Service court
Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
Ladies-in-Waiting Anne Somerset
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.50) Another titled person,' remarks Sir Percy Shorter upon being presented to Delia Lady Rumpers in Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus. 'What a breath of fresh air•' It must gladden the heart of many an old snob that Lady Antonia Pinter's pro- tegee, Lady Anne Somerset (daughter of tile new Duke of Beaufort and grand- d4gliter of the Marquess of Bath) is developing into such an assured social historian. Not yet 30, Lady Anne has already written a more than competent life of William IV in Lady Antonia's much maligned 'Kings and Queens' series and, following this entertaining study of the ladies of the court (not to be confused with Virginia Wade's forthcoming volume), is apparently about to embark on a biography of Elizabeth I. Ludies-In-Waiting discusses the English Court from the Tudors to the present day as it were from Lady Anne Boleyn to Lady Jean Rankin. Although the Tudor court aged as both a finishing school and a mar- market, the duties were often of a very Menial nature. The author's ancestress, the Countess of Worcester, attended Anne tIoleyn's coronation banquet when she and a�another lady-in-waiting 'did hold up a fine etloth before the Queen's face when she list spit or do otherwise at her pleasure'. Perhaps this unpleasant experience may the Queen's saucy behaviour by
wW.orcester. While the crown itself was Lady rthiri the grasp of mere ladies-in-waiting,
Pstakes, as Anne Boleyn and Catherine . ward discovered, were correspondingly nigh. court Despite the smell and the squalor of the in Elizabethan times, and notwith- standing "nding the regal sarcasm and occasional
swipe (one maid of honour had her finger broken), 'Gloriana' invested her household with a glamour that was irresistible. The in- fluence of the ladies on the great Queen could be overestimated; Sir Walter Ralegh thought that 'like witches they could do hurt but no good'. Lady Anne also quotes what could be described as the enjoyable old chestnut about Sir Walter 'getting up one of the maids of honour against a tree', whereupon the modest girl's protestations of 'Sweet Sir Walter' swiftly degenerated into `Swisser Swatter! Swisser Swatter!' As Lady Anne says, 'some ladies combined a career at court with the oldest profession of all.' Jacobean masques were not enhanced by the sight of drunken aristocratic ladies in the cast 'sick and spewing in the hall' or an errant member of the audience 'being sur- prised at her business'. The duties of the Queen's household became more clearly defined with the establishment in the 17th century of such positions as Mistress of the Robes, Mistress of the Sweet Coffers, Laundress of the Body and, naturally, Groom of the Stool 'Stole' was later substituted, giving rise to the incorrect impression that the holder of this important post emptying the royal chamber pots (an honour for which the grandest women would ardently compete) was a sort of ceremonial dresser. The dotty Dame Martha Jackson, who had become unhinged after being shot in the thigh in the Civil War, demanded the imaginary posts of 'Gentlewoman of the Horse and Lady of the Crupper to the Queen . . and Baroness of the Mews'.
The Restoration court was not so much a marriage market as a bordello. Charles Il swelled the ranks of ladies-in-waiting with his mistresses (Nell Gwynn, for instance, became a lady of the Queen's Privy Chamber) and packed off the 'six frights' attending Catherine of Braganza back to Portugal after they had complained of be-
ing unable to stir 'without seeing in every corner great beastly English pricks battering against every wall'. Foreign imports into the household almost invariably led to fric- tion, though Mary II brought some respec- table Dutch morality to the household; em- broidery became the order of the day. The traditional picture of Queen Anne's reign as the golden age of the ladies-in-waiting, with the wretched monarch buffeted between Sarah Marlborough and Abigail Masham, is nicely deflated here by the author, who shows that, for all the unspeakable Sarah's bullying, the Queen knew her own mind.
Under the Hanoverians, the atmosphere of the court became increasingly leaden and suffocated by etiquette. One lady-in- waiting, not daring to leave the royal draw- ing-room without permission, relieved herself on the floor, producing a puddle 'as large as a dining-table for ten' which threatened to engulf the shoes of a nearby princess. The court became unfashionable, no longer the centre of society and, in 1839, thanks to the Lady Flora Hastings affair and the Bedchamber Crisis, a dirty word. Albert, however, reorganised the household regime, and the advent of `Balmorality' plumbed new depths of tedium for the ladies-in-waiting.
There is a distinct falling-away towards the end of the book (Lady Anne reaches Queen Victoria's accession on page 266 and then gallops through the next 150 years in only 44 pages), but the points are concisely made. Unlike many of his forebears, Ed- ward VII did not select his mistresses from his wife's ladies-in-wating. (`These are your wives?' enquired the bemused Shah of Per- sia. 'They are old and ugly. Have them beheaded and take new and pretty ones.') When one of the long-serving ladies at Clarence House suggested that she was too old for the job, the Queen Mother replied, `What about me?' and there was no more talk of resignation.
Lady Anne writes with perception, wit, candour and a confident authority that is all the more effective for being understated.
I do wish, though, that she could eliminate `lifestyle', 'scenario' and 'relatives' from her vocabulary and that more of the proper nouns could have been spelt in the standard modern manner. Lady Anne's 'time travell- ing' is rather uncomfortable; 1 am not too happy with her assertion that 'develop- ments in Charles [II]'s love life were scrutinised with an interest that might nowadays be reserved for a Cabinet reshuf- fle or a by-election' (surely the latest girl- friend of Prince Andrew or his terrible Thatcher twin would be nearer the mark), nor with the statement that Fanny Burney's appointment as Keeper of the Robes 'ex- cited almost as much surprise as would the appointment of Iris Murdoch or Margaret Drabble to the present-day staff at Buck- ingham Palace'. Bored of 'the wearying, lifeless uniformity of life at court', Fanny chucked it in after only five years. Happily, the thankless task continues to attract those prepared to devote themselves to a lifetime of grease and fervour.
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