The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (5 page)

Yet, at the same time, Lillie was not one of the languid, ethereal maidens so beloved of the bohemian brotherhood of the day. Her beauty was brought to life by her vivacity. 'How can words convey
the vitality, the glow, the amazing charm, that made this fascinating woman the centre of any group that she entered?', asks Daisy, Countess of Warwick, who was one day to supplant Lillie in the affections of the Prince of Wales. 'The friends we had invited to meet the lovely Mrs Langtry were as willingly magnetised by her unique personality as we were.'
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And there was something else. Lillie Langtry exuded an aura of sensuality. Her full-breasted, broad-hipped body held the promise of an almost animal passion; she walked, wrote one admirer, 'like a beautiful hound set upon its feet. '
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There was an abandon about her – an entirely deceptive abandon, for Lillie was one of the most calculating of women – which men found all but irresistible.

It needed only one night, and the right setting, for Lillie's particular combination of qualities to launch her on her meteoric rise to fame. Until that evening early in 1877, she and her husband, the ineffectual Edward Langtry, whom she had married in her native Jersey three years before, had lived a life of almost total obscurity. Although they had been in London for over a year, living in apartments in Eaton Place, they were all but friendless. Their London life had certainly not been the breathless social whirl of Lillie's aspirations. But a chance meeting with Lord Ranelagh, an old roué whom she had known in Jersey, led, in turn, to their first London invitation: a Sunday evening at-home given by Sir John and Lady Sebright in their Lowndes Square house.

Olivia Sebright was one of those self-consciously bohemian hostesses who surround themselves with the cultural élite. A talented amateur actress and singer, she crammed her salon with as many of the leading professional actors, singers, writers and painters as she could muster. On this particular evening she had managed to assemble, among others, such luminaries as Henry Irving, John Everett Millais, James McNeill Whistler, George Francis Miles and that socially influential essayist and diner-out, Abraham Hayward. It was not, admittedly, an exclusively upper-class gathering ('actors and actresses were not then generally received,'
⁴
notes Lillie) but in Lady Sebright's crowded drawing room the aristocratic and artistic worlds overlapped. For Lillie, it was the ideal springboard.

Among the throng of sumptuously dressed, glitteringly bejewelled and toweringly coiffured women, Mrs Langtry struck a highly individual note. Her simple black dress had been run up by a Jersey dressmaker, she wore no jewels or ornaments ('I had none,'
⁵
she admits candidly), and she had twisted her golden-brown hair into a
casual knot on the nape of her neck. The effect was dramatic. Yet, on this occasion at least, it was not studied. Lillie simply could not afford anything more elaborate.

Feeling, she assures us, 'very un-smart and countrified', she 'retired to a chair in a remote corner.' Her corner did not remain remote for long. The sight of this decorously dressed, ravishingly beautiful and curiously erotic young woman acted like a magnet on the company. 'Fancy my surprise,' continues her arch account of this memorable evening, 'when I immediately became the centre of attention and, after a few moments, I found that quite half the people in the room seemed bent on making my acquaintance. '
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The half was, of course, the male half. And from 'the rush of cavaliers' begging to take her down to supper, Lillie chose John Everett Millais. Not only was he a fellow Jerseyman and the handsomest man in the room, but he was the most famous painter in the country.

Inevitably, over the supper table, Millais asked the enchanting Mrs Langtry to sit for him. He wanted to be the first painter 'to reproduce on canvas what he called the "classic features" of his country woman. '
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After a token protest, she agreed.

That evening at the Sebrights' transformed Lillie Langtry's life. The particular
milieu –
aesthetic, arty-crafty, unconventional – into which she had just been introduced was always on the lookout for new diversions, new sensations and new faces. And there were few faces as striking as hers. Within a few days the hall table of her Eaton Place apartment was heaped with invitations – to lunch, to dine or to dance. By the end of the month the Langtrys' landlady was grumbling about the number of times she was having to answer the door as yet another liveried footman delivered yet another gilt-edged invitation.

For the gratified Lillie Langtry, her girlhood dreams were at last coming true.

On the face of it, Lillie Langtry's background was highly respectable. She had been born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton on 13 October 1853 in the Old Rectory, St Saviour, Jersey. Her father was the Very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, Dean of Jersey, a man notable – or so she tells us – for 'his zeal and solicitous care for the poor'. Her mother, born Emilie Davis Martin, was apparently a paragon among women: poetic, musical, devoted to animals, flowers and fresh air. Both were exceptionally good-looking. The Dean was well over six feet tall, with piercing blue eyes, a head of prematurely white hair and
a military bearing. 'Do you know Sir,' exclaimed one general on first meeting the stalwart Dean Le Breton, 'that when you joined the Church, there was a deuced fine sergeant-major spoilt!'
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Lillie was convinced that the stage, rather than the army, had suffered the greater loss. For her father had, besides his commanding presence, 'the true histrionic gift' and an exceptionally good memory.

Mrs Le Breton, on the other hand, was small and fragile. But she was no less attractive. Charles Kingsley, who had known her as a girl in Chelsea, once described her as 'the most bewitchingly beautiful creature he had ever seen'.
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This handsome couple had seven children; Lillie, the last but one, was their only daughter. The grey stone deanery, all but smothered in climbing roses and sweet-scented jasmine, was one of the most picturesque houses in Jersey. The island itself, with its mild climate and lushly-wooded valleys, was a delectable place in which to live.

But life in the deanery was not quite as idyllic as it appeared. As in many another Victorian vicarage, dark undercurrents surged beneath the apparently tranquil waters. Lillie's claim, in her discreetly written memoirs, that her father was 'widely adored for his geniality and charm of disposition'
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was truer than she intended it to be. Her comment, made privately many years later, was nearer the mark. 'He was a damned nuisance,' she grumbled, 'he couldn't be trusted with any woman anywhere.'
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For Dean Le Breton was, in the polite terminology of the day, 'a ladies' man'. Stories about his rampant womanising ranged from the ludicrous to the scandalous. Amy Menzies, writing anonymously as 'A Woman of No Importance', tells one about the Dean emerging from church with a notable beauty on each arm: one was Mrs Knatchbull, the other Lady de Saumerez. At the sight of the notoriously lecherous Dean, the irate husbands, who had been waiting outside the church, set about him with their walking sticks. Le Breton, well practised, apparently, in avoiding angry husbands, managed to slip away, leaving Colonel Knatchbull and Admiral de Saumerez to continue the fight – but by this time against each other.

In the more serious battle – between Dean Le Breton's soul and his flesh – it was the flesh that usually won. Very few of the island's serving maids or flower sellers had the courage to refuse their favours to this muscular man of God. Jersey seethed with rumours about his amorous exploits. His distinctive features were said to have been reproduced time and again among the island's population. There was
even a postman, in later years, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the by then long-dead Dean.

It was no wonder that Mrs Le Breton – again in true Victorian wifely tradition – took to her bed. Her frequent and unexplained illnesses could hardly have been serious for she lived to a ripe old age, having long outlasted, and apparently forgiven, her faithless husband. 'An exquisite little woman, plump and as pink and white as a baby when she was seventy years old,' runs one account of Mrs Le Breton in old age, 'with a reverent and sacredly-held fidelity to her husband, the Dean of Jersey, whom she always extolled in a quiet, proud and wifely way, speaking of him as "my dear husband, the Dean".'
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Lillie had good reason, it seems, to remember her father's extramarital activities. For she first learned about them in the most brutal way. Many years later, in the course of one of her highly-coloured bouts of reminiscence, she told the story. At sixteen she had fallen in love with a slightly younger, socially inferior but extremely handsome boy. So passionate, apparently, was her attachment to him that when her father asked her to break off the relationship with this unsuitable youngster, she refused. There was nothing for it but for the Dean to reveal the true reason for his objections to the association: the boy was his illegitimate son. For the adolescent Lillie, the revelation came as a double blow: not only did she suffer the anguish of a broken romance, but she suffered a disillusionment about her father whom, until then, she had 'adored to the extent of a fixation'.
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Perhaps, in recounting the incident, the ageing Lillie Langtry may have dramatised its details and exaggerated its impact, but it seems unlikely that she would have invented the episode.

By the age of sixteen, the young Lillie Le Breton was already developing a distinctly unconventional streak. Her upbringing – with her father so often immersed in both pastoral and sexual activities, and her mother so often confined to her couch – had been relatively unrestrained. The only girl among six brothers, she tended to take her tone from them: she was tomboyish, hoydenish, devil-may-care. There was almost nothing of the demure Victorian miss about her; she apparently did very little in the way of embroidery, flower-pressing or water-colour painting. While her brothers attended Victoria College, she was educated at home, first by a governess and then by some of her brothers' tutors. Meeting few other girls and then not really liking those she met, she joined her brothers in their pranks and practical jokes; she would do almost anything for a dare. There is even one story of her running naked, at dead of night, along a country lane.
She was determined to prove that she was her brothers' equal. 'I must steady my nerves, control my tears, and look at things from a boy's point of view,'
¹⁴
she remembered.

The result of all this was that the young Lillie Le Breton learned, early on, to make her way in a man's world. She became accustomed to the company of men. She never suffered from any feelings of inadequacy or timidity in their presence. She learned not only how to handle them, but how to dominate them.

Allied to her exceptional self-assurance was her exceptional beauty. Few could believe that this radiantly lovely, physically mature creature was still a child. Was it any wonder that she received her first proposal of marriage at the age of fourteen? Or that Lord Suffield, recently appointed lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and a regular visitor to Jersey, once declared, 'Do you know, Miss Le Breton, that you are very, very beautiful? You ought to have a season in London.'
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Yet when she did have that season in London, it was a humiliating failure. At the age of sixteen her mother took her to England and for several nightmarish weeks Lillie tried to cope with this unfamiliar world of expensive clothes, polished manners and social chit-chat. The nightmare culminated at a party given by Lord and Lady Suffield. 'When I walked into the ballroom,' remembered Lillie many years later, 'I felt like a clumsy peasant. My one "party gown", which had been made for me in St Helier, made me look like one of the serving maids. I had never waltzed, and could follow the leads of none of my dancing partners. The food was strange and never have I seen so many forks and spoons at one's supper place, I had no idea which to use. I disgraced myself so often I could scarcely wait until the evening came to its abysmal end.'
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But the experience did not crush her already resilient spirit. Back in Jersey, Lillie set about improving both her mind and her manners. She studied hard. 'Between the ages of sixteen and twenty,' she afterwards wrote, 'I learned the magic of words, the beauty and excitement of poetic imagery. I learned there was something in life other than horses, the sea, and the long Jersey tides.'
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Despite her lyrically expressed reflections, it was not by plumbing the depths of literary appreciation that Lillie was hoping to compensate for the shallowness of the long Jersey tides: her ambitions were altogether more down to earth. She wanted to establish herself in English society. 'I was possessed by a conviction that my destiny lay in London,'
¹⁸
she says. And as the only possible way for her to fulfil this destiny was through marriage, Lillie consciously set about finding
herself a suitable husband. Somewhere there must be a Prince Charming who would take her away from the limitations and longueurs of life in Jersey; who would offer her a wider stage on which to display her physical charms and social talents.

Lillie was twenty before she met such a man. None of her other suitors had been considered worldly enough by her or elevated enough by her parents. Not that Edward Langtry was that brilliant a catch: a twenty-six-year-old widower (Lillie puts his age as thirty in her memoirs) whose first wife, another beauty living in Jersey named Jane Frances Price, had died a couple of years before. Plump, phlegmatic, with a drooping moustache and resigned expression, Edward Langtry was hardly the shining knight of Lillie's imaginings. His interests were confined to sailing and fishing. He was not even, by the yardstick of the day, particularly well-born: his father and his grandfather had been Belfast shipowners, pioneers of the service across the Irish Sea to Liverpool.