Etiquette and a Dinner with the Queen

In her youth, Victoria was reprimanded for her tendency to eat too much and to gobble. There was no privacy for a Queen in waiting and the grisly realities of 19th-century digestive problems were agonised over by everyone – including Victoria’s mother, her uncle Leopold and Lord Melbourne, the prime minister. The young Victoria herself fretted over her weight – at her very slimmest, she was just over seven stone. After Albert’s death, she became a trenchant if joyless eater, ploughing through course after course, still gobbling. The weight piled on. A politician forced to endure a meal with the old Queen wrote that it was a dismal experience: “I personally never heard her say anything at dinner which I remembered the next day. Her manners were not affable; she spoke very little at meals, and she ate fast and very seldom laughed.” Her physician Sir James Reid left detailed notes on the weary regularity of the Queen’s problems with flatulence, bowel irritation and stomach upsets. – The Guardian on Annie Gray’s Book on Queen Victoria, 2017

Regarded from a gastronomic point of view, it appears that there is nothing particularly, desirable in dining with the Queen, although it is a privilege much coveted by ambitious men. A distinguished divine, who occasionally preaches at Windsor, and dines and sleeps there afterward, said the other day that the dinner was a remarkably unsatisfactory affair to a hungry man. It is not etiquette to continue eating of any particular course after the Queen has partaken of it to her satisfaction; and as Her Majesty eats very little the courses are harried over. 

After dinner there is hardly time to take even one glass of wine before coffee is brought in. The Queen does not put her cup on tbe table, but sips a little as the servant holds it on the salver. Then Her Majesty rises, and of course the guests all rise and stand back from the table. The Queen the makes the round of the room, stopping to talk a few minutes to any one of the guests whom she may delight to honor, and then goes out, leaving the guests to amuse themselves as they like for the evening. – Hour, 1880

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia