The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince

Daisy Brooke was a fearless rider and dedicated fox hunter. Once, as she later related, while staying at Windsor, she defied etiquette by leaving before breakfast by the earliest train in order to go hunting, wearing the scarlet riding habit she had designed for herself (it was considered bad form for women to wear red). Peeping behind a curtain at an upstairs window, Victoria watched her go. “How fast!” said the Queen. “How very fast!”⁵ This story is probably apocryphal, but it is revealing about Daisy’s image of herself. Liberated by her marriage, and bored by Lord Brooke, whose passion was shooting, she began an affair with Lord Charles Beresford. The swashbuckling naval officer, who had won glory at the bombardment of Alexandria and then in the rescue operation after General Charles Gordon’s death at Khartoum, was “a Regency figure trapped in a Victorian moral universe.”⁶ He was an old friend of Bertie’s—he had commanded the royal yacht Osborne, and accompanied Bertie to India—and the Prince of Wales no doubt knew all about this liaison. Beresford’s wife, Mina, was already forty; the couple were dubbed the Red Admiral and the Painted Lady, on account of Mina’s frowned-upon habit of applying her makeup in public.⁷ Daisy was merciless about the older woman, describing with cruel glee an occasion when Mina, caught out by a blast of wind, found her hat blown off on the grass, with her yellow hair attached.⁸ So far as the nubile Daisy was concerned, Mina was no competition. Beresford was the father of Daisy’s second child, Marjorie (born in 1884). When he announced that he must end the affair because Mina was pregnant, Daisy was furious.⁹ In January 1889, she wrote him an absurdly indiscreet letter, demanding that he leave his wife and implying that Mina had no right to have a child by her husband. Unfortunately for Daisy, Beresford was abroad, inspecting Kaiser William’s navy, and in his absence Mina opened the letter. Mina fought back tooth and claw. She consulted the solicitor George Lewis, giving him Daisy’s letter for safekeeping, and he wrote to Daisy warning her off.

It was George Lewis’s letter, effectively accusing her of sexual harassment, that prompted Daisy to seek an interview with Bertie. What happened next can be reconstructed with accuracy because Mina Beresford later wrote a detailed account for Lord Salisbury.¹⁰ That same night, at two a.m., Bertie drove round to Lewis’s home on Portland Place and demanded to see the letter Lady Brooke had written to Lord Charles Beresford. Flouting all professional etiquette, and without consulting his clients the Beresfords, the hapless lawyer “was prevailed upon” to obey the prince.¹¹ He drove with the prince to his office on Ely Place, took the letter out of the box in the strong room, and showed it to HRH, but refused to allow him to keep it.¹² It was the most controversial act in his entire career.

Daisy swiftly dropped Beresford in order to become the prince’s favorite. According to Mina: “Wherever he went, he desired she also should be invited, and invited she was, but to the disgust of everyone.”¹⁴

When Mina was put down for a house party, Daisy recalled, Bertie “simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it and wrote to the hostess that he thought it would be better for her not to meet the angry woman till she had cooled off.” Thenceforth, “my husband and I were down on the Prince’s ‘list.’ ”¹⁵ Brookey always came along too, playing the role of complaisant husband.

In 1889, Bertie stayed at a house party at Easton for Daisy’s birthday (10 December).¹⁶ It seems likely that this was the occasion when they became lovers. “How well I remember spending your birthday with you just 10 years ago at your old home,” he wrote in 1899, regretting that the “very warm feelings” they then shared had “cooled down.”¹⁷

When Charles Beresford discovered that Bertie had moved in on his own mistress, he demanded an interview at Marlborough House in January 1890, before setting off to sea in HMS Undaunted. According to his account, he told the prince “in no measured sentences” that bullying George Lewis into allowing him to see Daisy’s letter was “a most dishonourable and blackguard action.” Bertie, “being somewhat excited,” called Beresford a “blackguard” himself, whereupon the latter demonstrated “with some warmth and considerable clearness that there was only one blackguard in the case at all, and that was YRH who had dared to interfere in a private quarrel.”¹⁸ The two men—who had previously been intimate friends—came very close to blows. According to Daisy’s later and doubtless somewhat colored account, Bertie told Beresford that he must stop Mina from blabbing and that he must give up Daisy. Beresford became very angry and declared that he would never give Daisy up.

Whereupon Bertie seized the inkstand from the table and hurled it at Beresford’s head. Fortunately it missed, but Daisy claimed she saw the ink stain on the wall the next day.²⁰

From then on, Bertie ostracized both Beresfords, Charlie and Mina, refusing to speak to them. The quarrel dragged on for another two years.

In July 1891, Alix invited Daisy to dinner at Marlborough House. Now that the Princess of Wales had received the “unabashed adventuress,” Mina decided to take her revenge.²¹ Her retaliation was deadly: She leaked the story.

She and her sister, Mrs. Gerald Paget, composed a pamphlet entitled “Lady River” (after Babbling Brooke, Daisy’s nickname). This gave scurrilous and possibly libelous details about Daisy’s various affairs, and reproduced her infamous letter to Charles Beresford. Throughout the summer of 1891, the typescript of “Lady River” circulated at country house parties, and readings from the pamphlet were eagerly attended.²² Daisy Brooke herself seemed blissfully unaware. Rumors reached Vicky in Germany—“I suppose there is no truth in Lady Brooke having a divorce,” she wrote.²³ Daisy sailed serenely on. Carrington was captivated by her at a dinner in July. “Lady Brooke has developed into a very beautiful woman,” he wrote. “She has the great gift of appearing intensely interested in anything that concerns anyone she may be talking to: and though a desperate attempt has been made to ‘knock her out’ of Society, she will weather the storm yet: as she smiles on everybody and looks pleasant, and never abuses or says an unkind word of any human being.”²⁴

Lord Charles Beresford held the office of Fourth Lord of the Admiralty (an appointment he owed to Bertie’s influence), and in July he appealed to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury. He sent Salisbury a draft letter he had written to the prince, accusing him of “instituting a species of social boycotting” against his wife. “The days of duelling are past but there is a more just way of getting right done in such cases than ever duelling supplied and that is publicity.”²⁵ Salisbury, who regarded the affair as “sordid and pathetic,” dissuaded Beresford from sending the letter and tried to prevent him from going public by appealing to his sense of honor. Beresford, wrote Salisbury, owed a duty of honor to Daisy as his former mistress—“It must not be your face or hand that brings her into any disgrace because she yielded to you.”²⁶

In December 1891, Beresford returned from the Mediterranean and dispatched another letter—even more furious—to the prince. Accusing Bertie of deliberately slighting his wife, he demanded a formal apology and blustered once again that he would make the scandal public.²⁷ In threatening publicity, Beresford broke the golden rule of Marlborough House: No Scandal. “Whenever there was a threat of impending trouble,” Daisy later wrote, “pressure would be brought to bear, sometimes from the highest quarters, almost always successfully.”²⁸ Mina Beresford wrote to the Queen. Alix now became involved, letting it be known that she was angry with Beresford, and she thought his letter to Bertie “disrespectful” and “improper.”

“She warmly supports the prince in everything connected with the unfortunate affair, and is anxious to do all in her power to assist him,” wrote Knollys.²⁹

Arthur Balfour, Salisbury’s nephew and political protégé, believed that Beresford was playing a deep game. “I still have faith in Charlie’s acute perception of his own interests,” he told Salisbury. “At the same time I admit that when you have to deal with one woman who is mad with jealousy [Mina], another who is mad with spite [Daisy], and a man who is mad with vanity [Bertie], anything may happen.”³⁰ Salisbury disagreed, dismissing Beresford as “a mere tool” in the hands of his wife.³¹ The quarrel reached deadlock because (as Schomberg McDonnell, Salisbury’s private secretary, wrote) “Nobody could approach Lady Brooke because the Prince of Wales would not allow it,” and, on the other hand, Mina Beresford “would agree to nothing which did not stipulate for the withdrawal of Lady Brooke from the Court and from London for at least a year.”³²

Bertie does not emerge from this tangled affair with much credit. He had protected Daisy Brooke, who had behaved outrageously, even by the standards of Marlborough House. By making her his mistress, he had himself behaved even more outrageously. As Beresford wrote: “Under our constitution Your Royal Highness’s sole duty is to guide and direct what is named society,” and this was compromised when the prince’s mistress happened to be involved in the quarrels he tried to arbitrate.³⁵ Bertie pretended to be the injured party and refused to accept that he was in any way at fault. He blamed Beresford, writing to the latter’s brother: “I can never forget, and shall never forgive, the conduct of your brother and his wife towards me. His base ingratitude, after a friendship of about 20 years, has hurt me more than words can say.”³⁶ This seems a strangely one-sided view of friendship. The Beresfords were surely justified in retaliating when Bertie had interfered in their private affairs, almost broken their marriage, ostracized Mina, and stolen Charles Beresford’s mistress. Bertie’s talk of chivalry rings somewhat hollow.

Nor does his remorseless prosecution of the vendetta impress. He allowed the affair to split his court. Consuelo Mandeville was one of those who circulated the “Lady River” pamphlet, and this made Bertie extremely angry. He punished her by striking her name from the guest lists, refusing to speak to her for many years.^‡³⁷ “These American ladies talk too much,” he wrote, “and their indiscretions and inaccuracies are most annoying. Those who profess to [be] Lady B[rookes]’s best friends have shown their friendship in a very doubtful manner.”³⁸ As Knollys remarked, Daisy had “cleared out ‘the American gang.’ ”³⁹

By the end of the 1880s, Bertie’s finances had reached a crisis point. He was pestered by moneylenders, and in Paris the ubiquitous French police reported that the hotels where he stayed were ringed by hucksters.⁴² The Prince of Wales’s annuity from Parliament was fixed at £39,000. The income from the Duchy of Cornwall grew from £59,000 in 1881 to £64,500 in 1890, in spite of agricultural depression, but the prince’s gross income dropped from £122,000 in 1881 to £107,600 in 1890.⁴³ The deficit was evidently yawning.

Gladstone’s secretary Edward Hamilton had urged his master as a matter of urgency to reform the prince’s finances in 1884. He considered that Gladstone was the only person who could do it. “A Tory administration would have the greatest possible difficulty about bringing the matter forward.” Gladstone, by contrast, “would be bound to be supported by the Opposition, would carry most of his own side with him, and would be able to stave off hostility from all but the very extremes.”⁴⁴ Gladstone disagreed. Parliament, he warned, would be certain to insist on a commission of inquiry and would probably find “a total absence of economic management.”⁴⁵ Bertie took the hint. He never asked for an increase in his allowance as Prince of Wales. He had no intention of inviting scrutiny of his affairs by Parliament.⁴⁶

In 1889, the Queen appealed to Parliament for royal grants for the children of the Prince of Wales, in the light of the impending marriage of his eldest daughter and the coming-of-age of his sons. Parliament grudgingly voted the prince £36,000 per annum in trust for his children, as well as a capital sum of £60,000, but this came at a price: the most lengthy—and uninhibited—debate on the monarchy to take place during Victoria’s reign, with 134 voting against the grants.⁴⁷ Bertie’s income was freely discussed, and some argued that from his £112,000 per annum he could well afford to pay for his children himself.⁴⁸ Others declared that the Queen, whose Civil List income of £385,000 was topped up with £50,000 from the Duchy of Lancaster, ought to subsidize her son, as she had devolved upon him so many of the functions of the Crown.^§ What exactly did the prince’s work consist of? asked Mr. Abraham, the radical MP for Glamorgan: On a typical day HRH held a levee, he unveiled a statue, he dined at the Mansion House, and he witnessed part of Figaro at Covent Garden—“And that, then, is a hard day’s work!”⁴⁹

Rather than risk parliamentary criticism, Bertie’s solution was to borrow from financiers. “My dear Natty,” he wrote to Lord Rothschild in 1883, “I cannot find words too extreme [in] gratitude for your great kindness and liberality, which you may be convinced will never be forgotten by me.”⁵⁰ Documents in the Rothschild archive evidence a private advance of £100,000 made to the prince in 1889, paid in cash and secured against title deeds. A further loan of £60,000 advanced on the Sandringham estates was made in 1893.⁵¹ Whether this money was ever repaid is not clear.

Another man who subsidized the Wales court was a self-made Scottish millionaire named James Mackenzie. The son of an Aberdeen stocking merchant who made one fortune in indigo in India and then another on Lombard Street, Mackenzie bought the Glenmuick estate (29,500 acres) bordering on Balmoral in 1869. Bertie and his sons nicknamed him MacTavish, and treated him as a cross between a factotum and a sugar daddy. The grouse shooting at Glenmuick was good, and Mackenzie was generous with invitations to Bertie’s friends and relations.⁵² Bertie wrote asking him to place bets for him on racehorses.⁵³ Mackenzie owned Sunningdale Park, which the prince borrowed for several years for Ascot races. An 1887 letter from Bertie to Mackenzie gives a sense of the relationship: “When I saw you a week ago did I understand you rightly when you said we might occupy Sunningdale Park for Ascot Races this year? as you did not intend entertaining. If so it would be most kind of you to lend it to us—as it is a charming house and such a pretty place, only pray do not hesitate to refuse if it is inconvenient to you.”⁵⁴ Though not exactly a command, such a request was hardly possible to refuse. From at least 1884 Mackenzie lent the prince large amounts of money, secured against the title deeds of the Sandringham estate.⁵⁵ There is a family story that when Mackenzie died in 1890, having been created a baronet in the nick of time, Knollys appeared at his house, and the deeds were hastily handed over.⁵⁶ The money owed to Mackenzie was rumored to be a staggering £250,000, and the trustees were obliged to call in the debt, causing consternation at Marlborough House. Enter the Austrian Jewish financier Baron Maurice de Hirsch. According to Lord Derby: “Hirsch seized the opportunity to pay off the debt, make the Prince his debtor, and so secure for himself a social position.”⁵⁷

Hirsch was much richer than Mackenzie, whose will was proved at £694,731. No one knew for sure how rich Hirsch was, but his wealth was estimated at well over £20 million. Descended from a family of Bavarian court bankers, “Turkish Hirsch” had joined the Brussels banking house of Bischoffsheim, married the boss’s daughter, and then made another fortune out of the Orient Express, punching a railway through the Balkans from Vienna to Istanbul.⁵⁸ Throughout 1890 Baron Hirsch, with his waxed Hercule Poirot–like mustaches, was constantly at Bertie’s side. His influence over the Prince of Wales, wrote Derby, “was a puzzle to society, since he is neither a gentleman, nor reputed altogether honest.”⁵⁹ Hirsch rented luxurious Bath House in Piccadilly, as well as a country house near Sandringham, and Grafton House near Newmarket. Egged on by the prince, he bought the racehorse La Fleche from the Royal Stud for a record price of 5,500 guineas. La Fleche went on to win £34,700 in prize money, all of which Hirsch gave to hospitals (Bertie, by contrast, tended to give his racing winnings to mistresses).⁶⁰ Bertie was “dreadfully annoyed” when Victoria refused to invite Hirsch to a state concert at Buckingham Palace, and the Queen remained suspicious of the baron, complaining that Bertie accepted too much of his hospitality.⁶¹

Hirsch entertained Bertie at St. Johann, his vast shooting estate in the sandy plains of Hungary. The anti-Semitic Austrian archdukes gasped when the prince became the guest of a Jew. Bertie thought St. Johann “an unpretentious house but most comfortable”—the more so as Jennie Churchill was among the guests.⁶² The shooting was spectacular, though Bertie was as usual dissatisfied with his own performance. “I never saw so much game in my life,” he wrote, “but there is nothing the least tame about it.”⁶³ Six hundred beaters formed a circle seven miles in circumference, converging on the shooters, who stood sixty yards apart, each gun stationed in a box walled in with fir branches to ensure that shots were fired safely into the air.⁶⁴ The party killed an obscene total of twenty thousand head of game in ten days, mainly partridges. This, Bertie told Georgie, “certainly beats everything on record and will quite spoil one for any shooting at home.”⁶⁵ At Sandringham, Bertie copied the design of Hirsch’s game larder, which was the biggest in the world, capable of holding seven thousand birds.⁶⁶

“We resented the introduction of Jews into the social set of the Prince of Wales,” wrote Daisy Brooke, “not because we disliked them … but because they had brains and understood finance. As a class we did not like brains. As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not the making of it.”⁶⁷ Reactionaries sneered at the prince’s Jewish court, while Bertie’s defenders praised his broad-mindedness. But for Bertie, the munificence of men such as Rothschild and Hirsch was as much a matter of financial survival as social inclusiveness. Rewarding them with recognition was the very least he could do. These men had saved Marlborough House from disaster.

On 27 July 1889 Bertie gave away his eldest daughter, Louise, who married his friend Lord Fife in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. Marie Adeane, one of Queen Victoria’s maids of honor, noted that Alix “looked as usual much younger than the bride, but rather tired.” Lord Fife lost his way in the “Have and to hold” sentence so the archbishop had to repeat it, and there was “a good deal of fumbling with the ring but there were no tears and very little agitation.”⁶⁸ When his sister Louise had married Lord Lorne in 1871, Bertie had objected that marriage with a subject was “lowering to the royal family,” but he was delighted with his daughter’s match, telling Vicky that “they have been devoted to one another for two years but he was too shy to propose.”⁶⁹ The issues of protocol, however, caused Bertie concern, and at his insistence, Victoria reluctantly agreed to promote Fife from earl to duke.⁷⁰ Fife was well known to the Paris demimonde, who dubbed him “le petit Ecossais roux qui a toujours la queue en l’air.”⁷¹ That the twenty-two-year-old Louise, a shy, plain girl who had led a secluded life, was being married off to a dissipated man eighteen years her senior seemed not to weigh upon the prince’s mind.

The chain-smoking Eddy was aimless and lackadaisical and distressingly prone to put his foot in it. He was remarkably sweet-natured, however, and Alix’s favorite. Bertie, though, was infuriated, and teased him for his dandified clothes and the tall “masher” collars he wore to hide his abnormally long neck (“Eddy-Collar-and-Cuffs”). To stiffen his son and keep him out of trouble, he resolved to send Eddy on a six-month tour of India.⁷⁴

Bertie had a meeting with his equerry Lord Arthur Somerset, the superintendent of his stables, and instructed him to see that Eddy was properly equipped with saddlery for his Indian tour, arranging for him to meet the prince on 30 September 1889.⁷⁵ At the last minute, Somerset wired to excuse himself from the meeting, as he was obliged to leave “on urgent private affairs” for Dieppe.⁷⁶

In London on 5 October, Lord Arthur saw his commanding officer, Oliver Montagu. They agreed that the prince must be told, and Podge wrote a letter confessing his sins. Montagu undertook to go to Fredensborg, where Bertie was on holiday with Alix’s extended family, to see the prince, “so as he may hear the right story first.”⁷⁹

“I don’t believe it,” Bertie told Dighton Probyn, the eccentrically bearded comptroller and treasurer of his household. “I won’t believe it any more than if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury.”^a ⁸⁰

From Fredensborg, Bertie ordered Probyn in London to clear up Lord Arthur’s case. “Go and see Monro [the police commissioner], go to the Treasury, see Lord Salisbury if necessary.”⁸¹ On the evening of 18 October, Probyn saw Lord Salisbury for a few minutes on King’s Cross station before he caught the 7:30 train home to Hatfield. On the same night, Lord Arthur Somerset fled the country.

Bertie wrote to the PM to say how glad he was to learn that “no warrant is likely to be issued against the ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ (I can call him nothing else) as, for the sake of the Family and Society, the less one hears of such a filthy scandal the better.”⁸⁵ On 12 November, however, the warrant was issued at last, charging Lord Arthur Somerset with “gross indecency” with other male persons contrary to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. By then, he was living in a villa in Monaco. He never returned to face charges.

Lord Arthur Somerset always maintained that his refusal to stand trial was more than a mere matter of saving his own skin. His real reason he explained in the letters he wrote from abroad to Brett. These documents reveal a sensational story: that Arthur Somerset was a scapegoat who went into exile in order to shield the name of Prince Eddy, who had also visited the Cleveland Street brothel.

Soon the rumors about Eddy’s involvement in the scandal were circulating in London, and an article in The New York Times (10 November 1889) actually mentioned him by name. This caused a “great pother” in the Prince of Wales’s household, and when Bertie returned to London in mid-November, Marlborough House swung into action to suppress the gossip. Oliver Montagu implored Lord Arthur Somerset to return and stand trial in order to clear Prince Eddy’s name.⁸⁶ Somerset refused. Nor did he make any attempt to protest the prince’s innocence. He explained his predicament in a letter to Brett:

Bertie was furious with Arthur Somerset. He wrote to Carrington on 2 January 1890: “I hardly like to allude any more to the subject of AS as it is really a too painful one to write about—and his subsequent conduct makes me wish that he had never existed.”⁸⁸

It’s possible, as one account suggests, that the rumors about Eddy visiting the Cleveland Street brothel caused such consternation to Marlborough House “not because they were false but because they were true.”⁸⁹ An alternative scenario suggests that the rumors about Eddy and Cleveland Street were slanders that were deliberately spread and embroidered by Lord Arthur Somerset. In his letter to Brett, quoted above, Somerset concedes that he cannot prove the rumors about Eddy visiting Cleveland Street. After his ignominious flight, he needed to vindicate himself and show he was a man of honor. What better way than to claim that he had voluntarily gone into exile in a chivalrous bid to throw his cloak over the young prince?⁹⁰ Whether or not Prince Eddy did, in fact, frequent Cleveland Street—or whether he was gay or, more likely, bisexual—is perhaps not the issue. The real point is that Eddy had become the story, and that made him a liability.

As for Eddy, he seemed happily unaware. On 7 October, as the Cleveland scandal was about to break in London, he wrote a letter from Fredensborg to his cousin Louis Battenberg, confessing that he loved his first cousin Alexandra (Alicky) of Hesse, and asking Louis, who was married to her sister Victoria, to find out “if there is any real reason why Alicky does not care for me, and if I have ever offended her in any way.” In a fluently written letter, which shows little sign that Eddy was the fool he is often supposed to be, the prince poured out a story of unrequited love. “I can’t really believe that Alicky knows how much I really love, or she would not I think have treated me quite so cruelly. For I can’t help considering it so, as she apparently gives me no chance at all, and little or no hope; although I shall continue loving her, and in the hope that some day she may think better of what she has said, and give me the chance of being one of the happiest beings in the world.”⁹²

The choice was limited. Vicky’s daughter Margaret (Mossy) was ruled out by Alix because of being Prussian.⁹⁵ The only eligible German princesses—a Mecklenburg and two Anhalts—were, according to Queen Victoria, “all three ugly, unhealthy and idiotic:—and if that be not enough, they are also penniless and narrow minded!”⁹⁶

Meanwhile, Eddy made his own choice. He had fallen for Princess Hélène d’Orléans, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the throne of France. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic. Such a marriage, said Queen Victoria, was “utterly impossible.”⁹⁷

Eddy’s romance with Hélène had begun in the summer of 1889, at Sheen, Richmond, where the Fifes lived close to the Comte de Paris at Sheen House. While his sister Louise spent the summer recovering from a miscarriage, Eddy “got to like or rather love” Hélène.⁹⁸

In July, he succumbed to a mysterious illness, possibly gout, and recuperated with the Fifes at Mar Lodge, where Hélène was staying, too. On 29 August, Eddy drove over to Balmoral and paid a surprise visit to Queen Victoria.⁹⁹ Holding Hélène by the hand, he told the Queen that she had loved him for years, and was prepared to make the sacrifice of changing her religion for his sake. Victoria, who was sentimental, was won over. She wrote in a memo to Lord Salisbury: “I have never seen him so eager, so earnest and she was touchingly pathetic in her equally earnest appeal. It was difficult not to say yes at once.”¹⁰⁰

With the Queen in support, it remained only to overcome the resistance of Hélène’s parents and of Lord Salisbury. Marriage to a Roman Catholic would have excluded Eddy from the succession under the Act of Settlement. Now that Hélène proposed to convert to Anglicanism, Eddy naïvely believed that this would satisfy Salisbury. He was wrong: Salisbury was dismayed. His reasons were chiefly diplomatic. Marriage to a French princess would annoy the Germans, jeopardizing his policy of cultivating the central powers in order to balance the threats posed to the British Empire by France and Russia. Nor would the marriage please the French Republic, as Hélène’s father, the claimant to the French throne, was pledged to its destruction. As he had done over the Vienna incident, Salisbury cloaked his foreign policy objections in a lecture on the constitutional position of the monarchy, writing a memorandum in which he listed seventeen reasons why the marriage could not take place.¹⁰³

By the autumn, it was plain that the Orleanist marriage was not to be. Ponsonby and Knollys heaved sighs of relief. Tampering with the Act of Settlement, worried Ponsonby, would raise debate in Parliament “as to whether there should be any succession at all,” and might encourage “actual opposition to Prince Eddy coming to the throne.”¹⁰⁵ Deep-seated anxiety as to the future of the monarchy meant that ultimately personal feelings must be sacrificed to preserving the institution—in the end the reason why Götterdämmerung was averted in England.

Hélène was devastated. Before her marriage to the Duc d’Aosta four years later, she told Margot Asquith^c that she had resisted the match, considering it a desecration of Prince Eddy’s memory. When Margot replied that she had always wondered at her devotion to someone “so much stupider” than her, Hélène’s “eyes filled with tears as she explained to me the sweetness of his character.”¹⁰⁶

Hélène might well have been unhappy with Eddy. At the same time that he declared himself to be “in love” with her, he was flirting with Lady Sybil St. Clair Erskine, Daisy Brooke’s half sister, penning her playful letters. “I thought it was impossible a short time ago to —— more than one person at the same time,” he told her.¹⁰⁷ Meanwhile, he appealed to the solicitor George Lewis to help him pay off two ladies who were demanding money for the return of his letters. “I am very pleased you are able to settle with Miss Richardson,” he told Lewis, “although £200 is rather expensive for letters.”¹⁰⁸ It was only too reminiscent of his father’s youth. So, too, was the fact that the illness from which Eddy was suffering turns out not to have been gout after all, but gonorrhea, as a prescription made out by the young doctor Alfred Fripp reveals.^d ¹⁰⁹

* In 1883, the Maynard estates comprised 13,844 acres in Essex and Leicestershire, yielding an income of £20,000. Daisy was rich, but she was not one of the super-rich.

† These quotes are taken from the account of the interview that Daisy gave many years later to journalist Frank Harris, who published it in 1916.

‡ Consuelo’s husband, Lord Mandeville, was declared bankrupt for £100,000 in 1889, which can’t have helped. (Vincent, Later Derby Diaries, p. 855 [16 March 1889]; Vane, Affair of State, p. 186.)

§ Gladstone considered that the Queen ought to help him out. “Her Civil List had been fixed with a view to her keeping up full state; she now lived a life of comparative retirement: duties and expenses consequently devolved on him which would naturally fall on the Sovereign; and yet the Queen allowed him nothing.” (Diary of Edward Hamilton 1885–1906, p. 98 [20 June 1889].)

‖ The Jewish historian Cecil Roth considered that this was damaging to English Jews. Not only did their leaders withdraw from the Jewish community, seduced by society’s glittering prizes, but the social prominence of rich Jews fueled anti-Semitism of the Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton variety. According to Roth, the people who paid the price for the social prominence of the Jewish plutocrats were the poor Jewish immigrants of the East End. Roth was writing in 1943. (Cecil Roth, “The Court Jews of Edwardian England,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 5, 1943, pp. 355–66.) Seen from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is arguable that the openness of English society under Edward VII played a part in the assimilation of the Jews, and may be one reason why Britain escaped the anti-Semitic excesses of the twentieth century.

a No doubt Bertie was unaware, but Archbishop Benson was an unfortunate example to choose; his wife, Mary Benson, was a lesbian, and his three sons were homosexuals.

b In India, Eddy “had relations” with a certain Mrs. Haddon, the estranged wife of a railway engineer whom he met at a ball. In 1914, she created a disturbance outside Buckingham Palace, claiming that Eddy had fathered her son. She was promptly arrested and packed back off to India, but Eddy’s putative son later assumed the name of Clarence and made a career out of his paternity claim, publishing a book and attempting to blackmail George V, for which he was imprisoned. Clarence Haddon was an impostor. He was born before Eddy met his mother, but his story had a basis in fact, as Eddy clearly had a relationship with Mrs. Haddon and wrote her letters. (Camp, Royal Mistresses, pp. 386–89.)

c Margot Tennant married the Liberal politician H. H. Asquith in 1894.

d Theo Aronson speculates that the close friendship that grew up between Eddy and Fripp was homoerotic, but this seems gratuitous.

CHAPTER 17

Scandal

1889–90