Free The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses by Theo Aronson Page B

Langtry 'my darling'. He then went on to make an assignation with Lillie. 'Naturally I was furious,' says Daisy, 'and never looked at him again.' 9
    Margot Asquith, too, has her youthful memories of Lillie's tendency to cause scandal. 'In a shining top-hat and skin-tight habit, she rode a chestnut thoroughbred of conspicuous action every evening in Rotten Row,' she remembers. 'One day when I was riding, I saw Mrs Langtry – who was accompanied by Lord Lonsdale – pause at the railings in Rotten Row to talk to a man of her acquaintance. I do not know what she could have said to him, but after a brief exchange of words, Lord Lonsdale jumped off his horse, sprang over the railings and with clenched fists hit Mrs Langtry's admirer in the face. Upon this a free fight ensued and to the delight of the surprised spectators, Lord Lonsdale knocked his adversary down.' 10
    This adversary was Sir George Chetwyn, who had accused Lillie of breaking her promise to go riding with
him
.
    And then there was the story of her obsession with 'young Shrewsbury, a boy of nineteen'. It appears that the young man's worldly mother, hoping that 'an attachment to a married woman would keep him out of mischief', encouraged the liaison. So conscientiously,apparently, did Lillie fulfil her duties of keeping the young man out of mischief that she one day sent a note to the Prince, asking him not to call, as arranged, that afternoon. The Prince, not having received the note, duly arrived to find her with Shrewsbury. What they were doing one does not know, but His Royal Highness, reports Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was 'very miffed'. 11
    Yet, at the same time, Lillie seems to have been anxious to affirm her hold over her royal lover. In doing so, she came dangerously close to overstepping the bounds of propriety. Lillie had once claimed that it would need a bold man to attempt any public familiarity with the Prince, and on a couple of occasions she seems to have proved herself very bold indeed.
    Once, at a charity fête held in the Royal Albert Hall, Lillie had been asked to grace the refreshment stall. Gentlemen were obliged to part with five shillings for the thrill of being served a cup of tea by her and with a guinea for the even greater thrill of having her take the first sip. When the Prince of Wales, accompanied by Princess Alexandra and their three daughters, approached the stall, Lillie poured the Prince a cup of tea and, without being asked, put her lips to the rim of the cup. The Prince put it down, untouched.
    'I should like a clean one please,' 12 he said politely. In silence he accepted another cup, drank it, paid a couple of sovereigns, and walked away.
    There was also the occasion on which Lillie is said to have dropped a piece of ice down the Prince's back at a fancy dress ball. Down the years the story has been so altered and embroidered upon that its authenticity is impossible to prove. Some say that it was a dollop of ice cream that Lillie slipped down the neck of Bertie's pierrot costume; others that it was not Lillie at all, but a pretty little actress by the name of Kitty Munro who put the ice down the Prince's back in – of all places – the foyer of the Folly Theatre; in the United States, cartoons showed Lillie dousing her royal lover with a bottle of iced champagne.
    Lillie, who always denied the incident, claimed that it was actually an 'audacious Irish beauty' (by whom she apparently means Patsy Cornwallis West) who 'popped a spoonful of strawberry-ice' down the spine of her irate husband.
    But however vigorously she protested her innocence, dismissing the story as 'a vulgar fabrication . . . in which there is not a grain of truth,' 13 Lillie was pursued by it for the rest of her life. And, true or not, the story's significance lies in the fact that it was so widely reported and so readily believed. Mrs Langtry, it was now said, wasgetting beyond herself. Many of the Prince of Wales's other companions had discovered, to their cost,