Harriet Phipps
British lady-in-waiting (1841-1922)
The Hon. Harriet Lepel Phipps, VA (22 January 1841 – 7 March 1922) was an English courtier who served as a confidential attendant of Queen Victoria.
Family
Phipps was born in 1841. She was the youngest daughter of Sir Charles Beaumont Phipps, a courtier, confidant of the Queen, and Keeper of the Privy Purse.
Career
Phipps was appointed Maid of Honour in Ordinary to the Queen on 3 March 1862 (giving her the courtesy rank of a baron's daughter), and later served as a Woman of the Bedchamber from 1889 until Victoria's death. She often accompanied the queen during visits, including the April 1900 visit to Ireland.
Phipps was used by the Queen to carry out confidential errands, and had access to many secrets, which she faithfully kept. Her papers were destroyed upon her death. She was decorated with the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert, 4th class.
Marie Mallet, a fellow lady of the bedchamber, found Phipps as a messenger of instructions from Victoria "the embodiment of early Victorian traditions, discreet almost to a fault, full of little mysteries," but also described her as "gay and excellent company and always warm-hearted".
“Harriet Phipps” enters the record as british lady-in-waiting (1841-1922). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Harriet, Phipps and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harriet Phipps” 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.