The acid-tongued ambassadress
The life and writings of the indomitable Lady Paget at the courts of imperial Europe
“I always see the faults of my friends,” writes Walburga, Lady Paget, in the introduction to her 1923 two-volume memoir Embassies of Other Days. “But I like their faults and I mention them as it adds to the piquancy of their personalities.” The second volume closes with a further disclaimer. “I have related everything exactly as it appeared to me to be and may thereby have inadvertently hurt the feelings of some, but this must be put to the account of my sincerity.” Reader, be warned: Lady Paget can be alarmingly sincere.
In all, she wrote six volumes of memoirs about her experiences as the wife of diplomat Sir Augustus Paget, who between 1860 and 1893 was Britain’s ambassador in Copenhagen, Lisbon, Florence and then Rome, and finally in 1883 at the imperial court in Vienna, to which Walburga was also appointed ambassadress in her own right. Embassies…, which was written during her ten years in Vienna and ends in 1893, mixes memoir with diary entries and letters; it is the most fully autobiographical of her books, which are long out of print. That is not too surprising. As The Times noted when she died in 1929, aged 90: “[She] belonged to a world which, already obsolescent, was utterly swept away by the Great War… a world in which ‘Society’ in most European countries meant a small set of aristocrats and diplomats who spent their lives in expensive amusements, sport, intermarriage, and the painstaking observance of an elaborate etiquette.” Put like that, I suppose, one can see its flaws.
Still, it’s a shame her books are neglected. Piquant observations – some of them eye-wateringly sharp – are everywhere. Within a few random pages, one might meet Lady Malet with “the look of an ancient Sybil… marred by the too frequent use of the waterproof which at times appeared to be her only and certainly was her principal garment”. Or Mme de Haymerle, wife of the Austrian ambassador in Rome, “a small attenuated person, who might have been pretty had she not been so washed-out looking… a native of Frankfurt where, apparently, the art of eating with grace does not enter into a higher education.” Or Anthony Trollope – “rough, heavy, persevering and rather vulgar, like his books”.
If all this sounds a touch de haut en bas, even for an ambassadress, there is a reason for that. Lady Paget was born Walburga Ehrengarde Helena de Hohenthal in 1839, the daughter of a German count with vast estates in Saxony, Prussia and elsewhere. The family seem to have traveled constantly, estate to estate, palace to palace: Lauenstein, Dresden, Ostend, Thuringia, Silesia, always among the very first of people, with the biggest houses, the most servants. Who among us doesn’t have a favourite among one’s family’s castles? Walburga’s favourite was that at Püchau, where the terrace outside the south tower quickly fell away hundreds of feet and the air in summer was sweet with orange flower and verbena. She was given her first ball gown aged five – white tulle over white satin looped with rosebuds. ‘Inharmonious colours’ would always cause her suffering.
But there was severity amidst the splendour. Walburga’s English governess up to the age of seven beat her every time she hesitated or made a mistake in her nightly prayers. The combination of a thin nightgown, kneeling on cold floors in the cold of winter, and the blank terror of punishment meant she was beaten often. Her parents were unaware of all this, but perhaps it was par for the course. Walburga’s father had been a delicate child; his mother had thought the best way to strengthen him was privation. He was starved so thoroughly that hunger drove him to eat the ends of candles.
Her friends called her Wally - pronounced with a ‘V’. She needed friends. Her father died in 1852. Money – Wally had never heard the word before – was suddenly scarce. By 1855 she and her four younger siblings were orphans. The family was broken and the children divided among relatives. Wally took solace in the church – “I went [there] constantly and passionately,” she wrote – and was tempted by the nun’s vocation, liking to visit the poor and the sick. Possibly she liked the drama of the idea itself. She devoured English novels and surely had a taste for the gothic; a great leaning towards ‘the Tragic Muse’, she writes, meant her party piece was falling in a dead faint to the floor.
But it is now, really, that Wally’s life – and her wider travels – began. Aged 18 she became maid of honour to Queen Victoria’s 17-year-old daughter, the Princess Royal, also named Victoria, who was shortly to marry Prince Frederick of Prussia. For the next few years, until her marriage to Augustus Paget in 1860, her life was a circuit of palaces and other royal residences. These were not an unmitigated pleasure. The sitting rooms might be stately, she recalled, but the bedrooms were wretched. “I do not believe anyone washed in former days, for if you were lucky you found a basin the size of an entrée dish.” The tea, meanwhile, “was invariably made of hay”. At Babelsberg she was housed in a cottage on the royal estate, which leaked whenever it rained. “I was in the habit of sleeping with an open umbrella tied to the head of my bed,” she writes. It may be that, as with inharmonious colours, she could be at once doughty and unduly sensitive: later, when she first enters the British embassy in Vienna she finds it “a cross between a Café Chantant and a second-rate railway hotel”. She sits in her bedroom – sea-green walls, furniture of yellow maple – and weeps.
She would probably have said her memoirs were those of an aesthete; certainly beauty in her eyes seems to take on an almost moral quality. Whistler, Burne-Jones and other, now forgotten artists, pass through the pages. She begged – or was it cajoled – her way into helping two monks remove the whitewash hiding some medieval frescoes in Florence’s Sante Croce. She has the sharpest of eyes for the ebb and flow of fashions too: her own dresses, and those of the women she meets, are described in perceptive detail: the Italian politician’s wife, for instance, wearing “a cream-coloured satin dress, with creamy coloured lace about it, out of which her beautiful creamy shoulders did more than peep”. It is not just fashions that change; sartorial mores do too. Crinolines fall in and out of favour, and with them the taste for dresses that obscured or revealed their wearer’s shapes: Wally was forced to abandon her crinolines by Queen Victoria and found her “pretty [French] dresses flapped around me like sails in a calm”. Then there was the period when it would been “the crassest ignorance or, worse, vulgarity” for ladies to wear anything but light brown gloves of Swedish leather; she would never have dined without them, Wally says, even if eating alone with her aunt.
But it is the people you remember most. Olympia Usedom, née Malcolm, Scottish wife of a Prussian diplomat, large-bodied, large-voiced, with a nose that Olympia herself likened to a brigand’s spear. Blocked by police from proceeding through a festive crowd, she stood in her landau and bellowed, “Let me pass. I am Prussia.” Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, “something of a cheap angel and a German professor”. Lady Pontarlington, “extremely high-bred looking, with a suggestion of a strangled bird”. The Duchess of Sutherland, with “a face like a Gothic window”. The Belgian Baron d’Hoogvorst “distinguished mainly by his unbounded hospitality, his love du cheval, and as being the owner of sixty-six pairs of shepherd’s plaid trousers, and two hundred blue satin cravats with white spots”. Spencer Cowper, a shy man whose dinner invitations were issued “with the air of a person who was going to ask you to lend him some money”. Emilia Peruzzi, wife of a Florentine politician, “a fat, lively little lady, who spat at you volubly in four different languages”. The Archduchess Marie Therèse, “barely thirty… whom the Archduke Charles Louis kills, from sheer ennui… [who] looks like a wild forest creature caged and pining for liberty.” It is as if you are watching the cast of an Italian comic operetta assemble. And then you remember these people governed the fates of nations and empires.
The scene is so brilliantly painted, in fact, you don’t notice the sleights of hand. High imperial politics toil away in the background: the Crimean war, the Schleswig-Holstein question, the Risorgimento, the Franco-Prussian war, Home Rule for Ireland, the Austro-Prussian war, Bismarck's creation of Germany, and so on. Sometimes it comes to the boil: there is nothing diplomatic about Wally’s detestation of Gladstone, for example. But for all her seeming indiscretions, veils are discreetly drawn in multiple directions. At first glance, you might say the business of diplomacy is largely missing from the memoir. But if misdirection is part of that business, then every page is glistening with it. Late in the second volume we glimpse her, between dinner and the theatre, spending an hour – in full dress and tiara – working on the cipher of the latest diplomatic telegram. The curtains part for a moment, the machinery of politics revealed; and then, with a passing dig at Mrs Gladstone, they swish back into place once more.
But if her world was, as The Times reported, already obsolescent by 1914, what does it look like to us now, a whole century later? This is, after all, Europe in which nation states were coming kicking screaming into the world, in which transnational dynasties were being supplanted by nascent democracies, and notions of blood and kinship which had dominated politics were giving way to ideology. Wally, however awkwardly – and no doubt unconsciously – straddles some of this divide: “It is astonishing under what glass cases these Archdukes live, especially the older ones,” she writes in imperial Vienna. “They are in no touch whatever with the world.” A vegetarian and an ardent opponent of blood sports, she was also a firm believer in the occult. Who can blame her? Ghosts of the past are everywhere. Her father as a child met Napoleon; he remembered the emperor in “a short coat with frogs [a kind of ornamental fastening] and white riding breeches… very short and pale”. In London she meets Lady Jersey, the only woman to shake hands with Byron after his disgrace. Ghosts of the present too. Wally’s younger brother died aged five. Another brother died in August 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war; it was nine years before his death was officially confirmed.
Political violence is on the rise. Assassinations attempts, some successful, pepper the narrative. “In those days we had not yet become accustomed to these attempts on crowned heads,” she writes of the murder of Tsar Alexander II. Outbreaks of cholera and typhoid are common. “Wherever we stopped,” she writes of one childhood journey through cholera-ridden Germany, “the dead and dying were carried round about in baskets, with a bellringer before them to warn people to get out of the way.” Death – in family and other tragedies – is a constant presence. In Vienna, she records “en epidemic of suicides… Servants kill themselves because they break a plate, children of seven or eight hang themselves because they cannot do a lesson, soldiers because they do not like the army… I was warned not to ride in the Prater in the morning before the patrol which takes the corpses off the trees, had gone round.”
All this reminds us that Wally and her world are ghosts too now. But what a strange world it was, and how exotic its creatures seem to us. Yet how gorgeously alive she makes them, these lavishly appareled vain, powerful, flawed, self-satisfied denizens of a doomed elite, stalking the haunted splendours of their ballrooms and salons across a continent fracturing under their feet.
This essay first appeared in Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly, Issue 82, Summer 2024. If you don’t know the wonderful Slightly Foxed, here’s how it describes itself. An independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach, Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Single issues from £12; annual subscriptions from £48. For more information please visit http://www.foxedquarterly.com.
Quite a girl, Lady Paget! Fascinating.
An amazing whirl through her writings, and her life. Whew - one could scarcely catch one's breath! Thanks for sharing Lady Paget.