The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (36 page)

If only the Prince had known that one day his darling Daisy was to use these affectionate letters to blackmail his son, King George V, he would have expressed himself with rather more circumspection.

'It would be wrong to assume,' wrote Margot Asquith, 'that the [Prince of Wales's] only interest in women was to have an "affaire" with them. That he had many "affaires" is indisputable, but there were a great many other women in his life from whom all he sought was a diverting companionship.'
⁴⁹

It is, perhaps, in this light that the Prince's strange relationship with Miss Agnes Keyser must be viewed. He first met the forty-five-year-old Miss Keyser in February 1898, about the same time as he met Alice Keppel. The daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, Charles Keyser, Agnes Keyser was an attractive and intelligent woman, with that strongly individual streak which the Prince always found so irresistible. It was this independence – allied to her financial independence – which led Agnes Keyser, in spite of her charm and beauty, to reject the conventions of her time and to take up nursing as a career. With the passing years she developed into a brisk, efficient, somewhat intimidating nursing sister, highly respected in her profession.

That the Prince should have been attracted to this nanny-like figure, so different from the sumptuously dressed and seductively mannered women in whose company he usually delighted, is revealing. Indeed, it was precisely these nanny-like qualities that appealed to him. In her comfortable home in Grosvenor Crescent, the Prince could be assured of the calm that was so conspicuously lacking in his daily life. With head sympathetically tilted, Agnes Keyser would listen to his troubles, discuss his health and advise him on personal problems. Serene and unaffected, she gave him a sense of security. In her reassuring company, the Prince felt completely at ease. She even tried to improve his eating habits. The Prince would often dine with Agnes Keyser, sometimes at a small table laid in front of a glowing fire, and instead of stuffing him with
ortolans rôtis sur canapés
or
gâteau punch granit au champagne
, she fed him with what, in those days, was considered healthy food: Irish stews and rice puddings. At least it was plain and wholesome, redolent of the nursery.

An added attraction, as far as the Prince was concerned, was that Agnes Keyser was an accomplished bridge player. Quite often she and her sister would join the Prince and Alice Keppel in a game. With his appreciation both of female company and of good bridge, the Prince greatly enjoyed these evenings.

When the Boer War broke out in 1899, Agnes Keyser decided to convert her Grosvenor Crescent house into a nursing home for officers. As not even her substantial private income could meet all the costs of equipping the hospital, she appealed to the Prince of Wales for help. He immediately set up a trust and coerced his many rich friends, such as Ernest Cassel, Arthur Sassoon and Nathaniel Rothschild, into subscribing to it. As the ineffable Rosa Lewis – the kitchenmaid who ended up presiding over the famous Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street – put it, the Prince 'got his snob friends to dole out'.
⁵⁰
After the Prince's accession to the throne, Agnes Keyser's nursing home, which she ran as matron, became known as King Edward's Hospital for Officers.

For twelve years, from 1898 until he died in 1910, King Edward VII kept up his close relationship with Agnes Keyser. Quite clearly, he was devoted to her. Whether or not it was anything more than an
amitié amoureuse
one does not know. Perhaps, for one of the greatest libertines of the time who never lacked sexual opportunity, it was enough that Agnes Keyser should be a comforting, understanding, all-forgiving presence – the quintessential mother-figure.

The Prince's relationship with his own mother, Queen Victoria, had greatly improved over the years. Time had mellowed them both. The Queen was more ready to concede her heir's good points and the Prince to appreciate his mother's attitudes. He was always very grateful when, during his all too frequent spells of trouble, she gave him active support. By now the Queen had finally allowed her heir access to official papers, with the result that one of his deepest causes of resentment had been removed. Max Beerbohm's famous cartoon – showing the adult Prince being made to stand in a corner by the tight-lipped Queen and captioned 'The Rare, the Rather Awful Visits of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, to Windsor Castle' – no longer had quite the same validity. Although mother and son remained at odds over some things, they were in complete accord on others. Both, for instance, were ardent imperialists, very conscious of the importance of upholding British prestige throughout the world. This shared imperialism was a very strong bond indeed.

They had even learned to take pleasure in each other's company. The Queen's entry in her Journal, after her son had been to stay with her at Balmoral one year, has a strangely touching quality. 'An early luncheon,' she wrote, 'after which dear Bertie left, having had a most pleasant visit, which I think he enjoyed and said so repeatedly. He had not stayed alone with me, excepting for a couple of days in May '68, at Balmoral, since he married! He is so kind and affectionate that it is a pleasure to be a little quietly together. '
⁵¹

But that the Prince should have felt an increasing frustration with the length of time he was being kept waiting for the throne can be appreciated. In December 1900 he entered his sixtieth year; he must, in darker moments, have agreed with the member of his household who afterwards claimed that 'the best years of a man's life, say from forty to sixty were to a great extent wasted, and King Edward came to the throne with a vitality already debilitated by the years of waiting.'
⁵²

On occasions, the Prince even gave voice to this sense of frustration. There is a story that once, in Paris, at the end of a long day, he turned to a companion and said, 'You Frenchmen are always talking of your Eternal Father, but I can see that you don't know what it is to possess an Eternal Mother.'
⁵³

Perhaps he said no such thing for, in the ordinary way, the Prince had far too highly developed a sense of majesty to make such a remark, but it would have been understandable if he had.

On this score of Queen Victoria's longevity, the Prince's great friend, the Portuguese ambassador, the Marquis de Soveral, used to
tell an amusing anecdote. One evening, in the course of the usual cheerless dinner party at Windsor Castle, the old Earl of Clarendon with, one suspects, a touch too much gallantry and a glass too much wine, turned to Queen Victoria and asked, 'Ma'am, can you tell me the secret of your eternal youth?'

Her Majesty's reply was unequivocal. 'Beecham's pills,'
⁵⁴
she snapped.

But not even this panacea could keep the old Queen alive forever and by the middle of January 1901 it was clear that she did not have much longer to live. On 18 January the Prince received a message advising him to come to Osborne, where the Queen was slowly dying, as soon as he could. That evening – his last in London before going to Osborne – he spent, not with his new mistress, the scintillating Alice Keppel, but with his new friend, the sympathetic Agnes Keyser. The eminently practical Miss Keyser would have known exactly how to hearten the Prince at this troubled time.

At dawn the following morning the Prince caught a special train to the Isle of Wight. Four days later, on 22 January 1901, Queen Victoria died and the Prince of Wales became King.

'So the Queen is dead . . .' wrote young Winston Churchill from Canada to his mother. 'A great and solemn event: but I am curious to know about the King. Will it entirely revolutionise his way of life? Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined among the crown jewels and other regalia? Will he become desperately serious? Will he continue to be friendly to you? Will the Keppel be appointed 1st Lady of the Bedchamber?'
⁵⁵

11

La Favorita

'I
F YOU
ever become King,' Queen Victoria had once warned the Prince of Wales, 'you will find all these friends
most
inconvenient, and you will have to break with them
all
.'
¹

Here was yet another piece of maternal advice that King Edward VII had no intention of following. Far from turning his back on his somewhat racy circle of friends, the King ensured that they were all made welcome at the new Edwardian court. Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, for so long noted for their hushed, cathedral-like air, were suddenly filled with cigar-smoking financiers, dashing men-about-town and soignée, animated women. The rooms echoed to the sounds of lively conversation and the strains of Lehar and von Suppé. Whereas at Queen Victoria's table no one had ever spoken above a whisper, dinners were now, observed one astonished official, 'like an ordinary party'
²
– all talk and laughter.

'The White Drawing Room where for the last two years of her life the Queen sat after dinner,' lamented one of Victoria's ladies-in-waiting, 'is now used as a card room, one table being for whist and the other for bridge. The King delights in the last-named game and plays every evening, Sundays included, till between 1 and 2 in the morning.'
³

Indeed, the old Queen's ladies-in-waiting, in their grey or mauve half-mourning, were pensioned off; as were scores of those attendants whose duties had become fossilised during the long years of Queen Victoria's seclusion. Out, too, went the accumulated memorabilia of half a century: the yellowing photographs, the elephants' tusks, the marble busts, the cumbersome mahogany furniture. Electric light, central heating and new bathrooms were installed. The state rooms were thoroughly overhauled: repainted, recurtained, recarpeted and refurnished. The chandeliers were electrified; the walls fitted with
enormous looking-glasses. Even at sacrosanct Balmoral the drawing room walls were stripped of their tartan covering.

Not only did the new King instigate all these changes, he took an active interest in them. With his fox terrier trotting at his heels, he bustled from room to room, advising, directing, deciding. 'Offer it up,'
⁴
he would command when someone suggested the hanging of a picture here or the placing of a cabinet there, and he would make an immediate decision. The effect of Edward VII on the court was, as one of his grandsons has put it, 'much as if a Viennese hussar had suddenly burst into an English vicarage.'
⁵

This is not to say that the new court lacked dignity. On the contrary, it gained as much in majesty as it did in animation. With his highly developed sense of showmanship, the King saw to it that he created an atmosphere worthy of his status. His refurbishing of the various palaces made them not only more convenient but more magnificent. Furniture and porcelain assembled by that great royal connoisseur, George IV, were brought out of storage; gilding was of the richest, carpeting of the deepest, fabrics of the most luxurious. On gala occasions, great pyramids of roses, hydrangeas and carnations decorated the main rooms.

Manners might have been more relaxed but dress became more formal, with the women obliged to wear tiaras and the men court dress with decorations. Once, when the young Duchess of Marlborough appeared at dinner wearing a diamond crescent instead of the prescribed tiara, she was sternly rebuked. And when Lord Rosebery arrived at an evening reception at Buckingham Palace in trousers instead of knee-breeches, the King was furious. 'I presume,' he said in his guttural voice, 'that you have come in the suite of the American Ambassador.'
⁶

As Edward VII remained the most punctilious of men, everything was done with the utmost precision. 'Nothing,' confirmed one of his Continental nieces, 'is more perfect in every detail than the King of England's court and household, a sort of staid luxury without ostentation, a placid, aristocratic ease and opulence which has nothing showy about it. Everything is run on silent wheels that have been perfectly greased; everything fits in, there are no spaces between, no false note. From the polite, handsome and superlatively groomed gentleman-in-waiting who receives you in the hall, to the magnificently solemn and yet welcoming footman who walks before you down the corridor, everything pleases the eye, satisfies one's fastidiousness . . .'
⁷

The ceremonial aspect of the monarchy was not only restored but
expanded. Queen Victoria's sedate afternoon Drawing Rooms were replaced by brilliant evening Presentation Courts. State occasions such as the opening of parliament, the Garter ceremony, the investitures and the levées, were all conducted with a hitherto unheard-of splendour. In Queen Victoria's day, visiting royals had to put up in London hotels; now they were lavishly entertained at Buckingham Palace. Whereas the late Queen had not paid a formal visit to a foreign capital for almost half a century, Edward VII's reign was to be notable for a series of the most spectacular state visits ever undertaken by a modern monarch.

Inevitably, there was criticism. Lord Esher, who was to become, in time, one of Edward VII's most trusted confidants, lamented the passing of 'the mystery and awe of the old court'.
⁸
Henry James, too, regretted the disappearance of 'little mysterious Victoria' and the succession of that 'arch vulgarian, Edward the Caresser'.
⁹
The King, reported Lady Curzon to her husband, 'was miserable in the company of any but his few bridge friends as he feels himself so hopelessly out of it with intelligence or intellect – on the whole he has begun
badly.'
¹⁰

It was true, of course, that the tone of the new court was somewhat philistine. The King might have had an eye for a splendid setting but his taste – in pictures, plays and books – remained undeveloped. Paintings had to be strictly representational. He went to the theatre to see light opera, musical comedies or the sort of contemporary play about upper-class society in which Lillie Langtry so often starred. Music provided by bandmasters like Sousa and Gottlieb was what he preferred.
East Lynne
by Mrs Henry Wood is said to have been the only book he ever finished; and when he wanted to furnish his library shelves, he simply left the choice of books to a man from Hatchards. On being told, at a literary gathering, that a certain writer was an authority on Lamb, he was astounded. 'On
lamb?'
¹¹
he exclaimed.