Mrs Keppel turned adultery into an art. Her demeanour and poise countered ‘whispers, taints and horrible noxious suspicions’. Clear as to what she wanted – prosperity and status – she challenged none of the proprieties of her class. She knew, said Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, who lived in Blenheim Palace in unhappy proximity to the Duke, ‘how to choose her friends with shrewd appraisal’.
Even her enemies – and they were few – she treated kindly which, considering the influence she wielded with the Prince, indicated a generous nature. She invariably knew the choicest scandal, the price of stocks, the latest political move; no one could better amuse the Prince during the tedium of the long dinners etiquette decreed.
Bertie when King asked Margot Asquith1 if she had ever known a woman with a kinder and sweeter nature than Alice’s: ‘I could truthfully answer that I had not.’
In her later years, Mrs Keppel displayed a large signed photograph of Queen Alexandra in her drawing room to show how far approval reigned. The Queen, too, had to appear not to mind her husband carrying on with a woman twenty-four years younger than herself. An extant letter from her to Mrs Keppel expresses formal concern at the illness of Alice’s husband:
Dear Mrs Keppel
I am so sorry to hear of yr husband’s illness in New York & that you should have this terrible long journey before you in addition to all the great anxiety … I do hope that on your arrival you should find the attack of typhoid less severe than you should fear.
Yrs sincerely
Alexandra
Less formal concerns were not recorded, though one year her daughter-in-law the Duchess of York wrote to her husband George when Mrs Keppel arrived at Cowes, ‘What a pity Mrs G.K. is again to the fore! How annoyed Mama will be.’ And on another occasion the Queen called her lady-in-waiting, Charlotte Knollys, to share the view from a window at Sandringham of Bertie and Alice looking fat and comic in a carriage in the grounds.
Dressed in gowns by Worth, with collars of diamonds and ropes of pearls, Mrs Keppel was there at the King’s left hand for racing at Ascot, sailing at Cowes, grouse shoots at Sandringham, sea air and casinos at Biarritz and Monte Carlo. She dazzled and seduced. Her daughters were enthralled. ‘As a child’, Violet wrote in an unpublished piece, ‘I saw Mama in a blaze of glory, resplendent in a perpetual tiara.’ Her mother, more than the crowned queen, was the Queen of Hearts, the stuff of fairy tales. Her alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts, kindness and charm so overwhelmed the King that he gave her love and great riches. ‘I adore the unparalleled romance of her life,’ Violet wrote to her own lover:
My dear our respective mothers take some beating! I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers; anyhow I mean to have a jolly good try!
Mrs Keppel eclipsed her daughters. ‘We are not’, Violet wrote of herself and her sister Sonia, ‘as lovable, or as good looking, or as successful as our mother. We do not equal, still less surpass her. We make do and mend.’ Sonia concurred: ‘From my earliest childhood,’ she wrote in her autobiography, Edwardian Daughter,
she was invested for me with a brilliant, goddess-like quality … she could have decreed that her particular pedestal should have been made by Fabergé. I can picture her as she lay back among her lace pillows, her beautiful chestnut hair unbound around her shoulders …
And I can see the flowers sent as oblations to this goddess, the orchids, the malmaisons, the lilies. Great beribboned baskets of them, delivered in horse-drawn vans by a coachman and attendant in livery. They would have been banked in tall, cut-glass vases about her bed.
The great beribboned baskets were not from Mrs Keppel’s husband George, who had very little money or imagination. In Sonia’s memory her mother’s bedroom was always scented by flowers ‘and a certain elusive smell, like fresh green sap, that came from herself’. In such a bower, mother seemed a touch unreal: ‘My mother began as an atmosphere,’ Violet wrote,
luminous, resplendent … She not only had a gift of happiness, but she excelled in making others happy. She resembled a Christmas tree laden with presents for everyone.
She particularly excelled in making King Edward VII happy. He for his part excelled in making her very rich. They were lovers for the last twelve years of his life and fêted as principal guests by most of the owners of the great Edwardian country houses. Mrs Keppel was not welcomed by the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey near Sherwood Forest where life, said the Duchess of Marlborough, was ‘enshrined in a hyper-aristocratic niche’, nor by the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel, nor the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire where segregated prayers were said in the private chapel every morning before breakfast and every evening after tea. And Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville, in deference to Bertie’s wife excluded her from a party at Knole on 10 July 1898:
The Prince had wanted to invite Lady Warwick and also his new friend Mrs Keppel, but I told him that I preferred to ask some of the County ladies … especially as the Princess was coming. He acquiesced and was very nice about it.
Such rebuffs were few. Little Mrs George was openly escorted by the King at Chatsworth and Sandringham, where tea was a full-dress meal – ladies in gowns, lords and
