To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [20]
As with many British officers, when he was ordered to South Africa the next year, Cecil's attractive young wife, Lady Violet, accompanied him. After he had joined his army unit far in the interior, she stayed on in Cape Town, the command center of the war effort. As loyal to the empire as someone like Charlotte Despard was rebellious, Violet busied herself working with the Red Cross, while frowning on the British women who arrived in Cape Town "without evening dress of any kind." A drawing of her from this time shows a stunning woman who could turn many a man's head: slender, full-lipped, with dark curly hair and doe eyes set wide apart. And turn one head she did, for here in the seaside city, beneath the spectacular flat-topped Table Mountain with its "tablecloth" of fog rolling off the top, she and Sir Alfred Milner were falling in love.
Decades later, after the world war that would upend both their lives, she combed through Milner's papers and her own, making sure that no intimate details were left to history. But we do know that their passion was mutual, intense, and, for many years, furtive. In Victorian high society, there was no question of Violet and Edward divorcing. And for Violet, who had left their four-year-old son in the care of nannies and her in-laws in England, to be known to have a romance on the side while Edward was under Boer fire would have meant betraying not just her husband but the British Empire itself. Nor could Milner afford the appearance of the slightest impropriety, since as high commissioner to South Africa, in a mansion with portraits of Queen Victoria on the walls, he was the moral embodiment of that same empire.
And there was yet a further reason why public scandal was unthinkable: Edward Cecil's father was prime minister of Britain.
In fact, it was he—Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury, to give him his full name—who had suggested that Violet accompany his son to South Africa. Edward's father's position was known to everyone, including the Boers. When Edward's mother died of cancer, they allowed a courier under a white flag to pass through their battle lines surrounding Mafeking, a town where Edward and his contingent of British troops had become trapped under siege, with the news.
Violet was a woman of style, wit, and elegance. Her father was an admiral, and a brother would become a well-known general. As a teenager she had lived two years in Paris, studying music and art, meeting the impressionist painter Edgar Degas, taking in the opera and the Comédie Française, and often seeing a family friend—the French politician, journalist, and future wartime prime minister Georges Clemenceau. It would be good for Edward, his mother wrote to a family member, "to have a clever wife." Violet and Edward had known each other less than six months before they married, but to both it must have seemed the perfect match: to him, Violet appeared suitably wellborn, cultured, and dazzlingly beautiful; as for her, she was marrying someone whose social position promised a glamorous life near the pinnacle of imperial power.
It took little time, however, for the first problems to appear. Violet was the life of any party; Edward had a melancholy streak. She cared passionately about the arts; the Cecils had little use for them. Attending three Anglican services each Sunday, the Cecil family was devoutly religious; Violet was an atheist. At her first Christmas at the intimidatingly gloomy Hatfield House, she recorded dryly that four clergymen had come to dinner, "one, so to speak, to each daughter-in-law." Above all, the recessive Edward never fully emerged from the shadow of his famous father.
Alfred Milner, on the other hand, was a commanding public figure, confident of his destiny. "I wish Milner had a less heroic fight to make," Violet wrote to one of her brothers from Cape Town,