1899: William Bruce Ellis Ranen, his sisters and their Mother.
1904.
1927.
1937.
1918: 'Pipe Practice.'
1926: 'The garden door.'
1933: 'Hall at Warbrook.'
Ca. 1922: 'Hibicus Flower' and 'An Anglo-Indian Student.' Who was this young man?
Like Sargent, Ranken was unmarried. Like Ranken, his friend and mentor, John Sargent, was proablly also gay. So were a good number of the artist's patron-turned-friends, including composer Cole Porter, writer Violet Keppel Trefusis, Miss Anne Morgan, daughter of the famous financer, decorator Elsie de Wolfe, her lover, the dynamic literary agent Elizabeth Marbury, Henry Davis Sleeper, the collector, actor Ernest Thesiger, who married Ranken's sister Janette at his behest, and most significantly, William Lygon, Earl Beauchamp, and his middle son, the Hon. Hugh Lygon, the model of Sebastian Flyte, the catalyst in Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel.
Ca. 1933: Cole Porter, Esq.
1917: Violet Keppel. Daughter of last mistress of King Edward VII, she became the reckless lover of Vita Sackville-West. Her great-granddaughter is the current Duchess of Cornwall.
Beyond pain and pathos, treachery and backbiting,in lovely or memorable surroundings, the story of the Lygon family's tragedy, relates an ongoing struggle for tolerance. High status and exceptional gifts, far from protecting them, instead render each Lygon more vulnerable for attack. Targeted as outcast, they were cruelly scapegoated by people considered upstanding and good, which is to say, those most inclined to be most intolerant.
Highly honored, vastly rich, the father of seven children, and the husband of Lady Lettice Grosvenor, sister of England's richest subject, William Lygon, the 7th Earl of Beauchamp, the master of Madresfield Court, made for an unlikely outlaw.
Like so many aristocratic English men, he had first discovered his sexual variance at school. So did his second son, Hugh. So had a great friend of Hugh Lygon's, with whom he would have an affair while at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh. The noted writer would eventually abandon homosexuality, marrying twice, but the Earl and his son, whose noble status and cultivation Waugh idolized, never changed.
Famously, in Brideshead Revisited, Waugh utilized his closeness with the Lygons to create an elegy to England, as it was imagined to be before the Second World War. He depicts a dynasty set apart, on account of their Catholicism, one that's shunned, because the patriarch is conducting a shameful affair with some foreign adventuress.
Diverting as it is, Waugh's saga was written at a time when it was impossible to more closely reflect the truth. This didn't prevent the discriminating from reading between the lines, but that 'awful truth' had to wait until now, to be completely revealed. The consummate researcher, Ms. Paula Byrne, in Mad World, Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, offers much material that's new with the masterful flair of a popular star-novelist. Setting the record straight, she has done an incredible job.
As only a few abbreviated excerpts from his wife's divorce petition indicate, Beauchamp's disgraceful downfall was colossal: 'THAT the Respondent is a man of perverted sexual practices, has committed acts of gross indecency with male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy. THAT throughout the married life ...the Respondent habitually committed acts of gross indecency with certain of his male servants, masturbating them with his mouth and hands and compelling them to masturbate him...THAT from the month of May 1909 to the month of April 1912 in the Chauffeurs rooms at 13 Belgrave Mews, West, the Respondent frequently committed sodomy with the said Samuel John Scown...1924...Respondent committed sodomy with a man named Cook... 1927...Respondent committed sodomy with a man whose name is unknown to Your Petitioner...'
Lord Beauchamp died of cancer in 1938 at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotle, at 66. He was succeeded in the earldom by his eldest son, William. Lady Beauchamp, who abandoned her home, forsook her 6 older children and divorced their father once his secret emerged, died in 1936, just 59. She had taken her youngest son with her when she fled. His younger daughter, the Hon. Lady Morrison lives at Madresfield today.
With the collapse of a spectacular façade of deceit, following a brilliant career, Lord Beauchamp's life changed abruptly. At the behest of his King, and on the insistence of his embittered, dissipated brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, he was forced to flee the country he'd only recently help to rule. His alternative was to face arrest and certain imprisonment, for being gay. Beyond the loss of earthly splendor in a luxurious domain all his own, one displaying costly treasures and superb workmanship: a balustrade of glass spirals, surmounted by heraldic beasts, a rainbow-hued chapel, presented to Lord Beauchamp as a wedding gift from his wife, showing the peer and his countess, with all their children, blissfully penitent in an idealized garden, the earl relinquished in exile, much more. Cast out, in circumstances which could hardly be called 'outer darkness', his suffering was all the same, real enough. Lord Beauchamp's children had spurned their mother's selfish betrayal and flight to her bullying brother. Except for their eldest brother, they remained loyal to and protective of their father. But on all sides the break-up of a happy and nurturing home-life took a dire toll.
1924: Ranken portrayed Lord and Lady Beauchamp and their family gathered in the staircase hall at Madresfield.
1927: The Hon. Hugh Lygon, the model of Sebastian Flyte. His father's favorite, he was killed by fallng drunk and fracturing his skull on a curbstone while visiting the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
1928: Lady Mary Lygon, later the Princess Pavlosk. Known by her family and friends as 'Maimie', or 'Blondie', Lady Mary's desent due to her father's scandal, was precipitous.
1939: 'His Highness Prince Vsevolode Ivanovitch of Russia', painted by Ranken and signed and inscribed "To Mary". Tsar Nicholas II's nephew, he was the last imperial prince born in Russia. Derided by Lady Mary's friends when they married, as her 'pauper prince', his work as a wine salesman aided and abetted growing mutual dipsomania and dissipation, proceeding divorce.
1938: Mona, the new and last Countess Beauchamp. A Danish widow, some years older than her second husband, she already had a 19-year old daughter, but was unable to have a son to inherit the now extinct earldom.
How nice, with the death of King George V, the disgraced earl was permitted to return to enjoy once more the beauties of home, that the warrant for his arrest was withdrawn. An avid and professionally instructed embroider, the earl also took up knitting to pass away hours spent sitting in the sunlight of his glorious gardens. How sad that he instructed his former servant and lover, to whom he left a handsome bequest, to destroy his personal papers. His tendency seems to have been to engage gay servants, artisans and, a physician, to make gay friends and associations whenever he could. Someday we may come to know how, in Ranken's case, this came about, learning more and more about the accomplishments of gay greats who dared to challenge the system merely by being themselves.
What an incredible Essay on a courageous and extremely talented man. It is so wonderful to view what was once impossible now with just a click of the mouse. As a lifelong devotee of Waugh, it is simply wonderful to see the illustrations of the Lygon family. Paula Byrne's book stays by my nightstand continually. Thank you!
Nick
Posted by: Nick | 04/03/2013 at 09:45 AM