CATHERINE WALTERS INTO OLD AGE : WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT and THE PRINCE OF WALES FIGURE INTO HER SURVIVAL

Perhaps the most surprising thing about courtesan Catherine Walter's story is that ex-lover, poet, and confidant Wilfrid Scawen Blunt figured in it to the end.

After her brief time in Paris, Catherine returned to England.  In the 1880's she featured in the goings on in Mayfair - London, as she had twenty hears earlier when her beauty and horsemanship made her career. She set herself up in a house in 1882 and began writing with Blunt once more, despite the ending of their romance which had been horrible for him. It turns out that she and Wilfrid wrote letters back and forth to each other for forty years.  Perhaps her instincts had been right that he would make for a loyal friend all along.  

At her house in Mayfair, Catherine became the hostess of a salon, which was the more fashionable way to be 'at home' to receive friends on a certain day and hour, as had been the custom. It was because of this salon that she began to be included again in society at least a little bit, as the class structure and notions of womenhood began to change slowly. She held teas on Sunday afternoons, when she knew that men would be able to come and women would generally not be able to. Both Blunt and the Prince of Wales came to visit as did the Prime Minister Gladstone. The women who showed up tended to be artists, writers, and actresses. 

It's not known who all were her 'protectors' were in her years as a courtesan in England, but what is known through Blunt is that in his last visit to her, when he and she were both debilitated with age, she showed him a drawer full of letters which proved that she also had been writing back and forth with the Prince of Wales, who seemed interested also in her welfare. Implied is that possibly the Prince had been one of the men who had once had a relationship with her and provided for her.

Catherine Walters had the gift of making old lovers into friends. (This reminds me of the woman who may be considered the most famous courtesan of the 21st century, Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman who also remained friends with the various men who kept her.)

She kept a friendship with Marquis of Hartington - Spencer Compton Cavendish, now in politics, who had been a man she once wanted to marry, and whose family had provided a liveable, life-long annuity.

However, as she aged she had increasing trouble with her lungs and at one point it was HRH, the Prince of Wales who sent a doctor to attend to her.  In 1889 the cure was the South of France, and months away from cold, rainy London.  Both Hartington and the Prince of Wales came to visit her as she lived in the South of France.  In her mid sixties her health had declined to the point where was in pain and took daily medications. She grew thin and was half deaf and half blind by 1918. She still wrote, using pencil instead of pen, her handwriting difficult to read. In 1920 she had a fatal stroke and died.

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