The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (10 page)

6. Lillie Langtry, 'looking like a seductive Renaissance princess' in a painting by Edward Poynter.

7. The Red House, Bournemouth: the curiously bourgeois 'love nest' which the Prince of Wales built for Lillie.

8. Soignée and seductive: Lillie Langtry as the very picture of a royal mistress.

9. Queen Victoria presiding over the sort of 'Drawing Room' at which Lillie Langtry was presented.

12. Lillie Langtry, as a celebrated actress, in one of her stage roles.

Once, early in Lillie's liaison with the Prince, when she and Edward were guests at Lord Malmesbury's country house, she wrote an indiscreet letter to her lover. Edward, on finding the letter reproduced on the blotting paper (every Victorian husband was adept at holding blotting paper up to the looking glass), was furious. Such was the force of his anger that even the resilient Lillie was reduced to tears. Lord Malmesbury was no less angry. But the anger of this experienced old diplomat was not directed at Lillie or Edward, but at the servants. They had strict instructions, he explained to Lillie, to renew the blotting paper throughout the house every day, in order to prevent precisely such an eventuality.

But not for a moment would Edward have expected his wife to break off her relationship with the Prince of Wales. Dutifully he continued to escort her to all those dinners and balls and country house parties which he so hated; doing it not so much for her sake but as an obligation towards the Prince and, indeed, the throne. Even he, it seems, was ready to bask in a little reflected royal glory. If one was going to be cuckolded, who better to be cuckolded by than the future King of England?

However, to make the whole business more palatable, Edward applied the customary remedy: he took to the bottle. He had always been fond of a drink; now he became fonder still. It was one way of passing the evenings on which he was left alone; or, even worse, the evenings on which he was obliged to stand about, making desultory conversation to people who he knew despised or pitied him. Sometimes, declared Lillie in later life, Edward was so drunk that he was incapable of going out. She would then be obliged to send last-minute apologies to her hostess.

Yet he consistently refused to grant her a divorce. Long after her affair with the Prince of Wales had ended, long after husband and wife had separated, long after Lillie had become a rich, world-renowned actress with a string of lovers, Edward would still not hear of divorcing her. And when Lillie was eventually able to win her freedom in an American court, it was on the grounds that Edward had deserted her.

'I have always treated Mr Langtry with affection,' she unblinkingly assured the judge, 'never giving him cause to disregard his duty to me as a husband.'
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During the first rapturous years of Lillie's romance with the Prince of Wales, she adapted her life, almost entirely, to his. There was hardly an occasion, in his crowded social calendar, on which she did not appear in his company.

One of the most public of these occasions was the daily ride, or drive, in the Park. This was one of the great rituals of society during the last decades of the nineteenth century. 'The Park' meant Hyde Park, never any of London's other great parks, and it was only the stretch between Albert and Grosvenor Gates, taking in Rotton Row, that was regarded as really fashionable. Here, after breakfast and between tea and dinner in the afternoons, during the season, would assemble a great concourse of riders and carriages. The scene was a splendid one: a kaleidoscopic pattern of lacquered carriages, high-stepping horses, gleaming harness, liveried footmen, smartly turned-out men and opulently dressed women. It was, remembers one observer, 'like a daily Society Garden Party.'
¹⁹
Highlight of the late afternoon cavalcade would be the arrival of Princess Alexandra in her claret-coloured barouche. Looking, as always, transcendently elegant, she would bow, in her inimitable way, to the hat-doffing men and the curtseying women.

Sometimes the Prince would be with her; more often he would be riding with his equerries and friends. Among these friends, of course, would be Lillie. Occasionally, arriving home at dawn from some ball, she would change straight into her riding habit and set out for the Park. By now she had a horse of her own, called Redskin, given to her by another of her new admirers, the young Morton Frewen. (The Langtrys had also acquired a carriage.) Dressed in her superbly tailored riding habit and top hat, Lillie would join the group around the Prince – whose own horse would be unmistakable in its royal red brow-band.

One day, when the two of them were out riding together in the late afternoon, Bertie showed no sign of wanting to go home. 'As etiquette demanded that I should ride on so long as His Royal Highness elected to do so,' explains Lillie, it was after nine before she arrived back in Norfolk Street. Her husband was furious. They were to dine out that evening. Having scrambled into an evening dress, and with the grumbling Edward in tow, Lillie arrived at her Eaton Square destination just before ten o'clock to find the entire company waiting for her. Her hostess was all sympathy. One of the guests, on his way
over, had seen her in the Park with the Prince.

'As we knew you couldn't get away,' smiled her hostess, 'we postponed dinner indefinitely. '
²⁰

When the couple were not riding, they would be racing; or rather they would be attending the great race meetings which were such a feature of the Prince's social life. Bertie relished the company of racing people and revelled in the 'glorious uncertainty'
²¹
of the turf. He once shocked Queen Victoria by suggesting that the funeral of Dean Stanley be held a day earlier than planned to avoid a clash with the racing at Goodwood. It was, in fact, in the year he met Lillie that Bertie first ran his own horses: the Prince's colours – the purple, gold braid and scarlet sleeves – were seen at Newmarket for the first time in July 1877.

Bertie was advised in all racing matters by the manager of his stud, Lord Marcus Beresford, one of those Beresford brothers – Charles, Marcus and William – whom Lillie describes as 'the most entertaining' of the Prince's set. 'They were all handsome as paint,' she says, 'and as merry as the traditional Irishman or sandboys . . . full of native wit, charm and bonhomie.'
²²
Unsuspected by Lillie at the time, Lord Charles Beresford was to be instrumental in involving the Prince with her successor – Daisy Warwick.

It was at these race meetings, at Newmarket, Ascot and Good-wood, where the Langtrys were invariably members of the Prince's party, that Lillie's own great love of racing was born. She had always been interested in horses, but from now on she was to take a far more intelligent interest. In time, she was to become an enthusiastic and successful racehorse owner, twice winning the Cesarewitch. 'As far as I am concerned,' she says, 'the pleasures of the turf do not merely consist in owning horses and seeing them win. I like the routine of racing. The fresh air, the picnic lunch, the rural surroundings, all tend to make a race meeting a delightful outing.'
²³

It could have been Bertie talking.

Lillie has a story to tell about her first meeting, just before Ascot one year, with Disraeli, then in his second term as Prime Minister.

'What can I do for you?' asked Disraeli, smiling quizzically.

'Four new gowns for Ascot,' was Lillie's pert reply.

'You are a very sensible young woman,' commented the Prime Minister. 'Many a woman would have asked to have been made a duchess in her own right.'
²⁴

With his sense of history, Disraeli would have appreciated the fact that, a couple of centuries before, a royal favourite would have stood a
very good chance indeed of being made a duchess in her own right.

Another setting for the lovers' meetings was, of course, the Prince's London home, Marlborough House. For almost a century, from the time that the newly-married Prince and Princess of Wales took up residence in 1863, until the death of Queen Mary in 1953, Marlborough House was one of London's great royal residences. It was particularly associated with the Prince of Wales who lived in it for almost forty years until he ascended the throne in 1901; indeed, his circle of racy, pleasure-loving friends were known as the Marlborough House set. Its grey, somewhat four-square exterior belied the luxuriousness within: the rooms of Marlborough House glittered with all the richness of an Aladdin's Cave. The main reception rooms were a riot of damask wall-paper, painted ceilings, velvet curtains, gilt-framed portraits, white marble busts and Gobelin tapestries. The private apartments, reflecting Princess Alexandra's love of intimacy, were divided up by screens and curtains and potted palms, and crowded with little sofas, love-seats, pouffes, silver-framed photographs and dozens upon dozens of knick-knacks.

The Langtrys, arriving for anything from an intimate supper party to a ball (the whole of society, it was said, could be accommodated in the Marlborough House ballroom at the time of the Prince's marriage; his liberal social attitudes soon changed that), would be admitted by a gillie in Highland dress. Two scarlet-coated and powdered footmen would take Lillie's wrap and Edward's coat and give them to the hall porter, in his short red coat with leather epaulettes. A page in a dark blue coat and black trousers would then escort the couple to an ante-room. From here they would be led, by yet another page, into one of the drawing rooms.