The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  The trial, which opened in the Central Criminal Court on 25 October 1879, turned out to be a cause célèbre. But the crowds that flocked to it in the hope of seeing the notorious Mrs Langtry were disappointed. They had to be content with the distinctly less beguiling figure of her husband, Edward Langtry. The court was assured, by the Langtrys' orotund counsel, that the couple lived in the best and highest society and that they had been honoured with the acquaintance, nay, friendship, of Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales, who had frequently visited them. That His Royal Highness had visited her a sight more often than Her Royal Highness (who had, in fact, visited her only once, when she was ill) was a point not stressed by counsel.

  'The lady of whom this libel has been published is of great personal attractions and beauty. Hence it has been that the defendant [Rosenberg] and those who are associated with him, have thought fit for the purpose of profit, and for the sake of their vile publication, to make her the subject of obloquy and defamation.'

  Edward Langtry assured the court that there was no truth whatsoever in Rosenberg's assertions; that he had never contemplated divorce; and that he and his wife lived on the most affectionate terms.

  Was there any truth, asked counsel, in Rosenberg's claim that Mr Langtry had been offered a diplomatic appointment?

  'Not a word,' replied Langtry.

  'I am very glad to hear it,' said counsel, a shade ambiguously.

  Rosenberg, pleading guilty to having published the libels, denied that he had known that they were false. The judge was not impressed. He sentenced him to eighteen months in prison.

  The Prince of Wales had been saved from another major scandal. Yet it must have been with more than a flicker of amusement that the crowded court heard Rosenberg's counsel declare that it was far from him 'to suppose that the Prince of Wales could for one moment depart from that morality which it is his duty to exhibit . . .'37

  Quite obviously, said the wags, there was nothing between the Prince of Wales and Lillie Langtry; not even a sheet.

  5

  The End and the Beginning

  BY THE SPRING of 1880, three years after she had first met the Prince of Wales, Lillie Langtry was riding the crest of her self-created wave. By a deliberate exploitation of her physical attractions, she had managed to achieve all her girlhood ambitions. At twenty-six, she was one of the most celebrated women in society. She had been presented to Queen Victoria, she could claim the friendship of kings and princes, she was the guest in some of the grandest houses in the land, she had been painted by the world's most famous artists, her photographic likenesses were familiar throughout the country, her movements were reported in the press, she was the centre of interest whenever she attended a ball and in danger of being mobbed whenever she appeared in the street. 'Jersey Lily' was one of the most famous sobriquets in the kingdom. When the ancient Egyptian obelisk – Cleopatra's Needle – was re-erected on the banks of the Thames in 1878, Lillie Langtry's photograph was among the various articles buried, for posterity, in its foundations.

  Yet more than anyone Lillie appreciated the precariousness of her social position. It depended, entirely, on the patronage of her royal lover. Without that neither her beauty, her vivacity, nor her drive could guarantee her a place in society. Lillie was no fool. She knew well enough that those who entertained her most readily were those most eager to gain, or retain, the Prince's friendship. In the main, it was the Prince's nouveaux riches friends, people like the Rothschilds and the Sassoons, who opened their doors to her, while the doors of truly aristocratic establishments, such as Hatfield House, home of the Salisburys, remained firmly closed. In short, if she had not been the Prince's mistress, Lillie Langtry's curiosity value would not have lasted for more than a season.

  At the same time, she realised that she could not hope to hold Bertie's interest forever. He was too fickle, too restless, too self-indulgent a man to remain faithful to one woman for long. After all, he was not yet forty. Already he had enjoyed the occasional peccadillo and he was often to be seen, these days, with another professional beauty, Mrs Luke Wheeler. In fact, the Prince was so often in the company of Mrs Wheeler – and, for appearance's sake, of her husband Luke – that Luke's father, a naive old clergyman, was once heard to remark, 'It is strange how fond the Prince of Wales has become of my son. He and Luke are inseparable.'1

  The year before, Lillie had had to compete with the attractions of an altogether more formidable rival – Sarah Bernhardt.

  The already famous actress had arrived in London with the Comédie Française in the summer of 1879. Lillie was among the first people to meet her. She was invited, with other members of 'the fashionable world'2, to a welcoming breakfast given by Sir Algernon Borthwick, proprietor of The Morning Post.

  The Divine Sarah looked, to say the least, extraordinary. 'Her beauty,' as Lillie somewhat gingerly puts it, 'was not understood by the masses.'3 Whereas Lillie, with her sloping shoulders, small waist, generous breasts and hips, conformed to the contemporary ideal of womanhood, Sarah was an exponent of the new 'aesthetic' style. Together with other unconventional women such as the actress Ellen Terry, and William Morris's wife, Jane, Sarah Bernhardt spurned the constraints of Victorian couture and dressed in a free, flowing, uncorseted fashion. Instead of disguising her thin, angular figure, Sarah emphasised it by wearing waistless dresses with bold vertical trimmings. Everything was designed to accentuate her sinuous seductiveness. The gauzy bow at the neck, the tight, transparent lace sleeves, the sensuous velvets or slithery silks, the 'tantalising' front fastenings – all these were regarded as highly provocative in less bohemian circles.

  Even more provocative was Madame Sarah's face. The forerunner of the 'vamp' or the 'It' girl of a later period, she painted her face in a manner that shocked those users of a little surreptitious rice powder or a few geranium petals. Her lips were brightly coloured, her eyes – with their famous 'drugged stare' – were outlined in kohl, her tufts of frizzy hair were dyed, even her earlobes were rouged. 'I went,' admitted the actress, 'to extremes in everything.'4

  This was no less true of her private life. The illegitimate daughter of a Jewish cocotte, with an illegitimate son of her own, Sarah Bernhardt cheerfully flouted every convention. 'London has gone mad over the principal actress in the Comédie Française . . .,' wrote an appalled Lady Frederick Cavendish, 'Sarah Bernhardt, a woman of notorious character. Not content with being run after on the stage, this woman is asked to respectable people's houses to act, and even to luncheon and dinner, and all the world goes. It is an outrageous scandal.'5

  But it was, of course, as an actress that Sarah Bernhardt should have been judged and here Lillie Langtry, so soon to become an actress herself, showed admirable discernment. 'This great and overwhelming artist was almost too individual, too exotic, to be completely understood or properly estimated all at once. Her superb diction, her lovely silken voice, her natural acting, her passionate temperament, her fire – in a word, transcendent genius – caused amazement . . .' Bernhardt's personality was 'so striking, so singular that, to everyday people, she seemed eccentric; she filled the imagination as a great poet might do.'6

  Sarah's opinion of Lillie was more succinct. 'With that chin,' she snapped after first meeting her, 'she will go far.'7

  Lillie was being remarkably generous in her assessment of Sarah, for not least among the actress's admirers was the Prince of Wales. In a way, this is surprising. Bertie's taste in women, as in so much else, was conventional. He liked dressy, well-groomed, curvaceous women. So punctilious himself, he disapproved of any sloppiness in dress; with the freedom affected by the so-called 'new women', he had very little sympathy. When Lady Florence Dixie appeared at Ascot in one of her 'rational' garments – a shapeless white boating dress – he icily asked her whether she had, by mistake, come in her nightgown. On the other hand, Bertie admired spirit, and Sarah Bernhardt was certainly spirited. Nor would he have been shocked by her unashamed hedonism.

&nbs
p; The two had met, some years before, in Paris, and on his frequent visits to the French capital, the Prince always made a point of seeing the actress, both on and off stage. He even, on one occasion, appeared on stage with her. During a performance of Sardou's Fédora, the irrepressible Bertie doubled as the corpse in the scene in which the distraught heroine weeps over the body of her murdered lover. One can only hope that Queen Victoria did not hear about this unseemly behaviour on the part of the forty-year-old Heir Apparent.

  During this 1879 London season, Bertie seems to have paid the visiting actress a great deal of attention. He not only reserved a box for each of her opening nights in her different roles but let it be known that she was to be received in society. He even entertained her at Marlborough House. After one such visit, Sarah scrawled a note of apology to the doyen of the Comédie Française. 'I've just come back from the P. of W. It is twenty past one. I can't rehearse any more at this hour. The P. has kept me since eleven . . .'8

  Quite clearly, Bertie was fascinated by the piquant-faced Frenchwoman. Whether or not they became lovers is uncertain. Given their shared sexual appetites and moral attitudes, it is not unlikely. Sarah had a seductive, smouldering quality that the Prince would have found hard to resist, and few women, least of all Sarah Bernhardt, would have turned down the opportunity of sleeping with a future king who also happened to be a man of great charm and considerable amorous expertise.

  What did Lillie Langtry make of all this? She would have realised that the Prince was fascinated by the actress but she would have been far too astute to have mentioned it, let alone to have reproached him for it. She was, in any case, in no position to throw stones. Not only was Lillie carrying on her clandestine affair with Arthur Jones, but her public behaviour was becoming increasingly indiscreet. Daisy, Countess of Warwick, then in her first season, has a story to tell on this score. Daisy was being courted by a young lord whose protestations of undying love she was more than ready to believe until she one night happened to overhear him call Lillie Langtry 'my darling'. He then went on to make an assignation with Lillie. 'Naturally I was furious,' says Daisy, 'and never looked at him again.'9

  Margot Asquith, too, has her youthful memories of Lillie's tendency to cause scandal. 'In a shining top-hat and skin-tight habit, she rode a chestnut thoroughbred of conspicuous action every evening in Rotten Row,' she remembers. 'One day when I was riding, I saw Mrs Langtry – who was accompanied by Lord Lonsdale – pause at the railings in Rotten Row to talk to a man of her acquaintance. I do not know what she could have said to him, but after a brief exchange of words, Lord Lonsdale jumped off his horse, sprang over the railings and with clenched fists hit Mrs Langtry's admirer in the face. Upon this a free fight ensued and to the delight of the surprised spectators, Lord Lonsdale knocked his adversary down.'10

  This adversary was Sir George Chetwyn, who had accused Lillie of breaking her promise to go riding with him.

  And then there was the story of her obsession with 'young Shrewsbury, a boy of nineteen'. It appears that the young man's worldly mother, hoping that 'an attachment to a married woman would keep him out of mischief', encouraged the liaison. So conscientiously, apparently, did Lillie fulfil her duties of keeping the young man out of mischief that she one day sent a note to the Prince, asking him not to call, as arranged, that afternoon. The Prince, not having received the note, duly arrived to find her with Shrewsbury. What they were doing one does not know, but His Royal Highness, reports Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was 'very miffed'.11

  Yet, at the same time, Lillie seems to have been anxious to affirm her hold over her royal lover. In doing so, she came dangerously close to overstepping the bounds of propriety. Lillie had once claimed that it would need a bold man to attempt any public familiarity with the Prince, and on a couple of occasions she seems to have proved herself very bold indeed.

  Once, at a charity fête held in the Royal Albert Hall, Lillie had been asked to grace the refreshment stall. Gentlemen were obliged to part with five shillings for the thrill of being served a cup of tea by her and with a guinea for the even greater thrill of having her take the first sip. When the Prince of Wales, accompanied by Princess Alexandra and their three daughters, approached the stall, Lillie poured the Prince a cup of tea and, without being asked, put her lips to the rim of the cup. The Prince put it down, untouched.

  'I should like a clean one please,'12 he said politely. In silence he accepted another cup, drank it, paid a couple of sovereigns, and walked away.

  There was also the occasion on which Lillie is said to have dropped a piece of ice down the Prince's back at a fancy dress ball. Down the years the story has been so altered and embroidered upon that its authenticity is impossible to prove. Some say that it was a dollop of ice cream that Lillie slipped down the neck of Bertie's pierrot costume; others that it was not Lillie at all, but a pretty little actress by the name of Kitty Munro who put the ice down the Prince's back in – of all places – the foyer of the Folly Theatre; in the United States, cartoons showed Lillie dousing her royal lover with a bottle of iced champagne.

  Lillie, who always denied the incident, claimed that it was actually an 'audacious Irish beauty' (by whom she apparently means Patsy Cornwallis West) who 'popped a spoonful of strawberry-ice' down the spine of her irate husband.

  But however vigorously she protested her innocence, dismissing the story as 'a vulgar fabrication . . . in which there is not a grain of truth,'13 Lillie was pursued by it for the rest of her life. And, true or not, the story's significance lies in the fact that it was so widely reported and so readily believed. Mrs Langtry, it was now said, was getting beyond herself. Many of the Prince of Wales's other companions had discovered, to their cost, that there was a limit to his familiarity. Had Lillie Langtry over-stepped that limit?

  It was at this time, in the spring of 1880, that Lillie embarked on a relationship that was to run parallel with the gradual ebbing of her affair with the Prince of Wales. In March that year she met the twenty-five-year-old Prince Louis of Battenberg.

  Prince Louis was a member of the Battenberg family that was just then beginning the extraordinary climb that was eventually to take it to some of the highest pinnacles in the world, including the British throne. The origins of the family had been, by royal standards, both humble and scandalous. The dynasty had come into being as recently as 1851 when the third son of the Grand Duke of Hesse had shocked his royal relations by marrying a commoner. The children of this morganatic marriage, excluded from the Hessian line of succession and addressed only as serene as opposed to royal highnesses, had been given the surname of Battenberg.

  Only gradually, and exceedingly grudgingly, had the Battenbergs been admitted into the golden stockade of royalty. That they were accepted at all was in no small measure due to their exceptional qualities; for not only were the four Battenberg princes – Louis, Alexander, Henry and Franz Josef – extremely handsome young men but they were all talented, high-spirited and intelligent.

  Prince Louis, the eldest, had joined the British navy at the age of fourteen in 1868. In the dozen or so years since then, he had proved himself to be an accomplished and conscientious sailor, treating his career with a seriousness that astonished many of his aristocratic shipmates. They found his cultural and intellectual interests puzzling and his abstinence from alcohol positively alarming. In one area, though, they found him reassuringly conformist. The tall, well-built, dark-bearded and handsome Prince Louis had a reputation not only as a 'good sport', but as a Lothario. 'If it was not quite a girl in every port,' writes one of his biographers, 'it was, for Louis, a girl in every other anchorage, island and naval establishment.'14 Women found his particular qualities – his gentle voice, his engaging manners, even his foreign accent – irresistible.

  The Prince of Wales was very fond of his young relation (Louis was a cousin-by-marriage to Bertie's late sister Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse) and entertained him lavishly whenever he was home on leave. In earlier days, the Prince of Wales h
ad often given the homesick young naval cadet sensible advice (and Bertie was more sensible than Queen Victoria ever gave him credit for) and during the winter of 1875–6, Louis had accompanied Bertie, as an orderly officer, on the Heir's spectacular tour of India.

  'You would do much better to get a little half-pay and spend the season with me at Marlborough House,'15 wrote Bertie to him on one occasion; while Louis, describing the periods he spent in the company of the ebullient Prince, claimed that 'theatres and balls were the daily fare'.16

  Queen Victoria was not anything like as ecstatic about Louis's frequent sojourns in England. It was not that she minded the morganatic 'taint' in the young man's blood (she once castigated her daughter, the German Crown Princess, for accusing the Battenbergs of not being Geblüt – pure bred – as though they were animals) but with her appreciation of virile good looks, she was afraid that her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, might fall in love with Prince Louis. The Queen had no intention of losing her daughter to a foreign prince: she wanted Beatrice to remain by her side.

  It was during a period of unemployment (the Admiralty were proving strangely tardy about finding him another appointment) that Prince Louis met Lillie Langtry. True to form, he fell passionately in love with her. Quite possibly, the Prince of Wales encouraged the liaison. Tiring of Lillie himself, and devoted to his young kinsman, he would have been amused by the idea of these two attractive young people enjoying each other's company.

  Ever a snob and pleased to have her powers of attraction confirmed, Lillie would have been delighted by the ardent attentions of yet another royal suitor; particularly one as personable as Prince Louis. Not only was he handsome and entertaining, but he also shared her taste for amusing, artistic and intellectually stimulating people. Through her, Louis met many of the leading cultural personalities of the time.