As the minute hand of Big Ben ticked in the direction of 4 o’clock on the afternoon of 1 December 1919, Nancy Astor smoothed her black swimsuit, straightened the velvet three-cornered hat that rested on her honest hair, and commenced to stroll alongside the corridors of the Palace of Westminster. The 40-year-old American-born mom of six, slight at five-foot-two and with piercing blue eyes, was strolling into the historical past books, too: she was about to take the oath of workplace to develop into the primary feminine British MP to sit down within the House of Commons alongside 706 males. (A Sinn Féin lady, Countess Markewicz, had been elected earlier than, however refused to take her seat.) A number one suffragette declared that Astor had made all of the ache and struggling worthwhile.
The splendid peculiarity of her place should have struck her all of the extra profoundly that night when Astor returned to the Italianate neo-Renaissance mansion in Berkshire she known as house – Cliveden, rebuilt by Sir Charles Barry within the 1850s, some years after he’d completed the Palace of Westminster. She was, in any case, mistress of 1 nice home and pioneer in one other.
The Astors had been the final household to make use of Cliveden as a personal residence, lastly leaving it in 1968. In 2012, my husband and I acquired the landmark mansion and turned it right into a luxurious resort. And although I’ve all the time been captivated by Astor’s good, vibrant and controversial character, being at Cliveden has introduced her vividly to life. Over the years I’ve walked its many corridors the place her indomitable spirit pervades, wandered by the rooms by which she as soon as entertained everybody from Gandhi to Charlie Chaplin, by the use of Churchill and the Asquiths, in addition to such literary lions as HG Wells, JM Barrie and Rudyard Kipling – all stalwarts of the grand salons Astor held, served by liveried footmen with their hair powdered by flour and water. Today, her portrait by John Singer Sargent hangs proudly within the Great Hall of Cliveden, her chin barely aloft, her arms folded behind her pale blue silk costume.
