The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

‘You looked such a darling and behaved so beautifully,’ Britannia wrote to Jessie. ‘I can dream and think of nothing else.’ She attempted to allay any fears her daughter might have had by heaping praise upon her new husband, whom she described as a man of worth and excellence of whom she had heard praises on all sides. ‘He has won a great prize,’ she told Jessie, continuing, ‘I believe firmly he knows its worth and you will be prized and valued as you will deserve. All your great qualities will now have a free scope.’7

Jessie arrived at Sledmere on 15 August 1874, to find the sixteen household servants all gathered together to greet her. At the head of the line-up was the housekeeper, Mary Baines, an elderly spinster aged sixty-six, who had begun her life in service under Tatton’s father. She ruled over two housemaids, three laundry maids and two stillroom maids, and was responsible for the cleaning of the house, overseeing the linen, laying and lighting the fires, and the contents of the stillroom. The other senior female servant was Ann Beckley, the cook, who was on equal terms with the housekeeper, and who had under her a scullery maid and a dairymaid. The butler, Arthur Hewland, was in charge of the male servants, consisting of a pantry boy and two footmen. Tatton’s personal valet was Richard Wrigglesworth. The servants were housed in the domestic wing, enlarged and improved by Sir Christopher in 1784, and they welcomed the young mistress to Sledmere.

Her younger sister, Venetia, bombarded Jessie with questions about Sledmere. ‘Is the Park large?’ she asked. ‘Have you a farm? What is the garden like, is there any produce? Have you any neighbours? What sort of Church have you. Where is it and who is the Clergyman high or low? What sort of bedrooms?’8 In fact the Sledmere at which Jessie had arrived was badly in need of a facelift. Virtually nothing had been done to the house since it was built, and as four of Tatton’s sisters had left home to be married, the last in 1863, he had lived there with only his spinster sister, Mary, to look after the place. She had had little opportunity to decorate and imbue the house with a woman’s touch, since Tatton was extremely careful with his money and was abroad for six months of the year On arriving at Sledmere, Jessie made up her mind to change all this, but her determination to renovate the house met a major stumbling block in that trying to get money out of Tatton to carry out her schemes was like trying to get blood out of a stone. ‘It has been practically impossible,’ she was on one occasion to write in a letter to her lawyer, ‘to persuade Sir Tatton to pay any comparatively small sums of money, nor to induce him to contribute to the keeping of our … establishment in town and country.’9

After years of living with the introverted Sir Tatton, Jessie’s extravagant and outgoing nature came to most of the household as a breath of fresh air, and she worked hard to breathe life into the house. In Algernon Casterton, one of three semi-autobiographical novels she was to write later in her life, Jessie described her methods of decoration through the eyes of Lady Florence Hazleton, recently wed and attempting to instil some life into her new home, Hazleton Hall. ‘She had made it a very charming place – it was in every sense of the word an English home. She found beautiful old furniture in the garrets and basements, to which it had been relegated in those early Victorian days when eighteenth century taste was considered hideous and archaic. She hung the Indian draperies she had collected over screens and couches; she spread her Persian rugs over the old oak boards. The old pictures were cleaned and renovated, and among the Chippendale and Sheraton tables and chairs many a luxurious modern couch and arm-chair made the rooms as comfortable as they were picturesque.’10 This could well have been a description of the Library at Sledmere, which was the first room on which Jessie made her mark. She plundered the house for furniture and artefacts of every kind, and soon the vast empty space in which her father-in-law had taken his daily exercise was filled to overflowing with chairs, tables, day-beds, china, pictures, screens, oriental rugs, bric-a-brac from Tatton’s travels and masses and masses of potted palms.

For the first two years of her marriage, Jessie threw herself into the role of being the mistress of a great house. She organized the servants, she breathed life into the rooms, she attended church and took up her deceased mother-in-law’s interest in good works and education, she read, wrote and hunted. She also tried hard to be a good wife, accompanying Tatton on his travels abroad, and to the many race meetings he attended when he was back home. But it was an uphill struggle. Twenty years later she was to say that she had never been to a party or out to dine with him since their marriage. She could never have guessed, when she took the fatal decision to bow to her mother’s wishes, the life that was in store for her with Tatton. Their characters were simply poles apart. While she had a longing for gaiety and company, he wished wherever possible to avoid the society of others.

Like his father, he seldom varied his routine. Each day he rose at six, and after taking a long walk in the park he would eat a large breakfast, before attending church. He spent the mornings dealing with business in the estate office, before returning to the house at noon for a plain lunch, which always featured a milk pudding. After lunch he would snooze, then return to the office for further business. He took a light supper and was in bed by eight. He did not smoke and the only alcohol that passed his lips was a wine glass of whisky diluted with a pint of Apollinaris water, which he drank every day after lunch. This was hardly a life that was going to keep a young wife happy for long, and her frustration and boredom were reflected in a pencil sketch she secretly made on the fly-leaf of a manuscript book. It depicts an old man lying stretched out asleep in a chair, snores coming out of his nose. Above him are written the poignant words ‘My evenings October 1876 – Quel rêve pour une jeune femme. J.S.’11

What changed life for Jessie was the eventual arrival of a child, though many years later she was to confide to her daughter-in-law that it had taken her husband six months to consummate the marriage, only with the utmost clumsiness, and when drunk. In spite of the rarity of their unions, however, she managed to get pregnant, and in August 1878 announced that she was expecting a child. The news was the cause of great rejoicing in Sledmere, all the more so when the child was born, on 6 March 1879, revealing itself to be the longed-for heir, a fact that must have delighted his father, who knew that his duty was now done. Though born in London, where his birth was registered in the district of St George’s Hanover Square, within a month he was brought up to Sledmere to be christened by the local vicar, the Rev. Newton Mant.

The ceremony, a full choral christening, took place in St Mary’s, the simple Georgian village church, its box pews filled to capacity with tenant farmers and workers and their families, all come to welcome the next-in-line, and each one of whom was presented with a special book printed to mark the occasion. The infant was traditionally named Tatton and Mark after his forefathers, while Jessie’s contribution was the insertion of Benvenuto as his middle name, an affirmation of her great joy at his arrival as well as a nod towards her love of Italy. When the ceremony was over, the doors of the big house were thrown open to one and all to partake of a christening banquet in the library, where tables laden with food were laid out end to end. Jessie was presented with the gift of a pearl necklace, and Mark, as he was always to be known, was cooed over and passed round by the village women.

Needless to say, Jessie’s mother was thrilled by the arrival of her grandson, as were Jessie’s friends and admirers. In one quarter only was there a singular lack of rejoicing at the birth of a new heir. Christopher Sykes, Tatton’s younger brother, was a sensitive, intelligent and charming bachelor of fifty-one who was MP for the East Riding, and a leading member of the Marlborough House set that revolved round Edward, Prince of Wales. He had been relying on his older brother to bail him out of his financial difficulties, which were the result of the constant and lavish entertaining of his Royal friend, both at his house in London, 1 Seamore Place, and at Brantingham Thorpe, his country home near Hull. The notion that his Tatton would ever marry, let alone sire a son, had never entered his mind, and when he managed both, the first came as a surprise, the second as a shock. ‘C.S.,’ wrote Sir George Wombwell, a Yorkshire neighbour, ‘don’t like it at all.’12

Though producing a son and heir had strengthened Jessie’s position immeasurably, she was as restless as ever and the next couple of years saw her indulging in a number of liaisons which set tongues wagging, beginning in 1880 with the dashing Captain George ‘Bay’ Middleton, one of England’s finest riders to hounds. When this flirtation ended, at the end of 1881, she took up with a German Baron called Heugelmüller, a serial womanizer who eventually ran off with her cousin Blanche, Lady Waterford. ‘Oh Blanche, how you have spoilt my life,’ she wrote miserably in her diary in August 1883. ‘He is selfish poor ugly and a foreigner, and yet I like him better than anyone or anything.’13 Her unhappiness was compounded by the fact that in the summer of 1881 she also suffered a miscarriage. ‘That walk on Saturday, the consequence of so much quarrelling,’ wrote Captain Middleton in August 1881, ‘must have been too much for you, and am very sorry your second born should have come to such an untimely end. Altho’ the little beggar was very highly tried … Goodbye and hoping this will find you strong, but don’t play the fool too soon.’14

Jessie’s state of mind was noticed by a new acquaintance she had made, George Gilbert Scott Junior, a young Catholic architect who was working on the restoration of a local Yorkshire church at Driffield. Intrigued by the Sykeses’ strange marriage, and having strong links to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, he saw them as perfect subjects for conversion. ‘The Baronet is a serious, taciturn, melancholy man, who has no hobby or occupation but church-building,’ he wrote to Father Neville, secretary to Cardinal Newman at Birmingham Oratory. ‘It is his craze and he grudges no money upon it and yet he is not happy. With everything to make life sweet, abundant wealth, fair health, a keen enjoyment of open-air exercise, a splendid house, a noble library, a clever luxuriously beautiful wife, and a promising healthy young son, he is one of the most miserable of men, neglects his wife, his relations, his fellow-creatures generally, lavish in church-building, he is parsimonious to a degree in everything else, leaves his wife, whose vivacity and healthy sensuous temperament throw every possible temptation in the way of such a woman, moving in the highest society, exposed within his protection to the dangers of a disastrous faux pas and all this for want of direction … I want to interest yourself, and through you the Cardinal, in these two. The securance to the Catholic Church in England of a great name, a great estate, a great fortune, is in itself worth an effort … But to save from a miserable decadence two such characters (as I am convinced nothing but the Catholic Faith can do) is a still higher motive and venture respectfully to ask your prayers for their conversion …’15

It was in fact a road down which Jessie had been considering going. ‘You have not forgotten that many years ago I told you that I was in heart a Catholic,’ she wrote in a letter to an old friend and Yorkshire neighbour, Angela, Lady Herries, ‘only I had not the moral courage to change my religion.’ After ‘many struggles and many misgivings’, she told her, she was at last ready to embrace the faith, adding, ‘and I shall have the happiness of bringing my little child with me’.16 It was a brave move considering that the Sykeses had been Anglicans since time immemorial, the six churches so recently built by her husband being monuments to their faith. She would have liked to persuade Tatton to join her, but he was reluctant to take the step for fear of offending the Protestant and Methodist villagers of Sledmere, even if he gave her the impression that he would consider doing so. ‘Sir Tatton, who as you know is of a nervous and retiring temperament and who dreads extremely publicity, has decided to wait to make his final profession when he intends he will be at Rome in the end of February.’17

Angela Herries, sister-in-law to the Duke of Norfolk, the head of England’s leading Catholic family, was delighted to hear the news of the conversion. It was through her family connections that Jessie had been given an introduction to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning, and she was pleased that he had not wasted the opportunity of adding another wayward soul to his flock. He had indeed taken a very personal interest in Jessie, who bared her soul to him in her letters. ‘Since I returned from London,’ she wrote to him in November 1882, ‘I have thought much and sadly of all the wasted opportunities and the useless and worthless life I have led up to the present time, thinking of nothing but my own amusement, and living without any religion at all for so many years. I sometimes fear that the voice of conscience and power of repentance has died away from me and that I shall never be able to lead a good or Christian life. I feel too how terribly imperfect up till now my attempts at a Confession have been, and how many and grave sins I have from shame omitted to mention …’18

With Lady Herries and Lord Norreys acting as her godparents, and Lady Gwendolyn Talbot and the Duke of Norfolk as Mark’s, Jessie and her son were received into the Catholic Church at the end of November. The conversion caused some upset in Sledmere, as Tatton had predicted it would, and in an attempt to soften the blow Cardinal Manning wrote a ‘long and eloquent’ exposition on the subject for the vicar of Sledmere, the Rev. Mr Pattenhorne. Nevertheless, Jessie was riddled with guilt at the unhappiness she had caused to him and his congregation. Her inner struggles continued, and she was devastatingly self-critical in her letters to Manning. ‘I … fear steady everyday useful commonplace goodness is beyond my reach,’ she told him. ‘Honestly I am sorry for this – I have alas! no deep enthusiasm, no burning longings for perfection, no terrible fears of Hell – I am wanting in all the moral qualities and sensations which I have been led to believe were the first tokens and messages of God the Holy Spirit working in the Human heart.’19

In taking Mark with her into the Catholic Church, Jessie well and truly staked her claim on him, and there is no doubt that she was the overwhelming influence upon him as he grew up. To her, children were simply small adults who should quickly learn how to stand on their own two feet. As soon as Mark had started to master the most basic principles of language, she began to share with him her great love of literature and the theatre. As well as the children’s books of the day – the fairy tales of Grimm, Hans Andersen and George Macdonald, the stories of Charles Kingsley and Lewis Carroll, the tales of adventure of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Robert Louis Stevenson – she read him her own favourites, Swift, Dickens and Shakespeare, much of which she could quote from memory. She encouraged him to dress up and act out plays, and she was delighted when he began to develop a talent for mimicry and caricature.

By regaling him with tales of her travels across the world, and of all the people she had met and the strange sights she had seen, Jessie also gave Mark a sense of place and of history. She described to him the architectural wonders of medieval Christendom, and told him of the important ideas and ideals which grew out of the Renaissance. Fascinated by politics since childhood, she brought to life for him all the great statesmen and prominent figures of the past, heaping scorn on modern politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, none of whom had any romance. She also passed on to him her hatred of humbug. The result of all this was that by the age of seven he was thoroughly precocious.

With Tatton away so much of the year on his travels, if anyone was a father to Mark, it was old Tom Grayson, the retired stud groom, who had been at Sledmere since the days of his grandfather. A tall, white-haired old man in his eighties, with a strong weather-beaten face and a kindly smile, he was an inseparable companion to his young master, a friendship that brought great happiness to his declining years.

He taught him to ride – ‘this is t’thod generation Ah’ve taught ti’ride,’ he loved to boast, – and helped him look after his pride and joy, an ever-growing pack of fox terriers. He also contributed greatly to his education, sharing with him his great knowledge of nature and the countryside, and inspiring his imagination with tales of local folklore and legend, which gave him a strong sense of locality and of his origins.

Grayson was like a rock to his charge. As a highly intelligent and sensitive child Mark could hardly have failed to be affected by the worsening relations between his parents, and when things got bad he always knew he could escape to the kennels or the stables. By the mid-1880s, Tatton was getting increasingly parsimonious and difficult, while Jessie had taken a lover, a young German Jew of her own age, Lucien de Hirsch, whom she had met some time in 1884, and with whom she had discovered a mutual fascination with the civilization of the Ancient Greeks. In a sizeable correspondence, she shared with him details of the tribulations she was forced to suffer at the hands of ‘the Alte Herr’, the old man, which was the nickname they gave Tatton: ‘that vile old Alte,’ she wrote in the summer of 1885, ‘has been simply too devilish – last night when I got back from hunting – very tired and very cold – he saluted me with the news that he had spent the afternoon going to the Bank and playing me some tricks, and after dinner, when I remonstrated with him and told him this kind of thing could not continue. He pulled my hair and kicked me, and told me if I had not such an ugly face, I might get someone to pay my bills instead of himself … I was afraid to hit him back because I am so much stronger I might hurt him.’20

The times Jessie dreaded most were the trips abroad with Tatton, taken during the winter months, long journeys of three months or more which separated her from her son as well as her lover. ‘Je suis excessivement malheureuse,’ she wrote to Lucien from Paris on 4 November, en route to India, ‘de quitter mon enfant – qui est vraiment le seul être au monde excepté toi que je desire ardemment revoir.’21 On these trips Tatton would become obsessed about his health, exhibiting a hypochondria that often bordered on the edge of insanity. ‘We mounted on board our Wagon Lits’, she wrote, ‘and passed a singularly unpleasant night. He had a cabin all to himself, and my maid and I shared the next one. I took as I always do the top bed and was just going to sleep when the Alte roused us and everyone on the car with the news his bed was hard and uncomfortable. We made him alright, as we thought, and all went to sleep. In about 2 hours, tremendous knocking and cries of Help! Help! proceeded from Sir T’s cabin. It then appeared he had turned the bolt in his lock and could not get out. Such a performance – shrieks and cries – it was nearly an hour before we got his door open and then he was in a pitiable state.’22

His extraordinary habits also drove Jessie to distraction. He had for example a mania about food. He would not eat at regular hours, forcing her to eat alone, while his own mealtimes were often erratic. Every two hours or so he would devour large quantities of half-raw mutton chops, accompanied by cold rice pudding, all prepared by his own personal cook and eaten in the privacy of his bedchamber. ‘He has also adopted an unpleasing habit,’ wrote Jessie, ‘of chewing the half-raw mutton, but not swallowing it, a process the witnessing of which is more curious than pleasant.’23 He took no exercise, and when not driving about in his carriage lay on his bed ‘in a sort of coma’.24 At night he would often call Jessie to his room as much as eight times, leaving her frazzled from lack of sleep.

Of all his obsessive whims, however, the most worrying was his fixation that he was going to die. ‘The Alte is a sad trial,’ she wrote to Lucien on 20 December, from Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta. ‘About 2 this morning Gotherd and I were woken by loud shrieks and the words “I am dying, dying, dying (crescendo)”. We both jumped up thinking at least he had broken a blood vessel – We found absolutely nothing was the matter … We were nearly two hours trying to pacify him. He clutched us … and went on soliloquising to this effect, “Oh dear! I am dying, I shall never see Sledmere again, oh you wicked woman. Why don’t you cry? Some wives would be in hysterics – to see your poor husband dropping to pieces before your eyes – oh God have pity. Oh Jessie my bowels are gone, Oh Gotherd my stomach is quite decayed, my knees have given way, Oh Jessie Jessie – Oh Lord have mercy.”25 ‘This is not a bit exaggerated,’ she added, ‘quite the contrary’, concluding, ‘My darling, I think of you every day, I dream of you every night …’26

In January 1887, Jessie was at Sledmere and beside herself with fury because of the latest of Tatton’s outrages. She loved to sit in the Library, which she had filled with palms and various potted plants. ‘I am very fond of them,’ she wrote to Lucien, ‘and when quite or so much alone there is a certain companionship in seeing them.’ The room being so large, however, and having eleven windows, it was only made habitable by having two fires lit in it. Having gone away for a few days, she had instructed the servants to keep a small fire burning in one of the grates until she returned. ‘After my departure,’ she wrote, ‘the Alte in one of his economical fits ordered no fires to be made till my return. The frost was terribly severe – the gardener knew nothing of the retrenchment of fuel and when he came three days later to look round the plants he found them all dead or dying from the cold.’27 Morale throughout the household appears to have been at a very low ebb. ‘The confusion here is dreadful, everyone is so cross, all the servants quite demoralized. Broadway leaves Monday – I am very sorry for him – The coachman cries all day – I can do nothing! Gotherd is in a fiendish temper – and the Alte is in his most worrying state.’28

However snobbish and scheming Jessie’s mother may have been, she had a soft spot for her grandson, and was increasingly worried about the effect that both the general atmosphere at Sledmere, and his parents’ frequent absences abroad might be having on him. They were often away for months at a time, and she saw how he was left in a household with eleven female servants, and only three males, around whom he apparently ran rings: ‘if he remains for much longer surrounded by a pack of admiring servants,’ continued his grandmother, ‘and with no refined well-educated person to look after him … and check him if he is not civil in his manners, he will become completely unbearable … When he goes to Sledmere he is made the Toy and idol of the place and each servant indulges him as they please.’29 His burgeoning ego needed stemming, and she felt strongly that the way to achieve this was to engage a tutor for him. She made her feelings known to Jessie. ‘He is a charming child and most intelligent and precocious, which under the circumstances makes one tremble, for there is no doubt that he is now quite beyond the control of women.’30 For a start, engaging a tutor for Mark would give him a male companion other than the elderly Grayson, to ease the loneliness of his life at Sledmere. Jessica herself admitted this in a letter to Lucien, on the eve of another trip abroad, this time to Jerusalem. ‘The house is to be quite shut up, all the servants that are left to be on board-wages, the horse turned out, and poor little Mark left by himself … and not a soul in whom I have any confidence in the neighbourhood to look after him.’31 She set out on her travels having even forgotten to buy him a birthday present, writing to Lucien in February, from Jerusalem, ‘March 16th is Mark’s birthday – it would be very kind of you if you would send him a little toy from Paris for it – as I fear the poor child will get no presents, and he would be so delighted.’32