At the general election in May 1929 Harold Macmillan lost to the Labour
candidate by 2,389 votes. As he and Dorothy left Stockton railway station
for London the following day his face was seen at the window of the
carriage. It was drenched in tears. One of the Conservative survivors of the
election was his friend and colleague Robert Boothby. In August, to cheer up
Macmillan, Boothby invited him and Dorothy to his father’s annual shooting
party in Scotland. On the second day, when Boothby was waiting his turn to
shoot, he was startled to find his hand being squeezed affectionately and
turned to see a beaming Dorothy beside him. The meaning of the gesture and
the smile was clear. She was out to seduce him. She succeeded.
The Kuranstalt Neuwittelsbach in Munich has a long-established reputation for
its expert treatment of severe nervous disorders. It was to this gentle and
rather solemn establishment that Macmillan was admitted in September 1931
with what was clearly a serious breakdown.
The preceding 18 months had been miserable. He was out of Parliament, his wife
was having a torrid affair with his political ally, his friends, such as
they were, mostly thought him pompous and didactic. In the late spring of
1931 he was openly saying that he could not go on. He was even seen banging
his head against a window of a railway compartment in despair and there were
dark hints of suicide.
The cause of all this was the sexual obsession of Dorothy with Bob Boothby.
Macmillan was warned of this at the end of July 1929. “I fell in with
Dorothy in Belgravia this afternoon,” a friend (known only by his initials)
wrote to him, “and she confessed to me, without apparent shame, that she
contemplates deserting you before long — a modern plan with which I have
little sympathy . . . Can’t we persuade you to dine whilst the inevitable
legal proceedings are put in motion?”
This was not to be simply a convenient arrangement such as was frequent — and
accepted — at the time. “[Illicit affairs were] quite common then . . ,”
said Dorothy’s niece. “It was a leftover from the Edwardian period, so many
people had ménages à trois of the most discreet kind.” This
was not in Dorothy’s mind. She wanted a divorce.
The third daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, she had spent a good deal of her
youth on outdoor pursuits — riding, shooting and golf. She was rumbustious
and warm-hearted. And she was not discreet. There were constant telephone
calls to Boothby that could be overheard by anybody in the vicinity.
Passionate letters were left lying about for anybody to read. They saw each
other every day, frequently meeting in the open. They went away together. It
was not long before the whole thing was widely known. But the press did not
hunt as ruthlessly as they do today. Lord Rothermere, a close friend of
Boothby, took the lead in telling his editors and other proprietors of
newspapers to suppress all press comment. When King George V heard of it, he
is said to have snapped “Keep it quiet”.
There is no doubt that Boothby was an attractive and skilled lover. He had a
raffish air about him that Macmillan could not match. He drove a
six-and-a-half litre, open-top, two-seater Bentley, liked jazz, was witty
and full of laughter. He spent summer holidays with Oswald (“Tom”) and
Cynthia (“Cimmie”) Mosley at their palazzo in Venice and their villa at
Antibes, and played golf with the Duke of York, the future King George VI.
He also had good looks and an animal sexuality, which he flaunted
enthusiastically — with both sexes. It is little wonder that Dorothy lost
her head. “Why did you ever wake me?” she asked him once.
Boothby, too, was infatuated with Dorothy (although this did not stop him
pursuing other women — and even attempting to marry one until Dorothy chased
him around Europe to stop him). Nor did he show any sympathy for Macmillan.
The entanglement became even more complicated when, in August 1930, Dorothy
gave birth to another daughter (mysteriously — and so far inexplicably — not
registered until October and left without a name on her birth certificate).
She told Macmillan that the father was Boothby.
The paternity of this child, Sarah, has never been settled. Boothby had his
doubts (for obvious reasons — not to be encumbered with an illegitimate
child), and Macmillan (again for obvious reasons — not to admit to the
humiliation of his wife’s infidelity) wrote to his old mentor Francis
Urquhart that “my family has just been increased by another daughter”. What
does seem clear was that Dorothy, determined on a divorce, would use her
version of the baby’s paternity, whatever the truth of it, as a lever to get
one.
In this humiliating mess, there was nothing Macmillan could do — just try to
bury misery in work, search for a constituency, take refuge in the practice
of his religion and hope that Dorothy would come out of her obsession. In
1931, while he was still resting quietly in Munich, he received a telegram
from Dorothy telling him that a general election was to be held in October.
He had put on weight, and felt “calmer and quieter”. Although he could walk
only with the aid of sticks, he set off for Stockton, just in time to be
formally adopted — as a “National Conservative”.
Dorothy then left Boothby to fight his own campaign in Aberdeenshire and
joined Macmillan in Stockton. Carried on the tide of one of the great
electoral landslides in Parliamentary history, he won easily by a majority
of over 11,000. Macmillan was back in the House of Commons — and Dorothy was
back with Boothby. In January 1932 his friend Cuthbert Headlam found him
“immensely improved . . . he is not nearly so superior as he used to be and
does occasionally listen to what one says . . . He is very clever and takes
infinite pains to make himself well informed, but . . . he bores people too
quickly and has little or no sense of humour.”
In September 1932 Macmillan made a trip to Russia. While he was away, Dorothy
and Boothby took advantage of his absence to spend a fortnight together in
Portugal. Boothby wrote to Cynthia Mosley of: “One lovely deserted beach
after another to bathe from . . . she brushed her hair back behind her ears &
actually put lipstick on & got more radiant by the day . . .”
Dorothy, still pressing for a divorce, also wrote to Cimmie at this time. “I
have not entirely given up hope of getting Harold into a more reasonable
frame of mind about divorce, but at present he is hopeless.”
Divorce would have damaged Macmillan’s career — possibly irrevocably — but
that was not the only issue for him. In his awkward and emotionally
strangulated way, he still loved her.The following year he wrote with a
mixture of hope and despair that “Dorothy certainly seems much happier &
better. It is very hard to know what to do best for her but I suspect it’s
best to leave her to recover from her wounds. I still (for some reason or
other) love her so ridiculously, that I don’t dare see too much of her. I
feel it’s best for her to try to forget altogether — for the present — the
emotional side of life and concentrate on children, gardens, politics etc.
But it needs a lot of self-control as I can’t stand too much of her at a
time — not because I don’t want to be with her but because I love her too
much, and have to hold it all in . . . But I do believe she is better . . .
The hard rebellious look seems much rarer now, and a softer quality to be
returning.”
In April 1934 he was still putting on a brave face. “Dorothy,” he wrote,
“seems very well & much more serene in every way . . . I think the
best great thing for her is to be allowed to get through in her own way. How
this will come about I can’t yet tell. But I do really think that it will
come about, in good time & given peace and calm . . . She must make her
own way through . . . She came with me to early service — an unusual act,
going beyond mere conformity . . .”
It was a brave try, but Headlam recorded a dinner in Chester Square in
mid-July: “He is such an odd unforthcoming type of man — so tremendously
absorbed in himself and his own affairs . . . and yet he is about the only
man in the House who in other respects appears a suitable person to work
with. Tonight he was far less self-centred than usual and full of ideas both
political and personal . . . until about 10pm when Dorothy suddenly appeared
— then he shut up like a trap and became morose and silent . . .”
In July 1935 Ramsay MacDonald [the Prime Minister] resigned, to make way for
Stanley Baldwin, who called an autumn general election. Stockton returned
Macmillan with a comfortable majority of just over 4,000 — Dorothy playing
the dutiful wife again, now that Boothby, earlier in the year, in what
looked like a fit of absent-mindedness, had married her Cavendish cousin.
The marriage was short-lived and he returned to a willing Dorothy.
In October 1937, Macmillan’s mother, Nellie died; she was 81 and had been
wandering in her mind for some time. Macmillan wrote later that she had been
“a rock-like, unshakeable support”. That was true. She was also domineering,
protective of her favourite son and overambitious for him. Furthermore, she
had never been able to get on with Dorothy (“Mrs Mac is really worse than
ever,” she had written to her mother, “and I’ve had nothing but a series of
rows since I’ve been here”) and had, perhaps inadvertently, contributed to
his marital problems. In her later years, as Macmillan acknowledged, she was
not an easy person to love but her favouritism to her youngest son meant
that his establishment could be moved from Chester Square to the caverns of
Birch Grove House, the 17-bedroom family home set in 108 acres near East
Grinstead in Sussex.
Macmillan and Dorothy lived there at opposite ends of the building. When,
during the Second World War, it received 40 “evacuees” from South London,
Dorothy moved into Pooks Cottage, a small house on the estate, and Macmillan
gave up Chester Square to spend his — still lonely — week in a small flat at
90 Piccadilly, with dinners at the Beefsteak.
Apart from a short interlude, he had been in the House of Commons for 15 years
without having been offered even the meanest political job. He bored his
colleagues by constant lecturing and by an obvious absence of a sense of
humour. He still had not achieved the confidence that would allow him to
relax. His political views, sincerely held, were neither flesh
(laissez-faire Conservatism) nor fowl (socialism), and failed to attract
more than an ephemeral following. For ten years he had also lived with the
humiliation of his wife’s open infidelity.
It was this last, miserable, experience that changed him over those years. He
learnt to become adamant (with the support of his mother and mother-in-law)
in his refusal to give Dorothy the divorce she wanted, and to be patient in
allowing her just enough rope to prevent her suddenly rupturing his
marriage. The firmness he showed in this was gradually translated into
firmness — verging on brutality — elsewhere. He came to realise that
politics is not just a difficult trade but one that is only for those who
have the will — and who are sufficiently self-centred — to surf the waves of
hostility they will encounter.
The patience he learnt had also taught him that friendships come and go — and
can easily break on the anvil of ambition — and that persevering conviction
in political views commands respect and, with any luck, success.
Paradoxically, Dorothy’s behaviour had taught him the two valuable lessons
that would stay with him for the rest of his life — reliance on self, and
patience. She might have asked Boothby why he had ever woken her. Macmillan
might also have asked her — but understandably never did so — how it was
that she, inadvertently, had in her turn woken him as well.
© Charles Williams 2009. Extracted from Harold Macmillan by Charles
Williams, to be published by Orion on June 4 at £25. To order it for £22.50,
inc p&p, call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
