Louise must have had a very low opinion of the Campbell men: her once-adored father-in-law had proved himself tyrannical,3 upsetting everyone by insisting that his second marriage take place less than a year after the death of his much-mourned first wife. Then there was Lord Colin Campbell, who had given his wife a sexually transmitted infection before fabricating lies about her having multiple lovers. In doing so he had blackened not only his wife’s name but also the innocent men he had cited, caring nothing about the consequences for them and their families. Even though the court found there was not enough evidence to substantiate his allegations, the reputations of Gertrude (Lady Colin) and her four reputed lovers were tarnished for ever by the case.4 Finally, there was Louise’s own husband, the Campbell who had married her despite being gay.5 In years to come, Louise and Lorne would become devoted to one another – she called him ‘my darling Lorne’ – and start to enjoy one another’s company more often, even becoming co-conspirators against the rest of Louise’s family when she needed an ally. This closeness had not yet developed.
Throughout 1891, Louise threw herself into officialdom, trying to dull the pain of Boehm’s death by keeping herself busy. For most artists, working in their studio would have been one method of working out the pain – but for Louise her studio was a constant reminder of her dead lover. She went to the Isle of Wight to launch a lifeboat; to the Lake District where she opened ‘a fancy fair’ in Kendal and an ‘industrial, arts, crafts and loan exhibition’ in Barrow; and to Edinburgh where she ‘formally opened’ the Edinburgh School of Cookery and presented diplomas to successful students. This pattern would be repeated throughout the coming years, with Louise lending her name to numerous charities and causes and responding to a stream of requests that she hand out prizes, lay foundation stones and attend balls and fund-raising dinners. Many of the charities she supported were concerned with health reform, education and the rights of women and girls. Refusing to shy away from the stigma attached to mental illnesses, she actively raised money for asylums as well as hospitals. She was president or patron of numerous charities, including the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company, the Victoria Hospital for Children, the National Society for the Protection of Young Girls, the Kensington District Nursing Association, the Kensington Philanthropic Society, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association,6 the Women’s Emigration Society, the Irish Distressed Ladies’ Fund, and the Home Education Society. She took an active interest in the Ragged School Union, the Boys’ Brigade, the Recreative Evening Schools Association, the Lifeboat Fund, a newly formed homeless charity called the House of Shelter, the East End Mothers’ Home, the Gentlewomen’s Employment Association and a large number of schools, hospitals and asylums around the country. When the operetta star Eugène Oudin died unexpectedly in 1894, Louise joined a committee to raise money for his bereaved family. She was also involved with several quirkily intriguing charities, including the British Institute at Brussels, which aided ‘all Englishwomen earning their livelihood in Belgium’, and the Young Men’s Friendly Society.
Louise allied herself to a number of artistic and artisan charities, including the Scottish Home Industries Association, the Ladies’ Work Society (which helped poor women earn a decent living from their needlework skills) and the Royal Female School of Art. In 1894, Lord Ronnie Gower recorded in his journal his observations on Beatrice and Louise, when the princesses attended the same charity fête but on different days. Princess Beatrice, Gower noted, ‘looked cross and extremely bored and produced an unfortunate impression’. Princess Louise was, however, ‘in every way a contrast to her younger sister, being most gracious and charming everyone’.
Throughout the 1890s, Louise’s name pops up tirelessly in the newspapers, less because of her court life than for her numerous public appearances and her artistic career. In fact, she was so renowned for the lack of ‘royalness’ in her diary that in 1895, when the queen was ill, the papers reported with open astonishment the news that ‘Princess Louise will hold the fifth and last Drawing Room of the season at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday next’. Neither Helena nor Alix was available, so Louise had stepped in. As the papers reported, ‘It is many years since Princess Louise held a Drawing Room, and the esteem in which her Royal Highness is held will ensure a large attendance.’ She impressed those who attended with her usual flamboyant dress sense: a lace-trimmed dress of cream satin, adorned with flowers, emeralds and diamonds and completed by a dramatic black velvet train decorated with embroidery, feathers and a pink satin trim.
Despite her numerous public engagements Louise had managed to devote much of 1895 to art. In November, she sent an unnamed present to Arthur Sullivan, who responded with a delighted letter: ‘Nothing could be of greater value to me – nothing give me more real and lasting pleasure – than to possess something done with your own hands and head – a part of yourself.’ He was in Berlin overseeing a production of Ivanhoe and his letter continues wittily about how much the press hates him because he is a ‘foreigner’ and how furious the people of Berlin are that an English composer’s work is being performed in their opera house. He writes of missing his home and friends and ‘longing to get back to London’.
By the early 1890s, Queen Victoria was in her sixties and had begun to experience a number of health problems, one of the most worrying of which was a deterioration in her vision. As Beatrice had a very young family (another baby was born in 1892), Louise found herself back in the role she had played in the early 1870s, standing in for her mother at official functions, usually with one of her brothers. Louise was still very much the member of the royal family whom the people had taken to their heart; she was accessible to them, and they turned out in their droves every time she appeared at an event. (In the early 1890s, the sporting pages are littered with mentions of a popular racehorse named Princess Louise.)
At the start of 1892, Louise was summoned to help Bertie and Alix through a heartbreaking tragedy. On 14 January, the country was shocked to hear of the death of their future king: Bertie and Alix’s eldest child, Prince Eddy. The young man whose name had been whispered about in connection with the Cleveland Street male brothel three years before was now reported to have died of influenza and pneumonia. The year in which he died should have been the year in which he married. Eddy was engaged to Princess May of Teck (May being the diminutive of Mary) and their wedding date was just a few weeks away. Princess May received the sympathy of the people when she placed on Prince Eddy’s coffin a wreath made of her bridal flowers. (She would go on to become Queen Mary when on 6 July 1893 she married Eddy’s younger brother Prince George, who became King George V.)
From very early on, there were rumours about Eddy’s death, the most outlandish of which was the claim that he had had his throat cut by a male lover, with his parents said to have covered up his murder to avoid a scandal. The rumours seem to have begun because Bertie had told the queen not to visit Sandringham when Eddy was ill. If Eddy genuinely died of influenza, the doctors would almost certainly have suggested that the queen, whose health was already failing, should not be exposed to the risk of infection. There are also rumours that Eddy died of a fatal venereal disease, the most common of which at the time was syphilis, which often led to early death from associated complications such as heart disease. In her biography of Lady Colin Campbell, the author Anne Jordan writes about the early death of the Duke of Marlborough, from a heart attack, and comments that a number of unexpected deaths of seemingly healthy young or middle-aged men are most likely to have been the result of syphilis, or complications caused by syphilis. Few doctors would have written the name of such a disease on the death certificate of anyone except a pauper. What is often overlooked, however, is that at the time of Eddy’s death Britain was in the grip of an exceptionally virulent and deadly strain of influenza. Official statistics record that almost 17,000 people died in 1891 and almost 16,000 in 1892.7
For some time, Bertie and Alix had not been getting on well and although the deat
h of their son drew them very closely together for a while, the marriage was suffering. Louise, who loved both of them, was caught in the middle of their constant arguments – as were their servants, who were seldom dismissed from a room before the couple broke into a furious row. Alix’s health had not been good for some years: a slender, frail woman, she had never recovered fully from the demands of pregnancy and childbirth, and suffered from agonising rheumatic fever. She had also lived for many years with debilitating hearing problems, and was becoming increasingly deaf. Both she and Bertie were made irritable by the problems caused by her deafness – and she found it more and more difficult to turn a blind eye to his constant infidelities, not least because so many people knew about them. One of the stories that Catherine Walters (‘Skittles’) related to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was about Alix and Mrs Keppel, who became Edward VII’s mistress in the late 1890s:
She [Alix] naturally enough does not like Mrs Keppel. On one occasion, when she had been obliged to receive her and her husband, Mrs Keppel came to take her leave at the end of a three days visit and made a little speech of thanks, to which the Queen responded with a few conventional phrases of politeness, but the moment she had turned away the Queen cocked what boys call a snooky at her. [Dr] Laking was there and saw it.
The 1890s saw great advances in engineering and technology making travelling easier and faster. In 1892, the royal family’s overseas visitors included both the King of Romania and a former slave from Tennessee. When she visited England, Martha Ann Ricks, who had left the United States to live in Liberia, said that she had been saving for fifty years to travel to England and meet the queen, because she wanted to thank her in person for the Royal Navy’s role in preventing slave ships from reaching the shores of Africa and taking people captive.
In the year of Martha Ann Ricks’s visit, Louise was working feverishly again. This was not only on her sculpture (in Boehm’s absence, with the help of Alfred Gilbert), but also on paintings. At a party held by the musician George Henschel, Louise was introduced to a young Polish pianist who was taking London by storm. Ignacy Jan Paderewski was renowned both for his talent at the piano and for his romantic good looks. His lustrous red hair, so fashionable in a post-Pre-Raphaelite world, and strong facial bones made artists long to paint him and Louise was no exception. When the actress Ellen Terry met Paderewski at a party hosted by the Alma-Tademas, she noted in her diary ‘Mrs Alma-Tadema’s “At Home”. Paderewski played. What a divinely beautiful face!’
Paderewski had become a friend of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, so when the eminent artist asked to paint him, the pianist agreed quite happily. In his memoirs Paderewski recalled:
It was probably the most exacting and elaborate posing for a picture that has ever been done, because at the first sitting I found, to my surprise, that there were three people making my portrait!… Princess Louise, Sir Lawrence himself, and Lady Alma-Tadema, and all three were furiously painting me at the same time.
Paderewski remembered all three of the artists repeatedly imploring him to turn in their direction, which he found impossible, and he described it not as a ‘sitting’ but as a ‘moving’. Louise wanted Paderewski to sit to her again. In 1892, in a round of newspaper interviews Paderewski was reported as saying that the princess had told him that, as he was so busy, she required only ‘three sittings of two hours each’, that these took place in her studio in Kensington Palace and that Paderewski was ‘very much delighted with the kind reception he received at Kensington Palace’. Reporters also claimed Paderewski had told them Louise had attended every one of his recitals and concerts that season, armed with her sketchbook and pencil.8 Of the three paintings created in Alma-Tadema’s studio, the pianist commented that Laura Alma-Tadema’s painting was very small, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s was ‘a masterpiece’ and that Louise’s was ‘not successful as a likeness, because, quite evidently, I was not turning enough her way!’. It may not have been an ideal likeness, but the painting is stunning. The Boston Evening Transcript claimed: ‘Princess Louise considers her greatest artistic achievement is the portrait of Paderewski exhibited by her in London … Paderewski, with his shock of red Pre-Raphaelite hair, dreamy green eyes and sensitive clear-cut features, stares out of the canvas straight into futurity.’9
While her portrait of Paderewski was being exhibited, Louise, in common with other artists, was working tirelessly in advance of the ‘World’s Fair’ of 1893, which was being held in Chicago. Louise sent to Chicago a bust of her mother as well as paintings which, the papers reported, ‘will, after the exhibition, be sold, the proceeds being given to some of the charitable institutions in this country in which she takes so much interest’. She was not the only member of the royal family to send artwork to the fair; the queen and several of the princesses sent paintings and embroideries. Despite an angry strike by over 1,500 of its workers in April 1893, the World’s Fair (also known as the Columbian Exposition) opened on 1 May and stayed open until 31 October. It was in the style of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the queen felt proud that her husband’s efforts to unite nations through art and industry were continuing.
Louise was becoming increasingly involved with her regiment, of which she had been made honorary Colonel-in-Chief; it was a role she took very seriously, aware of what an honour it was for a woman and a non-Scot to have been appointed. She must also have enjoyed the chance to spend the time with so many handsome young men – and not only because she enjoyed flirting, but also because, to the younger men, she could take on the maternal role that led her nieces and nephews to adore her. A number of former soldiers from this regiment have written about her regular visits to their barracks, and of how interested she was in them and their lives. In 1977, F. Maclellan Orr still remembered vividly the time he met the princess:
In the latter half of 1915 I was serving in the … Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stationed in Dunbarton Castle when H.R.H. Princess Louise, our Colonel-in-Chief, inspected the battalion. She very kindly requested that anyone who had already been in action in France, or elsewhere, should be presented to her, and as I had earlier returned as a casualty from the 1/9th Battalion, I came into this category. She addressed a few words to me and offered her hand to shake and as I was carrying a claymore I had to flick it quickly with the left hand, shake hands, return the sword and salute, a complicated manoeuvre, during which I was terrified that I should drop the sword … Although I have now reached my 82nd year, I remember the occasion well.
Today she is honoured at the regimental museum in Stirling Castle, where there are a number of Princess Louise objects on display. One is a stunning portrait of the princess (a copy of the original by Hubert von Herkomer). In the painting she looks every inch an Aesthetic beauty, wearing an unusual and very fashionable crimson bodice over an ivory-coloured blouse, together with a simple gold-and-pearl necklace. Louise is seen in left profile: her hair is swept back over her ear, but the whole of her right side, including the ear she injured in the sleigh accident, is hidden. The princess looks wistfully up and out of the painting, as if deep in thought. Every surviving photograph of Louise following her time in Canada shows her either from the left side or with her hair covering her right ear.
Lorne, meanwhile, was back in the world of politics, trying to repair the damage his brother had caused to the Campbell name and to promote the Liberal cause. Wisely avoiding any attempt to regain the Scottish seat that until Colin’s residency had been such a popular Campbell stronghold, Lorne focused his attention on England and, in 1895, was named the MP for Manchester South in the Liberal Unionist Party. The location of his constituency provided the perfect excuse for spending time away from London. Although throughout the first half of the 1890s, the Court Circular sections in the newspapers suggest that Louise and Lorne were often together, the reality seems to have been rather different. The columns would record their arrival together – for example at Windsor, Osborne or Balmoral – and their departure together, yet often Lorne went away and Louise remai
ned with her family on her own. It seems the official bulletins were intended to suggest the couple spent much more time together than they did; a ruse often belied by later announcements that Lorne had arrived somewhere he should already have been several weeks earlier. The same seems to have been true of their travelling plans. Every winter, the couple – in common with most of the royal family – would set off to warmer climes, usually the French Riviera and Italy. The fashion for the royal family ‘wintering’ overseas smarted with social reformers and radical journalists. One of their number, who had not yet recovered from his anger at Beatrice marrying yet another German – whose income was being paid by British taxes – wrote a caustic article in 1894 in Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper:
Meetings of the unemployed and starving will be held presently. The Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the others of that ilk, are in the meantime making arrangements to depart for warmer climes to escape the rigour of an English winter. The money spent on these trips would provide a living and luxuries for all the hungry and distressed. Moral: it is better to be a German pauper in a strange land than to be an English pauper in one’s native country.
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