The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (48 page)

On her return to London two years after Edward VII's death, the Keppels bought number 16 Grosvenor Street. Now freed both of financial constraints and of any need for circumspection, Alice entertained lavishly. The spacious, superbly furnished rooms of her Grosvenor Street house swarmed with guests: writers, dancers, politicians, Continental royals. The outbreak of the First World War brought only a slight diminution of this brilliant social life. Although George Keppel joined his regiment and Alice spent periods helping her great friend Lady Sarah Wilson run her hospital in Boulogne, she still played hostess to an assortment of guests, with as many as seventy sitting down to luncheon. 'Mama dominated the big table,' remembers her daughter Sonia, 'where usually it was tacitly understood that the conversation should remain on a light level with the darker shades of war excluded from it.'
³⁰

But darker shades, of a more personal nature, threatened Alice Keppel towards the end of the war when her daughter Violet embarked on a turbulent love affair with Vita Sackville-West, who was by now married to Harold Nicolson. Alice, who was more
disturbed by the possibility of scandal than by the unconventionality of the liaison, suggested the conventional remedy: Violet must get married. But Violet Keppel's marriage to Denys Trefusis in the summer of 1919 solved nothing; the Violet-Vita love affair became more stormy still. When Violet threatened to divorce her husband, Alice Keppel tried a second conventional remedy: she would cut her daughter off without a penny. This solution seems to have proved more successful; at any rate, it was from this point on that the affair began to die a death.

At one stage during this three-year upheaval, when Violet had been threatening to go off and live with Vita, Alice Keppel had said, 'Very well, but wait until Sonia is married: a scandal like this and her wedding will never take place. '
³¹
Violet agreed, and in the autumn of 1920 Sonia Keppel married Roland Cubitt, the son of Baron Ashcombe and heir to the Cubitt building fortune.

Lord Ashcombe had been somewhat disconcerted to find that, on arriving at Grosvenor Street to discuss the marriage settlement with George Keppel, it was with Alice Keppel that he was obliged to do business. Alice proved herself more than a match for his lordship. Visibly shaken by the size of the settlement to which Mrs Keppel had forced him to agree, Lord Ashcombe said that he hoped that this expensive marriage would endure. 'My dear Lord Ashcombe,' drawled Alice, 'neither you nor I can legislate for the future.'
³²

In 1927 the Keppels sold their Grosvenor Street house (Alice was able to up the price by agreeing to leave behind her celebrity-studded visitors' book) and moved to Italy. Here they bought the Villa dell'Ombrellino on Bellosguardo, above Florence. For the following two decades, with the exception of the war years, this was to be their home. Although Alice improved the house almost beyond recognition and furnished it in her usual sumptuous style, it was for its views – one across the domes and towers of the city, the other across the vines and cypresses of the countryside – that the villa was chiefly remarkable. At l'Ombrellino, says Alice Keppel's neighbour, Sir Harold Acton, 'none could compete with her glamour as a hostess.' Celebrated as the ex-mistress of Edward VII, as an international
grande dame
and as a matchless party-giver, Alice Keppel reigned like a queen over Florentine society. Her chestnut hair, by now, had turned white; her figure, always voluptuous, had become majestic.

'A fine figure of a woman, as they used to say, more handsome than beautiful, she possessed enormous charm, which was not only due to her cleverness and vivacity but to her generous heart,' writes Harold
Acton. 'Her kindnesses were innumerable and spontaneous. Altogether she was on a bigger scale than most of her sex; she could have impersonated Britannia in a
tableau vivant
and done that lady credit.'

George Keppel, continues Acton, 'spent much of his leisure compiling booklets of contemporary dates for his sight-seeing guests. Naturally he acted as cicerone to the prettiest debutantes – "such a little cutie" he said fondly of more than one.'
³³

Although Alice Keppel seldom dwelt on her past association with Edward VII, there were occasions when her listeners were sharply reminded of the position she had once enjoyed. She happened to be in the dining room of her favourite hotel, the Ritz in London, on the day that King Edward VIII abdicated his throne in order to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson. To Alice Keppel the whole thing was incomprehensible. That the King should want to sleep with Wallis Simpson was perfectly understandable, but why on earth should he want to
marry
her? With, according to the journalist Janet Flanner, 'all London' dining at the Ritz that evening, Mrs Keppel's opinion went reverberating through the room. 'Things were done much better,' she announced in her deep voice, 'in
my
day.'
³⁴

Within four years Mrs Keppel was back at the Ritz on a more permanent basis. In 1940 the entry of Italy into the war forced the Keppels to leave Florence and to find their way back to Britain. In France they were caught up in the familiar mêlée but, as always, Alice kept her head. In Biarritz she was greeted like a returning heroine and, on boarding the Royal Navy troopship off Saint-Jean-de-Luz, was given the only available private cabin – the captain's. The greatest danger faced by the refugees during the crossing seems to have been physical discomfort; yet Alice Keppel's friend, the inimitable Mrs Ronald Greville, was heard afterwards to say that 'To hear Alice talk about her escape from France, one would think she had swum the Channel, with her maid between her teeth.'
³⁵

On arrival in England, the Keppels went to stay with their daughter Sonia Cubitt in the country; but preferring, as Alice put it, 'bombs to boredom',
³⁶
they soon moved back to London and into the Ritz. Here they remained for the rest of the war.

In no time, Alice Keppel had established herself as the leading personality of the Ritz Hotel. 'The most jovially optimistic of my friends,' writes Harold Acton of these war-time years, 'was Mrs George Keppel, who was empress of the Ritz at this period. Wherever she pitched her tent she appeared to rule. She created her own aura of
grandeur in the suitably Edwardian lounge, far more regal than poor King Zog and Queen Geraldine of Albania, who had taken refuge in the same caravanserai. Traditionally better informed than anyone else – and when the fact failed her she would embellish it with plausible fancy – she divulged the latest Florentine gossip . . .'
³⁷

Her sense of humour remained as sharp as ever. On one occasion, during these years, she visited the Bishop of Wells in his picturesque moated palace.

'And what, Bishop,' asked the socially accomplished Alice in an effort to fill an awkward pause in the conversation, 'are your favourite books?'

'Well,' replied his lordship, 'my idea of a perfect afternoon is to relax on that sofa with my favourite Trollope.'
³⁸

It became one of Alice's pet anecdotes.

The diarist 'Chips' Channon has left a telling pen-picture of Alice Keppel towards the end of the war, when she was already seventy-four. 'I gave a dinner party at which Mrs Keppel was the "showpiece"; she looked magnificent in black sequins and jewels, and her fine white hair and gracious manners are impressive: she is so affectionate and grande dame that it is a pity she tipples, and then becomes garrulous and inaccurate in her statements . . .'
³⁹

This is not the only time that 'Chips' Channon mentions Alice's 'tippling'; nor is he the only one to do so. She was often to be seen, during these years, holding uproarious court to gatherings of equivocal young men in London pubs.

During this period in Britain, Alice and her daughter Violet once paid a visit to that other
grande dame
with whom she had so often come in contact in her days as Edward VII's mistress: his daughter-in-law, Queen Mary. Now also in her seventies, the dowager Queen was spending the war at Badminton House in Gloucestershire. What these two old matriarchs discussed one does not know (although Queen Mary was more worldly than was generally imagined) but Violet, herself almost fifty by now, was studiously ignored by the old Queen. Only on making her farewell curtsey was Violet rewarded with a remark.

'Very good Violet,' pronounced Queen Mary on her curtsey, 'you hold yourself as straight as ever. '
⁴⁰

Throughout these years at the Ritz, George and Alice Keppel had, as they put it, 'buried' the Villa dell'Ombrellino. They never harked back to their home above Florence. But one day, late in 1944, Major Hamish Erskine, freshly arrived from the triumphant Allied campaign in Italy, came bursting into the hotel.

'Mrs Keppel, Mrs Keppel,' he exclaimed. 'I can't wait to tell you that the Villa is safe, everything is intact, even the Chinese pagodas.'

Alice remained imperturbable. 'Those, my dear Hamish,' she declared, 'were the
common
pagodas.'
⁴¹

The uncommon pagodas – the pagodas given to her by Edward VII – were safely stored away.

In 1946 the Keppels returned to l'Ombrellino. Now seventy-seven, Alice was beginning to show signs of failing health. She was suffering from sclerosis of the liver. For a while though, the delights of her Italian home, with its warm sunshine, its statue-lined terrace, its orange and lemon trees in tubs and its 'jangle-tangle of bells'
⁴²
restored her. And her optimism, her tendency to look ahead, remained as marked as ever. When someone asked her how she regarded the prospect of turning eighty, her reply was characteristic. 'Oh, eighty is such a
dull
age!' she laughed. 'Now ninety, on the other hand, is rather chic. So I shall start counting from ninety.'
⁴³

But she did not even live to be eighty. By the summer of 1947 it was clear that she was dying. While poor George Keppel wandered disconsolately about the hushed villa, Alice's illness took its long, slow course. 'Look darling,' her daughter Violet once said in an effort to cheer her up, 'look at the view from your window. Surely you love nature?'

'Yes,' answered Alice, 'the nature of the Ritz.'
⁴⁴

Alice Keppel died, at the age of seventy-eight, on 11 September 1947. She was buried under the cypresses of the Protestant cemetery in Florence. Two months later, the heartbroken George Keppel also died. 'Always the most courteous of men,' says their daughter Violet, 'it was as though he were loth to keep her waiting.'
⁴⁵

Although all the obituaries of Mrs George Keppel linked her, with consummate tact, to 'the intimate circle of the Edwardian court'
⁴⁶
, it was as a contemporary figure that she was chiefly remembered. 'It was difficult to think of her as an old lady,' wrote Sir Osbert Sitwell in
The Times
, 'since she retained unimpaired her bold, vigorous and enterprising personality.' Another friend described her as 'one of the most vivid of beings, no one could ever have enjoyed life more, or provided greater enjoyment for those who surrounded her.'
⁴⁷

In short, Alice Keppel was not simply an Edwardian ghost. No more than with Lillie Langtry or Daisy Warwick did her fame rest solely on the fact that she had once been a mistress of King Edward VII. Like them, Alice was a woman of intelligence and independence, very much a personality in her own right.

Yet there was no denying the fact that when Alice Keppel died, the most colourful living reminder of Edward VII's scandalous love life died also. For if, by 1947, the leading representative of the official side of Edward VII's career was his eminently respectable grandson, George VI, then the leading representative of his unofficial, immoral, profligate side had been Alice Keppel.

But then she had never been able, Alice once said, to tell a king from a knave.

Notes

C
HAPTER
O
NE

1
   
Russell,
Collections
, p 132

2
   
Magnus,
Gladstone
, p 267

3
   
Ibid
, p 209

4
   
Ibid
, p 209

5
   
Nicolson,
George V
, p 82

6
   
Holden,
Charles
, p 257

7
   
Magnus,
Edward VII
, p 7

8
   
Ibid
, p 75

9
   
Hamilton,
Halcyon Era
, p 73

   
10
   
Magnus,
Gladstone
, p 211

   
11
   
Ibid
, p 209

   
12
   
Ibid
, p 213

   
13
   
Ibid
, p 214

   
14
   
Ibid
, p 215

   
15
   
Ibid
, p 216

   
16
   
Ibid
, p 215

   
17
   
Grey,
Twenty-one Years
, p 15

   
18
   
Hibbert,
Edward VII
, p 98

   
19
   
Lee,
Edward VII
, p 179

   
20
   
Jullian,
Edward
, p 13

   
21
   
Magnus,
Edward VII
, p 21

   
22
   
Nicolson,
George V
, p 14

   
23
   
Benson,
Edward VII
, p 21