Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  that my only really solid and unseverable lien with the world is you, my love for you? I believe if there weren’t you I should live more and more in my own world until finally I withdrew myself inwardly altogether. I’m sure it would happen.

  As a child her romantic heart went out to a friend whose English heritage spanned the centuries, whose home was the size of Hampton Court and whose mother trailed the romance of Pepita the Spanish dancer, the austerity of a French convent and the needs of a deprived child.

  Together Violet and Vita attended Helen Wolff’s School for Girls in South Audley Street. They were both clever, though Vita was better at exams. ‘Brilliant performance’ she wrote of her results in April 1908. Their education was formal and academic, free thinking was discouraged, sex was not discussed, views on social superiority went undisturbed. Vita knew which girls were Jewish or ‘bedint’ – the dismissive Sackville term for the middle class. ‘Genealogies and family connexions, tables of precedence and a familiarity with country seats formed almost part of a moral code,’ she wrote.

  She and Violet took piano lessons, learned Italian with Signorina Castelli and dancing with Mrs Wordsworth, lunched sometimes at George Keppel’s office, went to matinées with him and out to tea. ‘Mr Keppel is really a dear and so kind, he gave me a huge box of chocolates,’ Vita wrote in her diary.

  In spring 1906 Violet again stayed in Paris with Moiselle in an apartment in the Quai Debilly belonging to a friend of her mother’s. She visited Vita in Seery’s apartment in the rue Lafitte. Vistas of rooms opened into each other and there were ‘old and magnificent’ servants and footmen. There were paintings by Boucher, Fragonard panels, chandeliers in every room. They staged, in costume, Le Masque de Fer, a play in French by Vita. It rhymed and was in five acts. Their audience comprised their governesses, the concierge and his wife, the chef and the butler. ‘It speaks highly for their good manners that they sat it out,’ Violet wrote.

  Spurred by Vita’s fluent grammatical French, Violet went to classes in the Faubourg St Honoré, was ‘forever poring over a French grammar and a French dictionary’ and planned one day to write novels in French. They talked in French and tutoyered to show what friends they were. ‘Without the stimulus of Vita it is doubtful whether I should have taken so much trouble with my lessons,’ Violet wrote:

  If I’d read all the Elizabethans by the time I was twelve and quoted Marvell, Herrick and Pope … it was because she liked them. If I learned Rostand’s plays by heart and agreed to get myself up in Cyrano’s beard and Flambeau’s moustache, it was only in the hope of making her like me.

  Mrs Keppel visited her daughter: ‘my mother paid me the supreme compliment of coming to stay in “my” flat.’ She feared Violet was becoming too bookish, clever, avant-garde. She taught her to order the dinner menu, rebuked her for choosing mayonnaise with three courses and took her, as ever, to the dressmaker.

  In spring 1908, when she was thirteen, Violet told Vita that she loved her. In reply Vita ‘stumbled out an unfamiliar “darling”. Oh God, to remember that first avowal, that first endearment!’ she wrote twelve years later. That summer both went to Florence to improve their Italian. Violet and Moiselle stayed at a pension in the Via Venezia, Vita and her French governess in the Villa Pestellini. They went to the Uffizi and saw Botticelli’s Primavera, to Fiesole – ‘It was very hot, but the view one gets to the top’ – to the church of the convent of San Sacramento ‘where the nuns sing too beautifully’. The nights, in recollection, ‘were lit by fireflies and serenaded by frogs’.

  They had a farewell tea together when Vita left. Violet cried and gave her the doge’s lava ring she had cajoled from Joseph Duveen when she was six. Vita kept it on a piece of lapis lazuli. ‘I don’t think I was ever more sorry to leave any place,’ she told her mother. ‘Violet Keppel seemed very sorry to say goodbye to me; at least she cried very much.’

  Violet cried again that autumn when she feared Vita might break her plan to stay with her at Duntreath. Vita’s grandfather, Lord Sackville, died in September and she was, ostensibly, in mourning. But she arrived and Violet ‘in a carefully thought out Scottish get-up’ met her at the station. ‘I am afraid I forgot to sorrow much while I was there,’ Vita wrote. Mrs Keppel was at the castle with Colonel Forbes, Mrs Alec Farquharson, Sir Archibald and Lady Edmonstone and their sons. Violet filled Vita’s room with tuberoses, they walked together in the rain, dressed up and acted in Vita’s play The Viper of Milan.

  On Vita’s first night there, when she had gone to bed, Violet went to her room. They talked all night while owls hooted outside. It was the first time in either of their lives that they had shared the night with anyone. ‘I can’t hear owls now without recalling her soft, troubling presence in my room in the dark,’ Vita was later to write.

  Their childish passion for each other was, she said, too fierce even then to be sentimental. For Violet it was from the start obsessive and unswerving. Duntreath became haunted by Vita. ‘How I loved you then! I was always afraid of your guessing how much I loved you … The place is inviolably yours, the lanky, awkward, adorable you that wrote historical novels and had no sense of humour…’

  Violet’s love was not for a king but for a girl with whom she shared a sense of legendary allegiance, the capricious splendour of mothers, the expectation of a palatial home. This girl held sexual power for her while men and their desires were ‘no more than amourettes’. To this girl she took a romantic sensibility, an uncertainty of the worth of kings and princes and a fierce determination that what she wanted she might one day have:

  Darling, how dreadfully happy we were before we grew up, you and I! I am terribly against being grown up. It does nobody any good.

  EIGHT

  King Edward VII died in 1910. He set off for Biarritz on 6 March. The night before leaving Buckingham Palace he did ‘full justice’ to a menu of turtle soup, salmon steak, grilled chicken, saddle of mutton, several snipe stuffed with foie gras, asparagus, a fruit dish, ‘an enormous iced concoction’ and a savoury. He also had words with his Queen about ‘Mrs Keppel and the affront of his going openly with her’.

  Alexandra took a Mediterranean cruise in the new yacht named after her. Bertie stopped over in Paris and went to the Théâtre de la Porte St Martin to see Chantecler, a play by Edmond Rostand. He thought it stupid, childish and like a pantomime; the theatre was damp and cold, he caught a chill and arrived at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz with a chest infection. Mrs Keppel, flustered, wrote to Soveral:

  The King’s cold is so bad that he can’t dine out but he wants us all to dine with him at 8.15 at the Palais. SO BE THERE. I am quite worried entre nous and have sent for the nurse.

  Alexandra when told blamed ‘that horrid Biarritz’. She suggested Bertie join her in April when her yacht docked at Genoa and that together they sail to Corfu to visit her brother, the King of Greece. Bertie said that was ‘quite out of the question’.

  Cassel was not at the Villa Eugénie that spring. His daughter Maud was chronically ill with tuberculosis. In a vain attempt to cure her he took her, his sister and niece, on a cruise up the Nile to Aswan. To ensure her peace he booked three floors of all hotels. He and the King wrote regularly to each other about money and Maudie’s health. Bertie’s annual accounts were due. On 28 March he told Cassel ‘the matter you generally report to me at this time of the year is as satisfactory as the preceding ones.’

  He said his bronchitis was no more than a cold. With Little Mrs George he followed his routine of sightseeing, picnics and promenades. They saw Blériot fly at the local aviation ground, watched pelota in the Basque mountain village of Sare, spent afternoons at the Biarritz golf club and the racecourse at Anglet. On 20 April they took a trip to Pau, stayed in the Hôtel de France there, lunched in the mountains at Cauterets and went on to Lourdes to seek a cure for what was left of his lungs.

  On 25 April, after seven weeks, Biarritz bade the King farewell. Soldiers of the 49th Infantry Regiment who went out each ye
ar with him, local French soldiers and the fire brigade held a military tattoo under his hotel balcony. There was a fireworks’ display, parades. ‘I shall be sorry to leave Biarritz,’ Bertie said. ‘Perhaps it will be for ever.’

  He arrived home on 27 April. He wrote to Cassel saying he looked forward to meeting him on 7 May at Buckingham Palace and to ‘talking over many matters’ with him. He went to Sandringham for the weekend, supervised some gardening, ‘stood about in the cold wind’ and on 2 May returned to London. He played bridge with Mrs Keppel but she sent him off home at 10.30 to go to bed early. Over the next few days he was ill and she visited him each day at the Palace.

  Alexandra arrived home on the evening of 5 May. She had heard of the seriousness of this illness when she got to Calais. Bertie had chest pains, fainting fits, was a terrible colour and choked when he smoked his cigars. Cassel, too, returned to Brook House that day from his cruise. Mrs Keppel called to see him right away. He wrote to Maudie:

  Poor Alice met me on arrival in despair. There is grave ground for anxiety … but there is no reason to despair. I shall go to the Palace tomorrow where my appointment for tomorrow still holds good.

  Next morning his butler, Davidson, had a phone call saying the King was too ill to receive Cassel. Half an hour later Lord Knollys left a message instructing him to go to the Palace at once. Cassel took with him for the King an envelope with £10,000 in banknotes.

  He first saw the Queen. She asked after his daughter Maudie. She and the physician Sir Francis Laking advised him not to let the King speak much. Bertie, dressed and in his sitting room, tried to rise from his chair to shake hands but ‘looked as if he had suffered great pain and spoke indistinctly’. He too asked after Maudie and was glad the cruise had done her good. He said, ‘I am very seedy, but I wanted to see you … He then talked about other matters, and I had to ask his leave to go as I felt it was not good for him to go on speaking.’

  Late in the afternoon the Prince of Wales brought news that Bertie’s horse, Witch of the Air, had won the 4.15 at Kempton Park. ‘Yes, I have heard it,’ said the King. ‘I am very glad.’

  In his last hours Mrs Keppel went to see him. She had sent the Queen the letter Bertie wrote her in 1901, when he had appendicitis. It stated that if he were to die he wanted to ‘say farewell’ to her and that he was ‘convinced that all those who have any affection for me will carry out the wishes which I have expressed in these lines’. The Queen shook hands with her, said, ‘I am sure you have always had a good influence over him’, then turned away and walked to the window.

  Bertie had had a series of heart attacks and was incoherent. He kept falling forward in his chair and did not recognize his Little Mrs George. Cassel’s envelope of money was by his bed.

  In a rare display Mrs Keppel lost control and kept repeating, ‘I never did any harm, there was nothing wrong between us, what is to become of me.’ Princess Victoria tried, but failed, to calm her. Mrs Keppel was carried to Frederick Ponsonby’s room in a ‘wild fit of hysterics’. It was hours before she quietened down. Lord Esher wrote in his journal, ‘Altogether it was a painful and rather theatrical exhibition and ought never to have happened.’

  Bertie died at a quarter to midnight. Alexandra said Biarritz had killed him. She wanted to hide herself away in the country but ‘there was this terrible State funeral and all the dreadful arrangements that had to be made’. Francis Knollys sent the envelope of banknotes back to Cassel: ‘I presume they belong to you and are not the result of any speculation you went into for him.’ Cassel returned the money, saying it represented ‘interest I gave to the King in financial matters I am undertaking’.

  It was a large sum to have in notes – about half a million pounds in today’s money – and an odd offering to bring to the bedside of a dying King. ‘It was the fruit of a quite exceptionally lucrative investment’ said Cassel’s biographer, Anthony Allfrey, who surmised that the money was intended for Mrs Keppel. It was, perhaps, an indication of the casual way her fortune was accrued.

  The atmosphere was grim on 5 May at 16 Portman Square. Strangers gathered outside the house. ‘I was afraid to approach my stern, unsmiling mother,’ Sonia said. George was abstracted and serious, Nannie evasive, Moiselle silent.

  Next morning Violet and Sonia woke to learn the King was dead. Their mother and George had left the house in the night to stay with Arthur and Venetia James in Grafton Street. He was a racing friend of Bertie’s. To Venetia, Mrs Keppel said the Queen had sent for her to go to the dying King’s bedside, had kissed her and given her the promise that the royal family ‘would look after her’. Mrs James spread this story round the Ritz, ‘telling everyone about Mrs Keppel’s visit to B. Palace’. ‘Mrs Keppel has lied about the whole affair … and describes, quite falsely, her reception by the King’ Lord Esher wrote.

  Violet and Sonia, too, were taken to Mrs James’s house by Nannie and Moiselle. The Keppel family never returned to Portman Square. Mrs James was rich and childless and her house severe. The hall was of yellow marble with nude classical figures in niches. Manservants of ‘untouchable dignity’ opened and closed the doors to ‘frigid reception rooms’. Blinds were drawn, lights dimmed, everyone wore black. The girls were shown to darkened rooms, given black clothes – even their underwear was threaded with black ribbon – and told their mother was in bed. They tried to go and see her but Mrs James prevented them. Late in the day she escorted them to her bedside:

  We went up to her bed and she turned and looked at us blankly and without recognition, and rather resentfully, as though we were unwelcome intruders.

  It was all too much for Sonia, who was only nine. She sought out her father, wept ‘on his ever-comforting shirt-front,’ and confided her anxieties of the preceding day, her distress at leaving Portman Square, her dislike of Mrs James’s house, her ‘terror of Mama’s non-recognition.’ ‘Why,’ she asked with resentment, ‘does it matter so much, Kingy dying?’

  ‘Because,’ her father replied, ‘Kingy was such a wonderful man.’

  The newspapers, bordered in black, wrote of nothing but the King’s death. His body lay on a catafalque at Westminster Abbey from 17 to 19 May, until the funeral there on the 20th. Attending the service were the German Emperor and the Kings of Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and Bulgaria. Vita went with her father. ‘Everyone cried when they saw the King’s little dog following the coffin,’ she wrote in her diary.

  Sir Frederick Ponsonby arranged the funeral. ‘With memories of Queen Victoria’s funeral only nine years earlier I found no difficulty in organization,’ he said. The Order of Service was bound in purple velvet, the Archbishop of Canterbury in his benediction spoke of eternal life, the Bishop of Winchester thanked God for delivering Bertie from the miseries of this sinful world, the Archbishop of York asked God to resurrect him.

  The nation mourned. Church services were held in every village, town and city. Eulogies abounded to the King’s greatness, wisdom and glory. Voices of dissent were few and private. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary on the day of the funeral:

  Today the King was buried and I hope the country will return to comparative sanity for at present it is in delirium. The absurdities written in every newspaper about him pass belief. He might have been a Solon and a Francis of Assisi combined if characters drawn of him were true. In no print has there been the slightest allusion to Mrs Keppel or to any of the 101 ladies he has loved, or to his gambling or to any of the little vices which made up his domestic life. It is not for me or perhaps any of us to censure him for these pleasant wickednesses, but his was not even in make-believe the life of a saint or of an at all virtuous or respectable man, and according to strict theology he is most certainly at the present moment in hell. Yet all the bishops and priests, Catholic, Protestant and Non-conformist, join in giving him a glorious place in heaven and there were eight miles of his loyal and adoring subjects marching on foot to see him lying in state at Westminster Hall.

  For myself I think h
e performed his duties well. He had a passion for pageantry and ceremonial and dresssing up, and he was never tired of putting on uniforms and taking them off, and receiving princes and ambassadors and opening museums and hospitals and attending cattle shows and military shows and shows of every kind, while every night of his life he was to be seen at theatres and operas and music halls. Thus he was always before the public and had come to have the popularity of an actor who plays his part in a variety of costumes and always well. Abroad too there is no doubt he had a great reputation. His little Bohemian tastes made him much beloved at Paris … He did not affect to be virtuous and all sorts of publicans and sinners found their place at his table. The journalists loved him. He did not mind being snap-shotted and was stand off to nobody. If not witty he could understand a joke, and if not wise he was sensible … He liked to be well received wherever he went and to be on good terms with the world. He was essentially a cosmopolitan and without racial prejudice and he cared as much for popularity abroad as at home … He wanted an easy life and that everybody should be friends with everybody. He sank his English nationality on the Continent, talked French and German in preference to English, and English with a foreign accent. He knew Europe well and exactly what foreigners thought of England.

  … he never succeeded in making friends with his nephew Wilhelm and I fancy they hated each other to the end … he may rightly share with Solomon the title of the ‘Wise’. They each had several hundred concubines and as we know, ‘The knowledge of women is the beginning of wisdom.’ At least it teaches tolerance of the unwisdom of others.

  Of all this the newspaper writers say no word, being virtuous men and fools.

  The nation was denied full revelation of the King’s little vices and pleasant wickednesses. In his will he directed that letters and private papers should be burned after his death. This was done by Sir Francis Knollys and Lord Esher. After Alexandra’s death hers were burned by Knollys’s wife Charlotte.