The crown has changed hands by conquest, by accident and by act of Parliament, and almost every object around it has a story longer than the reign it served. These tiles follow the monarchy from a Christmas Day coronation in 1066 to a spoon that outlived a revolution, taking in the palaces, the regalia and the ceremonies that keep going whether or not anyone remembers why.
Every tile in a Kings and Queens of England game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Monarchs
nine stories
1The king who counted England's cows
On the tile: William I1086
Twenty years after the conquest, William I sent inspectors across England to find out exactly what he had taken. They sat in local courts and asked the same fixed questions: what is this place called, who holds it, how many men live there, how many cows. Clerks wrote the answers into two volumes covering more than 13,000 places, and the survey was done in 1086. Each holding was recorded three times over: as it stood before 1066, as William handed it out, and as it was that year.
In 1120 the White Ship went down in the English Channel, and with it went William, Henry I's only legitimate son, along with two of the king's other children. That left Henry one legitimate child, his daughter Matilda, and in January 1127 he pressed the barons of England and Normandy to swear allegiance to her. Many of them later broke that vow, amid doubts about a female ruler. When Henry died in 1135 his nephew Stephen of Blois raced across the Channel and had himself crowned at Westminster within the month.
Richard the Lionheart was king of England for almost ten years and spent only about six months of them in the country. He left on crusade in 1190, winning at Acre, Arsuf and Jaffa before the treaty of 1192 closed the campaign. On the way home he was captured in Austria and handed to Emperor Henry VI, and his ransom was set at 150,000 marks of silver. Even heavy taxation could not raise it all, so noble hostages covered the shortfall when he was freed in 1194. He died in 1199 at a minor siege in France.
4Counted the first queen to reign in her own right
On the tile: Mary I1553
Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, took the throne in 1553 and is counted England's first Queen Regnant: a queen reigning in her own right rather than through marriage to a king. She had a rival that summer, though. Lady Jane Grey's claim was recognized by the Council in London on 10 July 1553, and Jane is given a reign of nine days. It ended on 19 July, when the country rallied to Mary and even Jane's own father abandoned her cause. The first queen to reign in her own right had first to see off another woman's claim.
5Her successor had been a king for nearly 36 years
On the tile: Elizabeth I1558-1603
Elizabeth I succeeded on her half-sister's death in November 1558 and held the throne for more than forty years, long enough to see off a Spanish invasion fleet of around 130 ships in 1588. She died at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603 with no child to follow her. The crown went north for its next wearer. James VI of Scotland had been crowned King of Scots at thirteen months old, and he had been a king for nearly 36 years when he became James I of England as well.
After his father's execution in 1649 England became a republic, but Scotland crowned the son anyway: Charles II was crowned at Scone on 1 January 1651, the last coronation held there. Eight months later he was beaten at Worcester on 3 September and escaped to France, and Cromwell never got hold of the Scottish regalia. When Charles came back in 1660, the law behaved as though the gap had never happened. His regnal years were counted from his father's execution on 30 January 1649, so he returned already in the twelfth year of his reign.
Parliament decided in 1689 that James II had abandoned his kingdom, and offered the throne to his daughter Mary and her husband William as joint sovereigns. They are the only joint monarchs to have been crowned, and a second chair had to be made for Mary; it is still at Westminster Abbey. The offer came with conditions attached. The Bill of Rights barred the sovereign from suspending laws, raising taxes or keeping a standing army in peacetime without Parliament.
Anne came to the throne in 1702 ruling England and Scotland as separate kingdoms with separate parliaments. In 1706 commissioners for the two agreed a Treaty of Union, and the Scottish Parliament then spent from October to January 1707 approving it, amid protests, often violent, in many parts of Scotland. Later that year both parliaments gave way to a single one sitting at Westminster. Scotland kept its own church, its own law and its own schools, so the union looked less like a merger than a shared roof. Anne died in August 1714 with no child to succeed her.
George I is remembered as the king who spoke no English at all and therefore let his ministers govern for him. The royal household's own account is narrower: he spoke German and French and a little English. What is not in doubt is how far down the list he stood. The Act of Settlement of 1701 barred Roman Catholics from the throne, and around fifty relatives with better hereditary claims were passed over to reach him in 1714, after his mother Sophia died two months before Queen Anne.
The most famous royal address has only held that job since 1837. James I planted a mulberry garden on the site to rear silkworms. George III bought the house standing there in 1761 for Queen Charlotte, and it was known as the Queen's House, where fourteen of his fifteen children were born. Victoria was the first sovereign to live in the enlarged palace, in July 1837. It now runs to 775 rooms, 78 of them bathrooms.
A grapevine planted at Hampton Court in 1768 is still producing fruit. Lancelot Brown, the gardener nicknamed Capability, was in charge of the grounds and took the cutting from a house in Essex. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest vine in the world: the trunk measures about four meters around, and an average crop runs to roughly 272 kilograms of black dessert grapes, or 600 pounds. The best year on record was the autumn of 2001, at 383 kilograms.
Cardinal Wolsey's Hampton Court drew jealous talk that it was more impressive than the king's own palaces. After Wolsey failed to get Henry VIII his annulment, he surrendered it to the king in 1529, and Henry rebuilt and expanded it into a great royal palace. The Great Hall was decorated in honor of Anne Boleyn, who became queen in 1533. Her carved falcon badges are still in the hammerbeam ceiling, painted black after her fall. Henry ordered their entwined initials taken down after her execution in 1536, but two survived, in the paneling beside the minstrels' gallery.
The Sovereign's official residence in Scotland began as an Augustinian monastery, founded in 1128 by David I. James IV built a palace beside the abbey in 1501 for himself and his bride Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, and James V added to it between 1528 and 1536. Charles II ordered a thorough rebuilding in the 1670s under the architect Sir William Bruce. George V and Queen Mary brought it up to date with bathrooms, electricity and lifts.
5The prince paid his children market rate for produce
On the tile: Osborne House1845
Victoria and Albert bought the Osborne estate on the Isle of Wight in May 1845 for 28,000 pounds and had Thomas Cubitt build them a seaside house in stages, finishing the main wing in 1851. In 1853 and 1854 Albert added a timber Swiss Cottage for their nine children, nearly a mile from the house. Each child had a garden plot there, with miniature tools and a monogrammed wheelbarrow, and if the produce was good enough, Albert paid the grower the market rate. Victoria died at Osborne in 1901, and Edward VII gave it to the nation the next year.
6Born here, told the news here, never stayed again
On the tile: Kensington1689
William III bought a Jacobean house called Nottingham House in 1689 from his Secretary of State and had Christopher Wren enlarge it. It stayed the favorite royal home until George II died in 1760. Victoria was born there in 1819, and it was there in 1837 that the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury arrived to tell her that her uncle was dead and she was queen. She moved to Buckingham Palace to reign almost at once, and never stayed at Kensington again.
Henry VIII built St James's between 1531 and 1536 on the site of an old hospital, and much of his red brick is still standing. It remains a working palace, hosting around a hundred receptions a year for charities connected to the family. Its one duty that cannot be postponed is constitutional: when a monarch dies the Accession Council meets at St James's, and the new sovereign is proclaimed from the Proclamation Gallery above the courtyard.
By the early fourteenth century Eltham was one of the largest and most frequented royal residences in England. The future Edward II was given the manor in 1305. Edward III spent much of his youth there, and in 1364 he received John II of France at Eltham with dancing and caroling; the chronicler Jean Froissart called it "a very magnificent manor." Henry IV spent ten of his thirteen Christmases as king at Eltham and entertained the Byzantine emperor at the one in 1400. Edward IV built the surviving great hall in the 1470s, and Henry VIII passed much of his boyhood there.
The Banqueting House was completed for James I in 1622, and its architect, Inigo Jones, gave it a beamed ceiling with blank panels ready for enormous paintings. James had approached Peter Paul Rubens about the work but died in 1625 before any of it was painted. His son Charles I commissioned the scheme in 1629 to celebrate his father's reign, including the union of the crowns of England and Scotland. Rubens finished the canvases in 1634, and they were installed in early 1636. They are the only scheme Rubens painted that remains in its original position.
In 1649 Parliament ordered the medieval coronation regalia broken up and melted down at the Tower Mint. One object escaped. The silver-gilt spoon was sold to the Yeoman of Charles I's Wardrobe, who produced it again for Charles II's coronation in 1661. It is the only piece of royal goldsmiths' work in the collection to survive from the twelfth century, and it appears in an inventory of 1349 among objects at the shrine of Edward the Confessor. It still carries the oil.
The crown used at the moment of crowning is not medieval. The original, thought to go back to Edward the Confessor, was melted down in 1649, and in 1661 Charles II commissioned a replacement from Robert Vyner: a solid gold frame weighing 2.23 kilograms, nearly five pounds, with four crosses, four fleurs-de-lis and two arches. At past coronations it was dressed in hired stones. Only in 1911 did George V have it set permanently with the rubies, amethysts, sapphires, garnet, topazes and tourmalines it wears today.
The crown a monarch wears out of the Abbey was made for George VI in 1937, closely based on one designed for Queen Victoria in 1838 by Rundell, Bridge and Rundell. The reason for a second crown is far older. Before the Civil War the ancient coronation crown was always kept at Westminster Abbey, so a monarch needed another one to leave in. Some of its stones carry older stories too. The Black Prince's Ruby, in fact a spinel, was traditionally thought to have been given to Edward the Black Prince in 1367.
The Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross was made for Charles II's coronation in 1661 and has been used at every coronation since. Between 1910 and 1911 it was rebuilt around a single stone, the Cullinan I diamond, which at 530.2 carats is the largest colorless cut diamond in the world. The diamond is so large that the scepter had to be reinforced to take its weight, and the mount that holds it is hinged so the stone can be lifted out and worn on its own. Its partner scepter is topped with a dove, for the Holy Spirit.
Edward I had the chair made in 1300 and 1301 to enclose the Stone of Scone, and Master Walter painted it with birds, foliage and animals on a gilt ground. Later visitors were less reverent. Most of the graffiti on the back is the work of Westminster schoolboys and visitors carving their names in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one tourist carved "P. Abbott slept in this chair 5-6 July 1800" on the seat. Henry IV was certainly crowned in it in 1399. Mary I would not use it, fearing her predecessor had polluted it.
The Coronation Chair was built around a block of sandstone that Edward I brought south from Scotland in 1296. It weighs 152 kilograms, about 336 pounds, and it no longer lives in London. The Stone was returned to Scotland in 1996. For the coronation of Charles III in 2023 it traveled back to Westminster Abbey, was reunited with the chair built to hold it, and then went home again.
Monarchs are crowned on a floor laid in 1268. Henry III ordered it, and the workmen came from Rome with a man named Odoricus at their head. The pavement is twenty-four feet ten inches square, in purple porphyry, green serpentine and yellow limestone with pieces of colored glass, all on a bed of dark Purbeck marble. Its inscription, in brass letters, gives the date as a sum to be worked out: one thousand two hundred and twelve, plus sixty, minus four. The Abbey says coronations have taken place on it ever since.
The Crown has claimed unmarked mute swans on open water since as far back as the twelfth century, when swans were a prized food served at banquets and feasts. The claim survives as a headcount. Every July the King's Swan Marker, in a hat with a white swan's feather, leads a flotilla of rowing skiffs on a five-day journey up the Thames to Abingdon, checking and ringing cygnets. The Vintners and the Dyers have held swan rights since the fifteenth century.
The Sovereign's official birthday is not the day the Sovereign was born, and Trooping the Colour has marked it for more than 260 years. Over 1,400 soldiers, 200 horses and 400 musicians move from Buckingham Palace down The Mall to Horse Guards Parade, held together by more than a hundred separate words of command. A 41-gun salute is fired in Green Park, and the Royal Air Force flies past at the end.
1The first recorded Abbey coronation fell on Christmas
On the tile: Christmas 106625 December 1066
Before 1066 there was no fixed place for crowning an English king. William the Conqueror was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066, the first coronation there on record, and the Abbey has been the coronation church ever since. When Charles III was crowned there on 6 May 2023, he was the fortieth reigning monarch crowned in it. The building has changed around them. Henry III rebuilt the church in the Gothic style from 1245, and its role as the coronation church influenced the work.
King John sealed Magna Carta in a field at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, confronted by rebellious barons and hoping to avert civil war. He thought of it as a peace treaty rather than a body of law, and he set about undoing it almost at once, seeking the Pope's support. Just ten weeks later Pope Innocent III declared it null and void, and England plunged into war anyway. The charter later generations treated as a foundation stone was disowned within months by the king whose seal was on it.
After the execution of Charles I in 1649, Parliament ordered the medieval coronation regalia destroyed. Hoping to abolish the monarchy for good, it could not risk the sacred objects falling into the wrong hands. They were taken from Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London, where the stones were sold and the gold frames were melted down in the Tower Mint and turned into coins stamped "Commonwealth of England". The monarchy was back eleven years later, and Charles II ordered new regalia for his coronation in 1661. Those objects still make up much of the Crown Jewels.
On the morning of 9 May 1671, Colonel Thomas Blood, a soldier, spy and adventurer, fooled Talbot Edwards, the aging keeper of the Jewel House at the Tower of London, into showing him and his accomplices the Crown Jewels. Security was lax; for a fee, visitors could even handle them. The men attacked Edwards, seized the Orb, a crown and the Sovereign's Sceptre, and fled, but they were all captured. Then came the surprise. After an audience with Charles II, Blood was pardoned for all his previous crimes and granted Irish lands worth 500 pounds a year.
5The coronation they nicknamed the Half-Crownation
On the tile: William IV8 September 1831
William IV only reluctantly agreed to a coronation, and the one held on 8 September 1831 was scaled back so far that it was nicknamed the Half-Crownation. There was no banquet in Westminster Hall, because the king decided it was too expensive. The whole event cost a little over 40,000 pounds, while his brother George IV's coronation ten years earlier had cost nearly 240,000. William did start one custom that lasted: a state carriage procession to Westminster Abbey, which still takes place today.
Coronations attract omens, and two medieval ones were long remembered. The coronation of Richard I on 3 September 1189 is the first for which a detailed account survives, and bad omens are said to have blighted it: a bat fluttering around the king's head, and the Abbey's bells ringing mysteriously without warning. Henry V was crowned in spring, on 9 April 1413, yet snow was reported to have fallen during the day. Some took it to mean hard times ahead.
The coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937 made for a very early start. Abbey staff began work at four in the morning, and guests started arriving from six. The story handed down is that peers hid sandwiches in their coronets to sustain them through the morning. The Abbey tells it as something peers were said to have done, not as a documented fact, which is the right way to hold it.
On 20 November 1992 a spotlight set a curtain alight in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle. Putting the fire out took fifteen hours and about one and a half million gallons of water, and it damaged or destroyed more than a hundred rooms, roughly a fifth of the castle. Restoration finished five years to the day later, on 20 November 1997, at a cost of 37 million pounds, most of it raised by opening the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace to visitors.
The royal house took its name from Prince Albert's family, which made it Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and amid the anti-German feeling of the First World War that became an awkward thing to be called. At a meeting of the Privy Council on 17 July 1917, George V declared that Queen Victoria's male-line descendants who were his subjects, apart from women who married, would bear the name of Windsor, after the castle. In 1960 the Queen's descendants without royal styles were given the name Mountbatten-Windsor. It first appeared on an official document in 1973, in the register for Princess Anne's wedding.