The Ship of Dreams. Gareth Russell
of parched twigs,
Skeleton of former splendour …
Elisabeth of Bavaria (1837–98), Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, ‘Neujahrsnacht 1887’
FLOWING IN FROM NORTH AND WEST, WEAVING PAST Roman and Celtic monuments of obscure purpose, two streams joined with the River Leven to ring the ‘magnificently wooded gardens’ of Leslie House, the thirty-seven-bedroom country seat of Norman Leslie, 19th Earl of Rothes.[fn1] Nestling in 10,000 acres of ‘excellent arable land’, in 1911 Leslie House dominated the encircling parish, as it had for centuries. The minister of the local Church of Scotland drew his salary from the Earl’s coffers. So complete was the Leslie family’s influence in this part of eastern Scotland that the parish’s ancient recorded name of Fetkill had faded to become the parish of Leslie.
It had been predominantly a benign local absolutism. When an amateur historian arrived in Leslie in the 1830s, in the hope of unearthing grisly anecdotes from the village archives, he was, in his own words, distressed to find ‘nothing generally interesting in them’, with no perceptible drama having occurred in Leslie over the course of the last 300 years. The 800-seat chapel was built, the flax mills spun, whisky houses and inns were opened, closed and renamed, and local legend had it that King James V had written his poem ‘Christ’s Kirk on the Green’, in celebration of a Caledonian pastoral idyll, after his hunting trip near the village in the 1530s.[1]
As the Edwardian era drew to its close, the then Countess of Rothes, Lucy NoÉlle Martha Leslie, had busied herself with the renovation and preservation of Leslie House. Given the spiralling cost of maintaining a stately home, expansion, in the hope of restoring the house to what it had been in the previous centuries, would have been financially lunatic, although even at that the young Countess had sunk nearly £11,000 of her natal family’s money into the preservation and beautification of her husband’s ancestral home.[2] She had married into the Leslie family on a ‘delightfully bright and genial’ day in 1900, with a service at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, near the London townhouse of her parents where the future countess had been born on Christmas Day twenty-two years earlier.[3] Christ’s Nativity gave Lucy Dyer-Edwardes the first of her two middle names, Noël (the spelling on her birth certificate, but commonly spelled in Society columns and by various relatives as Noëlle); the other was Martha. These names and spellings were used variably throughout her life, although by adulthood she increasingly seemed to prefer her middle name of Noëlle. Her education had been entrusted to governesses and tutors who moved with the family as they oscillated between the Kensington house, their château in Normandy and their favourite home, Prinknash Park, the Dyer-Edwardeses’ country seat in Gloucestershire. Prinknash, pronounced ‘Prinnage’ as one of the thousands of anti-phonetic nomenclatures that form the pleasurable minefield of English place names, was originally a Benedictine monastery founded, with spectacularly poor luck on the Order’s part, only thirteen years before England’s break with Rome. Secularised and sold by the Tudors, Prinknash Park had become a beautiful stately pile in idyllic countryside, where Noëlle’s father, Thomas, was free to pursue his fascination with his home’s long-dead original owners and, bit by bit, their Catholic faith, to the distress of his wife, who regarded the Church of Rome as a foreigner’s creed.[4]
An only child and thus sole heiress to a substantial fortune, Noëlle also had the added benefit of blossoming into what one family member called ‘a true English rose beauty’ by the time she turned eighteen and could be launched into the ballrooms and on to the marriage market of the upper classes as part of the debutante Season. After a formal presentation at Buckingham Palace, which marked their ‘coming out’ into Society, the debutantes were, in the words of an Irish peer’s daughter, paraded ‘to shooting and tennis parties, polo matches, tea with the Viceroy in Dublin’ or, in Noëlle’s case, with the who’s who of the London beau monde.[5] The ultimate goal of this whirlwind of merrymaking was a wedding announcement in The Times, but although Noëlle was a popular ‘deb’, she resisted many of the offers of marriage that came her way until she met Norman Leslie, 19th Earl of Rothes, an infantry officer with a ‘pleasant face and manners’, who proposed to her in 1899.[6]
‘One 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