Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

governor of the Ionian Islands. When she was sixteen the fourth Sir William Edmonstone, a naval officer who became an Admiral, wooed her, wed her and took her to Duntreath. ‘From Ithaca to Kelvinside!’ Violet wrote, ‘What an odyssey. How she must have loathed and resented the indefatigable rain, the sulphurous fogs, the grim bewhiskered elders.’

Fastidious and conventional, Lady Edmonstone wore white dresses, acquiesced to her despotic husband, did drawings of imaginary birds with long comet-like tails and year after year in the castle gave birth to daughters. The required male heir died as a baby. ‘At last in 1868 she was rewarded … Archie was born to join a plethora of sisters.’ Alice, ninth and last, followed eleven months later. Her father was sixty, her mother in her forties and most of her sisters as old as aunts.

One, Charlotte, married a vicar three years before Alice was born. Another, Louisa, when Alice was three, married a major employed at the Tower of London. A third, Mary Clementine, married the Lord Advocate of Scotland, lover of Queen Marie of Romania. Violet and Sonia described their aunts as diffident women, given to malapropisms, ‘tiny tornadoes of tears’ and to knitting stockings and shapeless mufflers. None made a remarkable marriage in terms of wealth, status or power. Alice was considered the liveliest and prettiest.

Uninterested in her sisters, she was inseparable from ‘beloved Archie’, called him her twin, deferred to him, ruled him and when married turned to him not her husband for advice. With her influence he too served the Crown. She secured Archie a place in the royal household. He became Groom in Waiting for the last three years of Bertie’s reign. When rich, Alice provided for him and his family. ‘They seemed to complete one another,’ Violet wrote. ‘My mother all dynamism, initiative, and, yes, virility, my uncle all gentleness, acquiescence, sensibility. They adored each other, could not bear to be long parted.’ Archie disliked sport, shooting and fishing and in his studio in the castle painted shepherds and shepherdesses, saucy harlequins and wistful pierrots.

Childhood at Duntreath was privileged and feudal. The Edmonstones were Scottish aristocrats without much money but confident of status. Labour was cheap, there were cooks, valets, governesses and, at the entrance to the west drive, the Lodge and its keepers, Mr and Mrs Strachan, who supervised servants, dealt with repairs, admitted guests. There was a nursery wing with playrooms and a children’s dining room. The schoolroom had views of croquet lawns, tennis courts and Ben Lomond which Alice climbed. A pen-and-ink drawing of Sir William Edmonstone hung over the fireplace. ‘Characteristically it bore his signature not the artist’s,’ Violet wrote.

In 1888 he died. Alice, the remaining unmarried daughter, needed a husband. She found the Honourable George Keppel, a lieutenant with the Gordon Highlanders. He had blue eyes, dark hair, an aquiline nose, a waxed moustache. He was six foot four inches tall and in his Gordon Highlander busby nearly eight feet. ‘One could picture him waltzing superbly to the strains of The Merry Widow,’ Harold Acton, who knew him in the 1920s, wrote in More Memoirs of an Aesthete. Harold Nicolson called him ‘Pawpaw’ and thought him like a character in a French farce.

George Keppel curled his moustache with tiny silver tongs, was methodical, scrupulously tidy, liked gadgets and labour-saving devices, had ‘the hearty laugh that denotes lack of humour’ and an eye for big-bosomed young women whom he called ‘little cuties’. He was practical, punctilious, reliable. But he had very little money. There was no way, on his income, that his wife might come to resemble a Christmas tree laden with presents for everyone. He received scant pay from the Army, a small allowance from his father, the 7th Earl of Albemarle, and that was all. He was the third son with seven sisters. Lord Albemarle was an MP, colonel, aide-de-camp – the palace term for factotum – to Queen Victoria and married to the daughter of the Prime Minister of Canada. But he had to keep up the family estate, Quidenham Park, a rambling eighteenth-century mansion in Norfolk, leave an inheritance for Arnold, his heir, and provide dowries for his daughters.

Like Alice Edmonstone, George Keppel belonged to aristocracy that had seen its income dwindle. Neither family had business acumen like the Devonshires who owned Chatsworth, or the Cadogans, Portmans and Westminsters who owned much of London. Quidenham was acquired in 1762 by General George, 3rd Earl of Albemarle, with money awarded him by the Crown for leading a campaign to capture Havana. According to Keppel family lore this wealth was gambled away by the ‘Rowdy Dow’, the dowager wife of the next earl. Her creditors were said to have stripped Quidenham of its mahogany doors, engraved silver and family portraits painted by Joshua Reynolds.

Alice, twenty-two when she married in 1891, had not defined her material ambitions nor realized her assets. A photograph at the time shows the Keppel sisters in dull clothes and no jewels and Alice in furs, muff and hat. Her attire, modest compared to what was to follow, outshone her worthy-minded sisters-in-law – one of whom became a nun.

An aunt of George’s put up £5000 in trust for his marriage settlement. Archie settled £15,000 ‘or thereabouts or the securities representing the same’. They were comfortable sums of money, but not queenly. There was no capital or property.

To his credit George was an Honourable. His family had a history of service to the royal household and held a clutch of hereditary titles – a barony, a viscountcy, an earldom – titles bestowed in the seventeenth century for services rendered to the Crown. The Van Keppels came from Holland (‘Guelderland’) and lived in a castle ‘considerable for its privileges and antiquity’. As a sixteen-year-old boy Arnold Joost Van Keppel was loved by William of Orange, who in 1689 became King William III of England. The King rewarded his favourite boy as lavishly as King Edward VII rewarded his ‘Favorita’. He made him Baron Ashford