Shane Leslie - Adult Life

Adult Life

Before World War I, Leslie travelled extensively and in 1912 he married Marjorie Ide, the youngest daughter of Henry Clay Ide, the United States ambassador to Spain and Governor-General of The Philippines. His parents and other family members moved temporarily to London at the outbreak of war.

During the war he was in a British Ambulance Corps, until invalided out; he was then sent to Washington, D.C. to help the British Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, soften Irish-American hostility towards England and obtain American intervention in the war in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the execution of its leaders. But he also looked to Ireland for inspiration when writing and edited a literary magazine that contained much Irish verse. He became a supporter of the ideals of Irish nationalism, although not physical force republicanism.

In the 1918 election the Irish Parliamentary Party lost massively to Sinn Féin, putting an end to Shane Leslie's political career, but as the first cousin of Winston Churchill he remained a primary witness to much that was said and done outside the official record during the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Disappointed, he felt unwanted in Ireland and abandoned by the British. Like many members of the landed gentry from the 1880s who were obliged to turn to other occupations, Shane could no longer rely on income from landholdings.

He wrote extensively, in a wide range of styles, in verse and prose, over several decades. His writings include The Oppidan (1922), a roman à clef about his life and contemporaries at Eton, an edition of the Letters of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan to Lady Herbert of Lea (1942), and a biography of Mrs Fitzherbert: a life chiefly from unpublished sources (1939), together with an edition of her letters (with Maria Anne Fitzherbert), The letters of Mrs Fitzherbert and connected papers; being the second volume of the life of Mrs. Fitzherbert (1944).

Although Leslie was a passionate advocate of reforestation, he found the business of running an estate uncreative and boring, and transferred the estate entailed to him to his eldest son, John Norman Leslie, who succeeded as the 4th Baronet. He transferred St Patrick's Purgatory on Lough Derg to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clogher, The Most Rev. Dr. Eugene O'Callaghan. The wealth of the Leslies had waned by the 1930s following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and a farm that was loss making. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote "a gentleman's standing in his world was signalled by his list of clubs and it was worth paying hundreds of pounds in subs". The Leslies continued to maintain their lifestyle, involving attendance at the London season and the entertainment distinguished visitors, including Anthony Eden at Glaslough. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939 he joined the Home Guard. He spent the remainder of his life between Glaslough and London.

F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated his novel The Beautiful and Damned to Leslie.