by Theo Aronson
15. Daisy, when still Lady Brooke, before her momentous meeting with the Prince of Wales.
16. The always immaculately dressed Prince of Wales, at Homburg in the 1890s.
17. The Wales family. From the left, standing: Prince George, the Princess of Wales, the Prince of Wales, Princess Victoria Seated Princess Maud, Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), Princess Louise.
18. Warwick Castle, one of the settings for the liaison between Daisy and the Prince of Wales.
19 Royal Mistress: Frances (Daisy), Countess of Warwick.
20. A sketch of the Prince of Wales setting out from Marlborough House on his way, no doubt, to an amorous assignation.
21. Princess Alexandra, the beautiful, elegan and frequently betrayed wife.
22. Daisy Warwick in fancy dress, as the Queen of Assyria.
23. Daisy's cuckolded husband, the long-suffering Earl of Warwick.
24. A German cartoon showing the Prince of Wales 'comforting the wives and widows' of the men away fighting in the Boer War.
25. Daisy Warwick, 'the Socialist Countes:', on the husting: . .
Just occasionally, as she rode back from a pleasurable day's hunting and passed the exhausted labourers trudging home after working in the fields since dawn, Daisy Brooke might feel a pricking of the conscience she had sometimes felt as a child but, for the most part, she was happy enough to accept things as they were. She was always ready to dole out money to any of her tenants who were in trouble or to overlook non-payment of rent, but it never occurred to her that there might be something wrong – or immoral – with the system itself.
For the upper classes, nothing was ever so wrong that it could not be put right by an act of charity. Dutifully, the ladies of the manor would instruct the housekeeper to send coal and blankets to the elderly, broth and jellies to the sick, old clothes to the needy. Self-righteously, they would organise bazaars, run needlework guilds or collect donations. Unblinkingly, they would maintain that their tenants and dependants were more like friends, and their servants almost part of the family. Social divisions, they would claim, were just as prevalent among their servants; this was the natural order of things.
Over eighty years later Prince Leopold's daughter, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, remembering her own girlhood in the 1880s, could boast that 'class distinctions permeated the whole social structure and could be as rigid in the servants hall and in the village as they were in the castle. There distinctions were, however, tempered by gracious manners; and, in general, a courteous consideration for others, alas so rare today, governed the relationship between all ranks of society.'40
On Sunday mornings, across country churchyards, would float the reassuring lines of the hymn which, more perhaps than any other, reflected the Victorian upper-class view of their world: 'The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly, He ordered their estate.'
What better way of confirming the fact that all things were indeed bright and beautiful?
Only occasionally, during the first half a dozen years of her marriage, did Daisy Brooke come into contact with the hub about which this idle, unthinking, self-confident society revolved – the Prince of Wales. Lord and Lady Brooke were invited to shooting parties at Sandringham and they once entertained the Prince and Princess of Wales at Easton Lodge. On one occasion, during a ball given by the Prince's brother, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh at Eastwell, Bertie had asked Daisy to dance and had spent some time in the corridor talking to her. But for all her attractions – her big blue eyes, her fashionably straight nose, her alert expression, her ruby-red velvet dress with its low neckline and huge bustle – she seemed, for some inexplicable reason, unable to hold his attention. 'He doubtless found me shy and stupid,' she writes, 'for he spent most of the evening with Mrs Cornwallis West, then in the zenith of her beauty. '41
Nor was Mrs Cornwallis West the only beauty with whom the Prince was spending his evenings. Throughout the 1880s his name was linked, briefly, with this or that society figure. For a while he adopted what the Duke of Cambridge called 'a strange new line of taking to young girls and discarding married women'. Gladstone's secretary spoke of 'H.R.H.'s virgin band' and Lady Geraldine Somerset claimed that he was 'more or less in love' with, in turn, such 'reigning young ladies' as 'Miss Stonor, Miss Tennant and Miss Duff'.42 Then there was the lovely American debutante, Miss Chamberlayne, with whom, for a while, the Prince 'occupied himself entirely', and whom the Princess of Wales, with what passed for wit at Marlborough House and Sandringham, nicknamed 'Miss Chamberpots'.
Not all the Prince's indiscretions were conducted within closed aristocratic circles. His public behaviour could be equally improper. In Paris, there was hardly a music hall in which his portly figure was not familiar.' 'Ullo Wales,' shouted La Goulue, the raucous star of the Jardin de Paris as he one night entered the establishment, 'tu paies le champagne!'43
The French police needed all their ingenuity to keep track of his amorous meanderings through the capital. There were his afternoon calls on various society hostesses, his leisurely meetings with famous beauties in the Jardin des Plantes, his hour-long stays with celebrated courtesans, his clandestine visits to unidentified women in shady hotels, the evenings spent in his favourite brothel, the luxurious Le Chabanais. Its fauteuil d'amour, a curious double-decker chair especially designed, it is said, to accommodate the Prince's considerable paunch, has recently been sold for £20,000.
There were times when even the Prince's fellow royal rakes were embarrassed by his indiscreet behaviour. One evening he took a party of friends to a London restaurant. Among them was Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, the young man who had once been infatuated by Lillie Langtry. At about two in the morning Bertie asked the orchestra to play the famous can-can from La Belle Hélène. With the beautiful but notorious Duchess of Manchester as his partner ('the Duchess of Manchester is not a fit companion for you,'44 Queen Victoria had long ago warned the Princess of Wales), he flung himself into the dance with embarrassing abandon.
The far from priggish Crown Prince Rudolph was shocked. 'Tell the waiters to go,' he whispered to one of the company, 'they must not see their future King making such a clown of himself.'45
The easy-going attitude of the Prince of Wales's set towards extramarital affairs was one which Daisy Brooke lost no time in adopting. 'From the beginning of our life together,' she admits airily, 'my husband seemed to accept the inevitability of my having a train of admirers. I could not help it. There they were. It was all a great game.'46 In the first four years of marriage, Daisy gave birth to three children, but even during this period she was playing 'the great game' with all the ardour of her nature. As the novelist Elinor Glyn once explained, 'it was quite normal in Society circles for a married woman to have a succession of illicit love affairs, during the intervals of which, if not simultaneously, intimate relations with her husband were resumed. '47
Beautiful, flirtatious, passionate, 'with little responsibility and no driving need other than to satisfy each impulse as it arose',48 Daisy gave herself over to the febrile excitements of these love affairs. She delighted in the established ritual of such courtships, from the first meaningful glance to the final sexual fulfilment; followed by what Mrs Patrick Campbell – who was in a position to know – used to call 'the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue'.
Lord Brooke, like Edward Langtry, was obliged to make the best of things. He was, in any case, a more complacent, better-natured man than Lillie Langtry's husband. There were no outbursts of temper, no bouts of drinking with him; he was far too much of a gentleman to make a fuss. His own five-year obsession with the young Daisy Maynard had not long outlasted their wedding. It had been killed both by Daisy's feverish infidelity and by a certain incompatability between husband and wife. Daisy, although an enthusiastic rider to hounds, could not share her husband's passion for shooting; she found those long sporting house parties, when the women were left to amuse themselve
s for most of the day, 'intolerably boring'.49 For his part, Lord Brooke maintained that 'a good day's fishing or shooting is second in point of pleasure to nothing on earth'.50
Daisy's most serious love affair during these years – and the one which was to lead her directly into the arms of the Prince of Wales – was with the Prince's great friend, Lord Charles Beresford.
This dashing naval commander, one of whose pranks had been to switch off the supply of air to the cabin in which the Prince and Lillie were apparently making love, was one of the great adulterers of the period. Handsome, energetic and charming, Beresford had very little trouble in seducing the bored wives of the Marlborough House set. His own wife offered very little competition. Older than her husband, Lady Charles Beresford made gallant attempts to project a youthful image. Bright spots of rouge enlivened her otherwise white-painted face; a toddler once pulled off one of her false eyebrows in the misapprehension that it was a butterfly; and Daisy Brooke used to repeat, with obvious relish, the story of how once, while out driving with Lady Charles, a sudden gust of wind lifted, not only her hat but her yellow wig, and deposited them both on the grass verge. 'How lucky we were not on the high road!'51 exclaimed Lady Charles.
Lord Charles, with or without his wife, had been visiting Easton Lodge since the Brookes first moved into it, and by 1886, when Daisy was twenty-five and he thirty-nine, the couple had become lovers. In Daisy's eyes, Lord Charles Beresford possessed all the glamour so conspicuously lacking in her own husband. In fact, so besotted was she by her lover that one day, while the Beresfords were staying at Easton, Daisy marched into Lady Charles's room, told her of the liaison (in spite of the fact, sniffs Lady Charles, that 'the circumstances of the affair were at the time well known, and commented on, in Society') and announced her intention of eloping with Beresford. The reckless Daisy was quite ready, apparently, to abandon her husband and three children and to subject both her lover and herself to public disgrace.
Lady Charles was not anything like as ready 'to sacrifice Lord Charles's career to such an insane project'. She took him home, she declared, 'on the spot'.
It was a wise move. From this point on Lord Charles's love for Lady Brooke began to die a natural death; a death hastened by his discovery that she was 'not content with his attentions alone'.52 But Daisy, however much she might be amusing herself elsewhere, was not prepared to let him go. Her resolve turned to rage when she heard, late in 1886, that Lord Charles's wife was pregnant. As Lady Charles's morals were above reproach, there could be no doubt that the child had been fathered by her husband.
Infuriated by this indisputable evidence that her lover had deserted her for, of all people, his wife, Daisy wrote him a blistering letter. In it, she instructed him to leave his wife at once in order to join her on the Riviera; she claimed that one of her children was his; and she insisted that he had 'no right' to beget a child by his wife. This letter was regarded, by those who saw it later, as utterly shocking. Lord Charles's brother, Lord Marcus Beresford, maintained that 'it ought never to have seen the light of day'.53
But see the light of day it certainly did. For the letter was opened, not by Lord Charles who was away from home at the time, but by his wife. She was horrified. Lady Charles promptly passed it on to the well-known London solicitor, George Lewis. One of the key figures in late Victorian society, George Lewis enjoyed, according to one source, 'for more than a quarter of a century, the practical monopoly of those cases where the sins and follies of the wealthy classes threaten exposure and disaster. '54 The astute George Lewis was chiefly celebrated, in fact, for keeping things out of court.
Acting on Lady Charles's instructions, Lewis now wrote to Lady Brooke, telling her that her letter was in his possession and warning her against causing any further annoyance to his client. Daisy was furious. She wrote to Lewis, demanding the return of her letter. 'It is my letter. I wrote it,'55 she declared. Lewis explained that she was wrong. Legally, the letter was the property of Lord Charles Beresford, to whom it had been addressed.
Thwarted, Daisy turned to the only person she knew who was influential enough to give her some practical help: the Prince of Wales. Appreciating that he was a close friend of Lord Charles Beresford and knowing that he would do anything to avoid a public scandal in his set, Daisy hurried to Marlborough House. She begged the Prince, as Lady Charles scathingly put it, 'to help "Beauty in Distress"!'56
She did not beg in vain. Indeed, from out of this meeting with the Prince of Wales, Daisy got not only what she had come for, but a good deal more.
In the mind's eye, one can still see the two of them in the flaring gaslight of the Prince's overcrowded study on that evening in 1889: the plump, predatory, beard-stroking Bertie, all attentive sympathy as the distraught and lovely Daisy, her long-lashed eyes brimming with tears, spills out her story.
'He was charmingly courteous to me,' she afterwards said, 'and at length he told me he hoped his friendship would make up in part, at least, for my sailor-lover's loss. He was more than kind.'
And suddenly, she continues, 'I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand.'57
That very night, or rather, at two the following morning, the Prince of Wales went to see George Lewis. Any annoyance Lewis might have felt at being hauled out of bed was more than compensated for by the illustriousness of his caller. So gratified was he, in fact, that he took the highly unprofessional step of acceding to the Prince's request to be shown Lady Brooke's incriminating letter. The sight of it confirmed the Prince in his opinion that the letter should be destroyed at once. But as not even the sycophantic Lewis was prepared to do so himself, the Prince went to see Lady Charles.
She proved to be not nearly as overawed by the Royal Presence. She had no intention, she declared, of destroying the letter. She then, through Lewis, spelt out the terms on which she was prepared to return the letter to Lady Brooke. Read today, these terms seem ludicrous; at the time, they appeared draconian. Lady Brooke was to stay away from London for the entire season.
Lady Brooke was, as Lady Charles knew she would be, appalled at the prospect of so drastic a punishment. Again she flew to the Prince for help and again he, who was by now falling in love with her, went to see Lady Charles. This time His Royal Highness was far less conciliatory. In fact, he gave Lady Charles a dose of her own medicine. If she did not hand over the letter, it would be she, and not Lady Brooke, who would have to leave London for the season. Her 'position in Society!!' exclaimed Lady Charles with a forest of exclamation marks, 'would become injured!!!'58
The redoubtable Lady Charles held firm. Conveniently forgetting that it was she who had first threatened social blackmail, the lady now declared that she would refuse to give in to it. But the Prince's threat had not been an idle one. Within days he was ensuring that Lord and Lady Brooke were being invited to the same houses as himself. 'And when that sign of the Prince's support didn't stop the angry little cat,' wrote the triumphant Daisy, 'the Prince checked her in another way. She [Lady Charles] had been put down as one of the house party of a great lady to meet him. He simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it . . .'59
Into the teacup in which this storm was raging, there now plunged the errant husband, Lord Charles Beresford. Until then he had been trying, with uncharacteristic diplomacy, to get his wife to give up the letter. But the Prince's interference, followed by his social ostracism of Lady Charles, had proved too much for the notoriously short-tempered Beresford. On 12 January 1890, he called on the Prince. Tempers flared, with Lord Charles not only calling the Prince a blackguard but forgetting himself to the point where he very nearly hit the Royal Person.
The tangled situation was prevented from becoming more tangled still only by the fact that Lord Charles was obliged to leave England to take command of his ship. Just as the vessel on which Lillie Langtry's lover, Prince Louis of Battenberg, sailed away had borne the appropriate name of 'Inconstant', so Lord Charles Beresford's ship was distinguished by an equally appropriate n
ame: 'Undaunted'.
For Lord Charles had by no means been beaten by the combined machinations of the Prince of Wales and Lady Brooke.
7
'The Babbling Brook'
ONCE AGAIN, nine years after his liaison with Lillie Langtry had ended, the Prince of Wales was in love. But this time he regarded the object of his passionate love as more than a mistress: Daisy Brooke became, in the Prince's infatuated eyes, his 'wife'. This, at least, is how he always addressed her. She was his 'darling Daisy wife', his 'own lovely little Daisy wife', his 'own adored little Daisy wife'. She had, as far as he was concerned, everything he admired in a woman: beauty, elegance, vivacity and a quick mind. He felt able to discuss with her, in addition to the usual social trivia, what she calls 'the affairs of the greater world outside'.1 The Prince of Wales might not have been a particularly astute man but he very soon came to realise that there was more to Daisy Brooke than met the eye. She was far from being just a social butterfly with a tendency to land herself in trouble: the better he came to know her, the more he came to appreciate her many capabilities.
In these early years, he could hardly bear to have her out of his sight. Whenever they were apart, he would write to her, often three times a week, and would feel hurt if she failed to answer him. His letters were full of affectionate chit-chat, news about the weather and the shooting and the amateur theatricals with which country house guests entertained themselves in the evenings. 'Now my loved one,' ends a typical letter from Chatsworth, grandiose home of the Dukes of Devonshire, 'I bring these lines to a close, as I must dress and breakfast. God bless you, my own adored little Daisy wife . . . For ever yours, Your only Love. '2
She found him extraordinarily sentimental. He was a great keeper of anniversaries and sender of birthday and Christmas cards. He remembered significant shared experiences and delighted in exchanging little gifts. He once sent her a travelling clock, chosen especially because of 'a certain little gadget that added to its sentimental value'.3 German, with its many diminutives and romantic imagery, was the language they most often used in talking to each other. One of Daisy's most treasured souvenirs was the ring he gave her: a plain gold band, like a wedding ring, on which was inscribed: 'To Bertie from his affectionate parents A. and V.R., July 9th 1860.'4