Marlborough House set
The set included some of the leading bankers, politicians and lawyers of the day, and some members were rewarded with positions at court upon Edward's accession to the throne.
At this time, the court of his mother Queen Victoria was in the early part of a long period for mourning after the 1861 death of her husband Albert, Prince Consort.
Edward assumed many of the social responsibilities of the Crown, presiding over levees at the palace and holding balls and parties at Marlborough House.
[1] Edward had Marlborough House altered to provide larger ground floor rooms for entertaining and increased the staff there to more than 100 to support his functions, establishing in effect a second court.
[1] Key events in the social calendar of the set included horse race meetings, especially Royal Ascot, the Epsom Derby and the St Leger Stakes.
[6][1] A favourite joke of Edward's whilst meeting with the Marlborough House set was to pour brandy over the head of Conservative politician Christopher Sykes.
[7] The Marlborough House set had generally anti-Prussian (later German) and pro-Danish sympathies (the two countries were rivals and fought a war in 1864, and the Princess of Wales was Danish), which contrasted with the pro-German stance of Victoria's court, leading to tension between the two.
Lady Mordaunt confessed to her husband that her first child, born in 1869, was not his and the eye condition it suffered from was the result of venereal disease caught from a lover, naming Edward, Lord Cole.
Randolph got access to love letters that had been sent by Edward to Edith and showed them to the Princess of Wales, hoping to pressure her into persuading her husband to end his support for a divorce.
After consultation with the prince, Gordon-Cumming, who maintained his innocence, was persuaded to sign a document declaring he would never play cards again and the incident was to be kept secret.
[15] Members of the set included horse racing enthusiasts, bankers, actresses and opera singers as well as a large number of American heiresses who had married into the British aristocracy.
[2][16][15] Membership included a number of Jewish bankers of the Rothschild, Sassoon and Cassel families, who were not commonly accepted into high society in this period.
She recalled that she disliked the inclusion of the bankers, not for their background or personalities but for their intelligence and understanding of finance; the other members of the set were generally spendthrifts.
[1] The historian Jane Ridley, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography lists the following as the principal members of the set:[1] A small sub-set of members had significant connections to France and include:[1] Others, in addition to those listed previously, are given in an 1891 diary entry by civil servant Edward Walter Hamilton:[1] In addition Hamilton names Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery as being "of course of the set, but as a matter of fact is not much in it".
