The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (22 page)

The easy-going attitude of the Prince of Wales's set towards extramarital affairs was one which Daisy Brooke lost no time in adopting. 'From the beginning of our life together,' she admits airily, 'my husband seemed to accept the inevitability of my having a train of admirers. I could not help it. There they were. It was all a great game.'
⁴⁶
In the first four years of marriage, Daisy gave birth to three children, but even during this period she was playing 'the great game' with all the ardour of her nature. As the novelist Elinor Glyn once explained, 'it was quite normal in Society circles for a married woman to have a succession of illicit love affairs, during the intervals of which, if not simultaneously, intimate relations with her husband were resumed. '
⁴⁷

Beautiful, flirtatious, passionate, 'with little responsibility and no driving need other than to satisfy each impulse as it arose',
⁴⁸
Daisy gave herself over to the febrile excitements of these love affairs. She delighted in the established ritual of such courtships, from the first meaningful glance to the final sexual fulfilment; followed by what Mrs Patrick Campbell – who was in a position to know – used to call 'the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue'.

Lord Brooke, like Edward Langtry, was obliged to make the best of things. He was, in any case, a more complacent, better-natured man than Lillie Langtry's husband. There were no outbursts of temper, no bouts of drinking with him; he was far too much of a gentleman to make a fuss. His own five-year obsession with the young Daisy Maynard had not long outlasted their wedding. It had been killed both by Daisy's feverish infidelity and by a certain incompatability between husband and wife. Daisy, although an enthusiastic rider to hounds, could not share her husband's passion for shooting; she found those long sporting house parties, when the women were left to amuse themselves for most of the day, 'intolerably boring'.
⁴⁹
For his part, Lord Brooke maintained that 'a good day's fishing or shooting is second in point of pleasure to nothing on earth'.
⁵⁰

Daisy's most serious love affair during these years – and the one which was to lead her directly into the arms of the Prince of Wales – was with the Prince's great friend, Lord Charles Beresford.

This dashing naval commander, one of whose pranks had been to switch off the supply of air to the cabin in which the Prince and Lillie were apparently making love, was one of the great adulterers of the period. Handsome, energetic and charming, Beresford had very little trouble in seducing the bored wives of the Marlborough House set. His own wife offered very little competition. Older than her husband, Lady Charles Beresford made gallant attempts to project a youthful image. Bright spots of rouge enlivened her otherwise white-painted face; a toddler once pulled off one of her false eyebrows in the misapprehension that it was a butterfly; and Daisy Brooke used to repeat, with obvious relish, the story of how once, while out driving with Lady Charles, a sudden gust of wind lifted, not only her hat but her yellow wig, and deposited them both on the grass verge. 'How lucky we were not on the high road!'
⁵¹
exclaimed Lady Charles.

Lord Charles, with or without his wife, had been visiting Easton Lodge since the Brookes first moved into it, and by 1886, when Daisy was twenty-five and he thirty-nine, the couple had become lovers. In Daisy's eyes, Lord Charles Beresford possessed all the glamour so conspicuously lacking in her own husband. In fact, so besotted was she by her lover that one day, while the Beresfords were staying at Easton, Daisy marched into Lady Charles's room, told her of the liaison (in spite of the fact, sniffs Lady Charles, that 'the circumstances of the affair were at the time well known, and commented on, in Society') and announced her intention of eloping with Beresford. The reckless Daisy was quite ready, apparently, to abandon her husband
and three children and to subject both her lover and herself to public disgrace.

Lady Charles was not anything like as ready 'to sacrifice Lord Charles's career to such an insane project'. She took him home, she declared, 'on the spot'.

It was a wise move. From this point on Lord Charles's love for Lady Brooke began to die a natural death; a death hastened by his discovery that she was 'not content with his attentions alone'.
⁵²
But Daisy, however much she might be amusing herself elsewhere, was not prepared to let him go. Her resolve turned to rage when she heard, late in 1886, that Lord Charles's wife was pregnant. As Lady Charles's morals were above reproach, there could be no doubt that the child had been fathered by her husband.

Infuriated by this indisputable evidence that her lover had deserted her for, of all people, his wife, Daisy wrote him a blistering letter. In it, she instructed him to leave his wife at once in order to join her on the Riviera; she claimed that one of her children was his; and she insisted that he had 'no right' to beget a child by his wife. This letter was regarded, by those who saw it later, as utterly shocking. Lord Charles's brother, Lord Marcus Beresford, maintained that 'it ought never to have seen the light of day'.
⁵³

But see the light of day it certainly did. For the letter was opened, not by Lord Charles who was away from home at the time, but by his wife. She was horrified. Lady Charles promptly passed it on to the well-known London solicitor, George Lewis. One of the key figures in late Victorian society, George Lewis enjoyed, according to one source, 'for more than a quarter of a century, the practical monopoly of those cases where the sins and follies of the wealthy classes threaten exposure and disaster. '
⁵⁴
The astute George Lewis was chiefly celebrated, in fact, for keeping things
out
of court.

Acting on Lady Charles's instructions, Lewis now wrote to Lady Brooke, telling her that her letter was in his possession and warning her against causing any further annoyance to his client. Daisy was furious. She wrote to Lewis, demanding the return of her letter. 'It is my letter. I wrote it,'
⁵⁵
she declared. Lewis explained that she was wrong. Legally, the letter was the property of Lord Charles Beresford, to whom it had been addressed.

Thwarted, Daisy turned to the only person she knew who was influential enough to give her some practical help: the Prince of Wales. Appreciating that he was a close friend of Lord Charles Beresford and knowing that he would do anything to avoid a public scandal in his
set, Daisy hurried to Marlborough House. She begged the Prince, as Lady Charles scathingly put it, 'to help "Beauty in Distress"!'
⁵⁶

She did not beg in vain. Indeed, from out of this meeting with the Prince of Wales, Daisy got not only what she had come for, but a good deal more.

In the mind's eye, one can still see the two of them in the flaring gaslight of the Prince's overcrowded study on that evening in 1889: the plump, predatory, beard-stroking Bertie, all attentive sympathy as the distraught and lovely Daisy, her long-lashed eyes brimming with tears, spills out her story.

'He was charmingly courteous to me,' she afterwards said, 'and at length he told me he hoped his friendship would make up in part, at least, for my sailor-lover's loss. He was more than kind.'

And suddenly, she continues, 'I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand.'
⁵⁷

That very night, or rather, at two the following morning, the Prince of Wales went to see George Lewis. Any annoyance Lewis might have felt at being hauled out of bed was more than compensated for by the illustriousness of his caller. So gratified was he, in fact, that he took the highly unprofessional step of acceding to the Prince's request to be shown Lady Brooke's incriminating letter. The sight of it confirmed the Prince in his opinion that the letter should be destroyed at once. But as not even the sycophantic Lewis was prepared to do so himself, the Prince went to see Lady Charles.

She proved to be not nearly as overawed by the Royal Presence. She had no intention, she declared, of destroying the letter. She then, through Lewis, spelt out the terms on which she was prepared to return the letter to Lady Brooke. Read today, these terms seem ludicrous; at the time, they appeared draconian. Lady Brooke was to stay away from London for the entire season.

Lady Brooke was, as Lady Charles knew she would be, appalled at the prospect of so drastic a punishment. Again she flew to the Prince for help and again he, who was by now falling in love with her, went to see Lady Charles. This time His Royal Highness was far less conciliatory. In fact, he gave Lady Charles a dose of her own medicine. If she did not hand over the letter, it would be she, and not Lady Brooke, who would have to leave London for the season. Her 'position in Society!!' exclaimed Lady Charles with a forest of exclamation marks, 'would become injured!!!'
⁵⁸

The redoubtable Lady Charles held firm. Conveniently forgetting that it was she who had first threatened social blackmail, the lady now declared that she would refuse to give in to it. But the Prince's threat had not been an idle one. Within days he was ensuring that Lord and Lady Brooke were being invited to the same houses as himself. 'And when that sign of the Prince's support didn't stop the angry little cat,' wrote the triumphant Daisy, 'the Prince checked her in another way. She [Lady Charles] had been put down as one of the house party of a great lady to meet him. He simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it . . .'
⁵⁹

Into the teacup in which this storm was raging, there now plunged the errant husband, Lord Charles Beresford. Until then he had been trying, with uncharacteristic diplomacy, to get his wife to give up the letter. But the Prince's interference, followed by his social ostracism of Lady Charles, had proved too much for the notoriously short-tempered Beresford. On 12 January 1890, he called on the Prince. Tempers flared, with Lord Charles not only calling the Prince a blackguard but forgetting himself to the point where he very nearly hit the Royal Person.

The tangled situation was prevented from becoming more tangled still only by the fact that Lord Charles was obliged to leave England to take command of his ship. Just as the vessel on which Lillie Langtry's lover, Prince Louis of Battenberg, sailed away had borne the appropriate name of 'Inconstant', so Lord Charles Beresford's ship was distinguished by an equally appropriate name: 'Undaunted'.

For Lord Charles had by no means been beaten by the combined machinations of the Prince of Wales and Lady Brooke.

7

'The Babbling Brook'

O
NCE AGAIN
, nine years after his liaison with Lillie Langtry had ended, the Prince of Wales was in love. But this time he regarded the object of his passionate love as more than a mistress: Daisy Brooke became, in the Prince's infatuated eyes, his 'wife'. This, at least, is how he always addressed her. She was his 'darling Daisy wife', his 'own lovely little Daisy wife', his 'own adored little Daisy wife'. She had, as far as he was concerned, everything he admired in a woman: beauty, elegance, vivacity and a quick mind. He felt able to discuss with her, in addition to the usual social trivia, what she calls 'the affairs of the greater world outside'.
¹
The Prince of Wales might not have been a particularly astute man but he very soon came to realise that there was more to Daisy Brooke than met the eye. She was far from being just a social butterfly with a tendency to land herself in trouble: the better he came to know her, the more he came to appreciate her many capabilities.

In these early years, he could hardly bear to have her out of his sight. Whenever they were apart, he would write to her, often three times a week, and would feel hurt if she failed to answer him. His letters were full of affectionate chit-chat, news about the weather and the shooting and the amateur theatricals with which country house guests entertained themselves in the evenings. 'Now my loved one,' ends a typical letter from Chatsworth, grandiose home of the Dukes of Devonshire, 'I bring these lines to a close, as I must dress and breakfast. God bless you, my own adored little Daisy wife . . . For ever yours, Your only Love. '
²

She found him extraordinarily sentimental. He was a great keeper of anniversaries and sender of birthday and Christmas cards. He remembered significant shared experiences and delighted in exchanging little gifts. He once sent her a travelling clock, chosen especially
because of 'a certain little gadget that added to its sentimental value'.
³
German, with its many diminutives and romantic imagery, was the language they most often used in talking to each other. One of Daisy's most treasured souvenirs was the ring he gave her: a plain gold band, like a wedding ring, on which was inscribed: 'To Bertie from his affectionate parents A. and V.R., July 9th 1860.'
⁴

One must presume that Queen Victoria knew nothing about the fate of what should have been a sacrosanct token of parental love.

'He had manners and he was very considerate,' said Daisy in later life, 'and from a woman's point of view that's a great deal. Then he was remarkably constant and adored me exceedingly. I grew to like him very much. I think anybody would have been won by him . . . '
⁵

For her part, Daisy was only too delighted to be swept into the brilliant world that revolved around the Prince of Wales. If she had not been a full member of the Marlborough House set before, she certainly became one now. 'Of course,' she remembered in her old age, 'the Marlborough House set had glamour; indeed, glamour was its particular asset. It created the atmosphere which intrigued the public. I can feel something of the same sense of enchantment, in recalling it, that children experienced when they watched the transformation scene at the pantomime. For them, the girls in their spangles were beautiful fairies, and the scene a glimpse of fairyland . . .'
⁶

She went sailing with him at Cowes; she went racing with him at Goodwood, Newmarket and Epsom; she attended the same balls, receptions and house parties. In a very short time not only society, but those journals that so faithfully chronicled society's doings, knew all about the Prince's obsession with Lady Brooke. 'At the Opera,' reported
The World
with a knowing juxtaposition of their names, 'the Prince of Wales with his two younger daughters. Lady Brooke was in the pit tier, and the writer craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the goddess whose fame had penetrated even to the dim recesses of the placid country. Her profile was turned away from an inquisitive world, but I made out a rounded figure, diaphanously draped, and a brilliant, haughty, beautiful countenance.'
⁷