The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (43 page)

It was an extremely chastened and embarrassed Lord Alington who finally dropped Alice at her home three hours later. 'I do think it was charming of you to let me see Hoxton as it is
now,'
said Alice meaningfully. 'Next time I go there I shan't recognise it.'
²⁴

The value of such gestures is difficult to assess; with a man like Lord Alington, who knew that Mrs Keppel had the ear of the King, they could have been considerable.

A lesser woman than Alice might well have used her unique position as the King's confidante to press her own views or to make political mischief. But being both astute and good-natured, such influence as she was able to exert on her royal lover was always beneficial. The remarkable tribute paid to her by Charles Hardinge, permanent head of the Foreign Office and later, as Lord Hardinge of
Penshurst, Viceroy of India, is worth quoting in full.

'I take this opportunity to allude to a delicate matter upon which I am in a position to speak with authority,' he wrote in a private memorandum soon after King Edward VII's death. 'Everybody knew of the friendship that existed between King Edward and Mrs George Keppel, which was intelligible in view of the lady's good looks, vivacity and cleverness. I used to see a great deal of Mrs Keppel at that time, and I was aware that she had knowledge of what was going on in the political world.

'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.'
²⁵

Herbert Asquith, when he became Liberal Prime Minister in 1908 and had to take the unprecedented step of travelling to Biarritz in order to kiss hands in the Hotel du Palais (a step for which the King was widely criticised: the monarch should have received his new Prime Minister in Britain) was similarly grateful to Alice Keppel. In a letter written to her after his return from Biarritz, he thanked her for 'your kind words and wise counsels, which I shall treasure and (I hope) profit by'.
²⁶
One may be sure that, if nothing else, Alice would have advised Asquith on how to handle the King.

Often, Edward VII would ask Alice Keppel to do a little diplomatic scouting on his behalf; or she might decide to do some reconnoitring of her own. In 1907 Kaiser Wilhelm II, having paid a state visit to King Edward VII, prolonged his stay with a visit to Highcliffe Castle on the Isle of Wight. Count Mensdorff, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, was staying at nearby Crichel Down as a member of another large house party which included, as he puts it, 'La favorita Keppel with her "lady-in-waiting", Lady Sarah Wilson [Lord Randolph Churchill's sister]'. One evening the Kaiser came over to dinner.

In spite of Wilhelm II's imperviousness to feminine charm in general and his aversion to Edward VII's mistresses in particular, and with a complete disregard for all rules of precedence, the Kaiser found
that Mrs Keppel had been placed beside him at table. Only at the express wish of Edward VII would this extraordinary
placement
ever have been considered. 'The
Favorita
was seated next to the Kaiser,' decided Mensdorff, 'so she might have the opportunity of talking to him. I would love to know what sort of report she sent back to Sandringham!'
²⁷

On another occasion Mensdorff, having discussed the latest Balkan crisis with Alice Keppel at yet another house party, was disconcerted to find himself taken to task a couple of days later by Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, for what Grey considered to be Mensdorff's prejudiced opinion on the subject. Quite clearly, Alice had lost no time in reporting the conversation to the King; or the King in reporting it to Grey.

Yet Alice Keppel always denied that she was
au fait
with confidential political matters. She realised that this would be constitutionally improper. Years later, when Margot Asquith published her book 'More Memories', she was roundly attacked by Alice for having given the impression that Alice had been the late Edward VII's political confidante. She had never been told a cabinet secret in her life, declared Alice hotly, and Margot's assertions had 'got her into endless trouble with George V'.
²⁸

13

'Kingy was such a Wonderful Man'

E
DWARD
VII might have been devoted to Alice Keppel but he was certainly not faithful to her. The habits of a lifetime's philandering could not be changed overnight. The King was too old and licentious a dog to learn any new tricks of fidelity now; he continued to take his pleasures wherever and whenever he found them. And Alice, as a woman of the world who was fond of, but not in love with, the ageing libertine, let him have as much rein as he wanted.

In his sixties, the King's interest in the opposite sex was undimmed. 'Night after night as I sat in my stall at the opera and saw him coming into the omnibus box and taking up his opera glasses to survey the glittering women in the first and ground tier boxes,' remembers Robert Hitchens, 'I saw a man who looked, I thought, extremely genial and satisfied with his position in the scheme of the world.'
¹

As well he might be. In the majority of cases the King needed only to find out the name of some beauty who had caught his eye for a subsequent meeting to be arranged. There was even an occasion when the beauty who had captured the royal interest was not of the opposite sex. Prince Felix Youssoupoff who, a decade later, was to become famous as the murderer of Rasputin, was generally regarded as one of the most beautiful young men of his day. One evening at the Théâtre des Capucines in Paris, as he sat in the stalls dressed as a woman (he always, he assures us, dressed as a schoolboy by day and as 'an elegant woman' by night) Youssoupoff noticed an elderly gentleman in a box eyeing him persistently. When the lights went up for the interval, he saw that his admirer was King Edward VII. Yousoupoffs brother Nicholas, who had accompanied him to the theatre, came back from smoking a cigarette in the foyer with the news that he had been approached by one of the King's equerries: His Majesty wished to know the name of the lovely young woman he was escorting.

'I must confess,' says Youssoupoff, 'that this conquest amused me enormously and greatly flattered my vanity.'
²

If, as a monarch, Edward VII had to behave with rather more circumspection at home than he had as Prince of Wales, no such considerations inhibited him when he travelled abroad. It was true that on his various cruises Queen Alexandra was able to keep an eye on him, and at Biarritz Alice Keppel could do the same; but during his late summer sojourn at Marienbad and during his frequent stays in Paris, the King flung himself into amorous adventures with as much gusto as ever. 'I got so mixed up with the King's incessant gaieties, for which his energy and appetite are alike insatiable,' complained Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, the Liberal Prime Minister, from Marienbad, 'that it was no rest or holiday for me. Thus when at last he was gone . . . my Dr ordered me to bed and absolute rest for forty-eight hours.'
³

For the King's equerries, it was worse. They never knew who His Majesty was going to take up next. Amongst what one observer calls the 'semi-déclassé ladies'
⁴
were an overblown Parisian adventuress married to a bogus Baron years younger than herself; Mrs Dale Lace with 'short skirts and a murky past';
⁵
Mrs Hall Walker who would prepare her hotel room for the King's afternoon visits by filling the vases with flowers, spraying the air with scent and, most important of all, drawing the curtains. Then there was a Mrs X whom he would either visit in her Marienbad home or else drive out to the Café Nimrod, tucked away in the woods. For this particular excursion he would dispense even with an equerry; it would be left to a single Austrian policeman to plod among the dripping trees while the King of England took his pleasure within.

The American actress Maxine Elliot, realising that it would be almost impossible to meet the King socially in London, decided to go to Marienbad instead. Exquisitely dressed, she sat decorously one morning reading her book on a bench in the
Kreuzbrunnen
. As the King and his entourage passed by on their way to the Kurhaus for their first glass of mineral water, she glanced up. His Majesty glanced back. The party strolled on but within a few minutes one of the King's companions returned with a message for Miss Elliot. His Majesty would be delighted with her presence at a dinner party that evening; a formal invitation would, of course, be delivered to her hotel later. Miss Elliot was only too delighted to accept.

Their association blossomed and after a further visit to Marienbad the following year, Miss Elliot felt so confident of the King's interest
that she bought herself a house outside London. At considerable expense she prepared a suite of rooms above her own which she would always refer to as 'the King's suite'.
⁶

Even more worrying for Edward VII's staff was the sort of public escapade that could so easily get into the newspapers. He once asked for the English dancer, Maud Allen, to perform at a dinner party to be given in his honour. As Miss Allen usually appeared wearing only 'two oyster shells and a five-franc piece'
⁷
his entourage was understandably apprehensive. But as in those days journalists could be trusted to keep royal secrets if asked to do so, the newspaper corps were sworn to secrecy and the performance went ahead. His Majesty, by all accounts, was enraptured by Miss Allen's only too obvious talents, and no word of the entertainment found its way into the press.

Yet there were limits, it seems, even to Edward VII's taste for titillation. He once walked out of a theatre during a skit about a licentious countess who entices a monk to take off his robes. It was not so much that he was shocked: he felt that he should not have been publicly exposed to such smut. And on another occasion he again left the theatre during a performance of lewd songs by a touring Viennese cabaret company. This time, the King had been more bored than outraged.

When news of the King's walk-out reached England, the Bishop of Ripon felt moved to write him a fulsome letter of congratulation for having taken a public stand against obscenity. But the King was no hypocrite. When his secretary asked him how he should reply to the Bishop's letter, Edward VII said, 'Tell the Bishop the exact truth. I have no wish to pose as a protector of morals, especially abroad.'
⁸

Paris, so long the King's happy hunting ground, had by now been rendered somewhat less happy because of that increased emphasis on security by the French police. His clandestine meeting with one beauty in the Jardin des Plantes was completely spoiled when His Majesty recognised one of the plain-clothes policemen who had been assigned to keep an eye on him. The King was furious. It was absurd, he thundered, that 'in Paris of all places'
⁹
he should be shadowed. But any subterfuge to evade the police – such as publicly ordering his car for four o'clock and then secretly sending for it at three – was in vain; the police never let him out of their sight.

There were other ways, though, of enjoying feminine company without police surveillance. One evening, while staying incognito at the Hotel Meurice, the King returned to the hotel early to find his
equerry, Arthur Paget, in the dining room with an attractive young woman. The King promptly joined them.

'Dear boy,' he said to Paget over coffee, 'I have worked you much too hard today; go and get some rest.'

'I am feeling fine, Sir,' replied the uncomprehending equerry.

Over cognac the King tried again. 'You are looking
very
tired,' he said.

'But I can assure you, Your Majesty . . .' persisted Paget.

The King ordered a second cognac. 'I
advise
you to go up to bed immediately,'
¹⁰
he commanded.

This time Paget understood. Hastily draining his cognac he disappeared, leaving the King alone with his conquest.

There are countless other anecdotes. Two more will suffice. As late as 1940 a faded Edwardian beauty, the half-French Mrs Hope Vere, would sometimes astonish her listeners with a casual remark like, 'One morning the King said to me, "Put on your dressing gown and come and watch the squadron passing." '
¹¹
And an officer on board the royal yacht once heard, as he walked past the porthole of the King's cabin, the monarch's guttural voice saying, 'Stop calling me Sir and put another cushion under your back.'
¹²

Hand-in-hand with these stories of Edward VII's insatiable sexual appetite goes the recently revealed theory that he was impotent during the last years of his life. In his secret diary, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt reports a conversation he had with the courtesan Skittles on the subject. Blunt had asked her if the King's death, in 1910, had had anything to do with sexual overindulgence. 'Oh no,' answered Skittles, 'the King has been impotent for the last fifteen years.'
¹³
As an ex-lover and life-long friend of Edward VII (for years the King had written to her, paid her an annual allowance and, when she was ill, arranged for his doctor to attend her) she was probably in a position to know. In fact, the King regarded his letters to Skittles as so confidential that, when it was thought she might be dying of cancer in 1908, he sent his private secretary, Francis Knollys, to collect and destroy three hundred of them.

Skittles's contention seems to be borne out by something which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, once told the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. The King's affair with Alice Keppel, believed the Archbishop, had always been platonic. His Majesty indicated this by 'always placing her beside the Archbishop at table: something he would never have done if she had, as generally sup
posed, been his mistress. It would have been an insult to the Church and utterly unlike him.' The subtlety of this approach, said the Archbishop, 'was very characteristic of the King'.
¹⁴