Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  The housekeeper, maids and valets understood the careful coding of the cards that hung beside the bell indicator outside the pantry and ‘the recurrence of certain adjustments and coincidences’. At times scandal surfaced – to do with jealousy, betrayal, broken hearts. The Prince of Wales was twice threatened with the law by angry husbands. But these elite gatherings were untroubled by intrusion from zoom-angle lenses through the windows of the Tapestry Room, the tapping of cellular phones or bugging devices in the chandeliers.

  Mrs Keppel turned adultery into an art. Her demeanour and poise countered ‘whispers, taints and horrible noxious suspicions’. Clear as to what she wanted – prosperity and status – she challenged none of the proprieties of her class. She knew, said Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, who lived in Blenheim Palace in unhappy proximity to the Duke, ‘how to choose her friends with shrewd appraisal’.

  Even her enemies – and they were few – she treated kindly which, considering the influence she wielded with the Prince, indicated a generous nature. She invariably knew the choicest scandal, the price of stocks, the latest political move; no one could better amuse the Prince during the tedium of the long dinners etiquette decreed.

  Bertie when King asked Margot Asquith1 if she had ever known a woman with a kinder and sweeter nature than Alice’s: ‘I could truthfully answer that I had not.’

  In her later years, Mrs Keppel displayed a large signed photograph of Queen Alexandra in her drawing room to show how far approval reigned. The Queen, too, had to appear not to mind her husband carrying on with a woman twenty-four years younger than herself. An extant letter from her to Mrs Keppel expresses formal concern at the illness of Alice’s husband:

  Dear Mrs Keppel

  I am so sorry to hear of yr husband’s illness in New York & that you should have this terrible long journey before you in addition to all the great anxiety … I do hope that on your arrival you should find the attack of typhoid less severe than you should fear.

  Yrs sincerely

  Alexandra

  Less formal concerns were not recorded, though one year her daughter-in-law the Duchess of York wrote to her husband George when Mrs Keppel arrived at Cowes, ‘What a pity Mrs G.K. is again to the fore! How annoyed Mama will be.’ And on another occasion the Queen called her lady-in-waiting, Charlotte Knollys, to share the view from a window at Sandringham of Bertie and Alice looking fat and comic in a carriage in the grounds.

  Dressed in gowns by Worth, with collars of diamonds and ropes of pearls, Mrs Keppel was there at the King’s left hand for racing at Ascot, sailing at Cowes, grouse shoots at Sandringham, sea air and casinos at Biarritz and Monte Carlo. She dazzled and seduced. Her daughters were enthralled. ‘As a child’, Violet wrote in an unpublished piece, ‘I saw Mama in a blaze of glory, resplendent in a perpetual tiara.’ Her mother, more than the crowned queen, was the Queen of Hearts, the stuff of fairy tales. Her alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts, kindness and charm so overwhelmed the King that he gave her love and great riches. ‘I adore the unparalleled romance of her life,’ Violet wrote to her own lover:

  My dear our respective mothers take some beating! I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers; anyhow I mean to have a jolly good try!

  Mrs Keppel eclipsed her daughters. ‘We are not’, Violet wrote of herself and her sister Sonia, ‘as lovable, or as good looking, or as successful as our mother. We do not equal, still less surpass her. We make do and mend.’ Sonia concurred: ‘From my earliest childhood,’ she wrote in her autobiography, Edwardian Daughter,

  she was invested for me with a brilliant, goddess-like quality … she could have decreed that her particular pedestal should have been made by Fabergé. I can picture her as she lay back among her lace pillows, her beautiful chestnut hair unbound around her shoulders …

  And I can see the flowers sent as oblations to this goddess, the orchids, the malmaisons, the lilies. Great beribboned baskets of them, delivered in horse-drawn vans by a coachman and attendant in livery. They would have been banked in tall, cut-glass vases about her bed.

  The great beribboned baskets were not from Mrs Keppel’s husband George, who had very little money or imagination. In Sonia’s memory her mother’s bedroom was always scented by flowers ‘and a certain elusive smell, like fresh green sap, that came from herself’. In such a bower, mother seemed a touch unreal: ‘My mother began as an atmosphere,’ Violet wrote,

  luminous, resplendent … She not only had a gift of happiness, but she excelled in making others happy. She resembled a Christmas tree laden with presents for everyone.

  She particularly excelled in making King Edward VII happy. He for his part excelled in making her very rich. They were lovers for the last twelve years of his life and fêted as principal guests by most of the owners of the great Edwardian country houses. Mrs Keppel was not welcomed by the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey near Sherwood Forest where life, said the Duchess of Marlborough, was ‘enshrined in a hyper-aristocratic niche’, nor by the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel, nor the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire where segregated prayers were said in the private chapel every morning before breakfast and every evening after tea. And Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville, in deference to Bertie’s wife excluded her from a party at Knole on 10 July 1898:

  The Prince had wanted to invite Lady Warwick and also his new friend Mrs Keppel, but I told him that I preferred to ask some of the County ladies … especially as the Princess was coming. He acquiesced and was very nice about it.

  Such rebuffs were few. Little Mrs George was openly escorted by the King at Chatsworth and Sandringham, where tea was a full-dress meal – ladies in gowns, lords and gentlemen in short black jackets and black ties – and dinner a banquet – the guests bedecked in tiaras, ribands and Orders of the Empire. Both were friends of Lord and Lady Alington of Crichel, Lord and Lady Howe of Gopsall, Lord and Lady Iveagh of Elvedon, Ronald and Maggie Greville of Polesden Lacey. Mrs Keppel took holidays with Bertie in Paris, Marienbad, Biarritz, sailed with him on the Royal Yacht, dined with him at Buckingham Palace, entertained him for ‘tea’ at her house at 30 Portman Square.

  In her autobiography Margot Asquith described her first weekend party as the prime minister’s wife at Windsor Castle in June 1908. At prayers the King, Queen and their daughter Princess Victoria sat in a box, Alice Keppel sat below:

  We heard a fine sermon upon men who justify their actions, have no self-knowledge and never face life squarely, but I do not think many people listened to it.

  For tea all motored to Virginia Water. The King was in a filthy temper. The Queen, ‘with her amazing grace and in her charming way’, tapped his arm, pointed to his car and invited Mrs Keppel to accompany him. At dinner, ‘at 15 to 9’, Mrs Keppel, the Asquiths and others assembled, standing, in a room awaiting the entrance of the King and Queen. The Queen ‘looked divine in a raven’s wing dress, contrasting with the beautiful blue of the Garter ribbon and her little head a blaze of diamonds’. After dinner, at adjacent tables, Henry Asquith played bridge with the Queen and ‘the King made a four with Alice Keppel, Lady Savile and the Turkish Ambassador.’

  ‘For mama’, Violet wrote, ‘lack of self-confidence was unthinkable.’ Mrs Keppel’s confidence rested in her body, ‘my mother’s ripe curves’, wrote Sonia, ‘were much admired’, her clothes and jewellery, blue eyes ‘large, humorous, kindly and discerning’, her conversation, ‘bold, amusing and frank’, her aptitude for bridge, her social status. She was the Honourable Mrs George Keppel, daughter of Admiral Sir William Edmonstone, wife of the third son of the seventh Earl of Albemarle and mistress of the King.

  She was thought to manage her regal lover with political shrewdness and wifely concern. Sir Charles Hardinge, aide to the King, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Foreign Office and Viceroy of India, wrote of the ‘excellent influence’ she always exercised:

  There were one or two occasions
when the King was in disagreement with the Foreign Office and I was able, through her, to advise the King with a view to the policy of Government being accepted. She was very loyal to the King and patriotic at the same time.

  It would have been difficult to find any other lady who would have filled the part of friend to King Edward with the same loyalty and discretion.

  Friend was an acceptable euphemism. Rules of precedence were disregarded in deference to her charms. Bertie placed her next to the Archbishop of Canterbury at dinner which, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres wrongly surmised, ‘he would never have done if she had been, as generally supposed, his mistress – it would have been an insult to the Church and utterly unlike him’.

  At a dinner at Crichel Down in December 1907, not attended by Bertie, she was placed next to his nephew and enemy Kaiser William II of Germany so ‘she might have the opportunity of talking to him’. The Austrian Ambassador, Count Mensdorff, a second cousin of Bertie’s, wondered ‘what sort of report she sent back to Sandringham’. Alice got on well enough with the Kaiser to send him, care of the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace, a photograph of a new portrait of herself. It showed her with plunging neckline, flicking at her pearls. ‘Dear Mrs Keppel,’ the Kaiser replied, ‘Will you kindly allow me to thank you most warmly for the splendid photograph you sent me. It is very artistic & also very like you, & shows that the picture must be very well painted.’

  Mrs Keppel pleased Bertie in bed, influenced his judgement, partnered him at bridge, pandered to his little ways, fussed over his welfare. The King’s Assistant Private Secretary Sir Frederick Ponsonby – pronounced ‘Punsonby’ – described in Recollections of Three Reigns a déjeuner in a restaurant garden at St-Cloud in Paris. Mrs Keppel insisted that a man at an adjacent table be vetted. She said he had criminal features:

  She was convinced I had given the police the wrong name of the restaurant and that there we were at the mercy of any apache who fancied robbery and any anarchist who loved assassination.

  The man, apparently, was ‘one of the best and most trusted detectives in the force’.

  And, in 1905, she wrote with her customary tact and discretion to the King’s alter ego, his boon companion the rakish Marquis Luis de Soveral, Portuguese Ambassador, nicknamed ‘the Blue Monkey’ for his shadowy growth of beard and mischievous way with the ladies:

  I want you to try to get the King to see a proper doctor about his knee. Perhaps the Queen would make him do so. He writes that it is very painful and stiff and that massage does it no good or rather harm as there is a slight ‘effusion’ on it. This I know ought to be seen at once for it he gets water on the knee this might mean a stiff knee for life.

  Cher Soveral

  From your affectionate old friend

  Alice Keppel

  (Bertie had trouble with this knee after breaking it in July 1898. He fell down the spiral staircase at Waddesdon Manor, home of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Things were made worse when the carrying chair, used to get him to the Windsor train, broke on the passenger bridge at Aylesbury station.)

  In a memoir, Customs and Characters, Peter Quennell wrote of Mrs Keppel that in a tableau vivant of her time she should have played Britannia. Like Lady Thatcher some decades later, she seemed to personify her country, rule the waves and have her way with English men. Lady Cecilia McKenna, Alice’s niece, said she had many of the characteristics of a man. ‘She liked to control situations. And she was in control of her life.’

  Not everyone was impressed. The American writer Henry James thought the King an ‘arch vulgarian’ and the relationship between him and Mrs Keppel no more than ‘carrying on’ in an undignified manner, ugly, vulgar and frivolous.

  And Virginia Woolf in her diary was less than flattering when she met her in March 1932. Mrs Keppel, by then, was past her prime, lived most of the year in a villa in Florence and in London stayed in a furnished suite at the Ritz. ‘Oh dear,’ Virginia Woolf wrote,

  I had lunched with Raymond [Mortimer] to meet Mrs Keppel; a swarthy thick set raddled direct (My dear she calls one) old grasper: whose fists have been in the money bags these 50 years: but with boldness: told us how her friends used to steal, in country houses in the time of Ed. 7th. One woman purloined any jewelled bag left lying. And she has a flat in the Ritz; old furniture; &c. I liked her on the surface. I mean the extensive, jolly, brazen surface of the old courtezan; who has lost all bloom; & acquired a kind of cordiality, humour, directness instead. No sensibilities as far as I could see; nor snobberies; immense superficial knowledge, & going off to Berlin to hear Hitler speak. Shabby under dress: magnificent furs: great pearls: a Rolls Royce waiting – going off to visit my old friend the tailor; & so on

  Mrs Keppel was not jolly or extensive in 1918 when her daughter Violet suffered for love. Love in her view had no rights when it disrupted or confused the mores of her class. Her sort were aristocrats, political rulers with pedigree wives, owners of castles, houses, fields and forests, employers of legions of servants, makers and arbiters of the law, close to the Crown and close to God.

  She intervened in her daughter’s life on a startling scale to ensure that propriety and appearance prevailed. ‘How can one make the best of anything,’ Violet wrote to Vita, ‘that revolves on lies and deception?’ Her mother’s way was through charm, discretion and deference to the social code. Vita as a child was taught the habit of concealment: ‘toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’ her mother would say. Violet trailed the words in the memoirs she dedicated to her own mother and which revealed little of her life.

  In 1944 – by which time Violet was plump, false and middle-aged – Cyril Connolly gave her a copy of his book, The Unquiet Grave. She scored in red the lines,

  We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving … And on how that first great love-affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.

  From the testimony of her letters, her memoirs and her life, it is not entirely clear whether Violet’s first great love affair was with her mother or with Vita, or whether, like the serpent and its segments, the diamonds and the lovers’ knot, they coiled their way into one.

  TWO

  Violet did not know who her father was, though she was sure he was not her mother’s husband George. In adult life she claimed to be the daughter of Edward VII. She shared his temper, impatience and louche appetites and looked like him and his descendants, particularly his great-granddaughter Princess Margaret and Count Raben of Denmark who was rumoured to be his illegitimate son.

  She did not confront her mother on the subject – toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire – but she viewed her blood as royal. It became an obsession and a joke. The assumption had a child’s logic. Her mother’s life revolved around the King. All her sexual charms were for him. Mama lived in a blaze of glory and perpetual tiara because of him. He was the man Violet saw coming from her mother’s bedroom, not George Keppel, a shadowy figure whom she in no way resembled and with whom she had no rapport.

  ‘Who was my father?’ she wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1919:

  A faun undoubtedly! A faun who contracted a mésalliance with a witch, or rather the other way round!… ever since I was a child I have had the vague obscure terror of being ‘taken away’ claimed by someone or by something … that is partly why I hate being alone.

  Maternity was not in doubt. Alice Frederica Edmonstone, known to her husband as Freddie, was born in 1869 at Duntreath Castle near Loch Lomond, Scotland. In aristocratic tradition her forebears acquired the castle and its land as a royal gift. It was the wedding present, in the fourteenth century, of King Robert III of Scotland to his daughter Mary, when she married Sir William Edmonstone. It was inherited, father to son, from then on.

  Violet as a child went to Duntreath every summer with her mother. The place, she felt, reflected her mother’s past. ‘Here I can breathe freely and live freely – sympathetic hills surround me on all sides.’ There were streams, roe deer, kestrels, a High
land train with a cinder track. The castle, set between twin hills, Dumfoyne and Dumgoyne and built round a courtyard, had four corner pepperpot towers. The courtyard bell tolled for meals. Inside were smells of cedarwood, tuberoses, gunpowder, mince. There was a medieval staircase, a gunroom, billiard room, armoury, a dungeon with stocks and thumbscrews, an Oak Room supposedly haunted by the Dumb Laird whose ghost was said to crouch over the fire making gurgling noises. ‘The atmosphere of the place was complex, half medieval, half exotic.’ It formed Violet’s sense of what living quarters should be like.

  For Alice, Duntreath was home. Violet described her as

  in many ways typically Scots. Intelligent, downright … she loved a good argument … she was one of the most consulted women in England; she was certainly one of the funniest.

  Alice’s married sisters lived in Edinburgh, Perthshire, Stirlingshire. Their mother, Mary Elizabeth Parsons, was born in Ithaca, a daughter of the governor of the Ionian Islands. When she was sixteen the fourth Sir William Edmonstone, a naval officer who became an Admiral, wooed her, wed her and took her to Duntreath. ‘From Ithaca to Kelvinside!’ Violet wrote, ‘What an odyssey. How she must have loathed and resented the indefatigable rain, the sulphurous fogs, the grim bewhiskered elders.’

  Fastidious and conventional, Lady Edmonstone wore white dresses, acquiesced to her despotic husband, did drawings of imaginary birds with long comet-like tails and year after year in the castle gave birth to daughters. The required male heir died as a baby. ‘At last in 1868 she was rewarded … Archie was born to join a plethora of sisters.’ Alice, ninth and last, followed eleven months later. Her father was sixty, her mother in her forties and most of her sisters as old as aunts.

  One, Charlotte, married a vicar three years before Alice was born. Another, Louisa, when Alice was three, married a major employed at the Tower of London. A third, Mary Clementine, married the Lord Advocate of Scotland, lover of Queen Marie of Romania. Violet and Sonia described their aunts as diffident women, given to malapropisms, ‘tiny tornadoes of tears’ and to knitting stockings and shapeless mufflers. None made a remarkable marriage in terms of wealth, status or power. Alice was considered the liveliest and prettiest.