Lillie Langtry arrived in London with no money, no title, and no connections. Within two years, she was the most painted woman in Britain.
She was born Emily Charlotte Le Breton on October 13, 1853, at the Deanery of St. Saviour on Jersey. Her father was the Very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, the Dean of Jersey. Her mother had been a celebrated beauty in her own youth.
Lillie was the only girl among a crowd of brothers and was schooled alongside them. That single fact shaped everything that followed. She learned to argue, to ride, to hold a room, and to look a man in the face without looking away first.
By her teens, her beauty was famous across the island. She had already grasped a lesson that would carry her further than birth or money ever could. A beautiful woman who knew she was beautiful held a kind of power that the rules of her world had no way to take from her.
At 20, she married Edward Langtry, a widower of Irish landed background with money in shipping and a yacht. For a girl who had spent her life looking out at a Britain she had never properly seen, the yacht was a passport. They married on March 9, 1874, in her father's own church.
The marriage gave her exactly one thing of lasting value. It gave her the name she would make famous across two continents. Edward Langtry's fortune was thinner than it looked, and his fondness for drink would deepen with the years.
In 1876, the Langtrys moved to London. The turning point was a single evening and a single dress. Invited to a reception at the home of Lady Sebright, she came in a plain black gown with her hair simply done and no jewels at all.
Against all the ornament in the room, she looked like the only real person there. The room turned to her as if a light had been carried in.
The painters came first. John Everett Millais, himself a Jersey man, painted her in 1878 and called the picture "A Jersey Lily." The nickname fixed itself so hard that it has outlived everything else about her.
Then came the photographs. Postcard portraits of the Jersey Lily appeared in shop windows across the country. A clergyman's daughter from an island of a few square miles had become one of the most reproduced human images on earth.
The Victorians invented a phrase for her. They called her a professional beauty. She was, in everything but the word, the first celebrity in the modern sense.
The fame was entirely real, and the debts were entirely real. The two were running hard in opposite directions.
The most desirable woman in England was about to be noticed by the most powerful man in it. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, crossed her path around 1877. She was 23.
She became his acknowledged mistress. In the social world of the Marlborough House set, she was received openly as the prince's favorite. She was seated near him at dinners and photographed in the same gatherings.
She was not the prince's passive trophy. She was the active strategist of her own rise. She treated the affair as a campaign to be won rather than a piece of luck to be enjoyed.
By the closing years of the 1870s, the prince's attention was beginning to drift. Lillie Langtry did not wait to be discarded. She found herself a second prince.
Prince Louis of Battenberg was a fair-haired lieutenant in the Royal Navy in his mid-20s. He was clever, ambitious, and serious about his profession. In 1880, he had fallen hard for the most famous woman in England.
The affair ran through 1880, intense and increasingly unguarded. By the middle of that year, Lillie Langtry was pregnant. Her husband was beyond any doubt not the father.
The obvious answer was Prince Louis of Battenberg. He was her lover, and he had the royal blood to turn the pregnancy into a catastrophe for two great families at once.
But there was another man in the background. Arthur Clarence Jones was a Jersey man, a childhood friend of Lillie's brothers. In 1978, a bundle of love letters written by Lillie to Jones came to light.
The letters give every impression of an intimate relationship. They do not prove that Jones fathered her daughter, but they place a credible third man in the room at the exact moment the legend had always insisted there were only two.
The historian Jane Ridley, working from the diary of the Prince of Wales, established that Prince Louis was staying at Marlborough House on June 27, 1880, which falls squarely upon the most likely date of conception. The Battenberg family never entertained a moment's doubt. Louis's own son maintained firmly to the end of his life that his father was the father of Lillie Langtry's child.
The only honest position is that the paternity is genuinely uncertain. The social fact is that a prince of royal blood had got the most famous woman in England with child, and something had to be done about it quickly.
The Prince of Wales lent her £2,000 to clear her debts. It was the gesture of a worldly man managing an embarrassment.
The Battenberg family moved faster and far more coldly. An aide was dispatched to arrange a financial settlement. Louis was told plainly that there could be no question of marriage.
On October 17, 1880, Prince Louis sailed away aboard a warship bound on a voyage around the world. The ship was called the Inconstant.
Edward Langtry, the husband, had walked out of the marriage. He would die in 1897, reportedly in an asylum near Chester.
Lillie was spirited quietly across the Channel into France. On March 18, 1881, she gave birth to a daughter in a locked room in Paris. The child was named Jeanne Marie.
When the child was registered, she was registered under the surname Langtry. The borrowed name was the first brick laid in a wall that would take 20 years to build.
The baby was sent to Jersey to be brought up among the same parishes her mother had schemed to escape. She was placed in the care of her grandmother. The essential fiction held perfectly firm.
Jeanne Marie grew up believing herself a Langtry by blood and an orphan by circumstance. She grew up believing that the dazzling, frequently absent woman who arrived from London was simply her aunt.
Around her 20th year, Jeanne Marie was finally told who her father was. The person who finally told her was not her mother at all, but a society figure, the famously sharp-tongued Margot Asquith.
The knowledge came late. It came from outside the family, and it came as a blow. She was deeply and lastingly wounded.
A single remark attributed to Lillie captures her entire character in one cold flash. When her daughter complained of the shame of her illegitimate birth, the mother is said to have answered, "Who would you prefer to have as a father? A penniless, drunken Irishman or a royal prince and the most handsome of all naval officers?"
The relationship did not recover easily. By several accounts, it did not ever fully recover at all.
In 1902, Jeanne Marie married Sir Ian Malcolm, a Scottish Conservative politician. The wedding took place at St. Margaret's Westminster. She had four children.
She kept the secret. She never publicly named her father. The daughter of the greatest self-promoter of the age chose a lifelong and deliberate silence.
Jeanne Marie lived on until 1964. She carried the truth with her into a private life, and there she let it rest.
If Prince Louis of Battenberg truly fathered Jeanne Marie, then she was his daughter by blood. That would make her a half-sister to Princess Alice, and therefore a half-aunt to Prince Philip himself.
The Battenberg family shed the German name in 1917 and took the name Mountbatten. Louis's son became Earl Mountbatten of Burma. His daughter, Princess Alice, became the mother of Prince Philip, who married Queen Elizabeth II.
The paternity was never certain. The royal blood that may run from the Jersey Lily's secret child to the heart of the monarchy has to be described as a striking and genuinely well-supported possibility, never as a settled and provable truth.
In 1899, with her first husband dead, Lillie married Sir Hugo de Bathe, a baronet some 20 years younger than herself. The wedding took place at St. Saviour's Church on Jersey.
She retired to a villa in Monaco she called "Le Lys," the lily. She died at dawn on February 12, 1929, in Monte Carlo of pneumonia at the age of 75.
Her last clear wish was to go home. She was buried in her parents' tomb in the quiet churchyard of St. Saviour on Jersey, only a few steps from the church where she had been christened and married.
The most photographed woman of her age kept one picture the world was never allowed to see. The picture of herself as a mother holding the daughter she had hidden away behind a borrowed name on a small island in the sea.