Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives

Prologue

It was the late afternoon when His Excellency the Earl of Winchilsea, Ambassador Extraordinary from King Charles II to the Grand Seignior Mehmed IV, Sultan of Sultans and God’s Shadow upon Earth, sailed into Constantinople.

To arrive in Constantinople by sea, even today, is to be presented with an extraordinary sight. In 1661 it was one of the wonders of the world. Built on seven hills, and surrounded on three sides by water, it was described by contemporary travellers as not only the biggest and richest, but also the most beautiful city on earth. The unequal heights of the seven hills, each one topped with the gilded dome and minarets of a mosque, made the city seem almost twice as large as it really was. On each hillside, raised one above the other in an apparent symmetry, were palaces, pavilions and mansions, each one set in its own gardens, surrounded by groves of cypress and pine. On the furthermost spit of land, and clearly visible from the sea, was the Seraglio,* the Sultan’s palace, its turrets and domes reflected in the waters of the Bosphorus.

Few buildings in history have had the sinister beauty of this fabled pleasure dome. No contemporary Christian king, and only a few since, had aspired to anything that equalled it. Built around six great courtyards, and covering as much land as a small town, this city within a city was the focus of all life in Constantinople. The Seraglio was not only the symbol of all power in the great Ottoman empire but also, to the dazzled imagination of foreign travellers, the seat of all pleasures too. For it was here, too, that the Grand Seignior’s harem was incarcerated – several hundred concubines, beautiful slave girls bought from as far away as Venice, Georgia and Circassia and kept, out of sight of other eyes, for the Sultan’s delight alone.

Here, every day, as many as 10,000 people were catered for – including the four corps of guards who protected the Seraglio, the black and white eunuchs, the palace slaves, its pages, treasurers, armourers, grooms, physicians, astrologers and imams, as well as the Sultan and his family. According to one estimate there were 1,000 cooks and scullions working in the palace kitchens which, in addition to staples such as meat and vegetables, produced jams, pickles, sweetmeats and sherbets in quantities ‘beyond possibility of measure’.1

Opposite the Seraglio, and close enough to be easily visible from it, rose the graceful shores of Asia, a pleasing prospect of wilderness interspersed with villages and fruit trees. And on the narrow stretch of water in between them sailed the water traffic of the world.

It was three months since the ambassador’s entourage had set sail, and the journey had not been an easy one. On New Year’s Day, just after they had left Smyrna on the last leg of their voyage, a tempest had all but tossed them into oblivion. During the week of the storm their vessel had been cast upon rocks five times, leaving every man on board fearing for his life. It was an escape ‘so miraculous and wonderfull, considering the violence of the storm, the carere and weight of our ship, as ought to make the 8 day of January for ever to be recorded by us to admiration, and anniversary thankfulness for God’s providence and protection,’ wrote one witness.2

Now, the ambassador’s storm-battered, leaky little ship – its masts, yards and decks encrusted eerily with white salt from the continual spray of the sea, its flags and ensigns flying, its guns at the ready – sailed across the last stretch of the Sea of Marmara and into the Bosphorus at last. It must have seemed to those on board as if they had reached the very epicentre of the world.

In many ways, of course, they had. Whoever controlled Constantinople controlled not only the great gateway between Europe and Asia, but also one of the greatest water trade routes linking the northern and southern hemispheres. Looking north, the Black Sea gave access through the Volga to southern Russia, and through the Danube to the Balkans and eastern Europe. To the south, the Sea of Marmara led not only to the Aegean, but to the whole of the Mediterranean, North Africa and beyond. In amongst the fishing boats and the caiques, the galleons and perhaps even one of the Sultan’s magnificent gilded barges, sailed innumerable vessels from all four corners of the earth – merchant ships, slave galleys and vast timber rafts cut from the deep forests of southern Russia and floated down the Bosphorus for shipbuilding and fuel.

On the captain’s orders the men lined the rigging, their muskets at the ready. As the ship drew close to the Sultan’s palace, in a suffocating cloud of gunpowder, a salutation of sixty-one guns was fired. A little while later, when the ambassador finally disembarked, it was to a second deafening salute of fifty-one guns. His welcoming committee comprised not only his own servants, English merchants, and other travelling companions brought with them from Smyrna, but also many of the Grand Seignior’s officers who had come to honour him. Their procession was so splendid that multitudes of people flocked from all parts of the city to watch them, and made ‘the business of more wonder and expectation’. ‘As we marched all the streets were crowded with people and the windows with spectators, as being unusual in this countrey to see a Christian Ambassadour attended with so many Turkish officers,’ wrote the ambassador’s secretary. He was so proud of their ‘very grand equipage’ – believing that ‘none of his predecessours, nor yet the Emperour’s Ambassadours, can boast of a more honourable nor a more noble reception’ – that he recorded each element:

1. The Vaivod* of Gallata and his men

2. The Captain of the Janizaries with his Janizaries

3. The Chouse Bashaw with his Chouses†

4. The English Trumpeters

5. The English horsemen and Merchants

6. My Lord’s Janizaries

7. The Druggerman‡

8. My Lord himself with Pages and Footmen by his side

9. My Lord’s gentlemen

10. The officers and reformadoes of the ship.3

From the brief account of the voyage which has come down to us, we know that the Sultan presented the embassy with ten sheep, a hundred loaves of bread, twenty sugar loaves and twenty wax candles. We also know that the ambassador distributed money among the people, and was visited by the messengers of other foreign ambassadors to the Porte. We know that he was given audiences with both the Grand Vizier, and with the Grand Seignior himself.

But we can only speculate about the Countess of Winchilsea’s role in all this. The fact that we know she was there at all seems almost accidental. At the very tail end of the procession, in between ‘my Lord’s gentlemen’ and ‘the officers and reformadoes of the ship’, the ambassador’s secretary has inserted one simple phrase: ‘My Ladies Coach’. With these three small words, my Lady Winchilsea slips into history.

* The Topkapi Palace.

* Voyvoda, or Governor of Gallata.

† The chief guard and his guards.

‡ Dragomen, or interpreters.

1 Getting There

Sometime at the beginning of April 1915 a lonely Kirghiz herdsman wandering with his flocks in the bleak mountain hinterland between Russian and Chinese Turkistan would have beheld a bizarre sight: a purposeful-looking Englishwoman in a solar topi, a parasol clasped firmly in one hand, striding towards the very top of the 12,000-foot Terek Dawan pass.

Ella Sykes, sister of the newly appointed British consul to Kashgar, was dressed in a travelling costume which she had invented herself to cope with the rigours of the journey. Over a riding habit made of the stoutest English tweed was a leather coat. On her legs she wore a pair of thick woollen puttees, while her hands were protected by fur-lined gloves. On her head she wore a pith helmet swathed in a gauze veil, and beneath it, protecting her eyes from the terrible glare of the sun in that thin mountain air, a pair of blue glass goggles. If the herdsman had been able to see beneath this strange mixture of arctic and tropical attire, he would have seen that her cheeks and lips were swollen, her skin so badly sunburnt that it was peeling from her face in large painful patches. But her eyes, behind those incongruous goggles, sparkled with a very English combination of humour and good sense. ‘Such slight drawbacks’, she would later record, ‘matter little to the true traveller who has succumbed to the lure of the Open Road, and to the glamour of the Back of Beyond.’1

The glamour described by Ella Sykes is not of the kind usually associated with diplomatic life. This mysterious existence invariably brings to mind a vague impression of luxury – of diamonds and champagne, of vast palaces illuminated by crystal chandeliers, of ambassador’s receptions of the Ferrero Rocher chocolates advertisement variety. While it is relatively easy to conjure with these fantastical images (for on the whole this is what they are) it is much more difficult to imagine the reality behind them. To contemplate Ella Sykes on her journey across the Terek Dawan pass* is to invite a number of questions. Who were these diplomatic women, and what were their lives really like? Where did they travel to, and under what circumstances? And, most important of all, how did they get there in the first place?

In 1915 an expedition to Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan, was one of the most difficult journeys on earth. Following the outbreak of the First World War, the normal route for the first leg of the journey – across central Europe and down to the Caspian Sea – had become too dangerous, and so Ella and her brother Percy travelled to Petrograd (St Petersburg) on a vastly extended route via Norway, Sweden and Finland. From Petrograd they went south and east to Tashkent, the capital of Russian Turkistan, on a train which lumbered its way through a slowly burgeoning spring. At stations frothing with pink and white blossom, children offered them huge bunches of mauve iris, and the samovar ladies changed from their drab winter woollens into flowered cotton dresses and head-kerchiefs.

For all these picturesque scenes, even this early stage of the journey was not easy: the train had no restaurant car, and the beleaguered passengers found it almost impossible to find food. At each halt, of which luckily there were three or four a day, they would all leap off the train and rush to buy what they could at the buffets on the railway platforms, gulping down scalding bowls of cabbage soup or borsch in the few minutes that the train was stationary. The further east they travelled, the more meagre the food supplies became, until all they could procure was a kind of gritty Russian biscuit. Without the soup packets they had brought with them, Ella noted with some sang-froid, they would have half starved.

From Tashkent Percy and Ella took another train to Andijan, the end of the line, and from here they travelled on to Osh by victoria.† Here they found that Jafar Bai, the chuprassi (principal servant) from the Kashgar consulate, had come to meet them. Under his careful ministrations they embarked on the final stage of their journey, the 260-mile trek across the mountains.

At first they met a surprising number of people en route: merchants with caravans laden with bales of cotton; Kashgaris with strings of camels on their way to seek work in Osh or Andijan during the summer months: ‘Some walked barefoot, others in long leather riding boots or felt leggings, and all had leather caps edged with fur.’ The long padded coats they wore were often scarlet, ‘faded to delicious tints’, and they played mandolins or native drums as they went. On one occasion they met a party of Chinese, an official and a rich merchant, each with his retinue, also bound for Kashgar.

The ladies of the party travelled in four mat-covered palanquins, each drawn by two ponies, one leading and one behind [Ella wrote], and I pitied them having to descend these steep places in such swaying conveyances. They were attended by a crowd of servants in short black coats, tight trousers and black caps with hanging lappets lined with fur, the leaders being old men clad in brocades and wearing velvet shoes and quaint straw hats.

At night Ella and her brother stayed in rest-houses, which in Russia usually consisted of a couple of small rooms, with bedsteads, a table and some stools. Sometimes these rooms looked out onto a courtyard where their ponies were tied for the night, but often there was no shelter for either the animals or their drivers. Over the border in China these rooms became more rudimentary still, lit only by a hole in the roof. The walls were of crumbling mud, the ceilings unplastered, their beams the haunt of scorpions and tarantulas. Up in the mountains, of course, there were no lodgings of any kind. The Sykeses slept in akhois, the beehive-shaped felt tents of Kirghiz tribesmen, their interiors marvellously canopied and lined with embroidered cloths. In the remotest places of all they slept in their own tents.

According to Ella’s account, these nights spent in the mountains were attended by a curious mixture of the rugged and the grandiose. Wherever they stopped, Jafar Bai would instantly make camp, setting up not only their camp-beds, but also tables to write and eat at, and comfortable chairs to sit on. While he heated the water for their folding baths, another servant prepared the food. After the gritty Russian biscuits and packet soups, a typical breakfast – steaming coffee and eggs, fresh bread and butter with jam – must have seemed like a banquet. The Russian jam, delicious as it was, had its drawbacks. In a state of ever-accelerating fermentation, the pots had a habit of exploding like bombs, causing havoc inside Jafar Bai’s well-ordered tiffin basket.

The routine was one which the Sykeses were to adopt for all their travels in Turkistan: ‘The rule was to rise at 5 a.m., if not earlier,’ Ella wrote, describing a typical morning in camp,

and I would hastily dress and then emerge from my tent to lay my pith-hat, putties, gloves and stick beside the breakfast table spread in the open. Diving back into my tent I would put the last touches to the packing of holdall and dressing-case, Jafar Bai and his colleague Humayun being busy meanwhile in tying up my bedstead and bedding in felts. While the tents were being struck we ate our breakfast in the sharp morning air, adjusted our putties, applied face-cream to keep our skins from cracking in the intense dryness of the atmosphere, and then would watch our ponies, yaks or camels as the case might be, being loaded up.2

Most days they would walk for an hour or so before they took to their mounts. Ella usually rode sidesaddle, but on these long journeys she found it less tiring to alternate with ‘a native saddle’, onto which she had strapped a cushion. Her astride habit, she noted, did for either mode. They would march for five hours before taking lunch and a long rest in the middle of the day, wherever possible by water, or at least in the shade of a tree. Then, when the worst of the midday heat was over, they would ride for another three or four hours into camp (the baggage animals usually travelling ahead of them) ‘to revel in afternoon tea and warm baths’. This was Ella’s favourite time of the day, not least because she could brush out her hair, which she had only hastily pinned up in the morning, and which by now was usually so thick with dust that she could barely get her comb through it.

At high altitude – sometimes they were as high as 14,000 feet – she suffered from the extremes of temperature. During the day, beneath a merciless sun, in spite of her pith hat and sun-umbrella, she often felt as if she was being slowly roasted alive, while the nights were sometimes so cold that she was forced to wear every single garment she had with her, with a fur coat on top. ‘My feet were slipped into my big felt boots lined with lamb’s wool,* and a woollen cap on my head completed the costume in which I sat at our dinner table.’ Thus prepared, she felt perfectly ready, she wrote, ‘to meet whatever might befall’.

In Ella Sykes’s day a woman, diplomatic or not, was really not supposed to take with quite such aplomb to the challenges of ‘the back of beyond’. It was not just her physical but her mental frailty, too, which was the impediment. If women themselves were in any doubt about this, then useful handbooks such as Tropical Trials, published in 1883, were on hand to tell them so.

Many and varied are the difficulties which beset a woman when she first exchanges her European home and its surroundings for the vicissitudes of life in the tropics [warned its author, Major S. Leigh Hunt]. The sudden and complete upset of old-world life, and the disturbance of long existing association, produces, in many women, a state of mental chaos, that utterly incapacitates them for making due and proper preparations for the contemplated journey.3

Not only the preparations, but the departure itself, according to the major, were likely to reduce a woman to a state of near imbecility, coming as she did in moral fibre somewhere between ‘the dusky African’ and ‘the heathen Chinee’. When embarking on a sea voyage, farewells with well-wishers of a woman’s own sex were best done on shore, he advised, while ‘a cool-headed male relation or friend’ was the best person to accompany the swooning female on board.

In real life, of course, women were made of much sterner stuff, but nevertheless departures were often very painful. ‘The parting with my people was unexpectedly terrible,’ wrote Mary Fraser on the eve of her first diplomatic posting to China in 1874. ‘Till the moment came I had not realised what it was to mean, this going away for five years from everything that was my very own.’ Revived by a glass of champagne, thoughtfully provided by her husband Hugh, she soon pulled herself together, however, and ‘by the time the sun went down’, she would remember, ‘on a sea all crimson and gold, my thoughts were already flying forward to all the many strange and beautiful things I was so soon to see.’4

This poignant mixture of excitement and regret is probably superseded by only one other concern. Thirty years after Ella Sykes travelled to Chinese Turkistan, Diana Shipton was told by her husband Eric that he had been offered the post of consul-general in Kashgar. ‘Mentally,’ she wrote, ‘I began immediately to pack and to plan.’5

The notion of travelling light has always been an alien one to diplomatic wives. ‘We are like a company of strolling players,’ wrote Harriet Granville, only half jokingly, en route to Brussels in 1824. Over the centuries many others must have felt exactly the same. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose husband Edward was appointed ambassador to Constantinople, arrived in Turkey in 1717, the Sultan lent their entourage thirty covered wagons and five coaches in which to carry their effects. Mary Waddington, who travelled to Russia in 1883, did so with a staff of thirty-four, including a valet and two maids, a master of ceremonies, two cooks, two garçons de cuisine, three coachmen and a detective. ‘Four enormous footmen’ completed the team, Mary recorded with gentle irony, ‘and one ordinary sized one for everyday use’.6 Even as recently as 1934, when Marie-Noele Kelly arrived by P & O in Cairo, she was accompanied by three European servants, three children, and fourteen tons of luggage.* The prize, however, must surely go to Lady Carlisle who, when her husband made his public entry into Moscow in 1663, accompanied him in her own carriage trimmed with crimson velvet, followed by no fewer than 200 sledges loaded with baggage.

When Elizabeth Blanckley’s family travelled to Algiers, where her father was to take up his post as consul, they chanced upon Nelson and his fleet in the middle of the Mediterranean. ‘Good God, it must be Mr Blanckley,’† Nelson is reputed to have exclaimed when he saw their little boat, all decked out ‘in gala appearance’ with flags of different nations. ‘How, my dear Sir, could you in such weather trust yourself in such a nutshell?… But I will not say one word more, until you tell me what I shall send Mrs Blanckley for her supper.’

My father assured him that she was amply provided for [recalled Elizabeth Blanckley in her memoirs] and enumerated all the live stock we had on board, and among other things, a pair of English coach-horses which, to our no trifling inconvenience, he had embarked, and stowed on board. Nelson laughed heartily at the enumeration of all my father’s retinue, exclaiming, ‘A perfect Noah’s ark, my dear sir! – A perfect Noah’s ark.’7

Even the most determinedly rugged travellers, such as Isabel and Richard Burton, whose highly idiosyncratic approach to diplomatic life broke almost every other rule, travelled with prodigious quantities of luggage. On Isabel’s first journey to Santos in Brazil, where Richard was appointed consul, she took fifty-nine trunks with her, and a pair of iron bedsteads. It is hard to imagine anyone further from Major Leigh Hunt’s fanciful picture of the swooning and feather-brained female abroad than Isabel Burton. This was the woman who, when she learnt that she was to be Richard Burton’s wife, sought out a celebrated fencer in London and demanded that he teach her. ‘“What for?” he asked, bewildered by the sight of Isabel, her crinoline tucked up, lunging and riposting with savage concentration. “So that I can defend Richard when he is attacked,” was the reply.’8 Carrying out the order issued by her husband when he was finally dismissed from his posting in Damascus – the famous telegram bade her simply ‘PAY, PACK AND FOLLOW’ – was really a life’s work in itself. Although Richard was little short of god-like in Isabel’s eyes, when it came to the practicalities of their lives, she knew very well who was in control. ‘Husbands,’ she wrote, ‘… though they never see the petit détail going on … like to keep up the pleasant illusion that it is all done by magic.’9

One wonders who was responsible for overseeing the household of Sir William and Lady Trumbull when they travelled to Paris in 1685. The vast body of correspondence describing Sir William’s embassy gives us almost no information about his wife other than that she had ‘agreeable conversation’ and once enjoyed ‘a little pot of baked meat’ sent to her by the wife of the Archbishop of York. We do know, however, the exact contents of her luggage. The Trumbull household consisted of forty people, including Lady Trumbull and her niece Deborah.

Besides a coach, a chaise, and 20 horses, there were 2 trunks full of plate, 9 boxes full of copper and pewter vessels, 50 boxes with pictures, mirrors, beds, tapestries, linen, cloth for liveries, and kitchen utensils, 7 or 8 dozen chairs and arm chairs, 20 boxes of tea, coffee, chocolate, wine, ale and other provisions; 4 large and 3 small cabinets, 6 trunks and 6 boxes with Sir William and Lady Trumbull’s apparel, and 40 boxes, trunks, bales, valises, portmanteaux, containing belongings of Sir William’s suite.10

Handbooks for travellers, particularly in the late nineteenth century when the empire was at its height, were often aimed at readers who were going abroad, as diplomats were, to live for some time. They enumerated at length not only what to take for a two- or three-year sojourn, but also exactly how to take it. Major Leigh Hunt, perhaps because of his military background (Madras army), was very particular on the subject.

First there were the different types of trunk available. These include a ‘State Cabin Trunk’, made from wood with an iron bottom, for hot, dry climates; a ‘Dress Basket’, made of wicker, for damp climates; and a ‘Ladies Wicker Overland Trunk’, for overland travel (it was shallow, and could easily be stowed beneath the seat in a railway carriage). Then, of course, there was the ubiquitous travelling bath. One’s china, he advised, ‘should be packed, by a regular packer, in barrels’. Sewing machines were to go in a special wooden case; saddles in a special tin-lined case; paint brushes, he warned, should have their own properly closed boxes ‘or the hairs will be nibbled by insects’. Even a lady’s kid gloves, well-aired and then wrapped in several folds of white tissue paper, should be stored in special stoppered glass bottles.