‍“I’ve spent enough on you to buy a battleship,” said King Edward VII.

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‍“And you’ve spent enough in me to float one!” his lover Lillie Langtry replied.

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‍SHE SAT for artists Millais and Whistler, was worshipped by Oscar Wilde, collected royalty, tycoons and politicians for sex and put ice cream down the neck of the King at a society ball.

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‍This was the world of Lillie Langtry, a mediocre actress the Daily Express described as the most beautiful woman in England, who amassed a great fortune and ended her days gambling it away in Monte Carlo.

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‍Her beautiful body, bright blue eyes, satin skin and red-gold hair drove rich and powerful Victorian men mad. They showered her with money and diamonds, and she drowned them with sex, telling friends: “Men are born to be slaves.”

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‍One affair was with racehorse own George Baird, known for throwing orgies. He beat her and once apologised by buying her a 220ft luxury yacht called White Ladye. She renamed it The Black Eye.

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‍She stuck the affair out and after another beating, he hurled a bundle at her head – with £50,000 in notes, wrapped in a newspaper.

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‍Such was Lillie’s sexual notoriety that even America’s famed hanging judge Roy Bean wanted to sleep with her … even though he had never met her. He wrote her love letters and named his saloon bar after her … The Jersey Lily.

‍He had read about her trip to America when she was met by an army of reporters and Oscar Wilde, waving a bunch of lilies in the air. Wilde always loved her too. Did she have an affair with him? Some historians believe she did. He once said: “I would rather have discovered Lillie Langtry than America.”

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‍Bean followed her career the rest of his life, sent letters to her, and even built an Opera House near his saloon in the unlikely event that she would accept his invitation to visit and need a place to perform.

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‍After he died, she visited his Wild West bar in 1904, where he had left her his gun.

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‍America loved her but not her acting. A crushing notice in an American magazine dismissed her as a pointless novelty, comparing her unfavourably to a well-known performing elephant of the day:

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‍The critic wrote: “But let me do justice to Jumbo, even though I seem severe upon Mrs Langtry. He was not only a notorious elephant, but a very large one and the way he devoured things was thoroughly artistic. Mrs Langtry is not an extraordinarily beautiful elephant; she has no artistic skill.”

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‍Lillie was famous it seemed, simply for being famous.

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‍Fleet Street, however, adored her but she is mostly remembered today for being the lover of the Prince of Wales, Albert (Bertie to friends) the future King Edward VII. The affair began in 1877 while Lily was married and lasted three years.

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‍The King was known to have a string of lovers and couldn’t keep it in his trousers. He was nicknamed Dirty Bertie and Edward the Caresser. Lillie was like no other woman he had known, and he threw caution to the wind, not caring about Press scandals.

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‍He even designed them a love chair, the siège d’amour (seat of love), which ended up in his favourite Parisian brothel.

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‍The King and his love chair for Lillie … so many 

‍memories, but not just about her.

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‍They didn’t try to hide their affair. Theatre boxes. Restaurant dinners. Weekend parties at country estates. Everyone knew. Newspapers like the Express couldn’t explicitly say it—libel laws protected royalty—but they didn’t need to.

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‍The constant mentions of “Mrs. Langtry” attending the same events as “His Royal Highness” told the story clearly enough. And he always placed her next to him at official dinners.

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‍At the height of their affair, he even built her a home in Bournemouth, where the couple conducted their trysts away from the public gaze.

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‍The property, which was called the Red House, is now the Langtry Manor Hotel and the main bedroom they used for sex is the honeymoon suite.

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‍Lillie couldn’t even go shopping without crowds turning up to gawp at her. When she stepped off a train, she was regularly greeted by a brass band, a red carpet, crowds and a bumbling mayor in awe of her.

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‍But Victorian society had unwritten rules. Men could have affairs —expected, even, for men of status, however women having affairs usually ended up destroying their lives.

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‍When their affair was over, the Prince moved on. New mistresses. New scandals. One was actress Sarah Berndhart, who famously slept in her coffin to cure her fear of death. Lillie was yesterday’s fascination.

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‍Lillie was born Lillie Le Breton in Jersey in 1853, and she became Mrs Edward Langtry, when she married the heir to a dwindling shipping fortune in 1874. She was rumoured to have married him because she fell in love with his luxury yacht The Red Gauntlet.

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‍The couple moved to London, where Lillie began to sleep her way through Society and Edward began to drink himself to death. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1897.

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‍Her long-running affair with the Prince of Wales was swiftly broken off after she rubbed a lump of strawberry ice cream down his neck and back during an argument at a ball thrown by Randolph Churchill. It was the last straw, particularly as Lillie was now pregnant with the child of Prince Louis of Battenberg, the grandfather of Prince Philip, another affair.

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‍Judge Bean’s Jersey Lilly saloon, in Eagle’s Nest, Texas, is still a tourist attraction today. Lillie became an American citizen in 1897 and died in Monte Carlo in 1929 aged 75.

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‍ONE FOR THE PHOTO ALBUM: AUSCHWITZ STAFF ENJOY SUNSHINE BREAK 20 MINUTES FROM HELL

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‍JOB DONE: This chilling picture was one of many taken of staff relaxing in the sunshine at Auschwitz for a photo album, just 20 minutes away from queues of women and children having their heads shaved before stepping into the gas chambers.

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‍The images were taken at Solahütte, a specially built holiday chalet complex for camp commanders and their families, along with clerical staff and hairdressers in the 1940s to spend hours of R&R away from the stress of their everyday job, killing 1.1 million human beings.

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‍Karl Höcker, a former bank clerk who served as administrative assistant to Richard Baer, the last SS commandant of Auschwitz, took the pictures for his own personal photo album that was found by an American army officer in a deserted apartment and only more recently revealed.

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‍The holiday chalet overlooked a lake, and 116 black and white images over 32 pages, show parties around a Christmas tree as the candles are lit; officers singing to an accordion player; drinking, sharing jokes and topping up their tans on a sun deck.

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‍Some show them celebrating reaching their target of exterminating 350,000 Hungarian jews. Josef Kramer, Rudolf Höss and Josef Mengele appear in some pictures. None show any inmates of the camp.

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‍Surprise, surprise.

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‍THE DAY GIBSON CALLED COP ‘SUGAR TITS’ AND HAD TEQUILA IN HIS CAR

‍THE ENGLISH aren’t the only people Braveheart dislikes it seems. When actor Mel Gibson was stopped for drunk driving in Malibu, California, he shouted a barrage of anti-Semitic abuse at the police and claimed the Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world, the British and American Press reported.

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‍Calling a woman officer “sugar tits” he became ‘increasingly belligerent’ and at one point tried to run away, unlike his character in the inaccurate hit movie, Scottish rebel William Wallace, who slaughtered English soldiers in their hundreds.

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‍When he was caught, Gibson said: “Fucking Jews!” and warned a Jewish officer that he would regret arresting him because he “owned Malibu”. Really?

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‍Gibson, 50, was arrested in the early hours of Friday, July 28, 2006, after he was found driving his Lexus along the Pacific coast highway at 87 mph in a 45 mph zone while allegedly drunk.

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‍A three-quarters-full bottle of tequila wrapped in a brown paper bag was found on the floor. He was booked on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol and released on $5,000 bail.

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‍The 50-year-old star, whose father once told the New York Times that he did not believe the Holocaust happened, apologised for the anti-Jewish remarks, and was later fined $1,300, had his licence restricted for 90 days, and was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous, under an alcohol abuse program.

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‍He was also told to record a public service announcement about drunk driving as part of a plea deal for probation.

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‍In an interview with Variety magazine, he said: “I was loaded and angry and arrested. I was recorded illegally by an unscrupulous police officer who was never prosecuted for that crime.

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‍“And then it was made public by him for profit, through members of the Press, shall we say. So, not fair. I guess as who I am, I’m not allowed to have a nervous breakdown, ever!”

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‍In Braveheart, English soldiers are portrayed as uniformly cruel and villainous, and Gibson described King Edward I as a “psychopath”.

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‍In The Patriot, British soldiers are depicted committing atrocities that did not actually occur during the American Revolution.

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‍Critics at The Guardian and The Telegraph, in London, have noted that a “hatred of the English” or a “vendetta against England” has coloured several of his films, including The Bounty and Gallipoli.

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‍WANTED: A LIVELY WOMAN WITH GOOD TEETH,

‍SWEET LIPS, SWEET BREATH AND FULL BOSOM

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‍Advert from the Sheffield Independent, February 1, 1866.

‍“Tall and graceful in her person, more of the fine woman than the pretty one, good teeth, soft lips, sweet breath. With eyes no matter what colour so they are but expressive, of a healthy complexion, rather inclined to fair than brown, neat in person, her bosom full, plump, firm, and white.

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‍“A good understanding without being a wit, but cheerful and lively in conversation, polite and delicate of speech, her temper humane and tender, and to look as if she could feel delight where she wishes to give it.

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‍“If such a one there be, there is a gentleman of £2000 a year, 52 years of age next July, but of a vigorous, strong, and amorous constitution, that will marry her, be her fortune ever so small, and settle on her clear jointure of £600 a year.

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‍“She must not be more than 14 years, nor less than 7 years younger than the gentleman. If this advertisement should procure and answer, let it be sent to the Smyrna Coffee house, directed for A.B.”

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‍What a shame we can’t find out what happened.

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‍DID YOU KNOW?

‍President Trump’s fortune is a drop in the pond compared with some legendary names in history. Trump was assessed by Forbes as having a mere $5.1billion last year.

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‍Catherine the Great of Russia, who controlled imperial estates, vast natural resources, and the direct taxation of millions of serfs into her own bank, had $1.5 trillion in today’s money, ranking her among history’s richest rulers.

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‍Even that is put in the shade by Genghis Kahn, of the Mongol empire. He controlled wealth worth $120 trillion in today’s figures. But distributed a lot of it among his soldiers.

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‍Joseph Stalin was a communist of course, so he didn’t believe in personal wealth. He lived in several government mansions and had personal control of $8.5 trillion.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍2 February 2026

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