The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

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Parnell was universally condemned for having put personal happiness ahead of his duty to his country.

What did Lloyd George glean from this episode? It was an early lesson in the ways of high society. Queen Victoria was still on the throne, but the Prince of Wales, heading the fast ‘Marlborough set’, was establishing new rules when it came to combining public life with private happiness. The Parnell affair elicited a strange mix of old attitudes and new ones.

Prince Edward, who became Edward VII in 1901, was the ultimate playboy prince. He had earned himself the nickname of ‘Edward the Caresser’ with a series of affairs which scandalised his parents and enthralled the nation. Indeed, it was during a visit to his son’s college in Cambridge in the wake of an incident involving a popular actress called Nellie Clifden that Prince Albert contracted his fatal dose of typhoid, and Queen Victoria never forgave her son for being the indirect cause of her widowhood. In an attempt to regularise his private life, Prince Edward was married off to the beautiful and virtuous Princess Alexandra, but that did not curb his behaviour for long. Soon he and his intimate circle, the so-called Marlborough House set, were developing a code of practice that allowed them to indulge in serial affairs without upsetting the social order. The rules of the game were simple, and designed to keep the players out of the divorce courts. Affairs were confined to women of the same, aristocratic social class. Single women were out of bounds, as were married ones until they had had two or three children, including the necessary heir. But after family obligations had been fulfilled, gentlemen and married ladies could conduct discreet affairs during country-house Saturday-to-Monday parties or long afternoon visits in town while husbands were at their clubs. House-party hostesses would understand what was expected of them in arranging bedroom accommodation for their guests. In this way immoral behaviour was cloaked in respectability, and scandal averted. Young girls’ marriage prospects were not ruined by affairs with older men, and elaborate rules involving chaperones were devised to make sure that everyone obeyed the code.

After making the proper kind of dynastic marriage, providing their aristocratic husbands with heirs, and transferring their children’s care to nannies, well-born women would find themselves at leisure. They were often bored, and played the game as enthusiastically as their husbands. Society colluded to keep everything discreet, even when prominent ladies gave birth to ‘late’ children who looked nothing like their husbands. The only threat to this happy arrangement, the thing to be avoided at all costs, was the public scandal of the divorce courts. Then the gloves came off, and the losers—usually women—were reviled in the press and excluded from society.

As an illustration of this code of conduct, there could be no better example than the Parnell affair. Everyone who knew Parnell and Mrs O’Shea, from the Prime Minister himself to the chambermaids who served them, treated Mrs O’Shea as Parnell’s lawful wife, and no one seemed to trouble themselves about the morality of the situation. But the fateful intervention of Captain O’Shea removed Parnell’s private life from the realm of the Marlborough House set rules, and cast it firmly into the public arena, where such things could not be accommodated. Thus Gladstone, who had been perfectly happy to acknowledge the affair in private, could not risk supporting Parnell through a public scandal. This may seem like utter hypocrisy—it seemed so to Mrs O’Shea at the time—but it was a reflection of the fact that the middle and working classes expected their national leaders to keep out of such scandals.

This was the world in which Lloyd George found himself when he entered Parliament, and this was the context to his own behaviour during the years that followed. The Parnell affair had lessons to impart in terms of both his marriage and his career, and he learned them well. Within his marriage, he was able to keep transient flirtations and affairs separate from the love and commitment he offered Maggie. While expecting total fidelity from his wife, he indulged in relationships with other women and was never faithful to any of them, making full use of the prevailing silence of the press in such matters. This was a million miles away from the attitudes in Criccieth, but then, Lloyd George was far away from Criccieth. Such was the impact of the Parnell affair on Lloyd George that he would give Frances Stevenson a biography of Parnell when he asked her to be his mistress. The warning was implicit: there would be no divorce in his case. There would be no scandal. His career came first.

However clear in his mind Lloyd George was on this point, the story of the gallant Irish politician who sacrificed his career for love sent a very different message to others of his acquaintance. One of them was Catherine Edwards, the wife of a respectable doctor in Cemmaes, Merioneth, who by fancying herself as the Welsh Kitty O’Shea caused the first major scandal of Lloyd George’s parliamentary career.

By the summer of 1896, Maggie’s life had settled into its uneven split between Criccieth and London, and since Lloyd George had maintained his majority in the general election of 1895, she could be confident that her life as an MP’s wife was likely to continue. She was thirty, and her brood now numbered four chicks, with Dick aged seven, Mair six, Olwen four, and the youngest, Gwilym, eighteen months. She was pregnant for the fifth time, and as usual she intended to stay in Criccieth until the birth. She and Lloyd George were still spending long times apart. He was making a name for himself as a backbencher and leader within the Welsh Parliamentary Group, and had taken several long holidays with political friends, while she stayed behind in Criccieth, which seemed to suit them both.

Money was still a problem. In his struggle to keep the family financially afloat, Lloyd George was apt to be tempted into unwise business dealings, and in 1893 the prospect of a quick return on a goldmine in far-distant Patagonia had been too attractive to resist. The consequences were disastrous, and in an attempt to turn the situation around he decided to take a trip to Argentina during the 1896 parliamentary recess, leaving on 21 August and returning on 27 October. He also needed a holiday, for his mother had died on 19 June. She was sixty-eight, and had been an invalid for many years. Lloyd George returned to Criccieth for a small, private funeral, and was so upset that Richard Lloyd sent him back to London so that politics could distract him from his grief. Maggie was too unwell to attend Betsy’s funeral, and during his trip—or possibly just before his departure—she lost the baby. While she was recovering from this setback, unbeknownst to her a child was being born to a cousin of hers, Catherine Edwards. This child was going to cast a shadow over her life for the next three years.

Catherine Edwards, or ‘Kitty’ as she was (ironically) known, was a ‘pretty, pert, amiable young woman’

(#litres_trial_promo) who lived with her daughter and her husband, the local doctor, near the village of Mathafarn. In August 1896 her husband realised that she was pregnant, which was a surprise to him since the couple were estranged and had occupied separate bedrooms since 1894. What happened next came within a whisker of destroying Lloyd George’s political career.

Kitty later claimed that on 10 August her husband used physical violence to induce her to sign a statement written in his hand. It read:

I, Catherine Edwards, do solemnly confess that I have on 4th of February, 1896, committed adultery with Lloyd George MP, and that the said Lloyd George is the father of the child, and that I have on a previous occasion committed adultery with the above Lloyd George.

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Dr Edwards denied using violence against his wife, but he did throw her out of the house, and just over a week later she gave birth to a child at a temperance hotel called The Tower in Penygroes, near Caernarvon. At the time it was claimed that the baby was born near its full term, but the date of the confessed adultery, together with Dr Edwards’ ignorance of his wife’s condition until August, lend credence to a later doctor’s report that the child was born substantially premature, weak and sickly at just over four pounds. The child did not survive to adulthood.

Naturally, within a small community, news like this could not be kept quiet, and Lloyd George’s political enemies made sure that the gossip persisted. While Lloyd George was abroad the rumours reached the ears of his brother William. To his credit, William never entertained the notion that his brother could be guilty as charged, but he recognised the gravity of the situation, recording gloomily in his diary: ‘The event that has overshadowed everything else in my little world during the last two days is the charge which is being made against D in connection with Mrs Dr Edwards…I hope to God that neither Uncle nor Maggie will hear anything of this slander until D returns when, of course, he will be in a position to deal with the “affair” effectively.’

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William knew that the scandal would end Lloyd George’s career if he was not able to defend himself adequately, a fear that was reinforced the next day when he received a letter from R.O. Roberts, Lloyd George’s election agent, containing the sombre message: ‘The story is in everybody’s mouth here, and naturally enough, people are shocked whether it be true or not. If true, then D’s days are numbered; if untrue then it is a most devilish trick to blacken a man in his absence.’

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William immediately set about discovering the facts in order to mount a defence, taking care that Maggie heard nothing of the matter. He wrote a letter to Lloyd George with the bare bones of the accusation and sent it to Southampton to await his return. Having consulted Uncle Lloyd’s diary, which faithfully recorded Lloyd George’s whereabouts every day, he satisfied himself that his brother was innocent, and proceeded to do everything he could to keep a lid on the story. However, he did not know the date of the alleged adultery. He must have counted back nine months from the birth of the child rather than check the date in Kitty’s ‘confession’, because Uncle Lloyd’s diary clearly showed that Lloyd George did spend the night of 4 February at Dr Edwards’ house. Edwards had been called out during the night, and had not returned until morning, leaving his wife and Lloyd George alone in the house. This did not mean that Lloyd George was guilty, but William was premature in celebrating his brother’s innocence.

Dr Edwards was a Liberal supporter, and Lloyd George had got to know him when he campaigned for the Liberal candidate in Montgomeryshire in an 1894 by-election. A letter written to Lloyd George by Kitty suggested that he had also got to know Mrs Edwards rather well:

I am addressing this to the Club and the minute you have read it please commit it to the fire, I shall not expect an answer until you write to tell me you are going to spend a few days with us again…No more news, you may expect some trout from me in April, I shall send as many as I catch to Maggie and you and if my basket is not sufficient to supply your larder the Dr must help.

Excuse such an untidy letter and with my kind regards

Believe me

Yrs very sincerely

Kitty Edwards

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Kitty Edwards was a young, flirtatious, bored wife, and it later emerged that not one but two other men were also in the frame as the possible father of her second child. Nevertheless, for some reason, under the pressure of her husband’s interrogation, she named Lloyd George as her lover, and for a short time this was believed by Dr Edwards.

In late October, Lloyd George returned home to Criccieth to find political uproar awaiting him, with all except his wife and his uncle in the know. He denied the charge and, advised by his brother, wrote to Dr Edwards to protest his innocence. The brief correspondence between them suggests that Edwards by then accepted that his wife had lied, but the doctor put the matter in the hands of his solicitor. Sooner or later with all this activity going on Maggie was bound to find out, and find out she did. She was not told about the affair by her husband, but discovered it when she read a letter that was addressed to him. It provoked a violent quarrel between them. Maggie was understandably distressed, but she came to believe in his innocence, and remained stalwart in her support for him through the whole, drawn-out affair.

In March 1897 Dr Edwards finally sued for divorce, and was promptly counter-sued by Kitty on the grounds of his cruelty. Lloyd George was not cited as co-respondent (that dubious honour went to Edward Wilson, the stationmaster at nearby Cemaes), but the libel of Kitty’s confession had circulated so widely that the judge asked Lloyd George if he wanted to join the suit so that he could clear his name publicly on oath. This presented Lloyd George with a dilemma. Maggie was insistent that to appear in court in connection with such a sordid business would inevitably lead to more gossip. Mud sticks, she felt, even if he was found not guilty. On the other hand, refusing to clear his name could also lead to more rumour. Eventually, strongly advised by his brother (who consistently gave him excellent, impartial legal advice), Lloyd George decided to keep his name out of the proceedings.

If Maggie ever doubted her husband in this matter, she did not show it. On the contrary, whatever her private feelings, she maintained a philosophical, almost nonchalant attitude, writing to William George:

PRIVATE:* (#ulink_831ea201-043f-534d-983d-9786ebf4eaeb) Is it not a great nuisance to have this old story risen up again? I trust it will be over on Monday for Die’s sake—he is worrying about it. This world is a very cruel one, don’t you think so? The innocent must suffer in order to shield the culprits. There are several persons in this matter who are left out of it altogether, who no doubt are guilty of misbehaving with this woman.

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In November 1897, by which time the scandal had been circulating for a full fifteen months, a court date was set. Shortly before then, a deal was reached between Dr and Mrs Edwards: she dropped her claims of cruelty in return for his withdrawing the charge against Edward Wilson. The reason for this deal became apparent later, and was connected with the discovery of indiscreet letters written by Mrs Edwards to a third man, known only as ‘Gillet’, which exonerated the stationmaster. But this did not emerge at the time and the judge proceeded to grant Dr Edwards a decree nisi on the grounds of his wife’s adultery ‘with persons unknown’.

Clearly this did not satisfactorily address the rumours concerning Lloyd George, so the judge took it upon himself to read out Kitty’s confession in court, adding: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that I think no case whatever has been made out against Mr Lloyd George—I think it was in the interests of Mr Lloyd George himself that the written confession has been brought forward and dealt with fully.’

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The relief to Lloyd George and his family must have been considerable. The only cloud on the horizon was that since the proceedings would be reported in the press, Uncle Lloyd had to be told about the affair. He wept and was thoroughly upset, but still, Lloyd George’s name had been cleared.

And so the matter would have rested had not the divorce been interrupted in a most unfortunate manner. During the then compulsory six-month period between the granting of decree nisi and decree absolute, the man who employed Kitty as his secretary—Dr Beddoes of Aberystwyth—contested the decree nisi on the grounds that Dr Edwards had forced his wife to sign the confession. This dug up the scandal all over again, and led to a second court hearing in June 1899. The strain on Lloyd George and his family was compounded as further details of the affair came to light. Kitty’s confession was reprinted in the press, and when the court hearing came around, the whole business descended to near farce. Kitty’s letters inviting Gillet to visit her when her husband was away were exposed. She had also written to Dr Edwards begging him to let her return to the marital home, acknowledging, ‘I know I have sinned, but I have repented bitterly…I cannot expect you to receive me home yet, and of course the child shall never come,’

(#litres_trial_promo) which hardly backed up her claim that the child was her husband’s all along. Lloyd George referred to the resurrection of the case as ‘another dose of purgatory’, and it weighed heavily on both him and Maggie. His political opponents made the most of his discomfort, and the matter only ended when the judge unhesitatingly granted Dr Edwards his decree absolute.

There is no definitive answer to the question of whether Lloyd George did or did not have a relationship with Kitty Edwards, but given the evidence of her letter it seems most likely that there was a flirtation, if not a sexual relationship, between them. The two court cases and William George’s investigative work focused on identifying the father of the child, but fathering the baby was only the first of two charges Kitty made against Lloyd George in her confession. The second was that she had ‘on a previous occasion’ committed adultery with him, a charge which was more difficult to disprove. It may well be that a relationship existed between them in 1894, a relationship that may even have caused the rift between Kitty and Dr Edwards, but that by 1896 she had taken another lover who was actually the father of her child. We shall probably never know for certain.

Despite her unflinching loyalty, Maggie was troubled by this episode. Even so, the mounting evidence of Lloyd George’s tendency to stray did not persuade her to move the family base to London. It took a far more serious affair of his to persuade her not to leave him alone in the city. The two affairs were not unconnected, since it was when the Edwards case was at its height, and Lloyd George was under great pressure, that he felt the need for some comforting female companionship in London. With his career on a knife-edge and his wife still based in Criccieth, he needed support and he readily found it from another quarter.

* (#ulink_b9b37daa-8966-537d-8cb6-159aebae4458)R.O. Davies, a Criccieth acquaintance and chapel-goer, was a successful London draper. He and his family lived in Grasgarth, a comfortable house in Acton with a large garden and a tennis court.

* (#ulink_3d4ad745-b21d-5710-ba33-b52b3d3d94d2)Following Dick and Mair, Olwen was born in 1892 and Gwilym in 1894.

* (#ulink_7fefa6a4-dd95-5e46-b3a8-5c07d527d0af)Lloyd George often refers to his wife as ‘old Maggie’. In Welsh, particularly in North Wales, the word ‘hen’, which literally means ‘old’, is used as an endearment. A more accurate translation would be ‘little Maggie’ or ‘dear Maggie’.

* (#ulink_722bac00-73b1-5134-9c61-eece6c64c0fd)In 1895 he wrote to Maggie: ‘Ellis Griffith [MP for Anglesey] & I were comparing notes the other day & we both said that if we were asked on a future great occasion in what capacity we would like to be tried before the Judgement seat we would answer As a husband if you don’t mind. We both thought we would fare pretty well if we had to stand or fall by our merits or demerits as husbands.’

* (#ulink_7d7cd86c-602d-5f9b-a907-6c6cfbd17f04)This was intended to signal to William that the note was for his eyes only, not to be read to the rest of the family.

8 Mrs Tim (#ulink_a9a6c83c-2eee-58a0-b6ac-50e1bef7eebc)

VISITING THE HOMES OF Welsh friends was a normal Sunday-afternoon activity for the Lloyd Georges in London. When Dick was about eight years old, he and his father went to pay a social call in Putney, finding the lady of the house alone. Returning home, Dick ran to find his mother and excitedly told her of his adventures. He had seen Tada (Father) and the lady playing a game. ‘He was eating her hand,’ he said.

(#litres_trial_promo) Maggie knew what that meant: Lloyd George was having an affair with Elizabeth, wife of his friend Timothy Davies. A row followed, the first of many over ‘Mrs Tim’.

Elizabeth Davies was twenty-six in 1897, fourteen years younger than her husband. She lived in Oakhill Road, Putney, in a house named Pantycelyn,* (#litres_trial_promo) within walking distance of the Lloyd Georges. Her life was comfortable if not exciting, with a rather dull husband and three children. Timothy Davies was a solid member of the London Welsh community, who Lloyd George rather unkindly held up to Maggie as a kind of ‘insipid, wishy washy fellow’.

(#litres_trial_promo) On his letterhead he styled himself a ‘General Draper, Silk Mercer, Ladies Outfitter, Carpet and a furnishing warehouseman’, and he owned a number of premises in Walham Green in Fulham. He was President of the Welsh Presbyterian Association and a Liberal who shared the same radical views as Lloyd George. He married Elizabeth (known as ‘Lizzie’ to her husband, ‘Mrs Tim’ to the Lloyd George family) in 1893. She became an accomplished hostess, popular among the London Welsh, and Tim soon began to bring Lloyd George home. After making a success of his commercial ventures, Davies concentrated on politics, serving on London County Council, becoming Mayor of Fulham in 1901 and, with Lloyd George’s active support, Liberal MP for Fulham from 1906 to 1910 and for Louth from 1910 to 1920. Before then, his home had become a refuge for the lonely young Lloyd George, a haven of good meals, blazing fires and political conversation.

The two men struck up a friendship, travelling abroad together at least twice without their wives—to Rome in December 1897 and on a cruise at the end of 1898. Perhaps Timothy Davies was oblivious to the growing attraction between Lloyd George and Lizzie, or perhaps he decided to follow the lead of the Prince of Wales’ set and ignore the relationship. Either way, as Mrs Tim embarked on an affair with Lloyd George that was to last many years, her husband looked the other way.

Dick described Mrs Tim as ‘a lively, attractive creature, rather loquacious, very stylish, perhaps a little flamboyant’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She wore a scent that reminded him of a basket of carnations, and she went out of her way to charm the little boy. As for his father, Mrs Tim became the first woman to occupy a regular place in Lloyd George’s life since his marriage to Maggie.

It was inevitable that this relationship would hurt Maggie. She could be certain that Lloyd George would not risk the major scandal of divorce, but it irked her that he should spend his time with another woman, especially a woman she considered inferior to herself in all but housekeeping ability. This tension shows in her letters. In May 1897 she upbraided Lloyd George for giving Mrs Tim a ticket for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee festivities, instead of the more worthy Davies family he had stayed with in Acton as a new MP. In reply, he came out fighting:

What a jealous little wife I have got to be sure! Now let me prove to her how groundless her suspicions are—as usual. So much was I in agreement with her as to the prior claims of the [Acton] Davies’s, that I offered them my extra seat last night—but they had already received as many as eight seats elsewhere. I then told the Morgans, having got the Davies’s out of the way, that I had an available seat—but they also had ‘excellent seats’ in another quarter. So poor Mrs Tim only comes third or even fourth. But still I don’t wish her to occupy even that back seat if you object. Is there anyone else you would like me to hand my seat to?

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Lloyd George believed in brazening out any embarrassing situations, both in politics and in his personal life. His mistress, unlike Kitty Edwards, was not the type to risk her own comfortable situation, and Lloyd George trusted her not to expose their affair or to make excessive demands on him. Far from trying to keep the families apart, Lloyd George encouraged social contact between them. As the relationship between him and Mrs Tim flourished, his whole family was drawn into their social arrangements. Dick recalls being taken often to Pantycelyn, and going for long walks on which he and the Davies children would be sent ahead, allowing his father and Mrs Tim to have a leisurely tête-à-tête. Finally the penny dropped that this woman was making his mother unhappy, and although Mrs Tim was friendly and generous towards him, Dick turned against her with a fierce ‘childish hostility’.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Other members of the family also realised that there was more to their father’s visits to Putney than social duty, including Olwen, who already had a reputation for being outspoken. She recalls playing a guessing game with her father, her siblings and Maggie, who had made her husband a present of a pen. Lloyd George held the pen aloft and invited his children to guess who had given it to him. ‘Is it a lady?’ he was asked. ‘Oh yes!’ ‘Is it someone you kiss?’ asked Dick. ‘Well, yes!’ came the reply. Then, in her innocence, Olwen dropped the bombshell. ‘Is it Mrs Timothy Davies?’ The embarrassed silence that followed opened her eyes for the first time to her father’s infidelity.

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In the spring and summer of 1897, tension simmered between Maggie and Lloyd George. Maggie was jealous of Mrs Tim, and they were both feeling lonely as they continued to spend long periods apart. At the end of May, Maggie wrote from Criccieth chiding her husband once more for not spending enough time with his family. He, always on the lookout for ways of increasing his income, was about to start up a law practice in London, at 13 Walbrook in the heart of the City. His partner, the Anglesey lawyer Arthur Rhys Roberts, was expected to do the work, while Lloyd George, with his store of London contacts, provided the clients. Money, he replied to Maggie, was the reason he needed to stay in London. Her dismissive response provoked him to set out a few home truths:

You say you would rather have less money and live in a healthy place. Well, hen gariad [little love], you will not forget that you were as keen about my starting as I was myself. Then you must bear in mind that we are spending more than we earn. I draw far more than my share of the profits [of the North Wales practice] though I don’t attend to 1/10th of the work. This is neither fair nor honourable & feel sure you do not wish it to continue.

For all their sakes, he argued, it was time for his family to join him on a permanent basis:

Now you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs & unless I retire from politics altogether & content myself with returning to the position of a country attorney, we must give up the comforts of Criccieth for life in England. As to attending to the business during sessions & running away from it afterwards your good sense will show you on reflection that it is impossible. No business could be conducted successfully on those terms. You are not right, however, that this presupposes living entirely in London. If you prefer, we can take a home somewhere in the suburbs—say Ealing or Acton, Ealing for choice. There the air is quite as good as anything you can get in Wales as it is free from the smoke of the great city. Or if you prefer we could go still further out & live say in Brighton as Clifton does…Think of it, old pet, & think of it with all the courage of which I know you capable.

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Maggie would not budge, and by August Lloyd George’s sympathy was wearing a little thin: ‘How infinite your self-pity is! Poor lonely wife. You are surrounded by all who love you best—father, mother, children, Uncle Lloyd & all. But can’t you spare some sympathy & compassion for the poor lonely husband who is surrounded on all hands by wolves who would tear him—did they not fear his claw?’

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A few days later he wrote Maggie a loving letter, but the teasing, affectionate tone of the correspondence between them was about to be rudely interrupted. They were still under pressure from the Edwards divorce case, but the incident that sparked their most serious quarrel yet was Maggie’s decision not to accompany her husband on a trip to Llangadog in Carmarthenshire, presumably on political business. On 13 August Uncle Lloyd recorded in his diary that both Maggie and William George had received strong letters from Lloyd George: ‘Mag heard from D.Ll.G—fully expecting her to go to Llangadock. Pity he made his mind so—as she is unable to go. W.G. had letter today also, it seems.’

(#litres_trial_promo) His tone is sympathetic towards Maggie—at least, he does not seem to blame her for not going. He and William George often thought Maggie’s decision to stay in Criccieth far more reasonable than Lloyd George allowed. They were in a position to see the practical difficulties of moving a young family between Criccieth and London, and tended to take Maggie’s side.

Not so Lloyd George. His letter to William was angry and vengeful. He decided to force Maggie to join him in London permanently by giving up their house in Criccieth:

My wife declines to go out of her way to spend Sunday with me at Llangadock. She makes the kids an excuse. Becca [Owen, a cousin] would be only too glad to take up her quarters at Bryn Awel* (#litres_trial_promo) for a few days to look after them. I have made up my mind to give up the Criccieth house altogether. M. is giving notice today. She has failed to let it furnished, and even if she succeeded I shall want the furniture for a house up here [in London]. I mean to let the flat and take a small house in the suburbs. You can’t keep kids in a flat. Can’t you let Bryn Awel for me unfurnished?

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Lloyd George’s peremptory tone and unilateral decision-making might have brought some wives to heel, but not Maggie. It was one thing for him to ask her to join him in London, quite another for him to give up the house her father had built for their use without her agreement. Maggie wrote a furious and destructive letter threatening her husband with a public scandal. It has not survived, and we do not know if she was alluding to his relationship with Mrs Tim, some other personal matter, or, since Lloyd George was under pressure from his constituents because of the infrequency of his visits, a political exposure. The gist of her threats can be deduced from Lloyd George’s reply. In a cold, cruel letter he hit back, targeting her own weak spot: her failure as a wife:

When next you discuss your relations with your husband with the servants you may tell Jane—since you quote her views as having so much weight—that the marriage vow was not one-sided. You have worried me to distraction about my share of it. What about yours? You have wilfully disobeyed your husband—in a matter he was entitled to obedience—yes in a matter any other wife would have been only too delighted to obey him in.

You threaten me with a public scandal. Alright—expose me if that suits you. One scandal the more will but kill me the earlier. But you will not alter my resolution to have neither correspondence nor communication of any sort with you until it is more clearly understood how you purpose to guide your course for the future. I have borne it for years & have suffered in health & character. I’ll stand it no longer come what may.

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He does not deny that Maggie has the ammunition to cause a scandal. Instead he argues that it is all her fault. Her neglect is responsible for his defects of both ‘health’ and ‘character’. Instead of reassurance, she received an ultimatum: he would not write or talk to her again until she agreed to join him in London. Her reply, unfortunately, is also lost and the trail of letters is difficult to follow, since in the heat of the argument they wrote to each other more than once a day,* (#litres_trial_promo) but it seems that it was an angry one. This drew a curt and equally unconciliatory letter back from Lloyd George: ‘What colleague do you allude to? You are still at your old trick of innuendo. You say this business is childish. You may yet find it is more serious than child’s play.’

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Maggie must have sent another letter the same day containing an apology, for Lloyd George wrote again later in a softened tone, and although he returned to the ongoing quarrel, he also sent a gift of fruit: ‘I would much rather see you express sorrow for your refusal to comply with your husband’s earnest desire to see you than defend yourself as you do. It was a wilful act of disobedience. Of course I did not command. That is what no husband cares to do to his wife but I did entreat—for the last time.’

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Maggie, though, was not quite ready to let the matter rest. It seems she sent another intemperate letter—or perhaps their letters crossed—followed immediately by an apologetic and capitulatory telegram. Sensing victory, Lloyd George wrote back pressing his advantage to secure his goal of getting Maggie to agree to move to London:

My sweet but stupid Maggie

That telegram just saved you. Your letter this morning made me wild—there was the same self-complacent self-satisfied Pharisaism about it as ever. You had done no wrong. Even now there is a phrase in it that I cannot pass by unnoticed. When did I ever suggest in the faintest measure that you were a burden to me? Have I not always complained rather that you ‘burdened’ me too little with your society? You have no right to make these charges. What I have said I neither withdraw nor modify how grave soever the implication may be—nor do I wish to retract a syllable of what I told you in London about my being even happier when you & the kids are around me. A wise woman who loved her husband well & who knew herself well-beloved by him, would not write foolish letters arguing out the matter with him & doing that badly—she would rather put these things together, ponder them well & resolve at all costs to redeem the past.

He then goes for the kill.

Be candid with yourself. Drop that infernal Methodism which is the curse of your bitter nature & reflect whether you have not rather neglected your husband. I have more than once gone without breakfast. I have scores of times come home in the dead of night to a cold dark & comfortless flat without a soul to greet me. When you were surrounded by your pets.

Next comes the nearest thing to a confession Lloyd George ever made:

I am not the nature either physically or morally that ought to have been left thus. I decline to argue & you will mortally offend me if you attempt it. I simply ask you in all sincerity of soul—yes, & as a message of true love I supplicate you to give heed to what I am telling you now—not for the first time. I shall then ask you how you would like to meet your Judge if all this neglect led me astray. You have been a good mother. You have not—& I say this now not in anger—not always been a good wife. I can point you even amongst those whom you affect to look down upon—much better wives. You may be a blessing to your children. Oh Maggie annwyl [darling] beware lest you be a curse to your husband. My soul as well as my body has been committed to your charge & in many respects I am as helpless as a child.

(#litres_trial_promo)

As an argument of defence, the letter is masterful. It would not sound out of place as a sermon, delivered in solemn tones from the pulpit of Seion. How well Lloyd George knew his wife. In asking her to abandon her Methodism he plays on it for all he is worth, conjuring up the Calvinistic exhortation to reflect on sin, and encouraging her to take on the responsibility and guilt for his own moral lapses.

The row was over, and the correspondence between them swung back into its previous comfortable rhythm, but a powerful message had been delivered to Maggie. She did not dismiss Lloyd George’s covert warning that her absences were leading him into temptation. While she was in Wales the despised Mrs Tim had a clear field, and with the children growing older, she had less reason to cling on to Criccieth. Nevertheless, the bonds were difficult to break, and it was not until the end of 1898 that she finally agreed to join her husband in the city she hated.

With peace restored—somewhat precariously—between Maggie and Lloyd George, a happier period ensued. Indeed, for a family commuting between North Wales and London, theirs was a remarkably stable home life, due to Maggie’s unblinking focus on her children. The elder children, Dick, Mair and Olwen, had happy memories of growing up in Criccieth, largely cared for by Richard and Mary Owen and watched over by Uncle Lloyd in Garthcelyn, the house William had built for the family. With Maggie dividing her time unevenly between Criccieth and London, Dick remembers her as an occasional visitor during his infancy, with longer spells at home before a new brother or sister arrived. As a young child he missed his mother very much, and he may have exaggerated their periods of separation. His early memories may also have been coloured by the fact that he was sent back to Criccieth to attend school during the Boer War which broke out in 1899, and lived apart from his family for large parts of the year. Mair left no diary or memoir to speak for her, but Olwen, three years younger than Dick, writes of growing up in London with only extended holidays spent in Criccieth. The truth probably lies in between: the family was firmly based in Criccieth in the early 1890s, but as time went on pressure grew on Maggie to spend more time in London. She usually took the youngest member or members of the family with her, leaving the elder children behind, which would account for the different recollections of Dick and Olwen.

Dick was a sensitive boy who inherited his mother’s love of North Wales but did not possess his father’s brilliance and ambition. His restless energy found an outlet in mischief, especially during endless sermons in chapel, and he was made to sit with Richard Owen in the ‘set fawr’, the front pew reserved for deacons, on more than one occasion to put a stop to his antics. He had a gift for mimicry, and when he began to acquire some English he found he could deflect his mother’s anger by assuming an exaggerated accent and declaring ‘Oh I say!’, reducing her to helpless laughter. He was very close to Maggie, whom he worshipped, and as the first grandchild in either the Owen or the Lloyd family, he was secure in the attention of both.

As a child growing up by the sea in Criccieth, Dick was enthralled by the sight of the hundred-ton schooners moored to the stone jetty under the castle rock waiting their turn to load up with Porthmadoc slate. He watched their sails unfurl as they left the shelter of the bay for the open sea, and listened to the tales of weather-hardened fishermen on the seafront. The ‘maes’ (village green) gave yet more scope for entertainment as farmers and stockmen compared notes with Richard Owen presiding. Here, though, young Lloyd Georges had to behave or risk the displeasure of Uncle Lloyd, who frequently sat on a bench overlooking the maes. As the eldest child, Dick was more aware of the tension between his parents than were his siblings, and he was badly affected by their heated rows.

With regard to religion, a compromise was reached despite the entrenched attitudes of the older generation. Dick was raised a Baptist, and attended Berea, the handsome new chapel which replaced Capel Ucha in 1886, with Uncle Lloyd every Sunday; Mair was christened a Methodist like Maggie; Olwen was a Baptist; and Gwilym a Methodist. Only Megan, the youngest, bucked the pattern by becoming a Methodist too. When Maggie was at home she would take all the children with her to Seion, but when she was away Dick would sometimes take Megan to the Baptist service on Sunday mornings, and both would go to the Methodist service in the evening. This was all highly irregular, but not, it seems, confusing to the children, who were loyal to their own denomination while being perfectly at home in the other.