Edward VII_The Last Victorian King

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Prince was not disposed, however, to forgive the Beresfords yet. On hearing in March the next year that the troublesome letter had at last been burned, he told Lady Charles’s brother-in-law, Lord Waterford, to whose care it had been entrusted, that he could never forget and would never forgive her conduct nor that of Lord Charles. ‘His base ingratitude, after a friendship of about twenty years’, had hurt the Prince more than words could say. It was not until June 1897, when the King’s horse, Persimmon, won the Ascot Gold Cup that he was prevailed upon to speak to Lord Charles again; and even then he felt impelled to write immediately to Lady Brooke to apologize for having done so.

  My own lovely little Daisy [his letter ran], I lose no time in writing to tell you of an episode which occurred today after you left — wh. was unpleasant and unexpected — but I hope my darling you will agree I could not have acted otherwise, as my loyalty to you, is I hope, a thing that you will never think of doubting! — Shortly before leaving Ascot today, Marcus B. came to me, & said he had a gt. favour to ask me — so I answered at once I should be delighted to grant it. He then became much affected, & actually cried, & said might he bring his brother C. up to me to offer his congratulations on ‘Persimmon’s’ success. I had no alternative but to say yes. He came up with his hat off, & would not put it on till I told him, & shook hands. We talked a little about racing, then I turned and we parted. What struck me more than anything, was his humble attitude and manner! My loved one, I hope you won’t be annoyed at what has happened, & exonerate me from blame, as that is all I care about.

  Throughout the final stages of the distressing Beresford affair, the Princess of Wales, although naturally upset that her husband’s passion for Lady Brooke had led him to become so reckless a champion, had stood by him as loyally as she had done during the Gordon Cumming trial. Knollys told the Prime Minister’s private secretary that the Princess was even more angry with Beresford than the Prince, that she warmly supported her husband ‘in everything connected with this unfortunate affair’ and was ‘anxious to do all in her power to assist him’.

  Comforted by this support, the Prince was also consoled by Lady Brooke, who, on her father-in-law’s death in December 1893, became the Countess of Warwick. The Prince was still passionately in love with her, gazing at her longingly, so she afterwards claimed, giving her numerous little sentimental presents and tokens of his affection, writing to her regularly. And despite the warning administered to him by the Mordaunt case, he wrote her far more intimate letters than any he seems to have composed for other women, addressing her as his ‘darling Daisy’, his ‘own adored little Daisy wife’. ‘He wrote me a letter twice or three times every week,’ she said, ‘telling me everything that had happened to him. He expected me to write frequently, and if I didn’t he used to say I had hurt him.’

  In Lady Warwick’s subsequent accounts of their relationship, she makes him appear far more in love with her than she was with him, describing him once as having been ‘bothersome as he sat on a sofa’ holding her hand and ‘goggling’ at her. Six years after the Prince’s death, she told the journalist Frank Harris, ‘He was remarkably constant and admired me exceedingly … He had manners and he was very considerate and from a woman’s point of view that’s a great deal … He was indeed a very perfect gentle lover. I think anyone would have been won by him … I grew to like him very much.’

  By then Lady Warwick had become a dedicated socialist; and she liked to emphasize the part she had played in interesting the Prince in worthy causes, being at pains to point out the taste they shared for the simple pleasures of country life. She said that he had advised her ‘against giving expensive entertainments’ and had added that, for his part, he was much happier to come down to Easton Lodge to see her quietly with a couple of friends. All the same, they had both enjoyed house-parties on the grand scale; and she had spent a great deal of money in giving them. One of them, attended by the Prince, lasted a week, the guests being transported by a special train which ran from London and back every day; and actors being engaged to play the parts of chessmen in the gardens, arrayed in fantastic costumes.

  At Easton Lodge house-parties, according to Elinor Glyn, who lived nearby at Durrington House and often attended them, those with a taste for sexual intrigue and illicit liaisons found their hostess an ever-willing and resourceful collaborator, always careful to warn her guests that the stable yard bell rang at six o’clock in the morning, thus providing them with a reliable alarm in case they had to return to a previously unoccupied bed.

  In the staircase hall, Mrs Glyn wrote,

  there was a tray, on which stood beautifully cleaned silver candlesticks … one of which you carried up to your room, even if you did not need it at all. It might be that in lighting it up for you, your admirer might whisper a suggestion of a rendezvous for the morning; if not, probably on your breakfast tray you would find a note from him, given by his valet to your maid, suggesting where and when you might chance to meet him for a walk … Supposing you had settled to meet the person who was amusing you in the saloon, say, at eleven, you went there casually at the agreed time, dressed to go out, and found your cavalier awaiting you. Sometimes Lady Brooke would be there too, but she always sensed whether this was an arranged meeting or an accidental one. If it was intended, she would say graciously that Stone Hall, her little Elizabethan pleasure house in the park, was a nice walk before lunch, and thus make it easy to start. Should some strangers who did not know the ropes happen to be there, too, and show signs of accompanying you on the walk, she would immediately engage them in conversation until you had got safely away.

  Once the intending lovers had come to an understanding, it would usually be agreed that something would be left outside the lady’s bedroom door to signify that she was alone and that the coast was clear; but a pile of sandwiches on a plate, formerly a favourite sign, had fallen into disfavour since the greedy German diplomat, Baron von Eckardstein, seeing some in a corridor at Chatsworth, had picked them up and eaten them all on the way to his room, much to the consternation of the countess who had placed them there.

  These clandestine arrangements were perfectly acceptable to the Prince, of course, provided there was no hint of scandal or even of open discussion of what everyone knew was going on. Discretion was insisted upon as de rigueur, disclosure unforgivable. A gentleman’s behaviour was not to be measured in terms of his sexual activities but by the strictness with which he observed the rules that polite society imposed upon their conduct. Certain practices were not to be tolerated. On hearing reports that Lord Arthur Somerset, the superintendent of his racing stables, had been apprehended by the police in a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street frequented by Post Office messenger boys, the Prince had at first refused to believe it of a friend of his ‘any more than [he would have done] if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury’. He had sent emissaries to the Commissioner of Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Prime Minister in an effort to clear Lord Arthur Somerset and to get ‘something settled’. The Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions was informed by these emissaries that the Prince was in a ‘great state’ but that he ‘didn’t believe a word of it’. It was, as the Prince told Lord Carrington, ‘simply inconceivable’: if Somerset were guilty of such an offence, who on earth could they trust? Finally he was forced to conclude that Somerset, like anyone capable of such behaviour, must be an ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ and the less one heard ‘of such a filthy scandal the better’. But, aberrations like this apart, a gentleman’s infidelities were his own affair so long as he kept them to himself and did not allow them to become the subject of public discussion. This being understood, lovers who had spent part of the night together were expected next day to betray not the least hint of their previous intimacy.

  Lady Warwick’s own affair with the Prince of Wales seems to have ended a year or so after she became chatelaine of Warwick Castle. Contemporaries believed that he had grown bored by her lectures. As she her
self wrote,

  only a sincere democrat desires to know the uncomfortable things of life. In [the Prince of Wales] there was a perpetual struggle between his sense of duty and a desire to conceal from himself that all was not well with the best of all possible worlds. Queen Victoria did not lend a listening ear to recitals of the wrongs of the people; he, on the other hand, did listen, but he would not seek to hear. Those who revealed unpleasant things were not liked the better for it.

  He would murmur to them, ‘Society grows; it is not made.’

  He and Lady Warwick remained friends, and continued to see each other often at country house-parties; but since they were no longer lovers, Lady Warwick began to fear that, as her influence over him waned, she might lose it altogether. So, at the beginning of 1898, just before she gave birth to another child after an interval of over twelve years, she thought it as well to assure the Princess of Wales, who had never accepted her in the way she had accepted his other mistresses, that her relationship with the Prince was now purely platonic. She sat down to write to them both, contritely assuring the Princess of her great respect for her and addressing the Prince in a more formal tone than usual so that he could show the letter to his wife.

  My own lovely little Daisy [the Prince replied immediately], It is difficult for me to describe how touched I was by your beautiful letter which reached me at Chatsworth this morning … I gave it to the Princess to read. She was moved to tears, and said she felt very sorry for you and that ‘out of evil good would come’.

  She kept the letter to read it again and return it to me at tea-time, and begged me to thank you for the letter she received from you … She really quite forgives and condones the past, as I have corroborated what you wrote about our friendship having been platonic for some years. You could not help, my loved one, writing to me as you did — though it gave me a pang — after the letters I have received from you for nearly nine years! But I think I could read ‘between the lines’ everything you wished to convey … But how could you, my loved one, imagine that I should withdraw my friendship from you? On the contrary I mean to befriend you more than ever, and you cannot prevent my giving you the same love as the friendship I have always felt for you. Though our interests, as you have often said, lie apart, still we have that sentimental feeling of affinity which cannot be eradicated by time … I know my darling that [the Princess] will now meet you with pleasure, so that your position is, thank God! better now than it ever was since we have been such friends, and I do not despair in time that you and she might become quite good friends.

  In his relief that it had all ended so satisfactorily, the Prince even thought that this proposed friendship between his wife and former mistress might be brought about by finding some charity in which they could share a common interest. But the Princess, quite prepared to be friendly from a distance, was certainly not willing to become as closely involved with Lady Warwick as this. She did, however, undertake to send a brief note of forgiveness. And the Prince was duly thankful. ‘Certainly the Princess has been an angel of goodness through all this,’ he told Lady Warwick, ‘but then she is a Lady and never could do anything that was mean or small.’

  Yet, despite the Prince’s protests that he would never feel less than affectionate towards Lady Warwick, her ardent socialism, her indiscreet attempts to make use of her supposed influence over her former lover, as well as her undiminished appetite for other men, imposed too great a strain on a friendship which, if never entirely broken, was never fully resumed. For several years, presents and letters continued to be exchanged on appropriate anniversaries. But one day, four years after the birth of her last child, she was told by a messenger from Windsor, ‘with charming courtesy and frankness’, as she had to admit, that ‘it would be as well for all concerned if [her] close association with great affairs were to cease as it was giving rise to hostile comment’.

  By then two other women had entered the Prince’s life, both of whom were universally considered to be far more suitable companions for him than Lady Warwick. One of them was Agnes Keyser, daughter of a rich stockbroker, who, with her sister, ran a nursing home for army officers in Grosvenor Crescent which was supported by donations from the King’s rich friends. A handsome, governess-like woman of strong yet understanding personality, forty-six years old in February 1898 when the Prince first came to know her, Agnes Keyser shunned the kind of society which the Prince had enjoyed at Easton Lodge. And, when he felt disinclined to exert himself in more demanding company, Miss Keyser was prepared always to welcome him to a quiet dinner where, as though in a nursery far more agreeable than any he had known as a child, he was given such plain fare as Irish stew and rice pudding.

  The other woman, whom the Prince first met in that same month of February 1898, was to love him and be loved by him for the rest of his life. This was the bright and vivacious, stately and Junoesque Hon. Mrs George Keppel, ‘a memorable figure in the fashionable world’, in the opinion of Osbert Sitwell, who greatly enjoyed listening to her talking when ‘she would remove from her mouth for a moment the cigarette which she would be smoking through a long holder and turn upon the person to whom she was speaking her large, humorous, kindly, peculiarly discerning eyes.’ The daughter of Admiral Sir William Edmonstone, she was then twenty-nine years old and had married George Keppel, a son of the seventh Earl of Albemarle, some years before. Keppel was an extremely handsome, tall army officer with a bristling moustache, an aquiline nose and a hearty laugh. Very fond of women himself, he raised no objection to the Prince’s friendship with his wife, to whom he was deeply attached; and when his income proved inadequate for the sort of life he was called upon to lead — and his wife’s bank managers to whom she was, as her daughter said, ‘irresistibly attractive’, could help no more — he cheerfully went to work for Sir Thomas Lipton, who obligingly found him employment at the Prince’s instigation. Almost everyone, in fact, was devoted to Mrs Keppel, of whom scarcely anything worse was said than that during animated conversations her voice, usually so delightfully deep and throaty, became unnecessarily loud, and that, as Lord Carrington observed, she seemed to enjoy being ‘much toadied by everyone’. Well aware of the importance of her position, she never took advantage of it. Both kind and amusing, she was as discreet as she was disarming. Ministers, trusting in her circumspection and knowing her to be completely loyal to the Prince, while aware of his failings, reposed in her a unique trust, making use of her as a kind of invaluable liaison officer. Rules of precedence were disregarded in her favour: Count Mensdorff, the Austrian Ambassador in London, and a second cousin of the Prince of Wales, noticed that at a dinner party at Crichel Down, ‘the Favorita’, as Mensdorff called her, was actually seated next to the Kaiser so that ‘she might have the opportunity of talking to him’. Mensdorff would have loved to have known ‘what sort of report she sent back to Sandringham’.

  With very few exceptions, such as the Marquess of Salisbury and the Dukes of Portland and Norfolk, members of society accepted her and, when it became known that the Princess of Wales accepted her too, invited the Keppels and the Waleses to the same parties. But although the Princess of Wales tolerated her, she naturally found it impossible fully to share the general admiration. She was grateful to Mrs Keppel, no doubt, for keeping her husband entertained and, therefore, good-tempered; but her family knew that she found her constant presence irksome, while her attendants were sometimes given the impression that she even found it absurd. One day after she had become Queen, glancing out of a window at Sandringham, she caught sight of Mrs Keppel returning from a drive with the King in an open carriage. Mrs Keppel had become rather stout by then and the sight of her imposing bosom in such close proximity to the corpulant figure of the King suddenly struck the Queen as ludicrous. She called to her lady-in-waiting to come to share the view, and burst into peals of laughter.

  Yet Mrs Keppel’s reputation was such that the Archbishop of Canterbury was invited to sit down at the same table with her. By then, of course, King
Edward’s relationship with Mrs Keppel may have changed as his relationship with Lady Warwick did. Certainly, the Archbishop told the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres that he

  never believed the Keppel affair was anything more than platonic. The King showed this to the Archbishop by always placing him next to her at table: something he would never have done if she had been, as generally supposed, his mistress — it would have been an insult to the Church and utterly unlike him. The subtlety of this approach, the Archbishop said, was very characteristic of the King.

  After the death of the King, who made provision for her through Sir Ernest Cassel, Mrs Keppel bought a villa in Tuscany, where Sir Harold Acton remembers her enormous charm and her still fine figure. ‘One of the secrets of her success,’ Sir Harold says, ‘was that she could be amusing without malice; she never repeated a cruel witticism. Above all, she was not snobbish.’ Her husband, ‘well matched as to height’, looked ‘every inch a colonel’. ‘I remember how shocked he was to find my mother reading a book about Oscar Wilde,’ Sir Harold writes. ‘ “A frightful bounder. It made me puke to look at him,” he muttered. … To a certain extent the Colonel shared his wife’s aura. A guide once pointed him out to a group of inquisitive tourists as “l’ultimo amante della regina Victoria”.’

  12

  ‘Inconvenient’ Friends and ‘Ill-bred’ Children

  It is the greatest bane in one’s life saying good-bye, especially to one’s children, relations and friends.

  ‘If you ever become King,’ the Queen had warned the Prince of Wales in 1868, ‘you will find all these friends most inconvenient, and you will have to break with them all.’ He had long since become used to such criticisms and had grown tired of rebutting the allegation that almost all his friends were the ‘fashionable bad set and betting people’. It could not be denied, though, that a good many of them were. There was, for instance, a certain handsome young man who called himself Count Miecislas Jaraczewski, whose scarcely pronounceable surname was translated into English by his cronies at the Turf Club as ‘Sherry and Whiskers’. Jaraczewski had been admitted to the Marlborough Club by the Prince, who entertained him frequently at Sandringham and was often to be seen with him in Paris where the police described Jaraczewski as the Prince’s ‘faithful and inseparable friend and one who, incidentally, never had a good reputation for honesty as a gambler’. The Queen must have been distressed to learn that this young friend of her son, after giving a splendid supper party one evening at the Turf Club, had returned home to take a lethal dose of prussic acid rather than face arrest and ruin.