by Theo Aronson
That evening at the Sebrights' transformed Lillie Langtry's life. The particular milieu – aesthetic, arty-crafty, unconventional – into which she had just been introduced was always on the lookout for new diversions, new sensations and new faces. And there were few faces as striking as hers. Within a few days the hall table of her Eaton Place apartment was heaped with invitations – to lunch, to dine or to dance. By the end of the month the Langtrys' landlady was grumbling about the number of times she was having to answer the door as yet another liveried footman delivered yet another gilt-edged invitation.
For the gratified Lillie Langtry, her girlhood dreams were at last coming true.
On the face of it, Lillie Langtry's background was highly respectable. She had been born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton on 13 October 1853 in the Old Rectory, St Saviour, Jersey. Her father was the Very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, Dean of Jersey, a man notable – or so she tells us – for 'his zeal and solicitous care for the poor'. Her mother, born Emilie Davis Martin, was apparently a paragon among women: poetic, musical, devoted to animals, flowers and fresh air. Both were exceptionally good-looking. The Dean was well over six feet tall, with piercing blue eyes, a head of prematurely white hair and a military bearing. 'Do you know Sir,' exclaimed one general on first meeting the stalwart Dean Le Breton, 'that when you joined the Church, there was a deuced fine sergeant-major spoilt!'8 Lillie was convinced that the stage, rather than the army, had suffered the greater loss. For her father had, besides his commanding presence, 'the true histrionic gift' and an exceptionally good memory.
Mrs Le Breton, on the other hand, was small and fragile. But she was no less attractive. Charles Kingsley, who had known her as a girl in Chelsea, once described her as 'the most bewitchingly beautiful creature he had ever seen'.9 This handsome couple had seven children; Lillie, the last but one, was their only daughter. The grey stone deanery, all but smothered in climbing roses and sweet-scented jasmine, was one of the most picturesque houses in Jersey. The island itself, with its mild climate and lushly-wooded valleys, was a delectable place in which to live.
But life in the deanery was not quite as idyllic as it appeared. As in many another Victorian vicarage, dark undercurrents surged beneath the apparently tranquil waters. Lillie's claim, in her discreetly written memoirs, that her father was 'widely adored for his geniality and charm of disposition'10 was truer than she intended it to be. Her comment, made privately many years later, was nearer the mark. 'He was a damned nuisance,' she grumbled, 'he couldn't be trusted with any woman anywhere.'11
For Dean Le Breton was, in the polite terminology of the day, 'a ladies' man'. Stories about his rampant womanising ranged from the ludicrous to the scandalous. Amy Menzies, writing anonymously as 'A Woman of No Importance', tells one about the Dean emerging from church with a notable beauty on each arm: one was Mrs Knatchbull, the other Lady de Saumerez. At the sight of the notoriously lecherous Dean, the irate husbands, who had been waiting outside the church, set about him with their walking sticks. Le Breton, well practised, apparently, in avoiding angry husbands, managed to slip away, leaving Colonel Knatchbull and Admiral de Saumerez to continue the fight – but by this time against each other.
In the more serious battle – between Dean Le Breton's soul and his flesh – it was the flesh that usually won. Very few of the island's serving maids or flower sellers had the courage to refuse their favours to this muscular man of God. Jersey seethed with rumours about his amorous exploits. His distinctive features were said to have been reproduced time and again among the island's population. There was even a postman, in later years, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the by then long-dead Dean.
It was no wonder that Mrs Le Breton – again in true Victorian wifely tradition – took to her bed. Her frequent and unexplained illnesses could hardly have been serious for she lived to a ripe old age, having long outlasted, and apparently forgiven, her faithless husband. 'An exquisite little woman, plump and as pink and white as a baby when she was seventy years old,' runs one account of Mrs Le Breton in old age, 'with a reverent and sacredly-held fidelity to her husband, the Dean of Jersey, whom she always extolled in a quiet, proud and wifely way, speaking of him as "my dear husband, the Dean".'12
Lillie had good reason, it seems, to remember her father's extramarital activities. For she first learned about them in the most brutal way. Many years later, in the course of one of her highly-coloured bouts of reminiscence, she told the story. At sixteen she had fallen in love with a slightly younger, socially inferior but extremely handsome boy. So passionate, apparently, was her attachment to him that when her father asked her to break off the relationship with this unsuitable youngster, she refused. There was nothing for it but for the Dean to reveal the true reason for his objections to the association: the boy was his illegitimate son. For the adolescent Lillie, the revelation came as a double blow: not only did she suffer the anguish of a broken romance, but she suffered a disillusionment about her father whom, until then, she had 'adored to the extent of a fixation'.13
Perhaps, in recounting the incident, the ageing Lillie Langtry may have dramatised its details and exaggerated its impact, but it seems unlikely that she would have invented the episode.
By the age of sixteen, the young Lillie Le Breton was already developing a distinctly unconventional streak. Her upbringing – with her father so often immersed in both pastoral and sexual activities, and her mother so often confined to her couch – had been relatively unrestrained. The only girl among six brothers, she tended to take her tone from them: she was tomboyish, hoydenish, devil-may-care. There was almost nothing of the demure Victorian miss about her; she apparently did very little in the way of embroidery, flower-pressing or water-colour painting. While her brothers attended Victoria College, she was educated at home, first by a governess and then by some of her brothers' tutors. Meeting few other girls and then not really liking those she met, she joined her brothers in their pranks and practical jokes; she would do almost anything for a dare. There is even one story of her running naked, at dead of night, along a country lane. She was determined to prove that she was her brothers' equal. 'I must steady my nerves, control my tears, and look at things from a boy's point of view,'14 she remembered.
The result of all this was that the young Lillie Le Breton learned, early on, to make her way in a man's world. She became accustomed to the company of men. She never suffered from any feelings of inadequacy or timidity in their presence. She learned not only how to handle them, but how to dominate them.
Allied to her exceptional self-assurance was her exceptional beauty. Few could believe that this radiantly lovely, physically mature creature was still a child. Was it any wonder that she received her first proposal of marriage at the age of fourteen? Or that Lord Suffield, recently appointed lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and a regular visitor to Jersey, once declared, 'Do you know, Miss Le Breton, that you are very, very beautiful? You ought to have a season in London.'15
Yet when she did have that season in London, it was a humiliating failure. At the age of sixteen her mother took her to England and for several nightmarish weeks Lillie tried to cope with this unfamiliar world of expensive clothes, polished manners and social chit-chat. The nightmare culminated at a party given by Lord and Lady Suffield. 'When I walked into the ballroom,' remembered Lillie many years later, 'I felt like a clumsy peasant. My one "party gown", which had been made for me in St Helier, made me look like one of the serving maids. I had never waltzed, and could follow the leads of none of my dancing partners. The food was strange and never have I seen so many forks and spoons at one's supper place, I had no idea which to use. I disgraced myself so often I could scarcely wait until the evening came to its abysmal end.'16
But the experience did not crush her already resilient spirit. Back in Jersey, Lillie set about improving both her mind and her manners. She studied hard. 'Between the ages of sixteen and twenty,' she afterwards wrote, 'I learned the magic of words, the beauty and exci
tement of poetic imagery. I learned there was something in life other than horses, the sea, and the long Jersey tides.'17
Despite her lyrically expressed reflections, it was not by plumbing the depths of literary appreciation that Lillie was hoping to compensate for the shallowness of the long Jersey tides: her ambitions were altogether more down to earth. She wanted to establish herself in English society. 'I was possessed by a conviction that my destiny lay in London,'18 she says. And as the only possible way for her to fulfil this destiny was through marriage, Lillie consciously set about finding herself a suitable husband. Somewhere there must be a Prince Charming who would take her away from the limitations and longueurs of life in Jersey; who would offer her a wider stage on which to display her physical charms and social talents.
Lillie was twenty before she met such a man. None of her other suitors had been considered worldly enough by her or elevated enough by her parents. Not that Edward Langtry was that brilliant a catch: a twenty-six-year-old widower (Lillie puts his age as thirty in her memoirs) whose first wife, another beauty living in Jersey named Jane Frances Price, had died a couple of years before. Plump, phlegmatic, with a drooping moustache and resigned expression, Edward Langtry was hardly the shining knight of Lillie's imaginings. His interests were confined to sailing and fishing. He was not even, by the yardstick of the day, particularly well-born: his father and his grandfather had been Belfast shipowners, pioneers of the service across the Irish Sea to Liverpool.
But there were, as far as Lillie was concerned, certain compensatory factors. Langtry claimed to have taken a degree at Oxford and to have studied, if not practised, law. He had a house in England. And, above all, he was rich. Or rather, Lillie thought he was rich. Indeed, it was a party aboard his yacht, 'Red Gauntlet', then lying off St Helier, that first awakened Lillie's interest in him. 'One day there came into the harbour a most beautiful yacht,' she is reported to have said in later life. 'I met the owner and fell in love with the yacht. To become the mistress of the yacht, I married the owner, Edward Langtry.'19
Perhaps, at the time, it was not quite as calculated as that. But Lillie might well have seen in Edward Langtry the sort of man whom she would be able to mould, who would be a provider without expecting too much in return, and who would, above all, enable her to establish herself in society.
With the grudging consent of her parents, both of whom thought that she could have done better for herself, Lillie Le Breton was married to Edward Langtry, by her father, in St Saviour's Church on 9 March 1874.
The first two years of Lillie's married life were a period of deep disillusion. They were spent not, as she had imagined, in London but partly in Jersey, partly on another of Edward's yachts, 'Gertrude', and partly in their first English home, Cliffe Lodge, overlooking Southampton Water. Edward turned out to be poorer, less amenable and even duller than she had imagined. While she battled with the complexities of running a home for the first time, he spent his days drinking and yarning with his yachting cronies. 'We had so little to say to one another,' she complains, 'that we began to eat breakfast separately. Edward usually went off to join friends in Southampton at noon, so we rarely spent much time with each other until we dined together in the evening.'20
Many years later Lillie confessed that the intimate side of her marriage had been unrewarding; Edward had never aroused her sexually. In fairness to him, no Victorian husband expected his wife to enjoy the act of love-making, any more than she expected to enjoy it. Brides approached the marriage bed in a state not only of unsullied chastity, but of almost total ignorance. At best, they would have been told by their embarrassed mothers not to deny their husbands their 'rights'. 'Now you know what has to be done, so don't make a fuss,'21 were one husband's brisk instructions to his terrified wife as he climbed into bed on their wedding night.
What disappointed Lillie most of all was the fact that she was still no more part of the world of fashionable society than she had ever been. Not until she contracted typhoid fever, late in 1875, while living in Southampton, was Lillie able to take a step towards the realisation of her dreams. The doctor, she assures us unblinkingly, suggested that the best possible place for her to convalesce would be London.
'I have no idea,' she protests, 'what led us to select the great, smoky city as a sanatorium.'22 But select it she did, and early in 1876 the Langtrys settled into an apartment in Eaton Place.
But another year – of visiting museums and picture galleries, of strolling through pleasure gardens, of going to Hyde Park in the hope of seeing a member of the royal family ride by ('I had never set eyes on even a minor one, '23 says Lillie) – passed before the chance meeting with her Jersey acquaintance, old Lord Ranelagh, led to that invitation to Lady Sebright's at-home.
It was this invitation, claims Lillie, 'that completely changed the current of my life'.24
In the months after the Sebrights' party, Lillie Langtry developed into one of the most sought-after women in London. Swiftly and surely she progressed from the artistic salons of women like Lady Sebright to the grandest drawing rooms in the land. 'There was scarcely a great house in London that I did not visit during my first season,'25 she boasts.
She was fortunate in her timing. Society, by the late 1870s, was undergoing a transformation. Until then, the English aristocracy had been an exclusive clan, made up of about ten thousand people who, in turn, belonged to about fifteen hundred families. A title (the older the better) or a long established lineage were two of the qualifications necessary to belong to this select group; a third was the ownership of land. The upper classes were all landowners; over ninety per cent of the land was privately owned. No one could hope to be regarded as an aristocrat unless he could boast a great country estate and a great country house. Most of this privileged group knew one another or about each other; they almost never married out of their class. And just as rarely did they welcome anyone into their ranks who did not meet these qualifications.
But in the course of the last few years things had begun to change. Much of this was due to the attitude of the Prince of Wales. With his penchant for very rich men – whether they be self-made, Jewish or foreign, or indeed all three – he extended the boundaries of the upper classes beyond the gilded stockade of the landed aristocracy. Business acumen, beauty and, to a lesser extent, brains were becoming enough to get one accepted. Men like Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, whose recent forebears had been humble money lenders; women like Lady Waldegrave, whose father had been a Jewish singer, or Lady Moles-worth, the daughter of an obscure writing master; all these were not only being accepted but were often leading social lights.
As well as acquiring vast country estates and building palatial country houses, the nouveaux riches were marrying off their daughters to the sons of local aristocrats. Many a crumbling mansion was being restored and many a bankrupt estate being salvaged by the uninhibited use of the dowry brought by the daughter of some industrialist from Cleveland, Ohio, or some mineowner from Johannesburg, Transvaal. Not until the Roaring Twenties or the Swinging Sixties was there again to be such a breaking down of class barriers or such a relaxation of social conventions.
It was this opening-up of society that partly explains the ease with which Lillie Langtry was accepted; partly, but not entirely. Much of her success was due to her own particular qualities. For one thing, she was not some brash arriviste. She was, by Victorian standards, a lady. Her husband, whatever his shortcomings, did not do anything so vulgar as work for his living. His grandfather might have been a self-made shipping magnate, but Edward was a gentleman of leisure. Then Lillie herself was the daughter of the Dean of Jersey; and clergymen's daughters, if not exactly aristocratic, were certainly socially acceptable. In the Victorian hierarchy, clergymen ranked beside the landed gentry. Indeed, one of Lillie's brothers was to marry Lord Ranelagh's daughter.
Her air, despite her vivacity and sensuality, was well-bred: she knew how to conduct herself in public. Some witnesses even talk of her 'shyness' in
these early days. Lillie displayed none of the brittle, metallic self-assurance of a woman like Wallis Simpson who, over half a century later, was to set so many aristocratic teeth on edge. Her fascination was of an altogether more subtle variety.
And it says a great deal for that fascination when one remembers that she lacked the one sure entrée into this expanding upper class world: money. Edward Langtry was not anything like as rich as Lillie had at one time imagined. As so often happens, the Langtry dynasty was going from rags to riches and back to rags in three generations. Edward had no head for finance. In his efforts to keep up with the yachting fraternity, with those millionaires who raced three-hundred-ton cutters, he had squandered his inheritance. By now almost everything – Cliffe Lodge in Southampton, the stud of hunters, the coach and four, and the yachts – had gone. He was having to depend almost entirely on the rents from various properties which he still owned in Ireland. Nor was his suddenly burgeoning social life doing anything to conserve what little remained of his fortune.
Lillie, in common with most Victorian wives, knew very little about the state of her husband's finances. But she did not need to be a financial expert to appreciate that they had no country house, no town house, not even a carriage, of their own. And others, of course, appreciated it as well.
But then, in addition to her beauty and her personal magnetism, Lillie had something else to offer: her curiosity value. Within weeks of Lady Sebright's party, Lillie's had become one of the best-known faces in London.
Her meeting, at the Sebrights, with the artists John Everett Millais and Frank Miles had borne almost immediate fruit. Although Miles's sexual preference – as was the case with many another Victorian literary or artistic notability – was for little girls, he was not blind to Lillie's possibilities. He apparently sketched her there and then and, a day or two later, did another drawing of her which he sold to a printer. The picture, reproduced in its thousands, began appearing in shop windows all over London; within weeks Lillie's distinctive features had become familiar to a huge public. 'My sketches of Lillie during her first London season,' wrote Miles twenty years later, 'earned far more than I've ever made on the largest commissions for my most expensive paintings.'26