by Theo Aronson
'My only purpose in life,' she later said of these halcyon days, 'was to look nice and make myself agreeable.'15
How did the two people most closely associated with the lovers – Princess Alexandra and Edward Langtry – react to the affair? For not only did they have to contend with their private knowledge of it, but with the fact that it was being widely talked about.
Alexandra, very wisely, accepted it. With customary grace and dignity, she behaved as though nothing were wrong. The blind eye which she had always turned towards her husband's casual affairs she now turned, with equal determination, towards this more serious relationship. Indeed, the Princess not only tolerated Lillie but welcomed her to both Marlborough House and Sandringham, where she always showed her great kindness. On one occasion, for instance, when Lillie was a guest at a small dinner party at Marlborough House, she was suddenly taken ill.
'The Princess, so considerate and compassionate always, immediately told me to hurry home to bed, which I thankfully did. Half an hour later the Household Physician, Francis Laking, was ushered into my room, having been sent by command of the Princess of Wales to see me and report to her on my condition. By the next afternoon I was feeling better, and was lying on the sofa in my little drawing room about tea-time, when the butler suddenly announced Her Royal Highness . . .
'The honour of the unexpected visit brought me at once to my feet, ill though I felt, but the Princess insisted on my lying down again, while she made herself tea, chatting kindly and graciously. She always used a specially manufactured violet scent and I recall exclaiming on the delicious perfume, and her solicitous answer that she feared possibly it was too strong for me.'16
Although Lillie was not above embellishing the incident, there can be no doubt that the Princess was never vindictive towards her. Some of this was due to Alexandra's genuine goodness of heart; she had a horror of jealousy, regarding it as one of the worst sins – 'the bottom of all mischief and misfortune in this world.'17 Or she may have been guided by more practical motives: as there was nothing that she could do about her husband's unfaithfulness, Alexandra's best bet was to accept it. In this way she could win respect for her generous behaviour rather than pity, or even ridicule, for some less dignified response. Her attitude certainly won her the gratitude of her husband.
Or perhaps she simply did not care. With the passing years, Alexandra was becoming progressively more selfish and self-centred; she may by now have decided that as long as she was left to live her life in her own way, Bertie could do as he pleased with his.
Edward Langtry faced a somewhat different dilemma. His was the dichotomy of all husbands who are cuckolded by princes: resentment and jealousy on the one hand, pride and loyalty on the other. During the last century or so, British royal history has not been lacking in the wronged husbands of princely favourites: those silent, long-suffering, stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen whose reverence towards the monarchy forbids them to make a fuss. They bow their heads in deferential greeting while their royal guest's gaze shifts to their wife's décolletage; they eat lonely meals in the club dining room while she sips Moët et Chandon in some candle-lit supper alcove; they go on business trips to New York or Chicago while she is whisked off to Biarritz or Dubrovnik. Poor George Keppel was forced to go into 'trade' to earn enough to keep his wife in a manner to which her royal lover was accustomed. Ernest Simpson was forever having to find himself some work to do in another room while the scintillating Wallis entertained the Prince of Wales in the drawing room of their Bryanston Square flat.
As a mari complaisant, Edward Langtry was not as complaisant as he might have been. Although, according to Lillie, they had ceased having marital relations soon after moving into the Norfolk Street house, Edward was still capable of jealousy. Despite his apparent lethargy – unlike his wife, he was lazy, incurious, unambitious – Edward had a violent temper. Every now and then he would lash out at Lillie: at her extravagance, at her frenetic socialising, even at her association with the Prince of Wales.
1. Lillie Langtry's birthplace: St Saviour's Rectory, Jersey.
2. The only known photograph of Edward and Lillie Langtry together, taken soon after their marriage.
3. The young Mrs Langtry, whose blend of simplicity and sensuality made her so irresistible to the Prince of Wales.
4. The debonnaire Prince of Wales, aged thirty-five, at the time of his meeting with Lillie Langtry.
5. 'The Jersey Lily', Millais's famous portrait, picturing Lillie holding a nerine sariensis.
6. Lillie Langtry, 'looking like a seductive Renaissance princess' in a painting by Edward Poynter.
7. The Red House, Bournemouth: the curiously bourgeois 'love nest' which the Prince of Wales built for Lillie.
8. Soignée and seductive: Lillie Langtry as the very picture of a royal mistress.
9. Queen Victoria presiding over the sort of 'Drawing Room' at which Lillie Langtry was presented.
12. Lillie Langtry, as a celebrated actress, in one of her stage roles.
Once, early in Lillie's liaison with the Prince, when she and Edward were guests at Lord Malmesbury's country house, she wrote an indiscreet letter to her lover. Edward, on finding the letter reproduced on the blotting paper (every Victorian husband was adept at holding blotting paper up to the looking glass), was furious. Such was the force of his anger that even the resilient Lillie was reduced to tears. Lord Malmesbury was no less angry. But the anger of this experienced old diplomat was not directed at Lillie or Edward, but at the servants. They had strict instructions, he explained to Lillie, to renew the blotting paper throughout the house every day, in order to prevent precisely such an eventuality.
But not for a moment would Edward have expected his wife to break off her relationship with the Prince of Wales. Dutifully he continued to escort her to all those dinners and balls and country house parties which he so hated; doing it not so much for her sake but as an obligation towards the Prince and, indeed, the throne. Even he, it seems, was ready to bask in a little reflected royal glory. If one was going to be cuckolded, who better to be cuckolded by than the future King of England?
However, to make the whole business more palatable, Edward applied the customary remedy: he took to the bottle. He had always been fond of a drink; now he became fonder still. It was one way of passing the evenings on which he was left alone; or, even worse, the evenings on which he was obliged to stand about, making desultory conversation to people who he knew despised or pitied him. Sometimes, declared Lillie in later life, Edward was so drunk that he was incapable of going out. She would then be obliged to send last-minute apologies to her hostess.
Yet he consistently refused to grant her a divorce. Long after her affair with the Prince of Wales had ended, long after husband and wife had separated, long after Lillie had become a rich, world-renowned actress with a string of lovers, Edward would still not hear of divorcing her. And when Lillie was eventually able to win her freedom in an American court, it was on the grounds that Edward had deserted her.
'I have always treated Mr Langtry with affection,' she unblinkingly assured the judge, 'never giving him cause to disregard his duty to me as a husband.'18
During the first rapturous years of Lillie's romance with the Prince of Wales, she adapted her life, almost entirely, to his. There was hardly an occasion, in his crowded social calendar, on which she did not appear in his company.
One of the most public of these occasions was the daily ride, or drive, in the Park. This was one of the great rituals of society during the last decades of the nineteenth century. 'The Park' meant Hyde Park, never any of London's other great parks, and it was only the stretch between Albert and Grosvenor Gates, taking in Rotton Row, that was regarded as really fashionable. Here, after breakfast and between tea and dinner in the afternoons, during the season, would assemble a great concourse of riders and carriages. The scene was a splendid one: a kaleidoscopic pattern of lacquered carriages, high-stepping horses, gleaming harness, liveried footmen, s
martly turned-out men and opulently dressed women. It was, remembers one observer, 'like a daily Society Garden Party.'19 Highlight of the late afternoon cavalcade would be the arrival of Princess Alexandra in her claret-coloured barouche. Looking, as always, transcendently elegant, she would bow, in her inimitable way, to the hat-doffing men and the curtseying women.
Sometimes the Prince would be with her; more often he would be riding with his equerries and friends. Among these friends, of course, would be Lillie. Occasionally, arriving home at dawn from some ball, she would change straight into her riding habit and set out for the Park. By now she had a horse of her own, called Redskin, given to her by another of her new admirers, the young Morton Frewen. (The Langtrys had also acquired a carriage.) Dressed in her superbly tailored riding habit and top hat, Lillie would join the group around the Prince – whose own horse would be unmistakable in its royal red brow-band.
One day, when the two of them were out riding together in the late afternoon, Bertie showed no sign of wanting to go home. 'As etiquette demanded that I should ride on so long as His Royal Highness elected to do so,' explains Lillie, it was after nine before she arrived back in Norfolk Street. Her husband was furious. They were to dine out that evening. Having scrambled into an evening dress, and with the grumbling Edward in tow, Lillie arrived at her Eaton Square destination just before ten o'clock to find the entire company waiting for her. Her hostess was all sympathy. One of the guests, on his way over, had seen her in the Park with the Prince.
'As we knew you couldn't get away,' smiled her hostess, 'we postponed dinner indefinitely. '20
When the couple were not riding, they would be racing; or rather they would be attending the great race meetings which were such a feature of the Prince's social life. Bertie relished the company of racing people and revelled in the 'glorious uncertainty'21 of the turf. He once shocked Queen Victoria by suggesting that the funeral of Dean Stanley be held a day earlier than planned to avoid a clash with the racing at Goodwood. It was, in fact, in the year he met Lillie that Bertie first ran his own horses: the Prince's colours – the purple, gold braid and scarlet sleeves – were seen at Newmarket for the first time in July 1877.
Bertie was advised in all racing matters by the manager of his stud, Lord Marcus Beresford, one of those Beresford brothers – Charles, Marcus and William – whom Lillie describes as 'the most entertaining' of the Prince's set. 'They were all handsome as paint,' she says, 'and as merry as the traditional Irishman or sandboys . . . full of native wit, charm and bonhomie.'22 Unsuspected by Lillie at the time, Lord Charles Beresford was to be instrumental in involving the Prince with her successor – Daisy Warwick.
It was at these race meetings, at Newmarket, Ascot and Good-wood, where the Langtrys were invariably members of the Prince's party, that Lillie's own great love of racing was born. She had always been interested in horses, but from now on she was to take a far more intelligent interest. In time, she was to become an enthusiastic and successful racehorse owner, twice winning the Cesarewitch. 'As far as I am concerned,' she says, 'the pleasures of the turf do not merely consist in owning horses and seeing them win. I like the routine of racing. The fresh air, the picnic lunch, the rural surroundings, all tend to make a race meeting a delightful outing.'23
It could have been Bertie talking.
Lillie has a story to tell about her first meeting, just before Ascot one year, with Disraeli, then in his second term as Prime Minister.
'What can I do for you?' asked Disraeli, smiling quizzically.
'Four new gowns for Ascot,' was Lillie's pert reply.
'You are a very sensible young woman,' commented the Prime Minister. 'Many a woman would have asked to have been made a duchess in her own right.'24
With his sense of history, Disraeli would have appreciated the fact that, a couple of centuries before, a royal favourite would have stood a very good chance indeed of being made a duchess in her own right.
Another setting for the lovers' meetings was, of course, the Prince's London home, Marlborough House. For almost a century, from the time that the newly-married Prince and Princess of Wales took up residence in 1863, until the death of Queen Mary in 1953, Marlborough House was one of London's great royal residences. It was particularly associated with the Prince of Wales who lived in it for almost forty years until he ascended the throne in 1901; indeed, his circle of racy, pleasure-loving friends were known as the Marlborough House set. Its grey, somewhat four-square exterior belied the luxuriousness within: the rooms of Marlborough House glittered with all the richness of an Aladdin's Cave. The main reception rooms were a riot of damask wall-paper, painted ceilings, velvet curtains, gilt-framed portraits, white marble busts and Gobelin tapestries. The private apartments, reflecting Princess Alexandra's love of intimacy, were divided up by screens and curtains and potted palms, and crowded with little sofas, love-seats, pouffes, silver-framed photographs and dozens upon dozens of knick-knacks.
The Langtrys, arriving for anything from an intimate supper party to a ball (the whole of society, it was said, could be accommodated in the Marlborough House ballroom at the time of the Prince's marriage; his liberal social attitudes soon changed that), would be admitted by a gillie in Highland dress. Two scarlet-coated and powdered footmen would take Lillie's wrap and Edward's coat and give them to the hall porter, in his short red coat with leather epaulettes. A page in a dark blue coat and black trousers would then escort the couple to an ante-room. From here they would be led, by yet another page, into one of the drawing rooms.
When all the guests had assembled, the Prince and Princess would enter. 'The appearance of the Princess of Wales . . .' writes Lillie with studied generosity, 'wonderfully lovely and faultlessly dressed, seemed almost to dim the beauty of every other woman in the room, and her grace and fascination were such that one could not take one's eyes from her.'25
And if the guests found the Princess's flawless, almost wax-flower-like beauty remarkable, they found the Prince's energy and good nature even more so. One observer, attending a ball – not at Marlborough House but at the Prince's Norfolk home, Sandringham – watched in amazement as, in a country dance, 'the Prince and Princess set off with their partners, round and round, down the middle and up again, and so on to the end, the Prince the jolliest of the jolly and the life of the party, as he is wherever he goes. I never saw such amazing vitality . . . He is the antidote to every text and sermon that ever was preached upon the pleasure of the world palling upon the wearied spirit.'26
The Prince was equally in his element during the recreation that followed the close of the London season: the yachting at Cowes. At the beginning of August, society shut up its London houses and made for the Isle of Wight. The Royal Yacht Squadron, headquartered in its castle on the seafront at Cowes, was, says Lillie, 'the most exclusive club in the kingdom'.27 Although Queen Victoria, ensconced in Osborne House, confined her participation to the occasional drive along the beflagged and bustling waterfront, or to watching the proceedings through a telescope, Bertie flung himself into the activity with customary gusto.
Yachting quickened his pulses no less than racing. The swelling of the sails, the shimmer of the sea, the tilting of the decks, the gusting of the wind – all these delighted him. He delighted equally in the less bracing pleasures of Cowes week: in dining aboard some luxuriously appointed two-hundred-foot craft belonging to one of his millionaire friends, or in dancing on deck, under a canopy of flags, to the music of Strauss or Waltaeufel.
But, as much as anything, he enjoyed being with Lillie at Cowes. In spite of her delicate beauty, she was no hot-house plant; she loved the outdoors. Lillie's tomboyish streak, so marked during her Jersey girlhood, was very much in evidence on these occasions. 'How I enjoyed the excitement of that race,' she once enthused, 'crowding on sail to the verge of danger, with a swirling spray drenching us to the skin.'28
Lillie and Edward would be guests of the Prince's friend – the man who had introduced them – Sir Allen Young, on
board his schooner, 'Helen', while the Prince, and sometimes the Princess, would be on the royal yacht 'Osborne'. Often, to Lillie's gratification, there might be other members of Europe's inter-related royal families on board 'Osborne', and what she calls 'a favoured few' – herself, of course, included – would be invited to dine or dance.
Amongst the galaxy of royals to whom Lillie was introduced by the Prince was the widowed ex-Empress Eugenie of the French who, since the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, had been living in exile in England. She and her only child, the Prince Imperial, then in his early twenties, would take a house at Cowes each August. The Empress, although still remarkably beautiful, was no longer the stylish, insouciant creature of Bertie's first youthful visit to Paris. The Prince Imperial, on the other hand, was one of those high-spirited, devil-may-care young men in whose company the Prince of Wales delighted.
Through this irrepressible French prince, Bertie and Lillie were once involved in two of the most popular activities of the period: spiritualism and practical jokes.
A spiritual 'investigation' or 'table-turning' session had been organised at a seaside villa and was attended by, among others, the Prince of Wales, the Prince Imperial and the Langtrys. No sooner had the company around the table joined hands and the lights been put out than the furniture began crashing about. A lighted match revealed the young Prince Imperial to be the culprit. He was promptly expelled and locked out of the room. Once again the company settled down, in the dark, to await some spiritual manifestation. It came, some ten minutes later, in the shape of a ghostly white figure. Another match revealed the same culprit. The Prince Imperial had climbed up the wisteria, in through the open window and had covered himself, and several others, with flour.