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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466883505 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 406 |
| Sales rank: | 767,223 |
| File size: | 646 KB |
About the Author
Diana Souhami is the author of Gluck, Gertude and Alice, Greta and Cecil, and The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. She lives in London.
Diana Souhami is the author of many highly acclaimed books: Selkirk’s Island, winner of the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award; The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and winner of the Lambda Literary Award; the bestselling Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 1997; Natalie and Romaine; Gertrude and Alice; Greta and Cecil; Gluck: Her Biography; and others. She lives in London and Devon.
Read an Excerpt
Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter
By Diana Souhami
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1996 Diana SouhamiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8350-5
CHAPTER 1
At Christmas 1900 the Honourable Mrs George Keppel gave a Fabergé cigarette case to her lover Bertie, Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne. Made from three kinds of gold, enamelled in royal blue, over its cover front and back coiled a serpent contrived from diamonds. The head and tail of the serpent formed a knot. It was a symbolic gift from the Prince's temptress, 'La Favorita', his 'little Mrs George'.
Ten years later when Bertie – King Edward VII – died, his widow Queen Alexandra, mindful of the sexual link between her husband and Mrs Keppel, returned the cigarette case to her. In 1936, Mrs Keppel asked Bertie's daughter-in-law Queen Mary to accept it as a gift. It is now in the permanent royal collection of pieces by Fabergé. A fanciful equivalent, had times not changed, would have been for Mrs Keppel's great-granddaughter Camilla Parker-Bowles to have given cufflinks to her lover, the Prince of Wales, engraved with their entwined initials, for his wife Diana, had she become a widowed queen, to have returned these to Mrs Parker-Bowles at the time of King Charles's death, for Camilla at some later date to have given them to the wife of William, Charles's and Diana's son, to be kept in the royal trove.
But niceties are now scrutinized for what they conceal. In 1992 Princess Diana and her husband separated. She found it unacceptable for him, however exalted his rank, to be the lover of another woman while married to her. 'There were three of us in this marriage and it was a bit crowded,' she told the world. The triangle gave her 'rampant bulimia'. Mrs Keppel would not have sympathized. For her it was not how things were that mattered but how they appeared. Her precepts were those of Society: discretion, manners, charm. The appearance of civilized marriage was as imperative as a hat at Ascot, pearls and furs. It was her art to be Bertie's boudoir belle while he was Prince of Wales then King and, if not a pillar of the Establishment, then at least a cornice or an architrave.
She served the Crown and did not allow jealousy and sexual possession to blur her manners or her style. On 10 December 1936 Bertie's grandson, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee. Mrs Keppel dining at the Ritz was heard to declare, 'Things were done much better in my day.'
In her day she both shared a bed with the King and advised him on presents for his wife. Queen Alexandra collected pieces by Fabergé. At Mrs Keppel's suggestion Bertie commissioned jewelled, gold models of all the Sandringham animals for his Queen. Artists sent from St Petersburg made wax maquettes for the stonecutters. The Fabergé workshops produced a glittering farmyard of heifers, goats, cocks, pigs. Persimmon – Bertie's Derby-winning horse – was there and Caesar, his Norfolk terrier, with rubies for eyes, a gold bell and a collar inscribed 'I belong to the King'.
In her turn Mrs Keppel's daughter, Violet, gave her lover, Vita Sackville-West, a symbolic present, a token of their tryst. It was a Venetian ring of red lava, carved with a woman's head. It had belonged to a fifteenth-century doge. Violet acquired it on a visit with her mother to the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen of Bond Street. He supplied the Prince of Wales with paintings for Sandringham, Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House. (Bertie liked pictures of yachting scenes, battles and pretty women without much on.) Sir Joseph invited Violet to choose a present. She was six at the time, had a precocious heart and cried when her mother tried to make her put the ring back and choose a Victorian doll.
Seven years later, in 1908, Violet and Vita, accompanied by governesses, went to Florence for the summer to learn Italian. Violet cried again when they parted for home, told Vita she loved her and gave her the doge's ring. By 1919 this love had become passionate and volatile. As a pledge to each other, and in sexual rejection of their husbands, they took off their wedding rings. The following year Vita wrote of the doge's ring, 'I have it now, of course I have it, just as I have her.' In her will she decreed that it be returned to Violet. When she died in August 1962 her husband Harold Nicolson duly sent it with a circumspect letter. And when Violet died a decade later the ring was returned to her nephew so that it might form part of the Keppel memorabilia.
But the doge's ring was a memento of unacceptable love. Private devotions were one thing, social conformity another. A myriad of hypocrisies preserved the relationship between Mrs Keppel and the King. Marriage vows and even the Coronation Oath were rituals and semblances that preserved the status quo. An indiscretion of dress or etiquette mattered more than adultery. Noblesse oblige was the rule. Divorce was unthinkable because of loss of status, however compromised the relationship between husband and wife. When Violet in 1920 tried to extricate herself from a marriage that was worse than a sham her mother warned, 'You'll be a laughing stock, becoming Miss Keppel again.'
Group photographs of huge shooting parties commemorate Mrs Keppel's weekends with Bertie. He sits at the centre, portly and assured, Homburg tilted, hands folded on his walking stick, flanked by ladies in ankle-length gowns, their hats like nesting birds. All look inscrutably at the camera. Nothing is revealed of the secret relationships between other women's husbands and other men's wives, of the elaborate games of adultery decorously conducted at these country-house weekends.
These were Edwardian heydays for Bertie, Alice and their set. Taxation was low, servants cheap:
Money was freely spent and wealth was everywhere in evidence. Moreover it was possessed largely by the nicest people, who entertained both in London and in the country ... The champagne vintages from 'eighty to 'eighty-seven were infinitely superior to anything since produced.
Strict ceremony regulated their lives. Mrs Keppel, as the King's Lady, would change four times a day. She required two maids to iron and lay out her clothes, curl her hair, scent her bathwater, wind her watches.
It was a good hostess's duty to attend to the 'disposition of bedrooms', Vita Sackville-West wrote in her satirical novel, The Edwardians:
It was so necessary to be tactful and at the same time discreet ... the name of each guest would be neatly written on a card slipped into a tiny brass frame on the bedroom door ... Lord Robert Gore was in the Red Silk Room; Mrs Levison just across the passage. That was as it should be.
The housekeeper, maids and valets understood the careful coding of the cards that hung beside the bell indicator outside the pantry and 'the recurrence of certain adjustments and coincidences'. At times scandal surfaced – to do with jealousy, betrayal, broken hearts. The Prince of Wales was twice threatened with the law by angry husbands. But these elite gatherings were untroubled by intrusion from zoom-angle lenses through the windows of the Tapestry Room, the tapping of cellular phones or bugging devices in the chandeliers.
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 Asquith 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 gentlemen in short black jackets and black ties – and dinner a banquet – the guests bedecked in tiaras, ribands and Orders of the Empire. Both were friends of Lord and Lady Alington of Crichel, Lord and Lady Howe of Gopsall, Lord and Lady Iveagh of Elvedon, Ronald and Maggie Greville of Polesden Lacey. Mrs Keppel took holidays with Bertie in Paris, Marienbad, Biarritz, sailed with him on the Royal Yacht, dined with him at Buckingham Palace, entertained him for 'tea' at her house at 30 Portman Square.
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.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami. Copyright © 1996 Diana Souhami. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
A Personal Note,
PART ONE: Queens and Heirs Apparent,
PART TWO: Portrait of a Lesbian Affair,
PART THREE: Chacun Sa Tour,
Notes,
Sources and Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Diana Souhami,
Praise for Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter,
Copyright,