Charlotte Knollys

Honourable Elizabeth Charlotte Knollys (c. 1835 – 24 April 1930) was a Lady of the Bedchamber, and the first woman private secretary, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, later Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom, consort of Edward VII of the United Kingdom.

The daughter of Sir William Thomas Knollys, a successful military figure and Comptroller of the Household to Edward VII the Prince of Wales, and his wife, Elizabeth St. Aubyn, Charlotte Knollys (her middle name became her practical forename) was sent into Alexandra's service as a Lady of the Bedchamber. The Princess of Wales came to rely heavily on her. By the late 1880s she began to perform duties as a private secretary. Alexandra required her services more when she was in mourning, for example when her beloved son, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, died in 1892.

Upon Edward's ascension to the throne, when Queen Victoria died in 1901, Charlotte was officially installed at Alexandra's side. The new King Edward VII granted her the style the Honourable and precedence as the daughter of a Baron. She performed all duties as private secretary and was also in Alexandra's complete confidence. However, this came at the price of having little freedom, a price which grew much more oppressive when Edward died in 1910. Alexandra, now Queen Dowager, shut herself away in seclusion at Sandringham House, in Norfolk, England, her favourite home. Charlotte wrote in a letter dated a year before Alexandra's death in 1925:

H.M. is so fond of Sandringham...she readily falls in with the doctor's advice that she should not tire herself with all the hurry and bustle of the Season...As far as I'm concerned, I am a 'Cockney born and bred', and down here I can never see my friends and relations and seem quite cut off from all the world." (Letter to an unknown Gentleman; Private Manuscript collection)

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