The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  She immediately sat down and wrote an impassioned letter to The Times. Knowing nothing about the raid – that it had been an extremely dishonest and foolhardy adventure – she defended it with all the vigour of her nature. Writing, she claimed extravagantly, on behalf of all Englishwomen, she castigated the press for its lack of patriotism, praised the raiders for their noble motives, and ended with a veiled attack on the German Emperor for sending his telegram.

  The publication of her letter, with its criticism of the Kaiser, gave rise to the rumour that Lady Warwick had written directly to the German Emperor, complaining about his telegram. Daisy's mother, Lady Rosslyn, first heard about this from her brother-in-law, Count Münster, at that time German ambassador in Paris. 'I hear Daisy has written a most impertinent letter to the Emperor,' he complained. 'She ought to have dressed in black, and held her tongue and her pen.'17

  Although Daisy claims that she was quite ready to laugh the whole thing off, the Prince of Wales was not. In fact, he was furious about the rumours. Not trusting Daisy to write a strong enough reply to Münster, the Prince drafted one himself.

  'Dear Count M,' wrote Daisy, following his draft, 'Mamma has shown me your letter in which you state you hear I had written an impertinent letter to the German Emperor. I cannot get over my astonishment at so unwarrantable a statement, which is likely to do me harm, and from one who has known me since a child it is doubly hard to bear.

  'I have not the honour of His Majesty's acquaintance nor is it likely I should write to him, and I certainly should have thought you would have been the first to disbelieve so palpable a lie!

  'This is, however, not the first time you have said unkind things about me to Mamma, as a few years ago you asked her at Homburg when I was going to get divorced!

  'I feel your unkindness very deeply, and so much so, that should I be passing through Paris I shall be obliged to give the German Embassy a wide berth.'18

  To this, Count Münster wrote a grudging apology. But he could not resist one more jibe. 'I must say,' he wrote to Lady Rosslyn, 'I found her letter about Jameson to The Times uncalled for. Ladies ought not to be jingoes.'19

  But a jingo this particular lady continued to be. Since Rhodes's involvement in the Jameson Raid had forced him to resign the premiership of the Cape Colony, both Lady Warwick and Stead began working for his reinstatement. The early spring of 1896 found the Prince and Lady Warwick on the French Riviera and from here Daisy wrote to Stead offering to get the Prince to write letters for Stead to use on Rhodes's behalf.

  The Prince did not need much prompting. Indeed, he showed his support for Rhodes more publicly than this. When, in 1897, the disgraced Rhodes came to London to face a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the raid, the Prince not only attended some of the hearings but frequently entertained him, both at Marlborough House and Sandringham. To the Prince, Rhodes was 'a very remarkable' man. 'I hardly know any man who has impressed me more than he did,'20 he once claimed.

  As for Daisy, she revered the Empire builder. On first meeting him, through Stead, Daisy found this big, untidy, shambling man somewhat unimpressive to look at. But to listen to him, she says, was quite another matter. 'Cecil Rhodes was that strange, unmistakable thing, a man of genius,' she wrote. 'His big ideas lifted him right out of the common, well-worn paths.'21

  Although Rhodes was, in the expression of the day, a 'woman hater' ('Oh, I don't think that can be so,' protested Queen Victoria, 'because he was very civil to me when he came here'22) Daisy claims that he had a 'genuine liking' for her. 'I reciprocated this friendship with all my heart,'23 she says.

  In December 1896 Lady Warwick arranged what she fondly imagined was to be a momentous meeting between the two most important men in her life: the Prince of Wales and W.T. Stead.

  Until then she had acted as the link between Stead and the Prince; she, as Stead somewhat archly put it, was 'the priest of the parish' and the Prince 'the parishioner'. 'Mr Stead and I,' says Daisy grandiloquently, 'were mainly concerned with benevolently co-opting, commandeering and enlisting the sympathies of the Prince of Wales in the various schemes we nursed for bettering the race, or the country, or of allying him with some cause or movement that beckoned to our idealism.'24 In short, alone of King Edward VII's mistresses, Daisy Warwick fancied herself as an éminence grise, a woman of influence, if not power.

  The three of them met for luncheon in the South Audley Street house that Daisy had taken for the winter. Faced with the prospect of meeting the Prince, even the self-assured and politically radical Stead found himself suffering the usual apprehensions of those who are about to be shown into the royal presence. What, he asked Lady Warwick, should he talk about? South African affairs? His proposed character sketch of Queen Victoria? Or might it not be better for him to talk about the one subject in which he was quite certain the Prince was interested: Lady Warwick herself? Should he sing her praises as soon as she left the room?

  'She laughed very much at this,' reports Stead, 'and said she had no doubt it would please him as much as anything I could do.'25

  But as soon as the Prince was ushered in, Stead's journalist's eye, and ear, got the better of his nerves. He found himself able to come to a dispassionate assessment of his fellow guest. As Lady Warwick sank into her 'extremely pretty curtsey, prettier than any I had seen before,'26 Stead studied the Prince. He was smaller than Stead expected, both in height and in girth, and much simpler in his manner. This, again, is the usual reaction on meeting a royal figure; their status, their inaccessibility, the aura of pomp and deference with which they are always surrounded, lead one to expect something more majestic, in both looks and manner. Stead got the impression that the Prince had a slight squint and that one of his front teeth was crooked.

  The conversation at luncheon was wide-ranging – old age pensions, Cecil Rhodes, society small talk – with the astute Stead noticing that the Prince was like 'the type of Society hostess who contrives to give the impression to every one that she is much interested in what he is saying, and five minutes afterwards forgets all about it'.27 Diplomats and politicians noticed something rather similar about the Prince: that his opinions often reflected those of the last person to whom he had been speaking, and could very easily be changed.

  Luncheon over, Lady Warwick left the men to their coffee, cigars and still more talk. When they rejoined her in the drawing room, she was lying down. A fall on the hunting field some weeks before had left her feeling unsteady. But she had the satisfaction of believing that the meeting between the two men had been a great success. The Prince, in his letter to her the following day, thanked her for giving him the opportunity of meeting a 'remarkable man who made a far more favourable impression on me than I ever believed possible'.28 One day he would like to hear from her the impression that he had made on Stead.

  In repeating all this to Stead, Daisy expressed her delight in the fact that the two men had 'mutually pleased' each other; she intended that 'mutual feeling' to grow into 'a mutual friendship some day'.29

  But it would have needed more than Daisy Warwick's remarkable beauty and formidable powers of persuasion to turn this ill-assorted couple into friends. The Prince's political interests were in foreign – and particularly European – affairs; despite his natural kindheartedness, he could not really work up any enthusiasm for the sort of domestic politics or social conditions that so obsessed Stead. And as, in the years ahead, Daisy's hold over the Prince weakened, so in turn did Stead see the ebbing of his hopes of influencing 'the parishioner'.

  As Lillie Langtry became steadily wealthier and more self-sufficient, her husband, Edward Langtry, sank ever deeper into poverty and obscurity. They had not set eyes on each other for years. Lillie's only contact with him was through her solicitor, the famous George Lewis. Each quarter Lewis sent Langtry Lillie's £25 cheque, most of which he spent on drink; and every so often Lewis passed on her request for a divorce, which he resolutely refused to consider. The days when Edward Langtry had stood behind
his radiant wife in the grandest drawing rooms in the land – including Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House – had long since gone. Shambling, unkempt and invariably drunk, he shifted from one lodging house to another, leading an utterly purposeless existence.

  Yet he was still abjectly in love with the woman who had treated him so shamefully. For a while he lived in Holyhead through which his celebrated wife would often pass on her way to and from some theatrical engagement in Dublin. He always knew exactly when she was due and for hours beforehand would be at the station, pacing up and down the platform in mounting excitement. But half an hour before she was due to appear, in a flurry of feather boas, veiled hats and fur muffs, he would lose his nerve.

  'Boy,' he would say, summoning a young porter. 'I can't stick it any longer. Watch her for me. Look closely at her; tell me how she looks; does she look well? Is she as beautiful? What she wears. Be careful about her dress, and tell me all about it.' Then he would dart out of the station.

  'After the train or boat had gone,' reported a Detective-Inspector Perkins who was stationed at Holyhead and who knew Langtry well, 'he would come back and question the porter most minutely, and sob as if his heart would break as he learned the details, and walk off the station sobbing, and apparently dazed. I have seen tears come into the eyes of the porters at this exhibition of his emotion.'30

  Since 1893 Edward Langtry had been lodging in the home of Cornelius Collins, a valet, in Southampton. Sometime in 1897 Lang-try heard, presumably from George Lewis, that Lillie had finally been granted a divorce. On 13 May that year a judge in Lakeport, California (where Lillie, an American citizen, owned property) decreed that Mr Langtry, having failed to answer a summons, was in default and that the marriage was dissolved. It was generally believed, though, that the divorce applied only in the state in which it had been granted. 'It certainly would not apply in England,' claimed one report. 'So strong is the opinion on this point that it is held that if Mrs Langtry had married again in this country, she would have been liable to have been prosecuted for bigamy'.31

  The news of the divorce upset Langtry considerably. According to a friend, he became 'extremely unhappy'.32 On 29 September that year, the fifty-year-old Langtry suddenly left Southampton for London, telling Collins, his landlord, that he was going to join a Mr Arthur Greenwood for a journey first to Belfast and then to Glasgow.

  From this point on, the story becomes extremely curious. In London Langtry joined Greenwood and the two of them travelled to Liverpool from where they caught the ferry to Belfast. In the course of the crossing between Liverpool and Belfast, a steward came across Langtry sprawled out on the deck, badly cut and bruised. His nose had been fractured. How exactly he sustained the injuries, no one knew, least of all Langtry. It was thought that he had stumbled on entering the smoking room and had fallen, hitting his head on a step. The steward claimed, though, that Langtry was not drunk.

  Arriving in Belfast, Greenwood took the injured Langtry to the Royal Hospital, summoned Collins by telegraph and then disappeared. Collins, on reaching Belfast from Southampton, found that Langtry had already discharged himself from hospital and was on his way back to London. He never saw him alive again.

  At three o'clock on the morning of 3 October 1897 Edward Langtry shuffled into the Station Hotel at Crewe, some thirty miles south of Liverpool. His face was bandaged, according to the night porter, 'from his moustache to his eyes' and he was 'very unsteady on his feet'. On asking for accommodation he was shown into an empty bedroom, but he soon came down again, to complain that there were two other people in the room. When he was refused a drink on the grounds that it was too late at night, he asked, 'Oh, is it night?'

  Having had enough of him, the night porter suggested that he continue on his journey to London and led him back to the station. But by eight the following morning Langtry was back at the hotel. Again he asked for a drink (two bottles of bitter was what he wanted) and again it was refused.

  At ten that morning Detective-Inspector Perkins, who was now stationed in Crewe, found him wandering along the station platform. He looked so disfigured and acted so strangely that Perkins barely recognised him.

  'Langtry, how did this happen?' asked Perkins.

  Langtry then gave him a very strange answer. 'They thought they knocked me out this time, but they didn't.'33

  Perhaps he was too drunk, or too dazed, to know what he was saying. But in the days ahead the rumour spread that someone had tried to get rid of Edward Langtry. How much truth there was in the rumour is uncertain. But there can be no doubt that Edward Langtry's death would have suited Lillie very well. Not long before, she had had to abandon her idea of marrying Prince Louis Esterhazy, an old fop who was the military attaché to the Austrian embassy in London, for two reasons: one was that the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef I, would almost certainly have refused to grant the necessary permission for the marriage; the other was that there were serious doubts about the validity of Lillie's Californian divorce. Had she been a widow, then at least one, or perhaps even two, of the objections to the match would have disappeared. And one knows how dearly Lillie would have loved to have become a princess.

  Moreover, by this time – October 1897 – Lillie had already met the man whom she would soon marry; or might already have married had her divorce been valid. Langtry's death would have cleared up any uncertainties about her eligibility.

  On the other hand, Edward Langtry spoke a great deal of nonsense during the two days that he was wandering about Crewe station. To some witnesses it seemed as though he were drunk; to others that he was concussed. Apparently he did not know what he was doing there, nor where he was meant to be going. To the policeman who, at one stage, took him to the police station, Langtry spoke of the subject uppermost in his mind: that his wife, to whom he had been married for twenty-five years (it was actually twenty-three) had recently divorced him, and that she had had to go 'to the colonies'34 to get the divorce.

  Eventually Langtry was committed by the magistrate to the Upton Asylum, near Chester. There, ten days later, on Friday 15 October 1897, he died. A post mortem examination revealed that he had died of an 'effusion of blood on the brain'35 brought on by his fall on board ship, two weeks before.

  That Lillie Langtry had anything to do with her husband's death is unlikely; there is much more substance in the accusation that she allowed him to die in penury. Edward Langtry died with eleven and a half pence to his name. Pointing up, even more vividly, the contrast between the wealthy Mrs Langtry and her impoverished husband was the fact that, just a couple of days before his death, she had won a handsome sum on the Cesarewitch with her horse Merman. And it was she who had married Langtry for his money.

  To quell the rising tide of criticism, Lillie moved swiftly to get George Lewis to issue a statement on the subject. 'Mrs Langtry states with reference to the report that Mr Langtry was found with only a few pence in his pocket, that Mrs Langtry had since her separation from her husband many years ago, regularly made him an adequate allowance. As soon as she heard of his condition she at once forwarded to the authorities at Chester sufficient money for his immediate wants. The allowance paid by Mrs Langtry was in addition to the income which Mr Langtry derived from his Irish property.'36

  Nowhere does Lillie mention a divorce; merely a separation. There was no longer any need to bring that up.

  When Edward Langtry was buried in the Chester cemetery, a great crowd massed about the cemetery gates in the hope of catching a glimpse of the famous Mrs Langtry. But she did not appear. She contented herself with sending a wreath of lilies of the valley tied not, as is often alleged, with a ribbon in her racing colours of fawn and blue, but with a conventional purple ribbon. On the attached card was written, 'In Remembrance – Lillie Langtry.' She could hardly have said less; or more.

  'In an evil hour,' observed the Daily News on the day of Edward Langtry's funeral, 'he was caught in the whirlwind of London fashion, and being anything but a swimmer, and having no artifici
al supports in fortune, he was quickly on his way to ruin. Those who remember him years ago, a gentlemanlike nobody, with a genial confiding manner that seemed to mark him one of the crew of The Good Intent, can but lament his miserable end.'37

  Twenty years earlier Edward Langtry had watched his wife drop her first curtsey to the Prince of Wales at Sir Allen Young's supper party. How directly had that graceful obeisance led to his lonely and penurious death in the Chester Lunatic Asylum?

  By now – the year 1897 – the Prince of Wales's great love for Lady Warwick was waning. As restless, fickle and immature as ever, the fifty-five-year-old Bertie seemed incapable of sustaining a permanent relationship. His behaviour towards Daisy remained warm and protective, but she no longer obsessed him to the extent that she had once done. For some time now their relationship had been platonic. The Prince appears to have been finding his sexual satisfaction elsewhere.

  Daisy would not have minded this unduly. She had never been in love with him. In a frank moment she even admitted to a friend that she had found the Prince 'boresome as he sat on a sofa holding my hand and goggling at me'.38 What she had enjoyed was her position as royal favourite. Daisy had always relished the idea of being a woman, not only of importance, but of influence.

  In any case, not for several years had Lady Warwick been able to give the Prince her undivided attention. Ever since her friendship with Stead and her 'conversion' by Blatchford, she had been flinging herself, with customary ardour, into various worthy causes. She was then going through what she afterwards called her 'intermediate' or transitional stage: 'my middle-class period . . . that was my Board of Guardians, philanthropic, educational, lady-gardening period. I was a reformer, if you like, but not yet an avowed Socialist.'39 She was still part-lady bountiful, part-radical feminist.

  While leading as lavish a social life as ever (in spite of all Blatchford's strictures, she went to the Duchess of Devonshire's famous fancy dress ball in 1897 dressed, once again, as Marie Antoinette), she served on a bewildering number of committees and inaugurated countless progressive schemes. She started, among other things, a home for crippled children, a co-educational technical school, and the 'Lady Warwick Agricultural Scheme for Women' – a quaint project in which pairs of unmarried women would set up home together and devote themselves to working the land.