The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (6 page)

But there were, as far as Lillie was concerned, certain compensatory factors. Langtry claimed to have taken a degree at Oxford and to have studied, if not practised, law. He had a house in England. And, above all, he was rich. Or rather, Lillie thought he was rich. Indeed, it was a party aboard his yacht, 'Red Gauntlet', then lying off St Helier, that first awakened Lillie's interest in him. 'One day there came into the harbour a most beautiful yacht,' she is reported to have said in later life. 'I met the owner and fell in love with the yacht. To become the mistress of the yacht, I married the owner, Edward Langtry.'
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Perhaps, at the time, it was not quite as calculated as that. But Lillie might well have seen in Edward Langtry the sort of man whom she would be able to mould, who would be a provider without expecting too much in return, and who would, above all, enable her to establish herself in society.

With the grudging consent of her parents, both of whom thought that she could have done better for herself, Lillie Le Breton was married to Edward Langtry, by her father, in St Saviour's Church on 9 March 1874.

The first two years of Lillie's married life were a period of deep disillusion. They were spent not, as she had imagined, in London but partly in Jersey, partly on another of Edward's yachts, 'Gertrude', and partly in their first English home, Cliffe Lodge, overlooking Southampton Water. Edward turned out to be poorer, less amenable and even duller than she had imagined. While she battled with the complexities of running a home for the first time, he spent his days drinking
and yarning with his yachting cronies. 'We had so little to say to one another,' she complains, 'that we began to eat breakfast separately. Edward usually went off to join friends in Southampton at noon, so we rarely spent much time with each other until we dined together in the evening.'
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Many years later Lillie confessed that the intimate side of her marriage had been unrewarding; Edward had never aroused her sexually. In fairness to him, no Victorian husband expected his wife to enjoy the act of love-making, any more than she expected to enjoy it. Brides approached the marriage bed in a state not only of unsullied chastity, but of almost total ignorance. At best, they would have been told by their embarrassed mothers not to deny their husbands their 'rights'. 'Now you know what has to be done, so don't make a fuss,'
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were one husband's brisk instructions to his terrified wife as he climbed into bed on their wedding night.

What disappointed Lillie most of all was the fact that she was still no more part of the world of fashionable society than she had ever been. Not until she contracted typhoid fever, late in 1875, while living in Southampton, was Lillie able to take a step towards the realisation of her dreams. The doctor, she assures us unblinkingly, suggested that the best possible place for her to convalesce would be London.

'I have no idea,' she protests, 'what led us to select the great, smoky city as a sanatorium.'
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But select it she did, and early in 1876 the Langtrys settled into an apartment in Eaton Place.

But another year – of visiting museums and picture galleries, of strolling through pleasure gardens, of going to Hyde Park in the hope of seeing a member of the royal family ride by ('I had never set eyes on even a minor one, '
²³
says Lillie) – passed before the chance meeting with her Jersey acquaintance, old Lord Ranelagh, led to that invitation to Lady Sebright's at-home.

It was this invitation, claims Lillie, 'that completely changed the current of my life'.
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In the months after the Sebrights' party, Lillie Langtry developed into one of the most sought-after women in London. Swiftly and surely she progressed from the artistic salons of women like Lady Sebright to the grandest drawing rooms in the land. 'There was scarcely a great house in London that I did not visit during my first season,'
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she boasts.

She was fortunate in her timing. Society, by the late 1870s, was
undergoing a transformation. Until then, the English aristocracy had been an exclusive clan, made up of about ten thousand people who, in turn, belonged to about fifteen hundred families. A title (the older the better) or a long established lineage were two of the qualifications necessary to belong to this select group; a third was the ownership of land. The upper classes were all landowners; over ninety per cent of the land was privately owned. No one could hope to be regarded as an aristocrat unless he could boast a great country estate and a great country house. Most of this privileged group knew one another or about each other; they almost never married out of their class. And just as rarely did they welcome anyone into their ranks who did not meet these qualifications.

But in the course of the last few years things had begun to change. Much of this was due to the attitude of the Prince of Wales. With his penchant for very rich men – whether they be self-made, Jewish or foreign, or indeed all three – he extended the boundaries of the upper classes beyond the gilded stockade of the landed aristocracy. Business acumen, beauty and, to a lesser extent, brains were becoming enough to get one accepted. Men like Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, whose recent forebears had been humble money lenders; women like Lady Waldegrave, whose father had been a Jewish singer, or Lady Moles-worth, the daughter of an obscure writing master; all these were not only being accepted but were often leading social lights.

As well as acquiring vast country estates and building palatial country houses, the
nouveaux riches
were marrying off their daughters to the sons of local aristocrats. Many a crumbling mansion was being restored and many a bankrupt estate being salvaged by the uninhibited use of the dowry brought by the daughter of some industrialist from Cleveland, Ohio, or some mineowner from Johannesburg, Transvaal. Not until the Roaring Twenties or the Swinging Sixties was there again to be such a breaking down of class barriers or such a relaxation of social conventions.

It was this opening-up of society that partly explains the ease with which Lillie Langtry was accepted; partly, but not entirely. Much of her success was due to her own particular qualities. For one thing, she was not some brash
arriviste
. She was, by Victorian standards, a lady. Her husband, whatever his shortcomings, did not do anything so vulgar as work for his living. His grandfather might have been a self-made shipping magnate, but Edward was a gentleman of leisure. Then Lillie herself was the daughter of the Dean of Jersey; and clergymen's daughters, if not exactly aristocratic, were certainly
socially acceptable. In the Victorian hierarchy, clergymen ranked beside the landed gentry. Indeed, one of Lillie's brothers was to marry Lord Ranelagh's daughter.

Her air, despite her vivacity and sensuality, was well-bred: she knew how to conduct herself in public. Some witnesses even talk of her 'shyness' in these early days. Lillie displayed none of the brittle, metallic self-assurance of a woman like Wallis Simpson who, over half a century later, was to set so many aristocratic teeth on edge. Her fascination was of an altogether more subtle variety.

And it says a great deal for that fascination when one remembers that she lacked the one sure entrée into this expanding upper class world: money. Edward Langtry was not anything like as rich as Lillie had at one time imagined. As so often happens, the Langtry dynasty was going from rags to riches and back to rags in three generations. Edward had no head for finance. In his efforts to keep up with the yachting fraternity, with those millionaires who raced three-hundred-ton cutters, he had squandered his inheritance. By now almost everything – Cliffe Lodge in Southampton, the stud of hunters, the coach and four, and the yachts – had gone. He was having to depend almost entirely on the rents from various properties which he still owned in Ireland. Nor was his suddenly burgeoning social life doing anything to conserve what little remained of his fortune.

Lillie, in common with most Victorian wives, knew very little about the state of her husband's finances. But she did not need to be a financial expert to appreciate that they had no country house, no town house, not even a carriage, of their own. And others, of course, appreciated it as well.

But then, in addition to her beauty and her personal magnetism, Lillie had something else to offer: her curiosity value. Within weeks of Lady Sebright's party, Lillie's had become one of the best-known faces in London.

Her meeting, at the Sebrights, with the artists John Everett Millais and Frank Miles had borne almost immediate fruit. Although Miles's sexual preference – as was the case with many another Victorian literary or artistic notability – was for little girls, he was not blind to Lillie's possibilities. He apparently sketched her there and then and, a day or two later, did another drawing of her which he sold to a printer. The picture, reproduced in its thousands, began appearing in shop windows all over London; within weeks Lillie's distinctive features had become familiar to a huge public. 'My sketches of Lillie during her first London season,' wrote Miles twenty years later, 'earned far more
than I've ever made on the largest commissions for my most expensive paintings.'
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There was an equally large and no less appreciative public for her next portrait. Millais used her as the model for 'Effie Deans' in his painting of a scene from Sir Walter Scott's famous novel,
The Heart of Midlothian
, which he exhibited in the Marsden galleries in King Street. 'Her sweet lips are parted,' enthused one critic, 'and there seems to linger on them a trace of the last quivering sob which made the blue, upturned eyes glisten. It is in this sorrow-laden mouth, in the azure depths of tenderness in her appealing eyes that the rare art of Mr Millais is exemplified to a marked degree.'
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Here, in short, was the sort of sentimental story-picture to wrench the hearts and quicken the pulses of the aristocratic patrons who flocked to the King Street gallery. And not only them: engravings of 'Effie Deans' were soon adorning walls of middle-class sitting rooms throughout the land.

Millais's next picture of Lillie, which he was to exhibit at the Royal Academy of 1878, would make her even more famous. He painted her, not as she imagined he would, 'in classic robes or sumptuous medieval garments'
²⁸
but in a simple black dress, with lace collar and cuffs. She was, Millais told her, the most exasperating subject he had ever painted. For fifty minutes of each hour, she looked only 'beautiful', but for the other ten she looked 'amazing'.

One touch of colour relieved the sombre tones of the painting: in her left hand Lillie holds a fragile crimson flower. This was a
Nerine sarniensis
, a species of amaryllis which grows on Guernsey and which Millais, inaccurately, referred to as a Jersey lily. But inaccurate or not, he titled his painting 'A Jersey Lily' and it was as the Jersey Lily that Lillie Langtry was to be known from then on.

Winning Lillie even wider recognition were her photographic likenesses. At a time when photography was a relatively new art and an appreciation of feminine beauty at one of its heights, reproductions of attractive women were being bought by a vast public. Known as 'professional beauties', these women – or ladies, for they were almost all members of society – were photographed in every conceivable attitude: clasping bunches of artificial flowers; lolling in hammocks under riotously blossoming branches; gazing dolefully at dead birds; standing swathed in furs amid fake snow-storms. The craze for collecting these pictures – a craze foreshadowing the popularity of first film stars and then pop stars – was not confined to the middle classes; many an aristocratic drawing room boasted a leather-bound, brass-
locked album featuring the Junoesque charms of the Duchess of Leinster, the delicate profile of Mrs Luke Wheeler or the piquant expression of the Marquis of Headfort's daughter, Mrs Cornwallis West.

The most ardently collected pictures of all were those of Lillie Langtry. Whether the photographers 'one and all besought'
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her – as she claims – to sit for them, or whether she suggested it herself, one does not know; what is certain is that before very long her voluptuous features were familiar all over London. And as the professional beauties, or P.B.s, were much sought after by hostesses
('Do
come', they would scrawl on their invitation cards, 'the P.B.s will be here'
³⁰
) Mrs Langtry soon found herself much in demand.

The society into which Lillie was being swept was a brilliant one. Her first London season, spanning the months between late April and early August, meant a succession of parties. Often she was invited to as many as three a night. 'I see striped awnings,' recalls one member of this vanished world, 'linkmen with flaring torches; powdered footmen; soaring marble staircases; tiaras, smiling hostesses; azaleas in gilt baskets; white waistcoats, violins, elbows sawing the air, names on pasteboard cards, quails in aspic, macedoine, strawberries and cream . . .'
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Lillie's breathless account of that first season teems with titles: the Duchess of Westminster invites her to stay in the country, Lady Rosslyn asks her to join her for a drive in the Park, Lord Hartington drenches his evening clothes as he pulls water lilies out of a marble pool to present to her.

Trailing disconsolately behind Lillie on all these occasions was her husband Edward. It would have been unthinkable, of course, for her to have been invited without him. But as much as she revelled in all this social activity, so did he loathe it. 'My husband greatly disliked all this publicity,' she reports blandly, 'sometimes losing his temper and blaming
me.'
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But such, apparently, was the force of Lillie's personality that Edward never actually refused to accompany her. One's heart goes out to him. Night after night this dull but inoffensive man, who asked for nothing more than a day's quiet fishing or a night's drinking with his yachting mates, was obliged to get into white tie and tails and stand awkwardly in some corner while his wife enchanted the assembly with her beauty, her vivacity and her sexuality. 'My husband,' says Lillie with a flash of that steel that was as much part of her personality as was her charm, 'felt quite like a fish out of water.'
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