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Frederick Highland
website: amg
webhost: lunarpages
email:
comments
content:
Frederick Highland
website: amg
webhost: lunarpages
Extreme Stamps
Ape & Essence
Mystery
Fiction
The Missing
Mogul
History
The Queen's Menagerie
Stamps
The Stamp
Den
The Mystery Box book is the proud winner of a Silver Medal awarded by the Chicago Philatelic Society CHICAGOPEX Literature Exhibit
Read the Book Review by Barbara Kinne of the APS American Philatelist
When Queen Elizabeth took the throne in 1953, she inherited, along with an empire, a rather curious zoo.
Ten beasts, both real and mythological, stood guard over the entrance to Westminster Abbey to protect the queen during her coronation. By 1998, the beasts had proliferated, a set of them having taken up residence in Kew Gardens, another set having made its way to Canada, and a third set appearing on a set of stamps of the Royal Mail.
One might say that the beasts point to a fundamental insecurity on the part of the House of Windsor. The queen's people, you see, beginning with George I in 1714, were never really British, but German, having been imported from Hanover to ensure that British monarchs prayed only in Protestant.
In fact the House of Windsor, as such, wasn't born until 1917 when the British monarchy, then engaged in a World War with the German Kaiser, decided it wasn't such a good thing to draw attention to one's ancestry.
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The first stamp in the set for instance, features the lion and the griffin, the former having been introduced as a royal guardian by the Richard the Lionheart about 1190, the latter having been a guardian of the Plantagenet Edward III. Richard the Lionheart |
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Similarly the other animals fall into royal line, the falcon and bull being symbols of the House of York. House of York |
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The Yorkist line is also represented by the wonderful spotted antelope known as the yale, and the white lion belongs to Lancaster. The Yale and White Lion |
The Tudors, who united the red rose and the white, once kept the greyhound and the Welsh dragon as pets. The Tudors |
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The Unicorn is a Scottish emblem and stands for the Stuart line of English Kings. There is even a Hanoverian überasschung in the menagerie, the white horse that steals in on muffled hooves at the very end of the set. The Stuarts and Hanoverians |
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What has not been explained to my satisfaction is why the queen's beasts persist in sticking their tongues out at us? |
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Is this a kind of noblesse oblige in which royalty gives the raspberry to the common folk? Or is it a form of self-parody reminding royalty never to take itself too seriously?