The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  Lady Warwick, beaten at her own game by the palace professionals, was incensed. But she was not cowed. If she was not allowed to publish the letters, she would publish something equally revealing. Once more poor du Cros was visited by Lady Warwick. This time she threatened him with a manuscript which contained not only the full story of the way in which the palace had tried to silence her but a great deal of defamatory information about other prominent national figures. She even hinted, to the increasingly discomforted du Cros, that she knew one or two things about his past which he would probably prefer to be kept dark. In panic, du Cros suggested a couple of wildcat schemes whereby she might be able to make some money and, at a later stage, even went so far as to release her from paying back all the interest she owed him.

  The injunction against the publication of the letters had been a temporary measure, and the business was finally settled on 5 July 1915. The action against Lady Warwick was stayed on condition that the letters were destroyed. She was forced to comply. Edward VII's love letters, on which she had hoped to raise £100,000, were handed over.

  'I am handing back with splendid generosity,' runs her self-righteous statement of defence, 'the letters King Edward wrote me of his great love, and which belong absolutely to me. I have done nothing with these letters, and have never dreamed of publishing such things. My memoirs are my own affair, and every incident of these ten years of close friendship with King Edward are in my brain and memory . . .' 6

  It was, in short, a warning. They need not think that because she had been prevented from publishing the letters, she could be prevented from one day writing her memoirs.

  The palace, in its anxiety to sweep the whole scandalous business under the carpet, went to the extraordinary lengths of removing all traces of the legal action from the records. The affair must be kept absolutely secret. And so it was, until the day that Arthur du Cros's own meticulously detailed account was discovered by Theo Lang in that deed box in Switzerland, half a century later.

  In the end, the irrepressible Daisy Warwick did not do too badly out of the affair. For this, the well-meaning du Cros was responsible. Having already agreed that she need not repay the interest on his loan, he released her from paying back the £16,000 loan itself. He then, in a gesture of extreme generosity, took over all her outstanding bills, amounting to £48,000. Perhaps du Cros had taken her threats of exposing his past seriously; perhaps he simply wanted to put an end to the whole wretched business; perhaps he still saw it as a way of serving his sovereign.

  So what Daisy Warwick finally obtained – obliquely – for Edward VIIs love letters was £64,000. What du Cros obtained, a year later, was a baronetcy. Frank Harris, apparently, got nothing.

  By the time she finally came to publish her autobiography, fifteen years later, Lady Warwick seems to have convinced herself that her discreditable attempt at blackmail had never happened. Her friends, she claims, had expected her memoirs to be full of confidential information. But how, she asks piously, could she possibly betray those 'great ones' who had been her 'intimates'? The fact that 'they' were dead was all the more reason for her silence; 'those' who remained trusted her to keep silent.7

  One summer evening during the First World War, the gardens of Easton Lodge were the setting for an interesting encounter. Two of the late Edward VII's mistresses, Daisy Warwick and Lillie Langtry, were to be seen strolling arm-in-arm among the famous roses. With Lillie in her early sixties and Daisy in her mid-fifties, both were undeniably middle-aged, but whereas Lillie was merely plumper than she had once been, Daisy was frankly fat. Of the sylph-like shape that had so enchanted the Prince of Wales, no trace remained. Yet there were traces, in both women, of their once celebrated beauty. And it was about this that they were talking as they moved through the sweet-scented garden.

  'Whatever happens, I do not intend to grow old!' announced Lillie. 'Why shouldn't beauty vanquish time?'

  'I forgot what I answered,' writes Daisy, 'for I was busy analysing what she had said. I stole a glance at her, and certainly Time's ravages, although perceptible to the discerning eye of one who had known her at the zenith of her beauty, were disguised with consummate artistry, while her figure was still lovely.

  'But it came to me then that there was tragedy in the life of this woman, whose beauty had once been world-famous, for she had found no time in the intervals of pursuing pleasure to secure contentment for the evening of her day. Now that she saw the evening approach, Lillie Langtry could only protest that it was not evening at all, but just the prolongation of a day that was, in truth, already dead.'8

  There was something in what Daisy Warwick said. Lillie Langtry was growing old any way but gracefully. It was not that she behaved indecorously – she was far too dignified for that – it was simply that she bitterly resented the passing of time. Again and again, those who knew Lillie during the last dozen or so years of her life (she was to die in 1929) speak of her sadness, her loneliness, her inability to come to terms with the fact that her day was over.

  'Lillie Langtry interested me,' wrote the publisher, Newman Flower, who used to visit her in her London hotel in the early 1920s, 'because of the manner in which she strove to keep herself alive, after that particular Social World, which she had queened, was dead. She always appeared to be a lingering leaf on an autumn tree which hangs on and will not die nor perish beneath the blast of Winter, because it has once belonged to a never-to-be-forgotten Summer. She could not let go. She fought in order not to let go.'9

  Yet he, again like many others who knew her, paid tribute to Lillie's remarkable intelligence. Under all the theatricality, under all those anecdotes, impersonations and jokes, lay a bedrock of good sense. 'I discovered, stage by stage,' writes Flower, 'how deep-thinking was her mind. No one ever gave Lillie Langtry credit for her cultured mind. But she acquired something untaught from Life. She drew knowledge unto herself and stored it, and brought it out at the required moment.'10

  Occasionally, she would speak to him about Edward VII, as Prince of Wales. They had only had one serious difference throughout their relationship, she claimed. It had been 'a most stupid' quarrel. 'I wore a dress of white and silver at two balls in succession. I did not know that he was going to be present at both balls, but he was. He came up to me on the second night and exclaimed: "That damned dress again!"

  'He walked away in a temper . . . It took me a long time to make it up . . . That was the only quarrel we ever had.'11

  It was, of course, exactly the sort of trivial thing that annoyed the Prince.

  Not long after the war, Lillie sold her various English houses and bought a villa, overlooking Monte Carlo, which she named Le Lys. Set in a flowery garden, against pine-covered slopes and with a view over the glittering Mediterranean, Le Lys was something of a showplace. Occasionally Lillie's husband Suggie, the dapper and ineffectual Sir Hugo de Bathe, was to be seen in her company but a more constant companion was a Mrs Mathilde Peate, who acted as part-housekeeper, part-secretary and part-confidante. Lillie's days were spent in strolling along the promenade, gambling in the casino, meeting friends for tea and giving or attending little dinner parties. Always well dressed and regally mannered, she remained, amongst the fashionable crowd that thronged the Riviera, very much of a celebrity in her own right.

  It was, quite naturally, as the one-time mistress of King Edward VII that Lillie Langtry was chiefly celebrated. And although, in private conversation, she was ready to tell the odd anecdote about their association, she was careful not to commit anything to paper. Yet as long ago as the 1890s publishers had been pestering her to write her memoirs. 'I would go up to £40,000 and it would be worth it,' one publisher assured the journalist William Colley, 'if she would write all the truth and all she knows.'

  'Mr Colley,' exclaimed an amused Lillie on hearing about the offer, 'you don't really think I would ever do such a thing as to write my real reminiscences, do you?'

  'No,' admitted Colley, 'I don't.'12

  Lillie then ga
ve him, says Colley, her reasons for not writing her 'real reminiscences'; these, he says nobly, he would never disclose.

  But her well-known reluctance did not stop other publishers, or newspaper editors, from trying to get her to change her mind. 'Her frank reminiscences,' one journalist told Lord Northcliffe, 'would provide the best Sunday reading for many a long day.'13

  Newman Flower came closer than most. After he had been begging her for months to write her autobiography, Lillie one day invited him to her London house to discuss it. 'I was shown into a room where the litter of lunch still lingered – two used table-napkins thrown across the table, two stained glasses, an empty bottle, a cigarette-end still smouldering in a glass ash-tray . . .

  'She came in presently. There was no make-up on her face. She was depressed and unhappy. Restive. She pulled out a chair, and sat corner-wise on it. She pushed the plates and glasses aside in a noisy clatter.'

  'Oh, the book,' she remarked as if, says Flower, they had met to discuss the Scriptures. 'Oh, yes, the book. Now I'll tell you . . .'

  She drummed her fingers on the table. 'What you've got to do –' she began.

  'What I've got to do?' asked Flower.

  'Yes. You,' she explained. 'You've got to get all the cuttings about me that have ever appeared in the Press. You can get the record of all my horses. You can put the whole lot together and I shall sign them. There's the book.'

  'It's not quite like that,' he protested. 'I mean, books aren't made like that.'

  'Well, come into the drawing room and have coffee.'

  'We went into the drawing room,' writes Flower. 'We had coffee. We never talked about the book again.'14

  Yet in 1925 – the year of Queen Alexandra's death – Lillie Langtry published an autobiography entitled The Days I Knew. The book could hardly have been more innocuous or imprecise. It is remarkable more for what it leaves out or glosses over than for what it reveals. Whole areas of Lillie's life are ignored; others are presented in a haphazard, unchronological fashion. Her succession of lovers are either not mentioned or else dismissed in a sentence. Freddie Gebhard, the young American multi-millionaire who provided her with, among other things, her famous railway carriage 'Lallee', is referred to as 'what Americans designate a clubman, which gave rise to a great deal of newspaper gossip'.15 George Alexander Baird – 'the Squire' – who bought her a yacht and bequeathed her a string of racehorses, is described as 'an eccentric young bachelor with vast estates in Scotland . . . and with more money than he knew what to do with'.16 Prince Louis of Battenberg is not mentioned at all; nor is there any indication that Lillie ever had a daughter, whether by Prince Louis or not. Her husband, Edward Langtry, after a few condescending references, very soon fades out of the picture altogether.

  What Lillie calls her 'friendship' with the Prince of Wales is treated with great circumspection. Although she could not resist parading her relationship with her royal lover, both as Prince of Wales and as King, she is careful not to give away too much. Her tone, in dealing with him, is reverent and sycophantic, yet it must have been patently clear to any reader of her memoirs that the bond between the two of them had been physical. Why else should the heir to the throne have taken up with a woman so far removed from his usual social orbit? There was no need, though, for her lover's son, George V, to lose any sleep about Lady de Bathe's revelations. No secret injunctions against publication were issued on this occasion.

  On the contrary, George V remained very kindly disposed towards Lillie Langtry. Captain Champion de Crespigny told the writer Ernest Dudley the story of how, one day in 1928, when Lillie was visiting London from Monte Carlo, she telephoned him in great excitement to say that the King had invited her to tea at Buckingham Palace. The King, she afterwards told de Crespigny, had been 'sweet'. He had arranged for an old footman, whom she had known in Edward VII's day, to be on hand. 'My lady,' said the footman, 'I've brought you the same sort of brandy-and-soda you used to like when you came to see King Edward.'

  George V, in his chaffing way, had told Lillie not to hide herself away in Monte Carlo. 'That's what you pretty women are inclined to do when you feel you're not so young any more. It's a mistake, and I want you to come to London more often.'17 She promised that she would.

  She never did come back. Lillie Langtry died on 12 February 1929, at the age of seventy-five, in her Monte Carlo home. With her, at the end, was her faithful companion, Mathilde Peate. The value of Lillie's estate was £47,000. Of this she willed £5000 to each of her four grandchildren; Mathilde Peate inherited £10,000, the villa, the jewellery and such personal effects as were not otherwise bequeathed.

  Lillie had asked to be buried in her parents' grave in the churchyard of St Saviour's, Jersey, but with snow-storms raging across the Continent, it was not until ten days later that her body, aboard the steamer 'Saint Brieuc', reached St Helier. The coffin lay in the church overnight. St Saviour's – lying a stone's throw from the Rectory where Lillie had grown up – was where her father had been Dean and where she had married both Edward Langtry and Hugo de Bathe. A prettier spot in which to be buried than the leafy, gently sloping churchyard of St Saviour's would be difficult to find.

  Of the great and glittering world in which Lillie Langtry had been so celebrated an ornament, there was not a single member at her funeral on 23 February 1929. Mathilde Peate was her only close friend. Her family was represented by her daughter, Lady Malcolm, to whom she had not spoken for years and by her grandson, George Malcolm, whom she could not have known very well.

  Lillie, who had always laid claim to the friendship, and love, of so many royals, was sent only one wreath from a member of a royal family. It came from Prince and Princess Pierre of Montenegro, who now lived in Monte Carlo. Prince Pierre was the least important son of Europe's least important royal house, which had anyway ceased to reign in 1922. His wife, Princess Pierre, had been born Violet Wegner in South Hackney, London, the daughter of a tram conductor.

  No one could ever accuse Daisy Warwick of clinging to her yesterdays. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, when she was in her sixties and seventies, she remained as active, as forward-looking, as politically aware and involved as she had ever been. 'The way not to admit age, not to brand oneself as a back number, is to keep heart and faith and enthusiasms,' she pronounced. 'Let all your thoughts be hopeful. Study always. Keep as active mentally as you were physically active . . .'18

  Advancing age made Lady Warwick no less controversial or capricious. She surrounded herself with a host of unconventional and progressively-minded people. In a steady stream of articles, she pontificated on every aspect of modern life. A committed socialist, she was a hard-working supporter of the Labour Party. In 1923 she stood as a Labour candidate in a by-election in her own constituency of Warwick and Leamington. Her Conservative opponent was the young Anthony Eden, to whom she happened to be doubly related through the marriages of two of her children. Although Daisy came a poor third, after the Liberal candidate, the Labour Party did very well nationally and, in 1924, was able to take office as the first Labour government. Lady Warwick's gratification was somewhat tempered by the fact that on 15 January 1924, her understanding husband 'Brookie', the Earl of Warwick, died at the age of sixty-eight.

  As Lord Warwick had died a comparatively poor man and Lady Warwick was in her perennially impecunious state (which not even the sale of a great deal of land had been able to alleviate) she decided to combine philanthropy with expediency by a grand geste: she would allow the Labour Party the use of her home, Easton Lodge. Although she would live on there (Warwick Castle had passed to her eldest son) the Party, provided it paid certain expenses, could have free run of the house and grounds.

  It sounded like an excellent idea, but in the end it proved no more successful than her other enterprises. Neither as a centre for conferences and study groups, nor as a venue for summer schools, or a Labour college under the auspices of the Trades Union Congress, did her plans for Easton Lodge fully materialise. Yet, for several
years, its over-furnished rooms and spacious park were the setting for various Labour gatherings. The arrangement was not really a comfortable one. Beatrice Webb considered the house 'far too gorgeous in its grandiose reception rooms and large extravagantly furnished bedrooms',19 and her sister Kate felt that the less sophisticated party members must feel repelled by this show of 'degenerate luxury'.20 The grounds swarmed with Lady Warwick's bizarre collection of birds and animals, tame and wild.

  But most discomforting of all was the hostess herself. Shelf-bosomed, tightly corseted, picture-hatted and opulently gowned, Lady Warwick made a striking contrast to the short-skirted, shingled and cardiganed women members of the party. They found her manner, for all her good-heartedness and open-mindedness, to be autocratic and intimidating. 'When I first knew her,' writes one young socialist, 'though she had grown fat, her face still had the fixed pink-and-white attractions which one associates with the Lillie Lang-try era, and an "electric light" smile which was turned on in a brilliant flash and gone again. She had a gushingly affectionate manner of greeting, with her wonderfully curled head on one side and her smile blazing, which was none the less perfectly sincere "period"; she trailed about with a string of revolting Pekingese dogs and she had quick and sudden gusts of temper . . . '21

  Her outspokenness astonished the students attending the summer schools. Making no secret of her adulterous love affair with Edward VII, Lady Warwick would lead them through her 'Friendship Garden', where most of the flowers seem to have been planted by the Prince of Wales, and would point out the heart-shaped plaques with their inscriptions: 'Lily of the Valley. Planted by H.R.H. The Prince of Wales. Nov 18, 1892.'22 Conspicuously absent would be any flowers planted by the Princess of Wales. With almost every room sporting its photograph of the late King, Lady Warwick would regale her embarrassed listeners with risque stories about their intimate relationship. Unselfconsciously, she would point out, to tight-lipped Nonconformists, the great four-poster bed which she had shared with her royal lover.