The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Read online

  Her Majesty’s minister plenipotentiary for Tuscany was Henry Edward Fox, soon to be fourth Baron Holland. Fox’s wife was the attractive and flirtatious Augusta—“decidedly under three feet,” the diarist Thomas Creevey once reported, “and the very nicest little doll or plaything I ever saw.” It would be difficult to invent two people less likely to entrance the prickly and suspicious Morgan, who knew very well that Fox had learned of him and his political disasters through Ellice.

  The author and socialite Lady Blessington drew a brief sketch of Fox as he was in those days: “Mr. Henry Fox possesses the talent for society in an eminent degree. He is intelligent, lively, and très-spirituel; seizes the point of ridicule in all whom he encounters at a glance and draws them out with a tact that is very amusing to the lookers on.”

  At any such meeting, Morgan was much more likely to be the butt of the conversation than an amused onlooker. Though he wore his hair in a dandified center parting and clung loyally to the blue and yellow favored by the Regency period, he was too short, too pugnacious, and far too provincial to be of any interest to such great men as Fox. Lady Blessington, who was really rather a good journalist, had noticed some years earlier the fascination the British had for the Florentine portrait sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini:

  Every Lord and Commoner who has passed through Florence during the last few years has left here a memorial of his visit; and every lady who has ever heard that she had a good profile (and Heaven knows how seldom the assertion was true) has left a model of it on the dusty shelves of Bartolini . . . Elderly gentlemen with double chins resembling the breast of the pelican, requiring a double portion of marble in their representation . . . portly matrons too are ranged in rows with busts as exuberant as those that Rubens loved to lavish on his canvas . . . young ladies with compressed waists and drooping ringlets, looking all like sisters . . . and young gentlemen with formal faces and straight hair confront one at every step.

  Bartolini stored these effigies on shelves in his studios, and they were inspected in much the same way as the work of Michelangelo. They were on the tourist list. Mr. Thomas and his wife belonged much more to that world of nameless and dusty nonentities than anything suggested by the glamour of the great palaces. Georgina later wrote of the Florence years:

  My father disliked Society—he loved his home; my mother on the contrary liked Society. My father did not like women to wear low necked dresses; my mother on the contrary wished to be like other people. My father’s opinion was that eleven o’clock at night was a respectable hour for leaving parties; this was the hour at which parties began. He obliged my mother to come home just at the time when she was beginning to amuse herself. My father would not call on this lady or that lady, or visit Madame A because she had a lover, or Madame B because she received Madame A. He would not even set foot at the English Embassy while Lord Holland was Ambassador, because gossip was afloat concerning Lady Holland. He seemed possessed with a passion for virtue, and he had been nicknamed at Florence “the policeman of Society.”

  This is as good a portrait of Morgan as can be found, but Georgina added another very telling sentence: “I had inherited to the full his mania to keep his reputation inviolate. I bristled with virtue.”

  When she was six years old, she had an early opportunity to support her father’s reproach of local morals. In 1843 a penniless young artist named George Frederick Watts arrived in the city. Quite by chance on the boat from Marseilles, he had met Edward Ellice’s brother, who at once effected an introduction to the Hollands. The policeman of society and his little sausage-curled lieutenant soon learned that Watts was the son of a man who had fallen so low as to be a piano tuner. To their complete amazement, Morgan and Georgina saw Watts being taken up by the Hollands, commissioned to paint portraits by the fabulously rich Demidovs, and the darling of all who met him.

  While this may have secretly impressed Georgina as a striking example of how fame worked, Morgan had not come to Florence to have anything to do with art. The adoration of Watts, who was not only thin but unutterably gloomy and to many outsiders effete in the extreme, left him speechless. Augusta Holland commissioned a portrait by the artist in which she wore a chapeau de paille—“some lady having in a joke put one of the country hats on her head,” as a smitten Edward Ellice reported to Lady Holland in London. On New Year’s Day, 1844, Augusta presented the gangly Watts with a gold watch, specially commissioned from Geneva, murmuring, as she placed the chain around his neck, “We not only bind you to us, we chain you.” It was immediately interpreted as the sign of a liaison. Morgan fingered his own Warwickshire timepiece from Messrs. Vale and Rotherham and reflected bitterly on the levels to which society had sunk.

  The reason her father gave for fleeing London—his wife’s ill health—was a common euphemism for poverty. If Georgina was ever worried about her mother, events were soon to calm her mind. At the Villa Capponi Louisa had another three children in quick succession: Emily, Florence, and the baby of the family, Apsley. Though the heat did not suit her and she never adapted successfully to having such a quiverful of children, she was as healthy as a horse. She lived to be eighty-three and was on this earth longer than her husband and her eldest daughter.

  More sociable than Morgan in her timid, haphazard way, Louisa made the best she could of Florence. When Georgina was old enough, she took the child with her to the Cascine Gardens, where every day the bon ton gathered to gossip while the more gallant and amorous gentlemen threaded through the mass of carriages bearing messages and making their salutes. This morning concourse was, Georgina learned, to be compared favorably to Rotten Row or the Bois du Boulogne. When the weather was hospitable enough for walking, Louisa might descend from her carriage and stroll with her daughter under the trees by the banks of the Arno. There she would point out, not without envious longing, the roofs of the great houses on the opposite bank.

  From May onward the town would be refreshed by new faces, birds of passage making the grand tour. They were eagerly welcomed by the expatriates. What was happening in London? Was it true that rain and a hundred thousand special constables had turned back the revolutionary Chartist mob—and was Mr. Gladstone truly one of those who was sworn in? Was it also true that railway speeds now regularly touched forty miles an hour, without hurt to the internal organs of the passengers? And plum—was that really a color a lady of fashion might adopt? Sometimes the tedium of the daily corso would be broken by the distant sighting of some scandalous liaison in its early stages, or whispered news of ruination in some other form, like gambling. These intrigues Georgina dutifully reported to her father. She showed an aptitude for similar detective work all her life—not much given to self-analysis, she was a master of the dossier method of investigating others. It was exciting and she was seldom short of material.

  To a small girl groomed by her father to find outrage in everything, there was the additional frisson of the Austrian occupation. One afternoon an Italian lawyer absentmindedly spat on the ground while a patrol passed. The Austrian officer at once dismounted and, having the culprit pinned to the wall, ordered his troopers to line up and one by one spit in the unfortunate man’s face. In 1851 there was an even more shocking case. Two young brothers named Mather were following an Austrian military band and darted across the road between it and the accompanying troop of horses. Two officers spurred their mounts and cut one of the brothers to the ground.

  This was the sort of story to set Morgan bristling with indignation. Yet there was a diminishing return in feeding her father such tidbits. She gradually understood what it meant to be part of his police force. The fate of Charles Mather raised disgust and indignation all the way back to the floor of the House of Commons. However, Morgan’s contempt for other people was quite unspecific—he was not minded to like the unfortunate Mather any more than the man who had struck him. In his eyes the whole world was out of step. When Georgina was very young, her father’s vanity reinforced her own childish sense of superiority. To be a Thomas
was to be a thing apart, not different from but better than all the rest. As she grew up, the unwelcoming house and the lack of invitations from others gradually began to cast doubt in her. The possibility existed that there was something seriously wrong with them all.

  She was given tutors—a long roll call of them, not one of whom made any great impression or sowed the seeds of inspiration. Georgina learned to play the piano and completed a conventional and undemanding schooling in reading and writing. She once remarked, “I am sure if I had but studied Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing I should have made a great artist.” There is not the slightest nod here to the treasure house of art Florence was. She was intelligent but unlearned. The one gift she did possess she had been born with—a quite remarkably clear soprano voice.

  It was said in later life that her mother took special interest in her singing. This may have indicated to some that Louisa herself was musical, but this was not the case. Every girl child of that time was taught to sing, in the same way she was taught to brush her hair, or show deference to her elders, or any of a hundred other little things. Singing was a way of moving from the schoolroom to the drawing room, and a young girl’s voice was merely a further expression of the taste exhibited in the family’s choice of furniture, its display of pictures and china. The role a good-mannered girl had in a family was almost too obvious to mention. A boy might, within reason, do as he liked and go where he would. No one expected much sense from a boy. For that he was sent away to school. His sister was domesticated as soon as was practicable. Singing was an outward demonstration of her complicity in the affairs of the family. She was in that sense her mother’s child, an expression of her mother’s taste and sensibility.

  What is striking about Georgina’s childhood is its extraordinary tedium. Pleasures a young girl of her class might take for granted in an English setting simply did not exist for her—like picnics, visits to relatives, parties, river excursions, or a trip to the seaside. She had some idiosyncrasies that stayed with her all her life. From her youngest days she exhibited a mild mania for collecting. She cut out armorial bearings from magazines and pasted them into books. She was among the earliest collectors of stamps. She made lists of Important Things. She kept a diary and recorded the uninspiring events of her day in scrupulous detail. This suggests a secretive and lonely child, but it is more likely that the Villa Capponi days were simply very long. We know from more famous Florence residents—from the Brownings, for example—that in the three summer months that began in June, the heat became enervating and a torpor settled over everything. Even a shaded garden became too hot to endure, and those families who could afford it moved up into the hills for air and the chance of a breeze. Once there, improving sight-seeing and visits to hilltop monasteries were scheduled for five in the morning. So, to be a child in the stiflingly hot summers, even with siblings, became a little like being the inmate of a prison.

  Morgan had nothing to say to any of his children—they in turn were terrified to open their mouths in his presence. The rooms of the villa were extensive, there were servants in plenty, but there was nothing much to do. The only outdoor pleasure Georgina shared with her father was his passion for gardening, which he undertook in the winter months. She showed early on a very un-Latin enthusiasm for pets, especially dogs, treating them as little people, more loyal and certainly more loving than the two-legged inhabitants of the villa. Late in life she put this feeling into a letter: “I feel a horror for exaggerated love or friendship. It’s just too well demonstrated to me that when the moment comes that one asks for something, or has need of something, the response is not worth a biscuit.”

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  As she grew into womanhood, Georgina became nothing like the submissive little miss of the conventional fashion plate. Nor was she modeled on the enigmatic girls who decorated Leech cartoons in Punch with their smooth wings of hair and ultra-straight noses. The air of obedient calm required of young mid-Victorian women was quite foreign to her, and she had little chance to learn by emulation. Morgan saw to that. But if her upbringing had turned out rackety and unhappy, great changes were in the offing. Though he had lingered there a very long time, her father had always seen Florence as a makeshift arrangement, and its usefulness to him was as good as exhausted. The prime reason for moving on was right there under his nose. Georgina was no longer a child. In her adolescent form she was someone’s future bride. There was much to be accomplished before this could come about, not least the family’s reconciliation to society. Morgan would stir himself to exhibit his daughter to her best advantage, and then she herself could crown the family’s fortunes by marrying well. The two things hung together.

  This realization gave her power, perhaps more than she knew how to handle. The mystical writer Edward Maitland made a shrewd remark to Georgina when she was twenty. His opinion was colored a little by two things, both of them romantic. To begin with, he had fled the family home in Brighton, where his father was perpetual curate of St. James’s Chapel. His rebellion took him to the California gold rush, and thence to Australia, where he had married and buried his wife within a twelvemonth. Maitland saw something in Georgina that her father had failed to notice: “I am but one of numbers who would be delighted to see your gifts and prowess winning success; and feel mystified at the waste of them, when we know that with better management it might have been otherwise. You yourself will see it some day, when your stormy youth is spent, and the boy—which you really are now—has developed into the woman which you are only in form.”

  This insight struck at the heart of the Florence years. All the other Thomas children grew up to be models of dullness. Georgina’s brothers had upper lips as stiff as any in Victorian fiction. Her sisters were dutiful and long-suffering. That she was so different suggests a relationship to her father very far from the Victorian norm of duty and respect or, as was the case with her siblings, fear. It was as if she alone challenged Morgan, returning his systematic cruelties with some of her own. What was hoydenish in her as a child, running about the gardens of the Capponi in petticoats, changed as she grew only a little older into more dangerous forms of recklessness. If Morgan had hoped to crush her, things were turning out very differently. Not at all to his wishes in the matter, he had raised a rebel.

  A few years later she explained her parents’ expectations of her: “[They] never wearied of indoctrinating me with the belief that an eldest daughter should marry to the advantage of her younger sisters, from the point of view that if the oldest sister married a rich old man with a title, her siblings would find matches that were rich, young, and titled.”

  Many a diary hid the same thoughts. A beautiful young woman was, whether she liked it or not, a commodity; and a good marriage was one in which there was a significant amount of value added. Fifteen was not too young an age to start thinking of these things. Sooner or later she would have to come out in society—was that really to be at the edge of the crowd at the Casa Feroni, or mingling with the demimondaines at some sumptuously vulgar rout given by the Demidovs? Or was she instead to wait for a wandering Cambridge graduate or adventurous parson to turn up outside the Hôtel du Nord just as she had done, capture her in the street, and carry her off back to England? Her father’s incorrigible vanity would never settle for that.

  Morgan’s thinking was way ahead of his daughter’s. Sitting in state in his study, aloof and remote, he had begun to ponder a quite spectacular coup. It came upon him slowly like a gathering religious conviction, and once in place nothing would budge it. The details were perfectly simple and seemed to him to brook no abridgment. He would sell her to just that kind of man he most abhorred, and of a class from which he felt himself so bitterly excluded. It was his intention that Georgina should not marry for less than £10,000 a year.

  The first time he ever spoke these thoughts out loud there must have been a peal of nervous hilarity at the breakfast table, followed by a plea from Louisa not to repeat them outside the house. The sum involved was ridiculous
—to have that much income, a prospective suitor would need to be in possession of at least an earldom. (The letter Lord Conyngsby delivered to Victoria on the day Georgina was born was in fact an offer from the dying King of exactly that amount.) Louisa had grown used to her husband’s erratic behavior. Should this new scheme ever get about among her friends at the Cascine Gardens, they would be ruined socially. Louisa was dutiful and submissive to a fault, but even with her limited knowledge of the world she knew they were regarded as Florence’s nobodies. Ten years of Morgan’s disdain had done its work. A £10,000-a-year man for the plump and argumentative Georgina was going to be as easy to find and trap as the Emperor of all the Russias or the Bey of Algiers.

  It had, of course, occurred to both of them, ever since Georgina was a baby, that a shrewd marriage might greatly increase their own social position. That was the way the world was, and that was how what Bagehot called “the cousinhood of aristocracy” came into existence in the first place. Unfortunately, neither Morgan nor Louisa had gifts to bestow on the world. They had no friends of any significance, corresponded with no one, engaged in none of the controversies then in vigorous debate. When he wasn’t gardening, Morgan kept up a desultory study of Dante, presumably for the pleasure of seeing sinners punished. Of the Victorian England he had deserted at its birth, he knew next to nothing. Yet the campaign to marry off Georgina to such advantage to them all had to be fought in London, at balls and levees or wherever beautiful young women were set out in display.

  In Morgan’s day Almack’s Assembly Rooms had been the ground on which the greatest battles were fought. Controlled by the seven super-rich patronesses who managed the guest lists, it was said by the diarist Captain Gronow that in his time only five of the three hundred officers of the Foot Guards were admitted. (He happened to be one of them, which was the point of the story.) Though Morgan believed persons of lesser rank were acceptable nowadays, the truth was he had no clear idea how to set about promoting his daughter. Twelve fatal years in Florence among the Waterloo veterans and hapless exiles had done nothing to educate him otherwise. A local example of the old school was a man named St. John (“a scion of a noble house”) who wagered an Austrian cavalry officer to follow him wherever he went through the city. After a hectic chase, St. John put his pony at a parapet of a bridge and leaped forty feet into the dried-up riverbed, killing the pony outright. The Austrian declined the invitation to follow. St. John was the kind of man Morgan was looking for, only with money and in England.