Through the royal keyhole BOOK OF THE WEEK
From the Queen Mother’s sulky chauffeur to the groom in charge of the velvet latrine, a tantalising glimpse of Palace domestic life . . .
BEHIND THE THRONE by Adrian Tinniswood (Cape £25, 384 pp)
Until Meghan Markle opened and shut a car door the other week, shocking the world, no member of the Royal Family in history had achieved such a dramatic feat unassisted.
they employ, says Adrian tinniswood, armies of servants to ‘smooth their path through life’. they are entitled ‘by virtue of their position’ to a ‘cocoon of support to make their lives a little easier’.
Until recently, they did not cook, dress themselves, pour their own drinks, or make their beds.
tinniswood tells us there even used to be a ‘groom of the stool’, who supervised the Sovereign’s bowel movements, and had ‘the right to attend the king at all times’, standing there presumably with the Andrex on a silver platter.
the post was discontinued by Queen Victoria in 1837. the royal latrine, by the way, was a wooden box covered in monogrammed velvet, with a padded seat and pewter pan.
During an economy drive, when Victoria was advised she perhaps needn’t employ 13 porters whose sole job was to replenish her coal scuttle, ‘she commanded that toilet paper should give way to newspaper squares in the castle lavatories at Windsor’.
What is revealed by this history of regal domesticity is that, in many respects, nothing has altered. Palace life still operates on an absurdly grand scale, cut off from the rest of struggling humanity.
indeed, our own queen has always refused permission for the documentary the Royal Family, made in 1969, to be rebroadcast, as she ‘thought the film made her family look too ordinary’. the monarchy must only be extraordinary.
today’s household contains 1,200 employees, who at Buckingham Palace enjoy a staff gym, pool, fitness facilities and (news to me — i’d love to be a fly on the wall) a counselling service. Queen Victoria had only 921 salaried retainers.
Additionally, in the 19th century, there were dozens of doctors, apothecaries and surgeons on permanent call — but none correctly diagnosed Albert’s renal failure and typhus fever.
George V, who has always been considered puritanical when compared with his father Edward Vii, was looked after by 120 clerks and secretaries, 80 cleaners and maids, and when he went on holiday to Eastbourne was accompanied by a skeleton staff of only 45. When he visited india, there were three cows in his entourage to provide fresh milk. George iii kept an orchestra of 22 at Windsor, led by a blind organist and a deaf conductor. Victoria’s band comprised 25 military musicians, who played behind a screen during meals.
Victoria’s court also contained a Hereditary Grand Falconer, at a salary of £1,200, yet there were no falcons, and a Master of the tennis Courts, yet there was ‘no tennis court attached to the royal household’. the Alice in Wonderland atmosphere — the protocols so eccentric none dared question them (when Albert, and later Prince Philip, attempted to modernise the court they met with much resistance) — went back to Queen Elizabeth i, Gloriana herself.
She travelled in state about her realm, staying in her innumerable castles and the mansions of her nobles, accompanied by a personal retinue of 350 grooms, pages, yeomen, ushers, conjurers, jesters and entertainers, who between them consumed 600,000 gallons of beer a year.
‘the role demands magnificence, and magnificence costs money,’ says tinniswood, who estimates the daily tudor running costs at £112 (£32,000 today). Bills were picked up by the aristocracy: when the queen stayed three nights in Middlesex, in 1602, she required 24 lobsters and 624 chickens. Four hundred teams of horses in gold-plated harnesses carried the royal luggage.
A few centuries later, it was similar. Queen Victoria owned 187 carriages, replaced by Edward Vii with motor cars. He so adored speed, by the way, his mechanics were expected to adjust the tyres, check the brakes and examine the
carburettor while the vehicle was actually in motion. Delays made him cross.
A platoon of ladies-in-waiting sorted out Queen Elizabeth I’s robes, jewels and wigs. Her laundry was kept separate — dealt with by a special washerwoman. There were food tasters to check for poison.
Victoria had eight Ladies of the Bedchamber, and the present monarch has a rota of ladies-in-waiting to keep her company and hang on to the flowers proffered at walkabouts by members of the public.
‘Everything’, says Tinniswood, ‘was meticulously organised’ — whether at the renaissance court or the presentday one — in order to micro-manage the Royal Family’s contact with the outside world.
Cabinet ministers even had to be present at regal births, to ensure babies weren’t switched. It was only after Princess Margaret was born at Glamis Castle that this stopped.
Extravagance and spectacle always meant waste, for example all those unnecessary courses at banquets. There was a lot of pilfering: silver plate, candles, coal, furniture and even window panes went missing.
The household was also inefficiently run. One department laid the fires, for example, and quite another one applied the match.
THEYwere often not on speaking terms — in more modern times, the Queen Mother’s chauffeur regularly sulked. ‘ Have the car ready at 8.45 prompt, ready to leave,’ barked an equerry. ‘No,’ said the chauffeur.
Sir Alastair Aird, the Queen Mother’s Man Friday, intervened: ‘you can’t speak like that to the chauffeur, he is a very emotional person. you have to approach it in a very nice conversational way.’
It is the Man Fridays — the private secretaries and press secretaries — who do most to burnish the public image of monarchy.
The likes of Henry Ponsonby, Tommy Lascelles, Richard Colville, Michael Adeane, and so forth (mocked in the TV series The Crown as ‘the moustaches’), are the descendants of 17th- century Elizabethan viziers and chamberlains. These men (always men — always ex-military and public- school) draft reports, write letters and speeches, examine Foreign Office dispatches, doublecheck travel arrangements, represent royalty at funerals, and bear the brunt of the sovereign’s moods.
Confidentiality is at a premium. The Royal Family requires their employees never to blab — ‘utterly oyster’, in the Queen Mother’s phrase. When Crawfie, the nanny, published an innocuous memoir, she was banished to Aberdeen. ‘The Royal Family did not send flowers’ when she died.
Tinniswood wraps up his study with the Coronation in 1953. There were 11,651 members of the Armed Forces lining the processional route. As there were no Portaloos, ‘the maximum use must be made of the latrines in camp beforehand,’ soldiers were advised. No monogrammed velvet thunderboxes for them.