Pamela Hicks, Lady-in-Waiting to Elizabeth II of Britain, Dies at 97

 

Pamela Hicks, Lady-in-Waiting to Elizabeth II of Britain, Dies at 97

 

The queen’s third cousin, she was a bridesmaid at the royal wedding in 1947, and witnessed firsthand pivotal moments in British history.

 

By Alan Cowell

June 5, 2026, 5:57 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/world/europe/pamela-hicks-dead.html

 

Pamela Hicks, a cousin, bridesmaid and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II of Britain who witnessed the birth of an independent India as the daughter of the last imperial viceroy and who was one of the very few aides on hand in a remote corner of Africa when Elizabeth learned that her father’s death had lofted her to the throne, died on Friday. She was 97.

 

Her daughter India Hicks announced the death on social media, but did not say where she died.

 

From the moment of her birth in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona — with King Alfonso XIII of Spain personally supervising the appointment of a physician — to her attendance at Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022, Ms. Hicks led a life that was intertwined with Europe’s royal houses.

 

She was a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a first cousin to Prince Philip, Elizabeth’s husband. Her father, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was descended from the Battenberg dynasty of Germany and was often said to be a mentor to King Charles III when he was the heir to the throne. She and her elder sister, Patricia, were third cousins to Elizabeth and were bridesmaids at the royal wedding in 1947.

 

Ms. Hicks’s life was punctuated by tragedy — her father was among those killed in a 1979 bomb attack on the family fishing boat, orchestrated by members of the Irish Republican Army — and by what modern critics might depict as scandal. Her mother, Edwina Ashley, an heiress of great wealth and beauty, was known for taking lovers, one of whom moved in with the family, apparently with her husband’s consent.

 

When the Mountbattens moved to New Delhi in 1947, as Britain prepared to relinquish the so-called “jewel in the crown” of its empire, her mother was said to have forged a deep and mutual attachment with Jawaharlal Nehru, an Indian nationalist leader who became the country’s first prime minister. (Ms. Hicks always denied biographers’ suggestions that the relationship had been sexual.)

 

For his part, Lord Mountbatten had a longstanding and intimate relationship with Yola Letellier, a Frenchwoman on whom the writer Colette had based the title character of her 1944 novella “Gigi.”

 

Ms. Hicks’s own marriage to a commoner in 1960 took her into a different world of the international jet-set as the wife of David Hicks, a well-known designer of chic interiors in the 1960s. When her husband’s business began to falter in the late 1970s, the couple sold Britwell House, their home in Oxfordshire, and moved into the Grove, a smaller but still grand home on the same estate.

 

The wedding was “an unorthodox match, but one that would change my life completely,” Ms. Hicks wrote in a 2012 memoir, “Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten.”

 

“After 29 years as the dutiful daughter of a family at the heart of British society, with all its traditions and ceremonies,” she added, “I was about to enter a completely new world — of fashion, design and the whirlwind of the 1960s.”

 

Mr. Hicks died in 1998. In addition to their daughter India, Ms. Hicks’s survivors include another daughter, Edwina Hicks; a son, Ashley Hicks; and 12 grandchildren.

 

Pamela Carmen Louise Mountbatten was born in Barcelona on April 19, 1929, while her parents were traveling in Spain. As his wife went into labor, Lord Mountbatten called a cousin, Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain, to seek help finding a doctor. King Alfonso ended up making the arrangements for a qualified physician to attend the birth. He also ordered the Royal Guard to surround the Ritz, Ms. Hicks wrote in her memoir.

 

She was five years younger than Patricia, her only sibling, with whom she spent much of a peripatetic childhood while their parents traveled widely. Their mother undertook lengthy and exotic journeys with a favored lover, Lt. Col. Harold Phillips, a 6-foot-5 officer in the Coldstream Guards known as Bunny, who moved in with the family.

 

“It was a very unconventional marriage, but brought about by love, really,” Ms. Hicks told Vanity Fair in 2013. “My father adored my mother and wanted her to be happy. So it was his idea to bring Bunny, whom we adored, into the family. And he had Yola. So it was an extended family intimacy, but it worked very well indeed.”

 

The sisters were brought up largely by nannies and governesses, at one point spending months away from their parents at a hotel in rural Hungary after her mother lost the establishment’s address. On other occasions, her mother sent back unusual pets, including a lion cub and a bear, which inevitably grew to be threateningly large.

 

At home, their parents’ guests included Queen Mary, Noël Coward, Winston Churchill and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. At one point, King Edward VIII spent time at the Mountbatten home in England with Wallis Simpson, the American for whom he gave up the throne in 1936.

 

In later life, Ms. Hicks was scathing about Mrs. Simpson. In the interview with Vanity Fair, she called her “hardhearted” and accused her of devoting herself to a wealthy American playboy, to the chagrin of the former king. In the same interview, Ms. Hicks had sharp words, too, for Princess Diana, calling her “really spiteful, really unkind” to Charles before her death in 1997.

 

During World War II, the sisters were evacuated briefly to New York because of fears that, if Germany invaded, the Mountbatten family could be at risk — because of its aristocratic pedigree and because the two girls and their mother traced Jewish ancestry to their great-grandfather, Ernest Cassel, a wealthy financier.

 

In New York, they were housed on Fifth Avenue, near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in the vast apartment of the socialite Grace Vanderbilt.

 

For the teenage Pamela, the family’s postwar deployment to India to oversee independence and the subsequent partition appears to have offered a remarkable and exhilarating time. She befriended Nehru and Gandhi, and was charged by her parents with placating Indian student leaders who had been jailed by the same British authorities that were now preparing to withdraw.

 

From the abdication of Edward VIII, Ms. Hicks had known that her cousin Elizabeth was in the direct line of succession. Yet, she later wrote, it came as a surprise when King George VI died in 1952, at 56, while Elizabeth and Philip were on tour in Kenya.

 

As lady-in-waiting, Ms. Hicks was one of only a handful of close aides who traveled with the couple to Treetops, a remote game-viewing lodge built on a platform high up in an ancient fig tree overlooking a watering hole.

 

In the era before cellphones and satellite communications, the small group was completely out of touch. Not only that, urgent encrypted messages about the king’s death, sent to the British colonial authorities in Kenya, could not be deciphered because the official in charge of the code book was traveling to meet the royal couple later in the tour.

 

Only when the party moved on to the next scheduled stop on their journey after Treetops did royal aides confirm from a crackly BBC radio broadcast that the king had died. In British monarchic tradition, an heir assumes the throne the very second the previous queen or king dies.

 

After Philip broke the news to Elizabeth, Ms. Hicks wrote, “I instinctively gave her a hug but quickly, remembering that she was now queen, dropped into a deep curtsy.”

 

Alan Cowell had a long career as a foreign correspondent for The Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.