Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter

by Lucinda Hawksley

  For Bertie and Alix, the year was a mixture of happiness and anger. In the same month that their daughter Louise married the Earl of Fife, their eldest son, Prince Eddy, the future King of England, was implemented in sexual impropriety: the Cleveland Street Scandal. This was not an exploit of which Bertie would have approved, as it involved a male brothel. When the police raided 19 Cleveland Street in central London, several aristocratic men were suspected to have been inside the brothel. The story was suppressed, so the names of only two were reported by the press: the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Euston. (The former fled overseas, but the Earl of Euston successfully sued the reporter who had named him.) Although Prince Eddy was not mentioned as having been there at the time, it was rumoured that he had visited the brothel before. Whether there is any truth in this is debatable; it is possible that his name was mentioned simply to blackmail Bertie into having the scandal suppressed. Whatever Eddy’s involvement (or lack of it), the most damning aspect of the case was that the disgraced Earl of Somerset was Eddy’s equerry and a close friend of the royal family. In addition, Bertie was known to have attempted to suppress the information about Somerset. People were convinced there had been a cover-up when the two rent boys, convicted of the crime of sodomy, were handed surprisingly lenient sentences. Although no newspapers in Britain named Prince Eddy, the papers overseas were happy to do so.

  The month after the Cleveland Street Scandal, the new Emperor Wilhelm arrived in England, and his family attempted to treat him with civility. He was full of his own importance, now that he had succeeded his father, and Bertie – reminded once too often of his subservience to his mother – in particular found him very trying. Louise was caught in the middle between her brother, whom she adored, and the nephew who described her as his ‘favourite aunt’.

  At this difficult time, art was the one thing that was keeping Louise happy. She had been thrilled when the collector Henry Tate offered his enviable collection of modern British art, including works by some of her close friends, to the nation, in 1889 – although initially the nation was not at all grateful. The wealthy Tate found himself in the surprising position of having to persuade the nation to accept his generous gift. It was only three years later – after he had offered to build a gallery in which to house his works, at his own expense – that the nation accepted what is now recognised as one of the most important art collections in the world. (Henry Tate’s gallery is now known as Tate Britain.) While Tate was making his generous offer, Louise and her circle of artistic friends were greatly saddened by the inevitable demise of the Grosvenor Gallery. The Palace of Aesthetic Art was a victim of the failed marriage between Lady Blanche and Sir Coutts Lindsay and its doors closed for the last time in 1890. At this time, Louise’s work and her relationship with Boehm were the stabilising influences in what seemed in many ways to be a hectic and unhappy life, but that stable part of her world was about to change, dramatically, tragically – and in what appears to have been a mysterious scandal.

  CHAPTER 22

  The princess and the sculptor

  The sculptor Alfred Gilbert, who occupied a studio in the same premises, added his weight to their concocted story by taking responsibility for finding the body. Princess Louise championed him for the rest of his turbulent life.

  Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle, 1999

  Just before Christmas 1890, London was shocked by the sudden and unexpected death of Joseph Edgar Boehm. The Sculptor in Ordinary to the queen, who died in his studio, was only fifty-six. The story of his death was made even more newsworthy by early reports that his body had been found by Princess Louise. The newspapers, however, were confused by the order of events, and within a few days several versions of the sculptor’s last moments had been published. Was it the princess who discovered the body, or was it Alfred Gilbert, whose studio was next door to Boehm’s? Did Louise and Gilbert arrive together and find Boehm at the same time? Was the princess in the room with Boehm when he died? If the princess arrived on her own, how had she managed to get into the studio? Was it true that the princess had sent her lady-in-waiting away before she found her tutor’s body and, if so, why? The Truth newspaper, which loved a good scandal, rubbished the official version, printed in The Times, that Louise could have entered the studio and found Boehm dead; it pointed out that the innovative lock on the door made that an impossibility. Below is a small selection of the reports demonstrating how newspapers around the country covered the event:

  Manchester Courier 13 December 1890

  Death of Sir Edgar Boehm, the sculptor

  Sir Edgar Boehm, Bart., R.A., the famous sculptor, died suddenly last evening at his studio, in the Fulham-road, London. Princess Louise called by appointment at a quarter to six o’clock, attended by Mr. Gilbert, the artist, and they entered the studio unannounced to find Sir Edgar dead in his chair. The Princess who was deeply affected, and terribly shocked by the dreadful occurrence, hurriedly left the studio, and a doctor was called, who found that Sir Edgar had been dead for some time.

  Gloucester Citizen 13 December 1890

  Sudden death of Sir E. Boehm – Princess Louise finds the body

  Sir Edgar Boehm, R.A., the eminent sculptor, was discovered in his studio, in Fulham-road, London, on Friday evening. The discovery was made by the Princess Louise, who went to the studio to inspect a bust of herself, and entering unannounced was terribly shocked to find the distinguished sculptor dead in his chair.

  London Standard Saturday 13 December 1890

  Sir Edgar Boehm, Bart, R.A., sculptor to her Majesty the Queen, died suddenly last evening at about a quarter to six. The body of the deceased sculptor was found in his studio first by Princess Louise (Marchioness of Lorne). Princess Louise, who used to study the art of sculpture with Sir Edgar at his studio, 76, The Avenue, Fulham-road, paid occasional visits to Sir Edgar, and arrived last evening shortly before six o’clock, having previously intimated her intention to Sir Edgar. As is customary with Royal visitors, her Royal Highness walked straight to the studio, and was horrified to see the lifeless form of her late instructor. Her Royal Highness immediately proceeded to the adjoining studio of Mr. Gilbert, A.R.A., and Mr. Gilbert returned to the studio with the Princess. Finding that the fears of her Royal Highness were apparently correct, he sent without delay for Dr. Macaskie, of Sydney-place, South Kensington, and the deceased’s solicitor, Mr. Jno. Gascotte, of Onslow-square, W.

  Whitstable Times 20 December 1890

  On Friday evening Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, R.A., the distinguished sculptor, was discovered dead in his studio at the Avenue, 76 Fulham-road. The discovery was made by no less a personage than her Royal Highness Princess Louise, who went to the studio by appointment, about a quarter to 6 o’clock to inspect a bust of herself which had just been finished by this famous sculptor. As this time all the workpeople employed at the place had gone, and there being free access to the studio from a corridor, her Royal Highness, after tapping at the door, was startled beyond description on entering to find Sir Edgar Boehm dead in his chair, no one else being in the room. Her Royal Highness, who was much alarmed, at once rushed to an adjoining studio occupied by Mr. Gilbert, A.R.A., and they both returned together. Dr. McCaskie was quickly summoned from Sydney-place close by, and on his arrival pronounced life extinct. Princess Louise was terribly shocked at the occurrence, and afterwards drove away greatly affected.

  Lancaster Gazette Saturday 27 December 1890

  I hear on good authority that H.R.H. the Princess Louise went to Sir Edgar Boehm’s studio by appointment, and unattended by a lady or a gentleman. She discussed some of the sculptor’s latest work with him, and he turned to fetch a bust or something else to show her. The Princess remained studying his latest work, and stood with her back to him. Suddenly she heard a noise and turned to see its cause, when she discovered that the sculptor had fallen close to the sofa. Her Royal Highness showed great presence of mind by unfastening his collar before seeking assistance. Such is the version of
this deplorable event that has reached me.

  The differences in these reports demonstrate how, even within a few days, rumours were already starting to circulate about the circumstances of the sculptor’s sudden death. Even those who didn’t know Boehm’s name knew his works; these included the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, the monument to the Duke of Kent, the popular statue of Thomas Carlyle, and something that everyone in Victoria’s Britain had seen: the 1887 jubilee coin depicting the queen.1

  Boehm’s death was unexpected and shocking. He was a fit, seemingly healthy man with pronounced muscles from his years of hard, physical work; he could have been expected to live well into his eighties. From the very beginning, the story of what had happened was being garbled – some reports state that Louise went in alone, some that she was already in the studio with him when he collapsed, others that she immediately ran to the next-door studio to Alfred Gilbert, and in some versions that she and Alfred Gilbert had entered the studio together to find Boehm dead. One official view of the day of his death, as the queen wrote in her journal,2 was that Louise had gone to visit Boehm at his studio on Fulham Road, with her lady-in-waiting. The queen wrote that Louise and her lady-in-waiting had entered Boehm’s studio and found him dead and that Louise had gone to fetch the doctor. Contradicting itself, the journal also states that the initial version of events as reported in the newspaper was not true and that ‘poor Louise’ had not been the person to find him dead.

  Several years later, the account had been changed to such an extent that Louise didn’t even make an appearance, with the person who found the body being named as Alfred Gilbert, and Louise turning up much later. On Boehm’s death certificate, it is stated that Alfred Gilbert was the person who had found the body. That there were so many versions of the sculptor’s death, from the very beginning, made it apparent that something was being covered up. In letters to concerned (and disapproving) family friends, Louise protested that she had not been alone as the papers had suggested, that she had been with her lady-in-waiting and all was therefore entirely respectable. She blamed the story on salacious journalists not getting their facts right. Yet this in itself contradicts the story in the queen’s own journal which claims Louise wasn’t in the studio to find him.3 A letter written by Louise a few weeks after Boehm’s death to the Dowager Duchess of Atholl also supports this view:

  It was a terrible shock, doubly so as he was quite well when he met me in the long passage: as you see I did not go (unattended and unannounced) as all the papers pleased to say. Lady Sophia and I were talking to him some 20 minutes and then Sophia said ‘as your carriage will be here in a minute I think I will walk home’ and in much less than 5 I heard that awful cry. Sir Edgar had carried a bust to show me wh I entreated him not to, also pushed some heavy things & he must have overexerted himself. It was found to be aneurism of the heart.

  The very first version of events – that Louise arrived to visit Boehm and went unannounced into his studio, where she found him dead – had to be changed after people who knew the studios started musing about it. They wondered how Louise had managed to enter the studio if Boehm was already dead; his studio was one of a group of artists’ studios on Fulham Road and it was well known that they were all fitted with a new type of lock, which locked automatically when the door was shut. Any visitor would either need a key or need the person inside to open the door for them. Louise could not simply have opened the door and walked in. Alfred Gilbert was good friends with both Boehm and Louise. This was why the story began to be changed, and why later reports state that Louise arrived for her intended visit to her tutor and found Gilbert at Boehm’s studio, where he had discovered his friend’s body. Louise and Gilbert remained close friends and she helped promote his career to the end of her life. Like so many of Louise’s male friends’ wives (or girlfriends), Gilbert’s wife became increasingly jealous of how much time her husband spent with Louise, famously calling her ‘that tiresome princess’. The Dictionary of National Biography writes of Gilbert’s later career: ‘After Boehm’s death … Gilbert emerged as the most famous sculptor in England … he was a picturesque character of the 1890s in his flamboyant black cape, felt sombrero and walking stick.’

  In The Holland Park Circle, Caroline Dakers points out that, following Boehm’s death, Louise gave Gilbert even more help than she had done before. In the 1920s, after he had declared himself bankrupt, Louise had her studio at Kensington Palace converted so that Gilbert could live and work there. Gilbert’s biographer Adrian Bury describes it as ‘the last, most secure and peaceful home of his life’. Louise was a renowned patron of the arts and artists, it was not at all unusual that she should help out those she knew were struggling, yet there was no other artist for whom the princess found accommodation within her own royal palace. There are very strong suggestions that Louise was expressing her gratitude for Gilbert’s having helped to save both her and Boehm’s reputations and for helping to staunch the flow of gossip. Letters written by Gilbert’s first biographer, a Scottish journalist named Isabel McAllister, to her friend Marlon Harry Spielmann survive in the Royal Academy’s archives. McAllister wrote that Princess Louise had been an ‘invaluable friend’ to Gilbert, that she had attended to his final wishes and had visited him the day before he died.

  Those who have attempted to write about Boehm are often frustrated by the lack of material available. According to his biographer Mark Stocker this is because of the ‘sensational circumstances of Boehm’s death … for his executors destroyed all but a handful of his personal papers’. Within a very short time, the gossips of London’s artistic world were whispering that Louise had been with Boehm when he died and that he had died from the exertion of making love to her.

  In 1952, archivists at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge opened a box that had been bequeathed to them thirty years previously. The box contained private papers and diaries from the diplomat and diarist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt who had died in 1922. Blunt had left the box to the Fitzwilliam with a condition stipulating that it should not be opened for another three decades; he knew much of its contents would be considered historically explosive. In 1952 the curators read through his legacy for the first time. After analysing the papers, they made the decision to keep the contents of the box hidden from members of the public for another twenty years. Since 1972, the papers have been available to researchers, but much of what is in them is still little known as the diaries have never been fully indexed and researchers need to know what they’re looking for before requesting one of the many volumes.

  Blunt’s diaries are fascinating: they are politically acute, forward thinking and laced with the type of Victorian scandal that today’s gossip magazines would envy. Blunt had travelled widely and was far less inhibited than many of his contemporaries; his years of living overseas had allowed him a far greater freedom than those of his era who remained within the confines of British Victorian society. Blunt was interested in world religions and was unusually understanding of other cultures for a man of his time; one of his books is entitled The Future of Islam. He campaigned for Irish Home Rule and for Egyptian Independence. Blunt’s many correspondents included Jane Morris,4 T.E. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, Winston Churchill and Lord Alfred Douglas (about whose literary efforts and personality Blunt is often scathing).5 Through his friendship with ‘Skittles’ – Bertie’s former mistress, Catherine Walters, who had revealed the scandalous story of Louise and John Brown at Balmoral – Blunt found himself on the periphery of the royal circle and the receiver of many royal secrets. These secrets came to Skittles via one of the royal doctors, Sir Francis Laking, who was personal physician to Bertie (King Edward VII by the time of Blunt’s later diaries).

  During King Edward VII’s reign, his former lover was elderly and ill and was having radium treatment for cancer. Blunt visited her regularly, as did Laking and, until his death, the poet Swinburne. Skittles loved talking to Blunt about her life, knowing that he was as unshockable as she
and that he was recording everything she said in his diaries (in which Blunt always refers to Skittles as ‘XX’). On 4 June 1909 Blunt begins his account with the words:

  Called on XX whom I found almost convalescent, the radium treatment having been pronounced a success so far … We got onto the subject of the sculptor Boehm and his death and burial … The story is so important historically that I cross-questioned her pretty closely as to test its accuracy and found that in all essentials it held well together and was the same that she had given me so long ago.

  Boehm had also been one of Skittles’s lovers and through him she had been introduced to many of the most prominent artists of the day. She described the sculptor as having been ‘very good looking and distinguished in manner’ and told Blunt that Boehm had admitted to her that he had been so very impoverished as a student in Paris that he had barely been able to afford to eat. She said once he moved to England, he had started to enjoy success, and that the queen had wanted to commission Boehm not simply because of his talent, but primarily because he spoke German. Boehm was also commissioned by Bertie to sculpt an Aesthetic-style naked statue of Skittles, as the Venus de Milo. She stood for the sculpture in a seductive pose, with her arms thrust back behind her head and her breasts jutting forward.