The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (47 page)

'Oh, the book,' she remarked as if, says Flower, they had met to discuss the Scriptures. 'Oh, yes, the book. Now I'll tell you . . .'

She drummed her fingers on the table. 'What you've got to do –' she began.

'What
I've
got to do?' asked Flower.

'Yes.
You,'
she explained. 'You've got to get all the cuttings about me that have ever appeared in the Press. You can get the record of all my horses. You can put the whole lot together and I shall sign them. There's the book.'

'It's not quite like that,' he protested. 'I mean, books aren't made like that.'

'Well, come into the drawing room and have coffee.'

'We went into the drawing room,' writes Flower. 'We had coffee. We never talked about the book again.'
¹⁴

Yet in 1925 – the year of Queen Alexandra's death – Lillie Langtry published an autobiography entitled
The Days I Knew
. The book could hardly have been more innocuous or imprecise. It is remarkable more for what it leaves out or glosses over than for what it reveals. Whole areas of Lillie's life are ignored; others are presented in a haphazard, unchronological fashion. Her succession of lovers are either not mentioned or else dismissed in a sentence. Freddie Gebhard, the young American multi-millionaire who provided her with, among other things, her famous railway carriage 'Lallee', is referred to as 'what Americans designate a clubman, which gave rise to a great deal of newspaper gossip'.
¹⁵
George Alexander Baird – 'the Squire' – who bought her a yacht and bequeathed her a string of racehorses, is described as 'an eccentric young bachelor with vast estates in Scotland . . . and with more money than he knew what to do with'.
¹⁶
Prince Louis of Battenberg is not mentioned at all; nor is there any indication that Lillie ever had a daughter, whether by Prince Louis or not. Her husband, Edward Langtry, after a few condescending references, very soon fades out of the picture altogether.

What Lillie calls her 'friendship' with the Prince of Wales is treated with great circumspection. Although she could not resist parading her relationship with her royal lover, both as Prince of Wales and as King, she is careful not to give away too much. Her tone, in dealing with him, is reverent and sycophantic, yet it must have been patently clear to any reader of her memoirs that the bond between the two of them had been physical. Why else should the heir to the throne have taken up with a woman so far removed from his usual social orbit? There was no need, though, for her lover's son, George V, to lose any sleep about Lady de Bathe's revelations. No secret injunctions against publication were issued on this occasion.

On the contrary, George V remained very kindly disposed towards Lillie Langtry. Captain Champion de Crespigny told the writer Ernest Dudley the story of how, one day in 1928, when Lillie was visiting London from Monte Carlo, she telephoned him in great excitement to say that the King had invited her to tea at Buckingham Palace. The King, she afterwards told de Crespigny, had been 'sweet'. He had arranged for an old footman, whom she had known in Edward VII's day, to be on hand. 'My lady,' said the footman, 'I've brought you the same sort of brandy-and-soda you used to like when you came to see King Edward.'

George V, in his chaffing way, had told Lillie not to hide herself away in Monte Carlo. 'That's what you pretty women are inclined to do when you feel you're not so young any more. It's a mistake, and I want you to come to London more often.'
¹⁷
She promised that she would.

She never did come back. Lillie Langtry died on 12 February 1929, at the age of seventy-five, in her Monte Carlo home. With her, at the end, was her faithful companion, Mathilde Peate. The value of Lillie's estate was £47,000. Of this she willed £5000 to each of her four grandchildren; Mathilde Peate inherited £10,000, the villa, the jewellery and such personal effects as were not otherwise bequeathed.

Lillie had asked to be buried in her parents' grave in the churchyard of St Saviour's, Jersey, but with snow-storms raging across the Continent, it was not until ten days later that her body, aboard the steamer 'Saint Brieuc', reached St Helier. The coffin lay in the church overnight. St Saviour's – lying a stone's throw from the Rectory where Lillie had grown up – was where her father had been Dean and where she had married both Edward Langtry and Hugo de Bathe. A prettier spot in which to be buried than the leafy, gently sloping churchyard of St Saviour's would be difficult to find.

Of the great and glittering world in which Lillie Langtry had been so celebrated an ornament, there was not a single member at her funeral on 23 February 1929. Mathilde Peate was her only close friend. Her family was represented by her daughter, Lady Malcolm, to whom she had not spoken for years and by her grandson, George Malcolm, whom she could not have known very well.

Lillie, who had always laid claim to the friendship, and love, of so many royals, was sent only one wreath from a member of a royal family. It came from Prince and Princess Pierre of Montenegro, who now lived in Monte Carlo. Prince Pierre was the least important son of Europe's least important royal house, which had anyway ceased to
reign in 1922. His wife, Princess Pierre, had been born Violet Wegner in South Hackney, London, the daughter of a tram conductor.

No one could ever accuse Daisy Warwick of clinging to her yesterdays. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, when she was in her sixties and seventies, she remained as active, as forward-looking, as politically aware and involved as she had ever been. 'The way not to admit age, not to brand oneself as a back number, is to keep heart and faith and enthusiasms,' she pronounced. 'Let all your thoughts be hopeful. Study always. Keep as active mentally as you were physically active . . .'
¹⁸

Advancing age made Lady Warwick no less controversial or capricious. She surrounded herself with a host of unconventional and progressively-minded people. In a steady stream of articles, she pontificated on every aspect of modern life. A committed socialist, she was a hard-working supporter of the Labour Party. In 1923 she stood as a Labour candidate in a by-election in her own constituency of Warwick and Leamington. Her Conservative opponent was the young Anthony Eden, to whom she happened to be doubly related through the marriages of two of her children. Although Daisy came a poor third, after the Liberal candidate, the Labour Party did very well nationally and, in 1924, was able to take office as the first Labour government. Lady Warwick's gratification was somewhat tempered by the fact that on 15 January 1924, her understanding husband 'Brookie', the Earl of Warwick, died at the age of sixty-eight.

As Lord Warwick had died a comparatively poor man and Lady Warwick was in her perennially impecunious state (which not even the sale of a great deal of land had been able to alleviate) she decided to combine philanthropy with expediency by a
grand geste
: she would allow the Labour Party the use of her home, Easton Lodge. Although she would live on there (Warwick Castle had passed to her eldest son) the Party, provided it paid certain expenses, could have free run of the house and grounds.

It sounded like an excellent idea, but in the end it proved no more successful than her other enterprises. Neither as a centre for conferences and study groups, nor as a venue for summer schools, or a Labour college under the auspices of the Trades Union Congress, did her plans for Easton Lodge fully materialise. Yet, for several years, its over-furnished rooms and spacious park were the setting for various Labour gatherings. The arrangement was not really a comfortable
one. Beatrice Webb considered the house 'far too gorgeous in its grandiose reception rooms and large extravagantly furnished bedrooms',
¹⁹
and her sister Kate felt that the less sophisticated party members must feel repelled by this show of 'degenerate luxury'.
²⁰
The grounds swarmed with Lady Warwick's bizarre collection of birds and animals, tame and wild.

But most discomforting of all was the hostess herself. Shelf-bosomed, tightly corseted, picture-hatted and opulently gowned, Lady Warwick made a striking contrast to the short-skirted, shingled and cardiganed women members of the party. They found her manner, for all her good-heartedness and open-mindedness, to be autocratic and intimidating. 'When I first knew her,' writes one young socialist, 'though she had grown fat, her face still had the fixed pink-and-white attractions which one associates with the Lillie Lang-try era, and an "electric light" smile which was turned on in a brilliant flash and gone again. She had a gushingly affectionate manner of greeting, with her wonderfully curled head on one side and her smile blazing, which was none the less perfectly sincere "period"; she trailed about with a string of revolting Pekingese dogs and she had quick and sudden gusts of temper . . . '
²¹

Her outspokenness astonished the students attending the summer schools. Making no secret of her adulterous love affair with Edward VII, Lady Warwick would lead them through her 'Friendship Garden', where most of the flowers seem to have been planted by the Prince of Wales, and would point out the heart-shaped plaques with their inscriptions: 'Lily of the Valley. Planted by H.R.H. The Prince of Wales. Nov 18, 1892.'
²²
Conspicuously absent would be any flowers planted by the Princess of Wales. With almost every room sporting its photograph of the late King, Lady Warwick would regale her embarrassed listeners with risque stories about their intimate relationship. Unselfconsciously, she would point out, to tight-lipped Nonconformists, the great four-poster bed which she had shared with her royal lover.

She was still, in fact, hoping to turn her royal memories into hard cash. Two things – other than her reluctance to get down to work and her inability to get on with various collaborators – made her task more difficult: Frank Harris appears to have stolen some of her papers, and a fire at Easton, in 1918, destroyed a great many others. The fire, she would hint darkly, had not been accidental. Appreciating the lengths to which the palace had gone to prevent her from making use of Edward VII's love letters, she suspected that the same 'authorities'
might have had a hand in this destruction of her papers.

But eventually, after innumerable false starts and complicated agreements with collaborators and publishers, Lady Warwick produced two books of autobiography:
Life's Ebb and Flow
appeared in 1929 and
Afterthoughts
in 1931. Like Lillie Langtry's memoirs, they were selective, highly coloured and inaccurate, but they were given weight by Daisy's interesting account of her conversion to, and ardent Belief in, socialism. 'So much,' she felt able to write, 'has changed for the better.'
²³

About her 'friendship' with the Prince of Wales, Lady Warwick was very discreet. Quite clearly, she was not prepared to risk another prosecution. From her pages he emerges as a wise, magnanimous and lion-hearted gentleman. While admitting that he had 'no sympathy whatever with my enthusiasm for Socialism', she implies that he was otherwise ready to 'put himself out . . . in anything, everything' to please her. That the two of them were very closely associated for a number of years must have been obvious to even the most naive reader, and in
Life's Ebb and Flow
Daisy goes so far as to give her chapter on the Prince of Wales the title 'The Heart of a Friend'. To this she adds, as that other woman to capture the heart of another Prince of Wales – the Duchess of Windsor– was to add to the title of her book of memoirs: 'The heart has its reasons about which reason knows nothing.'
²⁴

By the late 1930s, Daisy, Countess of Warwick was becoming increasingly eccentric. Too fat, reports Robert Bruce Lockhart who visited her in 1937, to get out of her chair, she ate like a wolf: 'for breakfast she had two sausages, a fish-cake, and bacon.'
²⁵
Swathed in a feather boa, she would wander through the gardens tending to the assortment of birds and animals – peacocks, pigeons, ponies, donkeys, monkeys, dogs and cats – to which she had given a home. To her various other interests, she had by now added spiritualism: she threw herself into this latest obsession with characteristic ardour. Her old friend, Elinor Glyn, remembering Lady Warwick in her heyday – as a beautiful and sophisticated leader of society – was shocked to tears on visiting this odd and impoverished old lady. She could have saved her tears. 'I am a very happy woman,'
²⁶
said Lady Warwick simply.

And so she was. Even if most of her ambitious schemes had crumbled to dust, her idealism, her belief in a fairer tomorrow, had survived. While her aristocratic contemporaries were bemoaning the passing of their privileged world, she had already embraced a new, more egalitarian age. 'I am going to devote my afterthoughts to the
old days,' she wrote in the preface to her second book of memoirs, 'in the hope that the present generation will see, as I see, that conditions are far better for the great majority of people than ever they were before, and that we have made astounding progress.'
²⁷

This gallant, unpredictable, highly romantic figure died, at the age of seventy-six, on 26 July 1938. Her body was taken from Easton to Warwick where she was buried beside her husband in the family vault. She, who at the age of three had been an heiress worth £30,000 a year, left a mere £37,000 in property to her surviving son, Maynard. To her faithful housekeeper at Easton, Nancy Galpin, went a small annuity, five hundred birds and thirteen dogs. It was a not entirely welcome legacy.

'I fear,' remarked Miss Galpin, 'the dear Countess did not know it cost £8 a week to keep them.'
²⁸
And that was only the
birds
.

Discreet to the last, Alice Keppel published no memoirs. Although she outlived her royal lover by almost forty years, she seems to have felt no compulsion to put their relationship on record. In any case, Alice Keppel was never one for dwelling on the past. 'She made the best of what she found,' claims her daughter Violet, 'she did not, as the French say, "seek for midday at fourteen o'clock".'
²⁹
Life, for Alice Keppel, was for the living.