The Heir Apparent (43 page)

The new breed of scurrilous gossip papers, which had created Lillie Langtry, now threatened to destroy her, and burn Bertie in the process.
Town Talk
was a weekly London society paper edited and published by the twenty-seven-year-old Adolphus Rosenberg. Throughout September, it ran a story that Ned Langtry had filed a petition for divorce, and that the Prince of Wales was named as corespondent.

Rosenberg then claimed that Patsy Cornwallis-West used her house at 49 Eaton Place as a photography studio, running from one camera to another in order to mass-produce the
cartes de visite
that she sold on commission in a Victorian version of
Hello!
magazine. Patsy’s husband sued for libel at once. When the court case opened, Rosenberg was surprised to find himself further indicted for publishing libels against the Langtrys.
⁵⁵
How the notoriously hard up Ned Langtry paid the lawyer’s fees has never been explained.

Neither Lillie nor Patsy was present in court. Ned Langtry testified: “I have read these articles and there is not one single word of truth in them.… I am now living at home with my wife.”
⁵⁶
Rosenberg was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. But the silencing of
Town Talk
was achieved at a cost. Day after day throughout October 1879,
The Times
had printed column inches repeating the paper’s allegations against the Prince of Wales.

Queen Victoria, who was always generous when Bertie was in trouble, blamed his love of country house parties. “It is what has done dear Bertie so much harm,” she told Vicky. “That visiting is … the worst thing I know and such a bore. The gentlemen go out shooting and the
ladies spend the whole day idling and gossiping together. Alix hardly ever goes now—she hates it so.”
⁵⁷

The fact was that at thirty-eight, Bertie was a playboy Prince Hal, poised dangerously close to the edge of scandal. The London society press created a discourse of social slights and innuendo, of fashion and tittle-tattle, that reverberated nationally as it was reprinted in the gossip pages of local newspapers. Knollys’s desk filled with letters about petty social disputes, gambling debts, and slanderous chitchat and quarrels with
Vanity Fair
. Bertie had become the chief of the aristocratic tribe, ruling over the atavistic honor culture of the Victorian nobility, but this was hardly a fit role for a modern prince. The problem—what was the Prince of Wales to do?—remained unsolved.

Or so it seemed. The Marlborough House mailbag for 1879 also includes business letters from Beaconsfield about matters such as Egypt.
⁵⁸
There was correspondence with the Colonial Office about a Colonial Exhibition in New South Wales, with the Foreign Office about the Paris Universal Exhibition, with the Archbishop of Canterbury about the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and with the governors of Calcutta about the water supply in Dacca. Bertie’s life had a serious side, which is too easily overlooked. He performed twenty public engagements in 1879, visiting schools and hospitals, laying foundation stones, and presiding at dinners; he made nineteen appearances in the House of Lords, and at Buckingham Palace he held four levees, two drawing rooms, and two state concerts.
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When the Queen retreated to the Italian lakes in March, “Prince Hal” told Beaconsfield that he wished to be in frequent communication with the prime minister. “This is all very well,” commented Beaconsfield, “if it do not take, as threatened, the form of a rather protracted Sandringham visit.”
⁶⁰

Bertie’s diary for 1880 records at least seven visits from Prince Louis of Battenberg.
⁶¹
The handsome twenty-six-year-old naval officer was on
leave and half-pay, and on his frequent visits to London he stayed at Marlborough House.

Louis was the eldest of four Battenberg sons, and like his brothers, Alexander (Sandro) and Henry (Liko), he shamelessly exploited his charm and royal family connections to promote his career. Since joining the Royal Navy at age fifteen, he had benefited greatly from the patronage and generosity of “Uncle Bertie.” Louis’s son, Lord Mountbatten, was later to devote much effort to elaborating a romantic version of his antecedents, insisting that the Battenbergs were equal members of the German royal family. Louis was the son of a cousin of Princess Alice’s husband, the Grand Duke of Hesse, by a morganatic marriage—that is, a marriage to a woman who was not of royal rank.
⁶²
Provincial German courts were obsessed with the blood royal, the magic elixir that empowered toy-town princesses to marry kings, and in the snobbish world of the
Almanac de Gotha
the Battenbergs were looked down upon as “half-castes.” As Vicky’s husband, Fritz, remarked, they were “not … of the blood—a little like … animals”—a comment that perhaps says as much about Fritz as it does about them.
⁶³

In 1880, Louis Battenberg began an affair with Lillie Langtry. Whether Bertie knew about this and was complicit, as some have suggested, or whether he was irked by his good-looking young cousin stealing Lillie away from him can only be surmised; we have no real evidence either way.
⁶⁴
At a ball in May or June 1880, so the story goes, Lillie is supposed to have angered the prince by drinking too much champagne and slipping a spoonful of strawberry ice down the back of his neck. This was lèse-majesté indeed; Bertie could never bear to be teased.
⁶⁵
Lillie denied the incident, claiming that it was actually Patsy Cornwallis-West who was responsible; true or not, the story can be read as a measure of her falling stock with Bertie.
⁶⁶
There is no doubt that the prince wanted to distance himself from the scandal of the court case involving Lillie and Patsy Cornwallis-West.

At a Sunday dinner at Marlborough House (so Lillie related in her memoirs), she became suddenly ill with stomach pains, and Alix implored
her to leave early. The royal physician Francis Laking followed her home to Norfolk Street. The next day, to Lillie’s everlasting delight, Alix called at Norfolk Street, accompanied by Charlotte Knollys, and made tea for her.
⁶⁷
Neither Bertie nor Alix mentions these events in their diaries, and this episode could easily be dismissed as yet another of Lillie’s apocryphal stories. Being forgiven by Alix was the fantasy of every ex-mistress. It validated the mistress socially and gave closure to the affair. In this instance, however, there seems to be some truth in Lillie’s story. She wrote a letter shortly afterward to her friend Lord Wharncliffe:

Lillie’s letters to Lord Wharncliffe give edited highlights of her social career, but she would hardly have invented a dinner at Marlborough House, nor Alix’s visit—though her later claim that Alix made her a cup of tea seems improbable, to say the least. (Did Alix know
how
to make tea?)

What Lillie chose not to reveal in her letter to Wharncliffe was the reason why she felt unwell. She was pregnant. Which of her many lovers was the father of the child was a puzzle, most likely even to Lillie herself. The one man who was not in the frame was her husband, Ned, as he had walked out after the
Town Talk
libel case. The obvious candidate was Louis Battenberg.
⁶⁹
Lillie told him that he was the father, and he believed her. He confessed to his parents, who put paid to any foolish notions he might have had of marrying Lillie and arranged a financial settlement.
⁷⁰
Bertie may have worried that the child was his—there is a story that he tossed for paternity with Battenberg and lost—but it’s
unlikely that he would have introduced Lillie to Alix and allowed his wife to become involved if he was sleeping with Lillie at the time.
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Whoever the father was, hushing up the scandal was imperative. Lillie was lent £2,000 to pay her debts, and her husband, Ned, who often visited her unannounced, was prevented from seeing her, constantly occupied with invitations to shoot or fish. Keeping him in ignorance of the pregnancy was vital; he was angry and resentful, and the worry was that if he discovered that Lillie was pregnant by another man, he might sue for divorce, dragging Bertie into the law courts. Lillie spent the summer holiday in Jersey. One Friday in October, by now four months pregnant, she visited London briefly and saw Bertie.
⁷²
On 17 October 1880, Bertie held a meeting with his doctor, Oscar Clayton, and saw Louis Battenberg.
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The same day, Louis departed on a two-year voyage around the world on the aptly named
Inconstant
. Lillie herself was spirited away to France. Her baby was born on 18 March 1881—a girl named Jeanne Marie.

What Bertie did not know was that throughout her pregnancy Lillie clung passionately to another man. His name was Arthur Jones; a rakish Jersey sportsman, he was the illegitimate son of Lord Ranelagh. His sister Alice, another illegitimate child of Lord Ranelagh, had married Lillie’s brother Clement Le Breton. Lillie’s letters to Jones, discovered in 1978, make it clear that she preferred plain Mr. Jones to both the Prince of Wales and the glamorous Prince Louis Battenberg. She told Jones that he was the father of her child, and he bought the potions from the chemist that she took in fruitless efforts to precipitate an abortion. The love letters she wrote during her pregnancy suggest that she at least was convinced that the baby was his, and he was with her in Paris when the child was born.
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Oscar Wilde wrote
Lady Windermere’s Fan
in 1891. He offered Lillie the part of Mrs. Erlynne, which she refused. “Why he ever supposed it would have been … a suitable play for me I cannot imagine,” she wrote, disingenuously.
⁷⁵
In the play, Mrs. Erlynne is a professional beauty with a heart of gold. She is hated by the society ladies, one of whom quips, “Many a woman has a past, but I am told she had at least eleven, and they all fit.”

“You whose whole life is a lie, could you speak the truth about anything?” asks another. But Wilde’s play turns on the idea that it is London society that is morally corrupt, not Mrs. Erlynne, who has been redeemed through her suffering and disgrace. “You don’t know,” she says, “what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an outcast! To find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one’s face.”
⁷⁶

Bertie helped to pull Lillie out of the pit. After her baby was born, he did all he could to support her career as an actor, making a conspicuous appearance at her debut performance of
She Stoops to Conquer
.
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Lillie was a moderate success on the stage; as the diarist Loulou Harcourt wrote, after seeing her in
School for Scandal
in 1885: “She is fairly good when she is simply acting the lady of fashion moving about in society but the moment she tries to show any passion or force of feeling she is a miserable failure and proves herself to be no actress but people will continue to go and see her because she is Mrs. Langtry and is dressed by Worth.”
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Thanks to Bertie’s patronage, Lillie received a semi-royal welcome when she toured the United States, and she became a successful racehorse owner—she was the first woman owner to win the Cesarewitch.

Lillie’s long-estranged husband, Ned, died of drink in Chester Asylum in 1897. Francis Knollys was kept closely informed by the solicitor George Lewis when Ned Langtry’s landlord threatened blackmail, claiming to possess compromising letters Bertie had written to Lillie. “I was upon friendly terms with Mr. Langtry up to the last,” wrote
Lewis. “I am sure he would sooner have sent me any letters than have given them to his landlord.”
⁷⁹
It seems that Ned Langtry used George Lewis as a broker, trading silence and cash in exchange for Bertie’s love letters. Bertie, meanwhile, maintained a lifelong friendship with Lillie. “How I wish you were on board sailing with me now,” he wrote from Cowes in 1885.
⁸⁰
He attended her opening nights—“I count upon
you
to reserve the Box for me.”
⁸¹
He helped arrange for her daughter, Jeanne, to be presented to the Queen.
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He even gave Lillie a dog that had belonged to his current mistress, Lady Warwick: “Perhaps you would write Lady W[arwick] a line to W[arwick] Castle and tell her you like the dog and ask her the name.”
⁸³