Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power - Softcover

Renton, Claudia

 
9781101872567: Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
Softcover
ISBN 10: 110187256X ISBN 13: 9781101872567
Verlag: VINTAGE, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The three dazzlingly beautiful, wildly rich Wyndham sisters, part of the four hundred families that made up Britain's ruling class, at the center of cultural and political life in late-Victorian/Edwardian Britain. Here are their complex, idiosyncratic lives; their opulent, privileged world; their romantic, roiling age.

They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men--or men of great prominence...Mary Wyndham, wilder than her wild brothers; lover of Wilfrid Blunt, confidante of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (the Balfour Declaration); married to Hugo, Lord Elcho; later the Countess of Wemyss...Madeline Adeane, the quietest and happiest of the three...and Pamela, spoiled, beautiful, of the three, possesser of the true talent, wife of the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey (later Viscount Grey), who took Britain into the First World War.
     They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square, and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age," designed, in 1876, by the visionary architect, Philip Webb; the model for Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton.
     They were bred with the pride of the Plantagenets and raised with a fierce belief that their family was exceptional. They avoided the norm at all costs and led the way to a blending of aristocracy and art. Their group came to be called The Souls, whose members from 1885 to the 1920s included the most distinguished politicians, artists, and thinkers of their time.
     In Those Wild Wyndhams, Claudia Renton gives us a dazzling portrait of one of England's grandest, noblest families. Renton captures, with nuance and depth, their complex wrangling between head and heart, and the tragedy at the center of all their lives as the privilege and bliss of the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian era, the Great War, and the passing of an opulent world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CLAUDIA RENTON graduated from Trinity College, Oxford, with a First in History; she was awarded the Gibbs Book Prize for History. Before becoming a barrister, Renton was an actress in television and theater. Those Wild Wyndhams was awarded the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize. She lives in London with her husband and son.

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One

“Worse Than 100 Boys”

The eldest daughter of the portrait, Mary Constance Wyndham, was born to Percy and Madeline in London in summer’s dog days on 3 August 1862 and privileged from birth. Percy, called “the Hon’ble P” by his friends, was the favored younger son of the vastly wealthy Lord Leconfield of Petworth House in Sussex, a county some fifty miles southwest of London. Percy’s occupation was holding down a family parliamentary seat in the north of England as the Conservative Member for West Cumberland. He had a kind heart and the family traits of an uncontrollable temper and an inability to dissemble. It was true of him, as was said of his father, that he had “no power of disguising his feelings, if he liked one person more than another it was simply written on his Countenance.”

Percy’s Irish wife, Madeline, was different. Known in infancy as “the Sunny Baby,” she was renowned for her expansive warmth. “She is an Angel . . . She has the master-key of life—love—which unlocks everything for her and makes one feel her immortal,” said Georgiana Burne-Jones, who, like her husband, Edward, was among Madeline’s closest friends. Yet in courtship Percy had spoken much of Madeline’s reserve—“you sweet mystery,” he called her, one of very few to recognize that her personality seemed to be shut up in different boxes, to some of which only she held the key. Madeline, rumored to be descended from French royalty, had a romantic, disreputable ancestry: breeding, but no money. She and Percy had married for love. The substantial dowry Madeline had brought to the marriage was provided for her by her doting father-in-law, Lord Leconfield.

At the time of Mary’s birth, Percy and Madeline were twenty-seven years old, two years married, and lived an elegant, leisured life befitting the son and daughter-in-law of one of England’s richest men. They divided their time between stately Petworth, Cockermouth Castle—a grandly named but ramshackle family property in Percy’s constituency given to them by his father for their use—and fashionable Belgrave Square, at no. 44, where Mary was born. Madeline’s mother, Pamela, Lady Campbell, came over from Ireland for the birth, and during Madeline’s labor sat anxiously with Percy in a little room off her daughter’s bedroom. The labor was short—barely four and a half hours—and difficult. Lady Campbell had threatened to call her own daughter “Rhinocera” when she was born because of her incredible size. Mary, at birth, weighed an eyewatering eleven pounds. “The size and hardness of the baby’s head (for which I am afraid I am to blame),” Percy told his sister Fanny with apologetic pride, had required the use of forceps to bring the child into the world. “Of course we should have liked a boy but I am very grateful to God that matters have gone so well,” Percy concluded.

Percy and Madeline’s daughter held within her person the blood of Ireland and England—a physical embodiment of the vexed union between the kingdoms. Ireland was not, officially, a colony: it had shared a crown with England since King Henry VIII’s time. Yet since 1800, when its Parliament was abolished and its MPs sent, outnumbered, to England’s Westminster Parliament (a result of the abortive 1798 Irish Rebellion, in which Madeline’s grandfather Lord Edward Fitzgerald had died a nationalist hero and martyr), Ireland had been little more than an English satellite. In 1844 Parliament debated the motion “Ireland is occupied, not governed.” Benjamin Disraeli, writer and ambitious fledgling MP, described “a starving population, an absentee aristocracy . . . an alien church, and . . . the weakest executive in the world.” The novelist was exercising some artistic license—by 1873 only 20 percent of Ireland’s aristocracy were technically absentee—but fundamentally his depiction was and remained true. By the time Mary was a child, the republican Fenian Brotherhood was conducting a terrorist campaign in London. Instinctively iconoclastic, raised on stories of her rebellious great-grandfather and his French Catholic wife (known as “la Belle Pamela” for her beauty, and widely recognized as the illegitimate daughter of the royal revolutionary Duc d’Orléans and his fiercely intelligent mistress Madame de Genlis, a disciple of Rousseau’s), Mary’s childhood sympathies were with the oppressed and not the oppressors. She and her younger brother George—so she said later—were “the Fenians of the family.”

The harum-scarum hoyden was—like the age that bred her—hopeful, endlessly curious, entranced by novelty and change. At the time of Mary’s birth, Britain’s explorers were expanding the boundaries of the known world, their imperialists extending Britain’s governance over it. In Africa, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke discovered the Nile’s source. The British Crown was declared official ruler of India by parliamentary Act, wresting control from the East India Trading Company, which had hitherto governed the continent. The British were a “race girdling the earth,” trumpeted the radical, imperialist politician Charles Dilke in his best-selling Greater Britain. The British mission was civilizing and Christian. Yet the mid-Victorian era’s unquestioning faith had been seriously shaken by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Evolutionary theory challenged everything an evangelical nation had been taught to believe. Mary, who as a child had fossils shown and explained to her by her father, was born into a world ebullient in its capacity for exploration and invention but, in post-Darwinian terms, questing and unsure.

As Mary progressed from infancy to childhood, the landscape of modern London formed about her: Joseph Bazalgette built the great river walks along the Thames known as the Victoria and Albert Embankments (their purpose: to cover the new sewage system that meant the Thames was no longer the city’s chamber pot). The telephone and the first traffic light (short lived, it was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868, only to explode in 1869, gravely wounding the policeman operating it) were inventions of her early youth. Inside that Parliament, however, little had changed. The presence of a band of “Radical” politicians seeking social change did not diminish the fact that the patriarchy was dominant. Stringent property qualifications meant that in the early 1860s, only one in five males could vote. The 1867 Reform Act, which extended the franchise to the wealthiest of the urban male working classes, was known popularly as “the Leap in the Dark.” In fact it was fundamentally limited: but the nickname demonstrates how the political elite feared democracy as a gateway to mob rule. Women could not vote at all. Upper-class women could not even appear in public without a chaperone.

Mary was the child of a love match—on one side, at least. It had been a coup de foudre for shy, crotchety Percy when he met dark, voluptuous Madeline Campbell in Ireland as 1860 dawned. Madeline was sensuous, earthy, physical. “People in her presence feel like trees or birds at their best, singing or flourishing according to their own natures with an easy exuberance . . . she has a peculiar gift for making this world glorious to all who meet her in it,” said her son George, who never shied away from the Oedipal undertones of his relationship with his mother.

Percy and Madeline were engaged in London in July, and married in Ireland in October. During a brief...

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Verlag
VINTAGE
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
110187256X
ISBN 13 
9781101872567
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland

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