Royal Households of The United Kingdom - Historical Overview

Historical Overview

The sovereign's domestics were his officers of state, and the leading dignitaries of the palace were the principal administrators of the kingdom. The royal household itself had, in its turn, grown out of an earlier and more primitive "thegnhood", and among the most eminent and powerful of the king's thegns were his "dishthegn," his "bowerthegn," and his horsethegn or staller. In Normandy at the time of the Conquest a similar arrangement, imitated from the French court, had long been established, and the Norman dukes, like their overlords the kings of France, had their seneschal or steward, their chamberlain and their constable. After the Norman Conquest, the ducal household of Normandy was reproduced in the royal household of England; and since, in obedience to the spirit of feudalism, the great offices of the first had been made hereditary, the great offices of the second were made hereditary also, and were thenceforth held by the grantees and their descendants as holder of tenure in grand serjeanty of the crown.

The consequence was that they passed out of immediate relation to the practical conduct of affairs either in both state and court or in the one or the other of them. The steward and Lord High Chamberlain of England were superseded in their political functions by the Justiciar and Treasurer of England, and in their domestic functions by the Lord Steward and Lord Chamberlain of the household. The marshal of England took the place of the constable of England in the royal palace, and was associated with him in the command of the royal armies.

The marshalship and the constableship became hereditary, and, although the Lord High Constable and Earl Marshal of England retained their military authority until a comparatively late period, the duties they had performed about the palace had been long before transferred to the master of the horse. In these circumstances the holders of the original great offices of state and the household ceased to attend the court except on occasions of extraordinary ceremony, and their representatives either by inheritance or by special appointment have ever since continued to appear at coronations and some other public solemnities, such as the State Opening of Parliament or trials by the House of Lords.

The earliest record relating to the English royal household is of the reign of Henry II and is contained in the Black Book of the Exchequer. It enumerates the various inmates of the king's palace and the daily allowances made to them at the period at which it was compiled. It affords evidence of the antiquity and relative importance of the court offices to which it refers, though it is silent as to the functions and formal subordination of the persons who filled them. In addition to this record, there are more recent but (for the most part) equally meagre, documents bearing on the constitution of the royal household, and extending, with long intervals, from the reign of Edward III to the reign of William and Mary. Among them, however, are what are known as the Black Book of the Household and the Statutes of Eltham, the first compiled in the reign of Edward IV and the second in the reign of Henry VIII from which a good deal of detailed information is available concerning the arrangements of the court in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The Statutes of Eltham were meant for the practical guidance of those who were responsible for the good order and the sufficient supply of the sovereign's household at the time they were issued. The great officers of state and the household specifically mentioned are not all of them. We have named those only whose representatives are still dignitaries of the court and functionaries of the palace. If the reader consults Hallam (Middle Ages, i. 181 seq.), Freeman (Norman Conquest, i. 91 seq., and v. 426 seq.) and Stubbs (Const. Hist. i. 343, seq.), he will be able himself to fill in the details of the outline we have given above.

But the Black Book of the Household, besides being a sort of treatise on princely magnificence generally, professes to be based on the regulations established for the governance of the court by Edward III, who, it affirms, was "the first setter of certeynties among his domesticall meyne, upon a grounded rule" and whose palace it describes as "the house of very policie and flowre of England"; and it may therefore possibly, and even probably, take us back to a period much more remote than that at which it was actually put together.

Various orders, returns and accounts of the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, Charles I, Charles II, and William and Mary throw considerable light on the organisation of particular sections of the royal household in times nearer to our own. Moreover, there were several parliamentary inquiries into the expenses of the royal household in connection with the settlement or reform of the civil list during the reigns of George III, George IV and William IV. But they add little or nothing to our knowledge of the subject in what was then its historical as distinguished from its contemporary aspects. So much, indeed, is this the case that, on the accession of Queen Victoria, Chamberlayne's Present State of England, which contains a catalogue of the officials at the court of Queen Anne, was described by Lord Melbourne the prime minister as the "only authority" which the advisers of the crown could find for their assistance in determining the appropriate constitution and dimensions of the domestic establishment of a queen regnant.

In its main outlines the existing organisation of the royal household is essentially the same as it was under the Tudors or the Plantagenets. It is divided into three principal departments, at the head of which are the lord steward, the lord chamberlain and the master of the horse, and the respective provinces of which may be generally described as "below stairs," "above stairs" and "out of doors." The duties of these officials, and the various officers under their charge are dealt with in the articles under those headings. When the reigning sovereign is a queen, the royal household is in some other respects rather differently arranged from that of a king and a queen consort.

When there is a king and a queen consort there is a separate establishment "above stairs" and "out of doors" for the queen consort. She has a Lord Chamberlain's department of her own, and all the ladies of the court from the Mistress of the Robes to the Maids of Honour are in her service. At the commencement of the reign of Queen Victoria the two establishments were combined, and on the whole considerably reduced. On the accession of Edward VII the civil list was again reconstituted; and while the household of the king and his consort became larger than during the previous reign, there was a tendency towards increased efficiency by abolishing certain offices which were either redundant or unnecessary.