Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

In Lady Warwick’s subsequent accounts of their relationship, she makes him appear far more in love with her than she was with him, describing him once as having been ‘bothersome as he sat on a sofa’ holding her hand and ‘goggling’ at her. Six years after the Prince’s death, she told the journalist Frank Harris, ‘He was remarkably constant and admired me exceedingly … He had manners and he was very considerate and from a woman’s point of view that’s a great deal … He was indeed a very perfect gentle lover. I think anyone would have been won by him … I grew to like him very much.’

By then Lady Warwick had become a dedicated socialist; and she liked to emphasize the part she had played in interesting the Prince in worthy causes, being at pains to point out the taste they shared for the simple pleasures of country life. She said that he had advised her ‘against giving expensive entertainments’ and had added that, for his part, he was much happier to come down to Easton Lodge to see her quietly with a couple of friends. All the same, they had both enjoyed house-parties on the grand scale; and she had spent a great deal of money in giving them. One of them, attended by the Prince, lasted a week, the guests being transported by a special train which ran from London and back every day; and actors being engaged to play the parts of chessmen in the gardens, arrayed in fantastic costumes.

At Easton Lodge house-parties, according to Elinor Glyn, who lived nearby at Durrington House and often attended them, those with a taste for sexual intrigue and illicit liaisons found their hostess an ever-willing and resourceful collaborator, always careful to warn her guests that the stable yard bell rang at six o’clock in the morning, thus providing them with a reliable alarm in case they had to return to a previously unoccupied bed.

In the staircase hall, Mrs Glyn wrote,

there was a tray, on which stood beautifully cleaned silver candlesticks … one of which you carried up to your room, even if you did not need it at all. It might be that in lighting it up for you, your admirer might whisper a suggestion of a rendezvous for the morning; if not, probably on your breakfast tray you would find a note from him, given by his valet to your maid, suggesting where and when you might chance to meet him for a walk … Supposing you had settled to meet the person who was amusing you in the saloon, say, at eleven, you went there casually at the agreed time, dressed to go out, and found your cavalier awaiting you. Sometimes Lady Brooke would be there too, but she always sensed whether this was an arranged meeting or an accidental one. If it was intended, she would say graciously that Stone Hall, her little Elizabethan pleasure house in the park, was a nice walk before lunch, and thus make it easy to start. Should some strangers who did not know the ropes happen to be there, too, and show signs of accompanying you on the walk, she would immediately engage them in conversation until you had got safely away.

Once the intending lovers had come to an understanding, it would usually be agreed that something would be left outside the lady’s bedroom door to signify that she was alone and that the coast was clear; but a pile of sandwiches on a plate, formerly a favourite sign, had fallen into disfavour since the greedy German diplomat, Baron von Eckardstein, seeing some in a corridor at Chatsworth, had picked them up and eaten them all on the way to his room, much to the consternation of the countess who had placed them there.

These clandestine arrangements were perfectly acceptable to the Prince, of course, provided there was no hint of scandal or even of open discussion of what everyone knew was going on. Discretion was insisted upon as de rigueur, disclosure unforgivable. A gentleman’s behaviour was not to be measured in terms of his sexual activities but by the strictness with which he observed the rules that polite society imposed upon their conduct. Certain practices were not to be tolerated. On hearing reports that Lord Arthur Somerset, the superintendent of his racing stables, had been apprehended by the police in a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street frequented by Post Office messenger boys, the Prince had at first refused to believe it of a friend of his ‘any more than [he would have done] if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury’. He had sent emissaries to the Commissioner of Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Prime Minister in an effort to clear Lord Arthur Somerset and to get ‘something settled’. The Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions was informed by these emissaries that the Prince was in a ‘great state’ but that he ‘didn’t believe a word of it’. It was, as the Prince told Lord Carrington, ‘simply inconceivable’: if Somerset were guilty of such an offence, who on earth could they trust? Finally he was forced to conclude that Somerset, like anyone capable of such behaviour, must be an ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ and the less one heard ‘of such a filthy scandal the better’. But, aberrations like this apart, a gentleman’s infidelities were his own affair so long as he kept them to himself and did not allow them to become the subject of public discussion. This being understood, lovers who had spent part of the night together were expected next day to betray not the least hint of their previous intimacy.

Lady Warwick’s own affair with the Prince of Wales seems to have ended a year or so after she became chatelaine of Warwick Castle. Contemporaries believed that he had grown bored by her lectures. As she herself wrote,

only a sincere democrat desires to know the uncomfortable things of life. In [the Prince of Wales] there was a perpetual struggle between his sense of duty and a desire to conceal from himself that all was not well with the best of all possible worlds. Queen Victoria did not lend a listening ear to recitals of the wrongs of the people; he, on the other hand, did listen, but he would not seek to hear. Those who revealed unpleasant things were not liked the better for it.

He would murmur to them, ‘Society grows; it is not made.’

He and Lady Warwick remained friends, and continued to see each other often at country house-parties; but since they were no longer lovers, Lady Warwick began to fear that, as her influence over him waned, she might lose it altogether. So, at the beginning of 1898, just before she gave birth to another child after an interval of over twelve years, she thought it as well to assure the Princess of Wales, who had never accepted her in the way she had accepted his other mistresses, that her relationship with the Prince was now purely platonic. She sat down to write to them both, contritely assuring the Princess of her great respect for her and addressing the Prince in a more formal tone than usual so that he could show the letter to his wife.

My own lovely little Daisy [the Prince replied immediately], It is difficult for me to describe how touched I was by your beautiful letter which reached me at Chatsworth this morning … I gave it to the Princess to read. She was moved to tears, and said she felt very sorry for you and that ‘out of evil good would come’.

She kept the letter to read it again and return it to me at tea-time, and begged me to thank you for the letter she received from you … She really quite forgives and condones the past, as I have corroborated what you wrote about our friendship having been platonic for some years. You could not help, my loved one, writing to me as you did — though it gave me a pang — after the letters I have received from you for nearly nine years! But I think I could read ‘between the lines’ everything you wished to convey … But how could you, my loved one, imagine that I should withdraw my friendship from you? On the contrary I mean to befriend you more than ever, and you cannot prevent my giving you the same love as the friendship I have always felt for you. Though our interests, as you have often said, lie apart, still we have that sentimental feeling of affinity which cannot be eradicated by time … I know my darling that [the Princess] will now meet you with pleasure, so that your position is, thank God! better now than it ever was since we have been such friends, and I do not despair in time that you and she might become quite good friends.