So was Lord Charles Beresford. In his cabin aboard the Undaunted, letters of complaint had reached him from his wife, who, still cold-shouldered by the Prince, had been outraged to hear that the Princess had publicly received Lady Brooke at Marlborough House. The continuing humiliation was too much for her, Lady Charles announced to her husband: she would sell her house in London and go to live on the Continent.
Angrier than ever now with the Prince, Lord Charles sat down on 12 July to write a letter to him in which he told him bluntly:
For some months I have received letters, not only from Lady Charles but from many of my friends, that you have systematically ranged yourself on the side of the other person against my wife … [in such an] ostentatious way … that some people believe [my wife] is entirely [in the] wrong … I have no intention of allowing my wife to suffer for any faults I may have committed in days gone by. Much less have I any intention of allowing any woman to wreak her vengeance on my wife because I would not accede to her entreaties to return to a friendship I repudiated.
I consider that from the beginning by your unasked interference and subsequent action you have deliberately used your high position to insult a humbler by doing all you can to elevate the person with whom she had a quarrel… The days of duelling are past, but there is a more just way of getting right done … and that is publicity … The first opportunity that occurs to me I shall give my opinion publicly of Y.R.H. and state that you have behaved like a blackguard and a coward, and that I am prepared to prove my words.
Lord Charles did not send this letter direct to the Prince of Wales, but to Lady Charles, with instructions to show it to the Prime Minister first with a warning of the ‘grave events’ now likely to follow unless a ‘public apology’ were forthcoming. Lady Charles accordingly sent her husband’s letter, together with her own detailed account of the whole business, to Lord Salisbury, who was warned not only that ‘the highest legal authority’ had advised her husband that he was in a position to force ‘damning’ publicity upon the Prince of Wales, but also that Lady Charles’s sister, Mrs Gerald Paget, had prepared for publication a pamphlet which had ‘already been shown, as an interesting episode in the Prince of Wales’s mode of life, to several people who want to make use of the story at the next General Election for purposes of their own’.
Unwillingly dragged once again into the Prince of Wales’s affairs, Lord Salisbury nevertheless at once accepted the fact that he must try to limit the reverberations of the quarrel. He urged Lady Charles not to send on her husband’s letter to the Prince; and he wrote himself to Lord Charles to point out that such a letter would, ‘if published’, do the sender ‘endless harm’, since, ‘according to our social laws’, no gentleman must ever be the means of bringing any lady ‘into disgrace because she yielded’ to him. Furthermore, Lord Salisbury continued,
I do not think the letter was fair to H.R.H. So very grave a charge as that of insulting your wife should — if made at all — have been expressed in clear detail, so that H.R.H. might either show you that you were mistaken as to some matter of fact or apologise if his action had been misunderstood … Of course, if he actually insulted Lady Charles, there is nothing to be said in his defence; but I gather that you complain of a sudden cessation of acquaintance … [after the] stormy interview you had with him, in which your language to say the least was very plain, I quite understand why the Prince has fought shy of any meeting with Lady Charles. If any person had addressed you in similar language I think you would from that time forth have abstained from speaking to the third person or the third person’s wife. If I may give advice … the acquaintance of no illustrious person is necessary to one’s happiness … Your position in society is in your profession and not affected by the friendship of anyone however highly placed … Ill-considered publicity would be of no possible service to Lady Charles: it would do you most serious harm… I strongly advise you to … do nothing.
Thus warned of the harm he might do himself, and of his obligation to protect Lady Brooke, Lord Charles agreed that his letter should not be sent to the Prince, and that he would write instead a less inflammatory one, not involving Lady Brooke and giving the Prince an opportunity to apologize. But although this might have settled the matter quietly, Lord Salisbury could not prevent the circulation that autumn of Mrs Gerald Paget’s type-written pamphlet which, under the title Lady River, gave details of Lady Brooke’s intimacy with the Prince and provided a copy of her letter to Lord Charles which had precipitated the whole unpleasant affair.
Copies of this pamphlet were passed excitedly from hand to hand. According to the magazine Truth, it caused so much interest that hostesses who managed to get hold of a copy had but to announce a reading from it to find their drawing-rooms more crowded than if a dozen prima-donnas were on the bill of fare. The Duchess of Manchester was evidently one of these hostesses; and the Prince was so offended that he refused to talk to her for more than ten years, being reconciled only when the Duchess’s son, on meeting him by chance in Portman Square after his accession, knelt down, kissed his hand and afterwards invited him to meet the Duchess again at dinner.
Warned by her brother-in-law, Lord Marcus, and others, that the pamphlet would do much more harm to her than to Lady Brooke, Lady Charles sent a telegram to her husband asking him to come back to protect her. Lord Charles had already warned Lord Salisbury that it might be imperative for him to come home for this purpose as he was ‘determined not to allow Lady Charles to be annoyed and made unhappy in his absence by anyone no matter how high their position’. So he packed his bags and arrived home just before Christmas to find his wife demanding that Lady Brooke should withdraw from London for at least a year and his brother complaining of the disgrace that was being brought upon the family name. Lord Marcus asked:
Can anything be more terrible or damning to you, to your family and to your children, than this pamphlet being circulated high and low by your wife and your sister-in-law? … You expressed no horror at the letter being published — but you … utter threats about what you intend to do against a man who has been the greatest friend to you in the world, because people had written and told you that he says and does things which I can swear he never has said or done.
Undeterred, Lord Charles demanded an apology from the Prince, failing which he would ‘no longer intervene to prevent these matters becoming public’.
‘I am at a loss to understand how Lady Charles can imagine that I have in any way slighted or ignored her,’ the Prince protested. ‘Lady Charles was invited to the garden party at Marlborough House this last summer … and … I have made a point on all occasions of shaking hands with her, or of bowing to her, as the opportunity presented.’
The reply to this was sharp and short: ‘I cannot accept your Royal Highness’s letter as in any way an answer to my demand, Your Royal Highness’s behaviour to Lady Charles having been a matter of common talk for the two years that I have been away from England.’