Franny Moyle (5 page)

With marriage for Ada on the horizon, the Lloyd family had been thrown into an ugly financial war. On Horace's death, Grandpa Horatio had agreed to supplement Ada's income to the tune of £400 per year, on the understanding that she was also supporting the children. With a new husband on the scene, Horatio was proposing withdrawing this allowance to his daughter-in-law. In retaliation Ada was refusing to support her own children. John Horatio was evidently less keen to see his grandchildren having to earn their own keep than their mother, and so had been forced to work out a plan to cater for them, as Constance began to outline to Otho. They would ultimately inherit a portion of his estate: ‘by Grandpapa's will, having reached 23 we become possessed of the 4th share divided between us. Supposing Mama does not marry … we each give her half until her death, when it of course comes back to us.'
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Towards the end of September details had been finalized of further respective annual allowances that their grandfather was prepared to make. Constance, ecstatic to be financially independent of her mother at last, provided Otho with more information on her grandfather's proposals. Her ability to maintain something of a dry sense of humour amid this domestic turmoil speaks volumes for Constance's inner resilience, which would serve her well in years to come.

Your mother expected that you would write & condole with her on the loss of her income. You have not followed her unexpressed but oh! how expressive! wishes – in this respect. Was this right? Oh No … it was wrong. Was I say for there is no need now to write. The arrow smote deep but it has been stayed by the hand of whom do you think? – the aged Octogenarian who in spite of the storm of opposition raised by the assembly of Aunts & sisters in law has ventured to express his approbation of your humble servant's merits by bestowing on her £150 a year, £100 to be given to her guardian for her maintenance, £50 to be devoted to the purchase of her Dress, the payment of any studies or Concerts she may choose to attend & in fact for her ‘menus plaisirs' in general.
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Rather amusingly, and entirely understandably, Constance suggested buying the meanest possible wedding present for her mother, within the terms of the brief that Ada had clearly set them. ‘A propos of the honourable lady about to be married,' Constance informed her brother, ‘it is necessary that we give her a present, & that present must be … costly … she has fixed her affections on a plain gold bracelet … I find the smallest is £7.7.6.'
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Ada Lloyd eventually walked down the aisle with George Swinburne-King on 19 October 1878 at St James's Church in Sussex Gardens. The newly-weds headed off for their honeymoon, and Constance was dispatched to one of her aunts in Norwood, south London.

Constance's grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had three daughters in addition to his sons Horace and Frederick. The family was close-knit and would remain so throughout Constance's life. Frederick died early; Emily never married and lived with her father in Lancaster Gate; Carrie had married a physician, Dr Kirkes; and Louisa Mary, known as ‘Aunt Mary', married William Napier, second son of the Trafalgar veteran and former Lord of the Bedchamber to King William IV, Baron Napier.

It was in Aunt Mary Napier's cottage in the leafy, smoke-free environs of Norwood that Constance now found herself at the end of October 1878. If she hoped that her mother's attitude towards her
would be changed by marriage, she was to be disappointed. ‘I have not had a line from my parents have you?' Constance inquired of Otho. ‘Affectionate people!! Before I left Ella had had two letters from Mama, one from Mr King & Tizey … grandpapa one from Mama, and Aunt Emily one from Mama on Monday. Why is it I am always snubbed? However Aunt Mary is more than kind to me & Mr Hope too who admires you immensely.'
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The reference to Mr Hope is to Adrian Hope, a young nephew of William Napier, who would almost certainly have been invited over by Aunt Mary to meet Constance, perhaps with matchmaking in mind. At twenty, Constance was eminently marriageable. Her mother's recent marriage and subsequent lack of interest in her only contributed to her status as family burden, the responsibility for whom would now be shared out between her grandfather and his daughters. In the 1870s Constance was living in an era when middle- and upper-class women still did not work and were not expected to look after themselves. Despite any ambitions they might harbour, there was still no career path or opportunity for a stratum of society that had traditionally been supported by family or husbands. The era of the career woman remained far off, and those women who had found a living by writing or painting were still few and far between.

Adrian Hope must have been an attractive prospect as a potential husband, but there was clearly no spark. The irony is that later in life Adrian and Constance would indeed become intimately entwined, but in circumstances that neither of them could have foreseen in these early days.

It was not as if Constance was averse to marriage at this time; she simply lacked confidence when it came to young men. She had a tendency to lapse into what appeared to many to be a sulky silence when in company. This tendency, almost certainly an attitude she adopted when struck dumb by the extreme shyness that remained a lasting legacy of her abuse, was something that haunted her for the rest of her life. ‘Sulky' was an adjective often applied to her by detractors. The photograph in
The Young Woman
in 1895 serves as a
reminder that, years after she had conquered her nerves, she could still unthinkingly appear gloomy and melancholic.

‘Oh me! When shall I marry me?' Constance moaned to Otho around this time. ‘You say I shall have a chance of marrying. I see none. I have no beauty, no conversation, no small talk even to make me admired or liked … I shall be an old maid, I am doomed to it & you will see your Sister walking about with 6 cats and half a dozen dogs.'
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While Constance was staying with Aunt Mary, the debate raged over where the newly wed Swinburne-Kings would live and whether Constance would live with them. Constance suggested a move that would take them into South Kensington, into the artistic hub that surrounded the South Kensington Museum – now the Victoria and Albert Museum. Constance's friend Lucy Russell lived in nearby Queen's Gate, and Constance mooted a similar address. Ada's response was typically nasty: ‘I suggested to Mama to take a house in Queens Gate but she nearly fainted at the idea, for it suddenly occurred to her that Miss R lives there & she said she would not be near any of my friends for £1000!'
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Although Otho had been unable to protect his sister from Ada's abuse up to this point, the marriage presented a new opportunity. He visited John Horatio and insisted that Constance must be removed from her mother. Ada put up no resistance. And so Mr Swinburne-King and his daughter moved into Devonshire Terrace, and Constance moved out. Her new home was to be that of her grandfather, 100 Lancaster Gate, with John Horatio and Auntie Emily
in loco parentis
.

Now it would be these two charged with the future of their shy, studious ward. That within the next few years she would metamorphose into one of the most talked-about women in London was hardly an outcome they could have foreseen.

2

Terribly bad taste

I
N THE SECOND
half of the nineteenth century Hyde Park had become a pleasure ground surrounded by the palaces of the rich. It was in one such palace that, by the age of twenty, Constance Lloyd found herself resident.

Grandpa Horatio's house at Lancaster Gate was enormous and imposing. Built as part of an ambitious scheme in the mid-1850s around the newly built Christ Church, it was one of a row of huge houses, set back from the road and overlooking Hyde Park, that had been described as the most handsome terrace in the whole of London.
¹
John Horatio was a man who had made his mark, and his address was testimony.

From her new home Constance would have seen the full anatomy of London life. Early in the morning, from half-past seven, the so-called ‘Liver Brigade' would be out riding. Taking their constitutional gallop, shaking the liver ahead of the day's toil, London's top judges, barristers, surgeons and millionaires would be seen clad in silk hats and black hunting coats, breeches and shining patent boots. When they had headed off for the City and Inns of Court, nursemaids in their smart grey flannel uniforms would emerge with perambulators, and governesses would march smart children up and down.

Sometimes Constance would get a sight of a protest, since the park remained the arena for political manifestation since the great Chartist and reformist protests of the 1840s, 50s and 60s. And then in July she would have witnessed the municipal gardeners lay out thousands of potted palms and semi-tropical plants that would transform the park
for its ten-week ‘summer season' into something altogether more exotic.

But prestigious and well located though it was, Constance did not much enjoy ioo Lancaster Gate. Over-sized for its occupancy of three, it was an austere and un-homely place for a modern young woman to live and, as she later told Oscar, she never felt more than a guest there. Although Constance adored her grandfather, her aunt Emily was old-fashioned and disapproved of many of her ambitions. Nevertheless, beneath Constance's quiet exterior lay a determined soul. Perhaps not quite the ‘smouldering volcano' that her mother had alleged, but certainly someone with her own strong mind, who was not prepared to toe the line just for the sake of convention. And so Constance pursued her interests as best she could.

She began to display an increasing passion for art and culture, most specifically the visual and decorative arts. Constance makes much mention of the controversial Grosvenor Gallery in her letters in the early 1880s. This was a temple to contemporary art in New Bond Street, designed as an Italian palazzo. The art lovers who worshipped there would pass through its imposing Palladian entrance salvaged from the demolished church of Santa Lucia in Venice, before entering a huge room adorned with a blue coved ceiling on which James McNeill Whistler had painted the phases of the moon and a sprinkling of golden stars. Below a green velvet dado, red silk walls punctuated by Ionic pilasters rescued from the old Italian opera house in Paris displayed the best avant-garde art money could buy.

But the Grosvenor was more than just a gallery: it was also the social nexus for the alternative, Aesthetic, liberal-minded set and was particularly women-friendly. Since its inception it had garnered a reputation for supporting, among others, ‘feminist' artists, many of whom would go on to become firm friends of Constance and Oscar. Painters such as Emily Ford, Louise Jopling, Evelyn de Morgan and Henrietta Rae had their work shown here. They, like Constance, would have enjoyed the gallery restaurant, which specifically catered for ladies lunching unchaperoned, as well as its library and club, which had a dedicated ladies' drawing room.

Oscar, who even at university in Oxford was aligning himself with the Aesthetic group of poets and painters, had of course made a point of getting invited to the opening of the Grosvenor in 1877, and years later he summed up its enduring cachet in his novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray:
‘You must certainly send it [the painting of Gray] next year to the Grosvenor,' Wilde's Lord Henry Wooton urges the painter Basil Hallward.

The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have either been so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.
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Constance dashed to the Grosvenor on occasion to meet friends, although there is a sense that she did so with some secrecy. In one letter to Otho she confided that ‘as Grand Papa was in the City and Auntie at Windsor, I rushed off there in a hansom and … lunched there'.
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At the Grosvenor, Constance met like-minded friends and solicited introductions to some of the contemporary artists she so admired. One man whose friendship she cultivated in 1881 was the sculptor Richard Belt. Constance's fascination with Belt, a controversial figure, suggests a susceptibility to men whose character and profession placed them with at least a foot in the demi-monde.

In 1879 Belt had won a prestigious competition to create a monument to Lord Byron, and in 1880 Constance would have seen his huge bronze seated figure of the poet unveiled close to Hyde Park Corner. Just after it was unveiled, an article in
Vanity Fair
suggested that, far from being by Belt, the statue had in fact been farmed out by him to foreign assistants, as had all the output of his studio since 1876. The source of this libel was another sculptor, Charles Lawes, whom Belt had once assisted and whom he promptly sued. This national scandal was in full swing when Constance and Belt began seeing one another. She visited his studio, had dinner with him and began to make her own investigations into this man, whom she clearly found
fascinating and with whom she obviously shared some social connections.

‘Miss Emily A is going to take me to see the Pennants in Westminster next Wednesday in order to ask them about Mr Belt,' she wrote to Otho.

[T]he H's had not heard of the libel and are most deeply interested in it and of course having heard of his talents when quite a boy, don't believe a word of it … I've told Auntie that I am going but she does not remember the connection. Mr Belt, I daresay you will remember, was in Mr T's school, and it was he who first discovered his talents.
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Belt won his libel case, and Lawes was faced with £5,000 worth of damages. Just five years later, however, in another scandal involving the sale of fake diamonds to aristocrats that could easily have formed part of the plot of one of Oscar's plays, Belt was convicted of fraud and sent to gaol.
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