by Andrew Rose
That night in his suite at the Meurice, the Prince penned his London confidante a rambling screed of maudlin introspection headed ‘Good Friday’. Solipsistic outpourings by the Prince were common during their long correspondence, but this example seems particularly dark. ‘I’m off to Le Touquet tonight,’ he wrote, later using the third person singular to emphasise his feelings of emotional torment. ‘He’s got pretty rotten on this trip … God, what a bloody life this is & it’s a great pity I was not killed in the Army p[oin]t to p[oin]t … Your very sad little David.’534
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Endpapers
During the 1920s, Inspector Alfred Burt was entrusted with ‘personal and intimate enquiries … outside the province of official duties’, sometimes involving ‘pretty women’,535 which suggests that he may have had a role in compiling the (now missing) Special Branch file on Marguerite, opened after her first attempt at blackmail late in 1918.
Special Branch duties included observations and reports about the activities of women deemed to pose threats to the Prince. A Miss Mary Agnes Stanford was one such stalker, already the subject of police attention when, in May 1927, she was seen lurking near the Royal Palace in Seville during a visit by the Prince to King Alfonso. Mlle Marie Catherine Jeanne Geoffroy of Paris, another obsessive fan, who had written the Prince ‘an incoherent letter’, was observed loitering near the Hotel Meurice.536
The Prince’s private life, away from these harpies, was neatly encapsulated by ‘Cholly Knickerbokker’, byline of Maury Henry Biddle Paul, short, chubby and very camp gossip columnist of the American Hearst press. ‘All of Edward Windsor’s romances,’ mused Cholly, ‘– has any of us fingers and toes to count them?’537 In due course, keeping company with Marguerite, Wallis Simpson would be afforded the accolade of a Special Branch report, alleging that she was having an affair with the deliciously named Guy Trundle, a West End car salesman with upper-class contacts. The report must surely have been compiled without the knowledge of the Prince, already deeply besotted with his new mistress. The Trundle-Simpson affair has been doubted,538 but Superintendent Canning, the compiler, was a very experienced officer (posted to Special Branch in 1909), with many years’ service in the field of royal protection.539
In the later 1920s, the Prince made nine visits to Paris, some official, others ‘strictly private’. After 1929, Paris visits became much less frequent. In 1930, the Prince moved from York House to Fort Belvedere, near Windsor Great Park. Fredie Dudley Ward helped the process of refurbishing of a gothic folly designed by Sir Jeffrey Wyatville for the profligate King George IV and the Prince spent a good deal of his leisure time at the fort, during the period of his infatuation with Thelma, Lady Furness.540
The royal visits, some official, some ‘strictly private’ to Paris in the later 1920s, included a bizarre trip to Paris in mid-February 1929. By this time, leading members of the ‘handpicked team’ were almost at their wits’ end dealing with the capricious Prince, who had behaved particularly badly during an East African tour the previous year, complaining bitterly that he had been forced to break off an enjoyable visit (including sensual delights offered by Kenya’s ‘Happy Valley’ community) simply because of his father’s grave illness in November 1928.
Although the Prince had visited Paris previously in winter, weather conditions were exceptionally bad; there was a bitterly cold spell, the worst for nearly half a century. The thermometer recorded –8° in central Paris on the evening of 14 February the day of his visit.541 The Prince was taking a calculated, even callous, risk in leaving the country so precipitately. The King was in poor health, still recuperating at Bognor from the severe respiratory illness contracted the previous November and a sudden relapse was always a possibility. ‘The King is desperately ill,’ wrote Lady Lee in January 1929, ‘and we are all very despondent about his prospect of recovery.’542
The Prince gave Special Branch minimal warning of his trip, made at only one day’s notice, with Inspector Palmer in tow. Whatever prompted this mysterious wintertime journey, which had to be made by ship in stormy cross-Channel conditions, the Prince ‘requested … that the … arrangements be kept strictly private and wishes his movements to be kept from the press’.543 The journey was made after his feelings for Audrey Coats (whom he had first pursued at Eloïse Ancaster’s Drummond Castle houseparty in August 1923544) had cooled and some months before he met Thelma, Lady Furness, at an agricultural fair in Leicester.545
It has been claimed that the Prince continued to see Marguerite from time to time in Paris until he took up with Wallis Simpson,546 but such an extended time span seems unlikely. There is a remote possibility that the Prince met Marguerite clandestinely during his visit to a very chilly Paris in February 1929, but no material has been found to suggest any intimate contact after that date.
By early 1929, Lascelles had decided to leave the Prince’s service. Not long before, exasperated by the behaviour of the Prince of Wales and Prince George, he had written to his wife, ‘I am certainly getting too old for the society of the Windsors; they bore me stiff, I’m afraid…’547 A little later, he reflected wistfully on the Prince’s reluctance to face up to his Imperial destiny. ‘I always feel now as if I were working, not for the next King of England, but for the latest American millionaire.’
Lascelles, was not alone in his despair. Godfrey Thomas shared some of his reservations the Prince, but it was out of the question that both men should resign at the same time. The pair had grappled with so many hair-raising moments caused by the selfishness and arrogance of the Prince over the past decade of royal service. They had coped manfully with the most severe difficulties, including the consequences of the Prince’s affair with Marguerite, the return of the love letters, and the risky procedure of keeping the Prince’s name out of a most scandalous trial.
The true reasons for the problems repeatedly faced by both men over the decade could not easily be communicated to anyone beyond the confines of York House.
The York house staff grumbled about the Prince’s behaviour, but, as has already been noted, there seems to have been reluctance to commit intimate details of the Prince’s shortcomings to paper. Nevertheless, just a month before the mysterious last-minute trip to Paris, Admiral Halsey (the ‘old salt’) reported that the Prince ‘had begun to visit Night Clubs again prompting unpleasant comments.549
The Prince’s behaviour was now hopelessly erratic. At Le Touquet in August 1929, as recounted by Lady Rosslyn, ‘the Prince of Wales turned up at the Casino … quite drunk and quite incapable of standing.’550 Freda, it seems, was with him at the time. The Prince was then 35, approaching middle age, and a dispassionate appraisal of his life shows little to commend. He had developed a vain, shallow, sometimes treacherous character, almost maniacally self-indulgent, yet constantly looking for someone who would tell him what to do, someone who would say things that few others would dare to say, someone who might even treat him with scorn.
There were some good qualities. The Prince liked adventure, he loved to travel, and he was, above all else, a modern man in his public life. He intensely disliked the heavy hand of protocol, relishing a more relaxed approach, in manner as well as in dress. His power to charm and to put nervous people at their ease was a very attractive attribute. Furthermore, despite frequent periods of gloom and introspection, the Prince could show a sense of humour. His description of an Italian princess having ‘a face like a bottom’551 can still raise a smile. More seriously, both during and after the Great War, the Prince showed a warm regard for the servicemen who faced hardships in the trenches, in the air and at sea, privations that he would never be called upon to endure. There were glimmerings, too, of a social conscience when confronted with the problems of unemployment and social deprivation that beset Britain during the interwar years.
Over the years since the end of the Great War, the ceaseless efforts of Thomas and Lascelles, with the help of Special Branch and even the DPP, had succeeded in papering over cracks that regular
ly threatened to cause irreparable damage to the Prince’s reputation. Strangely, bearing in mind the seriousness of the challenge that Marguerite posed to the Royal Household and the notoriety of her trial, there are surprisingly few references to be found in contemporary letters, diaries and other documentation.
In good measure, this is due to a deliberate process of destruction. The Prince tore out and destroyed sections of his personal wartime diary referring to his affair with Marguerite. His compromising love letters no doubt suffered the same fate, after they were surrendered as part of the compact between Marguerite and the Royal Household. The Special Branch file, probably prepared in response to the ‘regular stinker’, Marguerite’s bombshell of November 1918, cannot now be traced in the Metropolitan Police archive. (As has been shown earlier in this book, these papers, which existed in 1923, seem also to have contained ‘horrible accusations’ against the Prince.)552
The language used by both Thomas and Lascelles in private correspondence, quoted earlier in this chapter, may give an explanation. The overarching requirement was to preserve secrecy, almost at any cost. In the case of Marguerite, the two secretaries succeeded brilliantly in heading off a major scandal, the narrative of which has remained carefully interred for the better part of a century. In this task, they were aided by several factors. Putting aside the question of whether the Prince took up briefly with Marguerite after the trial, the heart of the affair had taken place in France during the Great War. Only a few people closest to the Prince knew about the relationship during this very disturbed period. The Prince’s mistress was French, unknown to English Society, many of whose members would simply have regarded her a ‘French tart’ of little or no consequence, an attitude exemplified by the dismissive language of Curzon’s 1923 letter to his wife (using pejorative expressions such as ‘fancy woman’ and ‘keep’). Thomas, an old Foreign Office hand, also knew the importance of not writing down sensitive material or, if a note had to be made for any purpose, ensuring that it was quickly destroyed. Communicating information on a ‘need to know’ basis is not a new method.
Finally, although the episode was probably the most serious problem encountered by Thomas and Lascelles during their tenure of office, it was one of many crises to beset the Prince’s secretaries during the 1920s. After Marguerite had been ‘squared’, the letters returned and destroyed, and silence maintained at the trial in accordance with the unwritten compact, her sting had been drawn. The secretaries were thus free to move on and await the next scrape their young master would fall into.
After the farcical end to the phantom baby case in April 1924 and with the Prince off to Le Touquet, Marguerite decided to leave town for a while. Early July found her enjoying the summer season in Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Czechoslovakia. Described as ‘The Queen of Bohemian Watering Places’ in the New York Herald, the resort was overflowing with rich foreigners, Marguerite’s favourite quarry. President Masaryk was there, along with an assortment of the Austrian aristocracy and the American super-rich, a Rothschild or two, Viscount Cowdray, and the renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler.553
Throughout the 1920s and beyond, Marguerite relentlessly pursued her aim of acquiring as much of Ali’s fortune as possible, claiming that she had never been paid her dot (marriage portion) and that some exceedingly valuable jewellery belonged to her. In France, taking action against the Fahmy family, she had succeeded in obtaining jewellery held by a sequestrator after the French court had taken into account the fact of her acquittal on the murder charge in England. This appears to have been the Louis Vuitton jewelled handbag, worth 450,000 francs, which was handed over because it bore her initials. There was also the little matter of a ‘gold-studded diamond mounted dressing-case, equipped with gold-stoppered bottles and golden-backed brushes’, valued at £4,000 sterling. Some disputed items were retained by Van Cleef & Arpels, pending the outcome of judicial proceedings.
Returning to Egypt to prosecute other parts of her case, however, could be risky. She was determined to obtain a settlement of not less than 64,000,000 francs. She would donate half to Moslem causes (or so she said) and could live decently on the balance.’554
In 1928, she again set foot in Egypt and installed herself in the Hotel Continental in Cairo. Suing the Fahmy estate, she claimed £82,000 in arrears of income, demanding an annual payment of £6,000, but her attempt to get a share of Ali’s estate was doomed from the start. Memories of her trial in England and Marshall Hall’s xenophobic tactics were still fresh. ‘It will be remembered,’ wrote Sir Percy Loraine, the British High Commissioner, ‘that this sensational case caused a great deal of ill-feeling in Egypt.’555
The Fahmy family counterclaimed. At the hearing, the court showed hostility from the outset and her very identity was called into question before there was any argument on the merits of her case. Put simply, sharia law did not recognise the right of a woman to inherit if she was responsible for the death of her husband, except (possibly) if he had a gun in his hand at the time of the shooting. In April 1929, the sharia court heard the arguments of both parties, examined the shorthand record (now lost) of the trial and refused to accept evidence of Marguerite’s acquittal at the Old Bailey, deciding that this was a case of premeditated murder. The case was decided in favour of the Fahmy family.
Undaunted, Marguerite approached the British authorities in Egypt, demanding intervention on her behalf. Although the bulky Foreign Office file on this application does not make mention of her relationship with the Prince of Wales, the seriousness with which her claim was viewed suggests an unspoken tension. The matter was considered at the highest level and the facts put before Arthur Henderson, Foreign Secretary in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. If Marguerite had simply been a French national complaining to the British authorities about a local court decision in Egypt, her situation would surely not have merited such serious attention to her plight.
A British official considered her case to be ‘excessively delicate’. Arthur Booth, the Judicial Adviser, minuted his view that ‘it cannot be said that the Sharia Court is bound by the decision in London. Nor do I think that the judgment is so bad that it can be said to be a mockery of justice’, as Marguerite’s English lawyer had argued. Booth, in a poignantly worded postcript, indicated how difficult it was for an outsider dealing with questions of Egyptian law and practice. ‘In my hurry to get some sort of note to you…,’ he wrote, ‘I have not been able to find out exactly what Sharia Law requires in order to admit a husband-killer to a share in the estate – probably a difficult thing to get really clear as most questions of Sharia Law are.’
Back in England, the Foreign Secretary considered the papers. ‘We cannot intervene,’ minuted a senior civil servant, ‘Madame Fahmy was, I think, a Frenchwoman before her marriage & I shd have thought that if there was to be intervention in her behalf the French Minister might have had the privilege of opening the ball.’556
Marguerite lodged an appeal against the sharia court decision, but her claim was dismissed in April 1930. Seven years later, she visited Egypt for yet another court hearing, but it seems that this attempt also failed.557 Despite these setbacks, Marguerite remained a rich woman, well able to exploit a complement of wealthy male admirers.
As ‘Maggie Meller’, she proved excellent copy for media worldwide throughout the later 1920s, her various courtroom battles reported salaciously in the American press. Endlessly recycled headlines, including such gems as Mystery of Princess Fahmy’s Bogus Baby, Notorious Maggie Mellor, and Couldn’t Kill Her Husband and Grab His Millions.
After 1930, Marguerite’s name appeared less frequently in the newspapers, although the villégiature columns of Le Figaro give a fair idea of her pre-war travels within France. These notices, inserted by the rich and famous (or those who hoped to be so regarded) recorded their presence at fashionable seaside resorts, capital cities and spas, always her favourite working territories. Between 1930 and 1937, Marguerite was to be seen in Vienna, Budapest, Cannes, Venice,
Bad Homburg, Capbreton (near Biarritz) and St Malo. Gratifyingly for Marguerite, who loved a title, entries might randomly juxtapose her name with members of the aristocracy, as in July 1931 when she found herself alongside ‘Mme la Baronne Rudolphe d’Érlanger’ when staying at Néris-les-Bains, a spa in the Auvergne. More revealingly was a record, dated 2 September 1932, of visitors to Vittel, the Vosges spa famous for its mineral water, where Marguerite’s name followed that of ‘Maître Assouad’, her Egyptian lawyer, who may have been enjoying more than a merely professional relationship with his former client.
Vladimir Barjansky painted Marguerite’s portrait. Like many other Russian emigrés, Barjansky fled to France after the 1917 revolution, settling in Paris. He was socially well-connected, and his homosexuality also appealed to Marguente, who enjoyed the company of gay men, perhaps a welcome diversion from the demands of her heterosexual companions.
Marguerite’s final memoir was written by Michel Georges-Michel, who had met her first at Deauville just before the Great War. After the trial, their paths had crossed in Venice and at a ball in Cannes, where Marguerite – elegantly masked – appeared from nowhere, put two fingers to Georges-Michel’s temple, declaring only too evocatively, ‘Pan! Pan! [Bang! Bang!]’. A local wit composed a couplet in honour of Marguerite’s notoriety humorously suggesting that ‘cruel men’ should put their hands up promptly if Maggie Mellor came along.
The memoir, portentously titled La Vie Brillante et Tragique de la Princess Fahmy Bey, parisienne, was written very much under her direction558 and published in France on 30 April 1934. By this time, Marguerite’s affair with the Prince was long past and she may have felt released from earlier undertakings of confidentiality. Although she described meeting the Prince during the Great War, the account is discreetly written, though leaving the reader little doubt that the relationship was physical. By use of the expression on se tutoie, a French readership would be aware that Marguerite and the Prince had been on intimate terms. Marguerite also revealed that the Prince had written love letters, though no hint was given about their ultimate fate. Marguerite also claimed in her memoir that she was regularly shadowed by spadassins (hitmen), supposedly agents of the Fahmy family, although this is probably an invention. Nothing untoward ever happened to her.