Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

a beast of the field,’ how she threatened to kill the ‘poor, miserable, horrid little thing’ to which she had given birth and which might or might not have had a Royal Highness for its father.

Bertie, questioned by her counsel, admitted that for anonymity he used hansom cabs when visiting her. Asked, ‘Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?’ he replied, ‘No, never.’ In the evening he wrote to his mother, in language perhaps chosen by his lawyers:

I trust by what I have said today that the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations which have been so wantonly cast upon me are now cleared up.

He then took his wife to dinner with the Gladstones.

The affair made waves, but the man destined to be the fountain of justice, in whose name the law would be administered, went on his way. Alexandra referred to him as ‘my naughty little man’. The Times wrote, ‘The Prince of Wales has learnt by painful experience how carefully he must walk.’ Reynold’s News asked the question that might, given Bertie’s proclivities, have been on the minds of those in the courtroom:

Why should a young married man be so eager to pay weekly visits to a young married woman when her husband was absent, if it was all so innocent?

It said that it was unsurprising that rumours of the Queen’s ill-health caused anxiety when

the people of England read one year in their journals of the future King appearing prominently in the divorce court and in another of his being the centre of attraction at a German gaming-table, or public hell.

Satirical pamphlets appeared about Bertie’s private life. Gladstone warned that Victoria was invisible and Bertie not respected. A leading article in the Observer declared,

there are not wanting those among the opponents of the monarchical system who have ceased to regard royalty with that veneration which they have hitherto shown.

Crowds gathered in Hyde Park to listen to speeches advocating republicanism – an occurrence Bertie deplored:

The Government really ought to have prevented it … The more the Government allow the lower classes to get the upper hand, the more the democratic feeling of the present day will increase.

As Ascot approached in 1870, the Queen told Bertie to limit his visits to the races to two days at most and to keep company with ‘really good, steady and distinguished people’. ‘I am over twenty-eight,’ he wrote back, ‘and have some considerable knowledge of the world and society.’ She must, he said, permit him to use his own discretion.

His own discretion permitted him to do whatever he pleased. In 1873, his Private Secretary, Francis Knollys, found him a London pied-à-terre where he took lady friends. In 1874 he spent two weeks in Paris. Shadowing him in the parks and clubs kept the gendarmerie busy. In October 1875 he went to India but would not allow Alexandra to accompany him. She said she would ‘never forget or forgive him’ for refusing her request to go too.

He preferred to travel with his inconvenient friends. He carped at what he considered the inadequate money allocated him for the trip: £52,000 from the Admiralty, £60,500 from the Treasury for his personal expenses, £100,000 from the Indian government. His party went pigsticking, shot peacocks, kingfishers, tigers and elephants. ‘It is the custom for the successful sportsman to cut off the animal’s tail, and this the Prince did, streaming with perspiration,’ wrote Alfred E. Watson, author of King Edward VII as a Sportsman.

The Prince was distracted from such sport by another scandal. On 20 February 1876 Lady Aylesford, wife of ‘Sporting Joe’ who was in the party, wrote to tell him she was going to run off with Lord Blandford. By the same post Bertie got a letter from Blandford’s brother, Randolph Churchill, asking him to dissuade Sporting Joe from divorcing his wife or feuding with her lover. Lady Aylesford had, Churchill warned, given to him a packet of letters written to her by Bertie which ‘if made public would greatly damage and greatly embarrass the Prince of Wales’.

Bertie wished to steer clear of the whole business. But a further letter from Lady Aylesford’s brother, Lord Lansdowne, accused him of insisting that Sporting Joe go on the Indian trip, knowing this was against Lady Aylesford’s wishes – she ‘anticipated the danger to which she would be exposed during her husband’s absence’.

Randolph Churchill claimed to friends that ‘he held the Crown of England in his pocket’. With Henry Sturt – Lord Alington, father of Mrs Keppel’s admirer Humphrey Sturt – he went to Marlborough House to see the Princess of Wales. He told her that

being aware of peculiar and most grave matters affecting the case he was anxious that His Royal Highness should give such advice to Lord Aylesford as to induce him not to proceed against his wife.

He warned her that if Aylesford sued for divorce Bertie would be subpoenaed to give evidence and that if Bertie’s letters to Lady Aylesford were published he ‘would never sit upon the throne of England’.

Bertie perceived these machinations as impugning his honour, threatening his marriage and as blackmail. He called for a duel with pistols with Randolph Churchill in the north of France. Disraeli – who succeeded Gladstone as prime minister in 1874 – and Lord Hardwicke intervened. ‘Blandford,’ Disraeli said, ‘I always thought was a scoundrel, but this brother beats me.’ Hardwicke wrote to Bertie, ‘You have been scandalously used by a lady and two men passing as gentlemen. We shall know how to deal with them after the storm is passed.’ Disraeli called the Prince of Wales’s private affairs as troublesome as the Balkan crisis. Aylesford was persuaded not to divorce but to ‘arrange his matters privately’, separate from his wife and ‘make proper provision for her etc.’.

‘How can one make the best of anything,’ Violet Keppel was to write to her lover Vita Sackville-West, ‘that revolves on lies and deception?’ The sexual affairs of Bertie and his