CBS News: Prince Harry accuses his brother William of attacking him in new memoir

Prince Harry is reportedly accusing his brother William of physically attacking him during an argument in his new memoir, “Spare,” set to be released next week.

CBS News royal contributor Amanda Foreman explains what sparked the argument and how Buckingham Palace is responding.

Harper’s Bazaar: Behind her eyes: celebrating the Queen as a cultural icon

Our steadfast hope

Harper’s Bazaar

June 2022

If you’ve ever had a dream involving the Queen, you are not alone. After her Silver Jubilee in 1977, it was estimated that more than a third of Britons had dreamt about her at least once, with even ardent republicans confessing to receiving royal visits in their slumbers. For the past 70 years, the Queen has been more than just a presence in our lives, subconscious or otherwise; she has been a source of fascination, inspiration and national pride.

Queen Elizabeth II in 2002

When Princess Elizabeth became Queen in 1952, the country was still struggling to emerge from the shadow of World War II. Her youth offered a break with the past. Time magazine in the United States named her its ‘Woman of the Year’, not because of anything she had achieved but because of the hope she represented for Britain’s future. A barrister and political hopeful named Margaret Thatcher wrote in the Sunday Graphic that having a queen ought to remove “the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places”. After all, Elizabeth II was a wife and mother of two small children, and yet no one was suggesting that family life made her unfit to rule.

Thatcher’s optimism belied the Queen’s dilemma over how to craft her identity as a modern monarch in a traditional role. At the beginning, tradition seemed to have the upper hand: a bagpiper played beneath her window every morning (a holdover from Queen Victoria). The Queen knew she didn’t want to be defined by the past. “Some people have expressed the hope that my reign may mark a new Elizabethan age,” she stated in 1953. “Frankly, I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forbear.”

Nevertheless, the historical parallels between the two queens are instructive. Elizabeth I created a public persona, yet made it authentic. Fakery was impossible, since “we princes,” she observed, “are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world.” Although Elizabeth I was a consummate performer, her actions were grounded in sincere belief. She began her reign by turning her coronation into a great public event. Observers were shocked by her willingness to interact with the crowds, but the celebrations laid the foundation for a new relationship between the queen and her subjects.

The introduction of television cameras for Elizabeth II’s coronation performed a similar function. In the 1860s, the journalist Walter Bagehot observed that society itself is a kind of “theatrical show” where “the climax of the play is the Queen”. The 1953 broadcast enabled 27 million Britons and 55 million Americans to participate in the ‘show’ from the comfort of their homes. It was a new kind of intimacy that demanded more from Elizabeth II than any previous monarch.

Images and quotes from the Queen’s coronavirus address in April 2022 displayed across London

The Queen had resisted being filmed, but having been convinced by Prince Philip of its necessity, she worked to master the medium. She practised reading off a teleprompter so that her 1957 Christmas speech, the first to be telecast, would appear warm and natural. Harking back to Elizabeth I, she admitted: “I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do some­thing else, I can give you my heart and my devotion.” She vowed to fight for “fundamental principles” while not being “afraid of the future”.

In practice, embracing the future could be as groundbreaking as instituting the royal “walkabout”, or as subtle as adjusting her hemline to rest at the knee. Indeed, establishing her own sense of fashion was one of the first successes of Elizabeth II’s reign. Its essence was pure glamour, but the designs were performing a double duty: nothing could be too patterned, too hot, too shiny or too sheer, or else it wouldn’t photograph well. Her wardrobe carried the subversive message that dresses should be made to work for the wearer, not the other way round. In an era when female celebrity was becoming increasingly tied to “sexiness”, the Queen offered a different kind of confident femininity. Never afraid to wear bright blocks of colour, she has encouraged generations of women to think beyond merely blending in.

The opportunity to demonstrate her “fund­amental principles” on the international stage came in 1961, during a Cold War crisis involving Ghana. The Queen was due to go on a state visit, until growing violence there led to calls for it to be cancelled. She not only insisted on keeping the engage­ment, but during the wildly popular trip, she also made a point of dancing with President Kwame Nkrumah at a state ball. Her adept handling of the situation helped to prevent Ghana from switching allegiance to the Soviet Union. Just as important, though, was the coverage given to her rejection of contemporary racism. As Harold Macmillan noted: “She loves her duty and means to be Queen and not a puppet.” This determination has seen her through 14 prime ministers, 14 US presidents, seven popes and 265 official overseas visits.

At the beginning of the Covid epidemic in 2020, with the nation in shock at the sudden cessation of ordinary life, Elizabeth II spoke directly to the country, sharing a wartime memory to remind people of what can be endured. “We will succeed,” she promised, and in that desperate moment, she united us all in hope. The uniqueness of the Queen lies in her ability to weather change with grace and equanimity – as the poet Philip Larkin once wrote: “In times when nothing stood/but worsened, or grew strange/there was one constant good:/she did not change.” That steadfast continuity, so rare in a world of permanent flux, is an endless source of inspiration for artists and writers, designers and composers, all of us.

Historically Speaking: A Palace Open to the People

From the Pharaohs to Queen Victoria, royal dwellings have been symbols of how rulers think about power.

Every summer, Queen Elizabeth II opens the state rooms of Buckingham Palace to the public. This year’s opening features an exhibition that I curated, “Queen Victoria’s Palace,” the result of a three-year collaboration with Royal Collection Trust. The exhibition uses paintings, objects and even computer-generated imagery to show how Victoria transformed Buckingham Palace into both a family home and the headquarters of the monarchy. In the process, she modernized not only the building itself but also the relationship between the Royal Family and the British people.

Plenty of rulers before Victoria had built palaces, but it was always with a view to enhancing their power rather than sharing it. Consider Amarna in Egypt, the temple-palace complex created in the 14th century B.C. by Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten. Supported by his beautiful wife Nefertiti, the heretical Akhenaten made himself the head of a new religion that revered the divine light of the sun’s disk, the Aten.

The Great Palace reflected Akhenaten’s megalomania: The complex featured vast open air courtyards where the public was required to engage in mass worship of the Pharaoh and his family. Akhenaten’s palace was hated as much as his religion, and both were abandoned after his death.

Weiyang, the Endless Palace, built in 200 B.C. in western China by the Emperor Gaozu, was also designed to impart a religious message. Until its destruction in the 9th century by Tibetan invaders, Weiyang extended over two square miles, making it the largest imperial palace in history. Inside, the halls and courtyards were laid out along specific axial and symmetrical lines to ensure that the Emperor existed in harmony with the landscape and, by extension, with his people. Each chamber was ranked according to its proximity to the Emperor’s quarters; every person knew his place and obligations according to his location in the palace.

Western Europe had nothing comparable to Weiyang until King Louis XIV built the Palace of Versailles in 1682. With its unparalleled opulence—particularly the glittering Hall of Mirrors—and spectacular gardens, Versailles was a cult of personality masquerading as architecture. Louis, the self-styled Sun King at the center of this artificial universe, created a living stage where seeing and being seen was the highest form of social currency.

The offstage reality was grimmer. Except for the royal family’s quarters, Versailles lacked even such basic amenities as plumbing. The cost of upkeep swallowed a quarter of the government’s annual tax receipts. Louis XIV’s fantasy lasted a century before being swept away by the French Revolution in 1789.

Although Victoria would never have described herself as a social revolutionary, the many changes she made to Buckingham Palace were an extraordinary break with the past. From the famous balcony where the Royal Family gathers to share special occasions with the nation, to the spaces for entertaining that can welcome thousands of guests, the revitalized palace created a more inclusive form of royal architecture. It sidelined the old values of wealth, lineage, power and divine right to emphasize new ones based on family, duty, loyalty and patriotism. Victoria’s palace was perhaps less awe-inspiring than its predecessors, but it may prove to be more enduring.

The Guardian: Feminist Queen. Show explores how Victoria transformed monarchy

The story of how Victoria and Prince Albert rebuilt the palace into the most glittering court in Europe is explored through paintings, sketches and costumes, and includes a Hollywood-produced immersive experience that brings to life the balls for which she was famous.

Visiting the exhibition, Victoria’s great-great granddaughter, the Queen, was “totally engrossed” as she watched virtual-reality dancers recreate a quadrille, a dance that was fashionable at 19th-century balls. “Thank God we don’t have to do that any more,” said the Queen.

Quadrilles, in which four couples dance together, may no longer be performed but many of Victoria’s innovations remain. She created the balcony, and bequeathed balcony appearances and garden parties to a nation. “It is now unimaginable you would have a national celebration without this balcony, so embedded is it in the nation’s consciousness,” said Dr Amanda Foreman, the historian and co-curator of the exhibition, Queen Victoria’s Buckingham Palace.

Queen Victoria’s maternal role is highlighted in the sketches she made of her nine children, as well as an ornate casket containing their milk teeth and marble sculptures she had made of their tiny arms and feet.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, which marks the 200th anniversary of Victoria’s birth, is a recreation of the grand ballroom which she had built. She believed the picture gallery was too small for lavish entertainment, noting in her journal how the dresses get squashed and ruined during an attempt at a quadrille.

Digital technology by a Hollywood-based production company recreates the ballroom as it looked during a ball in 1856, with images of the wall furnishings and paintings, as shown in contemporary watercolours, projected on to its walls.

A quadrille is recreated through a hologram effect, using actors in replicas of the costumes featured in the watercolour. The technology was inspired by the Victorian illusionist trick known as Pepper’s Ghost, which used angled glass to reflect images on to the Victorian stage.

“Queen Victoria transformed Buckingham Palace, the fabric of this building, and in so doing created new traditions, those traditions which we now associate with the modern monarchy,” said Foreman.

“It is significant that it was a woman who was responsible for these traditions and a woman who defined our nation’s understanding and concept of sovereign power, how it’s experienced, how it’s expressed.

“It’s very much a feminist transformation, although Queen Victoria herself would not have used those words, and those words would not have meant to the Victorians what they mean to us today.

“We tend to diminish the contribution of women in particular. We assign their success to the men around them. We tend to simply forget who was responsible for certain things. So by putting on this exhibition, we are stripping away those layers of oblivion, forgetfulness, discounting, and allowing Queen Victoria the space to shine.”

Victoria turned the once-unloved palace into a home fit for state, public and private events. But for 10 years after her beloved Albert’s death, she rarely set foot in it, describing it in her journals as “one of my saddest of sad houses”.

 Queen Victoria’s Buckingham Palace exhibition is at the summer opening of Buckingham Palace, 20 July to 29 September 2019.

Harper’s Bazaar: Buckingham Palace is opening a new exhibition exploring the life of Queen Victoria this summer

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria and to celebrate, Buckingham Palace has announced a special exhibition as part of its state opening this summer, co-curated by Dr. Amanda Foreman.

Harper’s Bazaar, May 7, 2019

by Katie Frost

A portrait of Queen Victoria by Thomas Sully

The exhibit will explore the life of the monarch and how she turned the once unloved palace into the royal residence we know today. Highlights will include a portrait of the young queen painted by Thomas Sully soon after she moved into her new home, along with Victoria’s personal insignia, the Star and Collar of the Order of the Bath.

Victoria moved into the palace in 1837 when she was just 18. It had been empty for seven years following the death of her uncle, George IV. After Victoria married Prince Albert and started a family, Victoria wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, about her plans to revamp her family home. In it, she spoke of “the urgent necessity of doing something to Buckingham Palace” and “the total want of accommodation for our growing little family”, according to the Royal Collection Trust.

Historically Speaking: Real-Life Games of Thrones

From King Solomon to the Shah of Persia, rulers have used stately seats to project power.

The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2019

ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS FUCHS

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” complains the long-suffering King Henry IV in Shakespeare. But that is not a monarch’s only problem; uneasy, too, is the bottom that sits on a throne, for thrones are often a dangerous place to be. That is why the image of a throne made of swords, in the HBO hit show “Game of Thrones” (which last week began its eighth and final season), has served as such an apt visual metaphor. It strikingly symbolizes the endless cycle of violence between the rivals for the Iron Throne, the seat of power in the show’s continent of Westeros.

In real history, too, virtually every state once put its leader on a throne. The English word comes from the ancient Greek “thronos,” meaning “stately seat,” but the thing itself is much older. Archaeologists working at the 4th millennium B.C. site of Arslantepe, in eastern Turkey, where a pre-Hittite Early Bronze Age civilization flourished, recently found evidence of what is believed to be the world’s oldest throne. It seems to have consisted of a raised bench which enabled the ruler to display his or her elevated status by literally sitting above all visitors to the palace.

Thrones were also associated with divine power: The famous 18th-century B.C. basalt stele inscribed with the law code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which can be seen at the Louvre, depicts the king receiving the laws directly from the sun god Shamash, who is seated on a throne.

Naturally, because they were invested with so much religious and political symbolism, thrones often became a prime target in war. According to Jewish legend, King Solomon’s spectacular gold and ivory throne was stolen first by the Egyptians, who then lost it to the Assyrians, who subsequently gave it up to the Persians, whereupon it became lost forever.

In India, King Solomon’s throne was reimagined in the early 17th century by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as the jewel-and-gold-encrusted Peacock Throne, featuring the 186-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond. (Shah Jahan also commissioned the Taj Mahal.) This throne also came to an unfortunate end: It was stolen during the sack of Delhi by the Shah of Iran and taken back to Persia. A mere eight years later, the Shah was assassinated by his own bodyguards and the Peacock Throne was destroyed, its valuable decorations stolen.

Perhaps the moral of the story is to keep things simple. In 1308, King Edward I of England commissioned a coronation throne made of oak. For the past 700 years it has supported the heads and backsides of 38 British monarchs during the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey. No harm has ever come to it, save for the pranks of a few very naughty choir boys, one of whom carved on the back of the throne: “P. Abbott slept in this chair 5-6 July 1800.”

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Long, Long Fall of Monarchy

A portrait of Czar Nicholas II, published in a French newspaper in 1896. PHOTO: LEEMAGE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES

A hundred years ago, on March 14, 1917, just before midnight, the ministers of Czar Nicholas II informed him that the army was on the verge of mutiny. “What do you want me to do?” the Russian emperor reportedly asked. “Abdicate,” they replied. After a few minutes’ silence he agreed to go, thus bringing down the curtain on three centuries of Romanov rule. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: When a Monarch Calls It Quits

Photo: THOMAS FUCHS

Photo: THOMAS FUCHS

Abdication fever is sweeping the royal palaces of Europe. Recently, Spain’s King Juan Carlos became the third monarch in just over a year to renounce his crown. In January 2013, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands declared that she was stepping down in favor of her son, Prince Willem-Alexander. King Albert II of Belgium followed six months later.

Abdication in the old days was usually a prelude to execution. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, or Tarquin the Proud (who ruled from 534 to 509 B.C.), is one of the earliest recorded examples of a monarch who was forced to abdicate and still lived to tell the tale. Tarquin was the seventh and last king of the Romans. Burdened by heavy taxes, the aristocracy was already wishing to be rid of Tarquin when his son raped the pious Lucretia. The crime proved to be the catalyst for the birth of the Roman republic.

Tarquin eventually retired to the court of a neighboring tyrant. There, bored and angry, he plotted endlessly to reconquer Rome. Today, if Tarquin is remembered at all, it is by the generations of British schoolchildren who grew up learning to recite “Horatius at the Bridge,” Thomas Babington Macaulay’s stirring ballad on Tarquin’s defeat: “Lars Porsena of Clusium, / by the Nine Gods he swore, / That the great house of Tarquin / Should suffer wrong no more…And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods.”

Continue reading…