How an outsider made good in the royal court
FOR all the demands of the intense mourning period following the Queen’s demise, it has to be said that the men in grey suits didn’t waste a minute putting her right-hand woman, Angela Kelly, firmly in her place. Although an indispensable part of the late monarch’s inner circle and a member of HMS Bubble, when Covid struck, Ms Kelly, a docker’s daughter from Liverpool, remained invisible until Monday’s funeral.
What a comedown that was for the woman who, over almost 30 years of service, became a firm favourite of the Queen – so much so that she was more of a lady in waiting and a gatekeeper than a dresser.
Perhaps Ms Kelly expected the snub. The smile which seemed practically painted on her face outside Westminster Cathedral suggested she knew what to expect.
The position of royal favourite is a hazardous one, particularly when you have no powerful connections to protect you. Many people, both in the household staff and the royal family, resented her, mocking her airs and graces.
MS KELLY raised eyebrows when she described her friendship with the Queen in an interview, saying: ‘We are two typical women. We discuss clothes, make-up, jewellery.’ Charles was surprised that she had her own rooms beside his mother’s suite for watching television in.
But in taking Ms Kelly under her wing, the Queen was following a precedent set by her forebears, many of whom had favourites from the ‘lower orders’.
Queen Victoria was close to two servants, most famously her gillie John Brown, rumoured to have been her lover.
And as the late author Hilary Mantel described so memorably in her Wolf Hall trilogy, Henry VIII championed Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who created powerful enemies as he schemed his way to the top of the Tudor king’s court, becoming the ‘king’s right-hand man and minister for everything’. Inevitably, Cromwell fell out of favour and was put to the scaffold.
Breaking in the Queen’s new handmade shoes or joining her for episodes of Eastenders could hardly be considered public affairs, yet Angela Kelly was also an outsider at court.
Monarchs are surrounded by titled men and women, members of the nobility who, while often ambitious for advancement, are independently wealthy with impeccable pedigrees.
In the aftermath of the Queen’s death, her long friendship with Sonia Graham Hodgson was revealed. It was the only friendship the Queen ever chose for herself, and she began it as a five-year-old when she spotted Sonia playing in a London park. It’s a poignant reminder of the goldfish bowl that royals inhabit, where even their friends are hand-picked, and how in some respects so little has changed since the Tudors.
Within the stuffy confines of court and surrounded by cousins and former debutantes, the Queen must have seen her dresser as a breath of fresh air. But there was a flip side to Ms Kelly’s unique position: snobbery from courtiers because of her lack of blue blood, mixed with suspicion of the ruthlessness her utter dependence on the whims of royal favour for wealth and position might engender in her.
ANGELA KELLY had to survive on her wits because she didn’t understand the social codes of the Queen’s ladies in waiting – the arcane rules of the rarefied world she worked in. She once said that she ‘didn’t have any more room for knives in my back’.
Knowing how she might fall out of favour, the Queen protected her trusted confidante, granting her a grace-and-favour house beside Windsor Castle and allowing her to sign a three-book deal for her memoirs.
Ms Kelly has written two books, the latest of which is predictably self-aggrandising, full of vignettes about her importance to the Queen. Perhaps her next book will give an insight into the slights and insults that outsiders endure in a royal court.