19

‘An Infinitude of Trouble’: England, 1904

AFTER REACHING ENGLAND at the beginning of February, Mary was soon recounting the kind of things that made her husband un-anxious to return home: the foolishness of her sister Daisy, the unfriendliness of his sister Evie, the social intrigues of Margot Asquith, the ponderous and wearying humour of St John Brodrick. The Secretary of State for India, who chortled that Mary’s return alone gave him the droit de seigneur over her, ascribed George’s speed in Tibet to a desire to invite the Dalai Lama to be the new baby’s godfather. Other ‘corkers’ followed. The problem with Brodrick’s jokes, her husband replied, was that they combined great vulgarity with ‘a soupçon of rather offensive indelicacy [but] no real humour or dash to carry them off’. He rather shuddered at the prospect of becoming the victim of his ‘bovine pleasantries’.1

One apparently trivial incident had a significance that both Curzons missed. The incorrigibly flirtatious Daisy Leiter had just jilted one young officer and taken up with another, Eustace – known in the army as ‘Useless’ – Crawley. Mary, who thought she might as well marry a coachman or a stud groom, was exasperated by Daisy’s inability to ‘differentiate between horsey young gentlemen who can pilot her across Leicestershire and youths desirable to marry’. Curzon urged his wife to break up the affair because he believed ‘people who fall into the hunting set seem to lose social and moral perspective’; besides, Crawley was enormously in debt and had been searching for an heiress for years.2 Daisy did end the relationship and eventually married the Earl of Suffolk, one of her brother-in-law’s ADCs, an officer equally horsey but socially more presentable. In India he kept a pack of fox hounds.

While few people seem to have been concerned about Crawley’s feelings, much resentment was aroused by Daisy’s treatment of her previous suitor. Captain Raymond ‘Conk’ Marker, who had known Daisy since 1899 when he too had been one of the Viceroy’s ADCs, had served in South Africa before returning to India as a member of Kitchener’s staff. Meeting her again at the time of the Durbar, he was encouraged to believe that his passion for her was reciprocated and he was thus greatly upset to be told later that she preferred Crawley. Marker was like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel who needs to tell everyone he meets about his broken heart, and soon his woes were known all over Calcutta. Kitchener’s staff, a closely knit, fiercely loyal group whose members referred to each other as ‘the family circle’, was outraged by Daisy’s behaviour. One of them, Major Frank Maxwell, wrote to Lady Salisbury about ‘that pig of a girl’, another told her the history of the whole affair, and Kitchener himself complained to Mary.3 All of them, moreover, blamed Marker’s misery on the snobbery of the Curzons, who allegedly wished for a much grander brother-in-law. The charge of snobbery, for which no evidence was produced against the Viceroy, did not come well from Maxwell, who told Lady Salisbury he hoped Daisy would ‘marry somebody nearer in strain of blood to that of her own family – a butcher for choice. How the hairy heel does thrust out.’4

Kitchener encouraged Marker to believe he had been the victim of the snooty Curzons and suggested he took a posting in London. The heartbroken ADC accepted the idea and soon found himself installed at the War Office, acting officially as Private Secretary to Arnold-Forster and unofficially as a spy for Kitchener, sending him coded messages about military matters concerning India. Attempting to see Daisy when she came over to England, he was simultaneously rebuffed and informed about her intended marriage to Lord Suffolk. Unable to revenge himself on the fickle Daisy, Marker decided to work out his grievance on her brother-in-law. No one in Kitchener’s camp except Lady Salisbury was more useful in the campaign against the Military Department, and no one worked more effectively for the Viceroy’s downfall.

In their letters the Curzons referred to their forthcoming baby as Dorian or Nalder, but Mary feared she was going to have another girl. Her husband assured her the sex did not matter but continued to use masculine pronouns when writing about the baby. Later, in a letter timed to reach Mary just before the birth, he wrote:

If it is a boy we will bless and thank Almighty God. If it is a girl we shall still bless and thank him. If the child does not live we will then bless and thank him for those we have already. If you are ill you must keep up your heart and soon get well. You can remember that you have never done one thing that has not been true and sweet and loving towards me, and that you have been to me for nine years a strength, a delight and a blessing. We have been very very happy and there are under Providence many happy days in store for us in the future.5

Before she received this letter Mary had given premature birth to her third daughter. As the telegram with the news arrived three weeks before schedule, Curzon thought it might be a hoax sent by Mrs Smeaton or some other person with a grudge. When he realized it was true, he wrote a letter of consolation. The baby’s gender was unimportant and could easily have been his fault, the only thing that mattered was that Mary was all right, and in any case there was plenty of time for them to follow the example of one of his predecessors, Lord Lytton, and have a son after three daughters. Meanwhile ‘Nalder’ became Naldera, after the camp near Simla where she was conceived, and subsequently Alexandra Naldera because the Queen, when agreeing to be her godmother, wanted the baby to have her name; from birth, however, she was always known by friends and relations by her Indian nickname ‘Baba’. The choice of godfather seems to have been automatic. Curzon, who had just received another selection of Brodrick’s ‘buckish jokes with just that savour of unwitty impropriety which he so greatly relishes’, expected the Secretary of State would think he had ‘an absolute right’ and so duly appointed him. As Brodrick’s personal relations with the Curzons were soon to come to an end, it was not a successful selection. Many years later he confessed he had not been a diligent godfather. Baba agreed with him.6

Curzon admitted to his father that a third girl was rather ‘a blow’ but claimed it was worse for Mary because ‘in these matters a man philosophises whereas a woman cannot’.7 This dubious theory turned out in this instance to be correct. Mary was miserable at the thought that they would leave no name for their descendants and that not only Kedleston but also George’s titles would go to ‘that dreadful brother Affy’. She hoped her husband would receive a title after India which their eldest daughter could inherit, so that they could at least found their own line. ‘I think much of this,’ she told her father, ‘and bring up Irene with it in view.’8 Some years later Curzon received the barony of Ravensdale with remainder, in default of male issue, to his eldest surviving daughter. After the death of Irene, who never married, it was inherited by Cynthia’s son, the writer Nicholas Mosley.

In June, a few days after receiving Mary’s letter about titles, Levi Leiter died in Maine. Wise and generous, he was the member of the family Mary most loved and the one she most resembled. His last gift to his eldest daughter had arrived a few weeks earlier: £1,000 to cover her expenses for returning home and having her baby in London. Over-indulgent to his children, Levi Leiter had managed to keep the family together in spite of the reckless speculations of his son. After his death, however, it fell apart, and wrangling over the inheritance continued for three generations.

In March 1904 Curzon was offered the sinecure of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, an ancient title dating from the eleventh century. Its holders had originally been in charge of the coastal defences of the south-east, but by the end of the eighteenth century their post had become a largely honorary one held by leading statesmen. The historical traditions associated with the Lord Warden inevitably attracted Curzon, who was delighted to succeed Lord Salisbury as well as earlier incumbents such as Pitt the Younger and the Duke of Wellington. But what most commended the post to Curzon was the fact that Lord Dalhousie had also received it during his fifth year as Governor-General in India. Its only tangible advantage was the official residence, Walmer Castle, a medieval fortress on the Kentish coast which Wellington had loved and where he had died. Curzon was doubtful whether they would enjoy it very much, because it was a long way from London and offered little amusement except boating, for which he had no enthusiasm, and golf, which his back no longer allowed him to play. But he was sure they would like ‘the old-world distinction’ of the castle, while the sea air would be excellent for the children’s health.9

Mary travelled down from London and quickly entered into the spirit of the place. She gazed at the Iron Duke’s boots and wash basin, found the spot where Pitt had said farewell to Nelson, and from the ramparts watched ‘the Channel fleet do foolish manoeuvres in the deep blue sea’. The air was indeed good, she reported to George, but it was all there was to live on, for the castle’s drains were so appalling that the building was uninhabitable. Assisted by Frank, the one member of her husband’s family to be consistently helpful, she installed herself in a hotel in Deal where the food was inedible and then moved into a villa called Walmer Place. Here she found luxuries she had not previously experienced in England such as electric lights and telephones. Electric bells for summoning the staff were a particularly useful novelty; in London they had sometimes been forced to go outside and ring the front doorbell when they wanted a servant to appear. Even at Walmer Mary was afflicted by domestic problems, by maids who broke plates, by a cook who had to be discharged, and by ‘an idiotic old fool of a butler’ whose first act had been to drop a full ink-pot on to Mary’s desk, damaging the table, ruining her clothes, and splattering the carpet as he carried the dripping wreckage to the pantry.10

Curzon spent the voyage home arranging and indexing his departmental files and writing to his secretary about omissions. He also went through the household accounts which turned out to be surprisingly healthy. The food on board was as bad as usual and the wine undrinkable, so he lived largely on lemon squash. He felt no excitement about seeing England, he told Mary, or even about being with his friends, but he was longing to see her again ‘and be happy and peaceful, not to be eternally overwrought nor to be a slave to boxes, but to have another little honeymoon ere I pass into middle life’. And of course there was ‘the excitement of making the acquaintance of Alexandra Naldera’.11

After a four-month separation, they met at Dover in the middle of May, spent the night at Walmer and travelled up to London the next morning. Curzon had not expected anyone to take the slightest notice of his arrival or go to the station to meet him. People in England did not care about India, he moaned; nobody had greeted Dalhousie or Warren Hastings, and there was no reason for him to be more favoured.12 In the event he was given a terrific reception both by the press and by a large crowd at Charing Cross which included nearly all the members of the India Council with whom he had been feuding for so long. From there he was driven straight to Buckingham Palace for an interview with the King, and later went to see his father. During the following days he was able to see most of his friends. On the 19th Brodrick invited forty-four of them to a dinner in his honour at which, according to Godley, Curzon was ‘in great form’. A week later he stayed with the Cowpers at Panshanger, where he much enjoyed a ride in a motor-car; Mary was so terrified, however, that she put a blanket over her head.

In the Red Sea Curzon may well have wished for ‘another little honeymoon’ away from the slavery of boxes, but within a couple of days of his return he was bored. After being reunited with Mary, meeting the King and catching glimpses of friends he had not seen for over five years, he told Pearl Craigie he felt ‘terribly stranded and rather miserable’ without his work.13 Mary was in despair. He seemed lost and wretched, she told her father, wandering about saying ‘What am I to do? What am I to do?’ He had begun to go through fifty packing cases he had brought from India, which would keep him busy for a day or two, but she did not know what to do with him afterwards.14

A graver problem was her husband’s health. His leg gave him a good deal of pain, and his back was so troublesome that she was determined to consult the best spine specialist in Europe. A rest, which was one of the main objects of the holiday, would no doubt have helped, but he refused to rest. Even when flat on his back he insisted on transacting a mass of business and found time to write Brodrick ‘twelve heavy pages’ about a portrait of Warren Hastings. Ill health dogged him constantly during his six months in England. In June Ampthill was informed that he had spent the last two weeks in bed with neuralgia, in July that he could not walk more than a few yards and was laid up for the greater part of the day, and in September that although he could still eat a grouse he could no longer pursue one. He had not been able to fire a shot or put on country clothes since he had been in England, and his holiday had been ‘one of almost continuous pain and depression, relieved only by struggles to push forward’ policies about which he felt strongly.15

Curzon was able to dispel some of his boredom by making plans for Walmer Castle. The building’s insanitary condition seems to have been caused by a labyrinth of clogged drains constructed because the Duke of Wellington insisted on putting a lavatory either in or just beside every bedroom. Mary described the castle as a ‘rabbit warren’ of these ‘horrible little places’, and her husband was determined to reduce their number. Yet while Walmer gave him an opportunity to exercise his architectural skills, it also provided the scene for a long and ridiculous dispute with the new Lord Salisbury. Curzon objected to the practice according to which the Lord Warden was expected to buy his predecessor’s furniture. Walmer had been low down on the late Prime Minister’s list of residences and was furnished with discarded items which Curzon’s agents described as ‘absolutely unsuitable for a gentleman’s house’. Having no other country house, the new occupant wished to decorate the castle properly, but not wanting to quarrel with his old friend, who had become the fourth Marquess, he agreed to buy all the superfluous furniture except for broken chairs, threadbare carpets and a dilapidated stable used by the gardener’s chickens.

If the two men had merely appointed a valuer and accepted his decision, the matter could have been solved quite rapidly. But it was dealt with by agents and lawyers who relished the argument and kept it going. Curzon found Salisbury’s lawyer particularly offensive and was infuriated by the delays he caused which prevented the family from moving into the castle. In June he complained because he could not move in before his installation and the following month grumbled that he would have to take a seaside house for the children somewhere else. Eventually the question was resolved at the end of August when Curzon paid the arbiter’s valuation of £1,557. But he remained resentful about a dispute that had cost him two letters a week and a good deal of annoyance throughout the summer. When Salisbury observed irritably that the affair had been more bother than the settlement of the Entente Cordiale, Curzon answered with an aggrieved twelve-page letter stating that he had not wanted to buy anything at all, that he had only done so because he was dealing with an old friend, and that the discourteous behaviour of the Marquess’s agents had caused him ‘an infinitude of trouble’ that had gone far to embitter his brief holiday in England.16

The only moment of pleasure Curzon received as Lord Warden was at his installation in July. Arranged by the town clerk, who as an organizer could compare in efficiency with Curzon himself, the ceremony consisted of a procession through decorated streets, a church service, a carriage drive and the installation at Dover College Close, where the Lord Warden, according to medieval custom, momentarily presided over the Court of Shepway. At the official lunch in the town hall Curzon’s health was proposed by George Wyndham, the MP for Dover, and in the evening the public buildings were illuminated. Like Curzon, Wyndham and other participants, The Times declared itself in favour of the preservation of such ancient and cherished traditions.17

There were further events and ceremonies to mitigate the disappointments of his English holiday. During a speech at Eton on the Fourth of June he joked that the school’s recent record should give it a permanent right to appoint India’s Viceroys, a remark that was misinterpreted by the Reuters correspondent and then further misunderstood by Indian newspapers which promptly denounced his proposal to appoint permanent Viceroys! On receiving the freedom of the Borough of Derby in July, he made one of several speeches about the Englishman’s duty in India. Godley remonstrated, arguing that it was undesirable to increase British interest in India which would merely lead to interference from Parliament.18 Curzon thought informed parliamentary interference would be beneficial. At the end of the eighteenth century the House of Commons had filled rapidly to hear Burke or Fox speak on India, but now it no less rapidly emptied as soon as the affairs of the Subcontinent were discussed. Curzon had once complained that an Indian famine excited ‘no more attention at home than a squall on the Serpentine’, and despaired at the public’s indifference to British dominion in India.19 He now consciously set out to inspire his listeners with a belief in themselves and their destiny, and to a surprising extent he succeeded. In July, presented with the freedom of the City of London at the Guildhall, he told his audience that their rule in India was the greatest thing the British people had done, ‘the highest touchstone of national duty’. Their task was to build a bridge between the races, a bridge on which ‘justice must stand with unerring scales’ if their rule was to last. It should not be imagined, he argued, that Britain’s work was drawing to an end because, as the years rolled by, the call became ‘more clear, the duty more imperative, the work more majestic, the goal more sublime’. And in phrases worthy of the Authorized Version he proclaimed: ‘To me the message is carved in granite, it is hewn out of the rock of doom — that our work is righteous and that it shall endure.’20

His eloquence made a strong impression, inducing people to tell him how their hearts and imaginations had been touched by such inspiring words. Lord Selborne said it was the best speech his friend had ever made, ‘and devilish few better ones have ever been made’. Even the earnest Arnold-Forster was much moved and told Curzon it was ‘the most brilliant and stately piece of English’ he had heard or read in ‘all the records of modern oratory in our country’. For a nation still unsettled by the Boer War and uncertain of the future, the returning Viceroy had boosted morale. ‘Curzon’s magnificent speeches’, Earl Grey reported to Ampthill, had ‘stirred the blood and lumped the throats of the great majority’ of people who had read them.21

In March Balfour had told Mary that the sight of her husband, ‘dear old boy’, would settle the points of contention between the governments of Britain and India. But the old friendships of the Souls days had deteriorated, especially that between Curzon and Brodrick, and the problems turned out to be as intractable in the intimacy of a London club as they had been down a 6,000-mile telegraph wire. Although this was partly the result of genuine disagreement, it was exacerbated by altered personal circumstances. Under pressure in his new job and still struggling with the legacy of his old one, Brodrick found it difficult to re-establish a friendship with a man who showed no respect for his views and who, he thought, was trying to run India while ill in bed in England. Curzon, for his part, was contemptuous of a Secretary of State ‘who knows little or nothing about India, and does not seem concerned to learn’.22 To Ampthill he complained that India’s interests were suffering because three-quarters of Brodrick’s time was being wasted in trying to prevent Arnold-Forster expunging the last traces of his occupancy of the War Office.23 In April the new Secretary for War had infuriated his predecessor by abandoning his army corps proposals and thereby exposing him to the abuse and sarcasm of the press. ‘Mr Brodrick’s great achievement’, declared the Daily Mail, ‘is thus condemned by his colleagues within one short year of its accomplishment.’ No example occurred to the newspaper of a minister in such a position who had not resigned after his policy had been condemned and reversed.24 Embarrassed and resentful, Brodrick spent much of 1904 opposing Arnold-Forster’s own reforms and attempting to prove he had been a much misjudged War Secretary.25

During Curzon’s visit to England Balfour and Brodrick tried sporadically to settle their differences with him over Afghanistan, Tibet and the military administration in India. Since the death of Abdur Rahman in 1901, Curzon had been trying to persuade his successor, Habibullah, to come to India to negotiate a new agreement on the arms and subsidy supplied to Afghanistan as the price for keeping her as an ally and conducting her foreign relations. The new Emir had prevaricated about the visit, arguing that the agreements with his father had been made between governments and did not need to be renegotiated. The British, however, considered them to be vague, unsatisfactory and inadequate to deal with the dangers caused by Russia’s recent penetration of central Asia. Suspecting Habibullah of wishing to develop relations with the Russians, Curzon was eager to reach a clear settlement committing the Emir to the British and allowing their troops into Afghanistan in the event of a Russian invasion. If Habibullah opted to become Russia’s ally, he thought the Indian Government should not hesitate in occupying Kandahar.

Curzon had found negotiations with the Emir particularly difficult because all his important communications with him were sent home and ‘gutted’ by the India Office and the Cabinet who, he told Mary, did not know ‘the ABC of Afghan politics. They will not leave me to handle the Amir as I think he ought to be handled, and then they blame me if the letters are a failure.’26 The Cabinet was indeed extremely ignorant of Afghanistan, its well-informed membership limited, since the departure of Hamilton, to Lansdowne. Ministers perceived the danger of flooding the country with weapons without having any guarantee how they would be used, but they were terrified of doing anything that might provoke a third Afghan war. Consulted by Brodrick and Balfour during his stay in England, Curzon agreed with Ampthill’s view that, as the Emir would not come to India, an envoy should be sent to Kabul to open negotiations. Yet while Ampthill wanted a firm agreement on military co-operation against Russia and a guarantee from Habibullah that he would abstain from political relations with other powers, the British Government recoiled from anything more ambitious than renewal of those agreements made with Abdur Rahman. This divergence of aim, which angered Ampthill, became still more critical when Curzon returned to India.

A more urgent matter was the fate of the expedition to Tibet. At the time of Curzon’s hand-over, Brodrick had thought Younghusband too eager to advance and instructed Ampthill to give him ‘a hint against undue precipitancy’. The British Commissioner, who had already spent ten months in Tibet, was indignant at the thought of being considered a ‘rampant adventurer’ and felt it futile to go on waiting for negotiators to turn up at Gyantse. Yet his mission might have been becalmed indefinitely had it not been suddenly attacked, vigorously but ineffectually, by a large Tibetan force at the beginning of May. The home Government could hardly have reacted otherwise than to sanction an advance to Lhasa, although Brodrick insisted on giving the Tibetans another month in which to produce their negotiators before the expedition rolled on. Irritated by the delay and by other restrictions, Younghusband reacted petulantly by refusing to answer one telegram from the Indian Government and by sending an aggressive reply to another. Ampthill responded in the middle of June with what Younghusband described as ‘a very God-Almighty to a blackbeetle style of telegram’ which provoked the Commissioner to resign.27

Somewhat against his inclinations, Ampthill persuaded Younghusband to withdraw his resignation. The Acting Viceroy’s views on Tibet had been modified, and he now wondered whether it might be better to sacrifice the objects of the mission than to court the hostility of Russia. These doubts, confided to others, quickly reached Curzon, who was incensed to learn that while he was battling for the success of the mission in London, his understudy was contemplating with equanimity its failure in Simla. All their efforts and sacrifices, he predicted to Ampthill, would now be thrown away, and his only consolation would be that he was devoid of responsibility. The Acting Viceroy ascribed the outburst to ill health, a wise reaction commended by Godley, who agreed that Curzon deserved to be ‘forgiven for ebullitions which, in a smaller man, might fairly be regarded as unpardonable’.28

As the mission was now limbering up for its final push to the Tibetan capital, decisions had to be made about what it should do when it got there. In the telegram that had so annoyed Ampthill, Younghusband had scoffed at the idea of a quick round of negotiations at Lhasa followed by a withdrawal before winter: as he had already spent eleven months in the country unable even to begin negotiations, it was absurd to think that anything could be achieved with such obstructive people as the Tibetans in the two or three months allotted him. Curzon was arguing a similar line to the Cabinet. If the Dalai Lama had fled Lhasa before Younghusband reached it, he thought the British should be prepared to occupy the city until a treaty could be concluded and then leave an agent to see that its provisions were carried out. This case, stated at a Cabinet meeting on I July, was contested by what he termed ‘the reparation school’ of thought that did not care about a treaty and wanted the expedition to be merely retributive. Britain’s claims, argued Brodrick to Ampthill, could be established by ‘the mere fact of a British force marching on Lhasa and slaughtering a great number of Tibetans on the way …’ If the mission found neither the Dalai Lama nor anyone else in Lhasa to negotiate with, it should destroy the city’s arsenal, wells and fortifications, and withdraw with as large an indemnity as it could obtain.29

Laying waste the Buddhists’ most holy city before dashing out of the country without making arrangements for future relations between India and Tibet did not seem a sensible or attractive plan to Curzon, Younghusband or the Government of India, but it was the one that for the moment prevailed. In the list of terms telegraphed to Simla for Younghusband to dictate to the Tibetans, the home Government instructed the Commissioner not to demand a resident at Lhasa or elsewhere. The Cabinet may not have known very much about Afghanistan, but its members did recall that the British Agent in Kabul, Sir Louis Cavagnari, had been murdered in 1879 and they did not want to risk a similar incident in Lhasa. They do not seem to have realized that docile Tibetan Buddhists did not resemble fierce Afghan tribesmen: indeed, so unwarlike were the Tibetans that in a surprise night attack on the mission’s garrison of 120 men, 800 of them managed to do no more than wound 2 Indians at the cost of 250 losses of their own. On 26 July the Simla Government sent a despatch that argued strongly for an agent, pointing out that India already had one in Nepal and claiming that such an official would be in a position to oversee new arrangements with Tibet and protect Britain’s rights. Curzon complimented Ampthill, whose pessimistic views were not shared by the rest of his Council except Kitchener, and regretted his despatch ‘produced no more impression in Downing Street than it would have done had it been read in the streets of Lhasa’.30

At the beginning of August Younghusband at last rode in full diplomatic uniform in the shadow of the great Potala palace through the gates of Lhasa. The Dalai Lama had indeed fled and was making for Outer Mongolia after leaving his seals of office with an elderly Lama called the Ti Rimproche. Believing there was no one to negotiate with, the ‘reparation school’ concluded that the mission had no option but to exact retribution and depart. Balfour informed the King that the British force could not ‘retire without striking some blow at [the] enemy’, and the Cabinet decided it should ‘destroy such buildings as the walls and gates of the city, and … carry off some of the leading citizens as hostages’. Brodrick hoped Younghusband would reduce the scale of the fiasco by bringing away ‘a substantial indemnity’ that ‘would go a long way to ease off matters’. The Commissioner’s unpromising position did not improve when the Amban, the Chinese representative, forwarded the views of a body of notables known as the National Assembly: the Tibetans refused each of his demands and argued that any indemnity should be paid by Britain. Nor was the task made easier by the pusillanimous escort commander, who said his troops could not winter in Lhasa and must leave in the middle of September.31

In these extremely unpropitious circumstances, Younghusband managed through force of personality together with Chinese assistance to conclude an extraordinary treaty. The Tibetan leadership that had not fled eventually accepted his demands, agreeing to open new trade marts, to destroy all fortifications between Lhasa and the Indian frontier, to have no dealings with any foreign power without Britain’s consent, and to respect the agreements of the 1890s that had hitherto been ignored. The Tibetans also agreed to two articles not included in the terms telegraphed by London. Although the home Government had rejected Ampthill’s proposal that an agent stationed at Gyantse should have access to Lhasa, Younghusband discovered that the Tibetans did not object to the idea and he therefore incorporated it in a separate agreement. As for the indemnity, Brodrick had admitted that the Government’s ignorance of Tibet’s resources made it impossible to suggest a figure; he merely hoped for a ‘substantial’ sum to be paid over a period of three years and secured against a British occupation of the Chumbi Valley near the Indian border. When the Commissioner demanded £500,000, the Tibetans first claimed they could not afford the sum but subsequently suggested paying it in seventy-five annual instalments, a remarkable offer that would have given Britain the right to occupy for three-quarters of a century a piece of land regarded by Younghusband as ‘the only strategical point of value in the whole north-eastern frontier from Kashmir to Burma’. The Commissioner could not wait the twelve days needed to get a message to Simla and back or the longer period required to receive an opinion from cabinet ministers scattered over the grouse moors and golf courses of Scotland. He had to judge the offer himself, and to a frontier officer it was irresistible. On 7 September in the audience hall of the Potala he signed, together with the representatives of China and Tibet, the convention he had been striving for fourteen months to achieve.32

This wholly unexpected outcome, to which the Amban and the Ti Rimproche had contributed a good deal, was naturally welcomed by the British. Ampthill recommended its acceptance, the King sent a laudatory telegram, and Brodrick, telegraphing his hearty congratulations, declared that Younghusband’s actions would be supported. Within hours, however, the Secretary of State had changed his mind and decided that the terms were a provocation to Russia and therefore unacceptable. A minister who had hoped to disguise his Government’s expected humiliation by extorting a ‘substantial indemnity’ and sacking parts of Lhasa, was now embarrassed because his representative had secured a favourable treaty and a ‘prodigious’ indemnity without blowing up a single building. Brodrick, who had refused to give Younghusband any indication of the sum of money he should demand, now suggested that the Commissioner ought to stay in Lhasa to negotiate a reduction of the indemnity in return for trade concessions. Younghusband received the message as he was leaving the capital and ignored it. Had he re-opened negotiations, he told Ampthill, he might have come away without any convention at all, and he would certainly have forfeited Tibetan goodwill. Two weeks later, as he rode to Darjeeling to see his wife and child after a year’s absence, he received a telegram from the Secretary of State accusing him of insubordination.33

While Brodrick’s transformation from admirer of the convention to angry antagonist can partly be ascribed to Russian objections, his vindictiveness towards Younghusband can only be explained by the sudden conviction that his Tibetan policy had been deliberately upset by Curzon. Younghusband, it dawned on him, had been ignoring the Government’s instructions in order to carry out the policy of the former Viceroy. But unable to fasten the blame on Curzon, he was determined to make a scapegoat of his protégé. Balfour was converted, a good three weeks after the terms of the convention had become known, to the view that Curzon was culpable and that national honour demanded the public repudiation of Younghusband. The Commissioner’s ‘indiscretion’ — in achieving a settlement so much more favourable than anything the Government had expected — made it impossible, said the Prime Minister, for Britain to clear herself from ‘the very unjust imputation of copying the least creditable methods of Russian diplomacy’.34

The foreign correspondent of The Times, Valentine Chirol, ascribed Brodrick’s behaviour to stupidity and jealousy of Curzon, and regarded the ‘meanness of the subterfuges’ used against Younghusband as ‘almost past belief’.35 The Commissioner was censured, snubbed and awarded the lowest possible decoration, the KCIE. But the Government of India did ratify his convention after attaching a declaration reducing the indemnity by two-thirds and the occupation of the Chumbi Valley to three years. Younghusband, a hero in many people’s eyes, including the King’s, passionately resented his treatment. At Port Said on his way home he met Curzon returning to India and related the whole story. Greatly cheered by the friendship and approval of his former chief, he told Mary that for him or for her he would do anything in the world, but for a whole cabinet of ministers he would not ‘feel inclined to stir across the street’.36 In London he saw the King, who approved of what he had done, and Lansdowne, who was plainly embarrassed by the paltry honour and congratulated him on the expedition. He also had a revealing interview with Brodrick who ‘in a kind of galumphing way … intended to be cordial’ and told Younghusband he was ‘the victim of circumstances’. The Secretary of State then managed to give him the impression that his real targets had been Curzon and the Government of India who needed to be shown that they could not behave as they liked.37

Relations between Curzon and Brodrick were now almost beyond repair. Curzon had been amused by Edward VII’s description of the Secretary of State as ‘a most ridiculous personage’ about whom he could never think ‘without bursting out laughing’.38 But he himself was no longer moved to laugh at the antics of his old friend. Brodrick declared himself ‘hurt and distressed’ by the withdrawal of Curzon’s friendship,39 pleaded for a new start and told him he was constantly fighting his battles in the Cabinet and the India Council. Anyone who reads Brodrick’s correspondence will marvel at the audacity of the claim, for he was in fact busy misrepresenting Curzon’s views to all sorts of people, above all Balfour. The Secretary of State had become obsessed by the idea that the former Viceroy was sabotaging the policy of the Government by trying to run India through his correspondence from home. He regarded it as a great concession to consult Curzon, who had no official capacity in England, on Indian matters instead of considering it a normal way of treating someone who would shortly have to deal with those matters in India.40 When Curzon complained he had been kept in the dark about various important questions, Brodrick disingenuously replied that he had not wished to worry him during the illness of his wife and his own periods of ill health.

Since Baba’s birth Mary had yearned for a baby boy and had told her doctor she wished he could arrange one.41 She became pregnant again early in the summer but, after moving into Walmer Castle in August, she suffered a miscarriage which was clumsily handled by a second doctor. According to Mary, his failure to remove some of the afterbirth for two days led to an abscess causing peritonitis subsequently exacerbated by phlebitis. She may also have been infected by a poorly repaired drain underneath her bedroom window.

The illness flared up on the night of 20 September, three days before they had planned to return to India, and the following day she seemed to be dying. On the 22nd her husband began to keep notes of everything she said while lying on what both believed to be her deathbed. Emerging from a series of comas, she gave him instructions about what to do with the children, what presents she wished to leave her friends and how she wanted to be buried in the vault at Kedleston instead of in the ground. At times when she thought she was close to death she asked him to say the Lord’s Prayer, Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’ or their favourite psalm, ‘Lord who shall dwell in thy tabernacle: or who shall rest upon thy holy hill?’ He read them through a mist of tears. In the late afternoon she said goodbye to the children but later revived with brandy, milk and hypodermic injections of strychnine. Yet the doctor said there was no hope because she could not survive the anaesthetic for the necessary operation.

Against the odds Mary’s condition improved sufficiently for an operation to be performed on the 24th, but three days later perforation of the intestines was discovered. Believing recovery was impossible, she summoned her husband and asked him not to read ‘Crossing the Bar’ because she did not want to go. Later she became more composed and said it was no good fighting any longer. She told George he should return to India to complete his work but that he must leave the children behind with her mother. Then she sent again for the girls to bid them goodbye and thanked the doctors and nurses.

I asked whether in another world, if there was one, she would wait for me till I could come. Yes, she said, I will wait. When I said that we had loved each other long and been all in all to each other, she asked that that might be inscribed on her tomb. She asked that we might be buried side by side with a marble effigy of each of us looking towards each other, so that we might one day be reunited … She said our love letters have been wonderful and who that read them could doubt that ours had been a wonderful love. We talked of our marriage day, and of her look at me and mine at her as we stood side by side on the steps of the altar and the lovelights shone in her eyes.42

Later the doctors returned and encouraged her to keep fighting. She did. For twenty-five days she came and nearly went until pneumonia was overcome in the middle of October, and her recovery became consistent. She had been five times given up, Curzon told a friend, but her tenacity and resilience had brought her through. ‘I am convinced’, he said, ‘that no man could have survived.’ The local post office stayed open during the nights to receive anxious messages from India, America and many parts of Britain. Every Indian prince telegraphed. Lord Scarsdale wrote of the great sympathy in Derby and sent two brace of partridges with an apology that they were ‘Frenchmen’ and not the tastier English variety.

As soon as she was strong enough, Mary was moved from Walmer Castle to the villa nearby where they had stayed earlier. Curzon said that nothing would induce him to spend another night in that ‘charnel house’, and the King later agreed that it was uninhabitable. As residence at Walmer had been a condition of the lord wardenship, he resigned his office but characteristically remained interested in the castle’s history and for many years afterwards collected material for a projected book.fn1

In November, barely a month from the beginning of Mary’s recovery, her husband returned alone to India. After failing to find a locket with ‘Buck Up’ inscribed in diamonds as a parting gift, he went to Charing Cross and, as he admitted, ‘broke down rather disgracefully’ in front of a large crowd. It was with ‘a sad and miserable heart’ that he went, leaving all that made life worth living behind him and ‘going out to toil and isolation and often worse’. In the train and at sea he repeatedly contrasted his melancholy situation with the optimistic journey they had undertaken together six years earlier. ‘Then all was health and high hopes,’ he reflected, ‘now there is little but duty and great sadness.’ He thought of her all the time, he said, of her love, her courage, ‘her combat with all the foes of evil and death’. But one consolation, he added, was that they had been drawn very close in this ‘furnace of affliction’, and he hoped to become less selfish and more considerate in future.43

Profound though it was, Curzon’s unhappiness was exceeded by his wife’s. Her letters from Highcliffe, a Hampshire house they rented for her convalescence, are desperate, heart-rending and hardly rational, evidence both of an all-consuming love — ‘it is terrible to love as I do you’ — and of extreme generosity of character, for she did not reproach her husband for his extraordinary decision to leave her. She wrote of her efforts to be brave and her inability to control herself: her ‘pent up sobbing burst forth and shook the house’, and she had to be put to sleep with drugs. Once she tried to kiss his photograph but she did not have the strength to get out of bed to reach it. ‘The light of the world has gone out,’ she wrote and wondered, without self-pity, if she could live through the winter by herself.44 Looking at the broken handwriting distorted by love and despair and sickness, it is hard to understand how anyone could have read those letters without returning home.

Nothing but a feeling of obligation persuaded Curzon to go back to India. Every other argument was in favour of him staying: personal health and happiness, consideration for his wife, the interests of his career, the certainty of disputes with the home Government and Kitchener. Only the sense of mission, the need to complete his task and settle outstanding questions, drove him on. He called it destiny, a convenient and not unreasonable euphemism for the actions of stubborn people who insist on doing what they believe to be their duty.

At an official banquet following the landing at Bombay, his friend Lord Lamington proposed his health in ‘such charming terms and with such apposite and touching references’ to Mary that, as Curzon recounted, he ‘broke down most discreditably’ in his reply. Describing the incident to his wife, he explained that he had been

stretched nearly to breaking point, and any reference to you destroys my balance at once. I also feel so keenly the shameful way in which I have been treated by the native press and by so many of the Europeans in this country, and now my coming back to this rack of duty all alone with you still ill at home, excites such poignant contrasts and emotions in my mind that I feel at times quite unhinged, and it will be some time before I recover complete command.45

According to Lamington’s account of this ‘most touching scene’, his guest managed to recover his self-control and went on to talk passionately about his devotion to his work in India.46

Anxious to avoid a repetition in Calcutta, Curzon implored Ampthill not to talk much about Mary’s illness at the large banquet the Acting Viceroy had organized for his arrival. ‘He looked sad, worn and sombre,’ Ampthill reported to Brodrick, ‘and shook hands with everybody with the air of a dying man.’ At the slightest allusion to his wife, he broke down at once. Ampthill had been apprehensive at the thought of spending twenty-four hours with Curzon before handing over his office, but in the event there was no problem. The returning proconsul ‘could not have been more considerate and deferential,’ Brodrick was informed, if he had been a newcomer and Ampthill the Viceroy with five years’ experience.47