Palace show will feature servants from 160 years of royal history
KENSINGTON Palace is to launch its first exhibition on servants to show the “rich and diverse tapestry of humanity” that form the backbone of the royal court.
Untold Lives: A Palace at Work, opens at Kensington Palace in March and will focus on the plethora of characters who worked at royal palaces from Charles II in 1660 until the end of George III’S reign in 1820.
Mishka Sinha of Historic Royal Palaces revealed that they had uncovered stories about a gay usher, two Turkish valets and several women who took on traditionally male roles such as rat catcher, brewer and keeper of ice and snow. “There’s a very wide range of people, and it’s wide in terms of class but also in terms of gender and sexual identity,” she said.
“We have a couple of LGBTQIA+ stories, and others of race and identity and ethnicity – where people came from. One of the points of the exhibition is to illustrate just how rich and diverse a tapestry of humanity the palace was in this period.”
One of the servants who features in the exhibition is a gay man called Gustavus Guydickens, who worked as an usher, showing visitors through the palace. No image of him has been found and so a ceramic artist was commissioned to design a series of plates depicting how his life might have looked. “
He’s tried to create a dialogue with [current] palace staff to find out what they think of that story,” Ms Sinha added. “We’re trying to bring out how people might feel about that now and how his sexual identity may have impacted his life then, which was pretty badly actually.”
Untold Lives will also focus on the unexpected origins and identities of those who arrived at the palace from all over the world during a time of colonial expansion, religious wars and a fledgling constitutional monarchy. Certain exhibits delve into the backgrounds of black and Asian royal servants and attendants, among them Abdullah, a wild cat keeper from India, and Mehmet von Könsigstreu, keeper of the privy purse for George I.
Among the everyday exhibits used to represent specific members of staff is a linen apron that belonged to one of Queen Charlotte’s dressers, Mrs Thielke, a German woman who lived with the monarch until the end of her life.