Have you ever wondered what it must be like to be Queen and live in a palace and be taken care of by hundreds of servants? (
Hmmm...maybe just me.) Anyway, if you have, the book
At Home With The Queen: The Inside Story of the Royal Household by Brian
Hoey, will answer all your questions. At times, it will make you wish you had servants. However, it may make you glad you are not the Queen.
As the title implies,
At Home With The Queen is an inside look at the workings of Buckingham Palace and the management of the Queen's household in general. (We are discussing Elizabeth II.) The author talks to actual former servants with the Queen's household to get the full, detailed picture. The Queen has her servants sign iron-clad confidentiality agreements, but if the stories are told anonymously, it seems to be okay. The majority of the sources in
Hoey's book are uncredited. The Royal Family are now very serious about the confidentiality agreements. The Queen's former governess, Marion Crawford, wrote a sappy little memoir about her time taking care of the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Although the book was nothing but favourable towards the Royals, and portrayed the little Princesses as nothing short of angels, the Royal Family cut out all contact with Crawford.
If you are a royalty junkie like me, you will be exclaiming over all the new interesting facts and stories on every page. (And annoying your husband greatly by telling him every new fact on every page.) I really enjoyed the behind the scenes look at how stuff works - how one gets hired as a servant and how the servant
hierarchy is almost more strict than the Royal
hierarchy. The servants follow an incredibly strict precedence system which governs where they eat lunch! It all depends on who you work for and how long you've been there. I liked learning about the set-up for a giant banquet at the palace: setting up the giant table which must be polished by a footman wearing
dustcloths on his feet; the 7-hour table setting time; measuring the place settings with a ruler; and the green light, red light system of serving food to the guests.
I found it interesting that the housemaids have to vacuum backward so as to vacuum over their steps, and that no vacuuming takes place before 8am so as not to wake up Her Majesty, or any other Royals which may still be sleeping. The footmen are in charge of taking out the Queen's flotilla of corgis for walkies every day, and as it is a highly despised chore, the newest footman usually gets stuck with the task. I think I would like my own valet, or dresser: they would lay out all my clothes for me every morning and take care of my (hopefully extensive) wardrobe. I am glad, however, that they no longer are required to actually dress the Royal in question - it would be very strange to have some person helping you on with your clothes like you are a 3 year old.
This book also gives great insight into why the Royals are like they are. You also learn a lot about the personalities of the individual Royals: the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. Of course the Royals aren't like everyone else - they are surrounded by servants all of the time. There is always someone around to fetch and carry, bring lunch, take it away, carry out all the little errands, and all the other
minutiae of regular life we just take for granted. It is just a totally and completely different world. This makes me wonder how Autumn Phillips is doing. She is a regular Canadian girl who met, fell in love with, and married the Queen's eldest grandchild, Peter Phillips (son of the Queen's only daughter, Princess Anne). (Despite the fact that his mother is a Princess, Peter Phillips doesn't have a title as titles are passed through the male line and his father, Captain Mark Phillips, does not have a title.) I am not sure what the servant level is like in the Phillips household (as currently they live in
Hong Kong), but there would be more servants when the Royal Family is all together for holidays at
Balmoral or
Sandringham, and I can just imagine what a shock it must be to her. (On a happy note, Autumn and Peter are expecting their first baby in December 2010 - the Queen's first great-grandchild.)
It would be kind of neat to work for the Queen, even as a servant. One drawback - she doesn't pay very well. Prince Charles is where to go if you want the dough: he has the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall, so he can afford to pay his servants a little more. I would, however, LOVE to work for the College of Arms. This organization does genealogical research into both ordinary and aristocratic families. They are involved in tracing descendants of aristocratic families to bestow titles, and in establishing coats of arms. They even have genealogical information for the colonies, including the United States (a former colony) and Canada. Researching aristocratic and non-noble families? Sign me up!
In general, I really quite enjoyed the book and all its fascinating nuggets of royal information. One tiny quibble: I would have organized the book in a slightly different fashion. The book seemed to be divided between giving information about the Queen's household in general at all her properties and between being an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at Buckingham Palace. So there was some very detailed information about some specific things at Buckingham Palace, such as State Dinners, but then also other chapters on different types of servants and what it was like in the "good old days" for servants of Royalty. I would have appreciated a little more detail about the Queen's other residences comparable to what was being told about Buckingham Palace (such as Windsor) or maybe less detail about Buckingham Palace and more of an overall view. However, that does not detract from the fact that this is a very interesting book, not about the Royal Family, but about those who work for and with the Royals and what goes on behind the scenes.
