by Theo Aronson
There was an equally large and no less appreciative public for her next portrait. Millais used her as the model for 'Effie Deans' in his painting of a scene from Sir Walter Scott's famous novel, The Heart of Midlothian, which he exhibited in the Marsden galleries in King Street. 'Her sweet lips are parted,' enthused one critic, 'and there seems to linger on them a trace of the last quivering sob which made the blue, upturned eyes glisten. It is in this sorrow-laden mouth, in the azure depths of tenderness in her appealing eyes that the rare art of Mr Millais is exemplified to a marked degree.'27
Here, in short, was the sort of sentimental story-picture to wrench the hearts and quicken the pulses of the aristocratic patrons who flocked to the King Street gallery. And not only them: engravings of 'Effie Deans' were soon adorning walls of middle-class sitting rooms throughout the land.
Millais's next picture of Lillie, which he was to exhibit at the Royal Academy of 1878, would make her even more famous. He painted her, not as she imagined he would, 'in classic robes or sumptuous medieval garments'28 but in a simple black dress, with lace collar and cuffs. She was, Millais told her, the most exasperating subject he had ever painted. For fifty minutes of each hour, she looked only 'beautiful', but for the other ten she looked 'amazing'.
One touch of colour relieved the sombre tones of the painting: in her left hand Lillie holds a fragile crimson flower. This was a Nerine sarniensis, a species of amaryllis which grows on Guernsey and which Millais, inaccurately, referred to as a Jersey lily. But inaccurate or not, he titled his painting 'A Jersey Lily' and it was as the Jersey Lily that Lillie Langtry was to be known from then on.
Winning Lillie even wider recognition were her photographic likenesses. At a time when photography was a relatively new art and an appreciation of feminine beauty at one of its heights, reproductions of attractive women were being bought by a vast public. Known as 'professional beauties', these women – or ladies, for they were almost all members of society – were photographed in every conceivable attitude: clasping bunches of artificial flowers; lolling in hammocks under riotously blossoming branches; gazing dolefully at dead birds; standing swathed in furs amid fake snow-storms. The craze for collecting these pictures – a craze foreshadowing the popularity of first film stars and then pop stars – was not confined to the middle classes; many an aristocratic drawing room boasted a leather-bound, brass-locked album featuring the Junoesque charms of the Duchess of Leinster, the delicate profile of Mrs Luke Wheeler or the piquant expression of the Marquis of Headfort's daughter, Mrs Cornwallis West.
The most ardently collected pictures of all were those of Lillie Langtry. Whether the photographers 'one and all besought'29 her – as she claims – to sit for them, or whether she suggested it herself, one does not know; what is certain is that before very long her voluptuous features were familiar all over London. And as the professional beauties, or P.B.s, were much sought after by hostesses ('Do come', they would scrawl on their invitation cards, 'the P.B.s will be here'30) Mrs Langtry soon found herself much in demand.
The society into which Lillie was being swept was a brilliant one. Her first London season, spanning the months between late April and early August, meant a succession of parties. Often she was invited to as many as three a night. 'I see striped awnings,' recalls one member of this vanished world, 'linkmen with flaring torches; powdered footmen; soaring marble staircases; tiaras, smiling hostesses; azaleas in gilt baskets; white waistcoats, violins, elbows sawing the air, names on pasteboard cards, quails in aspic, macedoine, strawberries and cream . . .'31
Lillie's breathless account of that first season teems with titles: the Duchess of Westminster invites her to stay in the country, Lady Rosslyn asks her to join her for a drive in the Park, Lord Hartington drenches his evening clothes as he pulls water lilies out of a marble pool to present to her.
Trailing disconsolately behind Lillie on all these occasions was her husband Edward. It would have been unthinkable, of course, for her to have been invited without him. But as much as she revelled in all this social activity, so did he loathe it. 'My husband greatly disliked all this publicity,' she reports blandly, 'sometimes losing his temper and blaming me.'32 But such, apparently, was the force of Lillie's personality that Edward never actually refused to accompany her. One's heart goes out to him. Night after night this dull but inoffensive man, who asked for nothing more than a day's quiet fishing or a night's drinking with his yachting mates, was obliged to get into white tie and tails and stand awkwardly in some corner while his wife enchanted the assembly with her beauty, her vivacity and her sexuality. 'My husband,' says Lillie with a flash of that steel that was as much part of her personality as was her charm, 'felt quite like a fish out of water.'33
Throughout this kaleidoscopic social whirl, Lillie had appeared in her only evening dress: the black one which she had worn to Lady Sebright's party. 'I dined with Lord Wharncliffe last night,' reported Lord Randolph Churchill to his wife, Jennie, during the early days of Lillie's rise to fame, 'and took in to dinner a Mrs Langtry, a most beautiful creature, quite unknown, very poor, and they say has but one black dress.'34
It was not only Lillie's relative poverty that kept her in her black dress. In December 1876, her younger brother Reggie had died as the result of a riding accident in Jersey, and this meant that Lillie had to wear mourning. It was not until Lady Dudley, on inviting her to a ball some months later, 'tactfully and gracefully' asked Lillie not to wear black as Lord Dudley 'could not bear the idea of anyone appearing at his house in that sombre hue',35 that Lillie put off her mourning.
So, instead of appearing at Dudley House in black, Lillie wore white. The effect was hardly less dramatic. The dress, of white velvet embroidered with pearls, was classically simple: its bodice was low-cut and close-fitting; its skirt, drawn tightly back into a bustle, emphasised the seductiveness of her hips and the length of her legs.
'Looking back,' she says, 'and judging from the sensation it caused, it must have been a striking creation. As I entered the ballroom the dancers stopped and crowded round me, and as I pursued my way to greet my hostess, they opened out to allow me to pass.'36
But it was not, for all Lillie's assertion, her dress that caused the crowd to part like the Red Sea as she entered the ballroom. Nor was it because of her fame as a professional beauty. By now the word had got out that the Prince of Wales was very interested in the delectable Mrs Langtry.
At the apex of the society up which Lillie Langtry was so resolutely climbing was the royal family. Whereas today the monarchy is a supra-national body, trying its best to stand above class and faction, then it was as much a social as a political institution; the sovereign was not only the head of state but the head of society. The royal family crowned the social pyramid; they were the star on the Christmas tree of a class structure that appeared fixed and immutable. These days, almost anyone, provided they have discharged some sort of civic duty, stands a chance of being invited to the Palace; a century ago, such an invitation would have signified that one was a member of society – of the charmed circle of aristocratic families. Not until after the First World War did the crown, in the realisation that its appeal must be to all its subjects, begin to distance itself from the great families and from the so-called ruling class.
With Queen Victoria proving herself to be, in Gladstone's phrase, 'invisible', it fell to the Prince of Wales to carry out – only too happily – those social functions which were considered a very proper part of royal obligations and duties. Not only did he preside over such official occasions as investitures and presentation parties but, as the acknowledged leader of fashion, he attended private balls, receptions and garden parties. To entertain, or be entertained by, a member of the royal family was regarded as a tremendous social triumph; even to meet one of the princes or princesses socially was to indicate that one was moving in very elevated circles indeed.
The first two members of the royal family whom Lillie Langtry met were Queen Victoria's fourth daughte
r, the twenty-nine-year-old Princess Louise, then Marchioness of Lorne and afterwards Duchess of Argyll, and the Queen's youngest son, the twenty-three-year-old Prince Leopold, afterwards Duke of Albany. Both these royals fancied themselves as bohemians; they moved in artistic, relatively unconventional circles. Princess Louise – handsome, emancipated, sharp-tongued – was a talented sculptress. Her marriage, in 1871, to the Marquess of Lorne, who succeeded to the dukedom in 1900, was unhappy; Lorne was said to be homosexual. Lillie first met this high-spirited princess in Frank Miles's 'dusty old studio' in his rambling house just off the Strand. Here, late most afternoons, would gather many of the leading actors, artists and writers of the day.
Prince Leopold she met in more conventional surroundings: at a dinner party given by the Marchioness of Ely. But he, too, was often to be found at Frank Miles's studio. Slim and slight, with soulful eyes, a waxed moustache and a wispy imperial beard, Prince Leopold had a romantic, almost Byronic air. Lillie talks of his artistic interests and 'marked intellectuality'37 and certainly, to the public, he was known as the Scholar Prince. Unfortunately, Prince Leopold suffered from what was euphemistically termed 'very delicate health'; he was in fact a haemophiliac, a sufferer of the dreaded 'bleeding disease'. As such, he tended to be kept very firmly under Queen Victoria's wing. Prince Leopold's short life (he was to die, at the age of thirty, in 1884) developed into a tug-of-war between his mother's understandable possessiveness and his own, no less understandable, determination to break free.
On this score, Lillie has an amusing story to tell. Prince Leopold would often come to Miles's studio to watch the artist doing sketches of her. On one occasion he bought one of these sketches, a portrait showing Lillie in profile, with her name 'being delicately suggested by a background of faintly pencilled lines.' This the Prince hung over his bed. It remained there until one day, when he was laid up with yet another of his bleeding attacks, the Queen came to see him. At the sight of the portrait of the by now celebrated Mrs Langtry, the disapproving Queen Victoria immediately took it down; 'standing on a chair,' claims Lillie, 'to do so.'38
It was neither in an artist's studio nor at a grand dinner table that Lillie Langtry met her next member of the royal family. She was introduced to the Prince of Wales, on 24 May 1877, at an intimate supper party given by Sir Allen Young at his home in Stratford Place.
Sir Allen Young, known to his friends as 'Alleno', was one of those Victorian prototypes: a swashbuckling, chivalrous, clear-eyed adventurer, ready to devote himself to the cause of Queen and Empire. His particular field of endeavour was arctic exploration. Twice, in 1875 and 1876, he had, at his own expense, sailed his yacht 'Pandora' in a brave but futile attempt to discover the North-west Passage – that elusive arctic sea route joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In recognition of his services, he had been knighted in March 1877.
Sir Allen was also one of that coterie of discreet and wealthy bachelors who could be relied upon to arrange the sort of evenings that the Prince of Wales enjoyed above all others: intimate, informal suppers in slightly risqué company. Not all his bachelor friends, though, were equally accommodating. A request, through the Prince's private secretary, that Lord Rosebery make his house in Berkeley Square available as 'a rendezvous for the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh [his brother] to meet their "actress friends" '39 was politely but firmly turned down by Rosebery. His home, protested his lordship, was too small.
Ten people, including Mr and Mrs Edward Langtry, had been invited to this particular supper. And although Lillie seems to have had no idea that the Prince had been invited, there can be little doubt that the Prince knew that she would be there. Perhaps that old roué, Lord Ranelagh, had told him about her; perhaps the Prince had seen her photograph or heard of her great beauty; perhaps Sir Allen, knowing something of His Royal Highness's taste in women, had decided that they should meet.
The time could hardly have been more opportune. With the Princess of Wales away visiting her brother, King George of the Hellenes, the Prince (who had himself only just returned from his annual spring holiday in the South of France) was free to indulge himself with even less restraint than usual.
As the company stood waiting for supper to be announced, the host suddenly disappeared from the room. The puzzled Lillie heard a slight commotion outside and then came the sound of a genial, guttural voice saying, 'I am afraid that I am a little late. '40 A few seconds later the Prince of Wales entered the room.
The presence of royalty can strike panic into even the bravest of hearts and the most equable of temperaments and Lillie, despite her self-assurance, proved no exception. Her first impression of the Prince was blurred; she noticed only a dazzle of orders pinned to his chest. While Bertie, in his affable way, shook hands with the head-nodding men and curtseying women, she stood numbed. Should she escape up the chimney? But when the moment of introduction came, she executed her curtsey perfectly and then 'greatly enjoyed watching my husband go rather stammeringly through a similar ordeal.'41
Sir Allen had, of course, seated her beside the Prince at table and in no time Bertie was subjecting her to his practised brand of courtship: the chuckling laugh, the complimentary remarks, the caressing glance, the absorbed expression. Two things, other than his flattering attentiveness, Lillie especially noticed about the Prince. One was his great good nature; the other his dignity. 'I decided that he would have been a very brave man who, even at this little intime supper party, attempted a familiarity with him,'42 she wrote.
One cannot know what the Prince said to Lillie on taking his leave but one may be sure that he would have asked whether he could pay her an afternoon call. And that she, as she sank down into her curtsey, would have known exactly what such a call signified.
The Prince of Wales, instigator of so many social changes, was in no small measure responsible for the establishment of a revised code of sexual behaviour among the aristocracy during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Until then, with upper-class girls having to remain unblemished until the wedding night, their male relations had been obliged to confine their sexual activities to women of a lower social status. These rich, idle and self-confident young – and not so young – men could always find a servant girl to seduce or a prostitute to sleep with. London alone could boast a quarter of a million prostitutes. In this way, the virginity of their sisters and daughters could be preserved and the purity of their blood lines be ensured.
'Society girls,' writes one of their number, 'if not as innocent as they were pure, were often unbelievably ignorant of the physical facts of marriage. Marriage – their goal, their destiny, their desire – was all in a rosy haze. Afterwards, as wives, they accepted the code of their day as unchanging and unchangeable. Nearly all the young men had mistresses, so most bridegrooms had a second establishment to pension off or maintain. If a society woman met a man – even her own brother – in the park or a restaurant when he was accompanied by his mistress or an actress, he would not raise his hat to her. He cut her, and she understood.'43
All this – the untouchability of young unmarried women and the libertinism of their brothers or fathers or uncles – remained unchanged. What the Prince of Wales did change, or helped change, was the attitude towards adultery. As it was not really practical, or advisable, for the Prince to consort too often with prostitutes or chorus girls and as he did not really want to set up a 'second establishment', he solved the problem by making love to young married women. In that way, provided the husband was either unsuspecting or complaisant, the Prince was able to have the best of all worlds. He could enjoy the favours of a beautiful young aristocrat without having deflowered her; knowledge of the liaison would be confined to a relatively small circle; and, perhaps most important of all, he was able to choose the sort of woman who could give him more than just sexual satisfaction.
For Bertie was one of those men for whom feminine company, in or out of bed, was essential. 'He was never happier,' claims one of his secr
etaries, 'than in the company of pretty women.'44 He was interested in their clothes, their pastimes and their chatter. Never one for exchanging smutty jokes over the port with the other men, the Prince would far rather be in the drawing room talking to some stylishly dressed, sharp-witted beauty. 'What tiresome evenings we shall have,'45 he once sighed, when his wife's mourning for the death of her father obliged him to hold a series of men-only dinner parties.
As London was almost entirely lacking in the sort of women who flourished in Paris — those demi-mondaines who were not only sexually available but witty, informed and intelligent – the Prince of Wales was obliged to seek their equivalent among the young married women of his circle. And they were only too happy to oblige the heir to the throne. Condoned by the Prince, adultery became, if not exactly respectable, certainly acceptable. Once a wife had borne her husband an heir, she was considered fair game. Provided everything was organised in a civilised manner and that certain rules of discretion were adhered to, these liaisons between married people became more and more commonplace. They had not, of course, been unknown in earlier, more rakish, periods but they were now regarded as less reprehensible.
So it was along the by now generally accepted lines that the Prince's relationship with Lillie Langtry developed. After the initial flirtation at Sir Allen Young's supper table, there would have been a letter delivered to Lillie's Eaton Place address and then Bertie would have paid her an afternoon call. These calls were very much part of the prescribed routine of courtship. No husband would be at home at that hour: he would be at his club, or else calling on some other man's wife. The visiting gentleman would leave his hat, cane and gloves, not in the hall but on a chair in the drawing room, so giving the impression that he had simply dropped in for a few minutes.
