The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  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.'21 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,'25 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.'26

  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 n
ever 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?

  This possibility was made frighteningly clear in the summer of 1902. A few days before the Coronation – set for 26 June – the King was taken ill. Although insisting, to his worried doctors, that he would be crowned if it killed him, Edward VII was finally obliged to postpone the ceremony and to undergo an operation for appendicitis. It seemed doubtful that he would survive the ordeal. The surgeon afterwards told the King's unmarried daughter, Princess Victoria, that 'his firm conviction was that His Majesty would die during the operation'.31

  This, apparently, had been the King's conviction as well. He suspected that he might have cancer of the stomach, as both his brother, Prince Alfred, and his sister, the Empress Frederick, had recently died of cancer. It was when he was in this apprehensive state that he wrote a letter to Alice in which he said that if he were dying, he felt sure that 'those about him would allow her to come and see him'.32

  The operation was a complete success. On the day after, the King was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar. Relief, not only in the palace but throughout Britain and the Empire, was profound. And by few was it more genuinely felt than by Alice Keppel.

  Yet, ever practical, Alice kept the King's letter. Very carefully, she filed it away. She was to put it to good use at a later date.

  With Edward VII making no secret of his love for Alice Keppel or of his determination that she should be received in public, society found itself in a dilemma. Should Queen Alexandra and Mrs Keppel be invited to the same parties? Hostesses knew that the Queen would be irritated, or insulted, if Mrs Keppel were invited; and that the King would be in a bad mood if she were not. A cri de coeur from the Duchess of Westminster to the Marquis de Soveral (who managed to remain on friendly terms with the King, the Queen and Mrs Keppel) sums up this general quandary. 'I want the King to be happy, but I don't want to annoy the Queen, so please tell me what would be best,'33 she begged on one occasion.

  But not every host or hostess was similarly torn. For although even Queen Alexandra was obliged to receive Alice Keppel, not only in the official royal residences but in her own home, Sandringham, others felt no such obligation. Those pillars of Victorian and Edwardian rectitude, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Portland and the Duke of Norfolk kept the doors of their houses – Hatfield, Welbeck and Arundel – firmly closed against the King's mistress.

  The good-natured and worldly-wise Alice Keppel never allowed herself to be put out by these social embarrassments. Quite often, she triumphed over them. Once, when Lord Salisbury was entertaining the sovereigns at Hatfield, from which Alice was barred, she accepted an invitation to spend the weekend at nearby Knebworth, the home of Lord Lytton. The result, reports Count Mensdorff, the ambassador for Austria-Hungary, from Knebworth, was that 'all the guests (from Hatfield) came over here to tea – naturally, because La Favorita is here'.34

  Yet so exquisitely mannered were both Queen Alexandra and Alice Keppel that on the many occasions that they were invited together, there was never any suggestion of animosity. Daisy, Princess of Pless, a daughter of Edward VII's old flame, Patsy Cornwallis West, was a guest at a huge house party given by the Duke of Devonshire (another of the King's old friends, Harty-Tarty, who had by now succeeded to the title) at Chatsworth in January 1904. While the King and Mrs Keppel – 'with lovely clothes and diamonds' – played bridge in a separate room, the Queen – 'charming and beautiful as always' – was entertained with songs and music in the spacious corridor.

  'The last evening there was very cheerful,' writes the Princess of Pless, 'the Queen danced a waltz with Soveral, and then we each took off our shoes to see what difference it made to our height. The Queen took, or rather kicked, hers off and then got into everyone else's, even into Willie Grenfell's old pumps. I never saw her so free and cheerful but always graceful in everything she does.'35

  For however much, in private, Alexandra might resent her husband's infidelities, in public she always presented an untroubled image. She was sustained by the knowledge that she was immensely popular. Alexandra brought so many things to the monarchy. The general public knew very little about her failings; to them she was a decorative, socially accomplished Queen with a reputation for boundless sympathy for those in suffering. She was appreciated for being virtuous and vivacious, dignified and natural, caring and insouciant. They called her the Queen of Hearts.

  One of Alexandra's minor, but not insignificant, contributions to the monarchy was her way of dressing. It was to influence royal fashion for the following three-quarters of a century. Ignoring the fashion changes of the Edwardian era – the loosely-knotted hair, the outsize hats, the high waists, the narrow skirts – Queen Alexandra stuck resolutely to the style which she had decided suited her best. Her high-dressed, tightly-curled wig would be crowned by an elaborate toque; her slender neck would be encircled by a jewelled 'dog-collar'; her waist would be laced to its narrowest. Her clothes never looked anything less than opulent; she dressed as though she were on stage. There seemed nothing incongruous about her opening a row of workers' cottages wearing a toque of parma violets, a mauve ostrich feather boa, a dress of silver-embroidered lace, ropes of pearls, clusters of diamonds, and pale satin shoes.

  In this way Queen Alexandra set a style in royal dressing. It had nothing to do with fashion but everything with effect. Her example was followed by the two queens who came after her: George V's consort, Queen Mary and George VI's consort, Queen Elizabeth. All three women perfected, and remained faithful to, a strongly personal style. When, in 1938, Queen Elizabeth accompanied George VI on his state visit to Paris, the verdict of that fashion-conscious city was that although she was not chic, she dressed like a queen. Her achievement is not as unimportant as it may seem. This art of royal dressing – an art which has now been lost – provides the monarchy with several, not inconsiderable advantages: a touch of essential theatricality, an instantly recognisable image, and a stable, dependable, unchanging air.

  Never was Queen Alexandra's highly developed personal taste more in evidence than at the postponed Coronation, on 9 August 1902. Ignoring both tradition and fashion, she announced that she would wear 'exactly what I like and so will all my ladies – Basta!'36 She was proved right. In a dress of golden Indian gauze, shimmering with diamonds and pearls, and trailing a richly-embroidered, ermine-lined train, she looked magnificent.

  Even at that age of fifty-seven, Alexandra had no need to fear competition from younger women. She outshone them all. In Westminster Abbey that day was a bevy of the King's specially invited women friends, including Alice Keppel and Sarah Bernhardt, all sitting in a pew irreverently referred to as 'the King's loose box'.37 What Queen Alexandra thought of this collection of her husband's women friends one does not know, but one of her ladies-in-waiting leaves no doubt about her own feelings. To her 'the well-named loose box' was 'the one discordant note in the Abbey – for to see the row of lady friends in full magnificence did rather put my teeth on edge – La Favorita of course in the best place, Mrs Ronnie Greville, Lady Sarah Wilson, Feo Sturt, Mrs Arthur Paget and that ilk . . .'38

  Nor, apparently, was this the first time that the King had invited a selection of his old flames to witness him in his new regal state. 'King Edward, it appears, goes among his lady friends as "Edward the Caresser",' writes Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. 'When he succeeded to the throne he wrote to divers of these ladies to say that though called to other serious duties he hoped still to see them from time to time. They had all gathered in the Ladies Gallery of the House of Lords when he made his speech from the Throne and there was
much speculation as to whether he would address any part of it to them. He looked up twice, but maintained his solemnity . . .'39

  Yet another of Edward VII's old lady loves, who was attending the Coronation ceremony in her own right, as a peeress, was Daisy Warwick. She had arrived alone in the cumbersome family coach as her husband, the Earl of Warwick, had decided that he would prefer to travel to the Abbey in his new 'motor-brougham', having first applied to the police for permission to do so. 'I was agreeably surprised to learn that they would welcome it,' he writes, 'as old coaches were so difficult to move out of the way.'40

  For 'stately grace and absolute beauty', decided the watching Lord Rosebery, Lady Warwick's entry into the Abbey 'was next to that of Queen Alexandra'.41

  Of all the memorable moments in the Abbey that day, it is not altogether surprising that the scene which most impressed the King was an exclusively feminine one. It came just after the Queen had been crowned, when all the peeresses, in one graceful, fluid, simultaneous movement, placed their coronets on their own heads.

  'Their white arms arching over their heads', the King afterwards declared, had resembled 'a scene from a beautiful ballet'.42

  On 30 June 1902, four days after the original date of Edward VII's Coronation, Lillie Langtry's daughter Jeanne-Marie married the Honourable Ian Malcolm at St Margaret's, Westminster.

  Lillie could hardly have wished for a more socially acceptable match. The credentials of the thirty-three-year-old Ian Malcolm were, by the standards of the time, impeccable. Heir to the hereditary chieftainship of the Clan MacCullum and to a vast estate in Scotland, Malcolm led not only a privileged but a useful life. Eton and Oxford had been followed by a spell in the diplomatic corps, where he had served as an attaché in the British embassies in Paris and Berlin. Since 1895 he had been Conservative member of parliament for Stowmarket in Suffolk. Together with four other young Conservative members, among them Winston Churchill, he had formed a mildly rebellious group; in fact their name, 'The Malcolmtents', acknowledged him as their founder. Cultivated and capable, Ian Malcolm seemed set for a successful parliamentary career. In time, he would be knighted, and Jeanne-Marie would become Lady Malcolm.