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 (butter side down), side by side. Then, bets of a penny each were made (my bet provided by Mamma) and the winning piece of bread and butter depended, of course, on which was the more buttery. The excitement was intense while the contest was on. Sometimes he won, sometimes I did. Although the owner of a Derby winner, Kingy’s enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.
George Keppel’s name was on the birth certificates of both Alice’s daughters but there was speculation that their biological fathers were more likely to have been other men. Violet, born in 1894, was rumoured to have been the child of MP William Becket, while Sonia, born in 1900, was said to resemble George Keppel but was more probably Bertie’s. Either way, Sonia loved the man she believed to be her father and wrote very warmly about him, but as a child she accepted that sometimes holidays didn’t include him. At Easter, she and Violet, plus the ubiquitous Nannie, travelled through France by wagon-lit to spend two or three weeks in Biarritz with Kingy, as guests of Sir Ernest Cassel at the Villa Eugenie. Sonia repeatedly confused Sir Ernest with the King and would dutifully bob to him: ‘gradually I came to realise that Tweedledum was quite easily distinguishable from august Tweedledee. For one thing, Tweedledee laughed more easily and, as I already knew, he could enter into nursery games with unassumed enthusiasm. Always he was accompanied by his dog, Caesar, who had a fine disregard for the villa’s curtains and chair-legs, but a close personal regard for me.’
Easter Sunday at Biarritz was an occasion for giving beautiful presents, and not just to the grown-ups. Throughout her life, Sonia had a collection of little Easter eggs given to her by Kingy and Sir Ernest. One was ‘exquisitely midget’ in royal blue enamel, embossed with a diamond ‘E’ and topped by a tiny crown in gold and rubies.
After present giving, they would set off for a mammoth picnic:
Kingy liked to think of these as impromptu parties, and little did he realise the hours of preliminary hard work they had entailed. First his car led the way, followed by others containing the rest of the party. Then the food, guarded by at least two footmen, brought up the rear. Kingy spied out the land for a suitable site and, at his given word, we all stopped, and the footmen set out the lunch. Chairs and a table appeared, linen table-cloths, plates, glasses, silver. Every variety of cold food was produced, spiced by iced cup in silver-plated containers. Everything was on a high level of excellence, except the site chosen. For some unfathomed reason, Kingy had a preference for picnicking by the side of the road.
Violet, six years older than Sonia, grew up to a notoriety of her own after she fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. They had met as children with a mutual enthusiasm for books and horses, and at fourteen, when they went with their governesses to Florence together to learn Italian, Violet had declared her love to Vita and given her a special ring. Not many years later they became lovers.
Although homosexuality between women was never illegal it was still scandalous; but, like adultery, it was less so if conducted within the respectability of marriage. Both women went on to marry but they continued to be lovers, frequently going abroad together for months at a time. In 1913, Vita married Harold Nicolson, the diplomat, diarist, author and politician, with whom she had two children and a devoted but open relationship – he had homosexual lovers of his own. Violet married in 1919, but she did so under pressure from her mother, who was worried about the scandal affecting Sonia’s