The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  Considered equally important were such things as deportment (a straight back would serve one better than a thousand remembered pages of Molière or Schiller), dress, which must always be modest and subdued (heiress to a vast fortune, Daisy spent her girlhood in her mother's cast-off clothes), piano lessons, riding lessons, drawing lessons and visits to concerts and exhibitions. Even as late as the 1930s, the then Duchess of York, mother of the future Queen Elizabeth II, could maintain that all girls needed was plenty of fresh country air, the ability to dance and draw and appreciate music, good manners, perfect deportment and feminine grace.

  It says a great deal for young Daisy Maynard's strength of character that her individualism was not stamped out by this unimaginative curriculum. On the contrary, she seems to have overcome its many limitations and to have benefited from its few advantages. It left her, she assures us, with a great love of reading, an interest in history and a talent for languages. She even goes so far as to claim that it gave her 'a just sympathy and an open mind'.14

  By no means, though, could her education have been responsible for the telling observation she has to make on one aspect of her Easton girlhood. This concerned that sacred Victorian ritual – Sunday churchgoing. For the young Daisy, the ritual underlined, more strongly than anything else, the inequalities between masters and servants, rich and poor. The gentry or 'quality', in their determination that nothing should sully the sanctity of the Sabbath, kept it as a day of rest; they saw no inconsistency in the fact that a similar day of rest was denied to those who worked for them: the no less pious maids and valets who dressed them, the cooks, maids and footmen who served them their huge meals or the stablemen, coachmen and grooms who ensured that they were driven to and from worship.

  Within the church itself there was a strict separation of the classes. Among the gentlefolk who sat, of course, at the front, there was even a separation of the sexes. Apparently, this sexual separation was not considered necessary among the lower orders. The service over, the congregation would file out in order of precedence: the Rosslyn family first, then the estate steward and his family, then the farmers and finally the cottagers. There was even some curtseying as the 'quality' processed down the aisle.

  'I used to wonder, even as a child,' remembers Daisy, 'how God viewed this "table of precedence" in His church, where all men were supposed to be equal.'15

  If such unorthodox observations serve as a pointer to the direction Daisy's life would one day follow, another girlhood memory is linked to a very different phase of her future career.

  Daisy was still in her teens when, on going to Frank Miles's studio for the last sitting of a pencil drawing of her head, she met Lillie Langtry. Lillie was then on the threshold of her years of social success and to the young Daisy she was simply the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. 'How can any words of mine convey that beauty?' she gushes: those dewy eyes, that peach-like complexion, that 'mass of lovely hair drawn back in a soft knot at the nape of her classic head.' Even more remarkable was Lillie Langtry's charm; it was almost tangible.

  Lord Rosslyn, who had accompanied his step-daughter to Miles's studio, was hardly less captivated. He immediately invited this lovely young woman to dine the following evening at the family's London home, in Grafton Street. Lillie came, accompanied by her husband (Daisy described Edward Langtry as 'an uninteresting fat man whose unnecessary presence took nothing from his wife's social triumph') and 'magnetised' the rest of the company.

  After that, Lillie was often invited down to Easton. Here Daisy and her younger sisters, with all the ardour of adolescence, became her 'admiring slaves'. Uncomplainingly Lillie allowed herself to be led about on a fat cob, or to have her hats amateurishly trimmed by the adoring girls. 'My own infatuation, for it was little less, for lovely Lillie Langtry, continued for many a day,'16 admits Daisy.

  Or, at least, until the day when Daisy took her idol's place as the Prince of Wales's mistress.

  'In my teens,' writes Daisy, 'it came as a deep and almost incredible surprise and delight to me to find in men's eyes an unfailing tribute to a beauty I myself had not been able to discern.'17

  This is understandable. Victorian girls, with their long, tortuously frizzled hair and their short-skirted versions of adult fashions (the hip-hugging, bustled fashions of the late 1870s were particularly unsuitable for immature girls), needed to be exceptionally good-looking to convince even themselves that they might one day be beautiful. And, in any case, Daisy did not have the sensuous, striking, untamed beauty that had been Lillie Langtry's from childhood; her looks were altogether more refined. Daisy Maynard was slight, small-boned, sharp-featured. Lillie in the simplest of dresses and the most casual of hairstyles still looked arresting; Daisy needed the adult aids of elegant clothes and carefully coiffured hair to set off her more subtle looks.

  But there were some features – her dark-lashed, dark-blue eyes, her golden hair and her good bone-structure – which set her apart, even in girlhood, and which won her those admiring male glances. The most admiring of all, it seems, came from the young Lord Brooke. Francis Greville, Lord Brooke, heir to the fourth Earl of Warwick, was twenty-three when he first met the sixteen-year-old Daisy Maynard. He immediately fell in love with her. Within weeks he had asked her parents' permission to propose.

  In the ordinary way, Lord and Lady Rosslyn would have welcomed the match. Lord Brooke was a handsome, well-made, dependable young man who would one day inherit an ancient and respected earldom. Many a parent would have been only too anxious to snap him up. But the Rosslyns, somewhat to the surprise of the love-lorn Lord Brooke, begged him to say nothing to Daisy until she 'came out', at eighteen. Reluctantly and uncomprehendingly, Lord Brooke agreed. He was not to know that the Rosslyns had more ambitious plans for their daughter.

  Lord Rosslyn was friendly with Disraeli, then in his second term as Prime Minister, and it was Disraeli who first drew Queen Victoria's attention to Lord Rosslyn's step-daughter, Daisy Maynard, as a possible bride for Prince Leopold. Daisy, oblivious both of Lord Brooke's interest in her and of her parents' hopes of a royal marriage, was astonished to be told, one day in December 1879, when she was not yet eighteen, that she was to be taken to Windsor for inspection by Queen Victoria with a view to her becoming the Queen's daughter-in-law.

  It was an intimidating prospect. But not for a moment would Daisy, or any other aristocratic young girl, have defied her parents' wishes in this matter. Most Victorian society marriages were arranged and, in any case, few young women would have turned down the chance of becoming a princess. Daisy had already met Prince Leopold (he was friendly with Lord Brooke) and rather liked him. One suspects, from her description of him, that she found him a little too tame ('too delicate in health to ride or to take part in any sport': 'a sincere lover of art and music'18) but she admits that he was always very amusing company.

  The evening at Windsor was as unnerving as she had feared it would be. For three-quarters of an hour the company waited in the huge, draughty corridor for the Queen to appear. When she did, she rushed in, a tiny, black-clad figure followed by Princess Beatrice, and with quick nods to left and right, disappeared into the dining room. The party was small and intimate, but no merrier for that. Everyone, including the Queen, spoke 'in undertones', and no one dared laugh. Daisy felt the Queen's eyes on her all the time. Dinner was served, she says, 'in hot haste' and in less than half an hour, the Queen rose from her chair and, followed by the docile Princess Beatrice, 'seemed to run from the room'.19

  Reassembled in the freezing corridor (Queen Victoria always felt the heat, never the cold) the company stood about stiffly while the Queen addressed a few words to each of them. Suddenly, it was Daisy's turn. How did she like the idea of coming out? Was she fond of music or of drawing? After addressing two or three more questions to the 'agonisingly shy and overrawed' girl, the Queen passed on. These innocuous exchanges having, apparently, convinced the Queen that Daisy would make a suitable wife for her haemophilic, cul
tivated and complex son, negotiations moved on to the next stage.

  But it was now that the one element for which no one had made any allowances – love – asserted itself. Once Daisy turned eighteen, on 10 December 1879, Lord Brooke felt less obliged to hide his feelings for her ('in Lord Brooke's eyes I had recognised something that told me, in mute appeal, that his happiness and destiny were inseparably linked with mine, '20 she claims) while she found herself attracted far more strongly to the stalwart Lord Brooke than to the frail Prince Leopold. As it happened, Leopold was no more in love with her than she was with him. He had lost his heart to someone else whom, says Daisy, 'he took great care not to name.'21

  The impasse was resolved in the spring of 1880. During the course of a house party at the Prince's home, Claremont House in Surrey, Leopold 'opened his heart' to Daisy. As he was in love with someone else and as his friend Lord Brooke had told him of his love for her, Leopold suggested that Daisy turn him down in favour of Lord Brooke. No sooner suggested than accomplished. The following day, as Daisy and Lord Brooke were sheltering under a large umbrella on the muddy road between Claremont and Esher, he proposed and she accepted.

  Lord and Lady Rosslyn, their hopes of a great royal alliance dashed (they had spent the previous weeks in insisting that, once married to Leopold, Daisy would be given the full rank and privileges of a royal princess) were obliged to resign themselves to the situation. Queen Victoria was not nearly so resigned. According to Disraeli's secretary, she was 'furious'.22 Daisy was sent for but throughout her interrogation by the Queen 'she stood her guns'.23 In the end, it was the fear of a public loss of face that stopped Queen Victoria from making too much of a fuss.

  Within two years Prince Leopold had married, more conventionally, Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont. And in less than two years after this, he bumped his knee while climbing some stairs and died from the resulting internal haemorrhage. 'Prince Leopold's death was a great loss to my husband and myself,'24 says Daisy.

  For by this time, of course, Daisy had become Lady Brooke. Their engagement was officially announced at a ball in Grosvenor House, Park Lane in June 1880, in the middle of Daisy's first season. This season was her introduction to the sort of frivolous and frenetic life she was to lead for the following fifteen years. 'I was fetêd, feasted, courted and adored, in one continual round of gaiety, and I lived in and for the moment,'25 runs her account of the social whirlpool into which she now plunged. For not only was Daisy a great heiress, she had developed into a great beauty. All those 'thronging admirers',26 all those moustache-twirling officers from the Guards and the Blues, were attracted as much by her looks and personality as by her immense wealth. It was as well, perhaps, that the stolid Lord Brooke was too overwhelmed by his love for her to feel any apprehensions about the number of young men whom Daisy seemed not only to attract, but to encourage.

  The couple were married in Westminster Abbey on 30 April 1881. The ceremony was described as 'the most brilliant wedding of a dozen seasons'.27 Heading the galaxy of royal guests (Prince Leopold was best man) was the Prince of Wales.

  Although Queen Victoria who had, by now, forgiven the bride for turning down her son, did not attend the ceremony, she did what she imagined to be the next best thing. The newly-married couple were commanded to break into their honeymoon in order to dine at Windsor Castle. The bride was instructed to wear her wedding dress, 'orange blossom and all'.28

  Victoria professed herself enchanted with Daisy's appearance and asked not only for a photograph of her in her dress but for a spray of orange blossom to keep as a souvenir. First love, the sentimental Queen had once pronounced, was sacred: 'the divinest thing in the world'.29

  With their marriage, Lord and Lady Brooke became, if not exactly members of the Marlborough House set, certainly representatives of the sort of society that took its tone from the Prince of Wales.

  Marriage meant that Daisy could at last come into her inheritance and that until her husband, in turn, became the fifth Earl of Warwick, they could move into Easton Lodge. Considering Easton's combination of Elizabethan and mock-Elizabethan styles to be not nearly impressive enough for her new position in society, Daisy commissioned alterations that would transform it into 'a flamboyant pseudo-Gothic palace'.30 With all the gusto of youth and good health, and bolstered by Daisy's fortune, the couple now embarked on a life of uninhibited enjoyment.

  'It sufficed,' claimed Lord Brooke in later life, 'to be an agreeable young man, well-mannered, equipped with a modest independence and real skill at some sport, to have the very best of times.'31 By 'the best of times' he meant that state of highly organised idleness in which the upper classes passed their days. From the start, the lives of Lord and Lady Brooke followed the by now well established pattern: the London season with its rides in the Park, its afternoon calls with their complicated ritual of card-leaving, its balls and receptions and dinner parties; the great race-meetings ('I could find all the stimulus I needed in the movement, the glitter, the skill and, of course, the beauty of the animals themselves,'32 enthuses Daisy); Cowes Week; the country house parties with their hunting and shooting; the holidays in the South of France.

  Of all these diversions, it was hunting that afforded Daisy the most pleasure. There was something about the dash, danger and exhilaration of the chase that accorded well with her own increasingly headstrong nature. Very soon Daisy developed into a skilful and fearless rider, following some of the smartest hunts in the country. Dressed in her tight-fitting side-saddle costumes, and with a bowler hat perched on her fashionably fringed and ridged hair, she presented a striking figure on the hunting field.

  It was this love of hunting – allied to her determination to have her own way – that once caused Daisy to offend Queen Victoria. The Brookes had been commanded to dine and sleep at Windsor, but as her husband was to be away from home and as Daisy was anxious to attend the Essex hunt races, she made her excuses. But the Queen was not to be put off: Lady Brooke must attend alone.

  Not one to be balked, Daisy worked out a plan whereby she could attend both the Queen's dinner and the day's hunting. The dinner, an intimate occasion with only six guests in addition to the Queen and the inevitable Princess Beatrice, went well enough, and the guests retired to their rooms on the understanding that they would leave the following morning, after breakfast. But by first light Daisy was up and, having put on a hunting coat of brilliant pink ('a fashion innovation of my own,'33 she claims), she requested a carriage to take her, 'breakfastless', to the station to catch the earliest train. The lord-in-waiting, whom etiquette obliged to see her off, was both shocked and annoyed at her unorthodox behaviour.

  So was Queen Victoria. The Queen, having heard the carriage draw up below, got out of bed and, standing by the window in her night-gown, peeped through the curtain to watch Lady Brooke, in her vivid coat, climb into the carriage and drive off. She was appalled.

  'How fast! How very fast!'34 she muttered to her lady-in-waiting.

  The incident must have confirmed the Queen's view that Lady Brooke, whom she had so recently considered as a suitable wife for her son Leopold, had by now quite given herself over to 'the frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence and idleness (producing ignorance)' of the 'Higher Classes'.35 The tone and style of contemporary society, grumbled the Queen, was 'repulsive, vulgar, bad and frivolous in every way.'36

  In later years, when Daisy's opinion of the aristocracy had come to echo Queen Victoria's (although from a different standpoint), there was one aspect of this upper-class way of life which she found especially regrettable: its philistinism. 'The majority of the people who made up society were not taught to use their brains; they disliked making the effort necessary to appreciate books, pictures, music or sculpture, and what they disliked they distrusted,'37 she says. 'We acknowledged that it was necessary that pictures should be painted, books written, the law administered; we even acknowledged that there was a certain class whose job it might be to do these things. But we did not see
why their achievements entitled them to our recognition; they might disturb, over-stimulate, or even bore.'38

  She was equally oblivious, at the time, to a far more serious aristocratic failing: the inability to comprehend, or even notice, the injustices of the social system in which they lived. 'Social problems were apparently unknown,' wrote a bemused Lord Brooke in his memoirs. 'I hadn't heard of any, and the right of a young man to make the most agreeable use of the May-morn of his youth went unchallenged.'39 Most members of the Victorian upper classes simply accepted things as they were: they never reflected on the causes of the poverty and misery and inequality of their day. Their contacts with the lower classes were mainly with their servants (and, goodness knows, they seemed happy enough); poverty was personified by the cap-doffing stable-lad, the ruddy-cheeked farmhand or the aproned housewife on her cottage doorstep. Of the grinding penury and the seething discontent in the great industrial cities they knew very little and understood even less.

  13. Easton Lodge, the palatial mansion which Daisy Maynard (afterwards Warwick) inherited at the age of three.

  14. A 'shooting luncheon' at Easton Lodge. The Prince of Wales stands in the centre; below him, in a white hat, sits Daisy Warwick, at her feet sits her husband, the Earl of Warwick.