Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  The paper thought them uncompromising and ‘not such as to entitle the writer to a place in the next edition of Royal and Noble Authors’. But they were just the sort of letters that decades later, often and in open day, Bertie wrote to Little Mrs George. Five was the hour for his teatime assignations. ‘I am so looking forward to Monday when I shall hope to our next meeting between 5 & 6,’ he wrote to Mrs Keppel from Sandringham. ‘I shall motor over from here.’

  Sir Charles’s petition for divorce went before a special jury on 23 February 1870. Bertie was called as a witness. Though not obliged to appear he feared that if he did not ‘the public may suppose that I shrink from answering these imputations which have been cast upon me.’ The Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, gave him advice on the wisdom of testifying:

  The matter appears to me to depend entirely, first on how far Your Royal Highness can with a clear and safe conscience deny the main fact in issue, so far as you are concerned and, secondly, how far you may be constrained, when pressed, to admit circumstances calculated to detract from the credit which would otherwise be due to your denial … I would not, for the world, that Your Royal Highness should go into the witness box and that your evidence should fail to command the credit and respect which ought to attach to it. I am sure that the country would be more ready to look with indulgence on what might be thought only a youthful transgression, especially with a lady apparently of such fragile virtue, than on a supposed disregard of truth in one who will one day be the fountain of justice and in whose name the law will be administered. It must not be forgotten that a man, no matter what his station, comes forward on such an occasion under very disadvantageous circumstances, arising out of the notion that one to whom a woman has given herself up, is bound, even at the cost of committing perjury, to protect her honour.

  Bertie’s circumstances were not entirely disadvantageous. His Private Secretary, William Knollys, recorded that Gladstone, the prime minister, ‘took all the indirect means in his power (and successfully)’ to prevent anything coming out in the course of the trial that might harm Bertie or the Crown. Nor was Harriet Mordaunt’s fragile virtue and honour protected. Her punishment was to be declared insane. She was diagnosed as suffering from ‘puerperal mania’, deemed unfit to plead and put in an asylum. Far from finding her frail and fascinating, it proved expedient to call her mad and bad. The confessions her husband used as evidence were dismissed as insane ramblings. Servants from the Mordaunt household testified to her nervousness and weeping, to how she ‘was hardly better than a beast of the field,’ how she threatened to kill the ‘poor, miserable, horrid little thing’ to which she had given birth and which might or might not have had a Royal Highness for its father.

  Bertie, questioned by her counsel, admitted that for anonymity he used hansom cabs when visiting her. Asked, ‘Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?’ he replied, ‘No, never.’ In the evening he wrote to his mother, in language perhaps chosen by his lawyers:

  I trust by what I have said today that the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations which have been so wantonly cast upon me are now cleared up.

  He then took his wife to dinner with the Gladstones.

  The affair made waves, but the man destined to be the fountain of justice, in whose name the law would be administered, went on his way. Alexandra referred to him as ‘my naughty little man’. The Times wrote, ‘The Prince of Wales has learnt by painful experience how carefully he must walk.’ Reynold’s News asked the question that might, given Bertie’s proclivities, have been on the minds of those in the courtroom:

  Why should a young married man be so eager to pay weekly visits to a young married woman when her husband was absent, if it was all so innocent?

  It said that it was unsurprising that rumours of the Queen’s ill-health caused anxiety when

  the people of England read one year in their journals of the future King appearing prominently in the divorce court and in another of his being the centre of attraction at a German gaming-table, or public hell.

  Satirical pamphlets appeared about Bertie’s private life. Gladstone warned that Victoria was invisible and Bertie not respected. A leading article in the Observer declared,

  there are not wanting those among the opponents of the monarchical system who have ceased to regard royalty with that veneration which they have hitherto shown.

  Crowds gathered in Hyde Park to listen to speeches advocating republicanism – an occurrence Bertie deplored:

  The Government really ought to have prevented it … The more the Government allow the lower classes to get the upper hand, the more the democratic feeling of the present day will increase.

  As Ascot approached in 1870, the Queen told Bertie to limit his visits to the races to two days at most and to keep company with ‘really good, steady and distinguished people’. ‘I am over twenty-eight,’ he wrote back, ‘and have some considerable knowledge of the world and society.’ She must, he said, permit him to use his own discretion.

  His own discretion permitted him to do whatever he pleased. In 1873, his Private Secretary, Francis Knollys, found him a London pied-à-terre where he took lady friends. In 1874 he spent two weeks in Paris. Shadowing him in the parks and clubs kept the gendarmerie busy. In October 1875 he went to India but would not allow Alexandra to accompany him. She said she would ‘never forget or forgive him’ for refusing her request to go too.

  He preferred to travel with his inconvenient friends. He carped at what he considered the inadequate money allocated him for the trip: £52,000 from the Admiralty, £60,500 from the Treasury for his personal expenses, £100,000 from the Indian government. His party went pigsticking, shot peacocks, kingfishers, tigers and elephants. ‘It is the custom for the successful sportsman to cut off the animal’s tail, and this the Prince did, streaming with perspiration,’ wrote Alfred E. Watson, author of King Edward VII as a Sportsman.

  The Prince was distracted from such sport by another scandal. On 20 February 1876 Lady Aylesford, wife of ‘Sporting Joe’ who was in the party, wrote to tell him she was going to run off with Lord Blandford. By the same post Bertie got a letter from Blandford’s brother, Randolph Churchill, asking him to dissuade Sporting Joe from divorcing his wife or feuding with her lover. Lady Aylesford had, Churchill warned, given to him a packet of letters written to her by Bertie which ‘if made public would greatly damage and greatly embarrass the Prince of Wales’.

  Bertie wished to steer clear of the whole business. But a further letter from Lady Aylesford’s brother, Lord Lansdowne, accused him of insisting that Sporting Joe go on the Indian trip, knowing this was against Lady Aylesford’s wishes – she ‘anticipated the danger to which she would be exposed during her husband’s absence’.

  Randolph Churchill claimed to friends that ‘he held the Crown of England in his pocket’. With Henry Sturt – Lord Alington, father of Mrs Keppel’s admirer Humphrey Sturt – he went to Marlborough House to see the Princess of Wales. He told her that

  being aware of peculiar and most grave matters affecting the case he was anxious that His Royal Highness should give such advice to Lord Aylesford as to induce him not to proceed against his wife.

  He warned her that if Aylesford sued for divorce Bertie would be subpoenaed to give evidence and that if Bertie’s letters to Lady Aylesford were published he ‘would never sit upon the throne of England’.

  Bertie perceived these machinations as impugning his honour, threatening his marriage and as blackmail. He called for a duel with pistols with Randolph Churchill in the north of France. Disraeli – who succeeded Gladstone as prime minister in 1874 – and Lord Hardwicke intervened. ‘Blandford,’ Disraeli said, ‘I always thought was a scoundrel, but this brother beats me.’ Hardwicke wrote to Bertie, ‘You have been scandalously used by a lady and two men passing as gentlemen. We shall know how to deal with them after the storm is passed.’ Disraeli called the Prince of Wales’s
private affairs as troublesome as the Balkan crisis. Aylesford was persuaded not to divorce but to ‘arrange his matters privately’, separate from his wife and ‘make proper provision for her etc.’.

  ‘How can one make the best of anything,’ Violet Keppel was to write to her lover Vita Sackville-West, ‘that revolves on lies and deception?’ The sexual affairs of Bertie and his set – the royal family, aristocrats, the fountains of justice, makers and administrators of laws – revolved on lies and deception: lies to ostensible partners, deception of wider society. For a few years Lady Aylesford and Blandford lived in France as Mr and Mrs Spencer. When he inherited his dukedom he left her and married Mrs Hammersly, an American widow. Lord Aylesford – Sporting Joe – went to America in 1882, bought 27,000 acres in Texas and died of alcoholism within three years. Randolph Churchill apologized to Bertie who none the less shunned his company for years.

  As he grew older Bertie’s context for infidelity was the long-term affair. He chose young, pretty women who were married to someone else. The implication for his wife was that he did not want her sexually or emotionally. Prior to Little Mrs George he had two equally public lovers.

  Lillie Langtry, daughter of the Dean of Jersey, was an icon of beauty painted by Millais and Burne-Jones. In May 1877 Alexandra was ill and went to her brother in Greece to recuperate. As soon as she had gone Bertie asked friends to arrange for him to meet with Lillie. On 24 May at a supper party in Stratford Place given by Sir Allen Young, an Arctic explorer, he was introduced to the ‘Jersey Lily’ and her husband. Next day she received a note saying the Prince of Wales would like to call. Fame with a royal flavour was assured:

  It would be difficult for me to analyse my feelings at this time. To pass in a few weeks from being an absolute ‘nobody’ to what the Scotch so aptly describe as a ‘person’; to find myself not only invited to but watched at all the great balls and parties; to hear the murmur as I entered the room, to be compelled to close the yard gates in order to avoid the curious, waiting crowd outside, before I could mount my horse for my daily canter in the Row; and to see my portrait roped round for protection at the Royal Academy – surely I thought London has gone mad, for there can be nothing about me to warrant this extraordinary excitement.

  She was born Emilie Charlotte le Breton in 1853, had six brothers and when she was sixteen fell for a young man whom her father admitted was his illegitimate son. Three years before she met Bertie, when she was twenty-one, she married Edward Langtry, who owned two yachts, lived in Eaton Square and drank too much.

  Bertie, enamoured, called her My Fair Lily and wanted to be seen in public with her. ‘My only purpose in life,’ she wrote, ‘was to look nice and make myself agreeable.’ He presented her to mother, took her to country-house weekends of the sort spoofed by Vita in The Edwardians, and to Marlborough House, Sandringham, Balmoral and Buckingham Palace. ‘These balls at Buckingham Palace completely realized my girlish dreams of fairyland,’ Lillie wrote in The Days I Knew. They went riding together in Hyde Park – ‘etiquette demanded that I should ride on so long as His Royal Highness elected to do so’ – and for weekend shooting parties. ‘I was once persuaded to see a stag stalked. But I felt so sick and sorry for the fine beast that I have never forgotten it.’ When Lillie went on the stage in 1881 – as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer at the Haymarket – Bertie patronized the theatre and ensured her success. At her first night The Times commented on ‘the most distinguished audience ever seen in a theatre’. They went to the races, Cowes, Paris, Bournemouth. ‘He always smelled so very strongly of cigars,’ she said. Edward Langtry, like George Keppel after him, was invited too when it was seemly for him to appear: the complaisant husband, conscious that the Prince came first.

  The liaison was sniped at in cartoons, caricatures and satirical verses, attention that irritated in courtly circles, but was part of public life. But in 1879 Town Talk, edited by Adolphus Rosenburg, ran a story claiming:

  A petition has been filed in the Divorce Court by Mr Edward Langtry. HRH The Prince of Wales and two other gentlemen whose names up to the time of going to press we have not been enabled to learn are mentioned as co-respondents.

  Langtry sued for libel and told the jury there was no truth in Rosenburg’s assertions, he had never contemplated divorce, he and his wife lived on the most affectionate terms. Rosenburg got eighteen months in prison and the judge, Mr Justice Hawkins, regretted he was unable to sentence him to hard labour.

  So the waters closed over yet another questioning of regal sexual behaviour. It took eighteen years and several tries for Lillie to divorce her husband. He died alcoholic and destitute on 15 October 1897 in an American ‘asylum for the insane’. ‘He was caught in the whirlwind of London fashion,’ wrote the Daily News by way of obituary, ‘and being anything but a swimmer, and having no artificial supports in fortune, he was quickly on his way to ruin.’

  Sex of the noxious sort was rumoured in 1889. Bertie’s equerry, Lord Arthur Somerset, left the country to avoid prosecution in ‘the Cleveland Street scandal’. For months police watched a gay brothel in Cleveland Street, London. They shadowed Lord Arthur and identified him as a client. His solicitor warned the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions in September that if the case was pursued ‘a very distinguished person will be involved (P.A.V.)’ – Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, Bertie’s eldest son and heir to the throne. The Prince – Eddy, nicknamed ‘Collar and Cuffs’ for his dandy clothes – was, Margot Asquith wrote, ‘rather afraid of his father’ who let him know he was a disappointment and perpetually gibed at him ‘a form of ill-judged chaff’ which Alexandra hated.

  Bertie thought Lord Arthur’s involvement ‘inconceivable’. Anyone capable of such behaviour, he said, must be an ‘unfortunate lunatic’ and the less heard ‘of such a filthy scandal the better’. Chorus girls were one thing, rent boys quite another. After Lord Arthur’s departure and helpful intervention with the process of law, the case was dropped and Eddy spared such limelight.

  Eddy was spared, too, the roles of marriage and kingship and the nation was spared a perhaps homosexual king. He died of pneumonia in January 1892 when he was twenty-eight, a month before his marriage to Princess Mary of Teck. Two years later she married his brother George and they became Queen and King after Bertie’s death.

  Harold Nicolson writing to Vita Sackville-West on 17 February 1949 recounted a conversation over dinner with Lord Goddard, Lord Chief Justice from 1946–58. According to Goddard, a solicitor committed perjury to clear Prince Albert Victor, was then struck off the rolls, and later reinstated. ‘It is one of God’s mercies to us that that horrible young man died,’ Goddard said.

  * * *

  Eddy’s father was unswervingly heterosexual. In 1891 Daisy Countess of Warwick replaced the Jersey Lily as his official mistress. Twenty years younger than he, good-looking, feisty, rich, she lived in Carlton Gardens, London and Easton Lodge, Essex. She indulged in the usual social round of balls, hunting, house parties, adultery. She had married Lord Brooke ten years previously in Westminster Abbey. Bertie and Alexandra were at her wedding.

  One of her lovers, Lord Charles Beresford, had accompanied Bertie on his Indian trip in 1878. In 1891 he had sex with his wife who became pregnant. Daisy’s revisionist ideas on fidelity were confounded. She wrote him a letter saying he had no right to behave in such a way, he must live with her, Daisy, on the Riviera, one of her children was his and ‘more to that effect’. Lady Beresford opened the letter and took it to a solicitor. Daisy turned to Bertie for help. He invited her to Marlborough House. ‘He was more than kind and suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand. I knew I had won so I asked him to tea.’

  He called her ‘my own darling Daisy wife’, gave her the gold ring inscribed ‘V & A’ that his parents had given him at his confirmation, and swept her into his life. All of which meant social death for Lady Beresford whose husband penned a letter – which he did not send – to Bertie:

&n
bsp; you have systematically ranged yourself on the side of the other person against my wife … I consider that from the beginning by your unasked interference and subsequent action you have deliberately used your high position to insult a humbler by doing all you can to elevate the person with whom she had a quarrel …

  The days of duelling are past but there is a more just way of getting right done and that is publicity. The first opportunity that occurs to me I shall give my opinion publicly of YRH and state that you have behaved like a blackguard and a coward, and that I am prepared to prove my words.

  YRH had reason to avoid such publicity. That year he was again in court giving evidence in what became known as The Baccarat Scandal. At a house called Tranby Croft in Yorkshire in September 1890 he and eight others played baccarat for high stakes. Sir William Gordon Cumming, ship-owner, lieutenant-colonel with the Scots Guards and worth £80,000 a year, was thought to cheat. In exchange for ‘preserving silence’, his accusers requested him to sign a document agreeing never to play cards again. All involved signed it including Bertie.

  The story reached the papers. Daisy was thought to be the mole. Sir William brought action against his accusers. In court his counsel said it was anyway against regulations for Bertie, a Field Marshal in the army, to have signed the paper because all cases of alleged dishonourable conduct had to be put to the accused’s superior officer.

  The verdict went against Sir William but Bertie was hissed from the spectators’ gallery and neither the Queen nor his nephew the Kaiser, nor The Times were amused. ‘His signing the paper was wrong (and turns out to have been contrary to military regulations),’ Victoria wrote to Vicky. More than that she deplored

  the light which has been thrown on his habits … alarms and shocks people so much, for the example is so bad … The monarchy almost is in danger if he is lowered and despised.