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

an offspring in 1901. By then her affair with Bertie was at least three years underway. Lady Sackville, Vita’s mother, said they met in 1898 at the house of Georgiana, Lady Howe, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. The Prince of Wales, she said, told her he was struck by Mrs Keppel’s witty talk. He spent the whole evening talking with her on the top landing ‘which rather shocked people, especially when they sat for a short time on two steps’. Bertie went to dinner at Portman Square on 27 February 1898 and ‘an understanding which arose almost overnight was unclouded until the end of his reign.’ This understanding was of a sexual sort. From then on Bertie enjoyed ‘a good many small Mrs George dinners’.

As for Mrs George’s other lovers, Humphrey Sturt – Lord Alington and MP for Dorsetshire – was a friend of Bertie’s. His maternal grandfather was the 3rd earl of Lucan (a forebear of the vanished Lucan believed to have murdered his children’s nanny, supposing her to be his wife). ‘The Alington household was the hub of the big wheel of Edwardian fashion.’ His London home, 38 Portman Square, across the road from the Keppels, teemed with butlers and footmen. Crichel was his country estate for ‘Saturday to Monday’ gatherings. Elaborate shooting parties took up the day. Lady Alington, ‘a billowing ocean of lace and ribbons’, had her own white farm on the estate – cows, dairy, porcelain and butter all were white. At night a ‘glittering cavalcade’ went down to dinner. After dinner all played bridge. The neighbourhood church was in their grounds, the Alington pews upholstered in crimson velvet, with high doors to separate them from hoi polloi.

Humphrey Sturt liked to drive in his carriage with Mrs Keppel – to Hampton Court, Richmond Park, Kew, to picture galleries and antique shops. On one outing he drove her round the slum houses he owned in London’s East End. With queenly concern for the disadvantaged she used to recount how she fingered his conscience in Hoxton: ‘it was charming of you to let me see Hoxton now,’ she said. ‘Next time I go there I shan’t recognise it.’

As for Lord Stavordale, he did, as Mary Curzon said, marry Birdie Stewart in 1902. Stavordale had black hair, large dark eyes and the family motto, Deeds without Words. He became 6th Earl of Ilchester, lived in Holland House, London, and Melbury House, Dorchester, set in vast acres with parkland, deer, lakes and woods.

As the years passed, the relationship between the Prince of Wales and Mrs Keppel found context and routine. No other contenders for sexual favours were mentioned. Mrs Keppel was twenty-nine in 1898 and Bertie fifty-eight. He was five foot seven inches tall, weighed sixteen stone, had a forty-eight-inch stomach, ate five meals a day, smoked twenty cigarettes and a dozen cigars, was irritable and bronchial. When he started coughing he could not stop:

The parties which the King loved to attend and the large meals which he consumed, the numerous cigars which he smoked and the constant journeys in which he indulged at home as well as abroad were all symptoms of that restlessness which caused him to wage a perpetual battle against fatigue and irritability. Lacking inner resources, he depended upon external distractions, and his boredom was made manifest by an ominous drumming of his fat fingers on the table, or by an automatic tap, tap, tap, of one of his feet.

A few minutes with nothing to do proved a trial to King Edward’s temper, which had to find an outlet and which vented itself at times upon his friends and occasionally upon the Queen.

His temper, with him since childhood, was entirely uncontrolled. ‘At times I was perfectly terrified of him,’ Frederick Ponsonby said, ‘more especially when I was in unusual surroundings … when at luncheon or staying at a country house he got cross over a matter I knew little about, he fairly scared me.’ ‘His angry bellow once heard,’ wrote Loelia Duchess of Westminster, ‘could never be forgotten.’

But he did not bellow at Mrs Keppel. She flattered, calmed, soothed, pleased him and excited him just enough. Her jokes were wry, she dressed with flair, was as addicted to bridge and cigarettes as was he (she smoked hers through a long holder) and she had her blue eyes, alabaster skin, chestnut hair and much admired ripe curves. She also had a husband who accepted his own displacement from the bedroom so that his wife might serve the Crown. And upstairs on the nursery floor was her small daughter, who adored her and was afraid of her, and who was brought to her boudoir each morning and to her drawing room each evening where she absorbed the seductive force of her mother’s charm.

THREE

When Bertie began his ‘small Mrs George dinners’ in 1898, his mother, Queen Victoria, had been on the throne for sixty-one years. She had two to go. Her fat and wayward son, though fifty-eight, was denied a role. She did not let him represent her. It would, she said, be ‘quite irregular and improper’ for him to have copies of Cabinet reports. She vetoed the proposal even that he should be President of the Society of Arts. The power was hers – crown, sceptre, orb, the lot – and she was not going to share them with her son and heir:

no one can represent the Sovereign but Her, or Her Consort … Her Majesty thinks it would be most undesirable to constitute the Heir to the Crown a general representative of Herself, and particularly to bring Him forward too frequently before the people. This would necessarily place the Prince of Wales in a position of competing as it were for popularity with the Queen. Nothing should be more carefully avoided.

Victoria’s relationship to her eldest son began badly. She ‘suffered severely’ giving birth to him. ‘I don’t know what I should have done but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me,’