Ffion Hague - The Pain and the Privilege - The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

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.