The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (9 page)

It was to this modest Norfolk Street house that Bertie would come to pay his afternoon calls or, less frequently, to attend little dinner or supper parties. About these, Lillie is discretion itself. 'His affability to servants was well known to all who entertained him, for he seldom passed one without a word or a kind look,' she says in her memoirs.
'He really worked hard to make one's dinners and parties successful – an easy task with his magnetic personality.'
¹²

In those more leisurely days, it was still possible for the Prince to visit Lillie, or anyone else, with a freedom that would be unthinkable for a member of the royal family today. Although his libertinism was sometimes hinted at or even openly criticised in the popular press, Bertie was never hounded by reporters.

'I recall with wonder and appreciation,' writes Bertie's grandson, the future King Edward VIII, of his youth in pre-First World War London, 'the ease with which we were able to move about in public places. The thought occurs to me that one of the most inconvenient developments since the days of my boyhood has been the disappearance of privacy . . . Because our likenesses seldom appeared in the press, we were not often recognised in the street; when we were, the salutation would be a friendly wave of the hand or, in the case of a courtier or family friend, a polite lifting of the hat.'
¹³

On one occasion, when Bertie and Lillie were returning down Constitution Hill from a ride in the Park, they were held up by the preparations for a levée which the Prince was due to hold in Buckingham Palace in an hour or so's time. Sitting on their horses at the corner of the Mall, the couple were able to watch the band and the guard of honour march by and even to recognise some of the arriving guests. But the Prince himself was unrecognised by the waiting crowd. He remained so long, says Lillie, that he had a great scramble to get to the levée on time.

If Bertie was not paying for the lease and the running of the Norfolk Street house, he was apparently responsible for another of Lillie's homes. Towards the end of the year that he met her, 1877, he started building her a home in that most decorous of seaside resorts, Bournemouth. Designed in the mock-Tudor style so dear to the hearts of the late Victorians, and known, because of its red-brick lower storey, as the Red House, it was indistinguishable from the home of any successful business or professional man who had decided to retire to the South Coast. As such, it suited Bertie perfectly. With the house leased, according to municipal records, to an Emily Charlotte Langton, and with the foundation stone revealing nothing more than the date and a cryptic E.L.L. (for Emilie Le Breton Langtry), the Prince was able to avoid any direct association with the house. Travelling down to Bournemouth incognito, he was assured of the necessary anonymity whenever the two of them arranged to meet.

As a royal love nest, it may not have been a particularly romantic
establishment but, in many ways, it suited this realistic, eminently practical couple to perfection. Along one wall of the high-ceilinged dining room, whose stained-glass window sported a couple of amorous swans, ran a defiant inscription: 'They say – What say they? Let them say.'
¹⁴

It is not difficult, down the vista of the years, to picture the celebrated lovers amid the comfortable but incongruously middle-class surroundings of the Red House: the cigar-puffing Bertie in his brocade dressing-gown, the lovely Lillie in one of her frothy peignoirs, with her golden-brown hair cascading down her back. The hours spent in this Bournemouth retreat would have created an oasis of tranquillity amid the bustle and sparkle of their everyday lives. For Bertie, it would have provided a rare touch of domesticity; for Lillie, it would have meant a break in her unrelenting efforts to make her way in the world.

'My only purpose in life,' she later said of these halcyon days, 'was to look nice and make myself agreeable.'
¹⁵

How did the two people most closely associated with the lovers – Princess Alexandra and Edward Langtry – react to the affair? For not only did they have to contend with their private knowledge of it, but with the fact that it was being widely talked about.

Alexandra, very wisely, accepted it. With customary grace and dignity, she behaved as though nothing were wrong. The blind eye which she had always turned towards her husband's casual affairs she now turned, with equal determination, towards this more serious relationship. Indeed, the Princess not only tolerated Lillie but welcomed her to both Marlborough House and Sandringham, where she always showed her great kindness. On one occasion, for instance, when Lillie was a guest at a small dinner party at Marlborough House, she was suddenly taken ill.

'The Princess, so considerate and compassionate always, immediately told me to hurry home to bed, which I thankfully did. Half an hour later the Household Physician, Francis Laking, was ushered into my room, having been sent by command of the Princess of Wales to see me and report to her on my condition. By the next afternoon I was feeling better, and was lying on the sofa in my little drawing room about tea-time, when the butler suddenly announced Her Royal Highness . . .

'The honour of the unexpected visit brought me at once to my feet,
ill though I felt, but the Princess insisted on my lying down again, while she made herself tea, chatting kindly and graciously. She always used a specially manufactured violet scent and I recall exclaiming on the delicious perfume, and her solicitous answer that she feared possibly it was too strong for me.'
¹⁶

Although Lillie was not above embellishing the incident, there can be no doubt that the Princess was never vindictive towards her. Some of this was due to Alexandra's genuine goodness of heart; she had a horror of jealousy, regarding it as one of the worst sins – 'the bottom of all mischief and misfortune in this world.'
¹⁷
Or she may have been guided by more practical motives: as there was nothing that she could do about her husband's unfaithfulness, Alexandra's best bet was to accept it. In this way she could win respect for her generous behaviour rather than pity, or even ridicule, for some less dignified response. Her attitude certainly won her the gratitude of her husband.

Or perhaps she simply did not care. With the passing years, Alexandra was becoming progressively more selfish and self-centred; she may by now have decided that as long as she was left to live her life in her own way, Bertie could do as he pleased with his.

Edward Langtry faced a somewhat different dilemma. His was the dichotomy of all husbands who are cuckolded by princes: resentment and jealousy on the one hand, pride and loyalty on the other. During the last century or so, British royal history has not been lacking in the wronged husbands of princely favourites: those silent, long-suffering, stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen whose reverence towards the monarchy forbids them to make a fuss. They bow their heads in deferential greeting while their royal guest's gaze shifts to their wife's décolletage; they eat lonely meals in the club dining room while she sips
Moët et Chandon
in some candle-lit supper alcove; they go on business trips to New York or Chicago while she is whisked off to Biarritz or Dubrovnik. Poor George Keppel was forced to go into 'trade' to earn enough to keep his wife in a manner to which her royal lover was accustomed. Ernest Simpson was forever having to find himself some work to do in another room while the scintillating Wallis entertained the Prince of Wales in the drawing room of their Bryanston Square flat.

As a
mari complaisant
, Edward Langtry was not as
complaisant
as he might have been. Although, according to Lillie, they had ceased having marital relations soon after moving into the Norfolk Street house, Edward was still capable of jealousy. Despite his apparent lethargy – unlike his wife, he was lazy, incurious, unambitious – Edward had a violent temper. Every now and then he would lash out at Lillie: at her extravagance, at her frenetic socialising, even at her association with the Prince of Wales.

1. Lillie Langtry's birthplace: St Saviour's Rectory, Jersey.

2. The only known photograph of Edward and Lillie Langtry together, taken soon after their marriage.

3. The young Mrs Langtry, whose blend of simplicity and sensuality made her so irresistible to the Prince of Wales.

4. The debonnaire Prince of Wales, aged thirty-five, at the time of his meeting with Lillie Langtry.

5. 'The Jersey Lily', Millais's famous portrait, picturing Lillie holding a
nerine sariensis
.