Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  Photography, the new media rage, turned Lillie into one of the “P.B.’s”—professional beauties—whose photos were for sale in postcard form on nearly every London street corner. Now, everybody knew her name, including the most famous man in the kingdom, a renowned connoisseur of feminine beauty.

  Lillie met the bearded, slightly portly Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, in May 1877, at an intimate supper (ten guests only) hosted by their mutual friend, the dashing amateur arctic explorer Sir Allen Young. Bertie arrived late, flush from another engagement. An important one, Lillie assumed, “for some glittering orders and the blue ribbon of the Garter added to his regal appearance.”

  Lillie was standing by the fireplace, her long, Titian-red hair coiffed in her usual style, an unadorned coil at the nape of her neck. She was wearing the only gown she owned, a simple black dress with cream lace cuffs that had been sewn for her by a Jersey modiste. The black dress served double duty; she was in mourning for her favorite brother, Reggie, who had died in the winter of 1876 after a tragic riding accident.

  According to Lillie’s memoir, The Days I Knew, she hadn’t known the reason for the dinner party, unaware of the identity of the guest of honor. Suddenly there was a stir, followed by an expectant hush, a hurried exit of Sir Allen, then a slight commotion outside, and presently I heard a deep and cheery voice say: “I am afraid I am a little late.” Sir Allen murmured something courtier-like in reply, and the Prince of Wales, whose face had been previously unfamiliar to me except through photographs, appeared in the doorway of Stratford Place drawing-room.

  The twenty-three-year-old Lillie was so overwhelmed that although she was seated next to the prince, she could barely muster the guts to make conversation. But they’d made a conquest of each other. Soon Bertie was calling at the Langtrys’ Eaton Place flat. In Hyde Park, he rode with Lillie (who turned heads in her form-fitting habit) in full view of the public.

  Such outings made Mrs. Langtry even more of a public figure, and turned Mr. Langtry into a figure of fun. Society’s rigid (though wildly hypocritical) rules dictated that for propriety’s sake a husband had to accompany his wife when in mixed company.

  But it was soon common knowledge that the woman who had immediately impressed Bertie as “a beautiful hound set upon its feet” was the prince’s first official maîtresse en titre.

  Alexandra, the beautiful Danish-born Princess of Wales, seemed to like Lillie personally, and was always warm and gracious to her. Alix displayed a surprising generosity of spirit, even sending for the royal doctor to attend Mrs. Langtry at her home after she was taken ill during a ball at Marlborough House. Beautiful, slightly simple, and extremely deaf, Alix was adept at feigning ignorance. Or perhaps she had made peace with the fact that there was nothing she could do to stop Bertie’s philandering.

  Ned Langtry, however, had an Irish temper, and though he was a gentleman and not brought up to work (making him socially acceptable in the circle in which he now moved), he was also not raised to turn a blind eye to adultery. Mr. Langtry bitterly resented his wife’s unusual status—though the prince and Lillie were never seen alone together—as well as the toll it took on his ego, increasingly finding solace in the bottle. Ned was not above making scenes, once disrupting a house party at Lord Malmesbury’s estate when he snatched Lillie’s blotting paper from the escritoire and held it to a mirror, revealing the text of her rather indiscreet thank-you note to the Prince of Wales. The Langtrys’ row became the stuff of legend, with Lillie livid that his lordship’s servants had ignored their employer’s instructions and not burned the guests’ blotting paper every day.

  As a balm to Ned’s vanity, the prince gave him a pair of monogrammed cufflinks and arranged for him to be presented to the queen, which mollified him for a while.

  Lillie was presented at court some months later, resplendent in a low-cut ivory brocade gown with a nine-foot train that began at her shoulders. Her hair was dressed with three tall ostrich plumes that daringly mimicked the Prince of Wales’s crest. Unfortunately, she was presented third to last on an exceptionally hot afternoon, and both Lillie and Queen Victoria were debilitated by the time her turn came. Ordinarily, the queen didn’t remain for the entire three p.m. Drawing Room, leaving the late-afternoon presentations to her daughter-in-law, Princess Alexandra. Lillie, who was somewhat panicked about meeting her lover’s mum, had been counting on this changing of the guard, as Alexandra was already fond of her. But Victoria was anxious to see who her son was sleeping with, and endured the entire Drawing Room. When Lillie was finally presented to Her Majesty, “there was not even the flicker of a smile on her face, and she looked grave and tired.”

  Still, it was a huge deal to have been presented at court, though Lillie would later write that there was an awful lot of fuss and preparation for an interview that went by in an eye blink. But now Lillie was eligible to attend balls at Buckingham Palace, which naturally were the most glittering and glamorous events of the season. It’s hard to imagine today’s monarchy being so tolerant of such overt adulterers waltzing about their rooms and drinking their champagne. In fact, Queen Elizabeth refused to acknowledge Camilla Parker Bowles during Camilla’s lengthy extramarital affair with Prince Charles. But during the Edwardian era, adultery—which had become the norm among generations of men who had married for money—was far less of a scandal than divorce.

  Lillie’s sense of fun enchanted the thirty-six-year-old prince. He fell in love with her spirit as well as her remarkable outer beauty, and wanted the world to know it. He showered Lillie with jewelry, and when a society hostess finally persuaded her to ditch her black dress, claiming her husband had a horror of the color, Lillie’s wardrobe went from drab to resplendent—subsidized, as was the custom, by her royal paramour. The prince legendarily hated to see the same dress twice. Lillie admitted in her memoirs that their only quarrel came when she wore the same gown to two successive balls, not expecting Bertie to be at both of them.

  At one point during their three-year affair, Bertie bitterly complained, “I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship,” to which Lillie wittily riposted, “and you’ve spent enough in me to float one.”

  In 1877, the first year of their relationship, Bertie set her up in a little red-brick house in Bournemouth, where they resided like a couple of married bourgeoisie. From 1878 to 1880, Mrs. Langtry was the prince’s official mistress, and for the first two of those years they were surprisingly faithful to each other. In fact, Lillie wasn’t even sleeping with her husband.

  During their third year together, the prince whisked Lillie off to the Continent. There they enjoyed the delights of Vienna and Paris—where he openly kissed her on the dance floor at Maxim’s.

  But their commitment to mutual exclusivity was waning. The prince began to stray, dallying with the celebrated French actress Sarah Bernhardt and other women. Meanwhile, Lillie was enjoying an affair with the man who was said to be the great love of her life, her childhood friend Arthur Jones.

  The prince introduced her to his German cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, who had become a British national in order to realize his dream of serving in the Royal Navy. As Wales had privately predicted, throwing Lillie together with young Battenberg, dark and dashing, and closer to her age, had the expected conclusion. But soon the pair was wildly in love (which wasn’t in the script) and Lillie was pregnant (which really wasn’t in the script). As Lillie had been concurrently sleeping with Wales, Battenberg, and Arthur Jones, the hot potato of paternity was up for grabs. As it was, no one claimed responsibility beyond Bertie’s sending Lillie from Jersey to France during the final months of her pregnancy, where (unlike England) there was no law requiring that all births be recorded.

  On March 8, 1881, Lillie gave birth to a daughter she named Jeanne-Marie. At first, she pretended to be the girl’s aunt. When she finally revealed herself to be Jeanne-Marie’s mother, Lillie kept the identity of her papa a secret—in her view, protecting the girl from the taint of illegitimacy
by allowing Jeanne-Marie to assume that her father was Ned Langtry. Lillie believed Jeanne-Marie’s father to be Prince Louis—who during her pregnancy had conveniently received a new naval posting, sending him halfway across the world and out of Lillie’s life.

  Fully three years after her royal affair with the Prince of Wales began, the story went to press. Town Talk published reports of Lillie’s infidelities, which led not to a divorce proceeding but to a libel suit, resulting in the editor’s incarceration for eighteen months! Smart alecks quipped earnestly, “There was nothing between the Prince of Wales and Lillie Langtry; not even a sheet.”

  But the combination of an ugly trial and tabloid exposure was the final button on their love affair.

  As the prince’s mistress, Lillie had said that “my only purpose in life was to look nice and make myself agreeable.” But when her royal affair ended, she had to make a living. She took acting lessons and began to perform onstage, starting cautiously by appearing in charity events where her celebrity cachet, rather than her talent, was in the spotlight. Yet Lillie soon proved herself worthy of critical review. Step by step, getting her theatrical feet wet by performing in the provinces, she finally landed a contract with the Haymarket Theatre in London, where she made a brilliant success of it. Soon, her calendar was filled with international engagements. She toured America in a seventy-five-foot-long private railway car and invested her earnings in real estate and racehorses.

  It’s hard to miss the irony that as a royal mistress and obvious adulteress, Lillie was permitted to hobnob with high society and dance at Buckingham Palace, but as an actress, the same hostesses closed their doors to her. In fact, the palace had a rule prohibiting actors and tradesmen from darkening their gilded doorstep. But Lillie and Bertie, who encouraged his circle to receive her despite the stigma attached to theatricals, remained friends. When she performed in London, he never missed an opening night, frequently arriving with Princess Alexandra, and enjoying the after-theatre supper parties that Lillie hosted.

  She became an American citizen, and bought property in California, thereby establishing residency. In a California court she divorced Ned Langtry. Langtry remained so obsessed with her fame and beauty that he would ask rail porters to describe her appearance to him in detail. He received a quarterly allowance from Lillie until he died, a dazed and confused alcoholic, in a lunatic asylum. Lillie did not attend the funeral, but sent a wreath. The card read simply “In Remembrance—Lillie Langtry.”

  In 1899, the forty-six-year-old actress married Lord Hugo de Bathe, a twenty-nine-year-old playboy who spent Lillie’s money as fast as she could earn it. Lillie and her daughter remained estranged, a rift that widened when in 1902 one of Jeanne-Marie’s wedding guests told the bride that her father was really Prince Louis of Battenberg. By the way, this makes Jeanne-Marie the great-aunt of Prince Charles.

  On the death of his mother in 1901, Bertie became King Edward VII. During his decade-long reign he continued to enjoy extramarital affairs with impunity. At his coronation, three of his former official mistresses, including Lillie and Sarah Bernhardt, were seated in a special area, referred to by wags as “the King’s Loose Box.” And on May 20, 1910, Lillie was present at his funeral, at which Edward’s beloved wirehaired fox terrier trotted alongside the cortege, bearing a golden collar inscribed “My name is Caesar; I belong to the King.” In accordance with her late husband’s wishes, Alexandra gave the dog to Lillie.

  Lillie died at her home in Monaco in 1929, after a brief illness. She was seventy-five years old.

  EDWARD VII and Frances Evelyn “Daisy” Greville, Countess of Warwick 1861-1938

  Blond, blue-eyed, slim Daisy Greville was one of the “modern women” who were the rage of the age in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Both her father, Colonel Charles Maynard, and his father, the 3rd Viscount Maynard, died in 1865, so at the tender age of four, Daisy inherited their enormous wealth and property. Her position in society placed her on Queen Victoria’s short list for a royal bride for her youngest son, but it wasn’t Prince Leopold’s bed she wound up in. Daisy eventually ended up with Victoria’s eldest son.

  But first, she married—and for love. At the age of twenty, Daisy wed twenty-eight-year-old Lord Brooke, heir to the Earl of Warwick and Leopold’s aide-de-camp, at Westminster Abbey. Her future royal lover, the Prince of Wales, and his wife were honored guests at the lavish ceremony.

  “Brookie” adored her, but after Daisy did her duty by giving birth to a son and heir in 1882, she plunged headfirst into the whirlwind social life of the well heeled and well bred. She was a pleasure-loving thrill seeker, who once drove her motorcar three hundred miles nonstop from Easton Lodge to Land’s End just to admire the view from the craggy seacoast. She loved hunting and wild house parties, and drove a four-in-hand with masterful skill. In her form-fitting riding habit, her fashionably fringed hair peeking out from her stylish bowler, she was often seen cantering along Rotten Row in Hyde Park. And she raised her skirts and spread her legs to climb atop that newfangled contraption called the bicycle, inspiring the rollicking music hall song “Daisy, Daisy.”

  “Brookie” was usually complaisant when his sexually insatiable wife strayed from their bed. But in 1889, her three-year love affair with a dashing naval commander, Lord Charles Beresford, became a public scandal.

  Casting herself as “Beauty in Distress,” the distraught Daisy poured out her troubles to the graying, portly prince, twenty years her senior. “He was charmingly courteous to me and at length he told me that he hoped his friendship would make up in part, at least, for my sailor-lover’s loss. He was more than kind.” And then, as Daisy glanced up from her tear-stained lashes, “I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand.”

  Ultimately, Daisy emerged from the Beresford contretemps relatively unscathed, mostly because she had acquired a new trophy from the emotional debris: Prince Albert Edward. “He was a very perfect, gentle lover,” Daisy recalled. “He had manners and was very considerate, and from a woman’s point of view, that’s a great deal. Then he was remarkably constant and adored me exceedingly. I grew to like him very much. I think anybody would have been won by him.”

  Daisy was twenty-nine years old, extremely beautiful, and blazingly intelligent when she ensnared the heart of the Prince of Wales. Bertie fell head over heels in love with her. Her aristocratic background enabled her to fit in perfectly with his vibrant social circle, known as the Marlborough set. And yet, she could not seem to steer clear of scandal.

  In 1890, Daisy got the prince in hot water after leaking the details of an illegal baccarat game during a house party at which Bertie was present when Sir William Gordon-Cummings was caught cheating. After Bertie confided in Daisy, she blabbed about the whole affair to everyone she knew, earning her the nickname “the Babbling Brooke.” In what became one of the most celebrated trials of the late nineteenth century, Gordon-Cummings filed a libel suit against those who had accused him, one of whom was the Prince of Wales. England could talk of nothing else for weeks, focusing on Bertie’s pleasure-loving lifestyle and his unsuitability to become king.

  In 1891, the Lord Charles Beresford affair got a second wind after Lady Charles’s sister published a semifictional account of it, merely changing the name of Brooke to Rivers. Daisy’s reputation suffered tremendously, and Brookie briefly contemplated divorcing her, but the prince stood by his lover. The royal affair and the marriage weathered the storm.

  At Daisy’s estate, Easton Lodge, where Bertie was by now a regular visitor, the lovers would tryst in the pretty little summer house tucked away on the grounds. Daisy had a rail station built closer to her house so that the prince could more easily reach her on his private train. They cooed lovingly to each other in German and exchanged rings. Bertie, who had been married for twenty-eight years, referred to his new love as “my own adored Daisy wife,” closing his letters with “For ever yours, Your only love.”

  “He wrote me a letter twice or three times
a week, telling me everything that had happened to him. He expected me to write frequently, and if I didn’t he used to say I had hurt him,” Daisy admitted. And he never forgot special occasions, such as Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries, always sending cards and charming presents. One wonders what Queen Victoria might have thought when Bertie gave his mistress a ring that had been inscribed “To Bertie from his affectionate parents A. and V.R., July 9, 1860.”

  The affair was more than slightly lopsided. Daisy “like[d] Bertie very much” but had never loved him the way he adored her. After all, he was fiftyish, balding and portly, and reeked of cigars. She indiscreetly confided to a friend that the prince was rather “boresome as he sat on a sofa holding my hand and goggling at me.” What she loved was the élan her royal affair afforded her, the cachet of being maîtresse en titre.

  In 1893, Daisy became Countess of Warwick on the death of her father-in-law, inheriting Warwick Castle and an enormous fortune. Now, she entertained on an even grander scale; her house parties were renowned for the variety of pleasures on offer to her guests, both indoors and out. Her opulent wardrobe was the stuff of society columns.

  As time passed, Bertie grew less cautious about appearing with Daisy in public, squiring her to the finest restaurants, and even to church. Alix, who’d taken her husband’s affair with Lillie in stride, did not care at all for his new inamorata. Where Lillie had been so happy, even awed, to be included amid the upper crust at Marlborough House and Sandringham, and was always gracious and genuinely deferential to her hostess, Daisy was from that crowd and behaved with all the heedless entitlement of the aristocracy. And when Daisy became Bertie’s acknowledged maîtresse en titre, Alix refused to entertain her at either of their official residences. The Princess of Wales was hurt by her husband’s lack of discretion with Daisy, openly humiliated by Bertie’s insensitivity and by his mistress’s boldness. Lillie had behaved like a good friend in the royal presence, but Daisy—vain, outspoken, and eighteen years younger than Alix—left no one to wonder about the nature of her relationship with the prince.