by Jane Ridley
Edith Aylesford was a sister of Bertie’s equerry Owen Williams. Photographs show a plump woman with a long face and heavy chin accentuated by the fashionable bonnets that she wore perched on the front of her head. She was evidently amusing; certainly Queen Victoria thought it must be Edith whom Bertie admired rather than Sporting Joe, as “Lord A. was too great a fool to be really agreeable to the P. of W.”2
To understand the explosive impact of Edith’s letter, we need to track back to November 1874, when Joe and Edith Aylesford entertained Bertie and Alix at Packington Hall, their Warwickshire home near Birmingham. This was one of those defining house parties that shaped Bertie’s life as Prince of Wales. He and Alix stayed for five nights at Packington. Sporting Joe could ill afford it, but he spared no expense. A lake was created in the center of the vast dining room table (this unfortunately leaked, spoiling the dresses of ladies sitting at dinner), and a temporary wooden ballroom was constructed on the terrace. Fireworks rocketed money into the air, and adorning every room were wreaths of flowers and exotic plants, grown in the luxurious new conservatories that were specially admired by Alix. The chief entertainment was shooting in the Capability Brown park. After every second drive, each gun would shout “Boy!” and there would appear a bottle of champagne, curiously shaped like a “retort,” which must be drained instantly.* Luncheon, which the ladies attended, was held in a tent, and throughout the meal the party was serenaded by the band of the Warwickshire Yeomanry Cavalry. Afterward, Edith and Alix sat together in the pony carriage for an elaborately posed photograph, and then went driving together. Edith had four ponies, known as “rats,” which she drove at speed around the estate.†3
The guest of honor was the czarevitch, Bertie’s brother-in-law, who arrived in time for the climax of the visit, a grand ball on the last night. Six hundred guests thronged the temporary ballroom, which was decorated in crimson and hung with gold coronets. In the center stood an alpine grotto, constructed of rough virgin cork, flanked by pines, decorated with ferns, and containing a fountain that spouted sprays of water in the shape of the Prince of Wales’s feathers. One guest who is listed as staying in the house on the night of the ball, but not earlier in the week, was Lord Blandford.4 He was the eldest son of the Duke of Marlborough and a long-standing friend of Bertie’s.5 Clever and attention seeking, his aim in life was to wreak as much havoc as possible and achieve fame as a rakehell.
The last dance ended at two o’clock. Upstairs in the darkened house, lights still burned as ladies’ maids dismantled their mistresses’ elaborately pinned and padded hair, unlaced their stays, and arranged them for bed. Long afterward, the passages continued to creak. For the faster members of the Marlborough House set, corridor creeping was the dangerous sport of house party entertainment, and to signpost their nightly wanderings hostesses posted helpful names into brass plates screwed to bedroom doors.
The story, which is still told in Warwickshire today, goes like this. Padding along the passage toward the bedroom of Edith Aylesford came not one but two predator males. Putting out his hand in the dark, one of the men felt a beard: the only bearded man in the house (apart from Lord Hartington) was the Prince of Wales.‡ “Sir,” murmured the first man, and beat a hasty retreat, leaving Edith’s bedroom to his rival. The man stumbling back along the corridor was not Sporting Joe, owner of the house, host, and the lady’s husband. It was Lord Blandford. Edith Aylesford was entertaining both Bertie and Blandford.6
The suggestion is that the two men had reached an understanding. Blandford agreed that for now Bertie would have his way with Edith. In exchange, Bertie would arrange to take Joe with him to India, leaving Blandford to conduct an affair with Edith while her husband was thousands of miles away.
This theory—that Edith was Bertie’s mistress, and that he colluded with Blandford—rests largely on hearsay and is incapable of proof. Many people believed it at the time, however, and it was this that made the Aylesford affair so scandalous.
Joe knew that Bertie admired Edith, because he had seen the prince’s letters to her, written in December 1873. These letters (as Blandford later related) “had been shown to Lord Aylesford by Lady Aylesford when she received them, but had been taken no notice of by her husband.”7 It would not be surprising if Joe took the view that the letters were not incriminating. Possibly he chose to ignore them because it was to his advantage to allow the prince to flirt with his wife. His reward was admission to the inner circle of Marlborough House. He and Edith were invited to travel with Bertie to Russia for the wedding of Prince Alfred to the czar’s daughter in 1874, he was allowed the dubious privilege of bankrupting himself by entertaining the Waleses at his Packington estate, and he was taken by Bertie to India.
Joe was four years younger than Edith, who was convinced that he had long ceased to care for her. “You do not know, you never can know,” she told her mother-in-law, “how hard I have tried to win his love and without success.”8 Later, in court, it emerged that he was in the habit of going after dinner to Cremorne Gardens and forming “vulgar amours” with prostitutes, then drinking at his club and returning home intoxicated at three or four a.m.9
Joe knew about Blandford, too.
When Joe traveled to India with HRH, Edith stayed behind at Packington. The servants were puzzled each morning to find a pool of candle wax outside the door of the white drawing room on the garden front. This door was rarely used, so one night the house steward sat up to keep watch. The man he spotted being let into the sleeping house by Edith was Blandford. He frequently visited in the day as well, arriving about midday and remaining alone with her until ten or eleven at night. All this was reported by the servants to Joe in India.10
From India, Joe had written chatty, affectionate letters to Edith, complaining forlornly, “I have not had a letter from you for a very long time in fact I should hardly know your handwriting HRH says that I am the only one that hardly has any letters when the bag is opened.”11 When Edith wrote announcing her affair with Blandford, something snapped inside good-natured Joe Aylesford. Two days after receiving Edith’s letter, he wired: “By your letter you have decided for yourself about your future and have no other alternative but to leave at once.”12 The same day, he telegraphed his mother: “Send for the children and keep them until my return. A great misfortune has happened.”13 On 28 February 1876, he left the prince’s camp in an elephant howdah. “He is gone home broken-hearted at the disgrace,” wrote Carrington.14
In Nepal, the telegraph wires were buzzing. In England, news of the scandal spread like fire, and Alix soon heard of her friend Edith’s defection. She telegrammed Bertie, imploring him to prevent Joe suing for divorce. “Tell Joe not to take rash steps,” she wired. “Mother done nothing yet.”15
A few days later she wired again. “I know all about E, but things look a little better. There is a chance. Pray try your utmost to smooth matters with Joe. Hope to God all may come right yet.”16 Bertie was adamant. “It can never come right. If you had seen letter you would say the same. Joe left us today. Take my advice and do not mix yourself up in the matter or you will regret it.”§17
Louise Manchester telegraphed Bertie. “Entreat you persuade A[ylesford] bid her stay till his return. Not too late—you can prevent much misery. Essential you exert influence.”18
“It is too late,” replied Bertie. “After letter A received a week ago reconciliation is impossible. He will not allow her to remain under his roof, and returns to England at once.”19
Louise Manchester visited Edith at Packington. As soon as she saw her, she knew the case was hopeless. “I might just as much have talked to a stone,” she told Bertie. “She is an altered woman—speaks, thinks and talks like Lord Blandford who seems completely to have bewitched her.” Louise blamed Blandford, who was determined to get Edith into his power and “create as much scandal and notoriety as he could in imitation of a bad 4th rate French novel.” He had given Edith a box of poisonous pills to take in case anything happened to him, a
nd she kept rattling them about in her pocket.20
Blandford reveled in the attention and the drama. Heedless of the fact that he was himself still married, and his wife, Bertha, refused to divorce him, he demanded that Aylesford divorce Edith. If he refused, raved Blandford, “I shall only wait till HRH comes back to appear on the scene and then if A tries to lick me I shall do my damnedest to defend myself & afterwards if I am all right, I shall lick HRH within an inch of his life for his conduct generally, and we will have the whole thing up in the Police Court!!”21 His wife’s response was apt: When Blandford came down to breakfast one morning, he lifted the silver chafing dish to find a pink doll, instead of the customary poached egg.
Blandford’s family tried frantically to prevent the disgrace of a divorce. Their only hope was to persuade Bertie to forbid Joe from leaving Edith. When persuasion failed, they tried to threaten him. Lord Lansdowne, a Whig grandee who was married to a sister of Bertha Blandford, warned the prince that “Lady Aylesford, anticipating the danger to which she would be exposed in her husband’s absence, had used every effort to prevent him from going to India, but … you had insisted on his accompanying you.”22 This veiled threat that he had engineered the scandal and colluded in Blandford’s affair with Edith infuriated Bertie, who reprimanded Lansdowne for the “objectionable” tone of his letter.23
Far pushier than Lansdowne was Blandford’s younger brother, Lord Randolph Churchill, who was a friend of Bertie and a member of his circle. He bombarded Bertie with telegrams begging him to intervene. “For God’s sake use your influence to defer final decision of Aylesford’s till his and your return,” he wired on 28 February.24
“Matters can never be arranged,” replied HRH. “Had you seen certain letter you would say the same. Deeply regret that such should be the case.”25
Randolph tried bullying. “For your own sake advise Aylesford … to come to no hasty decision. Your Royal Highness will be held responsible generally for whatever line of conduct is adopted and is already credited with the initiative in this matter.”26
Bertie was mystified. “Your telegram received today has caused me even more astonishment than your last. Have not advised A though entirely approve of line he has taken.”27
When Bertie refused to be bullied, Randolph Churchill tried blackmail. Edith had by now been persuaded by her sisters to think again about divorce. She then produced her secret weapon: the packet of letters Bertie had written her in the winter of 1873. She gave copies of these to Churchill.
What happened next reads like a scene from a play. Edith went to see Alix at Marlborough House. She was accompanied by her friend Lord Alington and Lord Randolph Churchill, who made himself exceedingly unpleasant, demanding that Alix put pressure on Bertie to dissuade Joe from divorce, and talking threateningly about “means at his disposal” that he was determined to use to prevent the case from coming to court. Bertie had written letters to Edith, said Randolph, “of the most compromising character.” He had shown them to the solicitor general, who had given his opinion that if they ever came before the public, the Prince of Wales “would never sit on the throne of England.”‖28
A shaken Alix confided in Bertie’s former comptroller, old Sir William Knollys. While she was discussing the bruising interview she had endured with Randolph, her friend and cousin Mary, Duchess of Teck, was announced.a Quick as a flash, Alix invented a white lie, telling Mary that she had misheard when the footman announced that Edith Aylesford had called, and agreed to see her under the impression that it was her friend Lady Ailesbury.29 Though this story gained credence, it seems likely that Alix, in defiance of Bertie’s command, had in fact prearranged Edith’s visit.b
Meanwhile, Alix’s subterfuge succeeded. She asked her cousin for advice as to how to limit the damage, and Mary knew exactly what to do: “Order your carriage at once, go straight to the Queen and tell her precisely what has happened. She will understand and entirely excuse you from any indiscretion. It will be in the Court Circular that you were with the Queen today and any comment will be silenced.”30 Sir William Knollys agreed. “Her Royal Highness is giving very good advice. Pray follow it at once.”31
So Alix ordered a carriage for Buckingham Palace and told the Queen the story of her interview with the odious Randolph. The visit to the palace was duly reported in the Times Court Circular.32 Victoria was sympathetic. She knew all about the scandal already, and she thought it “unpardonable” to drag Alix into it. “Her dear name should never have been mixed up with such people.… Those Williamses are a bad family.”33
Bertie, meanwhile, was steaming home from India on board the Serapis. By the time the news of Randolph’s bursting in on Alix reached him (28 March), he was staying at Cairo in the khedive’s palace. In a rage, he dispatched Lord Charles Beresford in the royal yacht Osborne to England with a letter to Lord Hardwicke, the Master of the Buck Hounds. Evidently “written under great excitement,” the prince’s letter called for “a hostile meeting” with Randolph—in other words, a duel.34 Churchill’s response was superbly insolent. He apologized for approaching the princess on so painful a subject, but “this is the only apology which circumstances warrant my offering.” He refused to apologize to the prince; and with regard to Bertie’s challenge to a duel, he was crushing: “No one knows better than HRH the P[rince] of Wales that a meeting between himself and L[or]d R. C. is definitely out of the question. Please convey this to HRH.”35
The idea that Alix had hitherto been sheltered from all unpleasantness was a romantic fiction; it cannot have come as surprise to her to learn that Bertie had conducted a flirtation with Edith Aylesford. But by confronting her with evidence in the shape of Bertie’s letters, Randolph Churchill had torn away the veil and forced her to confront the painful fact that her husband was repeatedly and publicly unfaithful. With brutal accuracy, Randolph had skewered the web of lies and deceit that Bertie had woven around his marriage. While her husband was away in India, Alix had poured out page after page of longing for “my angel Bertie” in her letters to Minnie, and no doubt she wrote like that to Bertie, too.36 Now not even Alix, whose capacity for self-deception seems almost unlimited, could still cling to the belief that her Bertie really was an angel.
By refusing to apologize, Randolph was committing social suicide. He blamed Bertie for his brother Blandford getting involved with Edith in the first place, alleging (so Hardwicke reported to Bertie) that it was “through your influence that Aylesford left his wife to accompany Your Royal Highness to India, that you knew of Blandford’s intimacy with Lady Aylesford before you left … that you rejected an imploring letter from Lady Aylesford begging of you not to take her husband away, that in fact there was collusion between Your Royal Highness and Aylesford to throw Lady Aylesford into the arms of Blandford.”37
Randolph’s claim that Aylesford wanted to throw his wife into the arms of Lord Blandford seems bizarre, and his allegation that Bertie forced Joe to go to India against Edith’s will was untrue. Afterward, Bertie found letters from Edith (which he showed to the Queen), in which she gave up her opposition to Joe’s visit to India, agreeing with Bertie that “it would be greatly to Lord Aylesford’s advantage that he should accompany HRH.”38
When Bertie received a fifty-page letter from Hardwicke reporting Randolph’s threats, he appealed immediately to the Queen. Victoria was staying at Coburg. She unhesitatingly believed his claim that the letters to Edith were innocent. That Bertie said so was enough—true, it was unfortunate that there were any letters at all, but writing letters, said the Queen with a smile, was a family failing.39
The letters that Bertie wrote to Edith Aylesford in December 1873 were preserved by Francis Knollys, tightly folded in a sealed envelope.c The first, dated 11 December 1873, was written from Blenheim, where Bertie was staying for a shooting party.
My dear Lady Joe,
I hope you won’t think me very impertinent for addressing you “as above,” but it is so much shorter. I cannot resist writing you a few
lines to thank you for y[ou]r very kind letter—& how glad I am to hear that you liked y[ou]r stay at Sandringham.
… Y[ou]r sixpence is on my watch chain and will I am sure bring me luck. I am so glad to hear fr[om] Joe that you have decided to go to St. Petersburg next month, although I advised him at first not to go, so that we shall I trust meet very often there, and I trust I shall be able to be of some use to you.
I thought I should puzzle you by the mysterious way in which I mentioned the “discretion” I intended asking of you but it may perhaps astonish you still more when I really ask it. But I am in no hurry—you kindly ask me (for your “discretion”) anything that belongs to me. I fear I have nothing worth offering you, but if you could give me some idea I should be much obliged to you.40
Much of this seems a flirtatious code. Edith’s correct title was of course Lady Aylesford, not Lady Joe, and Joe’s first name was actually Heneage. Bertie was a stickler for correctness, so calling Edith Lady Joe was a form of intimate joshing, as presumably was the sixpence.
In his second letter, written a week later from another house party, Bertie enlarges on the theme of “discretions.”
My Dear Lady Joe,
Many thanks for your letter, which I received this afternoon, and it is very kind of you having ordered a harmonic-flute and American organ at Chappells to be sent to Marlborough House and I hope to find them there on our return on Saturday and I am quite sure that one of the two is sure to suit.
I cannot allow you to consider our bets or “discretions” as quits, and as you have no preference, you must allow me to choose something and send it [to] you for Christmas.
My “discretion” must keep as I have something in view, but would rather not ask you for it yet. You have never told me whether you did not consider my letter from Blenheim rather a cool one. I was afraid afterwards you would.
