THEIR WEDDING
From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir, circa 1907
ON THE AFTERNOON of July 12, 1890, when I wed Henry Morton Stanley in Westminster Abbey, most everyone of importance in London — including the Prince of Wales and Gladstone himself — turned up for our ceremony. (Of the five thousand requests for seats, only one-third of them could be honored.) Along the rainy streets outside the abbey a great crowd of well-wishers gathered to view the procession of dignitaries entering the sacristy, a flank of bobbies and mounted Life Guards keeping clear a path into the square as carriage after carriage veered into sight of the abbey doors. I’m told that within that gathering were pennywhistle musicians and jugglers; vendors hawked apples and taffy candies, as well as souvenir pamphlets and pins and postcards featuring pictures of Stanley and me and commemorating our union.
At about one-thirty, when I disembarked from my carriage in the company of my mother and brother, Gertrude and Charles Coombe Tennant, I alighted into a crowd of well-wishers, the ladies and young girls among them oohing and aahing over the nature of my wedding gown and train. It was a costume whose specifics I had dreamed about and made sketches of in my studio. My petticoat, bodice, and skirt were of white satin and trimmed with lace and silk cording, their edges decorated with garlands of orange blossoms and pearls; my bodice’s high collar, in the Medici style, was similarly embroidered with pearls. I wore a tulle veil fastened to my hair with diamond stars, above which sat a crown of orange blossoms held in place by an aigrette, also of diamonds (a gift from Stanley). My shoes were of silver leather with diamond buckles. These were complemented by a long diamond necklace, a gift from Sir William Mackinnon, shipping magnate and head of the Imperial British East Africa Company, who helped to finance Stanley’s last expedition. From it hung a brooch consisting of thirty-eight diamonds that had been arranged around a cameo of our good Queen Victoria (a gift, appropriately so, from Her Majesty).
During the days preceding our wedding, Henry had been laid low in his New Bond Street flat, unable to stir from his bed. He had fallen fiercely ill from a bout of chronic gastritis. Though he had continued on in great pain and was pale and feverish on the morning of our wedding, Stanley, fretful of missing out on what he had described to me in one of his daily letters as “the occasion of his greatest hope and promise in life,” roused himself from his bed and, hobbling, managed to bathe, shave, sit for a proper haircut, and dress. His valet, Hoffman, and Dr. Parke assisted him into a fine ensemble that included a silk top hat and dark frock coat, to whose lapel he affixed a white carnation.
By the time he came by carriage into the square, buoyed by the jubilation of the crowd, who greeted him with whistles and applause and shouts of joy—“Long live Stanley!”—he was barely able to walk without a cane, but with his usual fortitude and resilience he summoned enough strength to get out of the carriage unassisted.
With a pipe organ playing and a choir singing, I made my entrance into the abbey shortly after my husband’s arrival, a relief coming over me at the sight of him fidgeting with a pair of white kidskin gloves, for until a few moments before, we had wondered if Stanley would make it at all.
With my brother by my side, and with my two bridesmaids, bouquets of white roses in hand and jasmine wreaths upon their heads, leading the way, and with my two plumed squires carrying my lustrous train following at a distance of some twenty paces, I proceeded toward the altar into a realm that felt sanctified, supernatural, and protective. In the towering nave of Westminster, its stained-glass windows glorious with light, candles and lanterns aglow, in my trembling hands I carried a bouquet of white jasmine, gardenias, roses, and pancratium lilies.
When I joined Stanley by the altar, he was pale, his rheumy eyes betraying to me the gravity of his illness, his face drawn and his hair turned completely white. But he still managed to greet me with a slight smile and a nod of his head, and there was strength in his hand when he took hold of my mine. I can remember looking at Stanley and asking him, in a whisper, “Are you certain in your heart about this?” At that point he took a deep breath and stood straight, saying firmly, “Yes.”
When we left Westminster, rose petals tossed from the balconies of surrounding houses were falling upon the pavement and street like snow in our wake. And as the tower’s bells were ringing and the bystanders lining the street were waving miniature Union Jacks — as well as a few American flags, in honor of Stanley’s American association — I realized that my new husband had quickly fallen ill again. As we made our brief but jubilant procession by carriage to my family’s town house in Richmond Terrace, he let out a shallow breath and slumped back into his seat. Eventually, the carriage compartment, jostling along the cobblestones, brought him enough discomfort that he doubled over. But then he would open his eyes and ask, “Are we there yet?”
We held our reception in our back garden on Richmond Terrace. Tents had been erected in the event of bad weather, which was a good thing, as it had rained most of the day. Stanley, I should regretfully say, was not up to the occasion. When he had first come onto the green, assisted by Dr. Parke, he had simply said hello to a few folks, then retired inside to rest. After a while, Mother, being a determined soul and very aware of formality, went in to give my husband a rousing talk about his responsibilities. And so my husband, summoning his strength, chose to address the gathering from a lawn chair. For about five minutes, he named, from memory, nearly everyone in attendance and thanked them, ending his oration with these words:
“This is the very finest day of my life. Who would think that this old soldier would be so lucky as to have, at this stage of his life, a woman as good and lovely as Dorothy? How strange it all seems that I now, so unexpectedly, possess a wife.”
HERE THE NARRATIVE BREAKS OFF; at the time of writing, her mother entered her study to remind her of an impending luncheon appointment, and so she put down her pen, withdrawing into her dressing room.
Part Two
MEETING MR. CLEMENS
SHE SITS TO WRITE on an early spring day in 1908. Near her writing desk is a cabinet photograph that Samuel Clemens had given her in 1891, signed “With kindest regards to Mrs. Stanley, Mark Twain, Hartford, Connecticut, Jan. 29”; in the picture, Clemens was posed on his porch, his arm wrapped around a pillar, his legs crossed — a most intense expression on his face. The occasion of this gift, coming during Stanley’s last tour of America in late 1890–91, when he and Dorothy, or Dolly, as he had come to call her, and her mother, the pestiferous Gertrude Tennant, had met up with Clemens in New York City.
From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir
DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of our marriage, when Stanley began to move his most valued effects and books into my house on Richmond Terrace, we turned one of the large guest chambers into his study; as crates arrived by wagon from his New Bond Street flat, he would spend part of his days carefully unpacking them, and shortly that room, filled with those objects and books, became the one he found most inspirational to his thinking. Elsewhere in the house, we found space for numerous other photographs of Stanley in Africa and allocated one of the empty servants’ quarters for the storage of his travel podium, portable writing desk, medicine trunks, and the piles of tribute plaques and coffins and other commemoratives that came nearly daily.