Edward VII: The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  Extravagantly generous with her money, handing out cheques and cash to anyone who seemed in need of help, or pressing a pair of gold cuff-links into the hand of an unhappy-looking footman, she was not in the least discriminating, giving her nieces presents which were nearly always ‘inappropriate’. Often thoughtless, sometimes obstinate and always unpredictable, she could also be distressingly inconsiderate, particularly to her maids of honour, most of whom had cause to feel at some time during their service that the Princess paid little heed to their own welfare, and one of whom was seen to receive a sharp blow from her mistress’s long, steel umbrella for some offence during a drive in an open carriage. Utterly unimaginative, she was also in no sense clever, although her deafness, which grew progressively worse after her illness, occasionally made her seem more stupid and less interesting than she really was, especially when she attempted to conceal it by a continuous stream of talk which allowed of no comment or reply. Her deafness also prevented her from enjoying many of those social activities in which, in company with her husband, she had formerly delighted. After the onset of middle age, they spent more and more time apart.

  She never became the least bitter, though, and never displayed any jealousy she may have felt when her husband, who, in the later years of their marriage, treated her always with the greatest courtesy and respect, made it obvious to the world that he preferred the company of ‘his other ladies’ to that of his wife. She sometimes referred to them disparagingly. The lovely American debutante, Miss Chamberlayne — with whom Edward Hamilton, in the summer of 1884, saw the Prince ‘occupying himself entirely’ at a party at Mrs Allsopp’s — she nicknamed ‘Chamberpots’. But she was always perfectly polite to her when she met her. And when her husband, having finished flirting with ‘Chamberpots’, embarked upon a much more serious affair with Mrs Edward Langtry, the Princess sensibly accepted the situation and raised no objection to his new inamorata’s being invited to Marlborough House.

  The Prince had first met Lillie Langtry on 24 May 1877 while the Princess was in Greece staying with her brother and convalescing after an illness. The meeting took place at a small supper party given especially for the purpose by the Arctic explorer, Captain Sir Allen Young, an unmarried friend of the Prince who had a house in Stratford Place. The Prince was immediately captivated by the tall, graceful, glowingly voluptuous woman who had recently established herself as one of the most celebrated and sought-after beauties in London. The daughter of the Revd William Le Breton, Dean of Jersey, she had been married three years before, at the age of twenty-one, to Edward Langtry, a widower of twenty-six whose family had made money as shipowners in Belfast and whose yacht, his bride later confessed, interested her more than its owner. Edward Langtry was, indeed, a rather nondescript character, kind and amiable but indecisive and suggestible, the victim of moods of deep despondency — no match, in their frequent differences, for his wilful and determined wife. Persuaded to move to London he set up house in Eaton Place where, though he had sold his yacht, his income was insufficient for the kind of life his wife proposed to lead. He was like a fish out of water, Mrs Langtry said; and consoled himself by drinking while she set about making their entry into society.

  She experienced no difficulty in doing so. Helped by Lord Ranelagh, whom she had met occasionally in Jersey, where he had a house, the Langtrys were soon introduced into the kind of drawing-rooms where she wished to be seen and where her beauty, her confident bearing and her deliciously proportioned body could not fail to be admired. Lord Randolph Churchill met her at Lord Wharncliffe’s and told his wife, ‘took in to dinner a Mrs Langtry, a most beautiful creature, quite unknown, very poor, and they say has but one black dress’.

  Within a few months Mrs Langtry was quite unknown no longer. She was painted by Millais and Edward Poynter, by Whistler and Edward Burne-Jones, one of whose portraits of her was bought by the young Arthur Balfour. Photographs of her were to be seen everywhere. And, once her intimate friendship with the Prince of Wales became common knowledge, crowds gathered to stare at her whenever she went shopping or rode in the park on a horse which had been given to her by another admirer, Moreton Frewen. ‘It became risky for me to indulge in a walk,’ she recalled with pride. ‘People ran after me in droves, staring me out of countenance and even lifting my sunshade to satisfy their curiosity.’ The young Margot Tennant saw ‘great and conventional ladies like old Lady Cadogan and others standing on iron chairs in the park to see Mrs Langtry walk past’.

  The Prince took no trouble to disguise his love for her. He let it be known that he would like her invited to certain country houses where he was going for the week-end; he took her to Paris where he was reported to have kissed her on the dance floor at Maxim’s; he was often to be seen with her at Ascot; he arranged for both her and her husband to be presented to the Queen. She became, in fact, almost maîtresse en titre; and felt quite secure in that position even when Sarah Bernhardt, with whom the Prince often dined in Paris, came to London in 1879 and was invited to Marlborough House. ‘London has gone mad over the principal actress in the Comédie Française who is here, Sarah Bernhardt — a woman of notorious, shameless character,’ wrote Lady Frederick Cavendish disapprovingly in her diary. ‘Not content with being run after on the stage, this woman is asked into people’s houses to act, and even to luncheon and dinner; and all the world goes. It is an outrageous scandal!’

  The Prince himself once arranged for a supper to be given for her by the Duc d’Aumfile ‘at which all the other ladies present … had been invited at [his] request.’ But it was ‘one thing to get them to go,’ observed Charles Dilke, one of the male guests, ‘and another thing to get them to talk when they were there; and the result was that, as they would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d’Aumfile was deaf and disinclined to make a conversation on his own account, nobody talked at all …’

  Other evenings arranged by the Prince for Sarah Bernhardt were, however, more entertaining than this. And after one summons to Marlborough House she sent a note to the manager of her company: ‘I’ve just come back from the P. of W. It is twenty past one … The P. has kept me since eleven.’

  When asked what exactly was the relationship between the Prince and Sarah Bernhardt, her granddaughter replied, ‘They were the best of friends.’ Others supposed them to be occasionally lovers as well. But, in any case, Mrs Langtry displayed no jealousy and thus retained his fond affection, so that when her alleged affairs with other men, the birth of a daughter (fathered by Prince Louis of Battenberg), rumours of her impending involvement in what the scandalous weekly magazine, Town Talk, referred to as ‘about the warmest divorce case’ ever likely to come before a judge, all contributed to Mrs Langtry’s name being crossed off their invitation lists by many hostesses, the Prince did his best to save her from total ostracism.

  Gladstone was induced to visit her, much to the distress of his secretary, who was already deeply concerned by his habit of walking the streets at night and talking to prostitutes. Mrs Langtry ‘is evidently trying to make social capital out of the acquaintance,’ Edward Hamilton wrote in his diary after Gladstone had presented her with a copy of his ‘pet book’, Sister Dora. ‘Most disagreeable things with all kinds of exaggerations are being said. I took the occasion of putting in a word [as Rosebery also did] and cautioning him against the wiles of the woman whose reputation is in such bad odour that, despite all the endeavours of H.R.H., nobody will receive her in their houses.’ But Gladstone paid no attention. He told Mrs Langtry that she might write to him, enclosing her letters in double envelopes which, as Hamilton said, secured them from the ‘rude hands’ of his staff; and she made much use of this privilege.

  She also made much use of the Prince’s generous support when in 1881 she decided to go on the stage, appearing with a professional company at the Haymarket Theatre in She Stoops to Conquer. The Prince attended that performance, and praised her part in it to the actor-manager, Squire Bancroft, who
agreed to let her play a leading role in a new play which he was putting on the next month. The Prince went to see this play three times, persuaded all his friends to go to see it as well, and was largely responsible for its success. Thus launched on a profitable stage career, Lillie Langtry saw less of the Prince than she had done in the past; but they remained good friends, arranged meetings when she returned from her tours in America, and wrote each other friendly letters — those from him, like most of his other letters, containing little of interest, being addressed to ‘Ma Chere Amie’, ‘The Fair Lily’ or ‘My dear Mrs Langtry’ and being sent by the ordinary post.

  Towards the end of the 1890s, however, these letters became more and more infrequent, for the Prince had fallen in love with someone else. For a time he had adopted ‘a strange new line’, according to the Duke of Cambridge, of ‘taking to young girls and discarding the married women’. And Lady Geraldine Somerset, who said that he was ‘more or less in love’ with Mrs Francis Stonor’s daughter, Julie, also spoke of two other ‘reigning young ladies … Miss Tennant and Miss Duff’. But these girls, ‘H.R.H.’s virgin band’, as Edward Hamilton called them, seem to have meant little to him compared with the passion he developed, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, for the wife of Lord Brooke, heir to the cantankerous fourth Earl of Warwick.

  Frances Brooke, or Daisy as she came to be called, was twenty years younger than the Prince. Strikingly good looking, intelligent, fascinating and extremely rich, she was the owner of estates worth more than £20,000 a year which she had inherited from her grandfather, the last Viscount Maynard. There had been a suggestion that she should marry Prince Leopold; but this had come to nothing, either because her mother and step-father refused the match on her behalf, as she maintained in her first book of memoirs, or because, as she contradicted herself by claiming in the second, she had already fallen in love with Lord Brooke and Prince Leopold was in love with someone else. In any case, she had married Lord Brooke at Westminster Abbey in April 1881, in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Thereafter she had settled down happily to married life with her good-natured husband, first at Carlton Gardens in London and then at Easton Lodge, the Maynard family home in Essex where, pregnancies permitting, she indulged a passion for hunting, for driving a four-in-hand and for giving houseparties. After a time, however, such pleasures proved insufficient for her; and, her husband, ‘good old Brookie’, being a complaisant man — who remained always devoted to his erring wife but confessed that he found ‘a good day’s fishing or shooting second in point of pleasure to nothing on earth’ — she began to seek excitement elsewhere.

  She met the Prince of Wales at a ball in 1883. But at that time, though he asked her to dance and spent a few minutes talking to her in a corridor, he seemed much more interested in Lady Randolph Churchill. Not long afterwards, however, Lady Brooke found a lover in the Prince’s friend, Lord Charles Beresford, brother of the manager of the Prince’s stud, Lord Marcus Beresford, and a notorious adulterer who claimed, as one of numerous escapades, to have tip-toed into a dark room in a country house, and to have leaped joyfully into what he believed to be some obliging lady’s bed, only to find himself in the protesting arms of the Bishop of Chester. Beresford’s was not a kindly nature. He confessed that he enjoyed making women cry, because it was ‘such fun to hear their stays creak’. And he made no secret of the fact that he did not regard very highly the allurements of his wife, who was ten years older than he was and whose elaborate make-up included not only rouge and false hair but also false eyebrows one of which, mistaken for a butterfly, once came off in the hand of a child into whose pram she was foolhardy enough to poke her painted face.

  Lady Charles’s mettlesome husband and Lady Brooke fell passionately in love. Indeed, there was talk of elopement and divorce. But such steps, which would have placed the lovers beyond the pale of society, were fortunately never taken. For Lord Charles discovered that Lady Brooke ‘was not content with his attentions alone’; while Lady Brooke found out that Lord Charles’s wife was pregnant, and — the morals of Lady Charles Beresford being beyond reproach — there could be no doubt that the father was the husband.

  Enraged by this evidence that her lover had not abandoned his wife’s bed, Lady Brooke wrote him a letter of furious reproach which arrived at Lord Charles’s house while he was abroad. His wife, who said that she had been asked to open all his correspondence during his absence, read it with horror. In it, Lady Brooke stated that he must leave home immediately and join her on the Riviera; that one of her children was his; that he had no right to beget a child by his wife, ‘and more to that effect’. Other people, who read the letter later, agreed that its contents were utterly shocking; and that, as Lord Marcus Beresford commented, it ‘ought never to have seen the light of day’.

  When Lady Brooke heard that it had found its way into the hands of Lady Charles and thence into those of George Lewis — a solicitor said to know more about the private lives of the aristocracy than any other man in London — she was inclined to agree with Lord Marcus’s verdict. Distressed by what she had done, she turned to the Prince of Wales, trusting that his influence and hatred of scandal would enable her to extricate herself from her appalling predicament.

  Since that ball in 1883, when he had been preoccupied with Lady Randolph Churchill, the Prince had entertained the Brookes at Sandringham and had stayed with them once or twice at Easton Lodge. He had been attracted to Lady Brooke, and now responded readily to her call, agreeing to see her in private at Marlborough House. ‘He was more than kind,’ she later wrote of the subsequent interview, ‘and suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand. I knew I had won, so I asked him to tea.’

  Losing no time in his eagerness to help her, the Prince of Wales, at two o’clock that morning, went to see George Lewis, who was persuaded to show him the letter. The Prince, who thought it the ‘most shocking’ one he had ever read, afterwards tried to persuade Lady Charles to have it handed over to him so that it could be destroyed. Lady Charles declined to hand it over. Instead, she instructed Lewis to inform Lady Brooke that if she kept away from London that season the letter would be given back to her. Lady Brooke refused to consider such a solution, so the Prince went to Lady Charles a second time and ‘was anything but conciliatory in tone’. He ‘even hinted,’ so Lady Charles claimed, ‘that if I did not give him up the letter, my position in society!! and Lord Charles’s would become injured!!’

  Whether or not the Prince did, in fact, make such a threat, he certainly made it clear to society that he was now the close, trusted and devoted friend of Lady Brooke. He saw to it that she and her husband were invited to the same houses as himself. And according to the by no means reliable recollections of his new mistress, ‘when that sign of the Prince’s support didn’t stop the angry little cat, the Prince checked her in another way. He simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it and wrote to the hostess that he thought it would be better for me not to meet the angry woman till she had cooled off and become reasonable.’ Lord Charles, who had himself been trying to have the letter destroyed, was quite as angry with the Prince as was his wife. At the beginning of January he went to see him, warned him of the consequences of taking any further action against Lady Charles, with whom he was now reluctantly reconciled, and, as everyone who knew him would have expected, lost his temper. It seems that he furiously pushed the man who had taken over his former mistress against a sofa into which the Prince fell, murmuring, ‘Really, Lord Charles, you forget yourself.’

  Relieved as he must have been that, immediately after this painful scene, Lord Charles left England to go to sea again in the armoured cruiser Undaunted, the Prince’s peace of mind was not restored. For another and even more disquieting problem had yet to be resolved.

  In September the year before, the Prince had gone to Yorkshire for Doncaster races; but instead of staying as usual at Brantingham Thorpe with Christopher Sykes, who could no longer afford to ent
ertain him there, he went to Tranby Croft, the country house of Arthur Wilson, a rich shipowner. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Gordon Cumming, a baronet in the Scots Guards who enjoyed a private income of £80,000 a year, was also of the party. After dinner the first evening, while several of the guests, including the Prince, were playing baccarat, two of them suspected Sir William of cheating, a suspicion which had been entertained in various other houses in the past. The next night he was watched by other guests, who confirmed that he was, indeed, manipulating his counters dishonestly. Sir William was confronted with their accusation; and on the understanding that all those who knew of his conduct would ‘preserve silence’, he was asked to sign a document agreeing never to play cards again so long as he lived. Sir William, protesting his innocence, objected that to sign the document would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. But, under pressure, he did sign it; and the Prince added his signature to those of the nine other men who had played baccarat with him.

  The next day the Prince left Tranby Croft for York where, on the day after that, Lord and Lady Brooke, who had been prevented from joining the party by the death of Lady Brooke’s step-father, joined him at the railway station on their way to Abergeldie.

  It was widely supposed afterwards that the Prince told the Brookes in confidence what had happened at Tranby Croft; and that Lady Brooke, known to irreverent journalists as ‘the Babbling Brook’, could not keep the fascinating story to herself. She denied the charge; and George Lewis, now acting for the Prince’s friends, the Brookes, rather than for the out-of-favour Beresfords, was instructed to issue an announcement to the effect that proceedings would be taken against anyone repeating the lie. What could not be denied, however, was that someone had revealed the Tranby Croft secret; and, hearing that this was so, Gordon Cumming told his solicitors to bring an action against his accusers. In an effort to spare the Prince the ignominy of appearing in a civil court, attempts were made to have a military court inquire privately into the affair and thus render a civil action much more difficult to bring. But the Judge Advocate-General advised that this would be unfair to Sir William; and, to the prince’s dismay, the Adjutant-General, Sir Redvers Buller, accepted that advice.