Rationed Wedding Fabric
76. When Princess Elizabeth, later the queen, got married shortly after World War 2, she had to use ration coupons to purchase the cloth, just like everyone else. The government gave her 200 extra coupons.
77. Although she was known as “Bloody Mary”, Queen Mary I of England did not kill anywhere near as many people as her father, Henry VIII. Her exaggerated notoriety was mainly the result of Protestant propaganda.
78. Johnny Depp and Queen Elizabeth are related.
79. In the UK, there is a group called the “Royal Bastards” made up of illegitimate descendants of British royalty. Because Queen Elizabeth II has both legitimate and illegitimate ancestry, she has been invited to join.
80. Queen Elizabeth owns a Big Mouth Billy Bass, and she keeps it at the Royal Family’s summer home.
81. Duckies, or “duckys,” was a medieval English slang word for a woman’s breasts, used by Henry VIII and others in letters to Anne Boleyn, Queen of England.
82. Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip began dating and courting when he was 18 and she was 13.
83. The rules of chess were altered in the 15th century to reflect Queen Isabella’s accomplishments.
84. Queen Elizabeth still has the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India in her crown. It is one of the world’s largest diamonds.
85. Edward Oxford, the first man to attempt to kill Queen Victoria, turned his life around and became a house painter. After leaving prison, he relocated to Australia and became a respected figure in high society. He even attended the Queen’s 70th birthday celebration.
Royal Umbrella Armor
86. Queen Victoria had an umbrella lined with chainmail that was bulletproof.
87. In 41 B.C., Cleopatra and Mark Antony started their own drinking club, and they were known for joining in elaborate games, competitions, and wandering through the streets of Alexandria in disguise, where they played pranks on the people living there.
88. After becoming widowed, Elizabeth of Luxembourg, the Queen Consort of Hungary in the 1400s, asked her chambermaid, Helene Kottanner, to steal Hungary’s physical crown, and the chambermaid later wrote a book describing the successful theft.
89. In 1895, Empress Myeongseong of Korea was killed and her body was burned by 20 Japanese agents, and a Russian architect recorded an eyewitness account.
90. Queen Elizabeth instructed archbishop Aylmer to have one of his teeth removed, and then to do it again, so he could show that tooth extraction was safe and tolerable.
91. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was employed by Queen Christina as a tutor, and she demanded philosophy lessons at 5 in the morning. After a year of making his way through the Swedish cold each day, Descartes came down with pneumonia and died.
92. In the 1550s, Catherine de’ Medici of France was so repulsed by women with “thick waists” that she banned them from her court. This led to the widespread use of the corset throughout western civilization for the next 350 years.
93. Empress Catherine the Great established an orphanage in Moscow to transform Russia’s thousands of abandoned children into model citizens. More than 40,000 were taken in during her reign, but it ended in disaster because 87% of them died from disease.
94. In 16th-century Western Ireland, Pirate Gráinne Ní Mháille held power. After years of battling England, Queen Elizabeth agreed to meet her in person. Gráinne arrived carrying a dagger, would not bow, and tossed a noblewoman’s handkerchief into a fire.
95. Queen Victoria loathed pregnancy, found breast-feeding disgusting, and believed newborn babies were unattractive.
Rome’s Deadly Family Ties
96. Claudia Octavia was an empress in Ancient Rome. Her father, Emperor Claudius, put her mother to death, her step-mother killed her father, her step-brother and husband, Emperor Nero, killed her brother and step-mother, and then her step-brother and husband had her executed.
97. Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher once appeared in the same dress, which greatly alarmed the prime minister. To prevent a repeat of that embarrassment, she instructed her staff to check with the Palace about what the Queen would be wearing. The Palace refused, replying, “Her Majesty never notices what other people wear.”
98. Marie Antoinette syndrome refers to the condition where scalp hair suddenly becomes white. The term refers to the unfortunate Queen Marie Antoinette of France (1755-1793), whose hair is said to have turned white on the night before her final trip to the guillotine during the French Revolution. She was 38 when she died.
99. In Tudor England, Queen Elizabeth fined landowners £5 if they were unwilling to grow hemp, a type of cannabis species.
100. The Queen’s true title is “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith”.
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