by Jane Ridley
Lillie Langtry found herself eclipsed. She was never in love with Bertie; in old age she remarked that she was always a little afraid of him, and “he always smelt so very strongly of cigars.”50 For her, what mattered was her status as royal favorite, and here the warning signs were plain to see. The names of Mr. and Mrs. Langtry first appear in the guest list for a Marlborough House Sunday dinner in Bertie’s diary in April 1879.51 The fact that Bertie invited Lillie to dine with Alix indicates that he no longer considered her to be his mistress. An exchange at a charity bazaar at the Albert Hall in July neatly encapsulates her declining stock. Bertie bought a cup of tea from Mrs. Langtry’s stall. Before handing it to him, she put it to her lips. “I should like a clean one please,” snapped Bertie.52 The public snub is the closest we can get to Bertie’s feelings, which are, as ever, unrecorded. Lillie, for her part, embarked on an affair with a younger man—the teenage Lord Shrewsbury, who was just nineteen. One afternoon Bertie called unexpectedly (Lillie had tried to put him off, but he didn’t receive her note) and found her with Shrewsbury. According to the story Lord Derby heard, the lovers were discovered in flagrante, and a terrible row ensued.53 Lillie even thought of marrying Shrewsbury, but decided against it, as she found him “quite as uneducated and much more jealous than Ned … and he gets worse every day—In fact I should despise him in a month.”54
The new breed of scurrilous gossip papers, which had created Lillie Langtry, now threatened to destroy her, and burn Bertie in the process. Town Talk was a weekly London society paper edited and published by the twenty-seven-year-old Adolphus Rosenberg. Throughout September, it ran a story that Ned Langtry had filed a petition for divorce, and that the Prince of Wales was named as corespondent.
Rosenberg then claimed that Patsy Cornwallis-West used her house at 49 Eaton Place as a photography studio, running from one camera to another in order to mass-produce the cartes de visite that she sold on commission in a Victorian version of Hello! magazine. Patsy’s husband sued for libel at once. When the court case opened, Rosenberg was surprised to find himself further indicted for publishing libels against the Langtrys.55 How the notoriously hard up Ned Langtry paid the lawyer’s fees has never been explained.
Neither Lillie nor Patsy was present in court. Ned Langtry testified: “I have read these articles and there is not one single word of truth in them.… I am now living at home with my wife.”56 Rosenberg was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. But the silencing of Town Talk was achieved at a cost. Day after day throughout October 1879, The Times had printed column inches repeating the paper’s allegations against the Prince of Wales.
Queen Victoria, who was always generous when Bertie was in trouble, blamed his love of country house parties. “It is what has done dear Bertie so much harm,” she told Vicky. “That visiting is … the worst thing I know and such a bore. The gentlemen go out shooting and the ladies spend the whole day idling and gossiping together. Alix hardly ever goes now—she hates it so.”57
The fact was that at thirty-eight, Bertie was a playboy Prince Hal, poised dangerously close to the edge of scandal. The London society press created a discourse of social slights and innuendo, of fashion and tittle-tattle, that reverberated nationally as it was reprinted in the gossip pages of local newspapers. Knollys’s desk filled with letters about petty social disputes, gambling debts, and slanderous chitchat and quarrels with Vanity Fair. Bertie had become the chief of the aristocratic tribe, ruling over the atavistic honor culture of the Victorian nobility, but this was hardly a fit role for a modern prince. The problem—what was the Prince of Wales to do?—remained unsolved.
Or so it seemed. The Marlborough House mailbag for 1879 also includes business letters from Beaconsfield about matters such as Egypt.58 There was correspondence with the Colonial Office about a Colonial Exhibition in New South Wales, with the Foreign Office about the Paris Universal Exhibition, with the Archbishop of Canterbury about the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and with the governors of Calcutta about the water supply in Dacca. Bertie’s life had a serious side, which is too easily overlooked. He performed twenty public engagements in 1879, visiting schools and hospitals, laying foundation stones, and presiding at dinners; he made nineteen appearances in the House of Lords, and at Buckingham Palace he held four levees, two drawing rooms, and two state concerts.§59 When the Queen retreated to the Italian lakes in March, “Prince Hal” told Beaconsfield that he wished to be in frequent communication with the prime minister. “This is all very well,” commented Beaconsfield, “if it do not take, as threatened, the form of a rather protracted Sandringham visit.”60
Bertie’s diary for 1880 records at least seven visits from Prince Louis of Battenberg.61 The handsome twenty-six-year-old naval officer was on leave and half-pay, and on his frequent visits to London he stayed at Marlborough House.
Louis was the eldest of four Battenberg sons, and like his brothers, Alexander (Sandro) and Henry (Liko), he shamelessly exploited his charm and royal family connections to promote his career. Since joining the Royal Navy at age fifteen, he had benefited greatly from the patronage and generosity of “Uncle Bertie.” Louis’s son, Lord Mountbatten, was later to devote much effort to elaborating a romantic version of his antecedents, insisting that the Battenbergs were equal members of the German royal family. Louis was the son of a cousin of Princess Alice’s husband, the Grand Duke of Hesse, by a morganatic marriage—that is, a marriage to a woman who was not of royal rank.62 Provincial German courts were obsessed with the blood royal, the magic elixir that empowered toy-town princesses to marry kings, and in the snobbish world of the Almanac de Gotha the Battenbergs were looked down upon as “half-castes.” As Vicky’s husband, Fritz, remarked, they were “not … of the blood—a little like … animals”—a comment that perhaps says as much about Fritz as it does about them.63
In 1880, Louis Battenberg began an affair with Lillie Langtry. Whether Bertie knew about this and was complicit, as some have suggested, or whether he was irked by his good-looking young cousin stealing Lillie away from him can only be surmised; we have no real evidence either way.64 At a ball in May or June 1880, so the story goes, Lillie is supposed to have angered the prince by drinking too much champagne and slipping a spoonful of strawberry ice down the back of his neck. This was lèse-majesté indeed; Bertie could never bear to be teased.65 Lillie denied the incident, claiming that it was actually Patsy Cornwallis-West who was responsible; true or not, the story can be read as a measure of her falling stock with Bertie.66 There is no doubt that the prince wanted to distance himself from the scandal of the court case involving Lillie and Patsy Cornwallis-West.
At a Sunday dinner at Marlborough House (so Lillie related in her memoirs), she became suddenly ill with stomach pains, and Alix implored her to leave early. The royal physician Francis Laking followed her home to Norfolk Street. The next day, to Lillie’s everlasting delight, Alix called at Norfolk Street, accompanied by Charlotte Knollys, and made tea for her.67 Neither Bertie nor Alix mentions these events in their diaries, and this episode could easily be dismissed as yet another of Lillie’s apocryphal stories. Being forgiven by Alix was the fantasy of every ex-mistress. It validated the mistress socially and gave closure to the affair. In this instance, however, there seems to be some truth in Lillie’s story. She wrote a letter shortly afterward to her friend Lord Wharncliffe:
I have been so seedy again lately.… I felt so unwell after dinner that Sunday at Marlborough House that I had to leave an hour before the rest. I tell you this because no doubt you will hear as I did that I fainted at dinner because the Prince wasn’t civil enough!!!
The Princess and Miss Knollys came to see me before they left town and had tea and stayed for an hour. I was so puffed up about it … more especially as she kissed me when she left.68
Lillie’s letters to Lord Wharncliffe give edited highlights of her social career, but she would hardly have invented a dinner at Marlborough House, nor Alix’s visit—though her later claim th
at Alix made her a cup of tea seems improbable, to say the least. (Did Alix know how to make tea?)
What Lillie chose not to reveal in her letter to Wharncliffe was the reason why she felt unwell. She was pregnant. Which of her many lovers was the father of the child was a puzzle, most likely even to Lillie herself. The one man who was not in the frame was her husband, Ned, as he had walked out after the Town Talk libel case. The obvious candidate was Louis Battenberg.69 Lillie told him that he was the father, and he believed her. He confessed to his parents, who put paid to any foolish notions he might have had of marrying Lillie and arranged a financial settlement.70 Bertie may have worried that the child was his—there is a story that he tossed for paternity with Battenberg and lost—but it’s unlikely that he would have introduced Lillie to Alix and allowed his wife to become involved if he was sleeping with Lillie at the time.71 Whoever the father was, hushing up the scandal was imperative. Lillie was lent £2,000 to pay her debts, and her husband, Ned, who often visited her unannounced, was prevented from seeing her, constantly occupied with invitations to shoot or fish. Keeping him in ignorance of the pregnancy was vital; he was angry and resentful, and the worry was that if he discovered that Lillie was pregnant by another man, he might sue for divorce, dragging Bertie into the law courts. Lillie spent the summer holiday in Jersey. One Friday in October, by now four months pregnant, she visited London briefly and saw Bertie.72 On 17 October 1880, Bertie held a meeting with his doctor, Oscar Clayton, and saw Louis Battenberg.73 The same day, Louis departed on a two-year voyage around the world on the aptly named Inconstant. Lillie herself was spirited away to France. Her baby was born on 18 March 1881—a girl named Jeanne Marie.
What Bertie did not know was that throughout her pregnancy Lillie clung passionately to another man. His name was Arthur Jones; a rakish Jersey sportsman, he was the illegitimate son of Lord Ranelagh. His sister Alice, another illegitimate child of Lord Ranelagh, had married Lillie’s brother Clement Le Breton. Lillie’s letters to Jones, discovered in 1978, make it clear that she preferred plain Mr. Jones to both the Prince of Wales and the glamorous Prince Louis Battenberg. She told Jones that he was the father of her child, and he bought the potions from the chemist that she took in fruitless efforts to precipitate an abortion. The love letters she wrote during her pregnancy suggest that she at least was convinced that the baby was his, and he was with her in Paris when the child was born.‖74
Oscar Wilde wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1891. He offered Lillie the part of Mrs. Erlynne, which she refused. “Why he ever supposed it would have been … a suitable play for me I cannot imagine,” she wrote, disingenuously.75 In the play, Mrs. Erlynne is a professional beauty with a heart of gold. She is hated by the society ladies, one of whom quips, “Many a woman has a past, but I am told she had at least eleven, and they all fit.”
“You whose whole life is a lie, could you speak the truth about anything?” asks another. But Wilde’s play turns on the idea that it is London society that is morally corrupt, not Mrs. Erlynne, who has been redeemed through her suffering and disgrace. “You don’t know,” she says, “what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an outcast! To find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one’s face.”76
Bertie helped to pull Lillie out of the pit. After her baby was born, he did all he could to support her career as an actor, making a conspicuous appearance at her debut performance of She Stoops to Conquer.77 Lillie was a moderate success on the stage; as the diarist Loulou Harcourt wrote, after seeing her in School for Scandal in 1885: “She is fairly good when she is simply acting the lady of fashion moving about in society but the moment she tries to show any passion or force of feeling she is a miserable failure and proves herself to be no actress but people will continue to go and see her because she is Mrs. Langtry and is dressed by Worth.”78 Thanks to Bertie’s patronage, Lillie received a semi-royal welcome when she toured the United States, and she became a successful racehorse owner—she was the first woman owner to win the Cesarewitch.
Lillie’s long-estranged husband, Ned, died of drink in Chester Asylum in 1897. Francis Knollys was kept closely informed by the solicitor George Lewis when Ned Langtry’s landlord threatened blackmail, claiming to possess compromising letters Bertie had written to Lillie. “I was upon friendly terms with Mr. Langtry up to the last,” wrote Lewis. “I am sure he would sooner have sent me any letters than have given them to his landlord.”79 It seems that Ned Langtry used George Lewis as a broker, trading silence and cash in exchange for Bertie’s love letters. Bertie, meanwhile, maintained a lifelong friendship with Lillie. “How I wish you were on board sailing with me now,” he wrote from Cowes in 1885.80 He attended her opening nights—“I count upon you to reserve the Box for me.”81 He helped arrange for her daughter, Jeanne, to be presented to the Queen.82 He even gave Lillie a dog that had belonged to his current mistress, Lady Warwick: “Perhaps you would write Lady W[arwick] a line to W[arwick] Castle and tell her you like the dog and ask her the name.”83
Alix spent the summer of 1879 in Denmark with her sister Minnie, staying with King Christian at Bernstorff, his summer residence. An unpretentious early-nineteenth-century building with whitewashed walls, Bernstorff stood in a romantic park beside the sea. It had been the childhood holiday retreat of Alix and Minnie, and that summer the two sisters insisted on staying there together, refusing to move to the grander and larger castle of Fredensborg. They even shared the bedroom they had used as girls.84 The house was crammed with Romanovs and Waleses and their suites, and twenty or thirty people sat down to dinner each night at five o’clock, which, complained Charlotte Knollys, made the evenings “dreadfully long.”85 It rained every day, and Charlotte found that “one day here is so exactly like the other that there really is nothing to tell.”86
Minnie’s husband the czarevitch Alexander arrived, bringing with him four yachts. Charlotte Knollys thought him “much improved in manners (he used to be rather rough).”87 Alix reported that he was “most amiable … sensible and by no means violent in politics.”88 When Bertie joined the party, arriving on board his own yacht Osborne, Queen Victoria worried that her indiscreet son would cause trouble with England’s archenemy. Bertie replied diplomatically: “I shall of course avoid politics as much as possible but as he married dear Alix’s sister whom I am very fond of, I am most anxious that our relations should not be strained.”89 The two brothers-in-law competed to entertain on their yachts. In Paris, on the journey home, they spent four days together, Bertie showing the czarevitch round the boulevards. Beaconsfield commented that Bertie had “come back very Russian, they say.”90
Back in England, Alix missed “my own angelic little Minnie.” Usually, she told Minnie, she could survive their separations, but this time, “I have been so miserable that everyone asks what is wrong with me, but it was only homesickness for you!!”91 She found herself talking aloud, imagining that she could hear Minnie’s voice speaking to her. “It is always a pleasure to me when somebody says our voices are alike and that we look like each other!”92 It was as if Minnie was the other half of herself, wearing the same clothes, speaking in the same voice. Having a doppelgänger made her feel secure.
At Sandringham, she rode her six horses every day and indulged her passion for hunting. This had to be kept secret from the Queen, who disapproved almost as strongly of princesses riding to hounds as she did of them breast-feeding, but Alix found it more thrilling each time, in spite of bloodcurdling falls. On one occasion, the horse jumped and “I silly animal lost my balance and flew over the wrong side, head down, thinking my last moment had come—but I got my head out of the sand and picked myself half up, then I talked to the horse, and then it stopped, the sweet animal—then one of the gentlemen, [Dighton] Probyn, jumped off and pushed me into the saddle and then everything was well and I hurried on!!!” Another time the horse jumped over a wide, deep ditch,
“but it jumped too short and put its head through a fence, getting so afraid that it went on its hind legs down into the ditch and there we walked up and down and I could not get it out.” Eventually it rolled out, and fortunately both horse and rider were unharmed. She implored Minnie, “Do not tell!”93
At Sandringham, Alix was adored. Mrs. Louise Cresswell, the lady farmer and tenant of Appleton House on the estate, worshipped her. Alix would visit for tea, driving herself over in her four-pony carriage. Mrs. Cresswell was an occasional guest at the Big House, but she was terrified of the prince. He was frighteningly unpredictable—a jovial figure in the ballroom, but a tyrannical Henry VIII on the estate. His black looks spelled disaster.
Mrs. Cresswell fought a running war against the estate office, complaining that the royal pheasants and hares ruined her crops, and the clash sharpened as agricultural depression deepened after the wet summer of 1879. “Every proprietor of land is ‘down in the mouth’ at present,” wrote Bertie, and Mrs. Cresswell complained that he showed her scant charity.94 In 1880, the bank foreclosed on Mrs. Cresswell and called in its loans. She later wrote a book describing her battles, entitled Eighteen Years on the Sandringham Estate (1887), in which she failed to mention the fact that she owed more than two years’ rent. As her debts grew, she became convinced that she was being persecuted by HRH. The estate was reluctant to evict her, but their offers to help were met by threats of lawsuits, wild accusations, and unreasonable demands for rent reductions.95 Bertie emerges if anything with credit from the episode, but Mrs. Cresswell was able to write a one-sided account, presenting herself as the innocent victim of HRH’s Germanic lust for shooting—an attack to which he was powerless to reply.
Bertie stayed at Hughenden with Beaconsfield for a night in January 1880. The court-loving prime minister fussed about the visit and the guest list for weeks beforehand. He threw a small dinner party, which was a triumph, and the next morning, while Bertie retired to write to Alix, dashed off an ecstatic report to Lady Bradford. Prince Hal had “praised the house, praised his dinner, praised the pictures; praised everything; was himself most agreeable in conversation, said some good things and told more.” The prince went to bed no later than midnight, and Major Teesdale the equerry told Beaconsfield that “in regard to late hours, eating, drinking, everything, there is a great and hugely beneficial change in his life.”96
