by Theo Aronson
Yet the Queen, still racked by the thought of her son's 'fall', felt that it would be less than fair for the future bride's family to be kept in ignorance about it. She insisted that they be told. But they already knew. To the worldly Danish royal family, the idea of a prince losing his virginity before marriage was neither novel nor shocking; indeed, they would have been a great deal more disturbed if he had not lost it. Whether or not Princess Alexandra knew anything about the affair is uncertain. In any case, she would not have been unduly put out. Like so many women of her day, the Princess probably accepted that there was one code of behaviour for men and another for women.
The couple were married on 10 March 1863. The bridegroom was twenty-one, the bride eighteen. 'It does one good to see people so thoroughly happy as this dear young couple are,' reported the Crown Princess to Queen Victoria after visiting the honeymoon pair at Osborne. Bertie, she said, looked blissful. 'I never saw such a change, his whole face looks beaming and radiant . . . Love has certainly shed its sunshine on these two dear young hearts and lends its unmistakable brightness to both their countenances.'33
The Crown Princess, who was to be proved wrong about so many things, was to be proved wrong about this.
'All the world and the glory of it, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of his day . . . '34 wrote that great analyst of the British Constitution, Walter Bagehot. This had been true for the previous Prince of Wales, that celebrated debauchee who became first Prince Regent and then King George IV; and it was to be true for the future Prince of Wales, the capricious young man who was to become King Edward VIII and then Duke of Windsor. But neither of these princes availed themselves of the world's glories and seductions with quite as much uninhibited zest as did Queen Victoria's heir.
The Prince's honeymoon idyll, which had so enchanted the sentimental Crown Princess, did not last very long. Princess Alexandra, for all her grace and beauty, was not the sort to retain the interest of a man like her husband. Perhaps she was sexually cold. Lady Antrim, who knew the Princess well, once claimed that the Prince might have been a more faithful husband if the Princess had been a more loving wife. Certainly, the beauties with whom the Prince of Wales was to enjoy long-term relationships – his mistresses, in short – were all to be voluptuous women.
Nor was Alexandra clever, or at least sharp, enough to satisfy him. She had very little brain. Although the Prince was no intellectual, he liked the company of quick-witted women. A dull-witted beauty might do for the odd amorous encounter, but she could never hope for anything more than that from the Prince. And Alexandra, if not exactly dull-witted, was too simple, too childlike, too artless for her husband's taste. 'Very clever,' noted a worried Queen Victoria not long after the marriage, 'I don't think she is.'35 The trouble was that the Prince needed constant distraction. Having nothing worthwhile to do and lacking, almost entirely, in mental resources, he was very easily bored. An intellectually stimulating wife could have helped keep this boredom at bay; a stupid one could only increase it.
Causing Princess Alexandra to appear more stupid still was her increasing deafness. Queen Victoria noted this quite early on and, as the years went by, the Princess found it more and more difficult to follow conversation. This not only made her seem somewhat slow but it cut her off from intelligent talk; she was unable to improve or broaden her mind by hearing the opinions of others. Her tendency to avoid people whose voices she found difficult to understand gradually distanced her, not only from that scintillating company in which her husband delighted but from her husband himself. More and more she devoted herself to their five children – two boys and three girls, born between 1864 and 1869 – and to a small circle of companions.
But none of this can explain the Prince of Wales's tireless extramarital activity. It is doubtful whether even the most sensual, sharp-witted or sophisticated of wives could have kept him at home for long. He had a voracious sexual appetite and, having nothing better to do with his time, indulged it to the full. Where another man might have channelled much of that prodigious energy into work, the Prince channelled it into love-making. It was boredom, too, that was responsible for his need for constant change and variety in his sexual partners. During the first fifteen or so years of his marriage, he remained faithful to no one; he made love just as happily to duchesses as he did to prostitutes.
There were a couple of mitigating factors. One was his age. The Prince was only twenty-one when he was dragooned into marriage. Most male Victorian aristocrats married late. Their twenties and even their thirties were the years for sowing wild oats. In the ordinary way the Prince of Wales would have spent that period roistering and whoring with the other young bloods. Marriage would have illustrated a willingness to settle down. But having discovered the delights of promiscuity after marriage, Bertie could see no good reason for giving it up.
Another factor was that he was granted every opportunity for infidelity. To this day, princes are presented with the sort of chances denied to many others. Very few women would withhold their favours from the sons of the monarch. Snobbery, as one of Bertie's biographers has put it, 'is a powerful aphrodisiac'.36 It would have needed a very strong-minded woman indeed to withstand the heir's advances, particularly when he was as accomplished, persuasive and charming a philanderer as the Prince of Wales. And he, in turn, would have had to have been a saint not to have taken advantage of the opportunities offered to him.
These opportunities were everywhere. Mid-Victorian respectability, so studiously encouraged by Victoria and Albert, was largely confined to one layer of society – the middle classes. The aristocracy, as the Queen only too frequently pointed out to her lusty heir, was anything but respectable. It was quite given over to 'frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence and idleness'.37 It was in this happy hunting ground that the Prince of Wales was able to assuage his appetites.
There were other hunting grounds, too. London, behind the grandiose sweep of Regent Street and the imposing façades of Piccadilly, was a maze of mean alleys, ill-lit courts and shabby tenements, where every taste was catered for. More genteel areas, in St John's Wood or on the fringes of Regents Park, offered rather more discreet services. It was in this world – of actresses and chorus girls and courtesans, the world that had given him Nellie Clifden – that the Prince could satisfy his less discerning tastes. The Crown Princess of Prussia was shocked to hear that her brother was to be seen in such disreputable places as Cremorne Gardens or Evans's Supper Rooms. And the King of the Belgians, who was in no position to throw stones, professed himself pained to hear that the Prince of Wales frequented the notorious Midnight Club.
Yet another of the Prince's pleasure arenas was Paris. The periods that he spent there, en garçon, were very largely given over to amorous adventures. His Parisian conquests – if they can be called that – ranged from such members of le gratin as the Princesse de Sagan to the notorious Hortense Schneider who was known, with abundant reason, as le passage des princes.
How much did Princess Alexandra know about her husband's unfaithfulness? 'I often think her lot is no easy one,' wrote Queen Victoria as early as 1864, when the couple had been married for less than two years, 'but she is very fond of Bertie, though not blind.'38 The Princess would have noticed what others noticed: how her husband was paying too much attention to a certain 'Madame von B' at Sandringham, or how he was 'spooning with Lady Filmer'39 at Ascot. She would have heard of his involvement with various Russian beauties when he was in St Petersburg in 1866 and of his suppers with 'female Paris notorieties'40 when he visited France the following year. She must certainly have suspected the worst when, during her long illness in 1867, the Prince stayed out night after night, often not coming home until three in the morning.
And there were things she could not have known about. On one occasion the Prince was obliged to buy back some letters which he had written to Madame Giulia Barucci, one of the great courtesans of the Second Empire, who was pleased to d
escribe herself as 'the greatest whore in the world'.41 At the same time he was being asked for money, in an altogether less menacing fashion, on behalf of Lady Susan Vane Tempest who – not being the greatest whore in the world – was apparently about to bear his child.
During his serious illness in 1871, he gave so much away in the course of his fevered ravings that it was thought best to keep Alexandra out of the room. He even, at one stage of his delirium, accused her of being unfaithful. 'You were my wife,' he ranted, 'you are no more – you have broken your vows.'42
Every now and then, when her husband was involved in some major scandal, Alexandra's private misgivings would become public knowledge. He appeared as a witness in the divorce suit filed by Sir Charles Mordaunt against his wife and, although the Prince emphatically denied that there had been 'any improper familiarity or criminal act' between himself and Lady Mordaunt, the very fact of his association with the young woman (he had written her letters and paid her private calls) caused Alexandra real distress and the public pleasurable indignation.
A few years later he was caught up in an equally unsavoury scandal. In the course of a flirtation, if nothing more, with a Lady Aylesford, he had written her some indiscreet letters. When Lord Aylesford announced his intention of divorcing his wife (not because of her association with the Prince but because of her adultery with one of his friends, Lord Blandford) Lady Aylesford tried to use the incriminating letters to force the Prince to dissuade Lord Aylesford from starting divorce proceedings. In the end, the affair petered out: the Aylesfords merely separated. But by then every drawing room in London was seething with gossip about the Prince of Wales's indiscretion, while the Princess stood once more revealed as the wronged wife.
It was this public humiliation that Alexandra minded most. In private, she was quite prepared to play the game according to the rules of the time. In many upper-class Victorian marriages the husband's infidelity was taken almost as a matter of course. Wives tolerated it in the same way as they might tolerate any other of their husband's failings: extravagance or meanness, weakness or violence. Male unfaithfulness would never have been regarded as a good enough reason for breaking up a marriage, as it is today.
Divorce, in those days, was looked upon as a much greater shame than infidelity; a divorcée, no matter how blameless her own conduct might have been, always trailed an aura of scandal. She was generally regarded as an adventuress. In any case, the divorce laws were such as to discourage the contemplation of any such step. A husband was entitled to keep not only the children but any money or property that the wife might have brought to the marriage. So a divorced wife faced both ostracism and penury. It was no wonder that, during the 1870s, there were under a hundred divorces a year in England.
Even after he became King, Bertie – unashamedly employing the double standards of the period – once refused to be seen in the company of a couple who were about to be separated; and in 1909 he claimed that divorce was a subject 'which cannot be discussed openly and in all its aspects with any delicacy or even decency before ladies'.43 Not until late in the reign of George V was the 'innocent party' in a divorce admitted to the royal enclosure at Ascot; the 'guilty party' remained barred, regardless of the fact that the enclosure might be teeming with adulterers.
So, very much an exponent of the social code of her time, Alexandra simply swallowed her pride, showed the world a smiling face ('the Princess looked lovely but very sad when she was not exerting herself,'44 reported Lady Cavendish after the Mordaunt divorce trial) and devoted herself to raising her family, preserving her looks and tending to that great army of pugs, pekes and poms without which she seldom moved. 'My naughty little man' was the strongest epithet she seems ever to have applied to her errant husband. Apparently unembittered, she remained a charming, scatterbrained, unpunctual creature, the darling of the public. The Prince, by way of atonement, was always careful to treat her with great respect and courtesy.
There was, for Princess Alexandra, one consolation. Her husband, for all his unfaithfulness, had never fallen seriously in love with anyone else. Not once, in the course of all those tea-time têtes-à-têtes, after-theatre suppers or late night assignations in country houses, had he ever met anyone with whom he wished to establish a more lasting relationship. But in the year 1877, at the age of thirty-five, the Prince of Wales met the woman with whom he was to fall in love, and who was to be recognised as his first official mistress.
Part One
'MY FAIR LILY'
2
The Jersey Lily
TO THIS DAY, Lillie Langtry remains something of an enigma. Even though she lived the most public of lives – as a 'professional beauty', as a royal mistress, as an actress, as a racehorse owner, as a squanderer of fortunes and collector of lovers – she remains elusive. Opinions about her are contradictory; her personality defies definition. To some, she was simply a calculating, cold-hearted creature who used her physical attractions to further her own career; to others she appeared charming, open, with 'far more heart than she was given credit for'.1 Contemporaries talk of her fascination, her intelligence, even of her erudition. There must surely have been something, other than her marvellous beauty, to attract so great a variety of people, and to win her so remarkable a reputation.
There can be no doubt, though, that it was her beauty that launched the young Mrs Langtry on her glittering way. For at the age of twenty-three, in 1877, she had the advantage not only of being beautiful but of having an unusual type of beauty. Hers were the looks then in favour with the artistic avant garde. This is a feature which is often overlooked when assessing beauty of a previous period. In that age of the Pre-Raphaelites, Lillie Langtry was the Pre-Raphaelite woman personified. Everything – the great column of a neck, the squarejaw, the well-defined lips, the straight nose, the slate-blue eyes, the pale skin (she was nicknamed Lillie, she tells us, because of her lily-white complexion), even the hair loosely knotted in the nape of the neck – conformed to the artistic ideal of feminine good looks. It was no wonder that so many eminent artists fell over each other in their eagerness to paint her.
Yet, at the same time, Lillie was not one of the languid, ethereal maidens so beloved of the bohemian brotherhood of the day. Her beauty was brought to life by her vivacity. 'How can words convey the vitality, the glow, the amazing charm, that made this fascinating woman the centre of any group that she entered?', asks Daisy, Countess of Warwick, who was one day to supplant Lillie in the affections of the Prince of Wales. 'The friends we had invited to meet the lovely Mrs Langtry were as willingly magnetised by her unique personality as we were.'2
And there was something else. Lillie Langtry exuded an aura of sensuality. Her full-breasted, broad-hipped body held the promise of an almost animal passion; she walked, wrote one admirer, 'like a beautiful hound set upon its feet. '3 There was an abandon about her – an entirely deceptive abandon, for Lillie was one of the most calculating of women – which men found all but irresistible.
It needed only one night, and the right setting, for Lillie's particular combination of qualities to launch her on her meteoric rise to fame. Until that evening early in 1877, she and her husband, the ineffectual Edward Langtry, whom she had married in her native Jersey three years before, had lived a life of almost total obscurity. Although they had been in London for over a year, living in apartments in Eaton Place, they were all but friendless. Their London life had certainly not been the breathless social whirl of Lillie's aspirations. But a chance meeting with Lord Ranelagh, an old roué whom she had known in Jersey, led, in turn, to their first London invitation: a Sunday evening at-home given by Sir John and Lady Sebright in their Lowndes Square house.
Olivia Sebright was one of those self-consciously bohemian hostesses who surround themselves with the cultural élite. A talented amateur actress and singer, she crammed her salon with as many of the leading professional actors, singers, writers and painters as she could muster. On this particular evening she had managed to assemble
, among others, such luminaries as Henry Irving, John Everett Millais, James McNeill Whistler, George Francis Miles and that socially influential essayist and diner-out, Abraham Hayward. It was not, admittedly, an exclusively upper-class gathering ('actors and actresses were not then generally received,'4 notes Lillie) but in Lady Sebright's crowded drawing room the aristocratic and artistic worlds overlapped. For Lillie, it was the ideal springboard.
Among the throng of sumptuously dressed, glitteringly bejewelled and toweringly coiffured women, Mrs Langtry struck a highly individual note. Her simple black dress had been run up by a Jersey dressmaker, she wore no jewels or ornaments ('I had none,'5 she admits candidly), and she had twisted her golden-brown hair into a casual knot on the nape of her neck. The effect was dramatic. Yet, on this occasion at least, it was not studied. Lillie simply could not afford anything more elaborate.
Feeling, she assures us, 'very un-smart and countrified', she 'retired to a chair in a remote corner.' Her corner did not remain remote for long. The sight of this decorously dressed, ravishingly beautiful and curiously erotic young woman acted like a magnet on the company. 'Fancy my surprise,' continues her arch account of this memorable evening, 'when I immediately became the centre of attention and, after a few moments, I found that quite half the people in the room seemed bent on making my acquaintance. '6 The half was, of course, the male half. And from 'the rush of cavaliers' begging to take her down to supper, Lillie chose John Everett Millais. Not only was he a fellow Jerseyman and the handsomest man in the room, but he was the most famous painter in the country.
Inevitably, over the supper table, Millais asked the enchanting Mrs Langtry to sit for him. He wanted to be the first painter 'to reproduce on canvas what he called the "classic features" of his country woman. '7 After a token protest, she agreed.