Читать книгу The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life - Ffion Hague - Страница 12

WHEN MARGARET HEARD THAT HER husband had been elected to Parliament, she wept. Lloyd George later recalled that they were ‘tears of regret for the ending of her hopes for a quiet, untroubled existence in the country’.¹ However unrealistic her expectations of a quiet country life had been when she married, they were, it seems, genuine, and were now dashed to pieces.

The result of the Caernarvon Boroughs by-election attracted extensive coverage in the Welsh press and nationally. This was partly due to the name the successful candidate had already made for himself, but also because Lloyd George had overturned the Conservative majority of the previous general election, and, then as now, such upsets attracted a lot of comment. Lloyd George’s arrival at Westminster also received far more attention than it would have done if he had been elected amid a throng of others at a general election.

David Lloyd George MP took his seat on budget day, 17 April 1890, and his wife added the newspaper reports to her scrapbook:

It was a striking sight, the closely packed benches, the Chancellor of the Exchequer [George Goschen] with many little volumes of notes, bracing himself up for a grand effort; while immediately below the venerable figure of Lord Cottesloe stood the young M.P. for the Caernarvonshire Boroughs, nearly seventy years his junior, pale with excitement and the thoughts of the career opening before him.²

Maggie did not accompany her husband to London: amid the excitement following the election, Lloyd George had no time to find accommodation, and when he was in the capital he stayed with Criccieth friends or at the National Liberal Club, according to his circumstances. But she was not far from his thoughts, and he took the first possible opportunity to write to her, during the budget speech itself. His pride and sense of achievement in getting into Parliament, the ‘region of his future domain’, is tangible: ‘This is the first letter which I write as an introduced member of the House of Commons and I dedicate it to my little darling. I snatch a few minutes during the delivery of Goschen’s budget to write her. I was introduced amid very enthusiastic cheers on the Liberal side.’³ The next day, he wrote to his brother with the bemusement of a new Member of Parliament: ‘My first division last night. I voted against Bi-metallism, but I couldn’t tell you why.’⁴

As Lloyd George was finding his feet at Westminster, Maggie was wondering how they would manage now that her husband was an unsalaried MP with little or no time to spend on building his business. Unlike Lloyd George, who was not practical by nature, both she and William George could see the financial difficulty his election had placed them in as a family, and William’s diary betrays the sleepless nights the situation caused him: ‘For the village lad to have beaten the parish country squire is a (great) honour. Two practical questions present themselves: (a) How is D to live there? (b) How am I to live down here?’⁵

The law practice, now mainly run by William George, would have to provide for all: Lloyd George, Maggie and their growing family as well as Uncle Lloyd, Betsy and Polly. The firm was doing reasonably well as a result of some hard work by William, and had moved to premises in Porthmadoc. Uncle Lloyd helped out as an office clerk, but the family’s income would be spread thinly for some years to come. As late as 1894, William George recorded in his diary that his supper consisted of a cupful of hot water with some bread and butter. The first of many requests for financial help came from London when Maggie paid her husband a visit:

Dei wished me to ask you to send him £5 by return please. He has been using some of my money. If he doesn’t get it your dear sister can’t return home on Saturday without leaving her husband quite penniless in this great city…He also wants you to send him a few blank cheques. For goodness sake don’t send him many. They are such easy things to fill in and then the slashing signature of D. Lloyd George put to them—which I fear you would not be too glad to see.⁶

Maggie was as careful with money as Lloyd George was extravagant. Every penny was precious, and she formed money-saving habits that remained with her for life. Unfairly perhaps, they gave her a reputation for being tight-fisted. In her defence, she never enjoyed spending money on herself, but even Polly, who was perfectly aware of their financial situation, commented on her meanness to William George while on a visit to London in 1891:

You will be anxious perhaps to know whether your P.O’s came to hand safely. I may say that they are in the strictest sense of the word. Mag pounced upon them directly &no one has seen a scrap of them since or ever will…A rare one for keeping money is my little sister-in-law. She is a very kind little hostess and we get on very nicely together, it is when it comes to spending that she shows her miserliness, she will borrow a penny to pay the tram sooner than pay for you herself.⁷

During the first few weeks after his election, Lloyd George immersed himself in national politics and London life. He was anxious to find a place to live so that Maggie could join him, and did not seem to see the impracticality of this plan. In June 1890 he entreated her to make the eighteen-hour round trip from Criccieth by train so that they could spend Sunday house-hunting—not a prospect that would entice many women who were seven months pregnant.⁸ His pleading was all the more extraordinary because Maggie’s second pregnancy had not been straightforward. Her letters to Lloyd George, though trying to reassure him, are full of fear that she might lose the baby: ‘This afternoon we are going to Dwyfor Villa to tea, the walk will do me good if I do it slowly &rest at Criccieth. I’m going and coming back. Much more good than a drive that shakes me so much.’ And again: ‘I don’t feel very well today don’t be alarmed if you find an unease in the family when you come down. I am in good spirits. Mag.’⁹

Lloyd George was worried, and despite his efforts to cheer her up, Maggie was clearly having a hard time. She wrote:

I am longing dreadfully after you today. After being home for a flying visit you seem to have gone from my sight without hardly having seen you, &it may seem very silly on my part but I go to every room in the house today to find a trace of your having been occupying it, &I find but little traces of you, but when I do I relieve myself in tears, but I shall be alright when I get a letter tomorrow morning.

…send me a loving letter tomorrow &I shall be happy &make haste home on Saturday if you cant come before. I feel that I must see you once more before I am taken ill.¹⁰

There was great joy when Mair Eluned Lloyd George was born without complication on 2 August 1890, although the proud father was not at home to witness the event. He was told of the birth of his first daughter by his brother in a telegram, and caught the mail train to Criccieth for a flying visit before returning to London.

Lloyd George naturally wanted to participate in full in his first parliamentary session, but when the House rose in mid-August his family expected him to return to Criccieth to nurture his constituency, to help his brother with the law practice, and to spend time with his wife and new baby. Maggie was clearly looking forward to having her husband back, but he had other ideas: to Lloyd George politics was a full-time occupation, and when Parliament was not sitting he gave speeches across the country and travelled abroad with his political friends, a fact that his wife and brother eventually had to accept.

This was hard for Maggie. She could not see the attraction of London for her husband, and resented the time he spent there when he could be with his family. On one occasion soon after Mair’s birth Lloyd George announced that he was staying in London for the weekend to prepare a speech instead of coming home. Maggie had been looking forward to a visit, and her disappointment was sharpened when he mentioned casually that he had been distracted from his work by his friend and fellow Welsh Liberal MP, S.T. Evans, who she felt was a bad influence on him. On the Sunday, the two had taken a bus to Kew Gardens and had failed to attend chapel. Maggie was incensed:

Well I don’t approve of the way you spent your Sunday &I am sure by the way my old Dafydd put it that he knows I don’t. Thanks to you all the same for being honest in telling your Maggie. Tell her everything will you always never keep anything from her. If you were at home now &wanted to make a speech &your old Mag asked you to come with her to Chapel for 2 hours you would at once say well I can’t come I can’t go to such and such a place unprepared &make a fool of myself &that I must be responsible for the result if you come with me, but S T Evans turns up &asks you to go with him to waste a day you consent I am sure with a bright smile &no conditions as to responsibility. I shall remember last Sunday in future.

Maggie chose to believe that Lloyd George was a reluctant participant in the day trip, and blamed his friend for the episode:

I can’t bring myself to like S T Evans after what you told me. He is not teetotller (I am sure that is not spelt properly) for one thing &other things [i.e. his flirting] that you’ve told me, which I always dislike in men, that he must be rather fast. Perhaps I am mistaken. Tom Ellis [nonconformist MP for Merioneth] would be the man I should like to see you friendly with. I don’t think there would be any danger of your being any the worse for being in his company. I am not so sure about STE.

Her idea of a well-spent Sunday was not at all the kind that appealed to Lloyd George: ‘Buasai yn llawer gwell i ti fod yn Grassgarth hefo Davies yn cadw cwmpeini iddo fe. Gallset neud dy speech tra buasai Davies yn y capel ond iti fynd yno hefo fo unwaith’ (It would be far better for you to be at Grassgarth with Davies* keeping him company. You could prepare your speech while Davies was in Chapel, if you only went with him once).¹¹ Maggie’s outburst did not change her husband’s behaviour, but it did make him more careful to conceal his pleasure trips from her.

Lloyd George’s entry into the world of national politics took place during a period of great change. Irish Home Rule was dominating the political headlines, supporters of female suffrage were beginning to attract attention to their cause, and demographic and social changes in densely populated industrial areas were leading inexorably to the formation of a new political force as the Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893 under the chairmanship of Keir Hardie. Simultaneously, the dominance of the landed gentry in Parliament was giving way to men with ‘new’ money or from the professions, although in 1890 the average Conservative MP still had roughly twice the personal income of the average Liberal Member. The House of Commons reflected the habits and lifestyle of the aristocracy, creating a potentially hostile and threatening atmosphere to a working-class MP. But it was not intimidating to Lloyd George. He soon grasped the ways of the House, taking to it as naturally as if he had been born to it.

The change of character in the membership of the House meant that in the general election of 1892, Lloyd George was joined by more men of similar backgrounds. He himself increased his majority from the wafer-thin eighteen votes of the by-election two years previously to 196, despite facing the well-liked Tory candidate Sir John Puleston, Constable of Caernarvon Castle and veteran of the American Civil War. Of the thirty-four Welsh Members returned, thirty-one were Liberals, and over twenty were Welsh-born. Significantly, the group contained six village-school-educated men, fourteen lawyers, fourteen businessmen and twenty-two nonconformists. The Liberals, led by Gladstone, were not so successful elsewhere, and with a reduced Liberal majority of only forty, if they banded together as a group the Welsh Members to some extent held the balance of power. They were not slow to take advantage of the fact. Courted by the government, the Welsh MPs were determined to secure the great prize: a Bill for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church which would end the state-maintained dominance of the Anglican Church in Wales and give religious equality—at last—to nonconformists.

Maggie was not politically aware when she married, but she could see that these were important battles, and that her husband’s participation in Westminster politics at this time was crucial to the future of her own country, denomination and way of life. She could not see though why he had to be away from her when Parliament was not in session. He in turn could not understand why she did not want to follow him to London to look after him there.

Lloyd George wanted his family with him in London—‘I don’t know what I would give now for an hour of your company. It would scatter all the gloom &make all the room so cheerful,’ he wrote in June 1890¹²—but the unpleasant reality was that he could not afford to set up a second household on his income. At first he stayed in Acton with the Davies family, who became close friends and welcomed Maggie whenever she could visit London. But she now had two children under two years old to take care of, and also had plenty to occupy her at home, packing up at Mynydd Ednyfed and preparing to move to the new house in December 1890. It would have been difficult for her to spend more time in London even if the succession of temporary digs had been satisfactory, and they clearly were not.

The Lloyd Georges’ first home in London was a set of rooms in Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn, which they took on a lease of £70 (£6,147 at today’s values) a year early in 1891. The rooms were serviced, and there was a porter at the gate and two housekeepers on the premises, but the lease was surrendered at the end of the 1892 parliamentary session. That winter they took a six-month lease on a set of rooms at 5 Essex Court in the Temple, and in late autumn 1893 Lloyd George took a flat, No. 30 Palace Mansions in Addison Road, Kensington, for £90 a year which was to be their London home for six years. For the most part, however, Maggie stayed in Criccieth, resigning herself to the long absences that came to characterise her relationship with her husband at this time.

There has been much speculation about Maggie’s attitude towards living in London. Her visits there were so infrequent during 1894, when she was expecting their fourth child, that Lloyd George arranged for the flat to be let for six months, and it was again sub-let in 1896, when she was pregnant a fifth time (the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage). It does not appear that she was in London very often during the remainder of 1896, in 1897 (although she was there when she suffered another miscarriage in the spring) or 1898, until, finally, with the marriage at crisis point, she consented to let their Criccieth home and move to a family house near Wandsworth Common. Even then she delayed making the move for as long as possible.

The overwhelming consensus among Lloyd George’s biographers is that Maggie simply preferred Criccieth to London. In this way, the blame for the difficulties in their marriage has been divided between the philandering husband and the absent wife. The evidence, though, strongly suggests that, her preference apart, Maggie’s decision not to join Lloyd George in London at the beginning of his parliamentary career was based on practical considerations. After all, when the children were older she did—albeit reluctantly—move to London, and she was mostly at her husband’s side through his years as Chancellor and Prime Minister.

The conventional view is largely based on Lloyd George’s pleas in his letters home for Maggie to join him, although the possibility exists that he was exaggerating his loneliness to divert attention from his active socialising in her absence. Nevertheless, the love between him and Maggie was strong, and he was clearly anxious to have his family with him more often during these early years. This was the first time in his life that he had had to fend for himself without women to take care of his needs, and he did not enjoy it. He was not temperamentally equipped to look after himself. He had been spoiled as a child by the devoted Betsy and Polly, and cared for latterly by the servants at Mynydd Ednyfed. For the pampered young man, who to the end of his life was never able to tie his own shoelaces, it was a shock to the system to come home to an empty room with no food to eat and no clean collars for his shirts. In some ways, as we shall see, his solitary existence in London suited him, and he made the most of the opportunity to enjoy his new social circle, but the loneliness was not entirely faked, and his domestic helplessness was a real problem.

Lloyd George was not a systematic man, especially when it came to correspondence. Despite writing regularly and frequently to Maggie, William George and Uncle Lloyd, he never kept track of the letters he received, and the majority of theirs to him have been lost. Consequently, Maggie’s views on living in London and her reasons for her undisguised preference for Criccieth have not received similar attention.

There are many facts that would have affected her decision. Travel between Criccieth and London involved an uncomfortable and expensive nine-hour train journey via Bangor, Shrewsbury and Crewe. Money was desperately short, and when Lloyd George was elected, the twenty-three-year-old Maggie had a baby of fourteen months with another on the way. When Mair Eluned was born the practical difficulties doubled. It was far from clear in 1890 that Lloyd George would hold on to his seat for more than a couple of years, when the next general election was expected. Also, in the 1890s the parliamentary timetable was less regular and less frantic than it is now: sessions ran, typically, from January to late summer, with a short break at Easter, but Members were then free to return to their constituencies for the rest of the year, unless they were in office with government departments to run. Life as a backbencher involved having one foot in Westminster and the other in the constituency. It may have seemed utterly reasonable to Maggie that she and the family should stay where they were, with Lloyd George returning as often as he could.

The family’s health was another major factor. Lloyd George wrote to Maggie in June 1890:

You can’t imagine how glad I was to get such a long and interesting letter from you. I read it with avidity and delight. I went out for a stroll before breakfast to the Embankment Gardens & read your letter there. It made me quite happy. There is a sort of pleasure even in ‘hiraeth’ [homesickness] itself. I am sorry that they are cutting the hay so soon. Were it next week I might come then. I would so like to scent the hay. It would be such a contrast to this infernal sooty stinky [city].¹³

London was not a healthy place to live in the 1890s. Country people had long feared the contagion and ‘bad air’ of the rapidly growing cities—one of the reasons for Betsy and William George’s return to Wales from Lancashire in 1864. In subsequent years things had got worse. Some of the richest men in London were brewers, who provided an alternative to drinking the city’s dirty water, which posed a very real danger: a House of Commons cleaner died of cholera as late as 1893. City doctors were widely mistrusted, especially with regard to childbirth: infant mortality in the cities was 30 per cent higher than in the country. Maggie was happy to visit London before she became a mother, but with young children it was a different matter. The prospect of looking after two babies in a cramped set of rooms was a real deterrent. No wonder she thought it best for the children to stay in their comfortable house by the sea in Criccieth, with her parents on hand and servants to look after them.

In later life, Maggie declared with seeming sincerity that ‘a wife must put her husband first, her children second, and herself last. That is the way to take couples happily to their golden wedding.’¹⁴ It is difficult to reconcile that view though with her actions when her children were young. From the moment she first fell pregnant in 1888, the children filled her world, and although she loved her husband passionately, there is not much evidence to support the view that she put his needs above theirs. All in all, this was the worst time in her life to ask Maggie to live for long periods in London. During the first seven years of their marriage, she was pregnant for a total of thirty-six months, gave birth four times,* and assuming she nursed each child for six months after birth (a conservative estimate for the period), there were only fourteen months during the years 1888-95 when she was not either pregnant or nursing. After 1895 Maggie’s health was not strong, and she miscarried twice before giving birth to the couple’s last child, Megan Arvon, in April 1902.

Maggie’s life was centred around her children, her family and chapel. In London, she had none of the support systems she needed to make a home. Her social circle was small and scattered across the city, and getting about with small children was not easy. Lloyd George was wholly preoccupied with the intoxicating world of politics, and kept highly irregular hours. Yes, it was her duty to look after her husband, but did she not have an equal duty to look after her children? In the years ahead, this question was to cause increasing tension between them.

In the early 1890s, however, their relationship was warm and close, and Lloyd George’s affection for the children fills his letters: ‘When am I going to get little Dickie’s photo? I want it badly. I can’t stand this solitude much longer.’¹⁵ But while he was missing Maggie, he was not missing Criccieth. He had found life there, with gossips monitoring his movements, too confining and he never grew to like the town. He complained about the weather (very wet), and the fact that as his fame grew he was never left in peace. As the years wore on he came to regard time spent in Criccieth as a matter of duty, not respite. Early on in his parliamentary career he was making excuses to Maggie instead of returning to the family home at weekends. The truth was that, in his early thirties, he was relishing his freedom and enjoying the more cosmopolitan life in London. Maggie’s absence gave him plenty of time, and the incentive, to make the most of the social opportunities that were open to a young star in the Welsh Liberal Party. He made friends with his fellow Welsh MPs and with members of the flourishing Welsh community in the capital.

There has been a flow of people from Wales to London as far back as records exist, and the numbers grew to a torrent in the nineteenth century, forming a large, socially mixed group of immigrants. Then, as now, the Welsh in London did not feel a pressing need to gather protectively together. They spread themselves out across the city, with a slightly denser concentration in the west and north-west around Paddington and Euston, the two great gateways to Wales. Many of the migrants came from farming communities, and they made two farming-based trades their own: dairy and drapery. The sight of a Welsh dairy or draper’s shop was a familiar feature of Victorian London, and the great Welsh retailers’ names are still visible, Peter Jones, Dickins and Jones and D.H. Evans among them. These establishments, and countless smaller ones, attracted more Welshmen and women to work as dairy maids, shop assistants and domestic servants. They intermarried freely with native Londoners, lived above the shop or in the houses they served, and built up a community life around the numerous Welshlanguage chapels and churches they built in the city. Some did well: two nineteenth-century Lord Mayors of London were Welsh, and when the National Eisteddfod was held in the Albert Hall in 1887, royalty attended.

The prosperous Welsh in London readily opened their doors to Lloyd George, who enjoyed their lively social gatherings. He got to know them—and their wives—and there was enough evidence of flirting to make Maggie suspicious. In a letter written soon after Mair’s birth, she sounded a warning: ‘I am glad you have not seen any girl you should like better than poor me, but are you sure that you have not seen anyone to flirt with. Remember to be careful in that line as I will soon find out.’¹⁶

As early as 1893-94, in an undated fragment, Lloyd George had to defend himself against the same charge: ‘Am y reception [As for the reception]. I behaved very modestly. I am sure Mrs Gwynoro hardly saw me speaking even to any ladies—at least very casually.’¹⁷ He evidently felt he needed to make it clear to Maggie that his companion on this occasion was not physically attractive: ‘I dined that evening at Wynford Phillips & took his wife, a black thin skinny bony Jewess whom you could not squeeze without hurting yourself. This lady I took to the reception & left her there directly he arrived.’ He then lists all the women he met at the event, some of whom were clearly known to Maggie, and others whom he took care to describe in highly unflattering terms: ‘I met Mrs Evans of Llanelly (formerly Miss Hughes) Belle Vue, Miss Griffith Springfield, Miss Jones (hogan goch & spectols) [a red-haired girl with spectacles] & Mrs Dr. Price, Mrs Dr. Parry & a few more whose names even I do not recollect.’¹⁸

Dick recalls that this was a typical tactic of his father’s. Maggie was quick to confront her husband with evidence of any inappropriate behaviour. She had inherited a little of her mother’s temperament, and could be fierce when roused. Lloyd George believed that attack was the best form of defence: when accused he would come out fighting, disarming Maggie with a teasing response or a forthright denial. Their letters, though warm and affectionate, are littered with accusations and denials, some jocular, others less so. In November 1895, Lloyd George wrote: ‘Oh yes, Miss Jones. She is lovely. Twenty-one, charming & so jolly. It is a perfect delight to spend Sunday in the same house. Dyna i ti rhen Fagi! [There you are, old Maggie!] Love, fond & warm from your sweetheart.’¹⁹ Again, in February 1896: ‘You are a jealous little creature! Miss May is not there. As a matter of fact I have not seen her for months.’²⁰ And from Rome, where he was holidaying with two colleagues, he addresses a letter to ‘My dear suspicious old Maggie’:* ‘Mrs Blythe is a widow—young, pretty and genial. Are you scared stiff to hear this, old Maggie? Well, you needn’t be. She worships the memory of her dead husband and can think of nothing else.’²¹

Hardly reassuring. He went on to deploy another favourite tactic, suggesting that another member of his party was misbehaving, making himself look angelic in comparison: ‘They all know how fond I am of my Maggie. They see me writing letters when that is difficult…Gilchrist never talks of his wife and children, but I do often.’²²

Lloyd George genuinely considered himself to be a good husband and family man.* He was certainly a regular and enthusiastic correspondent, and he took a close, affectionate interest in his children. But left to his own devices in London, there were plenty of women who were more than happy to offer him the comfort of their parlours, posing a threat to the distant Maggie. An undated letter written to Lloyd George in the 1890s spells out the danger:

My Dear Mr Lloyd George

I have just returned from Birmingham. Went there yesterday and now I am back here in my flat [and my maids]. If you are going no where else tomorrow afternoon come up here and have some music. I shall be staying here now for a while so hope to see you.

In haste, yours etc

RFL²³

Again, from 1899 comes the distraught voice of a lady friend who wanted more attention than Lloyd George was able to offer:

My Dear Lloyd

Do please answer my letters. I never knew whether you got the one I sent you before you went abroad wishing you ‘bon voyage’. I am on [illegible] in case they do not reach you safely. Come & see me one Evening this week only let me know then I shall be in. I am dying for a long talk with you. Now do not fail to answer this letter.

Ys in haste,

Kate²⁴

Scribbled across the top of the letter, which is on black-edged mourning paper, is the instruction:

Read & tear it up at once but mind and write me. I have news for you too. A surprise.

We do not know what happened next, but the end of the story emerges in a telegram sent to Lloyd George at the Liberal Club. It seems that he had used the time-honoured way out of a tedious correspondence by continuing to ignore her letters:

I do think you unkind—you might put me out of my misery & acknowledge the receipt of my letters. I shall never write again unless you answer this. Will you come here or meet me tomorrow night—Friday? K²⁵

It is possible that Lloyd George was innocent of any wrongdoing in this case—there is no concrete evidence of indiscretion. But he was at the very least unwise to behave in such a way as to invite emotional letters of this kind. He was alone in London, at the height of his attractiveness. He was a popular and entertaining guest, and was as free as a single man to enjoy some music and female company once the business of the House was over for the day. From the start, he had redrawn the rules of marital fidelity to exclude sex from the deal. Maggie had his first loyalty, his love and his name. Anything she could not provide—including companionship and sex when they were apart—he felt free to take from others. Maggie had every reason to fear the worst.

The one thing Maggie did not have to fear was divorce. Quite apart from the fact that he loved her, Lloyd George was not going to leave his wife, for before he had served his first full session in Parliament he had witnessed at close quarters one of the most calamitous divorce scandals of the age. The affair between the leader of the Irish National Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Mrs Katharine O’Shea rocked the political establishment to its core. It made the young Welsh MP even more determined to put ambition before love, and political success above all else.

Katharine O’Shea, the wife of a captain in the 18th Hussars, met the charismatic Parnell in 1880, and they were soon living together in London and Brighton. She became closely involved in his political work, nursed him through his frequent periods of illness, and was often consulted by British and Irish politicians alike as Irish Home Rule became a more pressing issue. Her home was the first port of call when Gladstone or his lieutenants wanted to speak to Parnell, who was rapidly becoming one of the most prominent politicians of the day. He was worshipped in Ireland, and as the leader of the Irish Nationalists in the House of Commons, he held the balance of power.

It was perhaps inevitable that the chink in his armour, his relationship with Mrs O’Shea, with whom he had three children, would be used against him. The long-absent Captain O’Shea, who had seemed wholly unperturbed by his wife’s living arrangements, was persuaded by Parnell’s enemies to sue for divorce in 1889, citing Parnell as corespondent. Parnell refused to fight the case, relying on his personal reputation to help him ride out the crisis, but he lost the support of Gladstone, and with it the leadership of his party. It was the end of his career, and also the end of the campaign for Irish Home Rule which was his life’s work. He and Mrs O’Shea were eventually married in June 1891, and he died a little over three months later. He was forty-five.

The sheer scale of the scandal surrounding the O’Shea divorce case is difficult to imagine today. ‘Kitty’ O’Shea was reviled in the press, and Lloyd George attributed the loss of a by-election in Bassetlaw in December 1890 to the scandal. Parnell’s fellow MPs were amazed and appalled that he could have sacrificed the great Irish cause for the sake of a woman, no one more so than Lloyd George. He wrote: ‘The Irish party are now upstairs discussing Parnell’s future. I saw him just now in the tea-room looking as calm & as self-possessed as ever. But it is a serious business for him. Here he is quite a young man having attained the greatest career of this century, dashing it to pieces because he couldn’t restrain a single passion. A thousand pities. It is a still worse business for some of us fellows holding doubtful seats…’²⁶ A few days later he referred to Parnell as ‘a base selfish wretch’:

Everyone is so preoccupied about Parnell. Well it appears that fellow persists in brazening it out. The situation is getting very serious & acute & no one knows what will become of it. If Parnell sticks & his party stick to him it is generally conceded that Home Rule is done for. Isn’t he a rascal. He would sacrifice even the whole future of his country too.²⁷

Parnell was universally condemned for having put personal happiness ahead of his duty to his country.

What did Lloyd George glean from this episode? It was an early lesson in the ways of high society. Queen Victoria was still on the throne, but the Prince of Wales, heading the fast ‘Marlborough set’, was establishing new rules when it came to combining public life with private happiness. The Parnell affair elicited a strange mix of old attitudes and new ones.

Prince Edward, who became Edward VII in 1901, was the ultimate playboy prince. He had earned himself the nickname of ‘Edward the Caresser’ with a series of affairs which scandalised his parents and enthralled the nation. Indeed, it was during a visit to his son’s college in Cambridge in the wake of an incident involving a popular actress called Nellie Clifden that Prince Albert contracted his fatal dose of typhoid, and Queen Victoria never forgave her son for being the indirect cause of her widowhood. In an attempt to regularise his private life, Prince Edward was married off to the beautiful and virtuous Princess Alexandra, but that did not curb his behaviour for long. Soon he and his intimate circle, the so-called Marlborough House set, were developing a code of practice that allowed them to indulge in serial affairs without upsetting the social order. The rules of the game were simple, and designed to keep the players out of the divorce courts. Affairs were confined to women of the same, aristocratic social class. Single women were out of bounds, as were married ones until they had had two or three children, including the necessary heir. But after family obligations had been fulfilled, gentlemen and married ladies could conduct discreet affairs during country-house Saturday-to-Monday parties or long afternoon visits in town while husbands were at their clubs. House-party hostesses would understand what was expected of them in arranging bedroom accommodation for their guests. In this way immoral behaviour was cloaked in respectability, and scandal averted. Young girls’ marriage prospects were not ruined by affairs with older men, and elaborate rules involving chaperones were devised to make sure that everyone obeyed the code.

After making the proper kind of dynastic marriage, providing their aristocratic husbands with heirs, and transferring their children’s care to nannies, well-born women would find themselves at leisure. They were often bored, and played the game as enthusiastically as their husbands. Society colluded to keep everything discreet, even when prominent ladies gave birth to ‘late’ children who looked nothing like their husbands. The only threat to this happy arrangement, the thing to be avoided at all costs, was the public scandal of the divorce courts. Then the gloves came off, and the losers—usually women—were reviled in the press and excluded from society.

As an illustration of this code of conduct, there could be no better example than the Parnell affair. Everyone who knew Parnell and Mrs O’Shea, from the Prime Minister himself to the chambermaids who served them, treated Mrs O’Shea as Parnell’s lawful wife, and no one seemed to trouble themselves about the morality of the situation. But the fateful intervention of Captain O’Shea removed Parnell’s private life from the realm of the Marlborough House set rules, and cast it firmly into the public arena, where such things could not be accommodated. Thus Gladstone, who had been perfectly happy to acknowledge the affair in private, could not risk supporting Parnell through a public scandal. This may seem like utter hypocrisy—it seemed so to Mrs O’Shea at the time—but it was a reflection of the fact that the middle and working classes expected their national leaders to keep out of such scandals.

This was the world in which Lloyd George found himself when he entered Parliament, and this was the context to his own behaviour during the years that followed. The Parnell affair had lessons to impart in terms of both his marriage and his career, and he learned them well. Within his marriage, he was able to keep transient flirtations and affairs separate from the love and commitment he offered Maggie. While expecting total fidelity from his wife, he indulged in relationships with other women and was never faithful to any of them, making full use of the prevailing silence of the press in such matters. This was a million miles away from the attitudes in Criccieth, but then, Lloyd George was far away from Criccieth. Such was the impact of the Parnell affair on Lloyd George that he would give Frances Stevenson a biography of Parnell when he asked her to be his mistress. The warning was implicit: there would be no divorce in his case. There would be no scandal. His career came first.

However clear in his mind Lloyd George was on this point, the story of the gallant Irish politician who sacrificed his career for love sent a very different message to others of his acquaintance. One of them was Catherine Edwards, the wife of a respectable doctor in Cemmaes, Merioneth, who by fancying herself as the Welsh Kitty O’Shea caused the first major scandal of Lloyd George’s parliamentary career.

By the summer of 1896, Maggie’s life had settled into its uneven split between Criccieth and London, and since Lloyd George had maintained his majority in the general election of 1895, she could be confident that her life as an MP’s wife was likely to continue. She was thirty, and her brood now numbered four chicks, with Dick aged seven, Mair six, Olwen four, and the youngest, Gwilym, eighteen months. She was pregnant for the fifth time, and as usual she intended to stay in Criccieth until the birth. She and Lloyd George were still spending long times apart. He was making a name for himself as a backbencher and leader within the Welsh Parliamentary Group, and had taken several long holidays with political friends, while she stayed behind in Criccieth, which seemed to suit them both.

Money was still a problem. In his struggle to keep the family financially afloat, Lloyd George was apt to be tempted into unwise business dealings, and in 1893 the prospect of a quick return on a goldmine in far-distant Patagonia had been too attractive to resist. The consequences were disastrous, and in an attempt to turn the situation around he decided to take a trip to Argentina during the 1896 parliamentary recess, leaving on 21 August and returning on 27 October. He also needed a holiday, for his mother had died on 19 June. She was sixty-eight, and had been an invalid for many years. Lloyd George returned to Criccieth for a small, private funeral, and was so upset that Richard Lloyd sent him back to London so that politics could distract him from his grief. Maggie was too unwell to attend Betsy’s funeral, and during his trip—or possibly just before his departure—she lost the baby. While she was recovering from this setback, unbeknownst to her a child was being born to a cousin of hers, Catherine Edwards. This child was going to cast a shadow over her life for the next three years.

Catherine Edwards, or ‘Kitty’ as she was (ironically) known, was a ‘pretty, pert, amiable young woman’²⁸ who lived with her daughter and her husband, the local doctor, near the village of Mathafarn. In August 1896 her husband realised that she was pregnant, which was a surprise to him since the couple were estranged and had occupied separate bedrooms since 1894. What happened next came within a whisker of destroying Lloyd George’s political career.

Kitty later claimed that on 10 August her husband used physical violence to induce her to sign a statement written in his hand. It read:

I, Catherine Edwards, do solemnly confess that I have on 4th of February, 1896, committed adultery with Lloyd George MP, and that the said Lloyd George is the father of the child, and that I have on a previous occasion committed adultery with the above Lloyd George.²⁹

Dr Edwards denied using violence against his wife, but he did throw her out of the house, and just over a week later she gave birth to a child at a temperance hotel called The Tower in Penygroes, near Caernarvon. At the time it was claimed that the baby was born near its full term, but the date of the confessed adultery, together with Dr Edwards’ ignorance of his wife’s condition until August, lend credence to a later doctor’s report that the child was born substantially premature, weak and sickly at just over four pounds. The child did not survive to adulthood.

Naturally, within a small community, news like this could not be kept quiet, and Lloyd George’s political enemies made sure that the gossip persisted. While Lloyd George was abroad the rumours reached the ears of his brother William. To his credit, William never entertained the notion that his brother could be guilty as charged, but he recognised the gravity of the situation, recording gloomily in his diary: ‘The event that has overshadowed everything else in my little world during the last two days is the charge which is being made against D in connection with Mrs Dr Edwards…I hope to God that neither Uncle nor Maggie will hear anything of this slander until D returns when, of course, he will be in a position to deal with the “affair” effectively.’³⁰

William knew that the scandal would end Lloyd George’s career if he was not able to defend himself adequately, a fear that was reinforced the next day when he received a letter from R.O. Roberts, Lloyd George’s election agent, containing the sombre message: ‘The story is in everybody’s mouth here, and naturally enough, people are shocked whether it be true or not. If true, then D’s days are numbered; if untrue then it is a most devilish trick to blacken a man in his absence.’³¹

William immediately set about discovering the facts in order to mount a defence, taking care that Maggie heard nothing of the matter. He wrote a letter to Lloyd George with the bare bones of the accusation and sent it to Southampton to await his return. Having consulted Uncle Lloyd’s diary, which faithfully recorded Lloyd George’s whereabouts every day, he satisfied himself that his brother was innocent, and proceeded to do everything he could to keep a lid on the story. However, he did not know the date of the alleged adultery. He must have counted back nine months from the birth of the child rather than check the date in Kitty’s ‘confession’, because Uncle Lloyd’s diary clearly showed that Lloyd George did spend the night of 4 February at Dr Edwards’ house. Edwards had been called out during the night, and had not returned until morning, leaving his wife and Lloyd George alone in the house. This did not mean that Lloyd George was guilty, but William was premature in celebrating his brother’s innocence.

Dr Edwards was a Liberal supporter, and Lloyd George had got to know him when he campaigned for the Liberal candidate in Montgomeryshire in an 1894 by-election. A letter written to Lloyd George by Kitty suggested that he had also got to know Mrs Edwards rather well:

I am addressing this to the Club and the minute you have read it please commit it to the fire, I shall not expect an answer until you write to tell me you are going to spend a few days with us again…No more news, you may expect some trout from me in April, I shall send as many as I catch to Maggie and you and if my basket is not sufficient to supply your larder the Dr must help.

Excuse such an untidy letter and with my kind regards

Believe me

Yrs very sincerely

Kitty Edwards³²

Kitty Edwards was a young, flirtatious, bored wife, and it later emerged that not one but two other men were also in the frame as the possible father of her second child. Nevertheless, for some reason, under the pressure of her husband’s interrogation, she named Lloyd George as her lover, and for a short time this was believed by Dr Edwards.

In late October, Lloyd George returned home to Criccieth to find political uproar awaiting him, with all except his wife and his uncle in the know. He denied the charge and, advised by his brother, wrote to Dr Edwards to protest his innocence. The brief correspondence between them suggests that Edwards by then accepted that his wife had lied, but the doctor put the matter in the hands of his solicitor. Sooner or later with all this activity going on Maggie was bound to find out, and find out she did. She was not told about the affair by her husband, but discovered it when she read a letter that was addressed to him. It provoked a violent quarrel between them. Maggie was understandably distressed, but she came to believe in his innocence, and remained stalwart in her support for him through the whole, drawn-out affair.

In March 1897 Dr Edwards finally sued for divorce, and was promptly counter-sued by Kitty on the grounds of his cruelty. Lloyd George was not cited as co-respondent (that dubious honour went to Edward Wilson, the stationmaster at nearby Cemaes), but the libel of Kitty’s confession had circulated so widely that the judge asked Lloyd George if he wanted to join the suit so that he could clear his name publicly on oath. This presented Lloyd George with a dilemma. Maggie was insistent that to appear in court in connection with such a sordid business would inevitably lead to more gossip. Mud sticks, she felt, even if he was found not guilty. On the other hand, refusing to clear his name could also lead to more rumour. Eventually, strongly advised by his brother (who consistently gave him excellent, impartial legal advice), Lloyd George decided to keep his name out of the proceedings.

If Maggie ever doubted her husband in this matter, she did not show it. On the contrary, whatever her private feelings, she maintained a philosophical, almost nonchalant attitude, writing to William George:

PRIVATE:* Is it not a great nuisance to have this old story risen up again? I trust it will be over on Monday for Die’s sake—he is worrying about it. This world is a very cruel one, don’t you think so? The innocent must suffer in order to shield the culprits. There are several persons in this matter who are left out of it altogether, who no doubt are guilty of misbehaving with this woman.³³

In November 1897, by which time the scandal had been circulating for a full fifteen months, a court date was set. Shortly before then, a deal was reached between Dr and Mrs Edwards: she dropped her claims of cruelty in return for his withdrawing the charge against Edward Wilson. The reason for this deal became apparent later, and was connected with the discovery of indiscreet letters written by Mrs Edwards to a third man, known only as ‘Gillet’, which exonerated the stationmaster. But this did not emerge at the time and the judge proceeded to grant Dr Edwards a decree nisi on the grounds of his wife’s adultery ‘with persons unknown’.

Clearly this did not satisfactorily address the rumours concerning Lloyd George, so the judge took it upon himself to read out Kitty’s confession in court, adding: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that I think no case whatever has been made out against Mr Lloyd George—I think it was in the interests of Mr Lloyd George himself that the written confession has been brought forward and dealt with fully.’³⁴

The relief to Lloyd George and his family must have been considerable. The only cloud on the horizon was that since the proceedings would be reported in the press, Uncle Lloyd had to be told about the affair. He wept and was thoroughly upset, but still, Lloyd George’s name had been cleared.

And so the matter would have rested had not the divorce been interrupted in a most unfortunate manner. During the then compulsory six-month period between the granting of decree nisi and decree absolute, the man who employed Kitty as his secretary—Dr Beddoes of Aberystwyth—contested the decree nisi on the grounds that Dr Edwards had forced his wife to sign the confession. This dug up the scandal all over again, and led to a second court hearing in June 1899. The strain on Lloyd George and his family was compounded as further details of the affair came to light. Kitty’s confession was reprinted in the press, and when the court hearing came around, the whole business descended to near farce. Kitty’s letters inviting Gillet to visit her when her husband was away were exposed. She had also written to Dr Edwards begging him to let her return to the marital home, acknowledging, ‘I know I have sinned, but I have repented bitterly…I cannot expect you to receive me home yet, and of course the child shall never come,’³⁵ which hardly backed up her claim that the child was her husband’s all along. Lloyd George referred to the resurrection of the case as ‘another dose of purgatory’, and it weighed heavily on both him and Maggie. His political opponents made the most of his discomfort, and the matter only ended when the judge unhesitatingly granted Dr Edwards his decree absolute.

There is no definitive answer to the question of whether Lloyd George did or did not have a relationship with Kitty Edwards, but given the evidence of her letter it seems most likely that there was a flirtation, if not a sexual relationship, between them. The two court cases and William George’s investigative work focused on identifying the father of the child, but fathering the baby was only the first of two charges Kitty made against Lloyd George in her confession. The second was that she had ‘on a previous occasion’ committed adultery with him, a charge which was more difficult to disprove. It may well be that a relationship existed between them in 1894, a relationship that may even have caused the rift between Kitty and Dr Edwards, but that by 1896 she had taken another lover who was actually the father of her child. We shall probably never know for certain.

Despite her unflinching loyalty, Maggie was troubled by this episode. Even so, the mounting evidence of Lloyd George’s tendency to stray did not persuade her to move the family base to London. It took a far more serious affair of his to persuade her not to leave him alone in the city. The two affairs were not unconnected, since it was when the Edwards case was at its height, and Lloyd George was under great pressure, that he felt the need for some comforting female companionship in London. With his career on a knife-edge and his wife still based in Criccieth, he needed support and he readily found it from another quarter.

*R.O. Davies, a Criccieth acquaintance and chapel-goer, was a successful London draper. He and his family lived in Grasgarth, a comfortable house in Acton with a large garden and a tennis court.

*Following Dick and Mair, Olwen was born in 1892 and Gwilym in 1894.

*Lloyd George often refers to his wife as ‘old Maggie’. In Welsh, particularly in North Wales, the word ‘hen’, which literally means ‘old’, is used as an endearment. A more accurate translation would be ‘little Maggie’ or ‘dear Maggie’.

*In 1895 he wrote to Maggie: ‘Ellis Griffith [MP for Anglesey] & I were comparing notes the other day & we both said that if we were asked on a future great occasion in what capacity we would like to be tried before the Judgement seat we would answer As a husband if you don’t mind. We both thought we would fare pretty well if we had to stand or fall by our merits or demerits as husbands.’

*This was intended to signal to William that the note was for his eyes only, not to be read to the rest of the family.