Future kings don"t squeeze their own toothpaste: Tales of the pampered British royal family
By Anna Mundow September 29 at 8:00 AM (Basic) Housekeeping, the historian Adrian Tinniswood reminds us, has always been a vexing business. Never more so, perhaps, than in 17th-century England, what with dogs and servants urinating “all over the place;” house guests consuming “twenty-four lobsters and 624 chickens” in three days; scurvy and sweaty armpits at every turn (“Rub the places with powder of nitre, mixed with dog’s urine”); and kitchen visitors making off with “salmon tails and the heads of porpoises.” All of which and a great deal more — details of childbirth, for example, of laundry and latrines — are tastefully revealed in “Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the British Royal Household,” Tinniswood’s charmingly erudite tour through five centuries of, well, cosseting. For his subjects are no ordinary homemakers. “Kings and queens and their families were, and still are, entit...