After his appointment as Private Secretary to the Sovereign, Lord Knollys was well known as the public face of the Court, and is often mentioned in memoirs and fiction of the period.

In his 1911 novel "C.Q., or in the Wireless House", Arthur Train wrote of his fixing a scandal (fictitious, this time): "She was still spoken of as one of the most beautiful women in the world; but the exquisite hour of her perfection had passed.

Then, perhaps feeling that her supremacy was no longer undisputed, a sense of pique at younger and fresher women had led her into certain too flagrant indiscretions that could not be overlooked.

Lord Knollys had intimated that a knighthood might please her husband; and the directorate of the Royal Bank of Edinburgh, of which he was the London manager, by a coincidence no less extraordinary than it was timely, had proposed that he should open a similar branch in New York and temporarily become its resident agent.

In the 1902 Coronation Honours list, it was announced he would receive a barony,[3] and he was raised to the peerage as Baron Knollys, of Caversham in the County of Oxford, on 15 July 1902.