The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (21 page)

17. The Wales family. From the left, standing: Prince George, the Princess of Wales, the Prince of Wales, Princess Victoria Seated Princess Maud, Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), Princess Louise.

18. Warwick Castle, one of the settings for the liaison between Daisy and the Prince of Wales.

19 Royal Mistress: Frances (Daisy), Countess of Warwick.

20. A sketch of the Prince of Wales setting out from Marlborough House on his way, no doubt, to an amorous assignation.

21. Princess Alexandra, the beautiful, elegan and frequently betrayed wife.

22. Daisy Warwick in fancy dress, as the Queen of Assyria.

23. Daisy's cuckolded husband, the long-suffering Earl of Warwick.

24. A German cartoon showing the Prince of Wales 'comforting the wives and widows' of the men away fighting in the Boer War.

25. Daisy Warwick, 'the Socialist Countes:', on the husting: . .

Just occasionally, as she rode back from a pleasurable day's hunting and passed the exhausted labourers trudging home after working in the fields since dawn, Daisy Brooke might feel a pricking of the conscience she had sometimes felt as a child but, for the most part, she was happy enough to accept things as they were. She was always ready to dole out money to any of her tenants who were in trouble or to overlook non-payment of rent, but it never occurred to her that there might be something wrong – or immoral – with the system itself.

For the upper classes, nothing was ever so wrong that it could not be put right by an act of charity. Dutifully, the ladies of the manor would instruct the housekeeper to send coal and blankets to the elderly, broth and jellies to the sick, old clothes to the needy. Self-righteously, they would organise bazaars, run needlework guilds or collect donations. Unblinkingly, they would maintain that their tenants and dependants were more like friends, and their servants almost part of the family. Social divisions, they would claim, were just as prevalent among their servants; this was the natural order of things.

Over eighty years later Prince Leopold's daughter, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, remembering her own girlhood in the 1880s, could boast that 'class distinctions permeated the whole social structure and could be as rigid in the servants hall and in the village as they were in the castle. There distinctions were, however, tempered by gracious manners; and, in general, a courteous consideration for others, alas so rare today, governed the relationship between all ranks of society.'
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On Sunday mornings, across country churchyards, would float the reassuring lines of the hymn which, more perhaps than any other, reflected the Victorian upper-class view of their world: 'The rich man
in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly, He ordered their estate.'

What better way of confirming the fact that all things were indeed bright and beautiful?

Only occasionally, during the first half a dozen years of her marriage, did Daisy Brooke come into contact with the hub about which this idle, unthinking, self-confident society revolved – the Prince of Wales. Lord and Lady Brooke were invited to shooting parties at Sandringham and they once entertained the Prince and Princess of Wales at Easton Lodge. On one occasion, during a ball given by the Prince's brother, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh at Eastwell, Bertie had asked Daisy to dance and had spent some time in the corridor talking to her. But for all her attractions – her big blue eyes, her fashionably straight nose, her alert expression, her ruby-red velvet dress with its low neckline and huge bustle – she seemed, for some inexplicable reason, unable to hold his attention. 'He doubtless found me shy and stupid,' she writes, 'for he spent most of the evening with Mrs Cornwallis West, then in the zenith of her beauty. '
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Nor was Mrs Cornwallis West the only beauty with whom the Prince was spending his evenings. Throughout the 1880s his name was linked, briefly, with this or that society figure. For a while he adopted what the Duke of Cambridge called 'a strange new line of taking to young girls and discarding married women'. Gladstone's secretary spoke of 'H.R.H.'s virgin band' and Lady Geraldine Somerset claimed that he was 'more or less in love' with, in turn, such 'reigning young ladies' as 'Miss Stonor, Miss Tennant and Miss Duff'.
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Then there was the lovely American debutante, Miss Chamberlayne, with whom, for a while, the Prince 'occupied himself entirely', and whom the Princess of Wales, with what passed for wit at Marlborough House and Sandringham, nicknamed 'Miss Chamberpots'.

Not all the Prince's indiscretions were conducted within closed aristocratic circles. His public behaviour could be equally improper. In Paris, there was hardly a music hall in which his portly figure was not familiar.'
'Ullo Wales,'
shouted La Goulue, the raucous star of the
Jardin de Paris
as he one night entered the establishment, '
tu paies le champagne!'
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The French police needed all their ingenuity to keep track of his amorous meanderings through the capital. There were his afternoon
calls on various society hostesses, his leisurely meetings with famous beauties in the Jardin des Plantes, his hour-long stays with celebrated courtesans, his clandestine visits to unidentified women in shady hotels, the evenings spent in his favourite brothel, the luxurious
Le Chabanais
. Its
fauteuil d'amour
, a curious double-decker chair especially designed, it is said, to accommodate the Prince's considerable paunch, has recently been sold for £20,000.

There were times when even the Prince's fellow royal rakes were embarrassed by his indiscreet behaviour. One evening he took a party of friends to a London restaurant. Among them was Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, the young man who had once been infatuated by Lillie Langtry. At about two in the morning Bertie asked the orchestra to play the famous can-can from
La Belle Hélène
. With the beautiful but notorious Duchess of Manchester as his partner ('the Duchess of Manchester
is not a fit companion for you,'
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Queen Victoria had long ago warned the Princess of Wales), he flung himself into the dance with embarrassing abandon.

The far from priggish Crown Prince Rudolph was shocked. 'Tell the waiters to go,' he whispered to one of the company, 'they must not see their future King making such a clown of himself.'
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