That June, despite her objections, Diana received her first bona fide proposal. But Sir Claud Russell, a grandson of the Duke of Bedford, was twenty years older than her, and his present of a diamond and ruby pendant – her second of the early summer – did not prevent her laughing off his declaration as a huge joke. Her mother tried to encourage a romance with the unsophisticated, soon-to-be-invested Prince of Wales, but Diana considered the heir to the throne little more than a ‘snivelling cub’, and declared she had no intention of ‘marrying a country house’.

  By the end of the first week of June, London had become extremely hot after eight consecutive days of fine weather. A sun-bronzed colonel with the experience of many summers behind him was leaning over the parapet of Westminster Bridge near the House of Commons when he told a passing Daily Sketch reporter that he forecast a ‘long fine summer’. On the same day Mary Anne Sudworth, a typist who worked at the British Electrical Foundation in Kingsway in London, poisoned herself. Her mother said the abnormal heat had caused her daughter’s death, and a verdict of ‘temporary insanity’was brought in. It was a week during which the novelist Thomas Hardy celebrated his 71st birthday, the King’s daughter Princess Mary visited the sweltering sea lions at London Zoo, and Churchill attended a ball at Blenheim. Diana, with too many parties both behind her and ahead of her, needed a rest. She removed her aching feet from the London cobblestones and the ‘iridescent season of music, dance, pageantry and fluttering flirtations’, and left for ‘the calmer joys of the country’.

  Belvoir (pronounced ‘Beaver’) Castle was the Rutland family’s principal country seat, set in thirty thousand acres of Rutland-family- owned Leicestershire. There, with the encouragement of forty gardeners, the Clematis ‘Montana’was still in full flower in the middle of June. During the day larks filled the air with the same sound of ‘shrill delight’that had been so familiar to the poet Shelley, while at night ‘from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound’. Visitors, privileged, rich and connected, arrived to spend their ends-of-weeks, their Saturday-to-Mondays in the early-nineteenth-century castellated and turreted house, in drawing rooms hung with paintings by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Holbein. Extra night-watchmen were employed to circle the castle walls in case any intruder should seek to make off with the tiaras and precious jewels that had arrived in their own velvet-lined trunks earlier in the day.

  There was a familiar rhythm to these end-of-the-week days, for they were largely punctuated by meals. Guests were woken by their maids and manservants bringing cups of tea accompanied by biscuits for the gentlemen and plates of wafer-thin bread and butter for the ladies. Soon afterwards the housemaids, helped by the footmen, would either struggle up the stairs carrying tin baths which to Osbert Sitwell resembled ‘Egyptian coffins, and hip baths like gigantic snail shells’, or heave the baths out of the huge nearby cupboards in which they were stored. Heavy, slopping cans of hot water had to be lugged up from the kitchens: at Belvoir, special ‘watermen’were employed for this sole purpose. In the most avant-gard houses there were bathrooms where a man might find ‘the scented smell of his predecessor’s indulgence’. The writer Harold Nicolson winced at the sight of a signet ring, left floating in the grimy soap dish. However, Nicolson was quite unashamed to admit that he too, like all smart male guests when compelled to share a bathroom, would shave in his bath. ‘All Edwardians,’ he later confessed, ‘being at heart dirty folk, shaved in their baths.’

  Lavatories or water-closets had been familiar fixtures in rich people’s houses since the 1880s, long enough to have acquired an upper-class euphemism. Lady Louisa Anson, an intimidating guest at Viceregal Lodge in Ireland, was so rude to the Viceroy’s children that in revenge they stole the name card from her bedroom door and slid it into the holder on the door of the water-closet: Lady Louisa was not amused to find her maid persistently mis-delivering her early morning tea. The story spread, and from then on people needing a discreet reason to excuse themselves would announce that they were off to visit ‘Lady Loo’ or as it became known, simply ‘The Loo’.

  Not every house met the luxurious standards that were coming to be expected. At Stanway in Gloucestershire, home of Lord and LadyWemyss, Diana noted with amusement the ‘lukewarmwater, blankets that are no prison to ones wayward toes, and every horizontal objectwear[ing] a coat of dust like a chinchilla. It’s awonder the inmates look as clean as they do.’Even at Chatsworth the only fixed bath was in the sculpture gallery, convenient only for the already gleaming marble Greek goddesses who overlooked it.

  Breakfast included several cooked dishes both hot and cold: porridge, whiting, devilled kidneys, cold grouse, tongue, ham, omelette, kedgeree, and cold sliced ptarmigan, a sort of large mountain grouse. That summer an electrical gadget for grilling waffles and a new breakfast food, called Post Toasties, made from crisped flakes of corn, had arrived from America to take their place on the already laden sideboard, next to the scones, honey, and bowls of golden butter. At Belvoir the butter was fashioned by Miss Saddlebridge the dairymaid (whose face, Diana lamented, was not her fortune) into round yellow pats bearing the imprint of the Rutland peacock. Hot-house nectarines, grapes and summer fruits ended the meal. To drink there was coffee and a choice of tea, the Indian variety identified by a little Empire red flag, its string wrapped around the handle of the pot, China tea came with its own fluttering yellow indicator.

  After church (the Belvoir service was always conducted by the resident chaplain, who was also the captain of the Belvoir fire-brigade) the ladies went to their bedrooms to change from the formal dress suitable for church into day dresses, reappearing in time for lunch. In the dining room the tables were decorated with heavy glass vases filled with red roses, and white geraniums spilled over the edges of silver bowls. Sometimes home-made wines were served at lunch, and the Countess of Fingall was once quite overcome by home-brewed cider. Her legs would no longer support her, and, sober enough to be mortified, she had to be carried from the table by two footmen and settled down in a corner of the drawing room to recover.

  Not everyone aspired to the munificence of Belvoir. Mrs Arthur James, a hostess with a reputation for meanness in a world where such a thing was gasped at, usually served fish, but when she felt like pushing the boat out, chicken appeared on the menu. Nevertheless Mrs James kept a vigilant eye on her guests, and if they seemed satisfied with small helpings, would pass a coded note to her butler – ‘DCSC’, meaning ‘Don’t Carve Second Chicken’.

  After lunch therewas the garden to tour, and lawn tennis to play, in dresses so long that sprained ankles caused from tripping were not unusual. An expedition in the Daimler to a local site of interest and for antique-shopping in the nearest town would persuade the women to wrap up their faces in a claustrophobic veil to prevent too much dust flying into their already goggle-covered eyes. Other parts of the body were ill-protected from the all-pervading dust, until the mackintosh makers Burberry devised a discreet ‘Dust Wrapper’, to be worn over underwear to insulate ladies from the invasive dirt of the rough country roads. Outer garments were covered in rather ineffectual protective rugs.

  On returning to the cool of the house the ladies consulted Mrs Eric Pritchard’s excellent guide to fashions The Cult of Chiffon and retired to their bedrooms to change into floaty tea-gowns – because, as Mrs Pritchard advised, ‘when the tea urn sings at five o’clock we can don these garments of poetical beauty.’ After tea – ginger biscuits especially brought in from Biarritz (they had been Edward VII’s favourite), scones, egg sandwiches and three sorts of cake (including chocolate) – a rubber of bridge, with a plate of nourishing ‘bridge-rolls’ on the side-table, relieved the tedium before it was time for the ladies to change again, this time into something described by Diana as ‘a little less limp’.

  A good hourwas required for the evening toilette, since the fashionable brilliant white skin was achieved with the help of liquid creams and white rice powder, while to indicate sensitivity the naturally bluish-violet veins at neck, temple and cleavage were emphasised with a blue crayon. Elderflower berries or a cork singed in the flame of a candle darkened eyebrows and eyelashes. On 14 June the Daily Sketch printed a series of photographs from an American magazine under the heading ‘Decoys for the Affections: Beauty’s Artful Aids’. Here were devices to enhance the appearance. A double chin could be suppressed using a tightly-wrapped leather chin brace that resembled a dislodgedmuzzle or a miniature feeding trough that had slipped too far below the mouth. Other photographs showed how to enliven the cheeks with what looked like a small tarmacadam-road pounder. English ladies were also let into the secrets of a contraption for eradicating the lines on the forehead caused by bad temper, and an alarming nasal clamp said to ‘pinch the offending member into an Aphrodite contour’.

  The English country-house beauty routine was less complicated. Wavy locks were created nightly with curling tongs,

  straight hair being thought to indicate obstinacy. False braids or chignons known as ‘rats’ were often added, though they only stayed in place properly on rather grubby, sticky hair. Small silver rings clamped into the nipples deepened, enhanced and raised the cleavage by providing a sort of ledge on which the evening gown rested precariously. Fresh flowers – a carnation or gardenia for a man, a spray of stephanotis for a woman, provided by the Belvoir greenhouses and brought round on a silver tray by a servant – gave the finishing touch. And so the finest of Edwardian society made their way downstairs for dinner, the men smelling strongly of Mr Penhaligon’s Hamman Bouquet, undercut by inescapable body odour and cigar smoke, the ladies wafting down in a cloud of lavender and rose-water that helped disguise the whiff of dirty hair, while the rubbing of the unseen rings against the dress afforded a secret frisson of pleasure.

  The dining table would be decorated with orchids and cyclamen, and after an eight-course dinner at a grand house like Belvoir, eaten off Charles II silver and Charles II gold, the ladies would leave the gentleman for a period that if extended too long could lead to a row between enthusiastic port-dispensing host and weary conversation-sustaining hostess. Later there might be more bridge in the study, or an amusing session of charades in the gardenia and stephanotis-scented drawing room. A large dish of crystallised violets often sat on the piano in case an impromptu player or his accompanying singer should suddenly feel peckish.

  At the very, very grandest of houses a more elaborate entertainment was laid on – at Renishaw in Derbyshire, home of the Sitwells, a full orchestra for dancing was imported from London. At Chatsworth, not far away, the guests themselves might put on a play in the private Bijou Theatre. Crossing through the long Hall of Statues, the audience would enter the theatre by the small staircase at the back. A total of 200 could be seated downstairs, a further 50 could be squeezed in on the balcony above. Local worthies would be invited in for the evening, and the first thing they saw was the safety curtain painted by the master set designer and painter of the day, William Hemsley, with a sweeping panorama of the original Elizabethan house that had belonged to Bess of Hardwick. The footlights were provided by dangerously flickering candles, and an elaborately coiled wire was stretched across at the front to prevent the flames catching the lady actors’ gowns as they moved about at the edge of the stage.

  When the exhausted house guests finally dispersed to their own or other people’s bedrooms they would find fires lit by sleepy housemaids, the gentlemen’s loose change washed and dried by the valet and put on the table next to a vase of sweet peas. The latest novels and biographies, their pages still uncut, were stacked beside the bed, and a plate of sandwiches left on the dresser lest hunger strike in the night.

  Saturdays-to-Mondays were a heaven-sent opportunity for sex. Although a contemporary academic claimed that ‘nine out of ten women are indifferent to or actively dislike it’, the evidence pointed the other way, and most agreed with the writer Arnold Bennett who advised that ‘the most correct honeymoon is an orgy of lust and if it isn’t it ought to be’. Lady Diana Manners’s mother the Duchess of Rutland was generally known within her own circle to have ignored her marriage vows. Nearly nineteen years earlier she had enjoyed an affair with Harry Cust, the extremely handsome and clever editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Diana, though brought up as the Duke of Rutland’s daughter,was in fact the result of her mother’s teatime liaison with the charming Harry Cust.

  In a world of marriages of convenience, one in which divorce was both expensive and ruinous to the reputation, an illicit couple was challenged to find somewhere private to take their clothes off. A few restaurants, among them Rules and the Café Royal, rented out private dining rooms by the hour, but a large country house and a complicit hostess eased the problem beautifully. During the day, a clandestine affair could develop unobserved while family portraits were being admired in the picture gallery, or in a dark corner of the library, or out walking in magnificent gardens in which enclosed gazebos scattered the landscape with convenient regularity. At night, the names written on cards slotted into brass holders on the bedroom doors were as helpful to lovers as to the maids bringing early morning tea. Assignations confirmed by the squeeze of a hand beneath the bridge table, a whispered exchange over the candle that lit the way up the stairs, a note left (in collusion with the maid) beside the bottled water on the bedside table, or the placing of a code-laden flower outside a bedroom door ensured that extra-marital sex went on with ease. Confusions occasionally occurred. Lord Charles Beresford became particularly vigilant after leaping with an exultant ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’, onto a darkened bed, believing it to contain his lover, only to be vigorously batted away by themuch startled Bishop of Chester. At six in the morning a hand-bell rung on each of the bedroom floors gave guests time to return to their own beds before the early morning tea trays arrived.

  The general tedium and vacuity of the usual country-house Saturday-to-Monday held no appeal for Diana. Her childhood had prepared her for eccentricity and bred in her a horror of bores, and she later acknowledged gratefully that ‘everything Society criticised me for I now realise my mother encouraged’. Many of the guests at Belvoir were among the group of the Duchess of Rutland’s friends known to all but themselves as ‘The Souls’: they referred to themselves as ‘The Gang’. These were clever people who had rebelled against the bored indolence that characterised the usual country house set. Instead of spending these weekends drinking and eating to excess, the Souls used their brains, indulging in wit and revelling in conversation.Words were fundamental to the Souls’ enjoyment of life, and at Taplow Lady Desborough ensured that an hour and a half was set aside for the reading of The Times. They developed a private language – ‘diskie’ was disgusting, ‘deevie’ was divine, and ‘utterly utterly’ was used to describe a subject deserving of the most extravagant compliment, or simply the most emphatic feeling known to mankind, whether good or bad; further private language involved leaving the ‘G’off the ends of words – borrowing money from friends was ‘lootin’; and unlikely words were substituted for others, so that ‘spangle’ meant ‘flirt’, and ‘backstairs’ meant ‘homosexual’. An Italian ending was often added to nouns, so that ‘after dinnare’one might have a little ‘dansare’ with one’s chosen ‘partnerino’. They loved games which included acting, or ingenious plays on words. A favourite was ‘In the manner of . . .’, which might involve the writing as well as the reading of an essay ‘In the manner of Ruskin’.

  The Souls also played outdoor games and took up physical activities, as a relief from that constant cerebral intensity. The Crabbet was a club formed among The Souls with the purpose of playing ‘lawn tennis, the piano, the fool and other instruments of gaiety’, exemplified by Harry Cust joining Lord Curzon in a nude tennis doubles match against George Wyndham and Wilfrid Blunt. Days were spent at Lady Rutland’s sister-in-law Norah Lindsay’s beautiful house, Sutton Courtenay, drifting about on the Thames in boats crammed with poetry books while Norah, pearls and emeralds roped round her neck and dressed ‘mainly in tinsel and leopard skins’, watched with delight from the river bank. They would have lunch ‘under a loggia from great bowls of chicken in rice and kedgeree and mushrooms and raspberries and Devonshire cream and gooseberry fool and figs – all in abundance.’ Other favourite Souls meeting places included any one of the several marvellous houses in the Home Counties owned by the Rothschild family, among them Waddesdon, Mentmore, Halton and Tring. Walter Rothschild would send round a carriage drawn by two zebras to collect his guests to view his extensive menagerie, which included a collection of kangaroos, cassowaries, giant tortoises, a wolf, and several bad-tempered glis-glis, a variety of succulent edible dormice.

  Two love affairs involving the older generation were the subject of much Souls talk that June. Lord Curzon, a leading Soul whose house at Hackwood in Hampshire was one of Diana’s favourite places to stay, was not being kind to the writer Elinor Glyn. He was to her ‘the sun, moon and stars’, but the former Viceroy was not prepared to introduce the best-selling romantic author to the inner circle of his clever friends. Poor Elinor considered her lover to have been ‘the noblest ruler since Augustus Caesar’, but she was always invited down to Hackwood on a Tuesday and asked to return on a Thursday. The slight that hurt her most was her discovery that although on leaving she would carefully sign her name in the visitors’ book, by the Friday it would have been scratched out. But at least her husband had not discovered her liaison. Lady Cunard, on the other hand, having tired of her hunting, shooting, fishing, shipping line-managing baronet husband, Sir Bache Cunard, then made the mistake of getting caught, despite the six o’clock morning bell. One morning at her husband’s Leicestershire house, Neville Holt, near Belvoir, her bedroom curtains had fluttered open just wide enough to allow a workman, high on his ladder repairing the clock tower, to peer in and spot her ladyship tucked up in bed with the distinguished conductor Thomas Beecham. The ensuing scandal threatened to overwhelm her reputation, and that June Emerald Cunard packed her bags for a single life in London, renting the Asquiths’ house in Cavendish Square, conveniently unoccupied while its owners were resident at Number 10 Downing Street.