The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy Eden (1933)

I first mentioned The Tribulations of a Baronet in a post derived from an article titled “Out of Print” from the TLS in 1961. At the time, I wrote that it “appears to be a bit like Joe Gould’s Secret, another masterful portrait of a man of great promise and much disappointment.”

Having since read Tribulations, I would now say it resembles Joe Gould’s Secret in another way: it’s also one of the best short biographies of the 20th century. In both books there is wonderful writing, unforgettable characterization, and — most exceptionally — an amazing combination of surgical dispassion and aching empathy.

Not that the two men had much in common. Sir William Eden was 7th Baronet of Auckland and 5th Baronet of Maryland, magistrate of County Durham, lord of Windlestone Hall, and father of future Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, while Gould was a Bowery denizen who claimed to be writing the greatest work of history while, in fact, he was just a little more colorful than the next panhandler. Joe Gould made promises he could never live up to. William Eden never lived up to the promises made for him by his birthright.

William’s grandfather, Sir Frederick Eden, was a scholar and advocate for social justice. His father, also Sir William, was a sober and pious man who watched six of his eleven children die, leaving his second son, William, as the eldest surviving heir. William had been a dashing soldier, a cornet in the 8th Hussars, a daring traveler on the Grand Tour, and had developed a great love of art, becoming something of a fine touch with watercolors himself. Heir to a large fortune, the seat of an old county family, and a title, William was arguably among the most privileged men in the world. Unfortunately, as Timothy — his son — writes,

Thus he was induced neither by poverty nor obscurity of birth, nor by timidity — for he was physically and morally fearless — nor by the slightest vestige of self-discipline, to restrain the exuberance of his feelings. Nature had showered upon him with an uncontrolled hand her gifts and her curses alike, and without control he received them all, and without control he expended them.

As Master of the Durham Hunt, he was the model of the modern major horseman: “The neatest figure on a horse I have ever seen,” another Master told Timothy years after his father’s death. But he expected his fellow huntsmen to keep to the same rigid standards or risk banishment. As a father, “he could not endure, for long, even the presence of his own children.” “Their casual irresponsibility irritated him,” and he fled the house whenever they returned from school in numbers. The one lesson he drilled them on was that of natural born superiority: “Walk as if you had bought the earth!” he proclaimed.

When unhappy with the portrait of his wife that James McNeill Whistler painted on contract, he handed a Whistler a check for a hundred guineas, which he considered a fair price for something “the size of a note.” Whistler, whose self-esteem rivaled Eden’s, responded with a snarky note. Eden offered to pay 150 guineas instead. Whistler then declared that the painting was no longer for sale. The two rams proceeded to batter away at each other, taking their dispute to the press and then to the courts in Paris. Although Eden won the suit in the end, Whistler had the last word, publishing his own tract, The Baronet and the Butterfly, skewering the knight with his own pride. “Nobless Abuse!” announced the epigraph of Whistler’s diatribe. And he eventually destroyed the painting.

Sir William’s extreme cankerousness alone is the stuff of a fascinating portrait, but there is such wonderful writing here that I must have highlighted something on every third page of this book. This opening of a chapter entitled, “The Garden of Eden,” for example, could have come from Waugh or Wodehouse:

It is six o’clock in the morning. A dove in the sycamore outside the window gurgles in delicious satisfaction. A butterfly, mysteriously detached from its fellows on the wall-paper, flutters once and disappears into the pattern. A sheep bleats, a thrush pours out its song like a cascade, the triumphant light of summer bursts through the curtains, and William Eden awakes to another bloody day.

For a long time he lies and considers the hideousness of life; the treachery of friends, the frustration of endeavour, the futility, the hopelessness of it all.

One of his great passions was for his garden. His views on gardens were as iconoclastic as his views on politics, religion, riding, shooting — well, pretty much everything. “I have come to the conclusion that it is flowers that ruin a garden,” he once wrote in an article for the Saturday Review. If his gardeners erred the least bit in carrying out his instructions, he would erupt in fury. “I’ll bury you there myself, if I see another red flower!” he raged at one. Yet, at the same time, he considered the whole exercise ultimately futile. “All this that I have done, the trees, the grass, the flowers, all this beautiful place, second to none in England, what will become of it after my death? Thrown away, wasted, on a young man with an eye-glass who thinks of nothing but hunting and polo ponies!”

In his last years, he grew only more embittered and irritable:

… no member of his family is free from offence. All, in his eyes, are conspiring and plotting against him, and he sees himself isolated, with his back to the wall, surrounded by treachery and deceit but determined to hold his own against everything and everybody, to make his enemies his footstool.

When war broke out in August of 1914, he blamed every side and tolerated none. “Don’t you go giving your money to those damned refugees!” he warned his servants and tenants. Weakened and confined to a wheelchair, he makes one last attempt to shoot and misses. Take away the guns, he instructs his gillie. “And never let me see them again!” A few months later, an old friend came to break the news that his eldest son had been killed on the Western Front. When he died in early 1915, a notebook was found at his bedside. The last entry read, “The worm of the world hath eaten out my heart.”

“Great men, whatever they may think of the world, realise that they are of it and that they must work in it, with it and through it,” Timothy writes near the end of the book. “If they are refreshed and refined by nectar and ambrosia, it is from the world that they must draw their basic nourishment of food and water.” And it is here, he concludes, that his father failed. “He had no opinion of the human heart.” In another age, he might have flourished. “In spite of these grave defects, partly because of them, such a man might have made a magnificent despot in the sixteenth century.”

The Tribulations of a Baronet was first published by Macmillan in 1933. It fell out of print for the next sixty years, until Gillian Dickinson reissued it from the Spredden Press, an independent press specializing in books about Durham and Northumberland (including the Spredden Northern Classics series), in 1993. Dickinson died in 2002 and the book has been out of print ever since.

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The Tribulations of a Baronet, by Timothy (later Sir Timothy) Eden
London: Macmillan, 1933