Lady Winifred Burghclere

  LADY WINIFRED BURGHCLERE AND HER  TROUBLESOME DAUGHTERS

 Small  in stature, often  haughty and  snooty  by nature,  Winifred  Herbert [i] grew up to be best known as Lady  Burghclere,  wife of a quixotic  Victorian figure  named Herbert Gardner, [ii]  the illegitimate  son of a  peer.  Herbert was  a Liberal  MP, playwright and sportsman who was elevated to the peerage as the first (and, as he had no son, the  only) Lord  Burghclere[iii].  When they wed he was almost 20 years older than Winifred.  

 The marital union of  Winifred and Herbert Gardner in 1890 was a much  happier occurrence than her first doubly tragic experience of wedlock in 1887 when she married  a  soldier, another older man,  one of the sons of the George Byng, 2nd Earl of Strafford.

 Winifred’s first husband was Captain the Hon. Alfred John George Byng, [iv] an officer  in the 7th Hussars.  They had met in c. 1885  in Ireland when Alfred  was attached to the  Lord Lieutenant/ Viceroy of Ireland’s  pool of ADCs.  Winifred’s father, Henry Herbert, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon,[v] was at the time Viceroy of  Ireland.  Henry was the very model of the Victorian statesman and served Prime Ministers Derby, Disraeli and the Marquis of Salisbury in minor Cabinet posts. [vi]

 Although Winfred’s first husband, Alfred, was a man  rich enough to support an Earl’s daughter, he was not cut out for addressing a woman’s love needs, nor the associated  duties of a healthy marriage.  The relationship was not consummated.  Byng  was  impotent, infertile, incapable,  or all three, although  mercifully for Winifred’s loss of virginity and  sanity she was saved  a lifetime of  lying  and silent misery as Alfred died scarcely after a year from when they had been unhappily joined together.

 Winifred  was  clever, sharp-minded and scholarly.  After being  widowed for the first time she craved for a man who performed his duties in the bedroom.  Herbert Gardner was grabbed as  Winifred, being a  married women, was  deemed soiled goods.  He was the bastard son of  a  peer and the couple  had  four very remarkable Gardner daughters, each of  whom turned heads  with their failed marriages, society  antics and fall-out before, during and after their debutante years  from 1914 until their mother’s death in 1933.

 As the Burghclere daughters became fodder for gossip mongers and  hit the newspaper headlines Herbert  Gardner got off lightly; he died in  1921 before his daughters set London Society talking.

 People in Glass Houses

 The  Gardners  were  never  hugely  rich, but  comfortably enough off.   Herbert was a shrewd investor in the railways and shipping companies and provided for  his womenfolk. 

 He was a character well-known in  political, theatrical and literary spheres  in the late 19th/ early 20th century and  his death was a loss, it was said,  from which Winifred never recovered.

 The various branches of their extended  kinfolk were far from snowy white. The Gardners were tainted by illegitimacy.  Winifred’s side, the Herberts (Carnarvons)  of Highclere  Castle, had dark spots in their history and were blighted by the effects of inbreeding with cousins marrying cousins.

 Winifred was often critical of others but it was a case for  the proverb  “ people in glass houses……”.  Winifred was aloof, careful and coy; Herbert Gardner was not so circumspect and there were suggestions of shiftiness, impropriety and keeping bad company but, then, he was from a theatrical background and his quaint manners were put down to that profession’s disreputable ways.  In some respects the prissy Winifred and the less serious, jocular Herbert, were an odd ball mix.

 A  suggestion of  double standards  was  applied  by some to Herbert and Winifred’s wider family.  It was easy for aristocrats to hide their secrets and foibles, especially  Victorian men. In the  decades ahead it was less easy for Winifred to dismiss  her part in causing at least some of the bad  behaviour of her four  wayward daughters.[vii] They were wildcats. But, Winifred’s mothering skills were not her priority.

 The Four Gardner Girls

 These racy, remarkable and troublesome Gardner  girls were first paraded across the pages of  Society magazines as beautiful  nymph-like children.  Yet they were four little horrors. They  changed from  childhood angels into marriage breakers, bordering on neurotics;  in one case a lesbian, another an incurable depressant who married a homosexual, all  before their mother was dead. The girls were as unlike their ultra conservative-minded mother as any woman could be and as they grew up into womanhood Winifred was neither proud nor pleased at their exploits or choice of friends, husbands or relationships.

 Despite the dowdy Princess Mary (daughter of King George V and Queen Mary) being a close friend of several of  the Burghclere daughters,  and the ever present  fear of a Royal personage  being thought  unsuitable for such  friendship,  the Gardner girls disgraced themselves anyway.  Three of the girls,  Mary,  Evelyn and  Juliet were  all divorced during their mother’s life-time.  Evelyn was the infamous ‘She- Evelyn’, the first wife of the writer Evelyn Waugh. [viii] Alathea continued in a rocky and miserable marriage with a homosexual Downing Street Civil Servant, Sir Geoffrey Fry [ix]who served several Prime Ministers.  Alathea’s mental and physical health were always  in  constant turmoil.

 The second Gardner daughter, Juliet, deserted her husband in 1916 on the same night as her wedding, although  this scandal that was well-known about in private circles  was blocked as news, Juliet declaring that she  “did not intend to see, write, or live with him again”[x].  She was not cut for marriage and tried her hand at writing.  A novel was promised but this did not emerge beyond mention of it in 1922, the same year she was formally divorced.  Juliet shocked her mother a few years later by a humiliating public announcement that she was seeking secretarial work  but she was quite prepared to scrub floors or wash dirty dishes. She also went to live with another woman in what was a more acceptable form of  love than she found in being married to a man.

 Winifred’s third daughter Mary married  Geoffrey Hope Morley[xi], the heir to a  barony. She bore him two pretty daughters but was quickly unhappy being “a draper’s wife”[xii], (the Morley family were in drapery).  Mary found a lover and he became her second husband, a  more exciting figure than Morley. Alan Hillgarth[xiii] could not have been more different.  As Hillgarth became a diplomat, marriage meant a move to Spain where Mary had a son but she later divorced Hillgarth and devoted her life to cookery and maintaining her gardens in Spain.

 The fourth and last daughter, “the bun faced one”[xiv]  Evelyn,  became famous as the  first wife of the novelist Evelyn Waugh[xv].  ‘She-Evelyn’ broke away from family ties when she rented a flat with her chum  Pansy Pakenham[xvi].   The mothers of each girl were friends, too.  Pansy’s mother, Lady Longford (whose husband was killed in the Great War) and Winifred soon found their respective daughters were untameable.  ‘She Evelyn’ was engaged to be married to nine different men before she settled for a brief encounter with Evelyn Waugh, when he was on the rebound from homosexual affairs with Alistair  Hugh Graham[xvii] and others in the 1920s Oxford brigade of fun loving artistic, bohemian types that were dubbed the ‘Bright Young Things’.

 Winifred’s brother George Herbert, Lord Porchester[xviii] and her two sisters, Lady Margaret Duckworth[xix]  and Lady Victoria Herbert[xx], offered little stronger or steadier morality or standing, as did their  half brothers Aubrey[xxi]and Mervyn Herbert[xxii].  George was  a gambler, bully and had  secret sexual desires.[xxiii]  Margaret  was married to a child abuser and Victoria  (Vera) was always  a strange sort of  fussy, man hating  creature, brought up by her stepmother, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon’s second wife, Elizabeth (Elsie) Howard.[xxiv]  Vera  became very  much like her maiden aunt, her father’s eccentric sister Lady Gwendolen[xxv]  who  lived in a kind of never-never land and had no time for male persons, whether they were adult or child. That said, it is suggested that Vera’s only love, a member of the nobility was killed in the Great War. [xxvi]

 III

 Winifred Burghclere had for a father Henry Herbert, a straight-faced Victorian aristocrat – a studious classical scholar, politician-statesman who played some part in British Colonial  and Irish political history. Her brother George was the man who, with Howard Carter[xxvii], discovered the Tomb of Tutankhamun; her half brother was the adventurous Aubrey Herbert, a friend of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), “the most whimsical and beloved figure in the political life”[xxviii] of Britain in the era before the Great War.

 Winfred The Writer & Historian

 As well as being a Victorian politician’s wife, a Society hostess and the birth mother of four daughters, Winifred saw herself moreso as a serious historian and writer who “was diligent and exact in research.”[xxix] 

 As a compiler of histories she  specialised in the seventeenth century, and wrote books on Restoration figures, it was said “to set in their proper perspective ….. greatly misunderstood men.”[xxx]  She was a skilful chronicler of past society and edited several books of Letters, most notably those of the friend of the Duke of Wellington, the Lady Salisbury who became Lady Derby and some family histories including a book on her father’s brother Alan Herbert, who was a doctor in France.[xxxi].

 It was said that no-one who met Lady Burghclere casually would have guessed that she was a wife,  mother and scholar combined.  On the surface she appeared “notably light in hand, utterly without pedantry, quick to appreciate any scintilla of humour.” [xxxii]

 But in reality life’s cut had taught Winifred to be as hard as nails.  She could be pushy, obstinate and uncompromising.  Her  own mother, Lady Evelyn Stanhope[xxxiii], the first 4th Countess of Carnarvon, died when she was eleven.

 Winifred was tested  when first widowed very young, then a few years later she chanced on marrying Herbert Gardner, (as recorded, above), a playwright, poet, middle ranking MP and Liberal politician, who was raised to the peerage as Lord Burghclere, and  briefly held a  Cabinet position.  Herbert  always wore the air of a laid back country squire but, like Winifred,  had a much  sterner side: “few would have guessed he was such  a sombre man at heart”[xxxiv].  

 But Winfred’s hardest test  in life was her troublesome daughters.

 William Cross, FSA Scot,  Newport, South Wales. 25 December 2022

 END NOTES

[i] Winifred Anne Henrietta  Herbert (1864-1933).

[ii]  Herbert Colstoun Gardner, (1846-1921). Winifred’s second husband.

[iii] Burghclere is a hamlet in Berkshire adjoining others like Kingsclere, the most famous being Highclere, the seat of the Herbert/Carnarvon family.

[iv] Alfred Byng (1851-1887). Soldier. Winifred’s first husband.

[v] Henry Herbert (1831-1890). 4th Earl of Carnarvon. Winifred’s father.

[vi] His Under-Secretary at the Colonies Department, Frederick Rogers, said of Lord Carnarvon  ‘He had a generous desire to effect worthy objects, and also more, I think, of a wish to shine before the public and to distinguish himself in the ordinary sense of the word. His failing was rather too much self-consciousness, and a disposition to be caught by showy schemes.’ adding ‘though he was fully aware of his own abilities and desirous of receiving credit for them particularly in his measures and public appearances, he was given to take a second part in conversation, always wishing to draw others out than to speak himself’: G.E. Marindin (ed.), Letters of Frederick, Lord Blachford, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1860–1871 (London, 1896), p. 263.

[vii] Names and dates for the four daughters of Winifred and Herbert Gardner are

Juliet Mary Evelyn Stanhope Gardner (1892-1974).

Alathea Margaret Gwendolen Valentine Gardner (1893-1968).

Mary Sidney Katharine Almina Gardner (1896-1982).

Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner ( 1903-1994)

[viii] It was said that their friends referred to the two Evelyns as  “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn” and the term stuck.

[ix] [ Sir] Geoffrey Storrs Fry (1888-1960). 

[x] Reported in 1922 when Juliet was divorced.

[xi] Geoffrey Hope Morley (1885-1977) 2nd Baron Hollenden. Twice married.

[xii] Conversations between the Author and Tony Leadbetter (1938-2019), godson of Almina Carnarvon who lived with the Countess for over 30 years.

[xiii] Alan Hillgarth (1899-1978). Captain Alan Hugh Hillgarth CMG OBE was a British adventure novelist and member of the intelligence services, perhaps best known for his activities in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War.

[xiv] A nickname applied.

[xv] Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). Writer and Novelist.

[xvi] Patsy Pakenham (1904-1999)  Later Lady Lamb.

[xvii] Alistair Hugh Graham (1904-1982). Close friend of Evelyn Waugh in 1920s. Diplomat and recluse.

[xviii] George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert (1866-1923). Lord Porchester, 5th Earl of Carnarvon. Winifred’s brother.

[xix] Lady Margaret Duckworth (1878-1958) nee Herbert. Wife and widow of  Sir George Duckworth (1868-1934). She was Winifred’s sister.

[xx] Lady Victoria Herbert (1874-1957). Known as “Baby” or “Vera”. Winifred’s sister.

[xxi] Aubrey Herbert (1880-1923). Winifred’s half brother.

[xxii] Mervyn Herbert (1882-1929). Winifred’s half brother.

[xxiii] See the Author’s books on the Carnarvons, in particular “ Carnarvon, Carter and Tutankhamun Revisited” (2019) & “Lies, Damned Lies and the Carnarvons” (2022). Book Midden Publishing.

[xxiv] Elizabeth [Elsie] Howard (1854-1929).  2nd 4th Countess of Carnarvon. Winifred’s stepmother.

[xxv] Lady Gwendolen Herbert (1842-1915 ). Winifred’s aunt.

[xxvi] Almina Carnarvon’s godson Tony Leadbetter thought Vera had a soft spot for Raymond Asquith (1878-1916) son of  the Prime Minister but as he was a married man any romance was doomed. Raymond was a friend of Vera’s half brother Aubrey Herbert.

[xxvii] Howard Carter (1874-1939). Egyptologist and co-discoverer with the 5th Earl of Carnarvon of the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

[xxviii] Sunday Times,  8 October, 1933.

[xxix] Ibid.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Winifred books include “George Villiers, Second Duke Of Buckingham, 1628-1687 : A Study In The History Of The Restoration”; “The Life of James First Duke of Ormonde”;

“Stratford (Volumes 1 & 2)”;  A Great Lady’s Friiendships  Letters  to Mary, Marchioness of Salisbury Countess of Derby 1862-1890; “Alan Herbert 1836-1907, Letters & Memories” Various publishers and editions. 

[xxxii] Sunday Times, 8 October 1933.

[xxxiii] Lady Evelyn Stanhope ( 1834-1875). 4th Countess of Carnarvon. Winfred’s mother.

[xxxiv] Sunday Times, 8 October 1933.