The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (16 page)

What did Lillie Langtry make of all this? She would have realised that the Prince was fascinated by the actress but she would have been far too astute to have mentioned it, let alone to have reproached him for it. She was, in any case, in no position to throw stones. Not only was Lillie carrying on her clandestine affair with Arthur Jones, but her public behaviour was becoming increasingly indiscreet. Daisy, Countess of Warwick, then in her first season, has a story to tell on this score. Daisy was being courted by a young lord whose protestations of undying love she was more than ready to believe until she one night happened to overhear him call Lillie Langtry 'my darling'. He then went on to make an assignation with Lillie. 'Naturally I was furious,' says Daisy, 'and never looked at him again.'
⁹

Margot Asquith, too, has her youthful memories of Lillie's tendency to cause scandal. 'In a shining top-hat and skin-tight habit, she rode a chestnut thoroughbred of conspicuous action every evening in Rotten Row,' she remembers. 'One day when I was riding, I saw Mrs Langtry – who was accompanied by Lord Lonsdale – pause at the railings in Rotten Row to talk to a man of her acquaintance. I do not know what she could have said to him, but after a brief exchange of words, Lord Lonsdale jumped off his horse, sprang over the railings and with clenched fists hit Mrs Langtry's admirer in the face. Upon this a free fight ensued and to the delight of the surprised spectators, Lord Lonsdale knocked his adversary down.'
¹⁰

This adversary was Sir George Chetwyn, who had accused Lillie of breaking her promise to go riding with
him
.

And then there was the story of her obsession with 'young Shrewsbury, a boy of nineteen'. It appears that the young man's worldly mother, hoping that 'an attachment to a married woman would keep him out of mischief', encouraged the liaison. So conscientiously,
apparently, did Lillie fulfil her duties of keeping the young man out of mischief that she one day sent a note to the Prince, asking him not to call, as arranged, that afternoon. The Prince, not having received the note, duly arrived to find her with Shrewsbury. What they were doing one does not know, but His Royal Highness, reports Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was 'very miffed'.
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Yet, at the same time, Lillie seems to have been anxious to affirm her hold over her royal lover. In doing so, she came dangerously close to overstepping the bounds of propriety. Lillie had once claimed that it would need a bold man to attempt any public familiarity with the Prince, and on a couple of occasions she seems to have proved herself very bold indeed.

Once, at a charity fête held in the Royal Albert Hall, Lillie had been asked to grace the refreshment stall. Gentlemen were obliged to part with five shillings for the thrill of being served a cup of tea by her and with a guinea for the even greater thrill of having her take the first sip. When the Prince of Wales, accompanied by Princess Alexandra and their three daughters, approached the stall, Lillie poured the Prince a cup of tea and, without being asked, put her lips to the rim of the cup. The Prince put it down, untouched.

'I should like a clean one please,'
¹²
he said politely. In silence he accepted another cup, drank it, paid a couple of sovereigns, and walked away.

There was also the occasion on which Lillie is said to have dropped a piece of ice down the Prince's back at a fancy dress ball. Down the years the story has been so altered and embroidered upon that its authenticity is impossible to prove. Some say that it was a dollop of ice cream that Lillie slipped down the neck of Bertie's pierrot costume; others that it was not Lillie at all, but a pretty little actress by the name of Kitty Munro who put the ice down the Prince's back in – of all places – the foyer of the Folly Theatre; in the United States, cartoons showed Lillie dousing her royal lover with a bottle of iced champagne.

Lillie, who always denied the incident, claimed that it was actually an 'audacious Irish beauty' (by whom she apparently means Patsy Cornwallis West) who 'popped a spoonful of strawberry-ice' down the spine of her irate husband.

But however vigorously she protested her innocence, dismissing the story as 'a vulgar fabrication . . . in which there is not a grain of truth,'
¹³
Lillie was pursued by it for the rest of her life. And, true or not, the story's significance lies in the fact that it was so widely reported and so readily believed. Mrs Langtry, it was now said, was
getting beyond herself. Many of the Prince of Wales's other companions had discovered, to their cost, that there was a limit to his familiarity. Had Lillie Langtry over-stepped that limit?

It was at this time, in the spring of 1880, that Lillie embarked on a relationship that was to run parallel with the gradual ebbing of her affair with the Prince of Wales. In March that year she met the twenty-five-year-old Prince Louis of Battenberg.

Prince Louis was a member of the Battenberg family that was just then beginning the extraordinary climb that was eventually to take it to some of the highest pinnacles in the world, including the British throne. The origins of the family had been, by royal standards, both humble and scandalous. The dynasty had come into being as recently as 1851 when the third son of the Grand Duke of Hesse had shocked his royal relations by marrying a commoner. The children of this morganatic marriage, excluded from the Hessian line of succession and addressed only as
serene
as opposed to
royal
highnesses, had been given the surname of Battenberg.

Only gradually, and exceedingly grudgingly, had the Battenbergs been admitted into the golden stockade of royalty. That they were accepted at all was in no small measure due to their exceptional qualities; for not only were the four Battenberg princes – Louis, Alexander, Henry and Franz Josef – extremely handsome young men but they were all talented, high-spirited and intelligent.

Prince Louis, the eldest, had joined the British navy at the age of fourteen in 1868. In the dozen or so years since then, he had proved himself to be an accomplished and conscientious sailor, treating his career with a seriousness that astonished many of his aristocratic shipmates. They found his cultural and intellectual interests puzzling and his abstinence from alcohol positively alarming. In one area, though, they found him reassuringly conformist. The tall, well-built, dark-bearded and handsome Prince Louis had a reputation not only as a 'good sport', but as a Lothario. 'If it was not quite a girl in every port,' writes one of his biographers, 'it was, for Louis, a girl in every other anchorage, island and naval establishment.'
¹⁴
Women found his particular qualities – his gentle voice, his engaging manners, even his foreign accent – irresistible.

The Prince of Wales was very fond of his young relation (Louis was a cousin-by-marriage to Bertie's late sister Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse) and entertained him lavishly whenever he was home on leave.
In earlier days, the Prince of Wales had often given the homesick young naval cadet sensible advice (and Bertie was more sensible than Queen Victoria ever gave him credit for) and during the winter of 1875–6, Louis had accompanied Bertie, as an orderly officer, on the Heir's spectacular tour of India.

'You would do much better to get a little half-pay and spend the season with me at Marlborough House,'
¹⁵
wrote Bertie to him on one occasion; while Louis, describing the periods he spent in the company of the ebullient Prince, claimed that 'theatres and balls were the daily fare'.
¹⁶

Queen Victoria was not anything like as ecstatic about Louis's frequent sojourns in England. It was not that she minded the morganatic 'taint' in the young man's blood (she once castigated her daughter, the German Crown Princess, for accusing the Battenbergs of not being
Geblüt –
pure bred – as though they were animals) but with her appreciation of virile good looks, she was afraid that her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, might fall in love with Prince Louis. The Queen had no intention of losing her daughter to a foreign prince: she wanted Beatrice to remain by her side.

It was during a period of unemployment (the Admiralty were proving strangely tardy about finding him another appointment) that Prince Louis met Lillie Langtry. True to form, he fell passionately in love with her. Quite possibly, the Prince of Wales encouraged the liaison. Tiring of Lillie himself, and devoted to his young kinsman, he would have been amused by the idea of these two attractive young people enjoying each other's company.

Ever a snob and pleased to have her powers of attraction confirmed, Lillie would have been delighted by the ardent attentions of yet another royal suitor; particularly one as personable as Prince Louis. Not only was he handsome and entertaining, but he also shared her taste for amusing, artistic and intellectually stimulating people. Through her, Louis met many of the leading cultural personalities of the time.

The affair was conducted with great discretion. With Edward Langtry invariably away on what Lillie calls 'fishing trips', the couple would meet in the Norfolk Street house or in the country houses of sympathetic friends. That Louis was infatuated by Lillie there can be no doubt; but he could never have imagined that he might be able to marry her, even if she were to divorce her by now all-but-invisible husband. For a gentleman, let alone a prince, to marry a divorcée would be unthinkable. It would have meant, for Louis, dismissal from
the navy, rejection by his family, social ostracism and a life of penurious exile on the Riviera. The Battenberg morganatic marriage had been bad enough: a Battenberg marriage to a divorcée would be considered disastrous.

'Even the loss of a dear person is better than the general disgrace of a divorce,' declared the Princess of Wales's sister, the Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia, on one occasion. And when, in 1912, one of the Empress's sons married his long-standing mistress who was a divorcée, she was thunderstruck. 'It is unbelievable!' she wailed. 'I can hardly understand what I am writing – it is so appalling in every way that it nearly kills me!' Unless the marriage were kept
'absolutely secret'
¹⁷
she would not be able to show her face in public.

Indeed, not until 1978 (after Edward VIII had abdicated his throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, and Princess Margaret had renounced the once-divorced Peter Townsend) was a divorcée allowed to marry into the British royal family. Having received the permission of Elizabeth II and renounced his own rights to the throne, Prince Michael of Kent married the divorced Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz.

But even without the question of marriage ever seriously being considered, Lillie found herself facing a royal closing of ranks. By the autumn of 1880 she suspected that she was pregnant by Prince Louis. 'My own darling,' she wrote, not to Louis but to the faithful Arthur Jones with whom, throughout all the turbulence of her love life, she had kept up a loving relationship. 'I am not yet . . . I am sure there must be something wrong or what I took would have made me. Please go to a chemist and ask how many doses one ought to take a day as I must go on taking it . . .'
¹⁸

Once Lillie's suspicions were confirmed, she told Louis. He, in turn, told his parents. They acted with that instinct for self-preservation characteristic of all royal families. Louis was informed that there was no possibility of a marriage; an aide-de-camp was despatched from Hesse to arrange a financial settlement with Lillie; and the Admiralty, having kept Louis hanging about for months, suddenly found him an appointment. On 16 October 1880, he was sent away on the longest voyage he was ever to undertake.

The man-o'-war on which he sailed had the unfortunate, if entirely appropriate, name of 'Inconstant'.

All at once, Lillie's whole shiny, elaborate, painstakingly assembled
house of cards began to collapse. The Prince of Wales was losing interest in her; society was beginning to cold-shoulder her; she was five months pregnant by Prince Louis who had deserted her; even her husband had all but disappeared. And, most immediately disastrous of all, her creditors were starting to close in.

For years, as one of society's darlings, Lillie had lived well beyond her means. The Prince of Wales had usually paid her in kind rather than in cash. What with that, with Edward's financial fecklessness and with diminishing rents from the Langtry properties in perennially troubled Ireland, her income had reached, as she says, 'vanishing point'.
¹⁹
No longer was she able to stave off her creditors with airy promises or pretty entreaties: more acutely than anyone, they sensed the way the wind was blowing. In the end, the bailiffs moved into the Norfolk Street house; the contents of her home were to be auctioned off to pay her debts.

Although her maid, Dominique, who had been with her, as she puts it, 'through all my astonishing London experiences',
²⁰
managed to save a few pieces of jewellery by slipping them into the pockets or handbags of visiting friends, the rest of her possessions went under the hammer. 'Everything went for immense prices –' reported Lady Lonsdale to Lillie, 'your little tea-table with your initials on down to your skates – so I hope your horrid creditors are satisfied.'
²¹

For Lillie had not been there to witness this humiliation. With the sherriff's 'carpet flag' – the 'dismal emblem' of an auction – hanging from the drawing room window, she had fled the house forever.

She made for Jersey. But not even here could she find the anonymity she so desperately needed. 'Mr and Mrs Langtry have given up their London residence,' reported the New York
Times
that November, 'and for the present Mrs Langtry remains in Jersey. Is beauty deposed, or has beauty abdicated?'
²²
And if beauty had indeed lost her throne, who, wondered the Jersey gossips, was responsible for beauty's thickening waistline? Edward Langtry was certainly nowhere to be seen. Was the Prince of Wales the culprit?