Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser E-Book

Raymond Lamont-Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A detailed look at the two women in the life of Edward VII during his last years. Alice Keppel, youngest daughter of a Scottish retired admiral and MP emerged from obscurity in 1898 to become the publicly acknowledged mistress of the portly, fun-loving Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. Agnes Keyser, daughter of a prominent member of the Stock exchange, defied social expectations by not marrying, instead becoming involved in hospital charity work. Her twelve-year relationship with the king was much less in the public eye, but was just as important.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Genealogical Tables: the Keysers, the Edmonstones and the Keppels

The Separate British Royal Households, 1901

Introduction: Two Perfect Loves

1 Born a Keyser and Born an Edmonstone

2 Two Childhoods

3 Alice’s Marriage and the Albemarles

4 First Lover, First Child

5 Agnes and Alice Meet the Prince of Wales

6 War, Assassinations and Alarms

7 Raising the Wind

8 ‘The King’s Loose-Box’

9 Indispensable Duo

10 The Royal Curtain Falls

11 ‘Royal Widowhood’ and War

12 The Trouble with Violet

13 An Ending at Buckland House

14 ‘Queen of Florence’; ‘Empress of the Ritz’

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge with particular thanks the help given by Major Bruce Shand, Sonia Keppel’s literary executor, in supplying answers to family queries. Further thanks go to Major Shand and to Messrs Hamish Hamilton, publishers, for permission to quote from Sonia Keppel’s autobiography Edwardian Daughter and for the reproduction of pictures therefrom. Gratitude is also expressed to Violet Trefusis’s literary executor, John Nova Phillips, for his input on queries about the Keppels.

Regarding Edmonstone family matters the author is indebted to Sir Archibald Edmonstone (great-nephew of Alice Keppel) and Lady Edmonstone and to Lady McGrigor (great-niece) for specific comments to questions on the Edmonstones of Duntreath. Thanks go to Sir Archibald too for permission to reproduce family portraits from his collection.

Each quotation is individually acknowledged as it occurs in the text, but special thanks for permission to quote are extended to the following. To Angela Lambert for line quotes from 1939: The Last Season of Peace; to the Estate of Vita Sackville-West, via Curtis Brown, for the quotes from her The Edwardians; to Weidenfeld & Nicolson for a quote from Dame Rebecca West’s 1900; to Gordon Brook-Shepherd for quotes from his volume Uncle of Europe; to Random House UK Ltd for quotes from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV; and to Frank Magro, literary executor for Sir Osbert Sitwell, and Macmillan for quotes from Great Morning, Vol. III of the autobiography Left Hand Right Hand. The author’s thanks are recorded to the Estate of Anita Leslie for the quotes from her The Marlborough House Set. Mention too is made of the invaluable conversation the author had with Miss Leslie on Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser.

Advice and comments on Alice and George Keppel’s life in Florence have been supplied by the following to whom the author gives very grateful thanks:

Dr Edward Chaney; the Rt Revd Bishop Eric Devenport; Gladys Elliott; the late Joan Haslip; Michael Holmes, HM Consul, Florence; Nancy Pearson; Mark Roberts, Librarian, the British Institute of Florence; the Rt Revd Bishop J.R. Satterthwaite and the Countess of Sutherland.

More grateful thanks go to those listed below for their advice, patience and help at various stages of the book’s genesis: Diana, Countess of Albemarle; Mrs E. Collier, Beaconsfield Area Library; David Cliffe, Royal County of Berkshire Reference Library; Viscount Boyd; Gordon Brook-Shepherd; and Graham Snell, Brooks’s.

There are no companion volumes on the life and family of Agnes Keyser, and documentation on her is sparse and scattered. Further, Commander I.K. Brooks, house governor of the King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, noted that ‘but few documents recording the history of the Hospital from 1899 to 1952 … survived the various moves of the Hospital’. So, in building up the story of Agnes Keyser and her work I am particularly grateful to the following. For data on the history of the hospital, Peter Evans, Marketing Officer of the hospital has provided basic material. On the family I thank Miss Anne Keyser (grand-daughter of Charles Edward Keyser); Peter Keyser (great-great-nephew of Sister Agnes); Frederick N. Hicks of the Stanmore and Harrow Historical Society; Mrs Evelyn Philips (née Keyser); Mrs Muriel Sperling; Mrs Ursula Wadham (great-niece); Mrs E.R. West; Mr E.H. Whittall. General queries have been answered by: Robert Hale, Archivist, Berkshire Record Office; Mrs Helen Pugh, Archives Assistant, British Red Cross; Jo Knell, Cabinet Office; Mr Adrian Fitzgerald; Lady de Bellaigue, Registrar, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle; Christine Hancock, general secretary, Royal College of Nursing; Caroline Mulryne, Keeper, St John Ambulance Collections; and Mrs Jill Wellesley.

On the death of King Edward VII, 6 May 1910, a historical tragedy was enacted. In accordance with his will the king’s private papers and personal letters were burned by Viscount Knollys, his private secretary and Viscount Esher, Constable of Windsor Castle. All the surviving letters from Alice Keppel to her royal lover were burned as were those of Agnes Keyser. After the death of Violet Trefusis, her literary executor, John Phillips, gave to the Royal Archives at Windsor a few letters from Edward VII to Alice and there are a few extant letters from Agnes Keyser to King George V and Queen Mary. I acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen to quote material from the Royal Archives. Queen Alexandra’s papers were also eradicated by her order on her death, 20 November 1925, by her woman-of-the-bedchamber, Charlotte Knollys.

Genealogical Tables: the Keysers, the Edmonstones and the Keppels

Only genealogical data of main persons relevant to the text are mentioned.

The Separate British Royal Households, 1901

A key checklist for social networkers like Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser.

HM King Edward VIIPersonal under Gen. Rt. Hon. Sir Dighton Macnaughten Probyn; Lord Chamberlain’s Department under Edward Hyde Villiers, the Earl of Clarendon (NB: A separate hereditary and domestic court was retained for Scotland); Lord Steward’s Department under Sidney Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery; Department of Master of the Horse under W. Cavendish-Bentinck, Duke of Portland. (NB: The King’s Court was further composed of a range of other departments.)

HM Queen AlexandraLord Chamberlain: Charles John Colville, Lord Colville of Culross.

HRH The Prince of WalesComptroller & Treasurer: Lt-Col. Hon. Sir William Carrington.

HRH The Princess of WalesPrivate Secretary: Major-General Sir Stanley de Astel Calvert Clarke.

The King’s Sister-in-law

HR & IH Marie of Russia, Duchess Alfred of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Duchess of Edinburgh. Private Secretary: Baron Megden.

The King’s only surviving Brother

HRH Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught & Strathearn; Comptroller & Secretary: Col. Alfred Mordaunt Egerton.

The King’s Sister-in-law

HRH Princess Louise of Prussia, Duchess of Connaught & Strathearn; Secretary: Andrew Wilson Murray.

The King’s Sister-in-law

HRH Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, Duchess of Albany; Comptroller: Sir Robert Hawthorn Collins.

The King’s Brother-in-law

HRH Prince Christian of Schelswig-Holstein; Joint Comptroller & Treasurer: Maj. James Euan Baillie Morton; Col. Hon. Charles George Cornwallis Eliot.

The King’s Sister

HRH Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll. Equerry & Secretary: Maj. N. Cuthbertson.

The King’s Sister

HRH Princess Beatrice, Princess Henry of Battenberg; Comptroller & Treasurer: Col. Lord William Cecil.

The King’s youngest daughter

HRH Princess Charles of Denmark, Princess Maud; Comptroller & Private Secretary: Col. Henry Knollys.

INTRODUCTION

Two Perfect Loves

Agnes Keyser had no time for women. She liked men, sick men, wounded men, impecunious men, men she could dominate and scold and pamper.

Anita Leslie (1914–87), The Marlborough House Set (1972)

One of [Alice Keppel’s] secrets of success was that she could be amusing without malice; she never repeated a cruel witticism.

Sir Harold Nicolson (1886–1968) in conversation

The light breeze gusting along London’s North Audley Street had blown away the early morning fog as friends, acquaintances and admirers of Alice, the Hon. Mrs George Keppel chatted, strode away, or caught taxis from the steps of St Mark’s Church. All of those who had listened to the memorial service conducted by the Revd K.H. Thorneycroft on that Wednesday, 1 October 1947, could remember well King Edward VII and Alice whom he had loved for the last twelve years of his life alongside his affectionate relationship with Agnes Keyser.1

Alice’s death notice in The Times for 13 September of that year had stirred memories of the long-gone Edwardian Society in which Alice and Agnes had been significant players. For many their memory brought light and colour into Clement Attlee’s socialist Britain on that chilly early afternoon. The anonymous obituarist in The Times had noted that with the death of Alice Keppel an era had finally come to an end. She was hailed as one of the last great hostesses of her generation who efficiently worked within the rules of Society. It was emphasised, too, that her intimate association with the eminent men of her day had given her an unchallenged understanding and knowledge of the behind-the-scenes aspects of great political and international affairs. Sometimes her wit and diplomacy smoothed situations which would have caused her royal lover to explode with the irascibility for which he was famous. Another hand had added more in The Times for 20 September. Describing her as being larger than life, and generous to all she met, the obituarist averred she was classless in her dealings with all ranks.2 The tone underlined what HSH Daisy, Princess of Pless, née Cornwallis-West had said: ‘What spirit, wit and resilience the woman has.’3

Sir Osbert Sitwell’s obituary of Alice Keppel in The Times succinctly honoured the woman born into the secure, orderly, structured pre-1914 Society that all attending her memorial service could recall. The Sitwells had enjoyed a close friendship with Alice and her husband George for many years and Osbert Sitwell had written with intimate sincerity saying that she had never been old in spirit, seeking out the young in company and enveloping them with good nature to make them feel at ease. He also dwelt on the deep timbre of her voice and her bold direct look that gave the person she was talking to a feeling of full attention. Wherever she went, said Sitwell, she created a ‘special beauty’.

For Osbert Sitwell, and many of his contemporaries, Alice Keppel was the grande dame of the Edwardian era. Sitwell was to say more about his socialising with the Keppels in his autobiography:

Another house at which I was a frequent visitor during these and ensuing years was Mrs George Keppel’s [16] Grosvenor Street, surely one of the most remarkable houses in London. Its high façade, dignified and unpretentious as only that of a London Georgian mansion can be, very effectively disguised its immense size. Within existed an unusual air of spaciousness and light, an atmosphere of luxury, for Mrs Keppel possessed an instinct for splendour, and not only were the rooms beautiful, with their grey walls, red lacquer cabinets, English eighteenth-century portraits of people in red coats, huge porcelain pagodas, and thick magnificent carpets, but the hostess conducted the running of her house as a work of art in itself. I liked greatly to listen to her talking; if it were possible to lure her away from the bridge-table, she would remove from her mouth for a moment the cigarette which she would be smoking with an air of determination, through a long holder, and turn upon the person to whom she was speaking her large, humorous, kindly, peculiarly discerning eyes. Her conversation was lit by humour, insight and the utmost good-nature: a rare and valuable attribute in one who had never had – or, at any rate, never felt – much patience with fools. Moreover, a vein of fantasy, a power of enchantment would often lift what she was saying, and served to emphasise the exactness of most of her opinions, and her frankness. Her talk had about it a boldness, an absence of all pettiness, that helped to make her a memorable figure in the fashionable world.4

Discreet, loyal, humorous, gregarious, hospitable: all are epithets that have been applied to Alice Keppel. Although they were all true in varying relevant circumstances, they have been repeated to the point of caricature, and their middle-class sugariness belies her real role in Edwardian royal Society. Her discretion for instance was only a matter of degree. Before she was ‘widowed’ as a royal mistress on the death of King Edward VII, Alice Keppel was nothing less than a high-profile character; she was the monarch’s maîtresse en titre and everyone knew it; even crowds that gathered to see the king attend London’s theatreland shouted out as he came and went: ‘Where’s Alice?’ She was even to be referred to in the Survey of London series as ‘confidante of King Edward VII’.

Her discretion seemed to be lacking, too, when it came to visits to the homes of the great and good with the king; there she was always to be found standing or sitting near her lover in the official photographs for the picture papers of the day. And her ‘pushy presence’, some were to say, was such a constant irritation to Queen Alexandra that it drove her to eschew her husband’s company.

Yet Alice Keppel was also a member of what Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Diplomatic Correspondent and Assistant Editor of the Sunday Telegraph and author of the seminal work on Edward VII, Uncle of Europe (1975), called ‘the most extraordinary and exalted quartet to be found anywhere in Edwardian Europe’, alongside the king himself, Queen Alexandra and the Portuguese Minister in London, Luis, Marquis de Soveral.5

Together the quartet shared a confiance never known before in royal circles and an influence that was far-reaching. The role of mistress to King Edward VII held by Alice for almost twelve years was to be virtually unique in the history of royal adultery. Because of it Alice Keppel was to be the most sought-out woman in political, diplomatic and Civil Service circles and she was consulted by men and women at all levels.

From her place in Society, Alice Keppel had a greater public profile than Agnes Keyser, and by temperament and character became the most ideal of all Edward VII’s mistresses as friend, courtier and intimate. The king’s style of ruling was to extend the way that he had dominated Society from his homes at Sandringham and Marlborough House. He did so through a fluctuating and all-knowing caucus of friends and acquaintances. His inner corps of friends formed his link with key members of Society and Alice Keppel gradually became chief of the ‘Committee of Seven’, comprising the Marquis de Soveral, Sir Ernest Cassel, Sir William Esher, Admiral Lord Fisher, Lord Hardinge and Sir Francis Knollys, who advised and informed the king. Agnes Keyser, too, was a conduit of gossip.

Alice Keppel had a different role from Edward VII’s mistresses in other ways too. She offered the king a rare cocktail of sexual passion, amelioration of ire and relaxation under stress. She excited him physically – important in a man whose appetite for life’s good things drove him towards impotency – she helped smooth over social irritations and she eased mental tensions. She cherished him as a wife would, she loved him for himself as well as his crown and she supported him with devotion and prudence.

Not everyone had thought highly of Alice Keppel. Over the years she was to attract caustic comments from those like Reginald Baliol Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher (1852–1930), royal archivist and intimate of every Prime Minister from Rosebery to Baldwin, who believed that she deliberately lied in Society about certain royal happenings to enhance her own reputation.6 Virginia Woolf had some particularly acid things to say in her diary about Alice. Under the date Thursday 10 March 1932, she wrote:

I had lunched with Raymond [Mortimer, critic] to meet Mrs Keppel; a swarthy thick set raddled direct – ‘My dear’, she calls one – old grasper: whose fists had been in the moneybags these 50 years: And she has a flat in the Ritz; old furniture; &c. I like her on the surface of the old courtezan: who has lost all bloom; & acquired a kind of cordiality, humour, directness instead. No sensibilities as far as I could see; no snobberies, immense superficial knowledge, & going to Berlin to hear Hitler speak. Shabby under dress: magnificent furs, great pearls: a Rolls Royce waiting.7

Alice Keppel shamelessly milked her royal relationship. As Charles Robert Wynn-Carrington, 3rd Baron Warrington and Marquess of Lincolnshire, was to say in conversation: she enjoyed being ‘much toadied by everyone’. Alice Keppel’s place as royal mistress was something that few cared to mention within royal hearing. The staid George V was always acutely embarrassed by the memory of his father’s philandering, and Queen Mary, his wife May, was not the stuff of which mistresses are made. Queen Mary, to whom the physical, romantic side of marriage was uncomfortable, had empathy with her mother-in-law Queen Alexandra who had reluctantly publicly accepted Alice Keppel – in a long line of such mistresses – as a sharer of her husband’s bed. It had saved her the bother of having him in hers.

King George V, as Duke of York, had always dreaded Alice Keppel’s arrival on the scene when his mother Queen Alexandra was due. During the week of Cowes Regatta in 1902, Princess May, Duchess of York (who did not join the party aboard the royal yacht Britannia because she was a poor sailor), wrote to her husband asking how things were in the racing circle. Was there a dreadful atmosphere; was he having problems? The duke replied that peace had reigned, there had been no royal rumblings of discontent or rows, but he added: ‘Alas, Mrs K. arrives tomorrow and stops here in a yacht, I am afraid that peace and quiet will not remain.’ Princess May sympathised in her next: ‘What a pity Mrs G. K. is again to the fore! How annoyed Mama will be!’8

HRH Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (1883–1980), the last survivor of Queen Victoria’s thirty-seven grandchildren, was one of the few members of the royal family ever to acknowledge Alice Keppel in print, although she seems, erroneously, to give too rosy a picture of Queen Alexandra’s attitude to Alice. The princess recollected in old age:

Uncle Bertie used to invite us [her widowed mother, Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, Duchess of Albany, and her brother Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha] to some shooting parties he used to give at Sandringham. Alice Keppel, whom I found to be a most charming and tactful woman, was usually present … Our conversation inevitably turned to Uncle Bertie, and I told her that, much as I loved him, I found it difficult when sitting next to him at table not to be distracted by his habit of fiddling with his cutlery and almost impossible to keep up a consecutive conversation with him. ‘Don’t worry about that’, she replied, ‘we all experience that trouble. He likes to join in general conversation interjecting remarks at intervals, but he prefers to listen to others than talk himself. Often he starts a discussion, but as soon as he can get others involved in it he is content to listen and make occasional comments.’

Princess Alice continued:

Uncle Bertie was deeply attached to Alice, who talked easily and was a vivacious personality. She never flaunted herself or took advantage of her position as the king’s favourite. Aunt Alix [Queen Alexandra] was also very fond of her and encouraged her friendship with Uncle Bertie. Aunt Alix was renowned for her beauty, very lovely, with a gracious presence and a disposition which endeared her to the public who worshipped her. But being stone deaf and not mentally bright, she was not much of a companion for an intelligent man like Uncle Bertie … Of course, there was a lot of gossip and public disapproval of their relationship and unnecessary sympathy for Aunt Alix, who did not need it, as she welcomed the arrangement.9

It should be realised that Princess Alice’s opinion was entirely her own. Courtiers like the 2nd Viscount Esher recorded that the queen could not stand Alice, but condoned the affair, despite several rows with her husband over the relationship, because Alice generally helped keep him genial.

Osbert Sitwell also attested that not all royalty shunned Keppel society. He remarked on the fact that Alice’s younger daughter Sonia (Mrs Roland Cubitt) held lunch parties at her home which the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) attended.10 Again at the ‘coming-out’ dance for Sonia’s daughter Rosalind Maud Cubitt, on 6 July 1939 at Holland House, London, property of family friend the 6th Earl of Ilchester, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth made an appearance. In conversation with the author Angela Lambert, a guest that day, Mrs John Miller (née Christian Grant) mentioned that people had gossiped about how forbearing the king was in attending a dance ‘given by the daughter of his grandfather’s mistress’: ‘It was rather special,’ went on Mrs Miller, ‘because there was that slight aura of naughtiness about it … We all thought it rather broad-minded and nice of them to accept the situation, but it did make it a bit conspiratorial and glamorous.’11 There were others there that day who averred into their gin and tonics that King George was being exceptionally broad-minded. If rumours were correct that Sonia Keppel was the daughter of Edward VII, she was thus half-sister to George VI’s father and her children Henry, Jeremy and Rosalind were his first cousins.

The memory of Alice Keppel has been long in Society and her name can still touch a raw nerve. In 1985 the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Florence and stayed at La Pietra, the home of Sir Harold Acton who had a love-hate relationship for years with Alice’s elder daughter Violet.

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–97) was particularly interested in hearing details of the great-grandparents of her rival in the Prince of Wales’s affections, Camilla Parker-Bowles, wrote Nigel Dempster and Peter Evans in their Behind Palace Doors (1993). Sir Harold obliged, dwelling on a strong dislike of Camilla’s great-aunt. He recounted in florid detail her lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West and her eccentric ‘ungentlemanly’ behaviour in Florentine society. Violet, said Sir Harold with distaste, liked to be called ‘Highness’ in her erroneous belief that she was Edward VII’s daughter. ‘What a dreadful family they seem to have been,’ Diana remarked.

In her best-selling novel The Edwardians (1930), Vita Sackville-West describes Alice Keppel’s personality in the guise of her fictional character Mrs Romola Cheyne:

Mrs Cheyne was a woman of strong personality and vigorous courage … [she] had a real spaciousness in her nature; a woman who erred and aspired with a certain magnificence. She brought to everything the quality of the superlative. When she was worldly, it was on the grand scale. When she was mercenary, she challenged the richest fortunes. When she loved, it was in the highest quarters. When she admitted ambition, it was for the highest power. When she suffered, it would be on the plane of tragedy. Romola Cheyne, for all her hardness, all her materialism, was no mean soul.

She had, however, one weakness: she could not allow anyone to be better informed than herself. Whether it was politics, finance, or merely the affairs of her friends, the last word, the eventual bombshell of information, must proceed from her and no other. On the whole she preferred her information to be good; and although she was quite prepared to invent what she could not ascertain, she would first make an assault on the main and most reliable source of knowledge.12

Soon after the novel was published Marion Purves, whose family had known Alice from her youth, wrote:

On the fly-leaf of The Edwardians Vita Sackville-West had written, ‘No character in this book is wholly fictitious’, and I reflected how Vita had summed up for us all what we thought of Freddie [the diminutive by which Alice was known to her early childhood friends from her middle name of Frederica]; Mrs Cheyne was Freddie to a tee. When Margot Asquith [the second wife of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith] said that Freddie would be nicknamed as a ‘character of history’, it was not until later that I realised that she meant our history. I thought then what a wonderful book Freddie’s life would have made, for then we would have had a glimpse behind palace doors where enquiries were hardly welcome. I knew though that it was not to be; Freddie was naturally a reticent person on certain subjects and was certainly not an intellectual with a book in her. All of us who remembered Marlborough House and Buckingham Palace in ‘good old Teddy’s day’ knew that silence about what went on there was the price one paid for a repeat invitation. But maybe one day Freddie’s place as the king’s friend will be properly recorded.13

Everyone in Society knew Alice Keppel. She had that rare distinction of being known to high and low by a single name. You rarely had to explain which woman you meant when you referred to ‘Alice’. Agnes Keyser was also known by a sobriquet. When she began her hospital charity work she had asked her royal admirer what she should call herself. ‘Sister Agnes,’ Edward had replied. And so she was known throughout Society, although she had had no formal medical training.

Yet no one outside Alice Keppel’s family circle really knew much about her background. She kept her royal private life a closed book; people could wonder at her rapid rise to predominance as a royal mistress, but no one before or since could emulate her skill and talent as the perfect royal concubine who shaped adultery into a social accomplishment. In her lifetime Alice encountered few who would publicly speak a word against her; she had a kind of hypnotic charm and confidence that could defuse antagonism towards her.

When Agnes Keyser died on 11 May 1941, long-forgotten memories of her royal relationship with King Edward VII were brought to the recollection of old friends who read her obituary in The Times.14 Agnes was buried in the Keyser vault in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist at Great Stanmore, Middlesex, with her parents and siblings. The service was conducted by the Rt Revd Eric Knightly Chetwode Hamilton, Bishop Suffragan of Shrewsbury, a Keyser friend who had married into the Cassel family of financiers; he was assisted by the chaplain of Agnes’s foundation of the King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, the Revd R.S. Swann-Mason. Queen Mary sent her equerry Maj. the Hon. John Spencer Coke.

Reflecting ‘her extreme public dislike of publicity’,15 the ‘Appreciation’ of Agnes Keyser in The Times was very different from the fulsome praise of Alice Keppel in being succinct and unrevealing. Written by a pre-1914 junior subaltern, identified by the initials C.J.W., the appreciation mentions only, in a plethora of words, her kind good humour and absorption when dealing with patients and staff at the hospital she had founded with King Edward VII’s enthusiastic support. Alice had been publicly sociable, Agnes remained the self-effacing administrator.

Yet Agnes rivalled Alice for the Prince’s affections, and there was a certain gritting of teeth on Alice’s part when Agnes joined her and the Prince of Wales at the bridge table. When court life bored him Edward would go for a quiet drive to Agnes’s home at 17 Grosvenor Crescent to dine on Irish stew and rice pudding, the fare of the nursery, which she prescribed to wean him off the rich food in which he so delighted. On Monday 2 May 1910, on his return to London from Sandringham, Edward, his chest badly inflamed and racked by a severe cough, eschewed his bed and went to Agnes’s house to seek comfort, much to Alice’s annoyance. It was to be his last dalliance for he died four days later.

Between Agnes and Edward a strong romantic relationship sprang up as quickly as his affections had been captured by Alice. Agnes Keyser was a sympathetic, forceful, selfless, wise, practical and severe person whose main role in Edward’s later life was to keep the prematurely aged, bronchial and grossly overweight monarch alive as long as possible. Just as he loved Alice’s attention, Edward thrived on Agnes’s role as nanny, mother, confidante with the unstated sexual chemistry as an added frisson.

In contrast to Alice, Agnes Keyser, whom the Prince of Wales met in the same year as Alice Keppel, did not make herself rich at Edward’s expense or through his influence; unlike her, she was not a social gad-about, and cared naught for Society. Agnes exploited Edward and his circle only to promote her and her sister’s hospital foundation. And in immediate royal circles Agnes was not to encounter the court antagonism engendered by Alice. When Edward VII died the new king George V became patron of her hospital and both he and Queen Mary were to be her firm friends.

Her relationship with Edward as Prince of Wales and king never caused more than a flickering of eyebrows at Buckingham Palace. Yet writers like Anita Leslie, great-niece of Lady Randolph Churchill who sat with Alice Keppel at Edward VII’s coronation (although then as Mrs George Cornwallis-West), averred that Edward VII’s ‘affairs’ with Alice and Agnes were of equal merit. She and others looked upon Alice as la maîtresse du roi, in the European sense of a mistress – a physical lover, who also dispensed favours to others from her position in Society – whereas the tiny, blonde Agnes Keyser was an amitié amoureuse – a loving friend with whom sex might occur as a flavouring. Both gave Edward a distinct ‘home’ to satisfy his needs.

Today for the researcher of Alice Keppel’s and Agnes Keyser’s lives, large deserts have to be crossed before an oasis of material is discovered. Details of both prove to be the most elusive of those for all Edward VII’s loves. There are but the briefest mentions and chapters in royal biographies and, unlike other royal mistresses, such as Mrs Edward ‘Lillie’ Langtry, and Frances ‘Daisy’ Brooke, Countess of Warwick, neither Alice nor Agnes – for whom it would have been an anathema – wrote her memoirs.

Around the time of their marriage, George Keppel began a book of photographs for his sister-in-law Gertie Keppel; it is known as the ‘Quidenham Park Book’ and is in the archives of the Norfolk Record Office, Norwich. Yet its pages are strangely silent on royal visits to Quidenham and the presence of Alice. Violet Keppel, their daughter, also averred that her father was writing memoirs; if he did, they have never been published.

In the Edwardian royal circle Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser lived parallel lives that were of enormous importance to Britain’s royal social history. One woman offered the king a deeply felt romantic love, physical satisfaction and abiding loyalty. The other supplemented this role with an affection and the motherly fussing he had craved for all his days. They were the two perfect loves of Edward’s later life, and theirs is a story waiting to be told.

ONE

Born a Keyser and Born an Edmonstone

On 27 July 1852 Margaret Keyser (1823–90), younger daughter of Edward Blore, architect, gave birth to her fifth child and fourth daughter at the Keyser family home of Warren House, Wood Lane, Great Stanmore, Middlesex. As she and her husband Charles Keyser (1813–92) had not decided on a name for the child, the infant was registered by the mother before Registrar Alfred Green just as a ‘girl’ on 27 August. On 9 September the baby was christened Elizabeth Agnes at St John the Evangelist Church, Great Stanmore.

The Keysers’ eldest child was Marian Charlotte (1846–1931), who married Rowland Money Sperling (1841–73) in 1873. In due time their son Sir Rowland Arthur Charles Sperling (1874–1965) was to enter the Foreign Office wherein his Aunt Agnes attempted to pull strings with King George V to obtain him a better post. Next came Charles Edward born on 10 September 1847 at the Keyser London town-house of 1 Chester Place; he was educated at Eton from 1856 and Trinity College, Cambridge, during 1866–70. In 1871 he married Mary Emma Bagnall and lived at the family home of Warren House and Merry Hill House, Bushey, as well as his palatial mansion at Aldermaston where he died in 1929. They were to have four children, an heir Charles Norman, and daughters Dorothy, Muriel Agnes and Sybil Violet. Agnes Keyser’s siblings were completed with twins Margaret Fanny (d. 1926) and Nelly (d. 1890), born around 1850 – Nelly was to marry Charles Newton; and, lastly, Anna Julia (1854–81).

Family traditions aver that the original Keyser representative had come to Britain to continue as banker to Prince William of Orange, and was one of the prince’s Dutch entourage. In 1689 William and his wife Mary Stuart, eldest child of King James II and VII, were jointly to accept the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, when her father was deposed. Charles Keyser of Warren House carried on the financial traditions and made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange and through wise ventures that were backed by his friend and banker Sir John Lubbock, MP, 1st Baron Avebury, of Robert Lubbock & Co.1 A partner in the firm of Ricardo & Keyser, Charles Keyser was the great-nephew of David Ricardo (1772–1823), one of the handful of Jews who had early on embraced Christianity through the Anglican Church to further a career in politics. Ricardo, the son of a Dutch Jew, also made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange and, inspired by the Scots economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, took up the study of the scientific management of economics. In time he became a leading authority on the subject and in 1817 published his own famous Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Ricardo had retired from business to settle at Gatcombe House, Gloucestershire in 1814 and from 1819 to 1823 he was an independent-minded Radical Whig MP for the Irish rotten borough of Portarlington, Co. Laois, having turned Christian when he married his Quaker wife Pricilla Anne Wilkinson.

Agnes Keyser and her siblings were brought up in great prosperity and inherited the independence of mind that had engendered the family wealth. Her affluence, though, was to make Agnes a crashing snob.

During the sixteen years that separated the births of his last two romantic flings, Agnes Keyser and Alice Keppel, HRH Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, born at Buckingham Palace on 9 November 1841, struggled into his teenage years against the restrictive and badly contrived plans his parents devised for his education and upbringing. By 1852 he developed as a disobedient, wilful and recalcitrant youth, undermined by the fact that he was an unwanted child. Queen Victoria had resented greatly her second pregnancy coming so soon after the birth on 21 November 1840 of Victoria Adelaide, the Princess Royal. As a teenager the Prince of Wales showed more interest in clothes than books, pleasure than duty, and at the age of sixteen developed a taste for female company and intimacy that would be a lifetime’s occupation.

In August 1855, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, along with the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales, made an official visit to Emperor Napoleon III and his Empress Eugénie at Paris. It was to be a sexually heady experience for the pubescent Prince of Wales as writer Philippe Jullian noted:

In the Tuileries [ residence of the French sovereigns in the centre of Paris, burned by revolutionaries during the Commune de Paris, 1871] he breathed for the first time the odore di femina whose trail he was to follow for the rest of his life. The scented alluring women not only kissed him (was he not still a child?) but also curtsied to him, and as they bent forward, their decolletage revealed delights that were veiled at Windsor.2