Quinn Mrs Keppel

Mistress to the King
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78590-153-9
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

For Alice Keppel, it was all about appearances. Her precepts were those of the English upper classes: discretion, manners and charm. Nothing else mattered - especially when it came to her infamous affair with King Edward VII. As the King's favourite mistress up until his death in 1910, Alice held significant influence at court and over Edward himself. But it wasn't just Edward she courted: throughout her life, Alice enthusiastically embarked on affairs with bankers, MPs, peers - anybody who could elevate her standing and pay the right price. She was a shrewd courtesan, and her charisma and voracity ensured her both power and money, combined as they were with an aptitude for manipulation. Drawing on a range of sources, including salacious first-hand eyewitness accounts, bestselling author Tom Quinn paints an extraordinary picture of the Edwardian aristocracy, and traces the lives of royal mistresses down to Alice's great-granddaughter, the current Duchess of Cornwall. Both intriguing and astonishing, this is an unadulterated glimpse into a hidden world of scandal, decadence and debauchery.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Quinn, Tom

Leseproben

Introduction

BOOKS ABOUT EDWARD VII and his circle return again and again to the same sources. These typically include papers held by the British royal family and other European royal families along with documents held in official or government archives. Many of these books make a point of thanking the royal family for allowing access to various official papers and this is almost certainly a sign that these books will have little genuinely new to tell us. This applies particularly to books about Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII because so much has deliberately been destroyed – what’s left can be seen because it is usually innocuous.

Edward VII’s life was so scandalous – numerous mistresses and perhaps half a dozen illegitimate children – that we can be sure the royal family has done as much as possible to conceal or destroy the most incriminating evidence. We know, for example, that Edward VII himself insisted all his personal papers and letters be destroyed after his death. This was, no doubt, partly due to the fact that the papers included painful memories recorded during his extremely unhappy childhood. But mostly the document bonfires that lasted for several days after the King died were part of a comprehensive effort to protect his reputation.

Alice Keppel became the Prince of Wales’s mistress in 1898 and she remained his favourite mistress from then until his death in 1910. Alice got into bed with Bertie, as Edward was known to his friends, at the first opportunity because she wanted money and he had vast amounts of it. But Bertie was by no means the first wealthy man Alice had slept with for money. Almost from the day she married the Hon. George Keppel in 1891 she knew that she wanted to live among the very richest in the country and as her husband did not have the kind of money she needed, she was determined to get it by the only means open to her: the sale of her body to much wealthier men than her husband.

What makes the story particularly shocking is that Alice’s husband was only too happy to live on the money Alice earned by sleeping with the King, various aristocrats and numerous bank managers.

Alice and George had two children, but, as this book will show, neither was fathered by Alice’s husband. Both children were illegitimate and one, Sonia, is the grandmother of the present Duchess of Cornwall, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, now wife of Charles, Prince of Wales. It is very possible – and indeed believed by many – that Sonia was fathered by Edward VII, Charles’s own great-great-grandfather. This would make the Duchess of Cornwall a blood relation of her husband, albeit distantly.

Alice Keppel’s affair with the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, damaged the King’s relationship with Queen Alexandra; Alice Keppel’s great-granddaughter Camilla Parker Bowles’s adulterous relationship with Prince Charles destroyed his relationship with his wife, the late Diana, Princess of Wales.

It was always said that Sonia Keppel was the daughter of Alice and George Keppel. By contrast it was a barely concealed secret that Sonia’s elder sister Violet, born six years earlier than Sonia in 1894, was certainly not George Keppel’s daughter. Violet’s father was the MP and banker Ernest William Beckett (1856–1917), later Baron Grimthorpe, with whom Alice Keppel had an affair – in return for money – very soon after marrying the financially inadequate George Keppel.

Violet Keppel was to become notorious for a string of lesbian affairs in the 1920s and beyond, and her parentage became a matter of public speculation as a result. She was well known across fashionable London during her affair with Vita Sackville-West – an affair described in painful detail by West’s son Nigel Nicolson in his book Portrait of a Marriage.

Alice’s second daughter Sonia, by contrast, stayed out of the public eye, partly because she was far more conventional than her sister but also to avoid drawing attention to her dysfunctional family and the very real possibility that she might in fact be the daughter of King Edward VII.

The destruction of Edward VII’s private papers was carried out in accordance with the King’s wishes by his private secretary Francis Knollys. Edward’s long-suffering wife, Queen Alexandra, also insisted on her death that all her papers should be destroyed, and for similar reasons. In Alexandra’s case Charlotte Knollys, Francis’s wife, burnt the papers.

Had the Knollys’s servants behaved as Edward had behaved, the couple would have thrown them out on the street, but the rules were different for a King and Queen – however messy their lives, their reputations must be protected. That at least was, and is, the view of the royal family and their immediate circle.

Embarrassing documents that escaped the fires and might have turned up in succeeding years were also destroyed by a notoriously secretive family understandably embarrassed by the antics of a King who spent most of his life chasing other men’s wives and, when necessary, either bending the law or breaking it to avoid any repercussions for himself.

Edward’s most significant extramarital affair was with Alice Keppel, and this book is the story of her life. I have drawn to a limited extent on published versions of her life as well as official papers and the memoirs of those who knew her and the people around her. I say to a limited extent because memoirs of the time were mostly written by people who shared, to a large extent, Alice’s values and aristocratic background and they therefore had every reason to hide the truth about her. Osbert Sitwell, for example, describes her charm and humour; Princess Alice writes almost as if Alice Keppel were Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Virginia Woolf, a rebel from Victorian and Edwardian values of hypocrisy and deceit, was one of the few to write bluntly about Mrs Keppel. After meeting her at lunch in 1932 Woolf wrote:

I lunched with Raymond [Mortimer] to meet Mrs Keppel; a swarthy, thick set, raddled, direct (‘My dear’ she calls one) old grasper: whose fists have been in the money bags these 50 years: but with boldness: told us how her friends used to steal, in country houses in the time of Ed. 7th. One woman purloined any jewelled bag left lying. And she has a flat in the Ritz; old furniture; &c. I liked her on the surface. I mean the extensive, jolly, brazen surface of the old courtesan; who has lost all bloom; & acquired a kind of cordiality, humour, directness instead. No sensibilities as far as I could see; nor snobberies; immense superficial knowledge, & going off to Berlin to hear Hitler speak. Shabby underdress: magnificent furs: great pearls: a Rolls Royce waiting – going off to visit my old friend the tailor; and so on.

The anglophile American novelist Henry James called Bertie ‘Edward the Caresser’ and he thought his character and relationship with Alice Keppel ‘quite particularly vulgar’.

But we must weigh against this the many statements that recall Alice Keppel’s good qualities – her kindness, for example, at least to her social equals. Harold Acton, famously a member of the Brideshead set at Oxford in the 1920s, later lived in Italy close to where Alice Keppel had her final home. He said of her: ‘She possessed enormous charm, which was not only due to her cleverness and vivacity, but to her generous heart.’

Alice was also the last word in discretion and secrecy; she was, if anything, more secretive even than the royal family. She left no significant papers, and would have been horrified at the idea of writing her memoirs. When in later life she heard of the scandal surrounding Edward and Mrs Simpson, she famously remarked that things had been better done in her day – meaning affairs and sleeping with men for money were fine so long as no one found out or made a fuss if they did. When in 1921 Alice heard that Daisy Brooke, another of Edward VII’s former mistresses, planned to write her memoirs, Alice condemned the idea as a breach of a ‘sacred’ relationship.

I had long wanted to write about Alice Keppel’s life, but it was only in the early 1980s while researching a book on domestic servants that, quite by chance, I met and interviewed at great length a remarkable woman who, from her early teens, had worked as a maid for the Keppels.

Agnes Florence Cook, known to her friends as Flo, was a mine of information about the Keppel household from the late 1890s until 1924 when the Keppels effectively left England for good. Many of Agnes’s tales came down to her from her mother and grandmother, who had also worked for the Keppels. Agnes, who was in her late eighties when I met her, had a remarkably detailed memory of life in the Keppel’s grand London houses seventy and more years earlier, and it is these memories that inform much of this book.

The story Agnes told me was deeply shocking in many ways, revealing as it did that Alice Keppel was prepared to sleep with almost anyone rich enough to make it worth her while and that Camilla Duchess of Cornwall’s grandmother may well have been fathered by Prince Charles’s own great-great-grandfather.

The convention that describes upper-class women who sleep with men for money as ‘mistresses’ seemed to Agnes entirely unfair. A woman from what used to be called the lower orders would always be referred to as a prostitute or a kept woman if she slept with men for money so why did the same or similar labels not attach to more aristocratic women living similar lives? According to Agnes it was another example of one rule for the...