They took £500,000 worth of jewelery but actually wanted SPICY LOVE NOTES from the King! How blackmailers nearly brought disaster to Camilla’s great-grandmother – not to mention her lover, Edward VII…

Many comparisons have been made between Queen Camilla and her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel.

If their respective situations were similar – as long-time mistresses of Prince Charles and great-great-grandfather, King Edward VII – so were their feisty views.

Alice Keppel was certainly ready for battle, as a remarkable but little-known episode from the turn of the last century illustrates.

The lusty King Edward VII was so fond of his mistress that he wrote to her almost every day and Alice kept his spicy love notes wrapped in ribbon in her bedroom.

Alice Keppel’s affair with the king was an ‘open secret’ in society and tolerated by Keppel’s husband and Queen Alexandra

There, she no doubt imagined, they would be safe from prying eyes – and perhaps a shield from less opulent times.

But one day in 1903, disaster struck.

“She returned home at midnight one evening late in May and found two burglars in her bedroom, just ready to depart with £5,000 worth of jewellery,” The Morning Post reported in 1903. In today’s prices that is £500,000.

‘Mrs Keppel summoned a footman who attacked the burglars on the stairs. The burglars beat the footman and reached the front door, only to find it locked.

‘Mrs Keppel bravely followed the thieves to the door and pointed out that it was impossible for them to escape. The men then waited quietly for the arrival of the police.’

But the intruders in Grosvenor Street were not after jewelery but something much more valuable.

“The conspirators believed that the messages of an exalted character were kept in a container in Mrs. Keppel’s bedroom, and their plan was to carry off this miniature safe and all its contents,” the report continued.

‘And although the burglars searched every drawer and cupboard in the room during their search, the items they seized and found thereon had been taken without regard to value – instead to reveal the real purpose of the robbery hide.’

They wanted the love letters as a means of blackmail.

By the time the burglary occurred, the King and Alice Keppel had been lovers for five years – a fact known to Queen Alexandra and grudgingly tolerated. He was so consumed with passion that Edward wrote to his mistress almost every day – ‘La Favorita’ as she was known, since he had had so many others.

She fulfilled all his wishes.

A portrait of Queen Alexandra and Edward VII published in 1933

Lieutenant Colonel George Keppel with wife Alice and daughter Violet in 1907

Prince Charles and Camilla in 1979

The Prince of Wales, resting after a polo match in 1972, and Camilla Parker Bowles

“She listened eagerly,” someone wrote at the time, “and lay the same way.”

In London, gossip about La Favorita had become widespread – and when King Edward went to the theater the crowds shouted, ‘Where is Alice? Where’s Alice?’

But the rest of the country knew nothing, because this open secret had never been referred to in print.

Had the invaders succeeded in their dastardly plan, Edward’s sizzling relationship with the buxom Alice would have ended, ruining her reputation and effectively excluding her from polite society, where the cardinal rule was “Never be discovered.” .

Because it was so, their affair was never made public, unlike their less fortunate offspring Charles and Camilla.

The lovers would make an annual trip to Biarritz, where the French treated Alice as if she were the Queen Empress herself, and she was at King Edward’s side when he died at Buckingham Palace in 1910 – sobbing hysterically as an envelope filled with banknotes at the dying sovereign lay waiting for her next door.

This payment appears to have been a one-off gift, but in the course of their association the king had asked the banker Sir Ernest Cassel to ‘manage her investments’ – that is, give her money which was then invested.

In the years that followed – she died in 1947 – Alice retreated to Florence and the opulent Villa Ombrellino, taking the dynamite letters with her.

Villa dell’Ombrellino, home of Alice Keppel in later years

Her great-granddaughter Camilla visited the vacant, echoing villa not long ago during a tour of Italy, and ruefully admitted that she wished the villa hadn’t been sold out by the family.

As she rummaged through the many rooms, did she perhaps have a chance to rummage around and see if she could find those royal love letters – to add to her own personal collection of billets-doux?

In reality, the letters were probably eventually destroyed. Alice Keppel’s daughter Violet Trefusis (who became the lover of Vita Sackville-West) was infamous for erasing the past in this way, probably with Swan Vestas.