of the most beautiful young women seen at the Court this season’: the Countess of Rothes, shortly after her marriage.
Countess of Rothes. Unknown photographer (The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)
Married the following spring in ‘a pretty gown of white satin covered with exquisite Brussels lace’ and carrying a bouquet of carnations and white heather, Noëlle honeymooned on the Isle of Wight, before returning to London for her first audience at Court as the new Countess of Rothes.[7] A young, wealthy and good-looking couple, who were clearly very much in love, the Rotheses became a fixture in Society columns. The aristocracy were obsessive points of interest for the British, and certain sections of the American, press – the ‘beautiful people’ of the era, according to a critical study of their long decline.[8] It made the press’s job easier when, like Noëlle, the subject actually was physically beautiful, with even the Washington Post informing its readers, 3,000 miles away, that on her second trip to Buckingham Palace when she curtseyed to the Princess of Wales for the first time as a countess Noëlle was, by general agreement, ‘one of the most beautiful young women seen at the Court this season’.[9]
After their honeymoon, the newlyweds had spent most of their time at the Rotheses’ country house in Devonshire and their mansion in Chelsea, where their first son, Malcolm, was born on 8 February 1902 and the couple attended King Edward VII’s coronation in the capital on 9 August of that year. By the time their second son, John, was born in December 1909, the death of Norman’s great-uncle had freed up Leslie House for their use and Noëlle was enraptured with her husband’s fiefdom. With the piqued pride of a jilted friend who cannot quite believe the world exists beyond the sparkle of London, the Bystander reported that the Countess of Rothes, who had been the toast of the capital at the time of Edward VII’s succession, was now ‘so devoted to her Scottish home, Leslie House, that neither she nor Lord Rothes are often to be seen in London or anywhere else [where] the world of amusement foregathers’.[10] A journalist from the Scotsman observed that within a few years of her residency at Leslie House ‘not a Christmastide passed but the Countess celebrated her birthday, Dec. 25, by treating all the children in the parish to an entertainment in Leslie Town Hall, and presenting each with a Christmas gift’.[11] Convinced of the benefits created by clean air, Noëlle organised trips for young women employed in local factories to visit the beach or the countryside. She funded the creation of Fife’s first ambulance corps, the Countess of Rothes Voluntary Aid Detachment, she paid for the neighbouring parish of Kinglassie’s first clinic, organised parties to raise money for veterans from her husband’s regiment, and two years after John’s birth she began training with the Red Cross as a nurse.
Despite the Bystander’s gripes, London was not quite abandoned by the Rotheses and Noëlle often returned for the Season. She joined the committee that organised the Royal Caledonian Ball, an annual highlight for the capital’s socialites with its insistence on proper Highland attire and music. The funds raised were channelled to the Royal Caledonian Educational Trust’s care for Scottish orphanages.[12] She worked for the YMCA Bazaar and the Children’s Guild; she sat on the foundation boards for the Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital and the Queen Victoria School in Dunblane, which taught the sons of Scottish military personnel, and her passion for preserving a rural way of life in Britain brought her to serve the Village Clubs Association. The young Countess’s charitable activities were a mixture of the more glittering variety of philanthropy and intense hands-on work, and the former solidified many of her relationships with fellow like-minded aristocrats – Evelyn Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, Consuelo Spencer-Churchill (née Vanderbilt), Duchess of Marlborough, Kathleen Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington, and Constance Sackville, the Dowager Countess De La Warr, became close friends. With Millicent Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, Noëlle helped raise a substantial amount of money for the National Milk Hostels’ quest to provide ‘wholesome milk for poor families’, through a series of Society masquerade balls and garden parties, at which tickets were costly and donations firmly encouraged.[13]
One of Noëlle’s philanthropic connections was Louise, Duchess of Fife, who alone of King Edward VII’s daughters had married into the native aristocracy.[14] Through her, Noëlle met, and was sincerely liked by, King Edward’s daughter-in-law Mary, Princess of Wales. Her friendships within the Royal Family added a personal affection to the feudal obligations that brought Norman and Noëlle to most major state occasions, including the funeral of Edward VII, after his death at Buckingham Palace was announced on 6 May 1910. Over the course of the next three days, a quarter of a million people filed past the royal coffin to pay their respects. Despite a reign of only nine years, Edward VII had, in his Foreign Secretary’s observation, grown ‘intensely and increasingly popular’ and grief at his passing was judged stronger than the mourning surrounding Queen Victoria’s death nine years earlier.[15] The first people in the queue to pass King Edward’s bier, ‘guarded by household cavalry, soldiers of the line and men from Indian and Colonial contingents, all in the characteristic pose of mourning, that is with bowed heads with their hands crossed over rifle butts and the hilts of their swords’, had been ‘three women of the seamstress class: very poorly dressed and very reverent’.[16] When the Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was caught leaning against a pillar during the lying in state, courtiers judged ‘his attitude and general demeanour rather offensive’ and concluded that he must have been tipsy to behave so atrociously or, as one of them put it with leaden subtext, ‘I fear he had dined well.’[17]
There were no comparable faux pas at the funeral procession three days later. Many of the mourners had camped out overnight to vouchsafe their place in the crowds, which in places stood 100 yards deep, to watch Edward VII’s body being conducted from Westminster Hall to Windsor. As the catafalque passed Hyde Park, where nearly 300,000 had congregated, cigarettes were stubbed out and a forest of caps rose into the air. After the body, the first being to receive these gestures of deference was Caesar, Edward VII’s white terrier, who with the Queen Mother’s permission trotted by his dead master’s side.[18] Caesar was followed by nine monarchs on horseback, leading perhaps the largest gathering of royalty in history, with one of the emperors joking that this was the first time in his life he had yielded precedence to a canine.[19] Monarchy, the cause in which Edward VII had been such a devout believer, had come to inter ‘the uncle of Europe’. His son and heir, now George V, rode with two of the late King’s brothers-in-law, Denmark’s Frederick VIII and Greece’s George I, with one of his sons-in-law, King Haakon VII of Norway, and with two of his nephews – one by birth, the other by marriage, both heroically moustached – the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. They and their glinting medals were joined by the young Portuguese and Belgian sovereigns, Manuel II and Albert I, both on their respective thrones for less than two years. If Prime Minister Asquith’s slouching had been noted at the lying in state, so too were other things that mattered deeply to the Edwardian upper classes – it was observed by one civil servant that the rotund Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria had the worst seat on a horse of any royal present; the phrase ‘like a sack’ was tossed around with uncharitable accuracy.[20]
Affection rippled through the crowd as the fantastic spectacle of the Golden State Coach trundled into view, carrying four women transformed into black pillars by clouds of mourning lace and veil. Edward VII’s sixty-five-year-old widow, Alexandra of Denmark, one of the most consistently popular members of the British Royal Family since her arrival in 1863, had borne five children and buried two, but she retained the slender beauty of a person twenty or thirty years her junior. The Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law, who watched as Alexandra went by and saw her later at the interment, wrote in her diary that evening, ‘She has the finest carriage and walks better than anyone of our time and not only has she grace, charm and real beauty but all the atmosphere of a fascinating female queen for whom men and women die.’[21] Joined in the coach by her younger sister the Dowager Empress of Russia, her daughter Queen Maud of Norway and her daughter-in-law the new Queen consort, Alexandra was so moved by the sight of the crowds that at Hyde Park she broke with protocol by lifting her veil to bow her head to them, at which point hundreds of people began shouting variations of ‘God bless you!’[22] Most unusually in a country that still
