It was the weirdest of love triangles – a king’s brother, desperately in love with a married woman. His wife doing her best to befriend the mistress, writing what amounted to love-letters to her. The mistress knocking on her prince’s bedroom door while his wife slept in an adjoining room.
Sex, back in the Edwardian era, was done differently.
Hiding behind a bulbous moustache and looking pompous and old before his time, Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, looked as strait-laced as you’d expect the favourite son of Queen Victoria to be.
Far from it. He hid his passion for women so that – even a century later – it’s impossible to know exactly what he got up to when left alone in bedrooms, drawing-rooms, on board ships and in darkened corners.
The key to Arthur’s colossal passion lay in hundreds of letters he wrote to his mistress Leonie, Lady Leslie – letters which, when he died, were urgently ordered to be destroyed by King Charles‘s grandfather, George VI.
Though apparently happily married to a German princess, Louise Margaret of Prussia, it was Leonie who gripped him.
Bizarrely, Leonie equally forced her worldly charm on the duchess. ‘For decades Leonie ruled the Duchess, and ran the Duke,’ wrote her granddaughter Anita Leslie.
‘He thought of her by day, and dreamt of her by night,’ wrote Arthur’s biographer. And Arthur’s wife, known as Louischen, seemed just as smitten – ‘This was an unusual relationship because the Duchess joined in it to the full, and was quite as enchanted by Leonie as was Prince Arthur.’
Arthur and Leonie were introduced at a party in Ireland given by Lord Rossmore at a time when, after 20 years of marriage, Louischen had become bad-tempered, introspective, and unwell.
It took no more than a minute for him to fall for her charms.
Leonie Jerome was a dazzling, outspoken American heiress married to Jack Leslie, heir to Castle Leslie in County Monaghan, Ireland. Her sister Jenny Jerome was married to aristocratic politician Lord Randolph Churchill and was the mother of Winston Churchill.
Though nine years Arthur’s junior, Leonie became a mother-figure to a prince who was nervy and prone to depression.
‘As an American she was untarnished by the staleness of British etiquette,’ wrote biographer Noble Frankland. ‘She was gifted and amusing, and married to a husband who could scarcely be described as anything more than ordinary.’
The relationship hotted up quickly, and though Arthur continually protested it was ‘pure’, that was because he was doing his best not to be compared with his older brother with his scores of mistresses and concubines.
‘He relied on her for the advice and encouragement,’ wrote biographer Noble Frankland, ‘and the Duchess too was increasingly depending on Leonie for advice and friendship’.
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