Yes, Ma'am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants

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Yes, Ma’am

The Secret Life of

Royal Servants

Tom Quinn

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Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter One: Why everyone wants a servant

Chapter Two: Everyone is owned by the king

Chapter Three: The gentleman’s gentleman: butlers, valets and footmen

Chapter Four: Animal magic: hunting, shooting and fishing

Chapter Five: Fools, jesters and human pets

Chapter Six: Friends in very high places

Chapter Seven: A real revolution

Chapter Eight: Intimate arrangements: the royal bowels and the Groom of the Stool

Chapter Nine: Food, glorious food: eating, drinking and making merry

Chapter Ten: Bedroom antics

Chapter Eleven: Ladies in waiting

Chapter Twelve: Lords a-leaping (and no Jews or Catholics allowed) vi

Chapter Thirteen: Modern times: Mystic Meg, or England versus America

Conclusion: Hail and farewell

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Also by Tom Quinn

Copyright

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‘One doesn’t think much about one’s ancestors… They might be a rather bad influence.’

– Queen Elizabeth II, to the author

‘There is, at all Courts, a chain, which connects the Prince, or the Minister, with the Page of the Back-stairs, or the Chambermaid. The King’s Wife, or Mistress, has an influence over him; a Lover has an influence over her; the Chambermaid, or the Valet de Chambre, has an influence over both; and so ad infinitum.’

– Lord Chesterfield, Let ters on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1774

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Introduction

‘Children? Yes, I suppose some people see them as a sort of punishment…’

– Prince Philip, to the author

We are all intrigued by our own family histories and when we begin to delve into the past, most of us discover that long ago – and sometimes not so long ago – a family member worked as a servant. This is hardly surprising given that in 1900 there were an astonishing one and a half million people in the United Kingdom working as domestic servants.

Most were women from poorer backgrounds who were expected to work twelve-hour days six or six and a half days a week from the age of twelve or fourteen.

My own interest in the lives of domestic servants – including royal servants – began with my mother’s stories of working as a fifteen-year-old kitchen maid in a big house in Ireland in the 1940s. Much of the work was back-breaking and tedious, but the saving grace was, as my mother put it, ‘those marvellous girls I xworked with; the great gossip we had and the fun’. The fun included swimming in a lake on the estate, sleeping on the roof on hot nights in summer, shinning up a tree to escape the attentions of a ‘frisky gardener’ and gossiping about the family. For servants of the British royal family, the work might be just as exhausting, but there could be even more fun – who, after all, could resist life in a great palace, where so often even a humble kitchen maid became privy to the secrets of one of the most famous families in the world?

For centuries, servants were cheap and so the houses of the rich expanded, as it were, to accommodate them. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, country houses were being built on such a scale that the servants often had to run from the kitchen to the dining room if the food was to be served warm.

After the introduction of inheritance tax and the changes wrought by two world wars, the vast houses and their rolling parkland found themselves deserted by servants, who preferred factory work. The mansions became unmanageable or were simply abandoned, and they began to be demolished: more than 1,000 big country houses were torn down in the century after 1875, according to the curators of a famous 1974 exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

But while all this was going on, one family at least was able to keep its mansions and palaces going, continuing to employ vast numbers of servants, as it still does today: the royal family.

For this glimpse into the hidden world of the royal servant I have themed each chapter to see how, for example, the kitchen staff or the ladies in waiting have changed over the centuries. To xithis I have added stories told to me by royal staff on the strict understanding that informants’ identities were protected. Some royal staff jobs have now vanished, but even when those jobs were filled there was something mysterious and highly secretive about them – what exactly did royal jesters and fools do, for example, and why were they employed for so long? There are also chapters on the outdoor staff – the gillies and gamekeepers – as well as chapters on what goes on in royal bedrooms and in the kitchens.

In this book I’ve tried to avoid over-emphasising the dull routine of a royal servant’s life; there is little need for a blow-by-blow account of the servant’s day, nor for a precise account of who reported to whom and exactly what each was paid. Instead, I have tried to provide a more impressionistic account of the world of royal service, an account that focuses more on the telling anecdote than on the exact tally of buckets of coal carried upstairs at Buckingham Palace or Balmoral. I’ve included servant tales that bring to life the ups and downs, the eccentricities and intimacies of such close proximity to the only family in Britain that still lives, in the domestic sphere at least, as it did in the eighteenth century.

The idea is to get behind the surface view of royal service, a view with which we are already familiar and which can be read about in countless books. In order to find out what really goes on below stairs – and indeed on the backstairs – we need to go through the green baize door to the hidden world that supports a small number of glittering stars – the kings and queens, princes and princesses we know almost too well.

Here you will find the stories of the equerry who threatened xiito throw Queen Victoria out of her own stables, the king who preferred his parrot to his children, the courtiers who couldn’t understand a word their new king said.

Other stories include the tale of the junior footman who had to change his name because Queen Victoria was horrified to learn he was called Albert (how dare a servant have the same name as her beloved husband!); how the late Queen Mother fell into the arms of one of her gillies while fishing and would regularly shout at the salmon in the river Dee at Balmoral; and how Prince Edward once told his driver to stop looking in his rear-view mirror.

Moving closer to the present, we find Queen Elizabeth II trying to fix a picnic table and insisting that using a screwdriver is far more difficult than being queen; Prince Philip worrying that if his son Charles read too much poetry, it might make him gay; and Prince Philip’s mother regularly setting fire to her rooms at Buckingham Palace.

The final part of the book looks at the huge complexities of living with royal staff in the modern world; seeing life through the eyes of staff at Kensington Palace, for example, we glimpse Meghan Markle dancing with Prince William and terrifying an Old Etonian equerry by trying to hug him!

Perhaps most intriguing of all, we see, through the shrewd commentary of serving and retired staff, how the relationship between Meghan and Harry and William and Kate started with high hopes, fun and happiness and slowly descended into bitterness and anger.

As this book tries to show, the lives of royal servants, from xiiibelow-stairs staff to senior advisers, give us a unique and uniquely intriguing glimpse into the royal family, ancient and modern. Here you can see them – everyone from the grandest courtier to the humblest kitchen maid – as they have never been seen before.xiv

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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 2and 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 3classes – 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 4between 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.

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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 5going 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 6from 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.

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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 7in the royal family is by turns bizarre, entertaining, mundane, intriguing and rich in gossip and backbiting.

Perhaps most interesting of all are the stories the servants have to tell about their day-to-day experiences living with and attending to members of the royal family. Some of these stories reflect badly on individual royals, but others show the kindness and deep affinity royal family members occasionally have with their staff – and, as we will see, both aspects of servant life in the royal family have been true for as long as we have had a royal family.

The curious nature of royal service – that staff often feel uniquely privileged, just as their ancestor servants must have felt – has two important effects: first it tends to engender loyalty, especially if the staff are aristocratic companions (courtiers and ladies in waiting), and it occasionally creates uniquely close bonds even between relatively lowly staff and their masters. It is this close bond, an intimacy that does not always happen in other areas of employment, that has produced many of the stories recounted here. They are stories that reveal the strange, amusing, often bizarre, but until now largely concealed side of a unique family and a unique way of life.

Many biographers and historians today adopt a chiding tone – we writers are constantly on the lookout for ways in which the past fails to live up to our standards. It is as if we cannot believe that our own mores will, in turn, come to seem foolish, archaic, perhaps callous, a century or more from now; I have kept that very much in mind while writing this book.

Much of Yes, Ma’am concerns how history, and especially the history of the royal family, is about making friends and 8influencing people. We like to think that nepotism, jobs for the boys – whatever we like to call it – is largely a thing of the past or a thing that afflicts dictatorships elsewhere in the world but not us. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Britain never scores particularly well on the Transparency International corruption perceptions index because corruption is embedded in today’s society much as it was in the past. Let’s take a few examples: a large payment to a political party will often guarantee a peerage; ministers and MPs regularly leave political life and move into extremely lucrative jobs with private companies who are employing them solely in the hope that they will be able to influence former colleagues in Parliament; some ministers leave politics and within months have secured a dozen or more lucrative jobs for which they have few qualifications other than their previous influential positions. One former Cabinet minister left politics to become the editor of a national newspaper while having little experience as a journalist.

So, when we look at the past, at the royal court in Tudor, Elizabethan or Victorian times, we should resist the temptation to condemn. As power shifted from the royal family to Parliament, corruption moved with it, but the royal family’s social status remained and for those who love status, the appeal of working as a servant for the royal family remains as strong as ever.

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In the next chapter, I look back at the history and context of power that has produced the modern royal servant. That he or 9she feels different from other servants, and indeed from people doing other paid jobs, is entirely the product of more than a thousand years of royal and aristocratic history.10

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Chapter Two

Everyone is owned by the king

‘We have school fees and staff to pay, houses to keep up – that’s why we get paid rather a lot.’

– Former courtier, author interview

‘I hope I’m not a tourist attraction.’

– William, Prince of Wales

After William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings in 1066, everything in England became – overnight, as it were – the new king’s property. And by everything we really do mean everything – land, houses, animals and people, with the possible exception of the many religious houses, monasteries and abbeys. These last were nominally the new king’s property, but no English king at this time would have interfered with a realm under the jurisdiction of the Pope.

Land owned by William by right of conquest is still owned by the crown. Even today, the presumption is that