The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (24 page)

Elinor Glyn was full of admiration for the adroit way in which Lady Brooke organised the sexual liaisons, or 'amusements', which were so important a feature of these country house parties. 'Supposing,' she explains, 'you had settled to meet the person who was amusing you in the saloon, say, at eleven, you went there casually at the agreed time, dressed to go out, and found your cavalier awaiting you. Sometimes Lady Brooke would be there too, but she always sensed whether this was an arranged meeting or an accidental one. If it was intended, she would say graciously that Stone Hall, her little Elizabethan pleasure house in the Park, was a nice walk before lunch, and thus make it easy to start. Should some strangers who did not know the ropes happen to be there, too, and show signs of accompanying you on the walk, she would immediately engage them in conversation until you had got safely away.'
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If all these manoeuvrings cost a great deal of effort, then all this entertaining cost a great deal of money. Although hosts like the Rothschilds or the Devonshires (who were known to have up to as many as 470 people, guests and servants, at Chatsworth on occasions) could afford it, others could not. But this seldom stopped them. 'I could tell stories of men and woman who had to economise for a whole year, or alternatively, get into debt,' says
Daisy, 'that they might entertain Royalty for one weekend.'
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A member of this unhappy band was Christopher Sykes. One of the Prince's closest companions, the affable Sykes was a notorious snob. His reverence for his royal friend was so obsequious as to be ludicrous. His servile response – 'As Your Royal Highness pleases' – when, in one of his more boorish moods, the Prince emptied a glass of brandy over Sykes's head, became a catch-phrase with the Marlborough House set. In fact, so often had poor Sykes done as His Royal Highness pleased – so often had he given parties at the Prince's bidding or entertained the Prince's friends at Brantingham Thorpe – that, by the end of the 1880s, he was almost bankrupt. Declaring this to be a 'thoroughly bad business'
²⁶
(bankruptcy was regarded as the most heinous of crimes) the Prince paid off some of his more pressing debts.

Time did, though, bring in some of its revenges when, in September 1890, the Prince of Wales paid his customary visit to Doncaster for the St Leger races. In the ordinary way he would have stayed with Sykes at Brantingham Thorpe, but as his friend could no longer afford this dubious honour, the Prince was put up by one of his new acquaintances, the rich ship-owner, Arthur Wilson, at his huge, 'Italianate' home, Tranby Croft.

And it was at Tranby Croft that the Prince became embroiled in a gambling scandal that was to cause him some of the greatest unhappiness he had ever known.

The country, Queen Victoria once said, 'could never bear to have George IV as Prince of Wales over again.'
²⁷
The particular profligacy of that profligate Prince and King to which the Queen was referring was gambling. But alas, in this matter, as in so many others, Queen Victoria's heir fulfilled her apprehensions: Bertie was an enthusiastic gambler. He bet heavily on horses and played cards for high stakes, with baccarat having recently become his favourite game. Wherever he went, he took his own set of baccarat counters, engraved with the Prince of Wales's feathers and varying in denomination from five shillings to ten pounds: ten pounds being equivalent to five months' wages for an agricultural labourer on Daisy Brooke's estates, or two hundred and fifty pounds today.

This fondness for baccarat was to lead, directly, to one of the most celebrated trials of the Victorian age; a trial in which the Prince, and to a lesser extent Lady Brooke, were involved.

The Wilsons of Tranby Croft, in their ecstacy at having landed the
Prince of Wales as their guest for the Doncaster races, quite naturally invited his friends as well. Chief amongst these were Lord and Lady Brooke. But unhappily, the death of Daisy's step-father, the cultivated Lord Rosslyn, on 6 September 1980, prevented them from accepting the invitation. Another of the guests, who
was
able to accept, was Sir William Gordon-Cummings, of the Scots Guards, a man whom Daisy describes as 'the smartest of men about town'.
²⁸

Sir William was not quite smart enough, apparently, to conceal the fact that he was cheating at baccarat on the first evening of the Prince's stay. The next evening he was again caught cheating and, on being accused, agreed to sign a document to the effect that he would never again play cards as long as he lived. He was signing it, he made clear, without admitting guilt and on the understanding that the affair would be kept strictly secret. This somewhat schoolboyish pact having been concluded, the house party broke up.

To expect a dozen or so guests at a house party to keep their mouths shut on such a matter was being very optimistic, particularly when one of the guests was prone, as Queen Victoria put it, 'to let everything
out
'.
²⁹
Indeed, no sooner had the Prince of Wales met Lord and Lady Brooke at York station, on their way north to her step-father's funeral in Scotland, than he was telling Daisy all about it. Daisy, in turn, passed the story on to her relations at the funeral. Or so rumour has it. But true or not – and Daisy always vigorously denied having spread the story – everyone believed that it was Lady Brooke who let this particularly vicious cat out of the bag. For the rest of her days, Daisy was to be branded as 'The Babbling Brook'.

Once the pact of secrecy had been broken, Sir William Gordon-Cumming instructed his solicitors to bring an action for libel against his accusers. Chief among them, of course, was the Prince of Wales. Frantic efforts were made to keep the Prince out of court – some suggested a private military inquiry, others an inquiry at the Guards Club – but, in the end, a civil action became inevitable.

The trial, which opened on 1 June 1891 and lasted for nine days, was sensational: it was almost as though the Prince of Wales were on trial. For all nine days he sat in court under the critical gaze of a huge crowd who listened avidly to the description of what sounded to them like very dissolute goings-on; when he did finally give evidence, he cut a very poor figure. And although in fact Gordon-Cumming lost his action, it was the Prince who emerged, in the eyes of the public, as the guilty party. The jury, who had declared against Gordon-Cumming,
was hissed; the Prince was loudly booed at that month's Ascot; and the newspapers gave themselves over to an orgy of pious moralising.

The
Review of Reviews –
reflecting, it claimed, the opinions of various country gentlemen – condemned the Prince not only as a gambler but 'as a wastrel and whoremonger'.
³⁰
The Times
'profoundly regretted that the Prince should have been in any way mixed up, not only in the case, but in the social circumstances which prepared the way for it.'
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Queen Victoria, needless to say, was appalled. 'It is a fearful humiliation to see the future King of this country dragged through the dirt . . .' she wailed to her eldest daughter, now the Empress Frederick. 'I feel it a terrible humiliation, and so do all the people. It is very painful and must do his prestige great harm. Oh! if only it is a lesson for the future.'
³²

In an attempt to limit the damage to the Prince's reputation, various courses of action were proposed. Could not the government make some sort of pronouncement in the Prince's favour? This suggestion was scotched, very firmly, by Lord Salisbury, who had by now succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister. The private morals of the Prince of Wales were not the concern of the British government, he said. His worldly advice was for the Prince to avoid baccarat for six months and for him then to write a letter to some indiscreet friend – who would immediately publish it – to the effect that the trial had shown him the error of his ways and that he no longer allowed baccarat to be played in his presence.

The Queen had a less devious proposal. The Prince should write an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, expressing his strong disapproval of gambling. This ingenuous idea was rejected by both the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales.

In the end, Bertie wrote a private letter to the Archbishop in which he blandly expressed his 'horror of gambling' which he considered to be, along with intemperance, 'one of the greatest curses that a country can be afflicted with'.
³³

And from then on, instead of playing baccarat for money, His Royal Highness played bridge for money.

The Tranby Croft trial finished poor Gordon-Cumming. He was dismissed from the army, expelled from all his clubs and socially ostracised. He lived on, in unhappy seclusion, until 1930. Daisy Brooke, whose babbling was said to have led directly to the trial, afterwards claimed that she considered him 'more sinned against than sinning' and that 'after he had cut us all off in his retirement', she 'often
had sad thoughts of him' but that she 'always kept a warm corner in my heart for him'.
³⁴

As a refuge from the storms of public opinion there was always Sandringham. Nowhere did the Prince of Wales feel more at home than on his Norfolk estate. He had bought the property at the time of his marriage and, until his death almost fifty years later, he remained devoted to it. Indeed, for almost a century it was the royal family's favourite country home. George V and his son, George VI – who died at Sandringham in 1952 – both loved the estate; the entire royal family would gather there for Christmas. But Queen Elizabeth II, who spent her wartime girlhood in Windsor Castle, tends to regard that ancient fortress-castle as home, with the result that Sandringham has slipped in popularity and importance as a royal residence. The great royal Christmas jamboree now takes place at Windsor.

But in its heyday – during the Prince of Wales's years as king-in-waiting and his reign as Edward VII – Sandringham was one of the country's great social centres. No home better mirrored Bertie's particular lifestyle; it was here that he was seen at his most typical.

Not everyone, though, shared the Prince's uncritical devotion to Sandringham. Many of his guests found the Norfolk countryside flat and featureless. Victorians dearly loved a dramatic, romantic landscape; Swiss scenery, with its mountains and its lakes and its waterfalls, was their ideal. But failing that, they liked rolling, pretty, heavily wooded countryside, with a glitter of water between the trees.

There was, sighed one of Princess Alexandra's ladies, 'no attraction of any sort or kind. There are numerous coverts but no fine woods, large unclosed turnip fields, with an occasional haystack to break the line of the horizon. It would be difficult to find a more ugly or desolate-looking place . . .'
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The wind off the Wash was like a knife. The house, too, was hideous. The original Georgian mansion had been completely reconstructed in what was loosely termed the 'Elizabethan style': the result was a vast, sprawling, many-gabled pile of dark orange brick, looking more like a station hotel or the home of some
nouveau riche
industrialist than the country seat of a future king. 'As there was all England to choose from,' wailed the same lady-in-waiting, 'I do wish they had had a finer house in a more picturesque and cheerful situation.'
³⁶

Even Disraeli, who could usually be relied upon to make some flattering comment, confined himself to saying that visiting the Prince
at Sandringham was rather like visiting one of 'the Dukes and Princes of the Baltic: a vigorous marine air, stunted fir forests . . .'
³⁷
But then, as much as Queen Victoria hated the heat, Disraeli hated the cold.

The interior of the house was, if anything, worse. There were no really impressive rooms; arriving guests would be led directly into the main hall in which, more often than not, the royal family would be sitting down to tea. The house was furnished in the worst contemporary taste: the rooms were a cheerful clutter of sentimental paintings, plush-covered furniture, mounted animals' heads, suits of armour, display cabinets stuffed with china, tables crammed with ornaments and photographs, what-nots loaded with bric-à-brac. One had to look very closely, claims one of the Prince's biographers, to appreciate 'that those toy figures of animals were not trinkets from a parish bazaar but Fabergé creations sent by the Tsar of all the Russias'.
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There was even a big stuffed baboon standing beside the front door supporting, on its outstretched paws, a silver salver for visitors' cards.

But what Sandringham might have lacked in elegance it made up for in warmth. Its atmosphere was welcoming, cheerful and relatively informal; one was always made to feel at home. 'While a very spacious house, Sandringham is not palatial,' wrote Lillie Langtry, 'but, what is far better, it gives one the idea of being thoroughly liveable and comfortable . . . '
³⁹
And Daisy Brooke claimed that guests, no matter how illustrious, were always treated as personal friends. The Prince 'would impose no restraint upon those who came to visit him in his capacity as a country gentleman.'
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Quite often, guests would be shown to their rooms by the Prince or the Princess themselves. On one occasion Lord Fisher, wanting to avoid the other arrivals in the hall, slipped upstairs and started unpacking. As he stood with a boot in each hand, he heard someone fumbling with the door handle. Assuming it to be a footman, he shouted, 'Come in, don't go humbugging with the door handle!' But in walked his host, 'with a cigar about a yard long in his mouth'.

'What on earth are you doing?' he asked.

'Unpacking, Sir,' answered Fisher.

'Where's your servant?'

'Haven't got one, Sir.'

'Where is he?'

'Never had one, Sir; couldn't afford it.'

'Put those boots down; sit in that armchair.'
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So the two of them sat, one on each side of the fire, chatting so animatedly that they were almost late for dinner.