Edward VII Read online

  Chapter Three

  “GAY PAREE AND LONDON LOWLIFE”

  Oi, Wales, are you goin’ to pay for my champagne?

  —“LA GOULUE” OF THE MOULIN ROUGE

  Bertie and Alix embarked on their married life among the splendid surroundings of Marlborough House in Pall Mall. A beautiful Queen Anne mansion, Marlborough House had originally been designed for Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, by Sir Christopher Wren. The house had passed to the Crown and had been allocated to Bertie in 1860 and was the ideal royal residence, its high walls lending a secluded air while “its ballroom was large enough to entertain the whole of London Society and its lawns, running down to the Mall, proved a splendid setting for garden parties.…”1 Marlborough House swiftly became an alternative court, where Bertie and Alix lived with “the gay abandon of two children suddenly set free on a floodlit stage, with all the scenery and gorgeous costumes to play with. They went to balls every night of the season, they dined in the houses where Queen Victoria advised them not to go, they attended the opera and theatre dressed in glittering outfits, and gave the crowds their money’s worth.”2 These days were the happiest days of their marriage. But within a year, childbirth had begun to take its toll upon poor Alix. Prince Albert Victor was born two months prematurely in 1864, followed by his brother George a year later, four weeks prematurely.3 In November 1867, another confinement rendered Alix unable to accompany Bertie to St. Petersburg for the wedding of Alix’s sister to the Tsarevitch Alexander. During his six-week absence, Bertie’s head was turned by the “sirens of St Petersburg.”4 When Bertie returned to England, Alix was undergoing a ghastly pregnancy and suffering from rheumatic fever. As a result, doctors refused to allow her anesthetic and her baby daughter, Louise, had to be delivered without chloroform. Alix suffered serious long-term consequences from rheumatic fever, which left her with a damaged knee and triggered deafness that would become a real problem during middle age.5 Following the birth of Louise, Alix had two more daughters, Victoria, born 1868, and Maud, born 1869. Prince Alexander John, Alix’s last child, was born in 18716 but lived for less than twenty-four hours. After the age of twenty-six, Alix never had another baby.

  As if this was not enough to put a strain on their marriage, the fundamental incompatibility of the couple’s personalities began to emerge. Pleasure-loving Bertie, charming and dissolute, was a very different character from Alix, a natural homebody. Indeed, Alix’s character was the embodiment of the Danish word hygge, meaning a loving, informal gathering of friends and family. To make matters worse, Alix’s health problems made her a poor sexual partner for the demanding Bertie, who began to seek consolation elsewhere, adding to Alix’s distress. Lady Macclesfield, one of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting, recalled: “the Princess had another bad night chiefly owing to the Prince promising to come in at 1 AM and keeping her in a perpetual fret, refusing to take her opiate for fear she should be asleep when he came. And he never came till 3 AM!”7

  While Alix was recovering from a series of difficult confinements, Bertie was living in style, traveling across Europe with his entourage from hotel to hotel. Luxury suites were kept in preparation for the prince in Paris, Marienbad, Monte Carlo, and Cannes, and he became a familiar figure at opera houses and casinos. Despite his increasing girth, Bertie was always so immaculately dressed and impeccably groomed that even the French admired his sartorial elegance. Bertie changed six times a day, and his style was quickly imitated: when he left the last button of his waistcoat undone to accommodate his expanding waistline, all other men followed suit. The prince had little interest in the formal side of society: enough of his life was already constrained by protocol and consumed by an interminable sequence of receiving lines and diplomatic functions. What Bertie liked was fun, the company of attractive and lively women, cards after dinner, and the carpet rolled back for dancing.8 Bertie preferred his women bright but not clever. As Daisy Warwick later noted, “The Prince had a horror of highbrows.”9

  Bertie loved parlor games, high jinks and “ragging,” and mock duels with soda siphons.10 Sometimes, Bertie’s japes could verge on the sadistic. He took pleasure in humiliating his friend Christopher Sykes, a Yorkshire landowner and MP, by pouring brandy over his head while Sykes repeated over and over again, “As Your Royal Highness pleases.”11

  In London, his anonymity preserved by trusted friends and the fact that photography had not yet made his distinctive features instantly recognizable, Bertie enjoyed the lowlife. Disguised as any other “champagne Charlie,” Bertie was free to prowl the demi-monde of the Alhambra Rooms and Mott’s dancing rooms in Foley Street, acknowledged dens of vice patrolled by the middle ranks of London’s fifty-thousand-strong army of prostitutes. Bertie could visit the notorious Cremorne Gardens, a pleasure garden in Chelsea where toffs and swells rubbed shoulders with clerks and pickpockets, and couples disappeared into the bushes for al fresco sex. Bertie relished the freedom to walk about London unrecognized, to be driven in a hansom cab, or, one of his favorite activities, to see a big fire. Captain Eyre Shaw, head of the London Fire Brigade, was under strict orders to report a good blaze immediately to Marlborough House.12 Other high jinks included “galloping through London in a pink coat with the Royal Buckhounds like an unruly schoolboy, chasing a deer from the Queen’s herd known as ‘the Doctor’ from Harrow through Wormwood Scrubs to Paddington Station where it was cornered in the goods yard in front of the staff of the Great Western Railway.”13

  Bertie had a hand-picked band of accomplices for these exploits, including Lord “Harty-Tarty” Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire, and Sir Frederick Johnstone, a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, notorious even in those days for smashing up restaurants. Lord Dupplin, a Scottish earl, and Lord Hardwicke, MP for Cambridgeshire and the original “Champagne Charlie,” were also members of Bertie’s entourage, and the Marquis of Hastings, or “the wild Markis,”14 as he was known in the London underworld, was another favorite. Bertie had met Hastings, “the kind of self-annihilating rake who had flourished around the Earl of Rochester during the Restoration,” during his brief period at Oxford. Hastings was a textbook hell-raiser, who at Oxford had breakfasted on claret and mackerel cooked in gin.15 Handsome and rich, Hastings loved nothing better than to slum it alongside the sailors in the brothels of Rotherhithe. One night at Mott’s dancing rooms, Hastings turned up with a handful of sacks, and, just as the dancing was at its height, asked one of his cronies to turn off the lights. At that point, he opened the sacks and released two hundred full-grown sewer rats loose onto the dance floor.16 It was Hastings who introduced Bertie to cockfighting at Faultless’s Pit in Endell Street, Holborn, where he could pit his birds against those owned by the Duke of Hamilton, and ratting, where aristocrats would bet on how many rats a terrier could dispatch within one hour.17

  In 1864, Hastings had eloped with Florence Paget, fiancée of his best friend, Henry Chaplin, snatching her away from the doors of Marshall and Snelgrove’s department store and whisking her off to be married at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square. Three years later, Chaplin got his revenge. On an unseasonably cold Derby Day, in May 1867, Henry Chaplin’s horse, Hermit, went off at 66 to 1. Hastings bet heavily on the favorite, taking spiteful side action on Chaplin’s longshot horse. In a storybook ending, Hermit charged out of the sleet to win, stunning the oddsmakers and costing Hastings no less than £120,000. Chaplin’s winnings were £140,000. A year later, The Times announced that Hastings was dead, “ruined in health, in honour and in estate.”18

  In May 1867, while Alix was still recovering from the birth of Princess Louise, Bertie was invited to open the International Exhibition in Paris. Sir William Knollys, Bertie’s private secretary, wrote that “the accounts I subsequently heard of this visit were very unsatisfactory; suppers after the opera with some of the female Paris notorieties, etc. etc.”19

  Paris was Bertie’s spiritual home. Here, for the remainder of his life, Bertie would be accepted by the worldly French as
the consummate bon viveur, a connoisseur of wine, women, and horseflesh. Bertie had first visited Paris at the age of fourteen, with Queen Victoria. In 1855, the young Prince of Wales had wowed the French by appearing in Highland dress as he was driven through Paris with Napoleon III.20 Life back in England must have seemed very tame after that. Paris in 1867 was every bit as exciting as Bertie had remembered, and he soon discovered that Napoleon III’s tastes were very similar to his own. This was the man who remarked that he needed a woman, like a good cigar, after every meal.21 Here, Bertie could find “love treated as an art, a high society which pursued a civilised routine of sexual pleasure, a ready welcome from the most skilful mistresses of Europe.”22 The French attitude to beauty was that it was “a commodity which demanded a certain conventional devotion. There was an admitted objective brutality mingled with the aesthetic admiration. Young men were brought up to appreciate a fine woman by matching her to a catalogue of classic points, as if she were a high-bred horse or a Ming vase.…”23 Men paid court to the grandes horizontals, the fabulous courtesans who held sway over art and fashion, wooing them with diamonds and banknotes. It was inevitable that Bertie, with his appetite for pleasure, would fall prey to these shrewd and manipulative women. Parisian courtesans, unlike their more unfortunate sisters operating on the street corners, could pick and choose their followers. It was something of a coup to be accepted by one of these legendary goddesses, such as Cora Pearl or La Barucca. And Bertie was a willing victim.

  The first of Bertie’s French mistresses was Hortense Schneider (1833–1920), a professional singer who had excelled in Jacques Offenbach’s operettas, particularly Orpheus in the Underworld, as well as La Vie Parisienne and La Belle Hélène. Described by the Marquis de Villemer as “exciting, modern, ironic—the froth of the champagne,”24 Hortense was exactly the sort of woman who appealed to Bertie, and Bertie appealed to her. Hortense had such a great weakness for royalty that she came to be known as “Le Passage des Princes.”25 Bertie had to accept that she was not his exclusive property and that her long-term lover was Lord Carrington, with whom he had once shared Nellie Clifden. Hortense Schneider was the first of Bertie’s mistresses to have her name linked to him publicly, being mentioned in The Times, with a mixture of disapproval and envy, in 1867. At this period The Times did not possess the automatic deference of the establishment newspaper. Instead, it shared with other newspapers displeasure with the royal family, ranging from prurient interest about Bertie’s personal life to the suggestion that the queen, the self-indulgent “Widow of Windsor,” should abdicate, as she did not play a sufficient part in public life. Bertie, for all his faults, it was felt, did at least show himself “more zealous and courteous in the performance of all his duties.”26 Bertie was regularly compared with his ancestors, the Regency rake George IV and the debauched Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One. Bertie’s response to the criticism of his relationship with Hortense Schneider was to take his wife, Princess Alexandra, to watch Hortense perform in Paris. The impact of this upon the already long-suffering Alix may be imagined.

  Cora Pearl (1835–1886), who had begun life as ordinary Eliza Crouch from Plymouth, once appeared on stage alongside Hortense while Bertie was in the theater. Cora, clad in nothing more than two oyster shells and a five-franc piece, strategically fell over during the performance so that the audience could admire the diamonds on the soles of her shoes.27 While Cora was no actress, her activities that night had been sufficient to kindle Bertie’s interest. Cora, whose antics included being served up for dinner naked on a large silver dish (with a parsley garnish), was an accomplished and spirited young woman.28

  Bertie was also friendly with another lively expatriate, Catherine Walters, or “Skittles,” the former mistress of Harty-Tarty. Skittles had arrived in Paris in 1862,29 after Harty-Tarty had dumped her in favor of Louisa, Duchess of Manchester. Born in Toxteth, Liverpool, Skittles possessed a compelling combination of blond hair, blue eyes, and a mouth that could make a docker blush. On one occasion, when Skittles was thrown from her horse while out riding in Hyde Park, a gentleman hurried across Rotten Row to see whether she was hurt.

  “Hurt be damned!” Skittles replied, rising to her feet and dusting herself down. “Wait til I get my arse on that damned saddle. I’ll teach the bastard to go!”30

  An outstanding horsewoman, Skittles had been spotted by Lord Fitzwilliam while exercising horses for a livery stable and swiftly elevated to the position of mistress. Even the snooty country set accepted Skittles and permitted her to ride to hounds on account of her superb equestrian skills. On one occasion, Skittles cleared the eighteen-foot water jump at the National Hunt Steeplechase course at Market Harborough for a £100 bet, after three other riders had tried and failed.31

  In Paris, one of Louisa’s “protectors” was the young and somewhat naïve Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, diplomat and aspiring poet, who witnessed Skittles’s transformation from a healthy English horsewoman to a sophisticated poule deluxe, “dressed up and glorified for the world, beset by a crowd of wondering fools.”32 Scawen Blunt suspected that a more powerful lover lurked in the background, but could never be sure of his identity. Widely believed to have been Bertie’s mistress, but also known for her discretion, Skittles left a teasing reference to an affair with Bertie in her papers. According to Skittles, Bertie had once commented: “‘You always promised we should be friends some day’ and so it began.” As Bertie’s biographer Jane Ridley states, we don’t exactly know what began, but Skittles claimed to have possessed a drawer full of letters from Bertie, perhaps set aside as a pension. But these disappeared after she died and were never to be available for posterity.33

  One of the most beautiful courtesans in Paris, “La Barucci,” made an indelible impression on Bertie. Born Giulia Benini (1837–1871) in Rome, La Barucci had black eyes, luxuriant black hair, golden skin, and an air of southern languor. Within months of her arrival in Paris, La Barucci’s looks had earned her an apartment on the Champs-Élysées, and a jewel chest the size of a wardrobe, full of precious stones.34 La Barucci granted her favors to the entire Jockey Club, and somehow managed to remain on good terms with all of them. When Bertie visited Paris in 1867, the Duc de Grammont-Caderousse invited La Barucci to dine with them at the Maison d’Or. Before the meeting, the duke briefed La Barucci at length on the protocol required for the occasion, and warned her, strictly, not to be late, as the Prince of Wales was highly punctilious when it came to timekeeping. As the hour approached for the arrival of La Barucci, the duke and the Prince of Wales stood waiting for her to appear. Ten minutes passed, and then twenty, and then half an hour, and Bertie began that activity that every host feared, drumming his fingers in irritation. At last, after three-quarters of an hour, La Barucci swept in, an unrepentant vision in a blaze of diamonds. “Your Royal Highness,” said the duke. “May I present to you the most unpunctual woman in France?” Whereupon, La Barucci spun around, and with one swift movement lifted her skirts and bent over to show Bertie, as one source described it, “the white rotundities of her callipygian charms.” When the duke reproached La Barucci for mooning the Prince of Wales, she retorted: “I showed him the best I have—and it was for free!”35

  As a man of appetites, Bertie did not restrict himself to courtesans. In Paris, as in London, he also had affairs with society ladies such as Jeanne Seillière, the Princesse de Sagan, “an industrial heiress who had made a grand match” by marrying into the grand Talleyrand-Périgord family, who also owned the Sagan estates.36 In Paris, the Prince de Sagan was known as the fleur des pois, “the pick of the crop.” He was an elegant dandy, with a caustic wit, and a notorious and completely unregenerate womanizer who “excelled in the art of paying homage to women who showed themselves attentive to him, like a cat, without good-faith or law.”37 Hurt and angry, Jeanne de Sagan passed most of her time at her homes in Cannes and Deauville, and at the Chateau de Mello, about sixty miles south of Paris, which she had spent considerable money on restoring a
nd developing. An enterprising woman, Jeanne de Sagan had built laboratories at Chateau de Mello to distill perfumes, and it was a common joke in her circle that she was using them to find a method to poison her husband.38 Far from being annoyed by the fact that Bertie was having an affair with his wife, the Prince de Sagan reveled in it, finding it rather chic to be cuckolded by the Prince of Wales. When Bertie visited the Chateau de Mello, the atmosphere was like that when Louis XV called upon Madame de Pompadour, the staff, from the lowliest scullery maid to the butler, whipped into a frenzy of activity preparing for his arrival. When Jeanne de Sagan bore a child, nine years after the birth of her first son, Hélie, he was assumed by all to be the son of Bertie.39

  Bertie was not popular with one member of the Princesse de Sagan’s household. By the age of fifteen, Hélie had conceived such a violent hatred of Bertie that upon one occasion, after finding Bertie’s clothes on a chair in his mother’s boudoir, he picked the garments up and hurled them out of the window into the fountains. When Bertie emerged from Jeanne’s bedroom, it was to find his sopping wet clothes being retrieved from the ponds by hysterical servants. Bertie, as a stickler for correct dress, was annoyed, and had to drive away wearing a pair of trousers “borrowed” from the Prince de Sagan, which were too tight.40

  Bertie could not have been described as a serial monogamist. The prince of pleasure never restricted himself to one individual woman, but was forever chasing another conquest. By 1867, a pattern had emerged of a sexually insatiable man who loved to surround himself with willing women, short- and long-term mistresses, courtesans, and bona-fide prostitutes. As “a rake of truly catholic tastes,”41 Bertie was as ready to dally with a harlot as a duchess.42 And Bertie never seemed to differentiate in the pursuit of his ideal: young, high-spirited, feminine in appearance but somewhat masculine in character. Bertie also managed to remain on good terms with his mistresses once the affairs were over; throughout his life, we see evidence of his kindness and generosity toward his former lovers. This was of course contingent upon the behavior of these women. In certain cases, to remain on good terms was impossible; in one case, it was tragic.