The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  A story which Lillie tells about one of her encounters with Oscar Wilde seems to confirm that he knew the truth about Jeanne-Marie being her daughter, not her niece. One afternoon, after she had returned permanently to Britain from the States, he called to see her. Flinging a manuscript onto the table, he announced, 'There is a play which I have written for you.'

  'What is my part?' asked Lillie.

  'A woman,' he replied, 'with a grown-up illegitimate daughter.'

  'My dear Oscar,' she exclaimed, 'am I old enough to have a grown-up daughter of any description?' She refused to open the manuscript or to have him read it to her. 'Put it away for twenty years,' she advised.

  Why, she protested many years later, 'he ever supposed that it would have been, at the time, a suitable play for me, I cannot imagine. '8

  The play was Lady Windermere's Fan.

  By the end of 1888, there were indications that Lillie's long affair with Gebhard was turning sour. Perhaps he was beginning to regret the fortune that he had squandered on her; perhaps she was tired of him. Whatever the reason, they broke up: Gebhard to marry, first an heiress and then a chorus girl, Lillie to return to London.

  She sailed from New York on 13 July 1889, having shipped thirty trunks, her horses, carriages and everything movable from the West Thirty-third Street house and having managed to save, from her theatrical and other earnings, a sizeable sum of money.

  The Prince of Wales, never one to shirk a cliché, had once written – as she was about to set off on yet another American tour – that she was 'probably right to "make hay while the sun shines" '.9 She had been right. Not only had she made a great deal of hay but the sun would be shining on her for many years yet.

  As the Prince of Wales liked his women either stylishly dressed or naked, it is hardly surprising that he had very little sympathy with the movement for the emancipation of women. Later, as King, he dismissed the suffragettes as 'dreadful women' and was once extremely annoyed to be told that the names of two women had been put forward to serve on the Royal Commission for Divorce. He even hesitated to award the Order of Merit to the aged Florence Nightingale, on the grounds that it was not right 'to give it to a woman'.10

  Given this attitude, and given the generally accepted idea of a mistress as a rich man's pampered plaything, it is paradoxical that both Lillie Langtry and Daisy Brooke should have been, in their different ways, examples of emancipated women.

  The modern feminist movement, with all its ramifications, had its beginnings in the 1850s. It was then, as one historian has so graphically put it, that 'in women of all classes there was a stir . . . the stir of adventure and new ideas, comparable with the agitation which may be noted in a flock of migrants impelled by the lure of new worlds'.11 In medicine, education, social conditions, the franchise, women were beginning to agitate for reform. By the late 1880s the movement was gathering strength and importance. To the names of pioneers like Florence Nightingale were being added those of Lydia Becker, Barbara Bodichon, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Garrett – all fighting, in different fields, for a woman's right to lead her own life as a self-sufficient individual. Their bible was The Subjection of Women, written by that great theorist of feminism, John Stuart Mill.

  Although at first glance Lillie Langtry – with her extravagant tastes, feminine guile and cultivation of rich male protectors – seems to fit awkwardly into this regiment of militant females, there is no doubt that she had many of the qualities of a feminist. A practical, independent, liberated and self-confident woman, she was yearly proving herself equal to any man. More than one theatrical manager and, in later years, racehorse trainer, professed himself astonished at her grasp of what were generally regarded as 'masculine' concerns.

  'Mrs Langtry was ever an absorbing study,' wrote Edward Michael, one of her managers. 'Possessing in a marked degree every feminine charm – wiles, fascination and moods – she was at the same time possessed of an iron will power, immense courage and a gift of instant decision which the captain of a 50,000 ton liner in a critical situation might envy. Remarkably well-read, it was with me always a surprise that she found time for reading, for I have never known any topic – and I use the word "any" deliberately – literature, science, arts or any other subject which she was not able to discuss with specialists. Hers was always a big and broad mind which could not tolerate anything commonplace or futile and her favourite phrase is indicative of her nature: "Don't let's fuss, please", spoken in a soft plaintive voice, was a danger signal to those who knew her.'12

  Hardly had Lillie arrived back in Britain from her profitable years in the United States than she had formed another company and, in her capacity as actor-manager, was starring in a series of plays. In short, in an age when the majority of women were forced to confine themselves to their homes and families, and a minority were still campaigning for the right to be admitted into the professions, Lillie Langtry had carved out a highly successful career of her own.

  Daisy Brooke was proving herself equally independent-minded. In spite of her reputation as a social butterfly and mischief-maker, she had always had a good heart. That conscience, which in girlhood had caused her to question the fairness of the existing social order, had never been quite stilled. Lady Brooke was 'ever eager', wrote one neighbour, 'to be doing a good turn for somebody and not always quite knowing what it ought to be'.13

  Another neighbour, Elinor Glyn, has a story to bear this out. One day, while she was visiting Lady Brooke, a self-righteous curate came to call. 'During conversation about the parish,' she writes, 'he mentioned that some ungodly people, non-churchgoers, were in trouble, and that the husband was very ill. It was God's judgement, he said, and they did not deserve help. Daisy listened with a faraway look that I know well, and while carrying on the conversation with the curate about a new church hall which she was building, she leant over and rang the bell. When the footman appeared she told him to send the housekeeper, and she still went on talking sweetly to the curate. When the housekeeper arrived she looked up casually and telling her the name and address of the "ungodly wretches" she said, "I hear they are in great trouble. Please have beef tea and jellies and port sent round to them at once, and say that I will drive over and see them this afternoon." Then she went on talking to the dumb-founded curate about the erection of the church hall, as if nothing had happened.'14

  How far Daisy Brooke imagined this setting in train of footman, housekeeper, kitchenmaid and groom to deliver 'beef tea and jellies and port' would go towards nourishing a labourer's family one does not know; but then not all her philanthropic activities were quite so impractical. In 1890, in an effort to alleviate the poverty in the neighbourhood of Easton Lodge, she started a needlework school, where local women could work for wages. In other words, instead of applying the customary Victorian palliative – the giving of alms – Lady Brooke organised proper employment. Although not above making use of her influential connections (the lingerie for the trousseau of the bride-to-be of Prince Eddy, the Prince of Wales's eldest son, was embroidered by her needlewomen) Daisy did her best to run her school in a businesslike, non-charitable fashion. When she could no longer market the needlework personally, she opened a shop in Bond Street.

  This move, so daring by contemporary standards, caused consternation in society. For Lady Brooke to have gone into 'trade' was considered too outré for words. Her protestations, that her needlework school meant independence and a sense of pride for women who would otherwise have to rely on charity, made very little sense to sneering society matrons.

  Daisy's well-intentioned venture was not, in fact, a great success. Unlike Lillie Langtry, Daisy Brooke had no business sense. Nor, indeed, was the scheme a sufficient outlet for her abundant energy, considerable intelligence and awakening social conscience. Her philanthropic interests had yet to be channelled. When they were, they would sweep her away into a different world: a world far removed from society balls, country house parties and the Prince of Wales. But not yet.

 
'Queen Alexandra, in her younger years,' remembered Daisy, 'was full of fun and the joy of life. She enjoyed entertaining and being entertained, while beneath her placid exterior there was a shrewd judgement that expressed itself now and again in no uncertain terms.'15

  Daisy was in a position to know. For about few people did Alexandra's shrewd judgement express itself in less uncertain terms than about Lady Brooke. Princess Alexandra disliked her intensely. Whereas the Princess had always been ready to tolerate her husband's previous mistress, Lillie Langtry, she resolutely refused to have anything to do with Daisy Brooke. Once Daisy had become the Prince of Wales's recognised mistress, Alexandra would not receive her at Marlborough House or Sandringham.

  There were several reasons for Alexandra's unyielding attitude. For one thing, she had sympathised with Lady Charles Beresford during the turbulent Beresford affair. For another, the furore surrounding the affair had publicly revealed Alexandra as the betrayed wife in a way that her husband's more discreetly conducted liaison with Lillie Langtry had never done. Then, where the humbly-born Lillie had always been careful to treat the Princess with great deference, the rich and aristocratic Daisy was far more assured in Alexandra's company. After all, if Daisy had married Prince Leopold, she would have been Alexandra's sister-in-law. Daisy was the sort of vain, outspoken, trouble-making woman that the Princess did not like. Nor were matters helped by the fact that she was eighteen years younger than Alexandra.

  There were, of course, no scenes or recriminations on the Princess's part: she simply set her face against Lady Brooke and, as Alexandra was the most stubborn of women, nothing would induce her to change her attitude. Not until the affair had run its course would the Princess of Wales have any contact with Lady Brooke. And even then, it remained minimal.

  Increasingly, the Prince of Wales's restless, scandal-racked way of life caused his wife to retreat into a private, almost make-believe world of her own. She spent more and more time at Sandringham in the company of those with whom she felt most at ease, particularly those two long-serving and unmarried companions – Charlotte Knollys, her woman-of-the-bedchamber, and Sir Dighton Probyn, comptroller of the Prince's household. Enhancing the aura of unreality that was enveloping Alexandra was the fact that she still looked so extraordinarily young; it was almost as though time had passed her by. With her unlined skin, she looked twenty years younger than her age; with her figure of a girl, she dressed in the height of fashion. This enduring beauty, this bandbox elegance, was giving the Princess of Wales an almost artificial look. 'There was something about Aunt Alix,' wrote one of her nieces, 'something invincible, something exquisite and flowerlike. She gave you the same joy as a beautiful rose or a rare orchid or an absolutely faultless carnation. She was a garden flower that had been grown by a superlative gardener who knew every trick of his art.'16

  And when one added to the Princess's youthful appearance her youthful manner – her childish sense of fun, her scatter-brained charm, her impulsive generosity – one could hardly believe that she was a woman of almost fifty by the early 1890s.

  If Princess Alexandra was virtuous, it was not because she was lacking in masculine admirers. Even to Dighton Probyn, who knew her in every mood, she remained always the 'Beloved Lady'. But her most devoted admirer was the Honourable Oliver Montagu, a younger son of the Earl of Sandwich and an officer in the Blues who had been appointed as an extra equerry to the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1868. Tall and handsome, Oliver Montagu gave a first impression of being just another rollicking, sporting young blade, one of those 'wicked boys' in whose company the Prince of Wales delighted. But there was more to him than this. Behind the dashing façade, Oliver Montagu was a serious-minded, deeply religious man, imbued with a strong sense of chivalry. On first meeting the Princess of Wales, when they were both twenty-four, Oliver Montagu fell deeply in love with her, and he remained in love with her until the day he died, twenty-five years later.

  For year after year Oliver Montagu, who never married, devoted himself to the beautiful Princess of Wales: attending to her needs, providing her with constant companionship, shielding her – as one observer has put it – 'in every way, not least from his own great love'.17 That the affair remained platonic, there is no question. Even Skittles, always quick to sniff out any sexual scandal, was forced to admit that Oliver Montagu had never been Alexandra's lover. When Wilfrid Scawen Blunt asked her if the Princess had ever had a lover, she answered, 'Oh no. She is not made that way. She disliked even having her hand kissed. She submitted to her conjugal duties but never liked it. She was very fond of Oliver Montagu but it was only as a friend. She went to bed and cried for three days when he died. The Prince of Wales said he knew there was nothing in it.'18

  Platonic love affairs such as this were as much an aspect of Victorian upper-class life as the adulterous liaisons of country house parties. Love without sex was regarded as a perfectly natural state of affairs. There had been, during the nineteenth century, a great resurgence of medievalism, not only in art and architecture but in attitudes: a revival of what were somewhat naively regarded as the knightly qualities of idealism, chivalry and gallantry. Allied to this was the sentimentalism of the Victorian age: the love poems, the pressed flowers, the exchanged tokens, the fan language, the piano duets.

  It is in this light that Princess Alexandra's relationship with Oliver Montagu should be seen. It must have been no small consolation for the frequently betrayed Princess to be so blamelessly but ardently courted by this 'perfect, gentle knight'.

  Oliver Montagu was not, though, Princess Alexandra's only consolation. She derived even more pleasure from her children. Neglected by her husband and increasingly cut off from his social world by her deafness and her domesticity, the Princess devoted herself to her five children. In those days, reminisced Lady Brooke, 'we preferred to keep our children young, for the younger generation, we knew, would date us.'19 That might have been one reason for the Princess's determination to keep her children as childlike as possible for as long as possible, but an equally valid reason was her own immaturity. To the Wales children their mother – so gay, so spontaneous, so impractical and unpunctual – was always 'darling Mother-dear': a delightful companion hardly more grown-up than themselves. Long after their childhood was over, the Wales children still spoke and behaved like adolescents. One of the princesses celebrated her nineteenth birthday with a children's party; in manhood, the second son would sign himself 'your little Georgie'.

  The three Wales princesses – Louise, Victoria and Maud, all in their early twenties by 1889 – looked very alike: carbon copies of their mother but without her marvellous beauty. All three were pale and long-faced, with protruding eyes and tightly curled poodle fringes. Boisterous in private but diffident in public, they were often referred to as 'the whispering Wales girls'. They always talked, claimed one of their cousins, about people as 'the dear little thing' or 'the poor little man'. They 'spoke in a minor key, en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very wonderful and everything very beautiful if it had not been so sad.'20 Their rooms were like those of little children: crammed with an accumulation of tiny, pretty, dainty but far from aesthetic objets – miniatures, shells, little vases, diminutive paintings, tiny china ornaments.

  A letter written by the three of them when the eldest was already eighteen to their father's private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, perfectly illustrates their enduring childishness. Addressed to 'Dear old Thingy' and enclosing drawings of themselves as animals, they hope that 'the pictures will put you in mind of your little friends Toots, Gawks and Snipey. You must notice that Toots is practising her steps for the tiresome Court ball, that Gawks is going to bed instead like Cinderella, and that Snipey is trying to console herself with a song instead of singing her hymns in Church as she ought to do . . . We are afraid you won't be at all glad to see us country bumpkins again, as we shall have nothing to talk about but cows and co
wslips. Now goodbye, old thingy and hoping you will appreciate the works of art we send you. Your affectionate little friends: Toots, Gawks and Snipey.'21

  How much, one wonders, did the Prince of Wales long for three beautiful and sophisticated daughters of whom a father could be proud?

  Prince George, the second Wales boy, who turned twenty-five in 1890, was revealing himself to be more mature, not only than his three younger sisters, but than his elder brother, the twenty-six-year-old Prince Eddy. Much of this was due to the many years he had spent in the navy. Alone among Princess Alexandra's children, Prince George had inherited something of her good looks. Blue-eyed, sun-tanned, with a neatly trimmed nautical beard and moustache, he had none of the pallid, inbred appearance of his brother and sisters. And although he may have been an unimaginative and unintellectual young man, Prince George had – for his position – the more valuable characteristics of self-discipline and conscientiousness.

  Yet no less than his brother and sisters was he still very much enmeshed in his mother's web. To read the letters between mother and son is scarcely to believe that she was the middle-aged future Queen of England and he a fully adult naval officer. How he wished, he had written to her two or three years before, that he were going to Sandringham for the holidays. It almost made him cry to think of it. 'I wonder who will have that sweet little room of mine, you must go and see it sometimes and imagine that your little Georgie dear is living in it.'22

  Wrenched apart by so many things during the early 1890s – the Tranby Croft scandal, the Beresford affair, the Lady Brooke romance – the Prince and Princess of Wales were brought together by the problem of their eldest son, Prince Eddy; or, to give him his correct title, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale.

  Having turned twenty-seven in 1891, Prince Eddy remained the negative, lethargic, apathetic creature he had always been. Even allowing for the fact that all the Wales children were immature, Prince Eddy was, in his mother's telling word, exceptionally 'dawdly'. Nothing – his years in the navy, his time at Cambridge, a career in the 10th Hussars or a tour of India – had been able to shape his amorphous personality. Although not the imbecile he is sometimes made out to be, Prince Eddy was certainly backward. With his elaborate uniforms, waxed moustaches and sleepy-eyed stare, he had about as much animation as a tailor's dummy. The only activities for which he showed any trace of enthusiasm were shooting, fishing, playing cards and making love.