The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (38 page)

35. Edward VII, who rarely missed one of Lillie Langtry's first nights, in aspecially constructed royal box.

36. An idealised representation of Queen Alexandra at her husband's deathbed. The public knew nothing of the extraordinary scene which had taken place earlier.

37.The mistresses in old age. From the left, Lillie Langtry at Monte Carlo; Daisy Warwick at Easton Lodge; Alice Keppel at l'Ombrellino.

Her outspokenness even extended to the King. Alice was one of the few people in the world to stand up to him. At the bridge table, where the King was known for his high stakes, daring bids, short temper and dislike of losing, she refused to be cowed. 'God save the King,' she once drawled when her bidding had left him with a particularly difficult hand to play, 'and preserve Mrs Keppel from his rage.'
¹³
And on another occasion, when he barked at her for having played the wrong card, she boldly answered that she 'never could tell a King from a Knave'.
¹⁴

She knew exactly how far she could go with him. Alice always handled the notoriously impatient monarch with great expertise. When the King's niece, the young Princess Alice of Albany, once complained to Alice Keppel about her difficulty in keeping up a dinner-table conversation with the King – a difficulty made worse by his habit of fiddling with the cutlery as one spoke – 'the charming and tactful Mrs Keppel' reassured her. 'Don't worry about that,' replied Alice Keppel, 'we all experience that trouble. He likes to join in general conversation injecting remarks at intervals, but he prefers to listen to others rather than to talk himself. Often he starts a discussion, but as soon as he can get others involved in it he is content to listen and make occasional comments.'
¹⁵

Her tact, her skill in keeping the King amused and diverted was greatly appreciated by his entourage. 'Thank God,' Sir Arthur Nicol-son once exclaimed on joining the monarch on a cruise, 'Alice will be on board.'
¹⁶

Nicolson had good reason to fear his sovereign's peppery temper. When, as British ambassador at St Petersburg, Sir Arthur was summoned aboard the 'Victoria and Albert' to brief the King before a meeting with Tsar Nicholas II, His Majesty seemed more interested in the ambassador's decorations than his briefing.

'What is that bauble?' he finally demanded.

With some pride Nicolson explained that it was the 'badge of Nova
Scotia Baronetcy', the only hereditary order in England, conferred on his ancestors in 1637.

The King was not impressed. 'Never wear that bauble again,'
¹⁷
he growled.

Not only was Alice Keppel a soothing and cheerful companion, but her interests also coincided with those of her royal lover. No more cultured than he, no more knowledgeable about books or paintings or music, she was very well informed on those subjects which interested him. The Duchess of Marlborough, having paid tribute to Mrs Keppel's looks, geniality and approachability, goes on to claim that 'she invariably knew the choicest scandal, the price of stocks, the latest political move; no one could better amuse [the King] during the tedium of the long dinners etiquette decreed.'
¹⁸

On one point, all those who knew Alice Keppel are agreed: she was never malicious. Even those who accused her of being an adventuress had to admit that she was extremely good natured. 'One of the secrets of her success,' says one witness, 'was that she could be amusing without malice; she never repeated a cruel witticism. '
¹⁹
The King once asked Margot Asquith if she had ever known 'a woman of kinder and sweeter nature' than Alice Keppel, and even the normally acidulous Margot had to admit that she had not. 'She is a plucky woman of fashion,' notes Margot, 'human, adventurous and gay who, in spite of doing what she liked all her life, has never made an enemy . . . her desire to please has never diminished her sincerity.'
²⁰

Alice watched over her ageing lover's health with an almost maternal solicitude. Some years before, while visiting Waddesdon, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild's grandiose château-like country place, the Prince of Wales had fallen down a spiral staircase. He was discovered at the foot of the stairs, groaning with pain, by his current mistress, Daisy Warwick.

'I think I have broken my leg,' he gasped, 'please get someone to help me.'

He had, in fact, cracked his knee-cap. But refusing to have a doctor summoned from London, the Prince had returned to town by special train. 'The Prince,' says Daisy, 'had great fortitude and no man ever made less of physical pain.'
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Since then, the knee had given him constant trouble. This, and the King's characteristic refusal to do anything about it, worried his new mistress, Alice Keppel, considerably.

'I want you to try and get the King to see a proper doctor about his knee,' she once wrote to her lover's great friend, the Marquis de
Soveral. 'Perhaps the Queen could 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 . . . do try and do what you can with your famous tact and, of course, don't tell anyone
I
wrote to you . . .'
²²

This motherly, almost domestic facet of their relationship was enhanced during the King's frequent, at times daily, visits to Alice's home in Portman Square. (The King's green brougham, complained Lady Curzon, was
always
outside Mrs Keppel's house.) Not all their time there together was spent in bed. Sometimes Alice would entertain His Majesty to tea in the drawing room and, on these occasions, her two daughters might be allowed to come down. Alice Keppel's second daughter, Sonia, had been born on 24 May 1900 two years after she had first met the Prince of Wales. One must assume that George Keppel was Sonia's father, although the title which, almost sixty years later, Sonia Keppel gave to her memoirs –
Edwardian Daughter –
has the smack of a
double entendre
.

Just ten days before Sonia's birth, the high-spirited Alice Keppel had celebrated the Relief of Mafeking by sitting astride a lion in Trafalgar Square. 'I never doubted her story,' remembers Sonia. 'From my earliest childhood she was invested for me with a brilliant, goddess-like quality, which made possible anything she chose to say or do. It seemed quite right that she should bestride a lion . . .'
²³

To Violet and Sonia Keppel, their mother's lover was known as 'Kingy'. He was, remembered Violet, 'very kind to us children. He had a rich German accent and smelt deliciously of cigars and
eau de Portugal
. He wore several rings set with small cabochon rubies and a cigarette case made of ribbed gold, no doubt by Fabergé.'
²⁴

Before ushering the girls into the drawing room, their nurse would hiss, 'Always curtsey to the King, dear.' But for little Sonia, who was six years younger than Violet, this was easier said than done. She could not always distinguish between the King and another of her mother's friends, Sir Ernest Cassel. Cassel, who modelled himself on the monarch, was also portly, bearded, be-ringed, watch-chained and cigar-smoking; more often than not Sonia, playing safe, curtsied to him as well.

With Kingy, Sonia would play a fascinating game. On his outstretched and immaculately trousered legs, she would place two pieces of bread, buttered side down. Bets of a penny each would be laid on which piece of bread would slide down more quickly; the winning piece always being the more buttery. 'The excitement
was intense while the contest was on,'
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she remembers.

The King must indeed have been very fond of Sonia – or of her mother, rather – to have allowed this messy game to be played on his trousers. For, in the ordinary way, he was obsessively careful about his clothes; he could not bear to have anything spilt on them. Once at dinner, when a spot of spinach was splashed onto his starched white shirt, the King was so incensed that he plunged both hands into the serving dish and smeared the spinach all over his shirt-front. With a booming laugh, he left the table and thudded upstairs to change.

The fact that Sir Ernest Cassel was so often to be found in Alice Keppel's drawing room is significant. One reason is that, together with the Marquis de Soveral, and Alice Keppel herself, Cassel was a member of Edward VII's inner circle. So it was only natural that he and Alice should be friends. But for Alice, Cassel had another attraction: he was extremely rich.

A humbly-born German Jew, Cassel had, through his financial acumen, turned himself into a multi-millionaire. He was, in fact, the sort of self-made entrepreneur for whom Edward VII always had the greatest admiration. He admired him still more when, as his financial adviser, Cassel handled the royal investments in such a way as to increase the King's income most gratifyingly. For these services (and not, as has so often been assumed, because he gave the King money) Sir Ernest Cassel was handsomely rewarded by his grateful sovereign. He not only showered him with the honours that Cassel so dearly coveted but also, by parading their friendship, made him socially acceptable.

By now Cassel was one of the leading figures at the Edwardian court. Had he seen
The Importance of Being Earnest
, the then Prince of Wales had once asked the Marquis de Soveral. 'No,' replied the quick-witted diplomat, 'but I have seen the importance of being Sir Ernest.'
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Edward VII attended the wedding of Cassel's only daughter into the English aristocracy and stood godfather to his granddaughter, Edwina Ashley. With the subsequent marriage of Edwina Ashley to Lord Louis Mountbatten (who was not only a great-grandson of Queen Victoria but a half-brother to Lillie Langtry's daughter by Prince Louis of Battenberg) the Cassel star rose very high indeed. Yet Sir Ernest remained, despite this royal patronage, a modestly-mannered man: quietly spoken, austere, introvert.

Aware of the depth of the King's feelings for Alice, Sir Ernest Cassel was only too ready to grant whatever she might need for her task of keeping the monarch happy. And Alice would have been only too ready to take what was going. Cassel helped her, not so much with gifts of money but with financial advice and in kind. He always, for instance, lent her an entire floor of the Villa Eugenie at Biarritz each year so as to enable her to be near the King. And it would be through Cassel that Edward VII was to make provision for his mistress in the event of his death.

It was this close association with Cassel that led to talk of Alice Keppel's love of money; that, and her obvious interest in the stock market. Mrs Keppel, says the Duchess of Marlborough with a hint of disapproval, 'knew how to choose her friends with shrewd appraisal.'
²⁷
And Lord Esher always considered her to be 'rapacious'.
²⁸

Sir Harold Acton, who was to become friendly with Alice Keppel in later years, based his claim that she was not 'snobbish' on the fact that 'no snob could have won the confidence of the big bankers and merchants who had surrounded King Edward . . . Mrs Keppel was fascinated by the power of capitalism.'
²⁹

In her
roman à clef, The Edwardians
, Vita Sackville-West modelled her character Romola Cheyne on Alice Keppel. Describing her as 'mercenary' and 'materialistic', she writes of 'the financial shrewdness of Mrs Cheyne, a lady . . . who cropped up constantly in the conversation; Romola Cheyne, it appeared, had made a big scoop in rubber last week – but some veiled sneers accompanied this subject, for how could Romola fail, it was asked, with such sources of information at her disposal?'
³⁰

This fiction was firmly rooted in fact. For it was well known, in Edward VII's circle, that the King had given Mrs Keppel a number of shares in a rubber company which, in time, earned her £50, 000. Some of the monarch's gifts were more immediate than this. The courtesan Skittles, with whom the King still kept in touch, once told Wilfrid Scawen Blunt that His Majesty had recently paid a £5000 dress bill for Alice Keppel.

But who, after all, can blame Alice Keppel for looking after her own interests? Life with her fat, ageing, often irritable lover could not have been one of unalloyed joy. That she should want to make as much hay as she could while her particular sun shone is perfectly understandable. In any case, being the mistress of a man such as Edward VII, who liked his women well-dressed and his surroundings luxurious, was an
expensive business. It was also a precarious business. She could never be certain of retaining the King's affections: there was always the chance that she might be supplanted, as Lillie Langtry and Daisy Warwick had been supplanted. The King might be devoted to her but he was by no means sexually faithful to her. He could well fall in love with someone else. And although he was still in his early sixties during the first years of his reign, Edward VII was not really well: he suffered from recurrent bronchial trouble. Where would she be if he were suddenly to die?