LAURA TENNANT married Alfred Lyttelton on 21 May 1885. It was a dull and showery Thursday morning, and St George’s, Hanover Square, where the ceremony took place, was among the most dismal of London's fashionable matrimonial venues. Nevertheless this was the height of the London season, and the pews were packed with dukes and politicians. Alfred's uncle, prime minister William Gladstone, was there. So were the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Houghton, Lord Acton, Matthew Arnold, the Herbert Asquiths, Mary Elcho and Arthur Balfour. As everyone waited for the bride to appear, George Pembroke's friend Eddie Hamilton cornered one cabinet minister to discuss the political crisis brewing over the war secretary Lord Hartington, another guest at the wedding. Poet, anti-imperialist and philanderer Wilfrid Blunt fantasised about the bride as he did about most attractive young women. Madeline and Percy Wyndham sat mildly distracted by worry for their son George who was serving with the Coldstream Guards in the Sudan. Yet whatever private comedies or dramas absorbed the onlookers, it was still an occasion ‘freighted with more good wishes than any one I can remember,’ as the foreign secretary Lord Rosebery told Laura's father.

A popular society wedding provided comforting assurance of normality for observers, and this one showed Britain's ruling circles at their best. It offered visible evidence for the openness of an aristocratic landowning class willing to accommodate the forces of change in modern society. Lyttelton forebears had been landowners in Worcestershire since the thirteenth century. Now Alfred and his brothers were making their way in the military, education, the Church and the law, as well as management of the Hagley estate. The Tennants represented the integration of meritorious business families into the traditional circles of governance through the marriages of daughters and the public school and Oxbridge education of sons.

The match also confirmed gender stereotypes that Victorians saw as essential in a fluid social order. Laura – beautifully dressed after trousseau shopping in Paris – was thoroughly feminine in looks and sympathies. Alfred had been shaped by his athletic successes and the ‘sheer mental robustness’ developed by practice at law.