The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  Woken from sleep, Lillie scrambled into a dress and rushed downstairs. There stood the stork-like figure of King Leopold, sopping wet from having trudged through the rain from his hotel. The two of them sat making polite conversation – although conversation, polite or not, was hardly King Leopold's forte – for 'an interminable period'22, and he left. At nine the following morning, the King called again. This time Lillie sent down a polite excuse. Or so she tells us.

  An even more determined caller was Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria. Only son of the stolid Emperor Franz Josef and the beautiful but wayward Empress Elizabeth, the twenty-year-old Crown Prince Rudolph had inherited much of his mother's fascination and still more of her emotional instability. The arrival in London, in 1878, of this handsome and headstrong heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was regarded as a significant social event, and he was lavishly entertained.

  One of the first private dances in his honour was given by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at his home in Piccadilly. Determined that his famous white and gold 'Louis XVI' ballroom would be the setting for an occasion of unparalleled magnificence, the Baron invited a dozen celebrated beauties – Lillie amongst them – to a special luncheon party at which he offered to buy them each a new Doucet dress for the ball. Needless to say, the offer was snapped up. For Lillie, Doucet created a dress in pale pink crepê-de-chine, subtly draped and richly fringed. It was delivered to Norfolk Street, together with a petticoat which the couturier considered essential for the hang of the gown.

  Months later, Doucet sent Lillie a bill for the petticoat. Although the sum was trifling, Rothschild had refused to pay it. He was responsible for the dress only, explained the multi-millionaire.

  At the ball, one look at Lillie – so seductive in her clinging silk and with her loosely-knotted hair – was enough for the impressionable young Crown Prince. He insisted on dancing almost every dance with her. And ten minutes after the royal party had processed into their own supper room (where Rudolph was seated beside his host's sister, Alice Rothschild) the Baron came hurrying back into the ballroom. The Crown Prince, he explained to Lillie, had demanded that she be put next to him at table. Rudolph had not addressed a single word to poor Alice Rothschild, an amused Bertie afterwards told Lillie.

  After supper, Rudolph again monopolised her. So vigorous, apparently, was his dancing that his hands were leaving sweaty imprints on her dress. Politely, Lillie asked him to put on his gloves. His reply was singularly graceless.

  'It is you who are sweating, madam,'23 he said.

  In the days that followed the Rothschilds' ball, the Crown Prince was a persistent caller at Norfolk Street. One cannot know how much Lillie led him on, or whether she led him on at all, but there can be no doubt that the young man was infatuated by her. In later years, she is said to have told Somerset Maugham that their association ended when Rudolph one day made his 'dishonourable intentions' so apparent that, 'in disgust', she pretended to throw a magnificent emerald ring he had just given her into the fire. With a 'horrified cry he fell to his knees and desperately scrabbled out the burning coals in an effort to retrieve the jewel.'

  'I couldn't have loved him after that,'24 shrugged Lillie.

  But she kept the emerald ring.

  Almost ten years later, Crown Prince Rudolph shocked the world by shooting first his mistress, young Mary Vetsera, and then himself in what has been described as a suicide pact, at the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling.

  Would Lillie have considered a sexual liaison with Crown Prince Rudolph? It is doubtful. She would hardly have risked a possible break-up of her affair with the Prince of Wales. Her position was too precarious for that. She might have been tickled by the thought of adding the name of the future Emperor of Austria-Hungary to that of the future King of England as a royal lover, but it would have remained a thought only.

  Yet in spite of her circumspection, there is some recently unearthed evidence that Lillie was indeed involved in a clandestine love affair throughout this period. A cache of sixty-five love letters, written by Lillie to Arthur Henry Jones, was discovered in a battered green box in an attic in a Jersey farmhouse. The box had apparently been brought there by Arthur Jones's niece, many years ago. The tone of these letters is passionate; the relationship between Lillie Langtry and Arthur Jones was undoubtedly sexual. Always addressing him as 'My Darling', she often tells him when it will be safe for him to visit her. 'Please, please, hurry back,' she writes on one occasion. 'I want you so much.'25

  The ardent nature of these letters gives the lie to the frequent assertion that Lillie Langtry was asexual, cold-hearted, incapable of love. On the other hand, they reinforce the theory that no matter how passionately she might be in love, she would never allow her heart to rule her head. With Lillie, love always came second to ambition. Not for a moment would she have considered the world well lost for love: nothing must be allowed to interfere with her liaison with the Prince of Wales. She kept her three-year-long love affair with Arthur Jones secret; to this day he remains a shadowy figure.

  In any case, she had given the gossips quite enough to be getting on with. News of Lillie Langtry's spectacular success had by now crossed the Atlantic. 'Lovely Lillie Langtry,' trumpeted the New York Tribune, à propos her friendship with Crown Prince Rudolph, 'has added another royal scalp to her fast-growing collection.'26

  And when Moreton Frewen, one of her earliest admirers, who was soon to marry the sister of Jennie Jerome (wife of Lord Randolph Churchill and mother of Winston Churchill) arrived in New York, he was immediately quizzed on his friendship with Lillie by a reporter on the New York Post.

  Would he call himself an intimate friend?

  'Unfortunately, no,' replied Frewen.

  Would he have wanted to become her good friend?

  'I believe she is otherwise occupied,' was his circumspect answer to that one.

  Was Mrs Langtry as beautiful as was claimed?

  'Yes, I suppose she is.'

  Had there been just a hint of hesitation in that reply?

  'Not really,' said Frewen. 'She is lovely, but I've found her a bit dull, since she's always surrounded by people. A lily, to bloom as it should, must be planted in its bed.'27

  This was hardly guaranteed to turn the swelling tide of gossip.

  Foreshadowing, in a way, the turn her career would ultimately take was Lillie's friendship with someone still far removed from these royal and aristocratic circles: the young Oscar Wilde.

  They met towards the end of 1879, after Wilde had come down from Oxford and had moved into the 'untidy and romantic house'28 just off the Strand belonging to Lillie's artist friend, Frank Miles. Here, in a fittingly fashionable setting – white panelled walls, blue and white china, peacock feathers and sunflowers – Wilde entertained what he described as 'beautiful people' to tea. The most beautiful, in his opinion, was Lillie Langtry.

  'The three women I most admired,' wrote Wilde a year before his death, 'are Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry. I would have married any one of them with pleasure. The first had great dignity, the second a lovely voice, the third a perfect figure.'29

  Whether any one of the three women would have married him with an equal degree of pleasure is another matter.

  Lillie's opinion of Wilde, at this early stage of his career, is rather less flattering. She professes herself 'astounded' at his strange appearance: she describes him as 'grotesque'. His face was too large, his skin too pale, his hair too long, his lips too coarse, his teeth too discoloured, his nails too dirty and his clothes too outré. But she had to admit that he had a certain fascination. She found his voice alluring and his enthusiasm infectious. In those days, she says, he was truly ingenuous: 'his mannerisms and eccentricities were then but the natural outcome of a young fellow bubbling over with temperament, and were not at all assumed. '30

  For Wilde, Lillie's chief attraction was her notoriety. He might pay elaborate homage to her arresting appearance and her sharp mind, but it was her positio
n as maîtresse en titre of the Prince of Wales that attracted him more. Determined to hitch his wagon to this dazzling star, Wilde announced himself in love with her. There was nothing like an unrequited love affair with a celebrity to win a budding poet some public attention.

  A poem which he had originally written in praise of a youth was slightly altered to fit her ('A fair slim boy' was easily metamorphosed into 'A lily-girl') and an even more fulsome tribute, entitled 'A New Helen', was published in Edmund Yates's magazine, The World. 'To Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London', ran Wilde's florid inscription on the white vellum-bound copy which he presented to Lillie.

  On his way to visit her, he would stroll along Piccadilly holding in his hand, for all to see, a single lily. He even, so she tells us, once fell asleep, like a devoted dog, on the doorstep of her Norfolk Street house. On another occasion, after the two of them had had a tiff, Wilde, on suddenly spotting her in a box at the theatre, had to be led out of the house in tears.

  Lillie, of course, was too shrewd to be taken in by all these flowery gestures. Just as shamelessly as Wilde used her to draw attention to himself, she used him in her continuing quest to improve her mind. He took her to Professor Newton's celebrated lectures on Greek art at the British Museum; he introduced her to that great artistic arbiter, John Ruskin; he set about teaching her Italian; he tried to instil in her something of his own 'wild worship of beauty'.31 He even advised this most soignée of women on clothes.

  'I wanted to ask you how I should go to a fancy dress ball there,' she once wrote, 'but I chose a soft black Greek dress with a fringe of silver crescents and stars, and diamond ones in my hair and on my neck, and called it "Queen of the Night".'32

  But she was not always ready to take his advice.

  'The Lily is so tiresome,' he once sighed, 'she won't do what I tell her.'

  'Indeed?' answered a friend.

  'Yes. I assure her that she owes it to herself and to us to drive daily through the Park dressed entirely in black, in a black victoria drawn by black horses, and with "Venus Annodomini" emblazoned on her black bonnet in dull sapphires. But she won't.'33

  What, one wonders, would the Prince of Wales have said if she had? What, indeed, did he think of Lillie's exotic new admirer? There is no record of his having met Oscar Wilde until some years later, in Homburg in 1892. The by then successful playwright, together with his new young friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, was in Homburg to recover from his unsuccessful battle with the Lord Chamberlain over the proposed London production of his play Salomé, in which Sarah Bernhardt was to have appeared. The worldly Prince, who had a more than passing interest in the Divine Sarah, was all sympathy.

  Not until the autumn of 1879 did word of the Prince of Wales's two-and-a-half-year affair with Lillie Langtry appear in the British press. The respectable newspapers would have been too deferential to mention it, and the popular papers, without today's intrusive reporters, would have lacked enough hard evidence to risk carrying the story. That would have been the only reason for their reticence. In the ordinary way, popular journals never hesitated to criticise or lampoon members of the royal family.

  From the days of Gillray's and Cruikshank's ribald cartoons to the usually apocryphal stories in today's tabloid press, royals have been regarded as legitimate targets. The press might not, in Queen Victoria's time, have kept such a relentless watch on every waking – or, indeed, sleeping – moment of a member of her family, but there was no lack of critical comment. And nothing is guaranteed to cause the royal family more annoyance, or anguish, than adverse press publicity.

  Throughout his adult life, Bertie had been the subject of considerable newspaper abuse. Journals like Fun, Puck, Moonshine, Tomahawk and Reynolds Newspaper never hesitated to take advantage of the opportunities with which his hedonistic lifestyle provided them. Every fresh scandal brought forth its crop of cartoons, caricatures and comic verses. Reynolds Newspaper was particularly harsh in its editorial comment. 'If the Prince of Wales is an accomplice in bringing dishonour to the homestead of an English gentleman,' it lectured at the time of the Prince's involvement with Harriet Mordaunt in the Mordaunt divorce scandal, 'if he has assisted in rendering an honourable man miserable for life; if unbridled sensuality and lust have led him to violate the laws of honour and hospitality – then such a man, placed in the position he is, should not only be expelled from decent society, but is utterly unfit and unworthy to rule over this country.'34

  It was the scurrilous magazine Town Talk, edited by the young Adolphus Rosenberg, that first mentioned the Prince of Wales's name in connection with Lillie Langtry; a mention that was to lead to a titillating court case. Curiously enough, not one of Edward VII's major biographers, in cataloguing the various court cases in which he was involved, has mentioned the Town Talk affair.

  Rosenberg's first salvo came in the issue of 30 August 1879, when he claimed that, 'A petition has been filed in the Divorce Court by Mr Edward Langtry. HRH The Prince of Wales, and two other gentlemen whose names up to the time of going to press we have not been enabled to learn, are mentioned as co-respondents.'

  Even today, with society's more lenient attitudes towards sexual behaviour, an announcement that the Prince of Wales was to be cited in a divorce case would cause a sensation; it certainly caused one then. The circulation of Town Talk soared as the public, in the pleasurable anticipation of another royal exposé, rushed to buy copies. Whether Rosenberg was acting on firm evidence or whether he was simply chancing his arm is uncertain; but as there was no denial from the Langtrys, he pushed ahead.

  Each issue fed the hungry public another titbit. 'When we have a lady's name paraded before the public in a thousand different ways,' railed Rosenberg against Lillie, 'when we see her photographs displayed in almost every stationer's window: when we see that photograph side by side with bishops and lawyers, and in conjunction with facial representations of well-known harlots, the question arises, "Who is Mrs Langtry?" '

  He lost no time in supplying the answer. In a sentence heavy with double entendre, he claimed that 'there was something not very pleasing to the loyal mind to see, in a dozen shop windows, Mrs Langtry side by side or else beneath the Prince of Wales . . .'

  In one issue his readers were told that the Home Secretary had forbidden the cracking of any Langtry jokes in music halls. In another they were enlightened as to the names of the two men who would be appearing, along with the Prince of Wales, as co-respondents: they were Lord Lonsdale and Lord Londesborough. In a third they were informed that the divorce case was to be held in camera.

  Adopting that stock-in-trade of the popular press – a tone of mock outrage at the spreading of tittle-tattle – Town Talk applauded the fact that the case was to be heard in camera, so depriving 'scandalmongers of a fine opportunity'. 'Mrs Langtry has, I understand, filed an answer, denying the adultery [with the Prince of Wales and lords Lonsdale and Londesborough] and, as far as I can learn, the petitioner [Mr Edward Langtry] will find it exceedingly difficult to make good his case.' Of course, continued Rosenberg in the same sanctimonious vein, 'there will be a great outcry against the case being tried privately, but I don't see why anyone need be dissatisfied, especially as the details are not likely to be at all creditable to us as a nation.'

  In case his readers had not understood the significance of this last phrase, Rosenberg went on to say that he would not like to be 'more explicit' on this point.

  Why did the Langtrys not deny Rosenberg's assertions? Were they true? Or had the Prince, in his anxiety to prevent the affair developing into a full-scale scandal, advised Lillie against taking any action against Rosenberg? Or was royal pressure being brought to bear on Town Talk?

  For some reason or other Rosenberg, in the issue of 4 October, suddenly changed direction. 'I am now informed on authority which I have no reason to doubt,' he announced, 'that Mr Langtry has withdrawn the petition which he had filed in the Divorce Court. The case of Langtry vs Langtry and others is therefore finally disposed of
and we have probably heard the last of it. . . I am told also that it is not unlikely that Mr Langtry will shortly be appointed to some diplomatic post abroad. It is not stated whether his beautiful consort will accompany him.'35

  But Rosenberg had not heard the last of it. In the same issue of Town Talk, he foolishly moved his sights from Mrs Langtry to that rival beauty, Mrs Cornwallis West. This celebrated 'professional beauty', known always as 'Patsy', had been another of the Prince of Wales's paramours. There is a story that when the little daughter of one of the Duke of Westminster's estate workers told her father that she had seen the Prince of Wales 'lying on top of' Mrs Cornwallis West in the woods, the girl's father struck her 'a violent blow and told her she'd be killed if she repeated the story'.36 Indeed, it was rumoured that the Prince was not only the godfather of Patsy Cornwallis West's son George, but his actual father.

  Yet it was on quite another score that Rosenberg now attacked her. He accused Patsy Cornwallis West of co-operating with the photographers of 'professional beauties' to such an extent that she had rigged up no less than four photographic studios and fifteen darkrooms in her Eaton Place home; that she had all but exhausted herself in her eagerness to give sittings; and that she was making thousands of pounds a year in commission on the sale of her photographs.

  Mrs Cornwallis West's husband proved to be not nearly as long-suffering as Mrs Langtry's husband appeared to be. Within a week Cornwallis West had sued Rosenberg for defamatory libel. Rosenberg was arrested, and at the preliminary hearing he was astonished to learn that he was to be tried not only for his defamation of Mrs Cornwallis West, but also for his libelling of Mr and Mrs Langtry.