In her autobiography Margot Asquith described her first weekend party as the prime minister’s wife at Windsor Castle in June 1908. At prayers the King, Queen and their daughter Princess Victoria sat in a box, Alice Keppel sat below:
We heard a fine sermon upon men who justify their actions, have no self-knowledge and never face life squarely, but I do not think many people listened to it.
For tea all motored to Virginia Water. The King was in a filthy temper. The Queen, ‘with her amazing grace and in her charming way’, tapped his arm, pointed to his car and invited Mrs Keppel to accompany him. At dinner, ‘at 15 to 9’, Mrs Keppel, the Asquiths and others assembled, standing, in a room awaiting the entrance of the King and Queen. The Queen ‘looked divine in a raven’s wing dress, contrasting with the beautiful blue of the Garter ribbon and her little head a blaze of diamonds’. After dinner, at adjacent tables, Henry Asquith played bridge with the Queen and ‘the King made a four with Alice Keppel, Lady Savile and the Turkish Ambassador.’
‘For mama’, Violet wrote, ‘lack of self-confidence was unthinkable.’ Mrs Keppel’s confidence rested in her body, ‘my mother’s ripe curves’, wrote Sonia, ‘were much admired’, her clothes and jewellery, blue eyes ‘large, humorous, kindly and discerning’, her conversation, ‘bold, amusing and frank’, her aptitude for bridge, her social status. She was the Honourable Mrs George Keppel, daughter of Admiral Sir William Edmonstone, wife of the third son of the seventh Earl of Albemarle and mistress of the King.
She was thought to manage her regal lover with political shrewdness and wifely concern. Sir Charles Hardinge, aide to the King, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Foreign Office and Viceroy of India, wrote of the ‘excellent influence’ she always exercised:
There were one or two occasions when the King was in disagreement with the Foreign Office and I was able, through her, to advise the King with a view to the policy of Government being accepted. She was very loyal to the King and patriotic at the same time.
It would have been difficult to find any other lady who would have filled the part of friend to King Edward with the same loyalty and discretion.
Friend was an acceptable euphemism. Rules of precedence were disregarded in deference to her charms. Bertie placed her next to the Archbishop of Canterbury at dinner which, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres wrongly surmised, ‘he would never have done if she had been, as generally supposed, his mistress – it would have been an insult to the Church and utterly unlike him’.
At a dinner at Crichel Down in December 1907, not attended by Bertie, she was placed next to his nephew and enemy Kaiser William II of Germany so ‘she might have the opportunity of talking to him’. The Austrian Ambassador, Count Mensdorff, a second cousin of Bertie’s, wondered ‘what sort of report she sent back to Sandringham’. Alice got on well enough with the Kaiser to send him, care of the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace, a photograph of a new portrait of herself. It showed her with plunging neckline, flicking at her pearls. ‘Dear Mrs Keppel,’ the Kaiser replied, ‘Will you kindly allow me to thank you most warmly for the splendid photograph you sent me. It is very artistic & also very like you, & shows that the picture must be very well painted.’
Mrs Keppel pleased Bertie in bed, influenced his judgement, partnered him at bridge, pandered to his little ways, fussed over his welfare. The King’s Assistant Private Secretary Sir Frederick Ponsonby – pronounced ‘Punsonby’ – described in Recollections of Three Reigns a déjeuner in a restaurant garden at St-Cloud in Paris. Mrs Keppel insisted that a man at an adjacent table be vetted. She said he had criminal features:
She was convinced I had given the police the wrong name of the restaurant and that there we were at the mercy of any apache who fancied robbery and any anarchist who loved assassination.
The man, apparently, was ‘one of the best and most trusted detectives in the force’.
And, in 1905, she wrote with her customary tact and discretion to the King’s alter ego, his boon companion the rakish Marquis Luis de Soveral, Portuguese Ambassador, nicknamed ‘the Blue Monkey’ for his shadowy growth of beard and mischievous way with the ladies:
I want you to try to get the King to see a proper doctor about his knee. Perhaps the Queen would 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. This I know ought to be seen at once for it he gets water on the knee this might mean a stiff knee for life.
Cher Soveral
From your affectionate old friend
Alice Keppel
(Bertie had trouble with this knee after breaking it in July 1898. He fell down the spiral staircase at Waddesdon Manor, home of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Things were made worse when the carrying chair, used to get him to the Windsor train, broke on the passenger bridge at Aylesbury station.)
In a memoir, Customs and Characters, Peter Quennell wrote of Mrs Keppel that in a tableau vivant of her time she should have played Britannia. Like Lady Thatcher some decades later, she seemed to personify her country, rule the waves and have her way with English men. Lady Cecilia McKenna, Alice’s niece, said she
