Andrew Gailey
Wilmington Square Books
In this scholarly book Andrew Gailey weaves into a lucid narrative the complex story of a remarkable woman born in Scotland in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, who moves with her parents to London, is acclaimed the finest embroiderer of her age, sought after by artists, poets, religious leaders, intellectuals and politicians, whom she meets as a member of a salon group called the Souls, and who through marriage finds herself chatelaine of an ancient manor house linking the great matters and events of the reigns of Victoria, Edward VII and George V with its own pre-Reformation history.
The story is traced through the book’s many characters and their devotion to Frances Graham (1854-1940). “Francie Graham of Glasgow” is the daughter of William Graham (1817-1885), an entrepreneur and port importer, Liberal MP, art collector, patron of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and especially of Edward Burne-Jones. He and his wife Jane, a talented pianist, both firm Presbyterian Sabbatarians, keep a house atGrosvenor Place in London which they stock with Pre-Raphaelite art. It is here that Frances as a daughter of new commercial wealth is introduced to a world in which art, religion, social ambition and politics overlap. Once the painter Burne-Jones has met the daughter of his patron, life is never the same for him again. For twenty-five years he seeksintimacy with Frances, but she (as far as can be ascertained) never obliges him
John Francis Fortescue Horner (1842-1927), who marries Francie in 1883, is the descendant of Thomas Horner, who in the dissolution trials set up by Thomas Cromwell in 1539, testified in the show trial against Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury. Glastonbury was after Westminster the richest monastery in the land, with estates stretching from Devon and west Somerset to Wiltshire and Oxford. Glastonbury Abbey had acquired Mells Manor in 1197. Thomas Horner was its steward at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries and immediately upon Whiting’s death asserted his land rights, styling himself Thomas Horner of Mells. Such land acquisitions were a feature of Cromwell’s purge.
Frances Graham’s salon is not confined to artistic and religious figures only. She has a place in the world of politics too, conducted after her marriage to Jack Horner at 1 Buckingham Gate SW1. Not only is she the confidant of Prime Minister Asquith, she includes in her circle Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Curzon, Sir Edward Grey, R.B. Haldane, Christopher Hollis, Reginald McKenna, the Earl of Roseberry – all come under her aura.
Francie’s social and intellectual life is lived between London and Somerset. She is Burne-Jones’s muse of the book’s title: he draws her obsessively and hers is the face in many of his pictures. She copies into embroidery many of his drawings and enriches the ambience of Mells with the soft furnishings of William Morris. Francie forms close male friendships, particularly with Asquith and, after Jack’s death, with the Irish clergyman James Hannay, writer of satiric novels, who as patron she appoints to the incumbency of the parish church of Mells. She has long since moved from the Presbyterian to the Anglican stripe and exhorts Hannay to curb Katherine’s attraction (notwithstanding the powerful influence of her grandmother) to Catholicism. It is the Asquith element of the story that readers of this magazine will find of particular interest.
Raymond Asquith (1878-1916), presented here as a particularly attractive character, is killed in action during the Great War, leaving Katherine (1885-1976) with three children, Helen (1908-2000), Perdita (1910-1996) and Julian (1916-2011). Katherine and her mother develop Mells as a Pre-Raphaelite haven, hanging there pictures in their distinguished collection brought down from London, attracting an eclecticarray of intellectual visitors. Among the Catholics are Hilaire Belloc, whose “brash triumphalism stirred up long discarded evangelical loyalties” (p338) in Frances, resulting after a time in his being banned from Mells until after her death; Martin D’Arcy SJ, who secured Frances’s support for the building of Campion Hall in Oxford, designed by her friend Sir Edwin Lutyens and opened in 1936; Ronald Knox, whose translation of the Bible was completed at Mells; and Evelyn Waugh, author of a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti published in 1927. Others are the sculptor Eric Gill (who carved a plaque with a Latin inscription in memory of Raymond Asquith, installed by Frances in Mells parish church) , J.M. Barrie, Lytton Strachey, the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon (another poet-convert to Catholicism) and the famous Dean Inge of St Paul’s Cathedral (not Westminster Abbey as Gailey mistakenly attributes), who brought an astringently anti-Catholic voice to Mells discussion. Albert Einstein paid a visit and survived a boring lecture on Relativity delivered by his host R.B. Haldane, to mark the opening of the reading room Frances had built for the miners in the neighbourhood, after which Einstein delighted Frances by playing the violin. His dreamy eyes and gentle manners gained for him inclusion in her pantheon of Pre-Raphaelite saints. In 1939 Queen Mary grandly appeared, the first royal visitor since Charles I: after greeting two hundred refugees assembled for her by Frances on the lawn, she called for tea and a cigarette and then, having undertaken a tour of the house upstairs, descended to chideher lady-in-waiting, the Duchess of Beaufort, that she had “missed the quilts” embroidered by Frances. Frances died the following year.
In 1923 Katherine Asquith was received into the Catholic Church, much to her mother’s dismay, completing a conversion that had been in gestation from as early as 1906. Increasingly Katherine began to attract a confraternity of like-minds and Mells became a place of gathering for the faithful, “an elect drawn together by religious mystery” (p378). Helen followed her mother into the Catholic Church while at Oxford, for which she is rebuked at a ball at Cliveden by Lady Astor, who interrogates her, as recorded by Conrad Russell(Oxford friend of Raymond Asquith and Katherine’s devoted supporter): “Was it Maurice [Baring] did it?…Was it that drunkard Mr Bellock?…You don’t think Mr Bellock seriously tries to follow Christ do you?” (p360) And Julian was sent to Ampleforth, thereby renewing a monastic link at Mells. Soon after Frances’s death Katherine had a Catholic chapel built at the manor house.
Frances Graham will be a new name to many. Andrew Gailey traces her relationships, replete with a galaxy of artistic, political and social talent, with great skill, but even by the end of this account remains somewhat enigmatic and in the final analysis has not quite endeared herself to the book’s reader: but then perhaps a capacity for endearment might have dimmed her aura. Hers was a life spanning two world wars, three monarchies and massive cultural change. The list of dramatis personae at the beginning of the book is both helpful and necessary. Gailey writes with clarity and sensitivity, shielding the reader of this detailed biography from the asphyxia often inflicted by books of this kind. The book includes black-and-white photographs of many of the characters and good colour reproductions of Mells and its portraits and artifacts. Notes pertaining to each chapter are copious and arranged at the end of the book. The research among primary manuscript sources is extensive, including papers in the Horner family archive at Mells itself. It is a pity that the text is occasionally marred by typographical error (though few in proportion to its length) but it is handsomely produced and deserves a distinctive place on the shelves of those interested in this rich period of English cultural, religious and intellectual history.
Reading Hour 