The Proud Tower (10 page)

“Splendidly, Harry, splendidly.”

“Did you understand me, Arthur?”

“Not a word, Harry, not a word.”

Arthur Balfour, prince of the Cecil line, nephew of the Prime Minister and his political heir apparent, artist of debate and idol of Society, was the paragon of his party and its official Leader in the House of Commons. He was forty-seven in 1895 and, when his uncle retired in 1902, was to succeed him as Prime Minister. Over six feet tall, he had blue eyes, waving brown hair and moustache, and a soft, bland face that might have seemed vulnerable if it had not been smoothed to an external serenity. His expression was gentle, his figure willowy, his manner nonchalant, but there remained a mystery in his face. No one could tell what banked fires burned behind it or whether they burned or even if they existed.

Rarely seen to sit upright, he reclined in indolent attitudes as close to the horizontal as possible, “as if to discover,” wrote
Punch
’s parliamentary correspondent, “how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades.” In him all the gifts of privilege had combined. He had wealth, blue blood, good looks, great charm and “the finest brain that has been applied to politics in our time.” He was a philosopher on a serious level whose second major work,
The Foundations of Belief
, published in 1895, was read by the American philosopher William James with “immense gusto. There is more real philosophy in such a book,” he wrote to his brother Henry, “than in fifty German ones heaped with subtleties and technicalities.”

Although ultimately aloof and detached, Balfour had a winning manner that encircled him with admiration. His charm was of the kind that left everyone feeling happy who talked with him. “Although he was the best talker I have ever known,” said John Buchan, “he was not a monopolist of the conversation but one who quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best of other people.” After an evening in his company, wrote Austen Chamberlain, “one left with the feeling that one had been at the top of one’s form and really had talked rather well.” Political opponents were affected no less than allies. He was the only Conservative to whom Gladstone in debate accorded the term usually reserved for members of his own party, “my honourable friend.” Women succumbed equally. “Oh dear,” sighed Constance Lady Battersea after a visit to his home in 1895, “what a gulf between him and most men!” Margot Asquith found his “exquisite attention” and “lovely bend of the head,” when he talked to her, “irresistible”; so much so that earlier, when she was Margot Tennant, and herself a social star of high voltage, she had “moved heaven and earth,” according to Lady Jebb, to marry him. Queried on the rumor of this marriage, Balfour replied, “No, that is not so. I rather think of having a career of my own.”

As the eldest son of Lord Salisbury’s sister, Lady Blanche Balfour, he was named Arthur for the Duke of Wellington, who acted as his godfather. On the paternal side the Balfours were of ancient Scottish lineage, their fortune having been made in the late Eighteenth Century by Arthur’s grandfather, James Balfour, a nabob of the East India Company. James acquired in Scotland an estate of 10,000 acres, at Whittinghame overlooking the Firth of Forth, which became the family home, as well as a deer forest, a salmon river, a shooting lodge, a seat in Parliament and a daughter of the eighth Earl of Lauderdale as wife. A daughter of this marriage, Balfour’s aunt, married the Duke of Grafton, so that along with the Salisbury connection, Balfour, as a friend said, “can call cousins with half the nobility of England.” His younger brother Eustace subsequently married Lady Frances Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of the Duke of Sutherland, niece of the Duke of Westminster and sister-in-law of Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria.

Balfour’s father, also an M.P., died at thirty-five, when Arthur was seven, leaving Lady Blanche, in whom the Cecil streak of religious feeling was particularly marked, to govern her family of five sons and three daughters. Besides teaching Arthur to admire Jane Austen and her brother’s favorite,
The Count of Monte Cristo
, she also communicated the Cecil sense of duty. When her son at Cambridge became enamored of philosophy and wished to make over his inheritance to a brother in favor of the studious life, she scolded him severely for poor spirit in wanting to shirk the responsibilities of his position.

At Trinity College, where Balfour read Moral Science, his failure to take a First did not depress his imperturbable good nature or good spirits. He was, wrote Lady Jebb, the doyen of Cambridge society, “a young prince in his way and almost as much spoiled.” Of his four brothers, Frank was a professor of embryology who according to Darwin would have become “the first of English biologists” if he had not been killed climbing in the Swiss Alps at the age of thirty-one; Gerald, superbly handsome, was, according to Lady Jebb, “the most superior man I ever met,” although her niece thought him “the most conceited”; Eustace was merely average and Cecil was the bad apple in the barrel, who died disgraced in Australia. But Arthur, decided Lady Jebb, was “the best in a family all of whom are best,… a man that almost everyone loves.” She thought his nature, however, was “emotionally cold” and that his one essay in love, with May Lyttelton, sister of a Cambridge friend and Gladstone’s niece, who died when she was twenty-five and Balfour twenty-seven, had “exhausted his powers in that direction.” This was the accepted supposition in later years to explain Balfour’s bachelorhood. In fact, it was not so much that he was emotionally cold as that he was warmly attached to his complete freedom to do as he pleased.

Among his friends were two of Trinity’s outstanding scholars: his tutor Henry Sidgwick, later Professor of Moral Philosophy, and the physicist John Strutt, later third Baron Rayleigh, a future Nobel prize winner and Chancellor of the University, each of whom married a sister of Balfour. At that time, when to be an intellectual was to be agnostic, Balfour’s inherited religious sense caused his Cambridge friends to regard him as “a curious relic of an older generation.” His Society friends, on the other hand, when he published his first book,
A Defence of Philosophic Doubt
, in 1879, assumed from the title that Arthur was championing agnosticism, and when his name was mentioned, “they went about looking very solemn.” In fact, by expressing doubt of material reality, the book was paradoxically asserting the right to spiritual faith, a position more explicitly stated in his later book,
The Foundations of Belief.
At Whittinghame, which was run for him by his maiden sister, Alice, and shared by his married brothers and their numerous children, he read family prayers every Sunday evening. Steeped in the Hebraism of the Old Testament, he felt a particular interest in the “people of the Book” and was concerned about the problem of the Jew in the modern world. His niece and biographer in her childhood imbibed from him “the idea that Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid.”

He was the most dined-out man in London. Blandly ignoring the implacable rule that required the Leader of the House to be in his place throughout a sitting, he would often disappear during the dinner hour, reappearing shamelessly some hours later in evening dress. Every diary of the time finds him at house parties and dinner parties: “at the Rothschilds,” wrote John Morley, “only Balfour there,
partie carrée
, always most pleasurable.” He was one of twenty men at dinner at Harry Cust’s, where the talk was so absorbing that when the house caught fire upstairs the dinner continued while the footmen passed bath towels with the port for protection against water from the firemen’s hoses; he was at Blenheim Palace with the Marlboroughs in a party including the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Curzons, the Londonderrys, the Grenfells and Harry Chaplin; he was at Chatsworth with the Devonshires in a party including the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, Count Mensdorff, the Austrian Ambassador, the ugly, fascinating and ribald Marquis de Soveral, Ambassador of Portugal, the de Greys, Ribblesdales and Grenfells; he was at Hatfield with the Salisburys in a party including the Duke of Argyll, Mr. Speaker Peel and his daughter, Mr. Buckle of
The Times
, George Curzon and General Lord Methuen; he was at Cassiobury, home of Lord Essex, one Sunday at the end of a brilliant London season, when Edith Wharton, arriving for tea, “found scattered on the lawn under the great cedars the very flower and pinnacle of the London world: Mr. Balfour, Lady Desborough, Lady Elcho, John Sargent, Henry James and many others of that shining galaxy, so exhausted by their social labors of the past weeks … that beyond benevolent smiles they had little to give.”

Most often Balfour was to be found at Clouds, home of the baronet Sir Percy Wyndham and favored country house of the Souls. Among their congenial company the particular attraction for Balfour was Lady Elcho, one of the three beautiful Wyndham sisters, with whom, though she was the wife of a friend, Balfour pursued a discreet affair over a period of some twelve years, of which the letters survive. Sargent, when he painted the sisters in 1899, was hampered by no such compelling realism as affected him in the matter of Lady Charles Beresford’s eyebrows. The group portrait of Lady Elcho, Mrs. Tennant and Mrs. Adeane, gowned in porcelain whiteness and draped in poses of careless but haughty elegance upon a sofa, is a dazzling dream of feminine aristocracy.

The ladies of the Souls, in conscious reaction to the Victorian feminine ideal, determined to be intellectual, to be slim and likewise to allow themselves a new freedom of private morality. Their only American member, the beautiful Daisy White, wife of Henry White, First Secretary of the American Embassy, was once congratulated by a friend on not allowing herself to be changed by “all those people who have lovers.” In this activity the Souls were no different from the more philistine members of the Prince of Wales’s set. All were engaged in the same open conspiracy in which Society managed to depart from Victorian morality without deserting propriety. Balfour’s liaison with Lady Elcho was for a while serious enough to cause their friends some anxiety. The feelings of the husband, Hugo, Lord Elcho, heir of the Earl of Wemyss and a member, though a silent one, of the same circle, are unknown. The affair, like the Duke of Devonshire’s, was the permitted excursion of a person of character and position sufficiently lofty to be above reproach.

When Balfour first entered Parliament at twenty-six from a family-controlled borough, it had been less from personal desire than from ordained fate as an eldest son and a Cecil. By the time he moved into Downing Street in 1895 as First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House, in lieu of his uncle, who preferred to live at home, the passion for politics latent in his blood had grown with growing skill and power. Yet it did not disturb his temperamental detachment. When meeting criticism he would regard it, not as something to resent, but as a thing to be examined like an interesting beetle. “Quite a good fellow,” he would say of an opponent, “has a curious view, not uninteresting.” He was at heart both a conservative who wanted to retain the best of the world he knew and a liberal with, as his sister-in-law remarked, “a sympathetic outlook for all progress.” People felt in him “a natural spring of youth,” in the words of one friend, and a “freshness, serenity and buoyancy” in the words of another. Later, as Prime Minister, he was the first in that office to go to Buckingham Palace in a motorcar and the first to go to the House of Commons in a Homburg hat.

He thought of himself as belonging to the younger generation of Tories who recognized the necessity of responding to the rising challenge of the working class. Yet bred as they were in privilege they could not, when issues came to a test, range themselves on the side of the invaders. In his first years in Parliament, Balfour had joined the four “Radical” Tories of the Fourth Party led by Lord Randolph Churchill. They occupied the Front Bench below the gangway and Balfour sat with them, because, he said, he had room there for his legs, but the choice indicated a point of view. The Fourth Party were gadflies in the cause of what was called “Tory Democracy,” the belief that the rising political power of Labour could be harnessed in partnership with the Tories. If Labour, stated Lord Randolph in 1892, found that it could “obtain its objects and secure its own advantage” under the existing constitution—which it was the Tories’ business to preserve—then all would be well; but if the Conservatives stubbornly resisted these demands in “unreasoning and shortsighted support of all the present rights of property,” then Labour would be ranged against them. Since the Tories were a minority in the country, it was incumbent on them to enlist in their support “a majority of the votes of the masses of Labour.”

Balfour was never thoroughly persuaded of this convincingly worded argument, any more than, when it came to a practical test, was Lord Randolph himself. In the abstract, Balfour believed in democracy and extension of the suffrage and in improvement of working conditions and of the rights of Labour but not at the cost of breaking down the walls of privilege that protected the ruling class. Here was the fundamental difficulty of Tory Democracy. Its advocates thought it possible to meet the demands of the workers while at the same time preserving intact the citadel of privilege, but Balfour suspected the bitter truth of history: that progress and gain by one group is never accomplished without loss of some permanent value of another. He continued to express his belief that Socialism would never get possession of the working classes “if those who wield the collective forces of the community show themselves desirous … to ameliorate every legitimate grievance.” But when it came to specific acts of amelioration he was not enthusiastic or deeply concerned. “What exactly
is
a ‘Trade Union’?” he once asked a Liberal friend. Margot Asquith said to him that he was like his uncle in having a wonderful sense of humor, literary style and a deep concern with science and religion. Was there any difference between them? “There is a difference,” Balfour replied. “My uncle is a Tory—and I am a liberal.” Yet the fact that his uncle remained undisturbed by Balfour’s early association with the Tory “Radicals” and that the perfect confidence between them remained unclouded suggests that there was a basic identity of belief stronger than the difference.