Diana Cooper Read online

  PHILIP ZIEGLER

  Diana Cooper

  THE BIOGRAPHY OF LADY DIANA COOPER

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  FOREWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1 CHILDHOOD

  2 BIRTH OF THE QUEEN OF JERICHO

  3 THE GREAT WAR

  4 ‘THAT AWFUL DUFF’

  5 MARRIAGE

  6 THE MIRACLE

  7 ‘A LIGHT WORLD’

  8 ROYAL CIRCLES

  9 FIRST YEAR AT WAR

  10 ASIA AND ALGIERS

  11 PARIS EMBASSY

  12 ‘PARADISE LOST’

  13 ‘NEITHER QUEEN NOR TRAMP’

  14 ‘WHAT’S THAT LADY FOR?’

  15 OLD AGE

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  INDEX

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  This book is a labour of love, in the sense that I do not believe anybody could have got to know Diana Cooper as well as I have without feeling for her affection strong enough to deserve so extravagant a description. It is not hagiography. When I began work I warned Diana that the many generations of middle-class respectability which lay behind me would make me out of sympathy with her attitude towards, for instance, privilege and money. She was delighted, holding that only a touch of sharp criticism could redeem what she felt must otherwise prove a humdrum enterprise.

  People have frequently asked whether it was difficult to write about somebody who was still alive. The only honest answer is – yes. I have sought to meet my problem by pretending that it did not exist. I have constantly appealed to Diana for help in working out who was so-and-so in 1911, why she did such-and-such in 1920. I have talked to her for many hours. When it came to writing, however, I have never asked myself what she would think when she eventually read my book. Except for two short passages at the end where she breaks triumphantly into the present, I have written of her entirely in the past. She for her part has been generous in the correction of errors of fact but has made no attempt to change what must sometimes have seemed to her my perverse interpretation of events and motives.

  Whether the book should be published in her lifetime I left to her. She had no doubt that it must be; was indeed amazed that any other idea should have occurred to me. Whatever people might say of the book or her, the result was bound to be interesting and might well be amusing. To reject such a chance of fun would have been contrary to her every instinct and the pattern of her life.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First acknowledgement must obviously go to Lady Diana Cooper herself, without whom, for a variety of reasons, each more conclusive than the last, this book would never have been written.

  Next to her son, John Julius Norwich, who with my publisher, Mr Hamish Hamilton, conceived the idea of this book and talked me into writing it. He and his wife, Anne, have been miraculously helpful and have made what could have been an embarrassing experience into an enormously enjoyable enterprise.

  I must also make special mention of Sir Rupert and Lady Hart-Davis. As custodian of Duff Cooper’s diary as well as an editor of incomparable skill, Sir Rupert has made an enormously important contribution to my work.

  The list of those who have contributed in some way is alarmingly long and would be longer if a page of my notes had not mysteriously vanished. To any not mentioned for that reason I offer my apologies. All those mentioned below have helped in some way or another, and to all I am grateful. Of each one I can say that, but for their help, something in this book would be different.

  Miss Barley Alison; Mr Joseph Alsop; Mrs Susan Mary Alsop; Mr Mark Amory; the Marquess and Marchioness of Anglesey; Lady Helen Asquith; the late Hon. Michael Astor. Sir John Balfour, Mr Nicolas Barker; the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath; the late Sir Cecil Beaton; Sir Isaiah Berlin; the Hon. Mrs Richard Benyon; Sir Lennox and Lady Berkeley; Mrs Deirdre Bland; the Hon. Mark Bonham-Carter; Dr Michael Brock; Mr Kevin Brownlow; Mrs David Bruce; Miss Felicity Bryan; Miss Elaine Burrows. Lord Caccia; Lord David Cecil; Lord and Lady Charteris; Mr Paul Chipchase; Sybil, Marchioness of Cholmondeley; the late Mrs June Churchill; the late H.S.H. Prince Clary und Aldringen; Mr Peter Coats; the Hon. Artemis Cooper; the Hon. Jason Cooper; Miss Virginia Cowles; Mr Aidan Crawley.

  Helen, Lady Dashwood; The Earl of Drogheda. Pamela, Lady Egremont. The Hon. Mrs Daphne Fielding; the Hon. Mrs Ian Fleming; Mr Simon Fraser. Viscount and Viscountess Gage; Miss Martha Gellhorn; Mr Milton Gendel; Mr Martin Gilbert; Mrs Barbara Ghika; Lord and Lady Gladwyn; Mr John Gore; Mr John Grigg; Mr John Gross; Mr Peter Grosvenor. The Dowager Lady Harlech; the Hon. Mrs Averell Harriman; Mr Walter D’Arcy Hart; Lady Hartwell; the Hon. John Harvey; Sir William Hayter; Mrs Edna Healey; Sir Nicholas Henderson; the late Hon. Mrs Antony Henley; Lady Hesketh; Mr Derek Hill; Miss Patricia Hodge; the late Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal; Lady Home of the Hirsel; Lord and Lady Hutchinson.

  Mrs Carol Brown Janeway; Sir Charles Johnston; the Hon. John Jolliffe. Miss Philippa Kay; Sir William and Lady Keswick. Sir Alan Lascelles; Mr Patrick Leigh Fermor; the Earl and Countess of Longford. Mr Robin McDouall; the late Sir Robin and Lady McEwen; Mr Gordon Mackenzie; Sir Fitzroy and Lady Maclean; Mr Michael McLuhan; Mr Harold Macmillan; Sir Lees Mayall; Mr Ivan Moffat; Mr Malcolm Muggeridge. The Earl of Oxford and Asquith. M. Gaston Palewski; Mr Philip Palmer; Mr Stanley Prior; Mr Alan Pryce-Jones. Mr Peter Quennell. Mr Charles Ritchie; Mr Kenneth Rose; Lord Rothschild; Sir Steven Runciman; Mrs Gilbert Russell; Mr Martin Russell; the Duke and Duchess of Rutland; the Dowager Duchess of Rutland; Mr Nigel Ryan. Mr Jeremy Smith; Mr Stephen Spender; Dame Freya Stark; Sir Michael Stewart; Mrs Virginia Surtees; the Countess of Sutherland; Mr Sweeny. Mrs Marietta Tree; Mr Michael Tree, Mr Hugo Vickers. Mrs Daphne Wakefield; Mr Moray Watson; Mr Auberon Waugh; Mr Sam White; the late Mrs Violet Wyndham.

  Mrs Wilber devoted far more of her spare time than I like to think in typing and re-typing parts of my manuscript. Her help throughout has been invaluable.

  Finally, my wife and family have endured four years’ preoccupation with Diana Cooper and all her doings. It is a tribute to everyone concerned that they are still ready to take an interest in her today.

  ONE

  CHILDHOOD

  In the eyes of its inhabitants at least, Great Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century was unequivocally the leading country of the world. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see that already the economic base of Britain’s prosperity was being eroded, the will to dominate was failing; yet no such doubts assailed the island people. Confident that their empire was of unparalleled extent, that their navy was the size of any two others put together, that a third of the world’s trade travelled in British boats and was financed with British money, that Britons never would be slaves, they surveyed the future with the arrogant complacency of a master race. The world was their oyster and they would devour it as they chose.

  For many Britons, it was a question not of oysters, but of bread and water. The country was edging towards democracy but all its wealth and almost all its political muscle was still the perquisite of the middle and upper classes – at a generous estimate the top quarter of the population. The time was not far distant when the working classes would learn how to use their power but to the late Victorian it seemed that the rich man would live permanently in his castle, the poor man at his gate.

  The landed gentry and aristocracy had lost the exclusive power which once they had enjoyed but their share of the nation’s resources was still extravagantly large. Ninety-nine per cent of the land in private hands was held in substantial units, and of this a huge preponderance had been passed on within the same family for two or more generations. In the countryside the rule of the squire was still one o
f vast authority. The nouveaux riches flexed their muscles and increasingly asserted their grasp on the machinery of government but the traditional upper class remained blandly confident that it was the true, the destined ruling cadre.

  Within this already exclusive group some fifty or sixty great families preserved a status glorious out of all comparison with lesser mortals. Russells and Cavendishes, Cecils and Howards, Pelhams and Bentincks, they had ruled the country for centuries and could not wholly disabuse themselves of the conviction that it was still their fief. Their palaces, their possessions, their vast estates were the envy of the world. They were not parasites; many were conscientious landlords, if remote from the preoccupations of their tenants, and they made a substantial contribution to the running of the country. Nor were they wholly caste-ridden; even marriage out of their order was tolerated provided the financial incentive was sufficiently attractive. Some of them were cultivated; most of them were tolerably polite, even to members of the lower and middle classes. Their pride, however, was overweening; their self-confidence astonishing; their inbred sense of superiority daunting to all who did not share their advantages. The world, by and large, took them at their own valuation.

  It was into the heart of this innermost elite – the cream of the cream of the cream – that Lady Diana Manners was born.

  *

  Her mother was a Lindsay, granddaughter of the 24th Earl of Crawford. The Lindsays were a swashbuckling crew of considerable wealth and great antiquity. Diana’s grandfather, Colonel Charles, swashbuckled as lustily as any of them. A ‘fine, bearded, swarthy Crimean colonel’, as Diana’s sister Marjorie described him, he was a favourite with Queen Victoria; Master of Horse at the vice-regal court in Dublin and an intimate friend of Louis Napoleon. He married above his intellectual station Emilia Browne, daughter of the Dean of Lismore: a blue-stocking beauty with orange-tawny hair and ‘a perfect oval face with cream and apricot colouring’. They were not rich by the standards of their friends but they lived in considerable style in a country house near Wantage, where Diana’s mother, Violet, was born.

  From her early childhood it became clear to everyone, including Violet, that the Lindsays had produced something of a prodigy. ‘The most beautiful thing I ever saw,’ Mrs Patrick Campbell described her; tall, slender and moving with a dreamy elegance that complemented her pre-Raphaelite features and ivory complexion. But her looks were not her only advantage. Encouraged by her mother, she developed considerable talents as a sculptress and draughtsman: Rodin was to compare her sculpture to that of Donatello; Watts her drawing to Holbein’s. Neither authority could be called entirely objective, but she still deserved to be taken seriously as an artist. She played the piano competently and sang Lieder and romantic ballads with skill and feeling. Without being an intellectual herself, or even widely read, she commanded the respect of intellectuals and instilled a vague unease in the more philistine sections of the upper classes. She attended the original dinner party at which Lord Charles Beresford is supposed to have turned on Arthur Balfour and complained: ‘You all sit talking about each other’s souls. I shall call you “the Souls”’; and though the innermost membership of this amorphous body remained predominantly male, she was a camp follower of the Souls so long as they existed.

  An artistic temperament, pre-Raphaelite appearance and taste for high Bohemia did not preclude prudent pawkiness. She fought ferociously and without scruple for her own interests or the interests of those she loved, and never allowed her romantic urges to interfere with the serious business of life. As a girl she cherished an unrequited love for a neighbourhood hero forty years older than herself, Lord Wantage V.C. When Lord Wantage married an heiress she repined briefly, then addressed herself to the task of making the most suitable match in Britain. She found her mate in Henry Manners, great-nephew and heir-presumptive to the sixth Duke of Rutland.

  Cecils might be more clever, Pagets might make more row, but there was something awe-inspiring about a Victorian duke. They enjoyed a status second only to that of royalty, superior in some ways in that royalty remained mysteriously remote while dukes were divinity incarnate. Their grandeur, though not dependent on, was invariably linked with great material possessions, and the Manners were among the wealthiest. They owned 30,000 acres of land in Leicestershire, 27,000 in Derbyshire, 6,600 in Cambridgeshire, 1,100 in Notts, 760 in Rutland. Their rent roll was £97,000 a year; their income from coal mines substantial and growing rapidly; their principal seat, Belvoir (pronounced Beaver) Castle, among the most massive, if not antique, of ducal palaces. Their achievements were less conspicuous. As a family the Manners had never done very much. The seventh Duke, Henry’s father, had admittedly turned down the chance to be Viceroy of India and Governor General of Canada but this, though not unimpressive, may reasonably be felt negative as an exploit. He had, however, risen to be Minister of Works and a member of the Cabinet, a status never attained nor indeed aspired to by his son.

  Henry Manners was better than a dull dumb duke, but only just. He had his qualities. He was an exceptionally handsome man with charm and graceful manners. Though subject to furious tantrums – he once dashed an entire breakfast service to the ground when told that Princess Beatrice of Battenberg was coming to lunch – he was generally kindly and tolerant. He was, however, almost entirely without ambition; when he married he was private secretary to Lord Salisbury and this was the zenith of his public life. His principal interests were dry-fly fishing and fornication; pursuits requiring much dexterity but not intellectually demanding. Beaverbrook spoke of him as ‘a man of considerable stupidity’ and most references to him by his contemporaries are couched in terms of more-or-less affectionate contempt. There is no reason to doubt that Violet Lindsay was in love when she married him, but it seems unlikely that her love would have been bestowed in this quarter if he had not been a future Duke of Rutland.

  Marital fidelity was not a virtue highly esteemed among the British aristocracy. Many husbands kept women on the side; once the wife had produced an heir she often felt that her work was done and she could now relax. The only requirement was that one should not be caught out; in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s no doubt apocryphal phrase, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’

  Violet Manners dutifully settled down to bear her husband’s children. A girl, Marjorie, came first; then followed a son and heir, Robert, in 1885; another boy, John, next year and Violet in 1888. By this time the marriage had seen its best days. Whatever sexual delights it had once offered had faded and no sense of companionship had replaced them. Instead they organized their lives in a pattern that made the marriage tolerable to both of them. Lord Granby, as Henry Manners became after the death of the 6th Duke in 1888, developed a keen interest in the stage, concentrating his attention on the most attractive actresses. At one point he was strongly drawn to Gladys Cooper, sending her flowers with affectionate notes: ‘Dear and Beautiful One. I am venturing to send you some half-dozen “Daffys”.’ His most lasting liaison, however, was with Violet Vanbrugh, a performer whose acting skills were limited but whose physical charms were outstanding. He had a child by her, left her £200 in his will, and for several years devoted to her much of the affection that might more properly have been granted to his wife.

  Lady Granby did not repine. After some tentative forays she took herself a lover, Montagu Corry, later Lord Rowton, a dashing young man-about-town who was alleged to have won his place as Disraeli’s private secretary by his aptitude for singing comic songs while simultaneously performing a strenuous dance. More importantly, he was hard-working, tactful and devotedly loyal to his master. He was loyal to his mistress, too; long after their liaison was over his house provided an asylum to which surplus Manners children could be despatched when need arose.

  Corry, however, was no more than a sighting shot for what was to be Violet Granby’s most passionate and lasting love. Harry Cust was an altogether more striking obj
ect of her affection. He was a nephew of Lord Brownlow and a man of charm, intelligence and outstanding beauty. At Eton a master who taught all three reckoned that he was more likely to become prime minister than either Rosebery or Curzon. He entered parliament and shone there, but his performance was marred by its fatal facility. He found it all too easy, became easily bored and was distracted by the delights of that social life for which he was so admirably fitted. Literature, he decided, was more his forte than politics. He wrote minor verse and, in 1892, was offered the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette. Here too he shone at first, gathering contributors such as Kipling, Balfour, Alice Meynell and H. G. Wells. Wells, in particular, admired him greatly, inscribing The World Set Free to ‘Harry Cust: Noblest and best of Editors, Inventor of Authors, Friend of Letters’. Yet even Wells was disconcerted when he arrived at the editor’s office to find it apparently empty. Then the sound of sobbing disclosed Cust ‘prostrate on a sofa indulging in paroxysms of grief’.

  For Cust was as self-indulgent in his emotions as he was over drink or women. The last, in particular, dissipated his energies and blighted his career with scandal. He could never resist trying to seduce them and they frequently succumbed. ‘He was the Rupert Brooke of our day,’ wrote Lady Horner. ‘Gold-haired, wellborn, a poet. Irresistible.’ Unusually, for a professional womanizer, he was well liked by men; a member of the sternly masculine Crabbet Club and a participant in the celebrated nude tennis match in which he and Curzon beat George Wyndham and Scawen Blunt. His charm did not always work, however. Among his juniors in particular there was sometimes a feeling that he was a tiresome poseur; ‘an old bore,’ Julian Grenfell described him trenchantly, ‘with vulgar hair and disgusting habits’.

  When Violet Granby grew to know him well in the late 1880s, Cust was already the hero of a celebrated scandal involving Lady de Grey and Lady Londonderry and had had his name linked – fairly or unfairly – with a score of women in London society. Lord Granby can hardly have been pleased at his wife’s liaison with this notorious philanderer, but he had his own fish to fry and at least must have felt confident that the couple would stick to the rules and avoid any show of flagrant passion. Lady Granby, indeed, handled the affair with immaculate discretion, concealing her private meetings with Harry Cust under a cloak of tea-parties with her great friend Lady Tree. The relationship throve for several years until Cust grew bored and began to look elsewhere. Nemesis struck in the guise of Miss Nina Welby-Gregory, pretty daughter of a Lincolnshire neighbour whom Cust seduced more or less from force of habit. Miss Welby-Gregory pretended, or possibly believed that she was to have a child by him; Cust married her under protest and at once abandoned her; no child came, and Nina was left adoring but disconsolate. For years she dressed and tried to behave like Violet Granby in the hope she would win back her errant husband. In old age and decrepitude Cust did indeed return to her and she looked after him devotedly till he died.