As Somerset points out, in an age where the monarch or their consort personify the state, one cannot dismiss as hyperbole the claims of Lady Mary Grey that she would desire “rather death than to be any longer without so great a jewel as Her Majesty’s favour”. The lives of these long-suffering women, raucously recounted in this immensely enjoyable book, offer an oblique, but very human, perspective on English history. As one maid of honour said of her famously cantankerous mistress, Queen Victoria, “I always feel fascinated when I am with her and forget all the inconveniences and worries connected with her service.”
Anne Somerset takes us on, through Queen Caroline’s eccentric behaviour and George IV’s numerous mistresses to Victoria’s overturning of a Tory government by her unconstitutional refusal to lose her mostly fiercely Whig ladies, her maltreatment of Lady Flora Hastings and the freezing gloom of Balmoral. As this book was first published in 1984, we learn nothing about today’s court, but it is a fascinating reprint.
