Miscellaneous monarchy-related topics of interest

I would settle for fish & chips or egg, beans and chips with brown sauce!

I pity the Plantagenets for not having potatoes.

Queen Elizabeth I and Gloriana

In addition to being called Titania, Queen Elizabeth I was also known as Gloriana. This name too is associated with a Fairy Queen: Gloriana is the name of the main character in Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene (1590).

I think that the sobriquet Gloriana suits Elizabeth I better than Titania does.

Gloriana is the title of one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s Reward and Fairies. Queen Elizabeth I is the main character. She tells a story to two children that shows the painful decisions that a ruler has to take.

The story is followed by a moving poem called The Looking Glass, in which the ageing Queen Elizabeth is haunted by the spirits of Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Leicester and can’t bring herself to look in the mirror for fear of what she might see. This is the first verse:

The Queen was in her chamber, and she was middling old,
Her petticoat was satin and her stomacher was gold.
Backwards and forwards and sideways did she pass,
Making up her mind to face the cruel looking-glass.
The cruel looking-glass that will never show a lass
As comely or as kindly or as young as once she was!

The final verse shows her courage:

The Queen was in her chamber; her sins were on her head;
She looked the spirits up and down and statelily she said:
‘Backwards and forwards and sideways though I’ve been,
Yet I am Harry’s daughter and I am England’s Queen!’
And she faced the looking-glass (and whatever else there was),
And she saw her day was over and she saw her beauty pass
In the cruel looking-glass that can always hurt a lass
More hard than any ghost there is or any man there was!

The opera Gloriana

Benjamin Britten composed the opera Gloriana, first performed in 1953 during the coronation celebrations. The plot concerned the relationship between Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, but it was not critically well received.

Sherlock Holmes and some strawberries

There is a Sherlock Holmes connection with just about every topic on here!
Strawberries are no exception. We have a tribute book and a Hidden Object game that the description says also includes bananas!

More significance of Greenwich

It's also the location of the prime meridian - 0% longitude. It is also the zero of time bands, Greenwich Mean Time which is now usually referred to (outside Britain at least) as UTC. So it has strong associations with distance and time.

Once the old palace was demolished it became a hospital for seamen, then the Royal Naval College and Royal Observatory. I think it's interesting that the site was the birthplace of three of English history's best-known monarchs, and then had naval and astronomical associations at a time when significant advances were being made in these areas in Britain in the 17th to the 19th centuries.

Historical associations of Greenwich

"So it has strong associations with distance and time."

I wonder whether there are any ley lines running through Greenwich.

Napoleon’s planned invasion of England

Eurotunnel has been mentioned recently. The idea of a tunnel under the channel is not new. Napoleon toyed with the idea; he envisaged having an artificial island half way across to give the horses a rest!

He is reported to have seriously considered using a fleet of troop-carrying balloons for the invasion too.

A cartoon of the time shows both the balloons and the tunnel under the Channel. He is invading us by air, sea and land:

I love this cartoon, I've seen it before. Highly ingenious, but there was a slight flaw to the plan though... had he thought how to create the tunnel opening on the English side undetected, and wouldn't it be easily and heavily defended? Napoleon was supposed to be a military genius!

As I've said, Eurotunnel makes me nervous and that's built with 20th century technology - you wouldn't get me in one under the Channel constructed in the 18th/19th century! Just think of the knowledge they were lacking; precise depths, sea bed geological reports - it's a good thing it was never built back then.

One thing that I read about Eurotunnel is that it can be flooded in the event of national emergency. It's not stated whether they will get all the trains out first!

Napoleon’s intended invasion of Britain

There are many associated leads and topics of interest here.

The possibility of an invasion was taken very seriously at the time; it was also featured in many cartoons.

I think it may have helped to unify the country and make the royals more popular and relevant.

I have seen some of the Martello towers, round mini-forts, that were constructed along the coastlines of Sussex and Kent at the time to help defend our shores:

Queen Elizabeth I, the Earl of Leicester and Amy Robsart

magpiejack you were right. The Prince Charles, Camilla and Diana case reminded me of the unsolved historical case involving Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester Robert Dudley and his wife Amy, who died mysteriously at the age of 28. She was found dead at the foot of some stairs. It could have been an accident, it could have been suicide or it could have been murder.

There is plenty of information online, so I will just say that Elizabeth was very fond of Robert Dudley and might even have considered marrying him if his ailing wife had died of natural causes. Some people believed that Elizabeth remained single for his sake.

The manner of Amy’s death precluded any marriage. Although it was officially attributed to an accident, there were rumours of murder. If they had married, it would look as though Elizabeth and Leicester had conspired to get Amy out of the way. Elizabeth couldn’t risk it.

Just as with the cases of the two little princes in the Tower and Ludwig II of Bavaria, people have been speculating and analysing the evidence for centuries without solving the mystery.

A Victorian depiction of the tragedy:

I thought as much, UnseenI! We will never know the truth of this, I read once that it was also rumoured that Amy was dying, possibly from cancer so she may have been quite ill, causing her to fall. She might even have committed suicide by throwing herself down the stairs as she was so unhappy - she did insist that the servants went out that afternoon. Or an accident... or murder...

Elizabeth was certainly astute and geared towards survival after her precarious existence when Mary was queen. There were many at court who were jealous of Dudley's status as favourite, and it's not surprising that rumours spread of murder in order to damage his reputation.

One thing to consider is that had she married Dudley, she would not have been able to play politics with marriage proposals as a way to play potentially hostile states against each other, as she did so astutely. It's quite possible that the Catholic states may have formed an alliance to invade, had she married him.

Rudyard Kipling and Gloriana again

Rudyard Kipling collaborated with C. R. L. Fletcher on A School History of England (1911).

This is what they said about Elizabeth I:

“She was a woman of the most strangely varied character; extraordinarily stingy and mean, extraordinarily brave and fierce (not cruel); passionately fond of her country, and English to the backbone; so jealous that she could not bear her courtiers to look at another woman; so vain of her beauty that even in old age she covered herself with gorgeous dresses and ridiculous jewels; by turns a scold, a flirt, a cheat and a heroine.

But, somehow or other, she made her people follow, obey and worship her, till at last she became a sort of crowned spirit and guardian angel of the whole nation, which felt that it had grown to full manhood and power under her protecting care. Men called her ‘Gloriana’".

www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_gloriana1.htm

This is not a bad epitaph for Elizabeth I.

The coronation portrait:

Henry VII’s lost chapel at Greenwich Palace

The chapel from the old Greenwich Palace was found in 2006:

“Beneath four feet of heavy south London clay, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of Henry VII's lost chapel at Greenwich.

The site is where he and a host of his Tudor successors - Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I - worshipped.

The existence of the chapel, part of the Royal Palace of Placentia, a Tudor favourite but pulled down in the 17th century to be replaced by Greenwich Hospital - now the Old Naval College - has long been known from paintings and records...

Careful scratching away by a team of four archaeologists from the Museum of London has revealed the eastern walls of the chapel, a 10ft by 5ft section of floor made from black and white glazed tiles laid geometrically, and, beneath, a so-far unexplored vault.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1508708/Henry-VIIs-chapel-found-at-Greenwich.html

The floor with the black and white square tiles, which Elizabeth I would have walked upon:

Another near miss

There's a report today in the Mail that the Countess of Wessex had a near miss in the air. What's up with Air Traffic Control? You just can't get the staff...

"A report by the UK Airprox Board reveals that the Countess of Wessex – Prince Edward’s wife Sophie – had a similar scare after carrying out a public engagement in Worcestershire.

Her Queen’s Flight helicopter was at 4,400ft when the co-pilot saw a glider directly ahead and flying in the same direction around three miles east of Cheltenham.

The pilot of the helicopter, who was flying at 173mph, rated the risk of a collision as ‘high’ after coming as close as 500 yards to the glider.

The report said: ‘The AW109 pilot took avoiding action by turning left to ensure separation.

'He noted that had they maintained course the risk of collision would have been high.’

The report added that it was unlikely the glider pilot saw the helicopter until it passed.

An air-traffic controller at RAF Brize Norton did not warn the helicopter pilot about the presence of the glider.

The report found that the pilots of the helicopter and the glider, which has never been identified, ‘shared an equal responsibility... not to operate in such proximity to other aircraft as to create a collision hazard’.

The near-miss happened at about 3.30pm on July 5, 2017 after Sophie had watched a farming demonstration in Overbury."