Cassel went through the motions of aristocratic pleasures but was not to the manner born. From Crichel he wrote to his daughter Maudie:
The party is like all these parties. Everything very well done … Weather delightful and the shoot excellent. I look on. The King is in good spirits and gracious as usual.
His games of bridge with Bertie and Little Mrs George were a service. ‘The King,’ he wrote to Maudie in April 1902 when he was a guest on the Royal Yacht, ‘is rather pleased with me because I made one or two mistakes at bridge.’ He hunted with the Quorn but looked, ‘a stout Teutonic gentleman in a pink coat, uncomfortable in it and on his horse’. He bred horses and gave them to Bertie’s friends. His colt, Handicapper, won the Two Thousand Guineas which earned Bertie’s respect and congratulations. In 1895 he registered to join the Jockey Club. Even with Bertie’s influence it took thirteen years before he was admitted.
In middle age, when he had massively accumulated all the trappings of success, he lamented, ‘I have had everything in life that I did not want and nothing that I did.’ Bertie had bestowed all honours: the Order of Merit, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. ‘Levee dress will be worn,’ read Cassel’s invitation to Buckingham Palace at noon on 18 December 1905,
those attending the Investiture will leave their Cocked Hats, Helmet etc in the Lower Hall. They should wear one glove on the left hand. Swords are not to be hooked up.
In Frederick Ponsonby’s view these decorations were cost-effective baubles. Bertie’s
greatest wish was to see men wearing as many as possible … A man who received a Grand Cross of some Order, value £25, was happier than a man who received a snuff-box worth £200, so monarchs saved their purses and pandered to the unwholesome craving of human beings to wear decorations which they had in no way earned.
Sir Edward Hamilton said Bertie ‘liked to have a rich man at his beck and call and by this means is able to benefit the Favourite’. The benefit showed. At Portman Square Mrs Keppel’s sham Louis XV chairs and imitation Meissen china were replaced by the real thing. Three bathrooms were installed and more staff acquired: the butler Mr Rolphe, the cook Mrs Wright, Miss Draper the housekeeper, maids called Katie and Peggie, George the ‘boot boy’, a nanny, a nurserymaid, a governess. Joseph Duveen of Bond Street advised on pictures and antiques for Mrs Keppel, too. She visited him in her electric brougham driven by Mr Freed.
Her social visits dovetailed with the King’s. He hated being apart from her. Lord Esher, a close friend of Bertie’s, who for two years worked as Cassel’s partner, wrote to his son Maurice in July 1905 from Batsford Park, Lord Redesdale’s Gloucestershire home:
The King is perfectly happy. His admiration of Mrs K. is almost pathetic. He watches her all day and is never happy when she’s talking to someone else … she is never bored of him and always good-humoured. So, her hold over him grows.
She, not the Queen, was with him for winter shoots at Chatsworth as the guest of the Duke of Devonshire, or at Elvedon owned by Lord Iveagh. For racing at Goodwood they stayed with Mrs Willie James at West Dean Park in Sussex. For Cowes week they were guests on the yachts of Arthur Morley or Sir Thomas Lipton. For the Doncaster St Leger they stayed with the Saviles at Rufford Abbey. After Balmoral, Bertie joined her at the Sassoons’ Scottish house, Tulchan Lodge, or at Duntreath. When separated from her on public holidays he sent her notes: ‘This woodcock wishes you a happy New Year’ on a card with a picture of a gamebird; ‘Another Bonne Année. I think this girl is like dear little Sonia’ on a card with a sepia photograph of a child. And he lavished presents on her: a brooch set with precious stones, the initials spelling DEAREST, a silver cigarette case engraved with a crowned E, a hatpin with stag’s horns, a ruby tiara.
Mrs Keppel was compliant, available, flattering, firm, appeared to submit, but dominated him with her charm. ‘She sits next to him at dinner irrespective of rank,’ Esher observed. ‘Mrs George Keppel very smart and much toadied to,’ Lord Carrington wrote of a dinner given for the King by Lord Rosebery in February 1908. Like Cassel, politicians knew that to win the King’s approval they must first please her. When Carrington wanted in 1906 to change Bertie’s antipathy to the prospective Liberal Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman he invited him, the King and Mrs Keppel to dinner:
HM was in capital spirits and remained till nearly one o’clock. He played bridge and won £4. After dinner he had a long conversation with CB on foreign politics and the King told me as he went away he was quite satisfied with CB’s opinions and declarations.
Mrs Keppel could amuse Bertie, use him and make him change his mind. Violet said her mother’s investments by 1918 yielded at least £20,000 a year, which helped her stay luminous, resplendent and of the world of orchids, malmaisons, fine clothes, obeisance and romance.
In later life Violet in anger was to
wonder dully what relation I was to this woman to whom all beauty was non-existent, and who only judged people on their material worth … who hates music, never reads a line of poetry, or anything for that matter but the most trashy novels, who is not genuinely interested in art and cares nothing for even one of the things that mean such a lot to me.
When young such heresy was not overt. Mother, Violet said, was the star round which her own world revolved. She stored sensual memories of her: her geranium-scented bathwater, the flower smells of her bedroom, violet-scented cachous, chestnut hair, a lace dressing gown, a grey spring dress fastened from
