Dr Edwards was a Liberal supporter, and Lloyd George had got to know him when he campaigned for the Liberal candidate in Montgomeryshire in an 1894 by-election. A letter written to Lloyd George by Kitty suggested that he had also got to know Mrs Edwards rather well:
I am addressing this to the Club and the minute you have read it please commit it to the fire, I shall not expect an answer until you write to tell me you are going to spend a few days with us again…No more news, you may expect some trout from me in April, I shall send as many as I catch to Maggie and you and if my basket is not sufficient to supply your larder the Dr must help.
Excuse such an untidy letter and with my kind regards
Believe me
Yrs very sincerely
Kitty Edwards32
Kitty Edwards was a young, flirtatious, bored wife, and it later emerged that not one but two other men were also in the frame as the possible father of her second child. Nevertheless, for some reason, under the pressure of her husband’s interrogation, she named Lloyd George as her lover, and for a short time this was believed by Dr Edwards.
In late October, Lloyd George returned home to Criccieth to find political uproar awaiting him, with all except his wife and his uncle in the know. He denied the charge and, advised by his brother, wrote to Dr Edwards to protest his innocence. The brief correspondence between them suggests that Edwards by then accepted that his wife had lied, but the doctor put the matter in the hands of his solicitor. Sooner or later with all this activity going on Maggie was bound to find out, and find out she did. She was not told about the affair by her husband, but discovered it when she read a letter that was addressed to him. It provoked a violent quarrel between them. Maggie was understandably distressed, but she came to believe in his innocence, and remained stalwart in her support for him through the whole, drawn-out affair.
In March 1897 Dr Edwards finally sued for divorce, and was promptly counter-sued by Kitty on the grounds of his cruelty. Lloyd George was not cited as co-respondent (that dubious honour went to Edward Wilson, the stationmaster at nearby Cemaes), but the libel of Kitty’s confession had circulated so widely that the judge asked Lloyd George if he wanted to join the suit so that he could clear his name publicly on oath. This presented Lloyd George with a dilemma. Maggie was insistent that to appear in court in connection with such a sordid business would inevitably lead to more gossip. Mud sticks, she felt, even if he was found not guilty. On the other hand, refusing to clear his name could also lead to more rumour. Eventually, strongly advised by his brother (who consistently gave him excellent, impartial legal advice), Lloyd George decided to keep his name out of the proceedings.
If Maggie ever doubted her husband in this matter, she did not show it. On the contrary, whatever her private feelings, she maintained a philosophical, almost nonchalant attitude, writing to William George:
PRIVATE:* Is it not a great nuisance to have this old story risen up again? I trust it will be over on Monday for Die’s sake—he is worrying about it. This world is a very cruel one, don’t you think so? The innocent must suffer in order to shield the culprits. There are several persons in this matter who are left out of it altogether, who no doubt are guilty of misbehaving with this woman.33
In November 1897, by which time the scandal had been circulating for a full fifteen months, a court date was set. Shortly before then, a deal was reached between Dr and Mrs Edwards: she dropped her claims of cruelty in return for his withdrawing the charge against Edward Wilson. The reason for this deal became apparent later, and was connected with the discovery of indiscreet letters written by Mrs Edwards to a third man, known only as ‘Gillet’, which exonerated the stationmaster. But this did not emerge at the time and the judge proceeded to grant Dr Edwards a decree nisi on the grounds of his wife’s adultery ‘with persons unknown’.
Clearly this did not satisfactorily address the rumours concerning Lloyd George, so the judge took it upon himself to read out Kitty’s confession in court, adding: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that I think no case whatever has been made out against Mr Lloyd George—I think it was in the interests of Mr Lloyd George himself that the written confession has been brought forward and dealt with fully.’34
The relief to Lloyd George and his family must have been considerable. The only cloud on the horizon was that since the proceedings would be reported in the press, Uncle Lloyd had to be told about the affair. He wept and was thoroughly upset, but still, Lloyd George’s name had been cleared.
And so the matter would have rested had not the divorce been interrupted in a most unfortunate manner. During the then compulsory six-month period between the granting of decree nisi and decree absolute, the man who employed Kitty as his secretary—Dr Beddoes of Aberystwyth—contested the decree nisi on the grounds that Dr Edwards had forced his wife to sign the confession. This dug up the scandal all over again, and led to a second court hearing in June 1899. The strain on Lloyd George and his family was compounded as further details of the affair came to light. Kitty’s confession was reprinted in the press, and when the court hearing came around, the whole business descended to near farce. Kitty’s letters inviting Gillet to visit her when her husband was away were exposed. She had also written to Dr Edwards begging him to let her return to the marital home, acknowledging, ‘I know I have sinned, but I have repented bitterly…I cannot expect you to receive me home yet, and of course the child shall never come,’35 which hardly backed up her claim that the child was her husband’s all along. Lloyd George referred to the resurrection of the case as ‘another dose of purgatory’, and it weighed heavily on both him and Maggie. His political opponents made the most of his discomfort, and the matter only ended when the judge unhesitatingly granted Dr Edwards his decree absolute.
There is no definitive answer to the question of whether Lloyd George did or did not have a relationship with Kitty Edwards, but given the evidence of her letter it seems most likely that there was a flirtation, if not a sexual relationship, between them. The two court cases and William George’s investigative work focused on identifying the father of the child, but fathering the baby was only the first of two charges Kitty made against Lloyd George in her confession. The second was that she had ‘on a previous occasion’ committed adultery with him, a charge which was more difficult to disprove. It may well be that a relationship existed between them in 1894, a relationship that may even have caused the rift between Kitty and Dr Edwards, but that by 1896 she had taken another lover who was actually the father of her child. We shall probably never know for certain.
Despite her unflinching loyalty, Maggie was troubled by this episode. Even so, the mounting evidence of Lloyd George’s tendency to stray did not persuade her to move the family base to London. It took a far more serious affair of his to persuade her not to leave him alone in the city. The two affairs were not unconnected, since it was when the Edwards case was at its height, and Lloyd George was under great pressure, that he felt the need for some comforting female companionship in London. With his career on a knife-edge and his wife still based in Criccieth, he needed support and he readily found it from another quarter.
*R.O. Davies, a Criccieth acquaintance and chapel-goer, was a successful London draper. He and his family lived in Grasgarth, a comfortable house in Acton with a large garden and a tennis court.
*Following Dick and Mair, Olwen was born in 1892 and Gwilym in 1894.