India Hicks might be King Charles’s goddaughter, but she’s refreshingly down to earth despite growing up alongside royalty. The British designer and charity worker—whose mother, Lady Pamela Hicks, is Prince Philip’s first cousin—was a bridesmaid in Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s 1981 wedding. Recently, she sat down with Marie Claire to talk about her new book, Lady Pamela: My Mother's Extraordinary Years as Daughter to the Viceroy of India, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen, and Wife of David Hicks, while visiting NYC to promote the title.
Hicks tells Marie Claire that her 95-year-old mother “has had an exceptional life in the fact that she’s obviously had a front-seat to historic events.”
"No one today was with The Queen [Elizabeth] the moment she became Queen,” she continued, referring to the fact that Lady Pamela—often known as “Lady P”—was serving as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth in Kenya on the day the royal found out that her father, King George VI, had died.
Lady Pamela traveled around the world with Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth during their two Commonwealth tours (the first was interrupted by King George VI’s death) and took part in their royal wedding as a bridesmaid. She was very much a part of the traditional royal machine, but today, Hicks says her mom is a strong proponent of a more modern future for the British monarchy.
“She thinks that it is modernizing in a way that it should, and she absolutely believes in the thinning down of the Royal Family and making it this core hardworking foursome,” the author tells Marie Claire, referring to King Charles III, Queen Camilla and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Hicks also says that her mother was all for freshening things up when it came to the term lady-in-waiting itself. “When Camilla changed the name from lady-in-waiting to ‘companion,’ I immediately said to my mum and asked, ‘What do you think?’ and she said, ‘Perfect, it makes such sense.’”
While the role of a lady-in-waiting has shifted with the times, women like Lady Pamela have always served as a friendly face during long days of royal engagements, Hicks explains.
“My mother was there to check the dress is right, the lipstick is right...also to know the names of everyone in the room,” Hicks says. “You need someone who probably feels quite comfortable in that world, but also, as my mother would say, ‘You need someone you can have a giggle with.’”
As for her research process, she says it was useful that Lady P held on to so many mementos. “My mother has kept everything,” Hicks says, explaining that she went through Lady Pamela’s extensive archives in order to craft the coffee table book, which features nostalgic photo collages of diary entries, letters from Queen Elizabeth, and historic items from her mother’s life.
One discovery took her by surprise. “I came across this funny little box of slides,” Hicks tells Marie Claire, sharing that she took them “to Snappy Snaps,” a British photo shop, to be developed. “All of the photographs were of The Queen! Getting on a horse, chatting to people in a courtyard, putting on her boots. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what did Snappy Snaps think?’” she said with a laugh. Lady Pamela includes several of these unseen royal photographs, as well as an array of family photos of India’s grandparents and her father, the legendary designer David Hicks.
One of the most personal parts of the book details another historic event, the 1979 assassination of Hick’s grandfather, Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten—a tragedy that was dramatized in season four of The Crown.
"I’d never really heard the words ‘political assassination’ before,” she says. The then-11-year-old was vacationing with her grandfather and the rest of her family in Ireland when his boat was blown up by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), killing Mountbatten along with India’s 14-year-old cousin, Nicholas Knatchbull, his grandmother, Doreen Knatchbull, and a local teenage boy.
“I think for Charles it was very difficult,” since he was famously close to her grandfather, Hicks tells Marie Claire.
As for Lady P’s outlook on her father’s assassination, India says her mother told her, “‘We will not let bitterness erode our family. We will move forward, we will look forward.’ I think there’s an enormous lesson in that.”
These days, Hicks—who splits her time between Oxfordshire, England and the Bahamas—prefers to be known for her disaster relief work with Global Empowerment Mission and her role as a patron for her godfather’s charity, The King’s Trust.
The mom of five hinted at a future book, pointing out that Lady Pamela has an entire room full of “fascinating” diaries and letters, including volumes of correspondence with Queen Elizabeth.
She tells Marie Claire that her mother and the late monarch “wrote to each other for years” although they didn’t see each other as much as they did when they were young. While Lady P lived in a “fast and exciting design world” with her husband, she stayed close to Queen Elizabeth through letters.
“They wrote to each other at the end of each year, around Christmas time,” she shares. ”Like a sort of recap of life.”
As for what one can learn from her mother’s experiences, the humanitarian tells Marie Claire, “There are so many lessons that are so relevant for us right now today. We’ve slightly lost sight of a lot of this. She talks about duty and service, obviously. But she says, ‘Those are words you never hear anymore.’”
“It is a world that’s disappearing, but these lessons are very important, and they don’t disappear,” she notes.
