Royal firsts - what have monarchs brought us?

1. The flushing toilet

   1. The first ever ‘water closet’ or flushing toilet was invented some time in 1584-91, by Sir John Harington, the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harington was a well-known poet and gentleman, but he got into trouble after writing some particularly dodgy poetry, and was excluded from the Queen’s court until he could make amends. While hiding away at his newly-built house in Kelston, near Bath, inspiration of a completely different kind seems to have struck Harington, and he came up with an idea for making a flushing toilet! He invited Elizabeth I to visit his home in 1592, during which time she tried out his loo. Apparently she liked it so much that she forgave him for his earlier mistakes and requested that he build her a loo too, at her palace!
2. Photography

   1. We are used to seeing the Royal Family splashed over the covers of magazines and newspapers. But did you know that Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were instrumental in making photography a popular form of art and media in England? They attended exhibitions and became enthusiastic collectors of the new kinds of printed pictures that early photography pioneered in the 1840s. They also became patrons of the newly-established Photographic Society of London. The Queen and Prince Consort also commissioned photographers to take pictures of themselves, their family and friends, and their favourite scenes, which they collected together into beautifully-bound photo albums. Like the Royal Family today, however, they were not too pleased about photos being published of them without their permission. As a result, they ended up fighting the first ever legal cases to defend their rights over pictures of themselves.
3. The Church of England

   1. The ‘Church of England’ or ‘Anglican Church’ was effectively founded by King Henry VIII in the 1530s, after he decided to break with the Pope and the Catholic Church in Italy. Henry VIII infamously wished to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. However, being a member of the Catholic Church, which was against divorce, Henry was not allowed to end his marriage to Catherine and so he resorted to drastic measures to get his way. He dramatically broke off ties with Catholicism and appointed religious scholars to produce research that would enable him to justify this move, as well as to support his claim to be the rightful head of the Church in England instead of the Pope. This allowed Henry not only to marry Anne Boleyn (and later, four other wives!) but also to transform the Church of England into a Protestant church rather than a Catholic one. This move brought about a major and long-lasting cultural shift across Britain and caused decades of conflict between England and its powerful Catholic neighbours in Europe.  
4. Tax scandals

   1. Monarchs and tax have long had a messy and complicated history. The current queen, Elizabeth II, became the first reigning monarch to pay taxes from 1992, even though the sovereign is not legally obliged to pay anything. The Queen agreed to do so after a terrible fire ravaged her favourite royal residence, Windsor Castle. It was a good move to win over the public, after they were saddled with a hefty restoration bill (£36.5 million!), at a time when the monarchy’s popularity was weak in Britain. However, only recently a new tax scandal raised new questions about how the monarchy spends its money. This happened when the publication of the Paradise Papers by British newspapers revealed that millions of pounds from the Queen’s private estates had been invested in offshore tax havens - said to be without the Queen’s knowledge.
5. Smallpox vaccine

   1. In the eighteenth century, smallpox dramatically changed the succession of the British royal family from the Stuart dynasty to their cousins, the rulers of Hanover. The disease killed off the eleven-year old Prince William, the only son of Queen Anne, in 1700. This meant that the Crown ended up passing to George I who travelled from the small German state of Hanover to take over the British throne in 1714, bringing his family with him. England was hit by another smallpox outbreak in 1722. This time however, one of the most well-known ladies in fashionable English society, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was not prepared to let the disease take as many lives as it had done in the past. She had stayed for some time in Turkey, where her husband was working as a diplomat, and whilst there had experienced the Turkish method of vaccinating against smallpox. A liquid containing a small amount of the live smallpox virus was mixed into a cut in the skin of a healthy person, to enable their body to develop the disease but in a form that could be more safely overcome. Lady Mary persuaded Caroline, Princess of Wales (wife of the future George II) to vaccinate her own children using this procedure. The royal family waited for the results of tests carried out on prisoners at Newgate before getting vaccinated themselves. But after seeing how successful the attempt was, King George I agreed to have his grandchildren treated – and they survived. This very active royal stamp of approval meant that vaccination became much more widely accepted across British society, and helped to pave the way for the life-saving impact later made by Edward Jenner’s vaccine. 
6. New media

   1. Royals throughout history have often been quick to learn about and embrace new ways of communicating, so that they could more effectively run their kingdoms and portray themselves according to their desire. But even in more modern times, when the monarchy has taken on more of a ceremonial role, royal figures have not shied away from an interest in new types of communications technology. Queen Victoria was technically the first person to send a transatlantic telegraph message, when a note was sent in her name to President Buchanan of the USA, on 16 August 1858. The message didn’t quite manage to get through however, mainly because it was far too long: consisting of 98 words in total, it took more than 19 hours to transmit! Queen Elizabeth II, did a much better job of keeping her message short and sweet when she sent the first royal tweet, whilst opening an exhibition at London’s Science Museum in 2014. She is perhaps more famous for another royal technological first however: the Christmas TV broadcast. The royal tradition of a Christmas broadcast began with radio speeches by the King in 1932, but 1957 saw the first live broadcast by the Queen on BBC television. It was intended as a way of modernizing the monarchy and bringing it closer to ordinary families – through their TV sets – and is still watched by millions of people today!

A royal tour - what monarchy means to other parts of the world

A basic definition of ‘royalty’ is a person who reigns in the position of a king or queen, or more broadly speaking, is thought to have ‘royal blood’ or status. But people’s understandings of how royalty should work varies according to culture. Today, there are 26 monarchies around the world, ruling over 43 countries in total. Let’s dig deeper…

1. In some countries, women lead the way 
   1. In most countries with monarchies, the blood or lineage of the father is considered the most important in determining who gets to inherit the throne from amongst the reigning royal family. And in the majority of cases, the throne will usually pass to a man e.g. the king’s son inherits the throne, followed by his grandson, etc. In the UK, women were only allowed to take the throne when there were no male heirs available. This rule had been in place for 300 years, but in 2011 it was agreed that if Prince William and Kate Middleton had a daughter first, she would be allowed to inherit the throne and become queen even if she had a younger brother. In contrast, 'matrilineal descent’ determined the order of succession in the Niger-Congo area of Africa (stretching from West Africa to Zambia in the southeast), as well as in Madagascar, and regions of West India and Southeast Asia. This is where ‘royal blood’ is only thought to be transmitted via women. This was certainly the case for the Bemba people of what is now north-eastern Zimbabwe. Children born from a king or prince without an African princess as a mother would not be deemed fit for the throne. The bloodline of the royal women was prioritized over the royal men. Within the Asante kingdom in West Africa, it was acceptable for royal women to have more one than husband or lover at a time. Often the identity of a royal child’s father would be kept a secret in order to protect the princess against any claims to power that could be made by the man. 
2. Being a prince can be a risky business
   1. One of the defining features of a monarchy is that the right to rule a kingdom should pass from the ruler to a member of their family, usually one of their sons. However, in many cases, this form of succession is not exactly a simple or pain-free process. In the former Mughal and Ottoman Empires of South Asia and the Middle East, the practice of ‘open succession’ prevailed. This is where the brothers and sons of the reigning emperor competed to the death against one another, in order to capture the throne after the emperor died. In more than one instance too, such brutal competition could break out during the lifetime of the emperor. In the Ottoman Empire, fratricide, or the killing of brothers, was seen by many sultans as an effective way to guard against such threats. It became something of a tradition for newly-appointed sultans to have their brothers strangled with a silken cord in fact! By the seventeenth century, however, this gruesome practice shifted to the less deadly but still torturous practice of keeping princes imprisoned under a form of house arrest in a part of a sultan’s palace known as the kafes (or ‘golden cage’). This way they could be easily supervised and kept under tight control. 
3. Most kings in history have tended to have multiple wives
   1. In order to keep themselves and their families in power, monarchs have historically used marriage as an important social and political weapon. Marriage could strengthen a king or queen’s ties with other like-minded and well-connected royal or aristocratic families. It could also provide a committed husband or wife with whom to produce and train future heirs to the throne. However, the practice of a monarch marrying just one person at a time has been only been a consistent trend in Europe. Up until the nineteenth century, royalty from many other countries across the world have been much more willing to take multiple marital partners, and also concubines. Concubines are women who live with a man, but who are not formally married to him and do not have equal status to a wife. It’s thought that the strict ideals regarding family life that Christianity promoted has a lot to do with determining why most Western European royal families stuck with marrying only one person. This partly explains why Henry VIII had to go to such lengths in order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. That said, he and other European kings and queens were not quite obedient enough not to cheat on their husbands/wives as well! 
4. ‘Royalty’ doesn’t always mean a ‘royal family’
   1. In some cases, ‘royalty’ can be defined in an alternative sense: through control over landed resources, or through embracing the particular pomp and style typically associated with monarchs. The Pope, as head of the Catholic Church and the ‘monarch’ of the Vatican, is an example of when royal status can be claimed by a person or institution that is not directly connected with a royal family. Under international law, the papacy is recognised as a monarchy, and popes have claimed the right to rule over territory in Italy since at least the eighth century. Interestingly, Sikhs view and place their holy scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, on a very royal pedestal. At a Sikh gurdwara (temple), the Guru Granth Sahib is treated not as a book, but as an embodiment of the political and spiritual wisdom of God, who is worshipped as the Sacha Padshah (‘the truest emperor’). The Guru Granth Sahib is looked after and approached with similar kinds of ceremony to those performed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India by visitors to the court of the Mughal rulers, who were the contemporaries of the ten founding Gurus (teachers/spiritual leaders) of the Sikh faith. For example, the Guru Granth Sahib is typically covered with a richly-decorated canopy, and a fly whisk is waved over it, to prevent any dust or flies from landing on it, as was done to show respect to a Mughal emperor. Modern-day visitors to the gurdwara are expected to continue participating in some of these traditions and to pay their respects to the Guru, by covering their heads in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib, and bowing and making a small offering before it.