ysbel
Heir Apparent , TRF Author
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2005
- Messages
- 5,377
- City
- New York
- Country
- United States
For those of you who thought you knew everything about royalty, here are some curious royal facts that maybe you don't know. And for the rest of us, they're just fun to read.
- Ivan the terrible claimed to have 'deflowered thousands of virgins and butchered a similar number of resulting offspring'.
- Before the Second World War, it was considered a sacrilege to even touch an Emperor of Japan.
- In 1647 the English Parliament abolished Christmas (no wonder the English wanted Charles II back on the throne ASAP).
- King George III was declared violently insane in 1811, 9 years before he died.
- When George I became King of England in 1714, his wife did not become Queen. He placed her under house arrest for 32 years.
- Henry VII was the only British King to be crowned on the field of battle
- Richard II died aged 33 in 1400. A hole was left in the side of his tomb so people could touch his royal head, but 376 years later some took advantage of this and stole his jawbone.
- The Puritans forbade the singing of Christmas Carols, judging them to be out of keeping with the true spirit of Christmas. Another reason to bring back Charles II.
- The British did not release the body of Napoleon Bonaparte to the French until twenty days after his death.
- Catherine the First of Russia, made a rule that no man was allowed to get drunk at one of her parties before nine o'clock.
- Queen Elizabeth I passed a law which forced everyone except for the rich to wear a flat cap on Sundays.
- Julius Caesar wore a laurel wreath to cover the onset of baldness.
- One of Queen Victoria's wedding gifts was a 3 metre diameter, half tonne cheese.
- Queen Victoria was one of the first women ever to use chloroform to combat pain during childbirth.
- Peter the Great had the head of his wife's lover cut off and put into a jar of preserving alcohol, which he then ordered to be placed by her bed.
- Charles the Simple was the grandson of Charles the Bald, both were rulers of France.
- Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland seemed to have a prodigious sexual appetite, and fathered hundreds of illegitimate children during his lifetime.
- The Emperor Caligula once decided to go to war with the Roman God of the sea, Poseidon, and ordered his soldiers to throw their spears into the water at random.
- During the reign of Elizabeth I, there was a tax put on men's beards.
- Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of the Jacobite rebellion to depose of George II of England, was born 31 December 1720. Considered a great Scottish hero, he spent his final years as a drunkard in Rome.
- Princess Anne was the only competitor at the 1976 Montreal Olympics that did not have to undergo a sex test.
- Ethelred the Unready, King of England in the Tenth-century, spent his wedding night in bed with his wife and his mother-in-law.
- The Imperial Throne of Japan has been occupied by the same family for the last thirteen hundred years.