Walters' benefactors are rumoured to have included intellectuals, leaders of political parties, aristocrats and a member of the British Royal Family.

[5] Walters became the mistress of Spencer Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington (later eighth Duke of Devonshire), who set her up in a Mayfair house with an annuity.

[7][8] Walter's trend setting riding attire was mainly ordered from Henry Poole & Co including silk lining, velvet collars, and braided cuffs.

She pulls up her ponies to speak to an acquaintance, and her carriage is instantly surrounded by a multitude; she turns and drives back again towards Apsley House, and then away into the unknown world, nobody knows whither".

[10] That year, at the height of her infamy, she left London, selling the lease of her house and auctioning its contents; travelling to New York with a rich married man, Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk of Ardglass Castle, County Down, with whom she spent some months.

[11][12][13] Walters then went in Paris, where under the patronage of Achille Fould, Finance Minister to Napoléon III, she took her place amongst the leaders of the demimonde, and established a salon.

[20] Walters died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 5 August 1920 at her home at 15 South Street, Mayfair (now graced by a blue plaque,[21]) and was buried in the graveyard of the Franciscan Monastery in Crawley, West Sussex.

He also suggested that Skittles and other celebrity prostitutes were attractive not merely because they offered sex, but because they were more natural, less repressed and less boring than the well-bred girls who came to London for the marriage 'season'.

[24] Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's poetic sequence The Love Sonnets of Proteus and his later work Esther are thought to be based on his early affair and later friendship with Walters.