Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/143

 be. Some of the servants were under the Lord Chamberlain, some under the Master of the Horse, some under the Lord Steward; as neither the first nor second of these State officials had any permanent representative in the palace, more than two-thirds of the male and female servants were left without any master or mistress at all. They came and went as they pleased, and sometimes remained absent for hours, or were guilty of various irregularities, and there was no one whose duty it was to control them. There was no one official responsible for the cleanliness, order, and security of the palace; and if the dormitories where the footmen slept, ten and twelve in a room, were turned into scenes of riot and drunkenness, no one could help it. So little watch was kept over the various entrances to the palaces, that there was nothing to prevent people from walking in unobserved, and, as a matter of fact, shortly after the birth of the Princess Royal, a boy did walk into Buckingham Palace in this way, and was accidentally discovered at one o'clock in the morning under a sofa in the room adjoining the Queen's bedroom. The stupidity, disorganization, and wastefulness of the whole thing were boundless; the only redeeming point was that there appeared to be no corruption. Her Majesty might find it impossible to get her dining-room warmed because of a coolness between the Lord Chamberlain's and the Lord Steward's departments; but she was not called upon to pay for fuel she had never received, or for services that had been discontinued since the death of Queen Anne. Some idea of the scale in which the housekeeping at Windsor is conducted may be gathered from the fact that in one year (1842), which does not appear to have been in any way exceptional, as many as 113,000 people dined there, so that there was a magnificent scope either for waste