A noble lady who showed that virtue is its own reward
Truly good people have always been rarities, and ours is not an age which nourishes them by attention and respect. When a good person dies, it is not headline news but, rather, a private tragedy for friends, who thereby lose a beacon in their own confused and muddled lives, someone they could regard as a mentor and who could be relied on to tell them gently but truthfully where they had lost direction.
That was how I, and I think many others, saw Christian, Lady Hesketh, always known as Kisty: someone to turn to in time of trouble, for counsel and comfort. Her death earlier this month, swift and peaceful, was not unexpected, for she had long been ill and bore the signs of increasing frailty. Nevertheless, we heard of it with that leaden sinking of the heart which signals that someone irreplaceable and salient has gone from our lives, leaving us impoverished. The first words that came to my mind, when I got the news, were Milton’s, from the noble poem he wrote on the death of his wife: ‘Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined’. That is exactly how I thought of Kisty. There was something shining about her, and I have never known anyone whose entire person lit up so brightly and intensely when she greeted you. Oh, how she loved her friends, and how they loved her!
Kisty came from the north, the only daughter of Captain Sir John Hellas F. McEwen Bt., of Marchmont. The McEwens have been an extraordinary clan, corresponding to no archetype, various and manifold, impelled by adventurous energy to do countless different things. Kisty was like that: it was impossible to catalogue her interests and enthusiasms. As a child her life must have seemed charmed. She was pretty — some said beautiful — and universally loved, an agile and athletic denizen of a traditional Highland estate, the only girl in a family of handsome, gifted and affectionate brothers. There was a certain granitic hardiness about her, born of early training. She never seemed to feel the cold, outdoors or in, and what others might regard as indispensable comforts she tended to treat as superfluities; enjoyed, to be sure, when available, but never missed. She loved sports of all kinds, but above all rugby union, and was for many years the rugger correspondent of this journal. St Mary’s Ascot she enjoyed as a young Catholic teenager of her time and class, but she later felt her education had been grievously neglected. She was a passionate student of history. Much of the second half of her life was spent studying for an external degree, and writing a thesis on the reign of King Charles I as a Scottish monarch, a neglected subject on which she became an acknowledged authority. From many long conversations with her I grew to admire her sense of history, which revolved not so much around movements and ideologies or issues — though she could handle them when necessary — as people and places, pictures and artefacts, houses and estates, where her grasp was intense, personal, visual and concrete. She loved to visit battlefields and take with her knowledgeable friends to discuss the strategy and tactics on the spot. Among those I toured in her company were Edgehill and Marston Moor, Naseby and Flodden Field.
Kisty’s youth was golden. In 1949, still in her teens, she made a splendid marriage to a handsome major in the Scots Guards, Sir Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, 9th Baronet and second Baron. She thus became chatelaine of one of the most beautiful and distinguished houses in Europe, Easton Neston, which sits grandly in the centre of a spacious Northamptonshire estate and exudes everything which is settled and permanent about the English landed past. The house is the masterpiece of Nicholas Hawksmoor, Wren’s most gifted assistant and the expert behind the colossal theatrical flourishes of Vanbrugh. I have drawn and painted it many times, which is the key to understanding the architect’s intention, and can testify to the peculiar grace of the concept and the glorious quality of the stone with which it was realised. Kisty used to say, ‘It is not so much a large country house as a small palace.’ That is true: there is something palatial about the way in which Easton Neston draws itself up to preside magisterially over the surrounding countryside, and opens its doors to welcome guests into its princely halls and rooms.
Kisty proved a superb hostess and the great house rang with laughter in her time. Three sons were born and all seemed set fair. But then the first shadow fell. Her husband died in 1955, after only six years of marriage, and Kisty began half a century of widowhood. She gallantly kept Easton Neston fully functional and vibrant, until in due course her eldest son, Alexander, married. Then she moved into the dower house, a delightful Gothick structure where for many years she held her own miniature house parties for her discrete and learned, grave and eccentric, gossipy and jovial friends. She was not so much a pillar as a delicate ornament of her local Catholic church, surveying not uncritically the liturgical strengths and weaknesses of parish priests from her loft, lending a generous hand when required but never intruding into the clerical province. A Catholic of unbending rigour, she would willingly have given her life for her faith. She played a notable role in local government, being herself not so much an unbending as a willowy and resilient Tory. Her judgment in politics was of a high order, and I never came away from any discussion with her without feeling renewed hope and greater clarity.
Yet Kisty, sustained by her faith and natural ebullience, had much to bear in this world. She suffered in turn the loss of four of her brilliant and much-loved brothers, a son and a nephew, sometimes in distressing and tragic circumstances. She herself was involved in an appalling car accident which caused the loss of one eye, forcing her to wear a black patch. This, as it happened, made her one of the best-known figures in London society and became, as it were, the outward and visible symbol of her dauntless courage and almost superhuman resilience. She needed that courage too, as the shadows continued to fall. The last and latest, and in some ways the hardest to bear, was the decision, dictated by unarguable economic facts, to sell Easton Neston and its estate. This entailed her leaving the dower house, where she had been so happy and busy, and resettling in a Westminster flat.
Kisty seemed to me a model in all the great moral challenges of life, but most of all in accepting and rising above adversity. There were many calls on her courage but its deep well never failed her. She was indeed heroic, recalling Shakespeare’s powerful line from Measure for Measure: ‘Virtue is bold and goodness never fearful.’ She said, with Job: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ She observed to me, ‘The best advice is “Count your blessings” — they are always more than you thought.’ In her case they were indeed many: family, children, grandchildren, countless friends, boundless interests, a capacity for joy. Almost the last words she spoke to me were, ‘I am a very lucky woman’, and she meant it. For the truth is, goodness springs from within to cast a warm glow over all the harsh realities of life. That is what we mean by ‘virtue is its own reward’.
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