Mrs Keppel’s wealth was acquired with the skilled intervention of Sir Ernest Cassel. Bertie called him ‘the cleverest head in England’. Known as the ‘King’s Millionaire’, he worked magic on Bertie’s money. They looked alike. Both had beards, paunches, guttural voices, protuberant eyes, beringed hands and smoked cigars. ‘Always curtsy to the King, dear,’ the Keppel nanny adjured Violet and Sonia when she exhibited them in the drawing room as coffee was served. Sonia, as confused as Violet as to the significance of Majesty, curtsied to Cassel too. Both he and Bertie frequently gave the girls presents – a Fabergé egg, a jewelled bracelet. ‘I came to rely on him as a living form of gilt-edged security,’ Sonia said of Cassel, ‘a likeness which was enhanced by his wearing shirts with parallel stripes on them, like the bars in front of a cashier’s desk.’ He was a frequent visitor at 30 Portman Square and Mrs Keppel relied on him in such a way too.
Bertie when he became King said he wanted enough to ‘do it handsomely’. Parliament, with persuasion from his friend Sir Edward Hamilton, Joint Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, granted him an annual income of £470,000 – £85,000 more than to his mother and the equivalent of about £15 million now. But Bertie, a big spender, still had debts. His annual bills on his estates at Osborne on the Isle of Wight and Balmoral in the Highlands of Scotland alone were £40,000. Cassel helped. The poet and diarist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt recorded that at the time of the coronation the King’s debts were paid off by his friends, ‘one of whom is said to have lent £100,000 and satisfies himself with £25,000 in repayment plus a knighthood’.
On 7 March 1901, six weeks into his reign, Bertie gave Cassel all his spare capital to invest. At his office at 21 Old Broad Street, London, Cassel wrote in a ledger:
I hereby acknowledge having received from His Majesty the King the sum of twenty thousand six hundred and eighty five pounds. This sum is deposited with me for the purpose of being invested. The records of this and any future investments I may make on behalf of His Majesty will be kept in an account opened on my books this day entitled Special AA Account.
The following year Bertie asked him for £10,000 as he was ‘most anxious to pay off an acquisition of property’ near Sandringham. A few weeks after this payment Cassel wrote to Bertie: ‘Referring to our conversation about your Majesty’s investments, I have the honour to report that there is upwards of £30,000 available.’ Within a year, under Cassel’s husbandry, £20,685 had multiplied into more than £40,000.
The relationship was symbiotic. Bertie grew rich on Cassel’s ‘sagacious advice’, Cassel thrived on the King’s endorsement, the flurry of honours received, the sanction of the aristocracy, the peerage, the elite, the landowning class that dominated parliament and the armed and civil services, made the laws and owned most of the nation’s wealth. Bertie’s head endorsed the £7 million Cassel accrued as his private fortune.
After his coronation, Bertie made him a Privy Councillor. Cassel swore to ‘give his mind and opinion to the King’, to give ‘faith and allegiance’, to ‘keep secret all matters committed and revealed to him’. The King took him to the centre of his private life. Cassel dined and played bridge with him, absorbed his concerns about money, placed his bets, dealt with begging letters from ex-lovers, gave him and Mrs Keppel the use of his apartment in Paris and of his villas in Austria, Switzerland, Biarritz.
Giving faith and allegiance involved acceptance of the King’s special relationship with Little Mrs George. ‘My dear Cassel,’ Bertie wrote in September 1901 to him at Grosvenor Square, a few doors down from where Mrs Keppel would in time reside:
I have since heard that Mrs K will be back at the end of this month. So if you write to her at Hotel du Palais, Paris, I think she would probably be able to dine with you on Sunday week.
Cassel made Mrs Keppel and a number of influential aristocrats very rich – he invested for Lord Knollys and for Randolph and Winston Churchill. Lord Esher, responsible for the upkeep of the royal palaces, wrote of a visit to Churchill’s Bolton Street house in April 1908:
The drawing room is all in oak with books and one picture by Romney which is quite beautiful. The whole a gift from Cassel! These financiers always take up with the young rising politicians. It is very astute of them.
Cassel, though useful to the aristocracy, was not one of them. He was an arriviste, a Jew, without the genealogical credentials for acceptance into their closed world. He took no real pleasure in Edwardian patrician pursuits: country house weekends, shooting, bridge, gambling, adultery. He liked business, making money, acquiring status. His wealth secured him invitations, not friends. It kept at bay the anti-Semitism which writhed through patrician circles, detectable in the snide aside, private letter and dropped remark. Bourgeois, conservative and well-to-do, he wanted to assimilate. Proud to serve an English king, he avoided his fellow Jews and gave to gentile charities. Because of Bertie’s endorsement he did not have to hear what aristocrats really thought of him: ‘Israel in force,’ Lord Carrington wrote of a dinner for Bertie given by Albert Sassoon in July 1900, ‘Reuben Sassoon, Mr and Mrs Leo and Alfred Rothschild and that awful Sir Ernest Cassel who is in the highest favour, and of course Mr and Mrs George Keppel.’
Bertie’s association with Jews was an embarrassment to many of high-born gentile blood. It was not as unmentionable as the sexual orientation of his eldest son and of his lover’s eldest daughter, but it was a threat to their sense of society. Sir Edward Hamilton, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, wrote in his
