Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (people reading books .txt) 📗

wore black. The girls were shown to darkened rooms, given black clothes – even their underwear was threaded with black ribbon – and told their mother was in bed. They tried to go and see her but Mrs James prevented them. Late in the day she escorted them to her bedside:

We went up to her bed and she turned and looked at us blankly and without recognition, and rather resentfully, as though we were unwelcome intruders.

It was all too much for Sonia, who was only nine. She sought out her father, wept ‘on his ever-comforting shirt-front,’ and confided her anxieties of the preceding day, her distress at leaving Portman Square, her dislike of Mrs James’s house, her ‘terror of Mama’s non-recognition.’ ‘Why,’ she asked with resentment, ‘does it matter so much, Kingy dying?’

‘Because,’ her father replied, ‘Kingy was such a wonderful man.’

The newspapers, bordered in black, wrote of nothing but the King’s death. His body lay on a catafalque at Westminster Abbey from 17 to 19 May, until the funeral there on the 20th. Attending the service were the German Emperor and the Kings of Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and Bulgaria. Vita went with her father. ‘Everyone cried when they saw the King’s little dog following the coffin,’ she wrote in her diary.

Sir Frederick Ponsonby arranged the funeral. ‘With memories of Queen Victoria’s funeral only nine years earlier I found no difficulty in organization,’ he said. The Order of Service was bound in purple velvet, the Archbishop of Canterbury in his benediction spoke of eternal life, the Bishop of Winchester thanked God for delivering Bertie from the miseries of this sinful world, the Archbishop of York asked God to resurrect him.

The nation mourned. Church services were held in every village, town and city. Eulogies abounded to the King’s greatness, wisdom and glory. Voices of dissent were few and private. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary on the day of the funeral:

Today the King was buried and I hope the country will return to comparative sanity for at present it is in delirium. The absurdities written in every newspaper about him pass belief. He might have been a Solon and a Francis of Assisi combined if characters drawn of him were true. In no print has there been the slightest allusion to Mrs Keppel or to any of the 101 ladies he has loved, or to his gambling or to any of the little vices which made up his domestic life. It is not for me or perhaps any of us to censure him for these pleasant wickednesses, but his was not even in make-believe the life of a saint or of an at all virtuous or respectable man, and according to strict theology he is most certainly at the present moment in hell. Yet all the bishops and priests, Catholic, Protestant and Non-conformist, join in giving him a glorious place in heaven and there were eight miles of his loyal and adoring subjects marching on foot to see him lying in state at Westminster Hall.

For myself I think he performed his duties well. He had a passion for pageantry and ceremonial and dresssing up, and he was never tired of putting on uniforms and taking them off, and receiving princes and ambassadors and opening museums and hospitals and attending cattle shows and military shows and shows of every kind, while every night of his life he was to be seen at theatres and operas and music halls. Thus he was always before the public and had come to have the popularity of an actor who plays his part in a variety of costumes and always well. Abroad too there is no doubt he had a great reputation. His little Bohemian tastes made him much beloved at Paris … He did not affect to be virtuous and all sorts of publicans and sinners found their place at his table. The journalists loved him. He did not mind being snap-shotted and was stand off to nobody. If not witty he could understand a joke, and if not wise he was sensible … He liked to be well received wherever he went and to be on good terms with the world. He was essentially a cosmopolitan and without racial prejudice and he cared as much for popularity abroad as at home … He wanted an easy life and that everybody should be friends with everybody. He sank his English nationality on the Continent, talked French and German in preference to English, and English with a foreign accent. He knew Europe well and exactly what foreigners thought of England.

… he never succeeded in making friends with his nephew Wilhelm and I fancy they hated each other to the end … he may rightly share with Solomon the title of the ‘Wise’. They each had several hundred concubines and as we know, ‘The knowledge of women is the beginning of wisdom.’ At least it teaches tolerance of the unwisdom of others.

Of all this the newspaper writers say no word, being virtuous men and fools.

The nation was denied full revelation of the King’s little vices and pleasant wickednesses. In his will he directed that letters and private papers should be burned after his death. This was done by Sir Francis Knollys and Lord Esher. After Alexandra’s death hers were burned by Knollys’s wife Charlotte.

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Life at Court changed with Bertie’s death. ‘Are we as welcome as ever?’ was the caption to a cartoon by Max Beerbohm showing Ernest Cassel, Arthur Sassoon and Leopold Rothschild creeping along a Palace corridor. Scawen Blunt predicted a ‘regular sweep’ of

the Jews and the second-rate women that the King preferred to his aristocracy because they amused him … [George V] hates all these and would have nothing to do with them.

Cassel subscribed to a bust of Bertie by Sir Thomas Brock and continued for a while to oversee the royal portfolio and to donate large sums to charity. But for him and Mrs Keppel royal intimacy was over, the special relationship gone. He retired in