page_title: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Caricature of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922). Caption read "a prophet".
context_page_description: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, sometimes spelled Wilfred, was an English poet and writer. He and his wife, Lady Anne Blunt travelled in the Middle East and were instrumental in preserving the Arabian horse bloodlines through their farm, the Crabbet Arabian Stud. He was best known for his poetry, which was published in a collected edition in 1914, but also wrote a number of political essays and polemics. Blunt is also known for his views against imperialism, viewed as relatively enlightened for his time.
context_section_description: In 1869 Blunt married Lady Anne Noel, the daughter of the Earl of Lovelace and Ada Lovelace, and granddaughter of Lord Byron. Together the Blunts travelled through Spain, Algeria, Egypt, the Syrian Desert, and extensively in the Middle East and India. Based upon pure-blooded Arabian horses they obtained in Egypt and the Nejd, they co-founded Crabbet Arabian Stud, and later purchased a property near Cairo, named Sheykh Obeyd which housed their horse breeding operation in Egypt.
  As an adult, he became an atheist, though he would walk in and out of episodes of faith. His writings, and some of his close friendships,  show him to have also espoused a serious interest in Islam. Before he died, he agreed to see a priest, Father Vincent McNabb, and received Communion; thereby fulfilling the prediction of Sir William Henry Gregory, as recollected by his wife: "You will see Wilfrid will die with the wafer in his mouth."
  In 1882, he championed the cause of Urabi Pasha, which led him to be banned from entering Egypt for four years. Blunt generally opposed British imperialism as a matter of philosophy. His support for Irish causes led to his imprisonment in 1888 for chairing an anti-eviction meeting in County Galway that had been banned by the Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour, being successively incarcerated in Galway Prison, then at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin.
  He attempted to enter Parliament three times, unsuccessfully. He stood as a "Tory Democrat" supporting Irish Home Rule at Camberwell North in 1885, and as a Liberal at Kiddermister in 1886 where he lost by 285 votes. While in prison in Ireland, he contested a Deptford by-election in 1888 but lost by 275 votes.
  His most memorable line of poetry on the subject comes from Satan Absolved (1899), where the devil, answering a Kiplingesque remark by God, snaps back:
  ‘The white man's burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash’
  Here, Elizabeth Longford wrote, 'Blunt stood Rudyard Kipling's familiar concept on its head, arguing that the imperialists' burden is not their moral responsibility for the colonised peoples, but their urge to make money out of them.' 
  Wilfrid and Lady Anne's only child to live to maturity was Judith Blunt-Lytton, 16th Baroness Wentworth, later known as Lady Wentworth. As an adult, she was married in Cairo but moved permanently to the Crabbet Park Estate in 1904.
  Wilfrid had a number of mistresses, among them a long-term relationship with the courtesan Catherine "Skittles" Walters, and the Pre-Raphaelite beauty, Jane Morris. Eventually, he moved another mistress, Dorothy Carleton, into his home. This event triggered Lady Anne's legal separation from him in 1906. At that time, Lady Anne signed a Deed of Partition drawn up by Wilfrid. Under its terms, unfavourable to Lady Anne, she kept the Crabbet Park property (where their daughter Judith lived) and half the horses, while Blunt took Caxtons Farm, also known as Newbuildings, and the rest of the stock. Always struggling with financial concerns and chemical dependency issues, Wilfrid sold off numerous horses to pay debts and constantly attempted to obtain additional assets. Lady Anne left the management of her properties to Judith, and spent many months of every year in Egypt at the Sheykh Obeyd estate, moving there permanently in 1915.
  Due primarily to the manoeuvering of Wilfrid in an attempt to disinherit Judith and obtain the entire Crabbet property for himself, Judith and her mother were estranged at the time of Lady Anne's death in 1917. As a result, Lady Anne's share of the Crabbet Stud passed to Judith's daughters, under the oversight of an independent trustee. Blunt filed a lawsuit soon afterward. Ownership of the Arabian horses went back and forth between the estates of father and daughter in the following years. Blunt sold more horses to pay off debts and shot at least four in an attempt to spite his daughter, an action which required intervention of the trustee of the estate with a court injunction to prevent him from further "dissipating the assets" of the estate. The lawsuit was settled in favour of the gr
caption: Blunt caricatured by Ape in Vanity Fair, 1885
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