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‘Suppression Prepares for Overflow’

The prince was unwanted. Queen Victoria was infuriated when she fell pregnant in February 1841 less than three months after she had given birth to her eldest child and namesake, Victoria. Child-bearing was to her the resented sequel to sex. It made her feel sick, gross and flushed. It forced her to abstain from enjoyable sexual bouts with her husband Albert (the couple were first cousins in the Saxe-Coburg family, and were aged seventeen and sixteen when first introduced with a view to marriage). Pregnancy, moreover, diminished her sovereign powers by forcing her to devolve some decision-making to her ambitious and overmastering consort. Each of her nine pregnancies strengthened Prince Albert’s position. She was under five feet tall, so had a painful delivery of the large baby born at Buckingham Palace on 9 November 1841. This was the queen’s second child in twenty-two months of marriage: she later likened serial-breeding women to rabbits; and babies, with their jerky limbs, to frogs. She felt depressed for a year after the birth, and found breast-feeding repulsive. The royal heir was wet-nursed by a madwoman who subsequently murdered her own six children.

The baby was christened Albert Edward in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in January 1842. In his family he was known as Bertie. At birth he became Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew and Lord of the Isles. A few weeks later he was gazetted as Duke of Saxony, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. At the age of eight he was created Earl of Dublin. He was a plump, lusty child whom his mother thought ugly, backward, fractious and dull. His father’s preference for the eldest daughter was blatant. ‘Vicky will be Mama’s successor,’ Bertie predicted at the age of eight, ‘you see Vicky will be Victoria the second.’ Of the queen’s next children, Alice, born in 1843, was the prettiest, and Alfred, born in 1844, became a favourite of his mother because he was clever in the schoolroom and resembled his father.¹

Fright was basic to Queen Victoria’s character. She and her husband were only twenty-two years old when their first son was born: both were inexperienced and exposed as they tried to give a strong lead to a rich kingdom. Unsurprisingly she became an anxious, mistrustful, imperceptive, stubborn woman who handled her insecurities, suspicions and fears by insulating herself from threats and by striving to control people and circumstances. She was jealous of her powers and status. Her married life was a constant struggle to stay pre-eminent above her strenuously assertive spouse. Similarly, she wanted her children and grandchildren to be lesser people than she was – not only for her lifetime, but in perpetuity. Her imposition of the names Albert and Victoria on her descendants was not only self-aggrandizement, but a debasing label for her progeny. Each of her four sons was given Albert as a forename: so, too, were all of her six grandsons in the male line. Three of her five daughters had Victoria among their forenames. Another was christened Alberta. Her compulsion to lessen everyone who came after her was especially pronounced with her heir, for Victoria upheld the Hanoverian tradition of monarchs disliking and disempowering their Princes of Wales. Her disparagement of her eldest son was vehement and brutal. She made incessant adverse comparisons with his father.

Prince Albert was the second son of Ernest I, ruler of the sovereign duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which had been created by the union of the duchies of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg as recently as 1826. Saxe-Coburg and Saxe-Gotha were Frenchified names, meaning ‘Coburg Saxony’ and ‘Gotha Saxony’; the two constituent parts of the enlarged duchy were separated by territory ruled by the King of Saxony, the ruling family’s surname being Wettin. These small, sedate, landlocked territories on the Thuringian plain had no hope of expansion; but by crafty diplomacy and ambitious marriages instigated by the formidable dowager Duchess Augusta (grandmother of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert), the Saxe-Coburgs placed their menfolk on the thrones of Belgium in 1831, Portugal in 1853, Bulgaria in 1887 and Britain in 1901. Their bloodline became the most insinuating in nineteenth-century Europe.

Albert attended Bertie’s birth, and remained omnipresent throughout his childhood. He and his sententious adviser Baron Stockmar devised for his wife’s heir a stern system of schooling, which repeated the relentless educational indoctrination that he had undergone at the pretty ducal castle of Rosenau. Their object was to create a paragon of domestic virtue and royal leadership. They sought to extirpate by strict lessons and punishments the kind of vices, indiscretions and foibles that a lax upbringing had supposedly vested in the sons of George III. From the age of six the prince’s days were governed by a timetable running from eight in the morning until six at night, learning German, French, history, geography, poetry and dancing. No slackness was permitted: the prince was seldom allowed holidays, and none lasted more than a few days. After his ninth birthday, in obedience to paternal orders, his lessons were extended to occupy eleven hours on six days of the week. At the end of lessons, he and his brother Alfred were then exhausted by riding, gymnastics and drill: the intention was to leave them too tired for vicious thoughts. His resentment of this crushing regime was expressed in angry fits. ‘I had no boyhood,’ he said later. Lord Redesdale in 1915 remembered the twelve-year-old prince being taken to hear Etonians ‘spouting Demosthenes, Aeschylus, Cicero! I can see his poor bored little face now. It was pitiful.’²

Prince Albert whipped his eldest son, hid behind bushes to spy on him playing, and proved gullible when phrenologists gave assessments of Bertie’s weak character and meagre prospects. Albert, like many other nineteenth-century parents, believed that humiliating severity in childhood instilled virtue. By the time the boy was fifteen Albert was treating him as a potential political rival to be forestalled and restricted. As a girl princess, Queen Victoria had been encased in Kensington Palace, segregated from outside influences and kept so lonely that she developed a lifelong dread of solitude. A similarly dispiriting quarantine was imposed on Bertie. The youngster’s isolation resembled punitive confinement. Solitude became so detestable to him that in adulthood he ensured that he was never alone. At the time he felt cheated of the bantering comradeship that can save privileged children from becoming spoilt or self-obsessed. George Cadogan (afterwards Earl Cadogan) and Charles Carrington (later Earl Carrington and finally Marquess of Lincolnshire) were among his few permitted childhood associates. ‘Prince Alfred was the favourite, but I always liked the Prince of Wales far the best,’ Carrington recalled. ‘He had such an open generous disposition & the kindest heart imaginable. He was a very plucky boy and always ready for fun, which often got him into scrapes.’³

The heir’s remarks, demeanour and deeds were relentlessly monitored. A parental ban was placed on reading novels, lest fiction demoralize him, and he was only permitted to consult mindless history books, with facts and dates but shorn of ideas or controversy. With such boring material supplied to him, it is not surprising that he avoided literature as an adult. From infancy the prince was bilingual in English and German, and by the age of six spoke adequate French. This made a good basis for a European prince, but he stammered and three languages muddied his English accent to the extent that he was sent for elocution lessons. The sole pleasure that he was permitted by his parents was theatre: at the age of four he enjoyed his first pantomime, and when eleven he acted the part of Abner in Racine’s tragedy Athalie before the royal household. His appreciation of drama was lifelong: with it he developed his own sense of performance. As an adult he became a master of mellifluous, impromptu short speeches, although he never shed a Teutonic burr. His easy oratory was as useful in his royal duties as his rare memory for faces. His adult handwriting settled into an execrably inconsiderate scrawl.

During the summer of 1859 Bertie was sent for tedious scientific studies at Edinburgh University. When in October he went to Christ Church, Oxford, he was forbidden to attend lectures or live in college, but kept under surveillance in semi-detention in a well-guarded house so as to prevent contamination by fellow undergraduates. At Oxford, nevertheless, he met Sir Frederick Johnstone, a posthumous child who had inherited at his birth a baronetcy, property in the United States and most of the town of Weymouth. The roistering Johnstone, who was elected to the Jockey Club before he was twenty, showed the possibilities for a Prince of Wales in the way of worldly pleasures. Another rumbustious playmate was Harry Chaplin, a horse-mad squire who was to dissipate a fortune on hunting and racing. Queen Victoria was permanently dissatisfied with her Oxonian heir: ‘Let me never hear of your lying on a sofa or an armchair except you are ill or returned from a long fatiguing day’s hunting or shooting.’ As Henry James wrote of another mother and son, ‘an impenetrable partition, a tall bristling hedge of untrimmed misconceptions had sprung up between them’.⁴

In January 1861, when the prince enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, his parents again tried to keep him from being sullied by undergraduate life and exiled him to Madingley Hall outside the town. Although he was forbidden from inviting friends there, he re-bonded at Cambridge with Charles Carrington, and befriended the young Duke of St Albans, Tommy de Grey (afterwards Lord Walsingham) and others. At Trinity, too, he met the brothers Nathaniel and Alfred Rothschild, and rode hard with the Cambridge Drag Hounds, which Carrington hunted and ‘Natty’ Rothschild subsidized. His dependence on Rothschild subventions began at Trinity.

In a lecture of 1818, seventy years before the beginnings of Viennese psychoanalysis, Coleridge summarized the opening scene of Hamlet as ‘Suppression prepares for Overflow’. The phrase captures the situation of the young Prince of Wales as it does the Prince of Denmark. Bertie was emotional and energetic: the authoritarian monotony of his upbringing imbued him with a fear of boredom; he had a stifling sense that he was being forced to live someone else’s life; unlike many Society men of his generation, he never mastered the art of outward indifference; and it was always likely that an outrush of pent-up vitality would plunge him into escapades. The exorbitant schooling, with its ruthless colonization of his time, had parallels in the life of his nephew Wilhelm, the last Emperor of Germany. Wilhelm’s parents expected their educational strictures to produce a model liberal ruler: he reacted by becoming a furious reactionary. Bertie had none of his nephew’s vengeful resentment, but his energy and instincts could not be kept capped.

After the close of the Cambridge academic year, the prince went to the Curragh military camp in Ireland. There (aged nineteen), on three nights in September he scampered out of a window of his quarters for sex with a camp-follower named Nellie Clifden. From the Curragh he went to Koblenz to watch Prussian army manoeuvres. His elder sister Vicky (who had been engaged at the age of fourteen to marry a man eleven years her senior, married at seventeen and became Crown Princess of Prussia aged twenty) contrived for him to meet a Danish princess whom she thought would make an excellent bride for him. This was blue-eyed, flat-chested, long-nosed sixteen-year-old Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Back in England, he resumed his assignations with Nellie Clifden. In November Prince Albert heard about the liaison, and plunged into demented recriminations: ‘To thrust yourself into the hands of one of the most abject of the human species, to be by her initiated into the sacred mysteries of creation, which ought to remain shrouded in holy awe …’ He warned that she might launch a paternity suit with a spurious baby borrowed for the purpose: ‘she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury; yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!!’⁵

Albert’s death a month later, in December 1861, was blamed by his widow on the nervous anguish provoked by ‘the disgusting details’ of Bertie’s vices. ‘Oh, that boy!’ she exclaimed of her grieving son, ‘I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.’ She retreated into ostentatious, selfish mourning, becoming a recluse at Osborne, Windsor and Balmoral. Her imagination, from girlhood to old age, dwelt on the genealogies, territories and prospects of Germany’s petty kingdoms, principalities and grand duchies. As heir-general of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg, entwined by ancestry and marriage in the Saxe-Coburg cousinhood, she tried to turn her household into a simulated minor German court, with routines that were cosy, insular and uneventful. As she loathed to be seen when out in her pony-carriage, her household had to scurry behind bushes when they heard her coming. Because it was easier to hide singly, courtiers went for walks, like inmates in the grounds of a lunatic asylum, by themselves and in different directions.⁶

In March 1863 the marriage to Alexandra, which had been arranged by Bertie’s mother and sister, was performed at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was allowed to invite only four friends, including St Albans and Carrington. The queen put obtuse, pointless pressure on the bridegroom to pretend that it was a love match rather than a dynastic alliance. During the ceremony she sat swathed in black, looking inconsolable. Like many ceremonials at the Victorian court, the wedding was an undignified shambles. The procession of the Knights of the Garter, resplendent in blue velvet robes with gold collars and stars, ought to have been spectacular; but ‘instead of marching decorously two and two with a solemn space between the pairs, [they] contrived to club themselves into a clumsy knot of various sizes,’ recalled a gentleman-usher at the ceremony. ‘They badly needed a stage-manager.’ Many similar scenes of courtly disarray exasperated the Prince of Wales during the next thirty-seven years before his accession to the throne. As king he called a halt to them.⁷

Queen Victoria intended that her twenty-one-year-old son and his eighteen-year-old bride should act for her as the substitute social sovereigns of London. She wanted them to give social and moral leadership to the nation, as she believed she and Albert had done. They were installed at Marlborough House, which had been designed by Christopher Wren, stood between Carlton House Terrace and St James’s Palace and trenched on St James’s Park. The interior was rebuilt, refitted and refurnished for the new occupants at public expense to the tune of £60,000. To allow all of London Society to be received at a single ball, an enfilade of gilded state drawing rooms and dining rooms was created, with doors in alignment to emphasize the sumptuous expansiveness.

The prince was a communal object, watched by his ever-vigilant mother and her courtiers, and belonging body and bone to the press and public. There was nothing that he could hide for long. Queen Victoria’s widowed seclusion away from London made her even more inquisitive, fretful and controlling. She entrenched private secretaries, ladies-in-waiting and physicians around her son and daughter-in-law, and set them to snoop and to remit almost daily reports. She nagged the young Waleses to be selective when offering hospitality, and chary in accepting invitations to other people’s houses. Character and respectability were everything. The sporting aristocracy she condemned as sybaritic, self-indulgent and lazy.

The appointment in 1870 of Francis Knollys as the prince’s private secretary began to emancipate Marlborough House from Victoria’s suzerainty. Knollys was an able, pliant, assiduous man who proved indispensable to his royal master. For forty years the two men were in daily, even hourly contact. ‘I am here to answer letters,’ Knollys once said, and day after day, over four decades, he stood at his high desk, answering reams of correspondence in his own handwriting, in a concise prose that omitted nothing of importance but allowed no irrelevance.⁸

The prince followed his wife’s menstrual cycle and discussed her gynaecological intimacies with the German physician-in-ordinary selected for his household by his mother. In January 1864 she gave birth to a tiny son, who was probably two months premature. He was called Albert Victor at the queen’s insistence, and known as Prince Albert Victor of Wales (with his other forenames of Christian Edward elided) until created Duke of Clarence and Avondale in 1890. A second son was born one month premature in June 1865, and named George Frederick Ernest Albert to the annoyance of his grandmother, who thought three of the forenames over-reminiscent of her dissolute Hanoverian uncles. Bertie loved both boys in a gruff, intimidating way. In February 1867 a puny daughter was born a month prematurely, and called Louise Victoria Alexandra Dagmar. In July 1868 a second daughter was born, and dutifully named Victoria Alexandra Olga Mary. In November 1869 a third daughter – Maud Charlotte Mary Victoria – was born. The prince seemed indifferent to his daughters – perhaps because, unlike other women, they had no sexual point for him (in their maturity they were known in the royal household as ‘the Hags’). In April 1871 a third son – Alexander John Charles Albert – was born six weeks prematurely and died after a day. Physicians then advised that the princess’s life would be jeopardized, after six births in eight years, unless conjugal relations ended.

By the age of twenty-six Alexandra was going deaf, crippled by rheumatism and condemned to sexual abstinence. Disraeli was struck by her ability to seem gracious without smiling, and attributed her repose to the fact that she did not comprehend what was being said. In her thirties she grew isolated by deafness, and emulated her mother-in-law’s selfishness by hampering the development and constricting the opportunities of her children. All five of them were kept immature, uneducated, naïve. Her daughters were especially childish (Louise was known as Toots, Victoria as Gawks and Maud as Snipey). She hoped to keep them unmarried: they were not as mistreated as their Saxe-Coburg cousin Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, who was sent to marry Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria before she had reached puberty.

The months following his wife’s third confinement in 1867, the collapse in her health and her temporary need of a wheelchair saw the start of the prince’s philandering in London, country houses and foreign capitals. Thereafter female influences were crucial to the workings of the Prince of Wales’s court. Any study of him would ‘lack its most vital element’, the Earl of Rosebery said, if the author skirted the subject of his mistresses. In the prince’s career as a philanderer, his wife’s loyalty was his most precious asset. It also helped that although he cared about good form, and congratulated other men on the discretion with which they handled affairs with married women, he was immune to pricks of conscience. ‘She is my brood mare,’ he said of Alexandra, ‘the others are my hacks.’ Of course, men went elsewhere for excitement if they expected to serve their wives like brood mares. For many men of the prince’s generation, marital sex was too inanimate for more than quick pleasure. The Earl of Strafford, equerry to Queen Victoria, rebuked his wife on their wedding night, ‘Cora, ladies don’t move,’ for only coquettes were allowed to simulate enjoyment.⁹

Faced with his infidelities, which surprised her as she had always been told that she was beautiful, the princess took the petty revenge of being incorrigibly and blithely unpunctual. Whereas her husband seldom broke an engagement, except through illness, and believed in the sanctity of time schedules, she was sometimes thirty minutes late for dinner. This delinquency jarred the smooth-running mechanism of the royal household, where the doings of every quarter of an hour were preordained and each minute of the royal lives was allotted. Alexandra found an inseparable companion in Francis Knollys’ sister Charlotte, who joined her at the age of eighteen in 1863, and was appointed in 1870 as a Woman of the Bedchamber. Merry, tactful, tireless and self-effacing, Charlotte Knollys was nicknamed ‘Chatty’ by the prince. Alexandra also acquired a cavalier servente called Oliver Montagu. His ‘frantic efforts’ to rise from equerry to a household post were foiled by Queen Victoria, who deplored ‘his free and easy manners’ – especially after one of her spies reported that on a visit to her bedroom in Scotland, Montagu sidled behind another man, and threw him on the bed saying, ‘There Andrew, now you can say you have been in the Queen’s Bed.’ When Montagu died in 1893, Alexandra retreated to her own bed, where she cried for three days.¹⁰

The ascendant opinion in Victorian politics and society believed in robust masculine deeds as the propulsive forces of progress, citizenship and moral order. Immorality was held to be regressive because it made men sluggish and indecisive. Accordingly, opportunistic royal lechery was identified with weak leadership and unproductive energies. In 1873, at his master’s instigation, Knollys asked Rosebery, a future prime minister, if the prince and his brother Alfred might use the young earl’s spacious house in Berkeley Square for assignations with actresses. Rosebery refused contemptuously: ‘If the Prince of Wales mentions the matter again,’ he told Knollys, ‘please tell him the house is too small and unsuited for such entertainment.’ Another Victorian prime minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, would not invite the prince to his seat at Hatfield without the princess, because he deprecated royal night-time corridor-creeping. Such attitudes showed the risks for any Victorian prince ensnared in a sexual scandal. Several episodes between 1868 and 1892 endangered the Prince of Wales, but he always had the advantage that he was a man in a patriarchal society: in showdowns it was always the women who suffered most.¹¹

Only a few of his amours need space in this short book. In 1868 Sir Charles Mordaunt returned unexpectedly early from a Norwegian fishing holiday to his seat in Warwickshire. He surprised his wife Harriett in front of the house showing two white ponies to the Prince of Wales. After the prince’s swift departure, Sir Charles dragged her outside to watch him shoot the ponies dead. After further dramas, and his wife’s mental disintegration, Mordaunt in 1869 petitioned for a divorce – citing Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone and an unnamed man as co-respondents. Harriett Mordaunt was hustled to a seaside villa, where she was confined. A royal physician declared her mentally incapable of appearing in court before the divorce petition was heard in 1870. Although the prince was not cited as a co-respondent, he was forced to testify in the witness box: the most shocking revelation to newspaper readers was his admission that he was a furtive user of London hansom cabs. ‘She was so much liked in society,’ Carrington noted of Lady Mordaunt. ‘Such a pretty pleasant nice woman – everybody had a good word for her, and now she is done for, ruined and in a lunatic asylum.’ Soon afterwards, incensed by the Mordaunt publicity, a London theatre audience in the cheap upper-balcony seats hooted and booed the prince when they espied him in the royal box, and he was later hissed at Ascot races. Harriett Mordaunt remained incarcerated for the next thirty-six years.¹²

A successfully suppressed scandal involved Lady Adolphus Vane-Tempest, daughter of the Duke of Newcastle, and widow of Lord Londonderry’s alcohol-crazed son, who had died in a struggle with his madhouse keepers. The prince began afternoon visits to Susan Vane-Tempest in 1867, and in 1871 she fell pregnant. She took five or six months to confide her predicament to the prince, who refused to see her and blamed her for not consulting earlier his physician Oscar Clayton, who seems to have been a Society abortionist among his stealthy guises and was knighted at the prince’s request. She sent desperate, plaintive letters and had either a late abortion or a secret confinement. Broken by the prince’s harsh rejection as well as socially compromised, she died in 1875 aged thirty-six. This was the only bastard pregnancy that can be attributed with sureness to the prince. His familiarity with Parisian courtesans meant that he was more experienced than most Englishmen in contraceptive techniques: condoms, diaphragms, vaginal sponges and douching. He expected his English mistresses to take precautions as his Parisian actresses did; and if these precautions failed, married women could pass children off as their husbands’. Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant (the father is he who is married to the mother) was an old English legal presumption. Susan Vane-Tempest’s problem was that she was a widow.

The prince remained an avid theatregoer. During his many trips to Paris he disported with actresses, and served as the model for the Prince of Scots who goes backstage at the Théâtre des Variétés in Zola’s novel Nana. The stagehands in the wings of Parisian theatres, the performers on stage and the audience all ogled one another – ‘creating on every side a spectacle of Pleasure, Orgy, Intrigue’, in Edmond de Goncourt’s description, ‘no-where else can one find so many inducements to coitus’. Parisian police spies tracked the prince to assignations with (among many others) Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès, Baroness Alphonse de Rothschild, the Princesse de Sagan, a Russian vamp called Madame Kauchine, an American Miss Chamberlayne (nicknamed Chamberpot by Princess Alexandra), a woman calling herself Madame Hudrie (actually Comtesse de Boutourline, wife of the Prefect of Moscow) and the courtesans Catherine Walters (known as ‘Skittles’, because she had once worked in a Liverpool bowling alley) and Cora Pearl (who appeared naked before him sporting only a string of pearls and a sprig of parsley). The prince became an habitué of Le Chabanais, a sexual resort which was opened in Paris by Alexandrine Kelly in 1878 with bedrooms decorated in a variety of styles: Moorish, Hindu, Japanese, Louis Seize and Pompeian. At Le Chabanais there was a copper bath ornamented by a sphinx, which was filled with champagne to provide the sticky pleasure of cavorting with women. He also enjoyed there a chaise de volupté or siège d’amour (seat of love), equipped with stirrups and supports which poised several women together at different angles. Other European capitals provided diversions. The prince’s nephew Wilhelm of Prussia claimed in 1885 that his uncle, during a recent visit to Austria, had ‘the stupidity to be seen emerging from one of Vienna’s most infamous brothels in broad daylight at 12 noon together with several English roués!!’.¹³

In 1889 Mina Beresford, the wife of a nautical member of the prince’s set, Lord Charles Beresford, intercepted a self-incriminating letter sent to her incorrigibly adulterous husband by a beautiful heiress called Daisy Brooke. Lady Charles instructed the aggressive solicitor George Lewis to address an admonitory letter to Lady Brooke, who hastened to the prince for his protection. As she recalled twenty-seven years later: ‘suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way that all women understand. I knew I had won, so I asked him to come to tea. For ten years afterwards he came to tea with me every day when we were both in London.’ Tea-time visits (cinq à sept) had only one purpose: a man called on a married woman whose husband was sure to be out, handed his stick and hat to the servants to show that he was staying, and was ushered into her sitting room, with instructions that no one else should be admitted. The coureur des femmes, if not necessarily the woman, then achieved satisfaction, perhaps at awkward angles on a sofa. One evening at the Turf Club Charles Beresford’s brother ‘Markie’ (the Prince of Wales’s racing manager) thumped a pompous-looking man on the back with the words, ‘Hello, old bloomer, how are you?’ His victim, whose pince-nez was broken by the assault, replied severely, ‘Lord Marcus Beresford, I see that you have dined’ – meaning that he was drunk. ‘No, no,’ Beresford retorted, ‘it was purely a matter of five o’clock tea’ – meaning that he was exuberant after a cheery bout of sex.¹⁴

The prince supplanted Charles Beresford, who hated to be beaten at anything, as Daisy Brooke’s lover. He had the Brookes put on lists for country-house parties which he attended, while the Beresfords were deleted. The Beresfords resented this social boycott, and circulated an account of the affair entitled ‘Lady River’ (as in Lady Brooke). Lord Charles in a letter to the Prime Minister, Salisbury, threatened ‘a more just way of getting right done than duelling: and that is – publicity!’. Throughout 1889–91, in Salisbury’s words, ‘social hurricanes’ raged around the prince, the Beresfords and Daisy Brooke. ‘A very beautiful woman,’ Carrington recorded of her in 1891. ‘She has a very pleasant voice, and such attractive manners that she could wheedle a bird out of a tree. 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.’¹⁵

After turning fifty in 1891, and following the death of his elder son two months later in 1892, the prince became less sexually driven and more emotionally involved with his women. ‘Daisywife’, as he called her, was needed more than her predecessors, as witnessed by the fact that they met on sixty-nine days in 1893 (the year in which her husband inherited the Warwick earldom). Lady Warwick began to chafe at his possessive doting. Probably his sexual potency was waning by 1895, when she took a secondary lover. In 1897 the prince was reconciled with Beresford; and in 1898 she had a son by her other admirer, which was the recognized way of abdicating as the prince’s maîtresse en titre.

Soon afterwards the prince was introduced to Alice Keppel – possibly by Clarissa Bischoffsheim, daughter of the Habsburg court goldsmith Josef Biedermann and wife of the international financier Henri Bischoffsheim, who had bought Bute House in South Audley Street. Like Daisy Warwick, ‘La Favorita’, as Keppel was dubbed in Society, was astute and politically minded. She smoked cigarettes through a long holder, which was an extra recommendation. Unlike Lady Warwick, she had scant means, was married to a failed company promoter and was go-getting with millionaires. When in 1899 the Keppels took an expensive house at 30 Portman Square, there were guesses that the money was provided by the financier Ernest Cassel or the grocer Thomas Lipton, who were new Marlborough House favourites. In 1900 Alice Keppel was disencumbered of her husband George, when Lipton gave him a lucrative job in New York.

‘La Favorita,’ the Treasury official Sir Edward Hamilton wrote in 1900 while staying with the prince and Mrs Keppel at Lord Savile’s seat, ‘always keeps him in a good humour; and the older he gets, the more easily does he seem amused.’ Hamilton reckoned her ‘a very good influence over him, and … a decidedly clever woman. She plays her cards very well by never making mischief or saying disagreeable things of other people. The consequence is one never hears spiteful remarks made about her.’ It is striking how closely this description resembles Carrington on Daisy Warwick. Alice Keppel was Bertie’s ideal type. She remained ‘the only woman-favourite of the King who has created no jealousies and who has got on with the Queen’, Hamilton reflected after a subsequent conversation. She told him that the king had ‘a great reverence for the Queen, was genuinely attached to her; and was anxious that He should be friendly with Her friends and She with His’. She confided to Rosebery that the king complained that ‘Queen Alexandra never addressed a word of endearment to him. He used to say that he had not been a good husband in point of fidelity, but that he had always put the Queen first.’¹⁶

There were strains in the arrangement. ‘There is a self-consciousness about her which emphasizes the equivoque of the situation,’ noted Sir Almeric FitzRoy, Clerk of the Privy Council, when staying at a house party with Alice Keppel and the king in 1903. ‘She retains great beauty, but her carriage suggests an uneven blend of pride and humiliation.’ There were further mortifications for her cuckolded husband when he joined her at parties with her lover. ‘Kinki was there,’ Lady Desborough gossiped of a dinner given in 1904 by the Duchess of Marlborough, ‘& as usual the most fearful gaffes & “insinuendoes” were made in front of the miserable George Keppel!’ Ultimately companionship mattered more than sexual acts in this great romance of his life. ‘The friendship of the King & Mrs Keppel, which whatever it may have once been, now rests upon the indispensableness of twaddle to a man in the King’s position,’ FitzRoy concluded in 1908, when the monarch’s health was failing. ‘Their intercourse lay in constant consultations on the smallest points, which with an air of immense seriousness the lady submitted to him … interminable discussions revolve round matters of signal insignificance, which have at least the effect of passing the time innocuously & relaxing the tension of the Royal nerves.’¹⁷