Quinn Yes, Ma'am

The Secret Life of Royal Servants
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78590-928-3
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

What really makes the royal family tick? It's a question that royal watchers have pondered for as long as the monarchy has existed. And who better to ask than the army of servants and staff past and present who feed and clothe the royals, organise their days, polish their shoes, carry the deer and pheasants they shoot and even put the toothpaste on their toothbrushes? From medieval times, when the Groom of the Stool oversaw the monarch's lavatorial exploits, and courtiers accompanied the king and queen to bed on their wedding night and made bawdy remarks until ushered out of the room, below-stairs staff have had a unique insight into the lives of their royal masters. In this lively and colourful history, royal expert Tom Quinn goes behind palace doors to give a compelling glimpse of Britain's royals, ancient and modern. Here you will find the tales of the equerry who threatened to throw Queen Victoria out of her own stables, the junior footman who had to change his name on the orders of the queen, and the lady in waiting who, with Prince Philip's mother Princess Alice, regularly set fire to her rooms at Buckingham Palace. Perhaps most intriguing of all, we see, through the eyes of serving and recently retired staff, how today's royals live - including how the relationship between Meghan and Harry and William and Kate started with high hopes and descended into bitterness and anger.

Tom Quinn is the author of Gilded Youth: An Intimate History of Growing Up in the Royal Family; Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle; The Reluctant Billionaire: The Tragic Life of Gerald Grosvenor, Sixth Duke of Westminster; Mrs Keppel: Mistress to the King; Backstairs Billy: The Life of William Tallon, the Queen Mother's Most Devoted Servant and many more titles. He lives in London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Quinn, Tom

Leseproben

Chapter One

Why everyone wants a servant

‘I never liked animals quite as much as my wife or children – except eating them of course.’

– Prince Philip

To understand the secret lives of royal servants, it is essential to understand the history of monarchy and the social hierarchies that underpin it, because those hierarchies have survived remarkably unchanged from medieval times right up to the present.

In the Middle Ages, everyone, from earl to kitchen maid, was effectively the servant of the monarch. Kings controlled the lives and fortunes of the landed aristocracy; the aristocracy controlled everyone else. The vast bulk of the population could be described as landless, illiterate serfs. They had no rights and no property; their daughters and wives and they themselves were entirely at the disposal of the local landed aristocrat. That aristocrat in turn held his land entirely at the whim of the monarch. All the most senior aristocrats in the land – the barons, earls, lords, knights and baronets – worked with and for the monarch because to do otherwise was to arouse suspicion. A great lord who did not attend court would quickly fall under suspicion: he must be plotting rebellion. Why else would he not attend his king, his lord?

So, in a sense, in this early period everyone was a servant and every class, except the very lowest, in turn had their own servants. Servants, as serfs or villeins, were effectively property in the Middle Ages and then slowly over the centuries they became paid servants and then, as they are known today, staff. To own villeins, to have servants and to pay domestic staff was and remains a key part of what makes the aristocracy and the royal family different from the rest of us.

The highest ambition of the aristocracy and the royal family traditionally is to show that they do nothing menial for themselves. When the rising middle classes grew wealthier in England in the eighteenth century, they wanted above all else to ape royalty and the aristocracy by also paying others to do their dirty work. To be part of the leisured classes was to have arrived. And this aspiration lasted well into the twentieth century and to some extent continues into the twenty-first.

I can remember my own mother-in-law’s proudest boast was that she had never had to work; she had employed a full-time nurse for her children as well as a nanny, a cleaner, a gardener and a housekeeper. She always looked astonished when I asked what she did while the nurses and nannies were looking after the children. ‘Why, nothing I suppose, but I had a busy social life having tea with friends and shopping.’

This desire of the middle classes – even the lower-middle classes – to have at least one servant – a maid of all work, as she was known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – was linked to the desire to move up the social scale. Only the very poorest could not afford at least one skivvy. Aristocrats might have hundreds of servants. The monarch might have as many as a thousand.

Servants conferred status; the British obsession with class held and still holds that the highest social classes are most esteemed because they can afford to pay other people to do everything for them.

This book is about royal servants and their relationships with each other and with those who employed them, but it is also about how royal servants themselves sought status by having servants of their own; the world below stairs was just as socially stratified as the upstairs world of kings and queens. Well into the twentieth century, senior servants treated lowlier servants with the same kind of disdain and haughtiness with which they themselves were treated by those who employed them and by those who were even farther up the servant hierarchy.

Of course, the higher up the social scale one happened to be, the greater the range of servants, until at the very top we find the royal family keeping people to work for them but also, in earlier times, to amuse them; at its worst, the royal family even kept people as little more than pets. These, if you like, are the secret servants of the royal family whose lives we will try to explore in this book.

Then there are the vast numbers of servants who were employed rather than simply kept – though, as we will see, the line between being kept as a companion and employed as a member of staff was often blurred. Henry VIII kept a fool, a jester, who was fed and clothed but never paid. Elizabeth II paid her senior staff, her courtiers, but many of them felt – as they would have felt with no other employer – that they simply could not leave and seek employment elsewhere and were lucky to be offered the chance to be royal companions, paid or unpaid. As they had numerous servants themselves, being a royal companion gave them something to do that was not tainted by the idea it might involve any work.

Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting were paid handsomely, but they would have been horrified at the suggestion that they were really just foot soldiers in that army of people paid to be at the beck and call of the monarch. It was only snobbery and an obsession with status that refused to accept that a paid companion wasn’t that different from a paid nanny or footman or gardener.

*  *  *

The secret lives of all royal servants, whether companions or below-stairs staff, are fascinating, and though we can only piece together their lives in earlier ages through historical records, many of which have only become available more recently, the situation is easier as we move into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Many of the dozens of royal staff I have spoken to over the past four decades can recall life as a servant in the royal palaces going back to the 1890s because their parents and sometimes grandparents were also employed by the royal family.

One of the interesting changes this book also examines is how ‘servant’ became a dirty word; all royal servants are now known as royal staff. The change is a recognition that historically there was always something slightly demeaning about being a servant – what Victorian domestic servants called the ‘shame of cap and apron’.

What made being a servant demeaning was not the work itself but the acknowledgement by society itself that servants were a lower sort; they were inherently inferior to their masters, whether royal or otherwise.

And it is certainly true that we have moved from employers, including royal employers, deliberately emphasising their superiority to a situation where, quite rightly, royal employers are permanently terrified they will be accused of treating their servants as inferiors.

But what was formerly explicit is now implicit. The royal family now treat their staff with consideration and at least superficially as equals, but the old social barriers are still there and just as difficult to cross as ever they were.

Where medieval servants often slept on the floor, a member of the royal staff today may have his or her own flat at Buckingham Palace or a cottage in the grounds of Windsor Castle. But he or she will not be invited to tea.

There has been a vast change in attitudes, but deference, however uneasily maintained, is always there. Even today we suffer from a lingering sense of awe at the idea of the landowning aristocracy, which is to a large extent what royalty is; we think of them as somehow special. To work for them in any capacity is, for some, to be especially privileged; to work for the royal family, the ultimate aristocratic family, even more so.

Royal staff frequently stay in post for life and they are fiercely protective of their royal employers’ secrets. It is almost as if some version of the famous Stockholm syndrome is at work: we may recall that kidnap victims often grow to sympathise with, even, support their captors. Something similar happens with royal staff and it is a phenomenon as old and as inexplicable as the royal family itself.

*  *  *

There has always been something secretive about life in royal service – the royal family don’t really want people to know exactly what the royal gamekeepers do to ensure there are enough pheasants for a shooting day, for example. They don’t, as Princess Margaret famously said, want to tell people what they had for breakfast or what sort of loo paper they use. They don’t want the private thoughts of below-stairs staff to be more widely known, but the royal family – or The Firm as the late Diana Spencer called it, using a phrase coined by her father-in-law, Prince Philip – employs a wide range of people from an extraordinary range of backgrounds and as with any group of disparate people who work together there are disagreements, petty jealousies and examples of outrageous and eccentric behaviour. Life as a servant in the royal family is by turns bizarre,...