Читать книгу The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail - Penny Junor - Страница 12

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 Family’s estate in Norfolk, and sometimes made use of Alice to keep the King happy. Like his great-grandson, Charles, the King had a fearsome temper and Alice was the only one who was able to calm him.

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 chances of a good marriage. The marked man was Denys Trefusis, the soldier son of an aristocrat, a cavalry officer with The Blues who’d fought heroically in the First World War and was left with what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Sonia didn’t much like him to begin with and thought Violet had made an odd choice – he was neither literary nor artistic, which were the sort of people her sister liked to be around, but she warmed to him ‘when I discovered that he had a sense of the ridiculous very much like mine’. But Violet never did – and the lack of feeling was mutual. Alice threatened to stop Violet’s allowance unless she married Denys and she bankrolled him for some time, repeatedly refusing to let the pair file for an annulment. When Violet finally accepted that her affair with Vita was over, she and Denys moved to France, but they became completely estranged. She had a lengthy affair there with the Princess de Polignac, formerly Winaretta Singer, a daughter of the American sewing machine millionaire Isaac Singer. Her husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac, was a discreet homosexual.

Sonia Keppel’s marriage was infinitely happier than her sister’s – although it did end in divorce. She met Roland Cubitt in 1918. ‘Rolie’s greatest charm,’ she wrote, ‘was his gaiety. With his bright eyes and inexhaustible capacity for enjoyment, he looked like an alert fox terrier, eager for exercise … I began to invest Rolie himself with practically every romantic quality: Adonis’s beauty; the chivalry of Sir Lancelot; the fidelity of Leander; the heroism of King Arthur. Being an essentially simple person, had he realised this he would have been extremely embarrassed by it … In his happy way he took people as he found them and he expected them to do the same about him.’

They were unofficially engaged for a year before she was invited to spend a weekend at Denbies, the family seat, to meet his parents. She was terrified and had been warned in advance that Lord Ashcombe led family prayers every morning, Lady Ashcombe didn’t like fashionable girls, she liked them to look natural and to wear gloves at all times, and no one was allowed to smoke in the drawing room or to play cards on Sundays. She lowered the hem of her dress specially in preparation for the visit and used only minimal face powder.

Throughout tea, on the afternoon of their arrival, Lady Ashcombe referred to Sonia in the third person singular. ‘“Will the young lady have sugar in her tea? Will the young lady have a scone and some home-made strawberry jam?” Half dead with fright, I had a feeling that, by these indirect references, she was inferring that I had been deprived of my passport.’ It wasn’t until Monday morning that she detected anything approaching a thaw. ‘Still terribly nervous, somehow or other my restless hands got hold of a piece of knotted string which, unconsciously, I began to unravel. As she watched me, with sudden warmth in her voice, Lady Ashcombe commented: “I like young ladies who undo string!” Dared I hope by that remark that she had decided to return me my passport?’

His parents insisted the couple were too young to marry, but in reality were not keen on their son, and now heir, marrying the daughter of the King’s mistress. Alice expressed concerns too, but not about their age. ‘It isn’t that I don’t like Rolie,’ she had said, ‘I think he’s very nice. But if you marry him, you’ll marry into a world you’ve never known, and I’m not at all sure that you’ll like it.’

In comparison to the exotic and exciting world Sonia had known for the first twenty years of her life, the Ashcombes’ world was certainly very conservative and oppressive. Sonia had always been chaperoned but she had been allowed a great deal of freedom, and she was a brave, fashionable and feisty young woman. When a general, a big broad man, who had promised her mother he would act as her chaperon, made a sudden lunge for her in the back of a brougham between the Ritz Hotel and the Albert Hall, heading for the first big event of the 1919 London Season, she scratched his face. ‘“What a little tigress it is!” he exclaimed delightedly. “Quite able to fend for itself really, without a chaperon!”’ With silent intensity she fought him all the way, and by the time they arrived at the ball, her dress was torn, the powder gone from her nose and her shoulder had a big bruise. The general, on the other hand, had a face criss-crossed with red scratches and a swollen left thumb that clearly bore teeth-marks where she had bitten him. ‘As the brougham drove up to the entrance, he looked at me and burst out laughing. “Never enjoyed a drive so much in my life!” he exclaimed. “Now, run along, and tidy up, before I hand you over.”’

And when her parents took her off for a three-week winter sports holiday in Switzerland, to the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, home to the famous Cresta Run, she had not been there for twenty-four hours before she’d taken up bobsleighing and agreed to take part in the Bobsleigh Derby, the big event of the bobsleighing calendar. She joined two teams of complete strangers; in one she was with a crew of four men, in the other with two men, and she was to do the steering. They had bumped into some old friends in the hotel, the Duke of Alba and the Duke and Duchess of Santona, and it was Jack Santona’s suggestion. Her mother pointed out that Sonia had no experience of bobsleighing, but having established that she was not frightened by the prospect of racing downhill through a deep ravine of ice, with steep banks and corners, at up to 70 mph, neither she nor her father let their own misgivings spoil her pleasure. Sonia not only survived, her team won the race in which she steered and she came away with the Vlora Cup. One of her fellow steerswomen was not so lucky; when she took one of the bends too high, the boblet flipped over and crushed her leg so badly it had to be amputated.

After two years of unofficial engagement, Rolie’s parents finally came round to the marriage. He and Sonia officially announced it in the spring of 1920 and were married that autumn at the Guards Chapel of Wellington Barracks. In the intervening time, Alice negotiated her daughter’s marriage settlement. Lord Ashcombe had demanded a meeting with her husband, George, but arrived to find just Alice waiting to speak to him. She played the interview like a poker hand, luring Ashcombe into bidding very much higher than he had originally intended. She won, and ‘When, still shaken, he had expressed the hope that this (expensive?) marriage would last, grandiloquently Mamma had answered: “My dear Lord Ashcombe, neither you nor I can legislate for eternity.”’