Sir Charles Phipps
(1801-1866)
21 November 1861
Volume 5, page 256, sitting number 6517.
Born at Musgrave Castle in Yorkshire on 27 December 1801, Charles Beaumont Phipps was the second son of Henry Phipps, first Earl of Mulgrave and Viscount Normanby. He was educated at Harrow and in 1820 joined the army as an ensign in the Scots Fusiler Guards, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1837. Placed on half-pay in 1847, he retired from active service in 1851 and was thenceforth an unattached colonel. He acted as secretary to his brother, Constantine Henry Phipps, 1st Marquess of Normanby, when governor of Jamaica (1832) and as steward of the viceregal household when Normanby went to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant (1835-39).
On 25 June 1835 he married Margaret Anne, daughter of Henry Bathurst, Archdeacon of York; they had two daughters and two sons.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘On 1 August 1846, Phipps was appointed equerry to Queen Victoria, and thereafter acquired an increasingly important role in the royal household. He became treasurer and private secretary to Prince Albert in 1847, and keeper of the queen's privy purse in 1849. Although he was never officially accorded the title, he acted with General Charles Grey as Victoria's private secretary (particularly after Albert's death), and as such was much in the political confidence of the queen and prince consort. He was made CB in 1853 and KCB in 1858. He additionally held office as treasurer and cofferer to the prince of Wales from 1849 and as one of his council from 1863. He was receiver-general of the duchy of Cornwall from 1862, and keeper of the signet to the prince of Wales as steward of Scotland from 1864. He died of bronchitis at Ambassadors' Court, St James's Palace, on 24 February 1866, and was buried on 2 March in St George's Chapel, Windsor.’
His younger daughter Harriet Lepel Phipps (1841-1922) was one of Queen Victoria’s longest-serving confidential attendants, serving as a maid of honour from 1862 to 1889 and a woman of the bedchamber from 1889 to 1901.