The Prince would often change his clothes half a dozen times a day. He had so many clothes that he never travelled with fewer than two valets, with two more at home cleaning, brushing and pressing his vast wardrobe. As everything he wore was instantly copied, he was what we would call a fashion icon, and was known as an authority on fashion – tailors from all over Europe would gather to watch him as he strolled through the streets of a favourite Continental spa.
The cost of entertaining him was prohibitive. When he stayed in a house party, for instance – and as Prince of Wales he stayed at most of the stately homes in England, quite often with the Princess – his retinue was large. As well as the two valets mentioned above, he would also bring his own footman, who wore the royal livery and stood behind his chair at mealtimes and served him with his food, two loaders if it was a shooting party, his horses and two grooms if there was hunting. He was usually accompanied by a gentleman-in-waiting and one or two equerries, all or both of whom brought their own servants.
The house in which he was going to stay had to be redecorated and refurbished, with one room converted into a private post office and sometimes a private train laid on: Daisy Brooke at Easton Lodge built Easton Lodge Station for his first visit in 1895 and a few months later had to sell some of her estates. There was also the cost of new clothes to meet his exacting tastes and food and drink of banquet standard. When he stayed five nights with his friend ‘Sporting Joe’ (the Earl of Aylesford), where the chief entertainment was shooting in the Capability Brown park, after every second drive each gun would shout ‘Boy!’ and a bottle of champagne would appear, to be drained immediately.
His appetite was enormous: he would eat a breakfast of haddock, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock before a day’s shooting, lunch and dinner of ten to fourteen courses, elaborate teas, snacks of lobster salad or cold chicken, with a cold chicken left by his bed at night in case he became hungry. When he attended the opera he expected dinner to be as elaborate as at the Palace. ‘Six footmen went down early in the day,’ wrote one of the royal chefs, M. Tschumi, ‘with hampers packed with cloths, silver, the finest gold plate and anything else that might add to the comfort of the thirty or so guests usually entertained.’ A dozen hampers of food accompanied them, containing nine or ten courses, all served cold.
Then there were his special cigars, biscuits and bath salts, the choice of guests and where they would sleep – his own bedroom had to be discreetly near that of his current mistress – the composition of the bridge tables after dinner and the question of precedence. This, which had to be correct, meant that the senior peeress on his right was often elderly and rather dull – and Bertie bored was every hostess’s nightmare.
He was fascinated by millionaires, usually the self-made ones, for whom money was no object. ‘If the aristocracy wished to entertain the Prince, it had to accept the plutocracy on an equal footing,’ wrote Virginia Cowles. He also forced society to accept acting as a respectable profession, and hostesses to invite opera stars to their houses. The only people he was terrified of were intellectuals. Believing as he did that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the ruler and the ruled, when he met his subjects he was able both to give rein to his natural friendliness and not worry about questions of status. Above all things he wished to be amused, and a hostess who saw him begin to drum with his fingers on the table knew that this was a signal she had better rescue him at once from boredom.
One way of getting to know the Prince was through a yacht. Cowes was close to his heart, if only because he did not wish his nephew the Kaiser to make off with the regatta trophies. Americans had the largest and some of the fastest yachts in the world, which they often kept in England, so for a rich American with a determined wife and pretty daughter, to meet the Prince at Cowes was not too difficult.
Most of the American heiresses who tangled with royalty were friends of the Prince: the court of the Queen, nominally the highest in the land, was so gloomy and depressing that attending it was a duty rather than a pleasure. Perpetually in mourning1 for the death of her husband the Prince Consort many years earlier, Victoria did her best to enforce this state on everyone around her – made easier by the fact that she had so many relations that it was seldom a funeral had not recently taken place, when for weeks everything from dresses to shoes, fans, gloves and ornaments all had to be black, as had ink, pens and sealing wax. Writing paper and handkerchiefs were edged with black and underclothes frequently threaded with black ribbon.
‘I am in despair about my clothes,’ wrote Marie Adeane, a maid of honour, in October 1889. ‘No sooner have I rigged myself out with good tweeds than we are plunged into the deepest mourning for the King of Portugal [Louis I], jet ornaments for six weeks! And he was only a first cousin once removed … it is a lesson never, never to buy anything but black!’
Mary Leiter was one of the few American girls closer to the Queen than the Prince; she regularly wrote long, descriptive eight-page letters to Victoria when her husband Lord Curzon was Viceroy of India. She wrote from Viceregal Lodge, she wrote from the Viceroy’s Camp, she told the Queen how in one state caste was so strict that every Brahmin or high-caste Hindu must take a bath of purification after shaking hands with a Christian. ‘The dear little Princesses sat on my knee but were subjected to a good rubbing afterwards!’
To the Queen, she allowed her emotions to show, telling her as one mother to another of the sadness of planters’ wives whose children had been sent back to England in early childhood. ‘I think I have largely mentioned to your Majesty how very tragic and sad is this of every household in India. No father or mother ever seems to feel they have done their duty until they have packed their children off home. I cannot myself think the climate demands such complete renunciation of children.’
It was not an opinion likely to appeal to the unmaternal Queen, who would, one often feels, have liked nothing better than to get rid of her eldest son – and who certainly did not approve of his American lady friends. Of these, the three closest to him were Jennie Churchill, Minnie Paget and the Duchess of Manchester.
One of the earliest of the Prince’s American friends – and later a part-time mistress – was Jennie Churchill. ‘I don’t know why,’ wrote Clara Jerome, one of Jennie’s two sisters, ‘but people always seem to ask us whenever H.R.H. goes to them. I suppose it is because Jennie is so pretty and you have no idea how charming Randolph can be when il fait des frais! And I don’t want to be conceited but I think I make myself agreeable too as they could easily ask them without me.’
In any case, the Prince loved women. ‘A professional love-maker’ was how Margot Tennant [later the wife of the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith] described him. ‘Men did not interest him and like Disraeli, he delighted in the society of women. He was stimulated by their company, intrigued by their entanglements, flattered by their confidence, and valued their counsel.’ To many women, he was an excellent friend.
* * *
After the Prince had made it up with the Churchills, he resumed his friendship with Jennie, inviting her to his Sandringham house parties – often without her husband – and attending her dinner parties. In any case, by then Randolph’s health was deteriorating fast; it was thought he had syphilis (as a young man he had visited prostitutes), but later evidence suggests that it might have been a brain tumour.
At the time, Jennie was conducting a steamy affair with Prince Karl Kinsky, an attaché at the Austro-Hungarian embassy in London. It foundered when, travelling abroad with Randolph, she learnt of Kinsky’s forthcoming marriage to the highly suitable Countess Elisabeth Wolff-Metternich zur Gracht. Unhappily Jennie wrote to her younger sister Leonie: ‘From henceforth he is dead to me. I want to know nothing. He has deserted me at my hardest time in my hour of need & I want to forget him tho’ I wish him every joy & luck & happiness in this life…’
But this dignified pose did not last. In November 1894 she wrote again. ‘Oh, Leonie darling, do you think it is too late to stop it?�
�� Leonie darling use all your cleverness and all your strength & urge him to put off his marriage anyhow until I have seen him.’ With sadly misplaced assurance she added: ‘The world wd forgive him and if he still cares for me the girl I am sure would be willing to give him up … besides, I could help him in his career. The future looks too black and lonely without him … don’t let him marry until he has seen me.’ Her letter was to no avail; the Kinsky marriage went ahead.
But Jennie being Jennie, it was only a few months before another man stepped in. This time, it was the Prince of Wales.
When, after a long and painful illness, Randolph died on 23 January 1895 the first letter of condolence she received was from the Prince, writing from Sandringham on the same day. ‘My dear Lady Randolph, The sad news reached me this morning that all is over, & I felt that for his and your sake it was best so … there was a cloud in our friendship which lasted a few years but I am glad to think that it has long been forgotten by both of us … my thoughts are much with you, my dear Lady Randolph & I know what terribly trying times you have gone through…’
Soon he was seeing more of her, writing from the royal yacht Britannia. ‘My dear Lady R. C., I am delighted you will sail with me on Monday’ is typical of a whole sheaf of little notes in his black spiky writing that sloped to the right.
After a brief sojourn in Paris, Jennie established herself in a house in London’s Great Cumberland Place and began an affair with the Prince – by January 1896 she was ‘Ma chère amie’. A stream of letters followed. The ones indicating that sex was on the agenda would contain the sentence: ‘Should you wish to see me, I could call at five tomorrow.’ Some suggested he should visit her for a ‘Japanese tea’, when she was to wear a loose kimono, known as her ‘geisha dress’.2
Although Jennie at that time had an occasionally overlapping succession of lovers (including a briefish affair with the widower William Waldorf Astor), in the Prince’s circle this was looked on with latitude – always provided discretion was maintained. Otherwise, she did everything that could be expected of a royal mistress: she accompanied him to the Derby where his horse Persimmon won, her dinner parties for him were superb as she knew his friends and the food and the music he liked. The affair continued throughout 1896 and 1897, with Jennie blithely taking other lovers, many much younger.
But when, in 1899, the forty-five-year-old Jennie announced her engagement to George Cornwallis-West, a comparatively penniless young man the same age as her son Winston, the shock wave rippled round society. Even the Prince, now deeply involved with his last mistress, Mrs George Keppel, advised her against the marriage, telling her she was being foolish and compromising her position.
When the South African War broke out the same year, and off George went to fight in it, as did Winston, it seemed that more drastic events had supervened. Jennie was asked to organise an American hospital ship to care for the wounded in South Africa, which she did with great success.
And then she married George. His family, like hers, was horrified, her brother-in-law John ‘Jack’ Leslie writing to his wife, Jennie’s younger sister Leonie: ‘I hope G. West has survived the honeymoon.’ (Jennie had once been described as ‘more panther than woman’.)
Her friendship with the Prince, however, continued unabated. Entertaining him successfully often meant not so much knowing what to do as what not to do. He was extremely superstitious: mattresses could not be turned on a Friday, knives must not cross on a table, and above all thirteen must not sit down to dinner. Once, when he had learnt after a dinner in Germany that there had been thirteen at table, he had fretted for an hour until suddenly his face cleared and he turned to his secretary, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, to declare that it was all right after all because ‘Princess Frederick Charles of Hesse is enceinte!’
Society was quick to notice the ‘Jennie effect’: the charm American women held for the Prince, and their looser, less hidebound attitude. As the Prince himself had said of them: ‘they are not as squeamish as their English sisters and they are better able to take care of themselves’ (both qualities useful to anyone in his circle).
Jennie was not the only Jerome girl to move in royal circles. Her younger sister Leonie, married to John Leslie, the heir to an Anglo-Irish landowning baronet, Sir John Leslie, met the Prince of Wales’s younger brother the Duke of Connaught in 1895. Soon she, the Duke and Duchess became friends and Leonie would entertain them at the Castle Leslie estate at Glaslough, County Monaghan, Ulster.
By the time the Duke was appointed Commander-in-Chief in Ireland he was deeply in love with Leonie. Their close and intimate bond, which lasted forty years, became part of a curious tripartite relationship with the full knowledge and consent of the Duchess. She was a German princess who suffered from poor health and was no kind of helpmeet to a man who needed someone to support, soothe and advise him. She realised that Leonie was this person, so much so that when at one point Leonie, thinking her relationship with the Duke had become too intense, suggested that she withdrew, it was the Duchess who begged her to remain friends with them both. ‘I know I still count for something & am not put aside,’ she wrote to Leonie.
For the Leslies, their intimacy with the Connaughts meant a lively social life and, when they travelled together, luxury. ‘Your letter is the event of the day,’ she wrote to the Duke once, when she was alone with her children at Glaslough, adding, ‘The Duchess has written me a most kind letter – and I hope I shall always be worthy of her friendship.’ She signed herself, ‘Votre Amie, L’.
‘It was in the seventies that a new and powerful force began to make its influence felt in society,’ wrote Lady Dorothy Nevill of the arrival of women like the Jerome sisters. Its impact was such that concern was expressed by a group of aristocratic ladies about declining moral standards owing to the influence of American women on the Prince of Wales. They went as far as approaching the Archbishop of Canterbury to request him to hold devotional meetings for women of their class to reverse this trend. Nothing came of this idea; the Archbishop must have realised immediately that he would find few takers, since most of society followed the Prince’s lead slavishly.
One of the American women of whom they might have been thinking was Lady Mandeville, née Consuelo Yznaga (the model for Edith Wharton’s character Conchita Closson in The Buccaneers).
When the Mandevilles returned to London after staying with Alva in New York, Kim went to live openly with Bessie Bellwood, for which he was ostracised by society. He borrowed from her, too: when he left her, she sued him for what she had lent him and spent on him.
Consuelo was now virtually on her own. Her position was ghastly. She was alone in a foreign land with a disreputable husband about whose unfaithfulness she could not complain (‘any public recognition of it was unthinkable,’ wrote E. F. Benson in As We Were), and divorce, then almost unheard of, would bring instant and total social ostracism. But she was young, extremely beautiful, determined and had the allure of difference: her friends listened enthralled when she played the banjo and sang the Southern songs of her childhood.
Many girls would have run home, back to the shelter and security of their families. Consuelo, however, was determined to make a life for herself in England. What she had seen of English society showed her that the life of a married woman in England could be far more interesting and stimulating than that at home. As one of her compatriots, Belle Wilson, later declared: ‘There is only one place and one great society in the world and that is London and the English.’ So she set her mind not just to surviving but to making an enjoyable life for herself. Soon she became a friend of the Prince of Wales and, because she could keep him amused, would be asked to evening parties at Marlborough House and to stay for his week-long house parties at Sandringham.
By the late 1880s they were close friends. ‘My dear Lady Kim,’ he wrote to her in a five-page letter from Hungary on 26 September 1888, ‘many thanks for your long and amusing letter of 19th. Without the slightest flattery, I may say that nob
ody writes more amusing letters than you do.’ So intimate were they that at her dinner table one of Queen Victoria’s gentlemen-in-waiting, the Hon. Alexander Yorke, a brilliant mimic, was asked by the Prince: ‘I hear you can take off my mother very well. Please do so.’
The poor man begged to be excused (‘What will the Queen say if it gets to her ears? She’ll never forgive me’), but HRH was adamant and he was forced to obey. Fortunately, his secret seems to have been kept, probably because, although the Queen knew he could mimic, as she had told one of her ladies-in-waiting, ‘she would never believe that he could possibly be so vulgar [as to do so]’.
Consuelo’s difficulty was to make her finances stretch to the sort of life she wanted to lead – like Wharton’s Conchita, she was perpetually short of money. To make some, she began to give some of her countrywomen what they most desired, an introduction to English high society – for a price. If she thought a girl had the potential she would undertake, for a large fee3 – or for settling outstanding bills or payment in kind, such as a box at the opera or a diamond necklace – to groom her, teach her how to comport herself, present her at court and, finally, to invite her to a select dinner party at which the Prince of Wales would be present.
If the Prince took to her, the young woman was ‘made’; if she was looking for a husband among the aristocracy, Consuelo would introduce her to a suitable peer or, failing that, a younger son (marriage with the younger son of a peer held almost the same advantages: it brought the American bride into the closed circle of court and society, although without the burden of upkeep of a stately home).
The Husband Hunters Page 22