The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (45 page)

King Edward VII died just before midnight. He was in his sixty-ninth year.

When it was over Alexandra, 'in a terrible state of despair', blurted out her feelings about Mrs Keppel, and about the King, to Sir Francis Laking.

'I would not have kissed her,' she said, 'if he had not bade me. But I would have done anything he asked of me. Twelve [sic] years ago, when I was so angry about Lady Warwick, and the King expostulated with me and said I should get him into the divorce court, I told him once for all that he might have all the women he wished, and I would not say a word; and I have done everything since that he desired me to do about them. He was the whole of my life and, now he is dead, nothing matters.'
³⁴

And Lord Esher, invited by Alexandra to take a last look at her husband's body a few days later, has some interesting observations to make on her attitude to the King's death. He notes, 'The Queen talked for half an hour, just as she always talked to me, with only a slight diminution of her natural gaiety, but with a tenderness which betrayed all the love in her soul, and oh! so natural feeling that she had got him there
altogether to herself
[author's italics]. In a way she seemed, and is, I am convinced, happy. It is the womanly happiness of complete possession of the man who was the love of her youth, and – as I fervently believe – all her life. '
³⁵

After all, Alexandra is reputed to have said to a friend after Edward VII's death, 'he always loved me the best.'
³⁶

As for the legend about her saintly gesture towards Alice Keppel: how did that originate? Not with the Queen. Not even with those devoted members of her entourage who were always anxious for 'the beloved lady' to be presented in the best possible light. It originated with Alice Keppel.

Once her lover had died, Alice, in an effort to safeguard her future, had hurried to Marlborough House to sign her name in the book. But the new monarchs, King George V and Queen Mary, were having none of her: 'orders had been given that she should not be allowed to do so . . .'
³⁷
Seeing the way the wind was blowing, the astute Alice put about the story of how the all-forgiving Queen had summoned her to the dying King's bedside, of how Alexandra had 'fallen upon her neck and wept with her', and of how she had promised that the royal family would 'look after her'.

'Mrs Keppel,' declared Esher, who had heard the truth from Edward VII's secretary, Francis Knollys, 'has lied about the whole affair.'
³⁸

Among the hundreds of sanctimonious tributes heaped upon the head of the dead Edward VII, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's comments strike a refreshingly honest note.

'Today,' runs the unexpurgated version of his diary entry for 20 May 1910, 'the King was buried and I hope the country will return to comparative sanity, for at present it is in delirium. The absurdities written in every newspaper about him pass belief. He might have been a Solon [the Greek Sage] and a Francis of Assisi combined if characters drawn of him were true. In no print has there been the slightest allusion to Mrs Keppel or to any of the 101 ladies he has loved, or to his
gambling or to any of the little vices which made up his domestic life. It is not for me or perhaps any of us to censure him for these pleasant wickednesses, but his was not even in make-believe the life of a saint or of an at all virtuous or respectable man, and according to strict theology he is most certainly at the present moment in hell. Yet all the bishops and priests, Catholic, Protestant and Non-conformist, join in giving him a glorious place in heaven . . .'

Edward VII's particular qualities – his showmanship, his conscientiousness, his diplomatic achievements – 'doubtless made him a wiser and a better King than most of ours have been,' continues Blunt, 'and he may even rightly share with Solomon the title of the "Wise". They each had several hundred concubines and, as we know, "The knowledge of women is the beginning of wisdom". At least it teaches tolerance for the unwisdom of others.

'Of all this the newspaper writers say no word, being virtuous men and fools.'
³⁹

Having recovered her habitual composure, Alice recovered her habitual good sense. Her best bet would be to lie low. Overnight she and her husband left their Portman Square home to move in with friends in Grafton Street. The children followed a day or two later. The gossips lost no time in saying that she had had to flee her creditors; whereas, of course, Edward VII had left her very handsomely provided for. It was to escape publicity that Alice moved house.

Her youngest daughter, the nine-year-old Sonia, bewildered by the sudden flight from Portman Square and by her mother's abstracted air, appealed to her father for enlightenment. 'Why does it matter so much, Kingy dying?' she asked.

'Poor little girl,' answered George Keppel. 'It must have been very frightening for you. And for all of us, for that matter. Nothing will ever be quite the same again. Because Kingy was such a wonderful man.'
⁴⁰

At least Mrs Keppel received an invitation to the King's funeral. She went to it in full mourning 'like a widow',
⁴¹
reports Blunt; but she was obliged to slip into St George's Chapel by a side door. As discreet as she had ever been, Alice was determined to do nothing to upset the palace. When she invited a few old friends, Soveral among them, to dinner one evening, she took the precaution of dropping a line to Lady Knollys, wife of the late monarch's private secretary, to explain that she was
not
giving a 'dinner party': it was simply a matter of having a
few people in for a quiet evening to talk about old times.

'How people can do anything I do not know,' she continued, 'for life with all its joys have [sic] come to a full stop, at least for me. . . '
⁴²

In the end, Alice decided that it would be best for her to get right out of the country: away from the embarrassments of her position, from the inevitable changes at court and in society, and from the all-too-obvious disapproval of the new sovereigns. She would travel to the Far East. She would stay away for at least as long as the official mourning period lasted. In fact, Alice Keppel was to be abroad, in Ceylon and China, for almost two years.

By the time they set out, Alice had regained much of her celebrated verve and sparkle. When her excited daughters wanted to know why they were going to Ceylon, her reply was richly typical.

'In my opinion,' she explained airily, 'no young lady's education is complete without a smattering of Tamil.'
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Epilogue

'A WELL-REMEMBERED FRIEND'

14

Memories for Sale

O
NE DAY IN
the mid-1960s the writer Theo Lang, visiting friends in Switzerland, was shown an old family deed box. In it, among a fusty accumulation of papers and photographs, was a bundle of envelopes and a couple of photographic plates. Coming across this dossier was, as Lang puts it, 'one of those lucky accidents which come as a rare bonus in a writer's life'.
¹
For what he had uncovered were the carefully preserved details of a hitherto secret series of negotiations: the attempt by the Countess of Warwick to blackmail King George V.

By the summer of 1914, four years after the death of Edward VII, the fifty-two-year-old Daisy Warwick was in a desperate financial plight. Her debts – to a variety of moneylenders and friends – amounted to something like £90,000. She had had to talk her husband into letting Warwick Castle, both the Warwick and Easton estates were heavily mortgaged and her valuables had been either sold or impounded. Her various, and increasingly frenetic, money-making schemes had all proved abortive. Not by writing scripts for the cinema, producing weekly columns for the
Daily Express
, editing women's pages for the
Daily Sketch
or giving lectures in the United States was she able to keep her persistent creditors at bay. Her long-suffering husband, the Earl of Warwick, was proving equally unsuccessful. His investments were disastrous; his grandiose schemes, for mining gold or growing timber, utterly impractical.

And as not even Lady Warwick, with her aristocratic disdain for vulgar moneylenders, could stave off impending bankruptcy forever (the full realisation of her predicament came, it seems, when a shopkeeper in Leamington finally refused to grant her any more credit) she decided that there was only one way by which she could save herself: she must make use of King Edward VII's love letters.

Valuable enough in themselves, these letters had been rendered
even more valuable by virtue of the fact that, in his will, the late King had left instructions for all his private and personal correspondence to be destroyed. One knows that, even before his death, Edward VII had had all his letters to Skittles returned and burned (although his annual allowance to her continued after his death) and it was left to his two trusted associates, Lord Knollys and Lord Esher, to destroy everything that might be regarded as in any way compromising. Their lordships carried out their task with regrettable efficiency: all available traces of Edward VII's irregular private life were successfully obliterated.

Not that all the King's private correspondence was necessarily compromising. 'Do right by all men and don't write to any woman, '
²
Lillie Langtry used to say; and although Edward VII could not resist writing to his lady-loves, he usually had the good sense to keep these letters discreet and not to sign them with anything more revealing than a phrase like 'Your only love'. But by both the handwriting and the content, the letters were unmistakably his. Such of his letters as have survived – to Lillie Langtry and Alice Keppel – are innocuous enough: catalogues of the weather, the sport and the other members of the house party. Only the fact that they were written by, first, the heir apparent and then the monarch, to his women friends, makes them significant. But one may be sure that his more intimate letters to them were destroyed. Many years after Lillie Langtry's death, the writer Alison Adburgham came across an aged relation of Lillie's whose task it had been to burn a suitcase-full of Edward VII's love letters.

In 1914, though, Daisy Warwick still had all his letters to her. Addressed to his 'Darling Daisy Wife', they were not only love letters, rich in intimacies and endearments, but they were full of the sort of political information and comment that should never have been passed on by someone in his position. So what Lady Warwick had in her possession were letters which, having escaped the general conflagration after the King's death, were both rare and indiscreet.

Fully alive to the potential of these letters, Daisy, by the summer of 1914, had decided that she must use them to clear her £90,000 debt. But throughout the protracted and complicated negotiations which followed her decision, one clear fact emerges: unbeknown to all those with whom she had dealings, Lady Warwick had no intention of publishing these letters. What she was selling was not her secrets but her silence. Daisy wanted to be paid for
not
publishing her royal lover's letters. And the payment was to come from her lover's son, George V.

With consummate skill, Daisy put her plan into action. Her first approach was to that notorious contemporary figure, Frank Harris. By now this braggardly charlatan, his various literary adventures having failed, had been forced to leave England as an undischarged bankrupt and was living, as much by his wits as ever, in France. So when Lady Warwick suggested that he help her write her memoirs, Harris was all ears. Provided King Edward VII's letters were included, claimed Harris, he would be able to sell her memoirs for £100,000 in the United States alone. He, of course, would receive a share of the royalties.

Having had her letters thus valued, Daisy made her next move. She arranged a meeting with her financial adviser – and creditor – Arthur du Cros. No two men could have been less alike than Frank Harris and Arthur du Cros. A Conservative member of parliament, a millionaire, founder of the Dunlop Rubber Company and of the Junior Imperial League, du Cros was a model of integrity and respectability. He was also, as Lady Warwick well knew, a man of unquestioned loyalty to King and Country.

Arthur du Cros had recently lent Daisy £16,000 and it was his refusal to allow her any more time to pay the long overdue interest on his loan that led her to arrange a meeting with him. His insistence on payment, she claims, drove her to consider publishing her reminiscences.

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. By the time Daisy Warwick met Arthur du Cros in a borrowed house in Eaton Square on 25 June 1914, her plan of campaign was underway. Already, in her letter to du Cros suggesting the meeting, Daisy had hinted that she had in her possession certain information which, if made use of, would earn her £100,000. Du Cros had been sceptical. But his scepticism did not last long. Within a few minutes of meeting Lady Warwick, he was being told, as an 'understanding friend', that she had been forced into writing her autobiography in order to clear her debts. She realised that this would 'blast her reputation'
³
but what else could she do?

Du Cros needed only to be shown one of Edward VII's letters, and to be told that the notorious Frank Harris would be collaborating with Lady Warwick on the project, for him to become seriously alarmed. Had she considered the harm which the publication of the letters would do to 'the interests of the Royal Family and the nation'?
⁴
She had. But had the Royal Family and the nation ever considered her? That she was in such a dire financial predicament was entirely due, she said unblinkingly, to the fact that she had had to spend so much money
on entertaining her royal lover and his circle.

Du Cros advised delay. That would be impossible, countered Daisy. Her creditors would wait no longer and she was due to meet Frank Harris in Paris in ten days' time to finalise the deal. At least then, begged du Cros, let him speak to someone about the matter. To this, with a great show of indifference, Daisy agreed. She had all along appreciated that du Cros was the sort of socially ambitious man who would be only too willing to be of service to the Crown. When du Cros left – headed, she had no doubt, for the palace – Daisy knew that her plan was working.