Anthony & Clarissa

At dingy Caxton Hall, a kind of London equivalent of a U.S. city hall, Anthony Eden, 55, and Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, 32, niece of Britain's Prime Minister, became man & wife last week. Eden's divorce from his first wife, the former Beatrice Beckett,* excluded him from the morning-coated church wedding that Britons expect of their well born and highly placed.

The handsome, happy couple had been distant friends, over cocktail and garden parties, ever since Clarissa could remember. They had even worked together (though far apart) in Britain's wartime Foreign Office--she as a decoding clerk, he as His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Clarissa had long found her wartime boss attractive, but though they met frequently at the homes of mutual friends, closest friends learned of their romance only two months ago.

The ceremony began at 11:45 a.m. An hour before, dingy Caxton Street was alive with London housewives, camera-clicking tourists and Whitehall office workers out for midmorning tea. Fierce, embarrassingly fierce, feminine cheers greeted the handsome bridegroom as he arrived, looking middle-aged-blithe and debonair in a dark blue suit, famed Homburg hat and white carnation. "He's not every girl's cup of tea," go iped one feminine appraiser. "Divorced, dear, and fifty-five." Her companion tattled back: "But he's so distinguished . . ."

The Sword Arm. The Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill himself rolled up in his black Daimler, escorted by motorcycle cops and wreathed in cherubic smiles. Then came the bride, blue-eyed, reddish-blonde and glowing like an English hedge rose in her swirling pink dress (which she had designed herself) and pert, close-fitting hat.

It was quickly over. Winston Churchill signed as principal witness; Anthony kissed Clarissa, and arm-in-arm, the Edens set off down the seedy red carpet that stretched the length of a church aisle into cheering Caxton Street. Suddenly Anthony, pacing solemnly with Clarissa on his right arm, pulled up short and asked the bridegroom's perennial question: "Am I on the right side?" Clarissa didn't know; nor did Uncle Winston, who rumbled: "I am no expert in these matters." But the registrar saved the day. He switched Clarissa to her husband's left arm, explaining to Eden: "Gentleman on the right, sir. So that your sword arm is free."

Sword arm free, Anthony led his bride to their waiting limousine. Then the Edens were off to 10 Downing Street for a familial champagne lunch with the Prime Minister's family. Next morning, with four modest suitcases and -L-25 ($70) apiece (the pittance allowed by the British Treasury to Britons vacationing abroad*), the Edens caught the midmorning plane for Lisbon.

The Church Militant. All Britain wished them well--or almost all. Mr. Eden's second marriage, said the High Anglican Church Times, "like the unprecedented adoption by the American Democrats of a divorced man as candidate for the presidency, shows how far the climate of public opinion has changed for the worse, even since 1936 . . . [when Edward VIII left his throne for a woman]. It is now apparently to be accepted . . . that those who occupy the highest positions . . . may break the Church's law without embarrassment . . . This may make remarriage after divorce 'respectable' in the eyes of a pagan generation. But it does not make it . . . right."

Instantly Britain's decent, godless* daily press took up the cudgels on behalf of the Foreign Secretary. Such comments, declared the Manchester Guardian, "will make most of us glad that we do belong to a 'pagan generation' if the alternative is the rule of an intolerant clericalism . . ."

The honeymooners, making themselves at home for a week in a small hotel in the tiny village of Urgeirica, ignored the rumpus. Clarissa waited anxiously for BOAC to fly from London her cosmetic case, which, somehow, in the rush, had been left behind.

* Eden got his divorce in 1950 on the grounds of his wife's desertion, after 27 years of marriage, two sons: Simon, killed in action in World War II, and Nicholas, now aide-de-camp to the Governor General of Canada.

* Though round-trip tickets may be purchased before leaving Britain. The British Ambassador to Portugal invited them to spend a weekend at the embassy, which also stretched out their funds.

* Wrote T. S. Eliot of the pagan generation: In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit, The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court, And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people: Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls."

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