Victoria’s Electric Curiosity
26. In 1890, Queen Victoria invited herself to Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. Although it was an architectural and landscaping marvel, she spent 10 minutes turning a chandelier on and off because she had never seen electric lighting before.
27. The first queen to govern Egypt was Hatshepsut. She reigned 18 centuries before Cleopatra.
28. It is estimated that, during Queen Victoria’s adult life, she wrote 2,500 words each day.
29. French Queen Marie Antoinette had a fully working peasant village constructed on the grounds of Versailles. She enjoyed walking through the village dressed as a shepherdess, acting out a simple life milking cows or sheep, which the servants carefully kept and cleaned.
30. Cleopatra was not thought to be especially beautiful. According to Plutarch, it was her wit and charm that attracted people to her.
31. Queen Elizabeth II never granted a press interview, took part in an election, or publicly stated a personal opinion.
32. Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley grew wealthy by “taxing” ships that sailed past her lands in western Ireland, killing anyone who resisted. She met Queen Elizabeth I but was generally a rebel against English rule in Ireland during the 1500s.
33. In 1893, Hawaii’s monarchy was overthrown after a group of businessmen and sugar planters compelled Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate. The coup caused the Hawaii Kingdom to be dissolved two years later, followed by annexation as a U.S. territory and, eventually, admission as the 50th state in the union.
34. Jadwiga of Poland (died 1399) was a female king. Polish law made no allowance for a female ruler (queen regnant), but it did not say that kings had to be male.
35. The ancient Roman empress Valeria Messalina enjoyed working as a prostitute on the side, and she won a contest against other prostitutes to determine who could take more men.
A Pun Before Punishment
36. In 1589, Queen Elizabeth ordered John Stubbs to have his hand cut off for seditious writing, and just before the axe came down, he shouted, “My calamity is at hand!” making him the only known person punished by Elizabeth to work a pun into his dismemberment. He then fainted.
37. The Queen of England legally owns one-sixth of the land on Earth’s surface.
38. China’s Guangxu Emperor, who died in 1908, was likely poisoned by Dowager Empress Cixi. The amount of arsenic in his body was 2000 times the normal level.
39. Because of inbreeding among the Ptolemies, Cleopatra had only two sets of great-grandparents. One pair was the son and daughter of the other pair.
40. The Byzantine Empress Theodora started out as a disreputable actress in the hippodrome and was even said to have performed acts in which geese ate barley from her naked body before thousands of spectators.
41. Legend says that in 1845, Ottoman ruler Abdulmejid I said he wanted to send £10,000 to the victims of the Irish potato famine, but he was told to send only £1,000 so he would not give more than Queen Victoria, who had contributed £2,000. He sent £1,000 together with three or five food-laden ships.
42. California takes its name from a made-up island said to be inhabited by beautiful Amazon warrior women and their queen, Califia.
43. In 2012, a couple from Manchester jokingly asked Queen Elizabeth to attend their wedding. She agreed and appeared there with Prince Philip.
44. A cargo cult called the Prince Philip Movement, belonging to the Yaohnanen tribe in Vanuatu, worships Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband.
45. Lady Jane Grey was put to death only because she was connected to Henry VIII and had been named Queen by her cousin. The executioner even asked her to forgive him before he carried out the beheading.
BBC Halts Comic Programming
46. When the Queen dies, the BBC will stop broadcasting comedy shows until after the funeral.
47. Queen Elizabeth does not officially have a last name, only that she is from the “House of Windsor”.
48. Sunandha Kumariratana, the queen of Thailand, drowned while her subjects watched because they were forbidden to touch her.
49. The well-known Hawaiian song “Aloha ‘Oe” was composed by Liliuokalani, the last Queen of Hawai’i, who wrote it down while she was imprisoned after a coup that eventually led to Hawaii’s annexation into the U.S.
50. The former Queen Anne of Romania once was employed at Macy’s in New York.
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