The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (20 page)

The impasse was resolved in the spring of 1880. During the course of a house party at the Prince's home, Claremont House in Surrey, Leopold 'opened his heart' to Daisy. As he was in love with someone else and as his friend Lord Brooke had told him of his love for her, Leopold suggested that Daisy turn him down in favour of Lord Brooke. No sooner suggested than accomplished. The following day, as Daisy and Lord Brooke were sheltering under a large umbrella on the muddy road between Claremont and Esher, he proposed and she accepted.

Lord and Lady Rosslyn, their hopes of a great royal alliance dashed (they had spent the previous weeks in insisting that, once married to Leopold, Daisy would be given the full rank and privileges of a royal princess) were obliged to resign themselves to the situation. Queen Victoria was not nearly so resigned. According to Disraeli's secretary, she was 'furious'.
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Daisy was sent for but throughout her interrogation by the Queen 'she stood her guns'.
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In the end, it was the fear of a public loss of face that stopped Queen Victoria from making too much of a fuss.

Within two years Prince Leopold had married, more conventionally, Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont. And in less than two years after this, he bumped his knee while climbing some stairs and died from the resulting internal haemorrhage. 'Prince Leopold's death was a great loss to my husband and myself,'
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says Daisy.

For by this time, of course, Daisy had become Lady Brooke. Their engagement was officially announced at a ball in Grosvenor House, Park Lane in June 1880, in the middle of Daisy's first season. This season was her introduction to the sort of frivolous and frenetic life she was to lead for the following fifteen years. 'I was fetêd, feasted, courted and adored, in one continual round of gaiety, and I lived in and for the moment,'
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runs her account of the social whirlpool into which she now plunged. For not only was Daisy a great heiress, she had developed into a great beauty. All those 'thronging admirers',
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all those moustache-twirling officers from the Guards and the Blues, were attracted as much by her looks and personality as by her immense wealth. It was as well, perhaps, that the stolid Lord Brooke was too overwhelmed by his love for her to feel any apprehensions about the number of young men whom Daisy seemed not only to attract, but to encourage.

The couple were married in Westminster Abbey on 30 April 1881. The ceremony was described as 'the most brilliant wedding of a dozen seasons'.
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Heading the galaxy of royal guests (Prince Leopold was best man) was the Prince of Wales.

Although Queen Victoria who had, by now, forgiven the bride for turning down her son, did not attend the ceremony, she did what she imagined to be the next best thing. The newly-married couple were commanded to break into their honeymoon in order to dine at Windsor Castle. The bride was instructed to wear her wedding dress, 'orange blossom and all'.
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Victoria professed herself enchanted with Daisy's appearance and asked not only for a photograph of her in her dress but for a spray of
orange blossom to keep as a souvenir. First love, the sentimental Queen had once pronounced, was sacred: 'the divinest thing in the world'.
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With their marriage, Lord and Lady Brooke became, if not exactly members of the Marlborough House set, certainly representatives of the sort of society that took its tone from the Prince of Wales.

Marriage meant that Daisy could at last come into her inheritance and that until her husband, in turn, became the fifth Earl of Warwick, they could move into Easton Lodge. Considering Easton's combination of Elizabethan and mock-Elizabethan styles to be not nearly impressive enough for her new position in society, Daisy commissioned alterations that would transform it into 'a flamboyant pseudo-Gothic palace'.
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With all the gusto of youth and good health, and bolstered by Daisy's fortune, the couple now embarked on a life of uninhibited enjoyment.

'It sufficed,' claimed Lord Brooke in later life, 'to be an agreeable young man, well-mannered, equipped with a modest independence and real skill at some sport, to have the very best of times.'
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By 'the best of times' he meant that state of highly organised idleness in which the upper classes passed their days. From the start, the lives of Lord and Lady Brooke followed the by now well established pattern: the London season with its rides in the Park, its afternoon calls with their complicated ritual of card-leaving, its balls and receptions and dinner parties; the great race-meetings ('I could find all the stimulus I needed in the movement, the glitter, the skill and, of course, the beauty of the animals themselves,'
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enthuses Daisy); Cowes Week; the country house parties with their hunting and shooting; the holidays in the South of France.

Of all these diversions, it was hunting that afforded Daisy the most pleasure. There was something about the dash, danger and exhilaration of the chase that accorded well with her own increasingly headstrong nature. Very soon Daisy developed into a skilful and fearless rider, following some of the smartest hunts in the country. Dressed in her tight-fitting side-saddle costumes, and with a bowler hat perched on her fashionably fringed and ridged hair, she presented a striking figure on the hunting field.

It was this love of hunting – allied to her determination to have her own way – that once caused Daisy to offend Queen Victoria. The Brookes had been commanded to dine and sleep at Windsor, but as her
husband was to be away from home and as Daisy was anxious to attend the Essex hunt races, she made her excuses. But the Queen was not to be put off: Lady Brooke must attend alone.

Not one to be balked, Daisy worked out a plan whereby she could attend both the Queen's dinner and the day's hunting. The dinner, an intimate occasion with only six guests in addition to the Queen and the inevitable Princess Beatrice, went well enough, and the guests retired to their rooms on the understanding that they would leave the following morning, after breakfast. But by first light Daisy was up and, having put on a hunting coat of brilliant pink ('a fashion innovation of my own,'
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she claims), she requested a carriage to take her, 'breakfastless', to the station to catch the earliest train. The lord-in-waiting, whom etiquette obliged to see her off, was both shocked and annoyed at her unorthodox behaviour.

So was Queen Victoria. The Queen, having heard the carriage draw up below, got out of bed and, standing by the window in her night-gown, peeped through the curtain to watch Lady Brooke, in her vivid coat, climb into the carriage and drive off. She was appalled.

'How fast! How very fast!'
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she muttered to her lady-in-waiting.

The incident must have confirmed the Queen's view that Lady Brooke, whom she had so recently considered as a suitable wife for her son Leopold, had by now quite given herself over to 'the frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence and idleness (producing ignorance)' of the 'Higher Classes'.
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The tone and style of contemporary society, grumbled the Queen, was '
repulsive
, vulgar, bad and frivolous
in every way
.'
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In later years, when Daisy's opinion of the aristocracy had come to echo Queen Victoria's (although from a different standpoint), there was one aspect of this upper-class way of life which she found especially regrettable: its philistinism. 'The majority of the people who made up society were not taught to use their brains; they disliked making the effort necessary to appreciate books, pictures, music or sculpture, and what they disliked they distrusted,'
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she says. 'We acknowledged that it was necessary that pictures should be painted, books written, the law administered; we even acknowledged that there was a certain class whose job it might be to do these things. But we did not see why their achievements entitled them to our recognition; they might disturb, over-stimulate, or even bore.'
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She was equally oblivious, at the time, to a far more serious aristocratic failing: the inability to comprehend, or even notice, the injustices of the social system in which they lived. 'Social problems
were apparently unknown,' wrote a bemused Lord Brooke in his memoirs. 'I hadn't heard of any, and the right of a young man to make the most agreeable use of the May-morn of his youth went unchallenged.'
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Most members of the Victorian upper classes simply accepted things as they were: they never reflected on the causes of the poverty and misery and inequality of their day. Their contacts with the lower classes were mainly with their servants (and, goodness knows, they seemed happy enough); poverty was personified by the cap-doffing stable-lad, the ruddy-cheeked farmhand or the aproned housewife on her cottage doorstep. Of the grinding penury and the seething discontent in the great industrial cities they knew very little and understood even less.

13. Easton Lodge, the palatial mansion which Daisy Maynard (afterwards Warwick) inherited at the age of three.

14. A 'shooting luncheon' at Easton Lodge. The Prince of Wales stands in the centre; below him, in a white hat, sits Daisy Warwick, at her feet sits her husband, the Earl of Warwick.

15. Daisy, when still Lady Brooke, before her momentous meeting with the Prince of Wales.

16. The always immaculately dressed Prince of Wales, at Homburg in the 1890s.