3. Alfred and Marie had four daughters and one surviving son. Their second son was stillborn.
4. Ponsonby had been appointed the queen’s’ Private Secretary following the death of General Grey.
Chapter 21: Celebrating the Golden Jubilee
1. In 1931, a large part of the complex was destroyed by fire. By the 1950s, its replacement buildings had become part of Queen Mary, University of London.
2. Alfred Gilbert’s most famous work is his statue of Eros (1893), which stands in Piccadilly Circus in London. The statue is actually misnamed ‘Eros’: Gilbert created it as Anteros, Eros’s brother.
3. She was christened Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena.
Chapter 22: The princess and the sculptor
1. Not everyone was a fan of Boehm’s work. The artist Kate Perugini (née Dickens) wrote to her great friend Anny Thackeray Ritchie in 1905 bemoaning how dreadful most of the portraits were of Anny’s father, William Makepeace Thackeray, and mentioning ‘that awful thing of Boehm’s’.
2. There is some speculation as to whether this entry was genuinely written at the time or was added in later. As Jehanne Wake points out in her biography of Louise, it is not known whether the account of Boehm’s death in the queen’s journal is the original version told her by Princess Louise at the time, or the edited manuscript version made years later by Princess Beatrice, who then destroyed the originals.
3. The queen’s journal entry for 13 December 1890 states: ‘Terribly shocked at the news, that good, excellent talented Sir Edgar Boehm had died suddenly yesterday and that poor Louise had found him dead, which latter turns out not to be true from what I have learnt from her.’
4. Jane or ‘Janey’ Morris was a favoured model of the Pre-Raphaelites. Born Jane Burden in an impoverished part of Oxford, she ascended through the social classes by marrying the founder of the Arts & Crafts Movement, William Morris.
5. Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’, was a would-be poet of Uranian verses, best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde. It was Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who brought about Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment. Although he was known to be Wilde’s lover, the son of the marquess escaped prosecution.
6. Boehm was actually buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Chapter 23: Trying to dull the pain
1. During a country house party at Tranby Croft, the home of wealthy shipbuilder Sir Arthur Wilson, Bertie was one of the gamblers playing an illegal game of baccarat. A scandal ensued when one of the guests, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was accused of cheating. Sir William was confronted and agreed to give up playing cards; in return the scandal was hushed up. When the story leaked out, Sir William, whose position in society was becoming untenable, sued those who had accused him, for libel. Bertie was called as a witness.
2. Lady Battersea, née Constance de Rothschild, married Cyril Flower, a friend of Louise and Lorne’s, who later became Lord Battersea.
3. In 1895, Lord Colin Campbell died at the age of 42. Lord Ronnie Gower was shocked see that the Duke of Argyll did not seem to be ‘affected … at all’ by the death of his son.
4. Gertrude did have a sexual relationship with at least one of them, the Duke of Marlborough, but there is no way of knowing if this affair began before or after the court case. She may also have slept with Shaw, the fire chief for London (and the father of one of her friends) and possibly also had an affair with a Dr Bird – although it is more likely that they simply enjoyed a flirtation he was too embarrassed to explain to his wife. The fourth named co-respondent, the general, was too upset even to be in England during the court case, let alone enter the witness stand. Snide journalists claimed this proved his guilt, yet he was a deeply religious and apparently happily married man who barely knew Gertrude and it seems highly unlikely they had ever had any kind of intimate relationship.
5. There are claims by those who still insist the couple were in love and that no scandal ever touched them that Lorne ‘must’ have been heterosexual because there were rumours that, as a young man in Scotland, he pursued local girls and was a ‘ladies’ man’, and even stories of illegitimate children fathered before he married (these putative children are unnamed and unclaimed in any of the reports I’ve read). There must be very few gay men (or women), living in a country and an era where homosexuality was illegal, despised and harshly punished, who have not tried to ‘cure’ themselves of their sexual impulses by attempting to make themselves attracted to the opposite sex. Perhaps, like Oscar Wilde, Lorne was bisexual.
6. The earliest incarnation of what, today, is known as SSAFA.
7. Because influenza was not a notifiable illness, many more people may have died as a result of the flu epidemic than those whose deaths were officially attributed to flu.
8. The Royal Collection contains two photographs of Paderewski taken in 1891, which may well have been props used by Louise when finishing her painting.
9. Louise bequeathed the painting to the people of Poland.
Chapter 24: Scandal in the royal household
1. In the same letter Arthur thanked Louise for sending ‘charmingly painted matchboxes’ to a charity bazaar.
2. The first Boer War had taken place in 1880–1; the war usually referred to in Britain as the ‘Boer War’ is that of 1899–1902. The war was between the British Empire, which governed parts of southern Africa, and the residents of two Boer states: the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boers were Dutch settlers, who spoke Afrikaans. They wanted to rule themselves and not be governed by the British.
Chapter 25: A new century and the end of an era
1. In the 1870s, Josephine Butler wrote to Mrs Ford, a suffrage campaigner, advising her not to put Princess Louise on the spot by asking her to join a campaign, and explaining that she had caused her embarrassment once. In addition to the queen’s disapproving of Louise allying herself openly to the suffrage cause, Butler wrote that she was sure ‘that little prig Lord Lorne’ would prevent the letter from reaching his wife.
2. Bertie commented that his title had come too late for him to truly enjoy being king and he wished he had been twenty years younger when acceding to the throne.
Chapter 26: The death of Henry Locock
1. Antonio Corsi’s naked body appears in many famous works of art, including Edward Burne-Jones’s Wheel of Fortune (1883).
2. He was later named as Manuel Duran, also known as Mateo Moral. The newspapers made much of the surprising fact that those who knew him had described him as ‘well dressed’.
3. Ellen Terry, who was a year older than Louise, had been married to the artist G.F. Watts while she was in her teens and he was 47. The marriage was never consummated, and failed within a year, whereupon he sent her home to her parents but refused to divorce her. She lived for several years with the Aesthetic architect Edward Godwin and they had two illegitimate children. By the time Watts finally agreed to divorce her, because he wanted to marry again, Godwin had left Terry to marry a young heiress. Terry married fellow actor Charles Kelly, but the marriage failed, largely due to his alcoholism and erratic behaviour. When she married James Carew, Ellen Terry was marrying a man who was almost as many years younger than she as her first husband had been older. The marriage lasted three years.
4. The Irish Crown Jewels were a star and a badge made of diamonds, emeralds and rubies; mounted in silver, they were better known as the insignia of the Order of St Patrick. In 1907, the jewels were stolen from the safe at the Office of Arms in Dublin; several other items belonging to members of the household of the Ulster King of Arms were also stolen. At the time, the Ulster King of Arms was Sir Arthur Vicars, a friend of Frank Shackleton, who in turn was a close friend of Lorne. Shackleton was one of several men who fell under suspicion. Although a thorough investigation was begun, much of the official paperwork from the investigation disappeared and the case was never brought to fruition. It was widely believed that King Edward VII had ordered a cover-up to protect his brother-in-law (and, by
association, Louise) whose friendship with more than one of the suspects was well known.
Chapter 27: The king, the kaiser and the duke
1. Wilhelm’s arm had been irreparably injured during his very difficult birth, in which the German doctors gave up both Vicky and her baby for dead. Reputedly it was the Scottish doctor sent out by Queen Victoria who managed to save both of them, but he was unable to prevent the baby’s arm from being damaged.
2. Marjorie Crofton wrote in the 1970s: ‘The Kaiser said that Princess Louise was his favourite aunt, I don’t think he was her favourite nephew.’
3. In September 1911, Louise was saddened by the news of another death, following so closely after the death of her brother, that of Leopold’s former tutor the Reverend Robinson Duckworth. She sent a touching telegram to his bereaved brother, Sir Dyce Duckworth, expressing her condolences.
4. Niall was the son of Archie and Janey Campbell and heir to the dukedom. He and Louise were good friends.
5. Local sources in Lavenham claim that the building was intended to be removed to near Ascot, but Celia Culver-Evans, the daughter of Mrs Edith Bruce Culver, wrote of her mother’s involvement in the project and confirmed that the Old Wool Hall was intended for the Windlesham estate.
6. For this information I am indebted to the very helpful management and staff at the Swan Hotel in Lavenham.
7. The building was purchased by Trust House Forte and is now part of the adjoining Swan Hotel.
8. King George V ordered that all court mourning for Lorne be suspended for five days, as the King and Queen of Denmark were arriving for an official visit on 9 May.
Chapter 28: Widowhood and war
1. Although known in the family as David, when he became king he was crowned King Edward VIII.
2. Louise bequeathed this house to Prince Arthur’s daughter, Princess Patsy.
3. At the start of 1919, Dalchenna House, still occupied by the Women’s Land Army, was destroyed by fire. Fortuitously, the previous autumn, Louise had visited to remove her valuables from the house.
4. The movement, set up by a friend of Lord Baden-Powell, was intended to ‘preach patriotism instead of politics’.
5. In 1916, 25 April was officially declared ANZAC Day.
6. Louise did the same for her great friends in Scotland, the Warr family. When Charles Warr’s father died in 1916, Louise immediately offered the widow and her children a property she owned, Clachan House, to make use of for as long as they needed it. In 1916, she also lent another of her properties. Rhu Lodge, to a shell-shocked soldier to recuperate in.
Chapter 29: The Grande Dame of Kensington
1. Princess Alice of Battenberg was Queen Victoria’s great-granddaughter and the mother of Prince Philip, consort of Queen Elizabeth II. I am grateful to Hugo Vickers for sharing this anecdote with me.
2. According to the Vancouver History Society, ‘The Louise was on the run for 40 years without incident, a record, before being sold in 1955 to become a restaurant in Long Beach, California, where she sank in 1990.’
3. Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is on display at Windsor Castle.
4. The exhibition’s press release proclaimed, ‘All the last-word novelties will be on view, from handbags to evening gowns, and lingerie to sunshades.’
Chapter 30: ‘This remarkable lady’
1. Louise had been calling for years for a new children’s hospital for the impoverished area of North Kensington. The hospital was opened by King George V in 1928. The architects were George A. Lansdown and J.T. Saunders.
2. Louise was not alone in her distaste for jazz; Henry Fielding Dickens (son of the novelist), who was born less than a year after Louise, wrote in his memoirs, ‘I can only regard jazz as a passing phase in music, and not one that is likely to endure.’
3. The handwriting is difficult to decipher in the letter. I think the surname is Strain.
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