29

The Second Lady Curzon

THE OWNERS OF large country houses tended to restrict their scale of living and their domestic commitments during the war. Lord Curzon did not. Admittedly, he had committees, refugees, wounded soldiers and the Belgian royal family taking up parts of his houses. But he was not inclined merely to retreat with a much-reduced staff to the unoccupied rooms. In the middle of the First World War he acquired three large and dilapidated properties on which he had to spend a great deal of money and most of the time he could spare from his political duties. It was not of course his fault that he inherited Kedleston on Lord Scarsdale’s death in 1916. But it was eccentric to take the lease of Montacute a few months earlier, when he knew his father was dying, and even odder to buy Bodiam Castle and its estate in 1917. Yet both these acquisitions were made from excellent motives. He did not plan to hold court and entertain extravagantly at either place. His objective was simply to preserve and restore the buildings and in due course hand them on. ‘If you renovate a beautiful house,’ he said once in reference to Montacute, ‘it does not matter that it will pass from your family. You are preserving a lovely thing for the nation.’1 Like Tattershall, which he had also saved by purchase and restoration, he left Bodiam to the National Trust in his will.

The renovation of Kedleston was a daunting task in itself. Scarsdale had presided there for sixty years without throwing away a bill or the most trivial of documents; even the paper relics of his predecessors had been left undisturbed, many buried in dust, some white with mildew. Curzon excavated every cupboard and drawer himself in case it contained records of the house’s history, before destroying the things that seemed worthless. He was determined to clear out the detritus of previous generations and establish an archive of valuable documents before starting on the building’s much-needed restoration. On his brief visits to Kedleston he also had to supervise the running of the estate, a chore attenuated by such squirearchical pleasures as wandering around the park with a gun, which he had not done since before India, drinking a glass of creamy milk at the home farm, and forbidding the new parson to allow his ‘primitive choir’ to sing the psalms.2

Curzon consulted his eldest daughters about the Montacute lease, thinking they might like to use the house after restoration, and ‘trusting to an interest on their part which very speedily evaporated’.3 The choice of Montacute throws an interesting light on Curzon’s architectural tastes. It is usually thought that he could conceive of no finer architecture – apart from the seventeenth-century Mogul – than the Classical Adam style of Kedleston. But although he was something of a Renaissance man in life, in taste he was a medievalist. He loved Italian cities which had been fortunate enough to have ‘no Popes or Renaissance architects to wipe out the beauties of medievalism’. It was terrible, he once told Oscar Browning, ‘to see how Rome suffered in their hands’.4

His taste in English country houses had a similar bias. He never thought that the style of Kedleston, either in architecture or decoration, was ‘congenial to the English character, to English surroundings or to English life’. Hatfield was to him the finest country house, representative of ‘the one truly’ British style that lasted from the second half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign to the death of James I. Although he had only seen Montacute from photographs, he considered it to be the most beautiful of the smaller stately homes of the period, and he was unable to resist the opportunity to restore it when its lease came on the market. After agreeing to the owner’s condition not to alter the main fabric, which he would have ‘regarded as a crime to do’, he embarked on a programme to ‘eliminate the desperate mid-Victorian trappings’ with which he ‘found the place disfigured and disguised’, to preserve or restore all traces of original work in wood or stone, and to collect suitable Elizabethan furniture from the Somerset towns nearby.5 Montacute is one of four great buildings now belonging to the National Trust which were restored by Curzon. It is an unmatched record.

In May 1917, after work on both Kedleston and Montacute had begun, he heard that Lord Ashcombe was selling Bodiam Castle in Sussex. On seeing the place some years earlier, he had fallen ‘an immediate victim to its charm’ and had tried unsuccessfully to buy it. Surrounded by its ‘watery cincture’, the castle was a jewel ‘environed by parkland and … embowered by trees’, a ruin so untouched by the modern world, he wrote, that

it could hardly surprise anyone, were a train of richly clad knights, falcons on their wrists, and their ladies mounted on gaily caparisoned palfreys, suddenly to emerge from the Barbican Gate, for the enjoyment of the chase, or even were the flash of spearheads and the clatter of iron-shod hooves to indicate the exit of a party with more serious intent.6

News of the intended sale greatly excited him. ‘I am only interested in the castle,’ he told a friend, ‘and if I bought it, should repair it and leave it to the nation.’7 But later in the summer he instructed his agents to make an offer of £19,000 for the whole estate, including farmland and a manor house, to prevent the surroundings of the castle from being built over. After taking possession, he arranged for a team of twenty-five men to excavate the building, to drain and dredge the moat and to begin work on the restoration. On occasional free days he motored down from London with an architect to discuss plans to rebuild towers, drawbridges and the barbican.

Even Curzon must have realized that for once he was too busy to undertake the redecoration of all his acquisitions himself. Accordingly, he asked Elinor Glyn to do the job at Montacute. The novelist cannot have enjoyed the task, for she was much happier sitting in front of a fire with a book than standing on step-ladders in draughty Elizabethan rooms. But she agreed to go because she was still in love with Curzon and hoped, after her husband’s death in the autumn of 1915, that he would marry her. She was at Montacute in August of the same year when she wrote her long memoir of his character. She was there decorating when he visited the house several times during the autumn of 1916. And she was there, alone, when she opened The Times of 11 December to see what position her lover had achieved in the new Government: there on page nine was the list of ministers, while opposite on page eight was the announcement of his engagement to Grace Duggan. Elinor reacted by burning Curzon’s hundreds of letters and never spoke to him again. At some stage he followed his usual custom with adulterous correspondence and destroyed all of hers. Elinor’s sister ranted about the ‘waste of time and the bondage’ of decorating Montacute, referred to Curzon as an ‘ungrateful sneaking cad’ and declared that she would never again have faith in noblesse oblige.8

No episode in Curzon’s life is harder to explain than this one. There is no reference to it in his papers, and no evidence exists apart from that of Elinor and her family. That he behaved badly seems impossible to doubt. But that he behaved quite so badly – neither giving her a warning beforehand nor an explanation afterwards – is difficult to believe, because it would have been out of character. Curzon may have been harsh to men, but there is no evidence – with the exception of the Westbourne Terrace mistress in 1891 – that he ever was with women. Pearl Craigie had once described him as ‘always kind to all women – young, or middle-aged or old’, and Elinor herself had called him ‘the most loyal friend to women even after they have ceased to attract him’.9 Why he should have made an exception in this case, and done so with such apparent brutality, is incomprehensible.

In the month that Elinor wrote her memoir of Curzon, her hero began a passionate love affair with Grace Duggan, a handsome American lady of 38 loosely married to a wealthy Argentinian of Irish extraction who died, unmourned by his widow, a few months later. Tall, shapely and eighteen years younger than Curzon, she inspired Lady Desborough’s feline observation – ‘What an odd doll-like look a middle-aged face gets when it is so well massaged as not to show a single line’.10 For a decade she had been living in London, where her husband held the undemanding post of Honorary Attaché at the Argentine Legation, and where she devoted her life to society, fashion and discreet love affairs. Unencumbered by intellectual interests, she epitomized the type of frivolity Curzon most detested.

After meeting Grace at a lunch party given by the Duchess of Rutland, Curzon invited her to dine at the Royal Automobile Club, apparently because the location would excite less gossip than a rendezvous in a restaurant. Grace was somewhat alarmed by the intellect of her new admirer. Candidly admitting her stupidity, she told him she was proud of the way he talked to her and very ‘anxious to understand’. Their affair began a month after the RAC dinner, transforming Grace in her own words from a ‘miserable lonely’ creature to a woman who now understood the meaning of true love. ‘I have unlocked all the doors and shown you my soul,’ she wrote. ‘I want to be pure … teach me to please you in every way, not only in passion – my love for you makes that all too easy.’11

The logistics of the affair were complicated for a few months by Grace’s marriage and for rather longer by Curzon’s sense of propriety. Their assignations usually took place in London, but they also saw each other at Hackwood and at the various country houses she rented for her sons’ school holidays. When he joined her at one of them for Christmas 1915, Grace observed that he looked worn out and worried, unable to eat, unwilling even to talk. But after a summons to the telephone, he returned to the dining-room, bright and beaming, and suddenly broke down. ‘That was Arthur Balfour,’ he said with tears streaming down his face. ‘Gallipoli has been evacuated without a single casualty! … Without one single casualty … and we had feared the most terrible massacre … all those gallant men!’12

In the course of the following year he stayed for weekends with Grace at Trent, a house she rented in Hertfordshire. A fellow guest on one occasion was the novelist George Moore, whose jealousy had been aroused more than twenty years before by Pearl Craigie’s love for Curzon. He may have had a similar problem at Trent. Moore was told to leave before breakfast on Sunday because, as Grace explained to Edward Marsh, he had blasphemed the sacrament in front of her sons (who were Catholics), he had abused Curzon to her face, and he had told her the previous evening that she was a ‘dainty little morsel’, surprisingly inappropriate adjectives for a novelist to choose. A week later Marsh again encountered Curzon at Trent and recorded the Lord Privy Seal’s supervision of a séance at which it was predicted (inaccurately) that he would be one of Britain’s representatives at the peace conference.13

Jealousy, both current and retrospective, was an almost instant ingredient of their love affair. During the first month Grace assured Curzon that she had ended her relationship with her previous lover, Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart, and put his photographs away. But since she was unable to explain her new status, it was difficult to dissuade Crichton-Stuart from coming to see her. Grace’s jealousy was stronger and longer-lasting. She admitted at the beginning that she was excessively jealous of Elinor Glyn, and throughout their marriage she accused him of seeing her – or trying to see her – or of visiting other former mistresses.14 But she never produced evidence that he went to see any of them.

One summer morning in 1916, Grace recounted in her memoirs, Curzon took her to Bodiam, where he described his plans for its restoration, and then to Winchelsea, where he led her to a pew of the lovely medieval church and in ‘the most solemn manner possible’ asked her to marry him. Accuracy is not a strong point of the memoirs – since he had not yet bought Bodiam nor knew whether it was coming up for sale, he is unlikely to have discussed his plans for restoring it – but the elaborate staging sounds authentic, the display of the fairy-tale castle, the pilgrimage to a favourite church, the immaculately formal proposal; had he been younger and fitter, he would no doubt have gone down on bended knee. Having botched his proposal to Mary, he wanted to do the thing properly next time round.

Grace asked for time to consider but she did not need long. At the end of July, twelve months after the start of the affair, she told him she no longer had any qualms, that she wanted to be ‘worthy to mother your children’ and that she would ‘always keep the thought of your dear loved one before me’.15 The effect of this dignified letter was marred by a renewed outburst of hysterical jealousy, but she quickly apologized. In September Curzon told Grace’s mother, Mrs Monroe Hinds, of the engagement, which he wanted to keep secret until November, a year after her husband’s death. In the meantime Grace sailed to the Argentine to sort out her affairs and to give the news to her former mother-in-law.

On 22 September Curzon escorted Grace to Southampton with a mass of books, fruit and flowers, which he proceeded to arrange in her cabin. He also left her a letter, to be opened after he had gone, promising love and fidelity. They had ‘sifted and tested each other’ for more than a year, he told her, ‘and the gold [had] come forth purified from the fire’. While she was away, he assured her, she ‘need have no fear’ that he would have ‘any thought, wish, fancy or hope for anyone’ but her; his life would be one of ‘willing solitude’. This epistle was followed by many others lamenting their separation, missing her ‘fawn like tread’, her kisses that had ‘trembled’ on his lips, and ‘the floating webby hair of the Egyptian’.fn116

The constant professions of love were no doubt genuine, but the aspirations to physical fidelity were probably less wholehearted. At any rate he went several times during her absence to Montacute, where Elinor Glyn was busy decorating. One cannot, of course, know what happened between them, but it would appear that Elinor still considered herself to be his mistress when she opened The Times on that December morning.

Curzon went to eccentric lengths to keep their affair concealed from both contemporaries and posterity. He made Grace return all his letters written before their engagement, presumably so that he could burn them.fn2 And for her voyage he provided her with a stack of envelopes addressed to himself in his own hand, a tactic that must have caused comment in the servants’ hall about the master’s habit of writing letters to himself from Buenos Aires. The affair seems to have been a reasonably well-guarded secret for about a year because during 1916 rumours circulated that both of them were going to marry other people. Grace was apparently matched with Sir Edward Grey, a far more inappropriate spouse even than Curzon: it really would be difficult to find something which the voluptuous socialite had in common with that retiring and high-minded ornithologist, whose first wife had died in the same year as Mary Curzon. ‘I think you are well out of that,’ Grace was told by her fiancé, who considered Grey to be ‘a most bloodless man’.17 Gossip linked Curzon’s name with another wealthy American widow, Ava Astor, who later married Lord Ribblesdale, the widower of his old love Charty. This rumour was reinforced by Curzon uncharacteristically muddling up his monumental correspondence: an envelope addressed to Lady Cunard, intended to convey an answer to an invitation, contained a letter to Ava Astor beginning, ‘My beautiful white swan, I long to press you to my heart’.18 London society was much amused by Lady Cunard’s renditions of the story.

By the autumn the truth was becoming known, mainly because Grace was not good at keeping a secret, although her sister claimed to have guessed from the ‘eloquence’ of Curzon’s eyes. Many people, Mrs Hinds was told by her future son-in-law, had tried to prevent the marriage, but he did not explain who they were or why they had done so. One of them seems to have been Nancy Astor, whom he told two days before the announcement that, in spite of her warnings, he had decided to take ‘the fatal step’.19 Announcing the news to his friends, recorded Lord Crawford, Curzon devoted an ‘eloquent and very touching sentence or two to his undying affection for the late Lady Curzon’, passed on to a ‘very friendly appreciation of Mrs Duggan’ and remarked that she had been maltreated by her husband. The congratulations of Sir Pertab Singh, an eccentric Rajput warrior who spoke the most pidgin of English, gave Curzon particular pleasure. Unconsciously replying in the same idiom, the former Viceroy heard himself saying, ‘Me very pleased, me like very handsome woman’.20

The suggestion that Curzon twice married for money has equally little foundation in both instances. Rumour credited Grace with enormous riches – Lord Cowdray believed she had an income of £60,000 – on account of her extravagant style of living. But much of her magnificence appears to have been run on credit, a concept she never fully understood, and she amassed formidable debts. Like everyone else, Curzon may have thought her richer than she was, but he made no attempt to ascertain the truth: their correspondence shows that they never discussed financial matters before their marriage nor even asked each other questions about their respective wealth.21 The assumption that he used Grace’s fortune to maintain his establishments and to restore his houses is simply false. Both operations remained funded almost entirely by Leiter money. Whatever expectations he may have had, Grace’s reluctant and often tardy contribution to the upkeep of herself and her three children was £400 a month. Considering her natural extravagance, the sum was not vastly generous and represented about a tenth of Curzon’s total expenditure.

The money factor may have been advanced in an attempt to explain Curzon’s decision to marry someone apparently so unsuitable. Crawford found Grace ‘handsome in her florid way’, a woman of opulent charms and a tiresome simper, but ‘a good-hearted creature, admirably groomed and an excellent foil’ to Curzon.22 Others were less charitable. Cynthia Asquith thought her conversation ‘briskly banal’ and predicted that she would be ‘greatly in the way at his debating society parties at Hackwood’.23 On many counts Elinor Glyn would have made a better wife. She was more intelligent, more loyal, more understanding and more interested in his career. But unfortunately she was too old to have more children and she lacked Grace’s sensual attractiveness. These were the determining factors in Curzon’s decision, his desire to produce an heir and his physical adoration of a woman of strong sexuality. He never loved Grace in the way that he had come to love Mary, but his second wife did represent his physical ideal of a woman. Embarrassed by her curvaceousness, Grace asked the painter Sir John Lavery to portray her with a slenderer figure than she possessed. But on seeing the result, Curzon angrily asked the artist, ‘What have you done with her curves?’ He subsequently refused to buy the picture because it showed none of that ‘snowy amplitude’ which he considered to be ‘the greatest beauty of the female form’.24

The wedding, conducted by the Archbishop of York, took place at Lambeth Palace on 2 January 1917. Since marriage did not result in an early pregnancy, Curzon made some enquiries into gynaecological problems and persuaded Grace to have a small operation. Assuring her that it would be quick and painless, he observed that ‘there would not even be any need for chloroform were it not that modesty requires it’. As a prelude to the operation, Grace quarrelled furiously with her husband, accusing him of appearing ‘false and almost cruel’ and of not fully reciprocating her love. Admitting afterwards that the row was not ‘an over-good augury for our future’, she promised to try to trust him a little better.25 What Curzon had done to appear false is not explained in their letters, but the evidence of future scenes suggests that her jealousy was not well-founded.

The operation was a success so far as it went. Grace became pregnant soon afterwards but then suffered the first of a series of miscarriages. Over the next few years she conceived at intervals of four or five months only to miscarry after a few weeks. Curzon became desperate and miserable, asking why Providence plagued him with so many false alarms and misplaced hopes. Their marriage soon settled into a most unsatisfactory pattern. Grace underwent regular treatment, in England until the end of the war and afterwards on the Continent, then returned home, became pregnant and sat at Hackwood with nothing to do except smoulder with jealousy at the thought of how her husband might be spending his time in London. Taking one day in August 1917 as an example, he divided his morning between the War Cabinet and an Allied conference, prepared a speech over a quick and solitary lunch, returned to the Cabinet, looked in again at the conference, spent three hours at the House of Lords during which he delivered his speech, and ended up at a dinner for the French delegation at Downing Street.26 At some stage in this schedule he found time to write a letter to his wife, as he always did on any day when they were apart.

Grace managed to convince herself that her husband found time during his fourteen-hour working days to see Elinor Glyn or another lover. Once, when she heard that Elinor was in London, she assumed that they had arranged to meet. Observing that she was incorrigible, Curzon assured her he had kept his word not to communicate with his discarded mistress since their marriage. Grace declined to believe him and pronounced, as usual without evidence, that he was neither honest nor true. At other times, however, she accepted his assurances, enabling them to spend a few tranquil days together, only to wind herself up for a fresh row when he came down for the following weekend. Exhausted by ill health and overwork, Curzon found this tactic particularly wearying. ‘Do not let me come down’, he once pleaded, ‘only to quarrel with me and make me miserable.’ On one occasion she accepted the plea, refusing to let him celebrate their second wedding anniversary in his own home. Her unpredictable moods, no doubt exacerbated by the miscarriages and the boredom of her Hackwood solitude, bewildered her husband, who could not understand why she insisted on bickering about the past. ‘We can both be happy’, he told her, ‘if we are not always reverting to a past which has perished and gone.’27

One of the few things the couple had in common, a taste for stylish entertaining, was denied them by the war. In March 1917 they celebrated Irene’s coming of age with a small party at Trent which the press transformed into a great ball in London reported under the headline ‘Curzon dances while Europe burns’.28 He was highly sensitive to the charge of his family ostentatiously enjoying themselves in wartime and angered his elder daughters, who had felt ignored by their father since his marriage, by criticizing Nancy Astor for inviting them to the theatre. But he thought it justified to provide less frivolous entertainments, such as hosting a concert of Belgian musicians performing voluntarily in recognition of his services to Belgium,fn3 or giving a reception for American officers early in 1918. He also provided meals and guests for the visits of the Queen of the Belgians, and staged a memorable ceremony for her husband. Since it was impossible to hold Encaenia at Oxford, he organized the proceedings in Carlton House Terrace. Dressed in his Chancellor’s robes and preceded by proctors, macebearers and other university dignitaries, he processed upstairs to his drawing-room, watched by a select audience, and solemnly awarded the Belgian King an honorary degree. As Crawford observed, few others could have carried the thing off with such verve, aplomb and self-satisfaction.29

Curzon’s ability to maintain standards at his dinner table was also noted by Crawford. An ‘immense luncheon’ at Carlton House Terrace in November 1917 was served by a large staff and presided over by Grace, draped in her most fashionable clothes, while the other women, who included Lady Salisbury, were dressed ‘like housekeepers’. A large dinner the following June was ‘an immense and opulent spread’ which Crawford thought must have consumed twelve months’ rations of butter. It was a peculiar party, consisting of sixty men, most of them leading politicians, and a small number of selected women. The guests whose wives had not been invited were extremely annoyed by this apparent slight, especially Midleton, whom Curzon had not invited to his house since pre-India days twenty years before. As Balfour remarked to Ettie Desborough, it appeared ‘strange to take the trouble to have a dinner for sixty people in these difficult days in order to offend thirty of them’.30 Curzon’s talent for misjudging human reactions was not dimmed by age.