BEHIND THE THRONE

A DOMESTIC HISTORY OF THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD

ADRIAN TINNISWOOD

Cape, 384pp, £25

Adrian Tinniswood follows up his examination of the interwar English country house with a look at the toilers who have turned the oiled wheels of the royal household through the centuries. It is stuffed with gossipy anecdote: Rachel Cooke in the Observer thought his account ‘often delicious’ and indeed ‘juicy’. Tinniswood’s ‘magpie narrative is about boundaries’, she noted. ‘If Charles II had a mania for being seen – in 1661, the royal locksmith cut more than 150 double keys, one of which gave access not only to the state rooms at Whitehall, but to the King’s bedchamber – others liked to operate a forbidding personal exclusion zone.’

In the Daily Telegraph, Lewis Jones quite enjoyed the ‘romp’, particularly servants’ bad behaviour. Elizabeth I’s staff ‘fought with each other and pilfered anything that wasn’t nailed down, broke windows and urinated everywhere. Her household expenses ran to about £46,000 a year, with which she could have built a new palace.’ The current queen apparently has 1,200 employees who are provided with a 24-hour confidential counselling service.

Jane Ridley in the Spectator was relieved that Tinniswood did not shirk details of the duties of the groom of the stool, and, in the Times, Melanie Reid marvelled at the excesses (‘Republicans must either look away or locate their sense of the ridiculous’) but thought it a pity the book petered out at Princess Diana’s death. The moment was marked by Tinniswood thus: ‘As we reach that royal death, the past collides with memory, and history, which has no place in the present, comes to an end in a welter of judgment.’ A sentence whose ‘orotund fatuity’ Jones said he would ‘treasure’.