Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Uninterested in her sisters, she was inseparable from ‘beloved Archie’, called him her twin, deferred to him, ruled him and when married turned to him not her husband for advice. With her influence he too served the Crown. She secured Archie a place in the royal household. He became Groom in Waiting for the last three years of Bertie’s reign. When rich, Alice provided for him and his family. ‘They seemed to complete one another,’ Violet wrote. ‘My mother all dynamism, initiative, and, yes, virility, my uncle all gentleness, acquiescence, sensibility. They adored each other, could not bear to be long parted.’ Archie disliked sport, shooting and fishing and in his studio in the castle painted shepherds and shepherdesses, saucy harlequins and wistful pierrots.

  Childhood at Duntreath was privileged and feudal. The Edmonstones were Scottish aristocrats without much money but confident of status. Labour was cheap, there were cooks, valets, governesses and, at the entrance to the west drive, the Lodge and its keepers, Mr and Mrs Strachan, who supervised servants, dealt with repairs, admitted guests. There was a nursery wing with playrooms and a children’s dining room. The schoolroom had views of croquet lawns, tennis courts and Ben Lomond which Alice climbed. A pen-and-ink drawing of Sir William Edmonstone hung over the fireplace. ‘Characteristically it bore his signature not the artist’s,’ Violet wrote.

  In 1888 he died. Alice, the remaining unmarried daughter, needed a husband. She found the Honourable George Keppel, a lieutenant with the Gordon Highlanders. He had blue eyes, dark hair, an aquiline nose, a waxed moustache. He was six foot four inches tall and in his Gordon Highlander busby nearly eight feet. ‘One could picture him waltzing superbly to the strains of The Merry Widow,’ Harold Acton, who knew him in the 1920s, wrote in More Memoirs of an Aesthete. Harold Nicolson called him ‘Pawpaw’ and thought him like a character in a French farce.

  George Keppel curled his moustache with tiny silver tongs, was methodical, scrupulously tidy, liked gadgets and labour-saving devices, had ‘the hearty laugh that denotes lack of humour’ and an eye for big-bosomed young women whom he called ‘little cuties’. He was practical, punctilious, reliable. But he had very little money. There was no way, on his income, that his wife might come to resemble a Christmas tree laden with presents for everyone. He received scant pay from the Army, a small allowance from his father, the 7th Earl of Albemarle, and that was all. He was the third son with seven sisters. Lord Albemarle was an MP, colonel, aide-de-camp – the palace term for factotum – to Queen Victoria and married to the daughter of the Prime Minister of Canada. But he had to keep up the family estate, Quidenham Park, a rambling eighteenth-century mansion in Norfolk, leave an inheritance for Arnold, his heir, and provide dowries for his daughters.

  Like Alice Edmonstone, George Keppel belonged to aristocracy that had seen its income dwindle. Neither family had business acumen like the Devonshires who owned Chatsworth, or the Cadogans, Portmans and Westminsters who owned much of London. Quidenham was acquired in 1762 by General George, 3rd Earl of Albemarle, with money awarded him by the Crown for leading a campaign to capture Havana. According to Keppel family lore this wealth was gambled away by the ‘Rowdy Dow’, the dowager wife of the next earl. Her creditors were said to have stripped Quidenham of its mahogany doors, engraved silver and family portraits painted by Joshua Reynolds.

  Alice, twenty-two when she married in 1891, had not defined her material ambitions nor realized her assets. A photograph at the time shows the Keppel sisters in dull clothes and no jewels and Alice in furs, muff and hat. Her attire, modest compared to what was to follow, outshone her worthy-minded sisters-in-law – one of whom became a nun.

  An aunt of George’s put up £5000 in trust for his marriage settlement. Archie settled £15,000 ‘or thereabouts or the securities representing the same’. They were comfortable sums of money, but not queenly. There was no capital or property.

  To his credit George was an Honourable. His family had a history of service to the royal household and held a clutch of hereditary titles – a barony, a viscountcy, an earldom – titles bestowed in the seventeenth century for services rendered to the Crown. The Van Keppels came from Holland (‘Guelderland’) and lived in a castle ‘considerable for its privileges and antiquity’. As a sixteen-year-old boy Arnold Joost Van Keppel was loved by William of Orange, who in 1689 became King William III of England. The King rewarded his favourite boy as lavishly as King Edward VII rewarded his ‘Favorita’. He made him Baron Ashford of Ashford in Kent, Viscount Bury of Lancaster, Earl of Albemarle – a Normandy town – and left him 200,000 guilders in his will.

  Harold Acton alluded to this sexual underpinning of the Keppel family status when George, seeing Acton’s mother reading a biography of Oscar Wilde, muttered, ‘A frightful bounder. It makes one puke to look at him.’

  Fortunately Mrs Keppel had enough humour to spare. Did she ever remind him that he was descended from William III’s minion who was created Earl of Albemarle for his beaux yeux?

  Subsequent Keppels served the Crown as aides-de-camp, ladies of the bedchamber, equerries, grooms-in-waiting. George’s grandfather was equerry-in-waiting to Queen Victoria on her wedding day. Arnold, George’s eldest brother, who inherited Quidenham and the family titles, was aide-de-camp to Bertie. Derek, the second brother, was equerry and deputy master of the household to Bertie’s son when he was Duke of York then George V.

  Long before he met Alice, Bertie held the Keppel family in high esteem. His favourite Keppel, prior to her, was ‘dear little Sir Harry’, George’s great-uncle. He was Admiral Sir Henry Keppel, son of the 4th Earl of Albemarle, author in 1899 of A Sailor’s Life Under Four Sovereigns: His Personal Journal Edited by Himself. Five feet tall, with copper-coloured hair, in his early days he was ‘hard up for tin’ and had numerous creditors. Bertie and he went yachting at Cowes and to the races at Epsom and Ascot.

  Bertie was a friend too of little Sir Harry’s nephew, Henry Frederick Stephenson, who was also in the navy. In 1886 he asked him to teach his own son George, Duke of York:

  I feel that in entrusting my son to your care I cannot place him in safer hands, only don’t spoil him please! Let him be treated like any other officer in the Ship and I hope he will become one of your smartest and most efficient Lieutenants. He is sharp and quick and I think likes the Service, but he must be kept up to his work, as all young men of the present day are inclined to be lazy.

  Bertie told Henry Frederick to make sure George neither ate too much meat nor smoked too many cigarettes. He made him his equerry, knighted him, corresponded with him about little Sir Harry – ‘The old Admiral went every day to Epsom with me this week,’ he wrote in May 1886, ‘and I fear lost his money. I hope mylady won’t pitch too much into him on her return home’ – and about yachts, horses, deer drives and the shooting of elks, stags, grouse, rabbits and anything that flew.

  So there was a time-honoured bond between the Keppel family and the Crown, a tradition of service and reward, trust and familiarity. Which meant that when the newly married George and Alice moved to Wilton Crescent in Belgravia they were from the start ‘court cards’. Life’s principal domain was social. George was thought splendid in his upright military way, the perfect gentleman, and Alice had, as all averred, disarming blue eyes, charm, vivacity, humour, directness, confidence, ripe curves …

  But the costs of smart society were huge: the hats, the furs, the jewels, the crystal, the china, the champagne. The Keppels dined in houses in Grosvenor Street, Stratford Place, Portman Square and graced the weekend parties of Lord and Lady Derby at Knowsley Hall, Prescot, Lancashire, or Lord and Lady Alington at Crichel Down, Wimborne. Even the hostess’s staff expected to be tipped. ‘From a really great house like Lord Derby’s the guests would come away at least fifty pounds the poorer,’ Rebecca West wrote in her book 1900. And hospitality must be reciprocated, menus compare, pearls equal and gowns surpass.

  Mrs Keppel was ambitious and her nose for profit shrewd. She wanted more than George could give. ‘Throughout
her life,’ her daughter Sonia wrote of her, ‘mama was irresistibly attractive to bank managers.’ The attraction worked both ways. Violet was born on 6 June 1894, three years into the marriage. By the time of her birth the Keppels had moved from Wilton Street to a larger eighteenth-century house at 30 Portman Square. Violet’s father was said to be William Beckett, senior partner in the family bank, Beckett & Company of Leeds, member of parliament for Whitby, owner of a large villa in Ravello and heir to the Grimthorpe title. Vita Sackville-West told Violet’s first biographer, Philippe Jullian, that William Beckett was probably Violet’s father. And William Beckett’s grandson said Violet ‘undoubtedly had the Beckett nose’.

  Violet was never altogether clear whose nose she had. Beckett’s American wife died in 1891, the year of Alice’s marriage, leaving him with three small children. Perhaps Alice consoled him for his plight. ‘My mother,’ as Violet was to write, ‘not only had a gift of happiness, she excelled in making others happy.’ Daisy, Princess of Pless, in From My Private Diary, expressed shock at the candour with which women guests, at one of Mrs Keppel’s lunch parties, admitted to having had ‘several lovers’.

  Mrs Keppel viewed adultery as sound business practice, a woman’s work. In 1914, on holiday in Spain with the young Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine as guests of Bertie’s erstwhile financial adviser Sir Ernest Cassel, she advised Clementine to further her husband’s political career by finding herself a rich and influential lover. She inferred it would be selfish to desist and offered to recruit one.

  Her excellence in making others happy at times received uncharitable mention. Lady Curzon in September 1901 wrote to her husband the Viceroy of India:

  Mrs Favourite Keppel is bringing forth another questionable offspring! Either Lord Stavordale’s or H. Sturt’s!! Lord Stavordale is going to be married off to Birdie Stewart as Mrs Keppel made a promise to Lady Ilchester to allow him to marry at the end of the summer! Jenny said people were seriously disgusted at the goings on of the King – his pursuit of the Keppel and daily visit there in his green brougham.

  There is no record of Mrs Keppel bringing forth an offspring in 1901. By then her affair with Bertie was at least three years underway. Lady Sackville, Vita’s mother, said they met in 1898 at the house of Georgiana, Lady Howe, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. The Prince of Wales, she said, told her he was struck by Mrs Keppel’s witty talk. He spent the whole evening talking with her on the top landing ‘which rather shocked people, especially when they sat for a short time on two steps’. Bertie went to dinner at Portman Square on 27 February 1898 and ‘an understanding which arose almost overnight was unclouded until the end of his reign.’ This understanding was of a sexual sort. From then on Bertie enjoyed ‘a good many small Mrs George dinners’.

  As for Mrs George’s other lovers, Humphrey Sturt – Lord Alington and MP for Dorsetshire – was a friend of Bertie’s. His maternal grandfather was the 3rd earl of Lucan (a forebear of the vanished Lucan believed to have murdered his children’s nanny, supposing her to be his wife). ‘The Alington household was the hub of the big wheel of Edwardian fashion.’ His London home, 38 Portman Square, across the road from the Keppels, teemed with butlers and footmen. Crichel was his country estate for ‘Saturday to Monday’ gatherings. Elaborate shooting parties took up the day. Lady Alington, ‘a billowing ocean of lace and ribbons’, had her own white farm on the estate – cows, dairy, porcelain and butter all were white. At night a ‘glittering cavalcade’ went down to dinner. After dinner all played bridge. The neighbourhood church was in their grounds, the Alington pews upholstered in crimson velvet, with high doors to separate them from hoi polloi.

  Humphrey Sturt liked to drive in his carriage with Mrs Keppel – to Hampton Court, Richmond Park, Kew, to picture galleries and antique shops. On one outing he drove her round the slum houses he owned in London’s East End. With queenly concern for the disadvantaged she used to recount how she fingered his conscience in Hoxton: ‘it was charming of you to let me see Hoxton now,’ she said. ‘Next time I go there I shan’t recognise it.’

  As for Lord Stavordale, he did, as Mary Curzon said, marry Birdie Stewart in 1902. Stavordale had black hair, large dark eyes and the family motto, Deeds without Words. He became 6th Earl of Ilchester, lived in Holland House, London, and Melbury House, Dorchester, set in vast acres with parkland, deer, lakes and woods.

  As the years passed, the relationship between the Prince of Wales and Mrs Keppel found context and routine. No other contenders for sexual favours were mentioned. Mrs Keppel was twenty-nine in 1898 and Bertie fifty-eight. He was five foot seven inches tall, weighed sixteen stone, had a forty-eight-inch stomach, ate five meals a day, smoked twenty cigarettes and a dozen cigars, was irritable and bronchial. When he started coughing he could not stop:

  The parties which the King loved to attend and the large meals which he consumed, the numerous cigars which he smoked and the constant journeys in which he indulged at home as well as abroad were all symptoms of that restlessness which caused him to wage a perpetual battle against fatigue and irritability. Lacking inner resources, he depended upon external distractions, and his boredom was made manifest by an ominous drumming of his fat fingers on the table, or by an automatic tap, tap, tap, of one of his feet.

  A few minutes with nothing to do proved a trial to King Edward’s temper, which had to find an outlet and which vented itself at times upon his friends and occasionally upon the Queen.

  His temper, with him since childhood, was entirely uncontrolled. ‘At times I was perfectly terrified of him,’ Frederick Ponsonby said, ‘more especially when I was in unusual surroundings … when at luncheon or staying at a country house he got cross over a matter I knew little about, he fairly scared me.’ ‘His angry bellow once heard,’ wrote Loelia Duchess of Westminster, ‘could never be forgotten.’

  But he did not bellow at Mrs Keppel. She flattered, calmed, soothed, pleased him and excited him just enough. Her jokes were wry, she dressed with flair, was as addicted to bridge and cigarettes as was he (she smoked hers through a long holder) and she had her blue eyes, alabaster skin, chestnut hair and much admired ripe curves. She also had a husband who accepted his own displacement from the bedroom so that his wife might serve the Crown. And upstairs on the nursery floor was her small daughter, who adored her and was afraid of her, and who was brought to her boudoir each morning and to her drawing room each evening where she absorbed the seductive force of her mother’s charm.

  THREE

  When Bertie began his ‘small Mrs George dinners’ in 1898, his mother, Queen Victoria, had been on the throne for sixty-one years. She had two to go. Her fat and wayward son, though fifty-eight, was denied a role. She did not let him represent her. It would, she said, be ‘quite irregular and improper’ for him to have copies of Cabinet reports. She vetoed the proposal even that he should be President of the Society of Arts. The power was hers – crown, sceptre, orb, the lot – and she was not going to share them with her son and heir:

  no one can represent the Sovereign but Her, or Her Consort … Her Majesty thinks it would be most undesirable to constitute the Heir to the Crown a general representative of Herself, and particularly to bring Him forward too frequently before the people. This would necessarily place the Prince of Wales in a position of competing as it were for popularity with the Queen. Nothing should be more carefully avoided.

  Victoria’s relationship to her eldest son began badly. She ‘suffered severely’ giving birth to him. ‘I don’t know what I should have done but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me,’ she wrote in her journal. Breast feeding filled her with ‘insurmountable disgust’ and she described babies as ‘rather disgusting’.

  Beloved Albert, the Prince Consort, was, as Victoria frequently let Bertie know, ‘everything’ to her – ‘my father, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband.’ Her intention was to model Bertie on his father.
To mould him into a moral and intellectual paragon. ‘None of you,’ she told her children,

  can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father who has not his equal in this world – so great, so good, so faultless. Try to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you I am sure will ever be. Try therefore to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.

  Prince Albert read and studied avidly, disliked the company of women, never smoked and watered down his occasional glass of wine. He and Victoria ‘spent days and nights of worry and anxiety’ discussing every detail of Bertie’s physical, intellectual and moral training. He was to be ‘imbued with the indispensable necessity of practical morality’, keep company with ‘those who are good and pure’ and not mix with children because of ‘the mischief done by bad boys’. For six hours a day, six days a week and with scant holidays he was to be taught English, geography, calculating, handwriting, drawing, religion, music, German, French, archaeology, science, history, bricklaying, housekeeping, gymnastics, drill and more.

  From the start Bertie was ‘markedly anti-studious’ and given to tantrums of stamping, screaming and throwing things around. His governess, Lady Lyttelton, reported when he was four that he was ‘uncommonly averse to learning’ and required ‘much patience’ for ‘wilful inattention’ and ‘constant interruptions’, such as getting under the table, upsetting his books and ‘sundry other anti-studious practices’.