Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  The King’s cigars and cigarettes were not good for his health. Temper or laughter made him cough uncontrollably. In 1905 he had a swelling in his throat which his doctors feared ‘might develop any time into cancer’. He sprayed it twice a day. One year on a day when Mrs Keppel visited Bayonne without him, Violet persuaded him to take her to a carnival at San Sebastiàn. There were crowds. He had a bronchial attack, went scarlet in the face, appeared to be suffocating, and was rushed back to Biarritz by his chauffeur:

  Mama was waiting for us on the villa steps and I was sent straight to my room. As for the poor King, it was decidedly the last time that he gave in to one of my childish whims.

  The King and Mrs Keppel were at Biarritz in spring 1908 when Campbell-Bannerman resigned as Prime Minister because of illness and Asquith was elected. Bertie wrote to his Private Secretary, ‘C-B was a great gentleman and poor Asquith is so deplorably common not to say vulgar!’ Common or not, the Constitution required the King to swear in the new leader, preside over the Privy Council meeting, the delivering of Seals of Office, the ‘kissing of hands’.

  Bertie did not want to break his holiday with Mrs Keppel. He told his equerry to ‘sound Asquith’ and see if he would travel to Biarritz for the ritual kissing. There was criticism in the press and consternation in parliament. Mrs Keppel used her influence to defuse alarm. Bertie’s equerry, Sir Arthur Davidson, told Knollys:

  Mrs George Keppel told me last night that when motoring with the King in the afternoon she said something casually with reference to C-B and asked if his death would make any alterations to his plans. He said he could not say, but he meant to do whatever the future Prime Minister suggested.

  Asquith caught the boat train from Victoria Station on 6 May 1908 and reached Biarritz next evening. Mrs Keppel briefed him on how to behave. He saw the King on the morning of the 8th then wrote to his wife Margot:

  I put on a frock coat and escorted by Fritz and old Stanley Clarke went to the King who was similarly attired. I presented him with a written resignation of the office of Chancellor of the Exchequeur; and he then said ‘I appoint you Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury’ whereupon I knelt down and kissed his hand. Voilá tout! He then asked me to come into the next room and breakfast with him. We were quite alone for an hour and I went over all the appointments with him. He made no objection to any of them and discussed the various men very freely and with a good deal of shrewdness.

  Acknowledging the status of Mrs Keppel, the following day, on 9 May, Asquith wrote to her, too, on Hôtel du Palais stationery:

  Before leaving Biarritz I must send you a line of most sincere thanks for your kind words and wise counsels, which I shall treasure and (I hope) profit by.

  It was a real pleasure to see you at such a time, and to be made to feel that, whatever betides, I can count on your friendship.

  The King and the Keppels returned from their Biarritz holidays via Paris. Little Mrs George stayed a week or so in Cassel’s apartment at 2 rue du Cirque to visit Worth for her dresses and the rue St Honoré for gloves and shoes. Violet saw her mother received ‘like a goddess’:

  Monsieur Jean (Worth) supervising her fitting in person, the vendeuses quite shamelessly forsaking their other clients to vie with each other in flattering epithets … My mother was everything that could appeal to them, lovely, vivacious, fêted, fashionable, with a kind word for each of the anonymous old crones who had been for years in the establishment … Even I came in for a little vicarious petting. De Madame Keppel, je suis la fille, je suis la fille, I chanted.

  It was an unusual chant for a child and from it problems flowed, entrenching her view of herself as less lovely, less deserving of attention or praise.

  Violet preferred summers at Duntreath to Easters in Biarritz. Her mother’s ancestral castle seemed more apt, more romantic than the Villa Eugénie or Portman Square. ‘Every year I find it unchanged,’ Violet wrote with majestic imagery when she was sixteen,

  the same stone for stone as it was 500 years ago … the peacocks stalking round the house in the small hours of the morning uttering penetrating but unmusical cries … the gorgeous flaming sunsets that set the hills a-kindling for all the world like cabochon rubies … the haunted room and the Dumb Laird behind the dining room screen … the purposeless, incessant tick-tick of pigeon feet upon the roof and the jackdaws flying from turret to turret.

  On 1 September every year she and Sonia travelled there by train: Carlisle, Glasgow, Blanefield. In early childhood a wagon and roan horses took them, by night, the last stretch of the journey. When Bertie visited to shoot grouse in the heather all was displaced. For a week’s stay he would take with him forty suits and uniforms, twenty pairs of boots and shoes, a valet, a sergeant footman, a brusher, two equerries with their valets, two telephonists, two chauffeurs, two loaders for his guns and an Arab boy to make coffee the way he liked it. There was no room for Violet and Sonia. They were sent to stay with a neighbour. ‘We used to come over for the day however,’ Violet wrote. ‘The King was very kind to us children.’ The more grouse he shot, she said, the better his temper.

  Quidenham, George Keppel’s family home, defined Violet’s childhood too. ‘Places have played at least as important a part in my life as people,’ she wrote in her memoirs. In time her relationships with places proved more rewarding than with people. Photographs show the King and his friends at Quidenham shoots, the King seated at the centre, George standing at the party’s edge.

  Quidenham was an eighteenth-century, red-brick mansion, in spring its gardens carpeted with daffodils, primroses and bluebells. Lord Albemarle – Uncle Arnold, George’s eldest brother – adorned the house and grounds with sculptures of his own making: bronze drummer boys, model cannon and in the hall a lifesize marble nude which Violet doubted was of her aunt.

  In Violet’s room portraits by Sir Peter Lely testified to George’s aristocratic past: William Anne, the second earl, ‘fat and sallow’ and named after his godmother, Queen Anne; Arnold Joost – William III’s lover with curled periwig, robes, garters and red-heeled shoes; Louise de Kerouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth and lover of Charles II – ‘her tapering Lely white fingers play luxuriously with a string of grossly inflated pearls.’

  The Keppel Christmas was spent at Crichel. Augusta Alington decreed that ladies be given jewels or Fabergé ornaments as presents and the men be given gold. Violet and Sonia came ‘in the category of extra Christmas luggage’ and there was little for them to do. They lunched with the adults on Christmas day but for the most part stayed upstairs. Sonia described the drawing room as an ‘amphitheatre of sardonic adult laughter’. Twice a day they were exhibited to the guests – after lunch when they shook hands with them all and after tea, wearing dresses with frills and sashes.

  Mrs Keppel’s world was glimpsed and admired by her daughters, her approbation courted, her disapproval feared. What she wanted she got and the world was as she ordained. ‘When roused to anger, which was seldom, she cut with a remark.’ ‘You have no charm’ was one of her withering judgements. ‘Persuasion,’ Violet wrote, ‘was Mama’s strong suit. She could have persuaded Florence Nightingale to become a ballet dancer.’ When Sonia as a child said she did not like ham her mother countered ‘but it doesn’t taste like ham’.

  Life on the nursery floors of Portman Square was regulated by servants. They provided discipline and instruction, such cradling as there was, and order to the days. There were lessons all morning, walks in the park, visiting and sightseeing, bed at seven and when older at nine. Violet was clever, liked reading, learned languages easily, had a flair for drawing. She described herself as an unsociable child, ‘suspicious, introspective and passionately possessive about the people and things I cared for’. She wept for no reason and was more stormy and temperamental than anyone could understand.

  She said she always loathed London. ‘I hated everything about it – streets, climate, smell.’ In her memoirs she derided Portman Square for its lack of mystery or pr
ivacy and its occupants for their lack of intellectual stretch. ‘The most outstanding feature of Portman Square,’ she wrote, ‘was a boiler, unaccountably situated in the schoolroom cupboard.’ It gurgled and was a topic for visitors – ‘it could be counted on to create a diversion’.

  The household revolved around Mrs Keppel. In her boudoir on the floor below no boilers gurgled. All was scents, velvets, pearls. She breakfasted in bed. (In adult life Violet did too.) Miss Draper wound her watches, ran her bath, scented it with rose geranium salts, put out her underwear in a lace cover, helped her on with her stockings, laced her stays, combed and waved her hair. Mrs Wright then brought a black book inscribed with menus for lunch and dinner. ‘This book Mama would consider carefully, scratching out, writing in. And while she did so Mrs Wright would stand motionless…’

  Shopping was a crucial pursuit, a female equivalent to the hunting fields. Miss Draper pinned Alice’s veil, buttoned her gloves, put powder, cigarettes, money into her bag. Violet’s preferred visits were to Bumpus the bookseller or to Joseph Duveen. Sonia favoured the trip across Hyde Park to Albert Gate to Mr Montagu, manager of Westminster Bank. She was given a sovereign and stayed in an anteroom while business was done. Mama’s attractiveness to bank managers was legendary and ‘the one at Albert Gate was as infatuated as the rest’. He met Mrs Keppel at the door and ushered her to private rooms. When she put down her umbrella or parasol and lifted her veil he ‘seemed to catch his breath a little as he beheld her beautiful face.’ He talked, Sonia said, ‘in a reverently low voice as though he was praying in church’.

  In Edwardian Daughter Sonia chose a shopping story to show her mother’s munificence. Together they visited Morrell’s toy shop in Oxford Street. In the window was an ‘exquisite’ doll with eyelashes, frilled jacket, swansdown bonnet. Looking at it was a small girl ‘raggedly dressed and dirty’ who remarked on its beauty. Mrs Keppel left Sonia on the pavement, bought the doll, put it into the child’s ‘thin little arms’ and said, ‘Call her Alice.’ Like a Queen to the derelict she offered a glimpse of grace and favour.

  Trips to the bank manager and shopping were essential prerequisites to visiting. Mrs Keppel took her girls on the teatime rounds and country house awaydays: to Polesden Lacey, Clovelly Court, Appley Hall and Berkeley Square.

  When Violet was ten her mother fired her English governess Miss Ainslie and hired Hélène Claissac. Moiselle, as Violet called her, came from Paris and suggested a life other than seduction, entertaining and bridge. A Republican, she was, Violet said,

  my first (and salutary) contact with French intellectual integrity, so remote from the breathy beatitudes Miss Ainslie would exhale over some cliché attributed to a member of the Royal Family.

  She ‘did not give a fig for riches, rank, renown’. Introduced to Bertie, she shook his hand. He responded with ‘a Gallic kiss’.

  In spring 1905 Portman Square was redecorated. Sonia went to the Alingtons at Crichel, which she hated. Violet, aged ten, went to Paris for three weeks with Moiselle, Aunt Jessie and Hornsby, a manservant.

  She kept a diary which later she annotated and gave to Vita Sackville-West. She stayed in the Hotel Belmont, ate in its restaurant, met in the day with Moiselle’s niece Germaine. She walked in the Champs-Elysées ‘it was too lovely, all the horse-chestnut trees were out and smelt so nice’, in the Bois de Boulogne, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the Jardin des Plantes where Bertie as Prince of Wales had propositioned whores. She visited Nôtre-Dame, the Louvre, Napoleon’s tomb, the Musée de Luxembourg, the Musée de Cluny, the Musée Carnavalet, the Panthéon. She climbed the Arc de Triomphe, bought hats and hairpins in the Bon Marché, ate chocolate eclairs, drank iced lemonade at Rumpelmayer’s and was given a privileged view of the visit of the King of Spain. This Paris visit was a liberation, a relationship to a place where she felt she belonged. She determined to live there one day and to speak French without accent.

  But the city was not entirely hers. Mother crossed the Channel to be with the King. Bertie was there to affirm England’s allegiance to France and dissociate himself from his nephew the Kaiser’s claims to ‘world-wide domination by the Hohenzollerns’. Mrs Keppel stayed again at 2 rue du Cirque. She swept into Violet’s life, bought dresses for her, took her to Fontainebleau and told her how the Empress Eugénie had asked to meet her and shown her the pen with which Napoleon I signed the Act of Abdication, which was not the pen shown to tourists. She wove a fabrication of personal anecdote and unmatchable charm round Violet’s city then swept away to meet the King. ‘The great lost the power to impress,’ Violet wrote of her mother’s anecdotes. Mother was of the inner sanctum where greatness lay. Where she went, history was made.

  * * *

  Missing from Violet’s life was friendship with children her own age. Cleverer than her sister she kept to herself, shunned children’s parties, snubbed her contemporaries. But then one afternoon in the winter of 1905 ‘of a sudden everything changed’.

  She allowed herself ‘to be dragged to a tea-party at Lady Kilmorey’s’ at Aldford Street, Park Lane. Lady Kilmorey’s daughter had a broken leg. Violet went to talk to her. By the bedside was another equally unsociable girl, tall, gawky, ‘most unsuitably dressed in what appeared to be her mother’s old clothes’. They were drawn to each other. (‘It seems to me so significant that I should remember with such distinctness my first sight of her,’ Vita wrote fifteen years later.) Violet remarked on the flowers in the room. Vita ignored her. Violet was piqued but tried again.

  Back home she asked her mother if she might have the girl to tea. Mrs Keppel agreed and wrote to Vita’s mother. The invitation was accepted. Vita visited Portman Square.

  They sat in the dark by the fire in George Keppel’s sitting room (‘he was never in at this hour’), dangled their legs over the leather fender, talked of their ancestors and books – stories of adventure and romance with passionate heroes and unequivocal feelings: The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe. Violet alluded to the pleasures of Paris. Vita confided about her dogs, rabbits and the magnificence of Knole, her country home. In the hall when she left Violet kissed her goodbye. In her bath that night Vita sang to herself, ‘I’ve got a friend.’

  SEVEN

  ‘One never loves more passionately than at the age of ten,’ Violet wrote in her fifth novel, Hunt the Slipper. To her friendship with Vita she brought her childhood hopes and dreams. ‘Everything changed.’ ‘Don’t you see you are perfection to me as I am to you,’ she wrote. She idolized Vita and bombarded her with letters ‘which became more exacting as hers tended to become more and more of the “yesterday-my-pet-rabbit-had-six-babies” type’. All that winter they delved into each other’s inner world. ‘I’, said Vita, ‘who was the worst person in the world at making friends, closed instantaneously in friendship.’

  The word friend resounded for them both. It meant intimacy, filled a need: for Violet, who scorned her sister, viewed her mother as queen, was bewildered by the King and served by hired staff; and for Vita, an only child with a capricious mother and the strange weight of her relationship to Knole, the Sackvilles’ family home at Sevenoaks in Kent.

  Violet was invited to stay. Even as a child she knew Knole was the key to understanding her friend:

  Vita belonged to Knole, to the courtyards, gables, galleries; to the prancing sculptured leopards, to the traditions, rites and splendours. It was a considerable burden for one so young. No wonder she wrote about rabbits.

  Virginia Woolf sensed, when she fell in love with Vita twenty-four years later and wrote Orlando for and about her, that Vita inhabited Knole more crucially than her own body. Violet aged ten felt the resonance of Vita’s past:

  It was necessary to see Vita at Knole to realise how inevitable she was. Knole was committed to produce a Vita. Generations of Sackvilles, heavy-lidded, splenetic, looked possessively down on their offspring … These selfsame features, painted by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Lawrence, emerging from a ruff, a
‘jabot’, a ‘choker’, occurred in each generation …

  Duntreath and Portman Square were lesser homes. Knole was the setting of true splendour. It epitomized the aristocrat’s sense of having created the past and of owning the land. Mrs Keppel was the tinsel queen of a player king compared to Vita and Knole.

  Based on the diurnal year, the house had 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, seven courtyards. It covered six acres and had towers, battlements, twelfth-century buttresses, Tudor gables, long galleries, vast parks. Virginia Woolf called it ‘a conglomeration of buildings half as big as Cambridge’, capable of ‘housing half the poor of Judd Street’. Bought by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1456, it was added to, altered, given by Elizabeth I in 1556 to her cousin, Thomas Sackville, and stayed in the family from then on. ‘It is above all an English house,’ Vita wrote. ‘It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky.’

  She called herself its soul. She and Violet thought old houses if understood lived and formed relationships. ‘I really have antennae about places,’ Violet wrote. ‘I get their meaning, they tell me their secrets.’ Vita said Knole was not ‘haunted’:

  But you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle as I used to do when I was little … But I was never frightened at Knole. I loved it; and took it for granted that Knole loved me.

  She knew every detail: the leadwork on the pipes, the smells of woodwork, leather, tapestry. If scolded she ‘took sanctuary’ in the Chapel of the Archbishops. She saw the evening sunlight reflecting into the Cartoon Gallery on to the Renaissance fireplace and walls of Genoese velvet. One winter in the banqueting hall she encountered a stag that had strayed in from the snow.