CROWN JEWELS

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Every British queen named Jane has either been murdered, imprisoned, gone mad, died young, or been dethroned.

Prince Philip, the duke of Edinburgh, names his dogs after orchestral conductors.

The movie The Madness of King George III was released in America under the title The Madness of King George, because it was believed that American moviegoers would believe it to be a sequel, and not go see it because they had not seen The Madness of King George I and II.

King Charles VII, who was assassinated in 1167, was the first Swedish king with the name of Charles—the first six never existed. Almost 300 years went by before there was a Charles VIII.

ROYAL MESSES

The reign of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia ended in tragedy in 1918, when he and his family were murdered, but it had started badly as well. At his coronation, presents were given to all the people who attended. But a rumor started that there weren’t enough to go around and, in the stampede that followed, hundreds of women and children were killed.

Queen Supayalat of Burma ordered about 100 of her husband’s relatives clubbed to death to ensure he had no contenders for the throne.

BLOWING SMOKE

Sir Walter Raleigh supposedly financed his trip to America to cultivate tobacco by betting Queen Elizabeth I that he could weigh the weight of smoke. He did it by placing two identical cigars on opposite sides of a scale, lighting one and making sure no ashes fell. The difference in the weight after the cigar was finished was the weight of smoke—so Raleigh was on his way to America.

After Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco into England in the early seventeenth century, King James I wrote a booklet against smoking.

HARSH TASKMASTERS

Tsar Peter the Great made Russian peasants dig the foundations of St. Petersburg with their bare hands.

King Edward VII was so enthusiastic about his hunting that he arranged for all of the 180 or so clocks on the Sandringham Estate to be set a half hour early to allow him more time for his sport. Anyone having business with the king needed to ensure that they kept their appointment to “Sandringham time.” George V maintained this same tradition throughout his reign; however, when Edward VIII took the throne in 1936, he arranged for all of the clocks to be reset and kept in line with those in the rest of his kingdom.

King Alfonso of Spain was so tone-deaf that he had one man in his employ known as the “Anthem Man,” whose duty was to tell the king to stand up whenever the Spanish national anthem was played, because the monarch couldn’t recognize it.

Tsar Paul I of Russia banished soldiers to Siberia for marching out of step.

HER MAJESTIES

Mary Stuart became queen of Scotland when she was only six days old.

When Elizabeth I of Russia died in 1762, fifteen thousand dresses were found in her closets. She used to change what she was wearing two or even three times an evening.

Queen Elizabeth II was an 18-year-old mechanic in the English military during World War II. She was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1952.

Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands. She was also the only queen the United States ever had.

Queen Anne assigned her reportedly cross-dressing cousin Lord Cornbury to the post of governor of New York and New Jersey in 1701.

The Spanish kingdom of Castile once had a reigning queen who had been a nun. She was Doña Urraca of the house of Navarre, daughter of Alfonso the VI of Leon and Castile, and reigned from 1109 to 1126. She eventually married and had a son, who took the throne when she died.

Catherine the Great of Russia relaxed by being tickled.

BATHING BEAUTIES

Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not.

 

In her entire lifetime, Queen Isabella of Spain bathed twice.

HIS HIGHNESSES

In 1974, Cairo Museum Egyptologists, noticing that the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II was rapidly deteriorating, decided to fly it to Paris for examination. The mummy was issued an Egyptian passport that listed his occupation as “King (deceased).” According to a Discovery Channel documentary, the mummy was received at a Paris airport with the full military honors befitting a king.

King George I of England could not speak English. He was born and raised in Germany and never learned to speak English even though he was king from 1714 to 1727. He left the running of the country to his ministers, thereby creating the first government cabinet.

In the fourteenth century, King Edward II was deposed in favor of his son, Edward III, and later killed. It is rumored that in order not to mark his body, and hide evidence of murder, a deer horn was inserted into his rectum and a red hot poker was placed inside that. His ghostly screams are said to still be heard in the castle.

King Louis the XIV, also known as the Sun King, was rumored not to be the son of Louis the XIII, but the son of a Danish nobleman who served in France as a general and marechal of France. Supposedly he had to leave France when the boy grew up, because Louis was his spitting image.

King Louis XV was the first person to use an elevator; in 1743, his “flying chair” carried him between floors of the Versailles Palace.

If the arm of King Henry I had been 42 inches long, the unit of measure of a foot today would be 14 inches. But his arm happened to be 36 inches long, and he decreed that the “standard” foot should be one-third that length, or 12 inches.