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.
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