Lord Beauchamp & Son: The Gay Family Who Inspired Brideshead

While at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh had an affair with classmate Hugh Lygon [second from right], son of the brazenly gay Lord Beauchamp, the Liberal Party's leader in the House of Lords who chose his "exquisite" male servants for their beauty and their sexual acquiescence. Eventually Waugh would use their story as the basis for his great novel, Brideshead Revisited. Hugh was blond, cute, rich, fun, and dumb, so you already recognize him as Sebastian Flyte even before learning that he drank himself to death at a young age. His father, dividing his time between Belgrave Square and the 1540-built Walmer Castle in Kent, expected to sleep with Hugh's male houseguests. If they didn't comply (often forewarned to lock their doors at night), he groused at breakfast, "He’s very nice, that friend of yours, but he’s damned uncivil."

Lord Beauchamp carried on this way all his life, until he finally ran afoul of Lady Beauchamp's brother, the second Duke of Westminster, known as Bendor. One of the richest men in Europe, Bendor was irate that a little thing like two divorces and a third wife would make him shunned at Court, while his brother-in-law enjoyed buggery with 19 year-old boys and much royal favor. (Beauchamp bore the sword at King George V's coronation.) Bendor blew up their feud just as the King's bisexual fourth son George (who slept with Noel Coward among many, many others and had to pay off an extortionist French boy who threatened to expose his letters) was romancing Beauchamp's daughter Mary, known as Maimie [second from left]. The resulting hierarchy of hypocrisies (whose scandals were more scandalous), and their machinations through willing official channels to destroy, defend, and defer their separate fates is what makes Paula Byrne's article in the Times so riveting. It's an excerpt from her book Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead that goes on sale in the UK on August 20 and appears not to have a U.S. publication date.

Byrne is the first person to access court papers in this case that were to have been sealed until 2032. Her insights are smart, and well founded, but not easily highlighted here. This snippet is provided for the sole purpose of promoting "shut the door" as the catchphrase of 2009.

Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and diarist, recalled an astonished fellow guest at Madresfield who asked: “Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the butler, ‘Je t’adore?’ ”

“Nonsense,” Nicolson replied. “He said, ‘Shut the door’.”

But Nicolson, bisexual husband of Vita Sackville-West, knew that the other guest had indeed heard correctly. The Madresfield butler, Bradford, was an exceptionally handsome man. Not all the servants were homosexual, although many were. One day a heterosexual servant, finding the door locked to the drawing room in the family’s London home, peeped through the keyhole to find the earl and his doctor sexually engaged on the sofa.

(An over-the-top, Ascot-style hat tip to Charlene Howell.)

Comments

[Jameson Currier]

This sounds like a great read. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.