The Necklace That Scandalized a Prince The Real Lillie Langtry.

The year is 1890. The footlights of the princess's theatre blaze upward, catching something extraordinary at a woman's throat. A cascade of enamel scarabs, carnelian carved moonstones, turquoise cabochons and coral drops swinging as she moves. The audience doesn't know it yet, but that necklace was commissioned by the Prince of Wales himself, timed to the role she was born to play. And the woman wearing it, playing Cleopatra, the doomed Egyptian queen, was once his queen too. Her name was Lily Langtry. And the story of how a clergyman's daughter from Jersey ended up on that stage, wearing a future king's jewels on her own professional terms, is one of the most extraordinary reinventions in Victorian history. But to understand how she got there, we need to go back to Jersey, to a rectory that looked respectable from the outside, but hid a much darker reality. Emily Charlotte Le Breton was born on the 13th of October, 1853, at the old rectory of Saint Saviour on the island of Jersey. Her father was the very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, Dean of Jersey, a man of considerable standing and, as it turned out, considerable secrets. She grew up the only daughter among six brothers, riding horses bareback along the beaches, refusing the drawing-room accomplishments expected of Victorian girls, and receiving, unusually for a girl of her class, the same rigorous tutoring as her brothers. She was tall, with reddish-brown hair, pale skin, and violet-blue eyes that people would spend the rest of her life trying to describe. The rectory, though, hid something that would shape her entire understanding of men and promises. Her father, despite his ecclesiastical office, was notorious on the island for serial affairs with parishioners, and for fathering illegitimate children. Some of those children, Lily eventually discovered, were her own half-siblings. One adolescent romance ended when she was told that the boy she loved was, in fact, her father's natural son. The humiliation, the disgust, the sudden cold clarity that public virtue and private behaviour could be entirely different things. When her mother finally separated from the dean around 1880 and he fled Jersey, Lily had long since absorbed the lesson. She would never fully trust a man's constancy again, and she would never be naive about the gap between a man's reputation and his reality. On Jersey, that hard-won wisdom had nowhere to go. She dreamed of London, where reputations could be remade. The vehicle of escape arrived in the form of a yacht. Edward Ned Langtry sailed into Jersey Harbour in the early 1870s aboard his splendid yacht, Red Gauntlet. He was an Irish landowner, widowed, comfortably off, and romantic-looking enough to seem like a solution. Lily later said, with the particular honesty she reserved for herself, that she had fallen more in love with the yacht than with its owner. To become mistress of the yacht, she said, I married the owner. They married on the 9th of March, 1874, at St Saviour's, her father's own church. By 1876, they had rented a modest house in Eaton Place, Belgravia, and later moved to a larger home in Norfolk Street off Park Lane as invitations began to multiply. Ned was kindly and unremarkable. He drank heavily. Their marriage, already a mismatch of temperament, was quietly becoming a business arrangement. He the legal husband and chaperone, she the dazzling hostess around whom London society was beginning to revolve. She arrived in that society wearing almost nothing. In April 1877, Lily was invited to a reception at 23 Lownes Square, the home of Sir John and Lady Seabright, attended by artists and members of the fashionable set. She was still in mourning for a brother killed in a riding accident. She wore a simple black dress, no jewellery. Her hair arranged plainly. The simplicity proved electrifying. The young artist Frank Miles demanded she sit for him that very evening. Copies of his pastel portraits, reproduced as cabinet cards and postcards, soon filled stationers' windows across London. Sir John Everett Millais later painted her holding a lily, the portrait that gave her the sobriquet that would follow her for life, the Jersey Lily. The picture caused a sensation at the Royal Academy. Crowds had to be roped back from it. Victorian Britain had just discovered the professional beauty, society women famous largely for being beautiful, photographed and painted, rather than for any particular achievement. Lily was, for a time, first among them, and she understood instinctively that a single striking ornament, a string of pearls against black silk, a brooch at the throat, could do more than a fortune in diamonds. She let the jewel punctuate rather than overwhelm. The restraint made the later royal gifts all the more devastating in contrast. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, known in satirical circles as Edward the Caresser, first met Lily at a dinner party given by explorer Sir Alan Young on the 24th of May, 1877. He manoeuvred to be seated beside her. Her husband was placed at the opposite end of the table. Within months she had become his acknowledged mistress. The liaison lasted from late 1877 until around June 1880, and in sophisticated London circles it was an open secret. Society ditties mocked the situation. London society has gone quite silly, fallen at the feet of the Jersey Lily, but Queen Alexandra, long-suffering and politically astute, chose to accept her husband's infidelities so long as they were conducted with discretion. Lily was formally presented to the Queen. She appeared openly at events in the Prince's company, and it brought jewels. Among the most tangible symbols of the Prince's passion was the Egyptian revival necklace he commissioned from Hancocks and Company, timed to her stage role as Cleopatra, a graduated fringe of pendants featuring enamel and faience scarabs, a carnelian shell, ram's head motifs, coral drops, carved moonstones and turquoise cabochons, a piece that both echoed her role and proclaimed his patronage whenever she wore it in public. Then there was the smaller, more intimate token, a gold, diamond, ruby and enamel brooch in the form of the King's royal cipher, a crown above an E and the number seven. Accompanied at auction by a note from Lily's granddaughter, Mary Malcolm stating simply, this piece of jewellery was given to my grandmother Lily Langtry in 1879 by Edward VII. She was his mistress. Delicately set with rose-cut diamonds and rubies against blue enamel, worn perhaps in a place only a lover would notice. The Prince once reportedly remarked that he had spent enough on Lily to buy a battleship. Her response was characteristically precise. He had spent enough in her to float one. It is the kind of line that tells you everything about who held the sharper wit in that arrangement and who ultimately understood the transaction more clearly. Two pieces, one blazing under footlights for a crowd of thousands, one pinned close to the heart for an audience of one. Together they encapsulate everything about Lily's position, public spectacle and private consort, simultaneously. But the Prince was a married man of settled habits, nearly a decade older, with a history of regularly changing mistresses. And Lily, who had grown up watching her father's promises dissolve, was beginning to understand that royal favour had an expiry date. In the late 1870s, a new breed of society papers had emerged, specialising in insinuation and scandal. In autumn 1879, Adolphus Rosenberg, editor of a publication called Town Talk, published rumours that Edward Langtry had filed for divorce and would cite his wife's adultery with the Prince of Wales as grounds. Effectively naming the heir to the throne as co-respondent, the Prince instructed his formidable solicitor George Lewis to prosecute. Rosenberg eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. But the damage was done. What the scandal sheets didn't fully capture was how volatile Lily's personal life had already become. That same year, July 1879, she had begun an affair with Charles Chetwynd Talbot, the 20th Earl of Shrewsbury, a racing mad aristocrat whose infatuation with her was intense and reckless. By January 1880, they were reportedly planning to run away together, a step that would have destroyed what remained of Lily's social respectability and deeply embarrassed the Prince. The combination of legal peril for the Crown and Lily's increasingly complicated entanglements appears to have hastened the cooling of the royal romance considerably. Shrewsbury spent lavishly on Lily, his finances deteriorating badly in the process. She was at the centre of scandals that threatened other people's fortunes and reputations as much as her own, and she was beginning to understand that the intoxicating power of being desired by princes and peers sat uneasily alongside the hard truth that none of them could fully stabilise her life. It was in the midst of this volatility that she turned toward Prince Louis of Battenberg, an ambitious naval officer, future first sea lord, and friend and nephew by marriage to the Prince of Wales himself. Their liaison began in 1879, and in June 1880, Lily discovered she was pregnant. Think for a moment about what that actually meant. Her husband had effectively left her after the libel scandal. The Prince's physical relationship with her had cooled. The Earl of Shrewsbury's reckless devotion had come at enormous cost to them both. And now she was carrying a child whose father she may not have been entirely certain of herself, with the Prince's money in her pocket and the Prince's child possibly not in her arms. She withdrew to Paris, accompanied by a long-standing lover, Arthur Clarence Jones. On the 8th of March, 1881, she gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Marie. The secrecy surrounding the birth was intense. There was no announcement, no acknowledgement. Just a woman, alone in a foreign city, managing the consequences of a life lived at full speed. The question of who fathered Jeanne Marie has never been definitively settled, and I think that ambiguity is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly. Prince Louis and Arthur Jones were both candidates. Lily appears to have allowed Louis to believe he was the father. When he told his family, they quickly arranged for him to be posted abroad, and he paid support money for the child. Lord Mountbatten of always insisted his father was the parent, which would make Jeanne Marie an aunt of Prince Philip and, by marriage, connected to Queen Elizabeth II. But the later discovery of passionate letters from Lily to Arthur Jones led some historians to argue that Jones was the true father, and that the Battenberg connection was simply convenient for everyone involved. Whatever the biological truth, Lily reportedly told her daughter as an adult that it was better to have a royal prince as a father than a penniless drunken Irishman. A cruel remark, a revealing one. It tells you everything about the social calculus Lily had learned to perform, and something of the cost of performing it. In 1902, Jeanne Marie married Scottish politician Sir Ian Malcolm, moving firmly into the British political and social establishment. The hidden child of a famous beauty, grown up and respectable. The circle, in its way, complete. The withdrawal of royal favor, the burden of a hidden child, a husband increasingly absent and alcoholic, all of it combined to push Lily toward financial crisis. In October 1880, she was forced to sell many of her possessions to avoid Ned's formal bankruptcy. Some of the gowns, some of the jewels. And then she made a decision that was, for a woman of her class, genuinely radical. She would earn her own living on the stage. Encouraged by friends, including Oscar Wilde, she began training as an actress. In December 1881, she made her London debut at the Haymarket Theatre as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, the first society woman, as contemporaries saw it, to step from the private world of drawing rooms onto a professional stage. Over time, she developed into a competent performer, particularly admired as Rosalind in As You Like It. Off stage, she capitalized on her image by becoming the face of peers soap around 1882. Widely cited as the first instance of a celebrity endorsing a commercial product. Her face, already familiar from cabinet cards and engravings, now appeared in advertisements, linking cleanliness, beauty, and a hint of royal glamour. Think about what that actually means. In 1882, Lily Langtry invented what we now call influencer marketing. Every brand partnership, every carefully curated image sold to a mass audience, it traces a line directly back to her. She didn't stumble into it. She understood, with the same instinct that had made her stand in a black dress with no jewellery and stopper room, that her image was a currency. And she spent it wisely. And on stage, the jewels returned, transformed, pearls suggesting innocence, diamond stars sparkling in her hair. And for Cleopatra, that great Egyptian necklace blazing under the footlights, its fringe of scarabs and coloured stones catching the light as she moved. The piece commissioned for her role, now worn entirely on her own terms, royal patronage converted into stage armour. That necklace has had a remarkable afterlife. After passing into private hands, it was bought back by Hancocks at auction in 2003, and later loaned to the makers of the Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep wore it as Miranda Priestley. Lily's jewel, and her story, reaching a new generation without a single word of explanation required. In the early 1880s, Lily took her stage skills to America, forming her own touring company and crossing the United States. She was feted by millionaires and politicians, courted by wealthy admirers who saw in her a bridge between old world glamour and new world ambition. One such admirer was businessman Freddie Gebhard, who became her lover and partner in various ventures, including racehorses and land in California. In the Gwenoch Valley, she acquired a ranch and vineyards that would become known as Langtree Farms, producing wine under her own name. A Victorian woman building a brand decades before the concept existed. By the mid-1890s, she had returned to England with sufficient independent means to purchase Regal Lodge near Newmarket, 12 bedrooms, imported oak panelling, Italian marble fireplaces, transforming it into a racing establishment where the Prince of Wales himself came to visit. Their affair was long over, their friendship endured. The Lily Langtree Stakes, a modern horse race, still commemorates her connection to the turf. In 1897, Ned Langtree died. Two years later, she married Hugo Gerald de Bath, 18 years her junior. When his father died in 1907, she became Lady de Bath. A title. A quietly satisfying irony for a woman whose respectability had once been questioned in every scandal sheet in London. She settled eventually in Monaco, where photographs show her in softer pieces, strings of pearls, diamond bar brooches, lighter settings. The woman who had once worn a riot of Egyptian scarabs now understood that elegance, for a lady in her 70s, lay in restraint. The jewels had become personal talismans rather than weapons. Memories worn close to the skin. She died in Monte Carlo on the 12th of February, 1929, aged 75, and she was buried on Jersey, the island she had spent her whole life trying to escape, and the only place that could truly claim her. Here is what stays with me thinking about Lily Langtree. She arrived in London wearing nothing, no jewels, no title, no protection, and she left it having worn the jewels of a king, built a business empire on two continents, and outlasted every man who thought he had defined her. The royal cipher brooch, pinned close to the heart. The Egyptian necklace blazing under the lights. The quiet pearls of Monaco, worn by a woman who no longer needed to prove anything to anyone. Each piece a chapter, each chapter a choice. She was not a victim. She was not a villain. She was something far more interesting. A woman who understood, from the time she was a girl in a hypocrite's rectory, that the world would not give her what she wanted. So she took it. That Egyptian necklace is still at Hancock's in London today. A piece commissioned by a prince, worn by an actress, borrowed by Hollywood. If you'd like to see the full story behind that jewel, how it was made, where it went, and what it means that Meryl Streep was the one to bring it back into the light, let me know in the comments below. And if Lily's story is the kind of history you want more of, a like and a subscription will make sure you're here for what comes next.