The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ tactfully left.

      Morality aside, Alice Keppel was an intelligent, cultured and highly likeable woman, known for her tact and good humour, who inspired affection and admiration from all who knew her. She was outspoken, witty, generous, kind and utterly discreet, a winning quality in a royal mistress. Physically, she was very beautiful, with alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, a small waist and large breasts. Her eldest daughter, Violet, wrote of her, ‘As a child, I saw Mama in a blaze of glory, resplendent in a perpetual tiara. I adore the unparalleled romance of her life … She not only had a gift of happiness, but she excelled in making others happy. She resembled a Christmas tree laden with presents for everyone.’

      The bearded Bertie was charming, informed, intelligent, beautifully mannered and meticulously dressed – an arbiter of men’s fashion – but by 1898, he was not, physically, the most attractive of men. He was fat and bronchitic, a chain smoker with a 48-inch girth, who had always liked his pleasures in excess, including other men’s wives. He was a leading figure in London society and spent his time eating, drinking, gambling, shooting, sailing and playing bridge. At weekends he went to grand country-house parties, where he enjoyed more of the same.

      When he finally became king, after his mother’s reclusive forty years in widow’s weeds, he would revitalise the monarchy, but he did no work to speak of during his years in waiting. He performed ceremonial duties and was the first to make public appearances as we know them today, opening for example the Thames Embankment, the Mersey Tunnel and Tower Bridge. He also successfully represented Britain abroad, most notably in India; but Queen Victoria disliked him, disapproved of his playboy lifestyle and blamed him for his father’s death. Prince Albert’s death in 1861 had come just two weeks after he journeyed to Cambridge University to reprimand Bertie for bedding an actress. As the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter, ‘I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder.’ She refused to let him have an active military career and wouldn’t allow him to participate in affairs of state. So he had too much time on his hands – not a criticism that could be levelled at the current Prince of Wales, although the lack of parental approval rings loud bells.

      It wasn’t that Bertie had an unhappy marriage. He loved his wife Queen Alexandra and she loved him – she referred to him as ‘my Bertie’ – but he had a voracious sexual appetite and thought nothing of taking other men’s wives. They were different morals for a different age. Although not de rigueur today, adultery was rife amongst the upper classes in Edwardian times and a delicious source of gossip, even though any hint of indiscretion was instant social death.

      Alexandra tolerated her husband’s affairs. Not only was she a product of the time, she thought jealousy an ignoble quality, ‘the bottom of all mischief and misfortune in this world’. When Bertie took up with Alice, she welcomed her as a great improvement on Lady Warwick, who had caused public scandal. She received Mrs Keppel at Windsor Castle, as well as Sandringham, the Royal Family’s estate in Norfolk, and sometimes made use of Alice to keep the King happy. Like his great-grandson, Charles, the King had a fearsome temper and Alice was the only one who was able to calm him.

      For the next twelve years, Mrs George Keppel was a regular sight beside Bertie at all the social events he favoured. Dressed in fabulous floor-length gowns, with collars of diamonds and ropes of pearls, she was with him at the casinos in Biarritz and Monte Carlo; grouse shooting at Sandringham, yachting at Cowes, horse racing at Ascot, on trips to Paris and the fashionable Czech spa town of Marienbad, and to the endless rounds of high-voltage country-house parties, where she was welcome in all but a few. The King even had the temerity to sit her next to the Archbishop of Canterbury at dinner.

      Her two daughters were in awe of their mother. The younger, Sonia, who became Camilla’s beloved grandmother, wrote in her autobiography, Edwardian Daughter:

      Mamma used to tell me that she celebrated the Relief of Mafeking sitting astride a lion in Trafalgar Square. And that I was born a fortnight later. I never doubted her story. From my earliest childhood, she was invested for me with a brilliant, goddess-like quality which made possible anything that she chose to say or do. It seemed quite right that she should bestride a lion. Europa bestrode a bull, but the large, blonde Europa of my mythological picture-books in no way resembled my mother. In my extreme youth she drove a tandem of mettlesome ponies in a dog-cart. Had she decided to emulate Europa and ride a bull, she would not have let it take charge of her; she would have controlled it; and competently too; on a side-saddle. But somehow a bull was too plebeian a charger for my mother; a lion seemed much more fitting.

      And of her mother, after Sonia’s birth:

      I can picture her as she lay back among her lace pillows, her beautiful chestnut hair unbound around her shoulders … And I can see the flowers sent as oblations to this goddess, the orchids, the malmaisons, the lilies. Great beribboned baskets of them, delivered in horse-drawn vans by a coachman and attendant in livery. They would have been banked in tall, cut-glass vases about her bed.

      Mrs Keppel turned adultery into an art form. In Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami wrote:

      She dazzled and seduced. Her demeanour and poise countered ‘whispers, taints and horrible noxious suspicions’. Clear as to what she wanted – prosperity and status – she challenged none of the proprieties of her class. Even her enemies – and they were few – she treated kindly which, considering the influence she wielded with the Prince, indicated a generous nature. She invariably knew the choicest scandal, the price of stocks, the latest political move; no one could better amuse the Prince during the tedium of the long dinners etiquette decreed.

      Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, Head of the Foreign Office, who travelled with the King and wrote many of his speeches, made the following note in his private file after Bertie’s death:

      I would like here to pay a tribute to her wonderful discretion, and to the excellent influence which she always exercised upon the King. She never utilised her knowledge to her own advantage or to that of her friends; and I never heard her repeat an unkind word of anybody. There were one or two occasions when the King was in disagreement with the Foreign Office, and I was able, through her, to advise the King with a view to the policy of the Government being accepted. She was very loyal to the King and patriotic at the same time.

      It would have been difficult to find any other lady who would have filled the part of friend to King Edward with the same loyalty and discretion.

      The parallels are remarkable. When Edward died in 1910, Alice Keppel discreetly took herself, her two daughters, their nanny and five travelling companions on a trip around the world in a ship. They were gone for a couple of years before she quietly resumed her position in London society from a new house in Grosvenor Street. Some years later she and her husband bought a beautiful Italian property, Villa dell’Ombrellino, in the hills overlooking Florence, where she spent the rest of her life – apart from the war years – and continued to entertain the great and the good. Winston Churchill was one such visitor; he set up an easel on the terrace to paint the view of the Duomo. When Alice died in 1947, Violet Trefusis inherited the house and lived there writing novels and memoirs until her own death in 1972. Annabel used to love going to stay with her great-aunt. Violet, who had no children of her own, was fond of Rosalind and her young family and determined that Rosalind would have the bulk of her estate when she died.

      None of Rosalind’s children ever knew their Keppel great-grandmother, but they knew the story from their grandmother, and Camilla was the one who was always fascinated by it. Sonia called Edward ‘Kingy’ and would sometimes find him having tea with her mother when she came down from the nursery at six o’clock. She described it in her memoir:

      On such occasions he and I devised a fascinating game. With a fine disregard for the good condition of his trouser, he would lend me his leg, on which I used to start two bits of bread and butter СКАЧАТЬ