Читать книгу A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only] - Brian Thompson, Brian Thompson - Страница 10

In the autumn of 1857, Morgan and his brothers changed their name to Treherne. The battle of Poitiers was now 500 years old and the family was able to show that the two surnames had been interchangeable down the years that followed Sir Hugh’s adventures in France. They were merely reclaiming what was theirs by right and reverting to a more profoundly ancestral form of address. From Morgan’s point of view, there was an element of the ruse de guerre in the alteration. Like his forebear he had gone away one person and (he hoped) come home another. A change of name was a partial cancellation of all his earlier mistakes. While it might please his eldest brother to stand contemplating his Lletymawr estates as a Treherne, it did Morgan no harm either to lord it over his Sussex neighbours under the new title. In a way, it was as good as an elevation.

There was more of a problem how to identify the new Trehernes when they came up from the country to London. They were not rich, nor were they well connected. Families – brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts – usually made a simple enough matrix for the giving and receiving of hospitality, as did work, or political allegiance. None of these helped describe the Sussex Trehernes. To go about at all in society meant they had to have some circle of acquaintance and it is probable that the greater part of it was provided by Georgina. When carriages were summoned and Georgina parted regretfully from her hosts after what she hoped was an irresistible contribution to the evening, the question arose: who was she? Parsed, this meant who were her parents? Mr Treherne himself had no cronies, political or otherwise, and belonged to no clubs. He was estranged from his own family. His wife was a dumpy and unfashionable lady happier when she was in the country. If it was asked what this family wanted, what advantage it was trying to seek (a perfectly understandable enquiry) no easy answer was forthcoming. The change of name might indicate that Morgan wished to be considered Welsh but he would have been bitterly disappointed to have given this impression.

When Thackeray’s The Snobs of England was published ten years earlier it made the whole country anxious. Some of those who read the work in serial form wrote in to ask whether they could be accounted snobs and Thackeray cheerfully included the details of their lives in his next instalment. How far did a man like the new Mr Treherne come under the title? The word derives from Cambridge undergraduate slang in use during Morgan’s time at Trinity. In the narrow sense, the Welshman was indeed a ‘snob’ as much as he was a ‘tassell’ – his parentage bridged town and gown. Thackeray’s extension of the meaning to include anyone wishing to be something he was not was useful in principle but applied so indiscriminately by him that Morgan and many others might have wondered whether anyone at all in society could escape the term. One of the small miracles of literature is how Thackeray escaped the crude and gluey morass that was The Snobs of England to begin in the very next year his literary masterpiece, Vanity Fair. There he devoted a famous chapter to how to live well on nothing a year. The new tone is more realistic and generous: ‘The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on nothing a year, we use the word “nothing” to signify something unknown – meaning, simply, that we don’t know how the gentleman in question defrays the expenses of his establishment.’

This describes Morgan’s situation when seen about town in London or Brighton. His innate anxiety led him to claim more than he possessed, in wealth as well as rank, but he was not as fatuous as some of Thackeray’s more helpless victims. Nor was he in the slightest way ingratiating. He paid no man his loyalty. If the question turned on whether he was a gentleman at all, most Victorians would have concluded that he was. They might have gone on to say that he was not a very pleasant one, nor a very distinguished example of the breed. That was beside the point. Morgan’s desire was not so much to remake himself in a different image, but to consolidate what little rank he had. In that respect, he had gone away one person and come back as another.

His daughter was the immediate beneficiary of the new surname and the first to give it lustre. In October of 1857, Miss Georgina Treherne was included in the cast list of a private musical extravaganza devised in honour of the Duchess of Cambridge, called endearingly Hearts and Tarts. The performance took place at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, the home of Lady Marion Alford, a widow in her forties who kept up a lively artistic and political salon. The Queen of Hearts was played by Princess Mary of Cambridge, whom Queen Victoria always found so wanting for her terrible size, her dirty ball gowns and the racy company she kept. The Princess had been childhood friends with Constance Villiers, which explained her presence in the cast, as well as that of Lady Villiers’s father, Lord Clarendon, who acted as stage manager. His fellow Minister, Lord Granville, played the Knave of Hearts and had as his father in the play the newly succeeded Duke of Manchester. In fact, only Georgina was without noble connection. Princess Mary, perhaps confused by the surname and the obscurity of her background, remembered her afterwards as a handsome young lady from Cornwall.

How had Georgina come to be in such august company? It pleased her in later years to describe herself as racked by shyness but of all her fantasies this rings least true. She was certainly very pretty – the Pre-Raphaelite Frederick Sandys considered her one of the most beautiful women in England (though in this and practically every other area, his was a very unreliable opinion). It was her voice that gave her the entrée. There was a very long-established tradition of musical entertainment in great houses. If you were well-bred and could sing, you could do something very useful for your hostess and add to the charm of the occasion. It did not much matter if people talked through your rendition of some touching ballad – you were there to see and be seen. And it was a wonderful means of social introduction. At some of the grander functions, duchesses filled the first chairs and the audience were ranged back in strict order of precedence. Invitations to these evenings – when they took place in the London high season – might exceed a hundred. The better houses had music rooms, but in other places the company crammed into drawing-rooms and sat in bundles on the stairs. If there was not much glamour in it for the old, for the young it was exciting. For their mothers, it was a battleground.

Constance Villiers liked and remembered Georgina for her performance on this particular evening at Ashridge. Hidden in the playbill is the clue to how she may have come to take part. The prompt for Georgina’s performance in Hearts and Tarts was a wonderful old piece of Regency flotsam, Freddy Byng. It may have been his sponsorship that got Georgina into such august company. Poodle Byng (who was given his nickname by the Prince Regent because of the tight blond curls he wore as a young man) flits in and out of Victorian memoirs like an elderly and homeless bat. It was the Poodle who so scandalised the Court in the first months of Victoria’s reign when she was still considered a green girl by playing cards and making eyes at her, until he was gently shown the door. The fifth son of Viscount Torrington, he was fond of very young women and is said to have married his mother’s chambermaid. He seems to have travelled light in Victorian society and been tolerated in the houses of the rich for his manners and gentle heart – because he knew everybody and was so very old. His only official duty anyone could remember had come in 1824 when he was given the job of escorting the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands about London as a representative of the Crown. He did the best he could to amuse these two monarchs but could not stop them dying of influenza two months after they arrived. Acting with unusual decisiveness, he had them embalmed in brandy and shipped back to the South Pacific.

Byng seems to have been genuinely besotted by Georgina. Three years on, Thackeray, who knew the Poodle rather better than he knew Georgina, surprised her buying a wedding ring in Cockspur Street. Later in the afternoon, he ran across the decrepit old man and broke his heart by saying, ‘Poodle, you have lost your singing bird. Miss Treherne has married some other fellow.’ Poodle Byng found her when she first came out and introduced her to those of his many friends who spent part of their time and wealth on private concerts and recitals. If he was amorous, he was also kindly: after blandishments from Georgina, he helped get her parents presented at court in 1858. Even Morgan could see the use of a sponsor like that, however old and decrepit he might be.

Georgina at twenty possessed an enchanting and very idiosyncratic soprano voice (her diction was considered exceptionally clear and distinct) and what she lacked in manners and sophistication she made up for by being seen everywhere. If she was coquettish – and this could certainly be levelled against her – then it was all very artless and inconsequential. Suspicious mothers and society hostesses alike were quickly reassured that this was no Becky Sharp, no girl on the make. She was if anything naïve to a fault. Her dearest friends were the people she met last night. They were replaced without embarrassment by those to whom she was presently talking. So, for example, early on she spoke of Lord Lansdowne as a dear friend and ally. The fourth Marquis was an Under Secretary of State for foreign affairs and a political scalp worth having. Whether he could separate Georgina from any of half a hundred young women he might have met under similarly brief circumstances was quite another matter. Georgina was beginning to exhibit her father’s ability to improve the facts. She had only to be in a noble house once to affect a lifelong intimacy with its owners. The most casual kind word addressed to her was an affirmation of undying love. She was odd like this and had a number of other social faults, including a garrulity that sometimes led her into indiscretion. She was not a girl to keep a secret.

Poodle Byng soon found her an appropriate milieu in which to shine. This was at Little Holland House, the former dower house of Lady Holland. After her death it had been purchased by Mr and Mrs Thoby Prinsep. Prinsep was an amiable and elderly retired official of the India Office and his wife Sara one of the famously beautiful, famously eccentric Pattle sisters. Georgina was specially delighted to discover there someone she could claim to know from the Florence years. The last time she had seen him was in the Casa Feroni, when she was six. The principal adornment of Little Holland House was her father’s most reviled artist, George Frederick Watts.

Watts was now forty-one years old. He was the centrepiece of all Mrs Prinsep’s bustling social energies, a position he had more or less proposed for himself. ‘He came for three days; he stayed thirty years,’ his patroness observed dryly. The salon he helped her create included many of the Pre-Raphaelites, and figures such as Tennyson and Thackeray, Dickens and Caryle, but it was really given over to Watts’ enigmatic genius. George du Maurier left a description of Sara and her sisters – ‘Elgin marbles with dark eyes’ as Ruskin once called them – handing out tea to their guests with almost eastern obeisance:

Watts, who is a grand fellow, is their painter in ordinary: the best part of the house has been turned into his studio and he lives there and is worshipped till his manliness hath almost departed, I should fancy … After the departure of the visitors we dined; without dress coats – anyhow, and it was jolly enough – Watts in red coat and slippers. After dinner, up in the music room Watts stretched himself at full length on the sofa, which none of the women take when he is there. People formed a circle, and I being in good voice sang to them the whole evening, the cream of Schubert and Gordigiani – c’était très drôle, the worship I got …

This was a different kind of ambiance altogether from Ashridge and du Maurier’s breezy insouciance captures it exactly. The house itself was as good as in the country, removed by trees and meadows from the harsher, more unforgiving light that shone on soirées in Grosvenor Square or Belgravia. It was a low and sprawling building, the interiors decorated by Watts’s frescoes. Some rooms boasted wonderful blue ceilings and others were hung with Indian rugs and cloths. Behind a door covered in red baize lay the hallowed centre of the house, the source of its energies, Watts’s studio. For Georgina it was a perfect stage, non-political, gossipy and faintly loose. There was enough oddity already existing at Little Holland House for her to feel at home. Sara Prinsep swept about the rooms in her own version of Indian dress, coaxing and wheedling Watts and permitting in her other guests what seemed to stricter hostesses a dangerous bohemianism. Her husband’s library was kept out of the way and there were no books on display in the main rooms, forcing visitors and habitués into torrents of conversation and persiflage.

As to Watts, nobody could quite make him out. He had an almost perfect mixture of worldly vanity and ethereal otherness. Tall and thin, very good-looking in youth, now with a hint of pain and suffering peering out from behind biblically long and straggling whiskers, the time he spent in Florence – and in particular the gift for portraiture he discovered there – had set him on the road to fame. If there was a question mark against his sexual appetites – or lack of them – and if men found him ridiculous, he was all the same a society portraitist of the highest rank. This was a label he hated, for Watts had it in mind to paint the large allegorical works with which he had started out, and which the fame of the Florence portraits had eclipsed. As soon as Georgina met him she made up to him unmercifully and was given the reward – the accolade – of a sitting.

Watts had the reputation of making his subjects look younger and more beautiful than they were in life. In his Florence portrait of Augusta, Lady Holland, she looks out directly at the viewer under a slightly tilted head, her huge eyes shaded by the Italian straw hat she wears. Her lips are smiling and there are dimples in her cheeks: she wears the expression of someone sharing a pleasant secret with the artist, and so with us. It is the portrait of a clever, sensuous woman, well aware of the effect she is creating. Watts finished this painting in 1843. Fourteen years on, the portrait of Georgina makes a striking contrast. Shown in three-quarter profile, she wears a similarly wide-brimmed hat and her hand lightly supports her chin and cheek. She has highly arched and plucked eyebrows and looks out a little past the painter with unsmiling eyes. Although she is only twenty, her face is full and the neck plump. Augusta smiles out at the world with sardonic humour; Georgina’s expression is faintly suspicious. It is an unfinished woman that Watts has represented and not an entirely likeable one. He wrote at the time of the portrait:

I must tell you, Bambina mia, that I miss you very much and the studio is very silent. The Bambina’s vivacity was pleasant enough to the dull Signor, who was affected by the exhilarating contagion; now, coming from Lincoln’s Inn weary and listless, I miss the vivacious little Bambina, and though Little H. H. is always charming and I am always made much of and spoiled, especially when I am tired, I miss the effervescent stimulant that was sparkling and overflowing all about the house, yet I was always in a fidget about the wild little girl, and very often not a little unhappy.

There is the accent of a spinster aunt about this. What put him in a fidget and made him unhappy? Was it anything more than having his peace and routine disturbed? Or something deeper? In the next sentence he adds, enigmatically, ‘I depend upon her to be prudent and wise, not less merry I hope, God forbid she ever should be.’

The portrait, of which she was enormously proud, has nothing in it at all merry or skittish. At first blush he might have been writing about someone else altogether. Watts liked very young girls, as he was to prove in a disastrous marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, and he was also fond of moralising. But the artist in him was painfully honest. He had seen a gaucheness in Georgina that he put into words in another, later letter:

I want you to be very wise in the choice of a husband, for everything will depend on the person or persons with whom you may live. If you are fortunate in this respect, you will be as you ought to be, an ornament and a delight to society; if the contrary, I dread more than I can say for the poor little Bambina. I do not think you could be happy as the wife of a poor man …

In one way it is pretty obvious conventional advice. But Watts was writing to the girl who thought of herself as destined for a £10,000-a-year man, a story she must have told him. Fey though he was, however foolish he might act with the young, he was still the piano tuner’s son. His remarks seem to distinguish between a life spent in society and not. That was something he knew all about, but a thing too unpleasant for her to contemplate.

And was there anyone truly rich, eligible and well-connected among the people who flocked to Little Holland House, drank its tea and admired its painter in ordinary? Not Watts himself, nor any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Of the writers Mrs Prinsep cultivated, all were rich men, but their property was intellectual. Thackeray might gaze in amazement at a cheque for £2000 from his American tour and Dickens was by no means a poor man, yet theirs was a different kind of wealth. Carlyle had once explained this in a letter to Jane Welsh, the intelligent and ambitious girl he was trying to persuade to marry him – and it was a sentiment likely to have found favour at Little Holland House:

Kings and Potentates are a gaudy folk that flaunt about with plumes & ribbons to decorate them, and catch the coarse admiration of the many headed monster for a brief season – and then sink into forgetfulness … but the Miltons, the de Staëls – these are the very salt of the earth; they derive their ‘patents of Nobility’ direct from Almighty God; and live in the bosoms of all true men to all ages.

One of the occasional members of the coterie Georgina had now joined and who did belong to that rather less exalted nobility of plumes and ribbons was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Charlotte Schreiber had strong Welsh connections. Her first husband was Josiah John Guest of the Dowlais Ironworks, the MP for Merthyr Tydfil for twenty years until his death. Guest practically owned the town and employed most of the people in it. His wife was a daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsay and a Welsh scholar – she translated the Mabinogion into English when she was still in her twenties. After her husband’s death in 1852, she ran the iron and coal companies he left her under her own name. She had recently – and in some eyes shockingly – remarried Charles Schreiber of Trinity College, Cambridge, tutor to her eldest son. In Dorset the family kept up Canford Manor in all its magnificence, though (as the ever-vigilant Morgan discovered) under the terms of a trust, the house and Lady Charlotte’s personal share in the fortune were forfeited by reason of this second marriage.

It was at about this time, when the eldest son Ivor came into his majority and Canford became his, that Georgina first met the Schreibers. In the winter of 1856, Lady Charlotte and nine of her ten children crowded into a house at Marine Parade, Brighton, while a search was made for suitable and more permanent accommodation in London. Not until April of the following year did they find Exeter House in Roehampton, standing in sixteen acres. During their stay in Brighton they became acquainted with the Trehernes, in the general sense of being present at the same ball or party and included on the same subscription lists for concerts. The fourth son of the family was a boy called Merthyr. He was a year younger than Georgina, a restless and under-achieving student at Trinity College, Cambridge (where his brother had taken a first). Very comfortingly and after only a few meetings, he declared himself infatuated with her. When the family moved to Exeter House, Georgina was soon invited there by Lady Charlotte. She also saw her from time to time at Little Holland House, where Merthyr’s mother was wont to engage Tennyson in conversations about the Arthurian legends. She had no knowledge of the depths of her son’s feeling for the pretty and amiable Miss Treherne. For the time being, Georgina said nothing to enlighten her.

If coming out in society and making a mark in it was part of Morgan’s plan for his daughter, Georgina had already done a great deal to satisfy his ambition. Her voice had carried her into drawing-rooms that he would have difficulty in entering on his own merits. He had taken a house in Stratford Place, a small gated cul-de-sac off Oxford Street, from which to direct both her affairs and his own. In the country he was a magistrate and a ruthless persecutor of trespassers and poachers. On his own land he set spring-guns without the slightest qualm. He had by no means given up hope of a seat in the House of Commons. He was friendless and his relations with his brothers were as strained as ever but by his own lights the new Mr Treherne was making progress in the world. He was very deliberately old-fashioned and there were as a consequence huge gaps in what he knew about the age in which he lived. Style and the surface of things had always meant nothing to him. He was a reactionary and proud of it. In certain circles – say among military men – there was no harm in that. On brief acquaintance and with the addition of only a little humour, his position could even seem endearing. He polished a way of expressing himself that he was to use to the electors of Coventry in a famous speech:

I have a thorough and hearty detestation of the Whigs … I have a parrot at home that cries Damn the Whigs! and although I should be very sorry to use such language myself – even if I do express myself strongly sometimes – I cannot say that my feelings towards the Whigs are more friendly than those of my parrot.

Georgina was troublesome to him but no more than she had ever been. Although by now she was of an age where he might have expected her to be settled and not emptying his purse running about London as a young lady of fashion, there were some encouraging developments. It was never Morgan’s practice to give a compliment, yet Georgina’s impetuous charm had at least secured the interest of an eminently worthy family like the Schreibers and she had the friendship (or so she claimed) of Lady Constance Villiers, daughter of the Foreign Secretary. From such connections who knew what might follow?

And then the roof fell in.

In January of 1858, Lady Sudeley gave a ball in Brighton to which Louisa and her daughters were invited. The occasion was a happy one. Lord Sudeley, whose family owned large estates in the town, had just succeeded to the title. It was the first entertainment of the New Year and the 250 guests who assembled in the Pavilion Rooms had another lively topic of conversation, in addition to Lord Sudeley’s good fortune. A few days earlier, amid scenes of incredible pomp and attended by thirteen crowned heads of Europe, the Queen’s eldest daughter had married Frederick, Crown Prince of Prussia. She was seventeen years old. That very Saturday, there had been an immense press of people at a congratulatory Drawing Room, at which the young Princess stood by her mother to receive her guests. Victoria was amazed and delighted at the cordiality shown to the Royal Family on what was for her a watershed experience. (The Princess Royal left England the following Tuesday in a blizzard of snow, attended by immense crowds. At Buckingham Palace, the Queen had parted from her daughter in floods of tears and this mood was communicated to the entire household who sobbed and wailed as at a funeral. Lady Desart, a Lady-in-Waiting, said later it was the first time in her memory that Victoria completely lost control of herself.)

There was much to discuss, then. Louisa might borrow a little from the glamour of the Royal Wedding by having boys at Eton, for the school had telegraphed the happy couple on the day of the wedding and asked permission to drag the honeymooners’ carriage through the streets of Windsor, which they accomplished most gallantly and inexpertly. And of course, since the subject of marriage in general was more than usually on everyone’s lips, did the company know that Georgina, etc., etc? Nothing had been fixed, no formal announcements had been made, but Merthyr Guest was such a prepossessing young man and seemed so enamoured of Miss Treherne, etc., etc. Of course he was very young and had first his career at Trinity to contemplate, but he was a dear, kind boy. People who knew the Schreibers rather better than Louisa herself might have been startled at this piece of wishful thinking. A really shrewd observer might have looked behind the understandable note of triumph and discovered an ancient doubt: the development of the plot was only as good as the steadiness of its principal character, which was to say Georgina. Was she going to do something stupid at this critical moment?

She was. The officers of the 18th Hussars, who were in barracks at Preston Park, had been invited to the Sudeley Ball. The 18th was hardly a fashionable regiment: it had only recently been reconstituted and of the officers there was not a title among them. It was true that General Scarlett, the hero of Balaclava, had himself served as a cornet with the old 18th; one of the present cornets had the honour to have been born under a gun at Waterloo. But the regiment was originally raised in Yorkshire and re-formed there; and though it had taken part in the festivities surrounding the Royal Wedding, it was too new to have fought in the Crimea, or to have had any part in the putting down of the infamous Mutiny in India.

Among those of the regiment who accepted for Lady Sudeley’s ball was a young lieutenant called Harry Weldon. While he cut a fine figure in patrol uniform and was reputed to ride well, his experience of soldiering was practically nil. Like many of his troopers, he came from Yorkshire. He had the languid manners appropriate to a junior officer and was good-looking in a stock sort of way, but he was shockingly provincial, and the past glittering month or so – in Brighton and London – had bewitched him. His expression was frank and open and he was altogether the sort of boy you might entrust at a ball to fetch an ice or search for a shawl, but one whose name you asked only to forget. He was twenty years old and in the present company, a spear-carrier, an extra. If Morgan Treherne had searched the Army List for a week he could not have come up with a less appealing candidate for Georgina’s attentions.

To his stupefaction, therefore, a day or so after the ball this young man, this whippersnapper, this uniformed nothing rode out from Preston Barracks to Mayfield on his horse Multum. Flakes of snow fell romantically about his head: when the butler asked him his business, he explained he was there to see Georgina. Antonio (who may have been impressed at a wearisome journey undertaken in vile weather, but knew his master’s temper only too well) went off to see Morgan. Morgan sent back word that the gentleman was not to be admitted. The suitor – for that was the purpose of his visit – turned his horse’s head and set off on the long ride back to barracks. Georgina was summoned and closely questioned. A slow thrill of horror began to run through both parents.

Lieutenant William Henry Weldon was the son of a coal merchant from the Sheffield area. According to Georgina, writing in later years, old Mr Weldon actually delivered coal in sacks on a horse and cart, a piece of spite that may or may not have been true. Harry’s father died when he was a child and his mother now lived in a two-bedroom cottage in Beaumaris. There was a grandmother still alive from whom he would inherit and he claimed to be coming into a trust fund two months hence when he reached his majority. In letters which he had the extreme impertinence to send to Morgan, he diminished the value of this fund’s income from the £2000 which he may have boasted of to others. In fact he halved it, perhaps out of prudence or maybe as a demonstration of his good faith.

If he hoped to impress his prospective father-in-law by such honesty, the plan backfired badly. When he offered to have his solicitor write to clarify matters further, Morgan ordered the long-suffering Antonio to reply to the letter, not deigning to take up his own pen. Unfortunately, Harry Weldon was either having trouble reading these signals or had badly misjudged the fanatically snobbish Trehernes. Ten days after he had first been shown the door, Louisa burst in on her daughter while she was still in bed.

‘Here’s a letter from that blackguard Weldon. And look what he’s written! Oh the vile swindler! A thousand a year when he’s twenty-one on the 8th of April. Another £2000 when his 84-year-old grandmother dies and another two thousand when his mother dies. And she’s still young – what is it, hardly forty! Oh, I’m very happy he doesn’t have two thousand a year now – you’d be mad enough to want to marry him! Two thousand a year is beggary, but a thousand a year is starvation, it’s to die of hunger!’

If Louisa really spoke these words she stands accused of the same mania that afflicted her husband. Georgina may have recalled the conversation precisely because it threw a bad light on a snobbish and not very worldly woman. What alarmed and infuriated her mother, however, were the circumstances which had led to the letter. They took some explanation. It is unlikely (a crowded ballroom being what it is) that the two had passed more than twenty minutes in each other’s company unchaperoned. What, then, had been said? The question was not one of Harry’s income, but Georgina’s commonsense. He had met and been smitten by a pretty girl. Of all the things she may have told him about herself, it would seem the only thing she had not mentioned was the situation with regard to Merthyr Guest. Nor the volcanic temperament of her father.

Or maybe she did – maybe riding over to Mayfield was for him the romantic equivalent of the forlorn hope, beloved of gallant (and suicidal) officers in every army of every epoch. Maybe she did tell him that her father would have him for breakfast and the sheer thrill of that was enough for him to volunteer himself. He knew next to nothing of society, had no connections of any kind, and in every sense nothing to lose: why not make his play for her in as gallant a way as he knew how? Proposing to pretty young women was not a crime and Georgina’s father was hardly likely to shoot him from an upstairs window. (Luckily for a great many people in the nineteenth century, Morgan and firearms seem to have been strangers. That is among his own kind. Poachers in Mayfield spoke darkly of his use of spring guns, aiming to blow the head off anyone daring to take a pheasant on Treherne land.) There was one further possibility. Maybe Harry saw her, was bowled over by her, and what Mr Treherne interpreted as confounded impudence was an advanced form of love sickness. He must have that girl or destroy himself in the attempt.

Morgan invented a sobriquet for the unfortunate Hussar. He was swiftly known over the Gate House breakfast table as Ananias, the foolish man who lied to God and paid the penalty. The story comes from the Bible, Acts 5:1–6:

But a certain man named Ananias with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession and kept back part of the price, and brought a certain part and laid it at the apostle’s feet. But Peter said, ‘Ananias, why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? Thou hast not lied unto men but unto God.’ And Ananias hearing these words fell down and gave up the ghost; and great fear came on all those who heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up and carried him out and buried him.

In later life and in the full knowledge that Harry would read her words, Georgina declared the nickname well-merited. If she thought so at the time, it throws a lurid light on the whole Treherne family. Was Morgan really to be compared to the apostle Peter, or to God? And had it escaped all of them that a little while after, Sapphira followed her husband into the same grave?

In the short term the problem resolved itself. The 18th Hussars were ordered away back to Yorkshire. If it had been a case of lovesickness, the traditional cure seems to have worked. Harry Weldon reflected without bitterness that though he had lost this particular skirmish, he had hardly lost the war. In April he came into his trust money, which had appreciated to £7,500. He was young and good-looking and the world was filled with more or less beautiful women. Were he to stay in the 18th, he might become at the very least a Major. If he exchanged into an Indian regiment, he might one day have his own command. Instead, according to Georgina, he went through the whole of his inheritance in eighteen months, which hardly bespeaks a broken heart. He was easy-going and venal in just the right proportions; a model of a certain kind of junior officer who might continue exactly as Georgina had discovered him: a supernumerary at balls and banquets, a cheerful card-player and a modest rake. But if he thought it was all over, he was wrong. Thackeray at his most cynical could not have dreamed up a better twist to the plot.

In May, Merthyr Guest came to his mother and wished her permission to propose to Miss Treherne. Lady Charlotte was startled, for it seemed to her that Georgina was no more than a friend to him and a cruelly joshing one at that. Merthyr explained otherwise. He confessed that he had been seeing Georgina and corresponding with her for much longer than his mother suspected: in fact, since the winter of 1856. He could not now contemplate life without her. Charlotte Schreiber did everything she could to dissuade him. The first favourable impressions Georgina had made had begun to wear off and, while Lady Charlotte enjoyed her chats with Tennyson, the rest of the coterie at Little Holland House filled her with the deepest suspicions. However, her own second marriage placed her in a weak position. She grudgingly gave her consent to an engagement, on condition that it remain secret for a while and that Merthyr should not attempt to marry without her permission. Overjoyed, Merthyr went down to Mayfield to ask Morgan for his daughter’s hand. He was hardly greeted with open arms. As soon as he left, Morgan began bombarding the Schreibers with letters that did not waste time on felicitating the young couple. He wished to know the exact extent of the fortune involved. So far as Morgan was concerned this was the best offer he was going to get for his daughter and it merely remained to settle terms.

The tone of these letters was deeply offensive to Lady Charlotte. It seemed her son had been trapped by an adventuress. At Exeter House there were tears and recriminations, Georgina first saying she must obey her father’s wishes and in the next breath saying she must marry Merthyr or perish. A good-hearted compromise was worked out, without Morgan’s knowledge. No decision of any kind would be made until Merthyr came of age in January of 1859. Then, if the two young people were still of the same mind, matters could be straightened out with the ogre of Mayfield. Meanwhile, they might continue under the tacit understanding of an engagement. This seemed to please Georgina and it delighted Merthyr. It was the Long Vacation and Ivor Guest invited his brother to accompany him to Scotland. Georgina was annoyed at this and tried to prevent Merthyr from going. They parted acrimoniously.

Only a month after Merthyr’s interview at Mayfield and while he was still in Scotland with his brother, Lady Charlotte paid an afternoon visit to Little Holland House, probably to check up on one of her daughters, a young woman who had also been taken by the free and easy atmosphere of the house. Instead of her daughter, she discovered Georgina ‘closeted alone with Lord Ward in Watts’s studio, Watts being absent at Bowood’. The location was shocking in itself – nobody but the painter crossed the threshold of the red baize door, unless by invitation. The two might as well have been discovered in Mrs Prinsep’s bedroom, so great was the impropriety. The identity of the man found with Georgina was the second awful surprise. William Ward was twenty years older than her and an enormously rich widower. Whatever Lady Charlotte saw when she burst in on them – and it cannot have been innocent – it was enough to persuade her son to disengage himself at once from any undertaking to marry.

Lady Schreiber dropped Georgina and all the Trehernes forthwith. Nothing was said, nothing needed to be said: Georgina made no attempt to defend herself. It was disaster. She had recklessly thrown away connections she and her parents had striven for over four years. Word of Georgina’s betrayal of her hospitality got back to Mrs Prinsep and she was dropped there too. Watts’s prophecy had come true: the Bambina had made the wrong choice and her wildness had gone beyond what was permissible even in the easy-going ambiance of Little Holland House. Perhaps it might have been seen differently if Georgina had had some offsetting talent, some serious application to an art or to a cause: that might have mended fences with Mrs Prinsep. But, stung, Georgina now began to make blustering and unpleasant remarks about her hostess. Watts knew which side his bread was buttered. She lost his friendship too. The end came on 28 June, as recounted in Lady Charlotte’s diary:

I had thought it my duty last week to write and tell Merthyr how Miss Treherne was going on with Lord Ward, and how she went about telling everybody that her engagement to Merthyr was at an end. I, this morning, heard from Merthyr in reply, greatly grieved, poor fellow. He mentioned having written to her and to Mrs Prinsep for an explanation and I was anxious to hear from the latter what sort of reply she intended to make to him. I did not now find her at home … and so the next morning I went again to Little Holland House and had a long interview with Mrs Prinsep. Her opinion was that Miss Treherne cares nothing for Merthyr, but would gladly marry Lord Ward if she could accomplish it.

Morgan must take some of the blame – his dealings with the Schreibers and with Mrs Prinsep had been peremptory in the extreme. In other circumstances, Charlotte Schreiber would perhaps have felt it her Christian duty to rescue Georgina from the clutches of such a monstrous father. Towards her own children she showed an almost supernatural solicitude. (When her fourth son Montague embarked with his regiment at Gravesend, en route for India, she left Wales, where she had been staying with the ironmaster Talbot, and travelled for eight hours by train, only to find the troop convoy had left. Distraught, she tried to persuade the Custom House to let her follow the fleet downstream, where she was convinced they would remain at anchor until dawn the following day. She was at last dissuaded and arrived home at Roehampton at one in the morning utterly exhausted.) Though she did not much like Georgina, she would have exerted herself on her behalf in the same way, if it were not for one thing. Georgina herself had flung away the prize. Ward was almost old enough to be her father and though he was amazingly wealthy, he was never a serious lover – and she knew it. She had indulged herself with a man for the sake of momentary pleasure. She was brought back to Mayfield in disgrace and more or less made a prisoner of her father. He practically forbade her to leave the house.

The awful consequence of being Morgan’s daughter was at last plain to her. Taken together, their actions put the kind of marriage she had been promised and the future she envisaged for herself out of the question forever. She had behaved badly and he hardly any better. Socially they were doomed. Nor had Morgan’s political star shone as much as he would have liked since changing his name to Treherne. In 1857 he went up to Coventry to make his third assault on the constituency.

To the Freemen of Coventry ’twas Treherne who spoke – Ere the Tories are beat there are crowns to be broke!

So here’s to the man who freedom would earn, Let him follow the colours of Morgan Treherne.

Neither the candidacy nor the ballads had improved with age. Morgan came fourth out of five on the ballot and, when given the courtesy of a speech, held up his famous presentation watch, declaring bitterly: ‘It is a good watch; I value it highly, though it has cost me dear, for it has kept better time than its presenters of 1837 have kept faith with me.’

In April 1859 he tried again and was once again defeated. This time he was stung into reminding the electors of Ellice’s boast that Morgan would not serve Coventry for as long as he had breath. Ellice (who had not even come to Coventry to oversee his reelection, pleading gout as his excuse) at once denied he had ever said this and forced a humiliating public retraction. Victorian England was not so large that Morgan’s antics at Coventry and Georgina’s at Little Holland House could not be connected. In so far as they were known at all outside Sussex, father and daughter had contrived to make too many enemies. The campaign to find the £10,000-a-year man lay in tatters.

Harry Weldon, meanwhile, was smoking cigars and playing billiards in barracks in his native Yorkshire. He had completely forgotten Georgina and there had been no correspondence between them since January 1858. To his consternation, he was summoned back from the wilderness. The plump and enchanting girl he had bid for and lost now amazed him by writing to him. Unlike Ananias faced with the wrath of God, he was explicitly commanded not to give up the ghost. On the contrary, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, he found himself egged on to indiscretions he must often have pondered in the quiet of his quarters. He took leave to travel to Brighton.

The day is fixed, my beloved! On Thursday I think, darling, the best way for us to meet is for you to be waiting for me in a fly at the bottom of the colonnade, your horse’s head turned towards the left and the vehicle itself not quite at the edge of the street: almost – but not quite – opposite Ayler the hat woman. I am sure to be there by half past ten. Keep the blinds of your carriage down and have patience, my Harry, not to look out. Then, darling, when I see you are there, I will open the carriage door, jump in, and you tell the coachman before-hand to drive out of town.

On this particular occasion, he had enough gallantry to obey her instructions up to a point. But there was prudence in Harry, or maybe it was callousness. That Thursday, which must have cost her dear in deception, ended in farce. At half past ten she burst out of the hatshop, saw the carriage and ran towards it. She flung open the door. Inside, in the dark, his soldier servant greeted her with the gloomy words, ‘Mr Weldon is not here.’

Though setbacks like this did not deter her, if she was looking for gallantry in Harry she was soon disappointed. He wanted her physically with a passion that delighted her but was, in most other ways, the least gallant officer in the British Army. Just how much she told him about Merthyr and Lord Ward is unknown but it would hardly have made a difference – Harry knew nothing about society and cared less. All he saw was that a plum had fallen into his lap. She was used to the indolence of titled young men; her brother Dal, newly commissioned in the West Kent Militia, was busy learning the same laconic, drawling manners. Harry’s lazy good humour came from a different and more homely source. Money burned a hole in his pocket, the Army bored him, and he had no plans. She had all the plans. His letters to the prison that Mayfield had become were ordered to be wrapped in sheet music from Chappells. She even told him what scores to buy – Verdi. There were a handful of clandestine meetings. Writing many years later, her nephew remarked, ‘No doubt existed that this was anything other than a love match.’ He was quoting family history, for he himself had yet to be born. The evidence is all the other way. Harry was being driven along by forces out of his control. The only other explanation is that he was cynically abusing her. Of this time, when all her greater plans had been dashed to the ground, she writes of Morgan:

As we never dared open our lips in his presence, scarcely daring to breathe without his snubbing us unmercifully, and as he allowed us no amusement whatever, not even that of teaching the choir in the church at Mayfield, I left the paternal roof, where otherwise I should have been so happy, without much regret. I had no taste or need of marriage; in a convent I should have been the happiest of women, without a desire, without an aspiration: I was endowed with the most placid temperament in the world.

She was fooling herself. There is something quite manic in her pursuit of a little provincial Hussar she hardly knew. This is a woman in her twenties lighting matches in a gunpowder factory. At last, at the beginning of 1860, Harry came to her and explained that he had squandered his entire inheritance and all that was left for him to do was to go to India and there blow out his brains.

Instead, they married secretly at Aldershot on Saturday, 21 April 1860.

It was snowing in London that day. There was war in the air, as well as snow. All the docks and installations had been fortified and the previous month the Queen had received 2500 volunteer officers in review. Millais, Rossetti and even Watts joined the Artists’ Rifles, riding about Wimbledon Common on horses they could hardly manage. Most amazing of all, the decrepit and tottering Poodle Byng enlisted in the Queen’s Westminsters and was present on parade, just as he had been for George III in the levy of volunteers fifty-seven years earlier. It was a strange time for the happy couple to be rattling towards Dover and the continent, but a letter from Lord Clarendon to the Duchess of Manchester may hint at the suddenness of the marriage:

Don’t you remember Miss Treherne, who sang so well at Ashridge & the Poodle was so in love with? She has just eloped with Mr Welldon a respectable man of 3000 a year but who her father did not think fine enough for her. My sister knows her very well & had a letter from her to say how impossible it wd. have been for her to have acted otherwise.

The £3000 a year did not exist of course. What was the reason for her being unable to act otherwise? Whether she was pregnant going across to Dieppe we do not know (though she was very soon after). Although Harry was married in uniform and attended by his fellow officers, he sold his commission the same day. At Paris, Georgina wrote to her brother Dal, asking him to intercede with her father. But it was no use. Morgan cut her off without a penny and she never saw him again.

Harry had won his prize after all. The circumstances were less than ideal. He had met her parents only once at the Sudeley Ball. He knew her only through the days and nights they had stolen together. She knew nothing at all of his family and astounded him by supposing Manchester to be a town in Yorkshire. As the coach headed south and Georgina practised her French and Italian on the natives, their destination was – where else? – Florence. Less than two years after being presented at Court, a week after shaming her parents, she was talking with a wildness and lack of realism he must already have grown used to, of going on the stage. No matter that the Mediterranean sun began to shine on them and leaving aside the question of whether or not she was already pregnant, they were effectively ruined. The only way back from a fiasco like this was through love. Or genius.