Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley

Carolyn W de la L Oulton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317315872
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Giving a comprehensive critique of Cholmondeley's writings, Oulton analyzes the inspiration and influences behind some of her greatest work and provides an appealing biography on a writer whose work is of increasing interest to modern scholars.

1 ‘WATER TINTED WITH GOLD’

She spent nearly thirty years living in a series of London flats, but Mary Cholmondeley, as appreciative journalists never tired of pointing out,¹ came from an old and illustrious county family complete with ancestral acres. She was in her own person a powerful symbol of the ongoing shift in class power relations in late Victorian Britain, born into an aristocratic clan at a time of middle-class expansion, an encroachment of which she was always more than half aware. For the Cholmondeleys had been established in their own castle in Cheshire since the Conquest. In the early seventeenth century a younger son of the family was settled by one Mary Cholmondeley, ‘the bold lady of Cheshire’, at Vale Royal in the same county, and it was a descendant of his who became the first Lord Delamere in 1821.² Rather less glamorously, another descendant, Charles Cowper Cholmondeley, went into the Church, establishing himself in Hodnet, Shropshire, in the early nineteenth century. It was a lovely but small village north of the capital town Shrewsbury (to this day many residents of the town profess not to have heard of it, and only manage to give directions if asked for the slightly larger adjoining village of Market Drayton). There were few cottages in Hodnet and only a handful of suitable houses to provide a social life for the local gentry. The church, a surprisingly large one for such a small parish, still retains the family pews of its patrons, the Heber-Percy family.

The rector of Hodnet from 1807 was the famous hymnist Reginald Heber (best remembered for his still popular ‘Holy holy holy’, composed in 1820), and it was he who was responsible for building a new rectory in 1812. Within a few years it had become the scene of its first frustrated romance, when Maria Hare (aunt of Dean Stanley, who became Dean of Westminster in 1864) was not allowed to marry Martin Stow, the curate, on his departure for Calcutta with the newly appointed Bishop Heber in 1823.³ But at the same period the love affair of another, better-connected local curate was to have a happier outcome. A letter from one Mary Heber of Hodnet Hall, herself the sister of the famous hymnist, gives a telling if somewhat prim view of Charles Cholmondeley from the cadet branch of the family, in 1820:

Our new Chaplain at Moreton, young Charles, goes on remarkably well and is very much liked by all his parishioners high and low. He is a rather shy odd fellow, but when well known is highly to be valued for his numerous good qualities and excellent disposition.⁴

Two years later they were married and their first son, Thomas, was born in November 1823, followed by Charles in February 1825. Reginald Heber lived for only a few years after being appointed to the Bishopric of Calcutta, and on his death at Trinchinopoly on 3 April 1826, Charles succeeded him as rector of the parish. On 20 April a third boy, Reginald, was born, and some time in this year the family moved into Hodnet Rectory.⁵ Moving into a new house with two or possibly even three small children is unlikely to have been a relaxing experience for the parents, but it seems a fitting, if inopportune start to life for Reginald, a man who would later prove to be disorganized to the point of being actually irresponsible. Two years later, on 24 August 1828, a fourth son, Richard Hugh Cholmondeley, was born to the family at the rectory, ‘a noble lad indeed’ as his proud mother later wrote to her half brother Richard Heber.⁶ The death of her husband in 1831 would mean that the family had to leave the rectory, but Mary Heber was in any case a capable, even formidable woman – inheriting the greatly indebted Hodnet Hall for her lifetime when the impecunious Richard died in 1833, she sold the celebrated library and succeeded in virtually freeing the estate from debt by her own death in 1846,⁷ when it passed to her niece Mrs Emily Heber-Percy (she had married Algernon Percy, a grandson of the fifth Duke of Northumberland, in 1839, but the Heber family was important enough in its own right for the name to be added to Percy when she married).⁸ However these events did not leave the young Richard Cholmondeley homeless, as he might otherwise have been. On 18 May 1841 his mother had married the new rector of Hodnet, Samuel Heyrick Macaulay,⁹ who seems to have provided a home for at least one of the Cholmondeley brothers for some years after Mary’s death.¹⁰ Surprisingly, given the close connections with Hodnet Rectory, where she herself was born and later spent over two decades during her father’s tenure, the more celebrated Mary Cholmondeley completely ignored this second marriage in later accounts of her grandmother.¹¹ In 1832 meanwhile another Cheshire family would be celebrating the arrival of a daughter. The oldest of five girls in what would become a family of eight children, Emily was born in March of that year to Henry Ralph Beaumont of Newby Park, also a younger son, and Catherine, daughter of the famous aviator George Cayley.¹² Four years younger than Richard Cholmondeley, Emily was six when her father died and thirteen when her mother married her second husband, James Anlaby Legard, and had two more boys, James and Allayne (who subsequently became Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Ally to her own children).¹³ It is not known what the young Emily thought of her stepfather, but it was later remembered that she had not had an entirely happy childhood – apart from the death of her father, her beloved younger sister had fallen from her horse and become a permanent invalid when she was still young.¹⁴ In Hodnet Richard Cholmondeley was part of an expansive family network, growing up between the rectory during his father’s lifetime, and Hodnet Hall until his mother’s death in 1846, the year before he went to Cambridge. The Owens of Condover Hall, on the other side of Shrewsbury, were relatives, as of course were the Heber-Percys who inherited Hodnet Hall, and who enclosed a considerable portion of the common in 1850.¹⁵

Like his future wife, Richard had lost one of his parents at a young age. But their early lives would have been different in other crucial respects, Richard going to Rugby school with his older brothers¹⁶ while the more intellectual Emily received such education as she may have had at home. In their first year or two at Rugby (where none of them seems to have distinguished themselves, except for Charles’s winning of the fifth form prize for Latin verse in 1843)¹⁷ the Cholmondeley boys would have come under the influence of the famous Dr Arnold, celebrated in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), the novel of another old boy, Thomas Hughes. Richard then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, was ordained deacon in 1852 and became the curate of Hodnet, before being fully ordained as a priest in Lichfield in 1853.¹⁸ He was on excellent terms with his stepfather, who was also his father’s successor as rector, Samuel Heyrick Macaulay; indeed it seems likely that he was living at the rectory from the time of his graduation from Cambridge.¹⁹ It was probably shortly after this that he first spoke properly to the strikingly beautiful Emily Beaumont, at a dance.²⁰ It seems that he was the most orthodox and unadventurous of his brothers, content to fall into the clerical way of life and superintend the Hodnet parish, as his father had hoped at least one son would do – it was suspected by his children that, while his faith was deeply felt, he had given little or no thought to the debates that were so prominent a feature of Victorian intellectual and religious life from the 1840s onwards.²¹ Certainly he remained on excellent terms with the locals of all denominations, an achievement that testifies to his tolerance and good humour, if also perhaps to a certain unreflecting acceptance of theological differences.²²

In one sense this open mindedness was just as well, as in the meantime Charles was breaking with family tradition, studying at the Roman Catholic Oscott College between 1850 and 1852.²³ At Balliol College, Oxford, in 1844 he had intended to go into the Anglican Church. But at this point he came into contact with leaders of the Tractarian movement, an encounter that permanently unsettled his belief in Protestantism. In 1845 G. W. Ward, a fellow of Balliol, was condemned for his anti-Protestant teaching, and in the same year Newman spectacularly seceded to Rome. By now Charles had transferred to Cambridge, where it was later reported that he took counsel from the future Cardinal Manning, then Archdeacon of Chichester. Manning is supposed to have taken him into the church and told him to settle the matter with God, the result being that Charles converted to the Roman Catholic faith. After Oscott College, he published Sixteen Articles on the Protestant Doctrine of Justification by Faith in 1854. Between 1856 and 1860 he was in Rome studying his new faith with the Jesuits and he was finally ordained priest for the Diocese of Shrewsbury in August 1871.²⁴ It may not have been an entirely comfortable situation, so close to his Anglican brother (by then the vicar of Leaton) and shortly afterwards he moved to Chester, where he was ultimately made a canon, retiring in 1892 due to failing health. It is to the credit of both brothers that Richard’s children grew up with little sense of a division between the Anglican and Catholic forms of worship. What they may not have known is that on Charles’s conversion, Richard met his brothers to agree that he would be cut out of all their wills,²⁵ a decision which meant that he did not inherit the impressive Condover estate a few years later.

At around the same time, in 1851, Thomas was enterprising enough to take ship for New Zealand with a view to setting up as a farmer. His first months as an emigrant prompted some pitiful letters home, about prices being higher than in Belgravia, and the abrupt disappearance of an acquaintance to whom he had lent rather substantial amounts of cash. An asthmatic, he was relieved to find the climate suited to his constitution, but confessed to his brother Reginald that he was still suffering from a kind of hypochondria, or what would once have been termed ‘the vapors’. In the summer of 1852 he wrote,

You may have observed for some time before my leaving England that I was subject to a nervous disorder which I cannot well account for or explain. It first made its appearance a little before the death of our dear mother – since when it has been gradually creeping on.

In short, he found it difficult to eat in company. In an age less attuned to the effect of phobias on the sufferer, he feels obliged to go on, ‘This is not a fancy – I say it gives me positive misery’.²⁶ It is hardly surprising that one resident observed of him,

he is not well and will not come out (visiting). He is quite a gentleman, though, in every sense, and has only come out to settle a young cousin, I believe, but no one knows much about him. I suspect he lived rather delicately at home, for his work here has quite knocked him up … fond of books, speaks slowly and softly … and is in most respects very unlike one’s idea of a colonist.²⁷

The young cousin was George James Cholmondeley, whose daughter Mary would later keep track of her famous namesake, lovingly compiling a scrapbook over the decades to memorialize her English as well as her New Zealand relations.²⁸ It is also perhaps interesting to note that Thomas resembled other members of his family in his liking for books. Indeed his time in New Zealand inspired him to share his experience in Ultima Thule; or Thoughts Suggested by a Residence in New Zealand, published in 1854. An uninspiring read at this distance of time, it was nonetheless a useful guide to emigrants of the period – they were warned not to overload themselves with needless supplies, which could be bought on arrival, nor to assume that they could succeed at sheep farming without previous experience. These and other relevant matters safely dispatched, it returns to a familiar justification of the colonizing habit, and the greatness of the old country,

I would commence, as a general rule applicable to almost every Englishman, by impressing upon the minds of my fellow citizens the vast superiority of the country, which so many are without due reflection leaving, over any other country, whether in the Old or New World.²⁹

Writing aptitude aside, there was no doubting Thomas’s enjoyment of literature. It was a bent that Mary Cholmondeley would later imply had been shared by her father but rather less so by her mother, Emily Beaumont.

There is no contemporary evidence against which to measure Mary’s further insinuations that her parents’ marriage was not a happy one,³⁰ but certainly it seems that from the start of their marriage in 1855, not all of Richard’s relations were prepared to approve of his young wife. In the early years of their marriage, while he was still curate of Hodnet, one cousin ticked her off severely for the way she dressed her hair, telling her that it was not in keeping with her position (before adopting the offending hairstyle herself when it came into fashion a year later).³¹ Emily, however, never wore her hair in this style again, adopting one that was, if more respectable, considerably less becoming. No known photograph of her survives, but one taken some time after her marriage apparently showed her as ‘very handsome, with parted hair and noble brow, and magnificent dark eyes, but sad in expression’.³² She took an informed interest in politics and scientific advances, and may well have found it difficult to adapt to the life of a country parson’s wife, with its circumscribed society and the often tedious obligations in the parish. In fact very little is known about her at this stage of her life, although Mary Cholmondeley’s highly critical sketch twenty-two years after her death has led to her being branded a mirthless puritan, ‘this grimly repressed woman’ as one scholar expresses it.³³ But whatever her reservations about or suitability for her new position, Emily had a determined sense of duty, and possessed in addition both intelligence and courage – qualities she would pass on in full measure to her children.

It is not certain where Emily first set up house in Hodnet. She and her husband make no appearance in the census of 1861 or in surviving post office directories of the time, but letters from the early 1850s suggest that both Richard and Reginald had been living with the Revd Macaulay at the rectory, a short walk from the church, and it seems most probable that Richard brought his wife to live there after their marriage. Their daughter Mary would tell readers nearly seventy-five years later that she and her older siblings had been born in the rectory, and that her uncle Reginald was a member of her parents’ household for a while at least.³⁴ Again, she claims that in the early years of the marriage, an eccentric aunt, Georgiana Cholmondeley, was living with them as well...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 ‘Water Tinted with Gold’
• 2 ‘One Great Hope’
• 3 ‘If I Found I had no Power at all’: The Early Fiction
• 4 ‘The Only Life I Know’: Sir Charles Danvers, Diana Tempest and A Devotee
• 5 ‘Strumming on Two Pianos at Once’: London and the Writing of Red Pottage
• 6 ‘Not Mine to Keep’: Moth and Rust (1902) and Prisoners (1906)
• 7 ‘Windows Wide Open, yet Discreetly Veiled’: Notwithstanding (1913)
• 8 War
• 9 ‘I Dont Think I was Ever Brave’: The Romance of His Life (1921) and the Longing for Rest
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Figures
• Index