Amid a scaled-back holiday season in the month of December, Queen Elizabeth mourned two of her long-serving ladies-in-waiting. Fortune Fitzroy, Dowager duch*ess of Grafton, died on December 3 at the age of 101. Diana Maxwell, Lady Farnham, died on December 29 at the age of 90.
A royal source told the Telegraph about the queen’s response to losing her friends. “It has not been a good year for the Queen—losing her husband and then the duch*ess of Grafton and now Lady Farnham,” the source said. “They were dear friends who supported the Queen on official duties. Unfortunately a sad consequence of living a long life is that you have to say goodbye to a lot of people you care about.”
The ladies-in-waiting are an organized hierarchy of close friends and confidants of the queen who have titles that date from the medieval period. (Though they are called Ladies of the Bedchamber, they don’t actually have any duties in her bedroom or closet.) “They are almost exclusively drawn from the aristocracy, many of them are friends of the royal family, and all have shared interests, inbred caution, an intricate understanding of court etiquette, and sociable personalities,” Sally Bedell Smith explained in 2012’s Elizabeth the Queen. They often attend luncheons at Buckingham Palace, respond to correspondence, greet guests of the queen, and stand ready to take any flowers or gifts given to the queen during the course of their duties.
Fortune Grafton was first appointed as one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting in 1953, and in 1967, she became the Mistress of the Robes, which is the title given to the highest ranking lady-in-waiting. She was born in 1920 and trained as a nurse before her 1946 wedding to Hugh Fitzroy, who became the Duke of Grafton in 1970. In addition to her duties for the queen, she became a magistrate in 1949 and heard cases regarding juveniles for 23 years, before serving as a justice of the peace from 1972 to 1990, according to i News. According to the Times, the queen visited her friend on her 100th birthday shortly before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
Lady Farnham, who was known to her friends as Marion, married Barry Maxwell, the 12th Baron Farnham in 1959 and became a Lady of the Bedchamber in 1959. She joined the royal household in 1987 and accompanied the queen on her 2012 tour of Ireland, the first visit to the country by a reigning monarch since independence. The source who spoke to the Telegraph said, “It is very sad for the Queen. Everyone loved Lady Farnham, she was always so good humoured. She was also a very glamorous and attractive woman. She was always very generous to new people joining the household.”
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