Dirty Bertie

by Stephen Clarke

  Lillie’s story and the details of her affair with Bertie are very well documented. She was the daughter of a womanizing clergyman in Jersey, and came to London at the age of twenty-three, where she suddenly discovered that she was beautiful. After one society soirée in May 1877, at which practically every fashionable artist in England fell swooning at her feet, Lillie became an instant celebrity. Heavy-jawed, she would probably not have made such a splash in modern London, but she was idealized by the pre-Raphaelite artists, and captured everyone’s hearts. It was only a matter of time before the ‘Jersey Lily’ came to the notice of the city’s chief talent scout, Bertie, and once rumours about the pair began to circulate, her status was settled. After Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra, Lillie was suddenly the most famous woman in England.

  As a candidate for royal mistress, Lillie didn’t need idealizing. She was young, married and possessed a nondescript husband who seems to have resigned himself very quickly to his wife’s sudden independence. More than this, though, Lillie was the type of woman Bertie loved most – spirited and witty, aware of his status and respectful of it, but willing to speak her mind. She could almost have been French.

  In Paris, Lillie would probably have become a cocotte, but in England there was another way for a poor girl to buy the dresses and rent the house that she needed if she was to impose herself on glamorous London life. She became a ‘professional beauty’. Reproductions of the paintings of Lillie and postcards of her photographic portraits began to sell like hot cakes, and must have brought in a tidy income. In this, she was like the other category of person that Bertie always warmed to – the self-made man. And just as he had done with bankers and industrialists, he supported Lillie’s ambitions with introductions to the right people, invitations to the right parties (the only caveat being that Princess Alexandra must never be embarrassed by Lillie’s presence), and the odd gift. He even went as far as having a love nest built for them in Bournemouth on the south coast, which was then a quiet health resort rather than the beach metropolis that it is today. However, Bertie wasn’t quite as generous as some of his biographers make out, because the house was not, as some have suggested, on the seafront but a good ten-minute walk inland, set in an avenue where other similar houses were being built.

  Biographers also point out that at this time, Bertie’s trips to Paris suddenly stopped looking like stag parties. He was spending less time chasing after the latest cocottes, and fewer evenings in the upstairs rooms at cafés. But this was not because his wayward soul had been calmed by his love for Lillie. Bertie was now a man with a mission, a prince – at last – with a purpose. He was working on his Exposition.

  III

  The Bibliothèque Nationale (France’s national library) possesses a full collection of a magazine called L’Exposition Universelle de 1878 Illustrée. It was created in 1876 as soon as the planning for the exhibition began, and ran until the show closed at the end of October 1878. Its purpose was to drum up public excitement for the occasion and keep everyone abreast of progress. It published designs for the various buildings, explained who was who, and trumpeted the government’s view that this was to be a celebration of the new France. The magazine was a weekly, and Bertie features in almost every issue. The articles about him give an idea of how dedicated – and important – he was to the whole project, and to France’s image in a decidedly stormy Europe.

  An early issue in May 1876 sets out the Exposition’s ethos and shows a decidedly pro-Anglo bent, no doubt in part thanks to Bertie. A writer is describing the cafés and restaurants that will be built on the exhibition site, and adds that ‘taking a lesson from our English and American friends, there will also be well-stocked buffets. On y lunchera,’ he says – we will lunch there. The writer has coined a new Franglais verb, luncher, the kind of invention that enrages modern-day protectors of the ‘purity’ of the French language, but which proves that back then, this Anglo influence was welcome, something to be affectionately joked about.

  In October 1876, the magazine announces with evident pleasure that Bertie is to be ‘le Président executif’ and that he has formed a Royal Commission to manage Britain’s contribution to the Expo. He will, it says, be ‘putting his hands to the pastry’, meaning getting them dirty.

  Looking through different issues of the magazine, one gets an idea of Bertie’s enthusiastic hands-on participation over the next two years. We see him presiding over a meeting in London and issuing a request for the space attributed to British exhibitors to be tripled. He comes to Paris and spends half a day visiting the exhibition site with members of his Royal Commission and the French politicians and architects behind the project. He announces that he will be creating a personal exhibition consisting of the gifts – especially the carpets, cashmeres and jewels – that he received during his tour of India, and comes to inspect the new pavilion commissioned specially for his show.

  There are dozens of similar references to the Prince’s hard work. And not all the VIPs involved in the project get the same treatment. While Bertie is being praised for encouraging his architect to design a new façade for the expanded British exhibition space, other European countries get mere one-line mentions. A trainload of Austrian machinery is reported to be on its way, or the Danes are going to send a special consignment of pickled herring.

  In February 1878, it is reported that the British section is ‘the most advanced of all’ and the Expo’s French spokesman declares that: ‘We must pay homage to the activity deployed by the Royal Commission and its delegates under the powerful impulsion of HRH the Prince of Wales.’ Of course there is a dose of obsequiousness in all this, but the sheer number of matter-of-fact reports about telegrams written, requests made and visits paid tells a story of real involvement on Bertie’s part.

  And he was more than the head of a working committee. He was also, for the first time in his life, playing a serious diplomatic role. As Russia went to war with Turkey and the European nations declared their conflicting allegiances, Bertie was quoted in L’Exposition Universelle de 1878 Illustrée reassuring French readers that ‘despite the gravity of political events in the Orient, the attention of England will never be distracted from this great work of peace to which France has invited it’.

  At the banquet on 3 May 1878 to mark the opening of the Exposition, Bertie went even further. He had been in Paris for a week overseeing the finishing touches to the British exhibits, when, in front of his Royal Commission, the French Minister of Commerce and the entire British press, Bertie made a diplomatic gesture that the magazine reported in breathless terms: ‘[The Prince’s] short stay in Paris was marked by an event that no one in France will ever forget.’ Bertie’s speech (which he gave in French, without using notes) is then reprinted at length, and it is worth quoting a large section because it is one of the most eloquent pieces of public speaking he ever did. It sounds so personal – and so un-English – that it can only be his own work.

  After thanking the organizers for their help, Bertie reminds his audience that the banquet is being held in a country:

  . . . which has always received Englishmen with hospitality. Many years ago there was, it was true, a time when the two nations were not so friendly, but these times are past and forgotten. The jealousies from which enmity arose have now, I am sure, ceased to exist, and have been replaced by a cordiality of feeling that is not likely to be changed. Today we can already affirm that the 1878 Exposition Universelle will be a great success. Therefore permit me to say to everyone in France that the prosperity of this country and Great Britain are interwoven here, and that the cordial participation that we have contributed to the triumph of industry and the arts in this peaceful enterprise is of the highest importance for our two nations and for the whole world. The part that we have played in the Exposition Universelle is the best proof of friendship that we can give to the French people, to whom we owe so much and whom I love with all my heart, and I hope that this Exposition will live on in all memories as an emb
lem of work, concord and peace.

  Granted, there may be more than a little champagne speaking, and when Bertie says that ‘we owe so much’ to France, it is probably a royal we – he must have been thinking of everything he had learnt from Napoléon III and the cocottes. The speech also reflects the mixture of self-satisfaction and relief that colours any inauguration dinner. Even so, for once in his life, Bertie is sounding like a cross between a foreign secretary, a minister of development and, yes, a king.

  Various biographers underline the Prince’s naïvety and ignorance about the Russian–Turkish crisis – it is said, for example, that he got all his opinions about it from a colonel in the 10th Hussars who had been discharged from the army after raping a Turkish girl. But articles published in the international press at the time of the Exposition paint a very different picture. A correspondent for the Australian newspapers reported that Bertie had single-handedly changed the French government’s mind on European policy. Previously it might have sided with Russia, the reporter says, but since his speech, the French have:

  . . . recognized the old identity of interest between England and France, and the Prince’s popularity in Paris has sealed the change. In that respect the Exhibition may turn out to have been an important factor in smoothing away Eastern complications. In the Congress [of Berlin, the international talks to end the Russian–Turkish conflict] we2 are now practically sure of the support of France as well as of Germany, and Italy if not our partisan will be at least a friendly neutral.

  Bertie the international peacemaker, as seen by his contemporaries.

  Bertie also made an impact on French domestic politics, according to another British newspaper correspondent, Broadbrim, who noted in one of his regular ‘Letters from France’ that:

  Only a few days before the opening [of the Exposition] a band of rioters were arrested by the gendarmes shouting for Napoléon and the Empire. It was evident that another coup d’état was anxiously expected and hoped for . . . All these expectations have been doomed to a cruel disappointment.

  Thanks to Bertie.

  And what about the Expo itself? Well, the French were justifiably proud of themselves for an exhibition that introduced such Gallic innovations as the first solar oven and a gold-medal-winning fizzy drinks machine, but the British press was clear about who had put on the best show. One correspondent boasted that: ‘The exhibit of England stands out with a regal magnificence which has distanced all competition, and which silences even the voice of envy.’ Bertie and his Royal Commission had put together 40,000 square yards of British exhibition space, occupying more than 120 pages of the 400-page catalogue listing all the foreign exhibitors. The British buildings were a row of five small houses, including a mock-Tudor cottage and a neo-Gothic urban villa decorated with Doulton ceramics, a British buffet, a greenhouse, the Prince of Wales’s personal exhibition space and the much larger galleries containing the various industrial, agricultural and commercial exhibitors.

  The British firms selling their wares read like a portrait of Victorian Britain tinged with Bertie’s own tastes – there were suppliers and makers of hunting rifles, fishing rods, silver sandwich boxes, waterproof overcoats, heaters for use on yachts, and, thanks to Bertie’s trendiness, literally dozens of tweed merchants. There was also a manufacturer of water filters, perhaps a recommendation from the recent typhoid sufferer.

  Looking outside Bertie’s own interests, there were British firms offering to supply the world with railway ambulances, school furniture, English bibles and stained-glass windows, cricket equipment, police helmets, canal lock gates and an impressive-sounding device for protecting undersea telegraph cables against damage by marine creatures. There was even a company hawking tapestry portraits of Queen Victoria, and, amongst the many photography stands, there were doubtless a few selling pictures of Lillie Langtry, too.

  Despite British pride, however, this is an Expo best remembered for a French exhibit. France had recently signed a contract with the Americans to build a monumental statue called Liberty Enlightening the World, and construction was well under way. The hand holding the torch had gone on show at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and now the Parisians exhibited the huge crowned head, into which spectators could climb and get an idea of how the 140-metre-tall Statue of Liberty would one day look when it was erected in New York. However many Bertie-style tweed suits were ordered, this had to be the biggest commercial project of the Expo, and represented a French triumph on the international scene.

  Even so, it was a monument that was seen by Bertie’s royalist friends in France as a provocation, a celebration by one republic of another’s successful revolution. The fact that, after a period of uncertainty caused by the Franco-Prussian War, the joint Franco-American project was going ahead was a sign that the republicans were taking control of France. And despite his previous allegiances, Bertie was now perfectly at peace with this idea, and was busy forging a friendship with one of the unlikeliest people in Paris.

  IV

  Bertie described his first meeting with Léon Gambetta to Xavier Paoli, his police bodyguard, who quoted him saying that: ‘He [Gambetta] seemed so vulgar-looking and carelessly dressed that I thought to myself, is this really the man who exerts such irresistible power over the people?’ Bertie judged everyone by appearances, as he expected to be judged himself, so the relationship was getting off to a very bad start.

  Léon Gambetta was the Member of Parliament for Paris’s 20th arrondissement (one of the poorest parts of the city). He was a grocer’s son who dressed like the intellectual ex-student that he was. And as well as this inherent scruffiness, Gambetta had a highly noticeable physical disability – he had lost an eye in childhood after getting hit by a metal splinter while watching a knife grinder.

  But despite his appearance, Gambetta was acknowledged as the most influential man in France. In the middle of the siege of 1870–1 he had famously escaped from Paris in a hot-air balloon to represent the city at the exiled parliament. Staunchly republican, he was now a tireless powerbroker guiding the country through its tricky post-empire period. Travelling the country delivering rousing speeches, he had managed to rally the republican electorate and win the parliamentary elections at the beginning of 1876, effectively depriving President Mac Mahon and his allies of any excuse to engineer a return to monarchy. After Mac Mahon used his presidential powers to dissolve the new parliament, Gambetta went out on the soapbox again, and the republicans won even more convincingly in October 1877, weakening the royalists still further. This one-eyed, scarecrow-like politician was acknowledged as the great architect of the peaceful transition towards an enduring Third Republic, and Bertie wanted to meet him.

  On 6 May 1878, three days after Bertie’s banquet speech, the two men were introduced and spoke for what a British reporter called ‘a considerable time’ but which the Courrier de Paris newspaper described as three-quarters of an hour. They agreed that Britain and France should unite in their distrust of the Germans. ‘Gambetta explained his ideas and his projects,’ Bertie told the policeman Paoli, ‘and the lucidity of his intelligence, the breadth of his opinions and his charming eloquence made me forget the disappointment of his physical appearance. I was won over, just like everyone else.’

  Gambetta, too, seemed to have been seduced, proving that Bertie really was the only man in Britain, if not the whole world, who could be on friendly terms with all sides of the unstable and conflictual political scene in France. Only a few ultra-nationalists who still bore grudges about the Anglais burning Joan of Arc and sending Bonaparte to St Helena were immune to Bertie’s charms.

  In July 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, Britain made a peace deal whereby it received Cyprus from Turkey in exchange for signing an alliance with the Turks. This in turn annoyed the French, who saw their domination of the Eastern Mediterranean threatened by a British naval base. Anglo-French relations were so tense that Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador in Paris, warned Bertie not to return to th
e exhibition. Previously, Bertie would have ignored the advice on the grounds that he didn’t want to be deprived of his French holiday, but now his determination to come and show his continued support for the Exposition – his ‘great work of peace’ – really can be seen as a political decision. He seems to have come to a personal realization that the best people to run France weren’t necessarily those with the biggest châteaux.

  Bertie made it known that he wanted to see Gambetta again in July, this time at one of his usual haunts, the Café Anglais. There, the two men had another friendly meeting, discussing amongst other things a permanent entente cordiale and a Channel Tunnel.3 Afterwards, Lord Lyons sent a report to London saying that Bertie had ‘acquitted himself with great skill’. In other words, Bertie was now Britain’s chief negotiator with the most powerful man in France.

  Bertie kept up his dialogue with Gambetta, and even invited the scruffy republican into the chic homes of his royalist friends. In March 1881, the two men met for lunch chez the Marquis de Breteuil, a royalist MP, who gave an account of the meeting in which he said that Gambetta had a ‘heavy, vulgar walk’ and seemed to ‘spread himself across the elegant floor of our living room like an oil stain on a piece of silk’. (Not snobbish at all, then.) This time, the talk was again of the need for continued rapprochement with Britain, although Bertie’s main contribution to the conversation seems to have been a return to his old, superficial concerns – he told Gambetta that France ought to get rid of its ambassador to London because he was ‘living with his cook’.

  But it was in October 1882, just two months before Gambetta’s premature death at the age of forty-four,4 that the Prince and the Parisian had their most famous and most affectionate meeting. The former British republican Sir Charles Dilke was now Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs and on excellent terms with Bertie, and he set up a lunch at a restaurant called the Moulin Rouge on the boulevard at Chaussée d’Antin – not the famous cabaret of the same name. The lunch went well, and Bertie decided that he would like Gambetta to meet one of his closest but most controversial friends, the royalist soldier Gaston de Gallifet, who was still known in Paris as the ‘assassin’ of the Communards. So Bertie invited Gambetta to the Café Anglais, where Gallifet would be dining.