| Nationality | Greville [née Maynard], Frances Evelyn [Daisy], countess of Warwick (1861–1938), society beauty and socialist, was born at 27 Berkeley Square, London, on 10 December 1861, the elder of the two daughters of Colonel Charles Maynard (1814–1865), only son and heir of the third Viscount Maynard, and his second wife, Blanche Adeliza Fitzroy (d. 1933). Her father and grandfather both died in 1865 and Daisy Maynard inherited the bulk of the Maynard estates, worth some £20,000 a year in rents alone. They were centred on Easton Lodge, near Great Dunmow in Essex, and it was here that she spent most of her childhood, even after her mother married the fourth earl of Rosslyn in 1866, and produced five more children. As a great heiress Daisy would always have been sought after in marriage; she was also one of the great beauties of the age. Queen Victoria, seeking a suitable bride for her youngest son, Prince Leopold, duke of Albany, considered Daisy, but it was Leopold's aide-de-camp, Francis Richard Charles Guy Greville, Lord Brooke (1853–1924), heir to the earldom of Warwick, whom she married on 30 April 1881 in Westminster Abbey.
Young socialite: the Babbling Brooke
After an early miscarriage, Lady Brooke produced a son and heir in September 1882, and threw herself into the extravagant social life of the aristocracy, entertaining in London and at Easton Lodge. This was the era of the great country-house party, whereat the principal amusements were hunting (which Daisy adored), shooting (which occupied her husband), and dalliance (for which she became notorious). She bore a daughter in 1884 and a short-lived son in 1885, and late in 1886 she began an affair with Lord Charles Beresford. The affair cooling, she was enraged to discover that Lady Charles was pregnant, and in January 1889 wrote to Beresford in unrestrained terms. Lady Charles opened the letter, and a society scandal ensued, especially after Daisy brought the prince of Wales into the quarrel. By throwing herself on the mercy of the prince she not only ensured that she would not suffer social ostracism as a consequence of the exposure of her affair and imprudence but she also acquired the prince as her lover, supplanting Lillie Langtry as maîtresse en tître. She was also implicated in the 1890 Tranby Croft baccarat scandal: although she was not present during the disputed card game, she was widely accused of having leaked the story, and acquired the sobriquet the ‘Babbling Brooke’. The Beresford affair blew up again with renewed vigour in autumn 1891, when Lady Charles's sister Lucy Paget published a thinly disguised account of the business as Lady Rivers, which included the text of Daisy's indiscreet letter; the public scandal tarnished Daisy's reputation badly—although the prince of Wales stood by her—and even her generally complaisant husband was brought to consider divorce. The marriage survived (as it survived further infidelities), and in 1893 Brooke succeeded his father as fifth earl of Warwick.
Lady Warwick's life at this time was a curious mixture of philandering and philanthropy. Like most women of her class she took seriously her responsibilities towards the poor on her estates and gave generously in personal charity. But she could see the inadequacies of this kind of charity, and in 1890 set up the first of a series of institutions intended to address problems more structurally. This was a needlework school at Easton for girls and young women unable to go into domestic service. The school, and the London shop set up as an outlet for the work, were heavily subsidized from her own pocket, as were many of the enterprises that succeeded it, including Bigods School, near Dunmow in Essex, which she founded in 1897 to provide a co-educational agricultural and technical education for middle-class children. She was encouraged to think seriously about such matters by the professional moralizer W. T. Stead, whom she first met in 1892 and who hoped to use her as a channel to influence the prince of Wales to take his moral responsibilities seriously. Under Stead's influence she began to lecture the prince—her 'parishioner', as she and Stead called him (Blunden, 82)—on the needs of the poor and the injustices of society; his interest was limited, and in 1898 he replaced Daisy with the less troublesome Alice Keppel. The prince's relationship with Lady Warwick had caused some distress to his wife. When it ended in 1898 (shortly before the birth of the Warwicks' second son, Maynard, after a gap of thirteen years) Daisy was careful to mend her fences with the princess of Wales, as well as ensuring the prince's continued friendship. In letters that they exchanged, intended for Alexandra's eyes, they made clear that their relationship had been 'platonic for some years' (ibid., 126).
Early interest in socialism
Lady Warwick was elected as a poor law guardian for Warwick in December 1894. She was troubled by the condition of society around her (especially for the rural poor) but as yet her efforts at relief were directed along more or less traditional lines. A spectacular fancy dress ball held at Warwick Castle in February 1895 provided work for many dressmakers, milliners, caterers, and other staff, and Lady Warwick was shocked and angered to see it described in Robert Blatchford's socialist paper, The Clarion (which she regularly read), as a 'mad rivalry of wanton dissipation' that displayed a 'callousness that mocks and laughs at misery' (16 Feb 1895). She took the next train to London and stormed into Blatchford's office, demanding an explanation. Blatchford gave her a lecture on the difference between productive and unproductive labour which she never forgot. The meeting was not a Damascene conversion, and Lady Warwick did not become a socialist overnight, but it marked out a new path for her. She became interested in trade unionism and entertained trade unionists at Warwick Castle and made public speeches in their support; in 1897 she found Joseph Arch living in Warwickshire and persuaded him to write his memoirs, which she edited; she pursued with vigour her plans for providing agricultural training for middle-class women. In 1898 she set up a hostel for women in Reading, which in 1903 moved to Studley Castle, in Warwickshire, where it became known as the Studley Agricultural College for Women. It was the only one of her enterprises that survived to become financially independent of her, receiving its first government grant in 1926. It continued in operation until 1969.
Increasing interest in socialism did not prevent Lady Warwick from becoming a vigorous supporter of Dr Jameson after the notorious raid of 1895, nor from using her friendship with Cecil Rhodes to secure the lucrative Tanganyika concession, a speculation in the Katanga copper mines that between 1904 and 1914 brought in some £5000 or £6000 a year. The income was a vital re-injection of capital into the Warwick finances, which had been haemorrhaging for twenty years; income from estates had been declining dramatically, while Lady Warwick's style of living and entertaining, and her various philanthropic projects, took no account of the financial realities. From the jingoism of the 1890s, Daisy Warwick had by 1900 become a convinced opponent of the South African War because it overshadowed the needs of the British poor: 'they had heard much of patriotism and our glorious Empire, but too many people had their sunshine shadowed by poverty and the workhouse' (Blunden, 149). She expanded her interests in education; she employed the men from a Salvation Army colony to work on her redesigned gardens at Easton; she spoke from the platform for a variety of societies in which she was interested, especially trade unions and co-operatives, travelling widely throughout the country to speak on the plight of the workers and the poor. Dressed as flamboyantly and extravagantly as ever, she cut a dashing figure at the municipal halls in which she spoke and was a target for easy criticism and cheap laughs. By 1904 (following the birth of her second daughter and fourth child, at the age of forty-two) she was almost ready to announce her conversion to socialism.
Lady Warwick attended the International Congress of Socialists in Amsterdam in August 1904, where she met H. M. Hyndman, who succeeded Stead as her mentor. In November she joined the Social Democratic Federation; Hyndman celebrated his coup in gaining such a visible supporter and exploited her novelty value: 'There is of course a lot of snobbery in this, but what matters?' he wrote to his socialist colleague H. G. Wilshire; 'People would come to see and hear her who would never come to see or hear you or me' (Blunden, 176). The public adoption of the theory of class war by a countess (even a countess whose personal reputation had worn rather thin) aroused hostility in widely different circles. To some of her own class she was a traitor, although rather more considered her socialism an attention-seeking fad that would pass; to many in the working classes, and especially in the organized labour movement, she was a foolish woman bringing discredit to the genuine grievances and activities of the workers. Ramsay MacDonald (who later fell under the spell of ‘Circe’, Lady Londonderry) declined to meet her, expressing grave doubts 'as to the permanent good which can be done to a democratic movement by the exploitation of an aristocratic convert' (Marquand, 70). In many respects Lady Warwick was the original champagne socialist, mingling socialist theory and political campaigning with country-house parties and continued charitable work.
Author and Labour Party candidate
Daisy Warwick continued to be generous beyond her means to the causes she took to heart. Planning a socialist magazine, she became mired in a relationship with a dishonest financier and found herself encumbered with even greater debts. She took to writing as a means of generating income, persuading her neighbour R. D. Blumenthal to give her a weekly column in the Conservative Daily Express. A number of books appeared under her name but most were ghost-written for her, several by Samuel Bensusan, who was one of the literary and radical political circle based around her Essex estates. Others of this circle included journalist John Robertson Scott, novelist H. G. Wells, and Conrad Noel, the socialist vicar of Thaxted (of which living Daisy was patron). Her first book, Warwick Castle and its Earls (1903), she seems to have written herself, basing it on research by Harvey Bloom, but later works, including her two unreliable volumes of memoirs—Life's ebb and Flow (1929) and Afterthoughts (1931)—were largely the work of other hands. Indeed she also largely handed over her newspaper column to Bensusan. She tried turning her hand to film script-writing, and in later years attempted a novel, Branch Lines (1932), described by her usually sympathetic biographer as 'one of the worst novels ever written' (Blunden, 315). It was her desperate financial situation that led her to take steps to raise funds by publishing her memoirs, including her intimate correspondence with Edward VII when prince of Wales. She confided in Arthur du Cros, apparently hoping that he would buy the letters himself to prevent damage to the royal family or that he would persuade them to pay for the letters. The duke of Wellington had famously responded to a similar attempt at extortion, 'Publish and be damned!'. George V took more vigorous action, taking out an injunction against publication of the letters and eventually securing their destruction.
On the outbreak of war in 1914 Lady Warwick became involved in Red Cross work but she followed the socialist line that the war was the product of unfettered capitalism. She resisted Germanophobia, bitterly opposed the effects of the war on the home front, and welcomed the Russian revolution. In February 1918 a large part of Easton Lodge was destroyed by fire, taking with it most of her papers. The war over, she was approaching sixty. Her enthusiasm for socialism was unabated, and she continued to host gatherings of socialists and trade unionists at Easton, where they were surrounded by her ever-increasing menagerie of animals—monkeys, peacocks, marmosets—and the decaying grandeur of an aristocratic estate run to seed. She withdrew from the Labour candidacy for the Walthamstow East constituency, after some months, in 1920 but in 1923 stood for the party in a by-election (which was merged into a general election) for Warwick and Leamington, where she was opposed by her son's brother-in-law, Anthony Eden, and came third in the poll after a gruelling campaign. Lord Warwick, who had been in poor health for years, died six weeks after the election. Earlier, in 1923, Lady Warwick had offered to hand over Easton Lodge to the Labour Party executive as a centre for conferences and residential study. They took it under a temporary arrangement but it was not renewed. She then offered it to the Independent Labour Party, who held summer schools there for a time, and subsequently approached the Trades Union Congress with a view to their forming a labour college there, but the general strike of 1926 put paid to the scheme.
The next decade saw no abatement of Lady Warwick's interest in socialism or her literary activities, and in 1930 a series of weekend conferences was held at Easton to revive socialism in the Labour Party. But the money was gone and she was reduced to borrowing money from old friends; in April 1937 she advertised for a paying guest. Burglars at Easton in January 1938 found little to steal. Daisy Warwick had become extremely stout in middle age, but a new acquaintance recognized the beauty that she had once been: 'her face had still the fixed pink-and-white attractions which one associates with the Lillie Langtry era, and an “electric light” smile which was turned on in a brilliant flash and gone again' (M. Cole, Growing up into Revolution, 1949, 146). She died at Easton Lodge on 26 July 1938, and was buried with her husband in the family vault at Warwick. She bequeathed property worth £37,000 to her surviving son, Maynard (a mere fraction of the wealth that she had inherited in 1865), and left 500 pet birds and 13 dogs to the housekeeper at Easton. She had hoped that the grounds at Easton would become a permanent wildlife refuge, but ironically they were destroyed to make an airfield during the war. In 1946 Easton Lodge suffered another serious fire and it was demolished in 1947.
Reputation
Daisy Warwick has received a mixed press. Treated as a minor figure of fun by labour historians, she has been dismissed as 'ridiculous or hypocritical or both' (Cannadine, 538). Her earlier manifestation, as a society beauty and mistress of the prince of Wales, had by the late twentieth century become a glamorous tale of romance in high society rather than one of squalid adultery. She was the subject of a scholarly biography, published in 1967, which attempts to understand the entirety of her extraordinary career. Disorganized and contradictory, hazy about the truth, enthusiastic and passionate, she flitted from lecture platform to newspaper column, from cause to cause; but despite considerable pressure to conform she never wavered in her belief in the virtues and eventual triumph of socialism. In 1897 she wondered: 'When one has so many interests and does so many things how can one understand any one thing or do any one thing well?' (Blunden, 115). It was a perceptive question, and one to which she never found a satisfactory answer. |