by Jane Ridley
It was George Lewis’s letter, effectively accusing her of sexual harassment, that prompted Daisy to seek an interview with Bertie. What happened next can be reconstructed with accuracy because Mina Beresford later wrote a detailed account for Lord Salisbury.10 That same night, at two a.m., Bertie drove round to Lewis’s home on Portland Place and demanded to see the letter Lady Brooke had written to Lord Charles Beresford. Flouting all professional etiquette, and without consulting his clients the Beresfords, the hapless lawyer “was prevailed upon” to obey the prince.11 He drove with the prince to his office on Ely Place, took the letter out of the box in the strong room, and showed it to HRH, but refused to allow him to keep it.12 It was the most controversial act in his entire career.
Bertie’s next move was to call upon Mina Beresford. In her words, he “ordered me forthwith to give the letter up to him!!” which she refused to do. George Lewis wrote another letter on Mina’s behalf to Daisy, telling her that if she stayed away from London that season, her letter would be returned. This was blackmail, and Daisy appealed again to the prince, who called on Mina a second time. On this occasion, she recalled, “he was anything but conciliatory in tone to me and even hinted that if I did not give him up the letter, my position in Society!! and Lord Charles’s would become injured!!”13
Daisy swiftly dropped Beresford in order to become the prince’s favorite. According to Mina: “Wherever he went, he desired she also should be invited, and invited she was, but to the disgust of everyone.”14
When Mina was put down for a house party, Daisy recalled, Bertie “simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it and wrote to the hostess that he thought it would be better for her not to meet the angry woman till she had cooled off.” Thenceforth, “my husband and I were down on the Prince’s ‘list.’ ”15 Brookey always came along too, playing the role of complaisant husband.
In 1889, Bertie stayed at a house party at Easton for Daisy’s birthday (10 December).16 It seems likely that this was the occasion when they became lovers. “How well I remember spending your birthday with you just 10 years ago at your old home,” he wrote in 1899, regretting that the “very warm feelings” they then shared had “cooled down.”17
When Charles Beresford discovered that Bertie had moved in on his own mistress, he demanded an interview at Marlborough House in January 1890, before setting off to sea in HMS Undaunted. According to his account, he told the prince “in no measured sentences” that bullying George Lewis into allowing him to see Daisy’s letter was “a most dishonourable and blackguard action.” Bertie, “being somewhat excited,” called Beresford a “blackguard” himself, whereupon the latter demonstrated “with some warmth and considerable clearness that there was only one blackguard in the case at all, and that was YRH who had dared to interfere in a private quarrel.”18 The two men—who had previously been intimate friends—came very close to blows. According to Daisy’s later and doubtless somewhat colored account, Bertie told Beresford that he must stop Mina from blabbing and that he must give up Daisy. Beresford became very angry and declared that he would never give Daisy up.
“ ‘You’re not her lover,’ cried the Prince.
“ ‘I am,’ the sea captain retorted, ‘and I’m not going to stop.’ ”†19
Whereupon Bertie seized the inkstand from the table and hurled it at Beresford’s head. Fortunately it missed, but Daisy claimed she saw the ink stain on the wall the next day.20
From then on, Bertie ostracized both Beresfords, Charlie and Mina, refusing to speak to them. The quarrel dragged on for another two years.
In July 1891, Alix invited Daisy to dinner at Marlborough House. Now that the Princess of Wales had received the “unabashed adventuress,” Mina decided to take her revenge.21 Her retaliation was deadly: She leaked the story.
She and her sister, Mrs. Gerald Paget, composed a pamphlet entitled “Lady River” (after Babbling Brooke, Daisy’s nickname). This gave scurrilous and possibly libelous details about Daisy’s various affairs, and reproduced her infamous letter to Charles Beresford. Throughout the summer of 1891, the typescript of “Lady River” circulated at country house parties, and readings from the pamphlet were eagerly attended.22 Daisy Brooke herself seemed blissfully unaware. Rumors reached Vicky in Germany—“I suppose there is no truth in Lady Brooke having a divorce,” she wrote.23 Daisy sailed serenely on. Carrington was captivated by her at a dinner in July. “Lady Brooke has developed into a very beautiful woman,” he wrote. “She has the great gift of appearing intensely interested in anything that concerns anyone she may be talking to: and though a desperate attempt has been made to ‘knock her out’ of Society, she will weather the storm yet: as she smiles on everybody and looks pleasant, and never abuses or says an unkind word of any human being.”24
Lord Charles Beresford held the office of Fourth Lord of the Admiralty (an appointment he owed to Bertie’s influence), and in July he appealed to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury. He sent Salisbury a draft letter he had written to the prince, accusing him of “instituting a species of social boycotting” against his wife. “The days of duelling are past but there is a more just way of getting right done in such cases than ever duelling supplied and that is publicity.”25 Salisbury, who regarded the affair as “sordid and pathetic,” dissuaded Beresford from sending the letter and tried to prevent him from going public by appealing to his sense of honor. Beresford, wrote Salisbury, owed a duty of honor to Daisy as his former mistress—“It must not be your face or hand that brings her into any disgrace because she yielded to you.”26
In December 1891, Beresford returned from the Mediterranean and dispatched another letter—even more furious—to the prince. Accusing Bertie of deliberately slighting his wife, he demanded a formal apology and blustered once again that he would make the scandal public.27 In threatening publicity, Beresford broke the golden rule of Marlborough House: No Scandal. “Whenever there was a threat of impending trouble,” Daisy later wrote, “pressure would be brought to bear, sometimes from the highest quarters, almost always successfully.”28 Mina Beresford wrote to the Queen. Alix now became involved, letting it be known that she was angry with Beresford, and she thought his letter to Bertie “disrespectful” and “improper.”
“She warmly supports the prince in everything connected with the unfortunate affair, and is anxious to do all in her power to assist him,” wrote Knollys.29
Arthur Balfour, Salisbury’s nephew and political protégé, believed that Beresford was playing a deep game. “I still have faith in Charlie’s acute perception of his own interests,” he told Salisbury. “At the same time I admit that when you have to deal with one woman who is mad with jealousy [Mina], another who is mad with spite [Daisy], and a man who is mad with vanity [Bertie], anything may happen.”30 Salisbury disagreed, dismissing Beresford as “a mere tool” in the hands of his wife.31 The quarrel reached deadlock because (as Schomberg McDonnell, Salisbury’s private secretary, wrote) “Nobody could approach Lady Brooke because the Prince of Wales would not allow it,” and, on the other hand, Mina Beresford “would agree to nothing which did not stipulate for the withdrawal of Lady Brooke from the Court and from London for at least a year.”32
The crisis came on 21 December 1891, when Beresford wrote yet another violent letter to Bertie.33 Salisbury proposed a compromise: Beresford should withdraw his letter in return for a letter of apology from Bertie. An exchange of letters took place on 24 December. A few weeks later, the “Lady River” pamphlet was ceremoniously burned.34
Bertie does not emerge from this tangled affair with much credit. He had protected Daisy Brooke, who had behaved outrageously, even by the standards of Marlborough House. By making her his mistress, he had himself behaved even more outrageously. As Beresford wrote: “Under our constitution Your Royal Highness’s sole duty is to guide and direct what is named society,” and this was compromised when the prince’s mistress happened to be involved in the quarrels he tried to arbitrate.35 Bertie pretended to be the inj
ured party and refused to accept that he was in any way at fault. He blamed Beresford, writing to the latter’s brother: “I can never forget, and shall never forgive, the conduct of your brother and his wife towards me. His base ingratitude, after a friendship of about 20 years, has hurt me more than words can say.”36 This seems a strangely one-sided view of friendship. The Beresfords were surely justified in retaliating when Bertie had interfered in their private affairs, almost broken their marriage, ostracized Mina, and stolen Charles Beresford’s mistress. Bertie’s talk of chivalry rings somewhat hollow.
Nor does his remorseless prosecution of the vendetta impress. He allowed the affair to split his court. Consuelo Mandeville was one of those who circulated the “Lady River” pamphlet, and this made Bertie extremely angry. He punished her by striking her name from the guest lists, refusing to speak to her for many years.‡37 “These American ladies talk too much,” he wrote, “and their indiscretions and inaccuracies are most annoying. Those who profess to [be] Lady B[rookes]’s best friends have shown their friendship in a very doubtful manner.”38 As Knollys remarked, Daisy had “cleared out ‘the American gang.’ ”39
Involving the prime minister in the quarrels of Marlborough House was not a good idea. A figure of immense physical bulk and massive intellectual authority, dreadfully badly dressed and contemptuous of fashion, Salisbury was a private man with strong family loyalties. Episodes such as this seemed to confirm his view that the Prince of Wales was inferior, both morally and intellectually.40 The Marlborough House set epitomized all that he thought rotten within the aristocracy. Salisbury’s Hatfield House was barred to Bertie except on official occasions; it was the only country house where he was not welcomed.41
By the end of the 1880s, Bertie’s finances had reached a crisis point. He was pestered by moneylenders, and in Paris the ubiquitous French police reported that the hotels where he stayed were ringed by hucksters.42 The Prince of Wales’s annuity from Parliament was fixed at £39,000. The income from the Duchy of Cornwall grew from £59,000 in 1881 to £64,500 in 1890, in spite of agricultural depression, but the prince’s gross income dropped from £122,000 in 1881 to £107,600 in 1890.43 The deficit was evidently yawning.
Gladstone’s secretary Edward Hamilton had urged his master as a matter of urgency to reform the prince’s finances in 1884. He considered that Gladstone was the only person who could do it. “A Tory administration would have the greatest possible difficulty about bringing the matter forward.” Gladstone, by contrast, “would be bound to be supported by the Opposition, would carry most of his own side with him, and would be able to stave off hostility from all but the very extremes.”44 Gladstone disagreed. Parliament, he warned, would be certain to insist on a commission of inquiry and would probably find “a total absence of economic management.”45 Bertie took the hint. He never asked for an increase in his allowance as Prince of Wales. He had no intention of inviting scrutiny of his affairs by Parliament.46
In 1889, the Queen appealed to Parliament for royal grants for the children of the Prince of Wales, in the light of the impending marriage of his eldest daughter and the coming-of-age of his sons. Parliament grudgingly voted the prince £36,000 per annum in trust for his children, as well as a capital sum of £60,000, but this came at a price: the most lengthy—and uninhibited—debate on the monarchy to take place during Victoria’s reign, with 134 voting against the grants.47 Bertie’s income was freely discussed, and some argued that from his £112,000 per annum he could well afford to pay for his children himself.48 Others declared that the Queen, whose Civil List income of £385,000 was topped up with £50,000 from the Duchy of Lancaster, ought to subsidize her son, as she had devolved upon him so many of the functions of the Crown.§ What exactly did the prince’s work consist of? asked Mr. Abraham, the radical MP for Glamorgan: On a typical day HRH held a levee, he unveiled a statue, he dined at the Mansion House, and he witnessed part of Figaro at Covent Garden—“And that, then, is a hard day’s work!”49
Rather than risk parliamentary criticism, Bertie’s solution was to borrow from financiers. “My dear Natty,” he wrote to Lord Rothschild in 1883, “I cannot find words too extreme [in] gratitude for your great kindness and liberality, which you may be convinced will never be forgotten by me.”50 Documents in the Rothschild archive evidence a private advance of £100,000 made to the prince in 1889, paid in cash and secured against title deeds. A further loan of £60,000 advanced on the Sandringham estates was made in 1893.51 Whether this money was ever repaid is not clear.
Another man who subsidized the Wales court was a self-made Scottish millionaire named James Mackenzie. The son of an Aberdeen stocking merchant who made one fortune in indigo in India and then another on Lombard Street, Mackenzie bought the Glenmuick estate (29,500 acres) bordering on Balmoral in 1869. Bertie and his sons nicknamed him MacTavish, and treated him as a cross between a factotum and a sugar daddy. The grouse shooting at Glenmuick was good, and Mackenzie was generous with invitations to Bertie’s friends and relations.52 Bertie wrote asking him to place bets for him on racehorses.53 Mackenzie owned Sunningdale Park, which the prince borrowed for several years for Ascot races. An 1887 letter from Bertie to Mackenzie gives a sense of the relationship: “When I saw you a week ago did I understand you rightly when you said we might occupy Sunningdale Park for Ascot Races this year? as you did not intend entertaining. If so it would be most kind of you to lend it to us—as it is a charming house and such a pretty place, only pray do not hesitate to refuse if it is inconvenient to you.”54 Though not exactly a command, such a request was hardly possible to refuse. From at least 1884 Mackenzie lent the prince large amounts of money, secured against the title deeds of the Sandringham estate.55 There is a family story that when Mackenzie died in 1890, having been created a baronet in the nick of time, Knollys appeared at his house, and the deeds were hastily handed over.56 The money owed to Mackenzie was rumored to be a staggering £250,000, and the trustees were obliged to call in the debt, causing consternation at Marlborough House. Enter the Austrian Jewish financier Baron Maurice de Hirsch. According to Lord Derby: “Hirsch seized the opportunity to pay off the debt, make the Prince his debtor, and so secure for himself a social position.”57
Hirsch was much richer than Mackenzie, whose will was proved at £694,731. No one knew for sure how rich Hirsch was, but his wealth was estimated at well over £20 million. Descended from a family of Bavarian court bankers, “Turkish Hirsch” had joined the Brussels banking house of Bischoffsheim, married the boss’s daughter, and then made another fortune out of the Orient Express, punching a railway through the Balkans from Vienna to Istanbul.58 Throughout 1890 Baron Hirsch, with his waxed Hercule Poirot–like mustaches, was constantly at Bertie’s side. His influence over the Prince of Wales, wrote Derby, “was a puzzle to society, since he is neither a gentleman, nor reputed altogether honest.”59 Hirsch rented luxurious Bath House in Piccadilly, as well as a country house near Sandringham, and Grafton House near Newmarket. Egged on by the prince, he bought the racehorse La Fleche from the Royal Stud for a record price of 5,500 guineas. La Fleche went on to win £34,700 in prize money, all of which Hirsch gave to hospitals (Bertie, by contrast, tended to give his racing winnings to mistresses).60 Bertie was “dreadfully annoyed” when Victoria refused to invite Hirsch to a state concert at Buckingham Palace, and the Queen remained suspicious of the baron, complaining that Bertie accepted too much of his hospitality.61
Hirsch entertained Bertie at St. Johann, his vast shooting estate in the sandy plains of Hungary. The anti-Semitic Austrian archdukes gasped when the prince became the guest of a Jew. Bertie thought St. Johann “an unpretentious house but most comfortable”—the more so as Jennie Churchill was among the guests.62 The shooting was spectacular, though Bertie was as usual dissatisfied with his own performance. “I never saw so much game in my life,” he wrote, “but there is nothing the least tame about it.”63 Six hundred beaters formed a circle seven miles in circumference, converging on the shooters,
who stood sixty yards apart, each gun stationed in a box walled in with fir branches to ensure that shots were fired safely into the air.64 The party killed an obscene total of twenty thousand head of game in ten days, mainly partridges. This, Bertie told Georgie, “certainly beats everything on record and will quite spoil one for any shooting at home.”65 At Sandringham, Bertie copied the design of Hirsch’s game larder, which was the biggest in the world, capable of holding seven thousand birds.66
“We resented the introduction of Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,” wrote Daisy Brooke, “not because we disliked them … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class we did not like brains. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not the making of it.”67 Reactionaries sneered at the prince’s Jewish court, while Bertie’s defenders praised his broad-mindedness. But for Bertie, the munificence of men such as Rothschild and Hirsch was as much a matter of financial survival as social inclusiveness. Rewarding them with recognition was the very least he could do. These men had saved Marlborough House from disaster.
Bertie’s admission of Jewish plutocrats to court was unique. In no other Western country were Jews accepted as leaders of society.‖
On 27 July 1889 Bertie gave away his eldest daughter, Louise, who married his friend Lord Fife in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. Marie Adeane, one of Queen Victoria’s maids of honor, noted that Alix “looked as usual much younger than the bride, but rather tired.” Lord Fife lost his way in the “Have and to hold” sentence so the archbishop had to repeat it, and there was “a good deal of fumbling with the ring but there were no tears and very little agitation.”68 When his sister Louise had married Lord Lorne in 1871, Bertie had objected that marriage with a subject was “lowering to the royal family,” but he was delighted with his daughter’s match, telling Vicky that “they have been devoted to one another for two years but he was too shy to propose.”69 The issues of protocol, however, caused Bertie concern, and at his insistence, Victoria reluctantly agreed to promote Fife from earl to duke.70 Fife was well known to the Paris demimonde, who dubbed him “le petit Ecossais roux qui a toujours la queue en l’air.”71 That the twenty-two-year-old Louise, a shy, plain girl who had led a secluded life, was being married off to a dissipated man eighteen years her senior seemed not to weigh upon the prince’s mind.
