Tom Quinn - Mrs Keppel: Mistress to the King

A BOVE ALL THINGS Alice Keppel loved money and position, and it was these loves that motivated her to climb the social ladder into the highly lucrative position of the Kings favourite mistress. Three generations later, Alices great-granddaughter, Camilla Parker Bowles, followed in her footsteps when she became the lover of Charles, Prince of Wales, at catastrophic cost to Charless marriage to Lady Diana Spencer.

Camilla Shand, as she then was, grew up in an atmosphere in which affairs were treated much as her great-grandmother Alice Keppels circle treated them: they were private matters with no moral aspect at all. And thus when Camilla said to Charles in 1970, My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather, so how about it? she no doubt simply thought this was carrying on an exciting upper-class tradition; a tradition that says morality, like taxes, is for little people.

Camillas affair with Charles continued before, during and after his marriage to Diana Spencer, and Camilla even helped Charles buy Highgrove House, still his home today, because it was close to the house she shared with her husband. It was a shrewd move of which Camillas great-grandmother would have approved.

Knowing that as a divorced woman she would not be allowed to marry Charles, Camilla advised him to marry Lady Diana Spencer. The perception was that Diana was timid, easily led and therefore unlikely to make a fuss when she discovered that Charles had no intention of giving up his mistress.

Diana was to become Charless brood mare, just as Queen Alexandra had been his great-great-grandfathers brood mare. Camilla played the role of her own great-grandmother Alice Keppel, who was described at the time as a key figure in Edward VIIs loose box.

Camillas affair with Charles was aided and abetted by an upper-class set that, in its attitudes and morals, is largely unchanged since Edwardian times. Its a world closed to outsiders with its own rules and its own fierce desire to protect those on the inside. It relies heavily on the deference paid to it by politicians and the governing classes. It is the set centred on a few dozen large country estates still privately owned by ancient families. Social mobility via great wealth allows no admittance to this world even today foreigners are still seen as outsiders just as the Cassels and Rothschilds were seen as outsiders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was this group of aristocrats, a group that overlaps with those who helped Lord Lucan on the night he killed the family nanny, that enabled Charles and Camilla to pursue their affair by meeting each other at the country houses of their friends; friends who would never dream of letting anyone outside their circle know what was going on. They would have known, too, about the plan to find Charles a complacent wife. Then and now they live as their ancestors lived a century ago. The only difference is that the broughams and phaetons have become Range Rovers and Bentleys.

These are families who find it absurd that there are still people in the world who live on less than half a million a year; they laugh at the idea that there are people who have to buy their own furniture (rather than inheriting it) or cook their own food. They still defer to the royals and believe the rules that apply to the wider world do not apply to them, and since they can say and do as they please because their livelihoods are never at stake, their lives are very much like those lived by Edward VII, Alice Keppel and their friends a century and more ago.

Mocked by the media as a world of Tims who are nice but Dim, the English upper classes, though diminished in number, were until recently supported on their landed estates by vast subsidies effectively state handouts from the European Union. These largely made up for incomes lost to taxes and death duties in the early twentieth century taxes that were fiercely resisted by the then Prince of Wales and his circle.

Charles and Camilla received these subsidies (and despite the recent Brexit vote will continue to receive them for some time) even though they are enormously wealthy anyway. Any concerns they may have had about Britains so-called loss of sovereignty in the EU were more than compensated for by these state handouts. They helped ensure that Charles did not have to befriend financiers as his great-great-grandfather was forced to do; they helped instead to ensure that Charles and Camilla were and are able to live the opulent lives lived by both their ancestors. And as Alice Keppel, the subject of this book, knew: Love is all very well, but money is better.

B OOKS ABOUT EDWARD VII and his circle return again and again to the same sources. These typically include papers held by the British royal family and other European royal families along with documents held in official or government archives. Many of these books make a point of thanking the royal family for allowing access to various official papers and this is almost certainly a sign that these books will have little genuinely new to tell us. This applies particularly to books about Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII because so much has deliberately been destroyed whats left can be seen because it is usually innocuous.

Edward VIIs life was so scandalous numerous mistresses and perhaps half a dozen illegitimate children that we can be sure the royal family has done as much as possible to conceal or destroy the most incriminating evidence. We know, for example, that Edward VII himself insisted all his personal papers and letters be destroyed after his death. This was, no doubt, partly due to the fact that the papers included painful memories recorded during his extremely unhappy childhood. But mostly the document bonfires that lasted for several days after the King died were part of a comprehensive effort to protect his reputation.

Alice Keppel became the Prince of Waless mistress in 1898 and she remained his favourite mistress from then until his death in 1910. Alice got into bed with Bertie, as Edward was known to his friends, at the first opportunity because she wanted money and he had vast amounts of it. But Bertie was by no means the first wealthy man Alice had slept with for money. Almost from the day she married the Hon. George Keppel in 1891 she knew that she wanted to live among the very richest in the country and as her husband did not have the kind of money she needed, she was determined to get it by the only means open to her: the sale of her body to much wealthier men than her husband.

What makes the story particularly shocking is that Alices husband was only too happy to live on the money Alice earned by sleeping with the King, various aristocrats and numerous bank managers.

Alice and George had two children, but, as this book will show, neither was fathered by Alices husband. Both children were illegitimate and one, Sonia, is the grandmother of the present Duchess of Cornwall, the former Camilla Parker Bowles, now wife of Charles, Prince of Wales. It is very possible and indeed believed by many that Sonia was fathered by Edward VII, Charless own great-great-grandfather. This would make the Duchess of Cornwall a blood relation of her husband, albeit distantly.