Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  A Personal Note

  PART ONE: Queens and Heirs Apparent

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART TWO: Portrait of a Lesbian Affair

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART THREE: Chacun Sa Tour

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Notes

  Sources and Bibliography

  Index

  Also by Diana Souhami

  Praise for Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

  Copyright

  A Personal Note

  Violet Trefusis’s letters to Vita Sackville-West suggested this book to me. Written between 1910 and 1920, immediate, unedited, passionate, they are a cry from the heart quite unlike the polished style she contrived for her novels. Most are collected in the volume Violet to Vita published in 1989, others are at the Beinecke Library, Yale. They give Violet’s version of her affair with Vita. Romantic, overstated, eloquent, they testify to the destruction of love.

  Behind these letters lies a story of more than thwarted love. Its essence is hypocrisy and double standards, of high social standing for Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, and of silence and exile for Violet.

  Mrs Keppel loved profitably. ‘La Favorita’ of Edwardian high society, she was the mistress of Queen Victoria’s son Bertie, when he was Prince of Wales then King Edward VII. It was an affair that brought her social splendour and great riches. Memoirs, diaries and her own letters give evidence of her style. Those old enough to remember her – her niece Lady Cecilia McKenna, the Contessa Visconti who knew her in Florence – told me I could not imagine the scale of her entertaining, the lavishness of her houses, the silver, the servants, the dinners for seventy.

  Violet saw her mother as ‘luminous’, ‘resplendent’, ‘dazzling’, a paragon of romance. But her mother had impressive practicality. Confident, assertive, determined, she was not going to stand by while her daughter became declassé and a social pariah and tarnished the family name.

  Mrs Keppel and the King conducted their extra-marital relationship with discretion, propriety and unwavering confidence. Violet described herself as struggling with frightening emotions in uncharted waters. There were no rules for her sort of love, no discussion of it.

  The law neither condoned nor condemned. A move to legislate was made in 1921. A Tory MP, Frederick Macquister, proposed a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency by Females’ to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. In the House of Commons he deplored the decline in female morality, averred that lesbianism induced neurasthenia and insanity, debauched young girls, threatened the birth rate and was due to an abnormality of the brain. His clause was passed. Pat Dansey, Violet’s go-between, wrote to Vita:

  One thing I did urgently want to call your attention to was ‘The Criminal Law Amendment Bill’ and the clause that was inserted in the Bill at the third reading. It only makes me implore you to be careful for your own sake as well as Violet’s.

  She need not have feared. The debate moved to the House of Lords. Their lordships speculated on the effect of breaking silence. Lord Desart of Desart Court, Kilkenny, former Director of Public Prosecutions, said:

  You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.

  Lord Birkenhead, Lord Chancellor, concurred:

  I am bold enough to say that of every thousand women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices. Among all these, in the homes of this country, the taint of this noxious and horrible suspicion is to be imparted.

  It was not a crisp debate. The clause was rejected. The underlying directive ‘don’t talk about it’ prevailed.

  Vita Sackville-West in 1920 wrote her account of her affair with Violet Trefusis, then locked her ‘confession’ away in a leather bag. Neither wrote openly about it after it reached its stormy end. They talked of together writing ‘a better Well of Loneliness’ but this did not happen. Both wrote roman à clefs about their love for each other but coded these in heterosexual show for the sake of their mothers, husbands and reputations.

  Vita died in 1962, Violet ten years later. Some months after Violet’s death, Nigel Nicolson, Vita’s son and executor, published his mother’s confession, her De Profundis as he called it. In a decade of knowing about the manuscript he had not shown it to his father, Harold Nicolson, who died in 1968, or to Violet. It was not, in his judgement, a story to be aired while either was alive.

  He interpolated his mother’s account of 20,000 words, with 50,000 words of his perspective on it and gave his book the title Portrait of a Marriage, not Portrait of a Lesbian Relationship which was how she had written her story. He set her affair with Violet into the context of the subsequent years of her long, peaceable and supportive marriage to Harold Nicolson. He offered the book as a ‘panegyric’ to his parents’ marriage and called the story, in his introduction to the 1992 reissue, the triumph of love over infatuation. ‘It is a love story, not the love between Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, as many people assumed, but between Vita and my father Harold.’ The hero of the story is his father, whom he described as rock-like and angelic and whose determination and understanding saved the marriage.

  Violet is the ‘villainess’. ‘Remember that Violet was evil’ he said to me when I visited him at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent in 1993 to talk about this book. In his introduction to a collection of his parents’ letters to each other he wrote of Violet’s ‘pernicious influence’ and ‘cynical wickedness’. In letters to Violet’s executor, John Phillips, he wrote of her ‘intolerable conduct’ and ‘abominable character’. His dislike of her was not personal, for all he remembered of her were her French clothes and perfume when once or twice, in her later life, she visited his mother at Sissinghurst. It stemmed from his deep regard for his father. ‘I wish Violet was dead,’ Harold wrote to Vita in September 1918, ‘she has poisoned one of the most sunny things that ever happened.’ He compared her to ‘some fierce orchid, glimmering and stinking in the recesses of life.’ She was, he said, tortuous, erotic, irresponsible, ‘absolutely unscrupulous’, irremediable and a reptile.

  In December 1972, three months before Portrait went to press, Nigel Nicolson wrote to John Phillips warning him that quotation in the book from his father’s letters and mother’s diaries would ‘certainly put the reader against Violet’:

  I cannot help that because I believe it to be true. Let her be a devil in a scarlet cloak for those two years, and think that a devil is more interesting and dramatic than a saint in wings.

  Those who see through different eyes draw different portraits. I do not see Violet for those years as a devil in a scarlet cloak. And though Vita may well have been a successful wife as vouched for by her son and executor, her sexual pre
scription in Portrait of a Marriage was of little use to her women lovers who did not want to be marginalized or abandoned.

  Violet wanted a context for her love. ‘I HATE,’ she wrote to Vita in 1920,

  the furtiveness and dissimulation, the petty hypocrisies and deceits, the carefully planned assignations, letters that must be ‘given’ not posted. It revolts and nauseates me.

  She wanted an open relationship with Vita, which was not a villainous desire. Context, for Vita and Harold was their property, gardens, work, friends, marriage, family. They each took same-sex lovers but made it a rule that these affairs were always on their own terms. They talked about their marriage in a BBC broadcast in 1929 – a year after The Well of Loneliness was judged obscene and banned – and said it was the greatest of human benefits, guided by a common sense of values, respect and give and take.

  Portrait of a Marriage does not dwell on the litter of hurt lives left by Vita. She was magnificent and proprietorial but unavailable. Lovers wrecked existing relationships in the vain hope of being with her. Harold referred to the wreckage as her ‘muddles’.

  Violet moved to France after her affair with Vita ended. Few people there knew about her past. Her husband Denys Trefusis, and Mrs Keppel’s husband George, in anger burned Vita’s letters to her, written between 1910 and 1920. Violet herself tore up those she considered indiscreet. She did not have the same eye to posterity as Vita and Harold. She was not methodical, calculating or even organized. But later letters from Vita to her have survived, written during the Second World War, and numerous references by her to Vita’s earlier letters make their content clear.

  I hope I vindicate Violet in this story of adultery, royal and aristocratic families, dominant mothers and how not to conduct a lesbian relationship. Ironies unfurl in it, and a gulf between private life and public display. Mrs Keppel was ‘much toadied to’ by peers of the realm when she was with the King. Violet and Vita, when they partnered each other at a tea dance, were asked to leave the hotel. By way of bias I question why Portrait of a Marriage should be an acceptable story and Portrait of a Lesbian Relationship not.

  * * *

  It is a tribute to Nigel Nicolson’s generosity that he made material available to me and allowed me to quote freely from family papers, both published and unpublished. Most of these papers, in particular the letters and diaries of Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Lady Sackville, are at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana.

  I offer special thanks to Violet Trefusis’s executor, John Phillips. He helped me at every stage, answered the endless questions I put to him, suggested contacts and made unpublished material available to me, including letters from Alice Keppel to her husband George and to Violet. Most of Violet’s unpublished letters and papers are now at the Beinecke Library, Yale.

  I thank Ian Anstruther for information about Pat Dansey; Félicité Potter and Phyllida Ellis for letters, papers and photographs of Denys Trefusis and the Trefusis family; Ann Ravenscroft-Hulme for facts and photographs I would not otherwise have found; Lady Cecilia and David McKenna, the Ducessa Franca Visconti, the Duc d’Harcourt, Cécile Wajsbrot, the Marquise de Chabannes La Pelice, Bernard Minoret, Anthony Allfrey, the Honourable Lady Mosley, Maggs Bros, the Earl of Listowel.

  I acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen to quote from material in the Royal Archives and for the republication of material which is subject to copyright. I also acknowledge the permission of the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives Trust to quote from papers in the Cassel archive housed at the Hartley Library, Southampton University.

  I am grateful to my agent Georgina Capel, to Michael Fishwick and Rebecca Lloyd at HarperCollins and to Terence Pepper at the National Portrait Gallery.

  To avoid cluttering the text, references, including specific copyright credits, are at the end of the book by opening phrase. Bibliographic sources are in these references too.

  PART ONE

  Queens and Heirs Apparent

  ONE

  At Christmas 1900 the Honourable Mrs George Keppel gave a Fabergé cigarette case to her lover Bertie, Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne. Made from three kinds of gold, enamelled in royal blue, over its cover front and back coiled a serpent contrived from diamonds. The head and tail of the serpent formed a knot. It was a symbolic gift from the Prince’s temptress, ‘La Favorita’, his ‘little Mrs George’.

  Ten years later when Bertie – King Edward VII – died, his widow Queen Alexandra, mindful of the sexual link between her husband and Mrs Keppel, returned the cigarette case to her. In 1936, Mrs Keppel asked Bertie’s daughter-in-law Queen Mary to accept it as a gift. It is now in the permanent royal collection of pieces by Fabergé. A fanciful equivalent, had times not changed, would have been for Mrs Keppel’s great-granddaughter Camilla Parker-Bowles to have given cufflinks to her lover, the Prince of Wales, engraved with their entwined initials, for his wife Diana, had she become a widowed queen, to have returned these to Mrs Parker-Bowles at the time of King Charles’s death, for Camilla at some later date to have given them to the wife of William, Charles’s and Diana’s son, to be kept in the royal trove.

  But niceties are now scrutinized for what they conceal. In 1992 Princess Diana and her husband separated. She found it unacceptable for him, however exalted his rank, to be the lover of another woman while married to her. ‘There were three of us in this marriage and it was a bit crowded,’ she told the world. The triangle gave her ‘rampant bulimia’. Mrs Keppel would not have sympathized. For her it was not how things were that mattered but how they appeared. Her precepts were those of Society: discretion, manners, charm. The appearance of civilized marriage was as imperative as a hat at Ascot, pearls and furs. It was her art to be Bertie’s boudoir belle while he was Prince of Wales then King and, if not a pillar of the Establishment, then at least a cornice or an architrave.

  She served the Crown and did not allow jealousy and sexual possession to blur her manners or her style. On 10 December 1936 Bertie’s grandson, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee. Mrs Keppel dining at the Ritz was heard to declare, ‘Things were done much better in my day.’

  In her day she both shared a bed with the King and advised him on presents for his wife. Queen Alexandra collected pieces by Fabergé. At Mrs Keppel’s suggestion Bertie commissioned jewelled, gold models of all the Sandringham animals for his Queen. Artists sent from St Petersburg made wax maquettes for the stonecutters. The Fabergé workshops produced a glittering farmyard of heifers, goats, cocks, pigs. Persimmon – Bertie’s Derby-winning horse – was there and Caesar, his Norfolk terrier, with rubies for eyes, a gold bell and a collar inscribed ‘I belong to the King’.

  In her turn Mrs Keppel’s daughter, Violet, gave her lover, Vita Sackville-West, a symbolic present, a token of their tryst. It was a Venetian ring of red lava, carved with a woman’s head. It had belonged to a fifteenth-century doge. Violet acquired it on a visit with her mother to the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen of Bond Street. He supplied the Prince of Wales with paintings for Sandringham, Buckingham Palace and Marlborough House. (Bertie liked pictures of yachting scenes, battles and pretty women without much on.) Sir Joseph invited Violet to choose a present. She was six at the time, had a precocious heart and cried when her mother tried to make her put the ring back and choose a Victorian doll.

  Seven years later, in 1908, Violet and Vita, accompanied by governesses, went to Florence for the summer to learn Italian. Violet cried again when they parted for home, told Vita she loved her and gave her the doge’s ring. By 1919 this love had become passionate and volatile. As a pledge to each other, and in sexual rejection of their husbands, they took off their wedding rings. The following year Vita wrote of the doge’s ring, ‘I have it now, of course I have it, just as I have her.’ In her will she decreed that it be returned to Violet. When she died in August 1962 her husband Harold Nicolson duly sent it with a circumspect letter. And when Violet died a decade late
r the ring was returned to her nephew so that it might form part of the Keppel memorabilia.

  But the doge’s ring was a memento of unacceptable love. Private devotions were one thing, social conformity another. A myriad of hypocrisies preserved the relationship between Mrs Keppel and the King. Marriage vows and even the Coronation Oath were rituals and semblances that preserved the status quo. An indiscretion of dress or etiquette mattered more than adultery. Noblesse oblige was the rule. Divorce was unthinkable because of loss of status, however compromised the relationship between husband and wife. When Violet in 1920 tried to extricate herself from a marriage that was worse than a sham her mother warned, ‘You’ll be a laughing stock, becoming Miss Keppel again.’

  Group photographs of huge shooting parties commemorate Mrs Keppel’s weekends with Bertie. He sits at the centre, portly and assured, Homburg tilted, hands folded on his walking stick, flanked by ladies in ankle-length gowns, their hats like nesting birds. All look inscrutably at the camera. Nothing is revealed of the secret relationships between other women’s husbands and other men’s wives, of the elaborate games of adultery decorously conducted at these country-house weekends.

  These were Edwardian heydays for Bertie, Alice and their set. Taxation was low, servants cheap:

  Money was freely spent and wealth was everywhere in evidence. Moreover it was possessed largely by the nicest people, who entertained both in London and in the country … The champagne vintages from ’eighty to ’eighty-seven were infinitely superior to anything since produced.

  Strict ceremony regulated their lives. Mrs Keppel, as the King’s Lady, would change four times a day. She required two maids to iron and lay out her clothes, curl her hair, scent her bathwater, wind her watches.

  It was a good hostess’s duty to attend to the ‘disposition of bedrooms’, Vita Sackville-West wrote in her satirical novel, The Edwardians:

  It was so necessary to be tactful and at the same time discreet … the name of each guest would be neatly written on a card slipped into a tiny brass frame on the bedroom door … Lord Robert Gore was in the Red Silk Room; Mrs Levison just across the passage. That was as it should be.