HOWZAT

Henry was a stolid military type, but his younger brother Georgie was a very different character. He shared with their eldest brother David, the future Edward VIII, a love of serious partygoing and a voracious sexual appetite. Georgie, known to his friends as Babe, drove fast cars, flew, sailed, played the piano and was highly cultured. Tall, handsome and dark-haired, he loved fast women. One princely paramour, Kiki Whitney Preston, a member of the Kenyan Happy Valley set, introduced him to the delights of cocaine and morphine.

George was also bisexual. He had a long affair with Noël Coward, whose play The Vortex offered the most explicit portrayal of homosexuality and drug addiction yet seen on the London stage. The royal household had to pay a substantial sum of blackmail money to a Parisian boy to whom Babe had written compromising letters.

In about June 1930 he began an affair with Lady Mary Lygon, known as Maimie, the most beautiful of Beauchamp’s daughters. That month she was a guest in the royal stand on ladies’ day at Ascot. Six months later they were seen dancing together at a charity masked ball.

On the surface, Maimie was an ideal candidate to become a royal bride. She was the beautiful daughter of a knight of the garter with an impeccable record of service. Her mother was the sister to a duke. The Lygon family had great hopes that an engagement might have been on the way. Georgie was nearly 30; marriage would settle him down.

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Society rumours about the earl’s flaunting of his homosexuality in Australia therefore came at the worst possible moment. If George were to propose, there would suddenly be the prospect of the royal family allying itself to the household of a man who buggered his footmen. The lethal combination of a possible match and the prince’s own bisexual tendency was too high a risk to countenance.

The Duke of Westminster’s hatred of his brother-in-law being well known, the obvious course of action was for him to undertake the dirty work on behalf of the King. Buckmaster was therefore dispatched to Bendor and they worked together to gather sufficient evidence to force Boom to resign all his posts and slip out of the country. There would then be no question of the relationship between Babe and Maimie progressing beyond a fling.

The most powerful forces in the land had a vested interest in keeping everything private. Not only the King was involved: Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative party and sometime prime minister, was a close friend of Boom. Since his son Oliver was openly homosexual — this was accepted by his family, but not known to the public — the last thing Baldwin would have wanted was a public scandal turning on the sexuality of a prominent political figure.

The royal archives are silent on the affair. We may never know whether it was the King or the duke who fired the starting pistol. Whichever of them it was, Bendor set about his task with great relish and ruthless dispatch.

He arranged for Buckmaster and two other very senior barristers to inform the Countess Beauchamp of her husband’s double life. It was said she had no idea what homosexuality was: “Benny tells me it’s because he’s a bugler” was her alleged response. She left Madresfield for a house on Bendor’s estates in Cheshire.

On his return from Australia, Boom carried on with his duties but the strain was telling. Bendor made him an offer, via senior lawyers: marital separation without formal divorce, resignation from all duties — ill-health could be the grounds — and departure from the country, with a written undertaking never to return. But Boom would never willingly relinquish his public duties and the appurtenances of office and status, let alone abandon Madresfield and his children.

His opponents considered that they were left with no choice but to deliver an ultimatum. Reluctant as she was to make any public statement, the countess placed a notice in the newspapers saying she had separated from her husband and was in good health. Urged on by her brother, she then took the step from which there was no turning back, filing a petition for divorce in the High Court on May 21, 1931.

The grounds were so explosive that her affidavit was stamped to remain closed until 2032. The closure has now been cancelled and the document has been released to me for the first time by the National Archives at Kew. In paragraph five, on the second page, the grounds are given: “That the respondent is a man of perverted sexual practices, has committed acts of gross indecency with the male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy.” The following paragraphs lay out in graphic detail the evidence gathered by Westminster, Buckmaster and their detectives. Beauchamp had behaved this way, the petition said, throughout his married life.

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