam. Britain’s good-natured and timorous policy of ‘ceaseless, gratuitous, uncalled for and unrewarded concessions to everybody all over the world’ had not even earned her the gratitude of her rivals.29

Curzon compared his position as Under-Secretary to that of ‘Tommy Atkins’ in Kipling’s poem. He was like the ‘thin red line of ’eroes’ during the parliamentary session but found himself ‘elbowed out of the show altogether’ in the autumn.30 Over some areas of foreign relations he had no influence whatever. Wisely, perhaps, he was largely excluded from formulating policy on contentious issues with France. For several years he had been obsessed with the threat to Siam and believed the French would absorb that country as well as the vassal territories to the east of the Mekong River. Although he hailed the Anglo-French Agreement of 1896 – which recognized the neutrality and independence of Siam – as one of the triumphs of the Government, he privately feared that France would eventually gobble up the rest of the kingdom. As Viceroy of India a few years later, he was reluctant to give a Buddhist relic to the King of Siam because he thought the treasures of the royal palace in Bangkok would one day end up in the Louvre.31

Africa was another area over which he was largely sidelined. He was not, he complained, ‘allowed an innings’ with the Germans and the Portuguese over Delagoa Bay but was required to labour at length over schemes for the abolition of slavery in Zanzibar. He defended with verve the Anglo-Egyptian advance to the Sudan, but he seems to have had little influence on Salisbury’s long waiting game with the French in East Africa. By the time his chief, after years of patience, had finally excluded them from the area and turned the Nile Valley into an axis of British power, Curzon was in India.

The Under-Secretary did, however, have the satisfaction of seeing his policy prevail in two Asian matters he considered of crucial importance. Curzon’s visit to Chitral during his exploration of the Pamirs at the end of 1894 had been quickly followed by the murder of its pro-British ruler, the Mehtar, the deposition of his assassin by a small British force from Gilgit, the encirclement of that force in Chitral by a large army of Pathans and Chitralis, and a desperate siege that was finally broken by the arrival of a British relief column. Following this classic set-piece of Victorian valour, Rosebery’s Government decided to withdraw from Chitral, a policy powerfully opposed by Curzon in a series of letters to The Times. To those who argued that Chitral’s inaccessibility guaranteed it from Russian invasion, he pointed out that, while none of the advocates for retreat had been within 150 miles of the place, their opponents included the Viceroy and the Government of India, the previous Viceroy, the previous Commander-in-Chief and every British official in Kashmir. The placing at Chitral of a political officer with an escort, he maintained, was essential both for the security of the frontier and for the maintenance of internal order in a volatile region.32

The fall of Rosebery’s Government before the withdrawal had been carried out forced Curzon to turn his powers of persuasion on his colleagues. The nature of the country was such, he argued whenever a retreat was being considered, that even a small British force would be able to repel, or at the very least greatly to retard, any Russian advance. If, however, Chitral was evacuated, the tribes of the Hindu Kush and the Indus Valley would rise against the British while the Russians would move in and obtain an easy line of descent upon Jalalabad, turning the British flank and threatening any forward movement to Kabul. Salisbury was soon convinced, a garrison was sent, and in the frontier uprisings of 1897 there were no disturbances in Chitral. Liberal attempts to blame the troubles on the Government’s determination to stay in Chitral and build access roads were unconvincing, especially when accompanied by geographical ignorance. An unfortunate reference by Asquith to the ‘half-naked tribesmen’ of Swat, one of the highest habitable regions in the world, prompted Curzon to speculate in public on whether the Liberal politician was as knowledgeable about their feelings as he was about their appearance.33 The Under-Secretary knew the area better than any other politician and could afford to be derisive. Events, moreover, supported him, for the retention of Chitral proved to be cheap and successful, while evidence from Russian officers later revealed that their army had been ready to seize the place as soon as the British withdrew.34 No one was more responsible than Curzon for their failure to do so.

The Under-Secretary also induced his colleagues to counter a Russian move in the Far East. As government ministers often repeated, British interests in China were commercial rather than territorial and favoured the preservation of that country’s independence. The survival of such a policy, however, depended on the willingness of other powers to show similar forbearance over a nation trying to recover from its recent defeat at the hands of the Japanese. When in November 1897 the Germans seized the port of Kiaochow, and shortly afterwards a Russian naval squadron arrived in Port Arthur ‘to spend the winter’ – a stay that predictably outlasted the season – Curzon decided that some action must be taken to preserve British interests in northern China. In February 1898 the Chinese Government offered Britain a third port in the Gulf of Chihli, Weihaiwei, but Salisbury thought that an acceptance would be contrary to British policy. Suffering from a bad attack of influenza, the Prime Minister then went to the South of France for a rest, and the matter was set aside. Curzon, however, had prepared a memorandum arguing that Britain, which had greater commercial interests in China than any other nation, should not allow herself to be squeezed out of the northern part of the country by Russia and Germany. In March he distributed it to the six leading members of the Cabinet and remained undeterred by their unfavourable reactions. Despite the continued opposition of Hicks Beach and Chamberlain, he managed to persuade Balfour to bring the matter before the whole Cabinet and was invited to several meetings to argue the case in favour of accepting the lease for Weihaiwei. After his standpoint had eventually prevailed, Balfour telegraphed the Prime Minister for his approval. As with Chitral, Salisbury came to see the merits of his deputy’s firmness and thanked him for persuading the Cabinet to accept his point of view.35

The strain of Weihaiwei, the working weekends and the late nights spent editing draft papers to be sent to Lord Salisbury in France, finally laid him out. For nearly three years, the longest period in his adult life, Curzon had survived incessant work without his health breaking down. But by Easter 1898 he was flat on his back with his old complaint, spinal weakness. Unable to bend or stoop without acute pain, he took to his bed, attended by a doctor and a masseur, and lay editing and re-editing the papers on China. After a month he returned to the House of Commons, but the recovery did not last, and before the end of the session he had collapsed once again. At the same time his insomnia, which had hitherto been sporadic, became chronic. The slightest light through a window prevented him sleeping, so his wife had darkened curtains made which they could take on their travels.

Mary also suffered from the strain and absorption of George’s work. Her arrival in England after their marriage had been a triumph, thousands of people lining the streets of Derby to cheer while a crowd of tenants and estate workers waited to welcome them at Kedleston. Lord Scarsdale and his children were kind and charming, and George was in high spirits, joking with the gamekeepers’ wives. Her second visit to the ancestral home, which took place after the disillusioning experience of Southport, was much less enjoyable. Her father-in-law now struck her as an ogre, ‘an old despot of the 13th century’ who made ‘fiendish grimaces’ and refused to allow his eldest son to make improvements, even at his own expense, to the dilapidated and uncomfortable mansion.36

London, a city where she had enjoyed such social success a few years earlier, was also a disappointment. Shortly before their marriage her husband had taken 5 Carlton House Terrace, in Nash’s imposing row overlooking St James’s Park, where he had organized the decoration and hired the staff. He always had great confidence in his own taste and seldom trusted anybody else’s. When Mary gave him a ring, he declared that a ring on a man’s finger was no less absurd than a hoop through a woman’s nose, and put it on his watch chain.37 During his bachelor years he had prided himself on the way he had arranged his various lodgings and told Mary he thought he could have made a career as a decorator. He was ‘mad on furnishing’, he wrote during their engagement, and looked forward to doing it together after their marriage.38 But poor Mary was never given the chance. By the time she reached her enormous new home, the house was already decorated and inhabited by a large number of surly and incompetent servants. After an unhappy few months there, George decided the rent was too high, and they moved to a slightly smaller house at the end of the row, 4 Carlton Gardens, a former residence of Lord Palmerston which now belonged to Arthur Balfour. The staff problem, however, did not improve and drove Mary to complain that English servants were so stupid and disagreeable that they made life almost unbearable.39 The persistency of such complaints at these and other residences suggests that she was inept at handling people who worked for her.

The Curzons’ first daughter, Irene, was born in January 1896 at the house in Carlton Gardens. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, threatening a miscarriage and later a premature birth, and even causing Mary to fear for her own survival. Four days before the birth she made a new will leaving much of her jewellery, if she did not survive her confinement, to George’s next wife.40 Irene was followed two and a half years later by Cynthia, an event which drew commiseration from some who realized how much Curzon wanted an heir and who encouraged him with examples of couples who had bred sons after a succession of daughters.

Irene’s birth did little to reduce the feelings of loneliness and homesickness which had afflicted Mary since arriving in England. Married life in the capital turned out to be entirely different from those seasons of balls and country-house parties at which she had once shone. She was no longer an exotic and temporary novelty on the social stage but a settled woman who suddenly found it difficult to make new friends. She pined for Washington and longed to see members of her family, but their visits left her feeling even more homesick afterwards. She was still in love with her husband but she rarely saw him except when he was working at home. ‘He sits and sits at those Foreign Office boxes’, she wrote, ‘until I could scream.’ Curzon did indeed work harder than most ministers, virtually abandoning his social life and never taking any exercise beyond the short walk home from the House of Commons at night. But Mary did not object or try to alter him. She had heard complaints that Asquith’s second marriage had led him to pay less attention to politics than to his social life, and she did not want to be responsible for a similar change in George.

While Mary was pregnant and feeling miserable, her husband was telling Spring Rice that matrimony was a success so overwhelming that celibacy, which had once been a delight, had now become a puzzle.41 Curzon was a loyal and affectionate husband but not a considerate one. He loved to be with Mary and the babies, to tease them and use baby talk and nicknames: he always called her ‘Kinkie’, a name then without connotations, while she called him ‘Pappy’, which may have been a derivation of ‘Bab’, a name his brothers and sisters knew him by before he went to Wixenford. But he did not concern himself very much with Mary’s happiness when he was not with her. In London they hardly ever entertained or went to dinner in other people’s houses. Nor did they pay many country-house visits, although once they went to Chatsworth, Kedleston’s Derbyshire rival, and took a strong aversion to the Duke of Devonshire’s guests. ‘That fashionable card-playing, race-going lot are an idle set,’ Curzon observed, ‘and their life is very empty and vapid.’42 Only at weekends at The Priory, a Georgian house which they rented near Reigate, did Mary have a chance to entertain people.

Throughout his adult life as a bachelor, Curzon had lived uncomplainingly in small flats in the middle of London or in rooms in the suburbs. After his marriage he never lived in anything other than a large and very grand mansion. Apart from Carlton Gardens and The Priory, he also rented Scottish castles for grouse-shooting. Mary did not see much more of her husband on holiday than she did in London. On one visit he spent six days in bed with an injured foot while she, confined indoors by incessant rain, entertained members of his family and dealt with a fresh set of servants. In good health or bad, Curzon began the day working in bed with his Foreign Office papers and then summoned the head keeper at half-past seven to plan the day’s sport. He and the other guns set off at nine and walked all day with only a break for lunch. Proud of the fact that he could tramp for eighteen miles a day over the moors without having taken any exercise since the previous September, he sometimes insisted on walking home afterwards as well. Sending his guests back to the castle in a carriage, he liked to return with the keepers on foot, asking them numerous questions about the district and its inhabitants and telling them stories about his travels abroad.43