Tom Quinn - Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle

xi

She will have to walk behind the angels and she wont like that.

E dward VII on being asked if his mother would be happy in H eaven

You cant treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.

T om S toppard , R osencr antz and G uildenstern A re D ead

A t various times in its history, Kensington Palace has come under real threat of demolition. The most serious threat, during the second half of the nineteenth century, was averted only when Queen Victoria insisted that her birthplace should not be destroyed. But her motivation was not entirely based on sentiment. She was shrewd enough to realise that without Kensington Palace there would be nowhere suitable in London to house all those near and distant relatives she wished either to patronise or to control (or both). It was this role as the house of the hangers-on, as one journalist put it that Edward VII famously echoed when he described Kensington Palace as the aunt heap. xii

In a sense this book is an account of the aunt heap. Here you will discover the stories of those aunts and many others who have been forgotten for too long in the effort to focus always on the immediate royal family; as the journalist Peter Mahone put it, here you will find the dotty and the potty, in a story that takes us from the early seventeenth century right up to the tempestuous years when Princess Margaret lived at the palace, and beyond, to the present day.

I have included some anecdotes that are not directly related to Kensington simply because they are funny or extraordinary or provide a neat insight into the lives of the early Hanoverians who loved the palace. Some of these stories are bizarre, at least by todays standards we forget, for example, that royal couples were public property in earlier centuries in a way that would be unthinkable now. So it was not strange at all when George II and Princess Caroline of Ansbach, on their wedding night, dressed only in their nightshirts, found themselves surrounded by courtiers, lords, ladies, servants and even strangers who watched the couple climb nervously into bed and then made extremely bawdy remarks until ushered out of the room. Or take the fact that Queen Victoria sent a telegram each month to her doctor informing him that the bowels are acting fully.

For a writer, the Hanoverians and their favourite palace are almost too good to be true and this is especially so when one considers the outliers, those most likely to find themselves tucked away at Kensington. George IIIs daughter Elizabeth, for example, was married aged forty-eight to a massively obese German widower called Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg (known to all and sundry as Humbug). According to Karl Shaw in Oddballs and Eccentrics, Frederick was xiii forced to wash immediately before his nuptials as he stank, and as he and his bride drove away in their coach after the wedding, he threw up all over her.

Much of my information about the past fifty years of Kensington Palaces history comes from a series of interviews I conducted with servants at the palace. In the 1970s, servants were willing sometimes positively eager to talk about their lives, and this situation lasted well into the 1990s. It has been more difficult to source information in recent times, as those who work for the royal family now have to sign confidentiality agreements, but people still like to talk off the record about their lives, especially their working lives, whatever the barriers and risks. This book is the result of that desire to talk.