The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (25 page)

The kaleidoscopic nature of the company never ceased to amaze the Prince's more conventional guests. He flung them all together: aristocrats, clergymen, politicians, sportsmen, diplomats, financiers, soldiers, industrialists. The young Tsarevich, afterwards Tsar Nicholas II, visiting Sandringham at this time, wrote home to St Petersburg to complain about the composition of the house party. 'Most of them were horse dealers, among others a Baron Hirsch [to meet a Jew socially was regarded as unthinkable in the Russian imperial family]. I tried to keep away as much as I could, and not to talk.'
⁴²

Sandringham saw the introduction of other social changes as well. Lady Brooke says that it was the Prince, with his preference for female company, who set the example of leaving the table almost immediately after dinner to join the ladies. His introduction of cigarette smoking after the meal 'killed the claret habit'. After the first whiff or two it was difficult, she says, 'to tell a good wine from bad, and champagne speedily took the place of Bordeaux'.
⁴³
Yet when a newspaper once castigated the Prince for giving champagne suppers to his lady friends, his scathing comment was that champagne was for the
demi-monde;
what he gave his ladies at night was whisky and soda.

Bridge was another of the things he helped popularise. 'Your brother Rosslyn is trying to introduce a new form of whist, called Bridge,' the Prince once wrote to Daisy. 'It does not appear to be particularly interesting, and I do not think it will be popular.'
⁴⁴
Yet, within a few years, he had developed into an enthusiastic and skilful bridge player.

Life at Sandringham was permeated, above all, by the Prince's undiminished sense of fun. Few people, noted Daisy's half-sister, Lady Angela Forbes, had more
joie de vivre
than the Prince of Wales. 'He enjoyed himself with the infectious gaiety of a schoolboy. That indefinable, but undeniable, gift of youth remained with him all his life.'
⁴⁵
It remained, to an even greater extent, with the Princess of Wales. Not only did Princess Alexandra look untouched by time, she acted as though she were still a young bride. The rooms rang with laughter as the company, led by their host and hostess, played their childish games: tobogganing down the carpeted stairs on silver trays, racing their tricycles round the ballroom, crouching behind sofas for hide-and-seek.

Practical jokes were especially popular; humour was always of the slap-stick variety. 'If anyone caught his foot in a mat, or nearly fell into the fire or out of the window,' sighs one long-suffering observer, 'the mirth of the royal family knew no bounds.'
⁴⁶
Why bother thinking up
a witty remark when a finger caught in the door will bring forth gales of laughter?

The Prince was particularly fond of dancing. (And so, more surprisingly, was Queen Victoria; the public would have been astonished at the vigour with which the Widow of Windsor danced with John Brown at the Gillies' Ball at Balmoral.) At the three annual Sandringham balls – the County, the Farmers' and the Servants' – Bertie enjoyed himself immensely. 'He was his own Master of Ceremonies,' noted one guest, 'signalling and sending messages to the band, arranging every dance and when to begin and when to leave off. . . he looked as if he could have gone on all night and into the middle of next week.'
⁴⁷

But it was for its shooting that the Prince of Wales enjoyed Sandringham most. It was a sport which, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was practised to an extent which seems hardly credible today. For most Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen, not least among them Lord Brooke, shooting was almost a
raison d'être;
their lives were organised around the shooting seasons. The 'glorious twelfth' of August, which marked the opening of the grouse season, was regarded as almost sacrosanct. Fortunes were spent on improving the game on the great estates; records were solemnly kept and achievements endlessly discussed; the daily 'bags' of slaughtered birds and animals could be enormous; gun rooms were like shrines.

The Prince of Wales's brother, Prince Alfred, on a colonial tour, once took part in a hunt of wild animals which an officer in attendance describes as 'that glorious day when we killed six hundred head of game, all larger than horses'. Firing into the bewildered and stampeding herds, Prince Alfred alone shot over twenty-five head of game. 'Most of the sportsmen looked more like butchers than sportsmen, from being so covered in blood,' wrote the same exhilarated officer. 'His Royal Highness was red up to the shoulders from using the spear . . .'
⁴⁸

That there might be something distasteful about this wholesale killing would never have occurred to them as they stood there, blazing away for all they were worth. 'What my friends and I were doing,' remembered Lord Brooke in a more enlightened age, 'we thought our children would do after us, and the only possible alteration in conditions appeared to lie in the direction of higher birds and new sporting powders.'
⁴⁹
Yet a man like the Prince of Wales's son, the future George V, who was as dedicated a shot as the rest of them, could dissolve into tears at the sight of a dead garden bird.

Almost every weekday morning at Sandringham, the Prince of Wales would set out, correctly dressed in tweed suit, flat cap, heavy boots and swinging cape, with half a dozen or more of his male guests, to devote his day to shooting partridge, pheasant, woodcock and wild duck or rabbits. He was particularly fond of the
battue
: the Continental concept of a vast semi-circle of beaters driving the birds towards the sportsmen. The Prince spent tens of thousands of pounds improving the shooting at Sandringham. By the 1890s the amount of game killed each year was enormous: a single day's shooting could add up to 3000 birds or 6000 rabbits. 'At Sandringham,' wrote the Prince's eldest grandson, afterwards Duke of Windsor, 'everything, including, I regret to say, the interests of the farmer, was subordinated to the shooting.'
⁵⁰

At the time, though, very few members of the public would have been any more offended by this mass slaughter than the sportsmen themselves. It is true that some voices of protest were being raised. Even aristocrats like Lady Florence Dixie, daughter of the 7th Marquess of Queensbury, an enthusiastic shot in her time, were beginning to campaign against the barbarism of blood sports. For this she was dismissed as, at least, eccentric and, at worst, mad. In the eyes of the majority of the Prince's countrymen, he had every right to shoot as much as he pleased. It all helped confirm his image as a country squire.

For, in spite of his cosmopolitanism and his hedonism, it was as an English country gentleman that the Prince of Wales was generally regarded. He might have suffered periodic bouts of unpopularity but, for most of the time, he was admired for his quintessentially British qualities. With his love of sport – hunting, shooting and racing – and his interest in the land – the crops, forests, pigs and horses of his Sandringham estate – the Prince of Wales was looked upon as the very personification of that 'Merrie England' of so many of his countrymen's imaginations. He was, in many ways, a John Bull figure.

The day's sport at Sandringham over, the Prince's guests would assemble for tea at five o'clock in the hall. For this, the ladies would have changed, for the third or fourth time that day, into tea-gowns. They would then change again, into elaborate evening dresses with trains, while the gentlemen would wear full evening dress with decorations. As they waited downstairs for the arrival of the Prince and Princess, an equerry would move among them with a plan of the dinner table, to explain to each gentleman which lady he would be leading in to dinner and where exactly they would be sitting. The punctilious Prince disliked any hesitation in the finding of seats. The
wait for their hosts might be a long one, as Princess Alexandra was invariably late, but as soon as she arrived, looking her usual soignée, charming and unflustered self, the Prince would lead the company in, 'each lady in turn having the privilege of being taken in by her royal host'.
⁵¹

A typical dinner would consist of hot and cold soup, whitebait, trout, quail, pullet, roast mutton, cold ham, ortolans, asparagus,
gâteaux, pâtisseries
, a savoury and assorted ices. With this there would be sherry, madeira, two wines, champagne, port, more sherry and then brandy. No dish was too rich for the Prince of Wales. Quails packed with
foie gras
, pheasants stuffed with truffles, snipe crammed with forcemeat, and all of them garnished with truffles, mushrooms, prawns and oysters and served in thick, creamy sauces, he gobbled down with great relish. And if one still felt peckish after dinner, there were always plates of sandwiches or lobster and chicken salads available.

Not everyone approved of these lavish menus. For a perfectly adequate dinner, maintained the Earl of Dudley, one needed only 'a good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, ducklings with green peas, chicken with asparagus and an apricot tart.'
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Late at night, after the ladies had retired to bed, the Prince and his close friends would indulge in what were generally regarded as more masculine recreations: cards, bowls or billiards. Hazily, their pungent cigar smoke would drift across the famous billiard-room screen decorated with likenesses of such irreproachable contemporary figures as Lord Salisbury or Matthew Arnold. Only on closer inspection did one appreciate that these worthies were pictured, in extremely compromising attitudes, with naked women.

No sooner had the Tranby Croft scandal died down than the Beresford scandal flared up once more. Indeed, it might have been the fact that the Prince of Wales stood publicly disgraced by the Baccarat Case that encouraged Lord Charles Beresford to renew his attack on the Prince and Lady Brooke. This attack threatened to expose the Prince to even greater public humiliation.

Lady Charles Beresford, still smarting at having been cold-shouldered by the Marlborough House set, had been watching the triumph of her arch-enemy, Lady Brooke, with increasing fury. In letter after letter to her husband, aboard HMS Undaunted in the Mediterranean, she railed against the iniquities of the Prince and Daisy
Brooke. And when the person she scathingly refers to as 'that "Lady" ' was publicly received by the Princess of Wales at Marlborough House in the summer of 1891, Lady Charles felt that she could stand no more of this humiliation. Rouged cheeks flushing even redder, she wrote yet again to her husband, demanding that he take action.

In what was an extremely intemperate letter even for that intemperate man, Lord Charles Beresford attacked the Prince for behaving like 'a blackguard and a coward'.
⁵³
The days of duelling might be over, he threatened, in what was the nub of his letter, 'but there is a more just way of getting right done than can duelling, and that is –
publicity
.'
⁵⁴

This inflammatory letter was sent by Beresford, not to the Prince, but to Lady Charles, with instructions that she was to send it on to the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. This Lady Charles lost no time in doing. One would have thought that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, with its vast empire covering over a quarter of the earth's surface and accommodating over a quarter of the world's population, would have had more pressing concerns than a squabble between two society ladies. But no. Lord Salisbury attended to the matter without delay.

He had good reason for doing so. For, in a letter of her own, Lady Charles made it clear that not only was her husband in a position to blacken the Prince of Wales's reputation, but her sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, had already written a pamphlet on the Prince's affair with Lady Brooke which, if published, would blacken his reputation still further. Several people, she continued darkly, 'wanted to make use of the story at the next General Election for purposes of their own'.
⁵⁵

What Lady Charles wanted was
'a public
apology' from the Prince of Wales. She would not be fobbed off with some minor concession, such as an invitation to Marlborough House.

Sighing, one feels certain, a great sigh, Lord Salisbury wrote conciliatory letters to both Lord and Lady Charles Beresford. According to 'the social laws of our class',
⁵⁶
the Prime Minister pointed out to Beresford, it would not be seemly for a gentleman to disgrace his former mistress. Swayed by this apparently unanswerable argument, Lord Charles agreed to send the Prince a less violent letter.

And there the matter might have ended had not Lady Charles's sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, begun circulating her threatened pamphlet. Called
Lady River
, which everyone knew meant Lady Brooke, this typewritten expose of Daisy Brooke's various activities, not least her affair with the Prince of Wales, caused a sensation. A hostess had only
to announce a public reading of the scurrilous pamphlet for her drawing room to be crowded to capacity.

News of this titillating pamphlet eventually reached the ears of the Princess of Wales, at that stage holidaying with her family in her native Denmark. She was horrified. Princess Alexandra never minded – or, at least, she could cope with – her husband's infidelity in private; what she hated was being exposed to public humiliation. This latest gossip, coming hot on the heels of the Tranby Croft scandal, was more than she could bear. Instead of returning home to celebrate her husband's fiftieth birthday on 9 November 1891, she went to visit her sister Dagmar, the Tsarina Marie Feodorovna of Russia, in the Crimea. Her gesture did not go unnoticed.

And now things got worse. In December, following an urgent telegram from his wife, Lord Charles Beresford arrived home. He promptly issued an ultimatum. Unless the Prince of Wales apologised publicly to his wife and unless Lady Brooke withdrew from society for a year, Beresford would have no alternative but to publish the full details about the Prince's private life.

There followed four frantic days in which Lord Salisbury negotiated not only with the Prince and the Beresfords but with Queen Victoria herself. On the last day, with Beresford on the point of calling a press conference at which he planned both to expose the Prince and announce his own resignation from the navy, a settlement was reached. The Prince and Beresford exchanged conciliatory letters (drafted by Lord Salisbury) and Lady Brooke agreed to a temporary withdrawal from court. By the end of the year 1891, the crisis was over.