As he grew older Bertie’s context for infidelity was the long-term affair. He chose young, pretty women who were married to someone else. The implication for his wife was that he did not want her sexually or emotionally. Prior to Little Mrs George he had two equally public lovers.
Lillie Langtry, daughter of the Dean of Jersey, was an icon of beauty painted by Millais and Burne-Jones. In May 1877 Alexandra was ill and went to her brother in Greece to recuperate. As soon as she had gone Bertie asked friends to arrange for him to meet with Lillie. On 24 May at a supper party in Stratford Place given by Sir Allen Young, an Arctic explorer, he was introduced to the ‘Jersey Lily’ and her husband. Next day she received a note saying the Prince of Wales would like to call. Fame with a royal flavour was assured:
It would be difficult for me to analyse my feelings at this time. To pass in a few weeks from being an absolute ‘nobody’ to what the Scotch so aptly describe as a ‘person’; to find myself not only invited to but watched at all the great balls and parties; to hear the murmur as I entered the room, to be compelled to close the yard gates in order to avoid the curious, waiting crowd outside, before I could mount my horse for my daily canter in the Row; and to see my portrait roped round for protection at the Royal Academy – surely I thought London has gone mad, for there can be nothing about me to warrant this extraordinary excitement.
She was born Emilie Charlotte le Breton in 1853, had six brothers and when she was sixteen fell for a young man whom her father admitted was his illegitimate son. Three years before she met Bertie, when she was twenty-one, she married Edward Langtry, who owned two yachts, lived in Eaton Square and drank too much.
Bertie, enamoured, called her My Fair Lily and wanted to be seen in public with her. ‘My only purpose in life,’ she wrote, ‘was to look nice and make myself agreeable.’ He presented her to mother, took her to country-house weekends of the sort spoofed by Vita in The Edwardians, and to Marlborough House, Sandringham, Balmoral and Buckingham Palace. ‘These balls at Buckingham Palace completely realized my girlish dreams of fairyland,’ Lillie wrote in The Days I Knew. They went riding together in Hyde Park – ‘etiquette demanded that I should ride on so long as His Royal Highness elected to do so’ – and for weekend shooting parties. ‘I was once persuaded to see a stag stalked. But I felt so sick and sorry for the fine beast that I have never forgotten it.’ When Lillie went on the stage in 1881 – as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer at the Haymarket – Bertie patronized the theatre and ensured her success. At her first night The Times commented on ‘the most distinguished audience ever seen in a theatre’. They went to the races, Cowes, Paris, Bournemouth. ‘He always smelled so very strongly of cigars,’ she said. Edward Langtry, like George Keppel after him, was invited too when it was seemly for him to appear: the complaisant husband, conscious that the Prince came first.
The liaison was sniped at in cartoons, caricatures and satirical verses, attention that irritated in courtly circles, but was part of public life. But in 1879 Town Talk, edited by Adolphus Rosenburg, ran a story claiming:
A petition has been filed in the Divorce Court by Mr Edward Langtry. HRH The Prince of Wales and two other gentlemen whose names up to the time of going to press we have not been enabled to learn are mentioned as co-respondents.
Langtry sued for libel and told the jury there was no truth in Rosenburg’s assertions, he had never contemplated divorce, he and his wife lived on the most affectionate terms. Rosenburg got eighteen months in prison and the judge, Mr Justice Hawkins, regretted he was unable to sentence him to hard labour.
So the waters closed over yet another questioning of regal sexual behaviour. It took eighteen years and several tries for Lillie to divorce her husband. He died alcoholic and destitute on 15 October 1897 in an American ‘asylum for the insane’. ‘He was caught in the whirlwind of London fashion,’ wrote the Daily News by way of obituary, ‘and being anything but a swimmer, and having no artificial supports in fortune, he was quickly on his way to ruin.’
Sex of the noxious sort was rumoured in 1889. Bertie’s equerry, Lord Arthur Somerset, left the country to avoid prosecution in ‘the Cleveland Street scandal’. For months police watched a gay brothel in Cleveland Street, London. They shadowed Lord Arthur and identified him as a client. His solicitor warned the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions in September that if the case was pursued ‘a very distinguished person will be involved (P.A.V.)’ – Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, Bertie’s eldest son and heir to the throne. The Prince – Eddy, nicknamed ‘Collar and Cuffs’ for his dandy clothes – was, Margot Asquith wrote, ‘rather afraid of his father’ who let him know he was a disappointment and perpetually gibed at him ‘a form of ill-judged chaff’ which Alexandra hated.
Bertie thought Lord Arthur’s involvement ‘inconceivable’. Anyone capable of such behaviour, he said, must be an ‘unfortunate lunatic’ and the less
