A photograph taken of Alix in the summer of 1876 shows her wearing a skintight tailored jacket buttoned up to her throat. Her wasp waist is fiercely corseted and belted, making her look abnormally thin. The photo is a fashion plate, and it shows the princess modeling the new style of figure-hugging tailored day clothes that she popularized. These dresses liberated women from the voluminous skirts that restricted physical activity, subjecting their wearers instead to the tyranny of tightly laced corsets.1 She carries a jaunty umbrella and wears an unflattering round hat, but her eyes are heavy and dark-rimmed, her face is pale, her mouth set, and her glance avoids the camera.2
That winter she became ill. The official version, as conveyed to the Queen by woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Knollys, was that Alix was “dreadfully pulled down” by a “severe cold.”3 But her illness was more serious than that. The Queen of Denmark wrote in strictest confidence to Victoria, telling her of Alix’s “indisposition.” Victoria forwarded a translation of the letter to Dr. Gull, urgently asking for his advice. “She is too dear and precious to us all to let her be sacrificed to others. It is on them or rather on him that we must work and act.… What is to be done?”4 Evidently the Queen was referring to Bertie, but exactly what she meant by Alix being sacrificed isn’t clear. Perhaps it was the old complaint about the frenetic pace of Bertie’s life wearing Alix out, but this had been said so often before that it’s hard to see why the Queen of Denmark needed to write in strictest confidence. Perhaps conjugal relations had been resumed and Alix had suffered a miscarriage. There are references to neuralgia and fatigue.5 Three years before she had complained of pain in her eyes, which was so severe that she was unable to write.6 Whatever it was, Dr. Gull was alarmed and ordered her to stay for six weeks in Athens with her brother Willie, the King of Greece, for a “complete change”—something Victoria would never have normally allowed.7
Bertie, meanwhile, had developed an abscess on his bad leg. The surgeon Sir James Paget was obliged to cut it twice. For the second operation Bertie was given laughing gas and ether, which, Alix told the Queen, “made him fight with the doctors and being so strong he fell off the sofa and I saw him and the doctors rolling together on the floor!! This brought him to and he had no idea where he was. They had then to begin it all over again—and strapped him down poor boy! And then Paget cut it about 4 inches long and deep.” The pain afterward was torture.8
For ten days after his operation, Bertie dined alone with Alix. He entered this methodically in his diary.9 He had never been alone with her for so long, and though he was convalescent, it was also perhaps a sort of penance. Bertie was not well enough to escort Alix when she left for Greece on 4 April 1877. “Will write so sorry to leave dearest Bertie although he is very nearly well but both he and doctors insist upon it,” Alix wired the Queen.10 The next day she telegraphed from Paris after a rough crossing (“very ill”): “miss my poor Bertie dreadfully.”11
In The Times classified section throughout May 1877 there appeared the following advertisement:
EFFIE DEANS
BY J. E. MILLAIS R.A.
On view daily at the King-Street Galleries,
9 King-Street, St. James’s, S.W.
On 9 May, Bertie dined with Sir Coutts Lindsay at his newly opened Grosvenor Gallery on New Bond Street, where he saw James McNeill Whistler’s painting of fireworks, Nocturne in Black and Gold, which Ruskin rubbished as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”12 No doubt Bertie agreed. Certainly he bought no Whistlers for the royal collection. Unlike Albert, who had been an eager collector and patron, Bertie showed little interest in art. He has been accused of an “inborn philistinism”; not a single important contemporary British or French picture was acquired by him for the royal collection.13
Two days after the Grosvenor Gallery dinner, accompanied by his artistic sister Princess Louise, Bertie again visited a gallery: He went to King Street to view John Everett Millais’s Effie Deans.14 Whistler contended that art should stand alone, regardless of its subject matter, but Effie Deans was a virtuoso exercise in narrative art. Effie was the tragic heroine of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality, and Millais’s painting shamelessly milked the pathos, showing the beautiful country girl parting from her seducer, holding her maiden “snood,” the hair ribbon worn by Scots virgins, to which she had forfeited the right. Millais’s model was an unknown woman named Lillie Langtry.
Millais had met Lillie at an at home held by Lady Sebright, a hostess who collected artists and writers. Mrs. Edward Langtry’s entry that evening had caused a sensation. Among the “rush of cavaliers” who jostled to take her in to supper, it was Millais who won.15 Frank Miles, another fashionable artist, sketched her there and then, and the image was reproduced as a penny postcard that was sold on street corners. Frank Miles specialized in drawing society beauties for magazines, and Lillie came to his studio on Salisbury Street for her sittings. While she posed, Prince Leopold often called, and he bought Miles’s drawing of her sleepy features on a background of lilies and hung it above his bed at Buckingham Palace. One day when he was ill his mother the Queen came to visit him in bed, and (according to Lillie) the picture shocked her so much that she took it down at once, standing on a chair to reach.16
Bertie, who was no slouch where professional beauties were concerned, let it be known that he wanted to meet Mrs. Langtry, too. The intermediary was Sir Allen Young. “Alleno” was a wealthy bachelor, a yachting acquaintance of Bertie’s who had earned fame as a polar adventurer; he spoke rarely and in monosyllables, and, as Mrs. Langtry tactfully put it, his gray eyes had the “curious, far-away look which one associates with a great explorer.”17
A dinner was fixed for 24 May 1877. Bertie’s diary that day was, even by his standards, unusually packed. He returned from Portsmouth where the previous day he had inspected Lord Charles Beresford’s battleship Thunderer, arriving back in London at 1:30; lunched with his sister-in-law Marie, Affie’s wife, the Duchess of Edinburgh; chaired a committee meeting at the Marlborough Club, and then took leave of Marie at Charing Cross at 8:15.18
The dinner party of ten assembled at Alleno’s Stratton Street home was kept waiting. “I am afraid I am a little late,” boomed a “deep and cheery voice,” and Mrs. Langtry noticed an expectant hush. According to her own account, which is frankly unbelievable unless she was strangely dense, she was quite unaware that the Prince of Wales was expected. Alleno presented her to Bertie, whose chest was apparently adorned with glittering orders and a blue Garter ribbon, and she became panic-stricken and longed to escape. At dinner she “found herself” seated next to him and was struck silent.19 Her ordeal was brief. At 11:30 the prince departed for Lady Dudley’s dance.
In her memoirs, The Days I Knew, written in 1925, Lillie created a myth about herself. Brought up in Jersey, the only daughter of William Le Breton, the philandering Dean of Jersey, she ran wild as a girl with her six brothers, and married impulsively a seemingly wealthy Irish widower named Ned Langtry. After recovering from a dangerous illness, said to be typhoid, she came to live in London with Ned, who took lodgings on Eaton Place. In the spring of 1877 she was in mourning for her younger brother, and she appeared at Lady Sebright’s feeling shy and countrified, wearing a plain black dress and no jewels because she had none, with her hair twisted in a simple knot on the nape of her neck. “Fancy my surprise when I immediately became the centre of attention,” wrote Lillie.20 The next morning her table was heaped with invitations, and she and her reluctant husband found themselves attending two or three parties a night. Everywhere she went she wore the little black dress, which was the only evening gown she possessed.
Lillie’s narrative of herself as an innocent country girl to whom success just happened is disingenuous. Her assault on London society, though far more spectacular than she could ever have dreamed, was carefully planned. She admitted as much in an interview she gave to The New York Herald in 1882. Wearing a loose red robe and drying her waist-length hair before the fire, she told the reporter that the Le Breton family had a “prescriptive right” to the deanery of Jersey, which they had held for generations. “My pedigree being good and my position in Jersey society being assured, it was not surprising that I should be well-received.” She was introduced to London society, she claimed, by Lord Ranelagh, whose daughter had married her brother Clement. She was no adventuress.
Langtry denied that she had ever set herself up as a beauty. “I never thought I was one, and I don’t think I am now. I am never in the least surprised when I hear people say they are very much disappointed about my beauty.”21 Her modesty is engaging. Photographs show rather heavy features, a wide nose and a square jaw, but to the London of 1877 she was the epitome of classical beauty. Her admirers raved over her Greek profile; she was a portrait on a Greek coin, the lost Venus of Praxiteles, Venus Annodomini, the modern Helen. Millais, Frank Miles, Edward Poynter, and George Frederic Watts vied to idealize her low forehead, her chiseled mouth, and the feature they admired most of all, her column-like neck, the “augustly pillared throat” with its three “plis de Venus” or creases of skin at the angle of the jaw.22
A portrait of Lillie by James Sant, which belonged to Bertie and seems to have been commissioned by him, shows her Grecian profile.23 Her hair is simply knotted on her neck, her throat is bare, her skin innocent of makeup, and she wears a loose muslin blouse. Sant’s image breathes health and country freshness; Lillie epitomized the new fashion for ample beauty, which was the antithesis of slim Alix with her false fringe, her tightly laced wasp waist, and her scarred throat concealed by pearl chokers and lace collars.
This was the season of the Professional Beauties. “Do come, the P.B.s will be here,” hostesses would scribble on their invitation cards.24 PBs were paraded as trophies at parties; like horseflesh their merits were compared and discussed. Artists in search of bestselling soft-porn pinups competed to paint them; their photographs were sold as postcards by the thousands; women stood on benches to spy them over the crowds in the park, and their dresses were instantly copied. Lillie’s chief rivals that season were Mrs. “Patsy” Cornwallis-West and Mrs. Luke Wheeler. Mrs. Wheeler she damned with faint praise (“Her beauty was of line and expression rather than colour, and, while disappointing to some people when first seen, its charm grew on acquaintance”); Patsy Cornwallis-West, an old flame of Bertie’s and a far tougher proposition, she befriended. The two women lived on the same London street, Eaton Place, and they competed for Bertie’s attentions.25
According to Anita Leslie, whose grandfather was one of Lillie’s lovers, her seduction technique was to fix her admirer with her huge blue eyes and “appear to swoon, the idea being that the charm of his person had rendered her senseless. A lady in this state has to be held, supported on the sofa and perhaps her clothes loosened.” However, “she did not have to faint to get the Prince of Wales, of course. He was never bashful.”26
Alix was not completely recovered, and Dr. Gull ordered her to “limit fatigue and keep early hours.”27 This gave Lillie the opportunity to blossom as ruling favorite. According to her own account, she rode with the prince on Rotten Row each evening—in spite of the fact that she had barely ridden sidesaddle before, and when one admirer put her on his horse she fell off in a dead faint.28 The prince’s daily parade at seven p.m. on his horse with its red brow band was one of the rituals of the season, eagerly scrutinized by royal watchers. Accompanying HRH would have been a public affirmation of Lillie’s status. Bertie apparently made no attempt to conceal his new mistress or keep the affair secret—but we have only Lillie’s mythmaking and her own account to go on.
Alix, meanwhile, now recovered, involved herself with Eddy. The thirteen-year-old prince had become ill with typhoid, caused, so Alix believed, by drinking bad water at Sandringham. She nursed him devotedly, but she found the “constant fear” engendered by the dreaded typhoid almost unendurable.29 “I am with him all day long, and only take a short drive in the evening, and he continues as good a patient as possible—but what a long and dreary time it has been,” she told Victoria.30 A flare-up of Eddy’s illness kept Alix a willing prisoner at Marlborough House, while Bertie escaped to Cowes, where he spent most of August on board the Osborne with the younger children, avoiding the typhoid in London.31
Under the prince’s patronage, Cowes Week had ballooned from a family yachting party, where the royals could walk about freely without ceremony, into a crowded regatta with a perpetual garden party on the lawn of the Royal Yacht Club. Bertie raced his yacht the Hildegarde in a half gale and won his first Queen’s Cup; ladies rushed onto the platform to see the finish in defiance of the rules of the Royal Yacht Squadron, and Bertie received a stirring ovation that “will be one of the brightest dreams of his life.”32
Lillie Langtry was there, too, staying with her husband as guests of Sir Allen Young on his yacht Helen. Alix’s absence did not go unnoticed. Soon stories of an estrangement were circulating in London.33
It is often claimed that Alix felt no jealousy for Lillie Langtry, but her behavior hardly suggests a happy princess. That autumn at Abergeldie, her woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Knollys fell ill, apparently yet another victim of typhoid. The “inevitable” Charlotte was unpopular with the household but devoted to her mistress, and Alix dropped everything to nurse her, refusing to leave her while she remained ill. Her care for “my poor dear Charlotte” earned the approval of Victoria (“her unselfishness is indeed beautiful”), but Alix found comfort in martyrdom; nursing had perhaps become an emotional necessity to her.34 Alone at Abergeldie, without Bertie, she drew close to “Beloved Mama” as she called the Queen (behind her back, she referred to her as “Mutter”),* telling her that “you quite spoil me with all the kind words but you may rest assured that I appreciate them all very very deeply—but I am sure you know how happy it makes me to think that we should have understood each other so very well.”35
Not until late November was Charlotte well enough to move; still very weak, she was lifted into the train by Alix’s Highland piper and traveled in a special carriage that had been carefully heated to sixty degrees (this was the temperature that Queen Victoria ordained for the rooms of her palaces) by hot-water pans.36
Sometime in 1877, Lillie acquired a plot of land in Bournemouth from Lord Derby and began to build a house. The foundation stone reads: “ELL 1877,” for Emilie Le Breton Langtry, and the house was a redbrick seaside villa, many gabled, half-timbered, and sprawling. Inside it was emblazoned with mottoes. “They say—What say they? Let them say.” “And yours, my friends.” Legend has it that Bertie bought the land for her through an intermediary and paid for the house to be built, and that he stayed there and played at domesticity with Lillie. No evidence has ever been produced to support this.37
Nonetheless, 1878 was Lillie’s year of triumph. She and her husband, Ned, moved into a house at 17 Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, early in the New Year. Money was tight—when her furniture was sold a few years later, “the only thing at all nice was a low Chippendale wardrobe”—but Lillie by now was earning a little.38 Cartes de visite of her photographs filled the shop windows, and the society papers fed their readers with titillating crumbs of gossip about her. Her portraits by Millais and Poynter were the star attractions of the Royal Academy summer exhibition, and Lillie was mobbed by admirers as she walked through the rooms on the night of the opening banquet.39
One of her admirers was Bertie’s friend Rudolf, the eighteen-year-old Austrian Crown Prince. He had come to England to see his mother, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who was spending the winter riding to hounds in Northamptonshire, much to the annoyance of Queen Victoria, who thought it “very unbecoming”: “It lowers Royalty, and female Royalty above all to have an Empress coming over to hunt.”†40 The callow prince danced with Lillie at a ball given by Ferdinand de Rothschild. Lillie, who was wearing an expensive gown of pale pink crêpe de Chine, suddenly realized that Rudolf had become unpleasantly hot, and his sweaty hands were making marks on her new dress. When she asked him to put his gloves on, he ungallantly replied, “C’est vous qui suez, madame” (“It’s you who sweats, madam”).‡ Rudolf had misread the signals. He had called often at Lillie’s Norfolk Street house, presumably under the impression that Mrs. Langtry was a royal poule de luxe, but he was unwelcome.41
Lillie claimed in her memoirs (and her biographers have repeated it) that she went everywhere with Bertie in the season of 1878. Their friendship has often been described as a domesticated love affair, but there is a hole—a silence—at the center of the narrative. No letters from this time survive. Many of the stories seem to be exaggerated or wrong. Lillie is alleged to have consummated her relationship with Bertie when Alix refused an invitation to accompany him to a royal house party at Crichel, Dorset, with Lord Alington in January 1878. In fact, Alix was there, playing a central role in the ball and festivities, which lasted a week. Louise Manchester reported to Disraeli that Bertie was “very snappish” throughout the whole visit; the Langtrys are not mentioned.42
Lillie was presented to Queen Victoria in May. Her husband had been presented by Bertie a few weeks earlier, and Lillie’s presentation validated her ambivalent social status.43 She was low down the list of ladies, but the Queen, who usually left her drawing rooms well before the end, stayed on purpose to see her, or so Lillie believed. Victoria, dressed in black satin with the blue Garter ribbon across her bosom, looked straight in front of her and put out her hand, Lillie thought, in “rather a perfunctory way.” Lillie worried that her headdress, of three ostentatiously large ostrich feathers, cheekily aping the Prince of Wales’s crest, had annoyed the Queen. According to her own account, she went on to curtsey to the waiting row of royalties, beginning with the Prince and Princess of Wales; and later that evening, while dancing at Marlborough House, Bertie chaffed her on her feathers. Most of this anecdote seems to have been make-believe on Lillie’s part. Bertie was not present at Lillie’s drawing room. He was in Paris. So was Alix. Lillie’s presentation had been arranged in order to avoid embarrassment to the Princess of Wales.44
We can glimpse Bertie’s relationship with Lillie in a gossipy letter written by Disraeli, newly ennobled as Earl of Beaconsfield. One night his private secretary, Monty Corry, dined with Prince Hal, as Beaconsfield called Bertie. Afterward, Bertie took Monty to supper with a friend, and there he found “Mr. Standish and Mrs. [Sloane-] Stanley and the Jersey beauty whose name begins with an L; and what with oysters and champagne and so on it was getting very late and very late it was when they broke up. And then Prince Hal said, ‘I shall go to the Turf now and play whist!’ Even Monty could not stand that and escaped, having had a real day with Prince Hal!”45 Perhaps, like Shakespeare’s Hal, Bertie was a prince who roistered and drank until the small hours, and Lillie was his wench. Perhaps their relationship was not a grand passion, but a matter of companionship, of low life and late nights.
Bertie was taking risks, nevertheless. He had become the first modern gossip-column prince, keenly spied on by the new society papers such as Truth, Vanity Fair, and The World that mushroomed in the 1870s, competing for royal scoops and syndicating their columns to the provincial press. Everything he said or did was commented upon and often distorted. The World hinted at adultery, and warned Prince Hal, as it also called him, of the “gathering disfavour with which his widely conspicuous life is beginning to be watched.”46 The Queen’s private secretary Henry Ponsonby reported “an undefined feeling” against Bertie, as he “does not treat the Princess fairly.” Because Alix was more popular, any suspicion of unfaithfulness created indignation against him. He was accused of leading a frivolous life, but this, thought Ponsonby, was “hard on him for what is he to do.”47
The week before Lillie was presented at court, Bertie made a speech in Paris at the opening of the great Exposition. He chaired the British section, and in his speech he declared, “I am convinced that the entente cordiale which exists between this country and our own is one which is not likely to change.”48 His words were welcomed by the French as signaling a thaw in relations with England, which had frozen into a cold war ever since the birth of the Third Republic. On 6 May 1878, Bertie met Léon Gambetta, the architect of the Republic, and the two men agreed in their distrust of Germany and Chancellor Bismarck. The visit had turned into a state event, and Bertie was followed by reporters wherever he went. When “Vive la République!” was cried and Bertie was seen to put his hat on his head, a gesture of sympathy that he didn’t intend, he remarked, “I thought they were going to say ‘Vive la France!’ ” The Times reporter insisted that Bertie had put his hat on simply because it was raining.49
Never before had Bertie been taken so seriously as a diplomatic figure. The experience went to his head. He confided in Carrington that when he became king, he intended to act as his own foreign secretary. Carrington repeated this to Gladstone, who was horrified, and growled that in that case, the prince would “probably find his Foreign Office in foreign parts.”50 In England, anyone who disagreed with Bertie’s politics instantly declared that he was exceeding his constitutional powers. Abroad it was different. When he spoke to the Russians or the French, he was taken seriously; foreigners assumed that the British heir apparent carried the same weight at home as his counterparts abroad. This was the secret of his lifelong involvement in foreign politics. He had discovered that, in a Europe of monarchical great powers, his position gave him far more freedom and power to influence events abroad than those at home.
Bertie’s biographers, trying to give shape and purpose to the life of the future king, picture him taking an active interest in the Balkan Crisis of 1876–78.§ His views on the 1876 revolt of Serbs and Bulgarians against Turkish rule were certainly forthright. He staunchly supported the Ottoman Empire and blamed Russia for encouraging and promoting the Slavs. This brought him into line with Queen Victoria, who was fiercely anti-Russian, but caused a split with Affie, whose wife, Marie, was the daughter of the czar Alexander II. Alix’s loyalties were also pro-Russian. Not only was her sister Minnie the wife of the czarevitch, but her brother Willie, King George I of Greece, depended on Russian support for his throne. But though the Balkan Crisis made fault lines in British politics, its impact on the royal family was far less seismic and divisive than the wars of German unification had been.
Bertie agreed with the pro-Turk Beaconsfield, who stubbornly refused to declare his sympathy for the Bulgarian Christians massacred by the Turks in the summer of 1876. When Gladstone launched a moral crusade against the Bulgarian atrocities and published a bestselling pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, Bertie wrote to prime minister Beaconsfield giving his support. “I deeply deplore the present agitation over the so-called Bulgarian atrocities.… It must, I fear, weaken the hands of the government, who are so anxious to do all in their power to obtain peace.”51
But the Foreign Office no longer sent Bertie dispatches. Beaconsfield grumbled that Bertie talked indiscreetly to his friends about government secrets, and Victoria ordered that dispatches should not be sent.52 Her refusal to confide in Bertie contrasted starkly with her confidence in Leopold, twelve years Bertie’s junior, who acted as her private secretary on Beaconsfield’s recommendation (this was a move to block the influence of the Liberal Ponsonby, as Leopold was a staunch Tory). For his twenty-fourth birthday in April 1877, Leopold received a Cabinet key to the government red boxes, the coveted symbol of admission to the Queen’s confidence, which had always been denied to Bertie. To avoid trouble with Leopold’s “Royal Brothers,” Beaconsfield advised the Queen to ask for a second Cabinet key for her own convenience, rather than mentioning Leopold by name.53 Such matters were not discussed between Bertie and Victoria.
As Ponsonby wrote: “It is true that the Queen does communicate all unpleasant matters with the Prince of Wales through third persons—but so does he. They dread personal meetings on these controversies. Whenever they take place the Queen has always the best of it and he gives way on all points and throws any blame off himself quickly. But they write a great deal to each other—but even then avoid controversial subjects.”54
Bertie’s judgment on foreign affairs was worryingly naïve. His chief source of information on the military position in Turkey was his friend Colonel Valentine Baker, who had been dismissed from the 10th Hussars, of which Bertie was colonel in chief. Baker had been accused of attacking a girl in a railway carriage, and though he was acquitted of rape (but convicted of indecent assault), Victoria, who considered that he was a disgrace to the British Army, insisted on cashiering him. Bertie stood loyally by his friend, helping to get him appointed as a military adviser to the Turks, and as Pasha Baker, he became a military hero.55 Bertie pestered Beaconsfield to see Baker, but the prime minister, who was no doubt fearful of annoying the Queen, declined to take his advice.56 Ponsonby despaired at Bertie’s inability to concentrate. “Nothing can be more genial and pleasant than he is for a few minutes. But he does not endure. He can’t keep up the interest for any length of time. And I don’t think he ever will settle down to business.”57 To the suggestion that he should follow up his Indian tour by becoming a member of the Indian Council, Bertie was indifferent. (He did, however, lend his collection of Indian animals to London Zoo, which probably did more good, as visitor numbers soared, increasing the zoo’s takings by over £6,000.)58 Knollys complained of the difficulty of getting him to enter into any subject and decide on it. “They have to catch snap answers from him as he goes shooting etc.”59
Just how much of a loose cannon the prince could be became evident in the winter of 1877–78, when Russia invaded Turkey and advanced toward Constantinople. Bertie now spoke openly about war with Russia; Lord Derby, the foreign secretary, who was a dove, complained that the hawk prince “talks loudly and foolishly in all companies.”60 English politicians dismissed Bertie’s violent language as out of order, but, as Derby discovered, in Russia his explosions were taken seriously and created the impression that England was bent on war. Count Schouvaloff, the Russian ambassador in London, who knew better, “in vain tried to explain the position of the Prince of Wales, and the little importance that attaches to his words: but that is not easily understood in Petersburgh.”61
Russia was eventually brought to book at the Congress of Berlin (13 June–13 July 1878). This was a personal triumph for Beaconsfield; Turkey regained its independence, and Britain gained Cyprus. The Congress alarmed the French, who feared a threat to their influence in Egypt, and made Britain so unpopular that the ambassador in Paris advised Bertie to postpone the visit he was due to make in July. Bertie did the opposite. He went to Paris; and he held mediation talks with Gambetta, which helped win around the French. Salisbury, newly appointed foreign secretary, wrote to thank him “very earnestly.”62 When Bertie did what his foreign ministers wanted, they were all smiles, but his position at home was always vulnerable.
At a reception that summer (Lillie related), the parchment-faced Beaconsfield sat wearing his newly awarded Garter ribbon. He was introduced to Lillie. “What can I do for you?” asked the prime minister. “Four new gowns for Ascot,” came the pert reply, at which he laughed, patted her hand, and said, “You are a sensible young woman. Many a woman would have asked to have been made a duchess in her own right.”63
Lillie’s own story (which is unsubstantiated) implies that she was now recognized as royal mistress, like Charles II’s Nell Gwyn. As her biographer has observed, however, her career was one of invention. She excelled at self-fashioning, carefully constructing an image of herself as royal mistress to project to the world.64
Historians will probably never know the intimate truth about Bertie and Lillie, but Bertie certainly pulled strings to advance her family. He asked Lord Lytton, the Indian viceroy, to promote her brother in the Indian Civil Service; Lytton, however, replied that Le Breton had only recently been promoted to chief inspector of post offices in Rajputana, and “to put him over the heads of all his seniors … would I fear be too rapid promotion even for Mrs. Langtree’s [sic] brother.”65
The Murrietas were rumored to have created a love nest for Lillie on their estate at Wadhurst, the new house that the two bachelor brothers, Christobel and Adriano de Murrieta, had built with the profits of their Argentinian trade. Here Bertie’s friend Jesusa and her husband José de Murrieta, now ennobled by the King of Spain as the Marquess of Santurce, created fashion history by seating guests at separate tables in the dining room, arranged like a restaurant.‖66
Members of the Marlborough House set attempted to curry favor by dotting the countryside with cottages ornées where the prince could conduct secret assignations. At Gunton, near Sandringham, it is well authenticated that Lord Suffield, who was Lillie’s friend, lent her a shooting box, Elderton Lodge, where she could meet the prince.67 The stories about royal love nests always feature Lillie, and never the other mistresses.68 By keeping Lillie in secret houses, Bertie hoped to live a double life and shield Alix from embarrassment. The tales are revealing, too, about Lillie’s ambivalent social status—in spite of her friendship with the prince, she was not considered a suitable house party guest.
Alix seems to have found some consolation in the support of Oliver Montagu. As Lady Antrim, later Alix’s lady-in-waiting, recalled, the gallant Montagu “shielded her in every way, not least from his own great love, and managed to defeat gossip. Oliver Montagu was looked upon with awe by the young as he sauntered into a ballroom, regardless of anything but his beautiful Princess, who as a matter of course always danced the first after-supper waltz with him. But she remained marvellously circumspect.”69 An enigmatic letter that Montagu wrote to his father, Lord Sandwich, in October 1878 can be read as evidence of his tortured relationship with the princess:a
Yes, believe me, that though I says it as shouldn’t, the cock child is not a bad’un at bottom. I know he has faults as others have, and perhaps even more of them, but his heart is in the right place. Outwardly he is a noisy crowing brute, but if everyone knew what his inward feelings are and what he has had to go through, they would not envy him his existence. I know not nor have I read of anyone put in the unfortunate position that I have been and yet, thank God, to have got through the worst without much damage to others.70
He could be talking about anything. But the words about his feelings and the position into which he has been put suggest that the unspoken subject of this letter is his painfully platonic relationship with his princess. Loyal cavalier that he was, he could hardly mention her by name.
* She may have used the name in letters to Minnie to distinguish Victoria from her own mother Queen Louise; more likely, it was a disparaging reference to Victoria’s pro-German sympathies.
† The fitness-obsessed empress ruined the shoes of her ladies-in-waiting by walking each morning twice around Hyde Park (about eight miles). Though a skilled haute école rider, she lacked the hunting woman’s ability to make a horse gallop. “Come on, madam, come on!” her exasperated pilot, Bay Middleton, would yell; her trail across country could be followed like a paper chase from the throwaway squares of Japanese rice paper that she used as handkerchiefs. (Cornwallis-West, Reminiscences, pp. 76–78.)
‡ Men dancing with sweaty hands is a trope of royal stories. My father as a young man once danced with Princess Margaret, who was wearing a sequinned dress. He was nervous and hot, and afterward he noticed that his right hand was covered with sequins. To his horror, he saw an imprint of his hand on the princess’s waist.
§ Sidney Lee titled his chapter on Bertie’s life in 1876–78, “Political Estrangement from Russia,” writing as if foreign policy was the prince’s chief occupation. (Lee, Edward VII.)
‖ Wadhurst Park was built by E. J. Tarver in 1872–75, and another wing was added to entertain the Prince of Wales in 1881. It is now demolished. The Murrietas, who invested heavily in Argentinian railways, lost their fortune in the Barings crash of 1890, when Argentina defaulted on bond payments.
a Montagu made frantic attempts to obtain a post in the royal household, but the Queen disliked his free and easy manners. (Richard Davenport-Hines, “A Radical Lord Chamberlain at a Tory Court,” Court Historian, vol.16 [2011], p. 224.)