The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder

by Andrew Rose

  The Breteuils’ Paris residence was a recent confection in classical style, its ravissant first floor salon, decorated with the finest eighteenth-century carved boiseries, furniture and paintings, brought in from some of the many other magnificent properties belonging to the family.13 The Prince and his tutor were shown to their apartment on the ground floor of the building, which the Prince came to love deeply, considering it far superior to his accommodation in England.

  At first, the young prince seemed gauche to his sophisticated hosts, surprised when asked to take Lita’s arm when going in to dinner, and he spoke French awkwardly, though declaring firmly that English must not be spoken during his stay. The Marquis’s sons, François and Jacques de Breteuil, did their best to make the Prince feel at ease in this unfamiliar atmosphere. François, known as the ‘Comte de Breteuil’, was two years older than the Prince, and an aspiring composer, a leaning that his father strongly disapproved of, regarding it as an unsuitable occupation for a young aristocrat. The Prince, whose interest in the arts would always be limited, magnanimously overlooked so glaring a fault: ‘Even the eldest who likes music is very nice,’ he wrote in his diary.14 Just five years later, François de Breteuil was to play a very significant role in the Prince’s love life by introducing him to Marguerite Alibert, who would become his mistress, but in 1912 the Prince was probably closer to Jacques, the younger brother, who was the same age, fun to be with, and who liked to ride and play tennis and golf.

  Despite a rough-house naval education, including considerable periods at sea that should have been character-forming experiences, the Prince was physically and emotionally a late developer. Today he would be thought of as something of a ‘nerd’. Although he was taken to the theatre, to the opera, and to variety shows in Paris, he took only a lukewarm interest and liked to be in bed by 10.30 p.m., rising distressingly early the following morning. The Prince was capable of exhibiting a shy charm in company, but his social skills were still comparatively weak. To the Breteuil family, he must have seemed an idiosyncratic, even prudish, young man. He took little interest in food, almost a capital offence in his host country, and failed to sparkle at the family’s weekly lunch parties in Paris, attended by ‘statesmen, artists, writers and financiers’.15 Although the Prince was evidently keen on sports and the racecourse, with a developing taste for adventure, he was unenthusiastic about more formal social life, took little interest in the opposite sex, and – all in all – seems to have resembled a young Mr Pooter in Paris.

  In the countryside some 30 miles south-west of Paris stood the mighty Château de Breteuil, dating from the early 1600s. Here, the Prince was accommodated in a pretty, freestanding pavilion, whimsically named ‘Chester Cottage’ in his honour. The Marquis improved access to the first floor bedroom by installing a fine spiral staircase in mahogany and his guest could reach the main body of the house, in wet weather or simply to avoid observation, by a tunnel, lined with white glazed tiles, appropriately dubbed the ‘Metro’.

  The Prince’s visit was described as having ‘no political implication’,16 but both England and France, fearful of the growing power of Imperial Germany, were eager to underline the 1904 entente cordiale. The 1912 visit, private though it was supposed to be, served to emphasise the newly forged relationship between the two countries. Le Figaro heartily welcomed the young Prince, who ‘had recently established himself in Paris at the wish of his august father, King George V’.17 As The Times reported casually, it seemed ‘only natural if he were to call on the President’.18 A supposedly impromptu visit to Monsieur and Madame Fallières at the Élysée Palace took place within a day of the Prince’s arrival, the young visitor carefully shepherded by the British Ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie (pronounced ‘Bar-Tee’).

  Although the Prince’s general education had been patchy, the King was very keen that his eldest son should learn to speak fluently both French and German. Early attempts to interest the Prince in French had not been successful. His French governess insisted on the language being spoken at mealtimes, but the boy had decided that French was ‘effeminate’ and would deliberately mispronounce items when presented with a menu. According to his official biographer, the Prince’s dislike of the language and reluctance to speak it ‘persisted even after he had lived in France for many years’.19 He showed a greater aptitude for learning German, the language of large numbers of close relatives in the Kaiserreich.

  But now in France, his new French tutor was well qualified for the task in hand. Maurice Escoffier (no relation of the famous chef), a tall, heavily built man with a full beard, widely regarded as having a brilliant mind, was librarian and lecturer at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. Escoffier took his young charge on an extensive sightseeing tour of Paris, drily commenting, after the Prince had been awarded the Legion d’Honneur, that – along with death – the medal was the only thing a Frenchman could never hope to avoid.20

  The diminutive Prince, resembling Gulliver in Brobdingnag in the company of his two far bigger and taller companions, clambered around castles and explored churches all over la France profonde. Despite the ‘unofficial’ label of the visit, the Prince spent an enjoyable few days with the French fleet, cruising in the Mediterranean. In contrast to his almost old-maidish attitude to late nights, romance, strong drink and rich food, a latent sense of adventure took him on a descent in a French submarine, a risky venture at a time of primitive undersea technology. Two French submarines had been lost, with all hands, earlier that year.

  The Prince returned to London briefly to celebrate his 18th birthday on 23 June 1912. Although 21 was the age of majority for many purposes in England, reaching the age of 18 meant that there was now no need for a regency in the event of his father’s death or incapacity. Another milestone would have less positive consequences. The King, a smoker himself, had refused his eldest son permission to smoke until he became 18, marking the event by the gift of a platinum cigarette case. (The Prince wrote to thank the Marquis de Breteuil for a complementary present, ‘la charmante boïte à allumettes’ (the charming box of matches), surely a much more costly item than a simple matchbox.)21 In due course, the King’s gift would be mislaid in very embarrassing circumstances in Paris and, later again, the Prince’s persistent smoking habit would cost him his life.

  Probably encouraged by the Breteuil boys, the Prince learned to drive, taking an early delight in speeding along newly macadamed roads ‘to the terror of Escoffier, who, beard flying, clung by his eyelids to the back seat’. The Prince was well liked by the staff at the Château and his departure at the end of August was to be quite an emotional occasion. ‘He seemed as sorry to be leaving us as we were to see him go,’ wrote the kindly Marquis, recalling sadness in the Prince’s face at a solemn family lunch, which lacked the usual cheerful buzz of conversation. In Paris, the Breteuil car stopped briefly at 2 rue Rude, allowing the Prince to take a last look at his much-loved apartment. After farewells at the Gare du Nord from the Marquis and his younger son, Jacques, the Prince and his tutor journeyed to Amiens, where the Prince was keen to explore the great cathedral.22

  In October 1912, the Prince went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, a stay that lasted for nearly two years. His lack of education and modest intelligence spared him the trial of ‘Smalls’, as the college entrance examination was then picturesquely known. Never much interested in books, the Prince reluctantly received instruction in such heavyweight subjects as political economy, history and constitutional law, as well as further instruction in German and French. Emerging from his chrysalis, he continued to nurture a dandified manner already apparent during his visit to France and soon adopted modern fashions, such as flannel trousers (with turn-ups, the latest idea, detested by his father), sports jackets, and soft-collared shirts.

  The following month, he showed his power to charm in a letter to the Marquis de Breteuil, who was planning to visit Oxford with his wife, Lita. ‘Ce serait un grand plaisir pour moi de vous montrer le collège’ (‘It woul
d be a great pleasure for me to show you the college’), wrote the Prince, hoping that they would take lunch in his rooms, ‘si vous ne craignez pas un déjeuner étudiant!’ (‘if you’re not afraid of a student lunch!’).23

  Unlike many undergraduates, the Prince did not have companions from schooldays to help accustom him to university life. Although often seeming ill-at-ease in company (a nervous habit of fingering his tie remained with him throughout his life), he became quietly popular, ‘clean-looking and jolly, with no side at all’ in the recollection of one contemporary student.24 Initially, he fought shy of some of the grander personalities, the sons of peers and knights of the shires, fresh from the forcing-houses of Eton, Harrow or Winchester. His choice of friends was modest. One Scottish graduate, rather older than the run of Oxford students, thought the Prince ‘not a bad chap’.25 Another contemporary also found him likeable, ‘smaller and more Teutonic in appearance than he had expected, a straw-blond very slight figure in a navy-blue serge suit’.26

  Although accommodated in college, the Prince had – unusually for those days – a bathroom, albeit primitively equipped. To his irritation, he was still being supervised and escorted around Oxford by the ‘melancholy and inefficient’ Henry Hansell, a pairing that provoked no little amusement. The oddly-matched couple soon earned the nicknames ‘Hansel and Gretel’.27

  Happily for the Prince, he soon had a decidedly non-intellectual equerry, Major William Cadogan, much more his man. Together they rode, hunted and played polo. Other recreational activities included football and golf, beagling twice a week, and cross-country runs, alongside the usual student experiences of making a good deal of noise, getting drunk (often on ‘black-strap’ port, supposedly containing rum and molasses) and falling over. He recalled how Gunstone, the college steward, entertained him and other undergraduates with conjuring tricks and off-colour stories after dinner in the hall on Sunday nights.The Prince drove his first car, a grey Daimler, and learned to play the bagpipes, also joining the OTC (Officers’ Training Corps), where he target shot, took part in night manoeuvres and went up in an airship.

  Among all these diversions, however, there is no record of any romantic affair. The Prince firmly remained a he-virgin, with no obvious interest in female company. ‘If only he would bolt with a ballet-girl, say for twenty-four hours!’ Lord Crawford wrote despairingly in his diary.28

  In the spring vacation of 1913, the Prince (accompanied by Major Cadogan and valet Finch) visited Germany for the first time, staying with ‘Onkel Willie’ and ‘Tante Charlotte’, the King and Queen of Württemberg, in the royal palace at Stuttgart. On 5 April, he wrote to the Marquis de Breteuil, showing the depth of his affection for his French hosts in an unusual request, made at quite short notice. ‘… j’ai une petitite demande à vous faire’ (‘I have a little request to make of you’), wrote the Prince, explaining that he had a mind to spend a short time in Paris on his way home after leaving Stuttgart ‘… et j’ose vous demander si je pourrais passer un ou deux nuits chez vous à Rue Rude si cela ne vous incommode pas trop’ (‘and I dare ask you whether I might be able to spend one or two nights with you at Rue Rude if that would not inconvenience you too much’). He would be delighted to see the family again and could get to Paris on 15 April, but ‘naturellement ma visite sera absolument inofficiel ’ (‘naturally my visit would be absolutely unofficial’) and incognito. Only Major Cadogan, whom the Breteuils had met at Oxford the previous November, would be with him (plus, of course, the ubiquitous Finch and the Major’s own valet).29

  In the event, King George recalled his eldest son to London a day earlier than planned and the Prince regretted that he could spend only one night at the Breteuil town house. Nevertheless, the simple act of cadging a bed from friends illustrates the Prince’s growing taste for informality, as well as a need for support and affection, elements that were in short supply from his parents. He told the Marquis how, in awful weather, he had had to get up at 3 a.m. to hunt the ‘capercailzie’ (Auerhahn in German). The method of getting close to the birds was assez bizarre (quite bizarre), as they could only be detected by their croaking just before dawn.30

  During his four-month stay, the heir to the throne of the most powerful country in the world had come to feel at ease in France; this youth with ‘a dreamy weltschmerz look’31 enjoyed the relaxed company of an amiable aristocratic French family – so different in manner from the stiff and starchy folks back home in Windsor …

  2

  ‘Oh for the End of this Fucking War!!’

  During a visit to Germany in 1913, the Prince met Godfrey Thomas, then aged 24 and attached to the British Embassy in Berlin. Thomas, later to become the Prince’s Private Secretary, introduced the 19-year-old Prince to nightclubs and to the city’s Palais de Danse, ‘frequented by very doubtful women’, as recorded by the Prince, who ‘danced a good deal’ in an atmosphere happily ‘devoid of all coarseness and vulgarity’.32

  In late January 1914, the Prince vividly expressed his distaste for university life at Oxford in a letter to a friend from Dartmouth days. ‘I have just returned to this hole for the Easter term,’ he complained, ‘which does’nt [sic] promise to be less dull than the previous ones I have spent here!!’ Aware of the prospect of a European war, the Prince mooted opportunities for military service. Noting the recent ‘A7’ submarine disaster, the Prince wrote, ‘I dont [sic] suppose that decreases the competition for submarines … I dont [sic] know whether I should care for the job; I think I would rather join the flying corps.’33

  With the advent of war in August 1914, other considerations came into play and, after consulting the King, the Prince was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. Even though he stood nearly half a foot shorter than the regulation height of 6 feet, he was proud to have been an officer of the senior British regiment of the line. ‘Once a Grenadier,’ he would later write, ‘always a Grenadier!!’34 Like thousands of other young men, the Prince was keen to ‘do his bit’ and it was not his fault that he would spend the war behind the lines in France, not seeing active service because of his position as heir to the throne. For the British authorities, the risk was not that he might be killed, but that he might be captured and used as a negotiating pawn by the enemy. Whatever may have been his moral shortcomings, the Prince cannot be accused of physical cowardice. To friends and family, he constantly complained about being kept out of action on the Western Front.

  At the outbreak of war, one of the King’s closest advisers was Reginald Brett, Lord Esher. Born in 1852, Esher had served as courtier successively to Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V, and it was natural that he should seek to advise the young Prince of Wales. Descended from a ‘county’ family, whose fortunes had been boosted by a distinguished Victorian judge, Reginald (‘Regy’) Brett was educated at Eton – where he adored the hothouse atmosphere – and Trinity College, Cambridge. With considerable intellectual ability, he was a shrewd judge of character, ‘intelligent, able and arrogant … with a gift for friendship’.35

  Although married, with two sons and two daughters, Esher also had a weakness for the company of attractive young men. Although his attentions seem to have been platonic, he expressed his affections in highly charged language, as when he described the Prince as ‘the sweetest thing in uniform in all the armies’.36 Esher’s diaries and letters suggest a slightly prurient interest in the Prince’s private life, too. Never wholly at ease with Esher, the Prince had written, as early as 1912, ‘That man has a finger in every pie and one cannot trust him.’37 The ambivalent relationship between Prince and courtier endured until the latter’s death in 1930. The Prince wrote consolingly to Esher’s daughter, ‘We have lost a very good & kind friend which Lord Esher has been to me for many years now…’38 – but his private view of Esher was dismissive, regarding him as ‘a queer old bird’.39

  The Prince wrote to Esher in late November 1914 (shortly after his equerry, Major Cadogan, had been killed in action), ‘I long to be serving with my
reg[imen]t & going thro the campaign in a proper way. I hate leading this comfortable & luxurious life when all my friends are getting hell in the trenches.’40 It was a huge disappointment that his posting to France should be as a staff officer, initially serving under Sir John French, the first Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (or ‘B.E.F.’).

  The Prince was acutely embarrassed at being accommodated in a series of luxurious chateaux, with excellent provisions, including fine wine, champagne and cigars. In a reply to one of Esher’s gossipy letters, he expressed his feelings trenchantly, ‘I wish I was serving with 1 of the 2 batt[alions]s of Grenadiers out here instead of sitting here so far from everything…’ Less reliably, however, the Prince claimed to be a keeper of confidences: ‘I realise that all this information is secret & should you be kind enough to send me any papers at any time, they will of course be quite safe.’41 Despite this assurance, the Prince’s frustration with being kept behind the lines may have been the spur to serious indiscretion.

  Jacques de Breteuil, fluent in English, had been appointed a military interpreter attached to the British forces in France. The wartime interpreter’s life was vividly described by André Maurois in The Silence of Colonel Bramble, an elegant dissection of the differences between two cultures. In the book, a British army major claims that the French overestimate intelligence, declaring that ‘sport has … saved us from intellectual culture … We don’t go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy’.42

  In the early part of the war, the Prince wrote several letters to Jacques, initially from Sir John French’s GHQ (General Headquarters) at St Omer. One early letter, dating from October 1914, bears the legend Passed by Censor, but correspondence after this date, sent ‘OHMS’ and bearing the Prince’s seal on the back of each envelope, is not so endorsed.43 In May 1915, the Prince was transferred to the HQ of 1st Army Corps near Béthune, about 7 miles behind the front line. Subsequent correspondence seems to have been sent privately, using a King’s Messenger (usually retired army officers, employed to convey sensitive official documentation). This practice became a favourite device and, later in the war, the Prince would use King’s Messengers to carry intimate letters to both his French and English mistresses.