The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (19 page)

Daisy Maynard's background was very different from Lillie Langtry's. For one thing, it was indubitably aristocratic. Frances Evelyn Maynard had been born, on 10 December 1861, into a world of wealth, position and privilege. Her father, the Honourable Charles Maynard, was the only son and heir of the third Viscount Maynard, whose family seat was the palatial Easton Lodge near Dunmow in Essex. Her mother was a Fitzroy, doubly descended from Charles II through the Dukes of Grafton and the Dukes of St Albans.

Charles Maynard was one of those splendid Victorian swashbucklers; a
beau sabreur
straight out of the pages of an Ouida novel, whose escapades, real or imagined, were to become legendary. A big man, red-haired and blue-eyed, he became colonel of that most fashionable of regiments, the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues) where he was chiefly distinguished for his bravado, his quick temper and his addiction to drink. He was a superb horseman. 'He could leap his charger to and fro over the mess table ready laid for a banquet,' boasts Daisy, 'without disturbing a single wine glass. '
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And once, while attending a bull-fight in Spain, he astonished his companions – and infuriated the crowd – by leaping over the barrier, vaulting onto the bull's back and galloping the rampaging animal round the ring. That Daisy had inherited a somewhat wild streak is not to be wondered at.

Her mother was very different. Twenty years younger than her ebullient husband, Blanche Maynard was a woman of more restrained behaviour but more sterling qualities. She was a forceful character: strong-willed, resourceful, ambitious.

She needed to be all these for, in 1865, when her daughter Daisy was three and her second daughter not yet one, Charles Maynard died. His death was followed, less than five months later, by that of his father, Viscount Maynard.

But whatever losses Charles Maynard's widow might have suffered by way of death were handsomely compensated for by way of inheritance. For her eldest daughter, the three-year-old Daisy Maynard, now inherited the entire Maynard estates. Suddenly the golden-haired, blue-eyed little girl had become an heiress. Not only would she one day be mistress of Easton Lodge and its vast acreage, but she would enjoy an income of over £30,000 a year, equivalent today to something like three-quarters of a million. It was no wonder that her Maynard relations, eagerly gathered round the breakfast table to hear the reading of the will, were so incensed that
they flung pats of butter at the portrait of the late Lord Maynard.

Two years later, in 1866, Daisy's mother remarried. Her second husband, the thirty-three-year-old Lord Rosslyn, was very different from her first. No vaulting onto the backs of bulls for him. Sophisticated, cultivated and intelligent, Lord Rosslyn was far happier composing poetry or discussing politics. Very much the courtier, he was a great favourite with Queen Victoria. Like Disraeli, he had the Queen's measure exactly. He handled her with just the right blend of reverence and impudence. Lord Rosslyn was the only man in the kingdom, claims Daisy, who could tell the Queen a risqué story and go unrebuked.

'I have been at dinner in Windsor Castle and heard Lord Rosslyn spinning a daring yarn to the Queen, while the Princess Beatrice looked as though she were sitting on thorns, and other guests were quaking. I have seen the Queen's lips twitching with suppressed laughter and . . . I might go so far as to state that I have seen her most gracious Majesty shaking like an agitated jelly.'
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Yet for all his worldliness, Lord Rosslyn had a taste for family life and simple country activities. It was, therefore, in an atmosphere both cultured and loving that Daisy Maynard grew up. As her mother bore her second husband five children, there were seven children in all – five girls and two boys – growing up at Easton.

Their upbringing, in spite of Lord Rosslyn's cultural interests, was very much that of the average Victorian upper-class family. 'Except for escapades prompted by the natural high spirits of a group of healthy, happy children, in a beautiful country place, who had ponies to ride and animals to caress,' says Daisy, 'the story of our childhood was the story of our training and education.'
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The children saw their parents at set hours, usually in the late afternoon, after tea. 'Children in my early days,' remembered one of them in later life, 'were looked upon partly as a nuisance and partly as a kind of animate toy, to be shown, if they were sufficiently attractive, to callers. We were always brought down and shown after lunch, but were never expected to utter, and were consequently all abominably shy.'
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The rest of the time was spent in the care of nurses, governesses and tutors. Although the boys might be sent away to school, the girls were always educated at home. This education was designed to give them a veneer of culture: just enough to meet the not very exacting conversational demands of aristocratic society. They learned history, languages (French, German and sometimes Italian) and literature, with
the study of literature being largely confined to memorising great chunks of the classics. Geography meant little more than 'the use of globes for young ladies'
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; science was all but ignored. Religious instruction was limited to the study of the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, heaven and hell; an uncompromising doctrine reinforced by the habitual gloom of the Victorian Sunday.

Considered equally important were such things as deportment (a straight back would serve one better than a thousand remembered pages of Molière or Schiller), dress, which must always be modest and subdued (heiress to a vast fortune, Daisy spent her girlhood in her mother's cast-off clothes), piano lessons, riding lessons, drawing lessons and visits to concerts and exhibitions. Even as late as the 1930s, the then Duchess of York, mother of the future Queen Elizabeth II, could maintain that all girls needed was plenty of fresh country air, the ability to dance and draw and appreciate music, good manners, perfect deportment and feminine grace.

It says a great deal for young Daisy Maynard's strength of character that her individualism was not stamped out by this unimaginative curriculum. On the contrary, she seems to have overcome its many limitations and to have benefited from its few advantages. It left her, she assures us, with a great love of reading, an interest in history and a talent for languages. She even goes so far as to claim that it gave her 'a just sympathy and an open mind'.
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By no means, though, could her education have been responsible for the telling observation she has to make on one aspect of her Easton girlhood. This concerned that sacred Victorian ritual – Sunday churchgoing. For the young Daisy, the ritual underlined, more strongly than anything else, the inequalities between masters and servants, rich and poor. The gentry or 'quality', in their determination that nothing should sully the sanctity of the Sabbath, kept it as a day of rest; they saw no inconsistency in the fact that a similar day of rest was denied to those who worked for them: the no less pious maids and valets who dressed them, the cooks, maids and footmen who served them their huge meals or the stablemen, coachmen and grooms who ensured that they were driven to and from worship.

Within the church itself there was a strict separation of the classes. Among the gentlefolk who sat, of course, at the front, there was even a separation of the sexes. Apparently, this sexual separation was not considered necessary among the lower orders. The service over, the congregation would file out in order of precedence: the Rosslyn family first, then the estate steward and his family, then the farmers
and finally the cottagers. There was even some curtseying as the 'quality' processed down the aisle.

'I used to wonder, even as a child,' remembers Daisy, 'how God viewed this "table of precedence" in His church, where all men were supposed to be equal.'
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If such unorthodox observations serve as a pointer to the direction Daisy's life would one day follow, another girlhood memory is linked to a very different phase of her future career.

Daisy was still in her teens when, on going to Frank Miles's studio for the last sitting of a pencil drawing of her head, she met Lillie Langtry. Lillie was then on the threshold of her years of social success and to the young Daisy she was simply the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. 'How can any words of mine convey that beauty?' she gushes: those dewy eyes, that peach-like complexion, that 'mass of lovely hair drawn back in a soft knot at the nape of her classic head.' Even more remarkable was Lillie Langtry's charm; it was almost tangible.

Lord Rosslyn, who had accompanied his step-daughter to Miles's studio, was hardly less captivated. He immediately invited this lovely young woman to dine the following evening at the family's London home, in Grafton Street. Lillie came, accompanied by her husband (Daisy described Edward Langtry as 'an uninteresting fat man whose unnecessary presence took nothing from his wife's social triumph') and 'magnetised' the rest of the company.

After that, Lillie was often invited down to Easton. Here Daisy and her younger sisters, with all the ardour of adolescence, became her 'admiring slaves'. Uncomplainingly Lillie allowed herself to be led about on a fat cob, or to have her hats amateurishly trimmed by the adoring girls. 'My own infatuation, for it was little less, for lovely Lillie Langtry, continued for many a day,'
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admits Daisy.

Or, at least, until the day when Daisy took her idol's place as the Prince of Wales's mistress.

'In my teens,' writes Daisy, 'it came as a deep and almost incredible surprise and delight to me to find in men's eyes an unfailing tribute to a beauty I myself had not been able to discern.'
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This is understandable. Victorian girls, with their long, tortuously frizzled hair and their short-skirted versions of adult fashions (the hip-hugging, bustled fashions of the late 1870s were particularly unsuitable for immature girls), needed to be exceptionally good-
looking to convince even themselves that they might one day be beautiful. And, in any case, Daisy did not have the sensuous, striking, untamed beauty that had been Lillie Langtry's from childhood; her looks were altogether more refined. Daisy Maynard was slight, small-boned, sharp-featured. Lillie in the simplest of dresses and the most casual of hairstyles still looked arresting; Daisy needed the adult aids of elegant clothes and carefully coiffured hair to set off her more subtle looks.

But there were some features – her dark-lashed, dark-blue eyes, her golden hair and her good bone-structure – which set her apart, even in girlhood, and which won her those admiring male glances. The most admiring of all, it seems, came from the young Lord Brooke. Francis Greville, Lord Brooke, heir to the fourth Earl of Warwick, was twenty-three when he first met the sixteen-year-old Daisy Maynard. He immediately fell in love with her. Within weeks he had asked her parents' permission to propose.

In the ordinary way, Lord and Lady Rosslyn would have welcomed the match. Lord Brooke was a handsome, well-made, dependable young man who would one day inherit an ancient and respected earldom. Many a parent would have been only too anxious to snap him up. But the Rosslyns, somewhat to the surprise of the love-lorn Lord Brooke, begged him to say nothing to Daisy until she 'came out', at eighteen. Reluctantly and uncomprehendingly, Lord Brooke agreed. He was not to know that the Rosslyns had more ambitious plans for their daughter.

Lord Rosslyn was friendly with Disraeli, then in his second term as Prime Minister, and it was Disraeli who first drew Queen Victoria's attention to Lord Rosslyn's step-daughter, Daisy Maynard, as a possible bride for Prince Leopold. Daisy, oblivious both of Lord Brooke's interest in her and of her parents' hopes of a royal marriage, was astonished to be told, one day in December 1879, when she was not yet eighteen, that she was to be taken to Windsor for inspection by Queen Victoria with a view to her becoming the Queen's daughter-in-law.

It was an intimidating prospect. But not for a moment would Daisy, or any other aristocratic young girl, have defied her parents' wishes in this matter. Most Victorian society marriages were arranged and, in any case, few young women would have turned down the chance of becoming a princess. Daisy had already met Prince Leopold (he was friendly with Lord Brooke) and rather liked him. One suspects, from her description of him, that she found him a little too
tame ('too delicate in health to ride or to take part in any sport': 'a sincere lover of art and music'
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) but she admits that he was always very amusing company.

The evening at Windsor was as unnerving as she had feared it would be. For three-quarters of an hour the company waited in the huge, draughty corridor for the Queen to appear. When she did, she rushed in, a tiny, black-clad figure followed by Princess Beatrice, and with quick nods to left and right, disappeared into the dining room. The party was small and intimate, but no merrier for that. Everyone, including the Queen, spoke 'in undertones', and no one dared laugh. Daisy felt the Queen's eyes on her all the time. Dinner was served, she says, 'in hot haste' and in less than half an hour, the Queen rose from her chair and, followed by the docile Princess Beatrice, 'seemed to run from the room'.
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Reassembled in the freezing corridor (Queen Victoria always felt the heat, never the cold) the company stood about stiffly while the Queen addressed a few words to each of them. Suddenly, it was Daisy's turn. How did she like the idea of coming out? Was she fond of music or of drawing? After addressing two or three more questions to the 'agonisingly shy and overrawed' girl, the Queen passed on. These innocuous exchanges having, apparently, convinced the Queen that Daisy would make a suitable wife for her haemophilic, cultivated and complex son, negotiations moved on to the next stage.

But it was now that the one element for which no one had made any allowances – love – asserted itself. Once Daisy turned eighteen, on 10 December 1879, Lord Brooke felt less obliged to hide his feelings for her ('in Lord Brooke's eyes I had recognised something that told me, in mute appeal, that his happiness and destiny were inseparably linked with mine, '
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she claims) while she found herself attracted far more strongly to the stalwart Lord Brooke than to the frail Prince Leopold. As it happened, Leopold was no more in love with her than she was with him. He had lost his heart to someone else whom, says Daisy, 'he took great care not to name.'
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