But niceties are now scrutinized for what they conceal. In 1992 Princess Diana and her husband separated. She found it unacceptable for him, however exalted his rank, to be the lover of another woman while married to her. ‘There were three of us in this marriage and it was a bit crowded,’ she told the world. The triangle gave her ‘rampant bulimia’. Mrs Keppel would not have sympathized. For her it was not how things were that mattered but how they appeared. Her precepts were those of Society: discretion, manners, charm. The appearance of civilized marriage was as imperative as a hat at Ascot, pearls and furs. It was her art to be Bertie’s boudoir belle while he was Prince of Wales then King and, if not a pillar of the Establishment, then at least a cornice or an architrave.
She served the Crown and did not allow jealousy and sexual possession to blur her manners or her style. On 10 December 1936 Bertie’s grandson, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee. Mrs Keppel dining at the Ritz was heard to declare, ‘Things were done much better in my day.’
In her day she both shared a bed with the King and advised him on presents for his wife. Queen Alexandra collected pieces by Fabergé. At Mrs Keppel’s suggestion Bertie commissioned jewelled, gold models of all the Sandringham animals for his Queen. Artists sent from St Petersburg made wax maquettes for the stonecutters. The Fabergé workshops produced a glittering farmyard of heifers, goats, cocks, pigs. Persimmon – Bertie’s Derby-winning horse – was there and Caesar, his Norfolk terrier, with rubies for eyes, a gold bell and a collar inscribed ‘I belong to the King’.
In her turn Mrs Keppel’s daughter, Violet, gave her lover, Vita Sackville-West, a symbolic present, a token of their tryst. It was a Venetian ring of red lava, carved with a woman’s head. It had belonged to a fifteenth-century doge. Violet acquired it on a visit with her mother to the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen of Bond Street. He supplied the Prince of Wales with paintings for Sandringham, Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House. (Bertie liked pictures of yachting scenes, battles and pretty women without much on.) Sir Joseph invited Violet to choose a present. She was six at the time, had a precocious heart and cried when her mother tried to make her put the ring back and choose a Victorian doll.
Seven years later, in 1908, Violet and Vita, accompanied by governesses, went to Florence for the summer to learn Italian. Violet cried again when they parted for home, told Vita she loved her and gave her the doge’s ring. By 1919 this love had become passionate and volatile. As a pledge to each other, and in sexual rejection of their husbands, they took off their wedding rings. The following year Vita wrote of the doge’s ring, ‘I have it now, of course I have it, just as I have her.’ In her will she decreed that it be returned to Violet. When she died in August 1962 her husband Harold Nicolson duly sent it with a circumspect letter. And when Violet died a decade later the ring was returned to her nephew so that it might form part of the Keppel memorabilia.
But the doge’s ring was a memento of unacceptable love. Private devotions were one thing, social conformity another. A myriad of hypocrisies preserved the relationship between Mrs Keppel and the King. Marriage vows and even the Coronation Oath were rituals and semblances that preserved the status quo. An indiscretion of dress or etiquette mattered more than adultery. Noblesse oblige was the rule. Divorce was unthinkable because of loss of status, however compromised the relationship between husband and wife. When Violet in 1920 tried to extricate herself from a marriage that was worse than a sham her mother warned, ‘You’ll be a laughing stock, becoming Miss Keppel again.’
Group photographs of huge shooting parties commemorate Mrs Keppel’s weekends with Bertie. He sits at the centre, portly and assured, Homburg tilted, hands folded on his walking stick, flanked by ladies in ankle-length gowns, their hats like nesting birds. All look inscrutably at the camera. Nothing is revealed of the secret relationships between other women’s husbands and other men’s wives, of the elaborate games of adultery decorously conducted at these country-house weekends.
These were Edwardian heydays for Bertie, Alice and their set. Taxation was low, servants cheap:
Money was freely spent and wealth was everywhere in evidence. Moreover it was possessed largely by the nicest people, who entertained both in London and in the country … The champagne vintages from ’eighty to ’eighty-seven were infinitely superior to anything since produced.
Strict ceremony regulated their lives. Mrs Keppel, as the King’s Lady, would change four times a day. She required two maids to iron and lay out her clothes, curl her hair, scent her bathwater, wind her watches.
It was a good hostess’s duty to attend to the ‘disposition of bedrooms’, Vita Sackville-West wrote in her satirical novel, The Edwardians:
It was so necessary to be tactful and at the same time discreet … the name of each guest would be neatly written on a card slipped into a tiny brass frame on the bedroom door … Lord Robert Gore was in the Red Silk Room; Mrs Levison just across the passage. That was as it should be.
The housekeeper, maids and valets
