Features

He’s almost part of the family, now. Paddington Bear, who so famously starred in a sketch with Queen Elizabeth II to mark her Platinum Jubilee and became a poignant symbol of remembrance following Her Late Majesty’s death, took a starring role in a new royal tradition. As the Princess of Wales welcomed hundreds to Westminster Abbey for her second Christmas carol service, Paddington…

Mary Queen of Scots was born on 8 December 1542, at Linlithgow Palace, incidentally the birthplace of her father, James V of Scotland, in West Lothian, some fifteen miles distance from Edinburgh. The palace’s name translates literally as the “loch in the damp hollow” and still overlooks a inland loch. Today it ismaintained by Historic Scotland and was the residence of…

The Christmas story begins, of course, with a baby and there’s something about a Christmas birthday that makes it all the more interesting, even if mean relatives do double up on presents. Some of the most intriguing royal stories of all have begun on Christmas Eve, leading to lives filled with romance, tragedy and drama. King John of England Let’s start with the birth of a king.

A fourteenth-century Anglican church in the Somerset parish of Burnham-on-Sea and Highbridge is not perhaps the place where you might expect to find several remnants from the lost Palace of Whitehall, the main London residence of England’s monarchs until 1698. A second fire destroyed most of Whitehall, with the exception of Inigo Jones’s magnificent neo-classical Palladian-style Banqueting…