The Real Rule of the Victorian Affair: Her Husband Had to Be There

The evidence comes from inside the period where it can: a novel of 1902, the printed etiquette manuals, the Act as passed, two printed reports of the 1870 Mordaunt trial, and a Chester newspaper’s account of an inquest in 1897. Memoirs written decades later are dated where they appear. Modern values are explained in note 1.¹

Was there a code at all?

There was one convention, and it was put in print while it was still in force. Elinor Glyn, a novelist and a regular guest at Easton Lodge in the 1890s, set it out in The Reflections of Ambrosine, a novel published in 1902. In it marriage is “a tax of society,” and “The marriage vows, he said, were the only ones a gentleman might break without great blemish to his honor.” Several sentences later a lover is acceptable “provided the affair was conducted sans fanfaronnade, without scandal.”²

Frances, Countess of Warwick, said much the same in 1929, at sixty-eight, thirty years and more after the events and long after she had broken with the set. “The unforgivable sin was to give away any member of our group,” she wrote, and then: “we had no name for it.”³ A code its own members could not name was a habit, not a rulebook. Glyn, looking back in 1936, put the weight on the onlookers: “people were only too anxious not to see them, and if you were stupid enough to force them to do so, you must pay the price.”⁴

Why did the husband have to be there?

Because a married woman’s freedom, and her invitations, came through him. “A young married lady,” says the 1888 edition of Manners and Rules of Good Society, “can drive wherever she pleases and drive alone.” An unmarried girl could not.⁵

A story often told about Edward Langtry is that he was seated far from his wife, sometimes at a separate table, as a sign of the arrangement. No source for it has been found, his wife’s memoir included. What the manual prints, unchanged from 1888 to 1916, is a courtesy: “A husband and wife, or a father and daughter, or a mother and son, should not be sent in to dinner together.”⁵ At a country house, after the first night, the gentlemen drew lots for which lady they would take in.⁶

The rule that mattered sits a few pages on. “Married Ladies, as a rule, dine out with their Husbands, and do not accept invitations to large dinners when their husbands are unable to accompany them.” When “the head of a house is away for any length of time, invitations are seldom sent to the wife by givers of large dinners.”⁵ He did not have to be charming or liked. He had to be there. The manuals record what the etiquette press expected, which was not always what people did.

What did the husbands of the Prince’s favorites do?

They turned up, and it cost them. Edward Langtry married Emilie Le Breton in her father’s church on Jersey on March 9, 1874. Writing in 1925, she called his position “an onerous one”: he was kept busy hurrying her from place to place as crowds gathered to stare. The dressmakers gave her unlimited credit, “my husband aiding and abetting me by his approval.”⁷ The money came from his land in County Antrim in years when rents were falling, and by the late 1870s he had sold his last yacht.

George Keppel’s answer is in the London Gazette, in date order. He was commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders in 1886, married Alice Edmonstone on June 1, 1891, and resigned his commission ten months later. In 1894 he became a lieutenant in the Prince of Wales’s Own Norfolk Artillery, a militia regiment. His wife met the Prince of Wales in 1898, and in April 1899 he was re-appointed to the regiment. Their daughter Sonia was born on May 24, 1900, and five weeks later he left a wine merchant’s partnership in the City.⁸

One letter of his survives in print, to the Marquis de Soveral, the Portuguese minister and a regular in the King’s circle: “Dear Soveral, My wife tells me you contemplate buying a small motor car for use in London. May we offer our services in the matter…?”⁹ The sale runs through his wife, and her place runs through the King.

Did hostesses draw up bedroom lists?

No list has been found. The hostess placing lovers within reach, with a name card in a small brass frame on each door, appears in that form in The Edwardians, a novel by Vita Sackville-West published in 1930.¹⁰ Eric Horne, a butler for fifty-seven years, wrote in 1923 that the rooms he served “have no names or numbers,” which is how he came to walk into the wrong one.¹¹

What the corridor did have was a servant. Lady Warwick recalled that the bedrooms had no running water and each floor one bathroom.¹² Every occupied room, then, had hot water carried to it each morning before the guests were up.

The servants knew where everyone slept. William Lanceley started as a hall boy in 1870, at sixteen, lighting the servants’ hall fire at six and trimming thirty-five lamps: “This brought bedtime after a day’s work of sixteen hours.” He was paid £8 a year (about £1,000, or $1,300, today by retail prices).¹³ Their silence rested on the written character, the reference without which a dismissed servant could not be hired again. Horne put it plainly: “what weight would a servant’s word be against theirs? It would pay a servant better to keep his mouth shut about it.”¹¹

What happened at the Mordaunt trial in 1870?

It was not a divorce trial, and the Prince of Wales was never a party to it. Sir Charles Mordaunt, tenth baronet, of Walton Hall in Warwickshire, sat in the Commons for nine years without once speaking.¹⁴ In December 1866 he married Harriet Moncreiffe, who was eighteen. In February 1869 she gave birth early to a daughter. The nurse thought her “nearer an eight than a seven months’ child,” which put the conception in a June when Sir Charles had been fishing in Norway.

In the printed reports of the trial, the nurse describes Harriet taking his hand: “Charlie, this child is not yours at all. I have been wicked, and done very wrong with more than one person.” She named Lord Cole. He answered, “Nonsense, nonsense.” In court he explained why he had gone on writing kindly to her family: “I believed that her statements were not true, and I clung to that belief as long as I could.”¹⁵

Harriet entered no plea, because her family said she was insane, and Lord Penzance directed a jury to try one question: whether she was fit to defend the suit. The adultery evidence was heard only to show her confession was true. In the judge’s words, “the usual order of things was reversed.”

The trial opened on February 16, 1870. On February 23 the Prince was called by counsel for Harriet’s guardian, warned that he need not answer any question tending to show adultery, and answered anyway. Asked about “any improper familiarity or criminal act” with Lady Mordaunt, he said, “There has not.” His reply is often given as “Never,” which the printed record does not support. He was not cross-examined, and the judge took his name out of the case.

The suit was about land as much as feeling. A child born to a wife was her husband’s in law unless he proved otherwise in court, and a baronetcy turned on it. The jury found Harriet of unsound mind and the petition stopped. In 1874 the House of Lords ruled that a wife’s insanity was no bar, and on March 11, 1875, Sir Charles was granted his decree on the ground of her adultery with Lord Cole.¹⁶ He was made High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1879.

Why did so few husbands go to court?

Because the Act that gave a husband his remedy took it from any husband who tolerated the affair. Under section 27 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 a husband could petition on his wife’s adultery alone. A wife needed her husband’s adultery plus a second wrong, such as cruelty or two years’ desertion.¹⁷

Section 29 held the trap. The court had to ask “whether or no the Petitioner has been in any Manner accessory to or conniving at the Adultery, or has condoned the same.”¹⁷ On the face of the statute, a husband who had known and put up with it could not use it, and nor could one who had taken her back. In 1860 Parliament created the Queen’s Proctor, a salaried Crown officer who could intervene where collusion was suspected.¹⁸

The Earl of Aylesford found this out. In 1876 he came home from India to find his wife had left him for the Marquess of Blandford, and he went to law. As reported at the 1885 peerage hearing, the court found collusion between the two men and adultery by Aylesford himself, and granted only a judicial separation, which left the couple married.¹⁹

Court was also public. A husband had to name the other man, a jury fixed his damages in open court, and detailed reporting was not restricted until 1926.²⁰ In 1912 a court registrar put the cheapest undefended suit in London at £40 to £45 (about £5,500 to £6,200, or $7,000 to $7,900, today).²¹

How did it end for the husbands and wives?

Privately, and mostly badly. Lillie Langtry divorced Edward in California, by default, on May 13, 1897.²² On the night of October 3 that year, railway police at Crewe pulled him off the line twice. He had a railway ticket and 11½d in coppers (about £7, or $9, today), though six days earlier he had had £25 (about £3,800, or $4,900). He told the sergeant his wife had had a divorce from him and “had had to go to the colonies to get it.” He died in the county asylum at Upton on October 15, aged fifty. The post-mortem found bleeding on the brain from a fall aboard a steamer, and the paper headed its report “Fatal Result of a Fall.”²³

A railway detective, Inspector Perkins, had known him for years at Holyhead, where the Irish boat came in. When his wife was due, Langtry would wait for hours, then send a porter in his place: “Boy, I can’t stick it any longer. Watch her for me. Look closely at her; tell me how she looks.” Afterward he questioned the porter and left the station sobbing. “I have seen tears come into the eyes of the porters.”²³

George Keppel outlived the King by thirty-seven years and his wife by ten weeks, and died in 1947 in his suite at the Ritz.

Harriet Mordaunt was twenty-two when the jury found her of unsound mind, and she was confined for thirty-six years, from 1877 at Hayes Park, a house “appropriated exclusively to the reception of 18 ladies.”²⁴ The 1891 census enters her as HSM. The 1901 census calls her Morgan, a widow, and feeble-minded.²⁵ Whether she was ever ill is still argued: a jury said so unanimously, while the historian Elizabeth Hamilton, working from the Walton Hall papers, concluded she probably feigned it at first.²⁶ At Christmas 1889 she was let out, as “Miss Moncreiff,” to meet the man her daughter would marry. She was not at the wedding.

Edith, Countess of Aylesford, wrote to her mother-in-law in March 1876: “Let them think I am dead; it will be best.” In 1885 that mother-in-law told a committee of the House of Lords on oath that the children “do not know that she is alive.”¹⁹ Edith died in poverty at 51 Welbeck Street, London, on June 23, 1897.²⁷

If you had been the man holding that invitation, knowing your wife’s standing rested on your chair at the table, you would have had to decide what your presence was worth. The film ends on the same question, and the conversation is open in the comments on YouTube: was he a man who made a bargain and got what he bargained for, or a man with nothing left to trade?

Sources and notes