Lady Pamela Hicks has died at 97 - Prince Philip's cousin, a confidante of Queen Elizabeth II and one of the last living witnesses of a time that no longer exists. Her daughter, the designer India Hicks, announced the news, describing her mother as a woman who kept to the end "impeccable style, a sharp mind and natural charm." She called her "truly the last of her kind."

Behind those words stands a whole world. Pamela was the daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, and grew up between England, Malta and India, following her father's military and diplomatic duties. As a child she watched the collapse of the British Empire from the inside - not from a textbook, but from the drawing rooms where it was decided.

In 1947 she was a bridesmaid at the wedding of the then-Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip. And in February 1952, when she was in Kenya with Elizabeth, the news came that King George VI had died - Pamela was among the first to see the moment a young woman became queen overnight. She was there at the coronation in 1953 too, and at countless private family moments through the decades that followed. Discreet, steady, always in the background - precisely the place from which one sees the most.

She married the interior designer David Hicks in 1960 and had three children. Later she wrote memoirs - "Daughter of Empire" and "India Remembered" - books in which she spoke less of herself than of the world she watched vanishing. That's why her death isn't just a family loss. With her goes the living archive of an order, and a reminder that even the greatest empires end up as a memory in the mouths of a few old people who remember them.