by Theo Aronson
'The etiquette when the Prince called upon my aunt,' remembered the niece of one of Bertie's married amoratas, the fascinating Nina Kennard, 'was that everybody else should leave the room; sometimes we children were still in the drawing room when the butler showed him in, whereupon we had to back out of the Royal Presence as gracefully as best we could – often colliding unavoidably with the furniture on our way to the door; after our exit we could hear from the landing the Prince's laughter at our discomforture . . . It is almost unnecessary to emphasise the fact that the hostess was a singularly attractive creature.'46
The aproned maid, having deposited the tea tray with its sparkling silverware, gleaming china and laden, many-tiered cake stand, would bob her curtsey and take her leave, closing the door behind her in the knowledge that she must not re-enter until summoned by her mistress's tinkling brass bell.
What happened next ranged from a little flirtatious conversation, through passionate kissing, to full-scale sexual congress. Or as much congress as was possible given the restrictions of a chaise-longue and the armoury of clothes worn by the women. Under those flounced, ruched, draped, bustled and many-buttoned dresses lurked layer upon layer of underclothes, ending up with the most daunting of garments – a tightly-laced whalebone corset. Hardly less daunting would be the lady's coiffure: a fragile confection of curled fringes, false locks and strategically planted combs. A man would have had to have been as much a ladies' maid as a lover first to undress, and then to dress, one of these decorative creatures. To one contemporary observer, it all seemed like 'an enterprise which would have to be organised like a household furniture removal'.47
To meet this particular challenge, a special garment, known as the tea-gown, evolved. More than a peignoir, less than a formal afternoon dress, these filmy, lacy garments with their hint of the boudoir had one inestimable advantage: they could be worn without corsets. While respectable and lavish enough to be worn in public, they could very easily be slipped out of in private. By the last decades of the nineteenth century the tea-gown, or 'teagie', was an essential part of a society woman's wardrobe, whether she was contemplating adultery or not. For instance, the future Queen Mary, when Duchess of York, had a sumptuous collection of tea-gowns and one really cannot imagine her indulging in a little extra-marital dalliance on the chaise-longue.
Whether it was in the course of one of these tea-time têtes-à-têtes, or whether it was in rather more comfortable circumstances that Lillie Langtry first succumbed to the Prince's amorous advances one cannot know, but it very soon became apparent that he was fascinated by her. Quite clearly, she was not going to be just another in that succession of young married women with whom he amused himself.
Not content to confine their meetings to the odd afternoon call or the occasional country house weekend, he began appearing openly with her. Hostesses soon realised that if they hoped to lure the Prince to their dinner tables or their ballrooms, Mrs Langtry would have to be invited as well. There was nothing clandestine about their affair. Lillie Langtry became an openly acknowledged and apparently permanent feature of the Prince's life. She became, in short, his first official mistress.
3
Royal Mistress
NOT SINCE THE days of the Stuarts have royal mistresses played a significant part in British history. There has been no British equivalent of women like Madame de Maintenon or Madame de Pompadour. The Hanoverians might have enriched, and even ennobled, their mistresses, and their liaisons often caused great scandal, but these women never developed into national figures; they never wielded any social or political influence. For the most part, royal mistresses were content to use their unique positions to feather their nests.
The mistresses of Edward VII – both as Prince of Wales and as King – were content with even less than this. It was enough, it seems, to have become the royal favourite: they looked for neither power nor titles. Just to bask in the reflected glory of the throne, and to get some of the dress bills paid, was all they wanted.
The same was true of the mistresses of Edward VII's grandson Edward VIII, afterwards Duke of Windsor. His three mistresses – Lady Coke, Mrs Dudley Ward and Lady Furness – were all married women, content with no honours other than the honour of being the companion of the heir to the throne. Not until the arrival on the scene of Mrs Wallis Simpson (and one does not know whether she was, in fact, Edward VIII's mistress before she became his wife) did a royal romance develop into a national issue. Mrs Simpson could, of course, have settled for less than marriage; she could have contented herself with the not unenviable life of a king's mistress, in the way that others had done before her. That she did not do so was due, almost entirely, to the strength of Edward VIII's love for her: he was determined to marry her, even at the cost of losing his throne. Few royal mistresses – or, at least, objects of royal affection – can boast that.
No such overpowering passion marked Edward VII's feelings for Lillie Langtry. He was far too level-headed a man for that. But there can be no doubt that he was in love with her. During the first few years of their liaison, at least, he had eyes for no one else.
What was it about Lillie Langtry that the Prince of Wales found so fascinating? Initially, her physical attractions: her lovely face, her voluptuous body, her graceful bearing. 'Lillie Langtry happens to be, quite simply, the most beautiful woman on earth,'1 claimed Millais. She had, in addition, the sort of animation that Bertie liked in a woman: she was vibrant, high-spirited, amusing. But then all these were qualities which he could have found, to a greater or lesser extent, among many women in the so-called Marlborough House set. Pretty, bright, sexually available women were never hard for him to find.
What set Lillie apart from them were her non-physical attributes. For one thing, she had a refreshing independence. Although she was always polite in the Prince's company, she was never subservient. She spoke her mind. Princes – indeed, any member of a royal family – are so surrounded by sycophants and conformers that they tend to welcome almost anyone from another world: anyone who is open and natural and honest. Queen Victoria's obsession with the Highlanders was in great measure due to the fact that they were 'very independent and proud in their bearing – always answering you and speaking openly, and strictly the truth, with great freedom, but ever respectful.'2 Victoria's appreciation could be echoed in the royal family today.
So although, in old age, Lillie Langtry once told the actor Alfred Lunt that she had always been a little afraid of the Prince (she also told him that, close to, His Royal Highness smelt very strongly of cigars) she was clearly never overawed by him. In his company she remained, for all her charm, her usual practical self; a woman fired by an unsentimental ambition to get on in the world. In some respects, she was not unlike those self-made men for whom the Prince had so much admiration. She epitomised the new sort of person whom Bertie was welcoming into society.
Nor was Lillie one of those socially ambitious but essentially stupid women. On the contrary, she was very intelligent. And she was always eager to learn. 'Lillie's beauty has no meaning,' her friend Oscar Wilde once declared. 'Her charm, her wit and her mind – what a mind! – are far more formidable weapons. '3 The Prince found that he could discuss things with her; she was not some doll-like creature with no opinions of her own. And here is another parallel with Wallis Simpson, in whom that later Prince of Wales always felt that he had found a confidante: Lillie was to Bertie not only a lover, but what so many princes lack – a friend.
'I resent Mrs Langtry,' joked George Bernard Shaw some years later. 'She has no right to be intelligent, daring and independent as well as lovely. It is a frightening combination of attributes.'4
It was a combination that the Prince of Wales found irresistible.
Indeed, the claim that King Edward VII was not as feckless and foolish a man as has sometimes been asserted is admirably borne out by the calibre of the three women whom he chose as his mistresses. Lillie Langtry, Daisy Warwick and Alice Keppel were all, in their differe
nt ways, exceptional women. By his association with them Bertie enhanced, rather than debased, the quality of his own life.
'It would be difficult for me to analyse my feelings at this time,' wrote Lillie of these early days of her association with the Prince of Wales. '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 [A Jersey Lily] 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.'5
The lady was protesting too much. There was a great deal about her to warrant the excitement. Word that the alluring Mrs Langtry was the Prince of Wales's mistress soon spread beyond aristocratic circles. It was no longer only at balls that dowagers clambered onto gilt chairs to get a better look at her. People ran after her in the street. Crowds massed around her in the Park. Shopkeepers were obliged to usher her out of the back door because of the mob collecting at the front. One day in the Park a young girl bearing a striking resemblance to Lillie was mobbed to such an extent that she had to be carried 'suffering and unconscious'6 to St George's Hospital.
Everything Lillie wore set a fashion. When she twisted a length of black velvet into a toque, stuck a quill through it and wore it to a race meeting at Sandown Park, copies of the creation appeared in milliners' windows throughout London, bearing the label 'The Langtry Hat'. When she wore a pink dress to Ascot, that particular shade of pink became the rage.
In short, the days of the one black dress had gone forever. Lillie now wore every colour in the rainbow. Instead of having her clothes made by a humble St Helier dressmaker, she went to Worth and Doucet. Hours were spent in the fitting-room; her dresses became more elaborate, her hats more striking. She had her tea-gowns bordered with silver fox, her evening dresses embroidered with pearls, her negligées edged with ermine. To a ball at Marlborough House she wore a creation of yellow tulle draped with wide-meshed gold net under which 'preserved butterflies of every hue and size were held in glittering captivity'.7 It was left to her princely lover, the following morning, to pick up such butterflies as had been scattered all over the ballroom floor.
'Each successful season brought with it the same orgy of convivial gatherings, balls, dinners, receptions, concerts, opera etc, which at first seemed to me a dream, a delight, a wild excitement,' runs her breathless account of her new life, 'and I concentrated on the pursuit of amusement with a wholeheartedness that is characteristic of me, flying from one diversion to another, from dawn to dawn . . .'8
She was painted by every leading artist of the day. Edward Poynter pictured her in a 'gorgeous golden gown'9 looking like some seductive Renaissance princess. George Frederick Watts, on the other hand, decided that her luminous quality would be better captured if she were seen in a simple black dress, as 'The Dean's Daughter'. Edward Burne-Jones, impressed by her 'healthy appearance', used her, in full face and in profile, for two of the women in his famous painting 'The Golden Stair'. To illustrate, perhaps, yet another facet of her character, the perceptive Burne-Jones depicted her as 'Dame Fortune', in which a hard-faced figure in grey draperies turns a wheel on which 'kings, princes, statesmen, millionaires and others rise, reach the top, and then fall'10 to be crushed by a relentless Fate.
When Lillie posed for James McNeill Whistler in his studio in Tite Street, she was seen by the well-known art critic, George Smalley. 'A vision never to be forgotten,' wrote Smalley afterwards, 'the colouring brilliant and at the same time delicate; the attitude all grace. There was a harmony and a contrast all in one: the harmony such as Whistler loved; the contrast such as it pleased her Maker to arrange; between softness and strength; the lines of the woman's full body flowing gently into each other, but the whole impression was one of vital force.'11
As the apartment in Eaton Place was hardly adequate for her new status, Lillie – accompanied by the apparently unprotesting Edward – moved into more appropriate premises. Not that her new home, 17 Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, was another Petit Trianon. In this more bourgeois age, kings and princes no longer set their mistresses up in palatial mansions: a discreet establishment with a conveniently private entrance was considered to be more in tune with the democratic tenor of the times.
Indeed, the Prince of Wales might not have set her up at all. His financial contribution to his lady loves usually went no further than the giving of expensive jewellery. Bertie may have paid for the odd Worth creation but to meet all her other extravagances Lillie would have to have looked elsewhere. The rents of Edward's Irish properties would hardly have kept her in the style to which she was now aspiring. Lillie would almost certainly have been earning some money from the sale of her 'professional beauty' photographs. Although some society beauties – Mrs Cornwallis West chief amongst them – protested that they received no commission on the sale of their photographs and that talk of them earning thousands of pounds was nonsense, Lillie Langtry would have made sure that at least some of this money came her way. Her claim that, at this time, she was a financial scatterbrain, is difficult to believe. Throughout her career she was known as a shrewd and hard-headed businesswoman. She might have been profligate, but she would never have settled for anything less than her monetary due.
Then, as the Prince's acknowledged mistress, she would have been granted extensive credit. There would have been very little difficulty in borrowing money or in finding some socially ambitious acquaintance to stand surety for her. And after all, her new Norfolk Street home was hardly luxurious. It was simply one of a typical terrace of red-brick houses boasting no more than eight or nine rooms, a modest staff and some stabling in the mews. Nor were its furnishings particularly lavish. They consisted, for the most part, of spurious antiques pressed on Lillie by unscrupulous dealers. Touches of advanced contemporary taste were provided by Lillie's friend Whistler: gilded palm-leaf fans to enliven the plum-coloured walls of the drawing room, a ceiling painted to represent the sky, water lilies floating in flat blue glass bowls.
It was to this modest Norfolk Street house that Bertie would come to pay his afternoon calls or, less frequently, to attend little dinner or supper parties. About these, Lillie is discretion itself. 'His affability to servants was well known to all who entertained him, for he seldom passed one without a word or a kind look,' she says in her memoirs. 'He really worked hard to make one's dinners and parties successful – an easy task with his magnetic personality.'12
In those more leisurely days, it was still possible for the Prince to visit Lillie, or anyone else, with a freedom that would be unthinkable for a member of the royal family today. Although his libertinism was sometimes hinted at or even openly criticised in the popular press, Bertie was never hounded by reporters.
'I recall with wonder and appreciation,' writes Bertie's grandson, the future King Edward VIII, of his youth in pre-First World War London, 'the ease with which we were able to move about in public places. The thought occurs to me that one of the most inconvenient developments since the days of my boyhood has been the disappearance of privacy . . . Because our likenesses seldom appeared in the press, we were not often recognised in the street; when we were, the salutation would be a friendly wave of the hand or, in the case of a courtier or family friend, a polite lifting of the hat.'13
On one occasion, when Bertie and Lillie were returning down Constitution Hill from a ride in the Park, they were held up by the preparations for a levée which the Prince was due to hold in Buckingham Palace in an hour or so's time. Sitting on their horses at the corner of the Mall, the couple were able to watch the band and the guard of honour march by and even to recognise some of the arriving guests. But the Prince himself was unrecognised by the waiting crowd. He remained so lo
ng, says Lillie, that he had a great scramble to get to the levée on time.
If Bertie was not paying for the lease and the running of the Norfolk Street house, he was apparently responsible for another of Lillie's homes. Towards the end of the year that he met her, 1877, he started building her a home in that most decorous of seaside resorts, Bournemouth. Designed in the mock-Tudor style so dear to the hearts of the late Victorians, and known, because of its red-brick lower storey, as the Red House, it was indistinguishable from the home of any successful business or professional man who had decided to retire to the South Coast. As such, it suited Bertie perfectly. With the house leased, according to municipal records, to an Emily Charlotte Langton, and with the foundation stone revealing nothing more than the date and a cryptic E.L.L. (for Emilie Le Breton Langtry), the Prince was able to avoid any direct association with the house. Travelling down to Bournemouth incognito, he was assured of the necessary anonymity whenever the two of them arranged to meet.
As a royal love nest, it may not have been a particularly romantic establishment but, in many ways, it suited this realistic, eminently practical couple to perfection. Along one wall of the high-ceilinged dining room, whose stained-glass window sported a couple of amorous swans, ran a defiant inscription: 'They say – What say they? Let them say.'14
It is not difficult, down the vista of the years, to picture the celebrated lovers amid the comfortable but incongruously middle-class surroundings of the Red House: the cigar-puffing Bertie in his brocade dressing-gown, the lovely Lillie in one of her frothy peignoirs, with her golden-brown hair cascading down her back. The hours spent in this Bournemouth retreat would have created an oasis of tranquillity amid the bustle and sparkle of their everyday lives. For Bertie, it would have provided a rare touch of domesticity; for Lillie, it would have meant a break in her unrelenting efforts to make her way in the world.
