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

by Andrew Rose

  ‘How I long to get home to England & my own little angel for I’ve got so much to talk to you about & to tell you about beloved one that I just cant [sic] write,’ he wrote coyly, adding an exquisitely tortuous passage, ‘tho its [sic] nothing serious; if only I could write it but I just cant [sic] as I’m so hopeless at expressing myself!! But it can wait sweetheart so dont [sic] worry; if it worried me I would try to write it but as it doesn’t (& I think I know when its [sic] a case of worrying!!) I wont [sic] try!!!!’206

  The Prince had funked telling Fredie the truth. Revelations about Marguerite would be deferred until he was back in England. Although he wrote several more letters before returning to London, he made no further mention of the problems with his Paris ‘pol’.

  The Prince, of course, was not without advice and support. In his immediate household, Joey Legh and ‘the Lord Claud’ were eminently men of the world and could call in reinforcements. The royal solicitors could liaise with French lawyers in the event of a demand for money. Similarly, Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police could ask the Paris securité for information about Marguerite’s character and background, facts duly noted in the renseignements generaux, secret files kept on those French citizens (whether convicted of criminal offences or not) who were deemed to be of interest. Marguerite, with her eblouissante notoriété (dazzling fame) and her circle of the rich and famous, was an obvious candidate for official attention.

  There was, in truth, a great deal for the Prince to worry about. He might have avoided scandal over the affair with the VADs earlier that year, but Marguerite’s furious reaction to his neglect of her posed a much greater threat. She was rich, she was determined, and she had influential friends in Paris, with access to the best lawyers. Marguerite could afford to wait.

  Shortly after the Armistice, the Prince returned to royal duties in London until the end of November and it appears that he took this opportunity to tell Fredie (something at least) about the long affair with his Paris ‘keep’. He affected a measure of denial about his difficulties with Marguerite and, for a while, his correspondence with Fredie made no mention of ‘those bloody letters’ and the looming threat to his reputation and credibility.

  A month after receiving Marguerite’s ‘regular stinker’, he allowed himself some cautious optimism. ‘I have’nt [sic] heard another word from “IT” in Paris sweetheart so that I’m hoping its [sic] all blown over & that I shant here [sic] any more; but si ça continue I have expert assistance to hand so I’m less worried than I was tho. Gud! what a fool your E has made of himself darling & he deserves any thing except that he was very young at the time & I dont [sic] think he’s exactly the first to be had like this!! Gud!! this is a sordid life belovèd one…’207

  If Marguerite had suddenly turned nasty, the Prince was responding in kind. As with Marion Coke (‘bitch’), Portia Stanley (‘clutches’), and other discarded favourites, he employed a crude disparagement. ‘Marguerite, mon bébé’, the young woman who had brought him so much ‘bliss’ in Paris and Deauville, who had written him ‘the most wonderful letters’ in response to his own foolish correspondence, was now reduced to no more than ‘IT’.

  As to the ‘expert assistance’ to hand, this may have included advice from the royal solicitors, but with the national interest at stake, Special Branch was the obvious source for more robust protection. Founded in 1883 as part of a drive to combat the activities of the Irish ‘Fenians’, Special Branch became an early intelligence network for the British government, though by 1918 some of its remit had passed to MI5 and MI6.

  During the interwar period, as will be seen, Special Branch provided a team of protection officers, who had the not always agreeable task of looking after the heir to the throne and keeping him out of trouble. Reports (sometimes with updates) were regularly filed on individuals considered to pose any sort of threat to the Prince and his reputation. The subjects included several women ‘stalkers’ and, during the tense days of 1935, a year before the Abdication, a supposed lover of Wallis Simpson.208

  For now, the very considerable risk posed by Marguerite to the good name of the Prince amply justified the attention of Special Branch and a report was duly compiled about her, probably in late 1918. Sir Basil Thomson, then head of Special Branch, spent time in Paris in December 1918 and during the following month, officially superintending preliminary arrangements for next year’s peace conference.209 (Thomson prided himself on his friendship with the Prince and dined privately with him later in 1919, clearly thrilled that the Prince, ‘a charming host’ who ‘knew exactly the moment for leaving the table’, had personally ‘followed me to the main door [of York House] to see me off ’.)210

  So, in those first days of peace, a month after the ‘regular stinker’, no mail for the Prince arrived addressed in Marguerite’s handwriting, postmarked from the 16th arrondissement. For the moment, all was quiet on the Western Front. A week after his reference to ‘IT’, the Prince was telling Fredie, ‘Touching wood I think the Paris trouble is over, though I must get all those letters back somehow.’211 But Marguerite was biding her time. By the middle of December, six weeks after Marguerite’s ‘stinker’ and evidently still a worried man, the Prince wrote to Joey Legh: ‘Not another word from Maggy, thank God, so here’s to hoping.’212 If the Prince had persuaded himself that all danger was past, he was wrong. While convalescing in the Paris nursing home during August, she discovered that another patient was Charles Laurent, a young air force officer. Laurent had just returned from Russia, where he had been serving with the White Russian forces under General Wrangel, fighting the Bolsheviks.

  A blunt and impulsive character, Laurent quickly fell under Marguerite’s spell. For her, the handsome officer had very particular attractions. His father, Henri Laurent, was a director of both the Grand Magasins du Louvre, a large department store, and of the company that owned the Hotel Crillon, where Marguerite had first met the Prince of Wales some eighteen months before. While there was no chance of Marguerite ever marrying the Prince, Charles Laurent was unmarried and very rich. He could provide her illegitimate daughter, Raymonde, with an excellent Parisian surname and, best of all, could give Marguerite financial security, plus a measure of respectability and access to at least some of the Paris salons.

  Charles Laurent was too good a catch to miss and for the time being there was little point in pursuing a crude scheme of blackmail which could result in legal proceedings and, quite possibly, muffing her chances with Laurent.

  She had the letters.

  5

  Entr’acte

  After the end of the Great War, the Prince continued his affair with Fredie Dudley Ward, sending this complaisant, perhaps slightly dull woman a regular supply of abjectly worded love letters, prominently sealed on the back of the envelope with the likeness of a spider (or ‘thpider’ in royal baby talk). The Prince’s letters could be carried by King’s Messenger, but sometimes his correspondence, conspicuous black wax seal and all, was dispatched by ordinary mail, another example of risk-taking (or sheer carelessness, perhaps even arrogance) on the Prince’s part.

  After spending time with British and Empire forces in northern France and Belgium, the Prince returned briefly to Paris in February 1919. This was an official visit and much of his time was taken up with duties connected with the forthcoming Versailles Peace Conference (although there was an opportunity to buy some ‘filthy French [sex] toys’ in a Paris shop).213 The Prince would not return to Paris until January 1924.

  The long absence is partly explained by the extensive series of Empire tours (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India) which reduced the time available for private excursions abroad. The first Empire tour took him to Canada between August and November 1919; to Australia and New Zealand between March and October 1920; to India, taking in Ceylon, Malaya, Japan and Egypt, between October 1921 and June 1922.

  Nevertheless, bearing in mind his frequently expressed fondness for life in the city, the length of time that elapsed b
etween these Paris visits seems curious. During 1920 and 1921, his affair with Fredie Dudley Ward was at its zenith, an entanglement that took up much of his free time in England, and during his New Zealand tour in 1920, the Prince had written to Fredie, ‘As regards Paris … it’s unique … & I used to love Paris too when I was “jeune homme”. I’ve never been there as a “married man”…’214 He enjoyed the Season, went hunting and steeplechasing, played tennis and golf, and performed his quota of official ‘stunts’, but for some reason did not make the short journey across the Channel and visit the French capital.

  The Prince knew that Marguerite had kept his letters. Early in 1920, the Prince gave a warning talk to his three younger brothers (Albert, Henry and George), arising from ‘some of my experiences in Paris etc. which you’ve heard so often!’215

  The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had made a discreet mistress of his secretary, the quietly perceptive Frances Stevenson. Like so many of her contemporaries, Frances was at first entranced by the Prince, ‘a dear thing, with beautiful eyes, but such a boy’. Two months later, however, she was writing that she disliked his hard sounding voice, a less favourable observation, perhaps prompted by a tactless inquiry as they sat together, dinner guests of Sir Philip Sassoon. The Prince had asked her with a ‘meaning look’ why Mrs Lloyd George did not spend much time in London.’216

  In the summer of 1919, the Prince finally succeeded in persuading his father that he needed a home of his own, away from the confines of Buckingham Palace. He set himself up in York House, part of the sprawling complex of St James’s Palace. The mostly north-facing accommodation was unpretentious. The Prince’s bedroom had just a ‘narrow, single bed with a table beside it on which there was often a glass of milk and an apple.’217

  At the same time, the Prince took the opportunity to reorganise his personal staff. Godfrey Thomas was ‘poached’ by the Prince, leaving the Foreign Office to become Private Secretary, with Joey Legh and ‘the Lord Claud’ remaining as equerries, until the latter was replaced by the Hon. Bruce Ogilvy in 1921.

  Poor eyesight had kept Thomas away from military service and he had served in the Foreign Office for the duration of the Great War. At the Foreign Office, Thomas had been head of the ‘cipher department’ and was succeeded by Archibald Hay-Drummond (known as Archibald Hay), brother-in-law of Captain Ernest Bald, friend of the Duke of Westminster and Marguerite’s onetime lover in Deauville and Paris.

  Sir Godfrey John Vignoles Thomas was the only son of a Welsh baronet and Brigadier-General, and succeeded to the title after his father died on active service in 1919. The title, dating from 1694, had a respectable antiquity and the family fortunes were boosted by his father’s marriage to Mary Frances Isabelle Oppenheim, daughter of Charles Augustus Oppenheim (a name worthy of inclusion in one of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales). Oppenheim, a successful London businessman, left a family very comfortably provided for with an estate valued at some £160,000 (£9,000,000 today) at his death in 1878.218 Charles had married Isabelle Frith, daughter of the celebrated Victorian painter William Powell Frith, a union that may have brought Godfrey Thomas a measure of cultural sensibility.

  Thomas became a close associate of the Prince after their first meeting in Berlin the following year. ‘Whenever the Prince was on leave, he received permission from the Foreign Office to join him,’ so Godfrey Thomas would have been well aware from the start of the Prince’s romantic entanglements, including the eighteen-month affair with Marguerite.

  The Prince’s new Private Secretary, then aged 31, has been described as ‘dark and good-looking – a bit like … Cary Grant’. Thomas ‘usually wore a troubled air, as if he had just been slightly done down’. Though ‘much liked and respected’, he was thought ‘a shade dull’.219 The Prince, for his part, considered Thomas ‘really my greatest man friend & the only one to be trusted absolutely’.220

  Stamfordham crisply defined the qualifications for such a post: ‘Someone with brains, a facile pen – a nice fellow.’221 Thomas, who eminently fitted the bill, was quintessentially a figure of discretion, keeping a low public profile, his working persona steeped in Foreign Office culture. ‘For all his … self-effacing manner,’ wrote an anonymous obituarist in 1968, ‘he had much ability, a most resourceful tact, and an unfailing memory’.222 Described also as ‘a quiet man’, whose tastes were said to be of ‘an intellectual kind’,223 Thomas comes across as a shrewd, if rather indolent, observer of the Prince’s failings. From time to time, he would exert himself to give sound advice, but Thomas seems to have deliberately avoided confrontation. ‘A stronger personality … might possibly have curbed some of the Prince’s excesses, but more probably the two men would have quarrelled and greater mischief been done than good.’224

  Thomas, however, had learnt the value of secrecy in his official work and would serve his master well during the crisis of 1923. His political views, in so far as they can be ascertained, seem to have been deeply conservative. Thomas, for example, ‘always felt that the Prince should not marry a commoner…’.225

  Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles joined the Prince’s staff at York House as Assistant Private Secretary in November 1920. At first, like so many others, he was overwhelmed by the Prince’s charm. ‘He won me over completely. He is the most attractive man I have ever met.’226 Lascelles, born in 1887, was a grandson of the 4th Earl of Harewood. He was a first cousin by marriage of Princess Mary, sister of the Prince of Wales. A highly intelligent man, tall, spare, handsome (though with a slightly receding chin), some people considered Lascelles to be a snob. ‘It was when he reached public school that he first became aware of his own aristocratic nature’, but alas the public school was not Eton, Harrow or Winchester (all ancient foundations and top of the range), but Marlborough, a redbrick boarding school less than a century old. Hopelessly middle class, Marlborough contained ‘not a soul brought up to the same social traditions as myself … they knew none of the people I knew, or knew of…’ Lascelles hated his school.227

  Class was a sensitive issue in those days (it still is) and Lascelles was not alone in his sufferings. He would have empathised with a slightly younger victim, George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, Baron Derwant (pronounced ‘Darwent’), who bemoaned days spent at his ‘ordinary’ public-school, Charterhouse. Like Lascelles, Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone felt keenly that his true place was at Eton, Harrow or Winchester. Instead he was obliged to rub shoulders (and other bodily parts) with ‘sons of chemists and Indian Civil Servants, Trinidad sugar-merchants and country doctors…’228

  When in England, the Prince continued his usual diversions, both sporting and social. In June 1922, Harold Nicolson glimpsed him over lunch at the Marlborough Club, then at 52 Pall Mall (a club whose membership included Lord Stamfordham and Godfrey Thomas, perhaps some small guarantee against princely mischief). ‘P of Wales there,’ he wrote, ‘talking polo: very red: his little red hands flicking all the time about his neck-tie.’229

  The Prince also sought amusement in the company of men who had been (or were still) part of Fredie’s ‘barrage’ of admirers. A good example is Captain Alistair Mackintosh, charitably described by one of the Prince’s set as ‘witty, kind and generous to a fault’.230 Ali Mackintosh was, like Fredie, a product of the prosperous middle class and met the Prince in Italy during the summer of 1918. Friendly with Bendor, the Duchess of Sutherland, ‘Fatty’ Cavan, Loelia Ponsonby and scores of Society figures, Ali took his idle charms to Hollywood, where he married the silent film star Constance Talmadge in 1926.

  By the latter part of 1922, the Prince’s relationship with Fredie Dudley Ward was under severe strain. She was now contemplating divorce from William Dudley Ward (‘Duddie’) and seems to have been playing the Prince off against Michael Herbert, who had been a member of Fredie’s ‘barrage’ for several years. ‘In the spring of 1923 … Freda must have stated bluntly that their relationship could never be what it had been and that he would have to content himself with friendship.’231
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br />   He was now Prince Charming, an international media celebrity, arbiter of fashion, surrounded by crowds of adoring admirers and pursued relentlessly by legions of press reporters and newsreel cameramen. Yet the smiling, relaxed image that Thomas and Lascelles worked so hard to maintain was always vulnerable to disclosures, particularly in the American press, about the Prince’s private life, not always consistent with the clean-limbed, elegantly dressed sportsman of the public arena.

  In 1920, there had been a sharp reminder of this exposed flank. By this time, Lord Louis Mountbatten had succeeded in becoming close to the Prince, although young ‘Dickie’ was cordially detested by some members of the Prince’s entourage for his perceived arrogance and duplicity. Mountbatten had kept a diary during the antipodean tour, full of what he thought was amusing anecdote, and some twenty copies were privately printed aboard ship, HMS Renown. Although not scurrilous, the diary was ‘extremely frank’ about aspects of the journey and could have damaged the Prince’s burgeoning reputation as poster boy for the British Empire. Unfortunately, the ship’s doctor made off with a copy and, once back in England, tried to sell it. ‘The culprit was eventually tracked down to Kettner’s restaurant [in London’s Soho], where he was bargaining with an American journalist, the diary on the table … The asking price was £5000.’232

  The content of letters written to Marguerite by the Prince was potentially far more damaging than this artless account of high jinks on the ocean wave. Worries that the ‘little French lady’ might decide to market her treasures across the Atlantic must have been omnipresent in the minds of those few courtiers in the know, especially Godfrey Thomas and Tommy Lascelles. There were wider implications than simply royal scandal. In January 1922, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stanley Baldwin, had voyaged to America in a humiliating exercise, an attempt to reduce the crippling level of interest payable on Britain’s war debts. Settlement was eventually reached, but deep concern remained about the financial implications of unfavourable American attitudes towards Britain. A positive image for the Prince could be an enormous boost, but the situation was delicate. According to Lascelles, newspapers in the USA (including ‘the Sunday rags … notoriously filthy and scandalous…’233) often gave ‘exaggerated publicity to his amusements, expensive tastes, uselessness etc’, but the Prince had the power to ‘change … American opinion towards us, & the debt & 100 other things’.234 Given the unpredictable behaviour of the heir to the throne, that change of opinion could go either way.