The Heir Apparent (63 page)

By September 1897, Bertie probably knew that Daisy Warwick was three months pregnant. He continued to meet her through the autumn, but Daisy’s pregnancy meant that he could no longer be seen with her in public.
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It also brought Alix into the equation at last.

In January 1898, Alix accompanied Bertie when he attended a house party at Chatsworth.
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Daisy took this opportunity to write him a “beautiful letter,” which he gave to Alix to read, and she was “moved to tears.” She, too, had received a letter from Daisy. “She begged me to
tell you,” Bertie wrote, “that you had no enemies that she was aware of who were friends of hers, and that your name was not mentioned to her—or by her. I know, my darling, that she will now meet you with pleasure so that your position is, thank God! better now than it ever was since we have been such friends.”

This letter was written for Alix’s eyes, and Alix responded on cue. She wrote no letter to Daisy, but sent her a crucifix wrapped in a piece of paper on which was written the barbed words: “From one who has suffered much and forgives all.”
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Daisy had abdicated as
maîtresse en titre
. In exchange, she was granted forgiveness by Alix, which meant that she was reinstated at court. Daisy was triumphant, and wrote crowing to her friend W. T. Stead about her “complete reconciliation with the Princess of W[ales], and all estrangement on that score at an end.”
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Many years later, Daisy claimed that she would have remained with Bertie to the end, “but for an appeal made to her by Queen Alexandra to renounce him.”
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She remained friends with Bertie, who still addressed her as “my own adored little Daisywife.”

There are hints that Daisy’s pregnancy prompted Alix to confront Bertie. Of all Bertie’s mistresses, Daisy Warwick posed the greatest
threat to Alix and caused her the most unhappiness. Skittles, unreliable but well informed, related that after Bertie’s death in 1910, Alix remarked: “Twelve years ago when I was so angry about Lady Warwick and the King expostulated and said I should get him into the divorce courts, I told him once and for all that he might have any woman he wished and I would not say a word.”
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It had taken Alix many years to come to terms with Bertie’s philandering. As she later remarked: “But I thought I was
so-o-o
beautiful.”
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With Daisy’s defection, some sort of truce had been reached between the prince and princess.

Daisy’s son was born on 21 March 1898. The child was christened with only one name, Maynard, which was Daisy’s maiden name, and the godfathers were Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rosebery, both sexually ambivalent men rumored to be homosexuals. The child was passed off as Lord Warwick’s, but plenty of clues pointed to another father of this baby born after a gap of thirteen years. Bertie’s name was sometimes mentioned, and the “D” symbol does indeed cluster around the Diamond Jubilee in June 1897, when the baby was presumably conceived.
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Bertie took an interest in the “Diamond Jubilee” baby, as he called it in the letters he wrote to Daisy, but this need not imply paternity.
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Daisy herself was in no doubt that the father was Joe Laycock.
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Having a child by another man was the exit route that Lillie Langtry had chosen from her relationship with the prince, and in Daisy’s case, as with Lillie, Bertie behaved generously, showing no sexual jealousy. Daisy by now had three children by three different men. No wonder that she made a virtue of sexual freedom, telling Lord Rosebery, whom she fruitlessly pursued, that “Far too much fuss, in my opinion, is made by women about personal morality which, after all, is entirely a matter for the individual.”
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Of the damage done to her children or other people’s marriages, Daisy seemed unaware.

The “D” symbol recurs in Bertie’s diary a decent interval after the birth of her son.
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In June 1898, the prince stayed at Warwick Castle once more. Joe Laycock was also in the party, and Daisy took Bertie on a visit to Joseph Arch, the agricultural trade unionist, whose autobiography
she had edited. Bertie described the visit as “very interesting”—Arch “remains what he always was—a working man, and does not wish to be considered anything else!”
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Daisy, however, found the occasion excruciatingly embarrassing, as the prince sat beside the open stove, prepared to listen sympathetically, while Arch harangued him about class injustice.
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A flood of letters to “My own lovely little Daisy” continued to pour from Bertie’s pen. These letters only survive because, many years later, Daisy disobeyed the orders of the royal advisers and made transcripts of Bertie’s correspondence before returning the originals. But they give a glimpse of what the relationship was really like.

In spite of the Chatsworth agreement, the prince’s feelings toward Daisy seemed unaltered. “Though we do not see as much of one another as formerly,” he told her, “be assured that the sentiments and attachment I have for you are in no wise diminished though the ‘very warm’ feelings have under force of circumstances and by your own wish, cooled down.”
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When she reproached him for neglecting her, he replied: “Has it been
my
fault that we have not met so often lately as of yore? Especially in the evenings?! Will you
not
try and consider me
still
your best and most devoted friend? Have I deserved to forfeit it all?”

He told her: “You have become more serious, more independent and I have felt for some time that I cannot be of much use to you in
your life.… Your continued devotion to me in spite of my many shortcomings has astonished as well as pleased and touched me!”
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Daisy abdicated as mistress in January 1898. Alice Keppel was on the scene in February 1898. She makes her first appearance in Bertie’s diary thus: “27 February 1898. Dine with Hon G. and Mrs. Keppel at 2 Wilton Crescent 8:45.”
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Mrs. Keppel was twenty-nine. She had thick chestnut hair, alabaster Scottish skin, wide shoulders, and a large bust. She was not photogenic. She had a deep throaty voice and she was very funny.

There are several stories about Bertie’s first meeting with Alice. According to one version, related by Anita Leslie, it was at Sandown races where Bertie accosted Anita’s grandfather John Leslie, who had Alice on his arm, demanded an introduction, and then strolled off with the lady.
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Another story claims that they met at dinner with Lady Howe, and the prince spent the whole evening talking with Alice on the top landing “which rather shocked people, especially when they sat for a short time on two steps.”
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Others related that they met through Clarissa Bischoffsheim, society hostess wife of the German Jewish financier.
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It was characteristic of Mrs. Keppel not to circulate her own version. She wrote no memoirs, and very few letters have survived; she was as clamlike as Daisy Warwick was gushingly indiscreet.

That Mrs. George Keppel should have become acquainted with the prince was hardly surprising. Through her marriage in 1891 to a younger son of the Earl of Albemarle, she had joined the outer circle of Marlborough House. Dutch by descent, the Keppels had been a dynasty of generals, admirals, and court officials. George Keppel’s great-uncle, the five-foot-tall Admiral “Harry” Keppel, was a favorite at Marlborough House, and the tiny Princess Maud was nicknamed “Harry” after him. George’s brother Derek was equerry to the Duke of York.
^a

Alice’s family, the Edmonstones, were old established Scots landowners. Her father was an admiral who inherited the baronetcy in 1871, and she was brought up at Duntreath Castle, fifteen miles from Glasgow. Money from coal and railways had paid for the rebuilding of the ancient castle in the Scots baronial style. Alice’s daughter Violet remembered it smelling of cedar wood, tuberoses, gunpowder, and, oddly, minced meat.

At heart, Alice Keppel was a Scots gentry woman: “Intelligent, downright, devoid of pettiness or prejudice,” as Violet wrote, “she loved a good argument, especially a political one.”
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She spoke clipped English, she was brisk and shrewd, and her feet were planted firmly on the ground. The youngest in a family of nine, as a child she was inseparable from her brother, Archie, the only boy. He was a year older than her and, according to Violet, they were like twins; “they seemed to complete one another.” Archie detested shooting and “winced” through the Glorious Twelfth of August, the opening day of the grouse shooting season, while Alice swung sure-footedly across the moors, adored by all the keepers. “My mother all dynamism, initiative and, yes, virility, my uncle all gentleness, acquiescence, sensibility.”
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Masculinity was a characteristic of all Bertie’s favorites. Lillie Langtry grew mannish in old age, and the hard-riding Daisy Warwick often lamented that she was not born a man.

Alice Keppel was modern. She smoked cigarettes, and she was very interested in money and how to make it, the more so as George Keppel was a third son and had very little. The Albemarles were grander than the Edmonstones but not as rich, and George and Alice started married life with only £20,000 of capital. George left the army and went into business, attempting to capitalize on his name. He did not prosper. In 1898, he was sued by a company promoter named Richard Prior for breach of contract when he resigned as director of the Grand Hotel and Theatre of Varieties in Ipswich. George won the case. The judge ruled it “a monstrous thing” if a gentleman “should be liable to a suit
at the hands of the company promoter for all the losses which he said he had made because this gentleman had withdrawn his name.”
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It was George, as Rebecca West once wrote, who was “the real beauty of the two.”
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He was six foot three and almost too immaculately dressed, with a curled mustache. Some said he was sexually cold. Perhaps this was what Violet meant when she said that “he never really grew up.”
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Violet, the Keppels’ first child, was born in June 1894. In adult life she fantasized that the king was her father. She claimed to be “Fitz Edward,” and demanded to be addressed as Highness. But Violet was a mythomane and there is no reason to believe that Bertie knew Alice Keppel in 1893, let alone made love to her. Rumor, however, alleged that George Keppel was not Violet’s father. Her biological father was supposed to be a Yorkshire banker and MP named Ernest Beckett. He was a glamorous widower, his American wife having died in 1891, and he allegedly had an affair with Alice Keppel. Whether Violet was the result, as is sometimes suggested, is impossible to tell.
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Beckett was at the same time involved with another woman, a voluptuous South African divorcée, by whom he had a son who was born eight months after Violet.
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For a married woman to have an affair before the birth of her first child was to defy social convention, and Mrs. Keppel was a conventional woman. Violet in later life never mentioned Ernest Beckett,
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but she spoke of him when she was young; as for Alice Keppel, having committed this one indiscretion, she perhaps became super-discreet as a reaction. We shall probably never know.
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In July 1898, Bertie stayed at Waddesdon with Ferdinand de Rothschild. He wrote in his diary: “Prince of Wales falls downstairs … and fractures kneecap. Leave Waddesdon 3:30.… Dine in sitting room at Marlborough House.”
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Daisy, who was also a guest, related how she was running down a spiral staircase to breakfast when she heard a groan and discovered the heir to the throne lying at the bottom of the stairs unable to move. He had heard a bone crack. Daisy’s husband appeared and tied the leg straight out onto one of the carrying poles of
an invalid chair. The local doctor was called; he allowed the prince to eat breakfast with his leg down, which he did in excruciating pain: “He was ghastly white with beads of perspiration running down his forehead.”
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Some thought that the doctor’s failure to splint the leg worsened the injury. Bertie insisted on returning to London, and at Aylesbury station his invalid chair broke and he was dropped humiliatingly and painfully onto the passenger bridge.
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Back at Marlborough House, the leg was placed in splints, and Bertie showed “wonderful pluck” in spite of the doctors’ prognosis that his knee would always be stiff. Alix nursed him, and when Carrington visited, he thought the fifty-three-year-old princess, who was wearing a black-and-white-striped silk gown, looked about thirty-five. “Do you remember dining with us in this very room years ago,” Alix asked Carrington, “when I was so ill and laid up?”
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