by Gillian Gill
The royal household was as much an abstract concept as a practical entity. It referred to all the functions, activities, and facilities of the monarch every day of the year and in every place of residence. It was made up of all the staff involved in that life, from the Lord Chamberlain to the mistress of the robes to the head gardener to the under scullery maid. The royal household was a division of government, administered by four separate and autonomous governmental entities: the Lord Chamberlain’s Department, the Lord Steward’s Office, the Commission of Woods and Forests, and the Master of the Horse. Queen Victoria referred to them once as the “charming departments which really are the plague of one’s life.”
The four departments were administered by well-bred young men who needed an income but usually had better things to do than work. All four were inefficient, reserving their active energies for turf wars all the more ferocious because the turf had never, over the centuries, been fenced. They answered in theory to parliament, which exercised weak and intermittent control, and, in fact, to the Treasury Department. The Lords of the Treasury had the power of the purse and were the supreme guardians of turf. They made it their business to question bills, require exhaustive lists of expenditures, cut staff, and withhold payments, and generally make lesser bureaucrats know who was boss. On the other hand, when complaints came in, the Lord Chamberlain and his colleagues could always blame Treasury.
The employees who composed the royal household were paid out of the Queen’s civil list, but they were not her employees. Though their job was to serve her, they were not obliged to obey her. Only the specific governmental department that hired a worker could sack him. As a result, standards of service in the royal palace were lower than in middle-class homes where a cook who burned the roast could be dismissed on the spot.
Among the four rival departments, the Commission of Woods and Forests excelled in procrastination and inefficiency. It was responsible for maintenance and repairs at the royal residences, all of which posed special problems that the commission ignored to the best of its very considerable ability. Persuading the commission to send in a man to put a door back on its hinges, mend a windowpane, or plane down the wooden table of the pastry chef took diplomatic talents of the highest order. If another department or individual fixed the broken window, the commissioners arose in protest, ready now to remove the offending new pane.
Jurisdictional problems arose constantly. As Baron Stockmar noted in his 1842 memorandum, the Queen at times shivered from cold because “the Lord Steward lays the fire, but the Lord Chamberlain lights it.” Why were the palace windows so dirty that at times the Queen could not tell if it was raining? Answer: because the Lord Chamberlain’s men cleaned them inside and the commissioners’ men cleaned them outside, but never at the same time.
When a job needed to be done, a requisition in due form would need to be submitted to the proper department, as the Duchess of Sutherland, Queen Victoria’s first mistress of robes, soon discovered. Two rooms at St. James’s Palace were allocated to the duchess for the official use of herself and her staff and to house the Queen’s state robes. But when the Duchess of Sutherland was shown her two rooms, she found them completely empty. Politely, the duchess wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, requesting chairs, tables, rugs, fire irons, a clothespress, a clotheshorse, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and locks on the doors. The request was surely modest, and the duchess was not only an important state officer but a lady of ancient birth, vast wealth, and great beauty with long experience at court, but she got nowhere at first. The Lord Chamberlain replied within two days with equal politeness that the matters addressed by Her Grace in her most recent communication lay outside his jurisdiction. No wonder the official name for an application to a governmental department was a “craving”!
Internal reform of such an entrenched bureaucracy was incremental and ineffective at best. The royal household constituted a system of state patronage of particular value at a time when people of all classes perpetually tottered on the edge of ruin. It was not just the lower servants who worked the system to their advantage. A maid of honor as well as a scullery maid might slip a silver spoon in her pocket, and was more likely to get away with it. Each Lord Chamberlain got two thousand pounds a year, which was significant even to a nineteenth-century English peer. After the coronation, a decorous tussle occurred between the lord chancellor and the Archdeacon of Windsor over who should get the new solid silver inkstand that had been ordered to facilitate the Queen’s sign manual during the ceremony.
Why would a Lord Steward or a Commissioner of Woods and Forests seek to reform an institution from which they personally benefited and through which they obtained the undivided loyalty of thousands of their fellow citizens?
A VERITABLE BUREAUCRATIC Hercules, Prince Albert was determined to cleanse the Augean stables he found at Windsor and Buckingham Palace. His campaign for domestic reform was the toughest he ever faced, a wearisome “infinitude of tiny minutiae,” as he himself confessed. But he was determined to prevail, and, rather to the surprise of Stockmar, who often criticized the prince for his lethargy, he proved to be a master of bureaucracy. Dreamy, cultured Albert metamorphosed into the consummate committeeman and negotiator, a devotee of meetings, a master of memoranda, and an indefatigable supervisor. Both the cabinet ministers and the gentlemen of the Treasury warmed to the prince, finding him a reasonable man who was prepared to make a deal and never went over budget.
Thanks to the excellent relations he developed with successive British governments after the premiership of Sir Robert Peel, the prince was able to persuade the Treasury to pay for things without depleting the Queen’s privy purse. Buckingham Palace was impossibly small for a modern royal family, argued the prince. His children were stacked up in the attics, and, while one of the Queen’s levees or drawing rooms could attract two thousand people, the largest room in the palace accommodated only five hundred. Parliament heeded the prince’s complaints, and after 1845, Buckingham Palace was significantly reconfigured, enlarged, and modernized at the taxpayers’ expense. The royal yacht was powered by sail and made the Queen seasick, reported the prince. Parliament promptly ordered a new, steam-powered royal yacht. The Queen was enchanted by the speed and safety of rail travel, parliament learned. A royal train was procured for the use of Her Majesty’s family and household.
The prince’s most important internal reform was probably to persuade the departments to appoint a master of the household in each of the royal residences. This permanent official lived in and took responsibility for coordinating the work that needed to be done to keep the place clean, well run, and in good repair. Once the prince took control, when foreign royalty came to stay or a major public event took place, such as the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, the men and women of the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Steward could be counted upon to rise magnificently to the occasion.
In his relationship with the royal servants, Albert established himself as a strictly fair but attentive and tenacious master. Under his management, guests no longer wandered the corridors at Windsor for hours at night, trying to find their bedroom. Foreign diplomats did not blunder in on the Queen while she was dressing. The royal children were safely locked away in their nursery, to which their father kept the key. Such fires as the Queen would permit were lit on command. Items like candles, biscuits, and paper for the water closets were doled out carefully. The butler was under notice to keep the liquor bill low, especially since the Queen’s husband drank water or, perhaps, in memory of his native Germany, beer.
The prince made least headway with the Commission of Woods and Forests. When a new water closet was being installed at Buckingham Palace, the commission rose up in fury, not because the plans had the disadvantage of emptying the sewage directly onto the little roof under the Queen’s dressing room, but because they originated in the Lord Chamberlain’s department. The most intractable problem, however, was with the drains, which came under the commission’s rubric. Experts came in
every few years to investigate and look grim, but even Prince Albert failed to get a modern drainage system installed in London or Windsor. This meant that for all their wealth, members of the royal family were subject to the ravages of infectious disease like ordinary folk. Medical care was freely available for all palace residents, but even Harley Street doctors at that time had few weapons to combat the regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid that occurred when the cesspools overflowed into the drinking water.
Thanks to the prince’s energetic domestic campaign, within a few years, the comfort enjoyed by the English royal family was the envy of their foreign relatives. As Vicky discovered when she moved to Prussia in 1857, the Prussian royal household drew all its water from a single pump in the courtyard, and water closets were unknown in German castles. And the Germans found the Russians abhorrently dirty!
Having bearded the beast of bureaucracy in its lair, the prince was able to turn with relief to those parts of his wife’s estate where government officials had little or no sway. In managing the family money, Albert was outstandingly successful. He proved to have a combination of drive, vision, and administrative compulsiveness that would have made him a great captain of industry. These were bourgeois skills, unremarkable in mercantile families, habitually despised by aristocrats, and revolutionary for royals.
Deeply interested in agriculture, the prince introduced the latest in modern farming methods to the royal farms. He improved the breeding strains of the royal cattle and sheep. He designed and built in Windsor Great Park a superb new dairy conforming to the most exacting standards of hygiene. He installed a central laundry for the royal household at Kew in London that saved hundreds a year in lost or pilfered clothes and in salaries for washerwomen. He masterminded, supervised, and, along with the Queen, collaborated actively in the first exhaustive catalog of the royal collections. He had the royal pianos tuned regularly. He hired responsible men to manage his wife’s and son’s real estate and mining interests, kept an eye on the men he had chosen, and invested the profits wisely. The income from the royal estates soared under the prince’s management.
By 1845, Albert had wrapped his wife and family in a protective cocoon of comfort and privacy that no previous English sovereign had ever known. He earned the gratitude of parliament by his prudence and thrift. He earned the rapturous admiration of his wife. He created an idyll of family life that his children sought to re-create as adults. He won the approval of the English middle classes by espousing their values. Through the prince’s efforts, the English monarchy entered into a period of unparalleled prosperity, and when he died his wife was many times richer than at her accession.
Yet Albert’s assertion of control won him few friends in his own household. Victoria, as generous and appreciative as she was demanding, was adored by her servants. Albert was publicly obeyed and secretly resented. When the prince cut the wages of a housemaid from forty-five to thirty-five pounds a year, when he abolished the ancient perquisite of serving wine every night to a nonexistent official, when he pocketed the prize money for a champion ram at a county fair, dukes sneered and drovers grumbled.
The discontent was voiced by a newsman called, appropriately, Jasper Judge. This gentleman wrote for the Windsor local paper and was a stringer for the London press. Judge published a stream of articles and books excoriating the Queen and the prince for the public money spent on them. There was the new stable at Windsor that cost the Treasury forty thousand pounds. There was the fact that the royals were the major Windsor landlords and yet paid no local property taxes. There was the human waste from the castle and barracks that overflowed into the Windsor streets whenever it rained hard.
Jasper Judge accused the Queen and the prince of being hard-hearted landlords who thought only of their own pleasure, especially when it came to hunting. In his columns, Judge told the story of the poor woman gathering sticks who was set on and viciously bitten by the dog of one of the prince’s gamekeepers. He reported the case of a poor man brought to court for poaching four pheasants and six pheasants’ eggs from the royal estates. The poacher was tried in camera and ordered to pay a fine of ten pounds and eleven shillings or spend four months in Reading gaol.
Jasper Judge’s press campaign infuriated Prince Albert. How could such a man be allowed to attack the monarchy with impunity? When his father and brother needed more space for their castle or their new opera house, they had no difficulty securing it. In Coburg, a political troublemaker like Judge would have been horsewhipped by one of the duke’s henchmen and forced out of his home. In England this was not possible, but Albert refused to let Judge get the better of him.
At first Prince Albert tried bribery, only to discover that Judge could not be bought. He then brought legal action not only against Judge but also against Judge’s son and his publishing associate, who were bankrupted and forced into exile abroad. Judge hung on in grim determination, but when he naively advertised an exhibition of etchings by the Queen and the prince, Albert saw his chance. Judge had purchased the etchings quite legally from the Windsor man who had printed them, but the prince took him to court for stealing the copies of the etchings and displaying them without their owners’ permission. The prince prevailed in court. Judge was convicted, jailed, and ruined.
None of these legal proceedings made Albert popular with the English people.
The Court of St. Albert’s
…
N THE MIDDLE AGES, A ROYAL COURT AND A ROYAL HOUSEHOLD WERE much the same thing—the informal group of nobles chosen by the king and queen as their constant companions as they journeyed about the country. By the seventeenth century royal courts were more selective and more centralized, following the model of Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, and there was a clear distinction between the court and the household.
To the end of the eighteenth century, the royal household remained the exclusive domain of members of the aristocracy, while the royal court was relatively inclusive, consisting of a variety of people useful to the monarch. Ministers, officials, and mistresses were not infrequently of low birth but still took their place at court. In France under Louis XIV, any man with a hat and sword had the right to enter the Palace of Versailles and see the king. Until the French Revolution, on the “Fete de Saint Louis,” French nationals and even foreign tourists were permitted to gawk at Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as they ate “the great repast”—”le grand couvert.” However, by the mid-nineteenth century in Great Britain, court functions were by invitation, and only a few thousand people at most ever gained entrance to a royal palace or saw the Queen close up. When at the time of the Crimean War Queen Victoria personally pinned Victoria Crosses, the new medals for valor, on the chests of returning veterans and touched the hands of men of all classes, she was conscious of doing something new and radical.
There could be no king or queen without a court, and a regular part of a monarch’s time must be devoted to court functions. This the Queen and Prince Albert were quite clear about. The essential function of courtiers was to confirm by their own lofty social status the supreme status of their master or mistress. The essential satisfaction of courtiers was to shine in the sovereign’s reflected glory. Each year the calendar of events at the Court of St. James’s, as the court of the ruling British monarch is called in the language of diplomats and royal officials, was fixed in advance. To levees, where the only woman present was the Queen, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, dukes, country squires, and government officials were ceremonially admitted. At the so-called “drawing-rooms” at the palace, debutantes were escorted by their female sponsors to curtsy to the Queen or her representative and thus enter society officially State banquets were given for visiting dignitaries.
People came to these stiflingly formal events to be seen, to see friends, perhaps to do official business, but above all to come close to the Queen. If Her Majesty addressed a remark to them, they were gratified. If she was not there, they grumbled. If they knew her husband would be representing he
r, most were dissatisfied and one or two stayed away, declining to kiss the hand of a mere Prince of Coburg. Such abstentions never went unnoticed. Court events were reported in careful detail in the court circular, since the people who mattered wanted to know who attended.
A small group of courtiers composed the household, and their duty and privilege was to be close to the Queen and her family. This group was selected by Her Majesty and paid by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to attend the Queen and the prince from the moment they came down to breakfast to the moment they retired to their private suites at night, every day of the year. Even on their wedding night, court etiquette did not permit Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to be alone.
The traditional qualifications to become a member of the household were high birth and superb connections, but in so powerful and rich a country as England, the household by the nineteenth century attracted mainly a genteelly impoverished subset of the nobility. Younger sons like Lieutenant Seymour, widows in distress like Lady Lyttelton, and girls with more ambition than opportunity like Mary Bulteel went into the family business of waiting at court, rather as other Britons might go into plumbing or haberdashery. Though it was considered indelicate for them to say so, they needed a royal salary and free accommodation to keep up with their kin and educate their children.
Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert saw the court as a fact of life, the price of royal privilege. The young Victoria had not been brought up at court, and in the first three years of her reign, she was thrilled to be always the center of attention and free to pick the members of her household. The young Queen assumed that, like all her royal predecessors, she would choose her friends and companions from the ranks of England’s high aristocracy. She enjoyed paying country house visits and surrounding herself with young and beautiful people. But from the outset, Victoria was wary of the aristocratic attendants who surrounded her all day. She knew that their interests and her own only partly coincided, and she was always careful to keep her own counsel.
