One of Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted aides has given her first interview since the late monarch’s death in 2022.
In a new interview with The Sunday Times published Saturday, Oct. 12, Samantha Cohen — who worked for the Queen for 18 years, eventually spending nearly every day with the her as her assistant private secretary — opened up about the late monarch’s “shy” but “playful” nature.
The Australian-born aide, who often relocated with Queen Elizabeth along with her family, described the Queen as “a shy person” who valued the privacy of Balmoral, Scotland, where she spent each summer and where she died, at age 96 on Sept. 8, 2022.
But, Cohen explained, as well as being Queen, the monarch also “wanted to be a family woman.”
“It was important to her. She loved hosting everybody for summer, allocating the rooms and checking them herself,” Cohen — who transitioned in 2018 from working for the Queen to working for The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, where she stayed as their private secretary until 2019 — told The Sunday Times.
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Perhaps more surprising is the trusted aide’s memory of the Queen’s courageous — and speedy — driving habits. “She was gutsy,” Cohen said of the late monarch. “She would drive her cars fast around Balmoral.”
The Queen also loved riding her horses — and would sometimes run into Cohen’s children as she rode, the aide recalled. “Some mornings I’d be getting the cereal for breakfast, and the kids would go, ‘Mum! The Queen just rode past on her horse.’ Other times they’d bump into her on their bicycles,” she told The Sunday Times. “The Queen loved families having a nice time and hearing what everyone was doing.”
“They made us feel so welcome, very much a part of their lives,” she added. “The Queen was remarkably kind and would give us all Christmas presents, handwriting the tags.”
And her “playful” nature extended beyond her hobbies.
Recalling one of her favorite memories of Queen Elizabeth, which occurred as Cohen went to see her boss in the drawing room of her Scottish home, she said, “She was always sitting at her desk beside the window, and you would go through the basket, what had come in that morning.”
“This day, she said, ‘Oh, hold on a minute, there’s a butterfly, we must get it out.’ There was this beautiful butterfly sitting on a book,” Cohen continued. “She got up, picked it up and it flew away. Then I caught it and it flew out of my hands. Then she caught it. It was hilarious, she was laughing, I was laughing, eventually she caught it, we opened the window, freed the butterfly, and she said, ‘Right, where were we?’ ”
“She was so playful,” the aide added. “We just had fun.”
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Despite the fun, intimate moments they shared, Cohen also described her relationship with Queen Elizabeth as “very respectful.”
“There were no favourites. I felt my job was to make her life as easy as possible,” she told The Sunday Times, adding that in return, “the Queen was an incredible boss.”
And she had “no ego,” Cohen said, citing that as an attribute she admired most about the late monarch.
“It always struck me that in a world of celebrity, where we had all sorts of celebrities coming into the palace, the Queen was the antithesis of celebrity,” she said. “She was the maestro. She understood this was her role. She took it very seriously and performed it to perfection. But she knew it was separate to her as a person. She was never intoxicated by the allure, never showed off, was never tempted to preen.”
Added Cohen: “I loved that so much about her, because she had no ego.”
