The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses

by Theo Aronson

  As the King was recovering from his operation a few days before, there was no question of his attending the fashionable wedding ceremony, although it was reported that he had sent the bride a valuable piece of jewellery. Less easily explained was the absence of the bride's step-father, Lillie's new husband, Hugo de Bathe. Perhaps the fact that he was younger than the bridegroom was one explanation; the lack of rapport between him and Lillie might have been another. But then this outwardly conventional wedding was beset with irregularities; not least by the fact that by now Lillie and Jeanne-Marie were barely on speaking terms.

  The relationship between mother and daughter had never been harmonious. A gentler, more reserved person than Lillie, Jeanne-Marie had never really approved of her mother's flamboyant way of life. She had once been heard to say, on being told by some ageing Lothario that he had known her mother in younger days, that yes, a great many elderly men had told her the same thing. But the chief reason for Jeanne-Marie's antipathy towards her mother was the discovery, not long before her marriage, that she was illegitimate: that her father had not been the late Edward Langtry but Prince Louis of Battenberg.

  She had, it seems, first heard this astonishing news from Margot Asquith. What, asked Margot, had Jeanne-Marie's father given her for her recent birthday? When the bemused girl protested that her father was dead, the always outspoken Margot told her that, on the contrary, her father was still very much alive. He was Louis Battenberg. Surely her mother had told her this?

  Jeanne-Marie was appalled. For a girl who had spent the first half of her life believing that her father had been one of Lillie's brothers and that Lillie was her aunt, and the second believing him to be Edward Langtry, the news came as a severe shock. Hurrying home, she confronted her mother with the allegation. Lillie, who happened to be sitting at her dressing table when her distraught daughter burst in, did not even, it is said, turn round to face her. 'You shouldn't believe everything you're told,'43 she said coolly. But Jeanne-Marie would not be fobbed off in this way, and attacked her mother for her duplicity. It was in the course of a heated exchange that Lillie asked Jeanne-Marie if she did not prefer a father like Prince Louis to 'a drunken sot'44 like Edward Langtry.

  But Jeanne-Marie refused to be mollified. Once her wedding, followed by a reception at the Hotel Windsor, was over, she broke with her mother. At first, Lillie seems not to have appreciated the finality of the break. Not until over three months later, after she had written to Jeanne-Marie to demand 'some sort of explanation' for her long silence, was Lillie made aware of the strength of her daughter's feelings.

  'I think I have always shown my intense love for you,' Lillie had written, 'and to be in the same town with you and not see you makes me so wretched that I am quite ill. Please darling, write me a nice letter . . .

  Jeanne-Marie's reply was chilling. Having reminded her mother of their row about her parentage, Jeanne-Marie goes on to say, 'What I suffered the last days under your roof, knowing this change to have come upon me, yet feeling powerless to alter it . . . Had it not been for the support of the pure love and devotion of the strong man who wished to make me his wife, in spite of all, I think I should have gone mad . . . I have felt within the last year or two that our tastes are widely different. Therefore in future we had best live our own lives apart. In conclusion, please believe that, painful as I know it must be for you to receive this letter, the necessity of writing it causes the most intensive misery to your daughter – Jeanne. '45

  From that time on, Jeanne-Marie had nothing more to do with her mother. 'Lillie's name was not mentioned in our household . . .' claims Jeanne-Marie's daughter, 'my mother was unrelenting and would not receive her.'46

  Another of Lillie's bids for respectability – by the marriage of her daughter into a conventionally upper-class family – had turned to ashes.

  But rising from the ashes was something at which Lillie excelled, and she wasted no time on regrets. She was already well launched on her latest venture: the leasing and restoring of the old Imperial Theatre, Westminster. At considerable expense she had the interior gutted, the stage lowered, the walls lined with Italian marble, new plush seats put in, electricity installed and the boxes hung with satin curtains in what she fancifully calls 'the colours of nature's spring garb – purple, green and gold.'47

  Unfortunately, her performances never matched the splendour of her surroundings, and the venture was not a great success. One flop followed another. Not even the presence of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at a command performance of The Crossways on 8 December 1902 could save the situation. The theatre closed.

  So it was back to touring the United States where, as usual, she did good business and where, again as usual, she never hesitated to use Edward VII's name for publicity purposes. In 1905 she ventured even further afield: she toured South Africa. She was hardly back from this strenuous journey before she was persuaded to join a vaudeville show due to tour the United States. Vaudeville, usually regarded as a third-rate form of entertainment, had recently been made respectable by the likes of Sarah Bernhardt. This fact, allied to the size of the salary offered by the impresario, B. F. Keith, overcame Lillie's scruples and she agreed to do a performance of a piece called 'Between Nightfall and Light'.

  But she remained uneasy about it. 'For heaven's sake,' she instructed the flock of reporters who greeted her arrival in New York in September 1906, 'please don't ever refer to my playlet as a sketch! That sounds too vaudevillainous for words. I could not stand it. I call my endeavour "a tabloid tragedy".'48

  It was while performing her tabloid tragedy in Cincinnati on 6 January 1907 that Lillie heard that her father-in-law, Sir Henry de Bathe, had died and that her husband, Hugo, had inherited the title. She was now Lady de Bathe. It was, in a way, a moment of triumph. Yet when Keith, the impresario, suggested that she change her name on the billing, she refused. She had become famous as Mrs Langtry; she had no intention of being billed as Lady de Bathe, particularly as the title was all that the impecunious Hugo had inherited.

  'Everything is precisely as it was,' she explained to a friend. 'I'm still supporting my dear husband.'49

  In common with those other cuckolded husbands – Edward Langtry and Lord Warwick – George Keppel was obliged to turn a blind eye towards his wife's liaison with the King. Indeed, of the three of them, Keppel behaved with the greatest good nature. Where Langtry took to drink and Warwick to fishing, George Keppel remained devoted to his wife.

  The word most commonly used by his contemporaries to describe George Keppel is 'gentleman'. He certainly looked like everyone's idea of a gentleman. Six foot four inches tall, with an upright carriage, an upswept moustache (it had to be curled, with tongs, every morning) a carnation in the button-hole of his frock-coat and a gleaming top hat on his dark hair, George Keppel cut an impressive figure. 'One could picture him waltzing superbly to the strains of "The Merry Widow",'50 says one observer.

  Gentlemanly, too, were his manners and conversation. 'Kindhearted, spontaneous, he was easily pleased, easily appeased, willing to believe the best of everyone, the best of life. He was what the French call bon public, an optimist, '51 writes one of his daughters. His attitudes were conventional. A patriot, a lover of tradition and an uncritical friend, George Keppel was very much a product of his time and class.

  Once, on discovering someone reading a book about Oscar Wilde, Keppel professed himself deeply shocked. 'A frightful bounder,' he muttered. 'It made one puke to look at him.' Did Alice Keppel ever remind him, muses Harold Acton, 'that he was descended from William Ill's minion [Arnold Joost Keppel] who was created Earl of Albemarle for his beaux yeux?'52

  In no respect was George Keppel more of a 'gentleman' than in his attitude towards his wife's infidelity. He was the ideal mari complaisant. Keppel not only accepted the situation philosophically but with great grace and dignity. He never complained, he never showed a vestige of jealousy, he was never anything other than discreet. 'So you're a Keppel,' a grand duke on
ce remarked at Baden. 'Are you related to the King's mistress?'53 To this studied insult, Keppel paid not the slightest attention.

  Indeed, to some members of society, George Keppel seemed to be too tolerant by half. 'Had Keppel been put up for membership at some London clubs,' confided one Edwardian survivor to the writer Gordon Brooke-Shepherd, 'the black balls would have come rolling out like caviare.'54

  Keppel was even obliged, in order to keep up a style of life appropriate to his wife's new position, to suffer the ultimate Victorian and Edwardian humiliation: to 'go into trade'. He was given a job by the King's yachting companion, Sir Thomas Lipton. From an office in Wigmore Street, George Keppel worked as a salesman in Lipton's 'Buyers' Association'. Lady Curzon reported to her husband that Lipton had been given 'a high class Victorian order'55 by his grateful sovereign for making Keppel his American agent and sending him off for a spell in the United States.

  Nor, it was rumoured, was the King Alice Keppel's only lover. Daisy, Princess of Pless, attending a luncheon party given by Alice, professed herself shocked by the candour with which her fellow women guests admitted to having had 'several lovers'.56 Already it was being said that George Keppel had fathered neither of Alice's two daughters, and the indefatigable Lady Curzon reported to her husband, in September 1901, that 'Mrs Favourite Keppel is bringing forth another questionable offspring! Either Lord Stavordale's or H. Sturt's!!' Lord Stavordale, she goes on to say, was about to be married as 'Mrs Keppel made a promise to Lady Ichester to allow him to marry at the end of this summer'.57 (The fact that Alice Keppel did not have another child indicates that this might all have been unsubstantiated gossip.)

  Alice's happy-go-lucky attitude towards marital fidelity was graphically borne out when, three or four years after Edward VII's death, she one day suggested to Winston Churchill's young wife Clementine that, in order to help Winston in his career, Clementine should find herself a rich and influential lover. Alice, who was quite prepared to assist her in the search for a suitable candidate, considered it positively selfish of Clementine to refuse to help Winston in this fashion.

  To what extent George shared his wife's attitude one does not know. Perhaps his imperturbable public face hid a private melancholy; perhaps not. They seem, from all accounts, to have been very attached. So tactful in her dealings with others, Alice Keppel was never more so than in her handling of her husband. He, who was the simpler of the two, remained attentive and loving. To their children-and children are quick to sense an atmosphere of strain – they seemed an ideally matched couple. Theirs was 'a companionship of love and laughter',58 claims Sonia Keppel. Moving easily in and out of each other's bedrooms, delighting in dressing up and going out, devoted to their two little daughters, they epitomised marital happiness. Both were great tellers of bedtime stories. But whereas his would be conventional adventure tales, more suitable for boys than girls, hers would be altogether more exotic. 'Once upon a time,' Alice would start in her husky, seductive voice, 'there was a Manchu princess, who kept a singing cricket the price of a Derby winner . . .'59

  This admirably adjusted relationship lasted all their lives. There was never any question of the marriage breaking up. In fact, far from resenting his wife's affair with Edward VII, George Keppel basked in its reflected glory, both at the time and in later years. He even, towards the end of his life, became as celebrated a figure as she, in spite of the fact that the precise reason for his renown was not always clear. In Tuscany – where the couple lived until their deaths, within two months of each other, in 1947 – the Italian guides would solemnly inform the tourists that the tall, straight-backed, bristlingly moustached Englishman had been 'the last lover of Queen Victoria'.60

  12

  La Maîtresse Du Roi

  IF THERE WAS one place in which Alice Keppel reigned supreme, it was the French seaside resort of Biarritz. Lying on the Atlantic coast close to the Spanish border, Biarritz had been popularised by the Spanish-born Empress Eugenie during the Second Empire. The imperial residence, the Villa Eugenie, had been the Osborne of Napoleon Ill's court. This royal, or imperial, patronage had now been revived by Edward VII. For a month or so each year, from early March to early April, the King spent a holiday there. As neither Queen Alexandra nor George Keppel ever accompanied their spouses to Biarritz, the King and Mrs Keppel were able to live the life of a married couple, free of the social embarrassments that so often beset their relationship at home. During those weeks at Biarritz, writes one of Edward VII's biographers, 'Alice Keppel was Queen.'1

  It was only to be expected that France should be the country to provide the King with the setting for his annual spell of domestic bliss. The French understood this sort of thing so well: official mistresses, even royal official mistresses, were very much in the French tradition. And then France had always been Edward VII's favourite Continental country; it was the foreign country in which he felt most at home, in which he had enjoyed some of the most hedonistic days of his protracted youth.

  As Prince of Wales he had invariably spent these early spring weeks on the Riviera (at a carnival in Nice, noted an astonished French detective, the middle-aged Prince, masked and costumed, had behaved 'comme un jeune homme'2) but as King he preferred Biarritz. Its bracing Atlantic breezes seemed not only to relieve his chronic bronchial troubles but to discourage the sort of smart society that flocked to the South of France. 'I no longer go to Cannes and Nice,' he once explained to his French bodyguard, 'because you meet too many princes there. I should be obliged to spend all my time in paying and receiving visits, whereas I come to the Continent to rest.'3

  Biarritz was mercifully free not only of visit-exchanging royals, but of the statesmen, politicians and diplomats who crowded those other Continental resorts favoured by Edward VII – Bad Homburg in the German Empire and Marienbad in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Not that the King minded this blend of social and political activity; on the contrary, he revelled in it. In Marienbad particularly (in which, since 1903, he spent several weeks from mid-August onwards) much of the King's time was given over to informal talks with other holidaying or cure-seeking political figures. Indeed, it was as much through these casual discussions, often with no British minister in attendance, as through his more spectacular state visits that Edward VII gained his somewhat exaggerated reputation as an accomplished royal diplomat. In so-called spa diplomacy, which was such a feature of political life before the First World War, Edward VII had great faith.

  But at Biarritz it was different. Here the King's days, if no less active, were entirely given over to recreation. At the beginning of March each year, having spent a few days in Paris en route, the King would settle into a suite of rooms at the Hotel du Palais. Accompanying him would be a doctor, two equerries, two valets and two footmen. Compared with Queen Victoria, who used to be accompanied by scores of people and who would take over an entire hotel for her annual stay in the South of France, Edward VII's suite was very modest.

  Waiting for him in Biarritz would be Mrs Keppel. She never, for some reason, accompanied her royal lover to Marienbad. It has been suggested that whereas, in tolerant and republican France, her presence was quite acceptable, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Edward VII was a visitor to the domain of the stiff-backed old Emperor Franz Josef, she would have been less welcome. It was true that Franz Josef had a long-standing mistress of his own, Katharine Schratt, but unlike Mrs Keppel, Frau Schratt was never openly paraded. And Edward VII thought too highly of Alice to subject her to the indignity of a clandestine existence, even for a few weeks. Mrs Keppel's presence in Biarritz might not actually have been announced in the court circular but the King made no secret of the fact that she was there.

  Alice Keppel's journey to Biarritz for her annual 'Easter holiday' would be conducted with almost as much precision as the King's. Accompanied by her two daughters, their governess, their nurse, a ladies' maid and a courier supplied by the palace, she would leave in a specially reserved carriage from Victoria station. Her huge
studded wardrobe trunks, tall enough to stand up in and always stored upright, would be put in the van, while her smaller luggage – hat-boxes, shoe-boxes, overnight suitcases, food hampers, medicine chest, hold-all, rugs, cushions and, most important of all, her travelling jewel-case – would be stored in the carriage.

  On the boat there was always a special suite of cabins reserved for the family and, on arrival in Calais, Mrs Keppel would be formally received by the chef-de-gare who would personally escort her through customs. Her luggage was never searched. To avoid the stares of the curious (for by now, of course, all the passengers would know that the fashionably dressed lady in the private carriage was Madame Keppel, la maîtresse du Roi) Alice would insist that the family keep well away from the restaurant car and that they eat their meals from baskets in their compartments.

  Before going to sleep the beautiful Alice would be transformed into an almost unrecognisable creature. Her voluptuous body would be hidden under a shapeless nightgown; her chestnut hair would be pushed into an outsize mob-cap; her face and neck would be liberally creamed; and her lustrous, blue-green eyes would be covered by 'night-spectacles'. She would then take a powerful sleeping draught and, as the wagon-lits went hurtling south through the dark French countryside, she would sleep as though dead. 'Sometimes,' remembers her daughter Sonia, 'I would peer over the edge of my berth at Mama and, in the weird, blue ceiling-light, her white face, with its black-bandaged eyes, looked ghastly.'4