high spacious site above a bend of the Thames, with a magnificent terrace commanding a prospect downstream towards Maidenhead, rather than a short view of the opposite bank.
Immediately he was mired in ill-will. He quarrelled with Cliveden’s previous owner, the Duke of Westminster, over so paltry an object as the visitors’ book. The Duke denounced the Yankee to the Prince of Wales. Astor gave a sturdy defence to the Prince’s Private Secretary, for he was intent on buying his way into the Marlborough House set. In 1895, for example, when he joined the prince’s house party at Sandringham, he made a show of paying £1,000 for a pair of bay carriage horses from the royal stud. In appreciation of Astor’s outlay, the Prince of Wales, with the Duke of Buccleuch in tow, attended a house party at Cliveden.1
Astor’s prickliness ensured his unpopularity. Staying with Lord Burton at Rangemore in 1897, the Marquess of Lincolnshire noted of his fellow guest: ‘Astor is another instance of the utter inability of American men to get on in England. Here is a man with millions – probably the richest man in the country; and yet he is given to understand that, though he is tolerated on account of his wealth, he is of society and yet not in it.’ Astor had represented Ferdinand de Rothschild when Empress Elizabeth of Austria visited London, but her suite ‘refused to call him “Thou”, though he implored them to do so. Astor assumes a … scornful deference to Ladies to whom he is speaking. He evidently resents the way he is treated; but tries not to show it.’ Two years later, Lincolnshire met Astor at Lord Lonsdale’s racing stud in Rutland. ‘He is a social failure. Pompous & proud, with an aggressive air of mock humility … The boy (who is Captain of the Boats at Eton) is at present voted a Prig.’2
Astor bought a London evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, in order to enhance his social influence, and appointed as its editor a Society swell, Harry Cust. Astor’s aunt Caroline, a snob who had imposed the notion of the exclusive ‘Four Hundred’ on New York City, had inaugurated the custom among New York millionaires of publicising their parties and controlling reputations by issuing tit-bits of news about their guests to the social columns. Astor tried to foist this foolery on London. He gave Cust a list of names, headed by the Duke of Westminster, of people who were never to be mentioned in the Pall Mall Gazette, in the mistaken belief that the English nobility cared about being mentioned in newspaper Society paragraphs. At first this was mocked, but in 1900 it brought his social nemesis.
Sir Berkeley Milne, a naval officer in command of the royal yacht (whom the Prince of Wales dubbed Arky-Barky), was taken to a musical evening at Carlton House Terrace by an invited guest who assured him that he would be welcome there. Astor ordered the interloper from his house and inserted a paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette announcing that ‘Sir A. B. Milne RN was not invited to Mr Astor’s concert.’ This upset the haute monde more than the Boxer rebellion in China, as Lincolnshire noted at a house party for the Prince of Wales and his mistress Alice Keppel: ‘HRH quite open-mouthed with fury: and vows he will never speak to him again.’ In retaliation for this royal ostracism, Astor called Mrs Keppel ‘a public strumpet’, and told people that King Edward VII (as the Prince became after his mother’s death in 1901) had been impotent for twenty years. He believed that the government wished to nominate him for a peerage in 1902, but that this was forbidden by the King, ‘who hated me’. Thereafter, he said, he never relented in seeking ‘to attain what Edward’s spite had withheld’.3
Cliveden was never a conventional English country house. It was not the centre of a great estate which gave the owner political influence and social prestige in the county. When in 1890 Lord Cadogan, who owned much of Chelsea but no landed estates, spent £175,000 to buy Culford in Suffolk, he acquired a house with 400 acres of parkland and 11,000 acres, and got his eldest son elected as MP for a nearby constituency two years later; and in 1893 the newly created Lord Iveagh, the brewery millionaire, spent £159,000 to buy the 17,000 acre Elveden estate, which made him a power in the district. Although Astor paid a vast sum for Cliveden, he got only 450 acres, comprising woods and riverside pleasure gardens. Cliveden proved a showhouse rather than a powerhouse.
In 1906 Astor gave Cliveden to his elder son, Waldorf, who that year married an American divorcée, Nancy Shaw. The young man, whom Lincolnshire had dismissed as a prig, left Oxford with a social conscience that was rare in an American millionaire. He deplored his father as a selfish reactionary, and wished to make amends by a life of public service. This paragon entered Parliament as MP for Plymouth in 1910, before becoming effectual proprietor of the Observer, a Sunday newspaper which his father bought in 1911. He was diagnosed with a weak heart, which made him medically unfit for trench warfare, and spent the early war years monitoring wasteful army organisation. This was an indelible stain on his reputation so far as some Tories and combatants were concerned. His hopes of appointment as the country’s first postwar Minister of Health were accordingly frustrated, and his advocacy of public health reforms got him called a ‘doctrinaire Socialist’ by reactionaries. Nevertheless, by his late thirties, Waldorf Astor was entrenched among the nation’s great and good. He was a patient chairman of committees, without a dash of flamboyance, whose attitude to his good causes could be described as reticent enthusiasm (rather as his attitude to his children might be called frigidly tender).4
Old man Astor, in the midst of the Kaiser’s war, by judicious distribution of £200,000 to King George V’s favourite war charities and the fighting funds of both the Conservative and Liberal parties, obtained first a barony and then a viscountcy. When he died in 1919, Waldorf Astor went reluctantly to the House of Lords. His wife was elected for the vacant Plymouth constituency, and became the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons.
Nancy Astor, when young, was generous, bold and funny, with quick-witted shrewdness and inexhaustible energy; but after turning fifty her sudden amusing parries turned to rash outbursts, and she became a domineering, obstinate and often hurtful spitfire. Her religion put claws on her. She converted to Christian Science in 1914, coaxed her husband into becoming a disciple of Mrs Baker Eddy, and nagged her children along the same lines. Her first marriage had ended because her husband was a dipsomaniac who became sexually importunate when drunk. She and Waldorf were both prudish teetotallers, and her temperance campaigning became notorious for its scolding tone. Before 1914 she kept two infatuated young men, Billy Grenfell and Eddie Winterton, enthralled as her amis de marie, though she was the sort of flirt who required only to be the centre of admiring attention: Billy and Eddie were never permitted any pounces.5
Nancy Astor had six children: Bobbie Shaw by her first marriage, and four sons and a daughter by her second. The eldest child of her second marriage, William Waldorf Astor (known to his friends as Bill and to his parents as Billie), was born in 1907, and became the last Astor to live at Cliveden. From his mother he received the least affection of all her children, although he strove to win her approval and pretended to believe her Christian Science indoctrination long after he had privately rejected it. She belittled, chastised, and rejected him; and resented the fact that her favourite son, Bobbie, would inherit neither the Astor money nor title. Even in old age she spread discord: as a man in his fifties, Bill would still tense when she bustled into a room; people saw him blanch before her jibes began; and his widow believed that the aortic aneurism that killed him at the age of fifty-eight was partly attributable to the anxiety that his mother had generated. Certainly, her angry obsessions wearied her husband: Waldorf described her in 1951, a year before he died, as ranting against ‘Socialism, Roman Catholicism, Psychiatry, the Jews, the Latins and the Observer’.6
The Astor children suffered from their family’s reputation for ostentatious wealth. Bill was held by his ankles out of a school window to see if gold would fall from his pockets. He was victimised by his classics tutor at Eton, Charles Rowlatt – ‘rather a nasty bounder at the best of times’, he told his mother, ‘so I hope you’ll … have his blood’. Rowlatt was an austere bachelor who commanded the Eton Officer Training Corps and heaped Bill’s next brother David with work and punishments: ‘What annoys me is the way when he loses his temper with me (a daily affair) he always ends up by saying something about all
