Lady Rosemary Muir was 23 when she received a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, informing her that she had been chosen as one of the six maids of honour to assist the Mistress of the Robes in the coronation of Elizabeth II. That was in January 1953. From then until the coronation day in June, the maids of honour were the subject of many excited articles. The press dubbed them ‘the Lucky Six… envied by every other woman in the land’.
Envied they certainly were, but luck had little to do with it. Lady Rosemary tells me it was no surprise to her that she was appointed to be a maid of honour. ‘I was a duke’s daughter,’ she says as we look through her hefty album of coronation photographs and cuttings. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘People always ask me “Weren’t you nervous?” – no! We just got on with it’
We meet in March, when newspapers are full of jumpy reports that the coronation for Charles III will be ‘stripped back’.
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