Today, Queen Elizabeth will be entering
her 67th year as monarch. A feat never achieved before by a British
monarch. She will not be celebrating the occasion because the date
also marks the anniversary of her father’s death. The next
nationwide celebrations for a jubilee occasion will be in 2022 when
Her Majesty celebrates 70 years on the throne. The Platinum Jubilee
will take place in the…
The spectacular pyramids which cover the
tombs of the pharaohs are well-known, but the long-running
excavation of the Western Cemetery at Giza has recently discovered
the tomb of a female official from around 4500 years ago. Egypt’s
Ministry of Antiquities announced the…
With invitations set to go out this week
for the biggest event of the year, rumours are circulating over who
has been invited to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding, and
also, those who will be staying away. Until May 19th, we will not
know who will sit in the…
Today, Queen Elisabeth Christine of
Prussia (1715-1797) enjoys a kind of historical exile, banished to
footnotes and paragraphs amidst the mountainous body of
biographical material which exists about her exalted husband,
Frederick II, King of Prussia, already christened ‘the Great’ by
contemporary Europe and whom she prided herself on having been
married to. It is a sad echo of the type of…
Animals given to royalty could, of
course, become pets – but they could often be presented in the form
of political gifts, adding therefore to the monarch’s personal
sense of majestas. An example of this is the bay horse and three
brood mares, sent to Henry VIII by…
Born on 23 August 1740 to the Duke
Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick-Luneburg and his wife Anna Leopoldovna,
Ivan was the only grandson of the former Tsar of Russia Ivan V, and
consequently in line to the Russian throne. His mother was the
niece of Empress Anna and expected that…
Alongside the well-established royal love
of dogs, cats are far less recorded as preferred pets, unlike their
canine counterparts. They have, however, been no less loved by
those that did own them. So revered were cats (“mau”) as sacred
animals in Ancient Egypt that they were often mummified. Feline
depictions of Egyptian deities date back as far as 3100 BC; the
goddess Bastet often took this…
One of English history’s ‘forgotten’
queens, is actually one who was arguablyamong the most loved. This
was Mary II, the joint monarch – not queen consort of William III.
Forgiven by posterity for deposing her father, contemporary history
seems to have accepted…
Today we’ll explore the life of Princess
Michael of Kent. She is the wife of Prince Michael and was born
Baroness Marie Christine von Reibnitz in Sudetenland (now in the
Czech Republic) on 15 January 1945. Baroness Marie Christine’s
parents were Baron Günther…
“Mary Queen of Scots”. These were the
words I overheard from a visitor, passing their comment on the
magnificent canopy tomb in the south aisle of the Lady Chapel at
Westminster Abbey, erected on the orders of James I to house the
remains of his mother, transferred from their first burial place of
Peterborough Cathedral to the Abbey in 1612. However, tombs can
tell only part of the truth…
