Crown Equerry
Position in the British Royal Household
The Crown Equerry is the operational head of the Royal Mews of the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom. As executive head of the Royal Mews Department, they are responsible for the provision of vehicular transport for the sovereign, both cars and horse-drawn carriages. Rail travel is arranged by the Royal Travel Office, which also co-ordinates air transport.
The position of Crown Equerry should not be confused with that of Equerry: although both are nominally under the Master of the Horse, the equerries have a distinct role as personal assistants to the sovereign and senior members of the royal family.
History
After 1827, the Master of the Horse became a political office, its holder changing with each change of government. To provide continuity in the management of the Royal Mews, the role of Crown Equerry was created in 1854. The first incumbent was John Groves, a retired Major of the Essex Rifles; his full title was Crown Equerry, Secretary to the Master of the Horse and Superintendent of the Royal Stables. The secretarial aspect of the job led to him being seen as inferior to the other Equerries, and he was kept at one remove from the Queen and the Palace (Charles Phipps, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, was at pains to make clear in a letter to the Master of the Horse that the new office pertained 'exclusively to the Stables department').
Groves died in office five years later; his successor, Colonel George Ashley Maude, remained in post for thirty-five years. During this time he consolidated the office and worked to improve the working conditions of the Mews staff.
“Crown Equerry” enters the record as position in the British Royal Household. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Crown, Equerry and Position can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crown Equerry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.