The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  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.'17 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!'18

  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?'19

  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. '20 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.'21

  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?

  Alice Keppel proved to be the ideal mistress for an ageing man. She was attractive enough to interest him sexually; entertaining when he was bored, patient when he was cantankerous, sympathetic when he was ill, unobtrusive when he appeared in public. In his company she was amusing, even-tempered, uncomplaining. Like all successful mistresses, Alice was part-lover, part-wife, part-mother. An added attraction, in the Prince's eyes, was that she was an accomplished bridge player. For the Prince was reaching the age when a man values a good partner at the bridge table as highly as a good partner in bed. Before long, Alice Keppel had become an indispensible part of the Prince's life: a brilliant thread running through the fabric of his days.

  To live in a style worthy of her new status, Alice Keppel, like Lillie Langtry before her, was obliged to move house. The Keppels – George, Alice and their little daughter Violet – left Wilton Crescent to set up home in 30 Portman Square. It was in this house, in its elegant eighteenth-century square, that much of Alice's affair with the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII, was conducted.

  By today's standards, it was a highly inconvenient home. It was on six stories, up and down whose narrow stairs – carpeted for the drawing room and main bedroom floors, linoleumed for the upper and basement floors – the servants toiled all day. It had few of the amenities which were already being installed in comparable houses, such as central heating or the telephone, and food had to be kept cool in an outhouse in the area yard. Yet it did boast some modern conveniences: it was lit by electricity instead of gas, and husband and wife had a bathroom each – an almost unheard-of luxury for a London house. For most homes had no bathroom at all. Where, in some of the grandest country houses, there were one or two bathrooms, they were invariably huge, icy caverns situated at the end of unheated corridors.

  In most houses hot water would still have to be carried up by maids, to be tipped into hip-baths in the bedrooms. Writers of memoirs, recalling the joys of steaming and scented hip-baths in front of roaring fires in their bedrooms, rarely gave a thought to the servants who had to lug cans of water
from a cauldron in the kitchen up several flights of stairs, and who had then to carry the dirty water down again.

  In fact, in no area of domestic life has there been a more complete change since the turn of the century than in the matter of servants. To run their home, the Keppels, who were far from rich, employed what they considered to be the absolute minimum: a butler, a cook, a governess and a nanny for their daughter, two maids and a boy who acted as a general dogsbody. The butler and the boy slept in rooms in the basement, the governess and the nanny on the nursery floor, the cook and the maids in the attic. They ate in what was grandly called the 'servants' hall' which was simply a room in the basement.

  By the standards of their time and class, the number of servants kept by the Keppels – two for each member of the family—was regarded as a very modest ratio. Four to one was more usual; wealthier families had as many as eight for each member. At Eaton Hall in Cheshire, the Duke of Westminster employed over three hundred indoor and outdoor servants. The Duke of Portland employed even more. When the Prince of Wales brought an especially large party to stay with Lord Derby for the Grand National one year, his lordship remained unflustered. 'That makes sixty extra servants,' he calculated, 'and with the thirty-seven who live in, nothing could be simpler.'22

  Not that one needed to be especially wealthy or well-born to keep servants. A bank manager or a doctor usually had three – a cook, a parlourmaid and a kitchenmaid – and even the humblest tradesman could afford a 'skivvy' or maid-of-all-work. For a thirteen-year-old skivvy in a tradesman's home the wages were usually a shilling a week. The average annual wage for a housemaid, working for a family whose income could be in the region of £30,000 a year, was £20.

  It was no wonder that the great majority of aristocratic households could afford to employ a small army of indoor servants: housekeeper, cook, lady's maid, nurse, housemaids, kitchen maids, scullery maids, laundry maids, maids-of-all-work, as well as a butler, under-butler, valets, footmen, pantry boys, lamp boys, odd-job-men and kitchen porters. And all these in addition to the outdoor staff – the coachmen, grooms, stable-lads, gardeners and game keepers. By the end of the nineteenth century nearly one and a half million people worked as domestic servants. They formed the largest group of the working class.

  The life of the average housemaid was little better than slavery. From the time that she rose, usually in a dark, cold room at six in the morning, until the time that she went to bed, at about eleven at night, she drudged almost without stop. She tidied grates, laid and lit fires, swept, dusted and polished the downstairs rooms, served morning tea, carried cans of hot water, made beds, emptied slops, scalded chamber pots, washed windows and paintwork, carried coals, swept, dusted and tidied the bedrooms, put away clothes, checked soap and changed towels, answered doorbells, went on errands, served meals and, in the evenings, turned down beds, drew curtains, prepared warming pans or hot-water bottles, carried up yet more hot water and tidied the downstairs rooms.

  As, in a well-ordered household, no housemaid should ever be seen at work, all housework except for the bedrooms had to be done very early in the morning, before the family or guests came downstairs. In some households, housemaids were never seen at all. The tenth Duke of Beaufort, who died in 1893, would instantly dismiss any woman servant who crossed his path after twelve noon, by which time her work was supposed to have been done; while the third Lord Crewe stipulated that no housemaids were to be seen at any time of the day, except in chapel. Masters and servants, explained Lady Cynthia Asquith blandly, 'knew their places, and kept to them as the planets to their orbits.'23

  Worked almost beyond endurance, hedged about with regulations, at the mercy of intimidating mistresses or tyrannical upper servants, poorly and often irregularly paid, enjoying no long-term prospects, pension rights or job security, living in fear of dismissal without a reference for minor misdemeanours, frequently seduced by the master of the house or his sons, thrown out if found to be pregnant, the average female servant lived the most wretched of lives.

  'Poor little devils,' said the butler at Cliveden of the scullery maids, 'washing up and scrubbing away at the dozens of pots, pans, saucepans and plates, up to their elbows in suds and grease, their hands red raw with the soda which was the only form of detergent in those days. I've seen them crying with exhaustion and pain, the degradation too, I shouldn't wonder. Well, let's hope they get their reward in heaven. '24

  It was small wonder that girls sometimes turned to prostitution or became pregnant by the first handsome soldier who happened to treat them with kindness.

  Of course, there were exceptions. Upper servants often lived very comfortable lives and even housemaids, if they worked for a good-natured employer or in congenial company, could occasionally enjoy themselves. But the widely accepted vision of a Victorian below-stairs world full of jolly, contented servants devoted to their employers and working for the same family for generation after generation, is wildly inaccurate. In the year 1898 the average length of service in one household was a mere eighteen months. Most girls would far rather find employment in shops or factories.

  By all accounts, Alice Keppel was an exceptionally considerate employer. According to the, possibly rose-tinted, memories of her two daughters (a second, Sonia, was born after the Keppels moved to Portman Square) the atmosphere throughout the house was well-ordered but cheerful. There might be the occasional altercation between the French governess and the English nanny but Mr Rolfe, the butler, and Mrs Wright, the cook, were both 'corpulent, smiling figures, given to kind teasing and fat laughter'.25 Alice Keppel was a very capable woman, adroit in her handling of people and, as a frequent hostess to the Prince of Wales, would have been well aware of the advantages of a contented and smoothly-run household. She was the kind of fair-minded and warm-hearted mistress that servants appreciated.

  As well as having a staff worthy of her royal lover, Alice Keppel needed rooms worthy of him. A certain boldness of taste ensured that she avoided much of the frivolity and fussiness that characterised fin de siècle decoration. Nor was the sunlight filtered through layers of curtaining. 'Femininity in her drawing room was less challenging and more conciliatory than in many,' says one observer. 'Solidly comfortable chairs had their place there; and the curtains were not drawn until the daylight faded.'26

  Osbert Sitwell, who, as a young man, often visited Mrs Keppel, has left a description of the grander Grosvenor Street house to which she subsequently moved, but one can safely assume that her Portman Square home was not so very different. 'Within existed an unusual air of spaciousness and light, an atmosphere of luxury, for Mrs Keppel possessed an instinct for splendour, and not only were the rooms beautiful, with their grey walls, red lacquer cabinets, English eighteenth-century portraits of people in red coats, huge porcelain pagodas [a gift from her royal lover], and thick, magnificent carpets, but the hostess conducted the running of her house as a work of art in itself.'27

  The same 'atmosphere of luxury' pervaded her bedroom. Its mounds of pillows, its cut-glass vases filled with lilies and malmaisons and its rich velvet curtains drawn, in this instance, against the daylight, all helped to create a suitably seductive setting for her extramarital assignations. With George Keppel having obligingly gone off to his club – and later his job – for the afternoon, and with the staff remaining discreetly downstairs, the Prince and Mrs Keppel would be certain of a couple of hours to themselves.

  Vita Sackville-West, who was friendly with the young Violet Keppel even as a child, used often to see a 'discreet little one-horse brougham' waiting outside when she arrived at the house. Gently but firmly Mr Rolfe, the butler, would push the visiting girl into a dark corner of the hallway with a murmured 'One minute, miss, a gentleman is coming downstairs.'28

  Trailing a whiff of freshly-applied eau de Portugal, the gentleman would descend the stairs and, having collected hat, gloves and cane from the obsequiously bowing Mr Rolfe, would cross the pavement to the waiting brougham and go spinning away in the
direction of Marlborough House.

  A legend persists, to this day, that the attitude of Alexandra, as Princess and Queen, towards her husband's affair with Alice Keppel was one of saintly forbearance. She is popularly believed to have displayed all those qualities of charity and forgiveness for which she was renowned. This is not quite accurate. In the first place, Alexandra was never the saint of popular imagination: she had many attractive qualities but she could be stubborn and selfish. Her supposed acceptance of her husband's mistress could simply have been a manifestation of her own self-absorbtion. And secondly, there were times when, far from approving of Mrs Keppel, Alexandra revealed an active dislike of her.

  It is true that the Princess of Wales preferred Alice Keppel to Daisy Warwick. She would have agreed with the Duchess of Sutherland that her husband was 'a child, such a much pleasanter child since he changed mistresses'.29 (The fact that Millicent Sutherland was half-sister to Daisy Warwick gives her opinion added weight.) And Alexandra would have approved of the fact that Mrs Keppel did not flaunt her position to the extent that Daisy Warwick had once done. She would also have been grateful to Alice Keppel for keeping the Prince in a good temper. But this did not mean that she found her almost continual presence any less irksome.

  The royal family certainly appreciated the Princess's feelings. Mrs Keppel's presence at the annual regatta at Cowes, for instance, was always guaranteed to upset Alexandra.

  'How are things going on in general?' wrote Princess Alexandra's daughter-in-law, Princess May, to her husband Prince George one Cowes week. 'I mean, does peace reign or have you had a difficult time?'

  Peace had reigned between his father and mother, answered Prince George, but 'Mrs K. arrives tomorrow and stops here in a yacht, I am afraid that peace and quiet will not remain.'