Now, I am going to tell you about Diana Mitford, and don't you dare pretend you've heard enough, because nobody ever has, not really. Not the whole glittering, catastrophic, morally indefensible thing so sit down and order something strong. This will take a moment.
She was born in 1910, the third of the six Mitford girls and when I say "girls" I use the word with the same unearned tenderness one reserves for hand grenades.
Their father was David Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, a man of tremendous mustache and minimal patience, who believed that the primary purpose of daughters was to be beautiful and then married off before they caused trouble. He failed, darling, on the second count quite spectacularly.
Their mother, Sydney Freeman-Mitford, Baroness Redesdale (nee Bowles), was the kind of Englishwoman who believed that children were best raised like rare orchids, admired from a distance and never over-watered with affection. The result, predictably, was six of the most vivid, irrepressible, magnificent creatures that ever tormented the twentieth century.
Diana with her sisters Unity (left) and Nancy (right)
And Diana Mitford was the one who made everyone else feel they had somehow arrived in the wrong outfit to their own lives.
Diana was, by universal agreement, the beauty. Not merely pretty in the conventional, easily forgettable way that England produces in such reliable quantities, but devastatingly beautiful. The kind of face that makes painters reach for their brushes and historians reach for their footnotes.
Cecil Beaton photographed her and practically wept.
Evelyn Waugh adored her.
Augustus John painted her.
Even people who came to despise everything she stood for (and there were eventually quite a lot of those people) could not quite bring themselves to stop looking at her.
She had pale skin, corn-silk hair, and eyes the colour of a summer sky over the Cotswolds, that particular shade of English blue that makes foreigners understand, just for a moment, why the British are so insufferably convinced of their own superiority. She was tall, slender, and moved through the room as though it had been built specifically to frame her, and she was not entirely wrong about that.
Diana and Bryan Guinness on their wedding day, 1929
At eighteen, Diana married Bryan Guinness, heir to the Guinness brewing fortune. Now, people of ordinary imagination and adequate self-preservation instincts like you or I, would have considered this arrangement perfectly satisfactory. Bryan was handsome, gentle, deeply in love with her, and possessed of the kind of wealth that makes inconveniences simply disappear. They had a grand house in Buckingham Street. They had a country estate. They threw parties that the whole of London attended, all the glittering, gossipy lot of them.
Diana wore extraordinary clothes, was photographed constantly and seemed, to all outward appearances, to be exactly the sort of ravishing young aristocrat that the age required.
Then, at twenty-two, she met Sir Oswald Mosley at a dinner party and decided, right then and there, with the serene certainty of a woman accustomed to getting precisely what she wants, that she was going to have him. Never mind that Mosley was already married to one Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of a Viceroy of India, who was by all accounts a perfectly lovely person or that he had three children.
Never mind the Guinness beer fortune, the adoring husband, the social position, the common sense.
Diana had decided.
She left Bryan in 1933. He was, reportedly, devastated. She was, reportedly, not.
Mosley initially refused to leave his wife for Diana, but as fate would have it, in what can only be described as that electric moment when the last piece of a puzzle falls into place, Cynthia Mosley quite suddenly died of peritonitis that same year. The now widowed Mosley though, continued to refuse to commit to Diana, starting an affair with his late wife's younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe instead.
I know darling, you’re already lifting a hand to your throat, gathering those pearls as if they might steady you against what you’ve just read, but hold tight, as Oswald Mosley, after all, had already entangled himself in an affair with his dead wife’s stepmother as well, Grace Elvina Curzon, the Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, no less. One might say, though I suppose I will be the one to say it, that the Curzon family did not so much keep secrets as cultivate a rather intricate garden of them, in ways both fascinating and faintly scandalous.
And now we arrive, as we must, to the part that no amount of beauty can ever excuse.
Sir Oswald Mosley had been, in his youth, considered one of the most brilliant politicians in Britain. A man tipped for greatness, possibly even Prime Minister. He had served in the First World War and had been elected to Parliament. He was charismatic in the specific, slightly alarming way of men who believe absolutely everything they say. Then, in 1932, he founded the British Union of Fascists, adopted a black uniform, organized rallies of spectacular ugliness, and began a long, enthusiastic project of ruining his own legacy.
But Diana did not recoil. Diana was enthralled.
She became his devoted companion, his intellectual partner, his most ardent admirer, and his personal conduit to Adolf Hitler. You see, not only did she speak German, but Diana was the sort of Englishwoman that Germans in the 1930s found impossibly glamorous. And so Diana became, effectively, a one-woman diplomatic salon between the British far right and the Third Reich.
She first met Hitler in 1935 and found him fascinating, she later said.
Not in the way that one might find a terrible storm fascinating, with appropriate terror and desire to run elsewhere, but in the way a certain kind of person finds a powerful man fascinating, which is to say, completely and with rather poor judgment about the consequences.
On the 6th of October, 1936, Diana Mitford and Oswald Mosley were married in secret. The ceremony took place in Berlin, in the drawing room of Joseph Goebbels, and in case anyone has misplaced their programme, we are referring to the Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Adolf Hitler attended as a guest of honour and gave the couple a photograph of himself in a silver frame as a wedding gift.
A. Silver. Frame. From. Hitler.
I have attended some weddings in my time, darlings, and I have received some gifts of dubious taste and timing. But I want you to sit with this particular detail for a moment.
The Führer.
As a wedding guest.
Gifting silver.
To a couple who would, within a few years, be imprisoned by their own government as a threat to national security. The mind does not simply boggle. It performs several complicated maneuvers and then lies down on the floor.
They kept the marriage secret for two years, partly because Mosley's first wife, Lady Cynthia, had died in 1933 and public opinion was still tender on the subject, and partly because, one suspects, even Diana understood that "married in Goebbels' living room, Hitler witness" was not a detail that played well in Mayfair.
When the war began, the British government proved itself considerably less charmed by Diana's social connections than the Berlin dinner party circuit had been. In June 1940, under Defence Regulation 18B, which allowed the detention of individuals considered a threat to national security, Diana was arrested and sent to Holloway Prison. She was thirty years old. She had a four-month-old baby. She had been married for less than four years.
Oswald was arrested separately and sent first to Brixton. Eventually, the Mosleys were permitted to share a small cottage within the prison grounds, which is either a romantic gesture or an admission by the British government that two fascists under one cottage roof was actually somewhat more manageable than the alternative. They kept chickens. They grew vegetables. Diana apparently maintained that this period of her life, while inconvenient, was not without its pleasures.
I find this detail - the chickens, the kitchen garden, the resolute refusal to be diminished by the experience of wartime imprisonment - to be either the most admirable thing about Diana Mitford or the most infuriating, and I genuinely cannot decide which. There is a kind of courage in it. There is also a kind of monstrousness. Both things, I think, are true. Both things were frequently true about Diana.
The public response to her release was (and here I choose my words with the precision of a watchmaker) incandescent. Questions were asked in Parliament. There were protests outside Holloway. Winston Churchill, who had known Diana socially, was accused of favouritism. Diana seemed to regard the whole furore with the mild, slightly puzzled expression of a woman who has been told that her hat is too large and cannot quite see why anyone else's opinion on the matter is relevant.
After the war, she and Mosley left England more or less permanently. They lived in Ireland, then eventually settled in a house outside Paris called Le Temple de la Gloire, ‘the Temple of Glory’, naturally, because when Oswald Mosley named a house, he did not do it quietly. They remained there for decades, entertaining literary figures, conducting lengthy correspondences, and being comprehensively ignored by the British establishment that had once considered Mosley a future prime minister.
Oswald Mosley died in 1980. Diana, characteristically, did not collapse. She had always been the stronger of the two. More intelligent, sharper, more self-contained, and widowhood, while presumably painful, did not noticeably alter the architecture of her self-possession. She continued to live in Paris. She continued to write. She continued to receive visitors. She gave an interview in 1989 in which she expressed views on the Holocaust that were, to put it with maximum restraint, inadequate to the subject. This was, in the opinion of most people, a significant moral failure. Diana appeared to regard it as simply her considered opinion.
This is the thing about Diana Mitford that is most difficult to hold in the mind: she was, by every account of people who knew her, genuinely delightful company. Funny. Warm to those she loved. Intelligent and well-read. A wonderful letter-writer. Her correspondence with Nancy is some of the most entertaining writing in the English language. Barbed, affectionate, hilarious, cruel in the very specific way that only siblings can be cruel because only siblings know precisely where to aim. She was beloved by her grandchildren. She was a devoted pal to those she chose to befriend.
She was also someone who fell in line with a monster that was in the process of organising the murder of millions of people and kept his photograph on her wall for the rest of her life.
Both of these things were true. Simultaneously. About the same woman. And she lived to ninety-three, in comfort, in Paris, writing her memoirs with the tranquil confidence of a woman who had decided that her own account of events was the one that mattered.
She died on the 11th of August, 2003. Her obituaries ran, in some cases, to several columns, which is either a testament to the fascination she inspired or evidence that newspaper editors, like everyone else who ever encountered Diana Mitford, simply could not stop themselves from going on about her.
I understand completely.
As you can see.
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