Scandal that shocked a war-torn nation

Bloomsbury, 16.99

THERE is no love like that of love across the great divide - without tales of upper-class women finding passion in the arms of working-class men, or vice versa, the late Catherine Cookson wouldn’t have made a stupendous living and DH Lawrence wouldn’t have found himself in court. Writers have been well served by such daring, fictional lovers.

And by non-fictional lovers too. For his first book, Tim Coates tells the real-life story of upper-class Patsy, or Mary Cornwallis-West, and her affair with a working-class young soldier, merging novelistic invention with real-life letters and documents.

Not that much novelistic tinkering is required - the story practically tells itself. Patsy was born in 1858, the daughter of beautiful Olivia Taylour, who had had an affair with that great upholder of Victorian family values, Prince Albert. Once Albert died, Olivia returned to court to flirt with his son, the future Edward VII, but was soon superseded by her equally beautiful daughter, Patsy, who became Edward’s mistress when she was 16.

To deflect gossip from their affair, Patsy married William Cornwallis-West, continued to have a variety of affairs, then met Patrick Barrett, a young shell-shocked soldier home from the First World War, who was recovering near Patsy’s Welsh home. They began an affair; he was promoted to officer rank thanks to Patsy’s efforts; the affair was discovered and the soldier hauled in front of his superiors. Soon the whole thing was being used as a political football and Patsy found herself in court.

The parallels with Parnell and Kitty O’Shea, Profumo and Christine Keeler, are there and Coates makes them. One is inclined to disagree, however, with his sympathetic summation that, "Patsy neither broke families nor murdered people. Patsy’s sins do not compare with those of many people in higher places."

Patsy’s life was one long list of careless behaviour that wrecked lives: in 1879, Oscar Rosenberg, editor of Town Talk, a gossip paper which had reported that Lillie Langtry was Edward’s mistress (which she was) and about to divorce her husband, and that Patsy posed for dubious photographs (a report which Patsy herself admitted contained "too much truth"), was taken to court by the respective women’s husbands, found guilty of libel and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Nothing was more important than the protection of a reputation - even if it meant sending an innocent man to prison.

There is another disquieting note years later. Patsy was attempting to marry her elder daughter, Daisy, into the German royal family (her son, George, was almost certainly Prince Edward’s natural son and not Cornwallis-West’s). Coates notes that Daisy herself was interested in a young soldier, but "unfortunately he was also Patsy’s lover of the moment, so Patsy arranged through her contacts in the War Office that the soldier should be sent off to South Africa, to the Zulu Wars; sadly, he was killed a few months later." Patsy may not have "murdered" anyone with her own bare hands, but she still has flecks of blood on them.

Where Coates is on surer ground is in exposing the ruthless way that Patsy’s affair with the damaged young Barrett was used by several politicians - mainly Lloyd George - to discredit Asquith’s handling of the war and have him removed from office.

Once the affair became public, Patsy was demonised by the press as a manipulative harlot - neither she nor her husband ever recovered from the scandal, both dying shortly after - and she was subsequently air-brushed out of history. Coates has not exonerated his subject from blame - and he has also betrayed some novelistic shortcomings of his own, writing in a plain, simple style that keeps a potentially complicated story clear but also makes it sound a little like a boy’s own adventure tale on occasions - but he has reclaimed her from oblivion.

It is the manner of his reclamation that is troubling, however. Recent blurrings of fiction and biography tempt one to disbelieve Coates’s claim that he has used real letters and documents, to believe that the entire work is a fiction. Even though he denies this, one can still lament that he chose not one form or the other, but to mix both.

The non-fictional aspects of this tale are the most intriguing ones. If he had stuck to non-fiction, the gaps that the missing letters leave could have been just as useful. In novelised form, they constitute only a few semi-convincing romantic passages and ultimately do nothing to make Patsy as sympathetic as he clearly feels her to have been.