The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  He told her: “You have become more serious, more independent and I have felt for some time that I cannot be of much use to you in your life.… Your continued devotion to me in spite of my many shortcomings has astonished as well as pleased and touched me!”57

  Daisy abdicated as mistress in January 1898. Alice Keppel was on the scene in February 1898. She makes her first appearance in Bertie’s diary thus: “27 February 1898. Dine with Hon G. and Mrs. Keppel at 2 Wilton Crescent 8:45.”58 Mrs. Keppel was twenty-nine. She had thick chestnut hair, alabaster Scottish skin, wide shoulders, and a large bust. She was not photogenic. She had a deep throaty voice and she was very funny.

  There are several stories about Bertie’s first meeting with Alice. According to one version, related by Anita Leslie, it was at Sandown races where Bertie accosted Anita’s grandfather John Leslie, who had Alice on his arm, demanded an introduction, and then strolled off with the lady.59 Another story claims that they met at dinner with Lady Howe, and the prince spent the whole evening talking with Alice on the top landing “which rather shocked people, especially when they sat for a short time on two steps.”60 Others related that they met through Clarissa Bischoffsheim, society hostess wife of the German Jewish financier.61 It was characteristic of Mrs. Keppel not to circulate her own version. She wrote no memoirs, and very few letters have survived; she was as clamlike as Daisy Warwick was gushingly indiscreet.

  That Mrs. George Keppel should have become acquainted with the prince was hardly surprising. Through her marriage in 1891 to a younger son of the Earl of Albemarle, she had joined the outer circle of Marlborough House. Dutch by descent, the Keppels had been a dynasty of generals, admirals, and court officials. George Keppel’s great-uncle, the five-foot-tall Admiral “Harry” Keppel, was a favorite at Marlborough House, and the tiny Princess Maud was nicknamed “Harry” after him. George’s brother Derek was equerry to the Duke of York.a

  Alice’s family, the Edmonstones, were old established Scots landowners. Her father was an admiral who inherited the baronetcy in 1871, and she was brought up at Duntreath Castle, fifteen miles from Glasgow. Money from coal and railways had paid for the rebuilding of the ancient castle in the Scots baronial style. Alice’s daughter Violet remembered it smelling of cedar wood, tuberoses, gunpowder, and, oddly, minced meat.

  At heart, Alice Keppel was a Scots gentry woman: “Intelligent, downright, devoid of pettiness or prejudice,” as Violet wrote, “she loved a good argument, especially a political one.”62 She spoke clipped English, she was brisk and shrewd, and her feet were planted firmly on the ground. The youngest in a family of nine, as a child she was inseparable from her brother, Archie, the only boy. He was a year older than her and, according to Violet, they were like twins; “they seemed to complete one another.” Archie detested shooting and “winced” through the Glorious Twelfth of August, the opening day of the grouse shooting season, while Alice swung sure-footedly across the moors, adored by all the keepers. “My mother all dynamism, initiative and, yes, virility, my uncle all gentleness, acquiescence, sensibility.”63 Masculinity was a characteristic of all Bertie’s favorites. Lillie Langtry grew mannish in old age, and the hard-riding Daisy Warwick often lamented that she was not born a man.

  Alice Keppel was modern. She smoked cigarettes, and she was very interested in money and how to make it, the more so as George Keppel was a third son and had very little. The Albemarles were grander than the Edmonstones but not as rich, and George and Alice started married life with only £20,000 of capital. George left the army and went into business, attempting to capitalize on his name. He did not prosper. In 1898, he was sued by a company promoter named Richard Prior for breach of contract when he resigned as director of the Grand Hotel and Theatre of Varieties in Ipswich. George won the case. The judge ruled it “a monstrous thing” if a gentleman “should be liable to a suit at the hands of the company promoter for all the losses which he said he had made because this gentleman had withdrawn his name.”64

  It was George, as Rebecca West once wrote, who was “the real beauty of the two.”65 He was six foot three and almost too immaculately dressed, with a curled mustache. Some said he was sexually cold. Perhaps this was what Violet meant when she said that “he never really grew up.”66

  Violet, the Keppels’ first child, was born in June 1894. In adult life she fantasized that the king was her father. She claimed to be “Fitz Edward,” and demanded to be addressed as Highness. But Violet was a mythomane and there is no reason to believe that Bertie knew Alice Keppel in 1893, let alone made love to her. Rumor, however, alleged that George Keppel was not Violet’s father. Her biological father was supposed to be a Yorkshire banker and MP named Ernest Beckett. He was a glamorous widower, his American wife having died in 1891, and he allegedly had an affair with Alice Keppel. Whether Violet was the result, as is sometimes suggested, is impossible to tell.67 Beckett was at the same time involved with another woman, a voluptuous South African divorcée, by whom he had a son who was born eight months after Violet.68 For a married woman to have an affair before the birth of her first child was to defy social convention, and Mrs. Keppel was a conventional woman. Violet in later life never mentioned Ernest Beckett,69 but she spoke of him when she was young; as for Alice Keppel, having committed this one indiscretion, she perhaps became super-discreet as a reaction. We shall probably never know.70

  In July 1898, Bertie stayed at Waddesdon with Ferdinand de Rothschild. He wrote in his diary: “Prince of Wales falls downstairs … and fractures kneecap. Leave Waddesdon 3:30.… Dine in sitting room at Marlborough House.”71 Daisy, who was also a guest, related how she was running down a spiral staircase to breakfast when she heard a groan and discovered the heir to the throne lying at the bottom of the stairs unable to move. He had heard a bone crack. Daisy’s husband appeared and tied the leg straight out onto one of the carrying poles of an invalid chair. The local doctor was called; he allowed the prince to eat breakfast with his leg down, which he did in excruciating pain: “He was ghastly white with beads of perspiration running down his forehead.”72 Some thought that the doctor’s failure to splint the leg worsened the injury. Bertie insisted on returning to London, and at Aylesbury station his invalid chair broke and he was dropped humiliatingly and painfully onto the passenger bridge.73

  Back at Marlborough House, the leg was placed in splints, and Bertie showed “wonderful pluck” in spite of the doctors’ prognosis that his knee would always be stiff. Alix nursed him, and when Carrington visited, he thought the fifty-three-year-old princess, who was wearing a black-and-white-striped silk gown, looked about thirty-five. “Do you remember dining with us in this very room years ago,” Alix asked Carrington, “when I was so ill and laid up?”74

  Bertie raged at his enforced inactivity. “All my plans are upset, and I can make no future ones, nor can I at present form any idea when I shall be on my legs again.”75 For almost three months his diary is a painful blank.

  Bertie was moved to Cowes, to recuperate on board the Osborne. Queen Victoria visited in her wheelchair, finding the prince lying on a couch under a tent that took up the entire stern of the ship.76 Early in August, Alix was summoned to Denmark, where her mother lay dying. She left her daughter Victoria behind to nurse her father. On board the Osborne, Bertie became alarmingly ill with pleurisy, and Victoria was forced to send for Laking to apply a blister. Bertie for the first time in his life grew close to his daughter. Alix summoned her to join the family at the Queen of Denmark’s funeral, but Victoria hated Denmark, and Bertie refused to allow her to travel.77 He made no secret of his irritation with Alix, who dawdled in Denmark after her mother’s death. “Surely,” he told George, “dear Mama might for once in her life settle a definite date for her departure.… It is most inconvenient being kept in the dark for so long.” Communication between husband and wife was nonexistent. “I have given up writing to her as she never writes to me now, not even a line to give me an indication when she thinks of leaving.”78

  D
esperate to avoid the boredom of empty days, Bertie summoned old friends to visit. Daisy arrived, and found him ill-tempered: “His liver is bad and the enforced idleness is not making him look out pleasantly on the world.”79 Bertie wired Christopher Sykes, who was in Homburg recovering from a stroke. Unable even in extremis to say no, Sykes obeyed the summons. The journey nearly killed him. For Sykes’s nephew, also Christopher, who wrote a brilliant, angry essay about his uncle and the prince, this was the climax of a long career of royal selfishness and bullying. The “great Xtopher” had almost bankrupted himself in entertaining the prince. But if Sykes was a victim, Bertie was an unwitting oppressor; he had nothing but pity for his old friend, he visited him in London, and he wrote to Sir Tatton Sykes imploring him to provide for his brother.80

  At Marlborough House, a new court was taking shape. Francis Knollys, standing at his tall desk writing letters in a bold black hand, had by now served Bertie for almost thirty years. He was never quite comfortable in the twentieth century. There were three people who were to form an inner clique. One was Ernest Cassel. The others were the Marquis de Soveral and Mrs. George Keppel. All three were already in place by 1899.

  Soveral, the Portuguese minister in London, was known as the Blue Monkey. His blue-black hair, jet-black imperial beard and heavy eyebrows, and the white flower in his buttonhole make him instantly recognizable among the faces lined up for the innumerable royal photographs. Bertie had known him since he was first posted to London in 1884, but it was after 1897 that Soveral became a central figure at Marlborough House. In August 1899, he accompanied the prince to Marienbad for his cure, and Bertie found him a “charming” traveling companion and “a great resource.”81 Soveral’s clowning belied a sharp mind, and he was exceptionally well informed on European politics. He was flirtatious and liked to pose as a lady-killer. Being infinitely discreet, he conducted several flirtations at the same time. He was Alix’s favorite, filling the place in her affections left by Oliver Montagu; he always danced the first waltz at every ball with her, and he knew how to pitch his voice in a way that made it possible for her to hear.b82

  Have you seen The Importance of Being Ernest? Bertie asked Soveral. “No, Sir,” came the answer, “but I have seen the importance of being Ernest Cassel.”83

  The important Cassel filled the place left by Baron Hirsch, Bertie’s financial adviser, who died suddenly in 1896. Cassel, a forty-five-year-old financial superstar, had been Hirsch’s protégé. Hirsch allegedly left instructions to Cassel, his executor, that all Bertie’s debts to him, which were rumored to amount to well over £300,000, should be written off.84 Cassel took over the management of Bertie’s investments, but on the astonishing understanding that he himself would absorb any losses.

  Bertie and Cassel looked so similar—both bearded, cigar-smoking endomorphs dressed in double-breasted suits with rings on their fingers—that they were often mistaken for each other. It was even rumored that they were related—hence the joke about “Windsor Cassel.”c Cassel was born in Cologne in 1852, the son of a Jewish banker, and came to England at seventeen. He was engaged as confidential clerk to the London house of the bankers Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, and, backed by Hirsch, whose wife was a Bischoffsheim, he amassed a massive fortune, speculating in railways. After the early death from tuberculosis of his wife, he secretly converted to Catholicism—an emotional act for a proud and humorless Jew who disdained small talk. He was greedy for honors, collected orders, and spent money on racehorses. Better than anyone, he understood the uses to which money could be put; he made himself indispensable to the prince’s charitable projects.

  Cassel became Bertie’s most intimate male friend. From 1899, Bertie dined regularly with him either at 48 Grosvenor Square or at Moulton Paddocks, Cassel’s opulent home near Newmarket. The prince was witness at the wedding of Cassel’s only daughter, Maud, to the MP Wilfrid Ashley in 1901, and godfather to their daughter, asking for the child to be christened Edwardina (fortunately for her, perhaps, this was contracted to Edwina). Bertie bombarded Cassel with indecipherable notes about his investments.85 The symbol Ec, presumably for Ernest Cassel, starts to appear in his diaries in 1899. By 1901, Ec is his most frequent correspondent of those noted in the diary, and the initials appear sixty-three times that year. In 1904, the King wrote forty-five letters to Ec, the same number in 1905, and fifty in 1906.

  Finding his accommodation on Grosvenor Square too cramped, Cassel bought Brook House on Park Lane in 1905. He decorated the vast mansion with the rarest Italian marble. At the head of the staircase hung a portrait of King Edward. This was disconcertingly lifelike, causing guests to straighten themselves, and it proved a hazard, as some slipped and fell. Daisy Warwick considered that it was almost impossible to distinguish whether the portrait was of Bertie or of Cassel himself.86

  The third new name that features regularly is the Hon. Mrs. George Keppel.

  Bertie didn’t pretend to be in love with Alice Keppel: “It is rather hard that I may not prefer the society of one lady to others without being supposed to be infatuated with her!”87 Given his growing ill health and possible impotence, it’s likely that he rarely if ever slept with her. But he was determined that his new favorite should not be persecuted in the way that Daisy had been. She must be accepted by society, and even by Alix.

  That season, the word went out that wherever the prince was invited, the Hon. George and Mrs. Keppel must be asked, too. In September, Bertie paid a visit to the Edmonstone castle of Duntreath. “Mrs. GK was as usual the life and soul of the party,” he told Emma Bourke.88 In 1899, the Keppels moved to the fashionable address of 30 Portman Square (now demolished). This was a square much favored by the Marlborough House set; indeed, it was almost an enclave of Bertie’s court. The Keppels’ neighbors included the Dukes of Fife and Manchester and (after 1901) Mrs. Eddy Bourke. It seems unlikely that George Keppel could have paid the rent out of his earnings. His business dealings were by that point an embarrassment. In 1900, a fraudulent company of which he was director wound up with debts of £4,000 and no assets, having tried to promote three companies, each of which failed.89 George was found a job by Sir Thomas Lipton as wine manager in New York, “so he is provided for and got out of the way.”90 On the night of the 1901 census, Mrs. Keppel was alone at 30 Portman Square with two children, seven female servants, and three manservants—a substantial household. In December 1899, Alice Keppel paid her first visit to a Sandringham house party—unaccompanied by George.91 On the day Bertie returned to London, he dined for the first time at 30 Portman Square.92

  The people who invited the prince to house parties changed, too. Waddesdon was no longer an option: Ferdinand de Rothschild died suddenly in 1898. Often, however, when the people changed, the houses remained the same. The de Falbes died, but Bertie continued to stay at their house, Luton Hoo, which was bought by Sir Julius Wernher, the German financier and randlord.93 Elveden, in Norfolk, was another house that was itself almost a royal subject. When Bertie’s friend the Maharaja Duleep Singh died, it was bought by Lord Iveagh. Bertie once again slotted it into his shooting calendar. Glenmuick, near Balmoral, the estate that had once belonged to Sir James (MacTavish) Mackenzie, was bought by Lord Glenesk, who, as Algernon Borthwick, had founded The Morning Post, and Bertie became his guest of honor.

  War was declared against the Boer republics in South Africa in October 1899. At first it barely impinged on Bertie’s stately autumn progress of house parties and shooting. But the defeats of December 1899, known as Black Week, jolted the monarchy into action. The Queen was stirred to an unwonted display of leadership. “Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house,” she told Balfour. “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”94 She canceled her plan of spending Christmas at Osborne and remained at Windsor, where she entertained the wives and children of soldiers at tea. “The Queen is so right,” wrote Bertie.95

  “I am very despondent and can think of nothing else,” wrote th
e prince in January.96 The war gave him a new purpose. Day after day, as the government poured more and more men into South Africa, Bertie inspected detachments of troops before they sailed.97 Tirelessly, he visited military hospitals and barracks, and he chaired the Prince of Wales’s Committee to coordinate the volunteer agencies that proliferated to help the war effort.98 With Alix, he traveled to Southampton to receive a hospital ship returning full of wounded soldiers. “Oh! this terrible war!” Alix kept saying as she made the round of each man’s bed. A burly six-foot Highlander was addressed as “Poor little fellow.”99

  The British reverses delighted the kaiser. He visited Sandringham in November 1899 for the first time since 1880, restoring relations with Bertie after the Vienna incident—though the German foreign minister Bernhard von Bülow likened uncle and nephew to “a fat malicious tom-cat, playing with a shrew-mouse,” and Alix giggled at the special barber William brought to curl his mustache.100 But the kaiser was unable to resist rubbing salt in the wounds of Britain’s humiliations in South Africa. To Bertie he wrote after Black Week: “Instead of the Angels’ song ‘Peace on earth and Goodwill to Men’ the new century will be greeted by shrieks of dying men killed and maimed by lyddite shells.… Truly fin de siècle!”101 He appended his own military observations and plan of campaign. On 4 February he wrote again, observing that the British were good losers, which was just as well. “Last year in the great cricket match of England v Australia, the former took the latter’s victory quietly, with chivalrous acknowledgement of her opponent.”102 This was too much. Bertie exploded that the war was nothing like a cricket match. “The British Empire is now fighting for its very existence, as you know full well.”103 When Lord Roberts’s strategy in South Africa succeeded, William claimed the credit. Little did Bertie know that his nephew was, meanwhile, intriguing with the Russians to invade India.