The Heir Apparent (51 page)

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!”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It was the most controversial act in his entire career.

Bertie’s next move was to call upon Mina Beresford. In her words, he “
ordered
me forthwith to give the letter up to
him
!!” which she refused to do. George Lewis wrote another letter on Mina’s behalf to Daisy, telling her that if she stayed away from London that season, her letter would be returned. This was blackmail, and Daisy appealed
again to the prince, who called on Mina a second time. On this occasion, she recalled, “he was anything but conciliatory in tone to me and even
hinted
that if I did not give him up the letter, my position in Society!! and Lord Charles’s would become injured!!”
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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.”
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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.’ ”
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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).
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

“ ‘You’re not her lover,’ cried the Prince.

“ ‘I am,’ the sea captain retorted, ‘and I’m not going to stop.’ ”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Salisbury disagreed, dismissing Beresford as “a mere tool” in the hands of his wife.
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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.”
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The crisis came on 21 December 1891, when Beresford wrote yet another violent letter to Bertie.
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Salisbury proposed a compromise: Beresford should withdraw his letter in return for a letter of apology from Bertie. An exchange of letters took place on 24 December. A few weeks later, the “Lady River” pamphlet was ceremoniously burned.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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As Knollys remarked, Daisy had “cleared out ‘the American gang.’ ”
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Involving the prime minister in the quarrels of Marlborough House was not a good idea. A figure of immense physical bulk and massive intellectual authority, dreadfully badly dressed and contemptuous of fashion, Salisbury was a private man with strong family loyalties. Episodes such as this seemed to confirm his view that the Prince of Wales was inferior, both morally and intellectually.
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The Marlborough House set epitomized all that he thought rotten within the aristocracy. Salisbury’s Hatfield House was barred to Bertie except on official occasions; it was the only country house where he was not welcomed.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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