The royal love triangle that led to Montecito

Were The Duke and Duchess of Sussex to leave their mansion in Montecito, California, and head a couple of miles across town, to Toro Canyon, they would soon find themselves at the one-time home of a woman whose story they would find rather relatable. Because the former occupant once drove a wedge between the Prince of Wales and his younger brother, Prince Harry. Sound familiar? That former Montecito resident was Beryl Markham, a woman whose destructive involvement with the two English princes decades before Meghan was born bears one or two rather strange similarities with the Sussexes’s own story. The fact that Harry and Meghan chose to make their new home just around the corner from where Markham established herself after her own flight to America really is an extraordinary coincidence.

It’s not often that going down a Google rabbit hole results in one unearthing a royal world exclusive, but this is, in a sense, what happened to me after I read Markham’s autobiography – and subsequently discovered the Montecito connection rhat no one appears to have registered until now. That book, West With the Night (1942), is a gripping account of her wild childhood in what was then British East Africa, later Kenya, and her young adulthood as a solo pilot sourcing trophy big game for visiting Europeans to hunt, kill and stuff. The memoir culminates in the 1936 episode that made her famous – becoming the first person to fly solo east-to-west across the Atlantic, an episode that would almost kill her. But what the book doesn’t mention is the most interesting aspect of all – her simultaneous affairs with two royal brothers.

This pair were Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, popularly known as Harry, and his older brother Edward, the Prince of Wales and later Edward VIII – both great-great uncles of Princes William and Harry. Markham was 26, and already onto her second husband – and many other lovers – when she met the two princes at a ball given by the White Mischief community at Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club in 1928. What happened next was omitted from West With the Night and would remain secret for decades: both princes simultaneously became romantically involved with Markham.

‘A tremendous competition took place for Edward’s attention,’ recalled one English resident of the stir he caused in Nairobi. ‘His entourage were often kept waiting for several hours while he took his pleasure with a certain blonde.’ But Markham was also soon pleasuring Edward’s younger brother as well. A friend recalled: ‘The Duke became besotted.’

This developing royal ménage was revealed by former Nairobi resident and biographer Errol Trzebinski in The Lives of Beryl Markham (1993). Trzebinski – whose sources have wonderful names like Gypsy, Bunny, Ginger and Cockie – relates how Mrs Markham would, in the weeks that followed, cater to the Duke’s romantic needs in a room at the Muthaiga, while attending to Edward’s requirements at a nearby private bungalow. On one occasion Edward was so desperate to see Markham that he reportedly climbed down a drainpipe to escape his official residence and cavort with her until dawn. This double life became even more exhausting for Markham when the two princes went big-game hunting, arranging separate but parallel safaris. Incredibly, Markham trekked between the two parties to spend amorous nights in both princes’ tents.

Most popular

Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

Katja Hoyer

How the Magdeburg Christmas market attack will change Germany

Rupert Darwall

Labour has walked into a net-zero trap of its own making

‘Our gutsy lady was well able to cope with two or more affairs at the same time,’ observed another member of the party. But this royal version of Carry On Camping came to an abrupt halt when word reached the twin safaris that the brothers’ father, George V, was seriously ill. Both princes were summoned home.

Things appear to have fizzled out between Markham and Edward at this point, but Harry was keen to keep his holiday romance going and insisted Markham follow him to London. The besotted Duke met her when she disembarked at Tilbury and set her up in a suite at the Grosvenor Hotel, conveniently close to Buckingham Palace, where he would use a side entrance to sneak up to her rooms. Then Markham became pregnant. She persuaded the prince that he was the father and he attended the birth and continued the affair afterwards. It was only when Beryl’s husband, Mansfield Markham, discovered love letters from the Duke that matters came to a head: he threatened to make the affair public by naming Prince Harry in divorce proceedings.

To avoid the enormous scandal this would create, the royal family gave in to his demands to take his cheating wife off his hands financially – setting up a trust fund and an annuity that, astonishingly, apparently continued to be paid to Markham for almost another 60 years, until her death in 1986. This was despite the fact that it would eventually transpire that the baby wasn’t the Duke’s at all; as Trzebinski showed, the dates were incontrovertibly out. The Markhams divorced discreetly and the princes both moved on, Harry marrying Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott in 1936 – the same year that Edward was, briefly, King before abdicating over Wallis Simpson. Meanwhile, Markham stayed on in America after her solo flight there that September, marrying for the third time, to hack writer Raoul Schumacher.

And here another parallel with the Sussexes occurs: just as there has been much speculation about who was really behind much of the material in the two books by Omid Scobie about Harry and Meghan’s battles with his family, so too it’s believed that the authorship of West With the Night may not have been what was purported. It has been suggested that Markham’s life story was actually written by Schumacher and that much of the detail was his invention; recollections, as they say, may vary.

But Mr and Mrs Schumacher were a wealthy celebrity couple and, in 1945, decided to settle among similar people, buying their mansion on Toro Canyon Road in Montecito from the English conductor Leopold Stokowski – celebrated for the score from Disney’s Fantasia – who had lived there with his girlfriend, Greta Garbo. Neighbours included Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin. Almost a century later the town still attracts an equivalent crowd: Harry and Meghan’s neighbours include Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ellen DeGeneres, while Natalie Portman at one point actually lived in the Markham house. Markham’s Hollywood-adjacent period ended with the break-up of her third marriage. She moved back to Kenya in 1952 where she trained – and some said doped – racehorses, where she stayed until her death, which was brought on by complications to an injury she sustained by tripping over her dog.

The details of her royal scandal only emerged seven years after her death in 1993 in that biography. Her story’s strange parallel to a later Prince Harry only fully emerges today.