April 20, 2011 • 16 mins
This year, Prince William and Kate Middleton will be getting married at Westminster Abbey. Listen in to learn more about royal weddings as Sarah and Deblina travel through the centuries to look at the Abbey's connections to the crown and to the Windsors.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm to blame a Chuck Rewarding
and this is our special royal weddings episode, Get Excited
(00:20):
Royal Weddings kind of kind of royal weddings because you know,
I thought about it for a while and I figured
that some of you might not really be that interested
in royal wedding figure. Yeah, I mean, just judging by
by the type of suggestions that we normally get. And actually,
Candice and I have already done a royal weddings episode,
so if you are the type who who loves that
(00:41):
type of thing, you can go back in the archive
and listen. But you know, this is still related, but
it's still has something kind of for everyone. And it
all goes back to the choice of William and Kate
to pick Westminster Abbey of our St Paul's Cathedral or
other potential sites for their wedding. And the question is,
you know, why did they pick that site over the others?
(01:01):
Part of the reason they think it's cozy again, go figure, yeah,
go figure. I mean I can see that it's a
beautiful space. It is beautiful. It has a lot of
stuff in it has a lot of connections to their family,
it does Williams. Yeah, according to William's private secretary, he
was quoted in People Is saying it's almost the feeling
(01:22):
of a parish church. And I mean that might be
kind of hard to understand if you visited Westminster Abbey
and it's been filled with tons of tourists and it
is a huge, soaring Gothic space, But maybe if you're
a Windsor, it is kind of a parish church in
a way. Yeah. Like we said, it's an important site
for the family and for British monarchs in general. It's
where they have their core nations, that's where many of
(01:45):
them are buried. And for William personally, it's the site
of his mother's funeral and his grandmother's wedding. Yeah, so
a lot of good and bad memories there personally. So
as you tune into the royal wedding on April twenty
nine this year, it is the history of the backdrop
that you're looking at. That's sort of the point of
this episode. I want to give you a few facts
(02:06):
to trade around with your friends while you're all watching
the royal wedding together, so you'll start sound like a
real smartie if you start with some facts about the backdrop,
which starts out with saints and kings. So obviously the
structure is old, and even older than it looks. The
history goes back away beyond even what you see. It
um starts appropriately with a legend. The first Christian king
(02:30):
of the East, Saxons, founded it near the Marshy banks
of the Thames on Thorny Island in the seventh century.
Not long after his rule, the Danes sacked the place, though, okay,
but it's likely that that's just a legend and no
more than that. What we know for sure is that
by the tenth century a group of Benedictine monks had
set up set up shop there essentially, and by nine
(02:51):
sixty St. Dunstan, who is then Bishop of London, remodeled
their monastery and built a new church. And it's also
around that same time that the church got its first
royal patron, which obviously started a long relationship between the
abbey and the royals, and that was King Edgar, and
he granted the monks a huge amount of land. And
if you have visited London, you would be blown away
(03:14):
if you saw this amount of land, like superimposed on
a modern map, because it's pretty much the whole West End.
And at this time the Benedictines, who of course have
taken vows with poverty, obedience and celibacy, they spent most
of their time farming that land and reading. Later, as
they grow more prosperous, they manage the land through their
entire history. There are probably only ever thirty to sixty monks,
(03:36):
but there would be a lot of lay serve at
one time. Yeah, craftsman almsman around there too. Yeah, so
you know, it's it's a pretty thriving community. But the
church that we know didn't start to take shape until
about a hundred years after that, when Edward the Confessor
set up his palace nearby the monastery. And you know,
he was a pretty pious guy, as we all know,
(03:57):
and he decided he wanted to to build a church,
a new church for the monks there, and it was
a Romanesque building. It was quite large, it was cruciform
cross shaped and it was consecrated December. Unfortunately for Edward,
he didn't exactly get to enjoy it because he died
seriously just a few days after it was consecrated and
(04:18):
he was buried there. But it's likely that he at
least had some intention to make the church a coronation
spot for British monarchs. Until then, it had been pretty haphazard.
They were crowned anywhere from Bath, you know, just pretty
much all over the country, So he was maybe hoping
for some sort of centralized location for this really important ceremony. Yeah,
(04:42):
and it's possible that edwards immediate successor, Harold, acted on
this intention and was crowned there after Edward's death, but
we're not certain about that. Yeah, it's pretty pretty shaky
whether that actually happened. The first accepted coronation was appropriate
because it was way more dramatic. It just makes a
lot more sense if you're thinking of history as a
(05:03):
as a neat package. Instead of the defeated Harold, it
is the victor William the Conqueror, who brought Britain under
Norman rule after the Battle of Hastings in ten sixty six,
and he's the first one who is known to be
crowned there. And William's choice of the abbey for his
coronation on Christmas Day ten sixty six might have also
(05:23):
sort of been a pr move on his part to
stress his legitimacy as the new king, which as far
as blood claims went, it was not particularly strong. Yeah,
but regardless of the reason, he sets a precedent by
doing that, and every monarch who has been crowned since
then has been crowned at Westminster, most recently, of course,
Queen Elizabeth the Second in nineteen fifty three. Thirty eight
(05:44):
of them and all coordinated there well, and interestingly the
only exceptions are the two uncrowned kings of England. Interestingly,
again both former podcast subjects. One ever the five, who
is one of the princes in the Tower. We talked
about him pretty recently with the Lambert Seminal episode, and
then the others Edward the Eighth who abdicated to Mary
(06:07):
Wallace Simpsons. So pretty strong record there on coronations at Westminster. Still,
though Edward the Confessor's church is not the church that
we know, so it's still transformed a lot from that time.
On October sixty five, the Pope made Edward a st
so then it becomes a pilgrimage site in addition to
(06:27):
a coronation site, so a lot going for it all
of a sudden, definitely, and that cache makes the Gothic
architecture aficionado Henry the Third decide to tear the thing
down and rebuild it totally in twelve. It's kind of
an ironic homage, I guess to somebody to tear down
his own church. But they were of the opinion new
is better, I guess. So the new Westminster is soaring.
(06:51):
It had pointed arches, there were flying buttresses, or I mean,
I should say there are that This is what still
exists today, flying buttresses, rib vaulting on the ceiling, rose
windows and apps added to the traditional cross shape. And
all of this is remarkably similar to the new Gothic
style cathedrals that were popping up all over France. In fact,
(07:13):
the three master Masons who supervised the work on Westminster
were definitely influenced by cathedrals and Amien and Shar and
most notably the cathedral in Reims, which was a coronation cathedral.
Because after all, Westminster is by this point pretty firmly
established as a coronation church, and so the needs of
(07:35):
the monks and and the kind of things they need
in the church have to be balanced with a large
audience that's going to be there for a coronation. It
has to be a theater in a way. So it
was a bit roomier, definitely, And this is more like
the cathedral that we know today, Sarah mentioned, but try
to imagine it without the clutter of the countless monuments
(07:56):
and the tombs. Instead, there were paintings, two of which
were found in the nineteenth pties. Yeah, relocated. So apparently
cathedrals take a really long time to build, because it
wasn't until October twelve, sixty nine at the choir in
the eastern parts were finished enough to re enter St.
Edward's bones and they're still there today. Yeah, and Henry
the third became the next monarch to be buried there.
(08:16):
His project definitely outlived him. He died part way into
the construction, and that's a two hundred year gap between
those Westminster Royal burials. But it starts a trend too.
I mean, I guess nobody really wanted to be buried
in Edwards Church for some reason. But Henry's Church is
the place to be if you're a royal because the
abbey becomes the top choice for royal burials for about
(08:40):
the next five hundred years. Their seventeen monarchs buried there
up until George the Second when basically they run out
of room and he had to start being buried at
Windsor instead. And it's not just monarchs like Elizabeth the
First and Mary, Queen of Scott's that are married there either.
There's some other very big names buried in Westminster Abbey
as well. For example, Jeffrey Chall, Sir. He was an
(09:01):
abbey tenant and was buried in the South Transept in
fourteen hundred and after that Westminster pretty much became the
place to be. Yeah, if you were an artist or
a poet, it definitely was the place to be. But ironically,
Chaucer is just there because he was the clerk of
works to the Palace of Westminster at the time, not
because he was one of the greatest writers of all time.
(09:23):
Sort of strange if you think about it. But today
Poets Corner has all sorts of notable authors who are
buried there. Edmund Spencer, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens,
Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and then there are a lot
who have monuments too, and I think people sometimes get
confused about that. They think that Shakespeare is buried at
(09:43):
Westminster Abbey, whereas of course he's not. He just has
a monument, Yeah, a monument. Yeah, in addition to him,
Milton Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Blake, Jane Austen and Bronte,
all sorts of folks. But back to Henry the Third.
After his death, the construction continues according to plan for
about a hundred and fifty years. That doesn't mean distinctive
(10:07):
editions weren't added in later centuries though, Yeah. Most notably
there's the Lady Chapel of Henry the Seventh that was
started in fifteen oh three, and the Western Towers, which
that's probably if you look at a picture of the
exterior of the abbey, you're probably looking at that side.
They were built in the seventeen forties by Nicholas Hawksmore
and John James, and interestingly they're often misattributed to Sir
(10:29):
Christopher Wren. He's sort of the bigger name there of
architects of the time, and saw all sorts of articles
that had kept up that that misidentification of the architect
pretty strange. So we may have just illuminated the effect
that that could be a good fact for your friends,
I guess, um. But these towers were not just slapped
(10:50):
on for no reason. They were sort of built as
part of an overall renovation because the abbey had fallen
on pretty hard times between the dissolution of the monastery
is under Henry the Eighth and the Civil Wars. It
was really not in good shape at all. It needed
to be fixed up, some of the stone needed to
be replaced, just a lot of work. Yeah, and and
even underwent a name change after that, under Elizabeth the
(11:13):
First it became the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster,
as it's properly known today. Um. It was also severely
damaged during the Blitz when fire bombs burned through the roof. Fortunately,
though most of the treasures had been evacuated. It's kind
of interesting how they managed to save some of these.
The tapestries, effigies, gates and manuscripts were whisked off two
country houses, glass was boarded up and sandbags covered the
(11:37):
tombs that couldn't be taken out, and the two most
precious abbey artifacts were also saved. Edward the first coronation
chair was one that went to Gloucester Cathedral and the
stone of Schoon was buried under the building. Yeah. But
my favorite thing that was saved, or the facts about
how it was saved. The wax effigies of the monarchs
went to the Piccadilly Tube station. I'm just imagining measuring
(12:02):
like wax royals sitting around waiting for the train. I'm
sure they were boxed properly, but some of them don't
fair so well though, right, No, no, they didn't at all. Unfortunately,
some of the effigies were still damaged and it allowed
them to only redisplay the heads after the war. So, um,
you know, wax didn't last forever. Yeah, hopefully they knew
(12:24):
that going in, going into it all. But you know,
wax heads are probably not putting you in the mood
for the Royal wedding. We're trying to psyche you up
here and not make you think of maccab wax figures.
So we're going to talk a little bit about the
history of royal marriages at Westminster because that's kind of
the whole point of this whole episode. Yeah, and it's
(12:46):
a surprisingly short history. They have really only been fifteen
royal weddings in the abbey. In the nineteenth century, royals
actually tended to favor St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle,
which was another royal peculiar like Westminster. Yeah, that's kind
of like it falls specifically under the monarchs domain, but
they often also chose the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace,
(13:07):
and that's definitely a pre television kind of location because
it only seats one hundred. Starting in the early twentieth century,
you really had to pick a venue where a lot
of people could see you. Um that Chapel Royal for
instances where Victoria and Albert were married. But Westminster Abbey
itself became fashionable when Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Patricia of Connaught
(13:31):
chose it to marry a commoner in nineteen nineteen, and
it was the first royal wedding there in six hundred
and fifty years. Yeah, but the ironic part about that
is that's for a royal wedding. It's ironic, I should say,
is that she was royal going in, but not coming
out since she was marrying a commoner. Usually goes the
other way by the nineteen twenties, George the fifth kids
(13:52):
had started getting married there too. Patricia had really started
a trend. I guess George's two sons were married there,
his daughter was married there um in nineteen twenty three,
his son, the future George the six married the future
Queen Mother. So Queen Elizabeth's parents were married there in
nineteen twenty three, and then Queen Elizabeth herself was married
(14:13):
there as Princess Elizabeth in nineteen forty seven, and her sister,
Princess Margaret was also married there in nineteen sixty, and
Elizabeth's daughter Princess Anne in nineteen seventy three. Then of
course her son Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson in nineteen
eighty six. So yeah, I know a lot of people
were surprised that Will and Kate had chosen Westminster Abbey
over St. Paul's because his parents were of course famously
(14:36):
married at St. Paul's. But when you learn all this,
it's not really that surprising. Definitely not, and makes a
lot more sense when you know the history. Yeah, definitely
a mix of family history and royal history in general.
There So if you are going to be watching the
Royal wedding and you have comments about Westminster Abbey that
you want to send us, definitely feel free to email
(14:57):
us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at misst in history and we're
on Facebook. So yeah, let us let us know what
you think, and let us know if you if you
notice anything cool about the abbey during the television ceremony,
and or if you know of any cool facts that
we left out. Yeah, and if you want to learn
a little bit more about the Royal wedding or royal
(15:19):
weddings in general. There is tons of content articles, Slade shows, quises,
all sorts of stuff on TLC weddings and her old
school stuff you missed in history class. Fans, you might
even find Candice's World Wedding commentary, so all sorts. Yeah,
I mean, there couldn't even be some articles on there,
don't you think, Sarah? That might help out Will and
Kate as they're getting ready I think to go down
(15:41):
the aisle. So they're maybe not too keen on reading
lots of articles about themselves, but maybe not about themselves,
but they could read about you know, how to how
to plan your wedding, how to pick out the wedding dress.
A lot of those content book canvases putting together So
Will and Kate. If you're out there, good luck to you,
and if you would like to read some of our content,
you can look get up by visiting our homepage at
(16:01):
www dot how staff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage.
The how Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise. Download
it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm to blame a Chuck Rewarding
and this is our special royal weddings episode, Get Excited
(00:20):
Royal Weddings kind of kind of royal weddings because you know,
I thought about it for a while and I figured
that some of you might not really be that interested
in royal wedding figure. Yeah, I mean, just judging by
by the type of suggestions that we normally get. And actually,
Candice and I have already done a royal weddings episode,
so if you are the type who who loves that
(00:41):
type of thing, you can go back in the archive
and listen. But you know, this is still related, but
it's still has something kind of for everyone. And it
all goes back to the choice of William and Kate
to pick Westminster Abbey of our St Paul's Cathedral or
other potential sites for their wedding. And the question is,
you know, why did they pick that site over the others?
(01:01):
Part of the reason they think it's cozy again, go figure, yeah,
go figure. I mean I can see that it's a
beautiful space. It is beautiful. It has a lot of
stuff in it has a lot of connections to their family,
it does Williams. Yeah, according to William's private secretary, he
was quoted in People Is saying it's almost the feeling
(01:22):
of a parish church. And I mean that might be
kind of hard to understand if you visited Westminster Abbey
and it's been filled with tons of tourists and it
is a huge, soaring Gothic space, But maybe if you're
a Windsor, it is kind of a parish church in
a way. Yeah. Like we said, it's an important site
for the family and for British monarchs in general. It's
where they have their core nations, that's where many of
(01:45):
them are buried. And for William personally, it's the site
of his mother's funeral and his grandmother's wedding. Yeah, so
a lot of good and bad memories there personally. So
as you tune into the royal wedding on April twenty
nine this year, it is the history of the backdrop
that you're looking at. That's sort of the point of
this episode. I want to give you a few facts
(02:06):
to trade around with your friends while you're all watching
the royal wedding together, so you'll start sound like a
real smartie if you start with some facts about the backdrop,
which starts out with saints and kings. So obviously the
structure is old, and even older than it looks. The
history goes back away beyond even what you see. It
um starts appropriately with a legend. The first Christian king
(02:30):
of the East, Saxons, founded it near the Marshy banks
of the Thames on Thorny Island in the seventh century.
Not long after his rule, the Danes sacked the place, though, okay,
but it's likely that that's just a legend and no
more than that. What we know for sure is that
by the tenth century a group of Benedictine monks had
set up set up shop there essentially, and by nine
(02:51):
sixty St. Dunstan, who is then Bishop of London, remodeled
their monastery and built a new church. And it's also
around that same time that the church got its first
royal patron, which obviously started a long relationship between the
abbey and the royals, and that was King Edgar, and
he granted the monks a huge amount of land. And
if you have visited London, you would be blown away
(03:14):
if you saw this amount of land, like superimposed on
a modern map, because it's pretty much the whole West End.
And at this time the Benedictines, who of course have
taken vows with poverty, obedience and celibacy, they spent most
of their time farming that land and reading. Later, as
they grow more prosperous, they manage the land through their
entire history. There are probably only ever thirty to sixty monks,
(03:36):
but there would be a lot of lay serve at
one time. Yeah, craftsman almsman around there too. Yeah, so
you know, it's it's a pretty thriving community. But the
church that we know didn't start to take shape until
about a hundred years after that, when Edward the Confessor
set up his palace nearby the monastery. And you know,
he was a pretty pious guy, as we all know,
(03:57):
and he decided he wanted to to build a church,
a new church for the monks there, and it was
a Romanesque building. It was quite large, it was cruciform
cross shaped and it was consecrated December. Unfortunately for Edward,
he didn't exactly get to enjoy it because he died
seriously just a few days after it was consecrated and
(04:18):
he was buried there. But it's likely that he at
least had some intention to make the church a coronation
spot for British monarchs. Until then, it had been pretty haphazard.
They were crowned anywhere from Bath, you know, just pretty
much all over the country, So he was maybe hoping
for some sort of centralized location for this really important ceremony. Yeah,
(04:42):
and it's possible that edwards immediate successor, Harold, acted on
this intention and was crowned there after Edward's death, but
we're not certain about that. Yeah, it's pretty pretty shaky
whether that actually happened. The first accepted coronation was appropriate
because it was way more dramatic. It just makes a
lot more sense if you're thinking of history as a
(05:03):
as a neat package. Instead of the defeated Harold, it
is the victor William the Conqueror, who brought Britain under
Norman rule after the Battle of Hastings in ten sixty six,
and he's the first one who is known to be
crowned there. And William's choice of the abbey for his
coronation on Christmas Day ten sixty six might have also
(05:23):
sort of been a pr move on his part to
stress his legitimacy as the new king, which as far
as blood claims went, it was not particularly strong. Yeah,
but regardless of the reason, he sets a precedent by
doing that, and every monarch who has been crowned since
then has been crowned at Westminster, most recently, of course,
Queen Elizabeth the Second in nineteen fifty three. Thirty eight
(05:44):
of them and all coordinated there well, and interestingly the
only exceptions are the two uncrowned kings of England. Interestingly,
again both former podcast subjects. One ever the five, who
is one of the princes in the Tower. We talked
about him pretty recently with the Lambert Seminal episode, and
then the others Edward the Eighth who abdicated to Mary
(06:07):
Wallace Simpsons. So pretty strong record there on coronations at Westminster. Still,
though Edward the Confessor's church is not the church that
we know, so it's still transformed a lot from that time.
On October sixty five, the Pope made Edward a st
so then it becomes a pilgrimage site in addition to
(06:27):
a coronation site, so a lot going for it all
of a sudden, definitely, and that cache makes the Gothic
architecture aficionado Henry the Third decide to tear the thing
down and rebuild it totally in twelve. It's kind of
an ironic homage, I guess to somebody to tear down
his own church. But they were of the opinion new
is better, I guess. So the new Westminster is soaring.
(06:51):
It had pointed arches, there were flying buttresses, or I mean,
I should say there are that This is what still
exists today, flying buttresses, rib vaulting on the ceiling, rose
windows and apps added to the traditional cross shape. And
all of this is remarkably similar to the new Gothic
style cathedrals that were popping up all over France. In fact,
(07:13):
the three master Masons who supervised the work on Westminster
were definitely influenced by cathedrals and Amien and Shar and
most notably the cathedral in Reims, which was a coronation cathedral.
Because after all, Westminster is by this point pretty firmly
established as a coronation church, and so the needs of
(07:35):
the monks and and the kind of things they need
in the church have to be balanced with a large
audience that's going to be there for a coronation. It
has to be a theater in a way. So it
was a bit roomier, definitely, And this is more like
the cathedral that we know today, Sarah mentioned, but try
to imagine it without the clutter of the countless monuments
(07:56):
and the tombs. Instead, there were paintings, two of which
were found in the nineteenth pties. Yeah, relocated. So apparently
cathedrals take a really long time to build, because it
wasn't until October twelve, sixty nine at the choir in
the eastern parts were finished enough to re enter St.
Edward's bones and they're still there today. Yeah, and Henry
the third became the next monarch to be buried there.
(08:16):
His project definitely outlived him. He died part way into
the construction, and that's a two hundred year gap between
those Westminster Royal burials. But it starts a trend too.
I mean, I guess nobody really wanted to be buried
in Edwards Church for some reason. But Henry's Church is
the place to be if you're a royal because the
abbey becomes the top choice for royal burials for about
(08:40):
the next five hundred years. Their seventeen monarchs buried there
up until George the Second when basically they run out
of room and he had to start being buried at
Windsor instead. And it's not just monarchs like Elizabeth the
First and Mary, Queen of Scott's that are married there either.
There's some other very big names buried in Westminster Abbey
as well. For example, Jeffrey Chall, Sir. He was an
(09:01):
abbey tenant and was buried in the South Transept in
fourteen hundred and after that Westminster pretty much became the
place to be. Yeah, if you were an artist or
a poet, it definitely was the place to be. But ironically,
Chaucer is just there because he was the clerk of
works to the Palace of Westminster at the time, not
because he was one of the greatest writers of all time.
(09:23):
Sort of strange if you think about it. But today
Poets Corner has all sorts of notable authors who are
buried there. Edmund Spencer, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens,
Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and then there are a lot
who have monuments too, and I think people sometimes get
confused about that. They think that Shakespeare is buried at
(09:43):
Westminster Abbey, whereas of course he's not. He just has
a monument, Yeah, a monument. Yeah, in addition to him,
Milton Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Blake, Jane Austen and Bronte,
all sorts of folks. But back to Henry the Third.
After his death, the construction continues according to plan for
about a hundred and fifty years. That doesn't mean distinctive
(10:07):
editions weren't added in later centuries though, Yeah. Most notably
there's the Lady Chapel of Henry the Seventh that was
started in fifteen oh three, and the Western Towers, which
that's probably if you look at a picture of the
exterior of the abbey, you're probably looking at that side.
They were built in the seventeen forties by Nicholas Hawksmore
and John James, and interestingly they're often misattributed to Sir
(10:29):
Christopher Wren. He's sort of the bigger name there of
architects of the time, and saw all sorts of articles
that had kept up that that misidentification of the architect
pretty strange. So we may have just illuminated the effect
that that could be a good fact for your friends,
I guess, um. But these towers were not just slapped
(10:50):
on for no reason. They were sort of built as
part of an overall renovation because the abbey had fallen
on pretty hard times between the dissolution of the monastery
is under Henry the Eighth and the Civil Wars. It
was really not in good shape at all. It needed
to be fixed up, some of the stone needed to
be replaced, just a lot of work. Yeah, and and
even underwent a name change after that, under Elizabeth the
(11:13):
First it became the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster,
as it's properly known today. Um. It was also severely
damaged during the Blitz when fire bombs burned through the roof. Fortunately,
though most of the treasures had been evacuated. It's kind
of interesting how they managed to save some of these.
The tapestries, effigies, gates and manuscripts were whisked off two
country houses, glass was boarded up and sandbags covered the
(11:37):
tombs that couldn't be taken out, and the two most
precious abbey artifacts were also saved. Edward the first coronation
chair was one that went to Gloucester Cathedral and the
stone of Schoon was buried under the building. Yeah. But
my favorite thing that was saved, or the facts about
how it was saved. The wax effigies of the monarchs
went to the Piccadilly Tube station. I'm just imagining measuring
(12:02):
like wax royals sitting around waiting for the train. I'm
sure they were boxed properly, but some of them don't
fair so well though, right, No, no, they didn't at all. Unfortunately,
some of the effigies were still damaged and it allowed
them to only redisplay the heads after the war. So, um,
you know, wax didn't last forever. Yeah, hopefully they knew
(12:24):
that going in, going into it all. But you know,
wax heads are probably not putting you in the mood
for the Royal wedding. We're trying to psyche you up
here and not make you think of maccab wax figures.
So we're going to talk a little bit about the
history of royal marriages at Westminster because that's kind of
the whole point of this whole episode. Yeah, and it's
(12:46):
a surprisingly short history. They have really only been fifteen
royal weddings in the abbey. In the nineteenth century, royals
actually tended to favor St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle,
which was another royal peculiar like Westminster. Yeah, that's kind
of like it falls specifically under the monarchs domain, but
they often also chose the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace,
(13:07):
and that's definitely a pre television kind of location because
it only seats one hundred. Starting in the early twentieth century,
you really had to pick a venue where a lot
of people could see you. Um that Chapel Royal for
instances where Victoria and Albert were married. But Westminster Abbey
itself became fashionable when Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Patricia of Connaught
(13:31):
chose it to marry a commoner in nineteen nineteen, and
it was the first royal wedding there in six hundred
and fifty years. Yeah, but the ironic part about that
is that's for a royal wedding. It's ironic, I should say,
is that she was royal going in, but not coming
out since she was marrying a commoner. Usually goes the
other way by the nineteen twenties, George the fifth kids
(13:52):
had started getting married there too. Patricia had really started
a trend. I guess George's two sons were married there,
his daughter was married there um in nineteen twenty three,
his son, the future George the six married the future
Queen Mother. So Queen Elizabeth's parents were married there in
nineteen twenty three, and then Queen Elizabeth herself was married
(14:13):
there as Princess Elizabeth in nineteen forty seven, and her sister,
Princess Margaret was also married there in nineteen sixty, and
Elizabeth's daughter Princess Anne in nineteen seventy three. Then of
course her son Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson in nineteen
eighty six. So yeah, I know a lot of people
were surprised that Will and Kate had chosen Westminster Abbey
over St. Paul's because his parents were of course famously
(14:36):
married at St. Paul's. But when you learn all this,
it's not really that surprising. Definitely not, and makes a
lot more sense when you know the history. Yeah, definitely
a mix of family history and royal history in general.
There So if you are going to be watching the
Royal wedding and you have comments about Westminster Abbey that
you want to send us, definitely feel free to email
(14:57):
us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at misst in history and we're
on Facebook. So yeah, let us let us know what
you think, and let us know if you if you
notice anything cool about the abbey during the television ceremony,
and or if you know of any cool facts that
we left out. Yeah, and if you want to learn
a little bit more about the Royal wedding or royal
(15:19):
weddings in general. There is tons of content articles, Slade shows, quises,
all sorts of stuff on TLC weddings and her old
school stuff you missed in history class. Fans, you might
even find Candice's World Wedding commentary, so all sorts. Yeah,
I mean, there couldn't even be some articles on there,
don't you think, Sarah? That might help out Will and
Kate as they're getting ready I think to go down
(15:41):
the aisle. So they're maybe not too keen on reading
lots of articles about themselves, but maybe not about themselves,
but they could read about you know, how to how
to plan your wedding, how to pick out the wedding dress.
A lot of those content book canvases putting together So
Will and Kate. If you're out there, good luck to you,
and if you would like to read some of our content,
you can look get up by visiting our homepage at
(16:01):
www dot how staff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage.
The how Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise. Download
it today on iTunes
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