‘Ineverlikedanimalsquiteasmuchasmywifeorchildren –excepteatingthemofcourse.’
– Prince Philip
To understand the secret lives of royal servants, it is essential to understand the history of monarchy and the social hierarchies that underpin it, because those hierarchies have survived remarkably unchanged from medieval times right up to the present.
In the Middle Ages, everyone, from earl to kitchen maid, was effectively the servant of the monarch. Kings controlled the lives and fortunes of the landed aristocracy; the aristocracy controlled everyone else. The vast bulk of the population could be described as landless, illiterate serfs. They had no rights and no property; their daughters and wives and they themselves were entirely at the disposal of the local landed aristocrat. That aristocrat in turn held his land entirely at the whim of the monarch. All the most senior aristocrats in the land – the barons, earls, lords, knights and baronets – worked with and for the monarch because to do otherwise was to arouse suspicion. A great lord who did not attend court would quickly fall under suspicion: he must be plotting rebellion. Why else would he not attend his king, his lord?
So, in a sense, in this early period everyone was a servant and every class, except the very lowest, in turn had their own servants. Servants, as serfs or villeins, were effectively property in the Middle Ages and then slowly over the centuries they became paid servants and then, as they are known today, staff. To own villeins, to have servants and to pay domestic staff was and remains a key part of what makes the aristocracy and the royal family different from the rest of us.
The highest ambition of the aristocracy and the royal family traditionally is to show that they do nothing menial for themselves. When the rising middle classes grew wealthier in England in the eighteenth century, they wanted above all else to ape royalty and the aristocracy by also paying
