Enraged by this evidence that her lover had not abandoned his wife’s bed, Lady Brooke wrote him a letter of furious reproach which arrived at Lord Charles’s house while he was abroad. His wife, who said that she had been asked to open all his correspondence during his absence, read it with horror. In it, Lady Brooke stated that he must leave home immediately and join her on the Riviera; that one of her children was his; that he had no right to beget a child by his wife, ‘and more to that effect’. Other people, who read the letter later, agreed that its contents were utterly shocking; and that, as Lord Marcus Beresford commented, it ‘ought never to have seen the light of day’.
When Lady Brooke heard that it had found its way into the hands of Lady Charles and thence into those of George Lewis — a solicitor said to know more about the private lives of the aristocracy than any other man in London — she was inclined to agree with Lord Marcus’s verdict. Distressed by what she had done, she turned to the Prince of Wales, trusting that his influence and hatred of scandal would enable her to extricate herself from her appalling predicament.
Since that ball in 1883, when he had been preoccupied with Lady Randolph Churchill, the Prince had entertained the Brookes at Sandringham and had stayed with them once or twice at Easton Lodge. He had been attracted to Lady Brooke, and now responded readily to her call, agreeing to see her in private at Marlborough House. ‘He was more than kind,’ she later wrote of the subsequent interview, ‘and suddenly I saw him looking at me in a way all women understand. I knew I had won, so I asked him to tea.’
Losing no time in his eagerness to help her, the Prince of Wales, at two o’clock that morning, went to see George Lewis, who was persuaded to show him the letter. The Prince, who thought it the ‘most shocking’ one he had ever read, afterwards tried to persuade Lady Charles to have it handed over to him so that it could be destroyed. Lady Charles declined to hand it over. Instead, she instructed Lewis to inform Lady Brooke that if she kept away from London that season the letter would be given back to her. Lady Brooke refused to consider such a solution, so the Prince went to Lady Charles a second time and ‘was anything but conciliatory in tone’. He ‘even hinted,’ so Lady Charles claimed, ‘that if I did not give him up the letter, my position in society!! and Lord Charles’s would become injured!!’
Whether or not the Prince did, in fact, make such a threat, he certainly made it clear to society that he was now the close, trusted and devoted friend of Lady Brooke. He saw to it that she and her husband were invited to the same houses as himself. And according to the by no means reliable recollections of his new mistress, ‘when that sign of the Prince’s support didn’t stop the angry little cat, the Prince checked her in another way. He simply cut her name out and substituted mine for it and wrote to the hostess that he thought it would be better for me not to meet the angry woman till she had cooled off and become reasonable.’ Lord Charles, who had himself been trying to have the letter destroyed, was quite as angry with the Prince as was his wife. At the beginning of January he went to see him, warned him of the consequences of taking any further action against Lady Charles, with whom he was now reluctantly reconciled, and, as everyone who knew him would have expected, lost his temper. It seems that he furiously pushed the man who had taken over his former mistress against a sofa into which the Prince fell, murmuring, ‘Really, Lord Charles, you forget yourself.’
Relieved as he must have been that, immediately after this painful scene, Lord Charles left England to go to sea again in the armoured cruiser Undaunted, the Prince’s peace of mind was not restored. For another and even more disquieting problem had yet to be resolved.
In September the year before, the Prince had gone to Yorkshire for Doncaster races; but instead of staying as usual at Brantingham Thorpe with Christopher Sykes, who could no longer afford to entertain him there, he went to Tranby Croft, the country house of Arthur Wilson, a rich shipowner. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Gordon Cumming, a baronet in the Scots Guards who enjoyed a private income of £80,000 a year, was also of the party. After dinner the first evening, while several of the guests, including the Prince, were playing baccarat, two of them suspected Sir William of cheating, a suspicion which had been entertained in various other houses in the past. The next night he was watched by other guests, who confirmed that he was, indeed, manipulating his counters dishonestly. Sir William was confronted with their accusation; and on the understanding that all those who knew of his conduct would ‘preserve silence’, he was asked to sign a document agreeing never to play cards again so long as he lived. Sir William, protesting his innocence, objected that to sign the document would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. But, under pressure, he did sign it; and the Prince added his signature to those of the nine other men who had played baccarat with him.
The next day the Prince left Tranby Croft for York where, on the day after that, Lord and Lady Brooke, who had been prevented from joining the party by the death of Lady Brooke’s step-father, joined him at the railway station on their way to Abergeldie.
It was widely supposed afterwards that the Prince told the Brookes in confidence what had happened at Tranby Croft; and that Lady Brooke, known to irreverent journalists as ‘the Babbling Brook’, could not keep the fascinating story to herself. She denied the charge; and George Lewis, now acting for the Prince’s friends, the Brookes, rather than for the out-of-favour Beresfords, was instructed to issue an announcement to the effect that proceedings would be taken against anyone repeating the lie. What could not be denied, however, was that someone had revealed the Tranby Croft secret; and, hearing that this was so, Gordon Cumming told his solicitors to bring an action against his accusers. In an effort to spare the Prince the ignominy of appearing in a civil court, attempts were made to have a military court inquire privately into the affair and thus render a civil action much more difficult to bring. But the Judge Advocate-General advised that this would be unfair to Sir William; and, to the prince’s dismay, the Adjutant-General, Sir Redvers Buller, accepted that advice.
‘It is enough to make the great Duke of Wellington rise from his tomb,’ the Prince protested to the Duke of Cambridge, ‘and point his finger of scorn at the Horse Guards … The conduct of the A[djutant] G[eneral] is inexplicable but he cannot have the interests of the Army at heart, acting in the way he has. I always knew he was a born soldier — and equally imagined he was a gentleman, but from henceforth I can never look upon him in the latter category.’
An attempt by the Prince and his friends to avoid a public scandal by a private inquiry at the Guards Club also failed. A civil action was, therefore, inevitable.
Waiting for it to be brought, the Prince grew more and more anxious and irritable, deciding not to go to France that year, ‘not knowing what might turn up’, refusing to go to Windsor unless his mother promised not to talk about baccarat, constantly talking to his friends about the impending action and asking for their advice as to what he ought to do, if anything, in the meantime. Both Lord Hartington, a recognized arbiter of social questions, and Francis Knollys were against any attempt at compromise since ‘a great number of people [would] think and say that it [had] been arranged to screen the Prince of Wales’. Knollys gave it as their opinion, therefore, that it was in the Prince’s interest that the action ‘should be allowed to take its course’. The Queen also thought that the action ought to go ahead as, although it was ‘a sad thing [that] Bertie [was] dragged into it’, people thought good might come of it and it would be a ‘shock to Society and to gambling’.