Victorian morality and four love stories to make the point

When I was a kid, certain people – mostly conservative people – would hold up Victorian morality as a model that society as a whole, and I in particular, ought to return to as soon as possible. Strict and pure, those Victorians knew how to live a life of goodness, instead of simply chasing a good life.

Recently, though, I’ve been reading up on the Victorian period, and the Edwardian that followed it, for my podcast, A History of England (which, incidentally, now has the first 35 episodes also available in Kindle or paperback form, on Amazon). 

Let’s start with the Derbys and the Salisburys. Grand old English families. Long-established nobility and, in the nineteenth century, right up there at the top of the British political tree. 

The fourteenth Earl of Derby was Prime Minister on three separate occasions, one of only four heads of government to have managed more than two terms. On the other hand, he had the misfortune to become leader just when his Conservative party was emerging from a catastrophic split. That had given its opponents a grip on power that it was able to shake only on a few brief occasions. His three terms gave him a total of less than four years in office.

The third Marquess of Salisbury, on the other hand, also managed three separate terms, but between them they gave him nearly ten years longer than Derby. He, however, headed a Conservative party that had pulled itself together, while the Liberals opposite had themselves split, leaving them out in the cold for a long time.

Sadly, the two families were linked in another and less reputable way than leadership of the Conservative party and capture of the top job in British politics. A way that rather undermined the irreproachable morality which is the boast of those who admire the Victorian era, including – in their time – the Victorians themselves. 

Salisbury’s father, the second marquess, was widowed at 48. When he was 56, he launched himself into a second marriage, with Mary Sackville-West, who at that time was 23. He died in 1868 when she was 34. She waited for a decent mourning period but in 1870 remarried, this time to none other than the 15th Earl of Derby, son of the former Prime Minister. 

That fifteenth earl had a distinguished political career himself though he never made it to Prime Minister.

The second Marquess of Salisbury, Mary Sackville-West and
the fifteenth Earl of Derby

He was a lot closer in age to his wife than the Second Marquess of Salisbury. Indeed, he was two years younger. All very proper, you might feel. But the Salisbury who became Prime Minister didn’t see it that way. There was a distinctly cold relationship between him and his stepmother (only six years his senior) and her second husband. That flowed from a widespread suspicion, which seems well-founded, that the couple hadn’t waited for the death of Salisbury’s dad to get their own relationship started.

Now, that wasn’t wholly in line with the expectations of Victorian morality.

Nor was Salisbury the only Prime Minister of the time to have been caught up in a love triangle of this kind. Decades earlier, in a time that is strictly speaking pre-Victorian, since the matter came to a head the year before Victoria mounted the throne, the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had what on the surface seems to have been a close friendship with a certain Caroline Norton.

Mr Norton didn’t see things that way. In 1836, he sued his wife for divorce, on the grounds of her adultery with the Prime Minister. The charge was hardly beyond reasonable belief. Melbourne had a reputation as what was known as a ‘ladies’ man’, which means a man who has his way with ladies. However, the husband couldn’t prove his case and was denied the divorce.

Lord Melbourne and Caroline Norton

That was only the start of Caroline’s troubles, however. Married women’s property was at that time regarded as the husband’s, so after they separated she took nothing. He also denied her access to their children. What’s more, any earnings she might have, and she’d hoped to live on her income from journalism, also belonged to the husband, so he was able to deny her even that. She got her own back a little by running up debts with tradesmen, and telling them to sue her husband for payment. 

She also campaigned hard for reform of the law, and indeed gained at least some improvements in how divorce worked.

But the great story of the time has to be that of the Parnells. Charles Stewart Parnell, despite being a landowner and a Protestant, became the champion of the downtrodden Irish to the point where many called him ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He launched a blistering campaign of parliamentary disruption, with long speeches on indifferent points, and hundreds of amendments to proposed law, amendments that took forever to debate but never had any chance of being adopted, but only delayed legislation. He came to be seen as an appalling nuisance by pretty well everybody other than his backers in parliament, but he focused MPs’ minds on the Irish issue for a good decade.

A fellow Irish MP, but of a very different kind, a man more than enthusiastic to ingratiate himself with the powerful in England and driven only by whatever could lead to his personal benefit, was Captain William O’Shea. He played a dubious role as a go-between for Parnell’s Irish movement and the British government, limited in usefulness by the consciousness on both sides that he tended to say what he felt they would like to hear, rather than what was actually the case. 

Unfortunately, for all three, when his wife Katharine met Parnell, they fell entirely in love. They were, in fact, the love of each other’s life. For quite a time, O’Shea did nothing about it. That was probably because he felt that discretion served his own personal agenda better. When he realised, however, that no one trusted him anymore and his hopes of a bright future in politics were in pieces around his feet, he turned on the couple and sued his wife for divorce. The result? Parnell was found guilty in the court of public opinion, not of so much of adultery, but of adultery flaunted before the pubic. His career crashed, since Victorian morality was utterly unforgiving, not so much of the sinner, as of the sinner caught.

Katharine and Charles Parnell

Parnell was sacked as leader of his party and he barely had time to marry Katharine after her divorce came through before dying a few months later, at the age of 45.

The Norton affair (in both senses of the word) predates the strictly Victorian period. Let’s end with one that stretched beyond it. It also involves the Salisbury family we met at the beginning of this string of edifying stories.

Edward Cecil was one of the sons of the third marquess of Salisbury, the Prime Minister when his tale opens. Cecil was a Major in the army and was sent to South Africa to take part in the Second Boer War (yep, Britain not satisfied with one such war, in which it had been left with a distinctly bloody nose, launched itself into a second just as soon as it could). Cecil travelled with his wife, née Violet Manxse, with whom he was far from happily married.

It was no doubt because Cecil was the son of the Prime Minister that the man in charge of British South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, offered to put them up at his official residence. It was an honour that did Cecil’s marriage absolutely no good at all. He was packed off by the army to the town of Mafeking (today Mahikeng) which soon found itself in the grip of a Boer siege that lasted 217 days. That was plenty of time for Violet Cecil and Alfred Milner to fall in love, just like the Parnells had, and then for their relationship to grow and take meaningful shape to the satisfaction of both.

Edward Cecil, Violet Manxse and Alfred Milner

Over the next twenty years, they had little chance to take things much further. However, in 1918, Edward Cecil died. Again, there was a decent mourning period, but on 26 February 1921, Violet and Alfred were finally married.

It was all a bit late, though. Milner was 66, Violet 49. He died in May 1925, of sleeping sickness contracted on another African trip. Poor Violet: after waiting twenty years, she got four years of marriage, followed by 33 years of widowhood.

Not unlike the Parnell story, I can’t help feeling.

In any case, all four these stories strongly confirm one view of mine. That all that business of Victorian morality is so much guff. It’s just a fine hypocrisy, in which what mattered wasn’t how you lived, but whether you avoided getting caught.