by John Pearson
Thinking these slightly sour thoughts, he silently surveyed the big, distinctly over-heavy dining room at Marlborough House. It was crammed with people eating. Flunkeys were dashing to and fro, everybody else was chattering noisily, and at the far end of the table, fat, gross and cheerful, sat his future sovereign, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. He at any rate liked ortolans. During the past three minutes Richard had counted as he ate fourteen of them, this after celery soup and a slice of turbot; and there would be more to come, much more, roast beef and poire hélène and devilled kidneys and then Stilton and cigars. Where did His Royal Highness put it all? It was not as if he were a big man like the majority of his courtiers—tall, gloomy-looking Sykes or the enormous Henry Chaplin. Yet he out-ate them all. Richard refused to find the thought attractive.
He pushed the ortolans away and leaned back to enjoy his claret—Beychevelle ‘68. Good, but not all that good. Albert Edward, he reflected, was an undoubted connoisseur of food, cigars and women, not of wine.
“Don’t you think, Mr. Bellamy, that this dreadful man Parnell should be on trial for treason?”
This interruption of Richard’s seditious thoughts came from a red-nosed little woman dressed like a bright green cockatoo. Her name was Lady Orrery, and Richard had not met her before. Already she was starting to annoy him.
“Why do you say that?” he replied. “Treason’s a very serious affair.”
“And so are these letters from Parnell the Times is publishing. Clearly the man’s a traitor—and a dangerous one at that.”
Normally Richard might have assented politely. He had no liking for Parnell or what he stood for. But tonight he had other things on his mind. Instead of answering he twirled the pale red liquid in his glass and sniffed the odour of baked earth and ancient sunlight.
“Don’t you agree, though, Mr. Bellamy?” the cockatoo went pecking on. “These letters in the Times leave no doubt as to this dreadful man’s intentions, and as a member of the House you have a duty to do something.”
“Parnell claims they’re forgeries.”
“Oh, but he would. Obviously he would.”
“And so does Mr. Gladstone.”
“Now, Mr. Bellamy, I ask you, would the Times publish letters of this sort if they were forgeries? It’s inconceivable. As an M.P. you must do your duty. See that Parnell is placed behind bars, then given his deserts.”
She chattered on, angry and birdlike, whilst Richard nodded, drank his wine and vacantly looked on. At any other time he would probably have answered that the Piggot letters fascinated him and that at heart he was inclined to agree with Lady Orrery. But at the moment he was too preoccupied, and finally the indefatigable little woman gave up on politics.
“His Royal Highness seems on particularly good form tonight, don’t you think, Mr. Bellamy? Who is that very pretty woman he’s flirting with? It seems only yesterday that he was still pursuing Mrs. Langtry. This one must be his latest, I’ll be bound. Look at her now, look at that knowing look she has. I wonder who on earth she is?”
“That, Lady Orrery,” said Richard drily, “is my wife. And now with your permission we will change the subject.”
The Bellamys’ rise to favour in the eyes of the Prince of Wales had happened quite recently—and most unexpectedly.
It had been barely a month before that Richard and Marjorie were invited out to Hatfield for a long weekend. Someone had told Lord Salisbury that he ought to have more contact with back-benchers in the Party, and recently he had started inviting them to visit him at home. Richard’s turn had duly come.
He was not keen to go. Politically he still disapproved of Salisbury as much as ever, and he found the “Great Dead-Weight” personally formidable, very large and distant and aloof.
But at 165 Richard found himself a minority of one. Marjorie was excited at the prospect of weekending out at Hatfield and instantly ordered a new dress from Madame Alberoni (of Hanover Place, much patronised by Royalty). Richard was press-ganged into ordering a new tweed country suit. (His old one, Marjorie said, would get him arrested as a poacher if he went on wearing it.) Miss Roberts had been told that she would be going too as Marjorie’s maid, and the new butler, an Irishman named O’Donovan, would be valeting for Richard.
This was another reason Richard had for not being over-keen to go. He missed Hudson’s presence on occasions such as these, and the new butler, for all his eager blarney, was no substitute. A tall, good-looking man from County Wicklow, O’Donovan was always polite and seemed efficient, but there was something wrong about him. Richard could not decide quite what it was, but the straight fact was that 165 without Angus Hudson as its butler had become a wilderness. The other servants had got out of hand, service was erratic, and even Mrs. Bridges’ cooking had declined.
O’Donovan also had an extraordinary knack for getting on Richard’s nerves. One of his first remarks when he heard about the trip to Hatfield was, “I take it that his lordship will be expecting you to shoot.”
Hudson, who knew Richard’s dislike of the sport, would never have said this, but Richard checked himself and said, “Good heavens, no! I’d end up shooting him.”
And to the other servants O’Donovan let drop such little snobbisms as, “I hear the service out at Hatfield has been falling off of late. It will be interesting to observe how Lord Salisbury’s butler runs things.”
Then, just a day or two before they were due to go, O’Donovan produced his bombshell. As he was stropping Richard’s razors he remarked, “I hear, sir, that there’s an excellent chance that His Royal Highness will be gracing the weekend with his royal presence.”
“Nonsense, man,” Richard said quickly. “The Prince is still at Homburg, and from there he always goes to Biarritz. No, mercifully, there’s no chance of that at all.”
But next day O’Donovan triumphantly showed Mrs. Bridges an item in the court circular in that day’s Morning Post: “Today H.R.H. the Prince of Wales returned unexpectedly from Homburg, where he has been staying for the last three weeks.”
The real reasons Richard dreaded the weekend were far more profound than he would probably have admitted. He would simply have said that he enjoyed his home and was an idle fellow. But it was more complicated than that: the fact was that despite his time in Parliament and his marriage to Marjorie, he still felt uncomfortably aware of his disadvantages when he went into the top Tory world of wealthy landowners who, under Salisbury, formed the nucleus of government. There was his lack of a noble name, his lack of interest in hunting or shooting, and, worst of all, there was his crippling lack of money.
These condescending plutocrats alone could make him feel his place. Perhaps he was over-sensitive, but when he met them they seemed to be implying (in the discreetest way imaginable) that he was only there among them because he had had the great good fortune, or good sense, to marry Southwold’s daughter.
As it turned out, none of this treatment occurred, and the weekend was most pleasurable. Richard could hardly fail to respond to Hatfield—that enormous house, those splendid gardens, and the Cecil standard fluttering on the battlements. But to his surprise the part of the weekend that he most enjoyed was Salisbury himself. Here on his home ground the great statesman was quite different from the forbidding figure Richard knew at Westminster. Here he seemed simply a large, bumbling man with a black jacket shiny at the elbows, who for some reason seemed to make an effort to be genial to Richard.
“D’you ride, Bellamy?”
“No, my lord.”
“No more do I. I have always regarded riding as at best a mode of transportation of which the horse is an inconvenient adjunct.”
Richard agreed.
“Come and see my tricycle,” his lordship said. And the great Lord Salisbury led Richard to the back of the house, where a whole series of paths were laid out across the lawns and between the orchards. Lord Salisbury had a big black tricycle.
“Unbeatable exercise,” he said, and mounted, and with a footman on the st
ep behind him went pedalling away, his coat-tails flying. When he returned ten minutes later, red-faced and puffing, one of the servants came running out of the house and handed him a note. Salisbury read it, frowning.
“Forgive me, Bellamy,” he said, “but it seems we have an unexpected guest. This very evening too. His Royal Highness will be coming here for dinner. I invited him some months ago but never thought he’d come. To be honest, I have always thought I bored him. Oh Lord, Bellamy, oh Lord, oh Lord! The whims of princes, Bellamy! What was it Disraeli used to say about our gracious Prince? That he could deal with the Balkans but not with Bertie?” And he began to laugh with a rumbling noise that shook his big grey beard.
Lord Salisbury need not have worried. The Prince turned out to be no trouble—rather the reverse. During his time at Homburg he had been massaged, dieted and purged of at least twenty pounds of the Prince Regal girth. His breath was purer and his liver in good shape, so there was not much danger of the sort of outburst that could upset an unsuspecting gathering in his honour. The Prince, that afternoon, was at his genial and charming best.
Richard had never met the Prince before and so was grateful for the opportunity to examine him. He found him more extraordinary than he had expected; very dapper, very fat, and very foreign with his guttural voice and heavily rolled Rs. But the strangest thing about him was that one so small—he was little more than five feet two or three—could simultaneously appear so very much larger than life. He had extraordinary assurance and awareness of his royal role and dignity: it was this that saved him from absurdity. Even so, Richard was amused by the strange sight of towering Lord Salisbury with this portly little man.
The Prince talked to everyone with great good humour. He seemed to know that Richard had once served in Paris; Cartwright had recently died and he spoke of him with some affection. To Marjorie the Prince was warmer still, chatting about her father—“It has been far too long since I have seen him. Tell him that he must see me when he is next in London”—and tactfully avoiding any reference to her mother. But it was after dinner that Marjorie was confirmed in the princely favour. His Royal Highness was showing signs of some impatience for his customary game of bridge (there was no other way of filling in the time between his rising from the table and his going off to bed). But who would complete the four? There were luckily Lord Hardwicke and the good-natured Mrs. Jenkinson, a wealthy widow who could always be relied upon the keep the Prince happy and contented. But, typically, Lord Salisbury had overlooked the need for a final partner. Who would oblige? Worried inquiries ensued, and H.R.H. was waiting.
“Would Lady Marjorie be able to fill in?” Salisbury asked anxiously.
“I’m sorry,” Richard said, “but my wife …”
“As long as the Prince will make allowance for my lack of practice,” Marjorie said, and rose. “Richard, excuse me. Lord Salisbury, I will do my best.”
The first invitation to a Marlborough House reception duly arrived at 165 three days later. The servants were thrilled. So, to be fair, was Richard. Marjorie was somewhat cooler. But they went, and it was all a great success. The Princess was beautiful—even more beautiful, Richard thought, than in her photographs—and very gracious. The Prince was affability itself. There was champagne, a band was playing on the lawn, and H.R.H. spent nearly twenty minutes chatting to Richard—about Paris, about Parliament, and about the committee, on which the Prince was sitting, to provide dwellings for the poor. Richard had always prided himself on being far too rational to be, as he put it, “seduced by this royal mumbo-jumbo,” but seduced he was.
“Extraordinarily intelligent man, the Prince,” he said to Marjorie as they drove back to Eaton Place. Marjorie nodded pensively.
The Bellamys’ success did not stop there. After the reception further invitations followed almost as if by magic: to a ball at Manchester House, to another given by the Beresfords, then to a weekend three days later up at Hardwicke Hall. And everywhere they went the Prince was there. It was as if a touch of the Prince’s popularity had rubbed off on them. They were mysteriously “in,” and for the first time in his life Richard enjoyed the strange, rather dizzying sensation of being sought after by Society.
Again this was something he would previously have said he despised, but there is something irresistible about a dinner invitation from a duchess or a weekend with a Rothschild. Above all there is something few men can resist in the confidence of princes—and Richard really felt that Albert Edward liked him. How else explain the trouble he took to put Richard and Marjorie at ease? How else explain those confidential chats that H.R.H. so obviously enjoyed? He really had an extraordinary grasp of what was happening in Europe, and he knew absolutely everybody—from presidents and kings to courtesans, especially courtesans. Richard was even given the great honour of playing billiards with him on several occasions, although as Marjorie said, this was possibly because Richard was an indifferent player and the Prince always liked to win.
Throughout the early summer the Bellamys basked in the princely favour. Then suddenly, for Richard, everything went wrong. They were at Goodwood, members inevitably now of the exclusive party invited down to watch the racing and enjoy the splendours of that lovely house for the few days the Prince was staying there.
Richard was bored by racing. He was also bored by the Prince’s horsier friends (rather a ruffianly lot, he thought them) and by the fact that he saw so little there of Marjorie. On the second day he was standing on the edge of the enclosure, trying to concentrate upon the splendid view across the downs as an antidote to the view of the horses, when he overheard two loud gentlemen in loud check suits talking about the Prince. The Prince himself had at that moment just arrived with several of his friends—the Duke of Richmond, Hardwicke, Carrington—and Marjorie was with them. Richard was pleased to see that she had just said something that made Bertie laugh.
“So that’s what Bertie’s up to,” one of the loud gentlemen said.
“She looks very happy,” said the other.
“Naturally. They all are. Must be exciting to submit to the future King of England.”
“Rather beautiful, but older than Langtry. Interesting how his taste changes. Any idea who she is?”
“They say she’s married to a dull dog of an M.P. called Bellamy.”
“Poor dog.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’ll be all right. Rather an honour to be married to a royal mistress when you think of it—and Bertie always does the decent thing by the husband anyhow. Nobody ever loses out by being cuckolded by H.R.H.”
Richard was shattered. Unfaithful? Marjorie? And with the Prince of Wales? It was unthinkable. But was it? Everyone knew the Prince’s reputation, and mightn’t this explain why the Bellamys were suddenly so popular? The idea tormented him, and for the remainder of that afternoon Richard did his best to settle the matter and to decide what he could do. Neither was easy. There is—fortunately, perhaps—no way of proving absolutely any wife’s fidelity. And if—perish the thought—she really had been intimate with the Prince, what could he do? Make a fuss? Antagonise the Prince and all Society? Another jealous husband, Sir William Mordaunt, had done just that: he had even had the Prince in court, and today Mordaunt was a broken man. Not for nothing was His Royal Highness known discreetly as “the Bismarck of Society.”
But if Marjorie were deceiving him, the whole idea of playing the complacent husband sickened him, especially if it meant this sort of social life with everybody laughing quietly behind his back.
Fortunately for Richard, they were due back from Goodwood that same evening, and it was reassuring to be home again in 165 with the children there to greet them. Four-year-old James could hardly wait to hear about the Prince and what uniform he was wearing. Elizabeth jumped up and down with excitement at having her parents back again. The servants were naturally agog for any crumbs of royal gossip. For Richard it was suddenly a huge relief to be out of that whole hothouse world of kings and courtiers. Never had Eaton Place app
eared more welcoming. Marjorie was different too—far more at ease, more natural, more loving—and by the time they went to bed Richard had made up his mind. His suspicions were unworthy. Marjorie could not possibly have been unfaithful. But on the other hand this elevated social life of theirs was over. It had been enjoyable while it lasted, but he had had enough. The risks were far too great, and Bertie’s world was not for him.
But how to convince his wife? That was the real problem, especially now that Marjorie was enjoying life more than she had for years. The truth was that as Southwold’s daughter she was by nature and inheritance fitted to take her place around the Prince. Richard was not, and for the first time in the marriage she was sampling just the sort of life she would undoubtedly have enjoyed had she married a husband of her own rank and class.
These bitter and uncomfortable thoughts pursued poor Richard for the ensuing fortnight. It was a hateful fortnight, for him at any rate. For Marjorie it simply marked the continuation of a time of glittering success.
Richard did his best to reduce their social life, but how could he, short of confronting Marjorie with his hideous suspicions? The invitations had all been accepted and the arrangements made. Richard was not the man to put his foot down and, without giving any reason, tell his wife they were not going to the Warwick Castle Ball or for dinner with the Londonderrys or for the weekend with the Rothschilds out at Tring. (Nor, for that matter, would Marjorie have accepted it if he had.)
And so he went to all these fabulous affairs and hated every minute of them. Gone was his own naïve enjoyment of the social whirl, gone too his pleasure in a tête à tête with Bertie or a chat with Soveral or Cassels. Several of the regulars in the Prince’s circle remarked knowingly on “the sour look of the Bellamy fellow—I suppose the usual trouble.” Even Marjorie chided him for his ill humour, but there was nothing he could do.
The role of jealous husband is surely the most uncomfortable affliction of the married male. Richard bore it badly. His straightforward nature found it hard to cope with the degrading turns and twists of jealousy; nor was he tough enough or dishonourable enough to stoop to those machinations which alone might have told him the truth and brought the whole hateful issue to a head.