The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (33 page)

For the Prince and Princess of Wales Jubilee year ended, as always, at Sandringham. Christmas found them standing side by side in front of the glittering tree in the ballroom, handing out gifts to the members of their household. 'It was all so beautifully done,' remembers one of their secretaries, 'and the pleasure of giving seemed never to leave [them], as it often does with rich people.'
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On New Year's Eve the royal couple observed the usual ritual of' first footing'. The house was completely emptied of guests and servants so as to allow the Prince and Princess, standing in the cold outside, to be the first to open the
door after the stroke of midnight. This was guaranteed to bring them good luck in the coming year.

It was almost possible to believe, as the genial, portly, cigar-puffing Prince and his smiling, soignée, apparently ageless Princess entered their favourite home together, that they were the best-suited, most affectionate couple in the world. But the new year, which marked the end of the Prince's affair with Daisy Warwick, did not usher in a new period of marital harmony between the Prince and Princess of Wales. On the contrary, it brought the Prince not only a new mistress, but the greatest love of his life: Alice Keppel.

There is some doubt as to when exactly in 1898 the Prince of Wales first met the Hon. Mrs George Keppel. According to the not always reliable memory of the Baroness de Stoeckl, it was she who presented Alice Keppel to the Prince during his customary spring holiday on the French Riviera. Knowing something of the Prince's taste in women and thinking that he might be 'amused' by the young Mrs Keppel, the Baroness arranged a small luncheon party. 'He saw her then for the first time,' she maintains stoutly, 'and from that day started their friendship. '
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Another version is supplied by the writer, Anita Leslie. Mrs Keppel, she tells us, was a close friend of her grandfather, Sir John Leslie, and it was by him that Anita Leslie was told of the Prince's first meeting with 'the delectable Alice'. While inspecting the Norfolk Yeomanry, of which the Prince was colonel-in-chief and in which Mrs Keppel's husband served as an officer, His Royal Highness first noticed Alice. He immediately asked Lord Leicester to present her. A few days later, at the Sandown races, the Prince again spotted Mrs Keppel, this time on the arm of John Leslie. On being summoned by the Prince, Leslie – about to present Mrs Keppel to His Royal Highness – was assured that they had already met.

'Then, in the most gracious way possible,' reports Anita Leslie, 'H.R.H. gave Leslie to understand that his presence was no longer required. Whimsically, my grandfather used to describe that certain look – blending shrewd appraisement and admiration – that crossed the Prince's face as his eyes travelled over Mrs George Keppel's lovely face and fashionably curved figure.'
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Sir Philip Magnus, in his life of King Edward VII, claims that the Keppels first entertained the Prince to dinner (by which time, presumably, they had been formally presented) on 27 February 1898.

But wherever or whenever the two of them met, there can be no doubt at all about the momentous effect of that meeting. Between the Prince and Mrs Keppel an 'understanding', as Magnus so tactfully describes it, 'arose almost overnight'.
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That understanding, or to put it more bluntly, that strong physical attraction, very quickly developed into a full-blown love affair. Within a matter of weeks, Alice Keppel had been established as the Prince of Wales's new official mistress.

That the fifty-six-year-old Prince had been so strongly attracted to the twenty-nine-year-old Mrs George Keppel is not surprising. Alice Keppel was exceptional, both in looks and in personality. She was one of those women who, if not exactly beautiful, give an illusion of beauty. Her luxuriant chestnut hair was piled high onto her head, her skin was flawless and glowed with good health. She had large, lustrous, blue-green eyes. When, with studied slowness (for she was no fool), she lifted the veil of one of her ostrich-feather laden hats, the watching gentleman seemed, according to one witness, 'to catch his breath a little as he beheld her beautiful face'.
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She was very proud of possessing those prized Victorian attributes – small hands and feet.

With her short but generously proportioned figure, Alice Keppel exuded an unmistakable sensuousness; there was a warm, almost Mediterranean quality about her appearance. This same exotic aura characterised her manner. She was vivacious, extrovert, expansive. Her voice was low and seductive. In old age one admirer remembered her as having a 'deep throaty voice like Garbo'.
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Even in those less emancipated days she smoked, using a long cigarette holder; it emphasised her air of sophistication. She dressed with great panache and, after becoming the Prince of Wales's mistress, with greater panache still.

To attribute a certain Mediterranean quality to Alice Keppel's appearance and personality is not being too fanciful, for she had had a Greek grandmother. Her maternal grandfather, when British Governor of the Ionian Islands, had married a beautiful Greek girl; their daughter, in turn, had married Admiral Sir William Edmonstone, a descendant of a long line of Scottish baronets. Edmonstone had taken his half-Greek bride back to Scotland, to live in Duntreath Castle in Stirlingshire, not far from Glasgow. 'From Ithica to Kelvinside! What an odyssey!' exclaimed one of Lady Edmonstone's granddaughters in later life. 'How she must have loathed and resented the indefatigable rain, the sulphrous fogs, the grim bewhiskered elders!'
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But Lady Edmonstone apparently adapted to the change and bore
her husband nine children, of whom the youngest, born in 1869, was Alice. Being the youngest did not, as far as Alice Frederica Edmon-stone was concerned, mean being the least significant. According to one observer, her 'superabundant vitality'
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ensured that she was never overshadowed by some of her more forceful sisters. In fact, in common with the Prince of Wales's other loves, Lillie Langtry and Daisy Warwick, Alice was something of a tomboy in girlhood, with this same tomboyishness developing into the high spirits and air of independence which the Prince always found so alluring.

Duntreath Castle, where Alice grew up, had been the home of the Edmonstone family since the fifteenth century. Set amid rugged moorland and against two austere, bald hills, it was an uncompromising, four-square structure, built around a courtyard with a pepper-pot tower at each corner. But this somewhat forbidding exterior belied the elegance and comfort within. Duntreath had been almost completely renovated fifteen years before Alice's birth and was, for its time, an unexpectedly civilised home.

'I have completely misled you,' writes one member of the family, 'if you imagine that Duntreath was a dour Scottish fastness, reeking of Balmorality; it was nothing of the kind. It was romantic, of a standard of luxury without equal in those days; gay with a touch of Frenchness in its
salons en enfilade
, and premeditated perspectives. One fled from terror to enchantment. The atmosphere of the place was complex: half-medieval, half-exotic. The Greek goddess wedded to the Scottish ogre.'
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The masculinity of the castle, as characterised by the gun room, the billiard room, the armoury, the dungeons and even the haunted Oak Room, was compensated for by the overpowering scent of the tuberoses, grown in the greenhouse, with which Alice's mother kept the rooms filled throughout the year, and by the fact that of the Edmonstones' eight surviving children, seven were girls. Even Archie, the only boy, was not quite as manly as might have been wished. 'He detested sport, winced through the glorious 12th, took little or no interest in fishing,' writes one of his nieces. Archie was much happier closeted in his turret-room studio, painting 'shepherds and shepherdesses, fetês galantes, saucy harlequins, wistful pierrots'.
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Alice and Archie, the two youngest, were like twins. 'Their love for each other had the beauty of a theme in a Greek legend,' runs one honeyed account of their close relationship. 'Both had a great sense of family affection, but neither emotion transcended the white flame of
their love for each other.'
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Brother and sister complimented one another perfectly. Where Archie was gentle, sensitive, submissive, Alice was vital, outspoken, assertive. 'Oh, look,' wailed Archie, as the two of them once watched a funeral cortège passing the windows of their Edinburgh home, 'look at that great black coach, those great black horses, all those black people!'

'Never mind, Archie,' came Alice's brisk reply, 'the coachman's alive!'
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Although brother and sister shared a love of gardening, Archie did not have Alice's passion for outdoor sports. A tireless walker, she was seldom happier than when striding across the moors at Duntreath, or when joining the gillies in a wild game of cricket. 'Rin, Allus, rin!' – Run, Alice, run – they would yell encouragingly as, with lustrous hair flying, she raced down the pitch. Family picnics, on the banks of Loch Lomond, were another delight; she even climbed Ben Lomond.

Her sense of humour was sharp; in later life she was to become celebrated for her witty turns of phrase. She would often tell the anecdote about one of her older, vaguer sisters who, at the time of the defeat of the British by the Boers at the battle of Majuba, once asked her, 'Alice, dear, who
is
Majuba Hill?'
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As she matured, Alice Edmonstone – in spite of her Latin looks – appeared to be developing into a typically aristocratic young Scotswoman: honest, energetic, practical. She had, as they would say, her head screwed on correctly. But there was more to her than this. Alice Edmonstone had a genuinely kind heart; her nature was without pettiness, prejudice or malice. She never spoke ill of anyone; she almost never lost her temper. Even as a girl, her tact was remarkable. It was always she who kept the peace between her frequently bickering sisters; who formed the bridge between those who were dogmatic and those who were diffident. Her impartiality, her willingness to make allowances, were to become proverbial.

'She not only had a gift of happiness but she excelled in making others happy,' wrote one witness. 'She resembled a Christmas-tree laden with presents for everyone. '
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Fulfilling, in time, one of the most notoriously difficult roles in society – that of a King's mistress – Alice was to be unique in that it is almost impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say about her.

Allied to her seductively good looks and lively manner, Alice Edmonstone's strength of character and generous nature ensured that, by the time she reached womanhood, she was a very desirable
parti
indeed. The one thing she lacked was money. Sir William Edmonstone's
Scottish estates might have been extensive but they were not particularly profitable. What Alice needed was a rich husband. But if, in the years ahead, the one criticism that would be levelled against her was that she was somewhat 'grasping', there was no indication of this in her choice of a husband. Alice Edmonstone married for love.

The Hon. George Keppel, third son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle, might have been well-born, handsome, charming and even-tempered but he was not rich. He, no less than Alice, should have been on the lookout for a moneyed partner. But love, in their case, conquered all, and the young couple were married in 1891, when he was twenty-six and she twenty-two.

'At their wedding,' writes one of their daughters, 'the combined beauty of my father and mother had been sensational. In an age of giants he stood six foot four inches high, and in his Gordon Highlander bonnet, at nearly eight feet. Like her, he had eyes of bright blue. But whereas she had chestnut hair, his was black. And his magnificent breadth was a foil to her slender figure.'
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Marrying for love was one thing; trying to live in London society in the 1890s without money was quite another. Before many years had passed, the increasingly worldly Alice Keppel had come to appreciate that there was only one sure way by which a married but impoverished society woman could hope to get the bills paid. This was by adopting that easy-going attitude towards adultery characteristic of the Marlborough House set: she must take a wealthy lover. It has been said that the father of her first daughter, Violet, born in 1894, was the rich Ernest William Beckett, the future Lord Grimthorpe.

True or not, the child grew up to be the celebrated Violet Trefusis who, in 1918 was to win notoriety by embarking on a turbulent love affair with Vita Sackville-West. It was Vita Sackville-West who, many years later, told the writer Philippe Jullian that Beckett was probably Violet's father.

Violet, on the other hand, would always lay claim to much more illustrious ancestry than this. When she was not boasting about the Edmonstones (were they not direct descendants of Robert the Bruce?) or the Keppels (the handsome and nobly-born young Arnold Joost Keppel, having accompanied William of Orange to England had been created Earl of Albemarle by his adoring sovereign) or even, in more imaginative flights of fancy, the Stuarts or the Bourbons or the Medicis; when she was not boasting about these, Violet Trefusis would hint that her father had been the future King Edward VII.

This cannot be true. Not unless one is prepared to believe that the
Prince of Wales had really met Alice Keppel in 1893 – five years before the generally accepted date of the meeting – and that, on being introduced to her in 1898, he pretended, for some reason or other, that they had not yet met.

No, the claim that the Prince of Wales first met Alice Keppel in the early months of 1898 is probably correct. And whether or not they met on the parade ground or the racecourse, it would have been in the Keppels' Wilton Crescent home that the young couple first entertained the Prince to dinner. Even allowing for His Royal Highness's taste in women, and for Alice's eye for the main chance, would either of them have guessed, as they sat above the sparkling silverware and the glancing candlelight of the dinner table, that she was shortly to become his mistress and, within three years, the Pompadour of the Edwardian court?