by Andrew Rose
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Introduction
1. The French Connection
2. ‘Oh for the End of This Fucking War!!’
3. She-Devil
4. Royal Flush
5. Entr’acte
6. Honey and Roses
7. Munira
8. Stormy Weather
9. England 1923
10. Stompin’ at the Savoy
11. Femme Fatale
12. What the ‘Yellow Press’ Said
13. ‘Horrible Accusations’
14. Noble Rot
15. Conspiracy
16. The Go-Between
17. The Real Deal
18. The Prince over the Water
19. The ‘Great Defender’
20. Curtain Up
21. Centre Stage
22. A Frail Hand
23. Verdict
24. Show Trial with a Difference
25. ‘Mon Bébé!’
26. Endpapers
Photographs
Notes
Acknowledgements
Also by Andrew Rose
Copyright
For Raoul Laurent
A courtesan is a monarchist at heart
Honoré de Balzac, Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as ‘cruelty’
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Introduction
Years before the tragedy of Charles, Diana and Dodi, an earlier Prince of Wales was embroiled – along with a ‘Princess’ and an Egyptian multi-millionaire – in a scandal which has been superbly airbrushed from history …
This book describes the first significant physical and emotional obsession of the Prince, his liaison with the strikingly attractive Marguerite Alibert, better known in Paris as ‘Maggie Meller’. Their affair was, ‘a crazy physical attraction’.
I have long been fascinated by the inter-war years, that ‘long weekend’ from 1918 to 1939, delighting in the more bizarre manifestations of the social, cultural and political history of this febrile period. One of the most extraordinary episodes was the 1923 murder trial of Marguerite Alibert, then known as the ‘Princess Fahmy bey’.
Her trial was true Grand-Guignol. East meets West. Marguerite, a white woman ‘with a past’ on trial for her life. ‘Prince’ Ali Fahmy, bestial and sexually perverted Eastern husband. Enormous riches. Couture by Chanel, jewellery by Cartier, accessories by Van Cleef & Arpels and Louis Vuitton. The terrifying dénouement of a tempestuous marriage. Shots fired amid a violent thunderstorm. Sudden death in a luxurious London hotel. Triumphant acquittal against the weight of the evidence.
My short account of the trial, Scandal at the Savoy, is long out of print. Soon after publication, a mysterious-looking letter arrived, postmarked ‘Paris’, containing a well-merited rebuke from M Raoul Laurent, Marguerite’s grandson. Raoul told me, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to soulever la voile [lift the veil] on the case.
Intrigued and suitably contrite, I met Raoul in Paris. He indeed helped lift the veil on the story, telling me what he knew about the affair between Marguerite Alibert and the Prince of Wales during the Great War, about the Prince’s love letters to Marguerite. Raoul also gave me a copy of Marguerite’s 1934 memoir, which details her relationship with the Prince, an essential source previously overlooked by royal biographers.
I later made contact with Ali Fahmy’s great-niece, Dr Faïka B Croisier, then living in Geneva, who revealed how the Fahmy family (still hurt about the way Ali was demonised during the trial) had always suspected official interference in Marguerite’s favour.
I discovered that the Prince had torn out most of the passages in his wartime diary referring to ‘Maggy’. The prince’s spelling, not for the only time, was defective. Marguerite, demi-mondaine and top flight courtesan, was best known in Paris as ‘Maggie Meller’. My enquiries revealed that British official sources had clearly been ‘weeded’ at some stage. Important documents (such as a Metropolitan Police Special Branch report on Marguerite, hinting at ‘horrible accusations’) seemed to have been destroyed or simply removed from the archives.
Incontrovertible contemporary evidence of this conspiracy of silence is to be found in the private papers of Marquess Curzon, that ‘most superior person’, Foreign Secretary at the time of the trial and a man at the heart of government. I have also tracked down informative, previously unpublished, letters written by the Prince to his second mistress, Mrs Dudley Ward (known to him as ‘Fredie’). Unpublished correspondence with fellow Grenadier Guards officers during the Great War also turned out to be highly revealing. Often scabrous, these letters reveal much about the Prince’s lifestyle and his attitudes towards women, as well as providing important narrative background. I have also been allowed to see a collection of the Prince’s letters held privately in France, showing how the Prince expressed himself in French (the language in which he wrote to Marguerite) and just how indiscreet he could be about military secrets during the Great War.
The Woman Before Wallis does not claim to be a new biography of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor. It is, perhaps, better considered as a biographical study, whose principal characters are the Prince and Marguerite. The narrative tells of their respective backgrounds, their affair, and what happened afterwards in the context of that ill-starred wartime relationship.
For more detailed accounts of the Prince’s life and times, Edward VIII by Frances Donaldson, the informative unofficial biography first published in 1974, is an invaluable primary source. Philip Ziegler’s excellent official life, King Edward VIII (containing brief references to ‘Maggy’) remains the locus classicus on the subject.
The Prince’s relationship with Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, has been almost exhaustively documented. Among more interesting recent titles are Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor by Hugo Vickers and Anne Sebba’s That Woman. In contrast, this book concentrates on the woman before Wallis, telling the previously unknown story of Marguerite and her Prince.
The quest to find the truth about this royal affair has been a deeply personal – at times painful – journey. Years of research have been punctuated by false trails, dead ends and jealously-guarded source material. Some doors have (almost literally) been slammed in my face. I hope that further evidence about this extraordinary episode may come to light as a result of the publication of this book.
Since writing my first account of the trial, the volume of new evidence has changed my mind about two important elements of the story. Marguerite, as will be seen in the book, had a truly protean character. She could inspire loyalty and provoke intense dislike. She could be tender, but she could be very tough indeed.
I now believe that Marguerite ruthlessly exploited Ali Fahmy’s possibly ambiguous sexuality to her advantage, deliberately exaggerating and distorting rumours about this aspect of his character. I have accordingly altered my treatment of this issue.<
br />
The second re-appraisal is even more important. In my 1991 study of the trial, I had described the shooting as a crime passionnel. It was nothing of the kind. This was murder for gain. An execution. A perfect murder.
1
The French Connection
On April Fools’ Day 1912, a cross-Channel ferry put to sea in spite of a fierce north-westerly gale and squally snow showers. The dumpy, two-funnelled vessel (a far cry from the elegant lines of the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert) headed unsteadily out of Dover harbour towards the coast of France.
This workaday craft conveyed someone very much out of the ordinary run of travellers: His Royal Highness Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, and Lord of the Isles, 17-year-old heir apparent to the British Imperial Crown.
The Prince was making his first visit to France, a country in which he would live for more than half his adult life.
As the crowded boat yawed about, many of the passengers became seasick. The young Prince, an experienced sailor, had no intention of remaining below decks with the groaning throng, particularly as about ten or so press photographers had smuggled themselves on board, shadowing his every move. Demanding oilskins, the Prince ‘rattled up the swinging ladders as nimbly as a cat’, joining the ship’s captain on the bridge, where he stayed for the remainder of the voyage, seeming reluctant to come down when the ship docked at Calais, more than half an hour late.1
The Prince and his two companions, greeted by the British Consul-General, took a late lunch in a private room at the Hotel Terminus, before boarding a reserved First Class carriage, attached to the head of a train drawn by a steam engine massive by English standards and the pride of the Compagnie du Nord. A few years earlier, the Calais-Paris section has been described as ‘the least pleasant line in the country’ with engines ‘burning common coal which fills the … eyes with black dust’,2 but no such criticism is recorded of this journey. The driver made up time and the train pulled into the Paris Gare du Nord punctually at 6.45 p.m.
On the platform, in frock coat and silk hat, stood Henri Charles Joseph Tonnelier de Breteuil, 8th Marquis de Breteuil, now 64 and a close friend of the Prince’s grandfather, King Edward VII, who had died two years previously in May 1910. Alongside the Marquis stood the remarkable Louis Lépine, Paris Chief of Police since 1900, ‘the little man with the big stick’, a trenchant reformer who had introduced the study of forensic science and criminology to his metropolitan force way ahead of his London counterparts.
Lépine had also pioneered an attempt to control female prostitution in the city by regulating the enormous number of brothels, introducing a licensing system3 which created a distinction between maisons closes at the lower end of the market and the grander maisons de rendezvous, some of which were luxuriously appointed, catering for the richest and most demanding of clients, including industrialists, bankers, aristocrats – and princes of the blood.
The rest of the welcoming party at the Gare du Nord was rather less distinguished, consisting of an official of the railway company, a functionary from Normandy, and two representatives of the British Chamber of Trade.
In accordance with protocol, the first to step down from the special carriage was the tall, grey-moustached figure of Henry Hansell, an amiable non-entity, bachelor and former prep school master, generally regarded as an unimaginative and inadequate tutor to his royal charge. After a short pause (just long enough to heighten public expectation), a shy, slight, but noticeably elegant figure emerged, sporting a high-buttoned grey overcoat, grey suede gloves, black bowler hat and cane. The Prince’s comparatively quiet outfit emphasised what was supposed to be an incognito visit to France, modestly billed as ‘Earl of Chester’.4 Further back along the platform, the third member of the princely party, the Prince’s faithful valet, Frederick Finch, was busy superintending luggage and porters.
At a height of over 6 feet, Hansell towered over the Prince, who stood just 5' 7'' tall. Lépine might have mused on whether the Prince qualified for work in the Paris police force. It was Lépine’s idiosyncratic rule that no policeman under 5'9'' (1.75m) could serve in uniform and no one over the then average height of 5'7'' (1.70m) could become a plain clothes officer (in-betweeners had problems). The former had to be built to impress, the latter to be as unobtrusive as possible, and Lépine resolutely excluded anyone of singular appearance from undertaking detective work.5 On that basis, the Prince’s eye-catching good looks, slim figure and blond hair would perhaps have excluded him, although in due course he would demonstrate considerable observational skills, a sharp eye, and a good memory for detail.
When the Prince emerged, a cheer went up from the crowded station concourse, ‘press photographers and reporters surged about him … in a disconcerting glare of magnesium flashlight’,6 while the Marquis escorted the Prince and his tutor briskly through the Customs Hall to a side exit. Here stood a large and expensive motor-car, with enclosed rear compartment, equipped with a speaking tube for communication with the uniformed chauffeur, a footman sitting alongside him. Finch and baggage following by taxi, the Prince, his tutor and his host were driven through a snowbound Paris to the elegant Breteuil town house at 2 rue Rude, in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, a few steps from the Arc de Triomphe.
The stuffiness, the fussiness and the broad gamut of constraints imposed on the young Prince by his parents, King George and Queen Mary, are well known. ‘Buckingham Palace … unchanged. The same routine. A life made up of nothings … The King obstinate, the Queen unimaginative.’7 King George had seen the Prince off at Victoria, a separation that may have been something of a relief for the young man. At a dreary farewell tea the previous day at Marlborough House, the Prince had to cope with Queen Alexandra (his extremely deaf grandmother) and her querulous unmarried daughter, Princess Victoria, a woman the Prince would later castigate as ‘foul’ and an ‘old bitch’.8
Although the London Times claimed that ‘the Prince … has not yet appeared in society’,9 the Prince had made his formal debut the previous year at the Coronation, followed by the Garter ceremony at Windsor Castle, and – most notorious of all – his investiture as Prince of Wales, absurdly robed in an embarrassingly cod medieval extravaganza choreographed by the exceedingly ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. Official photographs, carefully doctored in an impression of soft focus, transformed the Prince from mere mortal into the company of those young, fair-haired, blue-eyed and very fey saints (so lovingly depicted in Ninian Comper’s stained glass windows, fashionable adornments of many contemporary Anglican churches).
Privately tutored, thrust into the uncongenial atmosphere of Osborne and Dartmouth Naval Colleges, it is little wonder that the Prince could seem withdrawn and ill at ease in company. ‘A kindly, simple-natured and modest boy, very anxious to do right, never putting himself forward or presuming on his rank,’ commented The Times. Yet there were signs, even in these early years, of a mulish obstinacy, even wilfulness of character. On his departure from Dartmouth in 1911, fellow cadets had gathered to give ‘the Sardine’ what was termed ‘a good send-off ’ in ‘a natural and well-meaning demonstration’.10 The Prince slipped away, allegedly ‘in a fit of shyness’ – or perhaps because he could not be bothered to attend the jamboree, confident in the knowledge that he would not be returning to an institution where he had been numbered with ‘an idle, lazy bunch of warts’,11 and constantly risked humiliating punishments. The ‘gong-rope’ was particularly dreaded. At night, before going to the wash-house, cadets had to undress, but the time allowed was inadequate. The last cadet through the door risked getting a resounding, painful thwack on the back from the ‘gong-rope’, a thick rope weighted with a solid glass globe.12
In joining the Breteuil household, the Prince discovered a very different world from the philistine atmosphere of George V’s co
urt. The Marquis moved in intellectual circles and was a friend of Proust, to the delight of that notorious snob and name-dropper. In Le Côté de Guermantes, Proust would write sympathetically of the ‘Marquis Hannibal de Breaute’, a man of erudition and wit, who interested himself in the livelier world beyond the French aristocracy. Bearing the same initials (HB) as Proust’s creation, Henri de Breteuil, although cultured, was just as at home in the Paris Jockey Club, fishing in Scotland, or shooting on his estates near the Pyrenees.
A young cavalry officer in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, he had been decorated for bravery, but – disgusted by the slaughter he had witnessed – embraced pacifism and resigned his commission. Serving as parliamentary deputy between 1873 and 1892, Henri believed that a constitutional monarchy on the British model, rather than the flawed constitution of the Third Republic, would bring stability to France. His friendship with the Prince’s grandfather began in the 1870s, with a shared passion for Paris, Maxim’s Restaurant, and the beauteous poules de luxe, such as Liane de Pougy and Agustina Otero Iglesias (‘La Belle Otero’), probably the most notorious courtesan of her time. Her studbook bristled with the intimate details of European royalty.
The Breteuil family had been closely connected with the French state for three centuries, with a pedigree including generals, government ministers, royal counsellors and the remarkable Marquise du Châtelet (1706–49), la sublime Émilie, a scientist whose dissertations on Newtonian theory had drawn the admiration of Voltaire. Henri de Breteuil’s maternal grandfather, the banker Achille Fould, had brought the family enormous wealth, enhanced by Henri’s advantageous marriage in 1892. ‘The American girl is to the fore again,’ noted the New York Times, when reporting Henri’s engagement to Marcellite (‘Lita’), daughter of William Garner, a leading manufacturer of cotton goods, who had died some years before in a yachting accident and whose fortune was estimated at some $20,000,000. In 1912, however, The Times with brutal English snobbery dismissed the beautiful Lita de Breteuil simply as ‘a Miss Garner of New York’.