I quite made up my mind that when he came to the Throne, the King would have such a sense of his own dignity and be so determined to play the part of monarch that He would only dine at exceptional houses. But after dining with Cassel of course he can dine anywhere. I much regret it.
Bertie, if he knew of such sentiments, was above them. He appreciated racial diversity, entrepreneurial success and capitalist enterprise.
Born in 1852 in Cologne, Cassel came from an orthodox family, his father a banker with an unremarkable income. True to the legend of the self-made plutocrat Cassel left for England in 1869 when he was seventeen in the clothes he wore and with a violin. In London he worked for Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, merchant bankers who made loans to foreign markets then encouraged investment on the stock exchange. It was an area of finance prone to price rigging and crashes. If shaky governments defaulted on repayments bond-holders had no redress. Contentious loans were negotiated in central America and elsewhere.
Cassel steered a course, was promoted and, within ten years, had personal capital of £150,000, stakes in all manner of enterprises and worked only for himself. He did not entrench himself as a director or chairman of any of the companies in which he held substantial stakes. He was, said his biographer Anthony Allfrey, ‘one of a new breed, an economic imperialist, a lone strategist’. Such partnerships as he formed were expedient and temporary.
He made a fortune on the new railroads which ‘guzzled capital’. Thousands of miles of track were needed across the American prairies. In temporary partnership with Jacob Schiff, director of the New York bank Kuhn Loeb, he loaned capital to and bought shares in the big railroad companies: the Canadian Pacific, Chicago and Atlantic, Denver and Rio Grande, Texas and Pacific, Texas and St Louis, the New York Ontario.
He became a dollar multi-millionaire, a major stockholder worldwide. He drew dividend from investment in American beet sugar, South African gold and diamond mines, the Westinghouse Electric Company, the Central London Railway (now the Central Line), Vickers’ armaments and shipbuilding factories. In Sweden he invested in the whole of the country’s capital market and industrial infrastructure. He arranged government loans to China, Japan, Russia, Uruguay, Egypt.
With Cassel’s sagacious advice and Bertie’s indulgence, lucrative investments were made for Mrs Keppel, too. She had shares in the Argentine Great Western railway, the Cordoba Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Great Northern, the Illinois Central, the Chicago St Louis and New Orleans, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the Transvaal Diamond Mining Company, the British South Africa Company. ‘When she came into his life twelve years ago she was bankrupt,’ Lord Esher said of her when Bertie died in 1910.
In her novel The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West gave Mrs Keppel the pseudonym Romola Cheyne and mocked insider dealings and her acquisitive skills:
investments bulked heavy in their talk, and other people’s incomes, and the merits of various stocks and shares; also the financial shrewdness of Mrs Cheyne … who cropped up constantly in the conversation; Romola Cheyne, it appeared, had made a big scoop in rubber last week – but some veiled sneers accompanied this subject, for how could Romola fail, it was asked, with such sources of information at her disposal? Dear Romola: what a clever woman. And never malicious, said someone. No, said someone else; too clever to be malicious.
Kingship, politics, business, adultery and personal profit intertwined. Wheels of enterprise need lubrication. In 1902 Cassel wrote to Bertie from the Cairo Savoy about his new Egyptian Agricultural Bank: ‘The poorer classes have not been slow to take advantage of the borrowing facilities placed at their disposal.’ Within a few months the poorer classes were paying interest on a million sterling. The Khedive – the Egyptian viceroy – wanted to visit England and hoped King Edward would visit Egypt. ‘The Khedive is very susceptible of kind and considerate treatment,’ Cassel wrote. ‘I think his Highness is very pleased to have found in me a medium through which he can communicate with your Majesty.’
Bertie encouraged Cassel’s skills. Codes of practice were not scrutinized. ‘You will have doubtless heard,’ he wrote to him on 1 June 1902
that Peace is signed [the Treaty of Vereeniging ending the Boer War] which is the greatest blessing that has been conferred on this country for a long time! ‘Consols’ are sure to go up tomorrow. Could you not make a large investment for me? It is to be hoped that the Chancellor of the Exchequer may announce on Wednesday not to put the extra pence on the Income Tax … I send these lines by hand. Excuse great haste.
Beneath the trappings of great wealth Cassel remained a loner, his private life bleak. After three years of marriage in 1881 his English Catholic wife, Amalia Maud Maxwell, died of consumption. At her dying wish he converted to her faith. She left him with a baby daughter ‘Maudie’ – Amalia Mary Maud. His divorced sister Wilhelmina Schönbrunn and her two children came from Germany to keep house for him. She reverted to the name of Cassel and some supposed her to be his wife.
Cassel emulated Bertie’s style and extravagance but without his louche appetites. In 1905 he bought 28 and 29 Park Lane and, in three years, and with 800 tons of white Tuscan marble created Brook House, a mansion to match the King’s Marlborough House. Twenty-foot-high pillars adorned the hall and glass-domed staircase. Visitors who climbed the crimson-carpeted stairs saw life-size portraits of Bertie and Ernest that showed how alike they looked. An oak-panelled dining room seated a hundred. There were thirty bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, six kitchens, a staff of thirty-one, hydraulic lifts, footmen in full livery with powdered hair, paintings by Frans Hals, Romney, Reynolds, Murillo and Van Dyck, Renaissance bronzes, Dresden china, Chinese jade, English silver and antique furniture, much of it chosen on the
