Bruce came back from the war a distinguished but broken man. His injuries had made him unfit for active service, he was retired from the Army the year Camilla was born in 1947, and after a false start marketing educational films, he went into the wine trade. The father he scarcely knew had written books on the subject. Bruce became a partner in the long-established Mayfair firm Block, Grey and Block of South Audley Street, which specialised in supplying wine to Oxbridge colleges – and he had an enviable cellar beneath the kitchen of the family home. Many years later, when the company ran into difficulties, he joined Ellis, Son and Vidler of Hastings and London, where he worked until he retired – while always combining the job with his duties and interests elsewhere. He was Master of the Southdown Fox Hounds for nearly twenty years, hunting several times a week from the end of August to April. He also reviewed military books for Country Life magazine, and later on became a servant of the Crown and a member of the royal household. He was a passionate historian, and a voracious reader of biography and memoirs. He had been kept sane during his years of incarceration by what he described as ‘a very adequate library’ at Spangenberg Castle that had provided him with all of these as well as ‘the great Victorian authors, notably Thackeray and Trollope’, to whom he remained loyal all his life.
Years later, when Camilla was caught in the midst of a very different type of war, she too read books to keep a hold of her sanity. Books, horses and the support of this very special father helped see her through some very dark times.
4
It was Rosalind’s family that had the money. In 1947, the year Camilla was born, Rosalind’s great-grandfather died and her father, the Hon. Roland Calvert Cubitt, became the 3rd Baron Ashcombe and inherited the family fortune. He’d grown up with no expectation of it but three older brothers were killed in the war, all in their twenties. The fortune had been amassed by his great-grandfather, Thomas Cubitt, a pioneering master builder born in Norfolk of humble origins in 1788. Cubitt revolutionised the building industry in the nineteenth century, designing and building great swathes of London including Camden, Islington, Bloomsbury, Stoke Newington, and in the heart of the West End, Belgravia and Pimlico. He also built Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s favourite retreat on the Isle of Wight, and won the contract to extend Buckingham Palace. He became close friends with the Royal Family and after his death of throat cancer at the age of sixty-eight, Victoria said, ‘In his sphere of life, with the immense business he had in hand, he is a real national loss. A better, kindhearted or more simple, unassuming man never breathed.’
Towards the end of his life, Thomas Cubitt bought Denbies, an estate of 3,900 acres outside Dorking in Surrey, where he built himself a grand three-storey mansion with nearly a hundred rooms, similar in design to Osborne House. After his death, the estate passed through his sons – at one time it employed as many as 400 people – but the fortune was decimated by death duties, and the house was billeted with troops during the war and fell into disrepair. Rosalind’s father didn’t have the money to restore and run it, so he converted a couple of other buildings into something more manageable and the big house was demolished in the early 1950s. By this time much of the land had been very profitably sold for development, and the remainder is now owned by Denbies Wine Estate, one of the largest producers of wine in the UK. (By a happy coincidence, Camilla is now the president of the United Kingdom Vineyards Association.) Rosalind grew up there but by the time she married Bruce, her mother had divorced her father had moved to West Meon in Hampshire.
Rosalind’s mother, Sonia Keppel, was also well-known in society, but for rather different reasons. She was the daughter of Alice Keppel, who’d been famous at the turn of the century as a dazzling society hostess and as the long-term mistress of King Edward VII.
Alice Keppel was married to the Honourable George Keppel, son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle, when she met Edward, or Bertie, as he was known, in 1898. She was twenty-nine years old, the youngest daughter of a Scottish baron, Sir William Edmonstone. Bertie was fifty-six and still Prince of Wales; he didn’t become king until Victoria’s death three years later, but he fell soundly in love with Alice and she remained with him and loyal to him, lightening his darker moods, until his death in 1910.
Alice was ambitious and her husband was a third son. Despite his charm, good looks and titled lineage, he didn’t have the wherewithal to meet her ambitions. So, being a strong and determined woman, she swiftly embarked on a series of affairs with rich men to keep them both in the style to which she aspired. She worked her way up the social scale until she came into the future king’s orbit. Within a matter of weeks she was his official mistress, ousting Daisy, Countess of Warwick. George Keppel, it would seem, was happy to share his wife and enjoy the proceeds of her numerous and varied lovers. Bertie was particularly generous in his largesse; he organised a job for George and membership of the gentleman’s club he coveted. In return, when Bertie came to call on his wife at 30 Portman Square, every day at tea time, George 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