Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

She also made much use of the Prince’s generous support when in 1881 she decided to go on the stage, appearing with a professional company at the Haymarket Theatre in She Stoops to Conquer. The Prince attended that performance, and praised her part in it to the actor-manager, Squire Bancroft, who agreed to let her play a leading role in a new play which he was putting on the next month. The Prince went to see this play three times, persuaded all his friends to go to see it as well, and was largely responsible for its success. Thus launched on a profitable stage career, Lillie Langtry saw less of the Prince than she had done in the past; but they remained good friends, arranged meetings when she returned from her tours in America, and wrote each other friendly letters — those from him, like most of his other letters, containing little of interest, being addressed to ‘Ma Chere Amie’, ‘The Fair Lily’ or ‘My dear Mrs Langtry’ and being sent by the ordinary post.

Towards the end of the 1890s, however, these letters became more and more infrequent, for the Prince had fallen in love with someone else. For a time he had adopted ‘a strange new line’, according to the Duke of Cambridge, of ‘taking to young girls and discarding the married women’. And Lady Geraldine Somerset, who said that he was ‘more or less in love’ with Mrs Francis Stonor’s daughter, Julie, also spoke of two other ‘reigning young ladies … Miss Tennant and Miss Duff’. But these girls, ‘H.R.H.’s virgin band’, as Edward Hamilton called them, seem to have meant little to him compared with the passion he developed, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, for the wife of Lord Brooke, heir to the cantankerous fourth Earl of Warwick.

Frances Brooke, or Daisy as she came to be called, was twenty years younger than the Prince. Strikingly good looking, intelligent, fascinating and extremely rich, she was the owner of estates worth more than £20,000 a year which she had inherited from her grandfather, the last Viscount Maynard. There had been a suggestion that she should marry Prince Leopold; but this had come to nothing, either because her mother and step-father refused the match on her behalf, as she maintained in her first book of memoirs, or because, as she contradicted herself by claiming in the second, she had already fallen in love with Lord Brooke and Prince Leopold was in love with someone else. In any case, she had married Lord Brooke at Westminster Abbey in April 1881, in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Thereafter she had settled down happily to married life with her good-natured husband, first at Carlton Gardens in London and then at Easton Lodge, the Maynard family home in Essex where, pregnancies permitting, she indulged a passion for hunting, for driving a four-in-hand and for giving houseparties. After a time, however, such pleasures proved insufficient for her; and, her husband, ‘good old Brookie’, being a complaisant man — who remained always devoted to his erring wife but confessed that he found ‘a good day’s fishing or shooting second in point of pleasure to nothing on earth’ — she began to seek excitement elsewhere.

She met the Prince of Wales at a ball in 1883. But at that time, though he asked her to dance and spent a few minutes talking to her in a corridor, he seemed much more interested in Lady Randolph Churchill. Not long afterwards, however, Lady Brooke found a lover in the Prince’s friend, Lord Charles Beresford, brother of the manager of the Prince’s stud, Lord Marcus Beresford, and a notorious adulterer who claimed, as one of numerous escapades, to have tip-toed into a dark room in a country house, and to have leaped joyfully into what he believed to be some obliging lady’s bed, only to find himself in the protesting arms of the Bishop of Chester. Beresford’s was not a kindly nature. He confessed that he enjoyed making women cry, because it was ‘such fun to hear their stays creak’. And he made no secret of the fact that he did not regard very highly the allurements of his wife, who was ten years older than he was and whose elaborate make-up included not only rouge and false hair but also false eyebrows one of which, mistaken for a butterfly, once came off in the hand of a child into whose pram she was foolhardy enough to poke her painted face.

Lady Charles’s mettlesome husband and Lady Brooke fell passionately in love. Indeed, there was talk of elopement and divorce. But such steps, which would have placed the lovers beyond the pale of society, were fortunately never taken. For Lord Charles discovered that Lady Brooke ‘was not content with his attentions alone’; while Lady Brooke found out that Lord Charles’s wife was pregnant, and — the morals of Lady Charles Beresford being beyond reproach — there could be no doubt that the father was the husband.

Enraged by this evidence that her lover had not abandoned his wife’s bed, Lady Brooke wrote him a letter of furious reproach which arrived at Lord Charles’s house while he was abroad. His wife, who said that she had been asked to open all his correspondence during his absence, read it with horror. In it, Lady Brooke stated that he must leave home immediately and join her on the Riviera; that one of her children was his; that he had no right to beget a child by his wife, ‘and more to that effect’. Other people, who read the letter later, agreed that its contents were utterly shocking; and that, as Lord Marcus Beresford commented, it ‘ought never to have seen the light of day’.

When Lady Brooke heard that it had found its way into the hands of Lady Charles and thence into those of George Lewis — a solicitor said to know more about the private lives of the aristocracy than any other man in London — she was inclined to agree with Lord Marcus’s verdict. Distressed by what she had done, she turned to the Prince of Wales, trusting that his influence and hatred of scandal would enable her to extricate herself from her appalling predicament.

Since that ball in 1883, when he had been preoccupied with Lady Randolph Churchill, the Prince had entertained the Brookes at Sandringham and had stayed with them once or twice at Easton Lodge. He had been attracted to Lady Brooke, and now responded readily to her call, agreeing to see her in private at Marlborough House. ‘He was more than kind,’ she later wrote of the subsequent interview, ‘and suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand. I knew I had won, so I asked him to tea.’

Losing no time in his eagerness to help her, the Prince of Wales, at two o’clock that morning, went to see George Lewis, who was persuaded to show him the letter. The Prince, who thought it the ‘most shocking’ one he had ever read, afterwards tried to persuade Lady Charles to have it handed over to him so that it could be destroyed. Lady Charles declined to hand it over. Instead, she instructed Lewis to inform Lady Brooke that if she kept away from London that season the letter would be given back to her. Lady Brooke refused to consider such a solution, so the Prince went to Lady Charles a second time and ‘was anything but conciliatory in tone’. He ‘even hinted,’ so Lady Charles claimed, ‘that if I did not give him up the letter, my position in society!! and Lord Charles’s would become injured!!’

Whether or not the Prince did, in fact, make such a threat, he certainly made it clear to society that he was now the close, trusted and devoted friend of Lady Brooke. He saw to it that she and her husband were invited to the same houses as himself. And according to the by no means reliable recollections of his new mistress, ‘when that sign of the Prince’s support didn’t stop the angry little cat, the Prince checked her in another way. He simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it and wrote to the hostess that he thought it would be better for me not to meet the angry woman till she had cooled off and become reasonable.’ Lord Charles, who had himself been trying to have the letter destroyed, was quite as angry with the Prince as was his wife. At the beginning of January he went to see him, warned him of the consequences of taking any further action against Lady Charles, with whom he was now reluctantly reconciled, and, as everyone who knew him would have expected, lost his temper. It seems that he furiously pushed the man who had taken over his former mistress against a sofa into which the Prince fell, murmuring, ‘Really, Lord Charles, you forget yourself.’