The Windsors come with a very large staff, some of whom may be visible this weekend at King Charles’s coronation. But don’t dust off your CV – you probably don’t qualify
Modern monarchy can feel a bit pointless. If there’s no pomp, there’s no point, surely? Duchy Original oaten biscuits and broad bean coronation quiche are tragically deficient in the shock, awe and fabulousness department compared with George IV’s 100-course banquets on a 4,000-piece silver gilt dining set, with real fish swimming in a channel running through the centre of his table. But there is still a touch of the old autocratic mystique. An investigation by the US media company Insider in January 2022 revealed 1,133 royal employees, including a “carpet planner” and “deputy yeoman of the plate pantry”. The palace dismissed Insider’s database of staff as “a series of ill-informed and baseless claims”. However, King Charles seems committed to keeping his end up in terms of flunkeys: the 2022 annual review of Clarence House (Charles’s residence since 2003) alone revealed it employed the equivalent of 101 full-time staff, including “four chefs, five house managers, three valets and dressers and a couple of butlers”.
Although the royal household significantly slimmed down in the 19th century, a proliferation of secretive sinecures, archaic titles, brocaded uniforms and feathered headgear remain. It is described by former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker in his 2019 book about royal excesses, … And What Do You Do?, as a “medieval mountain of absurdity”: equerries, pages, aides-de-camp, ushers and “enough chaplains to organise a football knockout competition”. “They are there to ease the monarch’s passage through life,” says Adrian Tinniswood, author of Behind the Throne: a Domestic History of the Royal Household. “But there’s another side to it – surrounding the sovereign in an aura of mystique, of magic almost. Those traditions remind us that even though we would like to think the royals are just like us, of course they’re not. Because if they were, what’s the point of them?”
